Kim Campbell is 75 years old today.
I can scarcely believe I’ve just typed that. I well remember, back on March 25, 1993, when Campbell, having just turned 46, gave a bravura performance announcing her intention to run for the federal Progressive Conservative party leadership to succeed Brian Mulroney.
In an era when too many politicians can’t seem to give a speech without slavishly following a teleprompter, Campbell launched her campaign without a script, speaking extemporaneously and with humour. With the backing of more than half the caucus, she won the leadership less than three months later, becoming Canada’s first female prime minister on June 25.
Today, Campbell lives outside Florence, Italy, and, as many people do on milestone birthdays, she’s taking stock of her life and the world.
“I’m conscious of the fact that I’m heading for the 19th hole,” she says. “I’m getting into that range where I’m too old to die young.”
Yes, Campbell’s sense of humour is still very much intact.
Female former first ministers at the No Second Chances conference in Ottawa in 2020: L-R: Alison Redford (Alberta), Kathleen Wynne (Ontario), Kim Campbell (PM), Kathy Dunderdale (Newfoundland and Labrador), Catherine Callbeck (Prince Edward Island). (Steve Paikin)
In a 70-minute Zoom call last week, Campbell took me through a panoply of issues, from life in Italy, to her marriage to the brilliant pianist/impresario Hershey Felder, to the state of the world today, and, yes, to Canadian politics, which she still follows.
“My personal life is fabulous,” she says. “I can’t tell you how happy I am. But the state of the world has me in the slough of despond when I think beyond that.”
Campbell grew up in the shadow of World War II; having been born in 1947, she was deeply influenced by the Cold War — so much so, she’s dedicated much of her life to helping the globe avoid a third world war. This is a woman who, as a teenager, wanted to be secretary-general of the United Nations.
She has numerous direct connections to war. Her father, George, was wounded in Italy during World War II while fighting as a member of the Seaforth Highlanders. Her father’s best friend is buried in Ravenna, two hours’ drive from Florence. Her first husband’s cousin died in Ortona, about four hours away. Campbell herself once performed official duties by laying a wreath at the Commonwealth war cemetery near where she lives.
“There’s a sweetness in being here, because Canadians paid the price so Italy could be what it is today — which is totally chaotic in many ways — but it made it possible for me to come and get to know a country that still has things to see that are inspiring,” she says.
Having said that, Canada’s first female defence minister (in 1993) is appalled by what she’s seeing in Eastern Europe. It particularly hits home because, in 1970, Campbell did a doctorate in Soviet government at the London School of Economics. In 1972, she spent three months in the Soviet Union and three weeks in Ukraine. She chaired a foundation in Kyiv for five years.
“I know that part of the world well,” she says, adding that part of the reason the world is so shocked by what Russian president Vladimir Putin has wrought is that “it’s hard for good people to believe in evil. We’re flabbergasted by it. If you’re a rational person, if you’re a good person, if you’re somebody who doesn’t harbour bad motivations, it’s very hard for you to understand somebody like Putin — or Trump, for that matter. Naïveté is often the other side of the coin of decency. You can’t see what you wouldn’t do yourself.”
Campbell says that Putin, ironically, has forgotten that, when the Soviet Union did exist, “the Ukrainians were the best soldiers,” as he’s currently discovering.
“If Russia were democratic, if it were a country that respected human rights, then its former satellites would cuddle up to it very happily and increase its relationships and feel pride in the association as they pursued their own independent ways,” she says. “He actually achieves the opposite of what he wants.” A reinvigorated NATO and European Union “is Putin’s greatest nightmare,” she adds.
Campbell talks about how, in many ways, her generation has failed the generations that have followed. That significantly animates her current agenda.
“What do we owe them?” she asks of those buried in cemeteries all over Europe. “They died so none of us had to be that brave. I’ve never had to be that brave. Yes, I faced the slings and arrows of outrageous journalists, the disappointment of defeat, and the experience of the reality of being a woman breaking through into an area where people didn’t think you belonged. But I never feared for my life. Now there’s an automatic 10-year sentence for Russians protesting. People in Ukraine are putting their lives on the line for something bigger than themselves. I never had to do that, because others did it.”
So what animates Campbell these days?
“I’m thinking of how I can be a good ancestor” is how she puts it. “I want to use the lessons of my own increasingly longer life to perhaps be a tile in the mosaic of progress.” To that end, she frequently speaks to student groups, including as a distinguished fellow at the Munk School for Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.
“Us old geezers, there are things we can share because of how we see history,” she says. “Not to tell them what to do but to develop their own sense of what morality is and what citizenship means and where their loyalty lies and how they can be constructive members of society.”
Campbell still follows Canadian politics, although her interest in partisan politics is long in the rear-view mirror.
“My old party doesn’t exist, and I’ve never joined another one,” she says of the former PC party, now subsumed into the Conservative Party of Canada. She expresses admiration for Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and Defence Minister Anita Anand, who’s just the second woman (after Campbell) to have that portfolio.
When Freeland was made finance minister in August 2020 and sustained numerous criticisms for her lack of formal business experience, “that brought me out of the bushes,” Campbell says with exasperation. “I was so mad at the condescension and sheer ignorance and blatant misogyny of these journalists. Jim Flaherty was a personal-injury lawyer. Don Mazankowski was a used-car dealer,” she says, referring to two successful Conservative finance ministers. “It doesn’t mean they weren’t good. But people allowed them to learn on the job. Chrystia Freeland came armed with deep and profound knowledge.”
No one more than Campbell knows how tough politics can be, and when I remind her that the man she defeated for PC leader almost 30 years ago is poised to make a comeback to run for the CPC leadership, she says of Jean Charest: “Good for him” — although, in the next breath, she allows that “he said he’d run as a Conservative not a red Tory, and that’s a tragedy.” Campbell regrets the fact that moderate conservatives have to pay lip service to being more conservative than they really are, lest they alienate the much more right-wing, populist base of the party.
Steve Paikin in conversation with Kim Campbell in 2010
One can’t talk to Campbell without referring to the fact that almost three decades later, she remains the one and only female prime minister Canada has ever had. How come?
“It’s harder than it looks,” she says. “You have to have a woman who can win the leadership of a party that can form a government. If you’re a party that can’t form the government, then people are prepared to have woman toil in the vineyards, do all the work, and take all the disappointment. Once you have a party that can form a government, the elbows are out. A lot of people want that.”
Campbell’s prime ministership began well. She took over a party that was moribund in the polls and moved it into a competitive position. But the 1993 election campaign laid bare myriad problems for the PCs — Mulroney’s unpopularity, Western alienation (which led to the rise of the Reform Party), Quebec nationalists who flocked to the Bloc Québécois, and Campbell’s own mistakes. The PC party essentially blew up and was left with only two MPs.
While Campbell admits she gets her fair share of taunts — “You were only prime minister for 10 minutes” — she’s more heartened by others who remind her of the significance of the accomplishment. One woman recently intercepted her at an airport, saying she’d been only six when Campbell became PM, prompting her father to say, “See? Girls can do anything!”
“These little nodes of encouragement,” Campbell says, “I want people to know I survived it. It was tough. When you’re breaking through, there are some human sacrifices when a non-prototypical person does the job.”
This helps explain Campbell’s commitment to a two-decade-old organization she helped found called the Club de Madrid (which helps promote democracy around the world) and the Council of Women World Leaders, made up of current and former women prime ministers and presidents.
One of Campbell’s most appealing characteristics has always been her openness, particularly about her own life, which has been unlike any other Canadian prime minister’s. Since 1997, she’s been married to Felder, her third husband, who is 21 years her junior. Having said that, she points out her first husband was 21 years her senior. And her second husband was seven years older.
“So, on average, my husbands are two and a half years older than me,” she says, displaying that sense of humor again. “I was 49 when I met Hershey. I remember thinking, Oh golly, I’m 21 years older than he is. But, somehow, we’re happier than ever. Maybe his fondness for antiques may have something to do with that.”
Campbell confesses she sent her husband, who was working in Venice during our Zoom call, a text the other day telling him she loved him.
“I love my husband so much, and I admire him and respect him so much,” she adds, tearing up. “He’s an absolute darling and treats me like a queen. We have a great life together.”
The author's daughter, Giulia Paikin, in front of Kim Campbell's official portrait in Parliament in 2018. (Steve Paikin)
Felder has spent the pandemic live-streaming concerts in which he plays everything from Beethoven to Gershwin, providing employment for 300 people who otherwise might have been at loose ends. As Campbell and I spoke, Felder was filming two hours away in composer Giuseppe Verdi’s house, “which is exactly as it was when Verdi lived in it,” Campbell says.
She expects to spend her 75th birthday having a romantic evening at their 12th-century villa (once a castello/fortress that was occupied by the Nazis during World War II) because it affords such a magnificent view of Florence.
“For the first time in our time together, we have a normal life here,” Campbell says. “He’s not in the theatre six nights a week. I cherish my happiness.”
Now if only the world could stop the war in Ukraine.
If only Canada would elect another female prime minister.
If only we could “embrace sharing our planet, our country, our societies with smart, good constructive people of all different sizes, shapes, and colors. That’s the guarantee of the future. Golly, what a world!”
Energized and passionate, Kim Campbell still has plenty on her agenda as she celebrates three-quarters of a century of life.