Two recipients of Canada’s highest civilian honour have been stripped of their honours. One is a convicted sex offender; the other was found guilty of corruption.
Peter Dalglish, a former humanitarian worker, and Jacques Lamarre, the ex-CEO of Canadian engineering giant SNC-Lavalin, were removed from the Order of Canada.Two recipients of Canada’s highest civilian honour have been stripped of their honours. One is a convicted sex offender; the other was found guilty of corruption.
Peter Dalglish, a former humanitarian worker, and Jacques Lamarre, the ex-CEO of Canadian engineering giant SNC-Lavalin, were removed from the Order of Canada.
The terminations were announced in the May 16 edition of the Canada Gazette, with the order signed by Governor General Mary Simon on April 15. The Gazette gave no reasons for their removal.
The Office of the Secretary to the Governor General declined to comment on the specifics of the termination cases, but said the removals were recommended to Simon by the Advisory Council for the Order of Canada.
“According to the Policy and Procedure for Termination of Appointment to the Order of Canada, revocation of an honour is an extraordinary measure intended to protect the credibility of the Canadian honours system,” the office said in a May 19 statement to The Epoch Times.
It added that the time and process needed to revoke an honour vary across individuals due to the “type of distinction.”
“For the Order of Canada, grounds for revocation are based on evidence that the person has acted in a manner inconsistent with the standard of conduct expected of members of this society. This may include, but is not limited to, a criminal conviction or sanction by a professional order,” it said.
Dalglish, originally from London, Ont., co-founded a Canadian charity called Street Kids International in the late 1980s. He had worked for several humanitarian agencies, including UN Habitat in Afghanistan and the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response in Liberia, and was named a member of the Order of Canada in November 2016.
In 2019, Dalglish was convicted in Nepal of sexually abusing two boys aged 11 and 14. Nepalese police arrested him in a raid in 2018 on a mountain home he had built in a village east of Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital. The Canadian was sentenced to nine years for one count and seven for the other, to be served concurrently.
Lamarre, the second appointee removed from the Order of Canada, had his engineering licence revoked and was fined $75,000 by l’Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec (OIQ), a self-regulating body governing Quebec’s professional engineers, this past January.
According to the OIQ’s Jan. 7 order, the society’s disciplinary council had found Lamarre, who led SNC-Lavalin from 1996 to 2009, guilty of corruption last year. Lamarre was made an officer of the Order of Canada in June 2005.
The ruling said the penalties stemmed from breaches during his tenure at the helm of the Montreal-based engineering firm, now known as AtkinsRéalis Group, between 2001 and 2009.
Those transgressions include payment of financial benefits to obtain contracts in Libya, with some $2 million going to the country’s ruling family.
The disciplinary council also found Lamarre guilty last August of “collusion and corruption” related to SNC-Lavalin’s political financing activities in Montreal, where the firm sought to win contracts through payments to political parties.
On Aug. 13, 2025, Lamarre sent a letter to the OIQ president to resign as a member of the society. In his letter, he called the ruling by the disciplinary council “unjust and unreasonable,” and cited its “relentless pursuit” of him as his reason for resigning.
The Canadian Press contributed to this report.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to include comments from the Office of the Secretary to the Governor General.
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