Canadian Speech Does the Job
It's not often I get to see speeches from across the border in Canada. But this one popped up and I'm glad it did. What an interesting speech this is. Full of detail. Skimpy on classical rhetorical devices. Long. And effective? Probably, but not for the traditional reasons.
The speech is from The Honourable Iona Campagnolo, the Lt. Governor of British Columbia to open the third session of the 38th Parliament. It does, in many ways, follow a traditional course. After opening with a tribute to those who passed away over the past year, she gives the audience the traditional "here's what I'm going to say" nugget. Five items that the government will focus on.
And she follows that with a straight-forward attack on each of those five items by setting it up with the nice set of declarative statements: "At the heart of the government's agenda lies this simple question: What can we do today to secure the future for our children and grandchildren."
She immediately launches into what has become a mandatory statement in politics today: the bipartisanship statement. Instead of letting it sit out there by itself, though, she includes it in a very effective triple: "This is a time for partnership not partisanship, for boldness not trepidation, for action not procrastination."
And then the five issues. And, oh boy, did she cover them. In detail. Lots of stats and figures in here. Some nice statements, too, that could easily be picked up by media. And here is the strength of this speech. It seems, in some ways, to be written more for posterity than for immediate consumption which typically goes against the grain of good speechwriting.
Point in case, it's long. Somewhere around 7,000 words or about an hour long. Lots of sore bums and fidgety people after that, I'm guessing. And, as mentioned, the speech is a bit skimpy on the traditional rhetorical devices that engage audiences: sentence variation, rewriting stats and figures,alliteration, word plays, rhythmic triads, etc. There are some rhetorical questions. A few short sentences. But on the whole, the speech seems to fall into a sing-song pattern with a traditional subject-verb-object sentence structure.
For the audience, this might have been difficult. But (and here's why I'm not quick to say it was ineffective) it did a very nice job of laying out the issues and what the government's position is on them. And it did an excellent job of providing material that could be quoted wholesale by the media. That is no small task when you're also trying to write for the ear.
You'll have to ask the politicos from BC whether the speech covered all the things it should have. And here is one -- and now a second -- critique from that standpoint. But it did cover the things it did very well. And that's good enough.
