Pearson, Lester B., 1897-1972 : Prime Minister of Canada (1963-68).
Lester Bowles Pearson was born at Newtonbrook (Toronto) on 23 April 1897. He studied history at the University of Toronto before joining the Canadian Army Medical Corps in 1915. He transferred to the Royal Flying Corps in 1917. Fellow pilots called him 'Mike,' the name by which he was known for the rest of his life.
Pearson was injured in a traffic accident in London in 1918 and was recovering at home when the war ended. Further studies at the University of Toronto were followed by two years at Oxford, where he played on the university hockey team that won the inaugural Spengler Cup in 1923.
Pearson taught history at the University of Toronto before joining Canada's foreign service in 1927. He served in Ottawa on the Royal Commission on Grain Futures (1931) and the Royal Commission on Price Spreads (1934), followed by increasingly senior positions in London (1935-41) and Washington (1942-46), where he was ambassador (1945-46). He represented Canada at the conferences that created the United Nations (1945) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (1949).
In 1948, Prime Minister Mackenzie King appointed Pearson secretary of state for international affairs, and he was subsequently elected for the riding of Algoma East. He continued as secretary of state under Louis St-Laurent and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 for his role in resolving the Suez Crisis.
Pearson succeeded St-Laurent as Liberal leader in 1958 and was elected prime minister in 1962 and re-elected in 1965. Despite never heading a majority government, Pearson enacted many changes that shaped contemporary Canada including the new national flag (1965), royal commissions on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963) and the Status of Women (1967), and oversaw celebration of Canada's Centennial (1967). Social welfare programs were mordernised with a national student loan programme (1964), the Canada Pension Plan (1965), and the Medical Care Act (1966). The first Canada-United States Automotive Agreement was signed (1965), a points-based system for immigration was introduced (1967), and the navy, army and air force were unified into the Canadian Armed Forces (1968).
After retiring in 1968, Pearson chaired the Commission on International Development, the International Development Research Centre and served as Chancellor of Carleton University (1969-72), where he also lectured.
Pearson became a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1968 and was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1971. He married Maryon Moodie in 1925. He died at Ottawa on 27 December 1972 and was buried in MacLaren Cemetery, Wakefield, Quebec.
Pearson attempted to modify the federal government's systematically racist relationship with Indigenous Peoples, which caused tremendous ongoing trauma, displacement, disenfranchisement and exclusion. He reintroduced 'Indian' claims legislation to Parliament, established the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development as a stand-alone body (1966) and commissioned the Hawthorn-Tremblay study (1966) of Indigenous Peoples' economic, educational, and political needs. At the same time, Indigenous children were taken from their homes and adopted out to settler families in Canada and internationally in what is known as the 'sixties scoop.' Residential and day schools also continued to operate throughout this period.
Pearson also held racist and homophobic opinions common in his time. As secretary of state for external affairs, he opposed the stationing of Black American troops on Canadian soil. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, members of the 2SLGBTQI community were actively purged from the federal civil service and Canada's military.
The damage done by policies and actions in place during Pearson's time in office have been acknowledged in recent years. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada concluded that the residential school system amounted to cultural genocide. The prime minister of the day apologised for residential schools in 2008 and 2017, and the government signed compensation packages for residential school survivors (2006) and for survivors of day schools (2019). In 2017, the Ontario Superior Court ruled that Canada had breached its duty of care towards children who were adopted in the Sixties Scoop. The federal government subsequently reached an $800 million agreement to compensate First Nations and Inuit children who had been adopted. In 2017, the prime minister apologised to 2SLGBTQI Canadians for their historic mistreatment, and established a $100 million compensation fund.
