“Most people get the impression that Canada, as we know it, just sort of popped out of a hat in 1867,” says novelist, historian, and essayist His Excellency John Ralston Saul. “And that has some real problems attached to it. It’s a very abstract and power-oriented view of the country, and there’s no intellectual content, there’s no sense of what was the concept of ‘the public good’ in Canada at the time of confederation.”

Ralston Saul-who is best-known to most Canadians for being married to Governor General Adrienne Clarkson-is promoting the Lafontaine-Baldwin Lecture, an annual event that he originated in 2000 and hosts along with the Dominion Institute. Named for two 19th century Canadian reformers and statesmen, Louis Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin, the lecture looks for indicators of Canada’s future as a democracy by focusing on its pre-confederation past.

“The serious discussions and arguments about the public good [in Canada] took place, I suppose, between 1810 and 1855,” says Ralston Saul. “The idea is that from this basis you can project a debate about the public good in Canada from the middle of the 19th century through to today. It gives you an interesting intellectual base to do that projection from.

“I think people are not used to that because they’ve been so used to being told that it’s really about transfer payments, or it’s really about something very very precise and something very immediate.”

This year’s lecture will be delivered by David Malouf, an Australian novelist and poet. “We spent a year talking about this: if we were to start working in, every three or four years, a non-Canadian, what kind of person could bring a point of view that would actually fuel the debate inside Canada? In other words, not make us simply look rather passively at someone else, but actually somebody who could bring something to the debate that would resonate with Canada.

“Australia is very similar to Canada, and it’s not simply the British origin; it’s the federalism, it’s the power of the regions-you could almost literally go through and say Melbourne, Toronto; Sydney, Montreal; Perth, Vancouver; we’re along the southern border, they’re all around the sea coast, most of the time turning our back on 90 per cent of the country. So I think he’s going to bring an interesting, slightly outside-of-the-logic view of Canada as seen through the eyes of Australia.

“Talking about Australia, talking about Canada, talking about the possibilities of the two places.”

The topic of the lecture, Ralston Saul says, is a surprise every year, so Malouf’s particular subject will be unknown until he gets here, although a comparison of the two countries seems very likely.

The lecture is on Friday, March 12 at 7 pm at Convocation Hall. Tickets are $10 for the public and $5 for students. Following Malouf’s talk will be a panel discussion featuring Ralston Saul, who delivered the lecture in 2000, Alain Dubuc, who gave it in 2001, national columnist Paul Wells and writer Irshad Manji. The next morning at 10 a.m. there is a free Town Hall discussion in the Canada Court of the Royal Ontario Museum.