Keeble McFarlane

T he day was perfect for the historic occasion scheduled for the Red Chamber - the room where Canada's Senate meets. The sky was picture-postcard blue, the sun bathed the stately parliament buildings in Ottawa, the country's charming capital city. A detachment of soldiers clad in brilliant red tunics topped off with huge black bear-skin hats stood at attention right in front of the main entrance, below the 30-story Peace Tower which is the focal point of Parliament Hill, a promontory overlooking the mighty Ottawa River. The 600 or so guests had taken their seats inside. A small motorcade pulls up, and emerging from a limousine is the country's 27th Governor General, here to be sworn in to office. Hold it - this is not some old white guy from across the Atlantic, speaking with a clipped British accent and wearing a plumed hat. No - it's a slender woman - and black as well!

Michaëlle Jean, a 48-year-old immigrant from Haiti, climbed the steps last Tuesday and walked into history. The ceremony took place less than two months after the prime minister, Paul Martin, in an uncharacteristic stroke of brilliance, named Ms Jean to the post as de facto head of state for Canada. The ceremony - usually an event encrusted with prescribed behaviour and protocol entrenched by history - broke new ground in keeping with the seismic shift in public life that the appointment signifies. Yes, the protocol was there, all right, but only in so far as it was necessary.

Ms Jean was accompanied by her husband - a French-born intellectual and movie maker - and their six-year-old daughter, who managed to bear up under all the scrutiny. They shattered all kinds of precedents. In the past, the outgoing G G would have either left town or stayed away from the ceremony, but this time the previous holder of the office - another forceful and formidable woman - threw precedent out the window and made sure she was there to welcome her successor. In addition to the presentation of the instruments of office and the signing of official registers, there was entertainment - a fiddler from Cape Breton on the east coast played Celtic music, a native story-teller offered a traditional explanation of how the land was formed, a singer from Alberta accompanied by a guitar, a young composer playing a composition on the pipa (a Chinese violin) accompanied by a conventional string quartet, topped off by a gospel choir from Montreal which promptly set the old place rocking at the end of the ceremony, with the new G G dancing along effortlessly while the prime minister struggled to maintain rhythm. Outside, Haitian immigrants who went by chartered bus from Montreal waved Haitian and Canadian flags, hooting and hollering in delight.

Ms Jean made a hard-hitting address, in impeccable French and English (she also speaks Creole, Italian and Spanish), asserting that "the time of the 'two solitudes' that for too long described the character of this country is past". She also appealed to the young, deploring a situation in which "nothing in today's society is more disgraceful than the marginalisation of some young people who are driven to isolation and despair".

Although the office she now holds is a ceremonial one, the appointment is nevertheless significant, since it represents the Canada of today, with its multi-hued and multilingual cities teeming with people from all over the world. In Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver or Ottawa, you can sample cuisines from Vietnam through Somalia to Argentina, Ukraine and Italy; you can attend movies with dialogue in Gujarati or Mandarin; you can worship according to aboriginal, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Shinto or Buddhist traditions, or you may have a Korean as one neighbour, a recent immigrant from Gwongdong as another, while across the street lives a family from Romania and further down one from Guyana living beside some whose grandparents came from Italy.

The story of Michaëlle Jean is like many others - she came to Canada in the 1960s when she was 11. Her father, a teacher in Port-au-Prince, had been abused and tortured by Papa Doc's Ton-Ton Macoutes, and he took his family to Quebec. Unfortunately, they split up shortly after they arrived because he just couldn't settle down after what he'd been through. Ms. Jean's mother worked as a nurse in Montreal and made sure her daughters got a good education. The girl who was to become the Queen's representative in Canada excelled at her studies, and became a journalist. It wasn't easy, because she had chosen television and the CBC's French network was pur laine (pure wool, as they say in Quebec) meaning old-line (white) Quebecois. But she blazed a trail there and eventually had her own programmes on both the French and the English networks.

Curiously, the publicly-owned CBC has provided the last three Governors General. The last one, Adrienne Clarkson, herself a trailblazer, was also an immigrant (from Hong Kong) who made a successful career over some three decades as a television writer, interviewer, and host, and also represented the province of Ontario in its trade and cultural office in Paris. Before her, Romeo Leblanc, who had completed a successful career as a Liberal MP and cabinet minister, had been a foreign correspondent for the CBC's French network.

Ms Jean's coat of arms also breaks traditions - it contains several Haitian references, including two Simbis, or water-spirits, who comfort souls, purify troubled waters and intervene with wisdom and foresight. The motto she chose is in French: Briser les solitudes, which means "Break down solitudes" - the focal point of her inaugural speech. But the appointment brings into focus another matter which will become more pressing with each passing day. The Queen is now 80, and the question of her successor will force Canadians to consider whether they want to continue having as head of state someone who is essentially a foreigner living an ocean away, and how to go about selecting one who lives there and springs out of the country's own domestic traditions.

- keeble.mack@sympatico.ca

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