Our Board of Directors
Marc Lemieux
Marc Lemieux has been organizing or monitoring elections abroad since the 1993 United Nations elections in Cambodia, his first of 3 peacekeeping missions. Before managing international development programs during 5 years at the Forum of Federations in Ottawa, he worked 2.5 years for the International Foundation for Electoral Systems in DR Congo and Iraq. The father of three children, he currently works at Elections Canada.
Kenneth Atsenhaienton Deer
For the last 20 years, Kenneth Atsenhaienton Deer has worked as a political activist and newspaper publisher and editor of the weekly newspaper The Eastern Door. Giving the community a balanced platform of information they could depend on. Kenneth was on the Board of Directors for the Quebec Community Newspapers Association. Using his own community based located in Kahnawake, he has engaged and educated business people and international communities on Indigenous Peoples’ Human Rights.
Ben Rowswell
Ben Rowswell is a Canadian diplomat with a specialization in statebuilding and stabilization. As Representative of Canada in Kandahar from 2009 to 2010 he directed the Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team, leading a team of more than 100 American and Canadian diplomats, aid workers, civilian police and other experts in strengthening the provincial government at the heart of the Afghan conflict. Having served before that as Deputy Head of Mission in Kabul, Rowswell brings a practitioner's knowledge of Afghanistan and of statebuilding in general to the CDDRL.
His previous conflict experience includes two years as Canada's Chargé d'Affaires in Iraq between 2003 and 2005, and with the UN in Somalia in 1993. He has also served at the Canadian embassy in Egypt and the Permanent Mission to the UN, and as a foreign policy advisor to the federal Cabinet in Ottawa. An alumnus of the National Democratic Institute, he founded the Democracy Unit of the Canadian foreign ministry.