Even rejected ideas from G7 gender advisory council will see light of day

OTTAWA — Isabelle Hudon has a few rules when she runs a meeting and one of them is to never allow women to sit along the wall — and away from the table.

“If there is no chair at the table, then you bring the table to the chair,” Hudon, the Canadian ambassador to France, said in an interview Thursday.

It is not about asking the men to take a back seat, she said, but, rather asking them to let the women squeeze in.

“I gave myself the challenge to do at least one thing a day for the cause.”

This week, Hudon, who was the head of Sun Life Financial Quebec before she entered the world of diplomacy last fall, is helping women squeeze into a space around a much more powerful table.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is making gender equality an overarching theme of Canada’s G7 presidency, which will include a focus on the economic empowerment of women as world leaders gather in early June in the Charlevoix region of Quebec.

Trudeau tasked Hudon with co-chairing — alongside billionaire philanthropist Melinda Gates — a G7 gender equality advisory council he set up to help bring feminism to the gathering of world leaders at a resort in La Malbaie, Que.

The advisory council, which includes such high-profile members as Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai and Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, is developing genderrelated recommendations that touch on each one of the themes for the G7 summit.

The gender equality advisory council presented its preliminary ideas to Trudeau this week, but will not be submitting its final recommendations until a few days before the G7 summit.

That is not a lot of time, Hudon acknowledged: “We are doing the best with the time that we have.”