Canada’s parliament resumes today with the governing Conservative party laying out its agenda in what is known as the “speech from the throne”.
Among the spending plans, and various programmes to be announced, will also be something rather unique.
The government will announce its intention to bestow honourary Canadian citizenship to Malala Yousafzai.
She was the young Pakistani woman who suffered gunshot wounds to the head and neck at age 14 in a Taliban assassination attempt. Having begun a blog at age 11 defending girls rights to education, the Taliban tried to kill her while she was on her way home from school in the Swat valley on October 9, 2012 as a message to stop educating girls.
- Violence in Pakistan. So grotesquely common it doesn’t register as news most nights. But it does tonight. Because of who it is bleeding on that stretcher. 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai, just a school girl who’s proved braver then most adults. In 2009, when the Taliban was beheading activists in her city of Mingora Swat, when they bombed girl schools and demanded girls not even try to get an education, it was 11-year-old Malala who decided she would stand up and defend a girl’s right to go to school”.
- (CBC’s Adrienne Arsenault reporting on The National, TV news programme in October 2012)
The attempted assassination only served to spark domestic and international support for her. However because of the danger, she and her family have moved to England.
She has since been featured on the cover of several influential news magazines and was a front-runner for the Nobel Peace prize. Malala Yousafzai has also written about the Taliban attack that nearly killed her and her campaign to bring education to girls around the world in her new memoir I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban.
The granting of honourary Canadian citizenship is unique because only five other people have been awarded the honour. They are; Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg., Nelson Mandela. The Dalai Lama. Aung San Suu Kyi, and The Aga Khan.
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