Former Prime Minister of Canada, Jean Chrétien, to deliver Commonwealth Lecture
29 March 2004
The former Prime Minister of Canada, The Rt Hon Jean Chrétien PC, will give the Seventh Commonwealth Lecture on Tuesday 30 March 2004 in London. His talk will be on the theme Making Progress Through Multilateralism.In his lecture Mr. Chrétien will explain how Canada has learned lessons from its diversity and bilingualism and their effective social and fiscal policies as well as its democratic system of governance. These lessons, he argues, have helped to shape Canada's character and enhanced her ability to be constructive in international institutions like the Commonwealth and the United Nations.
Mr. Chrétien will outline how this ability has been borne out by Canada taking a lead role in the Ottawa Convention banning land mines, in establishing the International Criminal Court and in championing the New Partnership for Africa's Development.
He will also say that Canada is proud to belong to the Commonwealth, an organisation which is enriched by its differences and finds strength in diversity.
Mr. Chrétien will also call for greater trade liberalisation, arguing that it is absurd that the developed world spends close to US$ 350 billion annually on subsidies on their own farmers whilst their aid to poor countries is only US$ 50 billion.
Called to the Canadian bar in 1958 and first elected to Canada's national parliament five years later, Mr. Chrétien joined the government in 1965 serving as Parliamentary Secretary to then Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson.
He held numerous ministerial portfolios and served as Deputy Prime Minister before his party left government. Following a short spell on the opposition benches he returned to private legal practice before being elected Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada in 1990. In the same year a by-election returned him to parliament where he became leader of the Opposition.
In October 1993 Mr Chrétien's party won a majority of seats in the House of Commons and he was sworn in as Prime Minister of Canada, a post he held until his resignation in December 2003.
He has received honorary degrees from universities in Canada, Israel, Japan, Poland and the United States of America.
Note to Editors:
The Lecture will be held at the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington, London at 6.30 p.m. and it will be followed by a question and answer session. For press invitations and other queries call the Communications and Public Affairs Division, Commonwealth Secretariat on + 44 (0) 20 7747 6382/6383.
The inaugural Commonwealth Lecture, entitled Human Rights: Is there a Commonwealth Perspective?, was delivered in 1998 by Professor Amartya Sen, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the 1998 Nobel Laureate for Economics. Subsequent annual lectures have been delivered by the Rt Hon Malcolm Fraser, former Prime Minister of Australia, who spoke on Globalisation and the Nation State; Kofi Annan, the United Nations Secretary-General and winner of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize whose title was Africa: Maintaining the Momentum; Mrs Graça Machel, President of the Foundation for Community Development and Chair of the Commonwealth Foundation, whose topic was Gender Inequality: From Roles to Rights and Mary Robinson, then United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, who spoke on Human Rights in the Shadow of 11 September. Last year's lecture was delivered by the founder and managing director of Bangladesh's Grameen Bank Professor Muhammad Yunus, whose topic was Halving Poverty by 2015: we can actually make it happen.
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