Sunday, December 22, 2024

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Sunday, December 22, 2024 | Latest Paper

‘I wrote it because Canadians have forgotten Flora MacDonald’: Geoffrey Stevens

Geoffrey Stevens and Flora MacDonald's book, Flora!: A Woman in a Man’s World, is one of the best political books published in 2021 in Canada. Stevens says he wrote the book because he wants people to remember MacDonald, who was the most influential woman in Canadian political life in her time (mid-1960s to late-1980s). An excerpt is published here. The book is a finalist for this year's Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.

Flora MacDonald, pictured in 2010 and who died in 2015, was Canada's first female foreign affairs minister. Geoffrey Stevens says MacDonald's final decades were remarkable. 'This high-profile cabinet minister disappeared from public view. She became an unpaid volunteer working in refugee camps in Africa and Asia, in an international campaign to preserve the watersheds of the great rivers of Tibet, and as a teacher and builder of schools and hospitals in remote mountain villages of Afghanistan.' The Hill Times file photograph by Jake Wright

feature
BY FLORA MACDONALD & GEOFFREY STEVENS
May 16, 2022

feature | BY FLORA MACDONALD & GEOFFREY STEVENS | May 16, 2022

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The five finalists vying for the Writers' Trust of Canada $25,000 prize are, from left to right: Mike Blanchfield and Fen Osler Hampson for The Two Michaels: Innocent Canadian Captives and High Stakes Espionage in the US-China Cyber War; Joanna Chiu for China Unbound: A New World Disorder; Flora MacDonald and Geoffrey Stevens for Flora!: A Woman in a Man’s World; Stephen Poloz for The Next Age of Uncertainty: How the World Can Adapt to a Riskier Future; and Jody Wilson-Raybould for ‘Indian’ in the Cabinet: Speaking Truth to Power. Photographs courtesy of The Writers' Trust of Canada

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