UBC president

Stephen J. Toope, a human rights scholar who also served as chair of the Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund Committee and as the Canadian lay delegate to the Anglican Consultative Council, has been named the 12th president of the University of British Columbia.

Mr. Toope, 48,  will step down as president of the Pierre Trudeau Elliott Foundation when he assumes his five-year post at UBC this summer. While at UBC, he will also hold an academic position as tenured professor of law.

Mr. Toope serves as chair and rapporteur of the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. He was formerly dean of the faculty of law at McGill University.

An Anglican from the diocese of Montreal, Mr. Toope was one of three lawyers fluent in canon (church) law on a legal commission created by New Westminster bishop Michael Ingham to look into whether the diocese could authorize same-sex blessings. He was recently a fact finder for the federal government's Commission of Inquiry into the case of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, who was arrested by U.S. authorities and deported to Syria on suspicion of being a terrorist.