Rideau Hall, Saturday, October 13, 2007

It gives us great pleasure to welcome you to Rideau Hall, which has been the official residence and workplace of every governor general of Canada since Confederation in 1867.

I am delighted to have Lord Weir among us today, a man whose ancestor, Thomas MacKay—a stonemason by trade—built the first incarnation of this house.

This public institution—one of the oldest in the country—represents the historic ties that exist between Canada and England.

It has also, on occasion, served as a stage for the natural ties that have formed between Canada and the United States, our closest neighbour.

You will recall that it was the Earl of Athlone, sixteenth governor general of Canada, who, in 1943 and 1944, welcomed the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, the American President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, to the Citadelle in Quebec City—the Governor General’s other official residence—for the Quebec Conferences.

The ties that unite our three countries are stronger than any border or ocean that may separate us, and they are now more important that ever, as it will take great solidarity to meet the challenges we are facing today.

I am delighted to see that your organization is helping to strengthen these ties on every level: social, cultural, scientific, diplomatic and commercial.

I was recently invited by President Havel to take part in an international forum in Prague on the theme of freedom and responsibility.

I would now like to share with you some of the things I said at that forum, which was attended by people who, like yourselves, are interested in governance in a world that is becoming more and more complex.

I broached the theme of freedom and responsibility with two lessons we can learn from the wisdom passed on to us by the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

We must listen to the genius of the peoples whose ancestors first inhabited the expanses of lakes and forests, mountains and plains, snow and ice that cover the vast Canadian landscape.

According to an Inuit legend, in order to obtain enough food from the ocean to feed their families, fishers had to first pay tribute to Sedna, goddess of the sea.

To not do so, or worse, to abuse her generosity, was to risk having the ocean unleash her fury on the unrepentant fishers.

That is the first lesson: if we do not treat things with care and respect, they can turn against us.

Furthermore, in a number of legends, the crow becomes a child and brings light to the world. Or the coyote begins speaking with man and the moon. Or the wind in the leaves tells the traveler which path to take. Or the spirits of the dead are the stars that shine in the sky.

What these legends are telling us is that all forms of life are interconnected, from the infinitely big to the infinitely small.

That is the second lesson.

At the start of the third millennium, as borders are blurred and being redrawn, the wisdom of our elders rings out louder than ever.

Because our horizons—which were for so long limited to the village, region, or country in which we lived—have now been expanded to the size of the world and require even greater solidarity.

This unprecedented openness to the world requires us to work together to redefine the ties that bind us to one another and—as the indigenous peoples of the Americas believe— to redefine the ties that bind us to every form of life.

The extent of inequality in the world, the many assaults on nature, the withdrawal into one’s identity when faced with diversity, and our obsession with security in light of the rise of all sorts of fundamentalism have all caused great anxiety.

Where is the world going?

Where is the world going when the economy is considered an end in and of itself?

When globalization benefits the rich while the world’s most vulnerable people are dismissed?

When growth is based on wasting resources and is indifferent to its environmental consequences?

When, in the name of progress, we force everyone to be a part of the same politico-economic order?

When openness to other cultures becomes a pretext for the establishment of a “monoculture,” as Lévi-Strauss said?

In a world in which our fates are irrevocably linked, we should be very wary of leaning towards a commercial logic without any safeguards, one in which “everyone for himself” or “for his clan” would make the rules.

We should be wary because today’s challenges affect the entire world.

We have no choice but to expand our definition of civic responsibility.

We have no choice but to enhance our sense of freedom and, I hope, our sense of fraternity.

Our freedom should no longer be defined in terms of individual interests; it should include everyone’s interests.

We must dare to dream of a freedom that would also be a global conscience.

Even in the most evolved democracies, we must constantly reconquer freedom in our search for meaning, revive it with our own questioning, and revitalize it through our own aspirations.

Let us fully assume our singular power to shape the world, to question it, to redefine it, to soften the blows against it, to protect its fragility, to ease its pain and to increase its joy.

Our greatest chance to “humanize humanity,” as Hannah Arendt put it, lies in this tireless commitment in the world and to the world.

And I think it is a collective responsibility.

It is impossible for us to escape the fact that we belong to the larger human family.

On the contrary, we should celebrate how we live together, while respecting our differences, our points of view, and the meaning we give to existence.

We should recognize all the experiences humanity has had thus far and learn from them.

Everywhere I have been as Canada’s Head of State—from Ottawa to the Arctic, from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and all around the world to Haiti, Algeria, Mali, Ghana, South Africa, Morocco and Brazil—I have met truly remarkable people.

Especially young people, who shared something very important with me.

They told me that solidarity is a responsibility.

That civic engagement is a promise for the future.

That we must now include the entire world in our definition of community.

A community they define not in terms of ethnicity or even space, but in terms of common values.

A community in which everyone focuses on our solidarities rather than our differences.

What is at stake here is our ability to build a new world together, a world in which each and every one of us can have a better life.

A world in which we can find a way to change things for the better.

A world in which one person’s freedom is part of everyone else’s responsibilities.

A world in which—as the legends of the indigenous peoples of the Americas illustrate—every organism draws its strength and fullness from the life that surrounds it.

A world that could go down in history as the most beautiful utopia that ever existed.

A world that each and every one of us wants to create.

After all, as Aung San Suu Kyi said, it is the vision of a rational and civilized humanity that inspires the daring and strength needed to build societies free from want and fear.

It is the vision of that world that I wanted to share with you here today.

Thank you for listening so attentively.