Kim Campbell

Prime minister of Canada (June 25–November 4, 1993)

• Born: March 10, 1947
• Place of Birth: Port Alberni, British Columbia, Canada

As the first woman to be elected prime minister of Canada, Kim Campbell inspired many women to seek high office, and her tenure, however brief, showed voters that women not only are electable but also are political professionals. Campbell also was Canada’s first female attorney general.

Early Life

Kim Campbell was born Avril Phaedra Campbell in Port Alberni, British Columbia. Her father, George Campbell, was a Canadian soldier in World War II who later became a lawyer. Her mother was Lissa Cook. Her older sister, Alix, was born in 1945, two years before her. After struggling to establish himself professionally for several years, George became a successful lawyer and moved his family into the suburbs. A liberal, enlightened father, he encouraged his younger daughter to excel at her studies and explore her interests in the arts. By the time she entered high school, she was recognized as the most talented and intelligent student in her class. However, Campbell's parents divorced, and in the aftermath of the split, Lissa did not see her daughters for ten years. It was during this period that Campbell assumed the first name Kim.

Campbell was valedictorian of her high school class in 1964. Despite her obvious promise, her life remained tentative and provisional during her early adulthood, but she earned an honors degree in political science from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver. The late 1960s were the height of radical agitation in North America over involvement in the Vietnam War, but Campbell's politics had already taken on a moderate-conservative coloring.

In 1967, Campbell began to date Nathan Divinsky, a mathematics professor. Divinsky, a brilliant but erratic intellectual, introduced her to a wider world of thought and discourse. The couple began living together as Campbell pursued her master’s degree in international relations at UBC. With Divinsky’s aid, she won a scholarship to study at the London School of Economics. Her conservative political views were cemented while in London.

In 1972, Campbell married Divinsky, and they returned to Canada shortly thereafter. Campbell hoped to secure a teaching job, but because she had not completed an advanced degree she could get only the most lowly and temporary positions.

Life’s Work

Campbell decided to abandon her plans for a teaching career in academia, and like her father, she instead earned a law degree. Once again, Campbell excelled as a student, and her achievement began to awaken thoughts of a political career. In 1980, Campbell won a seat on the Vancouver school board.

By 1983, Campbell was chair of the school board. Her increasing public prominence strained her marriage to Divinsky, and in that year, the couple divorced. As school board chair, Campbell earned notoriety for her vociferous attacks on trade unions. At the same time that Campbell was accepted as an associate at a prestigious Vancouver law firm, she tried to move up in politics, running for the provincial parliament. Even though she lost, Campbell had found her true vocation. She abandoned her career as a private attorney when she was hired to work in the office of William Bennett, the premier of British Columbia. When Bennett resigned, Campbell entered the race to replace him. As a total unknown, she lagged far behind the leaders, but her effort nevertheless garnered her a seat in the provincial legislature in October 1986.

Campbell generated controversy and earned acclaim as an advocate of women’s rights when she opposed the antiabortion views of the new premier. As a consequence, she alienated the right-wing leaders of the Social Credit Party, known for its advocacy of conservative political views in British Columbia. Realizing that her climb up the political ladder would be severely restricted if she remained in provincial politics, Campbell began to cast her eye toward the federal arena.

Meeting with important local leaders of the ruling national Progressive Conservative (Tory) Party, Campbell impressed them with her drive and ambition. When a parliamentary seat opened up some months later, Campbell decided to run. Strenuously championing Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s free trade agreement with the United States, Campbell won election by a narrow margin.

Campbell moved to Ottawa, where she began drawing attention. Campbell was soon named to Mulroney’s cabinet as minister of state for northern affairs and political development. In the Canadian parliamentary system, legislators also must be administrators. Campbell’s smooth mastery of both challenges brought her much praise from senior Tories.

Campbell broke through to the leadership ranks of the federal party in 1990, when Mulroney appointed her to serve as Canada’s first female attorney general and minister of justice. Campbell’s agenda was primarily focused on one issue: gun control. Drafting a proposal that would fortify existing gun control laws, she devoted many months to shepherding her bill through a sullen and fractious Parliament. Her vigorous efforts were vindicated when the bill was successfully passed in September 1991. Although staunch in her support of conservative law-and-order issues, Campbell emerged as an unconventional and unpredictable politician. Despite her conservative background, she argued that much of Canadian law was biased in favor of White men, and she overtly campaigned for women’s rights.

The Mulroney government, like the administration of Ronald Reagan in the United States, had reaped political profit from the economic boom years of the 1980s. In the wake of the worldwide recession that began in 1990, Mulroney’s popularity, which had been sufficient to ensure his reelection two years before, plummeted. By 1993, the Tories had been in power for nine years and were increasingly regarded as stale, outmoded, and likely to lose in the election that had to be called by autumn of 1993. As one of the few fresh faces in the party, Campbell saw her popularity and political eligibility soar. Her political strength was acknowledged when Mulroney asked Campbell to serve as defense minister in January 1993. Once again, Campbell had broken a barrier, receiving an appointment to a post not traditionally occupied by women. In no time, however, Campbell began to be spoken of as a possible candidate to succeed Mulroney as prime minister.

The now-unpopular Mulroney, after making desperate attempts to secure for himself the jobs of secretary-general of the United Nations and commissioner of the National Hockey League, resigned in March 1993, and Campbell immediately entered the race to be his successor as Tory Party leader. (In Canada’s parliamentary system, the leader of the ruling party automatically becomes prime minister. If Campbell were to win the Tory race, she would be prime minister as well.) Campbell took an early lead in the polls, spurred by the novelty of a woman prime minister and by her relative lack of association with the hated Mulroney administration. She was soon challenged, however, by a young, ambitious, and articulate politician from Quebec named Jean Charest. At the party convention, Campbell turned back Charest’s unexpectedly strong challenge and became Canada’s first woman prime minister.

Things did not look good in the polls for the Tory Party in 1993. The perceived failure of Mulroney’s economic politics, and his inability to resolve the constitutional crisis precipitated by the wish of many in the French-speaking province of Quebec to withdraw from the Canadian confederation, had shriveled the party’s formerly widespread support. Not only were the party’s traditional rivals, the moderate-left Liberals and the socialist New Democrats, looking to gain seats, but there were two new entrants in Canadian electoral politics. One was the Reform Party, which was based in the traditionally conservative western provinces and called for free enterprise, assaults on government waste, and an end to the so-called special pleading of the French Canadians for a distinct role in Canadian society. The other was the Bloc Québécois, a Quebec nationalist party that siphoned off the support of many Quebecois Tories who had helped elect Mulroney.

Despite this severe erosion in the Tories’ base of support, Campbell’s first weeks in office were dynamic and impressive. She soon became the most personally popular of all the party leaders, and she rallied the Tories from far behind to a respectable place in the polls. Campbell’s casual, colloquial, apparently unrehearsed style was refreshing and appealing to many voters. Many women saw Campbell’s prominence as a ratification of the gains of women in the workplace and in society over the past generation. Campbell generally made a good impression on Canadians and on the world during this period. Traveling to the G7 economic summit in Tokyo to meet with the leaders of the six other major Western democracies, Campbell was compared with recently inaugurated US president Bill Clinton as a member of the baby-boom generation who was bringing fresh ideas and energy into politics. In her time as prime minister, she created important and enduring ministries, like the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Department of Public Security.

Campbell sought to capitalize on this exposure when the election was formally called in 1993. Her opponents did not think that her experience would be sufficient, intimating that Campbell’s brief tenure as prime minister was only “a summer job.” Campbell went on the offensive, reviling her principal opponent, Liberal Party leader Jean Chrétien, as “yesterday’s man.” Campbell was appealing to many Canadians not only as a woman but also because she was from British Columbia, an English-speaking province, and thus represented a change from the long hegemony of Quebec politicians as exemplified by Mulroney and Pierre Trudeau.

Campbell’s dynamism, however, was not enough. Her performance in the televised debates between the party leaders had to be superb for her to make a dent in the polls. Her performance was less than superb. Mulroney’s legacy had saddled the Tories with an indelible stain of failure, and by the time election day came, the question was not whether Campbell would lose but by how much. As fate would have it, the margin was wide. In probably the most humiliating defeat for a major party in the history of modern democratic government, the Tories lost all but two seats of the more than 150 they had previously held. The heavy loss of support from traditional Tory voters, who had fled to either Reform or the Bloc Québécois, meant that the liberal Chrétien would be the next prime minister. There was not even any personal consolation for Campbell, as she lost her own seat in Vancouver as well. Campbell, though, was still only forty-six years old as she left office, a mere youth as far as political careers go, and many were predicting that this was not the last time her voice would be heard in Canadian politics.

Campbell’s overwhelming loss finished her as a political force in Canada. Although she had been put in a nearly impossible position by her predecessor Mulroney, the loss was on such a wide scale that Campbell inevitably bore at least part of the blame for its margin. Campbell, though, still commanded respect on the world political stage. She was elected as only the second woman to head a national government within the Comonwealth of Nations, the former settler colonies of the British Empire.

After politics, Campbell began teaching at Harvard University’s prestigious John F. Kennedy School of Government from 1994 to 1996. She then served as Canadian consul general in Los Angeles until 2000 and then returned to the Kennedy School to lecture until 2004. During this period, she also was actively involved in several international forums, directing the Council of Women World Leaders, International Women's Forum, and the Club de Madrid, an association of former heads of government of democracies that serves as a crucial back-channel consortium offering ideas and advice about global issues. During this period, Campbell married Hershey Felder, an actor and writer.

Campbell has led the International Advisory Board of the Foundation for Effective Governance in Kiev and the steering committee for the World Movement for Democracy (2008–15), and served as trustee for the International Center for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence at King’s College London and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. She has been a board member of the Global Security Institute, the International Centre for Democratic Transition, the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education, the Middle Powers Initiative, the Arab Democracy Foundation, the Forum of Federations, and Equal Voice. Her many affiliations have included the International Council of the Asia Society of New York, the Pacific Council on International Policy, and the International Crisis Group.

As part of her ongoing efforts to address gender concerns, in 2013 Campbell ran unsuccessfully for the position of executive director of UN Women; she lost to the South African candidate Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. Later that same year, Campbell joined with famed author Margaret Atwood and other women in 2013 to campaign for a return to gender-neutral wording in the Canadian national anthem, "O Canada!"

For her political achievements, Campbell has been accorded several honors. In 2004, the National Geographic Society named her among fifty major political leaders in history in its Almanac of World History. Campbell has also been the recipient of several honorary degrees as well as Canada's highest civilian honor, the Order of Canada (2010), and the Order of British Columbia (2012).

Appointed the founding principal of the University of Alberta's new Peter Lougheed Leadership College in 2014, at the same time she continued her advocacy of gender equality, which included publicly commenting on the 2016 US presidential race, which saw Hillary Clinton vying for the opportunity to serve as that country's first female leader. Though she ended her tenure at the Peter Lougheed Leadership College in 2018, she remained involved with various advisory boards and speaking engagements.

Campbell kept abreast of Canadian politics into the 2020s and occasionally offered her opinion on the issues and the direction the nation’s political parties were taking. In 2022, she was part of Canada’s official delegation at the state funeral of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II.

Significance

Campbell’s lasting legacy is likely to be that she was a female head of state and not that she was a Canadian prime minister. Indeed, this legacy becomes clear when considering the case of Jenny Shipley, who became prime minister of New Zealand, another Commonwealth nation, in 1997. Campbell inspired many women to seek high office, and her tenure, however brief, showed voters that women not only could be elected but were capable professionals in the political realm. Shirley, too, was a conservative, but she was succeeded by the first liberal female head of state of a Commonwealth nation, Helen Clark, in 1999.

By 2006, Campbell had made enough of a popular comeback in Canada to appear as a commentator on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television during that year’s elections, which saw a conservative leader, Stephen Harper, attain power for the conservatives for the first time since Campbell’s loss in 1993. The unveiling of Campbell’s official portrait in Ottawa in 2004 also signaled somewhat of a rehabilitation for a woman who, despite the turmoil of her short time in office, had set significant precedents for women in government worldwide.

Campbell’s brief tenure as Canadian prime minister was truncated by the unpopularity of her predecessor, Mulroney. Nevertheless, Campbell illuminated the often drab face of Canadian politics with her individuality and irreverence. She overcame personal disappointments and family unhappiness and made a swift rise to political power.

Bibliography

Campbell, Kim. Time and Chance: The Political Memoirs of Canada’s First Woman Prime Minister. 3rd ed. U of Alberta, 2008. Print.

Davey, Frank. Reading “Kim” Right. Talonbooks, 1993.

Dobbin, Murray, and Ellen Gould. Kim Campbell: From School Trustee to Prime Minister. Lorimer, 1993.

Fife, Robert. Kim Campbell: The Making of a Politician. HarperCollins, 1993.

Fulton, E. Kaye, and Mary Janigan. “The Real Kim Campbell.” Maclean’s 17 May 1993: 4–23.

Goodyear-Grant, Elizabeth. Gendered News: Media Coverage and Electoral Politics in Canada. UBC P, 2013.

Gray, Charlotte. “Singing in the Rain.” Saturday Night 106 (1991): 28–31.

Hoogensen, Gunhild, and Bryce Solheim. Women in Power: World Leaders since 1960. Praeger, 2006.

Jamieson, Kathleen Hall. Beyond the Double Bind: Women and Leadership. Oxford UP, 1997.

Leduc, Lawrence, et al. Dynasties and Interludes: Past and Present in Canadian Electoral Politics. Dundurn, 2010.

Major, Darren. "Prime Minister, Governor General to be Joined by Indigenous leaders at Queen's Funeral." CBC/Radio-Canada, 15 Sept. 2022, www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-delegation-to-queen-elizabeth-funeral-1.6584284. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Norris, Pippa, ed. Women, Media, and Politics. Oxford UP, 1997.

"Quick Facts & Timeline." The Right Honourable Kim Campbell, www.kimcampbell.com/node/25. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Swan, Susan. “Women on the Verge.” Mirabella Aug. 1993: 71–75.