OTTAWA - It was one of the first things Michaelle Jean learned about her adopted country - and it made her angry.
She immigrated to Canada from one of the world's poorest countries, and learned that even this land of seemingly infinite prosperity was home to patches of grinding, Third World-style poverty.
The plight of Canada's North came as a shock to an 11-year-old immigrant from Haiti.
Even more shocking was the apathy other Canadians showed toward the disparities that existed within their own country.
This week, the Governor General embarks on her fourth tour of the Arctic with a far more hopeful message for residents of the communities she will visit.
She will meet with community success stories, inaugurate a training facility for tradespeople, and speak to an Inuit education summit.
Her speech will highlight Canada's increasingly high hopes for the North, which has recaptured the attention of policy-makers amid growing excitement about its untapped resource potential.
She calls it a historic opportunity to right a few wrongs.
"(It was) one thing that was very hard for me to accept when I arrived in Canada. I realized that . . . there was this other world," Jean said in an interview at Rideau Hall.
"I could sense some indifference about them - about those realities. And this has always bothered me a lot.
"It kills me when I hear some of them (in the Arctic) saying to me, 'We are the invisible people.' Fighting against that indifference is very important."
She says every lost opportunity, every teen suicide, every source of despair in this region where the recorded unemployment rate is 25 per cent, are failures that belong to Canada.
"Every time we fail one of them we all fail. Every time one of the youth is desperate enough to commit suicide we all fail. This is how we need to see it and look at it," she said.
But as she did during her 2006 tour of Africa, Jean hopes to draw attention during her northern visit to the bright patches of opportunity instead of the well-documented gloom.
The five-day tour begins Sunday in Inuvik, N.W.T.
An emotional highlight of the trip will be her speech Tuesday in Inuvik to a group of policy-makers, teachers, and community leaders at the Summit on Inuit Education.
She will touch on the increased attention the North is drawing, with new resource exploration projects, and the new focus on Arctic sovereignty that will bring an expanded military facility and a new port to the vast region.
Jean says these opportunities must translate into a better life for northern residents.
She says the key lies in young people believing they can reap these rewards - and to have those newfound hopes encourage them to pursue an education.
"They can dare to dream big," she said.
"There's a momentum right now. (The area) is full of historic opportunities . . . When you ask them what they need in their communities they'll tell you, 'We need pilots, we need doctors, we need social workers, we need mechanics, we need engineers.'
"I always say, 'It can be you. Why not you?' "
Fear of change is the region's biggest enemy, she says.
When young people are afraid of briefly leaving their communities to get a degree, or afraid of losing their culture, failure can follow.
That's why her speech to the education summit will focus on hope overcoming fear.
"They have to break the fear - the fear of going down south to study . . . Fear is part of it. They're always afraid of the culture shock because, of course, becoming a professional implies eventually going down south to study," she said.
"That culture shock is always presented as something threatening, something frightening to overcome."
