Mary Walsh received an honorary degree at morning convocation for her outstanding contributions to the performing arts in Canada.

      Born in Newfoundland, Walsh is an accomplished actor, writer, director and political satirist. Her irreverent This Hour encounters with political leaders have provided a fresh new forum for the concerns of ordinary Canadians. Also well respected for her work on social issues, Walsh has had a long association with the Resource Centre for the Arts in St. John's and has produced theatre on juvenile delinquency, the Innu of Labrador and the problems of prostitutes. She has also addressed the United Nations Global Conference on Development and been a spokesperson for Oxfam Canada's human rights campaign.

      Walsh delivered an entertaining and spontaneous address, and responded graciously to an interruption by a student who presented her with a bogus degree as a protest against rising student debt.

      Following are excerpts from Professor Gordon Johnston's introduction of Walsh at convocation:

If someone needed, desperately needed, an introduction, it is Mary Walsh. This poor woman, clearly the victim of some obscure personality disorder, has been driven over the years to adopt the most bizarre series of disguises and personas, and to parade them shamelessly before the Canadian people in the most public of circumstances. Inexplicably she has been allowed to invade the most sacred spaces of our national identity (not to mention our living rooms and bedrooms) without being incarcerated (as, I assure you, any of the rest of us would be, immediately and permanently). Like some masked avenger, she has offended and humiliated our most sacred cows, and bulls - apparently without reprisal.

      If she were from Prince Edward Island and had carrot-colored braids, we'd call her "irrepressible." They use other words to describe her in the boardrooms of the nation, and in the corridors of power, words that are not repeatable in this distinguished company. Not that distinguished company has ever inhibited her.

      To speak seriously for a moment ... she is a national treasure. She increases consciousness; and after all, that's what we like to think we do at this university. She teaches Canadians the surprising lesson of doing good by being bad. Just as Newfoundland extends Canada geographically, she expands our sense of ourselves to include the brutally honest, the fiendishly clever, the crudely accurate, the tastelessly persistent. We can never thank her enough for those moments when Marg Delahunty wades into a scrum wielding a microphone, or thank her enough for those frozen smiles over clenched jaws, those looks of blind panic on her victims' faces, the faces of the high and mighty, the important who are also self-important. We thank her for adjusting the scale, for getting things back to life-size.