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Keith Spicer, Canada’s Offbeat Envoy of Reconciliation, Dies at 89

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Keith Spicer, who as a spirited authorities official pushed his fellow Canadians to outline their nationwide id and reconcile their bilingual heritage greater than two centuries after the British defeated the French to seize Quebec, died on Aug. 24 in Ottawa. He was 89.

His loss of life, in a hospital, was confirmed to The Canadian Press by Nick Spicer, considered one of his three kids.

Raised by Protestant mother and father who have been anti-Catholic and anti-French, Mr. Spicer started his skilled profession as a political science professor earlier than being drafted by two prime ministers into ombudsman’s jobs that extra risk-averse Canadians might need rejected.

One activity was to get all Canadians to simply accept their nation as formally bilingual; the opposite was hear them out in the event that they complained about language mandates and different irritants.

Mr. Spicer was solely 35 in 1970 when the Liberal Celebration prime minister Pierre Trudeau named him Canada’s first commissioner of official languages, charged with imposing the Official Languages Act, which gave English and French official standing in organizations and establishments below federal jurisdiction.

The legislation was drafted within the Nineteen Sixties by a authorities fee arrange to answer calls for for equal language standing by the one in 4 Canadians whose first language was French, and to fend off a risky secessionist motion in Quebec.

Getting all Canadians on board with bilingualism, nevertheless, was simpler mentioned than completed. A mandate that nationwide air visitors be directed in French in addition to English provoked, amongst different protests, a risk by English-speaking Canadian pilots to disrupt the Montreal Olympics in 1976.

Explaining that bilingualism was required of the federal government, not of particular person Canadians, Mr. Spicer mentioned the coverage offered that “every citizen is served within the language he’s taxed in.” However he additionally promoted the educating of “French immersion” in English-language colleges throughout Canada.

Often called vociferous and irreverent, Mr. Spicer favored safari fits and Panama hats whereas working as an editor in Ottawa (the place the typical low temperature ranges from 6 levels Fahrenheit in January to 60 in July). He most well-liked to drink beer from a wine glass as a result of, he mentioned, that’s what Parisians did.

He good-humoredly reminded English audio system that his personal affection for French had flowered within the tenth grade, when he started corresponding with a French woman as a pen pal. He was so besotted by {a photograph} she despatched him, he mentioned, that he grew to become a confirmed Francophile.

“Bilingualism and biculturalism work greatest via biology,” he later declared, including unabashedly, “The very best place to study French is in mattress.”

In 1990, after the collapse of a constitutional compromise that might have additional empowered Canada’s provinces and declared Quebec a “distinct society,” Prime Minister Brian Mulroney enlisted Mr. Spicer to tackle one other difficult activity: to steer the Residents Discussion board on Canada’s Future, during which he would sound out his fellow residents’ gripes concerning the authorities and the character of the nation, a federation of provinces and territories, all a part of the British Commonwealth, that hadn’t adopted a nationwide flag till 1965 or a nationwide anthem till 1980.

Mr. Spicer was roughly an official gadfly. On the town corridor conferences, polls, videoconferences and different interactive surveys, his Residents Discussion board was mentioned to have interacted with as many as 700,000 Canadians.

“I assumed I used to be singing ‘This Land Is My Land,’” Mr. Spicer recalled of the ridicule that the duty pressure initially generated, however the “media and public heard the theme from ‘Looney Tunes.’”(Unfazed by the mockery, Mr. Spicer mentioned, “If I needed a job that had no stress, I’d be promoting bananas in Martinique.”)

“Angst is our ecstasy,” he wrote in “Identities in North America: The Seek for Neighborhood,” a 1995 assortment of essays, referring to a inhabitants inhabiting what many Canadians take into account to be “the Woody Allen of countries,” beset by inferiority complexes.

Regardless of their placid status overseas, what united Canadians was their discontent, the Residents Discussion board report concluded, noting to Mr. Mulroney’s dismay, “There’s a fury within the land towards the prime minister.”

Canadians needed politicians to hearken to the individuals, the report mentioned, “to cease taking part in little parlor video games in Ottawa, to do what they promised they’d do, and in the event that they didn’t, the individuals mentioned, ‘We’ll recall you.’”

The report advisable numerous authorities reforms, extra rights for Indigenous peoples and a recognition of the distinctive tradition of Quebec. However proposed compromises largely failed, and in 1993 Mr. Mulroney retired and his Progressive Conservative Celebration suffered a historic defeat.

Keith Spicer was born on March 6, 1934, in Toronto. His mother and father, who met in an auto manufacturing facility in Oshawa, on Lake Ontario, owned a boardinghouse for single girls.

He graduated with a bachelor’s diploma in fashionable languages and literatures (French and Spanish) from the College of Toronto in 1956 and earned a doctorate there in 1962.

He taught on the College of Ottawa and the College of Toronto and studied on the Paris Institute of Political Research. He was a founder in 1961 of CUSO Worldwide (previously Canadian College Service Abroad), a volunteer group whose targets are to remove poverty and earnings inequality.

Mr. Spicer wrote editorials for The Globe and Mail in Toronto from 1966 to 1969, was a columnist for The Vancouver Solar from 1977 to 1984 and editor of The Ottawa Citizen from 1985 to 1989. From 1989 to 1996 he headed Canada’s broadcasting and telecommunications regulatory company. He then moved to Paris, the place he labored for Ernst & Younger, the consulting agency, on telecommunications and web points.

He was later a founding director of the Institute for Media, Peace and Safety on the College for Peace in Costa Rica, established by the United Nations, serving in that capability from 2000 to 2007.

After publishing “Life Sentences: Memoirs of an Incorrigible Canadian” (2004), he mentioned, “Everybody ought to write their memoirs to search out out what they’ve been as much as all their lives.”

Whereas he self-deprecatingly referred to as himself the Commissioner of Corn Flakes throughout his seven years imposing the bilingual legislation — even the elements on cereal packing containers needed to be listed in each languages — Mr. Spicer prided himself on a peaceable transition to improved communications between French and English-speaking Canadians throughout his watch.

“Our aim was to make this boring, and we now have succeeded,” he informed The New York Instances in 1986.

Nick Spicer, his son, informed The Canadian Press that within the Ottawa Hospital not lengthy earlier than Mr. Spicer’s loss of life, he reminded his father that his bilingual legacy in Canada, and particularly within the capital, as soon as a bastion of English audio system, was very a lot in proof. His medical chart was crammed out in each languages.

“That each one modified due to you,” the son mentioned.

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