Mary Dawson in June, 2012.Dave Chan/for The Globe and Mail
Emily Sharples remembers answering the telephone at her Ottawa home as a child in the 1980s and hearing the operator announce that the Prime Minister’s Office was on the line and wanted to speak to her mother.
Canada was then in the midst of a flurry of constitutional discussions over the future of the country and Emily’s mother, Mary Dawson, was at the heart of the action.
Quebec had voted against separation in the 1980 referendum and Pierre Trudeau, the prime minister at the time, was committed to a revamping of Canada’s Constitution. Over the next 15 years, Canadians endured round after round of constitutional negotiations, including the return of the founding document from Britain in 1982 and the failed Meech Lake and Charlottetown efforts.
During all those years, the work never stopped for Ms. Dawson, who was a top legislative drafter and a senior bureaucrat at the Department of Justice until she retired in 2005. It proved a brief interlude and the always energetic Ms. Dawson returned to the fray in 2007 as Canada’s ethics commissioner, who tussled with politicians like Justin Trudeau, authoring a harsh ruling in 2017 that criticized Mr. Trudeau for taking a family vacation on the private Caribbean island belonging to the Aga Khan.
Yet Ms. Dawson, who died in Ottawa on Dec. 24 at the age of 81, prided herself on being above the political fray. “She always saw herself as a lawyer’s lawyer,” said Morris Rosenberg, who was deputy minister of justice from 1998 to 2004 and was Ms. Dawson’s boss during part of her long tenure as associate deputy minister. Her impact on Canadian law was significant, he added. “She was involved in many of the most significant pieces of legislation [enacted] in the latter part of the 20th century.”
Mary Elizabeth McMillan was born in Halifax on June 23, 1942, the eldest child of Thomas McMillan and Florence Thurston. Her father worked for Simpson’s Department store and her mother was a teacher. The family moved to Toronto and then to Montreal, where Mary spent her high school years and then attended McGill University, where she earned a BA and a civil law degree. She later obtained a degree in common law at Dalhousie University and earned a Diplôme d’études supérieures en droit public at University of Ottawa.
When Ms. Dawson finished her legal studies and started her career, someone suggested legislative drafting. It sounded “intensely boring” to her, she recalled in a 2012 presentation at McGill Law School, but she was eventually convinced that drafting had more to do with crafting sensible policy and “was not nearly as dull as it sounds.”
Ms. Dawson joined the Department of Justice’s legislation branch in 1970 and helped draft legislation including the Access to Information Act, the Privacy Act and the Official Languages Act. She soon became involved in the intense years of constitutional negotiations and “held the pen” on the English version of the 1982 Constitution, including the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
There was huge pressure, particularly during intense bargaining between first ministers, where politicians would decide late in the day on terms of an amendment and it was up to Ms. Dawson’s legal team to come up with the legal language overnight. Often, she would try to anticipate possible changes and prepare “a hip pocket” draft of a possible provision ahead of time. And the physical process itself wasn’t easy. Typewriters were still in use and drafts were composed on legal-size paper. Changes were typed by secretaries onto strips of paper that were Scotch-taped to the original. When pages became too thick, new versions had to be typed from scratch.
She also had a direct impact on some laws, including the 1982 Charter, where she removed all pronouns from the text to avoid the use of “he” to refer to both men and women, a move she remained proud of, although she admitted that it ended up making some provisions sound “a little strained.”
Daughter Emily remembers her mother coming home carrying massive briefcases and working long into the night. “I don’t think she needed a lot of sleep.” Yet she never considered herself abandoned by her mother. “I can’t recall a single childhood event that she didn’t attend. When she was home, she was very present.”
“To be a good legislative drafter, you have to absolutely understand the law and what is trying to be done. She had this incredible gift of being able to distill a long-winded legal argument into a very concise statement,” said Ross Hornby, who was general counsel at the Justice Department and worked with Ms. Dawson on the Charlottetown Accord. “She was just an amazing lawyer for her ability to express a legal opinion in a few words.”
Although she stayed above politics, Ms. Dawson admitted at the 2012 McGill event that she was intensely disappointed by the collapse of the 1987 Meech Lake Accord. “I was devastated … by the failure of the amendments that we had worked for three years to achieve.” She felt it was a simple, straightforward approach to the issues at hand. But when the Charlottetown Accord also failed after the defeat of the 1992 Referendum, Ms. Dawson felt a sense of relief. There were parts of the Accord she disliked, particularly on the division of powers, and believed that the country was better off without it.
Mr. Hornby said that Ms. Dawson was also extremely practical and down to earth. When the government contracted out the cleaning at the Justice Department offices and service declined, she responded by buying a vacuum cleaner and putting it in her office for use by her colleagues. “We would all go and do our own vacuuming,” Mr. Hornby recalled. “She wasn’t going to take this crap cleaning from Public Works. She was just going to clean it herself.”
During her 35 years at Justice, Ms. Dawson became the go-to person at the department when it came to explaining legislation to Parliament and was a frequent witness before legislative committees.
Retirement didn’t suit her well so when she got a call in 2007 from the Harper government to become Canada’s first conflict of interest and ethics commissioner, she seized the opportunity. Over the next decade, she was frequently on the front pages, ruling on politically charged cases involving MPs and cabinet ministers who were alleged to have broken the ethics code in various ways.
“She defined the job as it is now,” said Lori Turnbull, a professor of management at Dalhousie University and an expert on public sector ethics. “She was very fair, very methodical. She took a legalistic approach in that she was so balanced in her thinking about things, completely not driven by a political agenda but trying to get to the truth of things.”
“Nothing rattled her,” Ms. Turnbull continued. “The political implications of what she did were very significant. It takes a very strong person not to be concerned with that and she wasn’t.”
Ms. Dawson’s most high-profile decision involved Prime Minister Trudeau’s 2016-17 family vacation to the Bahamas home of the Aga Khan, the wealthy spiritual leader. She ruled that the prime minister had breached four sections of the Conflict of Interest Act by accepting the free vacation, rejecting Mr. Trudeau’s contention that the Aga Khan was simply a family friend.
Ms. Dawson continued to opine on Mr. Trudeau’s behaviour even after she retired from the ethics job. In 2020, when controversy swirled over the government’s decision to award a lucrative contract to WE Charity, despite its close ties to Mr. Trudeau’s family, Ms. Dawson appeared on CBC to lash out at the prime minister. “One doesn’t continue to do the same thing twice,” she said. “There seems to be a little bit of a blind spot or something there.”
Yet Ms. Turnbull insisted that Ms. Dawson never resorted to grandstanding the way other agents of Parliament have done over the years. “Mary Dawson did not ever try to get headlines. She took a very bureaucratic approach to it and I mean bureaucratic in the most positive way, objective, non-partisan and impartial. … That’s her legacy.”
Ms. Dawson was active in community life as well, serving for many years on the boards of the Ottawa Hospital, Perley Health and Help Lesotho. Ms. Dawson’s health began sliding in the summer of 2023 and she underwent a series of tests in the fall before she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of thyroid cancer. She died 10 days later. She was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2007.
Ms. Dawson leaves her son, David Dawson; daughter, Emily Sharples; sister, Paula McMillan; and two grandchildren. Her husband, Peter Dawson, died in 2012.