She has had a long career of public service, played groundbreaking roles on behalf of women and spends half her time travelling the world representing international organizations. Yet it seems Huguette Labelle has just begun.
She was the first woman to head the Red Cross in Canada and the first francophone woman to rise to the position of deputy minister in the federal government. She advanced the cause of women as head of the Public Service Commission and was the longest serving president of the Canadian International Development Agency.
But Dr. Labelle hesitates to single out a particular position she has held, because she has been so deeply committed to each one that she has to be prodded to advance to the next. And for her, more opportunities and contributions lie ahead.
"The job I am in is always the best one," she says.
Dr. Labelle, chancellor of the University of Ottawa and chair of the board of Transparency International, is being honoured today by the Women's Exchange Network as one of 15 "Trailblazers and Trendsetters," pioneering women who have contributed to society.
What she calls her "smorgasbord life" began on a farm near Rockland, Ont., a francophone area east of Ottawa. She was the youngest of three children. Her father grew crops, raised dairy cattle and worked for a company that made ducts for new construction.
Her mother acted as a nurse-midwife to local women, at times turning the family's living room into a delivery room.
At 15, she was sent to learn English at a high school in Ottawa, where hers "was the only francophone name on the list." She went on to get an undergraduate degree in nursing, a master's in educational administration and a PhD in education, all from the University of Ottawa.
One of her early inspirations was her godmother, her mother's sister Betty, who worked in the government, fiercely believed in education and set goals for her niece.
Nurse training was her early focus, but while running the health science program at Algonquin College in Ottawa in 1973 she found herself "co-opted into the government," one of only five women among 700 civil servants at the executive level. She began as an adviser to the deputy minister of health and rose through a series of senior jobs, but says she refused promotions and ignored job offers a number of times because "whatever I was doing was the most important job in the world."
She was encouraged to stretch the limits by managers who "believed in me an awful lot more than I did myself." One was Bert Wisking, in charge of executive staffing for the Public Service Commission, who lectured her to not sit comfortably in one position when her talents were needed elsewhere and she could act as a role model for women.
"He really gave me a guilty feeling," Dr. Labelle says, "And he pushed me along."
By 1980, she was made a deputy minister as under-secretary to the Secretary of State, only the third woman in history and the first francophone woman to rise to that level in the government. That same year, she became the first female president of the Canadian Red Cross.
She remained a deputy minister for 19 years, becoming associate secretary to the cabinet and deputy clerk of the Privy Council, chair of the Public Service Commission, deputy minister of transport, deputy head of the Millennium Bureau of Canada and president of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), a position she held for almost seven years.
As under-secretary in 1982, she read out the proclamation giving Canadians a new Constitution before the Queen and then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau signed it at a ceremony on Parliament Hill. Characteristically, it was a job she offered to relinquish. "I suggested to Mr. Trudeau there would be many ministers who would love to do that — I wasn't running for election — but he said, 'Don't complicate my life, this is part of your job, let's not change that.'"
