Did you see The Imitation Game?

If you didn’t, I’d thoroughly recommend it. It’s a dramatisation of Alan Turing and others’ work, capturing the herculean task that the code breakers of Bletchley Park undertook to help our war effort. Historians estimate that the code breakers shortened the war by two years and saved thousands of lives.

Winston Churchill described the code breakers as “the geese that laid the golden egg” and last week I got to meet two of those geese… I mean code breakers in the flesh!

Sage German and Joan Powell are both residents of the Sunnybrook Veterans home in Toronto. During World War Two, they were code breakers who worked on Japanese ciphers. Sage worked at a Bletchley outstation on a Naval base in Victoria, British Columbia. Joan served at Bletchley Park itself. Joan’s son Bill, told me that whenever he asked about her wartime service she would always state “I was a file clerk”, but Bill never believed this was entirely accurate.

It was a huge honour for me personally to present these two remarkable women with their long overdue Bletchley badges and to thank them for their service. What made this ceremony all the more poignant was that it took place a few days after the 70th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day. It was wonderful and humbling to talk to these women about their experiences. Sage talked about the fun and adventures she had in serving as well as the friendships she’d made. Joan was very humble, and despite my efforts to get her to tell me more, she simply repeated that it had been an honour to serve.

It got me thinking about the role of women in public service and the fact that these women had been trailblazers for the generations that followed. I seem to keep coming across this theme in my role here as Deputy Consul General in Toronto. As just one example, a few months ago I hosted a reception for the Queen’s University Belfast alumni in Toronto. There I met Ann and Nora who had both had graduated from Queens in the early 1950s. Ann had graduated with a chemistry degree and Nora had graduated with a physics degree, both quite unusual degrees for women at the time. Anne told me she didn’t fancy becoming a secretary, which at the time would have been one of her few professional options. So she left friends and family behind and moved to Canada where she heard women had more opportunities. Her spirit of adventure paid off, as she was able to create a career at the Toronto Princess Margaret hospital.

These are just two examples of how working in Toronto has brought me into contact with some inspiring women. As the Director Trade for UKTI, I lead a 15 strong team which is almost all women. They are dedicated and committed professionals who are helping UK companies do business in Canada. We recently brought a “Women Led Business mission” to Toronto, and we are working with a number of Canadian organisations who are trying to get more women into business and the board room.

Toronto and Ontario’s political and business life has moved positively in this direction, for example the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, its Premier and Deputy Premier are women, so is the President of Toronto’s Board of Trade, the President of the Toronto Financial Services Association and the City’s Chief Planner.

There’s a lot that the UK  can learn from Canada’s impressive track record which speaks for itself – 11th in the UN’s equality index to the UK’s 26th  place.  I hope that we can capitalize on this for the benefit of Canadian and British businesses especially around the work we’ll be doing on promoting the EU Canada free trade agreement.

The British and Canadian women of previous and current generations continue to inspire me in how they overcame the odds and some not so small societal obstacles to accomplish great things. I plan to emulate them.