On December 31, 2025, Her Excellency the Right Honourable Mary Simon, Governor General of Canada announced 80 new appointments to the Order of Canada.
UBC Creative Writing alum Michelle Frances Good, C.M. (MFA ’14) was appointed as a Member of the Order of Canada.
The Order of Canada is one of Canada’s highest honours. It was created in 1967 to honour people whose service shapes our society, whose innovations ignite our imaginations, and whose compassion unites our communities. Its Companions, Officers and Members take to heart the motto of the Order: DESIDERANTES MELIOREM PATRIAM (“They desire a better country”).
Good is a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation who is esteemed for her work as an activist, lawyer and storyteller. A survivor of the Sixties Scoop and the intergenerational trauma of the residential school system, she has confronted laws that continue to hurt Indigenous communities and advocated reconciliation, truth and respect.
Good’s poems, short stories, and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies across Canada, and her poetry was included on two lists of the best Canadian poetry in 2016 and 2017. Five Little Indians, her first novel, won the HarperCollins/UBC Best New Fiction Prize, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Award, the Evergreen Award, the City of Vancouver Book of the Year Award, and Canada Reads 2022. It was also longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a finalist for the Writer’s Trust Award, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes. In May 2024, Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada was shortlisted for the Saskatchewan Book Awards, the Indigenous Voices Award and won the High Plains Book Award.
Including Good, 15 of the most recent appointments to the Order of Canada have ties to UBC, as current and former members of faculty, alumni, honorary degree recipients and a member of the Board of Governors.
Read the full list of UBC recipients here.
