IQALUIT, Nunavut – At least one person’s unimpressed by all the fuss over the seal-skinning adventures of Michaelle Jean: her predecessor as Governor General.
Adrienne Clarkson was curt when asked by a reporter about Jean’s headline-grabbing gesture last week, and Clarkson’s own memories of meals with the Inuit.
“I’ve eaten raw food here since 1971. It’s nothing new to me, okay?” Clarkson told The Canadian Press this weekend. Both women were attending an arctic gathering hosted by Clarkson’s husband John Ralston Saul.
“I have a lovely seal skin coat. . . I’ve eaten raw food since 1971 – and there you are.”
Jean’s decision to help skin a seal with a traditional ulu blade, ask for a slice of heart, and then eat it, triggered an emotional reaction from supporters and critics around the world.
There is indeed long historical precedent for the gesture: even Prince Charles snacked on the blubbery mammal during a trip to the North three decades ago.
But the difference is last week’s events were captured on video, landing amid an international debate over seal hunting.
Clarkson said she hadn’t seen the images, as she quietly slipped out of a high school gymnasium Friday. Across the room, a crowd had gathered around Jean to shake her hand and snap photos.
The former governor general may have been indifferent to the hoopla. But the indifference cuts both ways.
Jean is equally unimpressed with Clarkson’s most recent public offerings.
Clarkson, in remarks interpreted as a slight at Jean, last month suggested all future candidates for governor general should be forced to undergo a Canadian-knowledge quiz.
She urged televised hearings where vice-regal aspirants could be asked to locate the Mackenzie River, discuss the conscription crisis and the Manitoba Schools Question, or name Canadian artists.
The suggestion was interpreted by many as a shot at Jean, who had just recently been publicly corrected when she mixed up B.C.’s Coastal Mountains and the Rockies.
Unlike Clarkson, who in a lengthy career as a CBC journalist had travelled extensively across the country, Jean worked almost exclusively in Quebec.
She admitted in her 2005 installation speech that she had much left to discover about Canada.
Jean says what’s important is that the office reflect the country: a place where people arrive with different attributes, but celebrate what they have in common.
“You start from your own experience. What I brought . . . was my own story. And we live in a country where every individual can do that,” Jean said.
“That’s why we need to work on our sense of belonging. And belonging goes beyond the ability to name the Mackenzie River and say where it is. It goes far beyond that.”
That view of shared citizenship was illustrated last week by images of a Haitian-born Governor General participating enthusiastically in an Inuit skinning ritual.
Jean noted afterward that she was born in a place where meat is always well-cooked and eating it raw would be unthinkable – but there she was, defending seal-hunters and applauding Inuit traditions.
So does she know Canada now?
After four years and multiple trips throughout the country, Jean’s answer is the same as it would have been in 2005: not quite. She says nobody can claim to have finished learning about such a vast country.
“I think it would be very pretentious on my part to believe I could have arrived in this role declaring that I knew Canada in its entirety and by heart. Canada is a country constantly worth discovering,” she said.
“I believe one lifetime is not enough to discover Canada. What you need – above all else – before taking on this job is having a vision, a desire to salute the best of what this country has to offer. ..
“I have this privilege. Each governor general has had this privilege.”
There were at least a few moments of mutual admiration Friday between the current and former residents of Rideau Hall.
Jean, invited to the arctic symposium by Ralston Saul, saluted Clarkson’s devotion to northern issues on stage.
In return, Clarkson politely joined in the standing ovation when hundreds of participants rose to applaud Jean for eating the seal heart.
Tension between high office-holders and their successors appears to be a defining feature of Canadian public life.
It is a contrast with the United States, where former presidents and their successors are expected to discard their rivalries in favour of chummy chatter and shared projects.
The latest example was Bill Clinton and George W. Bush last week sharing a stage in Toronto. Clinton and Bush’s father – the man he ousted in the 1992 election – also worked together at W.’s request.
In Canada, civility and co-operation have been the exception, not the rule, in transfers of power between Trudeau, Turner, Mulroney, Campbell, Chretien, Martin and Harper.
One newspaper columnist recently suggested the phenomenon could be playing out again at Rideau Hall. When Clarkson advocated the GG quiz, the Globe’s Margaret Wente thought she detected jealousy.
“Life is so unfair,” Wente wrote.
“Someone can bust her buns for years, master the nuances of constitutional history, bring arts and culture to Rideau Hall, promote Canada around the world, and what does she get? Grief about her expense accounts!”
