June 10, 2011
Last evening, Senator Hugh Segal (Conservative, Kingston-Frontenac-Leeds) was named the first “Honorary Peace Patron” of the Mosaic Institute at a reception held at Toronto’s Rosedale Golf Club. Approximately 75 guests gathered both to pay tribute to Senator Segal and to celebrate the work of The Mosaic Institute over the past year. Senator Segal was joined at the event by his wife, Donna Armstrong Segal.
In presenting Senator Segal with this honour, Mosaic founder and Chairman Vahan Kololian described the honoree as an “exemplary Canadian whose record of public service and personal commitment to maximizing Canada’s contributions to the world are truly remarkable….” Kololian added that Senator Segal “is a man of passion, a man of action, and a living embodiment of the sort of ‘global citizenship’ that the Mosaic Institute seeks to encourage in other Canadians.”
Mosaic Chairman Vahan Kololian with "Honorary Peace Patron" Senator Hugh Segal, June 9, 2011
In addition to his work in the Senate, where he is a Member and former Chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, as well as the Chair of the Special Senate Committee on Anti-Terrorism, Senator Segal has been and continues to be extremely involved in helping to shape the content and form of Canada’s relationships around the world. He is a Life Fellow of the Institute for Research on Public Policy; was a founding Vice-Chair of the Canadian International Council; served as Chair of the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation; and, in 2010, was named a Member of the Eminent Persons Group of the Commonwealth Secretariat, among his many roles.
The Mosaic Institute’s Patrons’ Peace Circle is a group of generous and globally-minded Canadians committed to building bridges of understanding between ethnocultural communities here in Canada, and to strengthening Canada’s response to global conflicts by harnessing the knowledge, creativity and connections of their fellow Canadians from around the world. Senator Segal now joins their number as an honorary member.
In his remarks, Senator Segal spoke movingly about the important role that Canadians from all different communities can play in helping to promote peace and development around the world. His speech followed a presentation about some of the key projects of the Mosaic Institute, including:
- The “South Asian-Canadian Global Citizenship Project in Peel”, where more than 250 high school students from the Peel District School Board participated in a four-month long exploration of core Canadian values, what it means to be a Canadian of South Asian heritage, and how to live out Canada’s values as “global citizens”; this program will be replicated with the Toronto District School Board starting in September 2011;
- The “UofMosaic” initiative (www.uofmosaic.ca), where university students from different ethnocultural communities learn about “citizen diplomacy” and peacebuilding in campus-based chapters, and where they engage in inter-community dialogues designed to foster mutual understanding, increase social cohesion on campus, and identify common Canadian strategies for addressing the root causes of long-simmering conflicts around the world; and
- “The Young Canadians’ Peace Dialogue on Sri Lanka”, which, over the span of about 20 months, has brought together more than 80 young leaders from the Tamil, Sinhalese and Muslim Sri Lankan communities in Canada to confront their past, identify common priorities for re-building postwar Sri Lanka, and promote social and political reconciliation amongst both the people of Sri Lanka and its diaspora communities. Among the many achievements of the young participants in this peace dialogue is the establishment of the “Build Change” project (www.buildchange.ca), in cooperation with the Rotary Club of Colombo South and the Canadian Rotarian Water Foundation, which is an effort to raise funds to enable the construction of residential water wells for internally-displaced persons in the Vanni region of northeast Sri Lanka. This project is intended as a small, tangible demonstration of the young organizers’ commitment to broad-based reconciliation.
Headquartered in Toronto, the Mosaic Institute is a “think and do” tank that harnesses the connections, knowledge and resources of Canada’s ethnocultural communities to advance Canadian solutions and promote peace and development in conflict-ridden or under-developed parts of the world – starting right here at home. Using inter-community dialogues, schools-based programming and applied research projects, among other innovative approaches, the Institute engages with communities of Canadians connected to longstanding overseas conflicts to explore their common commitment to Canada’s fundamental values, strengthen their sense of attachment to each other, and promote constructive acts of “Canadian global citizenship”.
For further information, please contact Mosaic’s Executive Director John Monahan by phone at 416-644-6000, ext. 620, or by e-mail at jm@mosaicinstitute.ca.
