Christmas Luncheon

David Edmison, Chair, The Empire Club Foundation, Past President, The Empire Club of Canada and Chair, Community Service Award Committee; Diana Buck, Community Member and Volunteer, The Young Street Mission; David Adcock, Managing Director, The Young Street Mission; Dwight Johnson, Community Member and Volunteer, The Young Street Mission; Sue Cox, Executive Director, The Daily Bread Food Bank; Erika Klein, Community Member, Volunteer and Board and Member, The Daily Bread Food Bank; Rev. Edward Jackman, Member, The Empire Club of Canada; Major William A. Duncan, CD, Honorary Director, The Empire Club of Canada and Retired Chief of Personnel, Canada Post; Rod Shaff, Board Member, The Make-A-Wish Foundation of Toronto; Michael Seccareccia, `Wish Child," The Make-A-Wish Foundation of Toronto; R. Doreen Seltzer, 2003

Recipient of The Empire Club of Canada "Community Service Award" and Chair, The Seltzer-Chan Pond Inlet Foundation; and George L. Cooke, President and CEO, Dominion of Canada General Insurance Company and Past President, The Empire Club of Canada.

Introduction by John Koopman

Your Honour, Reverend Sir, distinguished head table guests, past presidents, members and guests of the Empire Club of Canada, welcome to our special Christmas luncheon in honour of community service and volunteerism. It is my pleasure to be able to introduce to you our honorary chair for the luncheon today, Ms. Valerie Pringle. Most of you will know Ms. Pringle as a very respected and well known broadcaster and journalist. But she is more than that. She is also a volunteer. She's won the Variety Club Diamond Award for her contributions as a volunteer in a wide variety of charitable organizations including the Sunnybrook Health Centre and the United Way. She's the honorary spokesperson for the Canadian Foundation for AIDS Research, honorary spokesperson for the Canadian Prostate Cancer Research Foundation, she's on the board of Trans Canada Trail and is honorary co-chair of the Ryerson University Invest in Futures Campaign. There's obviously no reest,for the wicked.

When I see a glass of water I tend to think of it as half empty. I know most of you are better than me so you think that the glass is half full. When Ms. Pringle sees the glass she just asks who is thirsty.

She is an impressive role model and an impressive community citizen. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Valerie Pringle to the podium of the Empire Club of Canada.

Valerie Pringle

Thank you very much. It is lovely to be here today because, as was explained to me, this is a bit of a diversion from the usual Empire Club fare. The Christmas lunch has evolved into one that celebrates community and excellence in service and that really appealed to me. That and the fact that whatever words you were to hear from me were to total no more than about four minutes seemed very attractive and I'm delighted to be here along with His Honour and this wonderful head table.

It's very important that you pay attention to who is here and what they do. We want you to listen to the names of all these people and what they do and applaud each one.

I will go through the names and introduce them to you now. (Head table guests are introduced)

We are celebrating all these wonderful people and great community servants and all this public service, but one of the things I wanted to talk about was the opposite of that. I read in the paper a couple of years ago that ambulances in New York City were having a hard time getting people to hospital because drivers were no longer pulling over readily when they heard the sirens. I remember thinking that it was staggering and it was disgusting. I have actually seen it happen here--people sitting in their cars with their lattes or their phones or switching disks indicating their life was more important. It is horrifying but very emblematic.

I think we live in a very selfish society and this is yet another canary in a mine shaft that's keeling over. Whether it is that we are in such a hurry or we're busy or people are not out for anybody except themselves, whatever the reason or the excuse, I think the result is the same. There's a problem with our society in its selfishness. I think it is particularly disappointing for those of us who are of baby-boomer age because we thought that when we were young we would really make a difference. I think we loved the idea of the just society, we loved the idea of living in a country where you asked what you would do for that country--peace and love and all that--and that has not come to pass.

We venerate and almost romanticize the contributions made by our parents and grandparents and their sacrifices during the Depression and the Wars. And yet we've done without nothing as a generation. Along the way we've also inhaled resources; just sucked them up. You look around and you think whatever happened to the idea of a green world and saving the planet. More of our generation focuses on their bank accounts, themselves, getting by and doing well in their tax shelters, while the gap between rich and poor in our communities and in the world has grown larger and larger. I think that is immoral.

While we are celebrating service here, and there are so many examples of people who do terrific work, the fact is that we have to stop this. We have to change. We have to pay more attention to the ambulance sirens and the cries in the night. We have to as citizens give more time or money or both, whatever we have a little of, and do a better job of looking after each other. It is not the government's job. We have to change our attitudes about what's important and what's urgent and surprise, surprise, it isn't us.

The problems in our community, and all these people who work in the community will know, are massive. If you look at the wider world, which is even more troubled, the problems can seem overwhelming and massive. Here we are having this lovely lunch in this wonderful country in this great city and we, who are able to help, are the lucky ones.

In giving we receive. That is a pretty obvious statement but we have to learn it anew. It was wonderful talking to my 16-year-old niece at a family Christmas party who learned this for the first time--the power of one. She had taken part in that magnificent breast cancer walk with her mother and saw what could be accomplished. She was one little 16-year-old kid and she could raise some money and make a statement.

Maybe this is sort of lame but it is the week "Return of the King" opens and you can be reminded of what Galadrial said to Frodo which is that even the smallest person can change the course of the future.

So I would at this time of year remind us all to recommit our energies, our ideas, our money and our time to help each other, make a contribution and make the world a better place. Thus endeth the lesson.

It is my distinct honour to introduce His Honour, the Lieutenant-Governor, the 27th lieutenant-governor of Ontario, James K. Bartleman. He was born in Orillia, grew up in Port Carling, and is a member of the Mnjikaning First Nation. He has been our lieutenant-governor for just less than two years focusing on three particular areas--mental health, anti-racism, and support for aboriginal communities, particularly young people. I'm really hoping he'll tell us about his books because I was hearing about them at lunch. Ladies and gentlemen, the Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario--the Honourable James K. Bartleman.

James Bartleman

Thank you very much Valerie. Good afternoon.

Mr. Koopman, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, I'm really happy to share the platform today with Valerie. Valerie made some very good and eloquent points about one aspect of human character and personality. I'm a Manichean. I believe that there's good and bad in everybody and it's part of our responsibility in life to focus on the good part, both as individuals and as members of society and nations.

I don't know how that goes down in your theology Father, but Bishop Tutu was expounding on this to me when he was trying to explain how there could be such evil in South Africa for so many years. After Mandela came in, the same people were able to switch to being positive and the good came forward.

Valerie talked very eloquently and truly about the indifference, the dark side of humanity and the need for us to re-dedicate ourselves to helping our fellow citizens, not just at Christmas I'm sure but all the time.

From my perspective as lieutenant-governor, I suppose I have been exposed more to the good side of society. Maybe it is because I have the OPP driving me, but whenever we put the siren on everybody pulls over to one side. The two years I've been lieutenant-governor has been a wonderful experience of meeting so many wonderful people and I don't say that from the Voltaire perspective, that everything is for the best and the best of all possible worlds as people are being flayed alive around you, but from my experience in life as well.

It is so great to be here at this table with people who are helping their fellow citizens. When I grew up, my father told his children often of his days as a hobo in the Depression. My father left home in Orillia when he was 14 because the relief payments were not enough to feed the whole family and he said it was not a romantic life despite the books that have been written about travelling across Canada, riding the rails, getting off in the hobo junctions, knocking on doors, and asking to cut up wood to get a sandwich. He said it was a terrible time--a desperate struggle for survival--and the beacons of hope back in the thirties were going to a police station and the policemen taking him and other young boys in and giving them something to eat and letting them sleep in the cells, coming to Toronto and going to the various missions and getting a square meal. His favourite place was a monastery near Ottawa where they always handed out very good apples and things like that.

To a great extent he survived on the charity of his fellow citizens and charity was not just a one-way thing, with my father and people like him accepting and the others giving. Both gained. I noticed that very much when I served as Canadian acting high commissioner in Bangladesh back in 1972. I had not been exposed to the Muslim faith before then. I noticed that, at a certain period of the Muslim year, it was the right of the disinherited to obtain charity and both sides understood that the giver gained as much as the person who received. Whether it is one person to another, one community to another or one nation to another, both sides win. I think in theology that is recognized and in psychology it is recognized and we know it in our hearts.

We saw that to a great extent in our province last year with the SARS crisis and the blackout. None of us will forget the people who went into the streets to direct traffic without being asked and the many acts of kindness that took place. Before the CBC went off the air during the blackout, the last thing the announcer said was that we would probably be engulfed in a tidal wave of rioting and all the rest. And then nothing happened. The city went into pitch blackness and yet there was no outpouring of rioting in our city. People were disciplined and people were helping each other.

I'd like to celebrate that generosity of spirit and I'm so happy to be at this head table here with people from the Young Street Mission, who have 500 volunteers to help people of all ages who are in need of food, shelter, jobs and counselling. The Daily Bread Food Bank, where volunteers distribute donated food to smaller agencies that serve, as Valerie has said, 160,000 a month, many of them children. And it is true that it does reflect a great failing I suppose of our government and society that this has to come to pass and there is a growing gap. With globalization we have found that in fact there has been a great growing gap in the world, not just in Canada, between the top 10 per cent and the bottom 10 per cent of our populations.

But we are not going to solve that problem here. What we can do is show solidarity to organizations like the Young Street Mission, the Daily Bread Food Bank, the Make,a Wish Foundation and other organizations that are too many to be mentioned. I'm very proud to attend many of their events around the city.

Having lived on six different continents around the world I think that we really do very well here in our province. People I've met over the last year include a teacher who returned to his troubled inner-city neighbourhood here in Toronto to help students overcome obstacles; a couple who provide respite and long-term care for developmentally challenged members of their community; and a doctor in his late eighties who still makes house calls every day and invites lonely seniors to join his family for Christmas. I'm very happy and honoured to meet these people regularly.

I'm very pleased as well that today I shall soon be presenting a community service award to a woman whose generosity has transformed a personal grief into a gesture of hope for the youth of Pond Inlet.

In the course of the past year I have visited up to 30 First Nations communities in Ontario and I can say that some of the communities are thriving, that the communities themselves are in pretty good shape. But in Northern Ontario where there are 52 communities and where there are about 60,000 people, more than 90 per cent of whom are First Nation, it is another situation. That is why I'm asking that you might want to pay some attention to a project that I am launching.

What I noticed in these communities was that there are no roads except winter roads at this time of the year. They are isolated. Unemployment is 90 per cent in many places. There are major problems of getting access to a proper education and health care and all the rest of it. The big thing that I noticed was that when I went into the schools there were no books in the libraries and no books anywhere in the community. They have television satellites where they bring in the worst of the reality programs from the United States and elsewhere but they don't have books.

In the libraries there will be government pamphlets on what is available here and there and I think that is a crying shame because here in Southern Ontario and Southern Canada we have books galore. People put books out to be recycled and people put them in garage sales. They try to find places to put them. Up there there aren't any books and in my view if a child has a book that is really the beginning of the approach to knowledge and possibly the spark, which will take that individual on to a higher education and into being a productive member of his or her community and country.

But that possibility doesn't exist up there and I don't think that is known here. We have too much in the South and not enough in the North, so what I am appealing to Ontarians and anyone listening to this broadcast to do is to send used children's books and young adult books to me, the Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario at Queen's Park, and working with the Ontario Provincial Police and the Canadian Forces we will deliver those books up to the North on winter roads this winter and stock all 52 of those libraries. You probably have books in your basement or elsewhere. Bring them to Queen's Park. We will have a bin there ready for you. In a little way we can also help our fellow Canadians in Northern Ontario.

Valerie begged me to mention my books. The reason I mention these books is that all the proceeds from the first one called "Out of Muskoka" are being given to the Aboriginal Achievement Foundation to help with scholarships for aboriginal youth. All the proceeds from my second book, which is called "On Six Continents," which is going to be published in February, will be going to the University of Toronto to help sponsor a lectureship series on "Shared Citizenship in Ontario." And the proceeds of my third book which deals with foreign policy in the nineties will go to this campaign of mine to provide used books for people in the North.

You invited me for lunch. You didn't know it was going to be a big pitch for a good cause in the company of other people doing similar things. I would like to say how much it has been a great privilege to be here with you today and to share the platform with Valerie. I apologize to her for using her very good theme as a takeoff for my theme--bad and good.

Merry Christmas. Thank you very much.

This was followed by the presentation of the Empire Club's Community Service Award to Doreen Seltzer by David Edmison and a performance by the Toronto City Mission Children's Choir led by choirmaster Dawn Bailey Elbourne.

The appreciation of the meeting was expressed by George L. Cooke, President and CEO, Dominion of Canada General Insurance Company and Past President. The Empire Club of Canada.