Her Excellency the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson
Speech on the Occasion of the Presentation of the Governor General’s Caring Canadian Award
Rideau Hall, Monday, April 18, 2005
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I am very pleased to welcome all of you here to Rideau Hall, Canada's House. I hope that this ceremony and the rest of your visit here will feel like home, a very special home whose raison d'être is to welcome Canadians and to honour all that is best about our wonderful country.
The Governor General's Caring Canadian Awards are a fine legacy of my predecessor, Roméo LeBlanc. More than anything else, he wanted to find a way to pay national respects to local heroes, the people who give substance and coherence to our communities. Today, we honour 22 of these heroes.
Recipients, I can almost hear the question in your minds. "Who, me?" The most common response I get in ceremonies like this is a humble, even embarrassed one. "I'm just helping out, the way a lot of other people do." I am always touched by the way that extraordinary people like you think of their work as the most natural, the most inevitable thing that a person could do.
And in this National Volunteer Week, one of the most hopeful things we can say about Canada is that large numbers of its citizens feel the same way you do. While not many of us could match your devoted and inspiring service, there are millions of Canadians who find a way each year to give back time and talent to the communities they love. In more ways than we can count, the spirit and the practice of voluntarism is what creates the communities that we love.
The key is compassion. Compassion is based on the simple but profoundly human understanding that other people are real, and so are their needs. Our marvellous writer Margaret Laurence called it "the passionate plea of caring....Try to feel," she said, "in your heart's core, the reality of others." All our most beautiful expressions of goodness, our many statements of one golden rule, are founded upon this feeling.
Meanwhile, the greatest evils, our sorry histories of injustice and oppression, stem from failures of compassion. The worst tyrants have condemned it as a quality of the weak. They make absurd analogies to the supposedly "dog eat dog" world of nature. They parade the blunt instruments of their physical or psychological power and argue for "the survival of the fittest".
But we know, from the lives of humanity's greatest heroes and saints, and from the examples of people like you in every town and city, that compassion is the hallmark of the truly strong. We see that self-absorption is a mark of immaturity, that only the most diseased or crippled souls are incapable of empathy. We understand that human virtue and ability are expressed in reaching out to better the lives of others. The fittest human societies are the ones that find a way to do this consistently.
This is what community building is about: finding ways to do together what we cannot accomplish on our own; gathering strength and shared resolution, for as one writer has said, "many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness." Community makes connections among people, allowing them to emerge from isolation, from that sickening feeling that no one cares.
In the citations describing you, the Caring Canadians, we are given a catalogue of the wonderful range of constructive possibilities. You are advocates for the poor, the aged, the dislocated, the sick, the young. You drive them, coach them, feed them, and house them. You build for them, organize for them, plan and sing and even run incredible distances for them. In your collective volunteer careers, you have helped thousands to feel that they belong to a community that cares. You have been a small oasis in the dryness of day to day.
In fact, you are most of the things that most of us want to be most of the time: lively, creative, cheerful, hopeful. From all reports, and from all the recipients that I have met over the years, you may be some of the happiest people we could find. I think you may be on to something!
I am pleased to confer upon you, on behalf of your fellow citizens, this modest but important title of "Caring Canadian". It is a sign of our esteem for you and for the causes that you have taken up as your own. It is a symbol of your country's gratitude to you for all your small victories among the people and places where you live.
Thank you so much.
