A Maritime family connection lies behind an impromptu $1 million gift to Riverdale’s pioneering gay-rights church.

“It came out of the blue,” says Metropolitan Community Church Pastor Brent Hawkes, of the donation from Wallace McCain, founder of McCain Foods, and his wife Margaret McCain, former lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick.

“I knew his father,” Wallace McCain said simply from the couple’s Toronto home, partly explaining their motivation. “His father had a grocery store five miles from Florenceville, (N.B).”

The announcement coincides with the 10-year anniversary of a controversial wedding ceremony Hawkes conducted for two same-sex couples. The act ranks as a milestone in Canadian civil rights and helped lead to legal recognition of same-sex unions.

The gift, Hawkes said, is to go toward paying off the church mortgage and pursuing a support program for gay and lesbian refugees to Canada.

“There are 68 countries in the world where I could be arrested for being gay,” he said. “In 10 of those I could be executed.”

In 1950, the pastor’s father opened a general store with a grocery in Bath, N.B., leading to the beginnings of the McCain-Hawkes connection.

“In the early days, my father also used to run almost a mini-store in a truck,” Hawkes recalled. “He used to drive around on different routes on different days of the week, and many of the farmers would go inside and buy their groceries.”

In 1956, Wallace McCain and his brother Harrison incorporated McCain Foods Ltd. and the following year opened their first french-fries plant 8 kilometres from Bath, in Florenceville.

The Hawkes family sold McCain products. McCain workers shopped at the Hawkes store. Tony Hawkes, Brent’s younger brother, went to school with the McCain’s daughter Martha.

“In the mid-1960s, Dad expanded the store and started a restaurant,” the pastor recalled.

“With french fries, it was always: ‘Are they hand-cut or are they McCains?’” he said. “Some people loved hand-cut, some people loved McCains. We always had to have both.”

After high school, Hawkes attended Mount Allison University. When Margaret McCain became chancellor, she and Hawkes would see each other at alumni events.

For decades, Margaret McCain played the organ at the Anglican Church in Florenceville, Hawkes said, and daughter Martha attends Metropolitian Community.

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“Some neat connections,” the pastor said. “Typical Maritime stories, right?”

In consultation with the McCains, the church board has laid out a three-year program, including hiring a part-time staff worker, to build its refugee support network.

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