17

A NEW MILLENNIUM AND A NEW WORLD

Canada’s energy future? A Caterpillar truck, the world’s largest, carries four hundred tons of oil sands at Fort McMurray, Alberta.

 

In December 1999 Maclean’s magazine published a feature entitled “The Vanishing Border.” The magazine had polled Canadians on Americans and Americans on Canadians, asking what they thought of themselves and of each other. On the American side, the general picture that emerged was positive. Americans thought Canadians friendly, if bland. Canada was the United States’ best friend, edging out Great Britain.

Canadians, on the other hand, seemed rather confused. They applied a mixture of adjectives to Americans, mostly negative, but then emerged with the opinion that Canadians were becoming more like Americans. About a quarter of Canadians, overall, said they would accept American citizenship, but the figure rose markedly in Quebec, where about a third of respondents said they would take the opportunity, if offered, to become Americans. Quebeckers were also the readiest to contemplate political union with the United States, at 28 percent, compared with 19 percent for Canadians as a whole.1 That winter, an American poll for the Pew Research Center reported that 71 percent of Canadians had a favourable opinion of the United States—behind the British and a few other countries, but higher than most.²

As far as Canadian–American relations went, this was standard fare. The citizens of both countries took each other largely for granted. In the tenth year of the free trade agreement with the United States (which for Canadians loomed much larger than NAFTA), Canadians saw the border as a bit of a nuisance, a formal barrier that prevented them from getting on with life. This view did not please the Canadian customs service, which pointed out that while the border delayed traffic it at least helped keep guns out of the country and allowed immigration to screen out unsavoury characters. Of course, it also kept thousands of customs and immigration agents employed.

The Maclean’s polling data did not reflect an event that occurred on 14 December, when the regular ferry from Victoria, British Columbia, docked in Port Angeles, Washington. On board the ferry was a young man named Ahmed Ressam, who was travelling on a Canadian passport under the name “Benni Noris.” Because “Noris” seemed nervous, customs agents began to search his car; when he tried to flee, he was arrested. His car was packed with explosives; his destination was Los Angeles international airport, which he proposed to blow up as the new millennium struck, at midnight on 31 December 1999.

Ressam’s arrest was a new and significant factor in Canadian–American relations. Canada was or could be a source of insecurity in the United States. Like the U.S., Canada received immigrants by the hundreds of thousands every year. That year, 1999, more than 189,000 immigrants that we know of came to Canada; most years there were over 200,000. In 1999, 12.8 percent of immigrants were classified as “refugees,” claiming the right to remain in Canada because of a fear of persecution in their country of origin or citizenship.3 Ressam, Algerian by origin, claimed to be such a refugee, though his activities in Canada subsequent to his arrival placed him clearly outside the law.⁴ As frequently happened, however, an under-funded and inadequately supported immigration service could not keep track of immigrants, legal and illegal, inside the country. Ressam, for example, had an outstanding arrest warrant against him. He’d even taken a trip to Afghanistan to be trained in the theory and practice of jihad, holy war, and returned to Canada tasked with a mission (and with $12,000) to attack the United States. But the police couldn’t find him.

Ressam was extensively interrogated by American authorities while Canadian police investigated his activities in Canada. It appeared that he was a member of a mysterious terrorist organization called al-Qaeda, which some years before had declared war on the United States. Some of Ressam’s information was included in a briefing given to President George W. Bush in August 2001, entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

MULTICULTURALISM

The Canada that sat north of the United States was very different in 2000 from the Canada of 1960. There were, of course, more Canadians—up from fourteen million at mid-century to more than double that fifty years later—thirty million in the 2001 census. Much of the increase was the baby boom—the “natural increase” of births minus deaths. People lived longer—life expectancy for a child born in 2001 was eleven years more than for a child born in 1951.5 The fastest growing “visible minority” in Canada was, in fact, grey, as the numbers of the elderly steadily increased.

It was, however, also true that the numbers of Canadian residents born in South Asia, East Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America were steadily increasing. Immigration totals for the 1990s were the highest in the twentieth century at 2.2 million, although proportionately the immigration of 1901–10 was bigger. The religious balance was changing too. Roman Catholicism was the largest religious preference, at 43 percent, as it had been for many years. The next largest religious grouping was “no religion,” at 16 percent, with the various Protestant sects further down the list, headed by the United Church of Canada (9.6 percent) and Anglicans (6.9 percent); 2 percent of the population were inscribed as Muslims, and 1.1 percent as Jews.⁶

The effects of immigration were most obvious in the largest cities, Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, though no Canadian community of any size went untouched. Indo-Canadian, Chinese-Canadian, and latterly Latino-Canadian politicians began to become prominent as the political system adapted to the new realities; Italian Canadians were already solidly entrenched. In 2000–01 an Indo-Canadian, the Sikh Ujjal Dosanjh, became British Columbia’s first non-white premier, a striking commentary on changes in a province where anti-Asian racism had been, as late as the 1940s, embodied in law and where “orientals” were formerly denied the vote in provincial elections.

Not all migration was external. Canada’s Native population grew markedly in the late twentieth century. This reflected, first, far lower infant mortality after 1950, and second, a higher-than-average birth rate, which peaked in 1967, about ten years after the baby boom peak in the rest of the country. (In the 1990s the Native birth rate was about 1.5 times the birth rate in the country as a whole, a considerable decline from the 1960s but still substantial.) Another important factor was a greater awareness of Native issues and identity, and a consequent inclination on many people’s part to take pride in Aboriginal ancestry. In the 2001 census, this produced a self-identifying Native population (First Nations, Inuit, and Métis) of 3.3 percent. Of these, about half (49 percent) lived in cities—notably Winnipeg, Edmonton, Saskatoon, and Vancouver. The highest proportion of the total population was in Saskatoon, at 9 percent, with Winnipeg just behind (and with a higher absolute number) at 8 percent.

The federal government attempted to meet the influx of immigrants by instituting a program of multiculturalism in the 1970s. Multiculturalism was suspected to be yet another way for politicians (mainly Liberal) to pander to institutionalized ethnic communities.7 More seriously, it was criticized as an impediment to the development of any true sense of place and country in Canada. One of the most prominent critics was Neil Bissoondath, who in his 1994 book Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada condemned multiculturalism for herding immigrant groups into ethnic ghettoes, dividing Canadians rather than unifying them. Defenders of multiculturalism praised it as an avenue to equity among diverse groups, but especially between new arrivals and the European-descended “old Canadians”; by that token, multiculturalism promoted satisfaction, if not exactly unity.⁸

UNREST IN QUEBEC

Quebec was the focus of discontent in Canada in the early 1990s. This was nothing new; what was new was that support for separatism had tipped into the majority opinion among francophones in the province—the legacy of Meech Lake. It had been expressed in the election of a large separatist contingent (the Bloc Québécois) to the federal House of Commons in the October 1993 elections, and it was expected that the separatists would sweep the next Quebec provincial elections, due at the latest in 1994.

Liberal premier Robert Bourassa had skilfully manoeuvred his province past a number of political pitfalls after 1990. But by 1994 it was obvious, despite Bourassa’s legendary talents at obfuscation, that he preferred Quebec to stay part of Canada. Major health problems forced him to resign as premier early in 1994, to be succeeded by Daniel Johnson Jr., one of his ministers and the son and namesake of a former premier.

It would be Johnson who led the Liberals to defeat in the 1994 Quebec election, though not by much, in terms of the popular vote.9 The separatist Parti Québécois won massively in terms of seats, seventy-seven to forty-seven. (The spoiler in the election was the Action démocratique du Québec, or ADQ, whose leader, Mario Dumont, had once been president of the Liberal party’s youth wing.) The PQ probably had a majority of the Quebec francophone vote, and the party leader and new premier, Jacques Parizeau, knew that very well.

Parizeau was committed intellectually and emotionally to Quebec independence. A prominent economist and political veteran (he’d been René Lévesque’s finance minister after 1976), he had never liked the strategy of “sovereignty-association” that Lévesque had used to tempt an uncertain population toward separatism in the 1970s. As premier, Parizeau was determined to achieve independence, and planning for a referendum began as soon as the PQ took office.

The PQ used its ample resources as a government to promote unity of feeling around separatism, at least among the French-speaking population. Johnson, as leader of the opposition, and formally the province’s chief federalist, was considered worthy but dull. Jean Chrétien, the Canadian prime minister, was unpopular in his home province. He had opposed Meech Lake, he had been Pierre Trudeau’s political lieutenant (and Trudeau had been successfully demonized among most francophone Quebeckers), and, among the intellectuals (“intellos”) he was despised as crude and uncultured, unlike Trudeau.

Parizeau had the opposite problem: many Quebeckers considered him to be pompous. Coming like Trudeau from a rich family, largely educated like Trudeau outside the province, Parizeau was definitely not a man of the people; unlike Trudeau, he looked rather like a British banker—not an image calculated to win affection.

Parizeau was not especially adapted to compromise either, and he would have preferred to fight the battle for independence—sovereignty—on clear and simple lines. But the polls showed that even after Meech Lake, and even with Chrétien in Ottawa and a weak opposition in Quebec, Quebeckers did not wish for a clean break with the rest of Canada. And so, unwillingly, Parizeau was forced into a political gavotte with the ADQ and its leader Mario Dumont, whose 6.5 percent of the votes in 1994 might make the difference between success and failure in a referendum. He was forced to invite Lucien Bouchard as well—though relations between the two men were not of the best. Despite hesitation and rivalry, and perhaps more fundamental differences, the three agreed in June 1995 that the “yes” side, their side, in the approaching referendum should promise to try to negotiate a new kind of “economic and political partnership” with Canada and only afterward proclaim Quebec’s sovereignty.

With victory in the referendum the undisputed objective, the means to achieve it became negotiable. The result was a convoluted question that asked voters to approve the June agreement and vote for sovereignty. Parizeau, scenting victory, began serious preparations. As an economist, he knew that business and international finance preferred stability, and that a separatist victory would promise anything but. It would hardly be an advertisement for Quebec independence to face immediate economic convulsions as the result of a vote for sovereignty. Accordingly, he began laying by a reserve fund to stabilize the Canadian dollar in the immediate aftermath of a “yes” victory.

Then, in September, he launched the “yes” campaign by listening to a Quebec declaration of independence in a theatre in Quebec City. The vote was set for 30 October, and the electoral debate began. At first, it seemed that Parizeau had misjudged. Polls weren’t especially encouraging, and the federalist “no” side took heart. One federalist spokesman talked of “crushing” separatism once and for all. It seemed sufficient to leave the campaign to the pedestrian Johnson, and to the federal Conservative leader Jean Charest, who, although not a political heavyweight, at least had a reputation as a good orator.

The voters hesitated, and began to move to “yes,” but before that could happen Parizeau, recognizing the handicap his personality posed for the “yes” camp, turned the direction of the campaign over to the more charismatic Bouchard. Bouchard entered the lists with his characteristic fervour, assuring the hesitant that independence would act like a “magic wand” to dispel the glooms of federalism and bring Quebec into the land of opportunity and prosperity and sovereignty. Voters began to follow Bouchard and his beckoning wand.

Jean Chrétien in Ottawa was thunderstruck. He prided himself on his practical political judgment, and it had deserted him. Speaking to the Liberal caucus in Ottawa, he burst into tears. The best he could do was promise some last-minute concessions to Quebec—which were taken, reasonably enough, to be a deathbed repentance. More practically, the American ambassador, James Blanchard, offered and delivered a statement by the U.S. president, Bill Clinton, expressing his clear preference for a united Canada. One of Chrétien’s ministers, Brian Tobin, organized a huge pro-Canada rally in Montreal the weekend before the referendum, and bussed and flew thousands of citizens from across Canada to come and express their patriotism and their love for Quebec—in Canada. It was an extraordinary gesture, and it had the effect of bucking up federalist morale; whether it actually accomplished its object, or whether it struck many francophone Quebeckers as one more example of outside manipulation, remains debatable. The American pronouncement was closer to the mark, and there the “yes” camp had no riposte but spluttering.10

The result on 30 October was hair-raisingly close. Parizeau began the evening believing that he’d won, but the vote gradually swung against him and his cause. Furious, the premier charged into the “yes” rally and proclaimed that the sovereignists had been cheated of their prize by only two things—money and the ethnics. He wasn’t wrong, and Quebec premiers had said it before—most notably the nationalist premier Duplessis in 1944, when he explained that the fact that the Liberals had got more votes didn’t matter—they were English votes. And indeed, had it been up to French-speaking voters alone, independence would have won.

Parizeau had planned to act decisively. He would have proclaimed Quebec’s sovereignty even if he had only 50 percent plus one in the popular vote. He expected, and claimed he had assurances, that France would recognize a sovereign Quebec.¹¹ If that happened, France would probably not have been alone—there was talk of recognition from some Latin American countries, and possibly some from the francophone Africa.

All this was now moot, as was Parizeau. His emotional harangue on referendum night terminated his career. He was an embarrassment even to most separatists, who considered him a throwback to a distant and darker age. Parizeau announced his resignation, and in January 1996 was succeeded by the inevitable man, Lucien Bouchard.

Bouchard, as far as English Canadians were concerned, wasn’t much of an improvement. He led off by explaining that proposals for part of Quebec to separate from the province by remaining in Canada were absurd, because, as he put it, “Canada is not a real country.” Quebec was. But if Quebec was “real,” why was it real? Presumably he meant that it was more than a geographical expression, but if it had any justification to be “real” it was as the homeland of the Québécois—the French Québécois. If it was just another multi-ethnic state—like Canada—with the majorities reversed, what was the point?

That question didn’t have to be answered, at least for the next few years. Quebec would remain part of Canada, Canadian laws would apply there, and Quebeckers would pay their taxes and vote in Canadian elections. A Quebecker was prime minister of Canada, and Quebeckers were prominent in his cabinet. Jean Chrétien had received a considerable shock in the referendum. Canadians now looked to him to devise a strategy whereby there would be no more such shocks.

The response to separatism was usually described as “Plan A” or “Plan B.” Plan A was compromise, concessions, attempts to adapt the constitution and federal institutions to accommodate more moderate Quebec nationalists. The problem with this option was that the constitution was, to all intents and purposes, beyond amendment, at least for the foreseeable future.12 Meech and Charlottetown had demonstrated that. Chrétien got the House of Commons to pass a resolution in 1996 recognizing Quebec as a “distinct society,” to no discernible effect inside the province. The provincial premiers, meeting in Calgary in September 1996, did their best, by issuing an anodyne declaration that proclaimed the right of Quebec to promote its “unique character … within Canada.” On the other hand, Canadians outside Quebec were showing fatigue at the prospect of an infinity of referendums, held whenever the separatists could manage them, unless or until the separatists won.

Plan B, on the other hand, was defined as “tough love.” Its premise was that the rest of Canada had been entirely too accommodating to Quebec separatists, playing the referendum game according to rules that the separatists themselves had devised, including referendum questions that were designed to obfuscate the issue of independence.¹³ What other sovereign state would tolerate a periodic ballot on whether it would continue to exist in its current territory?

Tough love took various forms. Its common theme was that concessions along the lines of Meech Lake, Charlottetown, or the Calgary declaration wouldn’t work. The proponents of one version argued that if Canada was divisible, then so was Quebec. In any case, Canadians generally had an interest in an issue that could drastically and negatively affect the stability of their currency, not to mention trade, transportation, and communications, as well as the viability and continuing legitimacy of their existing political institutions. To take one example, if the separatists had won in 1995, who or what would have been empowered to negotiate with them?

To answer such questions, the Chrétien government referred the issue of separatism to the Canadian Supreme Court. Could a province secede from Canada and, if so, how? Would a unilateral declaration of independence by a province—what Parizeau had in mind in 199514—be legal? The notion that Canadians outside the province might have an interest, and a say, in the question of Quebec sovereignty offended Quebec nationalists of all stripes, including the provincial Liberals, who joined the separatist PQ majority in the provincial legislature in condemning any such idea. Quebec’s right to self-determination was absolute, it appeared, however Quebeckers chose to exercise it.¹⁵ In the federal election of June 1997 Chrétien and his newly appointed minister for intergovernmental affairs, Stéphane Dion, defended the Supreme Court reference, and with it the idea that Canada as a whole must be involved in the issue of Quebec separation. In the election, Chrétien and the Liberals improved their standing in Quebec, as did the Progressive Conservatives under their new leader, Jean Charest. Evidently the Supreme Court reference hadn’t made matters any worse for the Liberals in Quebec.

The Supreme Court, when it eventually delivered its opinion on the question in August 1998, agreed that Canadians in general had an interest in what happened to Quebec. Quebec by itself had no right either under domestic or international law to secede. On the other hand, if Quebec did vote for separation, the rest of Canada must negotiate its prospective departure. Chrétien took this as a victory, arguing that in future Quebeckers must have a straight question put to them in any referendum. But Lucien Bouchard, the Quebec premier, took it as vindication that the rest of Canada must eventually respect a decision by the majority of Quebeckers for separation.

Bouchard wouldn’t ask the question any time soon. He wanted, as he said, “winning conditions,” and they weren’t there. In the opinion of the fervent supporters of separation, Bouchard was too supple, too prone to compromise, and had no sympathy for the more extreme and exclusionary forms of Quebec nationalism. Bouchard led the Parti Québécois to victory over the provincial Liberals in 1998, but he didn’t take that to be a mandate for organizing another referendum. The premier’s passivity on the issue of sovereignty caused discontent among PQ militants, and undoubtedly played a role in precipitating Bouchard’s resignation as premier and departure from politics in 2001. His successor, Bernard Landry, was a separatist veteran, unimpeachably orthodox on the great question of independence; yet he, too, had his hesitations, and with Landry as premier it was clear that a third referendum wasn’t imminent.

Bouchard and Landry may have been influenced by clear signs of fatigue in the Quebec electorate. When, following the Supreme Court opinion, Chrétien and Dion passed a Clarity Act through Parliament in June 2000, outlining the conditions under which Canada could accept a vote for separation, the premier tried to mobilize Quebec opinion against it. Instead, polls showed that Quebeckers didn’t think Ottawa’s position— that there should be a clear question, and that a majority of more than 50 percent plus one was necessary—to be unreasonable. When, in November 2000, Chrétien held another general election, he again improved his party’s standing in Quebec, outpolling the separatist Bloc Québécois by 44.2 percent to 39.9 percent.16

EXTREME POLITICS

The decade after 1993 was unusual if not unique in Canadian political history. In three elections, 1993, 1997, and 2000, the Liberal party won clear majorities in the House of Commons over an opposition that couldn’t realistically hope to defeat them. The Parti Québécois did not aim for power on the national level. Its function, it claimed, was merely to represent Quebec pending the inevitable victory of separatism in a provincial referendum. But as the referendum faded into the distance, so did the rationale for the PQ, as the 2000 election showed.

The main opposition to the Liberals during the 1990s came from the Reform party, founded and led by Preston Manning of Alberta. Its appeal tended to be confined to the Western provinces, but even there it had to struggle for a foothold in the some of the larger cities like Vancouver and Winnipeg. In an attempt to transcend its regional identification, Reform renamed itself the Canadian Alliance in 2000.17 Manning hoped to capture the Progressive Conservative vote, and with it some standing in the Atlantic provinces and in Quebec, but the Progressive Conservative leader, Joe Clark, who took on the job in 1998 after Jean Charest departed for provincial politics in Quebec, firmly opposed any such idea. In its quest, Manning sacrificed himself, losing the Alliance leadership to a provincial Progressive Conservative minister from Alberta, Stockwell Day. Day proved an inept leader for the Alliance, losing first the 2000 election to Jean Chrétien and then the Alliance leadership in the face of discontent in his own party.

Through the 1990s the NDP remained firmly in the cellar, managing only thirteen MPs in the 2000 election. (It was hobbled by the unpopularity of NDP governments in British Columbia and Ontario.) For many NDP voters, plainly, the Liberals were the party of choice, especially in the face of the openly right-wing Alliance. The Liberals understood this point very well, and centred their election campaigns on demonizing the opposition. They were helped in this strategy by the record of the very right-wing Progressive Conservative government in Ontario under Mike Harris (1995–2002).¹⁸

Fortunate in their opponents, the Liberals were lucky in their ability to manipulate political issues to their advantage. Quebec separatism aside, the politics of the 1990s were dominated by the Battle of the Deficit. Canada had, since the mid-1970s, run a steady succession of deficits, which steadily added to the national debt and drained the federal government’s ability to spend money on anything more than debt service. Separatists in Quebec proclaimed that the Canadian debt was a drag on Quebec’s prosperity—yet another argument, and a powerful one, in the run-up to the 1995 referendum. The Wall Street Journal bluntly nominated Canada as a third-world country because of the size of its debt; within Canada, public opinion decided that debt reduction was a priority.

The Liberals had taken power in 1993 with mildly reformist aspirations. They intended to spend more money, not less, and were shaken by the prospect that Canada could hit a “debt wall” and no longer raise cash on international markets. Chrétien and his finance minister, Paul Martin (son and namesake of Pearson’s external affairs minister, Paul Martin Sr.), reluctantly switched their financial course. The government, with a very few reserved exceptions, would spend less. It drastically cut transfer payments to the provinces, meaning that they would have less money to spend on health, welfare, and education. Federal politicians had long complained that the provinces took the credit and got the political benefit of federal subsidies. Now the provinces took the blame for cuts in services. While cuts may have been philosophically congenial for right-wing governments like Harris’s in Ontario, the decline in federal largesse undoubtedly exaggerated the impact of their policies, and probably over the longer term contributed to their political demise. (The same phenomenon didn’t help left-wing governments either, like Glen Clark’s NDP administration in British Columbia.)

Federal economizing hit military spending in particular. With the Cold War over, the size of the armed forces was already drifting downward, but the process accelerated under the Liberals. It wasn’t just numbers of troops, but their equipment. Purchases were cancelled or postponed, and aging tanks, aging fighter planes, and aged helicopters came to symbolize the plight of the armed services in the later 1990s. Though under Chrétien Canada still had an active foreign policy, it was increasingly unsupported by military force. American observers darkly compared Canada’s military contribution to Iceland’s.

Chrétien and Martin were successful in their domestic battle. The federal deficit was slashed, and then, in 1997, abolished. Martin began to pay down the national debt, which moved from being the largest in relation to GDP among the G8 group of advanced industrialized nations to being the smallest. (More concretely, Canada’s national debt was 68.4 percent of GDP in 1995–96, and 38.7 percent in 2004–05.)19 Canada’s deficit fight mirrored that in the United States, where Bill Clinton’s Democratic administration also reversed the deficit. Not for the first time, or the last, Canadian and American politics moved along parallel lines.

A mere listing of issues and policies, and a roster of Chrétien’s three successive election victories (1993, 1997, and 2000), do not do justice to the highly partisan character of politics during his decade as prime minister (1993–2003). That Chrétien managed to stay in power owed as much to the improving economic climate of the later 1990s as to his ruthless political instincts. Chrétien was no innovator in policy: he worked with what he had, and gave his government a largely managerial cast; and in truth, for most of his time in government there was no money for innovative policies.

That Chrétien and the Liberals led the country meant that it was governed from the political centre, while the right wing was consigned to the provinces, especially Ontario and Alberta.²⁰ But even NDP Saskatchewan swung to the right, as provincial ministers discovered the virtues of balanced budgets and pay-as-you-go politics.

Canada was also influenced by a spillover of American political issues and sometimes, it seemed, American political moods. American politics in the 1990s were viciously partisan and highly personal. Yet behind the personalities there was real change, as the Republican party and American society lurched to the right. The issue was mainly the legitimacy of the American welfare state (or any welfare state) against a conservative movement that had come to believe that the state was the problem, not the solution, for the country’s woes.²¹ The politics of entitlement were to be replaced by the politics of opportunity, the welfare state by the “market state.” There was, as well, the rise of “the religious right,” usually conservative Protestants who combined American nationalism with deep disapproval of the liberalization of public attitudes toward abortion and homosexuality.²² Their failure to prevail in politics and legislation was a source of deep frustration, as indeed it was for their counterparts in Canada.

The welfare state was defended, rather half-heartedly, in the United States by the Democratic party and the Democratic president, Bill Clinton (1993–2001). Unable to defeat Clinton in the presidential elections of 1992 and 1996, the Republicans nevertheless won a majority in Congress and used it to launch endless investigations into the president’s financial probity and sexual morality, and tried unsuccessfully to impeach him in 1999.

The welfare state had retreated further, and faster in the United States and Great Britain than in Canada. Canada was the odd man out among English-speaking countries. It was still equipped with a social safety net that the right was convinced it could and should not afford. Worse, the right had come to believe that the safety net hobbled the Canadian economy through high taxes and state interference. The measure of the country’s failure, according to right-wing organs like Conrad Black’s National Post, was the frustration of individual initiative and responsibility and the consequent departure of talented Canadians for the United States—“the brain drain” of headline writers in the late 1990s. Canada, it sometimes seemed, could do nothing right while the United States, despite the occupation of the White House by the Democrat Clinton, could do almost nothing wrong, and that little would be remedied by getting rid of Clinton and the Democrats.

What was good for the United States was also good for Canada. Like Bill Clinton, Chrétien was tarred with corruption by the right-wing press (again the National Post), but their choice of scandal, centring on a golf-course development in Chrétien’s hometown in Quebec, was so complicated and so apparently trivial that it failed to convince the electorate to unseat the Liberals.

It is probable that Canadian conservatives were pursuing Chrétien more as a symbol of what they believed to be the corruption of Liberal politics on the grand scale than in a truly personal sense; it merely happened that personalization was the most efficacious means of undermining your opponent and thereby effecting political change. Their failure to do so only increased their rage, but it didn’t diminish their belief that the Liberal party must not only be removed from office but actually destroyed, as the bulwark of everything they believed to be wrong with Canada.

As so often happens, great issues moved by trivial means: on the surface, wild charges and personal attacks prevailed; beneath, issues like lower taxes, less state regulation and interference, and a return to more traditional values were what the right wing sought, in Canada as in Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States. It meant that politics was being played for high stakes, and as a result Canadian politics at the end of the twentieth century was characterized by extreme bitterness and partisan division.

LIBERAL DIPLOMACY

Canada, the American secretary of state Henry Kissinger wrote, once had “an influence out of proportion to its military contribution” because of its “somewhat aloof position [and] the high quality of its leadership…. It conducted a global foreign policy; it participated in international peacekeeping efforts; it made a constructive contribution to the dialogue between developed and developing nations.”23

Kissinger’s admiring description of the Canadian role in foreign affairs was in doubt in the 1990s. The reason was largely structural or systemic. Canada was no longer as important a country as it had been in the 1970s, when Kissinger wrote. At that time, Canada qualified to be a member of the Group of Seven industrialized nations forum because it had, in fact, the world’s sixth or seventh largest economy. By the mid-1990s that was no longer the case.

Canada remained, as it had always been, a strong supporter of the United Nations and peacekeeping.²⁴ At one time, it was unthinkable that a major peacekeeping exercise could occur without Canada but, by the 1990s, Canada was struggling to keep up. Reductions in the armed services, and penny-pinching policies that affected the foreign service as they affected every other branch of government, meant that the quality of the foreign service suffered.²⁵

Chrétien was not especially or continuously interested in foreign affairs. He had a politician’s normal sensitivity to high-profile events abroad, but he didn’t ordinarily seek the international limelight. On the other hand, he believed deeply that trade was the key to restoring and increasing Canadian prosperity. He also saw it as a means of reinforcing national unity, for who could afford to stand up against trade, or seem indifferent to the economic welfare of the voters? As prime minister, therefore, Chrétien organized and led repeated “Team Canada” trade missions abroad. These were on the grand scale: all or most of the provincial premiers, high officials, and prominent businesspeople were loaded on board aircraft and flown to the country of choice—China, for example, where Chrétien hoped not only to increase exports but to sell Canadian-designed and -made CANDU nuclear reactors.

Chrétien’s preoccupation with trade and economic benefit led to compromises in Canada’s approach to foreign policy. Under Mulroney human rights had been a focus for Canadian policy, and Mulroney and his external affairs minister Joe Clark had stuck to the policy despite the risk of offending some of Canada’s allies—the British, in the case of South Africa, and the United States, in the case of Central America.

Chrétien was less consistent. China’s economic importance overshadowed its oppressive human-rights record. To be fair, the Mulroney government had already turned a blind eye to the domestic excesses of China’s dictatorial government, as had most of Canada’s allies, including and especially the United States. Team Canada was welcome in Beijing; the economic benefit, as opposed to the spectacle it occasioned, remains a matter of speculation.

Not even spectacles were entirely safe. Hosting a summit of Asia-Pacific powers in Vancouver in 1997, the Canadian government found itself on the wrong side of a public issue, using a very heavy hand to suppress demonstrations of public outrage at the presence of the Indonesian dictator, Suharto. Chrétien’s office took the blame, and the prime minister’s image suffered accordingly.

Nor did peacekeeping produce reliable results. When peace broke down in the Sinai in 1967, there was nothing the peacekeepers could do. They had a symbolic presence and, usually, not enough force in numbers or equipment to be able to impose peace where there was none. Canada was involved in a number of peacekeeping missions under the United Nations in the 1990s, in Bosnia, Croatia, Somalia, Rwanda, and Haiti, among other places. Of these, Bosnia, Croatia, and Somalia were already underway when Chrétien took office.

In Bosnia, an inadequate UN mandate and the inconsistent and evasive policies of Canada’s principal allies prolonged a civil war among Bosnian Serbs, Muslims, and Croats. Canadian and other UN troops were caught in the middle, without the strength or the authority to enforce peace on the local combatants. At best, the presence of UN troops prevented a Serb victory—but it could do nothing about the Serbian bombardment of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, or prevent the massacre of Muslims at Srbenica in 1995. Canada gave troops to the UN force, but despite the size of its contribution, Canada was excluded from the “contact group” that attempted to guide the Western approach to ex-Yugoslavia after 1991.26 The Bosnian war was solved militarily in 1995, by victory (of the Croats) and defeat (of the Bosnian Serbs) on the battlefield, and not by invoking the mantra of peace or peacekeeping. It was a lesson that peacekeeping, Canadian-style, didn’t work when there was no peace to keep.

Somalia and Rwanda were, if possible, worse. In January 1993 the Mulroney government had sent the Canadian Airborne regiment into Somalia, where government and most aspects of organized society had collapsed. The Somalia mission may have been hopeless from the start, but it was not enhanced by the torture and murder of a Somali teenager by members of the Airborne, who recorded their deeds on film. Eventually the news got out and investigations began, first under the Conservatives and then under the new Liberal government.

The Somalia inquiry was an object lesson in what not to do. The Liberals hadn’t set up the Somalia mission, and logically had nothing to lose, but the defence department proved to be evasive and obfuscating. Ministers were dragged in, and the Somalia affair became a lawyers’ carnival, at public expense, deeply fascinating to the media because villains could be depicted in bright primary colours. Eventually, the affair proved to be as damaging to the politicians as it was to the military. As a precaution in the lead-up to the 1997 election, Chrétien closed down the inquiry. The inquiry commissioners predicted dire consequences for the government that dared to interfere with their desire for infinity, but the consequences never materialized and Somalia passed into history as a stain on the reputation of the Canadian army, and on peacekeeping.

Liberal foreign policies weren’t much different from those of their Conservative predecessors, just as theirs hadn’t been much different from those of the Liberals under Trudeau. As Kissinger said, Canada was noted for its support of international peacekeeping, usually under the aegis of the United Nations, another Canadian icon. Canadians took pride in the fact, without really understanding what the implications might be. But as the 1990s advanced, and one peacekeeping failure followed another, Canadians began to lose faith in peacekeeping as a practical policy.

Peacekeeping also received a black eye in the African country of Rwanda, where a Canadian-led UN force, commanded by General Roméo Dallaire, stood helplessly by in the face of a genocidal assault on that country’s Tutsi minority in the spring of 1994. Dallaire had done his best to avert the catastrophe; in response the United Nations not only refused to take action but reduced the forces it had already deployed there. Close to a million souls perished in Rwanda, an indelible black mark against the United Nations. Canada by itself could do little, and even that little had gradually been drained by the diminution of Canada’s armed forces since the end of the Cold War.

The Canadian government continued to act as if peacekeeping was a viable policy no matter what the circumstances. The Canadian public, spurred on by the media and by special-interest non-governmental organizations (NGOs in the universal jargon of international affairs), was prone to demand action as one crisis after another was perceived and adopted by journalists—sometimes for good reason, sometimes not. One such case occurred in the eastern Congo late in 1996 when it appeared that a repeat of the Rwanda disaster was impending. Encouraged by his nephew Raymond, a professional diplomat and at the time Canadian ambassador in Washington, Jean Chrétien advanced the idea of a Canadian-led UN force for the region, ironically dubbed “Operation Assurance.” The operation lasted about six weeks, failed utterly to accomplish its mission of providing assurance to refugees in the Congo, and was hastily withdrawn when it became clear it could do little good. As one Canadian general, Maurice Baril, put it at the time, Canada was in over its head. “We are dealing with big players in a very complex situation,” he wrote, “without the tools or knowledge necessary to control either specific events or the general situation.”27 Adapting the words of a song, “Operation Assurance” became better known as “The Bungle in the Jungle.”²⁸

Failure in Somalia and Rwanda and frustration in Bosnia suggested that classic peacekeeping, respecting the sovereignty of the nations whose peace was to be kept, was not the right formula for the 1990s. In all three countries, the danger was internal, not international. The threat to peace didn’t come from organized, uniformed armies, but from irregulars and guerrillas, even gangsters. The appropriate international response must be to respect or preserve not so much national sovereignty, but the human rights of populations. This was an old liberal theme, though not one that had traditionally been identified with the Canadian Liberal party. Nevertheless, it became a signature of the Chrétien government as Canada sought to ban the use of land mines in warfare and promoted the establishment of an International Criminal Court.

Both issues—land mines and the court—differentiated Canada’s policy from that of the United States, even under the Clinton administration. Clinton, on the advice of his generals, resisted the regulation of land mines, and signed the International Criminal Court agreement only at the very last minute in 2001, when it was already certain to be defeated in a Republican-dominated Congress. Yet the abolition of land mines was popular with many Americans, who rejoiced when a treaty was signed in Ottawa in 1998 doing just that, under the approving eye of Chrétien’s foreign minister of the day, Lloyd Axworthy.

In one area, however, there was no difference between the two countries. A single item of unfinished business lingered in ex-Yugoslavia—the Serbian government’s attempt to “solve” the problem of the Albanian majority in its province of Kosovo. Well-publicized Serb brutality recalled the horrors of “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia and elsewhere. Owing to a Russian veto the United Nations Security Council was unable to agree on remedial action, and so the Western powers decided to act alone, using NATO as their instrument. After an American-led bombing campaign in the skies over Serbia, and with the threat of a land invasion in the background, the Serbian government caved in, and evacuated Kosovo.

Canada was an early and effective participant in the NATO air attacks—one of the few allies with the necessary aircraft and equipment to do so. Kosovo illustrated the principle that “human security” transcended even national sovereignty. Its supporters argued that it also demonstrated the utility of concerted international action. But, as critics noted at the time, the NATO action bypassed the United Nations. If, as some claimed, international armed action required UN authorization, then the legality of the Kosovo campaign was dubious.

OLD LEADER, NEW ISSUES, NEW CENTURY

As the 1990s drew to a close the world marked the occasion by generating the wild rumour (called an “urban legend” in the jargon of the day) that its computer systems would collapse with the advent of two new digits—20** instead of 19**. It was a measure of how widespread computers had become, and how dependent individuals and institutions had become on the machines, in the office and at home. By 1997, 36 percent of households had personal computers, and they had become standard equipment in any business of any size. With computers came the internet, which transformed communications and the flow of information—so much so that society faced grave disruption if computers failed and the internet suddenly shut down. Governments immediately set up task forces, the task forces spent money, new computers arrived in home and office, and 31 December 1999 passed into 1 January 2000 largely without incident. It was not in fact the new millennium—that would be a year later.

Canada celebrated the new millennium with its old Liberal government, then entering its eighth year. Jean Chrétien returned briefly to Ottawa from his Florida vacation and, finding that everything was all right, left the snow and the pines for the sands and the palms. The government was ticking over, though slowly, political problems were few, the election was past, and the economy was going well. Chrétien could relax and take credit for a job well done.

If Canadians watched the New Year’s celebrations, the odds were that they were watching on a colour television. A relative rarity as late as 1970, colour televisions were in 99 percent of Canadian households (65 percent of Canadians watched television on cable networks, another relatively recent innovation). Telephones, already 120 years old, had achieved 100 percent coverage, and during the 1990s cellphones had spread (59 percent household coverage by 2004). Refrigerators were nearly universal. The great exception for most of the twentieth century had been Native reserves, but even there, by the 1990s, over 90 percent of households had sewage disposal and connections to running water. Video recorders, CD players, and microwave ovens had all moved from luxuries in the early 1980s to ordinary (and much cheaper) household goods by 2000.

The houses that contained the households were different too—bigger. The size of Canadian dwellings shrank during the Second World War and after, but that trend had long since reversed.29 Bigger houses had more rooms (up one room per house in the forty years after 1961) but fewer people—from an average 3.9 people per house in 1961 to 2.6 people per house in 2001.

Canadians in the mid-twentieth century aspired to “a job for life,” and many actually had one, as far as the vicissitudes of the Depression and the war allowed. That had gone by the wayside in the 1990s: according to a government study, “Today’s worker will have on average approximately 3 careers and 8 jobs over a lifetime.”30 A single full-time job was getting scarcer too, down from 67 percent of workers in 1989 to 63 percent in the first years of the twenty-first century. Part-time or temporary workers had fewer benefits, and thus cost less, and were easier to fire, allowing employers to adjust rapidly to changing economic conditions.

Those conditions were determined in large part by a decline in industrial capacity and a rise in the importance of the service sector. (The decline was indeed very marked, as the number of Canadians employed in manufacturing dropped while the numbers engaged in finance, or tourism, or other “soft” sectors of the economy grew.) Already apparent in the late 1970s, this change accelerated as trade barriers such as tariffs fell, not only as a consequence of NAFTA, but with a general liberalization of international rules and practices governing trade and investment. This was labelled “globalization,” a term that had gradually become current since the 1960s.

The theory behind globalization was clear enough. “A rising tide raises all boats” was a convenient way of summarizing it. More precisely, it argued that true prosperity came about not through government direction but through the unfettered growth of markets, the abolition of barriers in the international economy, and the disestablishment of privileged special-interest groups.

It was a doctrine that fitted well with the neo-conservative reaction to liberal excess in the 1960s and 1970s. In a larger sense, it replayed the battles between mercantilists and protectionists and free traders in the early nineteenth century that had led to the abolition of the Corn Laws and the involuntary departure of Canada from British economic protection and direction.³¹ In the fall of 1999 a meeting of the International Trade Organization (ITO), the successor to the old GATT, was disrupted in the “Battle of Seattle” by thousands of anti-globalization activists who’d been summoned to combat over the internet. Canada’s trade minister, Pierre Pettigrew, was among the hundreds of delegates who had to scramble over walls and around barricades to escape. (The “battle” would be repeated in Quebec City in 2001, and around many other international meetings and especially summits, as demonstrators sought to show that national leaders could not transact their business undisturbed, or, ideally, at all.)32 A Canadian writer, Naomi Klein, became a bestselling participant in the international debate in 2000 with her book No Logo, which denounced international corporations for their indifference to the interests of the people who worked for them, often in shocking conditions and for very low wages.³³

Proof of the appropriateness of globalization was found in the rapid growth of the economies of East and Southeast Asia, where capitalism, not socialist planning, had led first Japan and then South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Thailand from dire poverty to prosperity.³⁴ (The extent of free marketeering in these countries was sometimes exaggerated in the eye of the Western beholder, to be sure, but there was no doubt that they were capitalists all.) Then, in the late 1980s, China joined the parade and the world’s largest country, after forty years of Maoist delusion, reformed its economy. Even India, for many years considered a hopeless basket case of regulation and protection, began to discover the joys of a large, well-trained, English-speaking elite workforce. (Canada had already discovered it through immigration from the subcontinent.) The full consequences wouldn’t be seen for twenty years and more, but even partially revealed they were stunning, and important for Canada, among others.

As noted above, manufacturing was becoming less important in the Canadian economy. The manufacturing formerly done in Canada, or in the United States, or in other developed countries was beginning to move to the lower-wage Third World, or at least to that part of the Third World that was politically and economically stable enough (“free” enough of state interference) to guarantee investment. Scholars in Canada and elsewhere learnedly debated whether stability preceded democracy, or prosperity was a necessary precondition for membership in the democratic club. Bankers and international lending agencies struggled to impose something called the “Washington consensus,” a doctrine devised in the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which were located in Washington, whereby the first freedom, the one that preceded and underlay all others, was economic.35 Without prosperity, the credo went, there could be no democracy, and without economic freedom, the freedom to invest, there could be no political freedom.

There was no effective opposition to globalization in Canada, though trade wasn’t absent from the political agenda, especially as it became apparent that “free trade” with the United States was not absolute. Softwood, a problem since the 1980s, surfaced again and again. Canada repeatedly tried to secure free access for its softwood to the United States, and was repeatedly blocked by a powerful American lumber coalition operating through Congress and the byzantine American legal system. (All legal systems are to some extent byzantine, and this is not to suggest that the American one is necessarily worse than any other.) In what was only the most recent manifestation of the eternal softwood problem, the new Conservative government marked its accession to power in 2006 by agreeing to terms in the latest softwood lumber dispute.

THE ETERNAL BORDER

The morning of 11 September 2001 promised a classically beautiful day, sunny, warm, and cloudless all over eastern North America. Toward nine o’clock, late risers were alerted by their radios to turn to the various television news channels, where there was word of an aircraft crashing into one of the World Trade Center’s towers in New York City. Horrified viewers then saw another airplane crash into the other tower. Shortly after there was another plane crash, this time into the Pentagon. Plainly this was a concerted attack, and it didn’t take long for the probable culprits to be identified—an Islamist terrorist group, al-Qaeda, the same group to which Ahmed Ressam had belonged.

The American government promptly closed American airspace in case of another attack. Canada was asked to receive all trans-oceanic flights that could not be turned back to Europe or Asia; in the event, some thirty-three thousand air travellers landed in Canada, where they were hospitably entertained until they could get home. Canadian reaction to the attack, like that of most of the world, was overwhelmingly sympathetic, and unlike most of the world, Canada had actually been able to do something immediate and practical to help. A memorial service was held on Parliament Hill on 14 September, and 100,000 people attended.

The American president, George W. Bush, phoned Chrétien on 12 September to thank him for his efforts, but publicly Canada went unmentioned in a list of countries thanked by Bush in an address to Congress soon after. Canadians were surprised, and some were resentful.36

It was not a promising omen for Canadian–American relations in a time of crisis. Rumours circulated that Bush had no regard for Chrétien, or vice-versa. An urban legend took root—in Canada—that Chrétien had been lukewarm or unsupportive, to the United States or to Bush, and that Bush knew it and resented it.³⁷ In truth the two had little in common ideologically: Bush’s right-wing philosophy did not attract the Canadian prime minister, and for right-wingers of the Bush stripe Canada’s moderate welfare state was entirely passé, a hangover from the nightmarish 1970s. It didn’t help that Chrétien’s political adversaries at home ceaselessly praised the recent right-wing American model of society as a cure for the diseased liberalism that they believed infected Canada.

Bush decided that an immediate and forceful response was required to strike at al-Qaeda’s base in Afghanistan. The United Nations authorized the use of force, and so there was no contradiction between Canada’s desire to assist the Americans and the stipulations of the UN Charter, as there had been over Kosovo. Canada sent troops to Afghanistan, and maintained Canadian participation in a surveillance and interdiction naval patrol in the Persian Gulf. American victory in Afghanistan was unexpectedly swift, and a pro-American government was implanted in the Afghan capital, Kabul. But the victory was not complete, and the government the Americans installed was not stable.

Afghanistan immediately went on the back burner. Bush and his deputies became convinced that an assertion of American power was necessary to change the balance of power and politics in the Middle East once and for all. The object of their attention was Iraq, whose atrocious dictator, Saddam Hussein, had been straining for a decade to escape from the web of sanctions and restrictions placed on him at the end of the Gulf War in 1991. Saddam’s strategy was to divide the allies of 1991, evade the sanctions, and ultimately reconstruct his power by such means as bacteriological or even nuclear weapons—the “weapons of mass destruction,” or WMDs. Through a combination of luck and insistent UN arms inspections, Saddam, as we now know, was thwarted; but a reasonable case can be made that this wasn’t entirely self-evident in 2001 or 2002. On the other hand, there was no positive proof. And despite American suspicions, there was no proof either of Iraqi collusion with al-Qaeda.

Nevertheless, by the middle of 2002 it was clear that Bush intended war on Iraq, and it was at this time that Chrétien met Bush in Detroit. Public reports of the meeting were accurate enough—that Bush had urged his case against Iraq, and that Chrétien had reiterated his known position that Iraq must pose a clear and present danger to the world before armed action was necessary.38 In private, Chrétien told Bush that Canada’s support for a war in Iraq would be greatly enhanced if the United States could secure the support of the United Nations.

UN support was not forthcoming, and neither was Chrétien’s. The official American case for war—that Iraq had WMDs and was ready to use them—was weak, and widely doubted in the intelligence communities of the Western world. Diplomacy at the UN hadn’t helped the American case; the American determination not to wait for the final reports of UN weapons inspectors counted heavily against the United States. France took the lead at the UN, but as a senior American diplomat later reflected, “The Mexicans, Canadians, and Chileans—our closest friends in the hemisphere—were not with us.”³⁹

Intelligence and diplomacy undermined the American case, but the ultimate consideration seems to have been public opinion, in Canada in general but particularly in Quebec. Nowhere in Canada did public opinion support going to war as part of an American-constructed “coalition of the willing,” but that was especially the case in Quebec.

Quebec was important for two reasons: history and politics. Three times in forty years Canada had gone to wars for which Quebec either was or became unenthusiastic. In 1917 and again in 1942 the government had imposed conscription for overseas service in the teeth of opinion in Quebec, and these facts were lovingly recorded and dwelt upon in the Quebec nationalist version of history. The Korean War, it was true, hadn’t created the same conflict, and certainly the UN peacekeeping operations of the later twentieth century hadn’t awakened the old English–French demons.

But Iraq had. In some ways this was surprising, because in order to offset English-Canadian influence Quebec nationalistes and separatists had made much of their affinity for the United States from the 1970s through the 1990s. The United States was the real thing, they argued, and English Canada merely a pale copy. This view of the United States appears to have reversed strongly, and suddenly, between 2001 and 2003. Analysts disagree as to exactly why, but the most plausible explanation seems to be that Quebec’s tradition of anti-militarism had confronted the recent war-making image of the United States, and it did not like what it saw.40 A poll published in November 2004 compared opinions of the United States held among various countries—including Canada’s, but also Quebec’s: it found that 79 percent of English Canadians seemed to like Americans, but that only 52 percent of Quebeckers felt the same way—similar to the level of approval in Spain.

The surge in Quebec public opinion was indicated by a huge anti-war demonstration in Montreal in March 2003, when 150,000 to 250,000 took to the streets to manifest disapproval of American policy. In Toronto, the comparable demonstration gathered only 10,000 to 30,000. This doesn’t mean that opinion in English Canada favoured the Iraq war; all polls concur that it did not, even in Alberta, considered the most pro-American and right-wing section of the country. In a poll taken in March 2003, over 50 percent of Quebeckers had an unfavourable view of the U.S. government compared with 21.1 percent in the rest of Canada. As for “the American people,” 24.3 percent of Quebeckers were “not favourable at all” compared with 8.9 percent in the rest of the country (and 5.9 percent on the Prairies).41

On the particular issue of the war, only 7.6 percent of Quebeckers were willing to follow the United States into Iraq without UN authorization (which was what happened). The figure for the rest of Canada was 20 percent, which broken down regionally at 22.7 percent for on the Prairies, 16.5 percent for in British Columbia, 17.8 percent for in the Atlantic provinces, and 20.4 percent for in Ontario. Had the Iraq war been authorized by the UN, 59.6 percent of the rest of Canada would have favoured Canadian participation; but in Quebec that figure dipped to 42.4 percent, with 50 percent still opposed. It was this policy that the Chrétien government publicly favoured. Bush’s decision to proceed without UN authorization therefore spared the Canadian government a great deal of domestic political turmoil in the face of Quebec’s probable dissent.

What was interesting, and significant, to any politician with a sense of history was the convergence of two of the main currents of Canadian history—the two-language divide between English and French Canada, and the political divide with the United States. It was a powerful combination, and Jean Chrétien paid it due homage.

It is also possible that English- and French-Canadian opinions had a common root—one not unique to Canada. As the Pew Global Attitudes Survey expressed it in early 2005, “Simply put, the rest of the world both fears and resents the unrivalled power that the United States has amassed since the Cold War ended.”⁴² Opinion of the United States as a superpower slopped over onto opinions about Americans. To quote Pew again, in a different survey, “In most Western countries surveyed, majorities associate Americans with the positive characteristics ‘honest,’ ‘inventive’ and ‘hardworking.’ At the same time, substantial numbers also associate Americans with the negative traits ‘greedy’ and ‘violent.’ Canadians, who presumably have the greatest contact with Americans, agree with Europeans on the negatives, but are less likely to view Americans as honest. And Canada is the only Western nation in which a majority (53%) regards Americans as rude.”⁴³

Some commentators went further. The prominent sociologist and pollster Michael Adams argued that Canadians, including English Canadians, were becoming more distant from Americans and closer to Europeans in values. On subjects like religion, Adams certainly had the polls on his side.44 It is also true, as the historian J.L. Granatstein has repeatedly argued, that Canadians have and have always had a streak of anti-Americanism in their character.⁴⁵ At its extreme, this shade of opinion seems to hold Canadians uniquely responsible for differences with Americans, and argues that if Canadians hold negative sentiments about the United States, they should keep them to themselves.

Such feelings appear to ebb and flow. If anti-Americanism is a constant in Canadian life, so is attraction to the United States; and the attraction occasionally works in reverse. Some Americans are closer to Canadians, culturally, than they are to others in their vast and exceedingly diverse land. When George W. Bush prevailed in the very divisive 2004 presidential election, a cartoon-map immediately circulated around the United States depicting “The United States of Canada” (the Northeast down to Washington plus most of the Midwest and Pacific states) as a separate country from “Jesus-Land,” the South, Plains states, and Southwest.⁴⁶ Opinions about the United States or Canada and their respective cultures are not only regional, but generational, with the older generations—those who remember the American New Deal and the Second World War—most likely to feel similarity to Americans. When Bush went to war in 2003 and Chrétien did not, the official opposition and three provincial premiers, Ernie Eves of Ontario, Ralph Klein of Alberta, and Gordon Campbell of British Columbia, vociferously supported Bush.

Interestingly, it was traditional Canadians (presumably represented by the three premiers) to whom George W. Bush appealed when he made a speech in Halifax in December 2004. He recalled what Canada had done in the Second World War, agreed that it had been right to do so, and argued that the time for action in a common cause had come again. His host, the Liberal prime minister Paul Martin, applauded appropriately. His government wouldn’t send troops to Iraq: public opinion forbade that. But it would send them (again) to Afghanistan.

DIVIDED POLITICS

Afghanistan wasn’t on the Canadian political horizon between 2003 and 2005. The Liberal succession was at first the main item, and it was closely followed by two years of scandal.

Jean Chrétien had overstayed his welcome with the Liberal party. Though Chrétien had an enviable record of success as Liberal leader, with three straight election victories, he hadn’t managed to make himself loved by his party or his parliamentary caucus. Irascible, imperious, and distant from his MPs, he created a vacuum of loyalty into which an ambitious aspirant might step. As it happened, there was one to hand, the minister of finance, Paul Martin Jr. Chrétien had defeated Martin for the Liberal leadership in a bitter contest in 1990, and subsequently relations between the two men were never warm or trusting. Martin was prepared to wait awhile for Chrétien to depart, but with each passing election, and each passing year, he was growing older. Assisted by some very able political operatives, Martin set about securing the loyalty of constituency associations across the country. Chrétien might have won, but Martin, Liberals were persuaded, would win bigger. The future of the party was tied to displacing the old leader and making room for the new: Martin.

Chrétien responded by firing Martin as finance minister, which only allowed Martin extra time to pursue his goal of the leadership. (Martin thereby avoided participating in the cabinet debates of March 2003 around the Iraqi war, and didn’t have to take sides.) Finally, under pressure, Chrétien agreed to step down. A convention was called for Toronto in November 2003. Martin was the inevitable winner, but Chrétien in his farewell address was the star of the show. He rang all the chimes—the Liberal tradition of social welfare, the Battle of the Deficit, the Clarity Act. He added, “And it was because of our deep belief as Canadians in the values of multilateralism and the United Nations that we did not go to war in Iraq.” The convention rose and cheered the old leader to the echo. Martin, many believed, would have done things differently in foreign policy, including Iraq; Chrétien’s speech was a warning not to try.

Martin’s moment at the centre of the national stage was brief, from December 2003 to February 2006. At first, he seemed to concentrate more on removing opposing elements in the Liberal party rather than attacking the opposition, apparently assuming that a victory over the previously hapless Conservatives was a sure bet. Confronted with a classic scandal, the misspending of federal money on Liberal-friendly ad agencies in Quebec in return for piffling work ostensibly boosting federalism and Canada, Martin chose to be indignant and, repeating Chrétien’s tactic over Somalia, appointed an investigatory commission into what was called “Adscam.” Then, hoping that the electorate had been appeased, Martin called an election in June 2004, just over three years into the term of the existing Parliament, expecting to harvest his own majority instead of Chrétien’s and to consolidate his authority over the party.

It was a poor gamble. Martin underestimated his enemy. The Conservatives had finally united, for the first time since Mulroney, under a new and talented leader, the Calgarian Stephen Harper. Harper had been a Progressive Conservative back in the 1980s, had quit Ottawa in disgust, and had been one of the first to call for a new right-wing party to replace the bumbling, compromise-prone Progressive Conservatives. He served for a term as a Reform MP before returning to the private sector to lead a right-wing interest group, the National Citizens’ Coalition. Replacing Stockwell Day as leader of the Alliance party, Harper made it his object to swallow up the remnants of the old Progressive Conservatives, who had returned to minor-party status under their former leader, Joe Clark. Clark opposed any such deal, but after his resignation as leader there was little to prevent it, and the merger formally took place in October 2003. The merged party reverted to the title “Conservative Party,” last used in 1942.

Harper’s merger extended the Conservatives geographically to the Atlantic provinces, and into Ontario. Harper was a much more solid and impressive figure than his predecessor, Day, but he carried with him a few liabilities, including his subscription to a 2000 declaration calling on the Alberta government to “build a firewall” around the province to keep out iniquitous Liberal influences. He had supported Bush’s war in Iraq in March 2003, and had denounced the government for not following its natural ally’s lead.47 In terms of Canadian politics, it would not have been unfair to label Harper a provincialist, or, perhaps, a strict constructionist, arguing that the federal government should stay within its enumerated powers under the 1867 constitution. It should, on the other hand, return its attention to neglected areas like national defence.

Harper was unsuccessful at putting his ideas across in the 2004 campaign. Canadians were disappointed in Martin and the Liberals, but not disappointed enough to want to take a chance on Harper and the Conservatives.⁴⁸ Martin’s campaign, based on his presumed popularity (election signs bore the slogan “Paul Martin’s Liberals,” evidently to distinguish them from the bad old Liberals of Jean Chrétien),⁴⁹ stumbled badly at first. His handlers immediately switched from the positive to the negative, stressing Harper’s extremism and rigidity—deficiencies for which the Conservative leader then provided some corroborating evidence. In a classic negative campaign, the Liberals pulled off a minority government, giving Martin a second chance at fulfilling his promise of a new, fresh face to Canadian politics. In one ominous development, the Liberals lost very badly in Quebec, signifying Quebec’s irritation at the Adscam scandal. Regardless of the cause, Martin had hoped to do better than Chrétien in Quebec, with a softer and more accommodating approach—the incoherent doctrine of “asymmetric federalism”—to Quebec nationalists; instead he did considerably worse.

Martin’s second chance dragged on for eighteen months. The government did score some successes, concluding a broad financial accord with Canada’s Natives in November 2005 and reaching agreement with the provinces on funding affordable daycare centres across the country. There was movement on getting new equipment for Canada’s hard-pressed armed forces. In foreign policy, it patched up relations with the Bush administration, sending Canadian troops to Afghanistan. (The Americans, facing an endless insurgency in Iraq, needed all the help they could get to relieve their own hard-pressed army, in this case by allowing them to reduce the U.S. forces in Afghanistan.) On the other hand, it failed to agree on one of Bush’s policy preferences, cooperation in a continental system of missile defence.

It was probably not a bad record, but it was offset by the increasing perception of the prime minister as unable to make up his mind on large themes, which was reinforced by the sometimes breathtaking opportunism of Liberal tactics in maintaining a majority in the House of Commons. (Martin was dubbed “Mr. Dithers” by a newspaper columnist, and the name stuck.)50 A prominent Conservative moved to the Liberals, and was promptly appointed a minister. Shortly after, the Liberals squeaked by in a tie vote in the House, rescued, according to parliamentary custom, by the Speaker’s casting vote.

Martin wasn’t so lucky in November 2005. Defeated in the House of Commons, he was propelled into an election in January 2006. He repeated his tactics of the 2004 campaign, but the second time out, these had less effect. He lost this election, more impressively in terms of popular vote than actual seat totals. Martin resigned as Liberal leader as well as prime minister. In February 2006 Stephen Harper became prime minister at the head of a Conservative minority government.

CONCLUSION

It’s too early to speculate on the prospects or duration of a Harper government. It’s possible that it represents a coda on the prolonged Liberal and liberal era in Canadian history—one that lasted seventy years from 1935, or possibly even a century from the era of Sir Wilfrid Laurier. The shape of Canadian history has always been related to ideas and politics that have crossed over Canada’s political boundaries, and the ebb and flow of liberalism and conservatism during the twentieth century have been no exception.

The ideology that accompanied Harper’s election win in 2006 was, in some respects, a return to the Canada of the 1930s, both in domestic policy and foreign affairs—a return, in fact, to the last decade before “liberalism” in its current welfare-state collectivist guise had taken hold. The Canadian government of the 1930s was a low-tax, low-risk affair, which avoided meddling in provincial priorities—not all that different from what Harper might wish to see. All that had changed in 1939, when Canada’s external alliances dictated an active participation in overseas conflicts. What followed, of course, was the expansion of the Canadian state, and the diminution of provincial power, in order to support the Canadian war effort.

There were other reasons to remember the 1930s. Relations then with Canada’s principal ally, Great Britain, were uncomfortable and contradictory as they were expressed in both domestic politics and foreign policy. There was good reason to lack confidence in the direction of British policy, and deep concern that English and French Canada were heading in different directions. That had also happened after 1911, when Sir Robert Borden’s Conservative government had got itself elected on different platforms in French Quebec and English Canada, with lasting and detrimental results for the Conservative party. In the years after 2001 the possibility existed of another split over foreign policy, and running along linguistic lines.

Unlike Great Britain, which lost interest in Canada along with the disappearance of its empire in the 1960s, the withdrawal of the United States from Canadian shores was not exactly in prospect. Geography, economics, and culture made sure of that. The fact of the United States, of another larger and richer English-speaking society right next to Canada, was, along with English–French relations and Native relations, one of the great constants of Canadian history. Two Liberal governments, Chrétien and Martin, struggled with the contradiction between two of the central themes of Canadian history—English–French harmony versus good relations with Big Brother. Was this a question that only benign neglect would eventually solve, or would it require more forceful and immediate action? Only time and circumstance would tell.

Circumstance demanded an adjustment to Canadian realities, which had changed over the century of Liberal dominance, and especially in the years after 1945. Demographics had changed in Canada. Most obviously, Canada’s Native population, including the Métis, hadn’t disappeared but expanded over time, making Natives and Native issues, and Native opinions, a much more important part of Canada’s reality than they had been since 1815. Canada was in some respects returning to its origins.

There were other signs of its origins in the first years of the twenty-first century. Climate, and climate change, had shaped Canada in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Global warming was by 2006 taken to be more fact than theory, and its effects on Canada and North America, from melting glaciers to hurricanes, reminded Canadians that “national” boundaries couldn’t protect them against international, in fact intercontinental, developments. Nor was climate change all. Disease was no respecter of boundaries, and the history of Canada and its Aboriginal inhabitants showed what could happen to whole peoples confronted by unknown and uncontrolled pestilence. Would the twenty-first century see a recurrence of the plagues that had decimated Canada’s First Peoples? Many believed it would, or believed that if it were to be prevented, it would require a strong and unified commitment from Canada, and from all other nations.

At the same time, large-scale immigration was changing Canada, as it was changing the United States. The political system mirrored the change, as far as representation was concerned, as one minority group after another found its way into elected or appointed office. Whether that would have an effect on the policies of Canadian governments, or on the attitudes of Canadian society as a whole, remained to be seen. Canada’s forms, its parliaments, its democratic culture, its monarchy, had proved surprisingly durable. But the monarch’s representative, symbolizing the continuity and adaptability of Canadian institutions, was first a woman born in Hong Kong, Adrienne Clarkson, and then a woman born in Haiti, Michaëlle Jean. It was a case of new wine in old bottles—familiar, but symbolizing renewal.

Multiculturalism, the standard buzzword to describe (and also obscure) the nature of a multi-immigrant society, might not be enough; might even prove to be a temporary phenomenon preceding the amalgamation of immigrants into a larger, but different, whole. Nevertheless, it seemed a safe bet that the demography of the late twentieth century harboured within itself a recalibration of the nature of Canada, if not an outright modification of what it meant to be Canadian.