Vancouver –
Pat Carney, who pioneered roles for women in Canadian politics and journalism, has died at the age of 88.
Her niece, Jill Carney, confirmed in a statement that the former MP and Senator passed away late Tuesday.
Pat Carney was the first female Conservative member of Parliament elected in British Columbia and the first female conservative appointed from the province to the Senate.
Born in Shanghai, China, in May 1935, Carney was educated in Canada and worked as a journalist and economic consultant in the Northwest Territories and the Yukon.
Her website says she began her journalism career in the 1960s and was the first female business columnist to write for daily newspapers, including the Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province.
She would later tell the Senate in her retirement address in 2007 that she never intended to enter politics.
“As a journalist, I sat in the press gallery … looking down literally and figuratively at MPs as the Chief Dief waved his tassels,” she said, referring to former prime minister John Diefenbaker.
However, she was first elected to the House of Commons in February 1980 in the Vancouver centre round.
Her website says Carney was the first woman in any government portfolio she held, serving as energy minister, international trade minister and Treasury Board President in Brian Mulroney’s cabinet.
Carney also pioneered the development of distance learning and in 1977 received a B Institute of Technology Award. C. for innovation in education.
Janice McAdam, Carney’s former assistant, said in a statement that Carney had been in and out of the hospital recently and was readmitted over the weekend.
McAdam said the family is not planning a public memorial because Carney had said she preferred an event only with family and friends.
After retiring from politics, Carney continued to contribute to newspapers. Last year, she wrote about the “scariest moment” of her political career, when she voted against her government’s anti-abortion bill in 1991.
The bill came within a single vote of being enshrined in law.
“There was no doubt about how I would vote. “I had told my voters that I believed that a decision on an abortion was a woman’s right, her conscience, and her doctors,” she wrote in the Globe and Mail.
“For personal reasons, I wasn’t going to have an abortion, but that was my choice; I knew other women had their reasons for having another.”
As Minister of Energy, Mines and resources, Carney was responsible for dismantling the National Energy Program and replaced it with the Western agreement, which deregulated the oil and gas industry, her website says.
As Minister of international trade, Carney was responsible for free trade negotiations with the United States.
Senator Hugh Segal said her role in the free trade negotiations “was essential, clear and demanding.”
“She brought a Pacific Coast sensibility to discussions that would have been different only for Central Canada, as is often the case in this city,” Segal told the Senate in 2007.
Carney also started a working group on barriers to women in public service during her tenure as Treasury Board president, her website says.
Carney said in her Senate farewell speech that her favorite story about entering politics came when she tried to shake the hand of an elderly woman in downtown Vancouver in 1979.
“The good-looking old woman grabbed his hand and snapped viciously:’ I’d rather have my hand dry and fall off before shaking hands with a conservator.”She then left,” Carney said.
Carney was a mother of two and lived on Saturn Island, one of the islands of B Bay. C.
This report by Canadian Press was first published on July 26, 2023.
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