Civil diners endure intellectual blast at Trudeau Foundation 

Heather Mallick
CBC.ca
November 21, 2008 

I find it hard to say no when people ask me to do things. It's partly because I was raised to be polite. Personally I think parents may have gone too far in this direction; there's nothing wrong with an honest "No thank you," especially for girls.

But I am maternal in nature and also, I write.

Everyone assumes writing is easy, consisting of lolling, then a brief effortless Astaire-like dance over the keyboard followed by canapés, a cigar and dinner atop a bank tower. They assume I am available to do good works, anything to fill the yawning hours. But I am not, having a rich full life packed with strife. Yes, books are pleasurable to write, but columns are a hard session of chipping away at the coal face.

I recently attended a Canadian Auto Workers book launch (yes, they have them) for the wrong reason, sympathy for the doomed, and they weren't nice to me at all. This annoyed me so I vowed never to attend events for reasons of liberal guilt, only to work for causes I admire. And I vowed to be polite under all circumstances, anodyne in the extreme and a balm to all gatherings.

Intelligence gathering

Let me tell you about my weekend.

I was invited to speak in Montreal at the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation's Fifth Annual Conference on public policy, entitled Redefining Canada's Global Agenda. That sentence is a dry way of referring to one of the greatest humans Canada ever produced and to a gathering of people — older ones doing magnificent things for the planet and the young Trudeau scholars, Canadians seeking to investigate the world at a cirrus cloud level of intellect, seeking to become what Trudeau himself would have called "global citizens." Oh, why don't you just lacquer my skin and feed me emeralds, I was so flattered.

But there I was, the only journalist in the place. My degrees are in English literature and the best I could do in conference terms would be to hold forth on Virginia Woolf's view of the League of Nations. "Very much in favour" I would say if I was asked, which I was not. And who wants to hear from journalists, sad remnants of a fading industry that will be revived but not without sweat and tears, and not yet.

All anybody wanted to discuss on opening night at the Trudeau Foundation was multilateral technical co-operation and global environmental facilities, with a degree of precision that would make a patents lawyer blanch. I had a lot to say, but with my new vow to belt up, I put my head down and worked on my quail, which was delicious.

Then a guest speaker blundered. He said he was happy to be in Montreal where people spoke French as badly as he did. The man was, I guess, fond of the Parisian accent. At this, the Quebecois in the audience got all attentive. Then he called Iran "a third-rate country." Everyone paled: Iran is part of one of the world's oldest civilizations; it is our cradle; we treasure its art from 9,000 years ago; and no civilized person dismisses any nation in this profoundly anti-historical anti-intellectual way.

And then he said the world was divided into three, the pre-modern, the modern and the post-modern, a simple-minded layer cake that would cause any intelligent audience to turn the knife on you. It would be like telling the Canadian Federation of Earth Sciences that the planet has three ingredients: hard rock, rock that is less hard, and then dirt, which is ground-up rock.

I don't know how the man survived insulting the intelligence of everyone in the room. But I realized what was holding the Trudeau Foundation back. It was civility. We are Canadians; we do not throw our food or boo; at most, we sit with frozen expressions or refuse to clap. In fact, we were embarrassed for the man, an alleged scholar, and we discussed over dinner whether the foundation had called on him merely in order to spark a reviving vitriol on the first night.

Manners of speaking

Polite Canadians. I love them.

And polite Americans. Scott G. Borgerson, an extraordinary scholar who works on ocean governance at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations , explained that our polar ice was so melted it was coming through the taps but he seemed quite chipper, so casually Yankee cool with that. He linked this with Russian aspirations, American and Canadian neglect, accessible oilfields, permafrost, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and the Strait of Hormuz and he did it with such patience and respect for our caribou that we were won over.

Later, James Orbinski, head of Médecins Sans Frontières when it won its 1999 Nobel Peace Prize, was candid. Now a medical researcher and political scholar, he was asked why he didn't run for Canadian political office.

For this is a question on everyone's mind. Why are intellectuals no longer attracted to politics? Where's our next Pierre Trudeau? Why don't we have a Canadian Barack Obama?

Orbinski talked about the impossibility of combining politics and family life. This is a man who already knows how hard it is to read bedtime stories to children when you're working on humanitarian salvation in Rwanda, Afghanistan and Somalia. Orbinski talked in a way you don't see politicians talk on camera, with expressiveness in his face, in complete sentences, with admission of defeat and also an unfashionable hope mixed with pain.

He would never fit into the current anti-intellectual, obedient, mono-voiced crowd in Ottawa. He knows it; you know it. Even Ottawa knows it.

Liberal (conservative) approach

I talked to a perfectly pleasant man in the audience who was contemptuous of Orbinski, saying essentially that people like him can't win over the Canadian public because they aren't willing to do the hard work. You have to do what I do, he told me, speak at Rotary Clubs, the Chamber of Commerce, overlook the extremists present in every crowd.

I told him that universities were worried about a panic among graduating students that they would never get a job. For this reason, I gave speeches to young audiences, praising the value of a liberal arts education, saying that being able to write, understand a situation and assess its context were invaluable to any employer. But in Western Canada, the idea doesn't go over well.

The man looked at me. "Why don't you say 'the value of a conservative arts education'? That might make them more amenable." He was serious.

I thought about explaining that "liberal arts" is a classical term. "Liber" means "free." It meant the education of a "freeman" as opposed to that of a slave. I thought about asking him if he divided the world into conservative and liberal, just like "pre-modern, modern and post-modern." In other words, I thought of patronizing him. And the earlier less-polite version of me thought of telling him to consider getting stuffed.

But I thought of the spirit of the conference: education, civility, an openness to the world and the world view of others.

"My," I said, "what a good idea!"