Activist was at G7 summit women’s empowerment meeting
Local activist Rosemary Ganley was seated between Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and British Prime Minister Theresa May at a G7 meeting on women’s empowerment in Quebec on Saturday morning when U.S. President Donald Trump caused a stir by arriving late.
Ganley was asked by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to be part of the G7’s Gender Equality Advisory Council. It’s a group of women from around the world gathered to advise leaders on how to advance gender equality in all areas of their work.
On Saturday morning at the G7 summit in the Charlevoix region of Quebec, the advisory council met for an hour over breakfast with the G7 leaders.
Trump arrived several minutes late, just as council co-chair Isabelle Hudon, who is Canada’s ambassador to France, was speaking.
Ganley said Trump flashed a big smile at Trudeau, and that the clicks of cameras from press photographers filled the room.
She said Trump drew attention even though he said nothing in the meeting.
“He’s an ominous presence,” Ganley said in an interview from an airport in Quebec, as she was returning to Peterborough late Saturday. “And he has a real scowl… He seems to have a way of undermining the good work – the progressive work – that is being done.”
Minister of Status of Women Maryam Monsef was also at the meeting on Saturday morning. She spoke to The Examiner over the phone Sunday afternoon from Ottawa.
“That time we had with the leaders in the room was history in the making,” Monsef said.
She said the leaders were looking at gender equality not simply as a social issue but as an economic one, and that in itself “was history in the making.”
The point is that fostering gender equality is not just a nice or right thing to do, but
a smart move to help grow the middle classes, Monsef said.
“And the leaders were listening,” she said.
Ganley said a few members of the advisory committee were missing on Saturday morning: co-chair Melinda Gates was at her son’s high school graduation, for instance, and Malala Yousafzai, a young Pakistani activist for female education, was not able to attend either.
But other members of the council were there and spoke to the G7 leaders, Ganley said: Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, for example, as well as Oxfam International executive director Winnie Byanyima.
The council has a report outlining their recommendations to the G7 (recommendations that Trudeau called “broad, bold and ambitious” in a news conference aired on Global TV).
“We recognize that gender equality is not a theme to look at for a one-hour session – it’s a theme that needs to cut through everything this G7 has done,” Trudeau said in news footage of the meeting.
Meanwhile the Trudeau government announced earlier in the summit that it had raised more than $3.8 billion, along with other countries, to send the world’s poorest girls to school, the Canadian Press reported.
That includes an investment of $400 million from the Canadian government, CP reported, as well as contributions from G7 partners and the World Bank.
Ganley said that announcement of funding for education for girls got applause in the room on Saturday.
She also said French President Emmanuel Macron announced at the breakfast that when the G7 summit is hosted in France next year, he would follow Trudeau’s lead and convene a gender advisory committee too.
“You felt you were heard by the world’s richest economies,” Ganley said. “We did make history.”