Heart Matters: A Memoir

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

Adrienne Clarkson was a fascinating Governor General. She travelled
widely and espoused causes, but after her 2003 tour of Nordic countries
to promote the arts, Prime Minister Paul Martin reduced her budget.
People who would have expressed approval had her tour companions been
snowmobile or aircraft vendors objected to travels with writers and
musicians seeking to publicize books, films, and music. The former
Governor General said that the controversy “deeply disturbed” her
because Prime Minister Jean Chrétien had asked her, in writing, to take
the trip. Martin failed to admit as much, let alone defend the trip.
Right-wing politicians and pundits accused her of frivolity and
extravagance, and the PM implied that he agreed with them.

In this very well-written memoir, Clarkson reviews her life: the
conditions in pre–World War II Hong Kong, where she lived; the horrors
of its occupation by the Japanese; the family’s escape (facilitated by
a well-placed Canadian friend); the terrible voyage aboard the ship that
took the family to neutral Mozambique; arrival aboard a Swedish ship at
a place (Canada) about which they knew little; the legal obstacles that
discouraged anglophones and allophones from learning French; her career
as a CBC celebrity; her marriage to and divorce from Stephen Clarkson;
her time with John Ralston Saul; and her time at Rideau Hall. One
memorable sentence reads: “When I was little in Ottawa in the late
1940s, it never occurred to me to think that there might be anybody who
had never seen a dead body in a street, or a dead body plastered against
a wall.”

Clarkson is too modest about her achievements, for she does not mention
one of her greatest, Project Adrienne. Having visited Pinochet’s Chile
as a journalist, she sympathized with Chilean refugees who relocated to
Canada. With the restoration of democracy, she realized that events
relevant to Chilean history had taken place in Canada. Accordingly, she
urged residents of Canada, both Chilean refugees and Canadians who had
written about Chilean topics, to donate copies of their works. The
writers responded enthusiastically, and the Governor General raised
Canada’s profile in Chile with the shipment of books to Chile’s
National Library.