Chris Selley: This can’t be happening at Rideau Hall

Governor General Mary Simon gives a speech during the Letters of Credence Ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa on Thursday, April 16, 2026. Photo by HYUNGCHEOL PARK /Postmedia

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With the very notable exception of promising to learn French, then failing to do so, Mary Simon has not been a terrible Governor General. She spent money rather freely, of course, but they all do, and Parliament makes the budget, after all. You didn’t hear much from or about her, which is Job One for a governor general. That is, except in the francophone media, where she is a constant thorn in nationalists’ side because of her linguistic shortcomings.

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The anglophone press outside Quebec is another thorn in nationalists’ side, because it features many voices defending Simon on grounds that she is bilingual, only in English and Inuktitut.

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There aren’t many surer ways to create a linguistic controversy in (francophone) Canadian media and politics than to liken French to another minority language. Official bilingualism is an exploded myth in many ways, but it’s a constitutional and historical reality and rightly so. Canada wouldn’t exist otherwise.

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Alas, Simon’s husband, former CBC journalist Whit Fraser, has unfortunately decided to poke that bear — not for the first time — as the couple prepare to leave Rideau Hall. Simon needn’t answer for her viceregal consort, necessarily, although surely His Excellency, an Order of Canada recipient, has at least some implied duties along the lines of the Governor General’s. Duties like not poking bears.

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“I would only say this to people who want to continue to criticize the Governor General’s inability or struggles with French: How was their own lessons in Inuktitut, or Cree or Algonquin or Blackfoot or Squamish? How are those lessons going?” he kvetched recently to The Globe and Mail. “It was the hypocrisy that riled me and still does.”

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Fraser is also a “back in my day” journalism crank straight out of central casting. In a new memoir titled “From Ragged Ass Road to Rideau Hall,” he takes aim at “new media” for whom journalism has ostensibly “become a licence to lie.”

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“The traditions, rules, and ethics in newsrooms where I learned my ‘craft’ were well understood. You could be fired for getting the facts wrong, and if you deliberately distorted facts your dismissal would be guaranteed. You would be discredited and know the wrath of your peers,” he writes.

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“Not anymore. … Today, an individual or an agency can lie with impunity and yet, at the same time, hold a membership in the Parliamentary Press Gallery long ago established on the principles of freedom of the press and the public’s right to know.”

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Among Fraser’s specific targets is National Post, for the crime of reporting on the catering costs of Simon’s 2022 trip to the Middle East — costs that Fraser himself grants were “outrageous,” and which he concedes the public has a right to know about, but … well, I’m not actually sure what his objection is, to be honest. No one suggested Simon personally signed off on the costs.