Life & Wisdom Quote by Frank Scott

Self-regard rarely lands as cleanly as it does here. Frank Scott’s line carries the calm, bureaucratic cadence of a man accustomed to minutes, mandates, and “perhaps” as a form of armor. Yet beneath the hedging is a bracing claim: not only did our Royal Commission matter, it still matters, and anyone pretending otherwise is dodging the record.

Scott was a poet, but this is institutional rhetoric with a poet’s ear for timing. The sentence performs modesty (“I think,” “perhaps,” “fair to say”) while building to an assertion that’s almost impossible to contest without sounding unserious: “one of the most influential” and “nothing… isn’t relevant.” The subtext is impatience with national amnesia. Royal Commissions are often treated as ceremonial pressure valves - a way to defer conflict into binders and footnotes. Scott flips that dynamic. He’s insisting the work wasn’t just diagnostic; it was prophetic, a map the country chose not to read.

Context matters: Scott was deeply tied to Canadian public life and constitutional debate, and commissions in mid-century Canada often addressed structural problems - rights, language, federalism, labor, social policy - that don’t resolve so much as recur. His confidence hints at a cycle: governments commission truth, then balk at the cost of acting on it. The line is a rebuke to short-term politics and a reminder that “the present situation” is usually an old situation with new branding.

It works because it blends administrative restraint with moral insistence: a polite sentence that quietly refuses to be ignored.