For one haitian taxi driver tearing through rain-drenched Montreal streets on a recent evening, there is only one reason anyone would want to attack Michaëlle Jean’s appointment as Governor General.

“It’s small-time politics,” the cabbie sighed. It’s a sentiment Prime Minister Paul Martin would no doubt endorse.

For a Haitian community used to grim news from their impoverished, violent homeland, Jean’s appointment to Governor General was an unqualified cause for celebration. It’s easy to understand, then, why Haitian-Canadians such as the taxi driver might find the attacks on Jean’s nomination irritating.

When she was 11, Jean’s family fled Haiti and settled in Quebec. She became an award-winning television journalist and independent filmmaker, participating in documentaries on being black both in Quebec and Haiti.

She speaks five languages fluently and, with her husband, adopted a child from Haiti who is now six. She is the first black to be named Governor General.

“It’s one of the best pieces of news ever for the Haitian community since its establishment in Quebec and in Canada,” Pierre-Gérald Jean, president of Montreal’s Creole festival, told The Gazette.

But not everyone was so enamoured.
Critics focused on Jean’s suitability to be the Queen’s representative in Canada. On one side, conservative commentators griped cynically that her nomination reeked of political correctness and was designed to shore up flagging Liberal fortunes in Quebec.

One wonders if Martin had tapped a white oil-and-gas executive from Alberta whether he would have been accused of trying to breathe new life into Liberal electoral fortunes in the West or head off western separatism.

Then there were questions about whether Jean is Canadian enough for the job. After all, she acquired French citizenship (to go along with her Canadian citizenship) through her marriage to French-born filmmaker Jean-Daniel Lafond.

She was judged by some commentators to have been insufficiently effusive in her praise of Canada during the press conference at which she was introduced by Martin as the Governor General designate.

Meanwhile, hard-line Quebec separatists opened their own front against the appointment, accusing Jean and Lafond of harbouring sovereigntist sympathies.

A novelist named René Boulanger alleged that Lafond, who produced a film about the October Crisis in 1994, was “a pure sovereigntist” and an erstwhile friend to former FLQ terrorists. Boulanger reported Lafond even had a bookcase built by Jacques Rose, a former member of the FLQ cell that kidnapped and murdered Quebec minister Pierre Laporte in 1970. The separatists also dug up a 1993 quote from Lafond in which he endorsed Quebec sovereignty.

But it’s Jean who has been appointed Governor General, and here, allegations of separatist sympathies were decidedly sketchier. She apparently has rubbed shoulders with separatists, according to Boulanger. “She’s been immersed for ages in the sovereigntist atmosphere that characterizes her intellectual circle.”

The media dutifully got on board and even gave some attention to gadfly separatist Gilles Rhéaume and his call for Jean to declare publicly how she had voted in the 1995
separation referendum.

If the aim of Boulanger and Rhéaume was to make trouble for Martin and the federalists, it was mission accomplished by the time provincial premiers gathered for their annual summer clambake. A number of premiers took up the call for Jean to make a public profession of love for Canada.

After a week of pounding, Jean finally was forced to issue a statement stating that both she and her husband “are fully committed to Canada. I would not have accepted the
position otherwise.”

Interestingly, a number of prominent separatists, including Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe came to Jean’s defence, urging hardliners to stop attacking her. Jean’s appointment is hugely popular in Quebec, especially among ethnic voters, and a strategy of tearing it down is not a winner for the separatist cause.

In announcing Jean’s appointment, Martin described her immigrant story as Canada’s story. If her personal history is uniquely Canadian, it’s just as true the unseemly debate over her fitness to become Governor General could only have happened in Canada. IE