Irene Spry

Irene Mary Spry, OC (née Biss: Standerton, Transvaal, South Africa, August 28, 1907 – Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, December 16, 1998) was an economic historian and social democrat awarded two honorary doctorates and named to the Order of Canada for her contributions to Canadian intellectual and public life.

The daughter of Evan Ebenezer Biss, Inspector of Schools in the Colonial and Indian Service, and Amelia Bagshaw Johnstone, she attended Bournemouth High School.

Irene Biss, as she then was, first began her undergraduate training at the London School of Economics (1924–25) and later obtained a graduate degree in economics at Girton College (1925–28) of the University of Cambridge, England, where she had been a student of J.M. Keynes, A.C. Pigou, D.H. Robertson and M. Dobb. This was followed by further studies for a master's degree (1928–29) in Social Research and Social Work at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

Spry's formal career as an economic historian began when she joined the Department of Political Economy at the University of Toronto in 1929 where she collaborated with the late H.A. Innis and taught Canadian economic history. Her marriage in 1938 to the late Graham Spry, and subsequent births of their three children, Robin, Richard and Lib, interrupted her academic career. However, during World War II she did serve actively on the Wartime Prices and Trade Board and its later affiliate, the Commodity Prices Stabilization Corporation, in Ottawa and, during the early postwar years, went to England and co-founded Saskatchewan House with her husband, broadcast reformer Graham Spry, who was Agent-General for Saskatchewan in London from 1946 to 1967.

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