GG role may be too confining for Payette

She should not feel obliged to remain if she’s miserable

For months, Julie Payette has been the talk of Ottawa. Her travails were discussed, sotto voce, among public servants and engaged observers long before they emerged recently in the Globe and Mail, followed, more thoroughly, in the National Post.

The news: The Governor General of Canada is struggling in the job, dislikes its demands and duties, and wants to leave. The Globe did not say explicitly that she wants to resign and the Post only implied that it might happen, 10 paragraphs into a fine piece by Marie-Danielle Smith and Brian Platt. “She is unhappy, they (senior government officials) have said, to an extent that some wonder if she will leave the job early,” the Post reports.

This hints at what others are saying less discreetly: Julie Payette wants out. One insider told me over the summer she was “negotiating the terms of her departure.” Whether that is still true today is unclear; her office says she is “fully committed to serving Canada and Canadians.”

If she does leave the job early it would be a royal embarrassment for her, even greater for those who appointed her. A premature resignation would be unprecedented, reflecting badly on the government and forcing it to name a successor quickly and to organize another installation little more than a year after the last one.

These are not reasons for Payette to stay. Before divorce was legal, husbands and wives endured bad marriages because they were told their union was for life. Stick it out; suffer in silence. For an unfulfilled Payette to remain would condemn her to years of discontent and leave us with a restless, disengaged viceregal representative.

This would not be good for her or the country. And if she were under subtle or direct pressure to remain so that the Trudeau government could save face, it would be less than progressive on the part of a self-declared “feminist prime minister” to keep a woman in an incompatible arrangement, particularly in 2018.

The reporting reveals that Payette is not just unorthodox and independent, but unprepared for the rigours of the office, which is full of obligations and constraints, all about form and appearances.

We learn, for example, that she does not sign bills — a foremost obligation — with dispatch or urgency, as did her predecessors. That she is reluctant to preside over as many public events. That she does not live in Rideau Hall but Rideau Gate, and that she spends weekends in Montreal. That she has not offered her patronage to the charities with which the governor general has long been associated. That she broke convention in attending the deliberations of the advisory council on the Order of Canada.

Some of the case against the governor general comes from the tiresome crowd of monarchists, harpies and fuss-budgets who become apoplectic when she wears the wrong decoration or asserts herself on science. That’s ridiculous.

This is an extraordinary woman of intelligence, achievement and international renown. A year ago, she appeared to be perfect for the job, and I applauded her appointment.

However, she may have had everything but desire. Unused to scrutiny and jealous of her privacy, she chafes under the strictures of royalty and formality.

Now she has a choice: to remain in the job, accepting its limits on personal freedom, as all governors general do, but making the office creative, innovative and relevant, as Adrienne Clarkson and John Ralston Saul did brilliantly.

Or, she can decide it is all too much. If so, let us say: Madame Payette, you have served your country well. But if you want to go, go.

This is an extraordinary woman of intelligence, achievement and … renown.