Elizabeth Dowdeswell

Violet Elizabeth Patton was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on November 9, 1944. She moved with her family to Canada in 1947, settling in rural Saskatchewan. Her father, Desmond Granville Patton (1920-2008), was a minister of the United Church of Canada. Dowdeswell married at a young age but soon divorced. She attended the University of Saskatchewan and Utah State University, and she later became a teacher and university lecturer.

Dowdeswell left teaching and entered public service as a special assistant to Saskatchewan's deputy education minister for two years (1976–78), then worked as deputy minister of culture and youth during the New Democratic Party government of Allan Blakeney. She was then dismissed, along with other deputy ministers, after the Progressive Conservative government of Grant Devine took power in 1982.

She held various positions in the federal public service during the 1980s, working at one point as assistant deputy minister at Environment Canada with responsibility for the Atmospheric Environment Service and negotiating the Framework Convention on Climate Change. She also led a public inquiry into Canada's unemployment benefits program and federal water policy.

In 1992, Dowdeswell was selected to lead the United Nations Environment Programme in Nairobi, Kenya, serving a full four-year term and a one-year extension until she resigned in 1998.

From 1998 to 2010, she was an adjunct professor at the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health at the University of Toronto, while also serving as founding president and CEO of the Nuclear Waste Management Organization. From 2010 until her appointment as Lieutenant Governor, she was the president and CEO of the Council of Canadian Academies.