Businesswoman won plaudits for her work as Ontario’s lieutenant-governor

When Hilary Weston was appointed lieutenant-governor of Ontario in late 1996, the press reaction was almost uniformly negative and at times vicious. “Prime Minister Jean Chrétien couldn’t have made a more inappropriate choice for the position,” Richard Brennan wrote in The Toronto Star, calling the wealthy former model “our version of a society debutante.”

The late columnist Allan Fotheringham called Mrs. Weston the “wife of a billionaire,” whose “only politics is Chanel,” predicting with biting sarcasm that she would quickly tire of handing out mine safety certificates in Sudbury, one of the duties he imagined she would be burdened with.