Vancouver is home. I spent a huge amount of time here as a kid growing up with my mom, with my grandparents who lived here.

I have a very difficult, high-pressured job. Everyone knows how challenging it is to balance family responsibilities with a job that takes me across the country and working extremely hard.

Gender equality is not only an issue for women and girls.

We know that society is better - more prosperous, more stable, more peaceful, more cohesive - when women's rights are respected and when women are valued, empowered, and lead the way in our communities.

We would completely delegitimise what we are doing if we allow politics to interfere with our work.

I don't think anybody has ever been able to live up to what they promised. I don't know a government that has ever been successful at that because once they get into power, things change and the world is controlled also by business now.

My father passed away a few days before my election. This man, an African American born to a poor single mother in 1936 in the South, would worry in the last years of his life that he had better life chances when he was growing up than a young man born in the same circumstances would have today.

But it is neither cannon nor bayonet that will do the worst damage to this city. No, this place will remember the war against our government just as long as there are inhabitants here.