Jean Vanier contributes to peace by creating inclusive communities for people with disabilities. #Canada150
Jean Vanier founded L’Arche in 1964 when he invited two men with intellectual disabilities to live with him in his home in France. There are now L’Arche communities in 35 countries where people with intellectual disabilities live with friends who assist them. A governing philosophy of the communities is Vanier’s belief that people with disabilities are teachers, rather than burdens.
Vanier is internationally recognized for his compelling vision of what it means to live a fully human life and for his social and spiritual leadership in building a compassionate society. He is a respected author with over 20 books to his name. He has received many awards in many countries for promoting peace, faith, and loving communities.
“We must do what we can to diminish walls, to meet each other. Why do we put people with disabilities behind walls?”
Jean Vanier, Massey Lectures, 1998
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Steve Paikin contributes to peace as a journalist with a concern for justice and a life-long commitment to informing the public. #Canada150
Steve Paikin’s work informing people about events and politics began in university where he was the sports editor for the University of Toronto’s weekly independent sports newspaper. He was also a play-by-play announcer covering hockey and football. With experience in radio and print journalism, he joined TVO, Ontario’s public broadcaster, in 1992. Since then, he has co-hosted or hosted a variety of public affairs programs. For more than a decade, the hour-long daily “The Agenda with Steve Paikin” has been TVO’s flagship current affairs program.
His April 12th, 2017 National Post article on the anniversary on the Battle of Vimy Ridge asked, “A century ago, how many of my sons would I have lost in the trenches of the First World War?”
Paikin was the moderator of six election debates: the 2006, 2008, and 2011 federal leaders’ debates, and the 2007, 2011, and 2014 Ontario provincial leaders’ debates.
Paikin has published several books and produced several documentaries on politicians and political life, including the award-winning “Return to the Warsaw Ghetto”.
For further “reading” we recommend:
The Agenda from 2015 with Karen Armstrong on Religion & Peace
The Agenda from 2014 on the Isreali-Palestinian peace process
The Agenda from 2016 with Christie Blatchford on Canadian justice
The Agenda from 2016 on how sexual assault is dealt with in the Canadian courts.
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Justice Rosalie Abella contributed to peace by doing groundbreaking work for equality in the Supreme Court of Canada. #Canada150
On July 1, 1946, Madame Justice Rosalie Abella of the Canadian Supreme Court was born in a displaced persons camp in Stuttgart, Germany, to parents who were Holocaust survivors. Her father was a lawyer, appointed to be the defense counsel for displaced persons in the Allied Zone in southwestern Germany. Rosalie grew up in Toronto after her family moved to Canada in 1950. She obtained her BA and LLB at the University of Toronto, and was called to the Bar in 1970 and practiced both civil and criminal litigation until she wasappointed to the Ontario Family Court at age 29, the youngest and first pregnant person appointed to Canada’s judiciary; appointed to the Ontario Court of Appeal in 1992;and the first Jewish woman to be on Canada’s Supreme Court.
Her interest and skills in fighting for human rights resulted in her appointment as the sole Commissioner of the 1984 Royal Commission on Equality in Employment, which developed the concept and term “employment equity”.
Her theories of “equality “ and “discrimination” were adopted first by the Supreme Court of Canada in its decision dealing with equality rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1989, and were later implemented by New Zealand, Northern Ireland, and South Africa and by the Canadian government. She also served as Chair of the Ontario Labour Relations Board (1984-89), Chair of the Ontario Law Reform Commission (1989 – 1992), and Boulton Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Law of McGill University (1988-92). As well, she was a commissioner on the Ontario Human Rights Commission, a member of the Ontario Public Service Labour Relations Tribunal, Co-Chair of the University of Toronto Academic Discipline Tribunal; a member of the Premier’s Advisory Committee on Confederation; and as Chair of the Study on Access to Legal Service by the Disabled.
Justice Abella is a prolific author, having written more than 90 articles and written or co-edited four books. She has been honoured as a Senior Fellow of Massey College (1989), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (1997), and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007. She has been lectured and served on various boards at universities in North America and abroad. She was also a member of the Canadian Judicial Council’s Inquiry on Donald Marshall, Jr. Justice Abella has been active in Canadian judicial education, organizing the first judicial seminar in which all levels of the judiciary participated, the first judicial seminar at which persons outside the legal profession were invited to take part, organized the fist national education program for administrative tribunals, and the first national conference for Canada’s female judges. She has been awarded 37 honorary degrees and other notable honours such as The Distinguished Service award of the Canadian Bar Association (Ontario), The International Justice Prize of the Peter Gruber Foundation; The Human Relations Award of the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews; the Honourable Walter Tarnopolsky Human Rights Award and the Bora Laskin Award for Distinguished Service in Labour Law.
She is a compelling speaker and was reported by Michael Enright on the Sunday Edition of CBC in 2016 as having made Yale Law School graduates cry on the happiest day of their lives after commenting:
“In these frenetically fluid, intellectually sclerotic, economically narcissistic, ideologically polarized, and rhetorically tempestuous times—a world that too often feels like it’s spinning out of control—we need a legal profession that worries about what the world looks and feels like to those who are vulnerable”
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Maude Barlow contributes to peace through her advocacy work on the right to clean water. #Canada150
Maude Barlow is the national chairperson of the Council of Canadians and the co-founder of the Blue Planet Project, a group working internationally for the right to clean water.
She was Senior Advisor on Water to the President of the United Nations General Assembly in 2008-2009 and a leader in the campaign to have water recognized as a human right by the United Nations.
She has received many honourary doctorates and written or co-written over a dozen books, including Blue Future: Protecting Water for People and the Planet Forever, and Boiling Point: Government Neglect, Corporate Abuse and Canada’s Water Crisis.
“The life of an activist is a good life because you get up in the morning caring about more than just yourself or how to make money. A life of activism gives hope, which is a moral imperative in this work and in this world. It gives us energy and it gives us direction. You meet the nicest people, you help transform ideas and systems and you commit to leaving the earth in at least as whole a condition as you inherited it.”
Maude Barlow, addressing Trent University after receiving an honorary Doctor of Laws in 2009.
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The Canadian Peace Congress contributes to peace by advocating and working for world peace and disarmament. #Canada150
The Canadian Peace Congress (CPC) was founded after the end of the Second World War, by former United Church minister James Gareth Endicott, as an affiliate of the World Peace Council.
In the 1950s and ‘60s, the CPC was a leader in the national peace movement, promoting dialogue and peaceful co-existence between the Communist bloc and Western bloc, opposing the war in Vietnam, and supporting nuclear disarmament.
The CPC is against Canada’s involvement in ballistic missile defense technology and the strategy of being the first to use a nuclear attack and then being equipped to resist and survive a counterstrike.
Currently, CPC is calling for the complete withdrawal of Canadian forces from Syria and the Middle East. As well, the CPC wants Canada to withdraw from NATO. It opposes all attempts to make Canada a military superpower, believing that peace, not war or militarism, is the way to achieve democracy, human rights, and social and economic justice.
A more in-depth telling of CPC’s history can be found on their website.
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Dr. Samantha Nutt contributes to peace through her work with War Child Canada which she established to help children in war zones around the world. #Canada150
Dr. Samantha Nutt is a family physician with almost two decades’ experience working in war zones, including Iraq, Afghanistan, The Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Darfur, South Sudan, Burundi, northern Uganda, Ethiopia, and the Thai-Burmese border. She wrote about her experiences as a war-zone physician in her 2011 book Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies and Aid.
Dr. Nutt is on staff at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto in the Department of Family and Community Medicine. She is also on the board of the David Suzuki Foundation.
She has published articles on human rights, foreign policy, and war-related issues.
“Justice not charity, solidarity not pity, opportunity not handouts.”
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The Canadian Voice of Women for Peace (VOW Peace) was established in 1960 when women across Canada were worried about the threat of nuclear war and the effect of nuclear fallout on children from weapons testing. Based in Toronto, it has chapters in several provinces in Canada.
VOW Peace is a part of a network of other peace groups in Canada and around the world, all working together for a world without war. It was a founding partner in the Canadian Peace Alliance which has over 4 million supporters across the country.
Current priorities include stopping the bombing in Syria and Iraq, withdrawing Canadian troops from Ukraine, opening Canada’s borders to more refugees, and signing and ratifying the Arms Trade Treaty.
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Saint Marguerite Bourgeoys contributed to peace by providing education to girls, the poor, and indigenous peoples in New France. #Canada150
Saint Marguerite Bourgeoys (1620 – 1700) came to North America from France as a young woman ready to serve the community. She opened the first public school in what is now Montreal in 1659 and worked to provide all children with an education. She also set up skills training classes for women in the community to help them earn a living. She always devoted the majority of her time to helping the more needy members of society. In 1692, her congregation opened a school in Quebec that specifically catered to girls from poor families.
After a few years, she established the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, a non-cloistered religious order whose members worked in the community. She had to resist continued efforts by the church to require the sisters to remain within a cloister.
The Catholic Church recognized her as a saint in 1982.
“Not only has she performed the office of schoolmistress by giving free instruction to the young girls in all the occupations that make them capable of earning their livelihood, but, far from being a liability to the country, she has built permanent buildings, cleared land-concessions, set up a farm…” – King Louis XIV of France
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The Honourable Flora MacDonald (1926 – 2015) contributed to peace as Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and then as an international humanitarian, working primarily with women in Afghanistan.
Flora MacDonald was elected Member of Parliament for Kingston and the Islands in 1972. She became the first female Minister of External Affairs in 1979.
During the Vietnamese boat people crisis, she challenged Canadians to match federal government funding for Vietnamese refugees; 60,000 were admitted into Canada. She was also part of the planning to rescue six American diplomats who were in hiding after militant Iranian students invaded the American embassy in Tehran.
She was defeated in the 1988 election, but soon threw herself into international development work, taking on key roles with groups including the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict and the International Development Research Centre. In 2001, she began travelling to remote parts of Afghanistan. In 2007, she founded Future Generations Canada, an aid group that supports schools for girls, and health and farming projects in Afghan villages.
MacDonald said she gave the same advice to women and men aspiring to elected office: “Polish your public speaking skills and learn to “relate to the difficulties somebody down the street is having.”
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The Honourable Len Marchand contributed to peace through his work in federal politics, particularly promoting the need for land settlements with Canada’s First Nations. #Canada150
The Honourable Leonard (Len) Stephen Marchand (1933 – 2016) was a member of the Okanagan Indian Band and the first status First Nations person to be elected to Canada’s Parliament.
Trained as an agronomist, Marchand left that career in the mid-1960s to work for the North American Indian Brotherhood. His work took him to Ottawa to lobby on Indigenous issues. He ran for the Liberal party in the riding of Kamloops-Cariboo in 1968, and represented the riding until 1979.
The Honourable Len Marchand became the first Indigenous person to hold a position in the federal cabinet. He was Parliamentary Secretary to Jean Chretien, who was then the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, and had a role in convincing the government to begin land settlement negotiations with First Nations.
Marchand also held posts as Minister of State for Small Businesses and Minister of the Environment. He was appointed to the Senate in 1984 where he worked to establish the Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples. He retired from the Senate in 1998.
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