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It has a lot to do with the confidence of success earned rather than conferred. Justin Trudeau called her “a polyglot”; even more, she is a polymath. She wanted to go to the Olympics as a youth but could not get there, she recalled, so she turned her talents elsewhere. She has what all successful people have: desire.

Julie Payette – dreamer, doer, star chaser, Girl Wonder – is something else, too, we learned the other day. She’s a political natural.

Still, this wasn’t the Gettysburg Address or the 123rd Psalm. There were no oratorical flourishes, touches of poetry or historical quotations typical of other addresses on this occasion. For the best of them, see Adrienne Clarkson’s remarks on her installation 18 years ago.

Unlike Clarkson, Payette did not quote Leonard Cohen. He was there instead in the haunting rendition of “Hallelujah” by two joyful singers. It was the most touching moment of the ceremony. Payette chose it.

Her themes were unity, ambition, compassion, solidarity. None is new or startling. All are enduring. “We are aboard the same planetary spaceship,” she said, one of several references to her time in space.

Photo by LARS HAGBERG / AFP/Getty Images

She said nothing terribly provocative but when she declared as a scientist how evidence and data matter, it reminds us that Stephen Harper – the slayer of the long-form census – would never have appointed her. She’s too independent.

Like all governors-general, she will choose her causes – science, education, nature, among them. Will she be content with cutting ribbons, pouring tea and uttering governor-generalities? Unlikely.