Her Excellency the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson
Speech on the Occasion of the Annual General Meeting of the Edmonton Community Foundation
Edmonton, Thursday, March 26, 2005
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It's good to be back in Edmonton, where I paid my first Civic Call as Governor General in October 1999. Alberta was the first province that we visited during my mandate. My most recent visit here, of course, was for the memorial to the four fallen Mounties, and I was deeply struck by your warmth and compassion.
I'm very pleased to be here with you to celebrate the work of the Edmonton Community Foundation. You have been persistent in inviting me, and now we are finally able to be together. This is an important institution in Canada. Community foundations like yours are in the business of enhancing people's lives over the long haul. You do it well; you do it efficiently. I am impressed that less than one percent of your outlay goes to administrative costs. (Could you give lessons?) None of us knows what will be the most urgent needs of the people of Edmonton in 100 years. But based on your track record of pragmatism and foresight, there is every reason to believe that you will be ready to fill the municipal cracks and support future citizens of this city.
This past holiday weekend – the national spring planting festival – John Ralston Saul and I opened up our cottage. With us was our dear friend Father Joe Maier, a Catholic priest with a heroic ministry among the poor in the slums of Bangkok. He has worked with young volunteers from around the world, and he always says that the Canadians are the best.
I asked him, "What is community for you?" I love to put questions to people whose life is focussed on the spiritual; they always take time to reflect before giving an answer. Father Joe thought for several minutes, and he said: "One of the most important things about community is not what people generally think. They have in mind a religious community, or some other group of like-minded people who all know each other. But real community is an identification with the values of others, even if you don't know them." In Father Joe's formulation, people everywhere who abhor poverty, hunger and homelessness are members of the same community. It is what we do with that feeling that counts.
This approach is very Canadian. People have come here from around the globe and accepted our history, our civic structure, our democratic viewpoint. They bring commitment, enthusiasm and talent to our country, one that many people still think of as a young one.
But our Aboriginal peoples have built strong and principled communities in this land for thousands of years. To them were added the first immigrants: the French, the English, the Scots, the Irish, the United Empire Loyalists. Now, our welcome is amazingly wide. Now, the builders of our future are coming from Somalia, Eritrea, Bosnia, Croatia, Pakistan, and Ghana. They come from everywhere, and they come to be citizens, not temporary labourers.
This is a fundamental Canadian value that we have developed only in the last four decades or so. The Canada I grew up in, as did many of you, was one that mainly excluded those who were not white, and even that was a moving target. For example, neither Italians nor Slavs were thought to be acceptable immigrants at the beginning of the 20th century.
A friend told me the other day, "I'm really tired of people who say, 'Why do all these people come and bring problems from their home countries?' What is Canada made up of, if it isn't people who bring the problems of their old countries?" It's true. Immigrants have never rejected their history or forgotten what and where they came from. They simply hoped to make a better life for themselves and their children. They brought with them the memories of their struggles – Highland and Lowland Scots, for instance, or Irish Catholics and Protestants – and some of that drama has always been played out here. By good luck and good management, though, it was done with comparatively little violence.
Today, different kinds of people come with new sorts of challenges, but our society's mission is very much the same. Through the values and the practices of Canadian life, we help new citizens to share with us the best of their traditions, and to gradually leave the bad old days behind.
The growth of our diversity reflects our commitment to the world. Canada aims to take in 1% of our total population every year as immigrants, about 310,000 people. We're not quite there; we hover around 220,000 annually. Still, the effect on our country has been dramatic. One writer has estimated that, in our Centennial year, 98.5 percent of Canadians were of European extraction.
Today, approximately 20% of us were born outside Canada; in major cities, this can be as high as 50%. By way of comparison, only about 8% of Americans were born outside the United States, whose national mythology speaks of taking in the "huddled masses yearning to be free". Not for the first time, Canada has made a dramatic, a revolutionary social development in a peaceful way.
Our levels of immigration have helped to prevent the continuance of those former homeland battles. When new sets of people arrive, they have many things on their minds, and no interest in the squabbles and timeworn resentments of others. They may be preoccupied with the problems that they themselves have left behind, and they are nearly always grateful for the stability and opportunity they find in Canada. Immigrants want order; they have often fled from unstable political situations or dismal social prospects. They want to get on with this Canadian experiment. They make a powerful case in the old "nature versus nurture" argument, because no matter where they came from, they thrive here. I have often spoken of Canada as a forgiving, rather than a punishing, society; it is also a nurturing one, which adopts new citizens into a national family based upon civility and compassion. So immigration has not only enhanced our diversity; it has also promoted our country's unity.
We accept immigrants on the basis of their ability and willingness to become good citizens within a reasonable time frame. This gives them hope and energy, and at citizenship ceremonies, you can almost touch it. We have, in the last two years, started twinning the swearing-in of citizens with the ceremony for the Governor General's Caring Canadian Award. We also invite recipients of the Medal of Bravery and Members of the Order of Canada to come, and it's a wonderful mix. New Canadians radiate their optimism and gratitude; outstanding Canadians, in turn, show them the countless ways in which citizenship can be expressed.
Lately, we've had members of these two groups sit down in roundtable discussions, which are rich with sharing and possibility. Established citizens, honoured for their contributions to Canada, can reach out to the newcomers and say, "We want you to be part of this. Here are some marvellous ways to go about it." It is a thrilling conversation every time, and I don't think there is another country in the world that can pull it off the way Canadians do.
Foundations like yours, and all the agencies that work within cities, play enormous roles in this process of acculturation. Here in Edmonton, you are part of the dynamic phenomena of large cities: feverish energy, rapid growth, and startling degrees of difference. You're not only an economic powerhouse but also a centre of innovation, culture, education and awareness of a wider world. You understand what one of the greatest philosophers of cities, Lewis Mumford, helped us all to realize. He knew that cities aren't just places where people happen to huddle together in a pleasant valley or near the mouth of a great river. They aren't just big collections of vaguely associated people.
"The chief function of the city," Mumford wrote, "is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity." In other words, cities are the engines of civilization.
But in a time of rapid change, when growth can feel explosive and unmanageable, the world's cities face tremendous challenges. For example, as the United Nations has reported, "In 1950, metropolitan New York was the only place on earth with a population of more than 10 million. There are now 20 cities of that size with more on the way, almost all of which will be in developing countries."
Yet it is still possible, it is still essential, to believe in the good city, though as Socrates said, "It is hard for it to come to be." In Canada, we are finding new ways to actualize what we probably always knew: you create a good city by creating strong communities within it. That's what your Foundation is really all about. Canada, as a fortunate and rich country, has certain built-in advantages. Our cities, for all that we might complain about the details, have functioning education and transportation systems, and extensive power and water and sewage infrastructure. There are planners galore, building permits, zoning regulations and neighbourhood associations. All of these things, which we may take for granted, are a good start, and all our cities have them. But making community is about much more than large-scale physical organization.
John and I have seen this in our travels across the country, especially in our series of urban visits, our ongoing dialogue with Canadians on what makes "The Good City". There are fascinating innovations happening, and we need to hear about them. Allow me to share with you some of the examples that we've learned about.
In Saint John, New Brunswick, the Business Community Anti-Poverty Initiative is a non-profit organization. Its study of the people struggling under poverty, and of the breadth and depth of existing social and professional services, showed that the majority of poor Saint Johners were single, unemployed parents with no high school education. With this information, the group created a holistic approach, seeking to break the cycle of poverty by removing barriers and improving opportunities in practical ways. They address people's most basic needs.
In Saskatoon, we found that an Aboriginal community from Muskeg Lake has created an urban reserve, the first of its kind. It is a commercial venture that grew out of negotiations between the city and the Muskeg Lake Reserve, which is about an hour to the north. This urban reserve encourages small business development, and it has worked out a novel tax arrangement with the city of Saskatoon.
In Toronto, the social housing development of Regent Park is the setting for a program called Pathways to Education, which is breaking the pattern of drop-outs and youth unemployment. They are getting kids to high school, keeping them there, and inspiring them to move on to post-secondary programs. They combine educational assistance with very pragmatic support. As there's no high school right in the district, the cost of a month's transit pass is often enough to discourage students from continuing, and Pathways takes care of this business. Attention to such seemingly miniscule details is part of what allows grassroots programs to change the emotional landscape in their target communities.
These are only a few of my favourite examples. There are many more. But it has become obvious, in sharing these stories of success and of needs still unmet, that positive changes made in one community could be echoed in all of them. In Edmonton, you have a great deal to offer to the civic conversations that we have in this country. Those who work for and with the Edmonton Community Foundation are generating their own stories of sustainable success, and everybody in this room can be part of it. Each of us has a niche that we can carve out for ourselves, some useful role in community construction. We may create awareness of immigrant needs, or indignation at the continuing blight of homelessness, or a fresh appreciation of the importance of public education in creating engaged and informed citizens.
Edmonton has been an important centre for the second wave of immigrant expansion in Canada, and you have a long history of diversity. You know that equality of opportunity springs out of public education. Without it, we cannot have a cohesive society. Public schools allow the children in all of our communities to take their rightful place. In this most critical Canadian institution, everybody has the chance to rub shoulders with everybody else.
In our public schools, I have seen children with turbans and head scarves happily singing "Silent Night". I have seen children with blond ringlets celebrating Diwali, the Feast of Lights. I have seen all kinds of children in front of a menorah, being shown how to light a candle for each day of Hanukkah. We no longer ignore differences, pretending they don't exist or wishing they didn't. We have passed through tolerance to acceptance, and we have come even farther: we are learning to celebrate our diversity. Of course, there are bumps along the way; I'm not saying we always make it on the first try! But we have decided to attract this broad spectrum of people and cultures, and we are making it work, often breathtakingly well.
Public education helps us to do this. We become part of each other by having learned together in the same classrooms. We understand, for example, that to be bilingual is a great advantage in Canada, and with 300,000 children in immersion schools, we are preparing young people for national and international service. When I was a child, my forward-looking parents wanted me to attend a French school, which they thought sounded terrific. Unfortunately, I was not allowed to be educated in French because I wasn't a Roman Catholic; that is how the lines were drawn in those days.
Thank goodness this is all changed. I look at a country which has transformed itself in my lifetime. Socrates knew that it is hard for the good city to come to be, but could he even have imagined the possibility of creating a nation like ours? Canada has become a place which, in effect, says to an astonishingly varied population recruited from the entire human race, "Why don't you join us? Together, we will build something good." It's both as modest and as meaningful as that. It doesn't have to be all wrapped up in nationalistic rhetoric. It's the day-to-day workings of this quietly spectacular country that really matter. We are lucky to have the national wealth we do, but it's the commitment of individuals and small groups that really counts. Every day we must struggle to encourage generous and hopeful attitudes. Every citizen should contribute to the greater good, and help others to find ways to do so. Every Canadian can feel part of some greater whole.
Who will lead such movements? Modern leadership, the kind that this Community Foundation offers to the people of Edmonton, is based on people finding ways to talk to each other, to listen to each other, and eventually to come up with answers.
In Canada, we have armed our minds and hearts with social visions which, for me, are the most inspiring ones in the world. As this Foundation has over the past 15 years, we just need to come together, wherever and whoever we are, roll up our sleeves and get to work. We must participate, and as we guide others to participate with us, we are making a better country. Thank you, Edmonton, for having taken such leadership in this beautiful process.
