Frances Lankin
Frances Lankin is a former member of Ontario’s legislature and Cabinet minister. Lankin spent more than a decade as CEO of the United Way of Toronto. She was recently commissioned by the Ontario government to co-lead a review of the province’s social assistance program.
Articles by
Frances Lankin
Two memoirs give a glimpse into the lives of women police officers
November 2015
Two women, two careers in law enforcement, two autobiographies chronicling their experiences, two life stories that could not be more different.
I must admit that when I was approached to review these two books, I made an assumption that both authors would explore the experiences of women breaking ground in a traditional male profession. I hoped to read about their…
Author and reviewer share a socially pioneering history
June 2013
Kate Braid’s memoir is beautifully written, with the lilt of poetry and the rich descriptiveness of a novel. In fact, in my first couple of attempts at reading this book, it was that style that I found off-putting. I was expecting something different: more fact and less flair. I found, for example, the detailed descriptions of scenery and the light on a certain morning more than 30 years ago a bit difficult to…
The defining figures—and paradoxes—of Canada’s Official Opposition
September 2012
If NDP organizers want a primer to hand out to all first-time convention delegates about how to make sense of the sometimes unintelligible undercurrents at work in the policy-rich but fractious world of the New Democratic Party of Canada, they could do worse than order up a few boxes of Lynn Gidluck’s Visionaries, Crusaders and Firebrands: The Idealistic Canadians Who Built the NDP…
