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Post-political career: Despite her dramatic loss in the election, Canadian women's magazine Chatelaine named Campbell as its Woman of the Year for 1993. She published an autobiography, Time and Chance, in 1996. The book became a Canadian bestseller and is in its third edition from the University of Alberta Bookstore Press.
She was briefly rumoured to be sent to Moscow as the ambassador to Russia, but in 1996, Campbell was appointed consul general to Los Angeles by the Chrétien government, a post in which she remained until 2000. While she was there, she collaborated with her husband, composer, playwright, and actor Hershey Felder, on the production of a musical, Noah's Ark.
From 1999 to 2003, she chaired the Council of Women World Leaders, a network of women who hold or have held the office of president or prime minister. She was succeeded by former Irish president Mary Robinson. From 2003 until 2005, she served as president of the International Women's Forum, a global organization of women of prominent achievement, with headquarters in Washington, DC. From 2001 to 2004, she was with the Center for Public Leadership and lectured at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She has served as a director of several publicly traded companies in high technology and biotechnology and currently sits on the board of Athenex, a biopharmaceutical company that had its initial public offering on June 14, 2017, and trades under the ticker symbol ATNX.
Campbell chaired the steering committee of the World Movement for Democracy from 2008 to 2015. She served on the board of the International Crisis Group, a non-government organization (NGO) that aims to prevent and resolve deadly conflicts. She served on the board of the Forum of Federations, the EastWest Institute, and is a founding trustee of The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence at King's College London. She was a founding member of the Club de Madrid, an independent organization whose main purpose is to strengthen democracy in the world. Its membership is by invitation only and consists of former heads of state and government. At different times, Campbell has served as its interim president, vice president, and from 2004 to 2006, its secretary general. Campbell was the founding chair of the International Advisory Board of the Ukrainian Foundation for Effective Governance, an NGO formed in September 2007 with the aid of businessman Rinat Akhmetov.
During the 2006 election campaign, Campbell endorsed the candidacy of Tony Fogarassy, the Conservative candidate in Campbell's former riding of Vancouver Centre; Fogarassy went on to lose the election, placing a distant third. At that time, Campbell also clarified to reporters that she was a supporter of the new Conservative Party (formed in 2003 as a result of a merger of the Canadian Alliance with the party that Campbell had formerly led, the Progressive Conservatives); however, she later clarified in 2019 that she had, in fact, never joined the Conservative Party as an official member.
While testifying in April 2009 at the Mulroney–Schreiber Airbus inquiry, Campbell said she still followed Canadian politics "intermittently".
In April 2014, Campbell was appointed the founding principal of the new Peter Lougheed Leadership College at the University of Alberta.
She has appeared on the CBC Television program Canada's Next Great Prime Minister, a show that profiles and selects young prospective leaders, and has also been an occasional panellist on Real Time with Bill Maher.
On August 2, 2016, Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau announced that Campbell had agreed to chair a seven-person committee to prepare a short list of candidates to succeed Thomas Cromwell on the Supreme Court of Canada. In mid-October 2016, the committee announced that it would recommend the appointment of Malcolm Rowe to the court, and he was sworn in on October 31 as the first Supreme Court justice to hail from Newfoundland and Labrador.
In August 2019, Campbell faced controversy when she said that she hoped that Hurricane Dorian would directly hit U.S. president Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. The President's son Eric responded to Campbell, saying that his family was "rooting for the safety" of those impacted by the hurricane. Campbell soon deleted the tweet and apologized for the remarks.
Campbell courted controversy on Twitter by claiming that female newscasters who expose their "arms" on TV are taken less seriously, despite having once posed with bare shoulders herself in a famously suggestive photograph.
Campbell revealed to Maclean's in 2019 that she could not survive in the Conservative Party. She said: "It's too intolerant; it's too right-wing." She later argued after the 2019 federal election that Conservative leader Andrew Scheer was untrustworthy, stating "He's hard to trust, and that's really it."
In September 2022, Campbell attended Elizabeth II's state funeral, along with other former Canadian prime ministers.
On the eve of International Women's Day, in March 2024, Campbell revealed "Beyond a Ballot" podcast, she revealed that while she believes that there are good people in the Conservative Party, she could not support current leader, Pierre Poilievre, because she believes that he is "liar and a hate-monger".
Legacy: As justice minister, Campbell brought about a new sexual assault law that clarified sexual assault and whose passage firmly entrenched that in cases involving sexual assault, "no means no". She also introduced the rape shield law, legislation that protects a person's sexual past from being explored during trial. Her legacy of supporting sexual victims has been confirmed through her work with the Peter Lougheed Leadership College at the University of Alberta, where the inaugural cohort of scholars proposed that the college immediately implement mandatory education regarding sexual assault for students, which Campbell readily accepted.
Since Parliament never sat during Campbell's four months as a prime minister, she was unable to bring forth new legislation, which must be passed by Parliament. She did implement radical changes, though, to the structure of the Canadian government. Under her tenure, the federal cabinet's size was cut from over 35 cabinet ministers and ministers of state to 23. This included the redesign of eight ministries and the abolition or merging of 15 others. The Chrétien government retained these new ministries when it took office. The number of cabinet committees was reduced from 11 to five. Her successors have continued to keep the size of the federal cabinet to about 30 members. She was also the first prime minister to convene a First Ministers' conference for consultation prior to representing Canada at the G7 Summit. Due to her brief time in office, Campbell holds a unique spot among Canadian prime ministers in that she made no Senate appointments.
Campbell harshly criticized Mulroney for not allowing her to succeed him before June 1993. In her view, when she became prime minister, she had very little time or chance to make up ground on the Liberals once her initial popularity faded. In her memoirs, Time and Chance, and in her response to The Secret Mulroney Tapes, Campbell suggested that Mulroney knew the Tories would be defeated in the upcoming election, and wanted a "scapegoat who would bear the burden of his unpopularity" rather than a viable successor. The cause of the 1993 debacle remains disputed, with some arguing that the election results were a vote against Mulroney rather than a rejection of Campbell, and others suggesting that the poorly run Campbell campaign was the key factor in the result.
Although the Progressive Conservatives survived as a distinct political party for another decade after the 1993 debacle, they never recovered their previous standing. During that period they were led by Jean Charest (1993–1998), Elsie Wayne (1998) and then, for the second time, by Joe Clark (1998–2003) (who had been opposition leader and briefly prime minister 20 years earlier). By 2003, the party under new leader Peter MacKay had voted to merge with the Canadian Alliance to form the Conservative Party of Canada, thus ceasing to exist, despite MacKay having promised not to pursue a merger. Joe Clark continued to sit as a "Progressive Conservative" into 2004. The new generation of right-leaning Conservatives gained power in the election of 2006, ensuring the "Tory" nickname's survival in the federal politics of Canada. A PC "rump" caucus continued to exist in the Senate of Canada (consisting of certain Clark, Mulroney and Paul Martin appointees); Elaine McCoy of Alberta was the last Progressive Conservative Senator, redesignating herself as an "Independent Progressive Conservative" in 2013 before launching the Independent Senators Group in 2016.
Campbell remains one of the youngest women to have ever assumed the office of Prime Minister in any country, and thus also one of the youngest to have left the office.
Campbell was ranked number 20 out of the first 20 prime ministers of Canada (through Jean Chrétien) by a survey of 26 Canadian historians used by J. L. Granatstein and Norman Hillmer in their 1999 book Prime Ministers: Ranking Canada's Leaders. A follow-up article co-authored by Hillmer in 2011 for Maclean's magazine broadened the number of historians surveyed; in this new survey of over 100 Canadian historians, Campbell again finished last, this time coming at number 22 out of Canada's first 22 prime ministers (through Stephen Harper). A 2016 follow-up poll by the same team, now expanded to cover the first 23 prime ministers (through Justin Trudeau), again ranked Campbell last.
In 2004, she was included in the list of 50 most important political leaders in history in the Almanac of World History compiled by the National Geographic Society. She was cited for her status as the only woman head of government of a North American country (defined variously), but controversy ensued among academics in Canada over the merit of this honour since her brief term in office was marked by very few, if any, major political accomplishments.
On November 30, 2004, Campbell's official portrait for the parliamentary prime minister's gallery was unveiled. The painting was created by Victoria, BC artist David Goatley. Campbell said she was "deeply honoured" to be the only woman to have her picture in the prime ministers' corridor, stating: "I really look forward to the day when there are many other female faces." The painting shows a pensive Campbell sitting on a chair with richly coloured Haida capes and robes in the background, symbolizing her time as a cabinet minister and as an academic.