On Thursday afternoon, close to a hundred women filled a room to celebrate International Women’s Day — and left it with something harder to quantify than a good lunch: a renewed sense of purpose.
The Cornwall Area Chamber of Commerce‘s annual Women’s Day High Tea, held ahead of the March 8th date, brought together elected officials, community advocates, entrepreneurs, and volunteers from across Cornwall, SDG, and Akwesasne. The event was warm and celebratory in atmosphere — but the messages delivered from the podium carried real weight.
Women’s Day High Tea: ‘We Can’t Go Backwards’
Nolan Quinn, our MPP, was the first to take the stage, and he did so with humility. He paid tribute to the women in our lives who hold things together behind the scenes — and made it personal, acknowledging that his own wife is the reason he’s able to represent us at Queen’s Park as she holds down the fort while he’s away. Mayor Justin Towndale opened with a nod to Cornwall’s own history of firsts — from Mary Mack, the city’s first female councillor elected in 1948, to Bernadette Clement, Ontario’s first Black female mayor elected 70 years later. He also acknowledged outgoing Police Chief Shawna Spowart, the first woman to hold that role in Cornwall’s history. He also spoke to the importance of his spouse, Sarah, who is always by his side.
Pointing to the rollback of women’s roles in the U.S. military and ongoing attacks on reproductive rights south of the border, the Mayor — himself a Canadian Armed Forces reservist — was direct: progress is fragile, and complacency is not an option. ‘We have to keep going forwards,’ he told the room. City councillors echoed that call, urging the women present to consider running for office in this municipal election year. ‘Women belong in all places where decisions are being made,’ Councillor Sarah Good said, quoting the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. ‘It shouldn’t be the exception.’
A Keynote Built from Pain and Turned into Purpose
The keynote address was delivered by Karen Brunet, founder and CEO of Ctrl+, a Cornwall-rooted women’s health company. She described stepping outside her comfort zone to share her story publicly — and then proceeded to fill the room with 40-plus years of it.
Brunanek lived for decades with undiagnosed endometriosis and PCOS, navigating a medical system that repeatedly dismissed her symptoms as constipation, nerves, or weakness. Multiple surgeries, a near-fatal sepsis event, a hysterectomy, and four years of fertility treatments followed — alongside the relentless grind of building a company while raising two daughters.
Her message was not one of victimhood. It was one of transformation. ‘Resilience is not endurance,’ she told the audience. ‘No woman should have to suffer to be strong.’ Ctrl+ is now scaling a telehealth platform in the United States aimed at giving women the real-time access to specialists and support they’ve historically been denied. Brunet spoke directly to her daughters Lauren and Sophie, seated in the audience, expressing hope that they would one day see not a mother stretched thin, but one who stretched limits.
It was the kind of speech people don’t forget.
44 Years of Showing Up: Debbie Fortier Wins She Inspires Award
The afternoon’s most emotional moment came with the presentation of the Chamber’s second annual She Inspires Award. From nearly 60 nominations, the selection committee chose Debbie Fortier, Executive Director of Maison Baldwin House — and the room responded with immediate, knowing applause.
Fortier has devoted more than 44 years to the shelter, beginning as a frontline counsellor in 1982 and leading as executive director since 1999. Under her watch, Baldwin House has weathered the ice storm, COVID-19, and budget crises that should have shuttered its doors. She founded Serendipity Boutique — a volunteer-run social enterprise at 331 Second Street West — to sustainably fund shelter operations. She pioneered human trafficking advocacy in the region at a time when few shelters had the capacity or mandate to help. And she is now working toward the opening of Our Sister’s Place, a dedicated residence for trafficking survivors, named in honour of the late Sister Pauline, the woman who hired her beside a pram on a Cornwall sidewalk over four decades ago.
Accepting the award, Fortier redirected every word of praise back to her team, her volunteers, and the women and children Baldwin House serves. ‘This award may have my name on it,’ she said, ‘but it belongs to every person who believes that women and children deserve safety, dignity, and hope.’
Cornwall, Keep Going
Thursday’s event was a reminder that International Women’s Day is not just a date on a calendar, it’s a checkpoint. A moment to measure how far we’ve come, acknowledge how far there is still to go, and celebrate the women in communities like Cornwall who refuse to stop pushing. In this room alone, that spirit was unmistakable.
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