Louise Arbour speaks after being named the next Governor-General during a news conference in Ottawa on May 5.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
The controversy over Louise Arbour’s appointment as Governor-General is unusual in that both sides cite the same set of facts.
She’s a former Supreme Court justice, say her supporters, a former international war-crimes prosecutor, and a former UN high commissioner for human rights, among a long list of other offices and laurels.
Exactly, say her opponents: a bona fide member of the “Laurentian elite,” a lifelong bureaucrat, and not just a bureaucrat but (shudder) a UN bureaucrat.
Much of the Conservative attack on her appointment sounds like a Twitter mob, circa 2017: the same obsession with identity-group representation (why wasn’t an Albertan appointed?), the same contempt for merit (Ms. Arbour’s selection was merely by virtue of being part of the same “Davos set” as the Prime Minister, sneered one critic; an “Ottawa-bubble choice,” sniffed another), the same fevered mining of past statements for ideological thoughtcrimes.
Opinion: Louise Arbour ticks every box for the job of governor-general
Among the latter: she was a supporter, as the UN special representative for international migration, of the 2018 Global Compact for Migration, an utterly non-binding and mostly anodyne framework for international co-operation in the handling of migrants that has had precisely none of the nation-destroying effects claimed by its hysterical right-populist critics.
Oh, and she warned that Israeli forces might have committed war crimes in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. And look here, she once wrote a dissent in a 2002 Supreme Court case that seemed to suggest a positive right to social benefits, rather than the traditional negative-rights approach to interpreting the Charter.
All of which might (or might not) make a case against her appointment as foreign affairs minister, or as justice minister, or any other job with direct responsibility for making policy.
But that is not the sort of role to which she has in fact been appointed. It is a job which has explicitly no policy-making responsibility, for which indeed one of the chief requirements is an ability to stay out of contentious policy debates.
And the others? At most times, it involves conducting oneself with dignity, symbolizing the unity of the nation, and otherwise representing the Crown in Canada. On very rare occasions, it may require making difficult decisions, where the rule of law or the stability and integrity of our parliamentary democracy are at stake.
For these she is eminently qualified – perhaps the most qualified person ever to hold the office. The King stands at the apex of our entire constitutional system. It would seem advisable that his emissary have an unusually deep knowledge of the Constitution, the law and our system of government.
And not only that, but a personal gravitas – a mix of experience, empathy, character, judgment and tact – of a kind that, were she to be called upon to make one of those difficult decisions, would move the country to stand with her.
No doubt Ms. Arbour has taken controversial positions from time to time, in the course of a five-decade-long career including some of the thorniest assignments on the planet. It would be more worrying if she hadn’t.
I don’t think it’s her positions, as such, that really upset the critics. It’s what those positions signify about her position in the political firmament, and theirs. She holds, without a doubt, the sorts of views that a Liberal government would find congenial. She moves in the same circles as senior Liberals. And they do not.
I don’t think anyone has claimed she would be biased, in the exercise of her duties as Governor-General, in favour of the Liberals. It is more that she symbolizes the Liberals’ near-permanent grip on power, and their near-permanent exclusion from it.
The summer Louise Arbour worked the phones for Expo 67
And this is where I think the critics have a point. The power to appoint the Governor-General is, like most things in the federal government, the exclusive privilege of the prime minister. There was briefly a sort of advisory committee, but he was not obliged to accept their advice, and it seems to have been abandoned.
It’s the process that’s the problem. No matter how qualified the appointee may be, he or she will suffer, as a unifying symbol, from not having been chosen by a more broad-ranging, consensus-based approach. That seems especially pertinent in such a fractious nation as ours.
The Germans have a better way. The President is elected by a convention, called expressly for the purpose. Half the convention is made up of the members of the federal parliament; the other half, by delegates from the state legislatures, chosen in proportion to the parties’ representation.
Whoever emerges from that process has to have genuinely national, cross-party support. We could use a bit of that these days.