CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY

As a proud Canadian, it was with some trepidation that I accepted an invitation to speak in Boston during the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

I grew up in Edmonton during the heyday of the Oilers, but I come to you today as a Member of Parliament from Leafs Nation. We have reason to both loath and envy the Bruins, and I didn’t know which sentiment would be dominant this morning.

Well, as it turns out, Torontonians will be watching the game tonight torn between fear and hope—and, just maybe, the Bostonians among you will find it deep, deep in your hearts to cheer a bit for us, too.

So, President Aoun, thank you so much for the kind introduction—and maybe you, too, will take a little pity on my yearning city tonight.

I want to thank you, President Aoun, and everyone here at Northeastern for the very humbling opportunity to address this remarkable Graduate class.

5,717 talented and exceptionally motivated graduates—the justifiable pride of 104 different countries.

And that is part of what makes Northeastern so special.

A global student body—and a school with a true global vision.

The international experience you’ve had at Northeastern will serve you well—whether you’ve learned from your classmates on campuses across the United States or in London—or in Vancouver or Toronto!—or while on co-ops around the world.

The challenges of this generation are not the monopoly of any one country or continent—nor will they be solved by anyone acting alone.

And as you set off into the world today, there is not a Graduate class anywhere that is better prepared to face them.

So to the Graduate class of 2023: congratulations!

It is an honour to be with you—and my remarks this morning are chiefly addressed to you.

But I would like to start where your stories all started—with the gloriously proud group of people gathered in this storied stadium today: your parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles.

We all know that it takes a village to raise a child. So to all of the villages that raised the remarkable young people here today: thank you very much!

I also know that many of you—too many of you—raised these wonderful graduates without villages—alone, or nearly so.

And if you weren’t alone all the time, I know, as a mother of three, that it often felt that you were.

Raising a child is the most important work any parent will ever do. It is the hardest job and the least well-paid—indeed, you have all paid handsomely for the privilege.

But as I look out on this crowd—on the fruits of your labour of love—I can say that yours has been a job very well done.

And now, let me turn to the people we are here to celebrate.

Today is a rite of passage for you.

It is an intensely personal occasion: a day to mark your individual achievement—but also to take a deep breath and reflect before you begin writing the next chapters in your lives.

I’d like to talk today about the world in which you will be writing that book of life—and about the profound opportunities and challenges which will mark it.

I have one key message for you: your own coming of age— your personal liminal moment—coincides with an historic moment of transformation for our world.

“There are tranquil ages, which seem to contain that which will last forever,” the Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers explained. “And there are ages of change, which see upheavals that, in extreme instances, appear to go to the roots of humanity itself.”

Our time of tranquility is over, and we are living in an age of change.

We are living through what President Biden, on a visit to my country in March, called an inflection point: a time of transformation, he said, that comes once every five or six generations.

Like it or not, you are graduating into that inflection point—and as some of the very best-educated people on our planet, you have the rare and precious opportunity to shape it.

So, what is this inflection point? What is this upheaval which is going to the roots of humanity itself?

There are many ways to describe this transformational moment, but I think they all come down to one fundamental question: Does capitalist democracy still work?

That is the question being posed around kitchen tables, in my country and this one, as parents wonder if our children can count on capitalist democracy’s essential promise of a future more prosperous than our present.

It is the question being posed in the muddy and bloodied trenches of Bakhmut, as Ukraine’s brave democrats resist the invading forces of Putin’s dictatorship.

And it is the question being posed by our shrinking glaciers and our warming oceans, which are asking us, wordlessly but emphatically, if democratic societies can rise to the existential challenge of climate change.

Now these are, of course, huge and fundamental challenges. But I am not here to counsel despair or retreat.

Yeats famously said, of another generation that came of age in a liminal moment, that the best lacked all conviction, while the worst were full of passionate intensity.

Spend a few minutes on social media, and you may be tempted to adopt that as an apt description of our own time.

But I disagree—indeed, I disagree with passionate intensity.

This is a time when we are being called to answer some very big questions, but I do not think that makes it, as Robert Kaplan has argued, a tragic age.

Quite the contrary.

I believe this age of upheaval has every possibility of becoming a time future historians will describe as the Renaissance of Democracy: an age of renewal of our civilization’s fundamental values and of its fundamental promise.

Indeed, I believe this will be the essential work of your time.

Democracy has been undoubtedly playing defence for the past couple of decades.

We have allowed authoritarian regimes to prey on weaker democracies and to undermine our own democratic institutions.

We have allowed incomes and opportunities for the middle class to stagnate, and a global plutocracy to emerge.

And we have allowed our oceans to warm, our glaciers to shrink, and precious species to become extinct.

Now is the time for democracy to fight back. It is time, as Wayne Gretzky said, to skate to where the puck is going, and to build a capitalist democracy that works for the 21st century.

And I know we can do it, because we are already starting to.

Democracy is fighting back on the battlefields of Ukraine.

Democracy is fighting back with measures like universal, $10-a-day child care in Canada, which makes life more affordable for working families and means women no longer need to choose between motherhood and a career.

Democracy is fighting back with Canada’s $120 billion clean industrial policy and with the Inflation Reduction Act here in the United States, which will bring down our emissions and create good-paying jobs for what Prime Minister Trudeau calls the middle class and those working hard to join it.

Now, I don’t want to be glib or to be a Pollyanna.

I don’t want to suggest that the fight for democracy will be easy, or even that I know—or that anyone knows—what exactly we need to do in order to secure our democratic renaissance.

This truly is an age of upheaval, and that means the person you should trust least is the one who claims to know all the answers.

But there is one thing I know to be true: you cannot opt out of a time of change.

As Trotsky said of another turbulent time: you might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

And so I’d like to share three stories for you to keep in mind as you navigate the turbulence beyond this historic stadium.

The first is the story of Viktoriia—and of the power of resilience.

Viktoriia is an electrical engineer, whom I met last month when I visited a world-leading clean tech company in Vancouver.

Except when I met Viktoriia in her lab, she told me we had actually met already—eleven months earlier.

Her family had been living in Irpin, near Kyiv, when Russia invaded. Their home was destroyed by Russian shells, and Russian soldiers stole their wallets and emptied their bank account.

They ran past bombed-out apartment blocks and over the broken bodies of Ukrainian civilians—scenes that her twelve year-old daughter still relives at night.

Viktoriia, her husband, her daughter, and their cat fled the only country they had ever known and landed, in May of last year, at the airport in Winnipeg—where I stepped on board their plane to welcome the very first flight of Ukrainian refugees to Canada.

For someone like me, with the incredible good fortune of being born in Canada, it was and is impossible to truly fathom the trauma Viktoriia and her family have endured over the past year.

Yet all Viktoriia wanted to tell me when we spoke in Vancouver was how much she loves her new job, how much her daughter loves her new school—and how excited they are for what the future will bring.

It is my profound hope that none of you will ever face the challenges Viktoriia has met and mastered—but whatever you encounter in this age of upheaval, you will be well served if you can muster some of Viktoriia’s resilience.

The second story I’d like to tell you this morning is about a moment in history I covered as a cub reporter on the eve of my 23^rd birthday—precisely the age of many of you here today. This is a story about the power of dissent.

On August 1, 1991, President George H.W. Bush delivered a speech to the Verkhovna Rada, the parliament of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In it, he lectured Ukrainians on the folly of “suicidal nationalism” and urged them to remain a part of the infirm Soviet Union.

Twenty-three days later, the Verkhovna Rada voted for independence. Ninety-nine days after that, the Ukrainian people overwhelmingly made the same choice in a national referendum.

And then, on December 26, 1991—one hundred and forty five days after that speech—the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus met to formally dissolve the USSR.

President Bush’s speech, which George Will swiftly and brilliantly dubbed the Chicken Kiev speech, taught me that in an age of upheaval, the conventional wisdom—even if spoken by the most powerful man on earth—can be utterly and totally wrong.

And it taught me the power—indeed the necessity—of dissent, as those Ukrainians showed in 1991, when they defied the will of both the President of the United States and the President of the USSR.

So trust your own convictions, and don’t be afraid to dissent. At inflection points, traditional expertise is an unreliable guide, and youth and openness to change a truer compass.

The third story is about the pearl necklace I am wearing today, and it is a story about the peril—and the power—of coming of age during an age of change.

My paternal grandmother, Helen Freeland, gave me these pearls on my wedding day, nearly twenty five years ago. She told me my grandfather, John Wilbur Freeland, had given them to her forty five years earlier, on the day he graduated from law school, to thank her for her support.

Seven years before that, neither of them could have imagined the graduation—to say nothing of the pearls.

My grandfather was a Depression-era frontier farmer’s son. He loved literature and ideas, but he didn’t make it through high school.

What little money he had, he earned on horseback in the rodeo corral, or with his fists in the boxing ring, where he went by the name ‘Pretty Boy’ Freeland.

When Hitler’s Panzers rolled into Poland, he and two of his brothers decided to fight back. Three Freeland boys crossed an ocean to fight their generation’s battle for democracy. Only two came home.

Wilbur, as he was known, was one of them, and he returned with a wife—a working-class war bride from Glasgow—and an infant son who would one day become my father.

Pretty Boy Freeland went from lassos to law school—part of an army of educated veterans across our triumphant, grateful continent that this school played a noble role in teaching.

We call them the Greatest Generation, because that is what they were.

For them, winning a world war was just the start. They came home determined to make their countries better.

As Canadian Prime Minister and Nobel Prize winner Lester B. Pearson put it: “We must resolve to fight for things—as well as defend ourselves against things; fight for things that make for the better life. Strength must include the resolve to make our own free democracies work for the benefit of all the people, not merely for a few or a class.”

Their fight for that better life back home was remarkably successful. Theirs was the era of Les Trente Glorieuses: three decades of extraordinary prosperity where our economies grew by three per cent per year, year after year after year.

They succeeded, I believe, for two reasons—their conviction, having defeated Hitler, that they could accomplish big things; and their determination, having already sacrificed a great deal, to use their strength for the collective benefit, and not merely in pursuit of personal comfort.

These two virtues were, of course, the hallmark of Boston’s own greatest leader of the Greatest Generation—who gave the commencement address at this university as a Senator in 1956.

As President, Kennedy urged Americans to ask not what their country could do for them, but what they could do for their country. And he called on his countrymen to do things not because they were easy, but because they were hard.

Those are lofty ways of saying: Don’t retreat. Rise to the challenge of your time. Help others. Make a difference for your country.

Coming of age in a time of change must be frightening, and it would be quite natural for each or any of you to respond to the challenges ahead by turning away from the world—by turning inward to a life focused chiefly on the self.

Don’t do that! It is a hard thing to come of age at a time of upheaval, to be sure—but it is also a privilege.

And with the education you have received at this exceptional school, you have earned the opportunity to shape the future—our planet’s, your countries’, and your own.

Your mission is not to free a continent, and I pray there will never be beaches for you to storm. But I believe that all of you can—all of you must—become the Greatest Generation of this century.

And the work of your greatest generation will be to lead a Renaissance of Democracy.

Standing up for the values we share—no matter where they are challenged.

Ensuring that working people in the societies you lead can enjoy dignified and prosperous lives, confident that their children will do even better.

Saving our planet and proving, just as the first Greatest Generation did, that democracies can rise to even the most existential of challenges.

Toni Morrison said that “if there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

Our shelves are filled with the tales of people who were once young graduates just like you—young women and men poised between hope and anxiety as they prepared to step into their adult lives.

They are filled with the tales of those who rose, in their own ways, to the challenges history handed them.

And that is what I am confident you will do, too.

Class of 2023: I cannot wait to read your stories, and I will be right beside you cheering you on.

Good luck, bonne chance, and thank you all very much.