Is it time for yet another new governor general? Or just another government that does a better job of vetting appointees to the vice-regal office?
Most Canadians know our previous governor general, Julie Payette, was a disaster in office. Chosen because she was a francophone and former astronaut, it was discovered she bullied and berated her staff at Rideau Hall. The Trudeau government might have known this would happen had it bothered to check into her past. Being a misery to staff was a pattern in her pervious postings, too.
Payette also often refused to wear her commander-in-chief’s uniform or attend official functions, such as Scout jamborees and mess dinners. She even insisted a quarter of a million dollars be spent altering the entrance to her official residence so her comings and goings could not be seen by the riffraff (i.e. the Canadian public) who were – ugh – free to wander about the grounds of her lavish, taxpayer-funded mansion on Ottawa’s Sussex Drive.
Initially, the current office holder, Mary Simon, a former bureaucrat, seemed to be an improvement. She had a taste for very expensive travel surrounded by huge entourages, but at least she wasn’t mean to the hired help. There have been no reports of her ripping into appointment secretaries or kicking footmen and gardeners.
But Simon does not speak both official languages. Since eminent Canadians began filling the role of GG in the 1950s, instead of wayward British nobles, Simon is the first GG not to claim to be bilingual. She doesn’t even try that often to read out phonetic speaking notes in French.
When she was appointed by the Trudeau government to replace Payette in 2021, Simon made repeated promises to learn at least a rudimentary understanding of French. This week it became obvious she hasn’t.
While on an official visit to Quebec City, the governor general was touring a local food bank when reporters began wondering aloud why she was offering no more than then odd simple greeting in French and why all of her interactions with food bank staff were in English.
This may seem like a non-issue. Who pays attention to Her Excellency anyway? So what does it matter if she can’t speak French as long as she is able to communicate with the people she is meeting?
Except, what if the shoe were on the other foot? What if the governor general were a unilingual francophone who spoke not a word of English?
How would the rest of Canada feel?
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It’s bad enough that Simon made so little effort to communicate with Quebecers in their official language, but what makes this incident so inappropriate is that when criticism of her language skills became an issue online, Simon cancelled her other public appearances in Quebec and retreated to Ottawa.
She also issued an official explanation that inadvertently shows what priority she places on French.
“While fluent in Inuktitut and English, I was not able to speak French,” she admitted. However, while continuing to practise and improve her French, she is “committed to the revitalization and preservation of all Indigenous languages.”
Doesn’t that sound like French is in third place?
Simon famously took 29 guests with her on a government jet in 2022 and consumed nearly $100,000 in catered meals onboard on the way to the Middle East. She and 32 guests ate over $100,000 worth of gourmet food on a $700,000 trip to a book fair in Frankfurt in 2023. And last summer, Simon charged taxpayers $71,000 for limos on a four-day trip to Iceland to ferry her five blocks from her hotel to a conference centre.
She has no respect for taxpayers, especially those who speak French.