Hang around the fort long enough, and you too could become Governor General

What strikes me about Mary Simon’s CV is the almost fifty years of service to the government. That would be the settler government.

Stuck in a tsunami of bad press re: those thousands of missing native kids from the residential school era, our ever-opportunistic PM came up with a brilliant PR solution to a bedevilling PR problem; make an Indigenous woman the Queen’s representative in Canada!

The establishment commentariat has lauded this bold stroke. How refreshingly post-modern to have the colonial power represented by an Indigenous person! And oh, what wonders this appointment will do for reconciliation! A mere 410 years after the first English settlers arrived in Canada, the English monarch has finally made things right!

Although it’s hard not to be cynical, this symbolic gesture is better than nothing. On the other hand, given the history of the past 410 years, let’s hold the hosannas for now. Symbolic gestures are too often conflated by our political class with “doing something” or “redressing issues.”

Time will tell.