Kim Campbell

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kim Campbell (2009) Kim Campbell Signature.svg

Avril Phaedra Douglas "Kim" Campbell PC , CC , OBC , QC (born March 10, 1947 in Port Alberni , British Columbia ) is a Canadian politician , diplomat, lawyer and author. She was the 19th Prime Minister of Canada from June 25 to November 4, 1993 and the only woman to date in this office; her term of office of 132 days is the third shortest.

Campbell was a member of the Progressive Conservative Party and was elected to the Canadian House of Commons in 1988. In 1989 she was appointed Minister of State for Indian Affairs in the cabinet of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney . From 1990 to 1993 she was Minister of Justice. After Mulroney had announced his resignation due to extremely poor polls, the party congress of the progressive conservatives named Campbell as his successor as party leader , which she also took over the office of prime minister. In the general election in 1993 her party suffered a heavy defeat and Campbell stepped briefly back to it. Two months later, she resigned as party leader. In the years that followed, she held various roles for the Canadian government and international organizations in the field of democracy promotion.

biography

Study and job

Campbell was born in Port Alberni on Vancouver Island , as one of two daughters of Phyllis Margaret "Lissa" Cook (1923–2013) and George Thomas Campbell (1920–2002). The father was in Montreal , the son of Scottish born parents had during the Second World War in Italy fought and later worked as a barrister . After a long separation, the marriage was divorced in 1969. In 1957, Campbell appeared on several episodes of the children's newscast Junior Television Club on Canadian television, at that time still under her maiden name Avril. After briefly attending a Catholic boarding school in Victoria , she moved with her family to Vancouver in 1960 , where she attended the Prince of Wales Secondary School. As a teenager, she started calling herself Kim. From 1964 to 1969 she studied political science at the University of British Columbia , where she was involved in the student council and became the first woman to represent first and second semester students.

In 1970 Campbell went to the London School of Economics in Great Britain to do research on her dissertation on the Soviet government. From April to June 1972 she traveled through various regions of the Soviet Union . She had previously studied Russian for several years and stated that she was almost fluent in the language at the time. Campbell was impressed by the beauty of the landscape and the cultural richness, but also pointed out that it was in extreme contrast to the waste and inefficiency that made the lives of citizens desolate. In the same year she dropped out of studies after marrying the 21 years older mathematician and chess player Nathan Divinsky . The childless marriage was divorced in 1983. Campbell began studying law in 1980 and graduated with a Bachelor of Laws in 1983 . She then practiced as a lawyer in Vancouver from 1984 to 1986 . Her second marriage to lawyer Howard Eddy lasted four years until 1991.

Political career

Campbell's political career began in 1981 when he was elected to the Vancouver City School Board. In 1983 she chaired this body and resigned the following year. A special concern for her was the recognition of the International Baccalaureate in Vancouver. During her time in local politics, she did not feel affiliated with any party. After being asked by the British Columbia Social Credit Party , she ran in the April 1983 elections to the British Columbia Legislative Assembly , albeit unsuccessfully. Three years later she applied for the chairmanship of the Social Credit Party and was clearly defeated by the later Provincial Prime Minister Bill Vander Zalm . On October 22 of the same year, she entered the legislative assembly and then represented the constituency of Vancouver-Point Gray. As a backbencher , she fell out with Vander Zalm after he cut the province's financial contributions for abortions . Out of anger, she decided to switch to federal politics and gave up her mandate at the provincial level on October 22, 1988.

In the general election in 1988 Campbell ran in the constituency of Vancouver Center, where they prevailed on November 21 with 37.2% of the vote; their lead over the NDP candidate Johanna Den Hertog was only 269 votes or 0.4 percentage points. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney took her to his cabinet on January 30, 1989 , initially as Minister of State (i.e., Deputy Minister) for Indian Affairs . In this office she was responsible for the preparation of the (ultimately failed) Meech Lake Accord . From February 23, 1990, she officiated as Minister of Justice and Attorney General - each as the first woman ever. She implemented significant changes to the penal code in the areas of gun control and sexual assault. Following a ruling by the Supreme Court , she submitted Bill C-43, which should regulate abortion uniformly. The law got through in the House of Commons, but failed in the Senate . To date (2019) there is no national abortion legislation, instead the legal situation varies from province to province.

Mulroney reshuffled his cabinet on January 4, 1993, after which Campbell took over the management of the Departments of Defense and Veterans. Again she was the first woman in each of these offices. Two months later, she attended a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels . Also in the spring of 1993, she had to put up with allegations of cover-up and downplaying after several Canadian paratroopers beat a Somali youth to death during the UN peacekeeping mission in Somalia . On February 23, 1993, Prime Minister Mulroney announced his imminent resignation in the face of poor poll results. Campbell applied for his successor and was considered a promising candidate from the start. An extraordinary party conference was held on June 13, 1993 at the Ottawa Civic Center . In the election of the new party leader Campbell prevailed in the second ballot with 52.7% of the vote against Environment Minister Jean Charest . She was then sworn in by Governor General Ray Hnatyshyn on June 25 as Canada's first female Prime Minister.

Prime minister

After taking office, Campbell massively reduced her cabinet from 35 to 23 ministers, and she merged several ministries. In July, she attended the G7 summit in Tokyo . In the following weeks she traveled all over the country and presented herself at numerous events. A poll conducted by Gallup in August found an approval rating of a whopping 51%, more than any other Canadian head of government in the past 30 years. At the end of the summer, her personal popularity far exceeded that of opposition leader Jean Chrétien, and the Progressive Conservative Party was only a few percentage points behind the Liberal Party in the polls . Campbell did not live in the official seat at 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa (Mulroney had not moved out there), but in the summer residence on Harrington Lake . Since parliament never met in session during her short term in office, she was unable to present any new bills, nor did she appoint a single senator .

Campbell offered the Governor General on September 8, 1993 to dissolve the House of Commons and call new elections, since the current legislature would soon be over anyway. The 1993 general election was scheduled for October 25th, the latest possible date under Article 4 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms . The progressive conservatives were optimistic that they would continue to run the government or at least force the liberals into a minority government. But no sooner had the election campaign started than the opinion polls showed an increasingly bleak picture. While the Liberals had prepared meticulously, the Tories left an at times disorganized impression. The campaign leaders decided to produce a series of TV spots that personally attacked the opposition leader and appeared to make fun of the partial paralysis of his face. The public, including representatives from all political camps, reacted indignantly to the offensive negative campaign, whereupon Campbell had the spots canceled. As a result, Chrétien's popularity ratings skyrocketed.

The general election ended in a devastating defeat for the progressive conservatives. The share of the vote shrank from 43 to 16%, the number of seats from 167 to just two. Both in absolute numbers and in percentage terms, the Tories suffered the worst defeat of any ruling party at the federal level. They did not even succeed in defending their group status. Their electoral base in western Canada had largely turned to the Reform Party , in Québec partly to the Bloc Québécois and in the rest of the country to the Liberals. Campbell herself received only 25.2% of the vote in her constituency and was clearly defeated by the liberal candidate Hedy Fry. She later mainly blamed Mulroney, whom she called the least popular Prime Minister of all, responsible for the election defeat. He resigned far too late, leaving her with too little time to get the party back on the road to success. Campbell managed the affairs of state until November 4th, on December 13th she handed over the chairmanship to Charest.

further activities

From 1994, Campbell was a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University . There were rumors that she would take over as Canadian Ambassador to Moscow , but these did not come true. However, on September 16, 1996, she was appointed Consul General in Los Angeles by Prime Minister Chrétien . A year later she married the composer and director Hershey Felder. After ending her three-year tenure, Campbell returned to Harvard University in 1999 to teach at the newly formed Center for Public Leadership. From 1999 to 2003 she chaired the Council of Women World Leaders , an international network of incumbent and former heads of state and government. From 2003 to 2005 she was President of the International Women's Forum , an international association for the advancement of women’s careers. As a founding member of the Club de Madrid , she headed this organization from 2004 to 2006.

Campbell headed the steering committee of the international network World Movement for Democracy from 2008 to 2015 . She was also a board member of the International Crisis Group , the EastWest Institute and the Study Center on Radicalization and Political Violence at King's College London . In 2014 she was elected the first rector of the newly established Peter Lougheed Leadership College at the University of Alberta and held this position for four years. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau named her on August 2, 2016, to chair a new seven-member non-partisan advisory board tasked with finding candidates for judges for the Supreme Court and assessing their suitability for office.

Awards

Campbell received the Order of Canada from Governor General Michaëlle Jean on September 3, 2010 . Two years later, on September 6, 2012, Lieutenant Governor Steven Point accepted her into the Order of British Columbia . In addition, Campbell is honorary doctorate from eleven different universities.

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Kim Campbell  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ James K. McDonell, Robert Bennett Campbell: Lords of the North . General Publishin Store, Burnsham (Ontario) 1997, ISBN 1-896182-71-2 , pp. 205 .
  2. ^ Introducing Avril Campbell. In: CBC Digital Archives. CBC / Radio-Canada , accessed May 19, 2019 .
  3. ^ Campbell: Time and Chance. Pp. 17-23.
  4. ^ Campbell: Time and Chance. Pp. 26-37.
  5. ^ David Ellis: Campbell's Coup. People , July 5, 1993, accessed May 19, 2019 .
  6. ^ Campbell: Time and Chance. P. 47.
  7. ↑ a b c d e f Quick facts and timeline. Kim Campbell, accessed May 19, 2019 .
  8. ↑ a b Vancouver Center, British Columbia (1917-). In: History of federal ridings since 1867. Parliament of Canada , archived from the original on November 23, 2018 ; accessed on May 19, 2019 (English).
  9. ↑ Undecideds crucial to winner: Campbell's conventional speech just fine for some. In: The Globe and Mail , June 14, 1993.
  10. ↑ Kim Campbell takes office. In: This day in history: June 25. history.com, accessed on May 19, 2019 .
  11. ↑ Clyde H. Farnsworth: Kim Campbell Takes Oath As Canada's Prime Minister. The New York Times , June 26, 1993, accessed May 19, 2019 .
  12. ^ Campbell, Though Liked, May Not Win in Canada. The New York Times , October 15, 1993, accessed May 19, 2019 .
  13. ^ Paul Wells: The Longer I'm Prime Minister: Stephen Harper and Canada, 2006– . Random House Canada, Toronto 2013, ISBN 978-0-307-36134-9 , pp. 144 .
  14. ^ Gordon Donaldson: The Prime Ministers of Canada . Doubleday Canada, Toronto 1997, ISBN 0-385-25454-7 , pp. 367 .
  15. ↑ Results of the 35th Federal Election October 25, 1993. Government of Canada, September 26, 2016, accessed May 19, 2019 .
  16. ^ Clifford Kraus: Canada Still Has Mulroney to Kick Around. The New York Times , September 25, 2005, accessed May 19, 2019 .
  17. ↑ Peter Desbarats: Somalia Cover Up: A Commissioner's Journal . McClelland & Stewart, Toronto 1997, ISBN 978-0-7710-2684-3 , pp. 243 .
  18. ^ Former PM to lead the way at Peter Lougheed Leadership College. University of Alberta , April 15, 2014, accessed May 19, 2019 .
  19. ↑ Kim Campbell to chair Supreme Court advisory board. Maclean’s , August 2, 2016, accessed May 19, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Campbell, Kim
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Campbell, Avril Phaedra Douglas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian politician
DATE OF BIRTH March 10, 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH Port Alberni , British Columbia