Charles Bertrand Harry Murphy (1924 - 1999)
Harry Murphy was born in Richmond, Quebec, the youngest of six children. His father, Joseph, worked for the railroad and so did Harry. Harry came to the Yukon in 1950 to visit his older brother Ed who was working in the Haines Junction area. Harry took a seasonal job as a record keeper at a federal construction camp working on the south end of the Mayo Road [North Klondike Highway]. John MacIsaac’s crews bulldozed up from Whitehorse while the Mannix crews came down from Mayo, and when the two met at Fox Lake in October, Murphy’s job ended and he returned to Quebec.1)
In 1952, a federal engineer who Harry had worked for in the Yukon wrote to ask him to help organize a federal department of Highways, Bridges, and Public Works in Whitehorse. He decided to take the job for maybe six months and ended up staying in the Yukon until retirement. He set up the administrative structure to maintain the Whitehorse to Mayo road and construct a spur road from Stewart Crossing to Dawson. After the capital moved to Whitehorse in 1953, Harry was absorbed by the territorial treasury department and worked under Commissioner Wilf Brown and Andy Ward, the territorial treasurer. When Dale Robertson needed help, Harry became the assistant territorial treasurer looking after old-age assistance, and allowances for the disabled and blind. Child welfare was looked after by a volunteer church society.2)
In 1956, Commissioner Fred Collins wanted welfare separated from the territorial secretary’s office and Harry started building a structured social welfare program. There were no funds to hire a professional social worker until 1958 and until then, Murphy personally handed interviews and determined needs. Every application had to be approved by the commissioner as guidelines and policies were gradually developed. Between 1956 and 1974, he justified the need for a funded program to reluctant territorial councils. His child welfare program evolved into a funded department of Social Welfare and the many service programs we take for granted today.3)
Murphy’s eighteen-year tenure as director of Social Welfare gave him contacts with bureaucrats and politicians in other jurisdictions and in 1974 he was asked to establish a federal intergovernmental affairs agency, He nurtured the directorate to function as a link between the territorial and federal governments and as a liaison with British Columbia and Alaska. In 1981, he went to Ottawa to set up the Yukon Federal Relations Office to acquaint Ottawa with Yukon priorities, needs and concerns. Harry and his wife Sheila retired to Victoria, British Columbia in 1988.4)