The Peterborough Examiner’s Joelle Kovach reported June 27, 2024 that Rosemary Ganley, a longtime community activist and supporter of women’s organizations including the YWCA, will receive one of the country’s top honours this year.
Rosemary Ganley, a local activist, teacher and feminist, is about to be appointed to the Order of Canada.
Ganley is 87 “and not shy about it.”
“I’m grateful for this long life,” she said. “And I love this country. I’ve seen it from coast to coast — and the north. And this is the greatest honour that my country could give me.”
Ganley recently received a phone call from the office of Governor General Mary Simon to let her know she’ll be appointed to the order, at a ceremony at Rideau Hall, sometime late in 2024 (date yet to be determined).
Ganley has been writing a weekly column for The Examiner for six years (350 columns, she said).
She spoke over the phone Wednesday from Edmonton, where she was attending a family gathering.
Ganley has a long history of activism that has taken her around the world.
She and late husband John lived with their three sons in Jamaica, for three years in the late 1970s — and later in Tanzania, again for three years, in the 1980s.
The Ganleys were high school teachers as well as aid workers: they’d applied for work through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).
Back in Peterborough, between the two assignments abroad, the Ganleys founded Jamaican Self-Help, an agency that raised funds and took nearly 1,000 students and 50 teachers from Peterborough to Jamaica on cultural exchanges.
Jamaican Self-Help operated from 1980 to 2012.
“I think we contributed to multiculturalism before it was chic,” Ganley said.
But she wasn’t nearly done working as an advocate: in 1995, Ganley was part of a delegation representing Canada at the United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing (which she covered for The Examiner in articles that she faxed to Peterborough).
And in 2018, she received a phone call at home from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, asking her to serve on the G7 council on gender equality issues.
That year, the G7 had convened a new council of women from around the world to advise leaders on how to advance gender equality in all areas of their work.
Recently, Ganley’s work has been recognized in Peterborough: she received the YMCA Peace Medal in 2018, and an honorary degree from Trent University in 2022.
In her interview, Ganley said she knows “hundreds” of other Peterborough people who qualify to be inducted into the Order of Canada.
“And I hope to represent them and their causes,” she said. “The motto of the order is, ‘They desired a better country.’ Isn’t that beautiful?”
In June 2023, Rosemary attended the Friends of the YWCA gathering and shared her thoughts on her involvement:
“I’m one of the elders in the movement, which has made real achievements here. It all started for me in 1995, when I was one of five Peterborough women to go to Beijing to the United Nations conference on women. Thirty thousand women, from around the world. And that was enough feminist juice for the rest of my life.”
Click here to watch the video scrapbook from the Friends of the YWCA event in 2023.