Judy Darcy

Judy Darcy MLA
Darcy protesting outside a Conservative Party fundraiser in Toronto in 2003
Member of the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia
Incumbent
Assumed office May 14, 2013
Preceded by	Dawn Black
Constituency	New Westminster
Secretary-Business Manager of the Hospital Employees' Union
In office 2005–2011
Succeeded by	Bonnie Pearson
4th National President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees
In office 1991–2003
Preceded by	Jeff Rose
Succeeded by	Paul Moist
National Secretary-Treasurer of the Canadian Union of Public Employees
In office 1989–1991
Personal details
Born	Ida Maria Judith Borunsky 1950 (age 66–67) Denmark
Political party	New Democratic Party (1985–present)
Other political affiliations	Workers' Communist Party of Canada (before 1985)
Alma mater	York University

Judy Darcy MLA (born 1950) is a Canadian health care advocate, trade unionist, and politician. She was president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees from 1991 until 2003 and business manager of the Hospital Employees' Union from 2005 to 2011.

Darcy was elected to the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia in the 2013 election, as a BC NDP candidate for the provincial constituency of New Westminster.

Darcy was born Ida Maria Judith Borunsky in Denmark and came to Canada with her parents when she was 18 months old. Her father was a research chemist who was a shipping clerk for years until he could re-establish his credentials in Canada and resume work in his profession.

Her father, Jules (Youli) Simonovich Borunsky, was a Russian Jew whose family had moved to France following the Russian Revolution. Borunsky's first wife was a French Catholic woman. During the war he enlisted in the French Army and was taken prisoner during the Battle of Dunkirk. During his detention as a Prisoner of War, he survived and avoided deportation to a concentration camp by hiding his Jewishness and pretending to be a devout Catholic, including Catholic references and symbols in his letters to his wife as part of the ruse. With Paris occupied by the Nazis, Borunsky convinced his father that it would be safer for him to join the rest of the family in Kovno, Lithuania. However, four days after he arrived, the town was invaded by the Nazis. Einsatzgruppen murdered most of the Jewish population, presumably including Borunsky's father, sister, her husband and their daughter. According to Darcy, her father “carried tremendous guilt, [t]he guilt of having survived when others died and the guilt of having sent his father to his death.” Borunsky's first wife died of illness around the end of the war. Borunsky, after being liberated, worked as deputy director of a United Nations Refugee Agency displaced persons camp where he met Else Margrethe Rich, a veteran of the Danish resistance movement who found work on the staff of the camp after the war. Traumatized by the war and the loss of his family, and afraid of further anti-Semitic oppression, Borunsky continued to hide his Jewishness from everyone except for his wife until later life.