Colin Kenny T'68
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"I have yet to have a day when I do not enjoy going to work"
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Aspiring to the Highest Honor
Pierre Trudeau used to give Colin Kenny a hard time. "Whatever I said, he would challenge every aspect of it," recalls Kenny of his days as a 23-year-old staffer in the Canadian prime minister's office. He was thinking himself of no worth—until it dawned on him that the grilling was actually a measure of Trudeau's regard. "It showed he had a real interest in what I was saying."
Today a Canadian senator, Kenny finds himself bearing down on his policy staff the same way. "If they can withstand my questioning, then probably I can make the argument myself."
That rigor has proved critical. As longtime chair of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence, Kenny has spearheaded debate on urgent issues. He's pushed hard for doubling the military budget (a tough sell in a country with no perceived enemies); pinpointed gaping holes in port, airport, and border security; and advocated to have cameras mounted on Tasers as a check on police overzealousness. He's examined on-the-ground realities in Afghanistan and wants to increase Canadian troop strength and allow soldiers to talk with local Taliban if it improves security or encourages disarmament.
Though Kenny grew up in Ottawa—his mother was the leader of Margaret Trudeau's Brown Owl Girl Guides—it was through a public-service fellowship at Tuck that he got his first taste of Canadian government. Kenny spent a summer working for a deputy minister, preparing the brief for negotiations on a U.S.–Canada tax treaty.
In 1969, he was hired as a staff assistant by the just-elected Trudeau, "more by accident than anything else—it wasn't that I had anything special," he says now. "Modesty is honesty!" It took him three years to earn Trudeau's full confidence, he says. By age 26, he was running Trudeau's media, security, and advance teams focused on Ontario; by 28, he was a policy adviser; and by 30, second-staffer-in-command.
Trudeau's federal election loss in 1979 sent Kenny into private industry: he worked four years for Dome Petroleum in the Alberta oil fields, staving off its bankruptcy. When Trudeau was re-elected in 1980, he appointed Kenny to the Senate, a body of lifelong, unelected legislators. Although bill-authoring is a rarity, Kenny has written and pushed through funding for a teen antismoking campaign and a forward-thinking 1995 bill converting 75 percent of the government vehicle fleet to alternative fuels like ethanol, methanol, and electricity.
Prominent on military issues for 25 years, he travels 100 days a year, often to bases at home and abroad and to meetings of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and other international bodies. "Public service is the highest honor that anyone can aspire to," says Kenny, a Liberal Party member. "I have yet to have a day when I do not enjoy going to work."
He lives in the heart of Ottawa and has three sons in their 20s—Robert, a prosecutor, Thomas, an advertising executive, and James, a student. His partner, Shirley Cuillierrier, is a Royal Canadian Mounted Police superintendent whom he met at an official dinner. Sadly for Kenny, by law he must leave the Senate at age 75. "I will just be hitting my prime in 2018."
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