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Governor-General Michaelle Jean believes more domestic travel could draw Canadians together

OTTAWA ? Michaelle Jean has a novel solution to Canada?s national identity question: domestic travel subsidies.

Canada?s 27th Governor General is about to enter her second year in office after 12 months spent criss-crossing her adopted nation.

?It was an incredible privilege to be able to discover this country,? Jean said in interview in advance of Wednesday?s one-year anniversary of her installation at Rideau Hall.

Quebecers, said the Haitian-born Montrealer, ?are sometimes very disconnected from the rest of Canada.? And residents of Winnipeg or Yellowknife or Halifax little realize how much their common concerns and desires mesh with those of Canadians in Chicoutimi or St. John?s or Victoria.

?My dream would be to see that people here in Canada can actually in an affordable way travel as much as I did across this country. This is something we have to think about.?

Jean, looking a decade younger than her 49 years, is seated this spectacular autumn day in her oak-lined, semi-circular office at Rideau Hall. Behind her, the burnished wood panels bear the carved names of governors-general past ? Dufferin 1872, Lorne 1878, Lansdowne 1883, Stanley 1888.

The list, ending with Adrienne Clarkson, now all but encircles the office. Jean?s name will begin a second tier, marking a symbolic turning of the page.

On a couch beneath the long-dead Victorian viscounts, earls and lords lounges the animated and stylish descendant of slaves, just the third woman and the first black to represent the Queen at the head of Canada?s constitutional order.

Jean is a study in paradox.

The former Radio-Canada journalist who sends her seven-year-old daughter Marie-Eden to a local French-language public school is at once gracious and informal to a pair of reporters ? while unabashedly pointing out her own historical importance.

She?s married to filmmaker Daniel Lafond who was once immersed in Quebec separatist thought, yet she?s a pointed and passionate proponent of a united Canada.

The former French citizen, who gave up her second passport only on the eve of her installation as governor general last Sept. 27, chides Quebecers for their fixation with Europe.

A visible-minority immigrant who endured racist taunts as a child in rough-and-tumble Thetford Mines, Que., Jean speaks of social integration as a shared responsibility.

And the daughter of Haiti, forced as a child to flee the military thugs of Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier, recounts an inbred fear of men in uniform while lavishing praise on the Canadian Forces and their deadly mission in Afghanistan.

Twenty-nine Canadian soldiers have died in the conflict since Jean became the Forces? commander in chief and she describes her painful calls to their spouses and parents with something close to awe.

?I?m always impressed to see how much they know what to say, how deeply they believe in that (military) commitment,? says Jean, her eyes welling. ?It is absolutely incredible each time.?

The soldiers and their families, she said, have come as something of a revelation.

?I come from a totally different experience,? says Jean, whose family fled Port au Prince in 1968 when she was 11.

?I was born in a country where a uniform would inspire terror right away. In Haiti, the army meant oppression. It meant violence of the citizens. It meant abuse of power. Nothing like the Canadian Forces.?

Even something so simple as having ?an open discussion? with young military members of her household staff at Rideau Hall surprises and delights her.

Jean is an emphatic proponent of the military and humanitarian mission in Afghanistan.

?We?ve made a promise to the Afghan people.?

It?s not the only pronouncement that places Jean off-side from the Quebecois artistic, intellectual and media community that was her adult milieu.

She suggests sovereigntists spend too much time focusing on Europe and examining what makes them different from other Canadians, rather than recognizing the ?common objectives that we have and that we must share in the actual country we live in.

?One can dream of another situation,? said Jean, speaking in French. ?But I believe that reality requires us to look at what is actually in our interest, which is to pool our efforts, pool our strengths, to build a common front on certain issues that are as important in Quebec as in British Columbia or elsewhere.?

Her take on Canada?s racial, linguistic and religious mosaic follows the same argument. Diversity, says Jean, has become a ?fundamental value? in Canada.

?But I find that the time has probably come for us to realize what we have in common. Because living together and being part of a country, being part of a nation, means being able to project ourselves and relate to common values, to certain principles, to our institutions also.

?You wouldn?t want to destroy something that you feel you?re connected to,? Jean adds.

It?s an argument that can be applied equally to Quebec?s violent separatist FLQ of the 1970s and radical Islamic jihadists of the 21st century.

Jean fervently believes that dialogue, travel experience and hands-on understanding can knit disparate Canadians together. She?ll tell you so at great length, finishing sentences in French that she began in English.

She believes she is the living embodiment of that dialogue, although the Governor General is coy when asked if she?ll follow Clarkson?s lead and write a memoir of her time at Rideau Hall following her five-year appointment.

?The idea of keeping a journal is not because I foresee writing a book about this experience,? Jean responds when asked if she?s chronicling her life.

?But I think I am in a position where I am also part of history . . . . That is very important.

?The reaction around my appointment said a lot,? adds Jean, dead serious. ?People saw something about this country, about the opportunities in this country, the possibilities, the openness.?