Michaëlle Jean
Michaëlle Jean is a Canadian former journalist who served as the 27th governor general of Canada from 2005 to 2010. She is the first Haitian Canadian and Black person to hold this office.
Jean was the third secretary-general of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie from 2015 until 2019. She was the first woman to hold the position and held the position until the end of 2018.
Jean was a refugee from Haiti—coming to Canada in 1968—and was raised in the town of Thetford Mines, Quebec. After receiving two university degrees, Jean worked as a journalist and broadcaster for Radio-Canada and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, as well as also undertaking charity work, mostly in the field of assisting victims of domestic violence. In 2005, she was appointed governor general by Queen Elizabeth II, on the recommendation of Prime Minister Paul Martin, to replace Adrienne Clarkson as vicereine. She occupied the post until being succeeded by David Johnston in 2010. Early in her tenure, comments of hers recorded in some of the film works by her husband, Jean-Daniel Lafond, were construed as supporting Quebec sovereignty and her holding of dual citizenship caused doubt about her loyalties. But Jean denied separatist leanings, renounced her citizenship of France, and eventually became a respected vicereine noted for her attention to the Canadian Forces, Aboriginal Canadians, and the arts, especially youth involvement in them. In 2010, Jean was appointed to a four-year term as the Special Envoy for Haiti for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.
Michaëlle Jean was sworn in as a member of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada on September 26, 2012.
Early life and education
Jean's family hails from Haiti; she was born in Port-au-Prince, baptized at the Holy Trinity Cathedral, and spent winters in that city and summers and weekends in Jacmel, her mother's hometown. Though her father worked as principal and teacher for a Protestant independent school in Port-au-Prince, Jean was educated at home, as her parents did not want her swearing allegiance to the then Haitian president, François Duvalier, as all Haitian schoolchildren were required to do.With her family, Jean fled Haiti to escape Duvalier's regime, under which Jean's father was arrested and tortured in 1965. Jean's father left for Canada in 1967 while she arrived with her mother and sister the following year; the family settled together at Thetford Mines, Quebec. Jean's father, however, became increasingly distant and violent, and her parents' marriage eventually fell apart; she, with her mother and sister, then moved to a basement apartment in the Little Burgundy neighbourhood of Montreal.
Jean received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Italian and Hispanic languages and literature from the University of Montreal, and, from 1984 to 1986, taught Italian Studies there, while completing her Master of Arts degree in comparative literature. She then went on with language and literature studies at the University of Florence, the University of Perugia, and the Catholic University of Milan. Besides French and English, Jean is fluent in Spanish, Italian, and Haitian Creole, and can read Portuguese.
Concurrent with her studies between 1979 and 1987, Jean coordinated a study on spousal abuse and worked at a women's shelter, which paved the way for her establishment of a network of shelters for women and children across Canada. She also involved herself in organizations dedicated to assisting immigrants to Canada obtain the entry they desired, and later worked for Employment and Immigration Canada and at the Conseil des Communautés culturelles du Québec, where Jean began writing about the experiences of immigrant women. She married French-born, Canadian filmmaker Jean-Daniel Lafond, and the couple adopted as their daughter Marie-Éden, an orphaned child from Jacmel. Through her marriage to Lafond, Jean has two stepdaughters.
Journalism, broadcasting, and film careers
Jean became a reporter, filmmaker, and broadcaster for Radio-Canada in 1988, hosting news and affairs programs such as Actuel, Montréal ce soir, Virages, and Le Point; she was the first person of Caribbean descent to be seen on French television news in Canada. She then moved in 1995 to Réseau de l'information, Radio-Canada's all-news channel, in order to anchor a number of programmes, Le Monde ce soir, l'Édition québécoise, Horizons francophones, Les Grands reportages, Le Journal RDI, and RDI à l'écoute, for example. Four years later, she was asked by CBC's English language all-news channel, CBC Newsworld, to host The Passionate Eye and Rough Cuts, which both broadcast the best in Canadian and foreign documentary films. By 2004, Jean was hosting her own show, Michaëlle, while continuing to anchor RDI's Grands reportages, as well as acting occasionally as anchor of Le Téléjournal.Over the same period, Jean made several films with her husband, including the award-winning Haïti dans tous nos rêves, in which she meets her uncle, the poet and essayist René Depestre, who fled from the Duvalier dictatorship into exile in France and wrote about his dreams for Haiti, and tells him Haiti awaits his return. She similarly produced and hosted news and documentary programming for television on both the English and French services of the CBC.
Governor General of Canada
Jean was Canada's first governor general of Caribbean origin; the third woman ; the fourth youngest ; the fourth former journalist ; and the second after Clarkson to not only have neither a political nor military background, but also to be a visible minority, to break the tradition of Canadian-born governors general, and to be in an interracial marriage. Jean was also the first representative of Queen Elizabeth II to have been born during the latter's reign, and her appointment saw the first child living in Rideau Hall, the official residence since Schreyer and his young family lived there in the early 1980s.As governor general-designate
On August 4, 2005, it was announced from the Office of the Prime Minister of Canada that Queen Elizabeth II had approved Prime Minister Paul Martin's choice of Jean to succeed Adrienne Clarkson as the Queen's representative. At the time, Martin said of Jean that she "is a woman of talent and achievement. Her personal story is nothing short of extraordinary. And extraordinary is precisely what we seek in a governor generalship—who after all must represent all of Canada to all Canadians and to the rest of the world as well." Almost immediately, there was speculation that Martin had been influenced by the political climate in Ottawa at the time, leading the Prime Minister to deny that rejuvenated popularity for his party in Quebec was a motivating factor in his decision.File:Paul martin 2004.jpg|thumb|left|Prime Minister Paul Martin, who recommended Jean to Queen Elizabeth II for appointment as the sovereign's viceroy
From Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, the upcoming appointment was met with mostly favourable comments, Jean's predecessor applauded the choice, saying that Jean was "an exciting and imaginative choice for Governor General." In her first remarks after this announcement, Jean herself encouraged Canadians to involve themselves in their communities, and stated that she wished to reach out to all Canadians, regardless of their background, and made it a goal to focus especially on Canadian youth and the disadvantaged.
However, by August 11, 2005, reports emerged of a forthcoming piece by René Boulanger for the Quebec sovereigntist publication Le Québécois that would reveal Jean and her husband's support for Quebec independence, citing Lafond's associations with former members of the terrorist organization, the Front de libération du Québec, specifically Jacques Rose. Though Boulanger admitted that he was motivated to incite a rejection of Jean by Anglophone Canadians, Gilles Rhéaume, former president of the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society, called on the Governor General-Designate to reveal how she voted in Quebec's 1995 referendum on independence, and Members of Parliament, as well as some provincial premiers, demanded that Jean and her husband clarify where their sympathies lay. Then, four days after the Prime Minister publicly explained that Jean and her spouse had both undergone thorough background checks by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, there came to light, on August 17, the existence of a documentary in which Jean had been filmed with several hard-line Quebec separatists, all toasting "to independence" after Jean stated: "Independence can't be given, it must be taken."
That same day, Jean responded with a public statement, saying "I wish to tell you unequivocally that both my husband and I are proud to be Canadian and that we have the greatest respect for the institutions of our country. We are fully committed to Canada. I would not have accepted this position otherwise... have never belonged to a political party or the separatist movement," and went on to say that in the documented footage she had been speaking about Haiti and not Quebec. Martin added on his earlier comments: "There is no doubt in my mind that her devotion to Canada is longstanding and resolute," though some critics continued to argue that Jean's response had been too vague. By late August, polls showed that there had been a 20% drop in support for the recommendation of Jean as the next governor general, in response to which the Haitian community voiced their support for Jean, even holding special church services in her honour. Jean reaffirmed in late 2010 that the rumours of her separatist sympathies were untrue and revealed that she had been upset by those journalists who she saw as capitalizing on sensationalism, rather than seeking accuracy through investigation, but she had been advised repeatedly not to respond.
The Queen held audience with Jean and her family on September 6, 2005, at Balmoral Castle. Though this type of meeting with a governor general-designate was standard, Jean's was unique in that the presence of her young daughter marked the first time in Elizabeth's reign that her designated viceroy-to-be had brought a child to an audience, which caused some protocol issues. The weekend was informal; for one dinner, coincidentally on the eve of Jean's birthday, the Queen drove Jean and her family to a cottage on the Balmoral estate, where they were joined by Prince Philip and Prince Edward, who, along with the Queen, performed the cooking and washing up. Of it, Jean said "t was probably the best birthday of my life." The commission appointing Jean was issued on September 10 under the royal sign-manual and Great Seal of Canada.
Upon her return to Canada, Jean yet again became a target when the subject of her dual citizenship was raised, in particular the French variety she had obtained through her marriage to the French-born Lafond. A section of the French civil code forbade French citizens from holding government or military positions in other countries, yet Jean, as governor general, would hold a governmental position as the representative of Canada's head of state, and, as such, would have a military role carrying out the duties of Commander-in-Chief of the Canadian Forces, as constitutionally vested in the monarch. The French embassy in Ottawa stated that there was "no question" that the law would not be enforced in Jean's case, but, on September 25, two days before her swearing-in, Jean made it public that she had renounced her French citizenship " light of the responsibilities related to the function of Governor General of Canada and Commander-in-Chief of the Canadian Forces" and "France acceded to my request by decree on September 23, 2005."