Senator Landon Pearson
By Fateema Sayani, BJ/01, MPNL/16
Landon Pearson has always advocated for children in a way that empowers them. Her eleven years of work in the Senate earned her the nickname, “The Children’s Senator,” because she has always been unafraid to question power dynamics and reach out to those who rarely had their point of view represented.
“When you listen to the kids themselves, you come away quite hopeful,” she says. “They’re doing better than they would have done 30 or 40 years ago. They have more confidence in speaking out and they understand they have a right to be heard.”
That wasn’t always the norm. When the Honourable Landon Pearson, O.C., chaired the Special Joint House Committee on Child Custody and Access in 1997- 1998, she assured that testimony from children was also heard, in addition to parents, because they are the ones most affected by the Divorce Act. Never one to turn a blind eye, then Senator Pearson, in 1998, co-chaired the Out From the Shadows summit, which brought together 54 youth delegates from Canada, the United States, and Latin America to tell their stories as youth who were exploited in the sex trade. She also chaired a federal committee against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children and Youth to break down barriers between institutions to advance the issue.
Mrs. Pearson studied philosophy and English at the University of Toronto and earned a Master of Education from the University of Ottawa, along with numerous honorary doctorates and the Order of Canada. As the spouse of former Canadian Ambassador Geoffrey Pearson (the son of Lester B. Pearson), she travelled widely, spending many years in Paris, Mexico, India and the former Soviet Union, which led to the publication of Children of Glasnost in 1990 and Letters from Moscow in 2003.
She left the Senate in 2005, but her work continues with the Landon Pearson Resource Centre for the Study of Childhood and Children’s Rights at Carleton University. The centre was established in 2006 and will continue to thrive well into the future thanks to a gift left in Landon Pearson’s will.
When asked about the impact she’d like to have, Mrs. Pearson is reflective. “The older you get, the more you realize that your impact is very hard to actually detail. You know what you’d like to happen, but how do you measure attitude change? I want all children to be considered as persons with rights that we must, as a society, understand, respect, and fulfill. That will take time.”
Mrs. Pearson mixes a dose of patience with her advocacy. “I was only a year old when women became persons in Canada,” she notes. “Change isn’t something that happens overnight. There are a lot of countervailing forces. It requires a shifting of perceptions on the part of individuals as well as institutions.”
She notes that is happening already with her work with children. “There are now governments in Canada, notably New Brunswick, that ensure that every new piece of legislation that impacts children’s lives respects the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. I dream that this will soon be true at the federal level as well, and that more and more people will understand how important fulfilling children’s rights is not only to the present, but also to the future of Canada.”