Biography
Senator Simons is a member of the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications and the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, and the past deputy chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry.
Appointed to the Senate of Canada in 2018, Senator Paula Simons has been a CBC radio producer and documentary maker, a playwright, and a popular historian. She spent 23 years with the Edmonton Journal as a reporter and opinion writer, winning two National Newspaper Awards, one for investigative journalism and one for column-writing. She earned a further six National Newspaper Award citations of merit for her columns and editorials on Alberta politics.
Her work has also been recognized with awards and honours from the UNESCO Canadian Committee for World Press Freedom, Journalists for Human Rights, the Alberta Centre for Civil Liberties Research, the Canadian Bar Association, the Canadian Mental Health Association, the American Society for Features Journalism and the Edmonton Historical Board.
In 2021, Senator Simons was nominated for her first National Magazine Award, for her regular column, On Second Thought, which appears in Alberta Views magazine. She is also the host of her own political podcast, Alberta Unbound.
Senator Simons is a proud graduate of the University of Alberta and Stanford University.
You can follow her on Mastodon @Paulatics@mstdn.ca and on BlueSky at @SenatorPaulaSimons