Kim Campbell

Avril Phaedra Douglas Campbell was born on March 10, 1947, in Port Alberni, a mill town on Vancouver Island in British Columbia ^[1]. Her father, George Campbell, was a lawyer who had served in the Second World War, and the family later settled in Vancouver. As a teenager she adopted the name Kim, a choice she kept for the rest of her public life ^[2].

Her childhood was marked by disruption. Her mother, Lissa, left the family when Campbell was twelve, an experience she has written about candidly in her memoir, Time and Chance ^[2]. Despite the upheaval at home, she thrived at school. At Prince of Wales Secondary School in Vancouver she became the first female student body president, an early sign of the political instincts that would define her career ^[1].

Campbell studied political science at the University of British Columbia, earning her honours degree in 1969, and won a scholarship to the London School of Economics, where she pursued doctoral research in Soviet government during the early 1970s ^[3]. She did not complete the doctorate, but the years in London, including travel in the Soviet Union, shaped her lifelong interest in comparative politics. Back in Vancouver she lectured in political science at UBC and at Vancouver Community College before deciding that she wanted to practise rather than only teach. She entered the UBC law school, took her law degree in 1983, and was called to the British Columbia bar the following year ^[3].

Campbell's political apprenticeship began at the local level. She was elected a trustee of the Vancouver School Board in 1980 and later chaired it, learning retail politics in a city with sharp ideological divides ^[1]. She worked briefly in the office of British Columbia premier Bill Bennett, and in 1986 she won a seat in the provincial legislature as a Social Credit member for Vancouver-Point Grey. That same year she ran for the Social Credit leadership; she finished near the back of the field, but her blunt debate performances earned notice well beyond the province ^[2].

Federal politics called in 1988. Campbell won the riding of Vancouver Centre for Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives in that year's general election, one fought largely over free trade with the United States ^[1]. Mulroney promoted her quickly. She became Minister of State for Indian Affairs and Northern Development in 1989, and in February 1990 he named her Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, the first woman to hold that portfolio ^[4].

At Justice she handled some of the most contested files in the country. She steered gun control legislation, Bill C-17, through Parliament after the 1989 massacre of fourteen women at Montreal's École Polytechnique, tightening screening and storage requirements for firearms ^[4]. She also rewrote Canada's sexual assault law after the Supreme Court struck down the old rape shield provisions; the resulting 1992 legislation, which defined consent in statute, drew support from an unusually broad coalition of women's groups ^[4]. In January 1993 Mulroney moved her to National Defence, making her the first woman to serve as Canada's defence minister, where she dealt with the early fallout of the Somalia deployment and decisions on the EH-101 helicopter purchase ^[3].

Brian Mulroney announced in February 1993 that he would retire, leaving a party exhausted by constitutional battles and deeply unpopular after nearly nine years in office. Campbell entered the leadership race as the favourite, presenting herself as a new kind of politician who would practise what she called the politics of inclusion ^[2]. At the convention in Ottawa in June 1993 she defeated Jean Charest on the second ballot, and on June 25, 1993, she was sworn in as Canada's nineteenth prime minister, the first woman to hold the office ^[1].

Her government moved fast in its short life. Campbell cut the size of cabinet from thirty-five ministers to twenty-three and reorganized federal departments, consolidations that her Liberal successors largely kept ^[3]. Through the summer of 1993 her personal approval ratings climbed, and she represented Canada at the G7 summit in Tokyo. For a period that summer, polls showed her among the most popular prime ministers in decades, a remarkable position for the leader of a tired governing party ^[5].

The election campaign that autumn undid all of it. Facing Jean Chrétien's Liberals, a surging Reform Party in the West, and the Bloc Québécois in Quebec, the Progressive Conservative campaign stumbled repeatedly. Campbell was widely quoted as suggesting that an election campaign was no time to discuss serious policy issues in detail, a remark her opponents used relentlessly, and the party ran attack advertisements mocking Chrétien's facial paralysis that it was forced to withdraw amid public outrage ^[5]. On October 25, 1993, the Conservatives fell from 156 seats to two, the worst defeat of a governing party in Canadian federal history. Campbell lost her own Vancouver Centre seat and resigned the party leadership in December ^[1]. She had served 132 days as prime minister.

Defeat closed one career and opened several others. Campbell spent a term as a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, reflecting on her time in office, and in 1996 she published Time and Chance, a frank memoir of her political rise and fall ^[2]. That same year Prime Minister Chrétien appointed her Canadian Consul General in Los Angeles, a post she held until 2000, representing Canadian trade and cultural interests in the southwestern United States ^[3].

International work on democracy and women's leadership became her focus after diplomacy. She chaired the Council of Women World Leaders, a network of current and former female presidents and prime ministers, and from 2003 to 2005 served as secretary general of the Club of Madrid, an organization of former heads of state and government that promotes democratic governance ^[6]. She taught again at the Kennedy School as a visiting professor of practice, lecturing on gender and power ^[3].

Canada drew her home in stages. In 2014 she became the founding principal of the Peter Lougheed Leadership College at the University of Alberta, a program built to train undergraduates in practical leadership, and she served in that role until 2018 ^[7]. She also sat on the independent advisory board that recommended candidates for the Supreme Court of Canada, chairing the body that helped select justices under the appointment process introduced in 2016 ^[6]. Honours accumulated across these decades: she is a Companion of the Order of Canada, a member of the Order of British Columbia, and a Privy Councillor entitled to the style Right Honourable for life ^[1].

Campbell has married three times. Her first marriage, to the mathematician Nathan Divinsky, a UBC professor and chess master more than twenty years her senior, lasted from 1972 until their divorce in 1983 ^[2]. She married Vancouver lawyer Howard Eddy in 1986; that marriage ended during her years in federal cabinet. Since 1997 her partner, and later husband, has been Hershey Felder, an actor, pianist, and playwright known for one-man shows about composers; the two have divided their time between Europe and North America ^[3].

She has no children, a fact opponents raised during the 1993 campaign and which she addressed directly in her memoir ^[2]. Outside politics her interests have run to music (she plays cello and guitar), Russian literature, and painting. Friends and journalists have long remarked on her unguarded wit, an asset in a classroom and sometimes a liability on a campaign bus ^[5].

Any honest Kim Campbell biography has to hold two facts in tension: she broke the highest barrier in Canadian politics, and she presided over her party's collapse. More than three decades after 1993, no other woman has served as prime minister of Canada, which keeps her tenure a point of reference in every discussion of women and political power in the country ^[6]. Political scientists still debate how much of the Conservative rout belonged to her and how much was the accumulated weight of the Mulroney years, recession, and regional fragmentation ^[5].

Her policy record has proven more durable than her electoral one. The 1992 consent provisions she introduced remain the backbone of Canadian sexual assault law, and her 1991 firearms legislation set the framework that later gun control measures built upon ^[4]. The machinery-of-government reforms of her brief premiership outlived her government entirely.

For anyone asking who was Kim Campbell beyond the record books, the answer is a scholar-politician who kept working long after losing power. Among Kim Campbell achievements outside office are the Club of Madrid's early development, a generation of students trained at the Lougheed College, and a steady public voice on democratic norms, delivered through lectures, social media, and board service well into her seventies ^[7]. Her portrait hangs with the other former prime ministers in Ottawa, but her example is invoked most often in a different setting: whenever a woman in Canadian politics is told what is or is not possible ^[6].