Member of the Order of Canada

• Awarded on: May 12, 2016
• Invested on: August 25, 2017

Mary Cornish has devoted her career to advancing equality rights. A human rights
lawyer, she was a central figure in the Jane Doe case, which exposed discriminatory
police practises in Toronto, and was a leading voice in the fight to create Ontario’s
Pay Equity Act. She has devoted countless hours to the most important pay equity
legal challenges of our time, and has successfully obtained fair pay for hundreds of
thousands of women workers. As the chair of a comprehensive review of Ontario’s
Human Rights Code, she was also called upon to craft the recent modernization of the
province’s human rights system.