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.

What I teach our people is that, as a leader, you have four key roles apart from people management. First is to champion the grand vision. Two, install systems and a culture to run experiments. The third thing is to savour surprises. The fourth thing is that even a leader's ideas need to be subjected to tests.

A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or regard that quality in its chosen leaders today - and in fact we have forgotten.

I learned what it is to lead - and above all learnt that leadership is more about being strong on the inside than being loud on the outside.

In fact, because of this deep desire for peace, the ruling class leaders of this land, from 1945 on, stepped up the hysteria and propaganda to drive into American minds the false notion that danger threatened them from the East.