Peers speaks English, French, Spanish, German and Russian. He is married with three children and four grandchildren. He currently resides in Toronto, Ontario where he is Ecumenist-in-Residence at the Toronto School of Theology. In 2006 his Grace Notes: Journeying With the Primate, 1995-2004, a collection of his monthly columns in the Anglican Journal, was published, and in 2007 his The Anglican Episcopate in Canada: Volume IV, 1977-2007. Peers is now confessor to the monastery of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Boston. He is also Ecumenist in Residence at the TorontoSchool of Theology.
Ministry on the prairies
Having come from a background that might have suggested to prairie folk that he was an "eastern" élitist, Peers quickly established himself as keen sympathiser with the ideals of prairie populism. Rural Saskatchewanians quickly perceived that Peers was their ardent supporter—that the ideals of prairie populism were his own ideals—and that his obvious membership in the Canadian élite was entirely to their advantage. The life of a prairie bishop is one of endless travel along the highways and byways of the prairie hinterland: in the course of such travels Peers made long and lasting friendships with many members of the Saskatchewan leadership, as with many grassroots Saskatchewanians, and these friendships amply informed the national and worldwide ministry of his primacy.
Major events of his primacy
Major events include:
the introduction of the Book of Alternative Services ;
the formal apology to native peoples for the abuses which occurred in the Residential Schools;
financial settlement with the federal government over aboriginal claims against native residential schools operated on the government's behalf principally by Anglican and Roman Catholic churches;
en route to the 1978 Lambeth Conference touched down in the newly independent Solomon Islands and the then-North Solomons Province of Papua New Guinea though it was Roman Catholic and United Church, to the former of which he and Mrs. Peers returned, having established friendly relations and later as Primate sending a bishop;
the stand taken by the Anglican Church in 1986 in support of Canada's northern people, who depended on the seal hunt, against the internationalanimal rights lobby; towards the end of his tenure,
