Elizabeth Dowdeswell

Dowdeswell (née Patton) was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom, on November 9, 1944, and moved with her family to Canada in 1947, settling in rural Saskatchewan.[4] Her father Desmond Granville Patton (1920–2008) was a United Church of Canada minister.[5] Dowdeswell married at a young age but soon divorced.[5] She attended the University of Saskatchewan and Utah State University and later became a teacher and university lecturer.

Dowdeswell left teaching and entered public service, working in Saskatchewan as deputy minister of culture and youth during the New Democratic Party government of Allan Blakeney, but was dismissed, along with other deputy ministers, after the Progressive Conservative government of Grant Devine took power in 1982.[5]

She held various positions in the federal public service in the 1980s, working at one point as assistant deputy minister at Environment Canada with responsibility for the Atmospheric Environment Service and negotiating the Framework Convention on Climate Change. She also led a public inquiry into Canada's unemployment benefits program and federal water policy.[6]

In 1992, Dowdeswell was selected to lead the United Nations Environment Programme in Nairobi, Kenya, serving a full four-year term and a one-year extension until she resigned in 1998.[7]

From 1998 to 2010, she was an adjunct professor at the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health at the University of Toronto, while also serving as founding president and CEO of the Nuclear Waste Management Organization. From 2010 until her appointment at Lieutenant Governor, she was the president and CEO of the Council of Canadian Academies.

Dowdeswell seated on the throne during her installation ceremony in 2014

Dowdeswell was appointed lieutenant governor by Governor General David Johnston on the advice of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who selected Dowdeswell from a shortlist devised by the Advisory Committee on Vice-Regal Appointments. On September 23, 2014, she was sworn in during a ceremony held at Queen's Park in Toronto.[8] She is the third woman to serve the position, following Pauline Mills McGibbon and Hilary Weston.

Dowdeswell declared in her installation address that she would not immediately espouse a particular area of focus during her time as lieutenant governor. Instead, she said she would engage the people of Ontario, listening to their concerns and ideas. She has since adopted sustainability and "Ontario in the world" as personal themes. In addition, Dowdeswell has called herself Ontario's unofficial "Storyteller-in-Chief".[9]

According to annual reports published on her office's website, Dowdeswell has conducted, on average, more than 700 public engagements yearly as lieutenant governor, as well as numerous visits abroad to the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Denmark.[10]

Dowdeswell has visited all of Ontario's provincial electoral districts.[11]

Dowdeswell has received several honorary degrees from various universities in Canada and Europe. These include:

Honorary degrees

Jurisdiction	Date	School	Degree
Saskatchewan	May 25, 1994	University of Saskatchewan	Doctor of Laws (LL.D) [15]
Nova Scotia	1998	Mount Saint Vincent University	Doctor of Humane Letters (DHL) [16]
Ontario	Spring 1999	York University	Doctor of Laws (LL.D) [17]
British Columbia	October 22, 1999	Royal Roads University	[18]
Saskatchewan	Spring 2001	University of Regina	[19]
Ontario	2013	University of Ontario Institute of Technology	Doctor of Science (D.Sc.) [20]
Ontario	June 9, 2015	University of Western Ontario	Doctor of Laws (LL.D) [21]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Elizabeth Dowdeswell.

• Lieutenant Governor of Ontario