Making a mockery of the GG's office

Let’s start by attempting a few analogies. Suppose Prince Charles had taken for a wife a woman whose idea of a good time was to go down the pub with a few mates from the IRA. Now suppose Charles himself, at one of these gatherings, raised a glass to the cause.

Imagine the President of the United States hoisting the Confederate flag. Suppose the fire chief had a kind word for arson.

Or, closer to home, suppose the men with whom our Governor General-designate was filmed endorsing, over a glass of some exquisite vintage or other, the necessity of revolution and the liberation of oppressed peoples everywhere, were not a clutch of felquistes and their fellow travellers, but al Qaedistes. Suppose instead of merely strangling Pierre Laporte, the terrorists with whom her film-maker husband was later to pass so many pleasant hours had cut his head off. Would the Prime Minister’s mouthpieces still be dismissing the whole affair as a smear campaign?

Actually, I’ve no idea. With each passing week under this train-wreck of a government, one grows more acutely aware that they are capable of anything. Or, perhaps, that they are incapable of everything. At any rate, with the release of footage from Jean-Daniel Lafond’s 1991 classic, La manière nègre, we can at least be certain of one point: the position of Governor General of Canada, in whom all formal constitutional power is vested, is now officially ridiculous. If it were not the Martinites’ intent to make an utter mockery of it, they have done so all the same.

Until now it was possible for the PMO to argue there was some ambiguity about the vice-regal couple’s position on whether Canada should be dismembered, as if that were a defence. But how do you spin away these exchanges?

Pierre Vallieres (a founding member of the FLQ): Not only should Martinique proceed to independence, but to revolution -- as Quebec should as well!

Michaelle Jean: Yes, independence isn’t given, it’s taken.

Thus speaks the future representative of constitutional government in Canada. Later, when a couple of her hardline separatist chums offer a toast to “independence,” she replies with a hearty: “No more dominated peoples!” Oh, well. Perhaps she meant Martinique.

But then, as her husband points out in a making-of book about the film: Martinique, Quebec, same struggle. After a lengthy comparison of Quebec’s plight with those of various Caribbean nations, all victims of “the transnational techno-capitalist Mafia,” he concludes:

“So, a sovereign Quebec? An independent Quebec? Yes, I applaud with both hands and I promise to attend all the St-Jean Baptiste Day parades.”

Not that this is likely to change the government’s mind. If there is one thing that experience teaches, it is that after each new outrage, the yardsticks are simply moved further down the field. When it was unthinkable that a Governor General should be a separatist sympathizer -- I think it was about 48 hours ago -- the defence was that there was no proof she was. Now that the proof has been produced, it will shift to something else: As long as she isn’t one now. Or, as long as she doesn’t say so out loud. So the bar, already low, drops ever lower.

Of course, the bar should not be anywhere near there. Yet so thoroughly have our expectations been defined down that even the sharper observers have tended to miss the point. Before these latest revelations had come to light, Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells was insisting there was no “smoking gun” linking Ms Jean or her husband to separatism. But we are not trying to convict them of anything. The issue is not whether there is evidence to prove they are separatists, but whethere there is any evidence to prove they are federalists.

That is part of the job description: not just that they should not be separatists, or even that they should be federalists, in the way that the average person is. To serve effectively as Governor General, as the very symbol of the enduring unity of Canada, you should be among the most notorious federalists in the country.

Writing in the Toronto Star, Chantal Hebert offered the defence that, as a journalist, Ms Jean was obliged to maintain a studious neutrality on the question. That may be true, at least in Quebec. But we are not hiring someone to be a journalist. We are hiring someone to be a sort of human flag, icon of the Canadian nation-state and all it stands for, the embodiment of its laws and protector of its constitution. Impartial she must be, on every question but the existential one.

But it isn’t Ms Jean that this is about. Her selection, as catastrophic as it may be, is far more revealing of those who made it. Others have speculated as to whether the Prime Minister’s people knew about her background. Incompetence is always a persuasive explanation, but in this case I think it was probably indifference. It just didn’t matter to them that she was at best ambivalent about whether Canada survived, nor that she was ambivalent, as a dual citizen, about whether she would belong to it if it did.

It didn’t matter to them, and it didn’t matter if it mattered to others. The rest of Canada had always put up with other indignities. Why should it not also put up with this one: a Governor General it has scarcely heard of, with an undistinguished record, no particular credibility as a constitutional arbiter, and it seems only the most tenuous attachment to Canada?