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Decentralized Democracy

Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the King’s Privy Council for Canada and Minister of Emergency Preparedness

Sherry Romanado

  • Member of Parliament
  • Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the King’s Privy Council for Canada and Minister of Emergency Preparedness
  • Liberal
  • Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne
  • Quebec
  • Voting Attendance: 67%
  • Expenses Last Quarter: $117,520.90

  • Government Page
Context: House Hansard - 177 - Mar/31/23
Mrs. Sherry Romanado (Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, Lib.)
Madam Speaker, before I begin my speech, I want to assure the member for Joliette that we are not planning to call an election this year. I am rising today to express my support for Bill S‑202, an act to amend the Parliament of Canada Act with regard to a parliamentary visual artist laureate. This bill recognizes that we do our best work as legislators when we are informed by many types of knowledge and that visual arts are included in the essential foundation of thinking and understanding that the Library of Parliament represents. As the official representative of the Library of Parliament, the visual artist laureate would create works of art, organize events and enrich the Library of Parliament's holdings in order to promote the arts in Canada. Like our poet laureate, who condenses big revelations into small constellations of carefully chosen words, a visual artist laureate would, through their creations, not only give us something new to see but also give us new ways of seeing things. We could certainly use that right now. I have had the privilege of serving Canadians in Parliament over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the experience has allowed me to confirm, on a large scale, many of the ideas I have long held about the people living across this country: their resilience, their stamina, their care for one another and their incredible hard work. I have also seen some breathtaking reminders of Canadians' imagination and creativity, extraordinary artwork that has revitalized our hopes, enlivened our thinking and allowed us to remain connected to our common humanity despite the distance between us. While it is definitely not my goal to minimize the painful feelings of separation and isolation that so many Canadians experienced during the early days of the pandemic, I have had the pleasure of meeting many people who are making deep connections with each other that are not solely based on being in the same place at the same time. We bear witness to one other when we communicate what we really care about, and today we have many ways to convey those thoughts and feelings. Some choose new technologies, which have reached heights we never thought possible before the pandemic, but many people choose to do things differently. For example, the information communicated through a letter is very different from a live dialogue between two people. Similarly, the arts represent a beautiful language for expressing ourselves and showing others what gives meaning to our lives. Art is also a powerful means of expressing the important issues that are at the heart of our experiences. It is an extremely effective tool for understanding and resisting the tumultuous times we are living in and for imagining a better world. These new visions that Canadian artists could offer are not bound by the constraints of literal eyesight. Take Bruce Horak, for example, a Calgary-born visual and performing artist. He had a cancer in childhood that took most of his eyesight. Since then, he has been legally blind. Speaking of his journey to painting in one of a series of interviews with artists from the Disability Arts Movement, presented by Tangled Art + Disability and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Mr. Horak said, “People would ask me how I see, how I am able to do what I do with 9% vision, so I started painting portraits to try to capture the way I see the world. That includes auras and halos and floaters and a lot of distortions...I painted a portrait a day for a full year and really enjoyed the connection that happened between myself and my subject.” Since beginning this project in 2011, he has painted over 600 individual portraits from live and virtual sessions, giving his subjects the opportunity to see themselves in a new way. Similarly, the visual artist laureate could facilitate more of these perceptual transformations, changing how Canadians see themselves and demonstrating the inherent richness that every different way of seeing brings to our collective. That richness has so often been squandered, whenever different ways of seeing have been shut out, cut down or marginalized. We lawmakers must take action to see our country's problems from other perspectives. Our vision captures only a pinhole of the bigger picture. For us to make just laws, we must work harder at seeing everyone and everything as they truly are. In an inspiring artwork from 2019, Montreal artist Michaëlle Sergile used Maya Angelou's voice reciting The Mask, which is a mash-up of We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar, a 19th century Black poet, and Angelou's own poem For Old Black Men, to translate sound into something visible, tactile and entirely new. The sound waves of Angelou's masterful and devastating performance of this piece, which speaks to the pain and injustice Black people have had to mask with laughter, is mapped with a spectrograph into a visual pattern. It is then transformed again into something new and richly layered by weaving that pattern into a black and white mix of cotton, alpaca and acrylic, with these broad, shawl-like ribbons of Maya Angelou's voice in fabric, cascading down the gallery wall. How would it change us if we could literally wrap the sound of those words around our shoulders? A visual artist laureate could open up a gateway to transformative experiences such as these, not just for legislators, but for all Canadians. When Gabrielle Roy, one of the most celebrated authors of 20th century French-Canadian literature, asks, “Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts?”, she reminds us that certain parts of ourselves can only be reached by taking detours, through metaphors and representations, through poetry and art. No matter how many people we share our time and space with, we live most of our lives inside our own heads. I would never call this a small space, though. Our inner world is like an ocean, full of mysterious, undiscovered spaces. Even though most of us know the path that runs along the shore, we are not comfortable spending time on the other side of the sandbar, beyond where our feet can touch the bottom, all alone, deep underwater, under pressure, in the unfathomable valleys of our being. Still, it is in these strange and isolated places that artists create most of their work. Their creations allow us to escape the confines of our consciousness, if only for a brief moment, and see life through the eyes of another person, in order to connect the submerged continents that separate our many ways of being. We must take every opportunity to enjoy the discoveries we make on these introspective journeys and recognize the courage of artists who resist the pressure to explore the deepest parts of their souls. We must examine, with courage and curiosity, both the treasures and the ruins they bring to the surface, in order to better understand who we are and where we come from. We need to pass Bill S-202 and create the position of parliamentary visual artist laureate.
1199 words
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