January 15, 2021

LANDON PEARSON at 90; Endless Contributions

By Hon. Landon Pearson

View webinar with the Hon. Landon Pearson on her work on children’s rights and on her reflections on Lester B Pearson, her father-in-law.

The following is her speech at Carleton University on the occasion of her 90th birthday.
Sunday’s Child
November 16, 1930—Nov. 16, 2020
Landon Pearson

(delivered at Carleton University, November 16, 2020)

Thank you President Bacon for your best wishes and many thanks to all of you who have zoomed in to share my birthday celebrations. I wish I could see you, but hopefully you can see me and that the Internet connection remains stable. What strange times we are living through! But, alas, nothing can stop the clock or reverse the flow of time and so, willy-nilly, I turned 90 this morning and woke up wondering how on earth I managed to get here from there.

So, if you will permit, and since this is my birthday I am sure you will, I am going to take you back briefly to the start of my long life’s journey and then bring you back slowly along it sharing what I have learned about children and childhood and children’s rights on the way. One of my favourite mentors, the late Dr. Dan Offord, once asked me why I do what I do and this is my short effort to answer that question.

But, the first thing I have to say is that this is not a journey that I could have possibly made alone. Another of my mentors, Desmond Kimmitt, used to say that each person’s life journey is unique, no one has ever taken it before and no one will ever take it again, and while that is true, one of my favourite poets, John Donne, also wrote “no man (in this case woman!) is an island” and finished his reflections with a famous line: “Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee”—and so it does as I fully realize now that I am somewhere near the end. But as I look back from my new vantage point I can see how many people have been there for me; family and friends, colleagues, mentors and mentees, officials and even government leaders whose unfailing support has made my journey here possible.

Since I firmly believe that our end is in our beginnings let’s go back to the start. I first opened my eyes in the Toronto Wellesley Hospital on Sunday, November 16, 1930 and both of my parents were delighted—or so they always say! My father was keen to have a daughter after two sons and, after five months of Depression-related unemployment, he got his dream job at Labatt’s at the same time as he got me. So, he would tell me over and over again that I was his good luck charm! My mother’s message was different. One of my earliest memories is her voice chanting to me the old nursery rhyme about the days of the week that begins “Monday’s child is full of grace” and ends, and here her voice would rise, “But the child that is born on the Sabbath Day is bonny and blithe and good and gay”. It is the words that are addressed to us when we are small that help to shape our identities and what great words for a growing girl to hear especially as I was born just a year after the Privy Council of Great Britain had proclaimed women in Canada to be “persons” and thus worthy of being appointed to the Senate!

Names matter too. My given name came from my maternal line stretching back to Colonial Virginia when Robert Carter married Elizabeth Landon at the end of the 17th century and fathered a whole stream of Lucy Landon Carters flowing from generation to generation usually from aunt to niece to granddaughter. Today I have a niece named Landon and a granddaughter and hopefully there will be many more Lucy Landons in generations to come. It appears that most of the women bearing the name have been strong and lively. I’m not so sure about their husbands, particularly during the Colonial period, but never mind. Being woven into the fabric of history, even when it is full of dark patches, is a gift every child should have and I applaud the cultures that make a ritual of the naming their newborns after honoured ancestors.

So, I started off well, a healthy child with sturdy genes; brown eyes from my mother, a solid frame from my father’s Scottish ancestors, and a sunny disposition from I don’t know where. Because our genes are the only given part of us the rest of who we become depends on nurture and care in our earliest years, the cultures that surround us as we grow up, the opportunities we are offered, as well as the people we are able to build constructive relationships with as we go along. I have to say I really lucked out in all these domains. Would I have turned out differently if I had been rejected, abused or humiliated by my near and dear during childhood? The answer, I think, is yes. We now know that adverse childhood experiences have a very negative impact on the developing brain, and that the anger such experiences generate can combine with a strong will to be very destructive.

But I escaped all that. I had a happy childhood. My parents surrounded me with love, providing me with emotional and economic security and a surprising amount, as I look back, of personal freedom. My father’s father was a professor and the son of an Archdeacon. He was rather given to diktats, but when he told his grandchildren that we should aim at leaving the world a better place than it was when we came into it, it was hard not to listen. I suppose that makes him the first of my many mentors. The next one I encountered was a beloved teacher—and less dictatorial. Miss Matthews was the principal of the little primary school I entered at the age of four and, because she was delighted by my avid curiosity, she instilled a life-long love of learning which enabled me to “make my mind a good friend” which is really important because, as another teacher once told the gifted American writer Marilynne Robinson, “you live with your mind every minute of your life and so furnish it well.” The only negative comment I got in my early report cards was that I was “a little untidy about my person”.

Miss Matthews advanced me a grade every time I got bored so I was only 11 when I finished grade 8 and my parents, forgetting that I had two older brothers, decided I was still too young to deal with boys in a big public high school. As a results they sent me to a girls’ boarding school in Quebec for three years where I encountered my next mentor. Adelaide Gillard, the head mistress of King’s Hall, Compton in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, was exemplary and she, too, encouraged me to learn, allowing me to spend hours in the school’s little library while others were out playing field hockey at which I was no good. When I persuaded my father that I was now old enough for boys (and because he and my mother missed me), he let me come back to finish high school at London South Collegiate Institute where I had a lively social life and found another teaching mentor, the unlikely-named Madame Carr-Harris, who reinforced my love for French already reinforced by the crush I (and several others) had on Mam’selle, our enchanting French teacher at Compton. Here at South, I became aware for the first time that for some adults Landon was a boy’s name and I will never forget the look on Mr. Graham’s face when he handed back to the girl with bangs and bobby socks sitting in the front row a trigonometry exam I had just aced.

At the University of Toronto I landed at St. Hilda’s, the women’s residence associated with Trinity College. The Dean of St. Hilda’s, Mossie May Kirkwood, was probably more of a role model than a mentor. A professor with high academic standards she would tolerate a certain amount of questionable behaviour from her girls as long as they achieved high marks! However, one day I found a note from her in my letter box asking me to come and see her because, as she wrote in her distinctive handwriting, “Your aberration has derogated from satisfaction”. I had been seen leaving the college with a man and a suitcase. It was actually quite innocent. She let me off with a warning.

In my third year (1949-1950) I went on exchange to Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, (it is only in writing this that I realize how much of my education was with other girls) where I lived in a scholarship house with a group of remarkable young women including the only Black student on campus at that time. It was there that I encountered two of my great life models—Eleanor Roosevelt and Barbara Ward, the British economist and author of “The Home of Man”. I also studied with the most brilliant academic I have ever encountered, Edgar Wind, who had come to the US from Nazi Germany and ended up for a while teaching young women at Smith. Perhaps it was my girlish appearance that puzzled him because he was as surprised as I was when he handed back an analysis I had made of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and said: “But you have the mind of a scholar!”

Back in Toronto for my final year I fell in love with Geoffrey Pearson and married him six months after graduation.in December 1951. He wooed me with poetry (the power of language again)! and kept me with prose and the prospect of adventure While Geoffrey was not always easy to live with (one of his daughters described him quite accurately, I think, as a romantic curmudgeon) he had a fine intelligence, unfailing personal integrity, and a unique sense of humour. And, as promised, he took me around the world and it was those close to thirty five years as a foreign service family that transformed my latent interest in human rights into a passion for the rights of children.

Growing up before and during the Second World War in a family that talked politics and practised social justice, having such remarkable mentors and so many rich educational opportunities sensitized me, I think, to the true significance of human rights. Only fourteen, when the War ended, I was not fully aware of the significance for world peace of the creation of the United Nations but I was eighteen by December 10, 1948 when the Universal Declaration on Human Rights was adopted and it became part of my consciousness from then on. Of course, acquiring LB Pearson as a father-in-law when I married Geoffrey was an extraordinary gift. I was deeply attached to him, especially after my own father died prematurely. We became close and I learned an enormous amount from him. I guess he was another much loved mentor! However, like many men of his generation, and in spite of his commitment to human rights in general, he didn’t quite ‘get it’ with respect to the rights of children.

Actually it was the birth of our first child that really opened my eyes. When I first held her in my arms I saw a “someone” and not a “something”, with her very own personality and chock-full of potential that I immediately determined to do everything within my power to open the world up for her. As our subsequent children were born this determination was reinforced and gradually it spread to encompass all children everywhere.

Living in cultures as different as France, Mexico, India, and the former Soviet Union and observing and interacting with children in those countries in a variety of ways confirmed the observation I made earlier in this talk that who children become will be a combination of genes, early nurture and care, culture and opportunity and this is why the conditions of early childhood and indeed of all childhood, as I eventually saw clearly, should be shaped by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

It took me a little while to understand this because I was working first with the 1959 Declaration on the Rights of the Child which was more about protection and provision than it was about participation. When we were on a home posting during the 1970s I became involved in local politics at the school board level while I was completing a Masters in Education which I undertook to clarify my thinking about the challenges that confront children and adolescents and how institutions could and should respond to children’s best interests. This led me to help develop Children Learning for Living in the Ottawa elementary school system and, then, towards the end of the decade, to join the Canadian Commission for the 1979 International Year of the Child and become its vice-chair and editor of its report to Parliament: “For Canada’s Children—A National Agenda for Action”. That is when all over the world National Commissions for IYC recognized that the Declaration had to become a Convention with “teeth” so that state parties would be obligated to make real change. Ten years later we had it.

During the 1980s, after we returned from Moscow, I became involved in national NGOs related to children and so by the time the CRC was adopted in 1989 I was nationally visible which is when certain political leaders, to whom I am extremely grateful, became active on my behalf. First of all, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who really was a champion for young people, took me on his delegation to the World Summit on Children in 1990 along with a young Canadian chosen by her peers. He then invited me to gather a group of children from all over the country so that they could witness, in the great Hall of Parliament bright with Christmas lights, the signature he was affixing to the instrument of Canada’s ratification of the CRC. Three years later, after a change in government, the newly elected Prime Minister Jean Chrétien appointed me to the Senate with a mandate to speak up for children and later in his mandate made me his special representative to the UN Special Session on Children that took place in 2002 postponed for a year because of 9/11. In the Senate, Al Graham (who was the leader of the government for much of the time I was there) made sure I was the sponsor of every piece of legislation that had anything to do with kids. Then Lloyd Axworthy made me his advisor on children’s rights and Paul Martin, as Finance Minister, listened to MP John Godfrey and myself as joint chairs of the Liberal Party’s Children’s Caucus and incorporated our recommendations about minimum wage supplements, parental leave and child care into his budgets. Al Graham is no longer with us, but I am immensely grateful to the others as well as to leaders like Bob Rae who, along with his wife, Arlene Perley-Rae, really ‘get it’ about children’s rights. How happy I am that Bob is now at the UN!

When I turned 75 in 2005, I had to retire from the Senate, but Virginia and Tullio Caputo, John Osborne, who was then the Dean of FASS, and the then president of the university, David Atkinson, invited me to bring my experience and all my books and papers to establish a Centre at Carleton. Subsequent presidents, Roseann O’Reilly Runte, interim president Alastair Summerlee and current president Benoit-Antoine Bacon, have all been supportive as the Centre has grown and developed. Thank you! And especial thanks to Virginia Caputo who has been my special friend and ally since the beginning.

Others I would like to thank are so numerous that I don’t dare mention them by name for fear I will leave one off. They are my large and extended family, my old and new friends, my many colleagues in support of children’s rights, the students I have worked with—I have learned so much from you all. Would I have been different without any one of you? Or is it because, collectively, with your warmth, your ideas, and your practical gestures you were able to bring out the best in me? If that is so then that is what we must do for all the children we meet or know about.

When I watch my little great grandson flourish under his parents’ care I am convinced that that is why we are all here; to make the world a better place for all children because, as the two young girls said from the podium during the UN Special Session on Children in 2002 “A World fit for children is a world fit for everyone!”

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