Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that Mary Simon would be Canada’s 30^th Governor General; the first Indigenous person to serve in that role. Simon is a tremendous choice.

Mary Simon was born in the tiny village of Kangiqsualujjuaq, on the east coast of Ungava Bay, at the tip top of Quebec. While her mother was Inuk, her father was an English Canadian who ran the local Hudson’s Bay Company post. Simon and her seven siblings grew up spending months every year on the land, hunting food.

Simon has dedicated her life to public service; specifically, to protecting and advancing the rights of the Inuit people in an environmentally sustainable north. As the board secretary of the Northern Quebec Inuit Association, she played a role in negotiating the 1975 James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement – Canada’s first comprehensive Indigenous land claim settlement. She was elected vice president and then president of the Makivik Corporation, which administered the agreement’s complex terms.

Simon served as the secretary and then co-director of policy with the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Its 1996 report outlined a 20-year plan to restructure the relationship between Canadians and Indigenous peoples.

The next year, Simon became one of three Canadians representing the country on the Joint Public Advisory Committee of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. She was elected committee chair in 1998.

From 1986 to 1992, Simon served as president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference. It represents nearly 200,000 Inuit in Alaska, Russia, Greenland, and Canada and lobbies governments to protect Inuit interests while advancing social and economic development. She then served as Canada’s ambassador for Circumpolar Affairs from 1994 to 2003. At the same time, from 1999 to 2001, she was Canada’s ambassador to Denmark.

Beginning in 2001, Simon served as a Counsellor on the Carter Centre’s International Council for Conflict Resolution. The Carter Centre was founded by former US president Jimmy Carter and seeks to mitigate and prevent conflicts around the world.

Simon served on the Nunavut Implementation Commission which, beginning in 1994, consulted Inuit communities to ensure their interests were reflected in the creation of Canada’s newest territory: Nunavut.

From 2006 to 2012, Simon was president of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami. It lobbies the federal and provincial governments with respect to Inuit rights in the north. Its work has become especially important as the very real effects of the climate crisis are altering life in the north. 

Simon has always respected education as the engine of change. From 2008 to 2014, she chaired the National Committee on Inuit Education. It brought positive changes to education in the north and ensured that Inuit children respect their cultural heritage and are taught in their own language.

The announcement that Simon would become Canada’s first Indigenous governor general was made in the shadow of recent revelations of mass graves being discovered outside several residential “schools.” The horrific news focussed attention on Canada’s history of systemic racism. Standing next to Prime Minister Trudeau, Simon observed, “My appointment reflects our collective progress toward building a more inclusive, just, and equitable society.”

I hope she’s right. We deserve to be pleased that it is no longer remarkable that our next governor general will be a woman. Let’s look forward to the day when the fact that a prominent official is Indigenous is no longer newsworthy. For now, let us celebrate the fact that our new governor general is such a well-qualified and simply amazing person.

(If you enjoyed this article, please see my others at www.johnboyko.com and you might even want to check out my books including my most recently published The Devil’s Trick: How Canada Fought the Vietnam War.)