A speech no politician would dare make
In place of the usual gooey clichés of Canadian nationalism, the obsession with minor differences, the nursing of ancient grievances, the exaltation of some supposed national predisposition to statism, we heard an invocation of a different Canada, and a different Canadianism — an older, meatier variety, before the Liberals and their bureaucratic accomplices went to work bleaching the life out of it. It was a speech, perhaps paradoxically, that only an immigrant could have given, or could get away with, for it spoke from and to the reality of the immigrant experience, of what immigrants really see in this country, and cherish about it. It is why they come here, and it is worlds away from what the mythmakers would have us believe about it.
The headline-making passage was, of course, her firm declaration that “the time of ‘ two solitudes’ … is past.” This wasn’t a fond hope. It was a brisk directive: not only to the traditional divisions of French and English, but to “ all the solitudes.” We must learn, she said, “to see beyond our wounds, beyond our differences, for the good of all.” Beyond our wounds? Beyond our differences? But, but... what about the mosaic? What about the community of communities? What about the Canada “whose strength is its diversity,” the Canada that issues weekly apologies for centuriesold slights, that spent 40 years turning itself inside out trying to meet the latest revision of Quebec’s “historic demands”? Balls to that, said this descendant of slaves. Get over yourselves. “ We must eliminate the spectre of all the solitudes and promote solidarity among all the citizens who make up the Canada of today.”
On its own, this would make this a remarkable speech. Try to imagine any elected politician in Canada having the brass to make such a statement. Or even the inclination — they whose careers have been built on pandering to those very differences, pouring salt into those same wounds. She shamed them all. Gilles Duceppe looked unhappiest when it was over. But I can’t imagine any of the assembled dignitaries could have been entirely comfortable at this implied rebuke.
Yet there was much more. What was the first quality she identified with Canada? What did she spend the first half of her speech praising? Our tolerance, perhaps? Our health care system, or our devotion to multilateralism? Try freedom. Over and over, she returned to the theme of “ this land of freedom,” connecting her own story to that of the first settlers, each seeking, and finding, freedom on its shores. Her life, she said, had been “a lesson in learning to be free.” As a refugee from “a ruthless dictatorship,” she knew, she said, “ how precious that freedom is,” and at what price it must sometimes be won.
To defend it required courage, even a little orneriness, qualities she was certain her fellow citizens, contrary to stereotype, possessed in spades. “Every Canadian woman, every Canadian man prizes that freedom and would defy anyone who tried to take it away — of that I have no doubt.” The same words might have been uttered by Joseph Howe or D’Arcy McGee, or any Father of Confederation. But today? Doesn’t it sound a little too … American? Would any Canadian politician so much as mention “freedom” without automatically balancing it against some equally valid opposite, like order, or equality, or the notwithstanding clause?
The freedom she prized as a distinguishing feature of Canada, it was clear, was defined not just as the absence of tyranny, but as a habit of mind: what she referred to, no less than four times, as our “spirit of adventure.” It was a spirit rooted deep in our history. “More than four centuries ago,” she said, “that spirit of adventure drove women and men to cross the ocean and discover a new world elsewhere.… Our history speaks powerfully about the freedom to invent a new world, about the courage underlying those remarkable adventures.” Indeed, “we are the sum of those adventures.”
Think about that: Canada as the creation of individual acts of courage, the accumulated history of millions of private adventures, for which the indispensable ingredient was freedom. This is not the orderly series of public works projects of so many high-school textbooks. It is the secret history of Canada, the one our statists have suppressed.
It is in freedom, she went on, that we find the true source of our unity: not in the heroic acts of statesmen, or in the romanticization of Crown corporation, but in the common experience of liberty. “From Signal Hill to Vancouver Island, from Baffin Land to Thetford Mines, the freedom that is ours unites us all.” A century ago, this sort of thing was commonplace. “Canada is free,” Sir Wilfrid Laurier said, “and freedom is its nationality.” Today it is heresy.
Does that make us different from other countries? Should we make the preservation of national differences, the protection of a distinctive national culture the idée fixe of policy? Not according to Mme. Jean. “I hope to rally our creative forces around those values that unite us all and that are universal in scope.” Not the values that make us distinct, note: the values that unite us. And they unite us, because they are universal: they connect us as Canadians, because they connect us as human beings.
Universal values? For decades, our artists and intellectuals, politicians and bureaucrats, have scoffed at the very idea. Apparently Her Excellency didn’t get the memo.