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

Keith Spicer, who as a spirited authorities official pushed his fellow Canadians to outline their nationwide identification 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 demise, in a hospital, was confirmed to The Canadian Press by Nick Spicer, certainly one of his three youngsters.

Raised by Protestant dad and mom 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 may 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 Party prime minister Pierre Trudeau named him Canada’s first commissioner of official languages, charged with implementing the Official Languages Act, which gave English and French official standing in organizations and establishments underneath federal jurisdiction.

The regulation was drafted within the Nineteen Sixties by a authorities fee arrange to reply to 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 stated than accomplished. A mandate that nationwide air site visitors be directed in French in addition to English provoked, amongst different protests, a menace 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 stated the coverage supplied that “each citizen is served in the language he’s taxed in.” But he additionally promoted the instructing of “French immersion” in English-language faculties throughout Canada.

Known as vociferous and irreverent, Mr. Spicer favored safari fits and Panama hats whereas working as an editor in Ottawa (the place the common 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 stated, 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 stated, that he turned a confirmed Francophile.

“Bilingualism and biculturalism work best through biology,” he later declared, including unabashedly, “The best place to learn French is in bed.”

In 1990, after the collapse of a constitutional compromise that will 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 guide the Citizens Forum on Canada’s Future, through which he would sound out his fellow residents’ gripes in regards to 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. In city corridor conferences, polls, videoconferences and different interactive surveys, his Citizens Forum was stated to have interacted with as many as 700,000 Canadians.

“I thought I was singing ‘This Land Is My Land,’” Mr. Spicer recalled of the ridicule that the duty power initially generated, however the “media and public heard the theme from ‘Looney Tunes.’”(Unfazed by the mockery, Mr. Spicer stated, “If I wanted a job that had no stress, I’d be selling bananas in Martinique.”)

“Angst is our ecstasy,” he wrote in “Identities in North America: The Search for Community,” a 1995 assortment of essays, referring to a inhabitants inhabiting what many Canadians contemplate to be “the Woody Allen of nations,” beset by inferiority complexes.

Despite their placid popularity overseas, what united Canadians was their discontent, the Citizens Forum report concluded, noting to Mr. Mulroney’s dismay, “There is a fury in the land against the prime minister.”

Canadians needed politicians to hearken to the folks, the report stated, “to stop playing little parlor games in Ottawa, to do what they promised they would do, and if they didn’t, the people said, ‘We’ll recall you.’”

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

Keith Spicer was born on March 6, 1934, in Toronto. His dad and mom, who met in an auto manufacturing unit in Oshawa, on Lake Ontario, owned a boardinghouse for single ladies.

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

He taught on the University of Ottawa and the University of Toronto and studied on the Paris Institute of Political Studies. He was a founder in 1961 of CUSO International (previously Canadian University Service Overseas), a volunteer group whose objectives are to get rid of poverty and revenue inequality.

Mr. Spicer wrote editorials for The Globe and Mail in Toronto from 1966 to 1969, was a columnist for The Vancouver Sun 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 & Young, the consulting agency, on telecommunications and web points.

He was later a founding director of the Institute for Media, Peace and Security on the University 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 stated, “Everyone should write their memoirs to find out what they’ve been up to all their lives.”

While he self-deprecatingly referred to as himself the Commissioner of Corn Flakes throughout his seven years implementing the bilingual regulation — even the substances 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 goal was to make this boring, and we have succeeded,” he informed The New York Times in 1986.

Nick Spicer, his son, informed The Canadian Press that within the Ottawa Hospital not lengthy earlier than Mr. Spicer’s demise, 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 stuffed out in each languages.

“That all changed because of you,” the son stated.