Stephen Lewis

Featured Keynote Programs

Stephen Lewis kicks off this event with a fresh perspective on global issues and a frontal challenge to the myths of globalization. Drawing upon his extensive political and international experience, Mr. Lewis will explore the role of leadership in promoting a different set of economic and social priorities for the 21st century.

Universities are, first and foremost, centres of academic excellence and academic inquiry. But if they are to be relevant to the modern world, they must understand the nature of community, especially the community of which they are a part, and understand, increasingly, that they have obligations to the wider world as well. Mr. Lewis will explore both those themes, drawing on personal experience to make his case.

Mr. Lewis, using the themes of the conference, will explore the way in which education, throughout the world, transforms the lives children lead, and is perhaps the greatest, unacknowledged instrument we have for dramatic social change.

Mr. Lewis will speak on the importance of community in the lives of children, focusing on leadership, accountability, health and education in both a national and international context. Mr. Lewis will examine the concept of peace as something far more fundamental than the absence of war, and in so doing will explore the application of the UN Millennium Development Goals. He will attempt to set everything in the broad context of human rights, and will argue that civil society has emerged as the fundamental social agent to secure those rights.

Stephen Lewis will examine the problem from global and local perspectives, with an emphasis on social and economic rights.

In 1988, Stephen Lewis chaired the first international conference on Climate Change, which drafted the first comprehensive policy on global warming. Two decades have passed since the political leaders, ambassadors, scientists and environmental activists joined Stephen in declaring what remains one of the best, though starkest, pronouncements about global warming: “Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war”. From his unique historical and global perspective, Stephen Lewis will talk about those consequences, focusing on the interconnection of health, social justice and poverty in the context of global climate change.