Why Canada has long wanted to honour her

Source: Globe and Mail

Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani education activist who miraculously survived a Taliban assassination attempt, will address Parliament on Wednesday as she becomes the sixth person to be awarded the distinction of being an honorary Canadian. The event marks the end of nearly four years of effort, first by the previous Conservative government and then by the current Liberal one, to recognize Ms. Yousafzai’s achievements in promoting the rights of girls and women to go to school.

The groundwork to make Ms. Yousafzai an honorary citizen began several months after she was shot. It was a political initiative tied into the Conservatives’ foreign aid focus on maternal, newborn and child health, Rachel Curran, former prime minister Stephen Harper’s former director of policy, said in an interview:

It was just really a sense that this young woman is doing really important work, it’s going to be increasingly important, we want to highlight it in Canada and highlight it internationally as well. ‘How can we bestow one of our greatest honours on her?’ We landed on that because it was the most significant thing we could do to draw attention to her work.

The idea to commemorate her work in that way began as a discussion among senior political advisers to Mr. Harper early in 2013. Rona Ambrose, then a Conservative MP and now the interim party leader, invited Ms. Yousafzai to Toronto in 2014 to mark the International Day of the Girl, an event now on the United Nations’ annual calendar thanks to Ms. Ambrose’s work as status of women minister in 2011. But once Ms. Yousafzai accepted, planning began for a second event – granting her honorary Canadian citizenship, a promise the Conservative government made in their 2013 throne speech.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/malala-yousafzai-canadian-citizenship/article34679040/