Dr. Bonnie Henry and Dr. Suzanne Jackson honoured for their transformative public health leadership
Ottawa, Ontario (29 April 2025) – Each year, the Canadian Public Health Association (CPHA) honours individuals or organizations who provide outstanding service to their community and profession. CPHA’s members nominate candidates for the awards and the recipients are selected by CPHA’s Awards Committee and confirmed by the Board of Directors. CPHA is pleased to announce the following recipients of its 2025 Honorary Awards to be presented at its annual conference on Wednesday 30 April 2025:
DR. BONNIE HENRY
R.D. Defries Award
Honorary Life Membership
Dr. Bonnie Henry, an experienced public health, preventive medicine and global pandemics professional, was appointed as Provincial Health Officer in British Columbia in 2018. She is responsible for monitoring the health of all British Columbians and undertaking measures for disease prevention and control and health protection. Dr. Henry has led the province’s response on the dual public health emergencies: the COVID-19 pandemic and toxic drug emergency. In this role, she excelled and quickly became a role model for her approach to public health, balancing critical epidemiological information, preventive care, and kindness. She notably captured this by the pandemic-tagline: “Be Kind, Be Calm, Be Safe.”
Doing this in the face of public scrutiny – including threats on her life and invasion of her personal life – Dr. Henry continues through this adversity with her leadership and expertise in evidence-based public health approaches. Having served in multiple leadership roles at the regional, provincial, national, and international levels in pandemics and emergency situations, including the SARS outbreak in Toronto and the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, Dr. Henry has contributed immeasurably to public health. This includes work with international agencies, including WHO and UNICEF, and serving in the Canadian Armed Forces.
Dr. Henry has been involved with planning, surveillance, and response to mass gatherings in Canada and internationally, and she is also the author of two books about public health and pandemics. In 2022, she was awarded the Order of British Columbia and the British Columbia Medal of Good Citizenship and has received numerous honorary degrees for her contributions.
DR. SUZANNE JACKSON
Ron Draper Health Promotion Award
Honorary Life Membership
Dr. Suzanne Jackson is an internationally recognized leader in health promotion who has exemplified the principles of the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion throughout her over 40 years in the public health sector. She has brought her expertise in community-based participatory research planning and evaluation to her work with diverse communities in several countries, including Canada, Brazil, Chile, Kenya, and Tonga, with the aim to strengthen community-based programs and healthy public policies, centering equity and social justice at the core of all her work. Her action-oriented research has generated insights on community-centred resilience in urban settings. Her contributions to mental health promotion have informed the work of pan-Canadian committees, and provided guidance for frontline workers supporting children and youth as well as seniors. Suzanne has also applied arts-based strategies to understand the health of street-involved youth.
As associate professor (emerita) at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Suzanne mentored and trained countless students in Canada’s largest and longest-standing graduate training program in health promotion. Her capacity-building contributions on realist, participatory and economic evaluation in health promotion have extended well beyond the academy to benefit professionals in community and government agencies. Through her leadership roles, such as co-director of the WHO Collaborating Centre on Health Promotion, past Editor-in-Chief of Global Health Promotion and past Chair of the Canadian Public Health Association, Suzanne embodies the values of the Ron Draper Health Promotion Award, with a passion for systems thinking and collaborative teamwork to facilitate constructive social change in academic and non-profit sectors.
– 30 –
ABOUT THE AWARDS
The Ron Draper Health Promotion Award is presented to an individual, group or organization engaged in community work to acknowledge a significant contribution to health promotion to build healthy public policy, create environments that support health, enable community action, enhance personal skills, and/or re-orient health services. Nominees are not required to be a CPHA member.
The R.D. Defries Award is CPHA’s highest award. Instituted in 1965, the Award is presented annually in the form of a medal and citation to a CPHA member for outstanding contributions in the broad field of public health, preference being given to Canadian contributions and individuals who have substantially supported CPHA's objectives and activities. Robert Davies Defries, CBE, MD, DPH, LLD (Sask), DrPH (Montreal), for whom the award is named, devoted a lifetime to the interest of public health in Canada and particularly to CPHA of which he was an Honorary Life Member. The Defries Award carries with it an Honorary Life Membership.