Julia Bentley

Julia Bentley served in the Canadian foreign service with distinction for 32 years, occupying several senior executive positions at Global Affairs Canada related to Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia.

Ms. Bentley has also represented Canada as a diplomat abroad. She served as Canada’s High Commissioner in Malaysia (2017-2020) and previously at the Canadian Embassy in Beijing (twice), the Canadian High Commission in Delhi, and the Canadian Trade Office in Taipei.

Ms. Bentley took leave from her diplomatic career to serve the non-profit sector as Chief Representative of Winrock International in China and Director of its NGO Capacity Building Program, funded by the Ford Foundation, and during a previous leave, as co-ordinator of Canada’s Civil Society Program in China.

In 2022, she was on secondment for a year at the University of Toronto. In 2023, she held a fellowship at the University of British Columbia’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs for a semester. 

She holds degrees in East Asian Studies from Princeton University and the University of Toronto and was a Canada-China Scholar in modern history at Nanjing University. She is a Senior Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and the York Centre for Asian Research.