Stéphane Dion

Stéphane Maurice Dion (born 28 September 1955) is a Canadian diplomat, academic and former politician who has been the Canadian ambassador to France and Monaco since 2022 and special envoy to the European Union since 2017.

Dion was born on 28 September 1955 in Quebec City, the second of five children.

His mother, Denyse (née Kormann), was a real-estate agent born in Paris, France, and his father, Léon Dion, was a Quebec academic.

Dion holds dual citizenship in France because of his French-born mother.

Dion was raised in a modest home on boulevard Liégeois in Sillery, today part of Quebec City.

While growing up, he remembers being taunted for his family's secularism in a society which was then predominantly Roman Catholic.

Dion was involved with the sovereignty movement, first as a teenager attending a Jesuit college in Quebec City, and later as a university student campaigning for Parti Québécois candidate Louise Beaudoin in the 1976 election.

Dion described his experience as follows:

"Because the party was there... I wanted to challenge my dad... the way to become an adult sometimes is to say the contrary to your father. Each evening, I would try out a new argument I had heard on the separatist network and my father was demolishing it... My father very quietly and very respectfully was refuting me, without insulting me."

Dion has said that his involvement as "an activist for the separatist cause" ended during a five-hour discussion with a federalist household while he was going door-to-door for the PQ, but he did not openly commit to federalism until much later.

After Dion obtained BA and MA degrees in 1977 and 1979 respectively (his master's thesis presented an analysis of the evolution of Parti Québécois electoral strategies ), he and Krieber departed together for France.

Dion spent four years in Paris, living with Janine in the Montmartre district and studying public administration under the supervision of noted sociologist Michel Crozier.

At the time of the 1980 referendum, his sentiments were neutral.

In his own words, the 'no' victory left him "neither moved nor outraged. To tell the truth, I felt no particular feeling."

(Moi, je ne me sentais ni ému ni révolté. À vrai dire, je n'éprouvais aucun sentiment particulier.)

He studied political science at Université Laval in the department co-founded by his father; this was also where he met his future wife, Janine Krieber, a fellow student in the same program.

After receiving a doctorate (doctorat d'état) in sociology from the Institut d'études politiques de Paris (commonly known as Sciences Po), Dion worked briefly as a teaching assistant at the Université de Moncton in 1984 before moving on to the Université de Montréal to assume an assistant professor position.

Dion taught there from 1984 to January 1996, specializing in public administration and organizational analysis and theory, and was a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., during a 1990–91 sabbatical leave.

In April 1986, Stéphane Dion married Krieber, and later the same year, they travelled to Peru to adopt their only child, Jeanne Krieber-Dion.

His wife is an "expert in strategic studies and counter-terrorism issues," who teaches political science and sociology at Royal Military College Saint-Jean in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu.

After the failure of the Meech Lake Accord in 1990, Dion directed his intellectual inquiry towards an analysis of Quebec nationalism.

His decisive conversion to federalism, as he later recounted to journalist Michel Vastel, occurred as he was preparing for a presentation in Washington:

"I sat down at my computer at 11 o'clock, and, at noon, I had a text that was so interesting that the Americans wanted to publish it. It was on that day that I realized I was truly a federalist. (Je me suis assis devant mon ordinateur à 11 h et, à midi, j'avais un texte tellement intéressant que les Américains ont voulu le publier. C'est ce jour-là que je me suis rendu compte que j'étais vraiment fédéraliste.)"

In this period, the sovereignty movement had begun to promote the idea that federalism was inefficient for Quebec due to the duplication and overlap between the two levels of government.

An expert in public administration, Dion emerged as a key figure in publicly criticizing this line of argument.

He served in cabinets as intergovernmental affairs minister (1996–2003), environment minister (2003–2006), and foreign affairs minister (2015–2017).

Before entering politics, Dion was a professor of political science at the Université de Montréal.

His research focused on Canadian federalism and public administration.

Throughout his tenure in government, Dion held a number of portfolios.

He was first named Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs by Prime Minister Chrétien in 1996, following the aftermath of the 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum.

His reference question to the Supreme Court of Canada, produced Reference Re Secession of Quebec and his Clarity Act, which provided guidelines for subsequent referendums.

He returned to the backbench in 2003 when Paul Martin became the prime minister and dropped a number of ministers in an effort to disassociate himself from the former Chrétien government.

After the 2004 election however, he returned to Cabinet as Minister of Environment, where he was in charge of implementing the Kyoto Protocol and chaired COP 11/CMP 1 when Montreal hosted the UN climate conference in 2005.

Dion was Leader of the Opposition and the leader of the Liberal Party from 2006 to 2008.

The Liberal government lost the 2006 election and Martin resigned as leader.

Dion campaigned to replace him and subsequently won the party leadership election.

Dion ran on an environmental platform in the 2008 federal election, but was defeated by the Conservatives led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in one of the Liberals' worst electoral showings.

After a subsequent parliamentary dispute, he was replaced as leader by Michael Ignatieff.

Dion continued to sit as the member of Parliament for Saint-Laurent.

In 2015, the Liberal Party returned to power and Dion was named Minister of Foreign Affairs under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, serving until 2017, when he left politics and assumed his current diplomatic postings.