The Ridiculousness Dissipates

During her speech at the National Press Gallery Dinner in October, newly-installed Governor General, Michaëlle Jean, leaned over the podium with a slightly inebriated look on her face and described what she had told Adrienne Clarkson after being sworn in. "Darling, I'm the Governor General now, not you."

Of course, Jean's relaxed demeanour can be attributed the forum where she spoke. The National Press Gallery Dinner is an annual forum for politicians to poke fun at themselves and each other. As Stephen Harper described it during his speech, it's a night where "people who aren't funny tell jokes to people with no sense of humour." Despite Harper's quip, the general consensus was that she was pretty funny. The lighthearted mood was a far cry from the tense days of summer, when Michaëlle Jean and her husband Daniel Lafond were facing relentless accusations of ties to Quebec separatists and even FLQ members (See my aritcle, The Ridiculousness Festers).

A week before the dinner, Jean had given her first public interview as Governor General to the National Post. In the interview, she said that her daughter was a source of strength during the difficult period of harsh criticism that followed the announcement of her nomination. Indeed, she must have felt isolated as a clip from 1991 circulated on the evening news showing her toasting to Quebec's independence.

So what changed between then and now that cleared the air? In Jean's inaugural speech, she spoke of Canadian unity, saying that the time of Canada's "two solitudes" has ended. But she never gave an assurance that she did not vote to break up the country in the 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum. In the National Post interview:

"You want to know how I voted in '95? [Pauses] In the voting booth, like every Quebecer, this is how I voted. As a citizen, with clear ideas about where she belongs and who she is and what she wants. That's all. And there was no way that I was going to just break that fundamental principle of secrecy of vote. It's something that's very personal to everyone. And it's a civic responsibility."

So what changed that made the controversy go away?

The answer is, of course, nothing. The public simply lost interest because there was nothing that anyone could have done about the appointment anyways. Paul Martin could have introduced Lucien Bouchard as the next Governor General and it would have been so. No checks. No balances.