This article is also available to read in French.
When the phone rang, in the fall of 2016, Tamara Thermitus wasn’t looking for a new job. Then fifty-one and working for Canada’s minister of justice, she had built a national reputation as a lawyer with a moral streak and a rare gift for consensus building. She played a key role in the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, the largest class-action lawsuit in Canadian history. She led the team that helped frame the mandate of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which, between 2008 and 2015, documented the wrongs visited by the federal government on Indigenous populations in Canada. In 2011, she received an award of merit from the Quebec bar for her work against discrimination and inequality.
