The following is the full text of Brian Mulroney’s speech to the Royal Canadian Geographical Society Gold Medal Award Reception in Montreal.

Brian Mulroney

October 27, 2021 

As a young university student, I once tried to sum up my part of Canada, calling the North Shore the “Unknown North.”

“When a Canadian refers to the North,” I wrote, “there are many reactions. Pierre Berton reflects wistfully on the Yukon. Alvin Hamilton points excitedly to a map, his finger tracing the route of the proposed Great Slave Lake Railway into northern Alberta. The legends which surround the opening of the Noranda gold mines are told by one; vivid accounts of Mackenzie’s first voyage down the raging Fraser River by another.”

My North was Quebec’s North Shore of the St. Lawrence; more colourful than Berton’s,  more prosperous than Hamilton’s, more steeped in legend and drama than a dozen Frasers, and just as wild.

“We need the tonic of wildness,” argued Thoreau. “At the same time that we are earnest  to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that  land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”

Twenty-eight years ago, as I travelled to Iqaluit for the Nunavut Land Claim signing  ceremony, I marvelled at the beauty of the land and the sea below, the indefinitely wild, the unsurveyed, the unfathomed, together, the tonic of wilderness.

Le règlement territorial du Nunavut, le 25 mai 1993 vise une région plus grande que les  trois provinces maritimes du Canada, la plus imposante superficie jamais transférée de cette  façon dans l’histoire de l’Amérique du Nord. Ce règlement met un terme à des réclamations juridiques et historiques à l’endroit des terres et ressources de cette immense région de notre pays. Désormais, les Inuit seront associés à part entière au devenir économique et politique de  leur terre ancestrale.

Deux ans auparavant, le gouvernement du Canada, dans le cadre du Plan vert, a promis  d’affecter 100 millions $ à une stratégie environnementale globale pour le Nord. Il s’agissait d’un programme de six ans prévoyant notamment l’élimination des déchets sur les terres fédérales  inhabitées, l’installation de stations de mesure de la qualité de l’eau partout dans les territoires,  l’identification des contaminants qui menacent l’écosystème, principalement la santé des  habitants, et enfin l’aide aux communautés du Nord afin qu’elles puissent élaborer des plans de  gestion et réaliser des travaux de protection en matière d’environnement.

And could there be anyplace, anywhere, that more fills Thoreau’s prescription for the well being of the human spirit than Canada, north of the treeline?

The Nunavut Land Claim Agreement represented the largest Aboriginal land claims  settlement in Canadian history. It addressed the Aboriginal rights and title of approximately 17,500 Inuit living in 27 communities in the central and eastern Northwest Territories (NWT).  

It is a great honour to receive the Royal Canadian Geographical Society Gold Medal for having transformed the map of Canada through the creation of the Territory of Nunavut, together with my environmental legacy.

The Nunavut Land Claim Agreement represented the largest Aboriginal land claims  settlement in Canadian history. It addressed the Aboriginal rights and title of approximately 17,500 Inuit living in 27 communities in the central and eastern Northwest Territories (NWT).

It covered over 2,000,000 square kilometres of land and adjacent marine areas,  representing approximately 20 percent of Canada’s landmass.

The agreement also vested the Inuit with ownership of 350,000 square kilometres of land, including mineral rights to 36,000 square kilometres. And it provided for capital transfers to Inuit of $1.14 billion and an ongoing share of royalties from resource development within the settlement  area.

But I noted that day: “In the course of this transition to the creation of Nunavut, we will redraft the map of Canada – indeed North America. But our collective achievement is far more than a simple exercise of cartography. It is, at its core, an act of nation-building.”

I went on to say that “we were forging a new partnership, a real partnership, not only  between the Government of Canada and the future Government of Nunavut but between  aboriginal and non-aboriginal Canadians,” and concluded by saying “now let us each resolve to  build on this achievement, to advance together, with conviction and determination. And in the spirit of partnership, toward the creation of Nunavut, the development of the North, and the fulfillment of the aspirations of the Nunavut people.”

When I was very young, we went to the foot of Champlain Street, and swam in Baie Comeau, for which my hometown was named. Today, there is a park where we used to swim.  The effluence from the paper mill created landfill, where once there had been pristine waters.  Nobody swims in the bay anymore. And that’s where my awareness of the environment, and of  environmental degradation, began.

I noted that day: “In the course of this transition to the creation of Nunavut, we will redraft the map of Canada – indeed North America. But our collective achievement is far more than a simple exercise of cartography. It is, at its core, an act of nation-building.”  

And when I became prime minister, it was clear there was work to do. As Elizabeth May  said: “In the era in the United States when strong environmental laws were being passed starting  in the 1970’s, you couldn’t break an environmental law in Canada because there weren’t any until  Brian Mulroney became Prime Minister.”

In addition to the Montreal Protocol and the Canada-US Acid Rain Treaty, we enacted the Green Plan, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, the Canadian Environmental  Protection Act, and established the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy.

Nous avons procédé également avec un programme de dépollution du fleuve  Saint-Laurent et les Grands Lacs et la création de huit parcs nationaux.

We created eight new National Parks, and for the first time in our history elevated the Minister of the Environment to full cabinet status as a member of the Planning and Priorities  Committee.

And Canada was the first industrialized nation to sign the Biodiversity Convention at the  1992 Rio Climate Change Summit.

But there remains much to be done.

We continue to witness the perfect storms of global warming—hurricanes slamming the Gulf Coast, incubated in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, wildfires that conjure up images of Dante’s Inferno, and the inexorable shrinking of the polar ice cap. What were trends in 2006, the year I was chosen the Greenest Prime Minister in history by Canadian environmentalists, are now part of the new normal and are more frightening for that fact.

In my address to a joint session of the United States Congress in April of 1988 in which I exhorted them to work with us to come to grips with the continuing environmental degradation caused by Acid Rain, I asked a question. “What would be said of a generation of North Americans  that found a way to explore the stars but allowed it lakes and forests to languish and die?”

Well, it is time for a new generation of leaders to ask themselves the same question about  global warming.

As difficult as the process may be to arrest and to mitigate the effects of global warming,  the work cannot be left to the next fellow. The stakes are too high, the risks to our planet and the  human species too grave.

But I am optimistic about the future because I see hope for our beloved Canada in this  new generation.

And as difficult and intractable as these problems may seem, I would encourage them to  persevere and remind them of the words of Lester Pearson, who said: “Don’t be downhearted in  the heat of battle. It is where all good men and women would wish to be.”