Sylvia Ostry


Sylvia Ostry was a Canadian economist and public servant.

Life

Born Sylvia Knelman in Winnipeg, Manitoba on June 3, 1927, she received a Bachelor of Arts in economics from McGill University in 1948, a Master of Arts from McGill in 1950, and eventually earned her PhD from Girton College, Cambridge in 1954.
After studying at the University of Cambridge, she was a lecturer at McGill, becoming an assistant professor from 1952 to 1955, and becoming Associate Professor at the Université de Montréal from 1962 to 1964.
From 1972 to 1975, Ostry was Chief Statistician of Canada at Statistics Canada. From 1975 to 1978, Ostry was Deputy Minister, Consumer and Corporate Affairs. From 1978 to 1979, she was Chairman, Economic Council of Canada. From 1979 to 1983, she was Head of the Department of Economics and Statistics of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Paris. From 1984 to 1985 she was Deputy Minister, International Trade, and Coordinator, International Economic Relations. Later, in 1986 Ostry became a member of the influential Washington-based financial advisory body, the Group of Thirty. During the 1988 G7 Summit in Toronto, Ostry served as Canada's sherpa.
From 1991 to 1996, she was Chancellor, University of Waterloo. In 1997 she was appointed Chancellor Emerita, University of Waterloo.
From 1990 to 1997, she was Chair of the University of Toronto's Centre for International Studies. Since then she has been a Distinguished Research Fellow there.
She was married to the late Bernard Ostry, with whom she had two children, Adam Ostry and Jonathan D. Ostry. She died in Toronto on Thursday May 7, 2020.

Awards

Honours

Sylvia Ostry Foundation

The Sylvia Ostry Foundation was established in April 1991, by several of Ostry's Canadian friends and admirers. The foundation had the objective of establishing an annual or biennial lecture in Canada on a subject related to the global economic and financial system. The lectureship was modelled on the Per Jacobsson lectures in Washington, which were established in 1964.
The inaugural lecture was given in Ottawa in May 1993 by Japanese diplomat Sadako Ogata; at the time Ogata was head of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
The first six Sylvia Ostry Foundation lectures were collected and published in 2003. The lecturers were Sadako Ogata, Jacques Delors, Michel Camdessus, Renato Ruggiero, Enrique V. Iglesias, and Paul Volcker.

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