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.[4]
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 Agencydisplaced 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.[5]
Borunsky and Rich married and moved to Denmark where Darcy was born in 1950. Darcy and her sister and brother were all baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church but were not raised in any faith. The family emigrated to Canada in 1951, and settled in Sarnia where Borunsky found work in the petrochemical industry. When she was 8, her parents changed the family's name to Darcy as her father wanted a French sounding name. After his retirement, her father started attending Holy Blossom synagogue and the Bernard Betel Centre for Creative Living in order to rekindle his Jewish roots and gradually revealed his story to his children.
Darcy was raised in Sarnia, and moved to Toronto to study political science at York University but quit after 1½ years,[4] but not before infiltrating and disrupting the Miss Canadian University Pageant yelling "It's true it's a meat market and they do exploit women!" as the winner was announced.[6] After travelling and doing odd jobs, she became a University of Toronto library clerk in 1972 and became active in CUPE.[4][7]
By the mid-1980s, she was president of the Metro Toronto Council of CUPE.[11]
In 1986, she ran for the position of Ontario president of CUPE challenging 10-year incumbent Lucie Nicholson.[7] She was unsuccessful,[12] losing by a margin of 318–240, her defeat blamed on a red-baiting campaign by the union's leadership. Darcy, however, did manage to retain a spot on the union's executive board topping the slate of "member at large" positions.[13]
By 1988, she was first vice-president of CUPE's Ontario division[14] as well as a vice-president of the Ontario Federation of Labour.[15] In 1989, she successfully ran for the position of national secretary-treasurer of CUPE,[16] the union's number two position. saying that said she stands for strong leadership to help CUPE cope with "some of the incredibly difficult challenges we'll see in the next few years, especially in light of free trade."[15]
In 1991, she was elected CUPE national president taking over the 406,000 member trade union.[19] By the time she retired 13 years later the union had grown to 525,000 members.[2]
↑Galt, Virginia, "Former radical new CUPE president Darcy wants to unleash lobbying potential of largest union in Canada", Globe and Mail, October 17, 1991
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