The Invisible Class

The recent flap over the separatist leanings of Michaëlle Jean and her husband, Jean-Daniel Lafond, obscures a more interesting fact about our country: we now elevate a certain kind of progressive public intellectual to positions of status and formal authority once reserved for British aristocrats and retired generals. Just as Lords Elgin and Alexander were representatives of the class structure of their day, the figures of Jean and Lafond, along with their predecessors Adrienne Clarkson and John Ralston Saul, say something about the power structure of present-day Canada.

Vice-regal personalities are ostensibly above partisan politics, but their words and indeed their identities are inherently political. In the same way that past rhetoric about imperialties and common loyalties was politically functional—it helped motivate our involvement in two world wars—today’s language of “Canadian values” (tolerance, diversity, multiculturalism and all the other familiar...