INUVIK
Tom Butters always believed never to take yourself too seriously.

Tom Butters, a five-term MLA and founder of the Inuvik Drum, shown at his home in British Columbia in the fall of 2013, was a well-respected member of the Inuvik community for decades. He was known as a man who respected residents and represented them for more than two decades in municipal and territorial politics. Butters passed away March 2 at the age of 89 in Duncan, B.C. - photo courtesy of Ian Butters

When he founded the Inuvik Drum in 1965, he had a motto. Under the newspaper logo on the editorial page of early editions of the paper, before Northern News Services took it over, read the Latin phrase Hodie Acta Diurna Cras Cacarta Charta.

The day's newspaper is tomorrow's toilet paper.

The founding editor of the Drum and five-term MLA died March 2 in Duncan B.C., at the age of 89.

While Butters took his job as publisher, editor, writer, photographer and printer seriously, he believed it important to remember who he was, to stay true to his beliefs and the people around him, to remain hard-nosed and never to let people take advantage of him.

Butters was born in Vancouver in 1929. By the age of 12 he and his sister were living in foster care. Growing up during the depression in British Columbia, Butters lived in poverty most of his young life, said his son Ian Butters.

He enrolled in pilot training for the military in the mid-1940s, however the length of training meant he never would have got to fight. He switched to air gunner training on a bomber but the war ended before he made it overseas.

Butters married his wife Margaret not long after and moved to London, England, where they lived for a few years working odd jobs in a candy manufacturing plant. The couple returned to Canada in the early 50s.

According to Ian, he was always drawn by stories of the North, the explorers and the classics by Jack London, so he went to the Yukon to seek his fortune panning for gold and wound up working as a grader operator on the Yukon Highway near Beaver Creek.

It was in 1959 when he and his family moved to Baker Lake, then part of the Northwest Territories, before putting down roots in Inuvik in 1962.

When Butters first arrived he managed a rehabilitation centre next door to the library downtown before moving into a role as regional director for the federal government. He soon became the federal government's voice on the ground for the newly-built community.

When the family moved to town Ian said they lived on the west side where living conditions were good, but knowing he represented the aboriginal and Inuit population on the east side, where many lived in tents due to a housing shortage and there was a lack of running water, Butters made the decision to move into a home there.

"He said if he was going to serve these people as a government official, he was going to live with them," he said.

Ian recalled a moment in Butters' time with the federal government that may have been the turning point for his father.

The government had fallen behind schedule on building homes promised for the relocation of Aklavik residents to Inuvik.

Many families were living in tents while waiting for housing and one night a fire broke out in the tent city. A number of children abandoned by their parents perished in the blaze.

It affected Butters profoundly.

"He couldn't be the guy going out to make these promises and not be able to deliver," Ian said.

"He knew the power of the word. If you're going to make headway in Ottawa, you have to put it on paper. He was disillusioned with the job he was doing and he wanted to do something more."

It wasn't long before he set his sights on journalism.

"He was a writer and he knew he had an ability there," said Ian.

"I think he saw the way to get action from Ottawa was to write the observations and the criticism on paper, what the promises were and what was actually delivered."

Three years after moving to Inuvik, Butters purchased a printing press and started the Drum. Dan Holman, the man who would become the paper's editor, remembers asking Butters how he landed on the name of the paper.

His reason, said Holman, represents how the man viewed life and his place in it.

"The drum is an evolutionary instrument as compared to a guitar," Holman remembers Butters telling him in the late 1970s when the then second-term MLA was transitioning out of the newspaper business.

"He believed in change, but didn't believe in radical changes just for the sake of change."

For the first two months of 1978, Holman trained to become the Drum's editor. A 24-year-old kid who had never worked at a newspaper in his life, Holman learned the ropes of operating the weekly publication. Butters took him under his wing, passing on the philosophies he instilled in the paper for 13 years.

"He pointed out that everyone would try to use you and push you around and you never want to be seen as a crusader or in the sway of any particular interest," Holman recalled.

"You have to be a hard-nose guy who won't let people push you around."

A note directed to then Member of Parliament Willy Firth on the editorial page of the Drum from Feb. 22, 1978, Butters' penultimate issue, was indicative of his belief in holding the feet of those in power to the fire when he believed they deserved it.

The note was a tongue-in-cheek response to a letter from Firth, thanking him for responding to a previous piece in the newspaper. However, the envelope was empty, and Butters took his dig.

"Kind of indicative of many promises to the North by federal politicians," he wrote. Butters was one of the first to echo Northern discontent for how Ottawa treated the North - and he believed it was his duty to hold those in power accountable when it was called for.

There was no fear and no favour, said Holman. No matter who a person is, "if they meet the criteria to be in the paper than you ought not to be omitting them because they are these big shots."

While newspaper ink ran in his blood and stained the tips of his fingers each week, Butters had another calling, and that was politics.

After one term on town council in the late 1960s, he ran for the local territorial seat at the legislative assembly in Yellowknife in 1970, and won. It would be the beginning of nearly 22 years as an MLA.

Butters believed in representing the people of Inuvik in Yellowknife with passion and vigour, said Holman. But when he returned to Inuvik with government officials in tow, he rarely spoke. Holman noticed this, when they'd meet with townspeople, and he asked him about it one day.

"He said, 'They elected me to represent them in a place they couldn't go,'" said Holman from his home in southern Ontario.

"'The people are here and they can speak for themselves. I like to let the visitors here listen to the people directly.' I thought that was a brilliant approach."

He was a straight-shooter, honest to his constituents, added Holman.

"It spoke to the fact that he was comfortable in his own skin and didn't need to micro-manage things and telling some big shot something only to risk having them come to Inuvik," he said.

"People were quite capable of telling the government what they felt but couldn't afford to go to Yellowknife and do it themselves."

Butters was re-elected in 1975 when the boundaries of the Western Arctic riding he represented were re-aligned and a new riding for Inuvik was created. He would go on to a successful career as one of four five-term MLAs which includes current sitting members Jane Groenewegen of Hay River and Michael Miltenberger of Fort Smith.

"Tom was an even-handed guy," said Holman. "He was a man of the people."

Butters was predeceased by his wife Margaret "Peg" Butters and his son Alan Butters. He leaves behind his wife Lynn Petrie and children Christine Cross, Ian Butters, Meg Innes and five grandchildren.