Watt-Cloutier's lecture was the centrepiece of a three-ring circus of ideas.

The Lafontaine-Baldwin symposium came to Iqaluit last weekend, and for a few whirlwind days it felt like the circus was in town.

The main purpose of the talkfest, led by symposium founder and author John Ralston Saul and his spouse, former Governor General and journalist Adrienne Clarkson, was to showcase a major address to Nunavut and the nation by the north's own Siila Watt-Cloutier.

"Very few southerners have ever listened to what northerners are saying," Saul told Nunatsiaq News. "When there are debates about the north, they're framed in the south by southerners."

"So the whole idea of this is to take one of the most important Canadians of our time, and one of the most famous Canadians around the world, who's a northerner, and ask her to talk about how the north sees the north, and how the north sees Canada."

As part of the cultural and media circus, Saul, Clarkson, Watt-Cloutier, and a retinue of other bright Canadian cultural lights, tag-teamed with a visit by current Governor General Michael Jean to promote:

• a university for the north;
• the Inuit sealing culture; and
• Saul's concept of Canada as a "métis" nation whose identity and governance style is a mix of aboriginal (including Inuit) and European values and the need to bring those aboriginal values more to the forefront to continue to thrive.

In her time as Governor General, Clarkson said in an interview, she toured the circumpolar countries, and saw universities everywhere but Canada.

"Where is our northern university?" she asked. "We need this university, which is generated as an idea from here, and which will respond to what people here want, not what people who are developing things in the south want of the north."

Saul added that the federal government invests hundreds of millions of dollars into studies related to the north.

"But where is that money going? To universities in the south," where all the infrastructure continues to be built up, bypassing the north.

The development of l'Université de Moncton, N.B., was a turning point in the revitalization of Acadian culture and identity, he said. A university in the north could do the same for the Inuit.

Close to 400 people – including most of Iqaluit's movers and shakers, as well as the Governor General and all of Canada's lieutenant governors and territorial commissioners, in town for their annual gathering, packed the gym at Inuksuk High School Friday evening to hear Watt-Cloutier "walk you through our Arctic story."

She described Inuit challenges and successes in her hour-long address, as well as talking about where she hoped "we as a people, the Arctic as a region, and Canada as a mature democracy, will go from here" (see accompanying story).

The speech was simulcast to the world over Isuma TV's web site, as well as running in several theatres in major centres across Canada – and in Alice Springs, Australia.

It was also published the next day in The Globe and Mail and Montreal's Le Devoir, and will be broadcast June 18 on CBC radio's Ideas program.

"You have to work your ass off to make sure that message gets as broadly distributed as it can," Saul said.

The symposium followed up the Friday lecture with a near-three-hour round table discussion the following day that drew about 100 people back to the high school to talk about what was on their minds after hearing Watt-Cloutier's address (see accompanying story).

Participants included a number of political and cultural leaders from Iqaluit and beyond, among them, Nunavut Premier Eva Aariak, Iqaluit Mayor Elisapee Sheutiapik, Senator Willie Adams, Nunavut Language Commissioner Alexina Kublu, seal activist, lawyer and artist Aaju Peter, former MP Jack Anawak, and Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami president Mary Simon.

Saul launched the Lafontaine-Baldwin Symposium in the spirit of Louis LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin, whom he calls two of the fathers of modern Canadian democracy. Saul delivered the inaugural lecture himself in 2000.

The Lafontaine-Baldwin Symposium has since become the child of the Institute on Canadian Citizenship that Saul and Clarkson founded in 2003.

Co-sponsors for this symposium included the Dominion Institute and Nunatsiaq News.