CAMPBELL LOOKS BACK, AHEAD
Ex-PM’s Vancouver visit Wednesday part of Library and Archives Canada event
Former prime minister Kim Campbell is in Vancouver this week to talk about the past — but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have some strong views on the present.
Campbell will be at the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library on Wednesday at noon to take part in a Library and Archives Canada (LAC) Signature Series public event featuring people who have donated their archives to the LAC.
“The national archivist was the first person who came to see me after the election in 1993 when I got back to Ottawa and asked me if I would donate my papers and I said of course I would,” Campbell said in a recent telephone interview.
When talking about the interest in archives, Campbell — first elected to political office as the MLA from Vancouver-Point Grey in 1986 — points to the kind of added value that comes with someone of note’s paper trail.
“One of the interesting forms of archival material is the marginal notes,” said Campbell.
“Say if you had something from John Maynard Keynes or Winston Churchill’s copy of a book, and you look at the marginal notes. It is a wonderful insight into that conversation that person was having with that author.
“It’s like an interview in a way. These are things that are really quite precious.”
While archives are an interesting topic, you can’t speak with a former prime minister and not address the U.S. elephant in the room.
“I am really worried,” said Campbell, now 70, when asked if we are witnessing the decline of the American Empire.
She said the fight to regain a measured America is a tough one as the playing field has been poisoned by partisan hacks pretending to be journalists and President Donald Trump’s town crier calls of fake news.
“Here’s the problem: The people who are following the reliable news are concerned about it, but there is a whole alternative narrative being put out through Donald Trump’s tweets, through Breitbart News and through Fox News, which is scandalously terrible,” said Campbell. “It’s just lies.”
Campbell, who said she was “mortified” the night of Trump’s election victory, had long been raising the alarm about his choices, and specifically his relationship to Russia, a country she has studied extensively.
“Trump’s unwillingness to criticize (President Vladimir) Putin was a huge red flag, if you’ll pardon the pun. This is just nuts,” said Campbell.
Campbell moved on from provincial politics to the federal scene in 1988, getting elected as the Progressive Conservative MP for Vancouver Centre. In June 1993 she won the federal PC leadership and became prime minister after Brian Mulroney’s retirement. Four months later, the Liberals under Jean Chretien trounced the Tories in the federal election.
During her time in Ottawa, Campbell held defence, veterans affairs and justice portfolios and was the minister responsible for federal-provincial relations before her brief stint as prime minister.
Looking back, Campbell is introspective about her time in government and becoming the first female PM.
“Well, I understand a lot more about where I was in the cosmic order of things now than I did then,” said Campbell.
“After I was out of office there was a burgeoning of research in social and cognitive psychology about gender barriers. I knew it to some degree but there has been a lot more serious research that underpins this. You know I didn’t look or sound like anybody who had done that job before.”
After her defeat, Campbell didn’t go away to some dusty job in academia or plunk herself down in a boardroom chair.
She wrote a memoir and was appointed consul general to Los Angeles and served in that post until 2000. Other resume notes include chairing the Council of Women World Leaders and World Movement for Democracy.
She has just renewed her contract with the Peter Lougheed Leadership College at the University of Alberta and she chairs Canada’s Supreme Court advisory board.
“You need to remind people that yes, women can do it,” Campbell said of her career path.
These days Campbell is busy with speaking engagements, her university post and posting regularly on Twitter.
She takes all the Trumps to task and has been vocal on the Hollywood sexual assault controversy.
Campbell will not comment on Canadian politics, but she doesn’t hold back outside of our borders. In one case she tweeted out a simple “WTF,” in response to Arizona Senator John McCain’s suggestion there should be no Miranda rights for someone who kills Americans.
“I just used it once because I thought I don’t know what else to say,” said Campbell. “I’ve always been sort of concerned about retweeting the F-word when other people use it, but I thought if I never did I would never retweet anything. Everybody uses it now.”
Really? It’s kind of hard not to.