To John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir
Your Excellency,
I address you formally out of respect. Yet I feel like I know you as a friend despite the years that separate our lives and tenures in office, and despite the fact you died a year before I was born. While I draw inspiration and ideas from many of my predecessors, the experiences and lessons from your life and specifically from your term as governor general are my guiding light. In your quiet way, you established a new model for the position of governor general in our country. Unlike your predecessors, you travelled widely across this country, especially to the North, to meet Canadians in the places where they lived, worked, worshipped, and played. The humanity and compassion you showed encouraged them to exhibit these qualities in their own lives. And while you were an unusually engaged citizen of the world, your country was a country of the mind, as Frank Scott put it.
You also made the first substantial contribution to the country’s cultural life by setting up the Governor General’s Literary Awards. How appropriate for someone who had over a hundred and twenty books published in his lifetime. Your awards have grown into Canada’s most coveted prize for writers, translators, and illustrators, and the ceremony to honour winners is a highly anticipated gathering at Rideau Hall each year. Your example inspired other ways to honour and inspire Canadians, such as creating the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards, the Governor General’s Innovation Awards and the Polar Medal, as well as rekindling the Governor General’s Caring Canadian Award, which in 2015 was elevated to the Sovereign’s Medal for Volunteers.
What impresses me most about you and your tenure is the sensitivity you showed to the country’s French and British heritage and the wise words you shared with all Canadians in the crucial first decade following passage of the 1931 Statute of Westminster. This act of the British Parliament, which granted legislative independence to Canada and made it a fully sovereign country under the law, stirred in many Canadians a sense of unease about their identity and more precisely an uncertainty about where their primary loyalty should lie – with Britain or with Canada or somewhere in between.
While you recognized the limitations placed on your office and how these limits often compelled you to speak in “governor generalities,” you nonetheless spoke clearly and sharply enough to persuade Canadians that having multiple loyalties was a positive force, and that we should acquire ever-widening loyalties, especially as we grew older. We should start small, you said, with our schools and neighbourhoods, and broaden our loyalties to include the profession in which we work and serve, then the province and nation in which we live, and ultimately our whole world and fellow human beings. You said that this array of loyalties was a positive and essential force not only in this country, but also throughout a world that had recently been drawn into a cataclysmic war by violent, exclusionary nationalisms, and that would soon be engulfed in an even more catastrophic war by these same forces. Why must we pay such an awful price to learn our lessons?
You had a keen view of this country. Perhaps it came from the fact that you were new to it and therefore could see it with fresh eyes. Early in your tenure, you observed that Canadians had a limited vision – that “everybody thinks in compartments” of region or language or religion or ancestry. You taught us that we don’t need to shed any other aspect of our identities to be Canadian. Being Canadian isn’t a matter of choosing a single compartment. Canadians become their true selves when they remain open to the world and all the complexity it represents. When we do so, we lessen if not overcome the many surface divisions and centrifugal forces that would tear apart such a diverse country as ours. Inclusiveness and an acceptance of complexity and all the difficulties and ultimately richness it brings: that is your idea of Canada. At the same time, you were under no illusions about the challenge Canadians faced to embody this idea of the nation. Canada is, after all, “a biggish job.”
Hugh MacLennan opens his novel Two Solitudes – published in 1945 but with its narrative spanning 1917 to 1939 – by exploring the habit of Canadians back then to think in compartments:
Two old races and religions meet here and live their separate legends, side by side. If this sprawling half-continent has a heart, here it is. Its pulse throbs out along the rivers and railroads; slow, reluctant and rarely simple, a double beat, a self-moved reciprocation.
He was writing about Montreal specifically, yet his words speak to the entire country and the compartments in which we placed ourselves then and in which some of us still choose to dwell or encase others – French-speaking or English-speaking, Protestant or Catholic or Muslim, new Canadian or native born, urban or rural, young or old, male or female. Many read the novel then and even now as a verdict on Canada: a country forever divided and therefore doomed. I disagree. Any of our differences are not symptoms of a permanent condition. We Canadians have shown an uncanny ability to bridge distinctions and include the isolated. John Ralston Saul wrote that Two Solitudes offered that differences weren’t prisons, merely complications that could be dealt with. MacLennan’s idea of Canada is that our history is itself an exercise in dealing with complications that come with life in such a vast, diverse country. The differences are there and may always exist in some form. Let’s deal with them and overcome them. Better yet, rise above them.
Both you and MacLennan held the idea that Canada has always been an experiment increasingly devoted to the proposition that ours would be home to all the peoples of the world – a nation for all nations. How has your idea fared over the past seventy-five years? I tried to answer this question in the preamble to the Speech from the Throne to open the Second Session of the Forty-first Parliament. My idea of Canada is that we have been able to survive and thrive because we have embraced some qualities larger and more important than others that may seem different on the surface.
We are inclusive. We are 36 million people gathered from every part of the world. We welcome the contribution of all those who inhabit this land – from the first of us to the latest among us.
We are honourable. People of peace, we use our military power sparingly, but when we do so we do so with full conviction, gathering our forces as men and women who believe that the freedoms we enjoy cannot be taken from us. This clarity focuses our might in terrible times. And wherever and whenever we unleash that might, we raise our grateful voices and our prayers to honour those who have stood in harm’s way for us.
We are selfless. Our survival has been sustained by humility and acceptance of our mutual interdependence. Giving lies in our very nature, certain in our hearts that none but the gift passed from an open hand will multiply as those we help better themselves, those they love, and, at length, the country they call home.
We are smart. We deplore self-satisfaction, yearning rather for self-improvement. We love learning and cherish our right to it. We are united, prosperous, and free precisely because we ensure that Canadians have opportunities to learn, excel, advance, and thus to contribute.
We are caring. Our abiding concern for the common good of our neighbours in each community makes us responsive. We do not abandon our fellows to scrape by in times of distress or natural disaster. Inspired by our common bond, we come swiftly and resiliently to the aid of those in need.
I think you would agree with this fresh idea of Canada. Even more so, I think you would agree that Canadians must relentlessly uphold principles and take actions that are inclusive, honourable, selfless, smart, and caring at every turn without fail. So much for governor generalities!
Collegially yours,
David
John Buchan, His Excellency the Right Honourable the Lord Tweedsmuir (1875–1940), served as Canada’s fifteenth governor general from November 2, 1935, to February 11, 1940, the day of his death.