Trade Secrets: A Memoir

In fall 2000 Trade Secrets hit the market and made a very big splash. Senator Carney undertook an extensive national tour and her memoir was the talk of the country. Senator Pat Carney is indeed one of Canada?s most innovative and adventurous personalities. From her birth in Shanghai, China, she details her personal and extraordinary professional life. Carney provides us with an inside look at newspapers, business, and politics, and the many fascinating people she has known over the years. She chronicles the rowdy world of journalists in Vancouver in the 1960s. She describes how she established her successful economic consulting firm in Yellowknife, revealing her love and concern for Canada?s north. She writes passionately about the hazards of being both a politician and a mother. We learn of her mixed feelings regarding the Free Trade Agreement, which she helped negotiate. And we go behind the scenes to see the inner workings of political life in our nation?s capital.

Pat Carney studied economics at the University of British Columbia before becoming a business columnist for the Vancouver Sun and the Province. In 1970, she moved to Yellowknife, where she ran her own consulting firm on northern socio-economic issues. Ten years later she was elected to Parliament. She was called to the Senate in 1990. She has a master’s degree in regional planning and has, for ten years, been an adjunct professor, teaching graduate students in the School of Community and Regional Planning at UBC. She holds honourary degrees from UBC and BC Open Learning University. Pat Carney has a son, John Dickson, and a daughter, Jane Reid. She lives on Saturna Island, British Columbia, with her husband Paul White and their cat Minou.