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Five reasons why Canada has no speech-making tradition.
“I once joked at a staff gathering that the old saying, ‘Give me the making of the songs of a nation and I care not who makes its laws’, could be amended by substituting ‘speeches’ for ‘songs’.”
Ted Sorensen wrote that sentence in his memoir Counselor, published in 2008. The longtime speechwriter and advisor to senator and then president John F. Kennedy appreciated the persuasive power of shrewdly crafted and delivered speeches. He was a masterful speechwriter and he observed the mesmeric influence of his work on countless audiences across the United States and around the world.
Sorensen’s boss also knew a thing or two about speeches. Kennedy used them as a springboard not only to the highest elected office in his country, but also to become the voice of his generation. His high regard for speech-making stemmed from a lifelong love of history and—as historian Barbara Leaming shows us—a close study of the political rhetoric of Churchill. Ah, Sir Winston. Such is the might of the legendary British parliamentarian’s oratorical legacy that English speakers everywhere revere his speeches more in memory than people did when he first delivered them. Richard Toye’s The Roar of the Lion reveals this surprising fact to us.
These two men—Kennedy and Churchill—are special yet not unique. Both were inheritors and guarantors of centuries-old speech-making traditions in their respective countries. Simply look at some of the names of the orators who preceded and succeeded them: Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama in the United States; Charles Fox, Edmund Burke, William Gladstone, Benjamin Disraeli, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair in Great Britain.
Can you identify a great Canadian speech or speech-maker?
I’m a student of history, a writer of speeches and a citizen of Canada. This combination has led me to reflect on the speech-making tradition of my home and native land. I’ve concluded we have none. Canada has produced no speech-makers of consequence and no speeches that are lodged in the historical memory of my countrymen and women.
Even the most politically and historically plugged-in Canadians can highlight, at best, a handful of noteworthy speeches—possibly Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s tribute to Sir John A. Macdonald on the death of our country’s first prime minister in 1891, or perhaps Pierre Trudeau’s televised address to the nation during the 1970 October Crisis, or maybe Stephen Harper’s recent apology to the Aboriginal men and women who, as children, were students of Canada’s residential schools.
Ask most Canadians to name a famous speech given by a national figure in their country that resonates across years, generations and regions as a definitive statement on our land and its people and you’ll get a blank stare.
I know. I’ve asked.
In the spirit of Sorensen’s quote, then, Canadians—unlike Americans and the British—don’t have the speeches of a nation. I dare say the spoken words embedded most deeply in Canada’s historical memory are those uttered by a Frenchman—“Vive le Quebec libre!” by Charles de Gaulle—to lend support to people who wished to break up our country.
How ironic. How Canadian.
Five reasons why you probably can’t name a great Canadian speech
The stark contrast between Canada on the one hand and the United States and United Kingdom on the other is puzzling. My country enjoys old and strong political, institutional, commercial and cultural bonds with these two great nations. So what factors account for Canada’s lack of a speech-making tradition? I’ve pinpointed five possible reasons:
1. Canada has two official languages: English and French. As a result, most national leaders feel compelled to use both languages in their speeches. This compulsion leads many of them to alternate from one language to the other—three minutes of speaking in English, then one minute in French, then two minutes in English, then two minutes in French, and so on until the entire speech is delivered.
One problem. While Canada has two official languages, few of its citizens understand—let alone are fluent—in both. As speech-makers alternate from language to language, audiences tune in and out, depending on which language is being spoken. Many listeners lose track—or stop following altogether—what a speaker is saying.
Compounding the problem and accelerating the rate at which audiences stop paying attention is the quality of the speech-maker’s fluency in his or her second language. A speech-maker’s delivery suffers as he or she switches to a second language. That’s natural. Like the rest of us, most speakers are much weaker in their second language than their first.
How would this situation manifest itself in the United States and the United Kingdom? Just think if Barack Obama felt the need to give large portions of his speeches in Spanish, or if Tony Blair did the same in Welsh or Irish or Scottish. Not a pretty sound.
2. Canadian elected leaders rarely take risks when they speak publicly. Their aversion to risk-taking in their speeches is an innate quality that arises from being an elected official in such a geographically vast and culturally diverse country. Canadian political scientists identify our political leaders and parties as brokers, because they must appeal to a nation of voters divided by region, class, language and income to gain power. Our brokerage system discourages officials from speaking boldly and encourages them to speak blandly. Audacious ideas expressed via spirited words may appeal to some, but they risk alienating even more others.
We don’t have to look far for proof. Paul Wells, in his portrait of Stephen Harper in power, The Longer I’m Prime Minister, quotes an unnamed official in the Prime Minister’s Office on Mr. Harper’s approach to speech-writing and speech-making: “It’s really rare that he would deliver a really meaningful speech. He works at removing memorable terms of phrase and identifiable ideas from speeches. He puts great effort into flattening prose.”
Why does the Prime Minister go to great lengths to suck the life out many if not all of his speeches? According to the source in Wells’s book, “All the best stuff that sounds good in speeches becomes a line in the sand. It gets held against you later. So that stuff is coming out. He (Harper) spends hours subtracting a voice from his speeches.”
The result of this approach is inconsequential speeches. Good governing, perhaps; bad speech-making, for sure. While Mr. Harper employed this method to an extreme, it’s one in keeping with that practiced by most Canadian leaders today and in the past: make speeches infrequently; have little to say that is truly meaningful; inform but never try to inspire. Can you picture Winston Churchill or Martin Luther King adopting this style?
3. Canadians rely on others to say things that truly matter. When something meaningful needs to be said, when big questions arise, when that figurative line in the sand must be drawn, we Canadians leave it to others—usually American or British leaders—to do the drawing for us. Canadians have others speak for us on such big questions because we tend to be self-effacing. Our reluctance to bring attention to ourselves is reflected in the powerful strain in Canadian life that our country should serve as an arbiter or a follower rather than a leader. We simply have neither the temperament nor the resources to lead others in perilous times or in pursuit of grand ideals.
We have expressed this national trait many times. When Canadians were gripped with questions of war and peace 75 years ago, we heeded the voices of Churchill and Roosevelt, not Mackenzie King and John Bracken. When Canadians faced up to the stern challenges of the Cold War, we drew justification and inspiration from the words of Truman and Kennedy, not Louis St. Laurent and John Diefenbaker. When Canadians pondered the promise and perils of a new century, we looked for assurance and guidance from the stirring rhetoric of Clinton and Obama, and Bush and Blair, not Jean Chretien, Paul Martin and Stephen Harper.
4. Speech-making in Canada’s national legislature has been moribund for years. You would think that an institution made expressly to encourage speech-making would be the forum for the greatest words uttered in my country’s national life. You’d be wrong. Canada’s House of Commons is my country’s very own kabuki theatre—a stage on which our elected representatives assume fixed roles and mouth assigned lines before coming to predetermined decisions.
This practice is particularly evident when members of Parliament from one party occupy a majority of seats in the House. Party discipline has become so rigid in Canada’s House of Commons that prime ministers whose parties control a majority of seats in the House have no need to speak with any regularity to persuade members of Parliament and little need to speak to persuade the people of my country. Leaders of opposition parties in the House of Commons aren’t much different than the prime minister in this regard, for they know their words will have no bearing on the result of House votes.
In this ironclad setting, all MPs are voting machines, locked into place to support the positions arrived at by their party leaders. They are also speech-making automatons whose words are guided by the positions of their respective parties. In the case of government MPs, their speeches most often originate from the offices of relevant ministers (depending on the motion under debate) and are approved by officials in the Prime Minister’s Office.
As a result, in Canada’s House of Commons, ritualized speeches spoken in isolation have replaced genuine verbal exchanges among members of Parliament meant to persuade the legislators and Canadians. On this platform, debate is not meant to enlighten and inspire but to consume time allocated for consideration of a motion before members vote according to their respective party lines. In this venue, speeches themselves are not carefully considered and delivered works of rhetoric. They are, at best, lectures; at worst, speeches are background documents read out loud, or they are based on pages of talking points prepared and then strung together by employees of federal departments or parties’ parliamentary offices.
Former Liberal Party and opposition leader Michael Ignatieff devoted a chunk of his recent memoir, Fire and Ashes, to my country’s lack of legitimate speech-making. He wrote, “I can’t remember a speech I heard in five years in the House of Commons that was meant to persuade.”
Isn’t persuasion what speech-making is all about? Not in Canada’s House of Commons. Ignatieff continues: “I heard dozens of speeches that faithfully recited party talking points (but) we (members of Parliament) never wasted a single breath trying to convince each other.”
Ignatieff is right. When it comes to giving speeches, most members of Parliament in Canada have been merely going through the motions for years. And the quality of their speeches reflects this fact.
5. Television. It’s the elephant in the room, the obvious truth about the lack of a speech-making tradition in Canada that goes largely unaddressed. Our disregard of the primacy of television in our lives is unsurprising: Can we notice let alone gauge the sway of something that has been with us — if not a part of us — since our infancy? So ubiquitous is television that we take its powerful presence for granted, never examining how it shapes our thinking, directs our actions, and defines how we interact with others and they with us. Since its launch in Canada in 1952, television — slowly but inexorably — has also decided the manner in which our leaders speak to us.
That manner is not speeches. Our leaders speak to us primarily through the televised proceedings of Question Period in the House of Commons. What is Question Period? The rule book sets out that for 45 minutes each sitting day, opposition members of Parliament are to pose questions to ministers, who are then to supply answers to said questions. That’s what the rule book says. What ends up happening tends to be opposition members making statements or allegations that are veiled as questions. Ministers respond with statements or allegations of their own that are veiled as answers. The questions are meant to indict, the answers to defend, deflect or counter-indict. Indictments and counter charges are recorded, then edited into a tidy package that is aired on evening newscasts across the country. Would the spectacle be different if cameras were not in the chamber to record the proceedings? I don’t know. Does it matter? As your favorite professional athlete is fond of saying, it is what it is.
What I do know is that the House of Commons began televising its proceedings (1977) and established its current form of Question Period (1975) at virtually the same time. As a consequence, for the past two generations, televised Question Period has been the main forum in which Canada’s elected leaders speak to the electorate, and 10-second indictments and counter-charges have been the main form through which Canada’s elected leaders speak to the electorate. Television has both nurtured the spectacle and engendered in us a craving for it.
Must it always be so? Predicting the future can be a mug’s game. That said, let me try. While television as we have known it for more than 60 years has changed radically recently, our screens and how we view them seem to be evolving in a way that reinforces the appeal of these 10-second sound bites. Smaller chunks consumed continually. What about virtual reality, you say? Will devices enable us to recover the lost art of rhetoric? Perhaps. Speeches are the world’s most inefficient medium of persuasion — and the most powerful. Inefficient because they are one-time events that take place at a specific time and place. Powerful because we can look into a speaker’s eyes, hear her voice and share a special experience with others. Perhaps virtual reality devices will enable us to experience the powerful elements of speech-making without having to endure the trials of time and travel that make them so inefficient.
Speeches will never be the songs of our nation
Perhaps. Yet if Canada doesn’t have a speech-making tradition now, it’s unlikely the country will ever have one. Speech-making seems to be an increasingly archaic holdover from a time before television and certainly before the screens we hold in our hands today. Again, smaller chunks consumed continually.
Should we want speeches to survive? As a student of history and writer of speeches, my answer is unsurprising: We should. Just as the Aboriginal practice of oral teaching enables generations to pass down centuries’ worth of accumulated wisdom, a tradition of speech-making would enable Canadians to tell stories about themselves and their land and, in so doing, reinforce their ideals and values, reveal their mistakes and triumphs, and highlight their present problems and future dreams. And not only with living audiences, but also with audiences to come—across the country and around the world—who will read these speeches and see them through other media.
Until then, until—as Ted Sorensen suggests—our speeches are the songs of our nation, we’re a lesser people than we could be.
