Media

Speech on the Occasion of a State Dinner Hosted by the President of the Federal Republic of Germany

Berlin, Wednesday, October 24, 2001

The Canadians have arrived. Thanks to your gracious invitation, President Rau. But why have we come.

We have come because this visit is an opportunity to meet you, the Germans, and to discover what you are thinking, what your views and concerns are as a dynamic and accomplished society.

We have come to see and to learn about the tremendous re-construction of this city, Berlin, as a major centre for culture and politics.

We've just spent two days in Dresden and Bautzen, seeing for ourselves how innovation and technology are revitalizing this historic part of the country. I had a fascinating discussion at the Bombardier plant, for about an hour, hearing from workers who had lived through the social and economic change of the past decade. After Berlin, we continue to Dόsseldorf and Cologne.

From our side, we hope to bring to you an honest and vivid message of what our country is like – what it is today.

Canada's relations with Germany are long and varied. They begin with the first German immigrants to Canada – Loyalists to the British Crown who rejected the American Revolution. This is not a well-known fact. Canadians and Germans experienced the struggles of two World Wars. And many Germans came to Canada after World War II in search of a new life.

Our intellectual relations with Germany are as long and varied – and equally important. The German achievements in music, literature and philosophy are truly universal. They have influenced and inspired western civilization, and therefore Canadian civilization, over the centuries. Many the world over have found their spiritual mentors in this land – from Bach, Beethoven, Lessing and Schiller to Stockhausen and Botho Strauss. And for the past 30 years, we have shared research ideas through the Canada-Germany Science and Technology Agreement, a wonderfully successful model of close cooperation between our best and brightest people.

Despite this familiarity, it's nonetheless time, at the outset of a new century, that we learn about each other anew – as close friends and allies. And a complex and challenging time in the history of our democracies.

Both our countries are engaged in what I would call noble experiments in democracy. We are trying, in our respective ways, to adapt and develop our societies in order to reflect the reality of modern times and circumstances.

In Canada, we are some years into the evolution of a complex multi-cultural society, based on two languages, reflecting our reality as a country of diversity and immigration.

You in Germany are a decade into a most remarkable endeavour – a reunification and reconciliation of a country once split in two. You are a leading force in the further deepening and enlargement of the European Union, bringing forth new ideas of how to make this institution more democratic and accountable to its citizens. And you are embarking on a new approach to minorities and immigrants in your society.

President Rau, in your speech last year at the House of World Culture you said that "integration is the task that [you] must approach jointly if [you] – (Germans and immigrants) – want to live together successfully and peaceably" and thus "incorporating the wish to belong".

Despite our different realities and circumstances, what Canada and Germany fundamentally share is a tradition of democracy which goes back much farther than our two societies. Two thousand, five hundred years ago, Pericles said to the Athenians.

"We live under a form of government...called a democracy. Its administration is in the hands, not of the few, but of the many... We are open in our public life. We are free from suspicion of one another in the pursuits of everyday life. We feel no resentment if our neighbour does as he likes. We obey...laws which bring help to the oppressed and those which bring upon the wrongdoer a disgrace which all men recognize...We throw our state open to all the world and we never...(prevent) anyone from seeing or learning anything... We are ready to meet dangers depending on the courage which springs from (our) manner of life rather than the compulsion of laws."

This is the ideal which we both seek to bring to fruition in our respective societies. And this is something that I can tell you that Canadians cherish.

Our trip is an opportunity to prove the solidarity and similarity of our two countries in upholding democratic values in modern times. When we started our planning, we never dreamed that one of its most important purposes would be so salient, thrown into dramatic relief by the terrorist assault on the United States.

But now we see our purpose magnified by recent circumstances, as our citizens look to their governments and leaders for a response.

President Rau, when I read your remarks at the Brandenburg Gate shortly after September 11^th, I was deeply impressed and moved by the humanism of its sentiments. You said: "We will not react to the challenge with powerlessness or with weakness, rather with strength and determination. Hatred must not lead us into hatred. Nothing is so difficult to build and nothing so easy to destroy as peace."

This is wise counsel, and serves as an important moral compass in helping us to find our way in difficult – and, to many, uncertain – times. But we will find our way, for we are well girded with, and strong in, the values that our democracies have embraced. Values which we as citizens have entrenched within our selves. Values which provide the foundation for our responsibilities to each other as citizens. Values which are at the core of our humanity – of our capacity to imagine the reality of others.

Margaret Laurence, one of our greatest novelists, wrote of this: "If this were my final hour, these would be my words to you. I would not claim to pass on any secret of life, for there isn't any, or any wisdom except the passionate plea of caring. Try to feel, in your heart's core, the reality of others."

This is the key to knowing other countries, other cultures and other peoples. And it is equally key in knowing one's own society and culture.

And you, President Rau, in your career and as President of the Federal Republic of Germany, have embodied this capacity to imagine the reality of others. In your efforts to build bridges between people of different backgrounds and beliefs, in seeking to reconcile, not divide. You have helped to set the style of the new, re-unified Germany.

What strikes me in particular is your effort to ensure that there are channels for everyone in society to voice their concerns. So that no one, no voice, remains unheard. This, as your speech to the House of Culture made clear, includes minorities and immigrants. So that their voices may be heard. So that people can live together without fear, without illusion. "A diverse and vibrant Germany – peaceful and cosmopolitan" is the goal that you articulated and resolutely seek.

But what sort of view do Germans today have of Canada? Something more than "moose, Mounties and mountains", we hope. Large numbers of German businesses see us as a land of economic opportunity. Just as we see you also as a land of investment and economic partnership.

Of course, we are very happy to see the many German tourists who come to Canada because of the wide-open spaces, the remarkable number of islands that you can explore, and the romance of our pioneer, explorer and Aboriginal histories. And, remarkably, you are not put off by our glacial winters and almost sub-tropical summers. Our German friends particularly enjoy the vast stretches of granite that we call the Canadian Shield. And the thousands and thousands of lakes, most of them unnamed, which knit our country together like the spaces between a net of land.

We enjoy these too. But we want you to know the real us and what we are like today – in addition to the images of Mounties.

We want you to know that we are surging with creative energy. We want you to know that we have welcomed people from all over the world who have chosen to come, or sought refuge, in this big land.

In particular, what we want to show you is how we have imagined our country through our culture. A country which we have imagined into being for the last several hundred years. A culture which reflects essentially Canada's aboriginal peoples and the immigrant society that Canada has always been – and will continue to be. For everyone in Canada has arrived there from someplace else. Except for the Aboriginal peoples, whose civilizations long pre-date the arrival of the explorers, traders, settlers and colonial administrators.

In our Delegation, we have brought the best and most modern of our playwrights, writers, artists, musicians, environment and business leaders. We have with us parliamentarians and a minister of the government. We have people who represent the cutting edge of our culture – Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, who won the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale in June; the renowned filmmakers Atom Egoyan and Don McKellar; the leading modern composer Alexina Louie; and the brilliant playwright Michel Marc Bouchard, who has already made his mark in the theatre world in Germany, and many others.

Our delegation speaks of our diversity – a diversity which many people in the world find almost incredible. And much of that diversity has come through deliberate choice or accidents of fate, as people from all corners of the globe, from all sorts of individual circumstance, have made Canada their home. I myself am a refugee who came to a country which has now evolved into a welcoming one – we're not better than anyone else, we just changed quicker.

One such person who arrived in Canada when well into his adult life was the outstanding German-Canadian poet, Walter Bauer, who was born in Saxony. He wrote very movingly of the experience of the refugee and new immigrant, having survived the banning of his books in the 1930s and his service in the German Army during the Second World War and as a prisoner of war. In 1952, he arrived in Canada and made it his home. In his poem, entitled Canada, Bauer says.

"Here you receive another kind of wisdom,
bitter and icy and not to everybody's taste.
This earth says:
I was here long before you and the like of you came;
Unmolested I conversed with wind and rivers,
Don't forget that, my friend. –
The wind blows cold from Labrador:
I have a message for you from the ice age,
But I shall not decode it for you. –
The forests of the north surge like waves:
We shall last longer than you."

In Canada, we forget the climate at our peril, and all people who come to our country learn that very quickly.

But Bauer also spoke of living in Canada under the "cold refugee sky here". Through his poetry he expressed the problems of alienation and assimilation faced by every immigrant. The "once I lived there, now I live here" of the newcomer. His work – like that of all immigrant writers and artists – has become, is becoming, a vital part of our culture and a society, a vital part of our collective narrative. Where everyone is an immigrant, everyone has written their own story.

We have come to listen to your new story. To how you envision yourselves and how you feel about a country that has willed itself into a re-unified democratic existence.

Perhaps this is why, as Canadians, we feel a particular empathy with Gόnter Grass. In his 1999 Nobel Lecture, he spoke of the importance of life as story-telling. He spoke of the narrative that must end with: "To Be Continued..." He said: "Our common novel must be continued." And I interpret that in a larger sense to mean that we, Germany and Canada, are together writing the chapters of a novel for this kind of unified, democratic civilization at the beginning of the 21^st century.

I raise my glass to toast the nobility of this purpose, and the strength to make it come about. To Canada, to Germany.