Senator Frum's Maiden Speech
My sister Linda today spoke her maiden speech in the Canadian Senate. No it was not about fish or grain handling, wise guys. It was a perfect masterpiece of parliamentary self-introduction, and with fraternal pride I reproduce it here below.
Honourable Senators, I rise today to speak for the first time in this place -- and I do so a little cautiously and very much in awe of this Chamber. I have been given an unexpected opportunity to serve my country as a Senator. I feel the full weight and honor of this new duty.
Honourable Senators, I rise to speak to the inquiry into "Canada’s Economic Action Plan -- A Third Report to Canadians." But I understand it is the tradition of this place that I should first introduce myself.
They tell a joke in Chicago about the novice who arrives at a campaign headquarters to volunteer his services. The Ward Boss looks him over.
“Who sent you?” he demands.
“Nobody sent me,” the volunteer answers.
“Well, we don’t want nobody nobody sent.”
So let me tell you a little about those who sent me.
I think first of my grandmother, Florence Hirschowitz, born on a kitchen table in the Bronx before the First World War. A brilliant intellect – a voracious reader – a schoolteacher, she took a personal interest in almost everyone she met and she practiced her charity face-to-face and eye-to-eye. Millions of people spend their honeymoons in Niagara Falls. My grandmother spent 34 years of married life there, thanks to a joyous cross-border marriage with my grandfather, Harold Rosberg. A businessman and community leader, the gallery in the Niagara Falls public library still bears his name and that of his brother Joseph.
Florence and Harold’s eldest daughter, and my mother, was Barbara Frum. A name that still resonates in this country, all these years after her early death. She loved this country more than anyone I have ever known, and was at home everywhere in it, from the mines of Nova Scotia to the rainforests of the Pacific Coast.
My father Murray has played a substantial role in Canadian cultural and business life, generously and usually invisibly supporting some of our finest institutions. His parents, Saul and Rivke Frum, arrived in this country in 1930. That decision for Canada surely saved their lives: their parents and siblings who remained in Europe were murdered by the death apparatus of Nazi Germany, with only one survivor to tell the story of their last days.
I have a brother, David Frum, a political thinker and respected public intellectual whose independence of mind was an example to me from childhood.
You are looking at a very lucky woman to be born into such associations. And I am extremely proud of each one.
Honourable Senators, when I was received into this Chamber on September 15th – along with eight others whom I am proud to be linked by association -- it was with an oath sworn on a bible given to me by Rabbi John Moscowitz of Holy Blossom Temple, one of the oldest congregations in Canada. The bible was over one hundred years old, its cover flaking. Rabbi Moscowitz had little information about how the bible had found its way to the Temple’s library. He knew only that it was printed in Vienna, and that it came to Canada before the holocaust, and thus had eluded the incinerators of World War II. Incinerators that consumed not only so many of my own relatives, but also my husband’s: for both his parents arrived in Canada only after surviving the death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau.
After my swearing-in ceremony, the bible was sent to the Senate archives of Canada. It pleases me greatly to know that there it will rest, a visible symbol of liberty, bonding persons invisible to one another, over generations of time.
I grew up in Toronto, went to university in Montréal, but it was only when I spent a year crossing the country to write a guidebook to Canadian universities, at the age of 24 -- and then crossing it again to promote that book -- that I began to appreciate the dimensions of my home and native land.
That tour was my first introduction to the surprising fact that not everybody admires Toronto – or Torontonians – quite as much as we admire ourselves.
I learned a few lessons the hard way. For example, while I was conducting research for my book I interviewed students at Memorial University in St. John's who told me that their campus was the most "amorous" in Canada and that their pub was the most profitable.
I wrote that down just the way I heard it. But then, when I came back for my book tour, nearly half the campus– or so it felt -- came out to greet me in something near to a lynch mob. It was a good lesson for me – a good lesson for everyone in public life. People want to be understood the way they understand themselves. Even an exact quotation can be perceived as an attack, if that quote is wrenched from its context and intended meaning.
In the years following, I worked as a magazine writer, a newspaper columnist, an author, and a documentary filmmaker. I thought often of the lesson those St. John’s students had taught me -- and if I gained any success in my profession I owe much of the credit to them.
As a volunteer I have dedicated time and effort to the Writers' Trust of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Soulpepper Theatre, Canada’s Walk of Fame, The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of Canada, The Military Family Fund, and many other causes close to my heart including Zareinu, a Toronto school for the physically and developmentally challenged.
Thanks to my husband Howard Sokolowski, I have gained a new appreciation of the central place of the Canadian Football League in the culture of this country. This culture is not just naked men wearing green body paint and watermelons on their heads – though to our delight we saw much of that at last weekend’s Grey Cup match in Calgary for which a record-setting, 6.1 million Canadians tuned in to watch. But no, as great as that is … Canada’s culture is even more than that.
It is founded on practices of tolerance and ideals of freedom. It is a culture of liberty that is open to the world. It is a culture of justice and equality.
My devotion to these Canadian ideals has sharpened my concern for the erosion of personal security and religious liberty that I see on our Canadian university campuses.
It is a very strange thing that in this haven for the world’s persecuted it should again be true that young Jewish men and women face the fear of physical attack if they express their identity, not in some rough street after dark, but in the public spaces of our institutions of learning. Sixty years after one attempted extermination of the Jews, some of our universities have offered their facilities to activists who urge a second try.
When students at these universities seek protection, they are usually denied. Sadly and strangely, it is their tormenters who often successfully deploy our Canadian law of human rights as a weapon against human liberty.
I am distressed by the Orwellian inversion of the meanings of such terms as “human rights.” I am concerned by the abuse of quasi-judicial tribunals to harass Canadians who speak freely about these issues.
And I am challenged and excited by this new opportunity as a Senator to get to the bottom of things, to cast light on dark corners of our public life.
As a woman too, my ears hear whisperings of new dangers. Forced marriages, genital mutilation, killings of wives, sisters, and daughters in the name of some primitive conception of “honour” – these too are becoming Canadian realities.
But it is not Canadian to tolerate injustice. It is not Canadian to submit to silencing and intimidation. Since confederation, our soldiers have fought bravely and victoriously on battlefields half a planet away. Our men and women under the maple leaf fight the forces of fanaticism and cruelty in distant Afghanistan today. We must never dishonour them, by failing to uphold, back here at home, the causes for which they made such sacrifices.
Nor should we shy, out of some false, Neville-Chamberlain sense of “the importance of diplomacy,” from continuing to confront states that deny humane values while seeking to arm themselves with weapons of mass destruction.
Yes, Western governments should always be prepared to go that extra diplomatic mile. But Canada has unique assets to offer if and when it becomes necessary to impose crippling sanctions on a nuclearizing Iran. And in my opinion, that day is already upon us.
Honourable Senators, I could not be prouder to have my name associated with the Harper government. The moral courage shown by our Prime Minister is a model to leaders around the world. I applaud specific actions that have exhibited this courage: the recent walk out on Iranian President Mamhoud Ahmadinejad at the UN, the boycott of the Durban II conference, the suspension of aid to Hamas, the refusal to be neutral when neutrality is a moral abdication, in places like Lebanon.
The Prime Minister's leadership in Afghanistan, his work in restoring the dignity and might of the Canadian military. These actions and others like them have changed the way Canada is perceived in the world.
I hope to repay, through dedicated efforts in this chamber, some of what my family has been blessed with here in this magnificent country. My forebears embraced Canada with their whole hearts.
Now in this time, new generations of migrants have enriched our country. I speak for a city that is almost one-half foreign born. My city has shown the world the power of the Canadian ideal. Whether born in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, or the Americas, new Torontonians have worked hard. They learned English. They mastered new trades. And they raised their children to be Canadians.
They have found here opportunity and welcome. We with the good fortune to be born here celebrate their success – and expect that they embrace Canada as their only home – and Canadian values of tolerance and equality as their own.
I would like to express the great satisfaction I have found in reading the New Immigrants' Guide, published by the Ministry of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism.
It articulates with a wonderfully reasonable clarity what Canada is, and has been; and also, with admirable candour, what Canada is not. Small things change from generation to generation, but in a good country, the big things stay the same.
Honourable Senators, on the question of my own personal migration into this fine, if sometimes mysterious chamber, I should like to express particular gratitude for the welcome shown me by my female colleagues, especially our leader
Senator LeBreton, and Senators Eaton, Johnson, Wallin, Martin, Andreychuk, Nancy Ruth, Raines, Cools and Poy. It is not that my male colleagues have been any less gracious, but that the path of a woman in public life is especially complicated, particularly when, as in my unusual case, she is also trying to be a good mother to three school-aged children, the youngest of whom is six.
I am lucky to be of a generation that has groundbreakers to model itself upon and to look up to. Even luckier, I have the good fortune to be married to a man who has cheerfully accepted the burdens of the legislative spouse. And for that I wish to thank him here.
Which returns me now, by perfect circularity of political speech, to the proposition with which I began -- a promise to speak to the government's Economic Action Plan. I had better say something about that!
Given the difficulties that so many countries around the world have experienced during this global recession, these regular reports on Canada’s efforts to ease the impact, and speed economic recovery, provide useful and well-organized information to parliamentarians and to Canadians at large. But they provide more, and I should like to call attention to what I find most admirable in them.
They provide what appears to me to be an honest account of the government's thinking and strategy, and a candid survey of progress to date on an agenda that has never been concealed.
One item on this agenda has been Senate reform: delayed but not forgotten. I myself support and endorse any measures that will make the Senate a more democratic and accountable body.
I look forward to working with my colleagues, both in the House and in the Senate, to advance legislation that will make this chamber more responsive and relevant. I pledge Honourable Senators, that on these issues, as well as the others I have discussed today I will dedicate myself to hard work on behalf of the people of the province it is my great privilege to represent.