To my successors
Dear governors general of the future,
I have delivered 250 or so speeches each year during my time as governor general – everything from impromptu remarks before informal gatherings to lengthy orations to members of Parliament and senators assembled to mark the opening of a new session of Parliament. I have gained from this experience what one might term a discordant relationship with speeches; they are the most inefficient way to communicate widely because each speech is a singular event that takes place at a specific time and place, yet this very inefficiency heightens the potential influence of speeches on those who carve out the time to attend them. These people get to look at you (sometimes right in the eye), hear your voice, and see the expressions on your face and movements of your body. For flesh-and-blood audiences, then, speeches can still say a lot – even in a day when the directly spoken word is eclipsed by so many other media.
Each of you will no doubt make many hundreds of speeches of your own during your tenures in this office. With this fact in mind, allow me to pass along a very brief counsel about speechmaking. It comes from my grandmother. She told me that on any and all occasions at which I’m called on to speak, I should stand up to be seen, speak up to be heard, and sit down to be appreciated. The third element of her directive is often the most important for us speechmakers – for when we neglect to follow the first of these two commands, our audiences certainly want us to follow the third. In the spirit of my grandmother’s sage advice, I’ll now sit down, so to speak.
Yours in brevity,
David
P.S. As W.C. Fields once observed: “There are smiles wherever I go. There are more smiles whenever I go.”
As of writing, there have been twenty-eight governors general of Canada. Although this office dates to 1867, it can be argued that the institution of the Crown’s representative on this land dates to 1627 with the appointment of Samuel de Champlain as the first governor of New France. One wonders how many speeches he gave.