Canada's Oldest Living Person Is 110 And She Scrapes The Butter Off The Paper
Marie Rosa was born in Toronto on September 17, 1915, the year before Canadian women won the right to vote in any provincial election, and she has been outlasting expectations ever since. She worked as a seamstress and forewoman during the Second World War, met her husband Gordon unexpectedly on a Toronto streetcar after the war ended, married him in 1952, and had her only child, Cathie, in 1954. She has now lived through 17 Canadian prime ministers, two world wars, the Great Depression, and three separate bouts of COVID-19. Her family grew to include two grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. In April 2026, following the death of 110-year-old Burdett Sisler, Marie became the oldest known living person in Canada, a milestone that her family celebrated with a gathering at The Village of Humber Heights retirement community in Toronto in mid-July, with generations of family and friends surrounding her. She is known among those who know her well for her bright, communicative eyes, which her daughter says say everything even when words have become harder to find.
Cathie Sinisalo, who has spent her life watching her mother navigate a world that has changed almost beyond recognition since 1915, has her own theory about what brought Marie this far: the Great Depression. Not because hardship is good for you, but because of what it taught her mother about waste. Marie Rosa scrapes the butter off the wrapper rather than throwing it away. She does not discard anything that can still be used. She does not treat abundance as a given or take any resource, no matter how small, for granted. Cathie says that lesson, absorbed during the Depression and never unlearned, became something close to a philosophy of life, and it is a philosophy that researchers studying the world's longest-lived populations consistently find echoed in their habits: people who live the longest tend to conserve, to stay connected, and to find meaning in small things. Marie's sister Virginia, who lived at the same retirement home, passed away in May 2026 at the age of 103. The grief was real. But the family says Marie still finds joy, still lights up in the right company, and still has something to say, even if she no longer always says it in words. She turns 111 in September.
