Photo: Louise Warr, third from left, with other members of the Greater Bay of Quinte Chapter members celebrate Seniors Day 2025
The Chair for the Bay of Quinte leads a vigorous Chapter
Louise Warr is quietly effective — a vigorous, determined figure — as she describes her entry into the CARP Chapter for the Greater Bay of Quinte, which she chairs. It was January 2011 and Warr was, by the standards of the famously traditional Loyalist region of central Ontario she was living in, an outsider. That didn’t dissuade her from enthusiastically embracing a new challenge in her life. “I started right with the first meeting,” she recalls to CARP Action. “I thought, ‘Yeah, this is for me.’ I just love the area. I believe in our sense of community.”
It’s been almost fifteen years since then, allowing Warr the time to fully integrate into the region. She now runs a well-organized group that hosts increasingly popular monthly meetings, advocates for seniors’ causes and has a high profile in the area. The Quebec native, who spent decades in Toronto, has found a home in Quinte, where she is the leader in a quartet of dedicated volunteers — representing well over 3,000 local members — which pulls the strings for CARP in the region.
“We’re a tight group of four individuals who run the Chapter,” says Warr. “For our monthly meetings, we attract close to 100 people. Recently, that number has increased — we had 117 last month!
Warr and her trio of hard working seniors’ advocates — Treasurer Minny Verburg, Membership Director Shirley Rogers and Media Relationships Officer Joe Salottolo — work together making the Quinte Chapter a model of volunteer success. “We all throw ideas into the hopper,” says Warr. “We want to make sure that our events are not too serious or political but full of information that our members will appreciate. We have to balance the interests of whoever comes, which can be people coming from as far as Napanee on the east side and as far west as Colborne.”
“A local bakery sponsors us with a free batch of wonderful cookies every month. We had to get a bigger coffee maker because the 36 cup one was too small to accommodate our members. We’re very fortunate that the city of Belleville allows us to use the Quinte Sports and Wellness Centre for free all year.”
Warr takes care to make sure that the region is fairly represented. She says to CARP Action: “Our catchment area is quite large, rural, semi-rural and small urban communities, covering three ridings. We work with three MPPs, three MPs and four mayors of the major urban centres.
“In this area, it’s truly all about community and relationships. Some of the ridings are Conservative and others are Liberal. It’s not easy rolling to get elected here. What’s so important to people here is that whoever their politicians are at any level of government, their expectation is that they’re going to be part of the community, and the local needs are important to them. It’s not about going to Ottawa or Queen’s Park. It’s about remembering who got you there. The mayors go through exactly the same thing.
“In this area, everybody knows everybody else. So, everybody has access on some level to somebody in the government, which is special. It’s really precious. Again, it is all about relationships. And respecting the families who started the community here and blending in what I call imports, such as myself and a lot of other people from Ottawa, Montreal and other places who moved here.”
Louise Warr’s roots are in the Townships, which used to define Anglo Quebec. In many ways, life in small towns characterized most of Canada until the seventies. She recalls: “I grew up in a small town on the South Shore, not too far from Montreal. It was different there. The community was very tight, everything was well-run and everybody enjoyed themselves. There was no schism, shall we say, within the society in those days. I guess a lot of that always stayed with me.”
Her eyes were opened when she left home to go to college and university in Montreal in the early seventies. “When I went to Dawson College for the academic two years and then to Concordia University, Montreal was incredibly vibrant. There was social engagement all over, up and down the streets. Who didn’t window shop at 3 a.m.? We all knew where the all-night cafes were, on Mountain and Drummond Streets. You could always find great conversation — and coffee and soup.”
It was in that period, and a bit earlier on the South Shore, when Warr discovered the joys of activism. “For so many of us back then, working to make changes in society was a big deal. I was kind of in that wheelhouse. Back in the day, it was about rights for women — the whole feminism thing — equal pay and all of that.”
Moving to Quinte after retirement spurred Louise Warr to rekindle the desire to be an advocate — but with a mature outlook. “When I retired, I started looking at other issues,” she recalls. “As we age, we find that there are other things that are equally as important now, at this point in our lives, that obviously we weren’t aware of when we were 21 years old. But that passion to make sure that things move forward is still important. Maybe that’s part of our DNA, from passing through the sixties.”
Warr spent decades working at big retail firms — Eaton’s, The Bay, Winners — where she was able to hone skills that she still applies to managing her CARP Chapter. She was told more than once that “’I’ve got a manager’s head and a buyer’s heart.’ Somehow I managed to blend those two where I could be a good business planner as well as being a creative person when it came to product development.”
Leaving Toronto, where she worked for many years, and settling in the Bay of Quinte was a natural choice for her. “I wanted to move back to an area that was similar to where I grew up. I like the sense of community, the fact that some people don’t have to lock their doors. There’s lots of nature, walking trails, conservation areas. When I ended up unpacking a couple of boxes of books that I’d moved four or five times without ever opening them up — and actually put them on shelves, I figured, ‘This is the moment.’ I’ve been here 18 years.”
The Quinte Quartet led by Warr have taken on major issues over the years. “We were tackling affordable housing long before it became a big deal,” says Warr. “We held panels in 2019 with four mayors coming in, and we had specific questions to ask them. At the very end, I thought it was really important to ask the mayors what were their roadblocks.
“That’s because so often it’s easy to poke holes in something and complain about it, but you don’t get the whole picture until you understand that there are challenges at every level of government and that all levels have to work together to make things happen.
“Each of the four mayors had different challenges, quite aside from funding from the feds or the province. That’s always a given. Nobody gets enough money. But they also talked about difficulties they have within their municipalities and the red tape that was put on them by the provincial government. They spoke about their municipal bylaws, which only allowed certain things to take place.
“After the mayors shared what their challenges were, it took the angst out of everybody. Most people stood up and said, ‘Thank you; we didn’t understand what your challenges are. And we’re disappointed. What we want to do is put more pressure on the other levels of government. To help.’”
Warr is able to apply some of the knowledge she acquired at Concordia in her work at CARP.
“My degree is in history and political science. I specialized in Canadian politics. It’s really important to me that people who come to live in this area understand that the people who are born and bred here, what makes them and the area so special. I often say to people who are coming here from elsewhere, ‘You moved here for a reason. I want you to appreciate the area on different levels from a historical point of view’. Of course, they all love the nature and the waterfront, but there’s more to it than that.”
Warr and her quintet are concerned about the future of the Chapter. “We talk a lot about succession planning. We’re in a demographic that we’re not going to be around forever. We talk a lot about asking for volunteers. But you don’t often get the people you need. Everybody and their brother wants to volunteer until they find out what’s involved. Or they have their own agenda. We need people who are reliable.
“We are all four of us passionate about our CARP Chapter. We love what we do. The success of growing our Chapter membership has been really special and it just validates the things that we believe in.”
It’s fair to say that people like Louise Warr are rare individuals. She has made the Quinte Chapter into something special, thanks to the work of her and her friends. Whenever they leave, there will be a legacy for future leaders to build upon.
To get involved in a CARP Chapter in your community or engage as a local voice for CARP advocacy, please contact Jeanine at CARP HQ: j.appleton@carp.ca
