Other Human Rights Defenders
The purpose of Speak Truth to Power Canada is to share the personal journeys of some of the many Canadian human rights defenders working today. As lesson plans are thematic and many Canadians assume the responsibility to advance human rights, every lesson plan also includes community-based defenders. It is hoped that your students may be inspired to identify themselves as human rights defenders and take positive action to support human rights in their own life and community. Perhaps your students will become community defenders themselves.
Harsha Walia
The founder of the Vancouver chapter of No One Is Illegal, Harsha Walia is a South Asian social justice activist focussed on migrant and indigenous solidarity, as well as ending gender violence – particularly in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. No One Is Illegal works both to directly support refugees and indigenous communities, and to raise public awareness about the challenged faced by both groups. Walia herself is inspired by her grandfather’s struggle against the British Raj in pre-partition India. Her book, Undoing Border Imperialism*, published in 2013, is both an education in mass displacement and a tutorial for movement building.
- Women’s Health and Security
- Truth and Reconciliation
Karen O’Shannacery
Karen O’Shannacery is an advocate for the homeless who worked with Vancouvers Lookout Emergency Aid Society from its inception in 1971 until her retirement in 2014. The Lookout Society provides housing and support services – including hangouts for the mentally ill, healthcare, addiction counselling, and kitchen and technical training – for those with low to no income. The goal is to provide flexible, non-judgmental services to help people with a variety of challenges attain stability and a higher quality of life. Inspired by her own struggles on the street in the Downtown Eastside, where she once made money by selling drugs, O’Shannacery believes that housing is both the first step to self-sufficiency and a right. She only revealed her personal past with her work following her retirement in 2014.
- Women’s Health and Security
Hannah Taylor
Hannah Taylor has been an advocate for Canada’s hungry and homeless population since she was five, when she saw a homeless man having to eat from a garbage can. Her charity, The Ladybug Foundation, which she founded in Winnipeg at age eight, promotes the basic human rights of adequate shelter and food. At 18, her activism now includes The Ladybug Foundation Education Program, which features “makeChange,” a K-12 resource to empower young people. Her work, including more than 175 speaking engagements, has raised more than $3 million for projects helping homeless people receive shelter, food, and safety.
- Women’s Health and Security
- Children’s Health and Wellness
Marilou McPhedran
Author, professor, researcher and advocate, Senator Marilou McPhedran is a staunch defender of especially the rights of girls and women, as well as those of patients in the Canadian health care system. Raised in Neepawa, Manitoba, Senator McPhedran, over the course of her very long career of human rights advocacy, has developed a number of human rights courses, chaired inquiries into the sexual abuse of patients, researched and authored international studies on a variety of women’s and health care topics, and founded the Institute for International Women’s Rights at Global College (Winnipeg). Senator McPhedran was named a Member of the Order of Canada in 1985.
- Women’s Health and Security
- Children’s Health and Wellness
Sally Armstrong
Born in Montréal, Quebec, award-winning author, journalist, and human rights activist Sally Armstrong has worked tirelessly to expose the true plight of women and girls in international zones of conflict. In addition, she monitors the status of women at home in North America. She has travelled to all four corners of the globe, with pen and camera in hand, documenting the experiences, the abuses, the hopes and the victories of the disadvantaged, the marginalized and the oppressed. Armstrong has added speaker, guest-lecturer and story teller to her long list of impressive talents, and has won many prestigious awards, earned many honorary degrees, and received the Order of Canada.
- Women’s Health and Security
- Children’s Health and Wellness
Bridget Perrier
“I was exploited by people around me who were put in place to protect me.” Bridget Perrier, born in Thunder Bay Ontario, given up for adoption, and subsequently raised in a “large, loving, non-Native family,” ended up lured into a life of prostitution by age 12. After a journey of healing spurred on by the death of her son, Perrier now chooses to educate others, as a motivational speaker, about the truths and myths surrounding prostitution, and about human trafficking, especially in Indigenous communities. She is a graduate of the Community Worker Program (George Brown College, Toronto), and was a recipient of the YWCA Woman of Distinction Turning Point award in 2006.
- Women’s Health and Security
- Human Trafficking
Dr. Andrew and Joan Simone
Both Dr. Andrew Simone and his wife Joan have been helping children for decades, through their charities “Canadian Food for Children” and “Silent Children’s Mission.” A successful Harvard-trained Toronto dermatologist, Dr. Simone’s life took a turn when, realizing he lacked fulfillment from the accumulation of wealth, he began a longstanding correspondence with Saint Teresa of Calcutta, who initially asked him to send food to starving children in Tanzania and Ethiopia. Their first charity serves over 20 developing countries; their mission charity provides basic needs, health and spiritual care, and counseling, so that women, children and their families know that there is someone who cares. Both recipients of the Order of Canada, Andrew and Joan are now retired, but their work continues to ease suffering across the globe.
- Women’s Health and Security
- Children’s Health and Wellness
- Human Dignity
