The 60th Adventure

Today I ate my lunch in the ballroom of the Château Laurier.

"220 outstanding senior high school students from across Canada" came to Ottawa this week "in a program designed to develop their potential as leaders in their communities and in Canadian society." Organised by the Rotary Club, this is a scheme which sprang to life sixty years ago and is still going strong. Chris and I are one of the host families co-opted to look after the young "Adventurers in Citizenship" (as they've been called since 1951); this year it was a couple of boys, Lucas from British Columbia and Dennis from Nova Scotia. Had he come from Wales, Dennis might have been known as Dennis-the-Tennis because he's particularly good at that game; he is trying to win a "tennis scholarship" to a university in the States on the strength of his abilities. Lucas is a clarinet and saxophone player. Both are keen historians, courteous, idealistic, intelligent, well-meaning young men who want to have a hand in changing the world (or their part of Canada) for the better. All Chris and I had to do was provide them with bed and breakfast and drive them downtown early in the mornings for four days, picking them up and bringing them home in the evenings; for having done this we were invited to the posh lunch.

The Rotarians in charge of this year's programme sat at the high table to give introductory speeches, telling the assembly that "...we do this for the good of Canada and of our fellow citizens" and that these young people were "a force for good in this world." (And so they are.) It was all very worthy, potent stuff. The Chair of the organising committee who also runs a Conflict Resolution programme said that the point of the young people's political discussions was to learn how to be forgiving of one another for one's disagreements and differences of opinion.

As has been the pattern since 1951, each province was represented by a Young Adventurer who stood up to make a speech about what the experience had meant to him or her. This year, one or two spoke of how exciting it had been to meet the MP Justin Trudeau (son of the former PM). Some, the girl from Prince Edward Island for example, whose ambition was to be a teacher, spoke very fluently. The young Inuit chap representing Nunavut had not made speeches before but was loudly and warmly applauded after each utterance in his not quite perfect English. The other kids particularly liked it (Woop, woop, way to go!) when he said about his four days in Ottawa: "I was shy at first, but now I'm confident!" Like nearly all the others he said he was proud to be Canadian, and the thing he had liked best was yesterday evening's dance at the Crowne Plaza Hotel.

At the end, when we had polished off our white chocolate trifles, drunk our coffees and heard all the speeches, Suzanne Pinel Judge of the Citizenship court (the lady who once swore Chris and me into Canadian citizenship, not to mention thousands of others in Ottawa) came up to the podium to lead the whole gathering in the singing of the National Anthem; it now seems to be the convention to sing the middle part of it in French, so I had better pull my socks up and learn the words:

O Canada, our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.
Car ton bras sait porter l'épée,
Il sait porter la croix!
Ton histoire est une épopée
Des plus brillants exploits.
God keep our land glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

We seem to have lost track of our glowing hearts and the True North strong and free, for the sake of a bilingual pride in swords and crucifixes. I might have said something about the significance of that, this week, had I been a not too shy Young Adventurer.