Marilou McPhedran

Marilou McPhedran was appointed to the Senate of Canada in 2016, representing Manitoba. She came from a distinguished career in human rights law and advocacy — she was one of the architects of the 1985 amendments to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that strengthened equality rights protections, and has spent decades in international human rights work, feminist legal theory, and access to justice advocacy. Her Senate work has reflected this background: she has been active on human rights legislation, on the rights of women and girls in international development contexts, on access to justice for marginalized populations, and on the oversight of Canadian foreign policy's human rights dimensions. These are important files that receive insufficient Senate attention. McPhedran has also been a voice on Canadian Arctic sovereignty and the rights of northern communities — an unusual combination of international human rights expertise and northern Canadian advocacy that the Senate benefits from having. The structural critique of the independent appointment process applies here as elsewhere: a senator appointed by a prime minister whose government she is expected to scrutinize, drawing a salary funded by the taxpayers whose legislation she is supposed to improve. That structure does not produce optimal accountability regardless of the quality of the individual senator. Within those structural limits, McPhedran has used her expertise and her platform for the purposes the Senate is supposed to serve. That is not nothing.