Mary Simon’s instinct for unity over division.
OUR SHIP OF STATE HAS JUST TAKEN A HIT. — BARBARA KAY
The viceregal appointment of Mary Simon has garnered wide support, an Indigenous governor general coming as a much-needed balm after the heightened tensions of the past weeks.
Given the catastrophe of her predecessor, Julie Payette, who was also hailed as a trailblazer on identity grounds, it is premature to predict success, but there is much surer ground for confidence this time around. Indeed, Simon was considered a strong candidate more than 10 years ago when David Johnston was appointed.
Before Simon takes up residence at Rideau Hall — that used to go without saying, but needs saying after Payette refused to live there — her appointment is significant in four important ways.
First, it is an acknowledgment that while Canada remains committed to English and French as official languages, as a functional matter Justin Trudeau has symbolically buried the dream his father had for Canada, bilingual from coast to coast. That dream was not widely shared, that English would be as welcome in Quebec as French would be everywhere else.
Quebec plans to amend the Constitution to ensure that French is its official language, and is ratcheting up its language policy to limit the prevalence of English. Trudeau is absolutely fine with that, as much as it would have horrified his father.
That Simon doesn’t speak French was noted, of course, but it is largely a non-issue. Canada has become, in recent years, more English-speaking than bilingual — just as Poland and Pakistan have become more English-speaking. It’s the age of the internet, and the internet is English.
The governor general, hardly a dominant public figure in English Canada, is truly marginal in Quebec. The only communities likely to lament that Simon’s bilingualism includes Inuktitut but not French are the minority French-language communities for whom federal protection for minority language rights is valued.
On the other hand, it will be nice to have a governor general who, when making land acknowledgments, does not need to have the proper pronunciations written out phonetically.
Second, it says something that Simon is the fifth governor general in the past 40 years to have worked at the
CBC (Jeanne Sauve, Roméo Leblanc, Adrienne Clarkson and Michaëlle Jean preceding her). David Johnston, in a radical break with tradition, had simply hosted a show that aired on CBC Newsworld.
The CBC has a certain view of Canada, but it is not the only valid one. If alternative views are really welcome, Rex Murphy should be considered for a viceregal posting, given his own long history at the national broadcaster.
Third, what is considered an advantage might not be. Wayne Spear praised Simon in these pages because “from the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, to the patriation of the Constitution, the Charlottetown accord, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, the creation of Nunavut and the Indian Residential School System — there is no major event or issue of the past 50 years that touched upon the affairs of Indigenous people that she has not been involved in.”
That she knows the terrain of Crown-indigenous history and current issues is beyond dispute. That she has an instinct for unity rather than division is also clear. But if you incline to the view that the Indigenous peoples of Canada have had rather too much government, rather than not enough, the elevation of someone who has spent her entire life negotiating how the government manages Indigenous peoples may not be a promising sign. Indigenous Canadians could do with a little less managing, permitted instead to enjoy the liberties that other Canadians take for granted.
Fourth, the genius of the viceregal arrangement is that it permits the Crown to speak, as it were, in the full bloom of local accents. I wrote last year of my pride that the new lieutenant-governor of Alberta experienced, like my own family, the expulsion from Uganda of all Asians. Salma Lakhani knows better than most the value of the Crown and Commonwealth.
The same is noted whenever another “first” is appointed, as when Clarkson was able to highlight in her person the contribution of Chinese Canadians. Jean Chrétien took pains that even that tiniest of all minorities, the billionaires, would be blessed with viceregal representation, appointing members of the Weston and Mccain families as lieutenants-governor.
There have been other Indigenous viceregal appointments; I particularly admired the contributions of Graydon Nicholas, lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick (2009-2014). There have been five Indigenous lieutenants-governor, and their admirable service is reason to expect that the benefits will be replicated on the national level.