An extraordinary person. She was to have co-authored the forward to the book on the safety and protection of the world’s children. What a contribution she made in her own right.
Children’s rights advocate Landon Pearson was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize - The Globe and Mail
Susan
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Former Canadian Senator Landon Pearson was a tireless advocate for children’s rights, who capitalized on her position of privilege to influence change. Ms. Pearson died Jan. 28 at the age of 92.
Lucy Landon Carter Mackenzie Pearson. The name alone conjures a woman of pedigree and influence, the kind of woman who would count no less than four former Canadian prime ministers among the friends calling in on Zoom a couple of years ago to wish her a happy 90th birthday.
Landon Pearson was all of that, said her long-time friend and fan Sandra Griffin. But she was equally a humble student of the world, an attentive and generous friend, and truly unstoppable in her efforts to improve the lives of children and youth, Ms. Griffin added.
“She made everybody feel important. If you were committed to working with children, then she was committed to you.”
Ms. Pearson died Jan. 28 in Ottawa after a winter cold she’d caught led to pneumonia. She was 92.
The former Canadian senator – daughter-in-law of Lester B. Pearson, Canada’s Nobel Prize-winning prime minister – is remembered by friends, family and work colleagues as a tireless advocate for children’s rights, who capitalized on her position of privilege to influence change.
“Landon spent a lifetime setting up the architecture for realizing children’s rights in Canada,” said Virginia Caputo, director of Carleton University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology, where the Landon Pearson Resource Centre for the Study of Childhood and Children’s Rights was established in 2006.
“She kept me and everyone around her engaged and motivated with her steadfast vision firmly set on making the world a better place for children. The cornerstone of all of Landon’s work has been to create and hold spaces for children and young people’s participation, to enable their right to know and to have a say in the decisions that adults make that affect their lives.”
Ms. Pearson was born in Toronto on Nov. 16, 1930, to American artist Alice (née Sawtelle) Mackenzie and Hugh Mackenzie, a Canadian businessman. Mr. Mackenzie used to joke that his daughter was his good-luck charm, as he had been promoted to general manager of Labatt’s Brewery on the day she was born.
The youngest of three, Ms. Pearson grew up as a “self-confident, sunny little girl” who even viewed being sent to boarding school at age 11 as a positive turn of events, said daughter Hilary Pearson. (In a 2014 profile in Maclean’s magazine, the elder Ms. Pearson attributed her lifelong commitment to children’s issues as “a combination of having a happy childhood and thinking everyone else should have the same.”)
She was 20 when she met Geoffrey Pearson at the wedding of a mutual family friend. Mr. Pearson left for England shortly after to attend Oxford University, but the smitten couple couldn’t bear being apart. They married a year later, and the late Mr. Pearson’s career as a Canadian diplomat and ambassador was soon underway.
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Then-Senator Pearson holds a joint news conference with Liberal MP Roger Gallaway in Ottawa, on Dec. 9, 1998, after releasing their report on Child Custody and Access titled For the Sake of the Children.
Fred Chartrand/The Canadian Press
“I think back on the life my mother lived in those years – there were five of us kids and all but one was born abroad, because my father was posted in Paris, then Mexico, India, the Soviet Union. I don’t know how she did it,” Hilary Pearson said.
“She was so interested in all of us kids, in seeing how we grew and the environments that we flourished in. And everywhere she went, she engaged with people to get her head around the new culture she was living in, to learn the language and find out how children were doing in that country.”
In India, Ms. Pearson worked with local women to open a daycare for the children of migrant mothers. In Russia, she interviewed dozens of children for what eventually became a book, Children of Glasnost: Growing up Soviet.
The family returned to Ottawa in between overseas postings, where Ms. Pearson began to be sought out for high-profile federal roles involving children’s issues. She was appointed chair of the Canadian Council on Children and Youth, and worked with the Canadian Coalition on the Rights of Children to promote the 1991 ratification and implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Her appointment to the Senate came in 1994, the year she turned 64. It was her first paid job, and a position she held for 11 years. Media coverage from that period routinely referred to her as “the children’s senator” for her unwavering focus.
When joint Senate-Commons committees were struck to work on reforms to Canada’s Divorce Act and review laws and processes around child custody and access, she co-chaired both committees. When then-minister of foreign affairs Lloyd Axworthy went looking for an adviser on children’s rights in 1996, Ms. Pearson got the job.
She was a familiar face at UN events related to children and youth, and challenged the federal government often over the years to do more to meet its commitments.
One of her favourite initiatives was “Shaking the Movers,” an annual workshop launched in 2007 by the Landon Pearson Centre. The youth-led workshops continue to bring young people ages eight to 18 together with decision-makers for dialogue on a different article of the UN convention each year.
Ms. Pearson attended a virtual meeting with the 2022 team just weeks before her death, telling the group that it would likely be her last one.
During her years as a senator and long into retirement, Ms. Pearson campaigned for change across a broad spectrum of child and youth issues in Canada.
She worked to end corporal punishment in the family home, and the sexual exploitation of children. She spoke out on the high rates of homelessness among young people coming from government care, and the dire plight of Indigenous children and families in remote communities.
Her efforts brought her international recognition. She was one of nine Canadian women among 1,000 globally to be nominated in 2005 for a Nobel Peace Prize for their collective efforts on behalf of peace, justice, education and sustainability.
Ms. Pearson “always had a very deep sense of the capacities of women,” said daughter Patricia Pearson. “She had to fight to be as effective as she was for children. She couldn’t have been ‘the children’s senator’ if she hadn’t first been a feminist.”
Ms. Pearson was inducted into the Order of Canada in 2008, and awarded five honorary degrees over her lifetime.
“Landon was incredibly intelligent, resourceful and enlightened, but what we all valued most about her was that she met people in a relational way. Relations were the source of power,” said Judy Finlay, Director of the School of Child and Youth Care at Toronto Metropolitan University.
“Landon was always engaged at multiple levels, always integrating all the parts of herself – her political life, family life, her work as an advocate. That’s what made her so powerful.”
Images are unavailable offline.
Ms. Pearson celebrated her 85th birthday with a room full of children and their parents and teachers from Pierre Elliott Trudeau School in Gatineau.
Courtesy of Carleton University
Ms. Pearson was 78 when she and Ms. Finlay visited seven First Nations in Northern Ontario at the request of Oji-Cree Elders, who asked them to document the Elders’ stories in a book for those communities’ Indigenous youth.
The trip unfolded during one of the hardest years of Ms. Pearson’s life, 2008, when her husband and then their daughter Katharine died within two months of each other.
“That was a very sad time for her,” Ms. Finlay recalled. “She was very close to each of her children in very different ways.”
Ms. Pearson leaves her children Hilary, Anne, Michael and Patricia; 12 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
The Mamow Sha-way-gi-kay-win initiative – the North-South Partnership for Children – lives on as a legacy of Ms. Pearson’s 2008 trip. The partnership has brought together a coalition of Ontario individuals and organizations with 30 First Nations communities in the north, with a goal of learning from each other and opening “pathways of hope” for Indigenous youth.
“She did make an impact,” Chief Donny Morris of the Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation said of Ms. Pearson, who sat on the partnership’s governing council alongside Chief Morris and Ms. Finlay.
“For an individual from down south to take notice of what our living conditions are for our youth, our children, our remote communities – that matters. Both her knowledge and the expertise she brought to us, that’s something I will cherish and try to learn from.”
A dedicated journal writer from the age of 16, Ms. Pearson’s hundreds of journals provide an incomparable documentation of her daily life and times, her daughter Hilary Pearson said. The journals spill over with the memorabilia of past symphonies, events and travel tucked into their pages.
Ms. Pearson’s niece Landon Mackenzie remembers her as “the most ordinary aunt you could have,” one whose lack of interest in cooking was family legend and whose absence of ego likely meant many people who met her had no idea of her accomplishments.
“She was this little, plain woman who dressed to fit in,” Ms. Mackenzie said. “She never tooted her own horn, always asked how you were. She lived her time – I’ve got letters between her and my mother where they talked for days about bridal gowns and whether bridesmaid dresses should go modern.
“But there’s her desk covered with letters on the Suez Canal crisis, and this life of moving all over the world, the daughter-in-law of a former prime minister, the diplomat’s wife. Through it all, she always kept in mind that this privilege came with a duty to give back.”
People like to muse about how different things might be if women ruled the world, Patricia Pearson said.
“My mother was a model for that. She used her power for good, and was so thrilled when her appointment to the Senate put her in a position to be able to do even more,” Ms. Pearson said. “More of her, please.”
Children’s rights advocate Landon Pearson was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize - The Globe and Mail
Susan
Children’s rights advocate Landon Pearson
Former Canadian Senator Landon Pearson was a tireless advocate for children’s rights, who capitalized on her position of privilege to influence change. Ms. Pearson died Jan. 28 at the age of 92.
Lucy Landon Carter Mackenzie Pearson. The name alone conjures a woman of pedigree and influence, the kind of woman who would count no less than four former Canadian prime ministers among the friends calling in on Zoom a couple of years ago to wish her a happy 90th birthday.
Landon Pearson was all of that, said her long-time friend and fan Sandra Griffin. But she was equally a humble student of the world, an attentive and generous friend, and truly unstoppable in her efforts to improve the lives of children and youth, Ms. Griffin added.
“She made everybody feel important. If you were committed to working with children, then she was committed to you.”
Ms. Pearson died Jan. 28 in Ottawa after a winter cold she’d caught led to pneumonia. She was 92.
The former Canadian senator – daughter-in-law of Lester B. Pearson, Canada’s Nobel Prize-winning prime minister – is remembered by friends, family and work colleagues as a tireless advocate for children’s rights, who capitalized on her position of privilege to influence change.
“Landon spent a lifetime setting up the architecture for realizing children’s rights in Canada,” said Virginia Caputo, director of Carleton University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology, where the Landon Pearson Resource Centre for the Study of Childhood and Children’s Rights was established in 2006.
“She kept me and everyone around her engaged and motivated with her steadfast vision firmly set on making the world a better place for children. The cornerstone of all of Landon’s work has been to create and hold spaces for children and young people’s participation, to enable their right to know and to have a say in the decisions that adults make that affect their lives.”
Ms. Pearson was born in Toronto on Nov. 16, 1930, to American artist Alice (née Sawtelle) Mackenzie and Hugh Mackenzie, a Canadian businessman. Mr. Mackenzie used to joke that his daughter was his good-luck charm, as he had been promoted to general manager of Labatt’s Brewery on the day she was born.
The youngest of three, Ms. Pearson grew up as a “self-confident, sunny little girl” who even viewed being sent to boarding school at age 11 as a positive turn of events, said daughter Hilary Pearson. (In a 2014 profile in Maclean’s magazine, the elder Ms. Pearson attributed her lifelong commitment to children’s issues as “a combination of having a happy childhood and thinking everyone else should have the same.”)
She was 20 when she met Geoffrey Pearson at the wedding of a mutual family friend. Mr. Pearson left for England shortly after to attend Oxford University, but the smitten couple couldn’t bear being apart. They married a year later, and the late Mr. Pearson’s career as a Canadian diplomat and ambassador was soon underway.
Then-Senator Pearson holds a joint news conference with Liberal MP Roger Gallaway in Ottawa, on Dec. 9, 1998, after releasing their report on Child Custody and Access titled For the Sake of the Children.
Fred Chartrand/The Canadian Press
“I think back on the life my mother lived in those years – there were five of us kids and all but one was born abroad, because my father was posted in Paris, then Mexico, India, the Soviet Union. I don’t know how she did it,” Hilary Pearson said.
“She was so interested in all of us kids, in seeing how we grew and the environments that we flourished in. And everywhere she went, she engaged with people to get her head around the new culture she was living in, to learn the language and find out how children were doing in that country.”
In India, Ms. Pearson worked with local women to open a daycare for the children of migrant mothers. In Russia, she interviewed dozens of children for what eventually became a book, Children of Glasnost: Growing up Soviet.
The family returned to Ottawa in between overseas postings, where Ms. Pearson began to be sought out for high-profile federal roles involving children’s issues. She was appointed chair of the Canadian Council on Children and Youth, and worked with the Canadian Coalition on the Rights of Children to promote the 1991 ratification and implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Her appointment to the Senate came in 1994, the year she turned 64. It was her first paid job, and a position she held for 11 years. Media coverage from that period routinely referred to her as “the children’s senator” for her unwavering focus.
When joint Senate-Commons committees were struck to work on reforms to Canada’s Divorce Act and review laws and processes around child custody and access, she co-chaired both committees. When then-minister of foreign affairs Lloyd Axworthy went looking for an adviser on children’s rights in 1996, Ms. Pearson got the job.
She was a familiar face at UN events related to children and youth, and challenged the federal government often over the years to do more to meet its commitments.
One of her favourite initiatives was “Shaking the Movers,” an annual workshop launched in 2007 by the Landon Pearson Centre. The youth-led workshops continue to bring young people ages eight to 18 together with decision-makers for dialogue on a different article of the UN convention each year.
Ms. Pearson attended a virtual meeting with the 2022 team just weeks before her death, telling the group that it would likely be her last one.
During her years as a senator and long into retirement, Ms. Pearson campaigned for change across a broad spectrum of child and youth issues in Canada.
She worked to end corporal punishment in the family home, and the sexual exploitation of children. She spoke out on the high rates of homelessness among young people coming from government care, and the dire plight of Indigenous children and families in remote communities.
Her efforts brought her international recognition. She was one of nine Canadian women among 1,000 globally to be nominated in 2005 for a Nobel Peace Prize for their collective efforts on behalf of peace, justice, education and sustainability.
Ms. Pearson “always had a very deep sense of the capacities of women,” said daughter Patricia Pearson. “She had to fight to be as effective as she was for children. She couldn’t have been ‘the children’s senator’ if she hadn’t first been a feminist.”
Ms. Pearson was inducted into the Order of Canada in 2008, and awarded five honorary degrees over her lifetime.
“Landon was incredibly intelligent, resourceful and enlightened, but what we all valued most about her was that she met people in a relational way. Relations were the source of power,” said Judy Finlay, Director of the School of Child and Youth Care at Toronto Metropolitan University.
“Landon was always engaged at multiple levels, always integrating all the parts of herself – her political life, family life, her work as an advocate. That’s what made her so powerful.”
Images are unavailable offline.
Ms. Pearson celebrated her 85th birthday with a room full of children and their parents and teachers from Pierre Elliott Trudeau School in Gatineau.
Courtesy of Carleton University
Ms. Pearson was 78 when she and Ms. Finlay visited seven First Nations in Northern Ontario at the request of Oji-Cree Elders, who asked them to document the Elders’ stories in a book for those communities’ Indigenous youth.
The trip unfolded during one of the hardest years of Ms. Pearson’s life, 2008, when her husband and then their daughter Katharine died within two months of each other.
“That was a very sad time for her,” Ms. Finlay recalled. “She was very close to each of her children in very different ways.”
Ms. Pearson leaves her children Hilary, Anne, Michael and Patricia; 12 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
The Mamow Sha-way-gi-kay-win initiative – the North-South Partnership for Children – lives on as a legacy of Ms. Pearson’s 2008 trip. The partnership has brought together a coalition of Ontario individuals and organizations with 30 First Nations communities in the north, with a goal of learning from each other and opening “pathways of hope” for Indigenous youth.
“She did make an impact,” Chief Donny Morris of the Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation said of Ms. Pearson, who sat on the partnership’s governing council alongside Chief Morris and Ms. Finlay.
“For an individual from down south to take notice of what our living conditions are for our youth, our children, our remote communities – that matters. Both her knowledge and the expertise she brought to us, that’s something I will cherish and try to learn from.”
A dedicated journal writer from the age of 16, Ms. Pearson’s hundreds of journals provide an incomparable documentation of her daily life and times, her daughter Hilary Pearson said. The journals spill over with the memorabilia of past symphonies, events and travel tucked into their pages.
Ms. Pearson’s niece Landon Mackenzie remembers her as “the most ordinary aunt you could have,” one whose lack of interest in cooking was family legend and whose absence of ego likely meant many people who met her had no idea of her accomplishments.
“She was this little, plain woman who dressed to fit in,” Ms. Mackenzie said. “She never tooted her own horn, always asked how you were. She lived her time – I’ve got letters between her and my mother where they talked for days about bridal gowns and whether bridesmaid dresses should go modern.
“But there’s her desk covered with letters on the Suez Canal crisis, and this life of moving all over the world, the daughter-in-law of a former prime minister, the diplomat’s wife. Through it all, she always kept in mind that this privilege came with a duty to give back.”
People like to muse about how different things might be if women ruled the world, Patricia Pearson said.
“My mother was a model for that. She used her power for good, and was so thrilled when her appointment to the Senate put her in a position to be able to do even more,” Ms. Pearson said. “More of her, please.”
Thank you, Susan, for sharing this sad news of the passing of Senator Landon Pearson.
ReplyDeleteI had the privilege to work closely with Senator Pearson during the preparatory process of the UN General Assembly Special Session on Children in 2001/02 when she represented Canada as the Special Representative of Prime Minister Chretien. She was superbly helpful to UNICEF during prolonged negotiations of "A World Fit for Children" that was adopted by the SSC.
She was very knowledgeable about and deeply committed to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. She was gentle but firm and commanded great respect from all delegates. We at UNICEF could always count on her help and guidance during the toughest negotiations with many recalcitrant delegates. She always reminded me of her father-in-law Lester Pearson's commitment to multilateralism and staunch support for the ideals and principles of the United Nations.
She lived a full life and made a tremendous contribution to Canada's leadership in safeguarding child rights domestically and promoting them globally. Her legacy will inspire future generations.
May her noble soul rest in eternal peace.
Kul