The following two Convocation Addresses were delivered at Carleton’s Fall Convocation ceremonies on Sat. November 14, 2009.
GRETE HALE
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Dr. Runte, faculty, honoured guests and, above all, students,
Little did I dream when 55 years ago I received my Bachelor of Journalism degree from Carleton that I would be standing in front of this year’s graduates to receive an honorary degree from my alma mater.
There are no words to describe my wonder and gratitude at this wonderful gift. I am proud to share this day with you. I salute each one of you graduates as you achieve your goal of a degree from this great university.
Commencement speakers like me often comment on the rosy futures ahead of today’s graduates. And yet, we all know this is an uncertain time. We all know the challenges in the job market and the broader economy.
So my message to you today is simple.
Whether times are good or times are tough, take action and contribute to your community and world. That will put you on the path to the most gratifying results.
I grew up with that lesson. I come from a pioneer family who first arrived on the shores of the Ottawa River in 1818. Life was tough, but they never gave up the dream of opening up the land for their families.
A hundred years later, my father ran a bakery that he started in 1911 with just $25. He knew challenges.
His bakery was wiped out in the 1930s and then he started up again.
By 1966, he was building one of the largest bakeries in North America, but due to some marketing mistakes and events beyond our control, the bank told us our company was bankrupt.
We could have run up the white flag.
We did not.
My sister Jean Pigott (former chair of the National Capital Commission and who received an honorary degree some years ago from Carleton) and I took over the reins of the company.
We decided to fight our way back. It was hard but we slowly turned things around.
I will never forget the afternoon, 14 years later, when I sat at my office desk and signed the dividend cheques with the accumulated interest to our long suffering shareholders. We had paid off the last of our debts.
Yet that did not mean life was settled and predictable. It never is and never should be.
A few years later, I was involved in preparations for the Free Trade Agreement with the United States. One day, the chief Canadian negotiator said to me: “Mrs. Hale, has your company made plans to close down your plant?” “Why,” I asked. “Because,” he answered, “under the Free Trade Agreement, your company will not survive.”
What do you do when the expert says you’re finished?
You take action and you don’t give up!
One day I will find that gentleman. When I do, I will be able to tell him that my company, Morrison Lamothe, is still thriving.
We now have three frozen food plants going full tilt in Toronto with 425 employees. We serve the North American market. And yes, we make a profit.
Now three brief stories to tell from my involvement in the voluntary sector.
Among the last words my 89-year-old father said on his death bed in his own home, the oldest house in Ottawa, were: “All I ask of my family is that they be contributors.”
I have tried to live up to that expectation and have had the privilege of serving on countless volunteer boards here and around the world.
I became a volunteer director of Ottawa’s Beechwood Cemetery 14 years ago. There was a controversy concerning selling acres of unused land for development. It took several long years of battle and we won.
And now, Beechwood has been designated Canada’s national cemetery by the Government of Canada. It is our national military cemetery and the RCMP memorial cemetery.
I encourage you to come visit our magnificent seven million dollar building, unique in the world, where people of every religion can worship. We call it The Sacred Space. I believe it will someday become a place of pilgrimage for Canadians just as Arlington Cemetery in Washington is for Americans.
As a baker’s daughter, I have seen what a little bit of yeast can do to make a delicious loaf of bread. I use that analogy to describe what a handful of us were able to do when, 21 years ago, we started the Community Foundation of Ottawa. From the interest raised over the years from our capital fund, we have given out over 50 million dollars in grants to charitable organizations in this community of ours.
One last story before I conclude.
I have been part of a small group of volunteers who, 16 year ago, started out helping a Ugandan fellow who was going to Algonquin College.
One day he heard that his sister and brother-in-law had both died of AIDS, leaving him five nephews and nieces to care for between the ages of 7 and 12. He had barely enough money to get through Algonquin, so we took on to pay the school fees of these children.
Today, that commitment is called the Canhave Children’s Centre, which pays for the education of 60 AIDS orphans near Kampala.
We have taken up the challenge to build a five-room trade school for them so they can earn a living. It has been one of the most fun, challenging and worthwhile projects I have ever been part of.
For my 80th birthday, this summer, I asked 300 of my Ottawa friends that if they would like to make a gift for my 80th, would they donate to help furnish the CanHave trade school?
At an afternoon reception at my home, those friends donated over $13,000 to build a dormitory for young women. An architect and an engineer are working in Uganda on the plans, as I speak.
I’m not done yet. At 80 years of age, life has never been as full, fun or fascinating. Yes, the old bones creak at times, but for me, the gift of life is so precious that I get up at 6 a.m. and go for it.
No question that we are in challenging times but let me tell you this. Always dare to dream. You have to work at them, believe in them, but dreams do come true.
I leave you with three sentences that come from the Old Testament that I say to myself each morning.
Be joyful always. Pray at all times. Be thankful in all circumstances.
I am one grateful Canadian who salutes and congratulates each one of you today as you start out on the next chapter of your lives.
RICHARD VAN LOON
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Just like all of you who are receiving degrees from Carleton University today, I am delighted to be here. Like you, I take my degree as, in some ways, recognition of attainments; yours in your programs, mine in some other areas of life. But I am honoured for other reasons as well, reasons which we all share.
We are all receiving degrees from a truly unique institution. Now all universities can claim to be distinct in some ways; program mixes are different across Canada as are physical facilities, faculties and student bodies. But Carleton is absolutely distinct in its origins and in the implications of those for the university we know today.
Carleton’s origins are beautifully described in a book called Creating Carleton, a history of its early years by the great Canadian historian and Carleton University Professor Blair Neatby and our wonderful University Secretary Emeritus Donald McEown. Carleton is the only university founded in Ontario in the long years from 1887 to 1957. It is the only university founded purely by a community movement with absolutely no support from either church or state. Its origins lie in the basement of the old Ottawa YMCA on Metcalfe Street, in the minds of community leaders and, perhaps most of all, in the unremitting work of its first president, Henry Marshall Tory, a man who, beginning in 1942 at the age of 77 and after founding what were to become the Universities of British Columbia and Victoria, been the first president of the University of Alberta and then the President of the National Research Council set out with single-minded determination and a lot of community support to ensure that Ottawa had a non-sectarian College and that the young people who flooded into Ottawa as part of the war effort and veterans who would return afterwards would have a place to complete their university degrees.
If I may be permitted a couple of asides, two-thirds of its first students were women, many of whom came to Ottawa in war-related jobs, a percentage of women students never equalled since. And as another, the famous Carleton/ University of Ottawa rivalry results in part from a now long dead religious rivalry. Carleton was non-sectarian, University of Ottawa was Roman Catholic. After the original Board of Governors approved Carleton’s motto…Ours the Task Eternal…the Chair of the Board, Harry Southam, publisher and owner of the Ottawa Citizen harrumphed: “The real motto is ‘To Hell with the Pope’.”
Even without the help of the Pope or the the government of Ontario, Carleton College opened for business on September 1, 1942. It had no buildings, no library, no facilities at all of its own. But it did have 500 students, an enthusiastic, if mainly part-time faculty, and a powerful will to survive.
This latter came in handy because, for its first seven years, it received no government support and was financed wholly by fees and donations. Its classrooms were borrowed from the Ottawa Collegiate Institute and its library was a guarantee from the Ottawa Public Library to carry three copies of each required text. Fees were $10 for each first-year course, faculty received $2.50 a classroom hour and the president’s salary was…zero.
In 1946, Carleton moved into its “new” building – the old Ottawa Ladies College at First and Lyon and it had its first convocation, with a graduating class of 3 BJs and 3 BPAs. Well, actually it sort of graduated its first class. In fact, until 1952, it had no provincial charter permitting it to grant degrees but it did so anyway. The first six years of Carleton graduates actually have illegal degrees, but fortunately so great was Tory’s reputation that other universities accepted Carleton degrees, in effect because he certified them. Fortunately, too, for you, Carleton College was given degree granting authority in 1952 and made a university in 1957, so you can breathe a sigh of relief. Your degrees are legal.
Henry Marshall Tory died in office in 1947 at the age of 83 and in full flight. For its first five years, he, the community leaders who supported him and the 500 or so students were the College.
I have described those years in a bit of detail because, even 67 years later, their influence echoes in our halls, classes, laboratories and tunnels. This is still a community enterprise. Its tradition is simply “we can do it and if we have to, we will do it by ourselves. The campus on which we are celebrating convocation today was mostly purchased by a brave Board of Governors in the early ‘50s out from under the NCC and the objections of Ottawa’s then Mayor, Charlotte Whitton. Where other universities were given campuses by governments, we acquired ours away in spite of governments.
The first three buildings on this campus were built without certainty that they would be financed and on a shoestring…something that any of you who have suffered through a seminar in the post-filled rooms of Paterson Hall will well know. The famous tunnels, unique among universities, were a smart expansion of heating pipe tunnels. It has survived repeated bouts of financial hardship most often caused by the nature of its origins and by the Government of Ontario’s reluctance to adequately fund all of the universities in Ontario. Its can-do attitude has fostered a tradition of what I would call “very loud civility” in which we often debate matters at the top of our lungs and in full public view before coming to conclusions which respect the best interests of the institutions. Carleton has never been a self-satisfied or overly comfortable place, but after it all, it has become a great research and teaching institution, one from which you are rightly proud to graduate.
I would like to conclude with a few words about my part in all this. I started at Carleton, and, yes, surviving a certain amount of initiation festivities, in 1958.There were 800 of us full-time students, about 40 full-time faculty and we were in the midst of the move to this campus. I have two (now three) degrees from Carleton. My father studied here. My sister has two Carleton degrees, I met my wife (BA, 1965) here and my daughter holds a Carleton MJ. I taught here for 10 years, interspersed with stints in government and I teach here now. And yes, I was president for nine years. All told, I have been closely associated with Carleton for 51 of its 67 years.
Carleton University was not in great shape when I became president. We faced a devastating combination of provincial grant cuts and enrolment declines. It’s fair to say I did not have any idea what I was getting into. Since things turned out pretty well in the end, after all, you are here and graduating today, that leads me to my first lesson: don’t always look too closely before you leap or, as the songwriter Guy Clark says: “Don’t you know that your life is just a leap of faith, so close your eyes and hold your breath and always trust your cape.”
My second, and last, lesson, is that you can’t do it yourself. Unless you write poetry or novels, what you accomplish will always be accomplished through others. At Carleton, I was blessed, as you graduates have been, with a committed faculty and great university staff. I also had brilliant and hard working vice presidents, Spruce Riordon, Stuart Adam, Duncan Watt, John ApSimon, Feridun Hamdillahpur, and Alan Harrison, who were willing to work endlessly for Carleton and I had a personal assistant, Pam Mallon, who made my life easier or maybe even possible, while also making the ceremonial life of the institution work as it should. This has been true in every job I’ve ever had, or at least the ones where I’ve accomplished anything, and I guarantee to those graduating today that it will be true for you too.
I want to end with the words of one of my predecessors, Claude Bissell, who was president in 1958 when I started at Carleton and later went on to be president of the University of Toronto for 14 years. His advice to graduates was the same as mine is to you:
Risk more than you think is safe.
Care more than others think is wise.
Dream more than others think is practical.
Expect more than others think is possible.
For you who are about to graduate and for Carleton, the university I love, there could be no better advice.
Saturday, November 14, 2009 in Speeches
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