TORONTO (AP) — Retired Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour will be Canada’s next governor general, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced Tuesday.
The governor general is the representative of Britain’s King Charles III. The king is the head of state in Canada, a member of the Commonwealth of former colonies.
Carney said Charles approved the appointment on his recommendation.
“I will have an opportunity to have very in-depth conversations with Arbour in private on issues that affect Canada and the rest of the world,” Carney said.
The governor general has important constitutional duties, but the job is mostly ceremonial and symbolic. Carney picked a Francophone for the job.
Asked if she considers herself a monarchist, Arbour said in French that she “doesn’t really know what that term is supposed to mean” but voiced her support for the current system.
“I will be the representative of the Crown in a constitutional arrangement that has served Canada extremely well throughout our history, even more in recent decades,” she said.
Arbour will replace Mary Simon, Canada’s first Indigenous governor general, who will reach the five-year mark of her tenure in July.
’”The previous Governor General Mary Simon’s lack of French language skills attracted criticisms from many francophone commenters,” said Daniel Béland, a political science professor at McGill University in Montreal.
Béland said Arbour is well known and respected in French-speaking Quebec. He noted that her appointment comes at a time when the provincial Parti Québécois pledges to organize an independence referendum by 2030 if they form a majority government after the Oct. 5 general election in the province.
“Having a francophone as Governor General might help,” he said.
Carney said Arbour, 79, is a world-renowned legal scholar, judge and leader in human rights and justice. She was appointed as a judge to the Supreme Court of Ontario, the Court of Appeal for Ontario, and the Supreme Court of Canada.
In 1996, she was appointed by the United Nations as Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. She led efforts that resulted in the first conviction for genocide since the 1948 Genocide Convention and the first indictment for war crimes of a sitting head of state.
She later served as a U.N. Special Representative for International Migration from 2017 to 2018.
After the United States gained independence from Britain, Canada remained a colony until 1867, and afterward continued as a constitutional monarchy with a British-style parliamentary system.
