I’m on the phone with Canada’s 26th Governor-General, the Rt. Honourable Adrienne Clarkson, talking about the crazy colours Pantone, the colour consulting people, have come up with.
“They have 110 shades of grey and about 150 shades of white,” Madame Clarkson laughs from her oak-lined study in the Toronto home she shares with husband, philosopher and novelist, John Ralston Saul. Madame Clarkson knows her colours.
“I love everything to do with art and painting and decorating houses,” she confesses. “I could have lived a very nice life just moving from house-to-house decorating.”
Other interests include cooking – “I can make hollandaise sauce in five minutes flat and I don’t need a double-boiler” – as well as reading, writing and attending concerts two to three times a week. “Music is everything to me.”
She’s published two novels, numerous essays, an autobiography, a biography on Norman Bethune, and Belonging, a book about citizenship. She’s presently writing another book called Now, That’s a Very Good Question, a cheeky compendium of answers to questions, both trivial and consequential, posed by friends and others. And on the back, back burner, the germ of an idea for a murder mystery.
“I’m cooking it,” she says.
Whew.
We, of course, remember her as a national TV host, her six-year tenure as the Governor-General and as an Officer and then a Companion of the Order of Canada. Along the way, she’s represented Ontario’s business and cultural interest in Europe as the province’s first agent-general, served as president of publishing house McClelland & Stewart and chaired the board of trustees of the Canadian Museum of History.
And now, as the recently appointed Honourary Chair of the National Institute on Aging, she brings her skills and experience to the world of seniors’ advocacy.
“We’re all living in a way we’ve never really imagined and we’re living it in a way which our parents never imagined,” she says about life in the 21st century.
Established in 2016, the National Institute on Aging is a collaboration between Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital and the Metropolitan Toronto University. Its goal is to make Canada the best place in which to grow old and to that end commissions research, publishes reports and lobbies the federal government on behalf of the elderly. It shares its information with other provinces and institutions – here in BC, it’s the Office of the Senior Advocate – and National Institute research has contributed, in part, to the Advocate’s continuing campaign to eliminate home care fees.
Madame Clarkson is the public face of the Institute and plans to use her position to highlight seniors’ issues, specifically aging in place, through interviews and public speaking.
“The Scandinavian countries handle things so much better,” she says. “In Denmark, if you are over 80, you have the right as a Danish citizen to have 40 hours of home care a week. We know that 68 per cent of Canadians want to stay where they live. They want somebody to come two hours a week to help them go grocery shopping. They want somebody to come two or three times a week to help them have a bath or wash their hair. In Denmark that is all handled in terms of home care and that’s what we hope to be able to get for people.”
Today, Madame Clarkson has the power to affect change but back in 1942 when she was two years old and the family fled Hong Kong aboard a Red Cross steamer for a new life in Canada, the prospect of influencing anything, much less government policy, seemed a long way off.
“We lost everything,” she says “but we spoke English and had the advantage of growing up in a former colony. Being Anglican was also an enormous advantage. My mother was very, very devout.”
Attending church provided solace and community. Her father joined the men’s association, her mother belonged to the women’s auxiliary. Young Adrienne attended Sunday School.
“The Anglican thread in my life is very, very strong and the Anglican Church was very much a part of my culturalization,” she says.
Her father started afresh, establishing his own import-export commodities business and although there were some lean years, she grew up in Ottawa encouraged to be the best she could be.
“I had a tremendously supportive father who validated everything I did and told me the sky was the limit. My whole aim in life was to get out and do as many things as I could.”
Education was the key. There was no question she and her brother were headed for university. She wanted to be a novelist and while she eventually earned a master’s degree in English and then studied at the Sorbonne in Paris to perfect her conversational French, Madam Clarkson says it was her high school English teacher, Walter Mann, who changed her life. He not only encouraged her to keep writing but, impressed with her speaking voice, trained her for a city-wide public speaking contest. She placed second.
“Whenever I give an important speech, I can always see Mr. Mann sitting at the back looking at me,” she muses. “He prepared me for public service.”
In 1965 she started her media career as an on-camera, part-time book reviewer for CBC-TV’s mid-afternoon current affairs magazine Take 30. When the show’s co-host left for other opportunities, the Corporation held auditions and Madame Clarkson, much to her own surprise, was awarded the position.
“I was thrown right into it at 25. I had no training. I didn’t go to journalism school. I didn’t think about it, yet I had the best time of my life.”
She learned on the job, perfecting her interviewing skills, thinking on her feet, distilling information quickly and accurately, listening, condensing, clarifying and above all, learning how to put people at ease, attributes that would serve her well in the future. After 18 years at Take 30, The Fifth Estate and other CBC shows, she became a well-known, homegrown TV celebrity.
Already a public figure, she became Canada’s 26th Governor-General in 1999, the second woman and the first person of Asian heritage to assume the role. Her tenure was not without controversy. Travelling extensively across Canada, especially the north, she was accused of over-spending, yet she championed the north, arguing it was part of our national identity and part of the circumpolar community.
She also breathed new life into the arts. A series of Governor-General’s Awards recognizing excellence in art, literature, and performance were all initiated during her term. She believed culture is a fundamental building block of nationhood, and nationhood and citizenship dominated her thoughts during and after her vice-regal appointment.
Thus, the Institute for Canadian Citizenship was born, a non-profit organization she and her husband founded in 2005 shortly after leaving office. Critical of an earlier experience in which she swore in new Canadians, she used her status and connections to create a warmer, more inclusive citizenship ceremony, one that truly gave newcomers a sense of what Canada was all about.
“I was asked to do a swearing in ceremony,” she says. “I did it. I liked it but at the end of it there was no coffee, nothing. That was it and I thought that was terrible. Lame. I wanted to do something that reflected my experience in life and that’s why it had to be about citizenship.”
Today, the program conducts enhanced citizenship ceremonies in towns and cities across Canada with speakers and performers. And yes, there is coffee. Canoo Cultural Access Pass, an idea spurred by Madame Clarkson’s love of the arts, allows immigrants one year’s free admission to over 1,400 cultural institutions.
“It’s been an enormous success,” she declares. “I’m really, really proud of our Canoo Pass.” She and her husband continue to chair the board and support it financially.
When I ask what drives her commitment to public service, she credits her upbringing and her faith. It instilled a sense of purpose.
“I grew up with a strong sense of knowing what was right and what was wrong, and you should help other people,” she says. “That was very, very strongly emphasized.”
She says she’s basically an introvert, not an extrovert and admits impatience is her worst trait.
“I don’t get angry. I don’t fume. I just get irritated.”
When I suggest it’s perhaps because she expects excellence in herself and likes to see it in other people, she replies,
“No, I don’t know what it is. I think I inherited it from my mother. She was quite irritable, and I try not to be, but I can feel it coming into my body.”
One of her better traits, she says, is knowing her strengths and weaknesses. Like when Prime Minister Jean Chretien offered to make her a senator in 1993 and she turned it down.
“He said, ‘Are you saying no?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ And he asked why? And I said, ‘I can’t do it better than anybody else and I’ve never done anything in my life that I didn’t think I could do better than anybody else.’ That’s the way I was brought up. I was brought up to be excellent. If somebody else can do it better than me then let them.”
Or when she chastised Russian President Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine.
“I wrote him a letter and said ‘Dear Mr. Putin, You named me to the Order of Friendship of the Russian Federation in 2001 and at that time we had very amicable relations. You should not have invaded Ukraine and I’m herewith returning your medal.’ And I sent it through diplomatic pouch to Russia.”
He did not write back.
A second-generation feminist, she believes challenging the patriarchy hasn’t gone far enough and isn’t afraid to say so.
“To me, it’s still very, very important that young women learn that they still haven’t totally succeeded in making things equal for themselves. If they believe that, believe me, they believe in the Easter bunny.”
Madame Clarkson speaks her mind.
Which bodes well for her new position at the National Institute on Aging. Her passion stems from her own experience convalescing at home from gall bladder surgery in 2013. Had home care workers not come in every day to drain an open wound, she would have had to go to emergency, eating up time, energy and taxpayer money at $300 per visit. It convinced her it was cheaper and more humane to subsidize home care workers.
“I really blame governments for this,” she continues, “because they really don’t look at it from the point of view of what is convenient and cheapest for society and the patient.”
“What I feel I’m best able to say is don’t feel you do not have a choice as you’re aging. I hate the idea that people who have been productive citizens all their lives are suddenly told they have no choice in how they want to age or where they want to age. We can’t do that in a democracy. It’s just not right. That’s the kind of thing the National Institute wants people to be aware of, to say this isn’t good enough and we want something else.”
Spotlight
If you were to meet your 20-year-old self, what advice would you give her?
“Go for it. The most important thing I did in my education was to persevere. I was determined to go to France and learn French. If I had not learned French, I would not have been Governor-General.”
Who or what influenced you the most? And why?
“Apart from my parents, my high school English teacher Walter Mann. He never talked politics in class but everything he embodied was about equality, fairness and social justice. All those things came out in the way he taught us literature.”
What are you most grateful for?
“I’m grateful for my religious faith. I couldn’t live my life without it. It gives me the feeling that whatever happens I’m kind of looked after. It gives me grounding and most importantly it gives me the ability to forgive. It contributes to my humanity.”
What does success mean to you?
“I’m very happy for my emotional life. I have a wonderful husband who I’ve been with for nearly 47 years. I have lovely grandchildren and remarkable daughters.”
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