Avril Phaedra Douglas "Kim" Campbell is a Canadian politician, diplomat, lawyer and writer who served as the 19th Prime Minister of Canada, from June 25, 1993, to November 4, 1993.
Background
The second daughter of George and Phyllis Campbell, Avril Phaedra Douglas Campbell was born on March 10, 1947, in Port Alberni, British Columbia, and raised in that province's largest city, Vancouver. Her father, a World War II veteran who was wounded during the Italian campaign, received a university degree after the war and became a lawyer. The parents divorced when their daughter was 12. In her own words, "My mother left a very difficult marriage … it had everything to do with the powerlessness of women in those days. The breakup … was very painful for me and being on my own as a teenager was very painful …. " It was during this period of emotional turmoil that Campbell began calling herself "Kim. " She did not see her mother for a decade after the divorce.
Education
At the age of 16 she was elected the first "girl president" of Vancouver's Prince of Wales High School student council, and she was the valedictorian of the graduating class of 1964. She earned a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of British Columbia (UBC), where she served as vice-president of the student government and developed a reputation for conservative, traditionalist views.
After beginning an M. A. in internationaShe has such honorary degrees: The Law Society of Upper Canada (LL. D) (1991); Brock University (LL. D) (1998); Northeastern University, Boston (DPS) (1999); University of British Columbia (LL. D) (November 23, 2000); Mount Holyoke College (LL. D) (2004); Chatham College (LL. D) (2005); Arizona State University (D. Litt) (December 2005); University of Alberta (LL. D) (2010); Trent University (LL. D) (2011)l relations at UBC, Campbell won a scholarship in 1970 to pursue doctoral studies in Soviet government at the London School of Economics. She returned home in 1973 without her Ph. D.
Campbell entered law school at UBC in 1980.
Career
She returned home in 1973, teaching political studies at Simon Fraser University, UBC, and Vancouver Community College, but not obtaining a permanent academic position. She would later express the opinion that this was because she was a woman and not because she had not completed a graduate degree. Campbell began work at the influential Vancouver firm of Ladner Downs in 1983, and was called to the British Columbia bar in 1984.
Campbell launched her political career in 1980, winning a seat as a trustee on the Vancouver School Board. From 1982 to 1984 she chaired the board and presided over its $150 million annual budget, vigorously defending high profile cost-cutting measures. Her controversial commitment to restraint in the face of labor union opposition impressed the right-of-center Social Credit premier of British Columbia, Bill Bennett. Campbell ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the provincial legislature under the Bennett banner in 1983, and in September 1985 she left Ladner Downs to serve as executive director in the premier's office.
Against the advice of colleagues and although still a novice in politics, Campbell contested the leadership of the provincial Social Credit Party after Bennett resigned in May 1986. She finished last, obtaining a derisory 14 out of almost 1, 300 votes cast by delegates at the convention, but impressed audiences with a powerful speech delivered on primetime television. Campbell was elected to the provincial assembly in October, but she had denounced the new leader in her convention address and she was never part of his inner circle. She married lawyer Howard Eddy during the summer of 1986; that marriage too did not last.
Campbell jumped to national politics in 1988, winning a Vancouver seat as a Conservative and attracting much favorable attention within the party and in the media. The prime minister, Brian Mulroney, took note and brought her into his cabinet as the junior minister for Indian affairs and northern development. On February 23, 1990, she became Canada's first woman minister of justice and attorney general. She championed tougher gun control regulations after the murder of women engineering students in Montreal, as well as legislation establishing stricter standards for the prosecution of rapists. Critics pointed to the compromises made along the way and to her support for the criminalization of abortion except when a woman's health was in danger. Campbell's growing list of admirers replied that she was adapting to the realities of politics, learning the flexibility and accessibility that she had always been accused of lacking.
In January 1993 Campbell was appointed Canada's first woman minister of national defense and minister of veterans affairs. Controversy quickly ensued. In the midst of a recession, and with millions of jobless Canadians, she determinedly defended the contract negotiated by her predecessor to buy $5. 8 billion worth of sophisticated EH101 helicopters. Then, on March 16, a prisoner was tortured and beaten to death while in the custody of Canadian peace-keepers in Somalia. Campbell claimed that it was not until March 31 that she learned the death had been "characterized as a homicide. " Her senior military commander contradicted her publicly.
Nevertheless, Campbell had transformed herself into the most striking politician in the country and the logical successor to retiring prime minister Mulroney. One by one the stalwarts of the Conservative Party, including former prime minister Joe Clark, dropped by the wayside, leaving only one other serious candidate, 34-year-old environment minister Jean Charest, to oppose Campbell at the leadership convention. In the final analysis, Charest came within six percentage points of victory, but Campbell's superior organization and the early support of the party bosses was decisive. She was elected Conservative chief on June 13, 1993, and was named prime minister on June 25.
The new prime minister pared down the size of the cabinet, initiated a massive reorganization of government structure, attended the July G7 Summit in Tokyo, and crisscrossed the country to drum up support. Polls showed that she was well-regarded but that the weight of a decade of Conservative rule under the deeply unpopular Mulroney was enormous. The mandate of the Conservatives was almost up, and an election had to be called soon. When the campaign came in September-October 1993, the Conservatives lurched from disaster to disaster, and Campbell was herself not blameless. She had been chosen as a fresh face, but her inexperience showed, and she spoke frequently without sufficient thought or tact. The opposition leader, Jean Chrétien, meanwhile performed flawlessly, while regional parties in Quebec and the West further sapped Conservative strength.
The result was the greatest electoral defeat ever suffered by a major national party in Canadian political history. The Conservatives won only two of the available 295 seats, and Campbell's was not one of them. She left the premiership on November 4, 1993. Without a base in Parliament and hounded by a legion of detractors, she resigned as head of the party on December 13, 1993. Later, in the summer of 1996, Campbell was appointed by Prime Minister Jean Chretien to be the Canadian consul general in Los Angeles.
She published her memoirs, Time and Chance: The Political Memoirs of Canada's First Woman Prime Minister in 1996, but the book proved to be less sensational than a 1994 book from her own senior advisor, David McLaughlin: Poisoned Chance: The Last Campaign.
It was briefly rumoured that she was to be sent to Moscow as the ambassador to Russia. However, in 1996, Campbell was appointed consul general to Los Angeles by the Chrétien government, a post in which she remained until 2000.
From 1999 to 2003, she chaired the Council of Women World Leaders, a network of women who hold or have held the office of president or prime minister. She was succeeded by former Irish President Mary Robinson. From 2003 until 2005 she served as President of the International Women's Forum, a global organization of women of prominent achievement, with headquarters in Washington, D. C. From 2001 to 2004, she was with the at the Center for Public Leadership and lectured at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She has served as a director of several publicly traded companies in high technology and biotechnology, and currently sits on the board of Athenex, a biopharmaceutical companty that had its IPO June 14, 2017 and trades under the ticker symbol "ATNX".
Campbell chaired the steering committee of the World Movement for Democracy from 2008-2015. She served on the board of the International Crisis Group, an NGO that aims to prevent and resolve deadly conflicts. She served on the board of the Forum of Federations, the EastWest Institute, and is a founding trustee of The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence at King's College London. She was a founding member of the Club de Madrid, an independent organization whose main purpose is to strengthen democracy in the world. Its membership is by invitation only, and consists of former Heads of State and Government. At different times Campbell has served as its Interim President, Vice President and from 2004 2006 its Secretary General. Campbell was the founding Chair of the International Advisory Board of the Ukrainian Foundation for Effective Governance, an NGO formed in September 2007 with the aid of businessman Rinat Akhmetov.
During the 2006 election campaign, Campbell endorsed the candidacy of Tony Fogarassy, the Conservative candidate in Campbell's former riding of Vancouver Centre. Campbell also clarified to reporters that she is a supporter of the new Conservative Party. Fogarassy lost the election, placing a distant third.
While testifying in April 2009 at the Mulroney-Schreiber Airbus inquiry, Campbell said she still follows Canadian politics "intermittently. "
In April 2014, Campbell was appointed the founding principal of the new Peter Lougheed Leadership College at the University of Alberta.
She has appeared on the CBC Television program Canada's Next Great Prime Minister, a show which profiles and selects young prospective leaders, and has also been an occasional panelist on Real Time with Bill Maher.
On August 2, 2016, it was announced by Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that Campbell had agreed to chair a seven-person committee to prepare a shortlist of candidates to succeed Thomas Cromwell on the Supreme Court of Canada. In mid-October 2016, the committee announced that it would recommend the appointment of Malcolm Rowe to the court, and he was sworn in on October 31 as the first Supreme Court justice to hail from Newfoundland and Labrador.
Achievements
Politics
As Justice Minister, Campbell brought about a new rape law that clarified sexual assault and whose passage firmly entrenched that in cases involving sexual assault, "no means no". She also introduced the rape shield law, legislation that protects a person's sexual past from being explored during trial. Her legacy of supporting sexual victims has been confirmed through her work with the Peter Lougheed Leadership College at the University of Alberta, where the inaugural cohort of scholars proposed that the college immediately implement mandatory education regarding sexual assault for students, which Campbell readily accepted.
Since Parliament never sat during Campbell's four months as a prime minister, she was unable to bring forth new legislation, which must be formally introduced there. However, she did implement radical changes to the structure of the Canadian government. Under her tenure, the federal cabinet's size was cut from over 35 cabinet ministers and ministers of state to 23. This included the redesign of 8 ministries and the abolition or merging of 15 others. The Chrétien government retained these new ministries when it took office. The number of cabinet committees was reduced from 11 to 5. Her successors have continued to keep the size of the federal Cabinet to approximately 30 members. She was also the first prime minister to convene a First Ministers' conference for consultation prior to representing Canada at the G7 Summit. Due to her brief time in office, Campbell holds a unique spot among Canadian prime ministers in that she made no Senate appointments.
Campbell harshly criticized Mulroney for not allowing her to succeed him before June 1993. In her view, when she became prime minister, she had very little time or chance to make up ground on the Liberals once her initial popularity faded. In her memoirs, Time and Chance, and in her response to The Secret Mulroney Tapes, Campbell suggested that Mulroney knew the Tories would be defeated in the upcoming election, and wanted a "scapegoat who would bear the burden of his unpopularity" rather than a viable successor. The cause of the 1993 debacle remains disputed, with some arguing that the election results were a vote against Mulroney rather than a rejection of Campbell, and others suggesting that the poorly run Campbell campaign was the key factor in the result.
Although the Progressive Conservatives survived as a distinct political party for another decade after the 1993 debacle, they never recovered their previous standing. During that period they were led by Jean Charest (1993–1998), Elsie Wayne (1998) and then, for the second time, by Joe Clark (1998–2003) (who had been Opposition Leader and briefly Prime Minister 20 years earlier). By 2003, the party under new leader Peter MacKay had voted to merge with the Canadian Alliance to form the Conservative Party of Canada, thus ceasing to exist, despite MacKay having promised not to pursue a mergers. Joe Clark continued to sit as a "Progressive Conservative" into 2004. The new generation of right-leaning Conservatives gained power in the election of 2006, ensuring the "Tory" nickname's survival in the federal politics of Canada. A PC "rump" caucus continued to exist in the Senate of Canada (consisting of certain Clark, Mulroney and Paul Martin appointees), but as of 2012 only one senator, Elaine McCoy of Alberta, sits as a Progressive Conservative.
Membership
She is a member of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada.
She is a Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics and a Honorary Fellow of the Center for Public Leadership, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
Personality
The young Campbell was hard-driving, outgoing, and adventurous.
During her career she had large quantities of charisma, humor, energy, intelligence—and, apparently, "winnability. "
Interests
Among her interests were the piano, the guitar, and the musical theater—and she had an aptitude for academic pursuits.
Connections
In 1972 she married her companion of five years, Nathan Divinsky, a mathematics professor almost twice her age. Campbell and Divinsky were divorced in 1983, and Campbell married Howard Eddy in 1986, a marriage that lasted until shortly before she became prime minister.
She is currently married to Hershey Felder, an actor, playwright, composer, and concert pianist.
19th Prime Minister of Canada, The Right Honourable
Awards
Companion of the Order of Canada Order of British Columbia 125th Anniversary of the Confederation of Canada Medal Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal