Ottawa, Ontario, Thursday, January 17, 2013

Thank you for inviting me here to speak to you today. I am honoured to be in the presence of so many talented women who have added so much to our country.

Last year, at an official gathering at Rideau Hall, a member of the Ottawa Women’s Canadian Club asked the question: “Why aren’t more women awarded the Order of Canada?”

Soon after this conversation, I set out to find out the answer.

Today, I’d like to discuss with you three questions:

1. Why does our national honours system recognize far fewer women than men?  

2. Do these awards embrace the unique contributions of women?

3. Finally, what can we do?

To tackle these questions, let us start at the top with the Order of Canada.

Its motto is “They desire a better country”. The Order is 45 years old, having come into existence on our country’s 100th birthday in 1967.  Over 6 000 Canadians have been awarded this honour, but only a quarter of them have been women.

The Queen is the sovereign of the Order, and it is non-political (unlike many honours in other countries) and overseen by the governor general.  

Recommendations are reviewed by a prestigious advisory committee chaired by the chief justice of Canada sitting as chair. The members are chosen from nominations sent in from anyone in the country, and are announced twice a year, around Canada Day and the New Year.

It has three levels: Members are selected for distinguished service, Officers for a high degree of achievement and merit, and Companions for outstanding achievement and merit of the highest degree.

There are numerous other recognitions in our Canadian Honours System, including Meritorious Service Decorations, military and police honours and bravery medals.  

Then there are the Governor General Awards, outside of the honours system, for subject areas ranging from the performing and visual arts to literature, journalism, architecture, history and teaching.

There are also those who are honoured for philanthropy and volunteerism at the community level through the Caring Canadian Award.

This last one is quite special for me and my husband because he regularly awards these on our visits to local communities to remarkable people who have been outstanding neighbours in their community.  

These are people for whom there is no expectation of reward except their own sense that when they stepped up, they took someone with them—a step that they regularly repeat again and again and again.

Finally, there are commemorative medals, struck for special occasions. These include the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medals, 60 000 of which were awarded this past year to individuals who have served Canada in the tradition of The Queen’s 60 years of duty, honour and service.

So from this broad skeleton, we can see that there are many ways to recognize and celebrate women through our national honours system.  

Let me return to the Order of Canada. It is the pinnacle of a life of hard work and of extraordinary contributions—whether to the arts, education, business, public service, volunteerism, philanthropy or other spheres.

The recipients achieve a long track record of success, they enact change, and they create a better Canada and a stronger world.

Let me highlight some of our women recipients:

Dr. Brenda Milner is a Companion of the Order and a world-renowned McGill neuropsychologist.

The Honourable Louise Arbour, a Companion and defender of human rights and civil liberties, is known well beyond Canadian borders.

Other examples of women with a wide range of accomplishments are the Honourable Rosemary Brown, an Officer and champion of women’s and minority rights, as well as a political and social activist; Roberta Bondar, an Officer and Canada’s first woman astronaut; Mary Simon, an Officer and a leader in Canada’s North; and Natalie MacMaster, a Member and internationally renowned fiddler.

These are great Canadians and truly extraordinary women. But they are recognized in far fewer numbers than men. How can women be a greater part of this? How can we better recognize women?

Let me make a sidebar here to briefly touch on the role of voluntary accomplishment as exemplified by my predecessors, wives of governors general past. I do so because of the important role they have played in casting a light on the accomplishments of women.

For historically, it was as volunteers rather than as paid professionals that women made their mark.

The historical under-representation of women in the ranks of the Order of Canada is not surprising considering it wasn’t until 1929 that women were recognized as “persons” to be appointed to the Senate, and not until 30 years ago that a woman, the Right Honourable Jeanne Sauvé, was appointed governor general. Since then, the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson and the Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean have served with distinction.

Until women held this office, spouses of governors general were the female voice of the office. Their volunteer contributions led to significant and lasting social change.

Lady Aberdeen, for example, established the Victorian Order of Nurses in the late 1890s. It is still a mainstream part of health care more than 100 years later.

Fifty years after the VON began, Governor General Vanier and his wife, Pauline, established the Vanier Institute of the Family. The Vanier Institute began by studying traditional families, that is, where women most likely stayed at home to care for children and the household.

However, it soon evolved into the voice of changed family dynamics—working mothers, single-parent homes, divorce, adoption, reproductive technologies, homelessness, and, finally, equal pay. In the spring, the Vanier Institute will be participating in a military family think tank.

The Vaniers planted a seed and let it grow under capable professionals such as Nora Spinks, the present chief executive officer.

Lady Aberdeen and Madame Vanier, alongside other viceregal spouses throughout history, exemplified how the office of the governor general can be leveraged to bring about social change and to recognize the distinctive contributions of women.

Greater recognition for women emerged in other fields as well. While the Vanier Institute was describing the evolution of families in our modern culture, legal experts were deciding fair compensation for women’s domestic contribution while staying at home.

This was the beginning of what we now know as modern family law. Our female justices of the Supreme Court were pioneers in this area. And I note that three of the nine, including our remarkable Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, are women.

Although legal deliberations centred on divorce and the distribution of assets, the consequence of these deliberations in family law was to highlight the unequal burden women bear in looking after a house and family.

And this, in turn, affects the personal adjustments women must make to achieve success outside the home.

Let me paraphrase Justice Rosalie Abella in commenting on the famous Moge versus Moge case to determine the fairness of sharing assets: Whether a woman follows a “traditional” model, staying at home, or a more “modern” model of being gainfully employed, in the interests of fairness, the law should ensure, as far as it is able, that the economic disadvantages of caring for children should be considered.

The fact that women are for the most part primarily responsible for child care, as well as for sick or elderly relatives, has economic consequences.

In the event of a divorce, a wife who has not been in the workforce will have diminished earning capacity when she enters.

Career choices will also be reduced due to the necessity of remaining within proximity to schools, not working late, remaining at home when the child is ill, etc.

A husband who is not awarded custody encounters none of these impediments. Leaving aside divorce, the modern career-minded professional woman bears a greater responsibility for raising children and managing the household than her husband.

All five of our daughters have adjusted their career paths to spend more time with their families. On the other hand, they have stated that they would be at a professional disadvantage if they stayed out of the workforce beyond their maternity leave.

My husband likes to say the five girls collectively have 16 degrees. I tell him this is boastful. But perhaps this is the time to address the fact that highly educated women like our daughters fill more than half the law and medical schools, yet there are still too few being recognized by our national honours system.  

Recently, Anne-Marie Slaughter, former dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, published a controversial article in The Atlantic monthly magazine entitled “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All.”

There was a swirl of counterarguments, agreements and questions that arose from her honest account of how being in the high-powered position of director of policy planning at the State Department gave her no flexibility to spend time with her acting-out son. He had entered his teen years unhappy. Her response was to scale back her career.

It is career flexibility or moving on a slower track that has helped my daughters to establish work-family-life balance.

After my second daughter finished her maternity leave, she took on the job as executive vice-president of Catalyst, a global non-profit organization expanding opportunities for women and business.

When she knew I was speaking to you today about women being recognized, she whipped off the following email: “If a woman is an executive VP, mentors a whole crew of younger talent, breaks down barriers for younger women, is primary caregiver raising her two kids, helps transition her dad into a nursing home when the time is right, contributes to her community on boards, etc., the value she adds to this country is enormous. She deserves a Nobel Prize.”

Considering the wealth of experience and accomplishments of women throughout our history, I ask myself why we are under-represented.

And there is no one reason why this should be the case. Are the numbers reflective of the stigma we place on women who take time off from careers for family, as we discussed?

Is the full breadth of work done by women not deemed worthy of national honours including the Order of Canada? Common observation shows that a great proportion of women expend their time, talent and treasure on promoting women’s rights, employment opportunities and safety.

Men do not need to promote themselves. Society does that. Only recently are we seeing the need for male advocacy in young boys who are underperforming girls. But advocacy for young women, for women’s rights, for equality, has been a vital part of the history of women in this country. And we obviously have more work to do if this is to be fairly recognized.

Finally, is this lack of recognition merely the absence of confidence to trumpet our own abilities? And if that is the case, how can we expect our accomplishments to be recognized?

A member of the Order of Canada does not need to be a household name. Nor do they have to have achieved success at a national level, which is a common misconception.

Those in the Order of Canada have changed lives all over the world, on a large scale, and also on a small scale, working in their communities to better the lives of friends and neighbours.         

At his installation, my husband called for a smart and caring nation. To this end, he established three pillars to support this vision— learning and innovation, volunteerism and philanthropy, and, finally, children and families.

I have given particular focus within the broad topic of children and families to mental health, and I hope to leave my own mark on this area during my time in office, just as others have done throughout our history.

Women are an integral part of this vision, of a smart and caring nation, and we must do more to acknowledge what they, what you, do. And there is some sign of hope.

Looking at the numbers, focusing on just Companions in the Order of Canada, we see that in the past 45 years, only 16 per cent of recipients have been women.

Yet, if we limit the focus to living Companions, that is, those who were more recently appointed, we see that the number jumps to nearly 30 per cent.

Last year, one of the female recipients at the Member level was 103 years old! So even age is not a barrier.

What this shows me is that we are gradually moving towards a more balanced honours system, where women and men are equal, where we nominate women more and more because of the distinctive and exceptional contributions they have made to our community, our country and the world.

But I believe that although we have made some gains, there is still so much more that can be done.

Let’s look again at the Order of Canada and numbers.

As I have said, Canadians nominate fewer women to the Order.  But the proportion of women selected for the honour from amongst nominees is slightly higher than men.

So we may have a problem of insufficient nominations, which can be remedied by encouraging more nominations of women. This would require a concerted, sustained effort.

I come to you today not with all the answers, but with the idea that we need to be more proactive in recognizing each other. Look around you today and ask yourself if there is anyone in the audience who has been overlooked.

We must be our own advocates. Women play a huge role in the evolution of our country and societal change. We need to honour that.

In five years’ time, we will be marking not only the 150th anniversary of Confederation, but also the 50th anniversary of the Order of Canada.

Can we not use this anniversary to make our special birthday gift to Canada be a clearer, broader, wiser, more inspiring recognition of women in creating a better country?

I hope that in that time, women can be a larger part of the Canadian Honours System. We need your help to bring about this change. You are no strangers to a challenge, and you all know something about change. I know that Canada can be a fairer, more equal place with your active participation. I look forward to seeing what you do for Canada in the future.

Thank you.