A7

LISA KEENAN
COMMENTARY

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Roméo LeBlanc will be greatly missed not only by those who knew him personally, his family, friends and former colleagues, and all those whose lives he touched directly, but also by those who knew him only as a public figure, one whose personal warmth and dedication to duty and his country are his legacy.

-Prime Minister Stephen Harper

This past week, my husband was stopped by an American tourist wanting to know if we were flying our flags at half mast for departed pop king Michael Jackson.

"No," he responded, realizing the complications of trying to explain the complexity of the governor general's position in a parliamentary democracy. "We are flying it half mast for a good and respected statesman."

I never met Romeo LeBlanc, but it seems by all accounts he was a titan in the political world. I reflected upon this sentiment this past week after viewing various photographs of the former governor general. In a couple of photographs, he wears his clothing awkwardly. I remembered what Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Abella said when she eulogized former MP and Human Rights Commissioner Gordon Fairweather at a memorial service I attended in Ottawa a couple of months back. She humorously commented on Fairweather's demur: "He fully looked the part - silver hair, magisterial bearing, lousy tailor." Someone in the small assembled crowd commented, "Aaah - a New Brunswick tailor."

When talking to my American friends I often compare my home province to the state of Maine, not because most Americans know as little of Maine as Canadians know about New Brunswick but because when it comes to politics Maine, like New Brunswick, often packs a powerful punch when it comes to producing political titans. From Joshua Chamberlain, the civil war hero, Bowdoin chancellor and Maine governor, to James G. Blaine, a U.S. secretary of state and Republican nominee for president, to Senator George Mitchell who oversaw the peace process in Northern Ireland and present-day senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, Maine has produced some of the brightest lights in American politics.

New Brunswick, (a province which was left off the map a couple of decades ago when CBC broadcast its Canada Day celebrations) is no exception when it comes to producing political giants. It has produced John Peters Humphrey, the drafter of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and this past year bore witness to the passing of two of its favourite sons - Gordon Fairweather, the first chairman of the Human Rights Commission, and Romeo LeBlanc, the first New Brunswick Acadian to become governor general.

Romeo LeBlanc was to Liberals what Gordon Fairweather was to Conservatives. Both men came from completely different backgrounds. LeBlanc, an Acadian, was one of seven children who went further than grade school because his family had given some firewood to a local group of priests who agreed to oversee his education. Gordon Fairweather was born into a New Brunswick patrician family. His father was a Harvard-educated judge who impressed upon his children that the true nature of people was how they treated others who were less fortunate than them.

LeBlanc helped draft the controversial invocation in 1970 of the War Measures Act; Fairweather was one of the lone MPs who opposed it. Although Fairweather and LeBlanc represented different political parties and beliefs, each man brought a sense of fairness and reason to the political table.

Each brought, as the poet T.S. Eliot once noted, an "experiencing nature" to the representation of their constituents. Be it LeBlanc's long, hard fight to introduce the 200-mile limit for Canada's fisheries when he was fisheries minister or Fairweather's strong opposition to capital punishment, each displayed a belief that no matter how much one disagreed with one's opponent, at the end of the day, most politicians were working for the common good of their province and country.

Both represented a conscientious, reasoned approach to the challenges of their times. Both believed that reasonable discourse always trumped provocative finger-pointing - seemingly an ever-more-distant approach for many of today's political up-and-comers.

Because Fairweather and LeBlanc came from a province with strong ties to two distinct cultures and languages, in all likelihood their experiences as New Brunswickers provided each man with the ability to reach across the political and regional divides of our nation and to become a trailblazer. Neither ever forgot where he came from, but each knew the importance of respecting those who did not come from the same place.

In essence, being from New Brunswick provided these remarkable men with a leg up on their political contemporaries and a chance to become national players in every sense of the word.

If, in fact, both men ever shared the same lousy tailor is not known, but each made an indelible mark - not merely upon their generation, but upon generations to come.

New Brunswick is a much prouder and richer society because of them.

Lisa Keenan of Saint John is a lawyer and the former president of the New Brunswick Progressive Conservative Party. Her column appears on Friday.