OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney appointed Louise Arbour as Canada's new governor general on Tuesday, replacing Mary Simon. Arbour, a bilingual lawyer born in Montreal, Quebec, previously served as a justice on the Supreme Court of Canada and as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2004 to 2008.

The governor general serves as the representative of the Canadian Crown, King Charles III, in Canada and acts as head of state on the monarch's behalf. The role typically carries a five-year term.

"Louise Arbour has held nearly every office a Canadian jurist can hold, and several that no Canadian had held before," Carney said. He also said: "The conviction that institutions are the load-bearing walls of a civil society – and that they remain trustworthy only as long as someone is willing to hold them accountable."

Arbour served as chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, where she secured the first-ever indictment of a sitting head of state, Slobodan Milošević. She prosecuted sexual assaults as crimes against humanity and secured the first conviction for genocide since the 1948 Genocide Convention in the case of Rwanda. In 2007, she received the Order of Canada for her contributions to the justice system both in Canada and internationally. Speaking to reporters, Arbour said she believes the constitutional monarchy in Canada has served the country extremely well and that it has provided continuity throughout its history.

Simon, appointed in 2021, was the first Indigenous person to hold the governor general role. She is Inuit, was born in northern Quebec, and previously served as Canada's ambassador to Denmark and as president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami. Bilingual in English and Inuktitut, Simon does not speak French and has said she had been denied the opportunity to learn French while attending a federal day school in Quebec. Carney faced pressure to appoint a bilingual governor general after Simon was criticized for lacking French proficiency.

In 2024, Simon released a statement responding to critical media reports following a trip to Quebec where she spoke mostly in English. In that statement, she said she understood "the importance of French to French-speaking Canadians as a critical part of their cultures and identities."

Julie Payette, an astronaut, engineer, scientific broadcaster and corporate director, served as governor general from 2017 to 2021. David Johnston, born in Ontario, served from 2010 to 2017 and was a former law professor and principal and vice-chancellor of McGill University.