Endnotes

1: NATIVE LAND

1.  For some time a site at Old Crow in Yukon Territory was regarded as harbouring proof of a very early arrival (twenty-seven thousand years ago) of human immigration to North America, but re-dating according to more advanced scientific methods has reduced that date to a mere thirteen hundred years ago: Alan D. McMillan, Native Peoples and Cultures of Canada: An Anthropological Overview, 2nd ed. (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1995), 28.

2.  See on these points Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1999), 362–63.

3.  Dean R. Snow, “The First Americans and the Differentiation of Hunter-Gatherer Cultures,” in Bruce Trigger and Wilcomb E. Washburn, eds., The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 1, part 1, North America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 182.

4.  Quoted in James V. Wright, A History of the Native People of Canada, vol. II, 1000 BC–AD 500 (Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1999), 896.

5.  Bruce Trigger and William R. Swagerty, “Entertaining Strangers: North America in the Sixteenth Century,” in Trigger and Washburn, Cambridge History of the Native Peoples, 362–63. See also Olive Dickason, Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times, 2nd ed. (Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 1997), 8–9, which discusses the issue of population figures and links it to the decimation of North America’s population following the arrival of the Europeans.

6.  Dean Snow, The Iroquois (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 88–89.

7.  J.R. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian–White Relations in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 18.

2: LAND FOR THE TAKING

1.  Scurvy was hardly a novelty. Cartier had faced the problem first among French explorers, but each generation seems to have had to face the disease anew. An effective cure for scurvy, lemon juice, was established as early as 1617, but it took the next 150 years for the cure to take effect in the world’s navies.

2.  Gilles Havard and Cécile Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique Française (Paris: Flammarion, 2003), 65.

3.  Diarmuid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 440.

4.  Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens, 55–57.

5.  Laval had been appointed bishop of a defunct diocese, where no Christians had lived for centuries; but defunct or not, the title of bishop remained.

6.  There is an amusing account of the affair, which occurred in 1694, in W.J. Eccles, Frontenac: The Courtier Governor (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1959), 297ff.

7.  See John Mack Faragher, A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland (New York: Norton, 2005), 58–59.

3: EXPANSION AND CONSOLIDATION

1.  The actual presidency of the council was sometimes disputed: Havard and Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique Française, 107.

2.  W.J. Eccles, Canada Under Louis XIV (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1964), 32–33.

3.  Havard and Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique Française, 106.

4.  R. Cole Harris and John Warkentin, Canada Before Confederation (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1974), 21.

5.  Marcel Trudel, Memoirs of a Less Travelled Road: A Historian’s Life (Montreal: Véhicule Press, 2002), 22.

6.  Talon could import goods free of duty and freight on the king’s ships. The goods so imported, for example 220 barrels of brandy, must have been re-sold: Eccles, Canada Under Louis XIV, 56.

7.  Allan Greer, Brève Histoire des Peuples de la Nouvelle France (Quebec: Boréal, 1998), 32–37.

8.  See the analysis of the St. Ours family in Allan Greer, Peasant, Lord and Merchant: Rural Society in Three Quebec Parishes 1740–1840 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 105–12. From their officer-founder in the 1670s, the St. Ours enjoyed a succession of official (military) appointments, pensions, and donations from the state; this persisted even after the end of the French regime in 1760.

9.  Harris and Warkentin, Canada Before Confederation, 57–58.

10.  E.E. Rich, The Fur Trade and the Northwest, to 1857 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1967), 36–37.

11.  Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 34.

4: THE WARS FOR AMERICA (1)

1.  An emissary from Massachusetts spent the summer of 1705 moored off Quebec City, negotiating a proposal of neutrality with Governor Vaudreuil: Dale Miquelon, New France, 1701–1744 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1987), 40–41.

2.  Cotton Mather, in 1691, quoted in Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (London: Pimlico, 2003), 147.

3.  In the most famous incident, the Deerfield massacre of 1704, 47 settlers were killed outright and 111 taken into captivity: Miquelon, New France, 40.

4.  Faragher, Great and Noble Scheme, 135. The Indians were a combination of Abenakis, Maliseets, and Mi’kmaq.

5.  Bruce P. Lenman, “Colonial Wars and Imperial Instability,” in P.J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 156.

6.  Faragher, Great and Noble Scheme, 136–45.

7.  Harold Kalman, A History of Canadian Architecture, vol. 1 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1994), 48–50.

8.  Peter Kalm, Travels in North America, vol. 2 (New York: Dover, 1964), 428.

9.  Intendant Duchesneau, quoted in White, Middle Ground, 36.

10.  See for example the description in White, Middle Ground, 70–75, of a complicated marriage entanglement in 1694.

11.  Quoted in Havard and Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique Française, 251.

12.  Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Viking, 2001), 389–90.

13.  In some respects the religious wars of 1520–1648 “sickened” many Europeans, but religion nevertheless remained an important political force, and changes in the balance of religion in Europe were viewed with alarm. James II thought his Catholic religion important enough to risk—and lose—his crown in 1688. The War of the Spanish Succession was seen by many in Great Britain as a Protestant struggle against advancing and aggressive Catholic power. See MacCulloch, Reformation, 669–71, for the state of mind at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

14.  David Landes points out the British advantages in efficient internal transport, availability of coal, and efficient agriculture, all of which contributed to British economic growth in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: Norton, 1998), chapter 15.

15.  Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America (New York: Knopf, 2000), 36.

16.  Anderson, Crucible of War, 18–20.

17.  Eccles, Canadian Frontier, 160; Anderson, Crucible of War, 32, estimates that the French spent four million livres on the expedition.

18.  Ian K. Steele, Betrayals: Fort William Henry and the “Massacre” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 117–22.

19.  Linda Colley, Captives, 181–82, uses the massacre to suggest a change in British attitudes to Indians, from romantic glorification earlier in the century to a kind of negative realism in the 1750s and after. But her treatment is brief and, while suggestive, is hardly conclusive. It seems more reasonable that opinions of the Indians differed widely both before and after Fort William Henry.

20.  The site had first been occupied by the farm of Abraham Martin, an early settler— hence “the plains of Abraham.”

21.  It takes a great deal to deflate Wolfe’s reputation, and the task may well be fruitless. The eminent historian Paul Kennedy (The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery [London: Ashfield Press, 1983], 108) suggests that Wolfe had few if any equals in the British army, either in the Seven Years’ War or later in the century. W.J. Eccles thought little of both Wolfe and Montcalm, especially the latter: Canadian Frontier, 181–82. Fred Anderson, in his Crucible of War, 351–55, argues that Wolfe was seeking death, “his grim muse,” in September 1759, and I’m inclined to agree with his argument.

5: THE WARS FOR AMERICA (2)

1.  Ian Buruma, Anglomania: A European Love Affair (New York: Random House, 1998), catches some of the varieties of anglomania in Europe from Voltaire to the age of Margaret Thatcher.

2.  W.S. MacNutt, The Atlantic Provinces: The Emergence of Colonial Society, 1712–1857 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1965), 72–75.

3.  T.F. McIlwraith, “British North America, 1753–1967,” in T.F. McIlwraith and E.K. Muller, eds., North America: The Historical Geography of a Changing Continent, 2nd ed. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 207.

4.  Philip Lawson, The Imperial Challenge: Quebec and Britain in the Age of the American Revolution (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 144–45.

5.  Piers Mackesy, The War for America, 1775–1783 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 511.

6.  David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 64.

7.  Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 2006), chapter 3.

8.  The theory accepted at Paris was that the British held America by right of conquest (from the French) and discovery, and that the Americans inherited from the British by right of conquest (from the British) too: Michael D. Green, “The Expansion of European Colonization to the Mississippi Valley, 1780–1880,” in Trigger and Washburn, Cambridge History of the Native Peoples, 465–66. The argument went further: Congress maintained that because the Indians had supported the British, they had forfeited their lands and not merely their sovereignty.

9.  See Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2006).

10.  The term “mob” was used by John Adams to characterize rioters in Boston in his defence of the British soldiers charged with their murder in the “Boston Massacre” of 1770: quoted in Hiller Zobel, The Boston Massacre (New York: Norton, 1970), 292. The soldiers were acquitted.

11.  Schama, Rough Crossings, 144–49.

12.  On this point see Jane Errington, The Lion, the Eagle, and Upper Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987), 4–5, 28–30.

13.  “I think we’re all Anglophiles,” commented the historian and Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin in 1961. “How can we fail to be Anglophiles? Unless we hate ourselves.” Boorstin is quoted in Christopher Hitchens, Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo–American Relationship (New York: Nation Books, 2004), 14.

6: THE WARS FOR AMERICA (3)

1.  www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/98-187-XIE/pop.htm, Statistics Canada, Estimated Population of Canada, 1605 to present.

2.  Taylor, Divided Ground, 17–18, notes how the material needs of late eighteenth-century Iroquois greatly exceeded those of their seventeenth-century ancestors.

3.  Gerald Craig, Upper Canada: The Formative Years, 1784–1841 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1963), 142–43.

4.  Edward Ermatinger, Life of Colonel Talbot and the Talbot Settlement, reprinted with an introduction by J.J. Talman (Belleville: Mika Silk Screening, 1972), original edition 1859, 111–15. The colonel’s double entendres over dinner so appalled the local Anglican parson that he never visited again.

5.  This adherence to principle, or resignation in the face of political reality, cost money: in the late 1780s the British government paid £150,000 per annum to subsidize Quebec: John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt: The Years of Acclaim (London: Constable, 1969, paperback ed., 1984), 364.

6.  Some time later there followed a highland unit, the Glengarry Fencibles, the first Catholic regiment in the British army, raised in 1794 by Alexander Macdonell, a Catholic priest, to serve in the war just beginning against revolutionary France; Macdonell served as the regiment’s chaplain. When the war paused, in 1802, the regiment was disbanded, leaving its soldiers unemployed and stimulating Macdonell to apply to the British government for help in settling them in Upper Canada. Leave and land were granted, two hundred acres (eighty-one hectares) for each soldier.

7.  See Taylor, Divided Ground, 119–36.

8.  J.M. Bumsted, Fur Trade Wars (Winnipeg: Great Plains Publications, 1999), 39.

9.  The transition to British (as opposed to French-Canadian) dominance was not immediate, but by the 1780s was clearly in place: see Kenneth Norrie and Douglas Owram, A History of the Canadian Economy, 1st ed. (Toronto: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), 134–35.

10.  The miniature St. John’s Island colony in fact already had a lieutenant governor, in token of its small size and dependent status.

11.  The notion of a single governor general was strongly supported by Sir Guy Carleton, the former governor of Quebec, who had carried off the unpleasant assignment of evacuating the British army from the new United States after peace was signed. Carleton’s presumed accomplishments and expertise made him the expert of the moment on Canada in London in the later 1780s.

12.  There was also a lieutenant governor in Lower Canada, but with no authority except when the governor was absent.

13.  Ehrman, Pitt, 363.

14.  For the celebrations and toasts see Mason Wade, The French Canadians, 1760–1945 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1955), 94. For one banquet, Prince Edward, son of George III and later father of Queen Victoria, then an army officer stationed in Quebec, lent his private band.

15.  Quoted in Peter Marshall, “British North America, 1760–1815,” in Marshall, Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, 385.

16.  Michael Smith, “Upper Canada During the War of 1812,” in Gerald Craig, Early Travellers in the Canadas, 1791–1867 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1955), 33. Smith, an American-born Baptist minister, published his analysis of the province in 1813.

17.  Wade, French Canadians, 94.

18.  John Richardson to Alexander Ellice, 16 February 1793, quoted in Wade, French Canadians, 97.

19.  Circular letter by Bishop Hubert, quoted in Wade, French Canadians, 99.

20.  Douglas Hay, “Tradition, Judges and Civil Liberties in Canada,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal, XLI/2 & 3, 320–21. McLane was unlucky in the judge, Chief Justice Osgoode, who tried him, for Osgoode pushed the then current interpretation of treason to its limits and beyond. The witnesses against McLane were promised land grants in return for their testimony; one of McLane’s counsel, as well as the judge, participated in the deal.

21.  Wade, French Canadians, 100–01.

22.  One unanticipated effect of the British conquest was the survival of the Jesuits in Lower Canada long after the suppression by the Pope of the Jesuit order in France, Spain, and Portugal and their colonies. Canada’s Jesuits retained their property, which wasn’t confiscated by the Protestant state—unlike their colleagues in the Catholic monarchies.

23.  Michael D. Green, “The Expansion of European Colonization to the Mississippi Valley, 1780–1880,” in Trigger and Washburn, Cambridge History of the Native Peoples, 492–93.

24.  Smith, “Upper Canada During the War of 1812,” 44.

25.  Helen Taft Manning, The Revolt of French Canada, 1800–1835 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1962), 102–03.

26.  Proclamation of 3 July 1812, quoted in J. Mackay Hitsman, Safeguarding Canada, 1763–1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 89.

27.  Hitsman, Safeguarding Canada, 87. The local population was opposed to “Mr. Madison’s War.”

28.  Wellington to Prime Minister Lord Liverpool, 9 November 1814, quoted in Hitsman, Safeguarding Canada, 109.

7: TRANSFORMATIONS AND CONNECTIONS, 1815–1840

1.  Donald Akenson, The Irish in Ontario: A Study in Rural History, 2nd ed. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), 11–12, tables 1 and 2, and 31, table 4.

2.  Akenson, The Irish in Ontario, 25–26. Contrary to the usual impression, Irish Catholics did come to Canada in significant numbers before the Irish Potato Famine of the later 1840s—although, again, they were outnumbered by Irish Protestants.

3.  Longer voyages were, however, the norm. Travellers’ accounts of the transatlantic voyage centre on the sheer boredom of the experience, as well as seasickness: see Charlotte Gray, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill (Toronto: Viking, 1999), chapter 4. These were, however, the stories of the more literate and wealthier immigrants, who had the time and education to set down their stories. The usual transatlantic voyage was much nastier and, in times of epidemics, much more hazardous.

4.  Quoted in Marcus Tanner, The Last of the Celts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 292. The source was a medical officer in Sydney, Nova Scotia, in 1827.

5.  Kenneth Bourne, Britain and the Balance of Power in North America, 1815–1908 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 40–41.

6.  At one point the earl occupied the North West Company post at Fort William on Lake Superior, and arrested the North West partners he found there. As J.M. Bumsted points out, he was acting in response to the North Westers’ violent and illegal behaviour: Bumsted, Fur Trade Wars, 157–61.

7.  Quoted in Bumsted, Fur Trade Wars, 224.

8.  Henry David Thoreau, A Yankee in Canada (originally published in 1853), chapter 3, www.walden.org/institute/thoreau/writings/canada/03_St_Anne.htm.

9.  Anna Jameson, “An English Gentlewoman in Upper Canada, 1836–1837,” in Craig, Early Travellers, 124. Jameson was referring back to the Loyalist roots of the province, but also describing social and political opinions as she found them in 1837.

10.  Caleb Upham, quoted in Reginald C. Stuart, United States Expansionism and British North America, 1775–1871 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 98.  Haliburton’s Yankee peddler was called “Sam Slick of Slickville.”

11.  Quoted in “George Ramsay, ninth Earl of Dalhousie,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

12.  Diary entry for 28 August, 1831: George W. Pierson, Tocqueville in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 191. See also www.tocqueville.org/ca.htm.

13.  It should not be forgotten that the provinces and the neighbouring states were in active competition for settlers during this period, and some books were written to further one side or another of the competition.

14.  The question of the nature of the political and cultural differences between Canadians and Americans was lively in the 1820s and remains a hot item today. Essentially, one school of academics argues that profound differences separate Canadians and Americans, with Canadians more traditional and more Tory in their attitudes, and Americans less deferential, less bound by tradition and authority. Canadians are held to be more communitarian and more prone to rely on the state, while Americans are thought to be more individualistic and more personally enterprising. Most recently Seymour Martin Lipset, an American political scientist, has made the case for cultural differences, especially in his book Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada (New York: Routledge, 1990), and two Canadian sociologists, Edward Grabb and James Curtis, in their book Regions Apart: The Four Societies of Canada and the United States (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2005) have strongly and convincingly argued the contrary. Naturally, it’s doubtful that a firm conclusion will ever be reached. The subject of Canadian and American differences remains a staple of popular culture, and in the early 2000s was even the subject of a TV series, Due South, juxtaposing a Canadian Mountie and an American policeman.

15.  £233,882 was spent on fortifying Halifax, including the completion of the Citadel: Bourne, Britain and the Balance of Power, 48.

16.  Quoted in Tanner, Last of the Celts, 293.

17.  Quoted in Tanner, Last of the Celts, 294.

18.  Quoted in MacNutt, The Atlantic Provinces, 200.

19.  Sir John Harvey to Christopher Hagerman, the Upper Canadian solicitor general, in 1837: “Sir John Harvey,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Harvey, a former army officer but a conciliatory and generally liberal official, managed the feat of governing successively all four Atlantic provinces, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia.

20.  Craig, Upper Canada, 134.

21.  Douglas McCalla, Planting the Province: The Economic History of Upper Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 163–66 and 298–99, table 9.2. The annual income from the Canada Company hovered around £22,000.

22.  Galt was later associated with the British American Land Company, which settled much of the Eastern Townships in Lower Canada: “John Galt,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

23.  There is a useful summary of the dispute in Norrie and Owram, History of the Canadian Economy, 141–45.

24.  Frank Mackey, Steamboat Connections: Montreal to Upper Canada, 1816–1843 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000).

25.  Montreal had been governed by a board of magistrates from 1796 to 1832, and would be again from 1836 to 1840. Silliman is quoted in Jean-Claude Marsan, Montreal in Evolution (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1981), 146. Montreal’s population in 1825 was 26,154, divided roughly 55–45 between francophones and anglophones.

26.  Quoted in “George Ramsay, ninth Earl of Dalhousie,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

27.  Manning, Revolt, 126–27. Dalhousie considered some of the Tory ministers at home to be dangerous radicals, and strongly disapproved of the idea of reforming the British, let alone the Canadian, constitution.

28.  Quoted in Manning, Revolt, 137.

29.  Fernand Ouellet, “Louis Joseph Papineau,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

30.  “Matthew Whitworth-Aylmer, fifth baron Aylmer,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

31.  “Archibald Acheson, second earl of Gosford,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Ironically, as Phillip Buckner, Gosford’s biographer, observes, Gosford had a better sense of the crisis than his military commander, Colborne, and brought in troops from Nova Scotia long before Colborne realized they were necessary.

32.  Allan Greer, The Patriots and the People: The Rebellion of 1837 in Rural Lower Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 193–94.

33.  Colborne was a veteran of the bloody war in Spain, 1808–13, which gave rise to the term “guerrilla” (little war), in which the distinction between civilian and soldier was effectively obliterated.

34.  Greer, Patriots and People, 328–29.

35.  The exiles were sent variously to Bermuda and to distant Australia.

36.  Carol Wilton, Popular Politics and Political Culture in Upper Canada, 1800–1850 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 11.

37.  The Americans and their Canadian guerrilla adherents burned his uncle’s mill.

38.  Strachan, originally a schoolmaster, tried and failed to become minister at Montreal’s St. Gabriel’s Presbyterian Church, and only afterward became an Anglican, a detail his opponents periodically raised.

39.  Elgin, a fellow Scot, is quoted in Gerald Craig’s judicious Dictionary of Canadian Biography entry on Strachan.

40.  S.J.R. Noel, Patrons, Clients, Brokers: Ontario Society and Politics, 1791–1896 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 95–96.

41.  Craig, Upper Canada, 247–51.

42.  Stuart, United States Expansionism, 142.

43.  He had at first refused the Canadian post in July 1837, and took the job only after news of the December 1837 uprisings arrived in London.

44.  Craig, Upper Canada, 263.

45.  Fernand Ouellet, “John George Lambton, First Earl of Durham,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

46.  Noel, Patrons, Clients, Brokers, 108.

47.  Thomson was a politician of the first rank, unlike Durham. He had been president of the Board of Trade (trade minister) through most of the 1830s, and had been offered the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) earlier in 1839. He’d refused the offer because he knew that most of his cabinet colleagues disagreed with him on what he considered to be necessary financial reforms: Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

8: COLONIES INTO PROVINCES

1.  Though there was some suspicion in 1832 that water was at the basis of the epidemics, it was only in 1849 that an observant London doctor concluded that the disease was indeed waterborne, and only in 1883 that the bacillus causing cholera was isolated and identified.

2.  Akenson, The Irish in Ontario, 241.

3.  Quoted in J. David Wood, Making Ontario: Agricultural Colonization and Landscape Re-Creation Before the Railway (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 139.

4.  Letty Anderson, “Water Supply,” in Norman Ball, ed., Building Canada: A History of Public Works (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 200. Montreal had a “partial system” after 1801. Saint John’s water company dated from 1837 and Toronto’s from 1841.

5.  Wood, Making Ontario, 158. About one-third of southern Ontario’s forest cover was gone by 1850; by 1914 the figure would be 90 percent.

6.  James Dixon, “The Canadian Temper at the Start of the Free Trade Era,” originally published in 1849, in Craig, Early Travellers, 167.

7.  MacNutt, The Atlantic Provinces, 228–29.

8.  Beginning in the seventeenth century, Britain regulated, or attempted to regulate, who might trade what in colonial ports. The new United States was of course subject to the Navigation Acts, which were more honoured in the breach than the observance. In 1822 commerce across the Great Lakes was officially exempted from the laws, and none too soon, since enforcement was virtually impossible.

9.  Bourne, Britain and the Balance of Power, 164–69.

10.  Donald Akenson, “Irish Migration to North America, 1800–1920,” in Andy Bielenberg, ed., The Irish Diaspora (Harlow, England: Longman, 2003), 120–21.

11.  Akenson, “Irish Migration,” 121.

12.  The movie Gangs of New York (2002) presents a vision of Irish immigration and American reaction to it in a spectacularly unpleasant way. There is one Canadian reference, to the battle of Lundy’s Lane in 1814, as a source of American patriotism.

13.  According to his entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Cartier would later say with a smile that he had been a “rebel” in 1837; in a letter to Lord Durham in 1838, he claimed that he had opposed only the local oligarchy, not the British crown. Durham didn’t believe him, and put Cartier’s name on a list of fugitives wanted for treason. Cartier did, however, compose some memorable songs of a sentimental, nationalist kind.

14.  Lord Elgin, the governor general, explained the issue to Lord Grey, the colonial secretary, in a letter of 23 May 1848: “The true policy in this matter according to my judgment, is—to secure for Her Majesty’s subjects in Canada, free access to the markets of the States and all the advantages with respect to reduction of freights which competition on the St. Lawrence & the Ocean will afford…. You must then trust to [the Canadian subject’s] affection for his own Institutions … to induce him to remain steady, and to resist the blandishments of the ‘Stars & Stripes.’” See Elgin to Grey, 23 May 1848, in Sir Arthur Doughty, ed., The Elgin–Grey Papers, vol. 1 (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1937), 178.

15.  Upper Canada had provided for the emancipation of slaves in 1793, though gradually. In 1833 the British Parliament legislated the end of slavery in the whole British Empire, effective in 1834.

16.  Under the American constitution, each state was equally represented in the Senate. In 1850, after the admission of California, there were fourteen “free” states and fourteen “slave” states.

17.  A letter from an experienced American showed what might be expected. “Not less than fifty thousand dollars has been expended for procuring the passage of a Bill for establishing a line of Steamboats,” the Canadian government was informed in December 1850: confidential enclosure in Lord Elgin, governor general, to Lord Grey, colonial secretary, 4 December 1850, in Doughty, Elgin–Grey Papers, vol. 3, 752. See also Alfred Eckes, Opening America’s Market: US Foreign Trade Policy Since 1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 67.

18.  Access to the fishery meant fishing and drying one’s catch on the shore. The British fishery was covered under Article I, and the American under Article II.

19.  Under the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, persons could be extradited for trial from one country to the other, as long as the offence with which they were charged was common to both countries. Slavery existed in only one country, the United States, and so the treaty could not be used to remove slaves from British territory back to their American owners.

20.  Stuart, United States Expansionism, 175–76.

21.  G.R. Stevens, History of the Canadian National Railways (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 46–47.

22.  E.G. Hornby, quoted in Stevens, Canadian National Railways, 48.

23.  Two Canadians won the newly created Victoria Cross, the empire’s highest award for gallantry—one at Balaclava in 1854 (a battle best known for the Charge of the Light Brigade) and one at Lucknow in 1857.

24.  Stuart, United States Expansionism, 177. One editorialist described British Americans as “hardy and thrifty and homogeneous with our own Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Celtic population,” ideal Americans, in fact.

25.  Disraeli to Prime Minister Lord Derby, 30 September 1866, quoted in Bourne, Britain and the Balance of Power, 294.

9: EXPANSION AND DISAPPOINTMENT, 1867–1896

1.  No figure for migration across the porous Canadian–American border can be completely accurate for this period; two million is an approximation derived from figures in David Corbett, Canada’s Immigration Policy: A Critique (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957), 121.

2.  According to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Scott was an Ulsterman and was most definitely an Orangeman. The Orange Order called on Macdonald to “avenge his death,” and Macdonald, not the most bloodthirsty of men, had little choice but to seem to comply. In the event, until 1885, Macdonald did what he could to control rather than exterminate Riel.

3.  Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Routledge, 2002), 117, notes that “Canada served as a hostage for British behavior in North America.”

4.  Attitudes toward Great Britain in the United States were complex, and far from uniform, then and later.

5.  Stevens, Canadian National Railways, 94.

6.  Doug Owram, Promise of Eden: The Canadian Expansionist Movement and the Idea of the West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 176.

7.  Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens, 187.

8.  The best known and most influential historical treatment of Riel is George F.G. Stanley, The Birth of Western Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1960; original edition, 1936), but there are many, many others, both scholarly and popular.

9.  John Palliser had surveyed the Canadian southern plains in 1858–59; he also identified land suitable for stock raising.

10.  Graeme Wynn, “Realizing the Idea of Canada,” in McIlwraith and Muller, North America: Historical Geography, 363.

11.  The Prince Edward Island section of the Intercolonial, incomplete when PEI joined Canada in 1873, also had to be finished. The historian of the later Canadian National Railway called it “a stupid project from the start,” unnecessary, given the availability of sea transportation, expensive to construct, and ruinous to operate, costing $1.44 for every dollar of revenue: Stevens, Canadian National Railways, 98. On patronage and corruption in the operation of the Intercolonial, Stevens is especially colourful: ibid., 99–105.

12.  This phenomenon is described by the French sociologist André Siegfried, in his The Race Question in Canada, originally published in French in 1906 and translated in 1907, republished in English in 1966 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1966). See especially chapter 20.

13.  The military analogy is obvious, and indeed the military were the first large-scale organization to be located in Canada. But the qualities of large-scale organization were also inculcated by engineering training, and what the railways required for construction and maintenance was professional engineers. See Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 94–109.

14.  See the excellent analysis in Ian Drummond, Progress Without Planning: The Economic History of Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 114–15.

15.  Eugene Forsey, Trade Unions in Canada, 1812–1902 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 27.

16.  Norrie and Owram, History of the Canadian Economy, 383, comment that “the continental integration that was taking place in business was thus paralleled, even exceeded, by that taking place in unionism.”

17.  Quoted in ibid, 47. The reference is to a Grand Trunk strike in 1876.

18.  Drummond, Progress Without Planning, 242–43.

19.  The process is described in Ben Forster, A Conjunction of Interests: Business, Politics and Tariffs 1825–1879 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), chapter 10. The most notable compromise on the tariff involved coal, which Ontario wished to import from the neighbouring United States and which coal-producing Cape Breton wished to exclude. The result placed a sizeable but not prohibitive tariff on coal, and therefore enriched the federal treasury.

20.  Legally, the fisheries regime reverted to the Convention of 1818, which forbade American access to the Canadian inshore fishery; that is, within the recognized three-mile (4.8-kilometre) limit of national jurisdiction. It did not necessarily prevent American boats from calling at Canadian ports, clearing customs, and then purchasing Canadian supplies, including fish bait. On this point see C.C. Tansill, Canadian–American Relations, 1875–1911 (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964, a reprint of the original 1943 edition), 23–25.

21.  Arthur Silver, The French-Canadian Idea of Confederation, 1864–1900, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 228.

22.  See Mark McGowan, The Waning of the Green: Catholics, the Irish and Identity in Toronto, 1887–1922 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), 132: “Between 1887 and 1922 Catholic schools in Toronto were committed to produce virtuous Christians and good citizens of Canada and the Empire.”

10: BOOM AND BUST, 1896–1914

1.  “Heaven is blue, Hell is red.” The Canadian party colours are still Liberal red and Tory blue—the reverse of the left–right colours in the United States. The later New Democratic Party appropriated orange, and the defunct Social Credit party took green.

2.  The total population in 1913 is estimated at 7.6 million.

3.  Interestingly, the Canadian imperialist George Parkin made these observations, which are still plausible, in 1892: Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 145.

4.  Jean-Claude Robert, “Quebec,” screens 25–26 and table, in Bob Hesketh and Chris Hackett, Canada: Confederation to Present CD-ROM.

5.  Norrie and Owram, History of the Canadian Economy, 321: “In 1909 Winnipeg handled more wheat than any other centre in the world.”

6.  See the analysis in Robert Bothwell, Ian Drummond, and John English, Canada 1900–1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 81–82.

7.  Quoted in H.V. Nelles, The Politics of Development: Forests, Mines and Hydro-Electric Power in Ontario, 1849–1941 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1974), 220 and 221.

8.  Blair’s biographer in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, D.M. Young, quotes an appraisal of the Board as “the prototype federal administrative tribunal and the first significant domestic manifestation of the rise of the modern regulatory state.”

9.  See especially Duncan McDowall, Quick to the Frontier: Canada’s Royal Bank (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993), 171–87.

10.  In 1913, during the Mexican revolution, the British legation in Mexico City asked Ottawa what it should do to protect certain Canadian investments. Ottawa, of course, had no idea. Six years later, however, the Canadian cabinet was interested in getting the powers to intervene in Mexico before the establishment of the League of Nations prohibited such international policing.

11.  Banks were not allowed to lend for mortgages.

12.  Michael Hart, A Trading Nation (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002), 74, 182.

13.  It was officially known as the Hydro Electric Power Commission of Ontario, or HEPCO.

14.  There were those in right-wing Catholic circles in Quebec who so feared contamination by the English and Protestants that they propagandized for a separate French and Catholic state. See the biography of Jules-Paul Tardivel in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

15.  There is the quip about the (Catholic) Austro-Hungarian Empire, defended, it was said, by “a standing army of soldiers, a sitting army of bureaucrats, and a kneeling army of priests.” See especially William J. Callahan, The Catholic Church in Spain 1875–1998 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 46.

16.  See Lionel Groulx, Mémoires, vol. 1 (Montréal: Fides, 1970), 106–08.

17.  Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, A Full-Orbed Christianity: The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900–1940 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), xiii.

18.  Booth had been a Methodist clergyman working in the slums of London in the 1860s, but in the face of the social problems he confronted in mid-century England he changed the emphasis of his preaching, founding the Salvation Army in 1878. The Salvationists began activities in Canada in 1882.

19.  On this point see William F. Ryan, The Clergy and Economic Growth in Quebec, 1896–1914 (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1966).

20.  She was invited by fawning Canadian politicians in the 1850s.

21.  These were, respectively, the Duke of Kent; the Duke of Clarence (later William IV); the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII); Princess Louise, the marchioness of Lorne and wife of the governor general; the Duke of York (later George V); and the Duke of Connaught, governor general from 1911 to 1916.

22.  Lord Monck, the first governor general, and Lord Lisgar, the second, were distinctly second-class political and social figures at home, but by the 1880s and 1890s the position was occupied by better connected individuals, culminating in Prince Arthur of Connaught, Queen Victoria’s youngest son, who made up in lineage and good intentions for what he lacked in brains.

23.  There was a tiny permanent force made up of professionals, but they were heavily outnumbered by the summer soldiers of the militia.

24.  Sir John Macdonald to Sir Charles Tupper, 12 March 1885, quoted in C.P. Stacey, Canada and the Age of Conflict, vol. 1, 1867–1921 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1977), 43–44.

25.  J.L. Granatstein, Canada’s Army: Waging War and Keeping the Peace (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 27.

26.  They were Newfoundland, the five Australian colonies, New Zealand, Cape Colony and Natal in South Africa, and Canada.

27.  The jingo song and many others were performed in music halls of the period, and were “enormously popular” in Britain and, probably, in English Canada too: John M. Mackenzie, “Empire and Metropolitan Cultures,” in Andrew Porter, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 4, The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 278–79.

28.  There were some French-Canadian imperialists. Sir Percy Girouard made his name carving out chunks of Africa for the empire, while Sir James LeMoine (granted, LeMoine was half-French and apparently an Anglican, but very much a fixture in Quebec society) could be relied on to wave the British flag from the battlements of Quebec City.

29.  Carman Miller, Canada’s Little War: Fighting for the British Empire in Southern Africa, 1899–1902 (Toronto: Lorimer, 2003), 21–23.

30.  Montreal Star, 5 October 1899.

31.  Miller, Canada’s Little War, 52.

32.  The Australian colonies had been federated into a single dominion in 1901, reducing the numbers of premiers at the conference table.

33.  As recently as 2003 Americans produced a prime example of folk memories: a francophobia that must surely recall the constant Anglo–French wars stretching from the twelfth century to the nineteenth. The best recent analysis of this phenomenon is David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

34.  See Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Routledge, 2002), 119.

35.  To take one example, the British abandoned an old treaty providing for a joint interest in a Central American canal when the American government decided that a uniquely American canal—American only—was in the United States’ true national interest. The result gratified President Theodore Roosevelt, as it was meant to.

36.  Roosevelt believed the Canadian claims to be bogus at best, and sharp practice at worst. Even conceding an arbitration of the Canadian claim was designed mainly to save face for the Canadians and by extension the British Empire.

37.  The most judicious account of the boundary dispute is in Stacey, Age of Conflict, vol. 1, 86–103. Roosevelt’s biographer, Edmund Morris, ignores the politics behind the award, and its pre-cooked nature: Theodore Rex (New York: Random House, 2001), 281. He does accurately describe it as “a near-total victory.” Roosevelt would have settled for nothing less.

38.  Sir Joseph Pope came from a prominent Prince Edward Island Conservative family, and had been Sir John A. Macdonald’s secretary in an earlier incarnation.

39.  It would also manage the division of water on certain rivers between Canadian and American interests, and govern diversions and obstructions such as dams or weirs. In its work, the principle of equality was to be applied between Canadian and American rights.

40.  William R. Willoughby, The Joint Organizations of Canada and the United States (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 22.

41.  The events of 1908 are described in a splendid book by H.V. Nelles, The Art of Nation-Building: Pageantry and Spectacle in Quebec’s Tercentenary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).

42.  To a later generation, Laurier’s proposed navy of five cruisers and six destroyers appears lavish. Certainly the destroyers would have been more useful on convoy duty in the First World War than an extra dreadnought or two in the Grand Fleet.

43.  In defence of the British ministers, it should be noted that they hadn’t even told the whole British cabinet, far less the British Parliament; so why should they tell Borden?

11: BREAKING THE MOULD, 1914–1930

1.  Eric Arthur, quoted in Kalman, History of Canadian Architecture, vol. 2, 738. Kalman notes that the Sun Life Building was “one of several Canadian claimants to the title of largest or tallest buildings in the British Empire.”

2.  Historical Statistics of Canada, 2nd ed., tables D 125, Y 235, and Y 241.

3.  Informed readers will object with the case of John Diefenbaker, Baptist and abstainer. Nevertheless, Diefenbaker was known to quaff the odd beer.

4.  The act was intended to give the government emergency powers. Laurier advised that it should be comprehensive and non-specific in its language. The resulting act permitted the federal government to legislate as it saw fit by order-in-council, during a declared war emergency.

5.  Bourassa was at this point an odd mixture of religious fervour, Canadian nationalism, and “good government,” meaning an end to the old patterns of corruption he correctly identified with Laurier’s Liberals. In response, the Liberals called Bourassa’s journal and other similar papers “la bonne presse.” In this context “bonne” translates as “goody-goody.”

6.  “The Allies” refers to Britain, France, Russia, Belgium, and Serbia in 1914, with the additions of Italy in 1915 and Romania in 1916. Their enemies were known as “the Central Powers”: Germany and Austria-Hungary in August 1914, joined by Turkey in November 1914 and Bulgaria in 1915.

7.  Granatstein, Canada’s Army, 55.

8.  One of the mistakes in Robert Holland’s essay, “The British Empire and the Great War,” in Judith M. Brown and Wm. Roger Louis, eds., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 4, The Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 130, is the assertion that General Sir Arthur Currie, the Canadian Corps commander, 1917–19, was “a professional officer before the war.” In fact Currie had been a real estate agent and a militia officer. J.L. Granatstein, Canada’s Army, 94–95, observes that by 1916 the usual understanding of Canada’s army as a citizens’ force “was effectively dead,” and that soldiers and officers had become professionals through bitter experience.

9.  804,000 out of 7.2 million.

10.  Granatstein, Canada’s Army, 57.

11.  McGowan, The Waning of the Green, 244–46, notes the Ontario English-speaking bishops’ fear that Catholic education as a whole would be endangered by Ontarians’ resentment of French-language education. There was in this period great concern over French-speaking immigration into northern and eastern Ontario, which, some argued, imperilled the English-speaking and Protestant character of the province. On this point see Susan M. Trofimenkoff, The Dream of Nation: A Social and Intellectual History of Quebec (Toronto: Gage, 1983), 203–05.

12.  Bill Waiser, Saskatchewan: A New History (Calgary: Fifth House, 2005), 73–74, 231–32, traces the reception of non-British immigrants on the Prairies, noting that the Great War sharpened differences among ethnic groups and increased pressures for conformity and assimilation.

13.  Silver, French-Canadian Idea, 263–66.

14.  Holland, “The British Empire and the Great War,” 126, makes the absurd assertion that Bourassa was a separatist.

15.  The rabid editorials of an Ottawa paper, the Journal, had much to do with creating and exciting a mob of soldiers who rushed the stage. One of Bourassa’s sponsors, A.C. Glennie, an English Canadian, was roughed up; his wife the next day horse-whipped the Journal’s editor. Glennie was, however, fired from his job. Wade, French Canadians, 659, gives a vivid description of the incident.

16.  Quoted in Wade, French Canadians, 660.

17.  Twelve thousand tons were fired in the prelude to the battle of the Somme in 1916.

18.  David Stevenson, Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 149: 58 percent of deaths in battle were caused by artillery.

19.  www.junobeach.org/e/4/can-tac-med-org-ep.htm: “The Army Medical Organization.”

20.  A report to Borden by a Montreal Conservative pointedly and disapprovingly mentioned the sources of this sentiment as members of Britain’s Liberal government: Stacey, Age of Conflict, 186.

21.  Borden to Sir George Perley, Canadian High Commissioner in Great Britain, 4 January 1916, quoted in Stacey, Age of Conflict, 192–93.

22.  The dominion representatives were the Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and Newfoundland prime ministers, and the South African minister of defence, General Jan Smuts. Of these, Smuts was the most important in terms of the value the British placed on his participation and advice.

23.  J.E. Rea, T.A. Crerar: A Political Life (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 55–56.

24.  Quoted in Waiser, Saskatchewan, 282.

25.  Robert Holland claims that “Bourassa displaced Laurier as the acknowledged leader of Quebec,” an argument that is simply erroneous. See Holland, “The British Empire and the Great War,” 126.

26.  Ontario and Quebec farmers were particularly angry, and vocal: Rea, T.A. Crerar, 55–56.

27.  Called the Income War Tax, it represented not only an innovation in the kind of tax imposed, but also an incursion into “direct” taxation. This would eventually perturb the provinces, whose limited tax jurisdiction the federal government now proposed to share. At a dominion–provincial conference in 1918 the provinces urged that the federal government turn half the receipts of the income tax over to them: Christopher Armstrong, The Politics of Federalism: Ontario’s Relations with the Federal Government, 1867–1942 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 128–30.

28.  There were a few small issues in 1915 and 1916: R.C. Brown and G.R. Cook, Canada 1896–1921: A Nation Transformed (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1974), 230–31.

29.  They withdrew Canadian troops from Siberia and Murmansk as soon as they practically could, thereby undermining British intervention in those two areas.

30.  The “Progressives” covered the ideological spectrum. Some were markedly conservative in their attitudes toward government, taxation, and regulation, the hallmarks of “progressivism” elsewhere in the world. Some took a contrary view. To make matters worse, “progressive” with a small p was used in Canada in the usual international sense, which made for a great deal of muddle in political identities and definitions.

31.  J.W. Pickersgill, Seeing Canada Whole: A Memoir (Markham, Ont.: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1994), 74–75.

32.  W.A. Motherwell and Charles A. Dunning, both prominent Saskatchewan Liberals, joined the King cabinet in the 1920s, Motherwell as minister of agriculture, Dunning as minister of finance.

33.  There was a further complication. Under centuries-old British practice, members of the House of Commons accepting a new office under the crown had to resign their seats and seek to return in a by-election in their new, ministerial guise. In a house of minorities, Meighen could not afford to swear in a complete cabinet, and so he alone took office and consequently had to watch proceedings from the galleries. This usage was soon abolished, and MPs can now accept office without having to quit their seats.

34.  Armstrong, Politics of Federalism, 140.

35.  Ontario and Quebec also wanted control over waterpower from Canada’s greatest navigable river system, the St. Lawrence and its tributaries. Navigation, however, fell under federal control even if “natural resources” were provincial.

12: UNFRIENDLY WORLDS, 1930–1945

1.  There were at least thirteen RCMP movies in the 1930s. The best-known was probably Rose Marie, starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, but others included Susannah of the Mounties, Renfrew of the Royal Mounted, and Murder on the Yukon. There was also a children’s book series, beginning with Dale of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 1935.

2.  What was left of the Progressives got twelve seats, mostly in Alberta, and there were as well a couple of Labour members.

3.  Waiser, Saskatchewan, 261–63.

4.  The port elevators were truly impressive in size and sweep: one, Saskatchewan Number 7 at Port Arthur, built by the C.D. Howe Company, was cited by the architect LeCorbusier as a model of modern design.

5.  Social Credit eventually became a right-wing party, but at the time it was a reforming movement that hoped to revolutionize money and credit so as to solve the Depression.

6.  Louisiana, the other great French-speaking enclave in the United States, was well on the way to assimilation, though the “Cajuns” of that state had a more secure position, legally, socially, and politically, than their New England “Canuck” counterparts.

7.  It is this world that is depicted in the much later Claude Jutra film, Mon Oncle Antoine.

8.  Quoted in Max and Monique Nemni, Young Trudeau, 1919–1944: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2006), 72–73.

9.  “The crowd booed Taschereau and the Jews.”

10.  It is nevertheless true that some old-time English Conservatives stayed on in the new party, and equally true that some of the French Conservatives in the Union Nationale were more conservative than nationalist. Some of these left the UN in 1939 and some more later in the Second World War, but there was always an English remnant in the party.

11.  Lapointe was especially worried by the apparent willingness of the head of the Catholic Church in Quebec, Rodrigue Cardinal Villeneuve, to cozy up to the nationalists. See Lita Rose Betcherman, Ernest Lapointe: Mackenzie King’s Great Quebec Lieutenant (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 233.

12.  Betcherman, Lapointe, 269–70, discusses the minister’s refusal to admit Jewish refugees from the ship St. Louis to Canada, and Mackenzie King’s concurrence.

13.  King was not alone in this: Sir John A. Macdonald carried the nickname “Old Tomorrow,” which certainly didn’t mean that Sir John was accounted to be a man of sudden, decisive action and clarity of purpose.

14.  King’s most effective critic, though posthumously, was the Montreal poet and law professor Frank Scott, in his poem “W.L.M.K.,” which was published in his The Eye of the Needle: Satires, Sorties, Sundries (Montreal: Contact Press, 1957).

15.  The question of anti-Semitism in Canada ranks with the Riel rebellion as a subject for bitter controversy among academics and other commentators, because like Riel it strikes at the heart of the English–French divide. That there was anti-Semitism is beyond dispute, but who were the anti-Semites, and where were they influential? There is also the implied question, Who was worse, the English or the French?

Canadian society in general—English and French—displayed anti-Semitic characteristics. On the English side, Jews weren’t admitted to rich men’s clubs, there were real estate covenants in some places which restricted where Jews could live, and Canadian universities maintained quotas as to the number of Jews they would admit. There were anti-Semitic incidents in Toronto and other English-Canadian cities. On the other hand, society reacted adversely to these incidents, which did not have the effect of creating a general anti-Semitic movement in Canada. Nevertheless, it’s quite clear that Quebec was not alone in the incidence of anti-Semitism in the 1930s.

It’s also true that some of the most virulent anti-Semitic manifestations were in Quebec, and true that it was the French-Canadian parliamentary delegation, almost entirely Liberal, that was most nervous of offending the Quebec right wing by admitting Jewish refugees to Canada in the 1930s. (Some of the “Liberals,” to be sure, shared the right’s anti-Jewish prejudices.) Disputes over French-Canadian anti-Semitism burst into a bitter public quarrel among historians in the 1990s. On one side, see Esther Delisle, The Traitor and the Jew: Anti-Semitism and the Delirium of Extremist Right-wing Nationalism in French Canada from 1929 to 1939 (Montreal: Robert Davies, 1993), supported by Mordecai Richler, especially in his O Canada, O Quebec: Requiem for a Divided Country (Toronto: Viking, 1992). Richler made Quebec nationalism a laughingstock, or so its partisans believed, and they responded with great bitterness. Delisle’s book appeared as the controversy over Richler raged, but her arguments were already familiar to him.

On the other hand, see Gary Caldwell, “La controverse Delisle–Richler: Le discours sur l’antisémitisme au Québec, et l’orthodoxie néo-libérale au Canada,” L’Agora, juin 1994, vol. 1, no. 9. The subject was politically explosive in the 1990s, because separatist nationalism in Quebec was considered by many to be anti-immigrant and fixated on the “pure laine” French-Canadian race, Quebec branch. Normand Lester, an amateur historian, strung together four volumes of abuse on the subject of English Canadians in a book aptly entitled Le livre noir du Canada anglais (Montreal: Les Intouchables, 2001 and subsequent years). Le livre noir, which lovingly listed English-Canadian deficiencies, some real and some fancied, resonated in Quebec, where it became a bestseller.

16.  The key work on this subject is Irving Abella and Harold Troper, None Is Too Many (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1983).

17.  King called on Hitler, and dictated some gaseous and notably obtuse comments in his diary on the peasant nature of the German dictator (King, after all, had a Ph.D., and Hitler did not).

18.  Waiser, Saskatchewan, 324–26.

19.  Conrad Black, Duplessis’s biographer, argues that the Quebec premier “was, literally, roaring drunk”: Black, Duplessis (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1977), 208–09. This is a reasonable explanation, but drunk or sober Duplessis could seldom resist creating the maximum political effect through demagoguery. As one Liberal MP put it in the late 1930s, at the time of Stalin’s murderous purges in the Soviet Union, “Staline tue, Duplessis salit.” (“Stalin kills [you], but Duplessis makes you dirty.”)

20.  By 1944 1.1 million Canadians were working in war industries, and 37 percent of the total population over fourteen was working in “non-agricultural industry”: Michael D. Stevenson, Canada’s Greatest Wartime Muddle: National Selective Service and the Mobilization of Human Resources During World War II (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 26. In addition, over a million Canadians, male and female, served at one time or another in the armed forces.

21.  Winnipeg had sixty thousand war workers, Vancouver eighty-nine thousand.

22.  Figures for 1944 were actually higher than for 1945, when war production was winding down and finally terminated in September 1945.

23.  Bothwell, Drummond, and English, Canada 1900–1945, 375.

24.  Paul-André Linteau, René Durocher, Jean-Claude Robert, et François Ricard, Histoire du Québec contemporain, vol. 2, rev. ed. (Montréal: Boréal, 1989), 149.

13: A TIME OF GIFTS, 1945–1963

1.  Jeff Keshen, Saints, Sinners and Soldiers: Canada’s Second World War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004), 262, quoting a straw poll.

2.  Angus Maddison, The World Economy: Historical Statistics (Paris: OECD, 2003), 88, Table 2c, Per Capita GDP in Western Offshoots.

3.  The best description of the often ingenious government regulations governing consumption is in James H. Gray, Troublemaker: A Fighting Journalist’s Record of the Two Booming Decades That Followed the Winter Years (Toronto: Macmillan, 1978), 124–27.

4.  W.J. Eccles interview in Robert Bothwell, Canada and Quebec: One Country: Two Histories, rev. ed. (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998), 77–78.

5.  Canada Year Book, 1948–1949 (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1949), 822 and Table 24.

6.  The actual phrase used by the government was “a high and stable level of employment”—what we might call not-quite-full employment.

7.  On this point see Robert Bothwell and William Kilbourn, C.D. Howe: A Biography (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1979), 194–96.

8.  Keshen, Saints, Sinners and Soldiers, 146ff.

9.  Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby Boom Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 12.

10.  The first marriage took place six weeks after the arrival of Canadian troops in England in December 1939. Ninety-three percent of the war brides were British, and the remaining 7 percent French, Belgian, Dutch, and Italian—the countries the Canadian army traversed during the war. The figures refer to the period 1942 to 1948: they are derived from www.canadianwarbrides.com. Keshen, Saints, Sinners and Soldiers, 268, gives 47,783 as the total for war brides, and on page 233 quotes the figure of 30,000 for illegitimate children.

11.  Keshen, Saints, Sinners and Soldiers, quotes a poll taken among soldiers in late 1944 that shows 54 percent believing that things would be better or at least no worse for them after the war, while only 15 percent were pessimistic.

12.  A book by Tom Brokaw on the comparable group of American veterans calls them The Greatest Generation (New York: Random House, 1998); generally speaking, the characteristics I have mentioned are ascribed to that group, in William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 (New York: William Morrow, 1991), 261–78.

13.  The first recorded usage is thought to be 1941, in the United States; the term “baby boomers” as descriptive of the generation appears to date from 1974.

14.  The rate was 61 deaths in the first year per thousand population in 1940–45, and 31.3 in 1956–60. Historical Statistics of Canada, 2nd ed., table B24.

15.  Polio increased in severity after 1945, reaching a rate of 60 cases per 100,000 population in 1953, and sinking, after Salk, to 1.6 in 1957, though with a sharp one-year spike in 1959 to 15: ibid., table B522.

16.  Ibid., tables W340–438 and D8–85.

17.  See Joy Parr, Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral, and the Economic in the Postwar Years (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 87, for an example of the government’s rejection of micro controls.

18.  Alvin Finkel in his Our Lives: Canada After 1945 (Toronto: Lorimer, 1997), 15–21, takes a different view, accusing King of hypocrisy and painting the reconstruction conference exercise as a charade. I think the situation was a great deal more nuanced.

19.  By way of comparison, 480,000 American troops served in Korea.

20.  There was a moment in the fall of 1950 when it seemed that the UN (U.S.) forces were on the verge of defeat at the hands of an interventionist Chinese Communist army, and Truman made an incautious remark that seemed to indicate he would use atomic weapons. That was not his intention, but it did cause intense worry in Canada.

21.  These would soon be called “the Third World,” a term just being invented in the 1950s. By extension the Western industrialized democracies would be called “the First World,” and the Communist bloc “the Second World.” The original reference is to the three estates of pre-revolutionary France.

22.  Escott Reid, memorandum of 30 August 1947, quoted in Escott Reid, Radical Mandarin: The Memoirs of Escott Reid (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 270–71.

23.  H.S. Ferns, Reading from Left to Right: One Man’s Political History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 172–73.

24.  His real opinion would slip out in November 1956 in a heedless remark to the House of Commons about “the supermen of Europe.” As the reaction to his remarks would show, many Canadians felt quite comfortable with “the supermen.”

25.  As Matthew Connolly points out in A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post–Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 278–79, “international norms” in the 1950s were again beginning to” trump national sovereignty,” and if a colonial power was unable to maintain its rule without resorting to barbarism, its control over a colonial territory lost its legitimacy. This was not an entirely unfamiliar idea—it had been applied to Italy in the 1860s, to the Balkans in the 1880s and after, and, of course, to Ireland.

26.  Greg Donaghy, “‘The Most Important Place in the World,’ Escott Reid in India, 1953–1957,” in Greg Donaghy and Stéphane Roussel, eds., Escott Reid: Diplomat and Scholar (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 71–72.

27.  Donaghy, “Escott Reid,” 78–80.

28.  Historical Statistics, series Q82. By 1976 thermal capacity would reach 23.3 million kilowatts.

29.  Howe was an American by birth and, as he liked to remind his cabinet colleagues, a Canadian by choice. None of them, he pointed out, had actually had to choose.

30.  Ontario actually had the distinction of having North America’s first oil well.

31.  NRX, designed by a British engineer, was exceptional at producing radioactive isotopes, which became a Canadian specialty.

32.  Canada’s reactor program is described in Robert Bothwell, Nucleus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988).

33.  His experience was hardly unique, and indeed many years later it was repeated by David T. Jones, a former officer at the U.S. embassy in Ottawa, who became something of a specialist in reminding Canadians of their deficiencies, in articles published in the Canadian journal Policy Options.

34.  The minister was Alvin Hamilton, Diefenbaker’s last minister of agriculture and a star in his cabinet. Hamilton added that the Conservatives were surprised to find that the civil servants’ advice was not always good.

35.  George Perlin, The Tory Syndrome: Leadership Politics in the Progressive Conservative Party (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1980).

36.  See Owram, Born at the Right Time, 154–55.

37.  Naturally there were Canadian singers too, like the Crew-Cuts (an early group), Bobby Curtola, and Paul Anka.

38.  Politically and socially it was the Second World War veterans who were dominating Canadian life at the end of the fifties; and of course it was they who were paying the bills for the teenagers.

39.  Though very few knew it outside Washington, even Kennedy’s defence secretary, Robert McNamara, was appalled when he learned what Western strategy would be in the event of war: Deborah Shapley, Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 185, 187–201. McNamara would eventually push hard for the limitation of atomic weaponry, especially after his experience in the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he “felt vividly that the nuclear danger could not be controlled or fine-tuned.”

40.  The acronym stands for Boeing Michigan Aeronautical Research Center.

14: AFFLUENCE AND ITS DISCONTENTS, 1960–1980

1.  In constant dollars, using 1981 as a base, the gross national product increased 4.6 times, from $74.1 billion in 1949 to $344.5 billion in 1982: Norrie and Owram, History of the Canadian Economy, 549.

2.  “Gross Domestic Product per Capita: Purchasing Power per Capita: Purchasing Power Parity (EKS): Compared to United States,” The Public Purpose, Labor Market Reporter, www.publicpurpose.copm/lm-ppp60+.htm.

3.  www.publicpurpose.copm/lm-intlunem.htm. The statistics are derived from the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and may vary slightly from their Canadian equivalents.

4.  The Trans-Canada Highway was authorized in 1948; the final section, in Newfoundland, was completed in 1965. Quebec was a late and rather reluctant participant, but joined when it became clear how much of the province’s new highway system could be paid for out of federal funds.

5.  Rita Joe, “Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens,” used as the title of J.R. Miller’s book, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian–White Relations in Canada.

6.  See Bruce McCall’s memoir, Thin Ice: Coming of Age in Canada (Toronto: Random House of Canada, 1997), which captures aspects of small-town Ontario, and small-town Toronto, in the 1950s. See also the perceptive comment by Robert Fulford in the National Post, 26 September 2000.

7.  Between 1976 and 1981 Alberta’s population grew at the truly remarkable rate of 21.7 percent, compared with Ontario’s 4.4 percent and Newfoundland’s 1.8 percent.

8.  Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York: Collier, 1961), and subsequent editions. The notion of an “end of ideology” wasn’t confined to North America; it appeared in Europe as well: see Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 384.

9.  George Grant, Lament for a Nation (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1965).

10.  Owram, Born at the Right Time, 207.

11.  Owram, Born at the Right Time, 207–08.

12.  William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 (New York: Quill, 1991), 299ff.

13.  The two went on into the later CCF.

14.  The intellectual end of the NDP may be found in Michael Oliver’s edited collection of essays, Social Purpose for Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961). It posed a challenge to the simultaneous intellectual renovation of the Liberal party.

15.  The intellectual climate was exceptionally favourable. Much public discussion in Canada as well as in the United States focused on the notion that there was “poverty in the midst of plenty.” On Galbraith’s ideas, see Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2005), 282ff. See also Penny Bryden, Planners and Politicians: Liberal Politics and Social Policy (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997); Tom Kent, A Public Purpose (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), 56, 81, 83.

16.  Even the Saskatchewan Liberal party, originally strongly opposed to medicare, hastily recanted, and supported it in the 1964 provincial election: Bryden, Planners and Politicians, 130.

17.  Ottawa would estimate the cost of doctors’ services per capita across the country in any given year, and then give the provinces a fee based on the population of each province. If a given province wished to pay for more, it was free to do so, but it wouldn’t get more than the national average in return: Kent, Public Purpose, 365–66.

18.  Premier Manning objected at some length to the program in discussions with Pearson; according to Tom Kent, Public Purpose, 369, his objections “had little logic but much vehemence.” On shared cost programs, see Mitchell Sharp, Which Reminds Me … A Memoir (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 138–39.

19.  Kent, Public Purpose, 365.

20.  This is effectively described in Dimitri Anastakis, Auto Pact: Creating a Borderless North American Auto Industry 1960–1971 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), chapter 3.

21.  The Créditiste leader, Réal Caouette, was however a very firm federalist—firmer than many of his followers.

22.  He liked to call the NATO secretary general, the Dutch diplomat Josef Luns, simply “General” Luns, meaning somebody who echoed what the real generals told him.

23.  There is the occasional contrary item, like Claude Julien, Canada: Europe’s Last Chance (Toronto: Macmillan, 1968).

24.  Flying over Canada in 1987, en route to a Commonwealth summit in Vancouver, Denis Thatcher, the husband of the British prime minister, turned to a group of British reporters and opined, “Y’know what Canada is? Canada is full of fuck all.” Thatcher is quoted in Martin Kettle, “Let me tell you about Canada. No, really, it’s very interesting,” Guardian, 7 January 2006.

25.  Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens, 227–29.

26.  According to one estimate, there were four federal–provincial conferences from 1902 to 1927, eight from 1927 to 1944, ten from 1945 to 1959, and fifteen from 1960 to 1969. They were called “dominion–provincial conferences” down to 1960, and “federal–provincial” thereafter.

27.  As in the classic study, Richard Simeon’s Federal–Provincial Diplomacy: The Making of Recent Policy in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972).

28.  Historical Statistics of Canada, 2nd ed., tables E190–197.

29.  Ibid., table E194.

30.  It was in fact the Year of the Child, a UN promotion designed to draw attention to children and their plight.

15: TWO NATIONALISMS

1.  A demographer, Richard Joy, wrote the aptly titled Languages in Conflict: The Canadian Experience (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Canadian Library, 1972).

2.  The best known revolutionary document is the offensively titled Nègres blancs d’Amérique by Pierre Vallières (Montréal: Parti Pris, 1968). It argues that the English ruled Quebec through “rois nègres” like Duplessis.

3.  On this point testimony is abundant. Perhaps the most accessible glimpse of aspects of Westmount and the other sections of English Montreal is to be found in the irreverent and usually scathing works of Mordecai Richler: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (London: Deutsch, 1959, but first published in Maclean’s magazine some years earlier) and St. Urbain’s Horseman (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1971) are excellent examples.

4.  Quoted by Tom Kent, The Globe and Mail, 11 October 2005.

5.  Quoted in Robert Bothwell, Ian Drummond, and John English, Canada Since 1945, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 269.

6.  Albert Breton, an economist, argued at the time that Quebec’s activity should be seen as self-interested benefits for the province’s French-speaking middle class: Breton, “The Economics of Nationalism,” Journal of Political Economy, LXXII (August 1964).

7.  Marc Lalonde, quoted in Robert Bothwell, Canada and Quebec: One Country, Two Histories (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1995), 105–06.

8.  As the automobile industry developed, location and delivery times became extremely important, and Ste. Thérèse’s isolated location, far from the car factories of Ontario and the U.S. Midwest, didn’t help.

9.  As Allan Gotlieb, then a senior member of the Legal Division of the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa, has pointed out, Gérin-Lajoie was resurrecting an argument first put forward by Ontario in the Labour Conventions case before the Imperial Privy Council in 1937. The Privy Council ignored the assertion, though it did agree that the federal government couldn’t use international agreements as a means of legislating in areas granted to the provinces under the British North America Act: The Globe and Mail, 5 October, 2005.

10.  Gotlieb and Tom Kent, in The Globe and Mail on 5 and 11 October 2005, have clarified what was or was not agreed to by Pearson and Lesage. The meeting took place at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. Pearson didn’t concede any of Lesage’s arguments, and Lesage didn’t expect him to. This account differs from the one given in J.L. Granatstein and Robert Bothwell, Pirouette: Pierre Trudeau and Canadian Foreign Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 115.

11.  Both terms were used by René Lévesque to describe his aspirations in an interview with Larry Zolf and Pierre Elliott Trudeau on the CBC TV program This Hour Has Seven Days on 6 December 1964: http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-73-870-5014/politics_economy/rene_levesque.

12.  Translated in Dale Thomson, Vive le Québec Libre (Toronto: Deneau, 1988), 199; see also Alain Peyrefitte, C’était de Gaulle, III. (Paris: Fayard, 1997), 307.

13.  Thomson, Vive le Québec Libre, 203.

14.  Quoted in Eric Roussel, Charles de Gaulle (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 841. The politest translation for connerie is “rubbish.”

15.  The CBC news interviewed various demonstrators, who in good Canadian fashion almost choked on their desire to be fair and polite, and at the same time indignant. The result is presented in the CBC’s internet archives: “Standing Up to de Gaulle,” http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-74-1265-7658/people/lester_b_pearson/clip7.

16.  The best remembered incident during the election was a well-publicized cavalcade of Brinks security trucks carrying valuables out of the province to safety in Ontario. Effective at the time in stimulating pro-federalist votes, it would be remembered and exploited by separatists as an illegitimate political tactic of the kind only to be expected from federalists.

17.  Cross’s title was “trade commissioner,” but his function was effectively that of consul. Laporte had been a prominent journalist, and had run unsuccessfully for the provincial Liberal leadership. He was thus both senior and well known.

18.  See for example the film Les Ordres, by Michel Brault (1974), which won a prize at Cannes in 1975. Even twenty years on, the October Crisis served as subject matter for a dramatization by Pierre Falardeau, Octobre, of the kidnapping of Laporte, and for a National Film Board documentary by Jean-Daniel Lafond, La liberté en colère, in 1994.

19.  Claude Morin, quoted in Ron Graham, The One Eyed Kings: Promise and Illusion in Canadian Politics (Toronto: Collins, 1986), 66.

20.  English had to be either the child’s maternal language, or the child had to take a test to prove knowledge of English. This latter provision panicked but also irritated immigrant parents. The administration of the test became a byword for heavy-handed government intervention.

21.  On individual versus collective right in language, see Paul-André Linteau, René Durocher, Jean-Claude Robert, et François Ricard, Histoire du Québec contemporain, vol. 2, Le Québec depuis 1930, 2nd ed. (Montréal: Boréal, 1989), 603–04.

22.  Garth Stevenson, Community Besieged: The Anglophone Minority and the Politics of Quebec (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), 124.

23.  Graham Fraser, Sorry, I Don’t Speak French: Confronting the Canadian Crisis That Won’t Go Away (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2006), 105–10; Keith Spicer, Life Sentences: Memoirs of an Incorrigible Canadian (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2004), chapter 9.

24.  As Garth Stevenson points out, Community Besieged, 258–59, the English in Quebec found federal aid lacking, for a variety of reasons.

25.  The stadium was originally budgeted at $315 million, and eventually clocked in at $1.3 billion. It never worked exactly as advertised, and when the city’s major-league baseball team, the Expos, finally decamped in 2004 it was said to be the worst venue in the sport.

26.  The stadium architect, Roger Taillibert, long afterward claimed that Bourassa had bought off the construction unions. In an article in the Montreal Gazette, 14 September 2000, by Hubert Bauch, “Taillibert: blame Ottawa, Quebec,” Taillibert is reported as complaining about “… petty politicians, incompetent local engineers, crooked contractors, quasi-Mafia construction unions and xenophobically parochial Quebecers, who treated him as a ‘maudit Français.’”

27.  In Canada as a whole, the mid-1970s was a period of almost constant strikes, or so it seemed. Over three million work days were lost in the third quarter of 1976, though only 175,000 workers were involved. Compare that with the million-plus workers involved in strikes or lockouts in the fourth quarter of the same year: figures from Statistics Canada, “Chronological Perspective on Work Stoppages in Canada,” www110.hrdcdrhc.gc.ca/millieudetravail_workplace/chrono//index.cfm/doc/english.

28.  The leader in question was the very Scottish Joe Davidson of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers.

29.  Linteau et al., Québec contemporain, vol. 2, 573, comment on the adverse impression made on public opinion by repeated public service strikes.

30.  Claude Forget, quoted in Bothwell, Canada and Quebec, 152.

31.  Pierre Godin, René Lévesque, vol. 3, L’espoir et le chagrin (Montreal: Boréal, 2001), 157–58.

32.  Jean-Claude Picard, Camille Laurin: L’homme debout (Montreal: Boréal, 2003), 247, writes of the “therapeutic” effects of Bill 101, in repairing the “trauma” caused to French Canadians by the Conquest of 1760.

33.  Stevenson, Community Besieged, 144–51.

34.  Picard, Laurin, 250, observes that the minister became convinced that there was no hope of compromise between his views and those of the anglophones, and that it was therefore better to proceed as if the minority “n’existait pas.”

35.  See the remarks by the author and commentator Ron Graham, in Bothwell, Canada and Quebec, 153. Laurin spoke for a substantial part of the PQ caucus, who were overjoyed at seeing Bill 101 pass, and who viewed it as an essential defence for the French language on a continent where French speakers were outnumbered forty to one: Godin, Lévesque, vol. 3, 221–22.

36.  There had actually been a confrontational meeting between Laurin and Thomas Galt, the president of Sun Life: Picard, Laurin, 251.

37.  Stevenson, Community Besieged, 185.

38.  “Net Loss Due to Inter-Provincial Migration, Anglophones from Quebec,” www.pco-bcp.gc.ca/olo/docs/reference/demodata_e.pdf. The diminution slowed markedly after 1986.

39.  There is a good description of the atmosphere of the time in Ron Graham, The French Quarter: The Epic Struggle of a Family—and a Nation Divided (Toronto: Macfarlane, Walter and Ross, 1992), 224–29.

40.  Polls showed that 57 percent of Quebec voters believed that economic conditions would improve or remain the same in a sovereign Quebec.

41.  Fifty-three percent of Quebeckers preferred Trudeau to Lévesque (22 percent). The figures are 46 percent and 27 percent if only French speakers are considered: Bothwell, Drummond, and English, Canada Since 1945, 386.

42.  Kenneth McRoberts, Misconceiving Canada: The Struggle for National Unity (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997), 158, 174.

43.  Quoted in Robert Sheppard and Michael Valpy, The National Deal: The Fight for a Canadian Constitution (Toronto: Fleet, 1982), 42.

44.  The ultimate product of the 1970s constitutional negotiations, a draft agreement with the provinces, would have produced, in the words of some well-informed Saskatchewan observers, “a major redirection of Canadian federalism … augmenting provincial powers at the expense of federal authority.” See Roy Romanow, John Whyte, and Howard Leeson, Canada … Notwithstanding (Toronto: Carswell-Methuen, 1984), 53.

45.  An example of the usage may be found in Bob Plecas, Bill Bennett: A Mandarin’s View (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2006), 140ff.

46.  A point made by the constitutional expert Peter Russell in his Constitutional Odyssey: Can Canadians Be a Sovereign People? (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 111.

47.  Lawrence Martin, Chrétien, vol. 1, The Will to Win (Toronto: Lester, 1995), 299: of 124 amendments, Martin observes, over half were adopted.

48.  The issue that divided Lévesque from the rest was an offer by Trudeau of a referendum. Lévesque, true to his democratic principles and thinking he might win it, considered it a good idea. The other provincial premiers, fearful that they might lose, considered it political poison.

49.  Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall, Trudeau and Our Times, vol. 1, The Magnificent Obsession (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990), 9.

50.  Daniel Schwanen, “Ranking Prime Ministers of the Last 50 Years: The Numbers Speak,” Policy Options/Options Politiques, June–July 2003, 18–20.

51.  Michael Valpy, “Trudeau: The Response,” The Globe and Mail, 4 October 2000.

52.  James Marsh, “Pierre Elliott Trudeau,” in The Canadian Encyclopedia.

16: BUST AND BOOM IN THE EIGHTIES

1.  Jeffrey A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York: Norton, 2006), 372–74.

2.  Brian L. Scarfe, “The Federal Budget and Energy Program, October 28th, 1980: A Review,” Canadian Public Policy, VII: 1, Winter 1981, 1–14. The best study of the energy crisis in Canada is Bruce Doern and Glen Toner, The Politics of Energy: The Development and Implementation of the National Energy Program (Toronto: Methuen, 1985).

3.  Editorial, “But a superb energy plan,” Toronto Star, October 29, 1980, A4, quoted in Doug Owram, “The Perfect Storm: The National Energy Program and the Failure of Federal–Provincial Relations,” in Richard Connors and John M. Law, eds., Forging Alberta’s Constitutional Framework (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2005).

4.  Editorial, Edmonton Journal, 3 November 1980, A4, quoted in Owram, “The Perfect Storm.”

5.  See Bothwell, English, and Drummond, Canada Since 1945, 451–54.

6.  Arthur Campeau, law partner, quoted in Peter C. Newman, The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2005), 53.

7.  Newman, Mulroney Tapes, 189–90.

8.  The Turner Liberals did have the support of the Liberal government of Ontario, which bitterly opposed free trade.

9.  Derek Burney, Getting It Done: A Memoir (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 128.

10.  The Conservatives swept Quebec, sixty-three members to twelve for the Liberals, and even edged the Liberals forty-six to forty-three in Ontario, although in the latter province the Liberals won more of the popular vote.

11.  Maryse Robert, Negotiating NAFTA: Explaining the Outcome in Culture, Textiles, Autos and Pharmaceuticals (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 29–31, 33–35.

12.  Donald Barry, “The Road to NAFTA,” in Donald Barry, Mark Dickerson, and James Glaisford, eds., Toward a North American Community? Canada, the United States and Mexico (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 10.

13.  George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Knopf, 1998), 62–63. Interestingly, however, neither NAFTA nor Mexico is discussed in Bush’s memoir.

14.  See Bruce Doern and Brian Tomlin, Faith and Fear: The Free Trade Story (Toronto: Stoddart, 1991), 121–25, and Michael Hart with Bill Dymond and Colin Robertson, Decision at Midnight: Inside the Canada–US Free Trade Negotiations (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1994), 377–78.

15.  Charles Roh, interviewed on Bill Moyers’s PBS series, NOW, 1 February 2002, www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_tdfull.html. See also Stephen Clarkson, Uncle Sam and Us: Globalization, Neoconservatism, and the Canadian State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 227–28, 348–51.

16.  Steven Pearlstein, “10 Years Later, Canada Sharply Split on Free Trade,” Washington Post, 29 June 1999, E01; John McCallum, senior economist for the Royal Bank of Canada (and later Liberal cabinet minister), “Two Cheers for the FTA,” Royal Bank of Canada Economics Department, June 1989.

17.  Jimmy Carter, “A Flawed Timber Market,” The New York Times, 24 March 2001.

18.  In 2006 the new Harper government reached an agreement with the Bush administration on softwood exports; it imposed an export tax, sought to drop Canadian lawsuits, and returned $4 billion out of $5 billion that had been—possibly illegally—collected by the United States on Canadian softwood imports. Canadian lumber producers were not, on the whole, charmed.

19.  Trudeau, “Say Good-bye to the Dream of One Canada,” La Presse, Toronto Star, 27 May 1987.

20.  Quoted in Bothwell, Drummond, and English, Canada Since 1945, 397.

21.  Mulroney had wasted little time negotiating with Newfoundland premier Clyde Wells prior to the “rescission” of Newfoundland’s approval of Meech Lake: Andrew Cohen, A Deal Undone: The Making and Breaking of the Meech Lake Accord (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1990), 224.

22.  James Winter, “The Media, the Meech Accord, and the Attempted Manufacture of Consent,” Electronic Journal of Communication/Revue électronique de communication, vol. 1, no. 2, Winter 1991. One does not have to agree with Winter’s evidently leftist politics to find his evidence of media bias toward the government and in favour of Meech Lake, especially in the CBC, very compelling.

23.  Susan Delacourt and Graham Fraser, “Marathon Talks Were All Part of Plan,” PM says, The Globe and Mail, 12 June 1990.

24.  One ordinarily sober Quebec academic put it this way to the author: “We said ‘We love you’ and you [the English] said ‘Fuck off.’”

17: A NEW MILLENNIUM AND A NEW WORLD

1.  Chris Wood, “The Vanishing Border,” Maclean’s, 20 December 1999.

2.  Pew Global Attitudes Project, 23 June 2005, table “Favorable Opinions of the U.S.,” using Environics data reported by the Department of State for 1999–2000: http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=247.

3.  The U.S. State Department’s 2005 “Country Reports on Terrorism” singled out Canada’s “liberal immigration and asylum policies” as contributing to a terrorist presence: www.state.gov/documents/organization/65473.pdf.

4.  Stewart Bell, Cold Terror: How Canada Nurtures and Exports Terrorism Around the World (Toronto: Wiley, 2004), 132–33, describes Ressam’s life as a pickpocket in Montreal. Even though Ressam’s claim to merit refugee status was rejected, he wasn’t deported because of Canada’s lack of confidence in the treatment he’d receive back in Algeria.

5.  A 1951 boy baby could expect to live sixty-six years, a girl, seventy-one years; their 2001 counterparts were expected to live seventy-seven and eighty-two years, respectively.

6.  Given the apparent decline in religion in Quebec, one might have expected to see “no religion” appear more prominently in that province’s census figures, but that’s not the case: “no religion” was more frequent in Ontario by far, and even in Alberta the number of “no-religionists” is absolutely higher than in Quebec by a considerable margin.

7.  Immigrant communities when they came to Canada had always been prone to support the party in power, and the Liberals were in power most of the time after 1896 and again after 1945, the periods of greatest immigration. There is striking evidence for this phenomenon in the 2000 election. That year, 72 percent of non-European immigrants voted Liberal: André Blais, Elizabeth Gidengil, Richard Nadeau, and Neil Nevitte, Anatomy of a Liberal Victory: Making Sense of the Vote in the 2000 Canadian Election (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2002), 92, table 6.1.

8.  See, for example, Pico Iyer, The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home (New York: Knopf, 2000), 117–71.

9.  The English-speaking population of Quebec voted overwhelmingly for the Liberals and against separatism in 1994, but because the English were geographically concentrated in a few ridings their votes had no more than a marginal impact in seat totals.

10.  The polls cited in footnote 1 suggest that pro-American sentiment was strong in Quebec, but not necessarily for the obvious reason of love and admiration for the U.S. per se; rather, expressing affection for the United States was a useful alternative for nationalist and separatist Quebeckers—they didn’t have to depend on English Canada when they could depend on the stronger and richer United States.

11.  Indeed, French president Jacques Chirac told an American interviewer during the referendum that France would recognize a sovereign Quebec in the event of a “yes” vote: Lawrence Martin, Iron Man: The Defiant Reign of Jean Chrétien (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2003), 128.

12.  This was confirmed when Chrétien failed to get the necessary provincial support for some constitutional fiddling in the fall of 1995: Martin, Iron Man, 141.

13.  William Johnson in Stephen Harper and the Future of Canada (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2005), 170, points to a poll that showed that only a third of Canadians thought that recognizing Quebec as a “unique society” would discourage separatism. In Quebec, 49 percent thought that such recognition would actually encourage separatism.

14.  Parizeau conveniently published a book, Pour un Québec souverain, in the spring of 1997, which detailed what he had done and would have done had he been successful in the referendum.

15.  Canadian Annual Review of Politics and Public Affairs, 1997 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 125.

16.  The election also showed that federalists needed more than a five-point spread to win more seats in Quebec than the separatists, who in this case got thirty-eight seats to the Liberals’ thirty-six.

17.  There was some uncertainty over precisely which formulation would best capture its essence. One idea, briefly favoured, was the Canadian Reform Alliance Party, which produced the acronym CRAP. When this coincidence was realized, it became the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance, or the Alliance party for short.

18.  Harris had demons of his own: unions, teachers, Natives, welfare recipients, and the public sector generally. His confrontations with these elements produced a steady diet of strikes punctuated by the occasional riot. All this served to remind potential NDP supporters that the Liberals were, at least, better than Harris and his political cousins in the Canadian Alliance.

19.  Canada, Department of Finance, Canada’s Fiscal Update, chapter 3, “Canada’s Fiscal Progress,” www.fin.gc.ca/ec2005/ec/ecc3e.html.

20.  In Ontario, a Liberal government under David Peterson (1985–90) was succeeded by an NDP administration (1990–95) under Bob Rae, and then by the Progressive Conservatives under Mike Harris (1995–2002) and Ernie Eves (2002–04). The disastrous experience of the Rae government, which governed in a time of economic recession and falling revenues, had an impact not only in Ontario but across the country.

21.  See David Runciman, The Politics of Good Intentions: History, Fear and Hypocrisy in the New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 136–37.

22.  The title of Kevin Phillips’s book, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (New York: Viking, 2006), says it all.

23.  Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 383.

24.  See Jocelyn Coulon, Soldiers of Diplomacy: The United Nations, Peacekeeping and the New World Order (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), x.

25.  A survey in 2002 placed Canadian salaries and benefits behind many comparable countries, not to mention international agencies and private business: see Andrew Cohen, While Canada Slept: How We Lost Our Place in the World (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2003), 138.

26.  It appears to have been the British who did the running in persuading the Canadians under Mulroney not to insist on membership in the contact group.

27.  Peter Kasurak, “Accountability for Intelligence in Peacekeeping Operations: Canada’s Operation Assurance as a Case Study,” www.carleton.ca/csds/pki/doc/Kasurak.doc.

28.  The song was by Jethro Tull.

29.  Natural Resources Canada, Energy Use Data Handbook, 1990 and 1995–2001 (Ottawa: Natural Resources Canada, 2002), 26–27.

30.  Federal Labour Standards review, Backgrounder, www.fls-ntf.gc.ca/en/bg_01.asp.

31.  The debate was and remained very lively. See for example Jeff Faux, The Global Class War: How America’s Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future—And What It Will Take to Win It Back (New York: Wiley, 2006).

32.  Governments responded by kitting out their police in bulletproof outfits not seen since the great days of armour in the sixteenth century. This reflected an apparently all-pervasive sense of insecurity that gave bulletproof vests to parking meter enforcers and caused otherwise sane city dwellers to buy all-terrain military-style vehicles like the Hummer, which they could then drive to the shopping centre.

33.  Although No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (New York: HarperCollins, 2000) was part of print culture, it spawned an enthusiastic internet world, including a website under the same name.

34.  See Jeffry A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York: Norton, 2006), chapter 18.

35.  A point usefully made by Faux, Global Class War, 98–99.

36.  There are two muddled explanations for the omission, one by a Bush speechwriter, the right-wing pundit David Frum, which seems to argue that the omission was deliberate, and one from the American ambassador, Paul Celucci, who noted that “Canada should have been mentioned,” but that there was “no deliberate snub.” See “Canada was purposely cut from speech, Frum says,” The Globe and Mail, 8 January 2003, A4, and Paul Celucci, Unquiet Diplomacy (Toronto: Key Porter, 2005), 85.

37.  Celucci, Unquiet Diplomacy, 87–88, tries to refute such rumours.

38.  The meeting was only half an hour, followed by a press conference: http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/09/09/bush.iraq/index.html.

39.  Martin Indyk, quoted in Philip H. Gordon and Jeremy Shapiro, Allies at War: America, Europe and the Crisis Over Iraq (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004), 145. According to one insider, the American response at the time was to try to get the Canadian, Chilean, and Mexican ambassadors fired.

40.  David Haglund, “Does Quebec Have an ‘Obsession anti-américaine’?” Seagram Lecture, McGill University, 11 April 2005, www.misciecm.mcgill.ca/enpages/pdf/haglundseagramtext.pdf.

41.  The most useful breakdown of opinion is by the Calgary polling firm, JMCK Polling, in its “Global Sunday: Attitudes Towards the US and War with Iraq (March 2003),” www.queensu.ca/cora/polls/2003/March-Support_for_USA_Iraq_Plan.pdf. I am obliged to Carrie Spear for this reference.

42.  Pew Research Center Report, Trends 2005, 106: http://pewresearch.org/reports/?ReportID=6.

43.  Pew Global Research Project, “U.S. Image Up Slightly, but Still Negative,” 23 June 2005, http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=247.

44.  Michael Adams, Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values (Toronto: Penguin, 2003), 50.

45.  J.L. Granatstein, Yankee Go Home? Canadians and Anti-Americanism (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1996).

46.  In his radio show A Prairie Home Companion, the humorist Garrison Keillor told his audience after the 2004 election that Canadians should have been allowed to vote too, since those who voted for Bush were already “citizens of another country,” meaning some kind of religious rapture-state. A CBC documentary aired in the weeks following the outbreak of the Iraq war examined the feelings of Americans about Canada and discovered that most were not especially irritated at Canada for not participating in the war: Paul Rutherford, Weapons of Mass Persuasion: Marketing the War Against Iraq (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 150–51.

47.  William Johnson, Stephen Harper and the Future of Canada (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2005), 319–22.

48.  The most interesting example of the Conservatives’ determination to rid Canada of its Liberal taint came after the 2006 election, in an article in the Toronto Star (Les Whittington, “Emerson Frustrated with Conservatives,” 21 April 2006), from one of his ministers, an ex-Liberal named David Emerson in a conversation with his former Liberal aide, David Epworth: “Behind closed doors, the Conservatives are worse partisans than the Liberals ever were,” Emerson said, according to notes Epworth wrote after his conversation with the minister. “They hate the f—ing Liberals and they’re doing everything they can to screw them,” he quoted Emerson as saying.

49.  There was even some discussion of “rebranding” the Liberal party, giving it another name, to escape the presumed negative connotations of its immediate past. What the new name might have been is hard to imagine—Paulistas, perhaps, or Martinizers.

50.  The reference is to the irascible boss in the comic strip “Blondie.”