Anne Innis Dagg, CM, BA (Hons), MA, PhD, Hon DSc, is a pioneering zoologist, groundbreaking biologist, animal rights activist, and feminist who has received worldwide recognition for her work on giraffes. In 1956, she became the first person to study giraffe behaviour in the wild. She is the author of over 60 scientific papers and 23 books including The Giraffe: Its Biology, Behaviour and Ecology (1976) along with fellow zoologist Bristol Foster. She faced many challenges in her career – most notably because she was a woman who was prevented from becoming a tenured professor at the three universities she taught at near her home in Waterloo. This resulted in her disappearance from the giraffe world. Three decades later, an invitation to a giraffe conference in Phoenix, Arizona, and a documentary about her life, The Woman Who Loves Giraffes, brought her story to light again.
The recent Order of Canada recipient has dedicated her efforts to establishing The Anne Innis Dagg Foundation with a mission to draw attention to the challenges wild giraffes are facing in Africa and the importance of conservation.
Dr. Dagg holds a BA (Honours) in Biology and MA in Genetics, both from the University of Toronto, a PhD in Animal Behaviour from the University of Waterloo, and Honorary Doctorates in Science from both the University of Waterloo and University of Toronto.
Anna Maria Tremonti, BA (Hons), Hon LLD, is a long-time journalist who has travelled Canada and the world in pursuit of stories that both enlighten and disturb. She has worked in radio and television for decades, mostly with the CBC.
She began her career at CKEC radio in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, and spent three years in private radio in the Maritimes and Ottawa before joining CBC as host of its morning show in Fredericton. Her path through the CBC included local reporting jobs in Edmonton and then to the Parliament Hill bureau in Ottawa, taking on the environment and defence beats, as well as covering the politics of the day. From Ottawa, she became a foreign correspondent, travelling the world from bureaus in Berlin, London, Jerusalem and Washington. During that time, she covered the end of the Soviet Union, the changes in Eastern European countries after the fall of the iron curtain, the wars in the former Yugoslav republics, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the final two years of the Clinton administration. Anna Maria returned to Canada to pursue investigative reporting as a host of the fifth estate but within two years, shifted back to radio to be part of the team that created The Current, CBC Radio 1’s flagship current affairs program.
The Current team brought hard-edged interviews, long form interviews, documentaries, extensive road trips – from across Canada, including Northern Canada, to Afghanistan, Jerusalem, Argentina and across the US – and inclusive public forums to the airwaves, changing the expectation of what radio was capable of in morning programming, and winning numerous domestic and international awards for its host and producers in the process.
After 17 years as host of The Current, Anna Maria chose to leave her permanent job at the CBC to explore audio storytelling through podcasting. The CBC podcast More went to the top of the Apple charts when it was released. She is now working on a second, serialized storyline for podcast.
Anna Maria was born in Windsor, Ontario. She has an Honours BA in Communication Studies from the University of Windsor, and honorary doctorates from the universities of Windsor, Carleton, York and Royal Roads. Beyond her work she is a voracious reader, a theatre and cinema buff, a dedicated cook, a passable skier, a rusty scuba diver, and a traveller. Her driver’s licence still includes a designation for motorcycles, but she says she’s done with that. Anna Maria lives in Toronto with her partner, John Filion.
Lynn Jones, BA, Hon D Hum, is an educator, community historian, civil and human rights activist, labour leader, and a truly inspiring speaker. Lynn has served her community and the nation in multiple ways over the course of a long and distinguished career. She was the first African Canadian to join the executive ranks of the Canadian Labour Congress and to be elected General Vice-President. She was also an official international observer of the first democratic elections held in South Africa which saw the election of Nelson Mandela as the country’s first Black President.
Lynn is a native of Truro, Nova Scotia, and one of 10 children born into an Indigenous African Nova Scotian family of community leaders. She has been a life-long civil and human rights activist. Her protest has always focused on all aspects of social, political and economic inclusion with special attention in areas of anti-racism, feminism, class, ability, poverty and the environment. Her social justice priorities are presently focused on the obtaining of Reparations for Afrikan People and highlighting the crimes against humanity perpetrated during and following the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade. As well, she continues to highlight the archival Lynn Jones African Canadian and Diaspora Heritage Collection housed at Saint Mary’s University and containing more than 10,000 articles and artefacts of Black and Indigenous life locally, nationally and internationally, collected by Lynn over 50 years and donated for public access.
Lynn believes that “by putting aside our individual agendas and working for the good of all, we can solve all problems.” She is a recipient of an Honorary Doctorate of Humanities from Acadia University. And while retired from the federal public service, she remains active in her community.