2020 Clarkson Laureateship for Public Service High Table
Friday, January 17, 2020
Principal Des Rosiers,
Fellows,
Clarkson Laureates,
and all friends of Massey College,
Je suis tellement contente que cette occasion du dix-septième (!) décernement des Lauréats Clarkson pour le bénévolat publique soit enprésence de la nouvelle Directrice Principale Nathalie des Rosiers. Elle est le choix qu’il fallait pour cette institution en ce moment de l’histoire: avocat, femme politique, et championne des droits de la personne. Massey Collège a besoin d’elle et les bonnes fées nous l’ont livrée ! J’accueille avec beaucoup d’enthousiasme l’avenir de Massey Collège sous son sens d’éthique, son énergie enthousiaste et sa formidable capacité intellectuelle.
For over a decade now, this evening at Massey College is a highlight in my calendar year. Because it’s for public service, I am always deeply moved and honoured to be here to present them. The idea of public service is so much a part of the generation in which I grew up in Canada. It was a generation that was either in kindergarten or grade one when the second WW ended. And I graduated from high school, Lisgar Collegiate in Ottawa at the time of the Suez crisis. I left university when we had a leadership role in the Korean War and were an entrenched part of the world’s new understanding of what peacekeeping meant.
I suppose that many of us thought that if we gave ourselves the time to think of what we would like to do, it was that we would like to contribute to the public good. We wanted to think of what would help us to be part of Canada. We wanted to make our project of our individual lives a reflection of our peaceful way of life in the world. We wanted to say that the educations that happened here on this campus at the University of Toronto would be of some benefit to the world as a whole. And that was our aim and goal. Quite modestly, we hoped we could do some good for the world.
In the 4 years that I was an undergraduate here and in the following two years at graduate school, with my colleagues I hoped and dreamed that Canada would play a role identified by the world by Lester Pearson who received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1957. While I was at university here, we saw the formation of WUS (World University Service) and CUSO (Canadian University Service Overseas). We also dreamed with our Caribbean friends of a Federation of a West Indies. My colleague at University College Stephen Lewis later leader of the NDP in Ontario and Ambassador to the United Nations told me that he would be leaving our 3rd year here even
though he was supposed to serve with us in the Students Administrative Council because he was going to work in Africa. He told me that this is where we must look to help a whole continent to come to an understanding of its place in the world and to help them with that future.
There were some who graduated with me who decided public service would be best served through joining the federal civil service. But of course that excluded most of us who were women because we were not considered basically to be even qualified to become ambassadors for our country. We knew the minuscule amount of women who were allowed through the barriers of the exams and we didn’t think that any of us could make it. Women’s dreams in that pre-second wave of feminism period were circumscribed. Circumscribed by our own talents or our own idea of how we could help to change things but they certainly were circumscribed by male attitudes towards us!Now when I look back at the large part of my career which was the CBC, I do not consider that I was working for television. I always believed that I was working for the public broadcaster of Canada whose goal was to educate, enlighten and entertain. I always believed this and I always worked for the CBC. Nowadays when people write to me and ask what was it like to work “in the golden age of television”, I have to say it was wonderful! We had a mission and we knew we were going to be able to say things and do things on radio and in television which would really make a difference to the country in both French and English.
This idea of what public service is – is not just about doing volunteer work or activities in a charity. It is an infusion into your general way of looking at life and looking at what can be done for others. This attitude has never left me. I am always thinking of what can be good for the way in which we live our lives as Canadians. I am always looking at the way I can contribute to it. That goal has always been the guiding star of my life.This week I happened to see on Crave One a documentary entitled Cold Case Hammarskjöld which is an amazing documentary made by a Swedish group. I highly recommend it not just because of the story it tells which is a mystery which I think they solve, but also because it is a ground-breaking way of making a documentary in its form. I believe it has won a prize at Sundance and deservedly so. It caught my eye because Hammarskjöld was one of my heroes from the time I first heard about him when I was in grade 11 studying history at Lisgar Collegiate when he became Secretary-General of the United Nations until he died in a plane crash in the Congo in 1961, the year I happen to start graduate school.
He became Secretary-General because the UN had voted on 4 candidates and Lester Pearson was the only candidate of four countries to receive the majority. Unfortunately, he was vetoed by the Soviet Union. Instead, Dag Hammarskjöld of Sweden became the Secretary-General. His election was dismissed by many at the time as somebody who was “a brilliant economist, and an unobtrusive technician and an aristocratic bureaucrat”. There was very little controversy about his selection but in the 8 years that he was Secretary-General he became somebody extremely effective and totally remarkable. In 1961 while attempting to diffuse the crisis in the Congo in which the separatist group Katanga had attempted to seize power, he died in a plane crash en route to negotiating a cease fire. There were no survivors.
It has since been assumed (and the documentary goes into this in extraordinary and fascinating detail) that he was actually assassinated by a combination of the CIA, MI6 – the American and British spy agencies – together with a combination of some international mining companies. The former president of the United States Harry Truman commented at the time that Hammarskjöld “was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said WHEN they killed him”.
He always struck me as having a singleness of mind and a kind of inward purity. In his posthumous book entitled Markings he says that great spirits “find the strength to say yes to every demand which the needs of their neighbours make them face and also to say yes to every fate they have in store for them when they follow the call of duty as they understand it”. He answered this call to duty. He found the way to say yes.
It is this call to duty that I notice in every Clarkson Laureate that we have had in 17 years. These are the people who decide that there is a need and that they will help to meet it with whatever resources, education and personality that they have. Tonight’s two Laureates Gurveer Bains and Philip Berger exemplify that par excellence. Dr. Berger has been in the forefront for so many decades of all the fights that we must have in order to keep people who have been harmed like refugees, the homeless, the poor, people with AIDS and victims of torture. Happily because he has been active for so long he has influenced many younger people to give their lives, to helping the marginalized. And we see that same spirit in a young, exciting person, like Gurveer Bains, who by her involvement in the community and her seeing where needs must be met is helping us to understand that one person can truly make an enormous difference.
In the longings of the students of the 60s and 70s of this university, I see the deflection of myself as having believed that Canada could make a difference in the world. I believe that is still true. I believe that we still want our nation to make a difference. It is the spirit in wanting to give yourself to something bigger or to something else which counts. This idea that you can contribute your hours, your feelings, your actions to others who are not like you. You can give that time to people whose problems you will never have. And by that you are providing a redeeming factor in our society. And it is this kind of redemption which our Laureates tonight exemplify. We are redeemed by their actions because they have done them. We recognize them and we honour them.
