Half a world away, in Melbourne, Australia, Dr. Paul Mees died of cancer this summer at the young age of 52.

ATU Local 113 joined with many others around the world in mourning the sudden loss of this great champion of public transit and fierce opponent of transit privatization.

Dr. Mees was an Associate Professor in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University in Melbourne. He died of cancer on 19 June 2013.

He started his career as a lawyer but later turned to Urban Planning and Transport, where his legal training proved to be a great asset to the Public Transit Users’ Association (PTUA), an activist transit group in Australia, for which he served as President for many years.

Dr. Mees was very familiar with Toronto and the TTC. He did his doctoral work on a comparison of public transit in Toronto and Melbourne, cities with many things in common. Because of his deep knowledge, he was asked by Local 113 to be in our highly-praised 2010 video, Keep TTC Public. His clear explanation of the hazards of transit P3s and privatization proved to be the highlight of the video, which has been shown to great acclaim at transit and urban affairs conferences around the world.

In recognition of his life’s work and his contribution to the mission of the ATU to prevent privatization here in Toronto, Local 113 is funding the Paul Mees Memorial Lecture series - a special project involving a campaign highlighting the publicly-funded transit achievements of the Western Australia city of Perth. These achievements of publicly-owned and operated transit will be compared to the failure of transit privatization in Melbourne, Australia’s southernmost urban centre. The presentation will be delivered at public events around Australia and will also be available next year on YouTube.

A wonderful eulogy to Paul Mees by one of his students can be found here.