Kim Campbell - Legacy

Legacy

As Justice Minister, Campbell brought about a new rape law that clarified sexual assault and whose passage firmly entrenched that in cases involving sexual assault, "no means no." She also introduced the rape shield law, legislation that protects a person's sexual past from being explored during trial.

Since Campbell never sat in Parliament during her four months as prime minister, she was unable to bring forth new legislation, which must be formally introduced there. However, she did implement radical changes to the structure of the Canadian government. Under her tenure, the federal cabinet's size was cut from over 75 cabinet ministers and ministers of state to 23. The number of cabinet committees was reduced from 11 to five. Her successors have continued to keep the size of the federal Cabinet to approximately 30 members. She was also the first prime minister to convene a First Ministers' conference for consultation prior to representing Canada at the G7 Summit. Due to her brief time in office, Campbell holds a unique spot among Canadian prime ministers in that she made no Senate appointments.

Campbell has harshly criticized Mulroney for not allowing her to succeed him before June 1993. In her view, when she finally became prime minister, she had very little time or chance to make up ground on the Liberals once her initial popularity faded. In her memoirs, Time and Chance as well as her response to The Secret Mulroney Tapes, Campbell even suggested that Mulroney knew the Tories would be defeated in the upcoming election, and wanted a "scapegoat who would bear the burden of his unpopularity" rather than a viable successor. The cause of the 1993 debacle remains disputed, with some arguing that the election results were a vote against Mulroney rather than a rejection of Campbell, and others suggesting that the poorly run Campbell campaign was the key factor in the result.

Although the Progressive Conservatives survived as a distinct political party for another decade after the 1993 debacle, they never recovered their previous standing. During that period they were led by Jean Charest (1993–1998), Elsie Wayne (1998) and then, for the second time, by Joe Clark (1998–2003) (who had been Opposition Leader and briefly Prime Minister 20 years earlier). By 2003, the party under new leader Peter MacKay had voted to merge with the Canadian Alliance to form the Conservative Party of Canada, thus formally ceasing to exist; this occurred despite MacKay having earlier promised that he would not do this. Joe Clark continued to sit as a "Progressive Conservative" into 2004, and the new generation of right-leaning Conservatives gained power in the election of 2006, ensuring the "Tory" nickname's survival in the federal politics of Canada. A PC "rump" caucus continued to exist in the Senate of Canada (consisting of certain Clark, Mulroney and Paul Martin appointees), but as of 2012 only one senator, Elaine McCoy of Alberta, sits as a Progressive Conservative.

Campbell remains one of the youngest women to have ever assumed the office of Prime Minister in any country, and thus also one of the youngest to have left the office.

Campbell was ranked #20 out of the first 20 Prime Ministers of Canada (through Jean Chrétien) by a survey of 26 Canadian historians used by J.L. Granatstein and Norman Hillmer in their 1997 book Prime Ministers: Ranking Canada's Leaders. A follow-up article co-authored by Hillmer in 2011 for Maclean's Magazine broadened the number of historians surveyed; in this new survey of over 100 Canadian historians, Campbell again finished dead last, this time coming at #22 out of Canada's first 22 Prime Ministers (through Stephen Harper).

She has appeared on the CBC Television program Canada's Next Great Prime Minister, a show which profiles and selects young prospective leaders, and has also been an occasional panelist on Real Time with Bill Maher.