Sandra Bell

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• First-hand information. Entered by Sandra Bell at registration.

Sandra Bell had a talented, loving son (writer, drummer, tennis pro), Colin Earl Bell-Pimentel, who passed away tragically at age 20, after being struck by a train walking home while listening to music in headphones. After Colin's death, she wrote an album of songs expressing her love and loss, which Andrew Collins (Foggy Hogtown Boys) recorded/produced. The songs remained unpublished as at December, 2016, due to lack of funds to complete the project. Sandra once performed (percussion/snare drum/singing) in a country band (The Cameron House, Hart House/University of Toronto, county fairs), which self-produced/published one CD, containing several of her songs. Following a leave of absence she continued her work in the arts championing music and was instrumental in giving Toronto's creative music artists a space within which to do their work. She is best known for her work progressing the cause of natural gardening and following a lengthy court case over her natural garden in The Beaches, she and her legal team secured a victory based on the Canadian Charter of (guaranteed) Rights and Freedoms'. which ruled that her right to express herself in her gardening practices was inviolable and for the first time compared this to the right of religious freedom of expression. This set a unique, major precedent, which went on to support environmental legal challenges across North America. Subsequently, she with her and City of Toronto lawyers re-wrote Toronto's bylaw governing private property use, creating one of Canada's most progressive earliest bylaws enabling natural / renaturalized gardening. She produces abstract paintings and has written poetry (best New Voice by Poetry Canada Review), and prose. In her early career as a journalist, she worked as a writer at The Globe and Mail (unusually immediately upon becoming a student of the profession and during her first year of study). Prior to exiting college, she worked at two other major papers. She dreams of one day seeing her homeland in Scotland, including her parent's ancestral lands, and meeting some kin.