Ambassador Joyce Napier

Ambassador Napier dedicated more than four decades to journalism before her 2024 appointment as Ambassador of Canada to the Holy See. A multilingual journalist and foreign correspondent, she began her career in Montreal in 1981 and went on to hold senior roles at CBC, Radio-Canada, La Presse, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press, and CTV, where she was named parliamentary bureau chief from 2016. To date, she is the only person ever appointed bureau chief at both an English and a French-language Canadian news network. Her reporting has taken her to defining moments around the globe, covering Canadian and American elections, the post-9/11 tribunals at Guantánamo Bay, and political events across the Middle East. She covered the Quebec sovereignty referendum, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, the Vatican’s papal transition, and Barack Obama's historic 2008 U.S. presidential election win. Born in Montreal to Egyptian immigrants and raised in Rome, she brought to Concordia's early journalism program a determination that has shaped her career. Named an Order of Canada recipient and a  Great Concordian, she credits the university with opening a world she once thought out of reach, and has said that her experience at Concordia provided the foundation and freedom for her career as a journalist telling the stories of our time.