National Post (National Edition)
The gilded prison of Rideau Hall
PAYETTE NOT THE FIRST TO GROW RESTLESS
According to a recent National Post report, Gov. Gen. Julie Payette has dramatically slowed her participation in public events and is reportedly quite unhappy and frustrated with the post.
However, Payette is said to be fully committed to the role and in a statement said she was looking forward to sharing accomplishments and new initiatives as her one-year anniversary approached.
Of late, there have been a string of governors general who thrived in the role. But that has not always been the case throughout our 151-year-old history. For those who accept it, Canada’s most elite appointment can easily become a confining nightmare.
Initially, Canada’s governors general were all minor royals dispatched by London. While an ambitious earl or viscount might see the post as an easy way to pad their resume, it’s not uncommon that their families would resent the sudden relocation to what was at one time malarial, dirt-roaded Ottawa.
The most classic example was Princess Louise, a daughter of Queen Victoria who would ultimately lend one of her middle names to the province of Alberta.
The princess was homesick, contemptuous of Ottawa high society and was badly injured in a sleigh accident. To top it all off, her governor general husband was likely a secret homosexual.
She spent the last years of her husband’s tenure taking extended vacations home in London, something which “resulted in her loss of popularity in Canada,” according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Still, Canadian historians have optimistically maintained that this need not be a sign that she hated us. “There is no evidence to support the argument that Princess Louise disliked Canadians,” reads the official account of the legislature in her eponymous province.
More recently, much of the 1970s and 1980s would see Rideau Hall occupied with unhappy occupants.
“The first few days were pretty grim,” Lily Schreyer, wife of Gov. Gen. Ed Schreyer, said in 1979, adding that her initial time at Rideau Hall was often spent inside a closet. “I called it my ‘crying closet’ and I think everyone should have one.”
Even governors general who like the job often grow tired of the mansion where they are forced to spend most of their time. “I find it a bit hard to always be interred in there,” Jeanne Sauve told Maclean’s in 1985.
But the Schreyers, along with their four children, had been thrust into a fish-out-of-water scenario. Ed Schreyer was a smalltown Manitoban who had just ended an eight-year stint as his province’s
I CALLED IT MY ‘CRYING CLOSET’ ... EVERYONE SHOULD HAVE ONE.
first NDP premier and he was now entering a protocol-laden world of morning suits and official toasts. And by all accounts, the Schreyers did not care for any of it.
In 1979, a CBC camera crew sent to Rideau Hall ended up capturing a Schreyer family with barely hidden contempt for the place.
“I really need the people around here to bring me up sometimes,” one daughter said. In a subtle rebellion against the strictures of Rideau Hall life, another daughter was interviewed while wearing a Winnipeg Jets jersey and a bow tie, saying that the rigours of her new life “would bother me I think but I’ve been told not to let it botherme.”
Even Ed Schreyers called the formality of the job “rather more than I anticipated” and lamented his sudden inability to say or do anything consequential. “The pressure of decision-making is, to be very blunt, considerably less,” he said.
Meanwhile, Jules Léger (governor general from 1974-1979) was a veteran diplomat well-versed in the niceties of palace life, but only five months after his appointment he suffered a severe stroke that left him partially paralyzed. Official tours and functions slowed to a trickle as he fought to relearn first French, and then English.
Although his steady rehabilitation was inspiring, later press accounts describe Rideau Hall as having been under a “pall” during the era. Leger would say later that for a time he thought “every morning” about resigning.
Then-prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was under pressure to press for a shortening of Léger’s tenure, but the governor general’s wife was “apparently reluctant to vacate Rideau Hall,” according to a 2008 book by Australian political scientist Peter John Boyce.