Mr. Speaker, Premier McLeod, Members of the

Legislative Assembly, grand chiefs and chiefs, dear friends... [English translation not provided.]

We are simply delighted to be with you, my wife and myself. This is one of I hope many visits. As I will mention in a moment, my first visit here was almost 30 years ago. If you remember nothing of what I say today, I’d like you to remember two things: First of all, this is a part of Canada where we don’t speak about either/or, we speak about both/and. I’d like to give you some illustrations of both/and.

Secondly, there may be a tradition in the South of thinking of ideas and movements and technologies and people moving from south to north, but what I have to say to you is there’s a remarkable movement of ideas and influences from north to south. The contribution of the Northwest Territories to the makeup of Canada in a north to south learning curve is valuable. So those two things: a territory of both/and, and a movement of ideas for the good from north to south. [English translation not provided.]

This is the 13th of 13 official visits. We had hoped

we would complete all of them in the first 12 months, but there were two elections that interrupted the visit here. One was the federal election last spring, which made it impossible for me to travel – the Governor General is not supposed to be involved in official visits during an election period – and then there was the election here. But here we are. This is a formal visit. Our first visit here was informal and that is the first of the both/ands that I want to speak about.

The circumstances were very interesting. I served on a committee in Ottawa with a name some of you will know: Max Ward – the great Max Ward, larger than life Canadian with extraordinary airlines, beginning as a bush pilot in the North. We were sitting around the table one day – it was January – and Max said to the group and to me, now, you’re a teacher, you’re a professor, have you ever been north of 60? I said, I haven’t. He said, how on earth can you be a teacher of important things in Canada and you haven’t been north of 60? He said, we will remedy that. Nothing more was said. Unbeknownst to me, Max got hold of Sharon and arranged that the last week in August of that particular year we would block off a week’s holidays, and about a week before the last week in August I realized that

we were not going to the usual summer cottage that we rent, but we were going to Max’s wilderness camp on the Coppermine River with our three youngest children. And it was, in a word, magical.

I could talk for days about that experience, but one was a day when we set out in Max’s Twin Otter, went some distances, landed on a little lake and then went to a meadow where we saw some caribou moving towards us. We got up on a large rock and for all that day the caribou were moving through, and our children, eyes wide open, mesmerized, watched a day’s movement of a caribou.

They’ve never forgotten that. So, here we are flash forward with an official visit, but it reinforces those informal, unofficial, very personal, extraordinary memories that I have and my children have of our first visit here.

I have just come from the Caucus Room where I saw the largest display of A.Y. Jackson paintings that exist in one room anywhere in the country. This is a both/and experience for me, because in my office in Montreal, I was the principal at McGill University for 15 years and in my office was a wonderful A.Y. Jackson painting of the North. I can’t tell you how many people would come into my office and they’d be mesmerized in front of that painting and they’d say the colours are surreal. It’s a bit like the impressionists in France 100 years ago. Somehow this artist has done something with the colours that make them dazzling, inviting and penetrating, but it can’t be real. Then, of course, I made my first trip to the North and those colours were real. What Jackson captured was the unusual colouration of the North, which is unlike anything in the South and unlike anywhere in the world. That’s the both/and movement. This great painter who came north in 1948 was able to capture the realistic beauty of the place and present it to eyes in the South that saw it as something surreal, both/and.

One of my favourite writers is a writer by the name of E.B. White. My grandchildren call me Grandpa Book because I always read books to them and I’m now reading books for the second time. I’ve read the Narnia series five times to our five daughters and now with eight grandchildren going through it again. E.B. White wrote books like “Charlotte’s Web,” “Stuart Little;” wonderful stories that were for children, but they were for everybody. And he spoke about seeing things whole, connected one with the other. I think that’s what you do in the North. That’s what I mean by the both/and. You don’t divide things up into a compartment; you put them together in a context and they fit.

I see that in learning. One of the great lessons that the North has to teach the South is when we marry the old and the new, we marry traditional cultures and languages and customers and bring in the new that help us advance in a variety of ways, learning,

economically, et cetera. We don’t drive a wedge between them. It’s not either/or. It’s this both/and marriage from those traditions from our past that are valuable and important and molded into new fashions of life that permit us to build more prosperous, healthy communities.

It’s true of new technology and old customs. I’m wearing this beautiful gift the Speaker has given me. It is a scarf, and a hat and a mitten set made of muskox hair and I learned just a moment ago that this is muskox hair that is collected from the muskox on Banks Island, temperatures going down to minus 60 degrees below zero. The fibre is remarkable in terms of its ability to store heat, to breathe. I was told by one of the experts that it’s even being used in Italy today for people with very severe burns. Somehow it can close those burns and permit them to breathe and heal, at the same time providing warmth. This is a beautiful sense of traditional clothing that was used for people in the North and now becoming a deluxe item in the South.

I learned just a moment ago in your Caucus Room that you speak 11 official languages. You know, we Canadians are told that we have a challenge of bilingualism, a country with two official languages. How do you make that work? In Belgium they’ve gone, I think, some 16 or 18 months unable to form a government because they have not been able to make two official languages work.

I’ve often said our problem in Canada is not bilingualism, it’s multilingualism. It’s how do we embrace more than one? How do we have the both/and? Here in the North, somehow you make 11 official languages work and somehow you understand one another and somehow we get on to build communities very well.

Darwin once said it’s not the most powerful or expeditious of the species that survives, it’s the most resilient. That resilience of being able to combine the old and new together, the both/and, I think is the magic that comes from the North.

I had the honour of being the founding chair of the National Roundtable on the Environment and Economy back how many years ago – 25 or so – when the notion of sustainable development first came into our lexicon. How do we have economic development that still respects and preserves the environment so it’s there intact for our children and grandchildren? Here in the North you are practising sustainable development every day. You are combining the both/and. You are developing economically, but you’re doing it with an enormous respect for the environment around, and you’re doing it with that inclusiveness where there are voices for all to contribute their learning, and out of it to come through with these solutions that permit us to have the economic advances that we wish, but ensure that we hand on this precious land to

our children because we were simply stewards for a time for them.

In Yellowknife last evening the mayor and some of his colleagues were explaining why Yellowknife for three years in a row has been voted as the most sustainable community in the country. Because you’ve learned about recycling; you’ve learned about using biomass; you’ve learned about taking advantage of taking local materials and putting them to work and, above all, being enormously respectful to the land around us.

This morning we spent a little time with my great friend General Guy Hamel and his colleagues in the Joint Task Force North, and again saw this wonderful combination of old and new, of traditional military responsibility and embracing new members, the Rangers, both adult Rangers and the junior Rangers, which is a wonderful example of how our military brings local knowledge into military operations in a way that permits our communities to be safe and our country to be safe, and those Rangers with the enormous pride they have in what it is they do in their traditional past applied in a modern setting for the protection of Canada.

We see the both/and in the forms of government. Mr. Speaker, here we are in a round room where everyone can see one another when they speak. It’s a wonderful way to communicate, not a long, long room where you have to look around corners, et cetera. Looking one another face to face you operate by consensus. You haven’t found it necessary to break up into parties and factions and count votes down to the last decimal place, et cetera. Somehow you have a form of government that’s very attractive and the form of government that I also think focuses on consensus, because you can bring traditions of the past with new opportunities, new challenges and find that consensus.

Of course, we are forging new forms of government here in recognizing Aboriginal rights and responsibilities, forms of government that marry those different traditions and somehow find an accommodation which is a peculiar genius of Canada. Those are wonderful lessons that we need to transmit from north to south. Those are wonderful lessons that we need to transmit from Canada to around the world. You think of the root of so many of our problems. It’s the inability of people from different traditions to be able to sit down with one another and solve their problems with a common kind of consensus. It’s being done in the North, translated to the South and translated around the world.

This is not new. Let me just leave you with some thoughts from one of my favourite authors. [English translation not provided.]

David Fisher is a Pulitzer Prize winning author who writes a book called “Champlain’s Dream.” In it he

says that our understanding of Champlain was greatly mistaken. I learned about Champlain in an English speaking school system as a French hero, not an English hero. New France, a conquistador came and conquered lands, explored lands, planted the French flag, demoted the Roman Catholic religion and then went back to France and that was it. If that was Champlain, it was a very small part of Champlain.

What Fisher explains is Champlain was baptized as a Protestant Christian, became a Catholic as a young man because he had to convert to survive in a difficult situation at that time. He was always someone at odds with the French monarchy because he was sent out to be a conquistador, but what he was was a builder of permanent settlements. He was a man of inclusivity. He was a man who believed in the rule of law. He was a man who believed that you build settlements around community consensus and always looking to leave that community better for our children and grandchildren. Champlain spoke many of the languages of the Indian tribes in his area. He made friends with all the Indian tribes save the Iroquois. The only reason he didn’t make friends with the Iroquois is they were the enemy of all the other Indian tribes and for a short period of time he actually arranged a truce. He established the rule of law in Canada. He had a great dream, did Champlain. That dream was that we would put behind us some of the quarrels and the dissentions and the inability for different cultures to live together that was Europe, and in this new land, Canada, build communities that were permanent based on inclusivity, based on great understanding, based on constant working with our neighbours, no matter what culture, colour, creed, language they spoke, so the land and the place would be better for our children.

So that is what the Northwest Territories means to me. [English translation not provided.]

We have here the concept of both/and putting things together and we have a great tradition of learning which should go from north to south.

Thank you so much, Mr. Speaker. A wonderful delight to be with you today.

---Applause