Campbell born to leadership role
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.
Ironically — perhaps thankfully — Canada’s brilliant, talented first female prime minister is better remembered for an impromptu photograph by Saltspring Island artist Barbara Woodley than for one of the country’s most crushing electoral defeats.
Taken on the spur of the moment, just after she’d picked up new Queen’s counsel robes not long after her appointment as Canada’s first female justice min- ister, she displayed bare shoulders.
“The Queen Mother shows more skin than I’m showing,” she later quipped. Still, the ensuing media furor hadn’t been seen since Pierre Elliot Trudeau was photographed doing a pirouette behind Queen Elizabeth.
“She may read Tolstoy in Russian and play a mean Bach on the cello, but it was bare shoulders that put Avril Phaedra ‘Kim’ Campbell on a fast track to be Canada’s next prime minister,” predicted the Independent, one of Britain’s quality newspapers in 1993.
A month later she was prime minister, the first native-born Brit- ish Columbian to hold the office. Alas, she inherited the unpopularity of outgoing prime minister Brian Mulroney, who in 1984 had won the biggest margin ever. Four months after taking office, Campbell’s party held only two seats — neither was hers.
Yet she’d begun as the brightest, fastest rising star in Canada’s political firmament.
Born in Port Alberni in 1947, Campbell and her sister were raised in Vancouver by their father, a successful lawyer.
She attended Prince of Wales Secondary, where she was a top student and began her impressive string of political firsts as the first female student president.
In 1969, Campbell graduated in political science from University of B.C., where she was the first-year class student president. She then did graduate studies in Soviet government at the London School of Economics. She married a brilliant math professor and chess master she met as an undergraduate, and abandoned grad school to follow him to Vancouver where she took work teaching. They later divorced and she remarried.
She was elected to the Vancouver School Board in 1980, was its chair by 1983, took a law degree, entered provincial politics, sought the Social Credit Party leadership, was elected an MLA in 1986, successfully jumped to federal politics in 1988, and rapidly rose through Indian affairs, justice and defence ministries.
After her defeat as PM she held various public service posts, wrote an autobiography and became first principal of the Peter Lougheed Leadership College at the University of Alberta. She remains the only woman with her portrait hanging in the Prime Ministers’ corridor.