Santa Ono

PRESIDENT, UBC

PREVIOUSLY # 22, 2016 As Vancouver’s biggest employer and a big driver of its economic engine, University of British Columbia gets its fair share of the spotlight—especially when things go awry. President Santa Ono, two years into his term, has generally been able to right the ship—and has been proactively trying to advance UBC as an institution committed to diversity and inclusion. In April, Ono appointed Mary Ellen Turpel-lafond, an Indigenous lawyer and former judge (and B.C.’S former representative for children and youth), as UBC’S inaugural director of the new Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre. As part of the announcement, he also formally apologized to survivors of Indian residential schools for the role UBC played in supporting a system that ruined the lives of thousands of young children.