Payette right to speak out and to keep talking
Oh, to be Governor General of Canada, the world’s most earnest country. Oh, to be Governor General encumbered with an education in mathematics, engineering and aeronautics. Oh, to be Governor General celebrating science with a refreshing, if artless, honesty.
This is what it is to be Julie Payette. Address a science conference, as a scientist, and defend science. Question creationism and a little astrology, too. Dare to doubt a “sugar pill” can cure cancer.
Try this, as vice-regal representative in Canada, and feel the wrath of the aggrieved come down upon you. Resign! Apologize! Fire your speechwriter!
Her Excellency should have known that rejecting astrology and creationism in Canada might be seen as an attack on faith. Challenging orthodoxy here — real or perceived — is not done, which is ironically why we cannot have an adult conversation on abolishing the monarchy.
Nothing gets the harpies, the royalists, the constructionists, the purists and the literalists going like a mouthy Governor General questioning old pieties and discredited notions. She’s rising above her station or falling below it.
As a woman famously said of Lester Pearson after hearing he’d won the Nobel Prize in 1957: “Well, who does he think he is?”
Who is Madame Payette to wonder that “we’re still debating and still questioning whether humans have a role in the Earth warming up or whether even the Earth is warming up, period?”
Who is she to doubt that “your future . . . can be determined by looking at planets coming in front of invented constellations?”
Who is she to wonder that “we are still debating . . . whether life was a divine intervention or whether it was coming out of a natural process let alone, oh my goodness, a random process?” For uttering this blasphemy, the nanny brigade called her a partisan, compromising her office. They slapped her wrist and sent her to bed without a Happy Meal.
It is the usual suspects wagging a wrinkled finger. This is what you get from the Miss Thistlebottoms and their schools of scolds when you venture beyond governor generalities.
Asked the headline over a critical column by Robyn Urback: “In what universe is it appropriate for a Governor General to deride people for their beliefs?” Well, actually, this universe if those beliefs (it isn’t clear Payette attacked religion) become public policy against a body of evidence that shows climate change is real. This universe includes a president of the United States who denies climate change.
Of course the Governor General shouldn’t offend people, nor cause the government to squirm. But that doesn’t mean she should stay home and pour tea. That’s not why she was appointed, and why Catherine McKenna, minister of the environment and climate change, was right to defend her.
McKenna sees more than anyone the consequences of ignoring climate change. This includes Washington’s frontal attack on the environment: cutting funding to the Great Lakes Basin, weakening the Clean Air Act, withdrawing from the Paris Accord on Climate Change.
Payette offered a few bracing truths. In our Orwellian world of falsehood and fake news, Canada benefits from a word of doubt from a figure of authority.
Indeed, let her talk more of things unsaid in our country: sexual harassment in the military and beyond; a citizen’s responsibilities as well as rights; the blight of child poverty. Of what are we afraid?
Unbound by 19th-century strictures, Payette can carefully and creatively raise public awareness and provoke useful debate, affirming, once again, that it’s 2017.