Mutual Accommodation Is Part of Canada’s DNA
INTRODUCTION
Throughout its history, Canada has exhibited a stronger drive toward mutual accommodation than any other country. It has mostly put what works ahead of nationalism, ethnic difference, religion, class, and ideology, thereby avoiding war and violent conflict. Canada has been blessed by voters and leaders who learn from what works and fails – alongside governing leaders who have combined vision, practical boldness, and an ability to work and get along with a wide range of diverse people. It has one big failure (and many smaller ones): its relationship with the Indigenous people is its biggest piece of unfinished mutual accommodation business. The good news is that this issue is on the path to becoming better, long and painful as the past will continue to be, as both the Indigenous and the non-Indigenous try to move forward.
The United States is different. The dominance of its freedom, science, and technology strengths enabled it to lead the first global trade and inclusive world order for over six decades following 1945. But the world has changed in the early years of the twenty-first century. The United States now needs a huge new pivot beyond its historic strengths and toward mutual accommodation. Is it up to that? This question will be the major issue of the next few decades. The United States will continue to count, no matter what it does. But can it become helpful again within more realistic limits? It overreached under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush; and now with Donald Trump, it is both underreaching and overreaching – and worse. Despite its multiple huge strengths, the United States still lacks the essential characteristic needed to thrive in this new era – ever more mutual accommodation.
Canada, under Stephen Harper, strengthened its national unity on the Quebec, Western Canada, and Indigenous people fronts. Fortunately, the country has so far not been burdened with the negative anti-immigrant sentiments that have been rising in the G7 nations. Now, to preserve and advance these gains, it is up to Justin Trudeau or his successor to reset the economy on a more viable longer-term path and to face the third key challenge for all Canadian prime ministers – its relationship with the United States. Trudeau has failed to reset the Canadian economy on a more viable path but has done about as well with the Trump-led United States as any leader could. The high stakes ahead will require Canada to extend its proven abilities in mutual accommodation to the world stage, but at a time when the world simultaneously needs it more than ever while becoming increasingly less open to it.
Canadians have yet to grasp the reality – evident at the time of the 2015 election – that Canada’s economy could be headed for the rocks unless the new government embarked on an effective policy course correction. Unfortunately, that correction is still nowhere in sight. Canada’s 2015 rocks were self-made: living beyond our means and falling behind on competitiveness. Today the Canadian economy is facing other intensifying challenges from outside Canada – populism in Europe (including Brexit), protectionism in the United States under Trump, and friction with China. One result of these centrifugal forces is the rising threat of trade wars at a time when the United States and global economic expansions are reaching their end. The 1930s witnessed what happens when too much debt leads to depression or near-depression and is combined with trade protectionism. The result – the Great Depression and the horrors of the Second World War.
Justin Trudeau and the federal Liberals have been doing as well as they can on the US and national unity fronts. They know that, in the case of the Trans-Mountain Pipeline, no single issue, no matter how important, can ever be allowed to prevail over what national unity requires. On many other issues, the Liberals are proving to certain key groups to be less inclusive than expected – to men in general; to those over fifty; to those with different visions from them on single issues who do not want to be financially punished for it; and to those who create and build businesses and wealth. This Liberal political narrowness, alongside a US neighbour that does not know its way forward or what it has become, is where things stand in 2019. If the United States cannot move beyond the limitations of Trump and were to re-elect him in 2020, a second presidential election victory will make him almost totally uncontainable. In the new world in the midst of multiple Trump traumas, the United States primarily depends on trade with Canada and Mexico. China, in turn, depends more on trade and also on many more countries than does the United States.
1. THE MAGIC OF THE CANADIAN IDEAL*
Two ideas: Canada is magic, and that magic has conjured up one of history’s truly transformational ways in which to do things better.
All creativity involves overcoming limits. Canada’s magic results from the way it has overcome the limits of geography and history in its relations first with its mother countries, France and Britain, and then with its powerful southern neighbour, the United States. These stories create our magic. In the current challenging times for Canada and the world, we need to understand them and use them to our advantage.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, we began a new moment in history. Good moments are often followed by bad stretches, and the Western world had enjoyed nearly six positive decades since the end of the Second World War in 1945. That period ended suddenly on September 11, 2001. In the years since we have faced the post-2008 economic and financial crises, the geopolitical challenges of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and Islamic State terrorism in the Middle East. The postwar inclusive global order led by the United States is, under President Donald Trump, rapidly becoming less global and less inclusive.
Canada is still an unknown country – it has a shared story, but few people know and understand what that story is. It is high time Canadians had a national conversation about this magic story and learned how to use it for the benefit of its citizens and the world.
Throughout their history, Canadians have exhibited a stronger drive toward mutual accommodation than any other country – especially in comparison with the United States, which is currently paralyzed by political and social divisions. Mutual accommodation – the shared Canadian story – is crucial today not only in Canada but globally.
Here are some fundamental ideas to spark the national conversation. When considered together, they put Canada and mutual accommodation at the centre of the next stage in world history.
The troubled global order, the weak global economy, and the challenge of fostering economic growth in Canada while returning to live within our means will require resilience and adaptability. To help us along the way, usable history will become very important – the shared and individual stories that bind us together as a nation.
Canada’s story is not marked by dramatic events, but the strength of our separate stories makes a powerful shared narrative. After 150 years of consolidating our coast-to-coast-to-coast country since Confederation, Canada has reached a point where its stories mutually reinforce one another. All through its challenging history, Canada has found it necessary to put what works ahead of nationalism, ethnic difference, religion, class, and ideology.
Canada’s shared narrative is defined by its achievements in mutual accommodation and its socio-cultural bent. Canada has got one of the great governance lessons of history right – the necessity of mutual accommodation for a good and decent life. Accomplishing this goal makes Canada not just a good country but a great country.
Great countries (like great leaders) make many mistakes, including big ones, but they get the most important things right. The most significant piece of unfinished mutual accommodation in Canada is its relationship with the First Nations.
Three Clear Examples
Historically, the choices made by leaders and followers have entrenched the Canadian narrative of mutual accommodation. Three of the major stories focus on Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin in 1848; the election and re-election of Sir Wilfrid Laurier from 1896 to 1908; and the role played by Sir Arthur Currie and his Canadian Army during the First World War in the defeat of Germany. Some historians consider Currie the Allies’ greatest general from that conflict.
The vision of LaFontaine and Baldwin manifested itself in 1848. They led the only reform movement in the Western world during that tumultuous year which ended as a responsible government and never lost its democracy. In this case, the francophone Catholic LaFontaine in Lower Canada needed the strength of the anglophone Protestant Baldwin from Upper Canada to overcome the anti-reform position of the Quebec clergy. Baldwin, in turn, needed the strength of LaFontaine to combat the anti-reform power of the Family Compact.
Both these leaders were able to work together successfully at a time when differences of religion and nationality were intense. When LaFontaine lost his Quebec seat, and Baldwin lost his in Ontario, each ran successfully in the other’s province, despite these deep divisions. This accommodation showed, two decades before Confederation, that a shared public purpose pursued through compromise could trump nationality and religion with Canadian voters.
The idea of restraint is also a striking element in this story. LaFontaine stood down the anti-reform mob in Montreal by asserting that reform would prevail without recourse to violence – a century before Mahatma Gandhi championed non-violence in India, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and Martin Luther King in the United States.
As for Laurier, his vision was political – to achieve peace, prosperity, and public purpose through compromise and accommodation. He said that the twentieth century would belong to Canada – and in many ways that proved true in the relative quality of life available in Canada to ordinary people. It became true primarily because Canada followed the Laurier vision of public achievements through compromise and restraint. The very election of Laurier, a francophone Catholic from Quebec, as prime minister only thirty years after Confederation is but one example.
This approach was so powerful and suited to Canada that it kept the federal Liberal Party in office three out of every four years over the following century. The less flexible (instinctively either/or, win/lose) Canadian leaders have been either restrained in their actual behaviour or, along with their party, made to pay the price of not being restrained. The federal Liberal Party is still paying a price, three decades later, for Pierre Trudeau’s unilateralism and his initial lack of restraint on both the Constitution and the National Energy Program. The Conservative Party similarly paid a six-decade price in Quebec for Robert Borden’s inability to find the conscription compromise needed in the First World War.
Leaders with the right followers, and followers with the right leaders, can do great things. Both came together for Canada in the final years of that war – a coming-of-age moment for the country. At Vimy Ridge in April 1917, Currie first led his Canadian Corps to victory – making it the only army on the Western Front to capture a fortified ridge. During the Hundred Days offensive from August to November 1918, the Corps outflanked the Germans, leading to their only real defeats in the war at the Drocourt-Quéant Line and the Canal du Nord – both key to ending the conflict.
In advance of Vimy Ridge, Currie decided to make his battle plan (but not the date) available to every soldier. As the battle unfolded, he wanted them all to understand what was going on and be able, if needed, to operate without direction. No other country was socio-culturally flexible enough to do that. Even today, few chief executives would take that kind of risk.
Together these strong and proud visions have made Canada a great country, and the choices that made these achievements possible have made it a magic country – a nation able to overcome its limitations through creative solutions. But much remains to be done in bringing the First Nations into full participation in our unique mutual accommodation story. The words “cultural genocide” used by Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin in her lecture in Toronto in May 2015 drew headlines, as did the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada that same year. This report will take its place alongside others that have shaped our history – the Durham, Rowell-Sirois, and Bilingualism and Biculturalism reports – all of them milestones in mutual accommodation.
Resource development and education are the urgent issues for First Nations. Canada has lost much of the past decade in economic development because the federal and Alberta governments, along with natural-resource industries, ignored the opportunity they had to work with First Nations. As for Ottawa’s stalled Education Bill, the best way forward is to move beyond politics by making the program optional. That would enable those Aboriginal communities anxious to educate their young people to do so.
Four Ways to Be Better
Since the Middle Ages, the Western world has tried to make things better in four powerful ways: through freedom, science, compassion, and mutual accommodation.
Freedom and science (which includes education and technology) represent the power of the inflexible either/or and have been the dominant drivers. Compassion and mutual accommodation – the power of the flexible both/and – have been much less influential. Amid all the global tensions today, it is crucial that these four basic qualities act more in unison. Otherwise, the future will become hellish again, as it was from 1914 to 1945.
Journalist Martin Wolf wrote in the Financial Times that “we are doomed to co-operate.” That does not mean, of course, that we will. Zbigniew Brzezinski, a US national security adviser when Jimmy Carter was president, believed that mutual accommodation is the only way forward for both China and the United States. He may be right, but only time will tell.
On the foreign-policy front, Canada should be working the compromise side, doing the independent thinking about the world and what is going on, and seeking the relationships that could make it a useful player. No other country is better positioned to be helpful in a world that desperately needs creativity in overcoming limits.
Canada is not a mistake-free zone. Canadians have work to do, but little sense of what it entails right now, let alone for the future. For example, since the 2008 financial crisis, they have been suffering from moral smugness and economic complacency. Canada has run annual current account deficits of some $55 billion – money borrowed to sustain consumption, not to build Canada or enhance its ability to create lasting jobs. The current account deficit is already starting to rise again because of the oil-price collapse, despite a lower Canadian dollar and a stronger US economy.
The federal government faces a Canadian economy that demands a major set of structural and macro-economic policy shifts. The oil collapse is a huge shock to an economy that has been living on credit while its growth and supply-side competitiveness have declined. Still, Canada’s medium and longer-term prospects continue to look strong. What happens in the short term seems more problematic.
If Canada is to address the current economic challenges, it is essential for the government to rein in excess consumer demand, run federal deficits a bit longer to finance public infrastructure and pro-capital-creation tax policies, and focus on a stronger supply-side performance.
I have three suggestions to get us back on track. First, we must once again learn to live within our means. Second, we must urgently address mutual accommodation with the First Nations. And third, we must immediately focus our foreign policy on long-term and strategic goals in our interest. Only then will we be ready for the transformational changes that are sure to come.
Canada’s mutual accommodation drive gives us hope. No other single idea, if taken on board globally, could do more to change the world in a positive way in the decades ahead.
2. HOW CANADA’S EIGHT LEADERS OF SPECIAL VISION GUIDED THE WAY*
Great countries get the leaders they need just when they need them the most. Exactly why that happens is both a mystery and a miracle. If it keeps happening, as it has so far for Canada, the result is a kind of magic – the magic of creatively overcoming challenges and limits that look almost impossible.
In its relatively short history, Canada has had eight leaders of special vision, not all of them chosen at the ballot box.
Six Governing Visionaries
What can we learn from the personalities and events that shaped the way we do things in our country? Canada’s defining narrative began early, with the reliance, amid a difficult geography, of European traders and settlers on Aboriginal people. Over the centuries, the nation that has emerged has continued – in fact, extended – this tradition of mutual shaping and accommodation. Canada has not been entirely free of violence, but its primary markers have been a blend of vision and of what works on the ground. In this way, it has been a great country unlike any other in history.
Canada’s three greatest visionary leaders – Samuel de Champlain, John A. Macdonald, and Wilfrid Laurier – each combined vision, practical boldness, and an ability to work and get along with a wide range of diverse people. Two other politicians, Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine, showed that political and social reform could be achieved by non-violent means. William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, was the skillful consolidator of their achievements. Consolidation can be as vital as initiation, although it requires a different type of vision, boldness, and patience.
Today all these leaders would recognize that many of their visions are embedded in the fabric of modern Canada.
Champlain wanted a new kind of society – one in which Aboriginals and Europeans could live together in amity and with mutual respect. Individualism underlies the American dream – the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for every citizen that is reflected in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Canadian dream comes from someone remembered as an explorer but who arrived here as a soldier personally familiar with the horrors of war.
Champlain had many dreams – among them the colonization of New France, which he succeeded in doing, and finding a passage to China, which did not exist. The greatest of his dreams focused on humanity and peace. In North America, Champlain became a political leader and statesman who, through his ability to get along with different people, was able to convert his dreams into reality.
Canada’s dream includes individual desires for freedom, material advance, and happiness, just as America’s includes wishes for a better, fairer, and more equal and open society. But the initial aspirations of these two countries were and remain distinct. “And that,” as US poet Robert Frost put it in another context, “has made all the difference.”
Macdonald’s vision was national – for a transcontinental country in the northern half of North America. This country had to accommodate people of French and English heritage, of Catholic and Protestant faith. It had to be ready to stand up to the United States and to build a sound economy. Macdonald remains the country’s greatest builder, striving for a nation of “one people, great in territory, great in enterprise, great in credit, great in capital.” He got three big things right: Confederation, a transcontinental railway, and containment of American expansionism. He also got English-French politics mostly right, although the execution of Louis Riel aggravated the political challenges from western Canada and francophone Quebec. Finally, when the country needed a looser federation than Macdonald sought, his Confederation allowed it.
Macdonald found, in his partnership with George-Étienne Cartier, a way forward on the Quebec political front that others followed. His model has endured for more than 150 years. And he recognized how fundamental mutual respect was to mutual accommodation: “Treat them as a nation, and they will act as a free people generally do – generously,” he said of French-speaking Canadians. “Call them a faction and they become factious.”
In a private letter just before the inauguration of what he called “the confederate government” on July 1, 1867, Macdonald described what he felt had been achieved: “By the exercise of common sense and a limited amount of the patriotism which goes by the name of self-interest, I have no doubt the Union will be good for the Country’s weal.” And so it has turned out.
Confederation was a first. No previous colonials had written their own constitution. It set in motion a coast-to-coast-to-coast country that has survived and thrived. Canada also has emerged as one of the better places to live and, because of its achievements in mutual accommodation, one of history’s truly remarkable countries. And because of the potential importance of this idea to the world right now, Canada has vastly more runway ahead than it has used so far.
The visions of its founders have shaped Canadian society in ways that have been mutually reinforcing. Champlain’s desire for a diverse and peaceable society remains a dominant, if not yet fully realized ideal. For example, much remains to be done in mutual accommodation with the First Nations and, currently, in finding ways to cope with anxieties about extreme Muslim groups, fed in part by a fearful US neighbour and its hyped-up media.
The belief of Baldwin and LaFontaine in reform through non-violent means has become the Canadian way. Macdonald’s vision has led to the quality of life that Canadians enjoy, while Laurier’s political model of accommodation has, for the most part, been followed. Together these visions have made Canada – a country of unexpected magic.
Two Cultural Visionaries
Mutual accommodation involves two fundamentals: an effective two-way communication and a belief that a shared and meaningful order exists at the heart of things. Geography creates one kind of communication problem – it helps to explain why western Canadians feel alienated from Ottawa and Toronto, and why midwestern Americans disdain Washington and New York. But breaking away from history can result in much bigger and deeper communication challenges than holding on to it. The US Civil War lasted for just four years but the aftermath still persists, contributing to our neighbour’s current political turmoil.
Canada did have its own historical break with its two mother countries, but it was not abrupt. Rather, its English and French connections have remained, though they have gradually become less relevant over the years. The American rupture between North and South was sudden, violent, and destructive, followed by subsequent not always happy reconnections. Canada’s recent existential crisis concerning Quebec was peaceful and lasted for decades. These differences have produced distinctive communication, institutional, and socio-cultural results in both countries.
It’s no accident, perhaps, that Canada’s two greatest non-political visionaries in the mid-twentieth century, Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan, both addressed communication issues. Each came partly out of the University of Toronto, an intellectual environment that had been greatly influenced by Harold Innis, a pioneering theorist in economics, communications, and the media.
Like Innis, Frye and McLuhan had a Canadian, as distinct from an American, sense of the fundamental shared order at the heart of things. Between them they captured better than anyone else the nature of the transformational communication and identity changes of the post-1945 era. McLuhan grasped the scale and scope of the incipient revolution of modern communications technology, along with some of its socio-cultural implications. For him, the medium was the message, and, because the technology was global, the world had become a global village. Frye grasped the reality that culture is fundamental and that all culture is local in expression. Although culture is shaped by the medium, it is not the medium. For Frye, culture and nationality come from a shared order, and all literature has the same anatomy. The global village is also a globe of villages.
The successful or unsuccessful reconciliation of the global village with the globe of villages is what the next decades in the world will largely be about. For Frye, the world of the imagination (inner) is the only place of unlimited individual freedom, unlike the physical (outer) world of limits and possibilities. The shared structure of all imaginative literature is what makes us human.
The Americans, more than any other society, have a never-ending drive for outer freedom in search of new possibilities with the fewest possible limits. Frye argued that free individual responses, rather than manipulated responses, would produce genuine and sustainable human cohesion. He saw the media as too often a world of manipulated mass response, leaving less space for individual reflective response – and, I would add, for real mutual accommodation that lasts.
The US media may be a particular problem for Canadian culture. But as Frye famously said, the problem was even greater for American culture. Culture for Frye was not simply high culture: it was the characteristic response of individuals and groups to what they find before them. While Canadians seem to lean toward “underlying unity and order,” many Americans prefer the “struggle between good and evil until the final moment of victory or judgment.”
What a Difference a Border Makes
Alarmingly, the drive toward irresolvable divisions (the endless struggle between good and evil) produces a world of slippery slopes and apocalyptic dangers. It makes democratic politics and mutual accommodation much more difficult to achieve. Today, there is more internal political turmoil in the United States than at any time since the Civil War. In an era of terrorism, it is important for Canadians, living next to a fearful country, to keep their cool and hang on to mutual accommodation as the best way to go – even when it does not work quickly or well and even when it fails.
Canada used its first 150 years to consolidate the initially thin coast-to-coast thread that made the country improbable into one that was strong and viable. It withstood the centrifugal forces within and the external expansionist instincts of the United States from without. It survived the global convulsions of two world wars and a great depression. Now, as it is tries to cope with the world’s latest challenges, it has the “usable history” – proven tactics for getting through difficult situations – that it needs to move forward. Canada must now use it or lose it.
Not surprisingly, narratives have emerged from the many challenges, successes, and failures in this vast country, home to diverse peoples from many parts of the world. These stories, however, have rarely been national stories. More commonly they are regional and local stories of everyday life – from First Nations, the Québécois, western Canada, the North, immigrants, and francophone Canadians outside Quebec. Only Ontario, particularly since 1945, has consistently regarded Canada in a more national way. Now, as Ontario finds itself in a Canada that no longer works all that well for its economy, this outlook may also change. What is certain is that many more shared and separate stories will emerge from what Canada and the rest of the world are experiencing right now.
Canada’s glue is still its unknown shared narrative. Its future lies in a return to the boldness that created Canada in 1864–67. Canada enters this new era with an exceptional range of strengths. Paradoxically, these same strengths will make Canada more vulnerable than ever to those who want what it possesses. They may also make Canadians more anxious. Our best defence will be twofold: to articulate our stories in order to understand who we are and what we stand for; and to discuss what Canada should do to seize the opportunities and minimize the risks that accompany good fortune. We could well now be entering a second Sir John A. Macdonald moment of huge challenge in our history – one that will again call for boldness in pursuit of the improbable.
3. TO BE A GLOBAL ROLE MODEL, CANADA MUST REALIZE WHAT SETS IT APART*
Use words, not force. Make railways, not war. These overly simple ideas capture the Canadian national story – one that differs from those of most other countries.
Canada’s story has increasingly been driven by persuasion. The American story has more often been shaped by war and violence: the Revolutionary War, Civil War, Indian wars, Mexican wars, lynching, and the almost 400 million guns in private hands. These differences in how to go about things and how to make a good society are huge. They come from the fact that the histories of the two countries are dissimilar, as are the choices each has made along the way. Over the years the differences have been the source of both strength and weakness.
The United States has been great when it comes to freedom as well as science and technology – the most transformative forces for doing things in a better way since the Renaissance. There is still more to do, but science and freedom now face limits because the United States lacks mutual accommodation – the key to a satisfactory way forward.
So, while the United States remains unmatched, it is now less indispensable because so much is inherently beyond its reach. The world today is different and needs a different kind of country, which means Canada’s special task is to help advance mutual accommodation outside as well as within its borders.
Since its beginnings – first Quebec in 1608 and then Confederation in 1867 – Canada has had three very big achievements. First, it has survived – not just as a nation but as one that includes the distinctive province of Quebec. Second, it made itself a coast-to-coast-to-coast nation. Finally, despite its divisions of nationality, culture, language, religion, and class, it has developed a political and socio-cultural outlook that works.
All these achievements have been based on mutual accommodation. Today’s Canada is the product of its capacity for mutual accommodation and a belief in an underlying shared order. How well is this historical fact understood in 2017, our 150th anniversary of Confederation?
Seven Key Ideas
The Canadian Narrative Project is a collaboration with Bill Innes, who has spent his career in the global oil industry in Canada, Europe, Japan, and the United States. He and I are not historian wannabes who think we have a better grasp of Canadian history than others. The purpose of the project is very simple: to get Canadians talking about whether Canada has a shared story; whether that story is indeed mutual accommodation, and whether understanding that story will strengthen us for the future.
At the heart of the project is the notion that, in many ways, Canada is still the unknown country that inspired the famous 1942 book with that title written by Bruce Hutchison, the late journalist and political commentator.
That idea is one of seven that shape the notion of Canada as the product of mutual accommodation. The second is the concept of usable history, which stems from a piece in the New Yorker by US historian William Pfaff soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Newly emerged Russia’s problem, he said, was that it had no usable history – which comes from what has worked to get a country through something hard in its past. Interestingly, after the 9/11 terror attacks, Mayor Rudy Giuliani found New York’s usable history in what Londoners did during the Second World War to endure the Blitz.
Third, the central idea that shared stories are the stuff of usable history – a vital source of strength or of weakness – comes from many diverse places.
The four remaining ideas are more original and therefore may be less familiar. Although Canadians instinctively understand the term mutual accommodation as a practical way to go about much of their business, the idea has not been expressed previously in two simple words. Amid everything that is going on in the world today, it becomes ever more central, not only for Canada but for other nations too.
Canada needs to have another Sir John A. Macdonald moment – one that demands achievements that seem completely improbable and require much boldness and patience. The first such moment was Sir John A.’s bold and brave decision to build a railway that would extend this sparsely populated country from coast to coast and thus be able to withstand American expansionism.
Globally, today, we are at another very difficult moment of change in history (as in 1815, 1914, 1945, or 2001). Moments in history come when the momentum and direction of the dominant forces that have overcome everything standing in their way start to weaken, the counterforces become stronger, and the path forward is once again uncertain.
Greatness is important for countries and for leaders. Although great leaders and great countries make many mistakes – some of them big ones – they get the most important things right. Sir Wilfrid Laurier and Canada became great by getting mutual accommodation right. Canada will always be Laurier’s country, unless it chooses to abandon its mutual accommodation ways or reaches an impasse where they no longer work.
As for shared stories, they can strengthen the courage needed to support bold action and confront hard challenges. These two ideas – courage and shared stories – lie behind the Canadian Narrative Project.
Mr Innes sees Canada’s mutual accommodation story as a crucial advantage at home and abroad, an idea central to what we have achieved. I, in turn, foresee several decades of challenge ahead on the scale of what happened internationally after 1910.
We will get the policies we need to survive and thrive only if we find the story that captures where Canadians are now and how they see things – and if we put what we find to good use. This national conversation is key to everything else before us.
Global Implications
Mutual accommodation is the opposite of what is happening in the United States. This great nation is being undermined by extreme emphasis on individual rights at the expense of society, on divisions among different groups, and on the never-ending struggle between good and evil. The global order now faces serious risks of destabilization and disruption. Mutual accommodation looks more and more to be the crucial ingredient needed for the survival of the best of our world as we know it.
There are three kinds of stories: the “how” (the manner of journey), the “where” (the journey’s destination), and the “what” (specific events that happen along the way). Mutual accommodation is a how story – a way of doing politics and social living. Science is another great how story – the whats (the discoveries) and the wheres (the specific investigation goals) take place within the science way of doing things. In the years since the Renaissance, science has changed the world by the way it approaches knowledge and technology. Freedom, human rights, the rule of law, and democracy have also changed the world.
Mutual accommodation is not itself a memorable event, although it can make possible uniquely remarkable events. It has changed Canada, but it has not yet changed the world. Europe’s postwar successes have come from the continent’s growing capacity for mutual accommodation, though its current risks stem from those places where it has fallen short. With the right will, however, mutual accommodation can change the world – just as freedom and science have changed everything.
Canada’s mutual accommodation story began when Samuel de Champlain arrived at Quebec in 1608. He came with a vision for a new nation based on co-operation between the Aboriginal inhabitants and the incoming French settlers. Once Canada became a nation through Confederation in 1867, it spent its first 150 years consolidating its northern half of the North American continent into a viable country – again through mutual accommodation between the provinces and the federal government, French and English, Protestant and Catholic, Quebec and the rest of Canada, and settlers and immigrants, though with the glaring omission of the First Nations. Much has been achieved, but more remains to be done.
The next one hundred years will likely be dominated by serious threats to the world’s economic and geopolitical order and stability – a world in which Canada’s rare combination of physical bounty, socio-political understanding, and living in a good neighbourhood could make a significant contribution. The time has come for Canadians to begin talking about their shared history and how to use it purposefully in the years ahead for the benefit of Canada and the world. As the late Quebec premier Robert Bourassa put it, Canada is for its citizens “one of the world’s rare and privileged countries in terms of peace, justice, liberty, and standard of living.”
To date, Canada’s focus has been on its own internal development – on making things work – and on coping with the United States. Its development has taken place largely separated from events outside North America. The focus in the future, however, will be more external and will extend far beyond this continent. Canada is moving from being a largely disconnected part of the world to being deeply interconnected. This change will make it a very different country, and its mutual accommodation strength will increasingly need to be deployed abroad.
Canada has the water, food, space, minerals, resources, and the political, economic, social, and cultural ways that are in short supply for the rest of the world. These diverse advantages carry both opportunity and risk. If Canada is to seize the opportunities and avoid the risks, it should quickly get on with a national conversation about the shared and separate stories of its different peoples and regions – about how it got where it is, how to envisage its future, and how to seize its place in the world.
The Goal Is to Look Inward
In some senses, Canada is still an unknown country – unknown to itself as well as to others. It needs to hold national conversations about many important issues. Above all, it needs to talk about whether its mutual accommodation narrative captures how most Canadians feel about the country.
If it is to succeed, the Canadian Narrative Project must spur Canadians to think about when mutual accommodation has worked in the past and how in the future it may help us both at home and abroad. For example, what if it were used to manage the fallout from all the current anxiety over extremists claiming links to Islam? If we articulate our narrative well and deepen our understanding of its power – and of the costs where it has yet to work – it will continue to help us and others in the future. Values, stories, ideas, dreams, purposes, and choices together shape individuals, societies, and civilizations. Vision – the sense of what can be and what should be – lures and drives them all.
As the great Canadian critic and thinker Northrop Frye said, identities are always about who you aspire to be, not who you are now. Moving toward some vision of the future for Canada and the world – the two now go hand-in-hand – is really what this Canadian Narrative Project is all about.
Central to all identities – as individuals, organizations, societies, or countries – is how our particular culture shapes us to respond to what is put in front of us. We must understand both ourselves and others and the effect we have on each other. In his book, The Duel (1990), historian John Lukacs tells the story of the eighty-day struggle between Churchill and Hitler immediately following the fall of France. Although many others contributed to the ultimate defeat of Hitler, Churchill won this particular round because he understood Hitler better than Hitler understood himself.
So it is with mutual accommodation. It works best when each side understands the other side very well. It’s essential to know what the opposing group wants before you can come to a deal that can last, and how best to respond if a deal does not initially prove possible.
The big questions for those who think a national conversation about Canada’s mutual accommodation story is worth pursuing include these points:
• Does the mutual accommodation Canada I have described feel like the Canada you live in?
• If it doesn’t, what does the Canada you live in feel like to you?
• Do you have an alternative shared story – in addition to or instead of mutual accommodation? What is it? What are your reasons?
• Do you agree with the thought that usable history comes from shared stories and separate stories, and how they may strengthen or weaken one another? If not, why not?
It’s time now to get the conversation started.
4. JUSTIN TRUDEAU’S SUNNY WAYS – AND A STORM ON THE HORIZON*
The results of the October 2015 federal election were so startling, and the likely effects so huge, that it will be some time before we can grasp them fully. But let’s start with three major outcomes that go beyond the usual fallout from elections.
First, this was much more than a fight between three leaders and parties of varying degrees of acceptability. It was also far more than a poll on the economy or how Stephen Harper went about his business. It was an election about the kind of country Canadians want. A vast swath of voters was determined to hold on to the Canada they have come to love and not to lose it to divisive themes.
Second, Quebec returned to be part of the country’s government. Throughout the long campaign, the province was more engaged in a federal election than it had been in almost thirty years. Some 80 percent of its voters supported a federalist party.
Third, the Liberal Party came back from near death five years earlier to win the first federal vote since Canada’s existential crisis – its battle with Quebec separatism. The first such provincial election was also won by a Liberal – Premier Philippe Couillard, who dispatched the Parti Québécois in March 2014. In both cases, a political realignment is under way that will leave the crisis behind and look to the future.
The People’s Election
Quite simply, the election belonged to the people – it was more about trust than leaders, parties, or policies.
The Liberals recognized that mood best, with their program, their campaign, and their leader, who seemed to grow a little every day in full public view. From the beginning of his Liberal leadership run three years ago, Justin Trudeau trusted Canadians to be fair and give him a chance, despite inevitable miscues as he gained experience – and they did. The Conservatives’ “not ready” attack ads recognized that public patience and shifted to “not ready yet.”
Over time, the public obviously learned to trust, as well as tolerate, Justin Trudeau. Canada’s political system proved that it works (a challenge still to be met by the American system). Their trajectory from a third-place start through a three-way tie to a majority shows that the Liberals had struck a chord with the people. Across the country, the cumulative votes of Liberal, New Democrat, Green, and moderate Conservative voters meant that some 70 percent of the Canadian electorate was on side with seeking mutual accommodation on the niqab and on security issues. At the end, Canadians preferred what they saw as a moderate economic risk over losing who they feel they are as a people.
The election’s most striking feature was the level of energy from almost every direction and the number of people actively engaged in the campaign. From time to time, Canadians have strong feelings and worries, but they usually want leaders who are less extreme and worried than they are. The Trudeau victory message – the return of Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s “sunny ways” and Canada as the country where better is always possible – added to the historic, stunning scale of the win. It will also move Trudeau into new territory where expectations of what is possible could be too high. He needs to figure out quickly what economic expectations are reasonable and explain them to Canadians. This election was not about the economy. The next one almost certainly will be.
The Harper Legacy
Every Canadian prime minister faces the same three big challenges: the economy, national unity, and the United States. Mr Harper did not do well on the economy: by the end of his term he was burdened by the highest consumer-debt to income ratio in the G7 and the frightening total of $400 billion of accumulated borrowing from abroad to fund consumption. This excess credit masked Canada’s economic vulnerability.
Most people do not yet realize the extent of that vulnerability. Mr Harper inherited an economy and fiscal position from the Mulroney-Chrétien era that set him up for a decade. Unfortunately, his natural make-up does not fit with mutual accommodation: he did not trust other people, yet insisted they trust him, and he was determined to manage everything from inside his own mind – an impossible task in a complex and fast-moving world. As a result, he leaves Canada with an economy that is weaker than necessary, and with a decade’s worth of policy challenges that will involve some voter pain.
Mr Harper did not get along with the United States, but political leaders there cannot get along with each other. Mr Trudeau may have a better chance, but relations with our southern neighbour will be difficult until the political turmoil there subsides.
Counter-intuitively, Mr Harper did well, over all, on national unity. His greatest skill in terms of mutual accommodation was political calculation. His understanding of Canada’s political reality kept him from crossing the line most of the time. In the end, the power of Laurier’s Canada prevailed: pursuing public purpose through compromise.
The only time Mr Harper faltered seriously was in his policies toward Muslims and terrorists. Otherwise he leaves an important set of unity achievements.
• When he took office in 2006, the West wanted in and Quebec was still undecided about getting out. Ten years later, the West is in, and so is Quebec – perhaps in part because Mr Harper passed the “Québécois nation” resolution in the House of Commons.
• During the controversy over the proposed Charter of Values in the 2014 Quebec election, he asked premiers and his own Cabinet to keep out of it, knowing that Quebeckers do not want outsiders intruding in their affairs.
• While other countries have serious divisions over immigration, abortion, and same-sex marriage, Canada does not. The opposition on these issues was inside the Conservative Party, and Mr Harper kept it quiet.
• He gave the First Nations the apology they wanted and needed.
• He established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose thoughtful and balanced summary report came out in the spring of 2015.
• He presented a First Nations education bill that awaits implementation by the Trudeau government (and can be quickly achieved by an opt-in approach for those that want to get moving for their children now).
In the final analysis, Mr Harper was an exceptionally skilful political operative, limited by an ideology and a political style that relied on a base that was strong but proved too small and difficult to reach the majority of the population.
Ideology can be like celebrity – a form of shouting. It lacks real substance, the ability to get lasting things done or to provide reliable paths forward. As well, ideology is always trumped by reality – and mutual accommodation can help to keep us within its bounds.
Mr Harper’s approach sometimes seemed to be that of a doctor who just shouts: “Bad disease, go away!” And, of course, it never does. For example, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a huge and potentially destructive force that a globally televised snub from a Canadian prime minister does nothing to curb.
Whatever his shortcomings prove to be, Justin Trudeau appears to have the patience, the inner confidence, and the toughness to find very good people to work with as a team. Together they will pursue a strategy that can help, over time, to get the disordered parts of the world to a better place.
Left Behind
The New Democrats and the Parti Québécois have made strong contributions to shaping what Canada is today, but each now seems to have run out of space on the runway.
The federal NDP has never, since its 1933 beginning, offered a single constructive, doable, fresh proposal on any of the fundamental challenges every federal government must face: the economy, national unity, and the United States. Meanwhile, its substantial contribution in social policy and rights has been largely achieved. Unlike Britain, there is no political room here for more mainstream, Tony Blair–style socialism.
The Péquistes, meanwhile, likely have a future in Quebec – but only if they abandon separatism (the BQ has no future federally). If they cannot, some other party will emerge as the primary contender to the Quebec Liberals. The PQ of René Lévesque and Lucien Bouchard gave Quebeckers the choice of in or out. Ironically, that choice and the PQ language bill saved Quebec for Canada, and Canada for Quebec.
Federally, the Conservatives may become the main alternative to the Liberals in Quebec. They can also become federally competitive again if there is more room for Progressive Conservatives. I see no real right-left shift in Canada (the world is too diverse and complex for the left-right split to be useful).
So, federal third parties may now recede. If they return, it will likely be more for regional reasons.
Challenges Going Forward
In the years ahead, October 19, 2015, will take its place among the important elections held since Laurier became prime minister that have involved national unity and solved our problems through mutual accommodation.
The first such election, in 1917, brought to power the Borden conscription coalition, which Laurier would not join and which divided the country fatefully along English-French language lines. It represented the greatest failure of mutual accommodation in Canadian history.
The second was the 1940 victory of onetime Laurier protégé William Lyon Mackenzie King. His policy of “conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription” avoided deep divisiveness over a war most francophone Quebeckers did not support.
The third was the election of Pierre Trudeau in 1968. He could be even more averse to mutual accommodation than Mr Harper, but he subsequently faced down Quebec separatism and preserved Canada.
Now we have Justin Trudeau, who matches his father in moral and physical courage, but brings more emotional intelligence and a less intellectual approach to government. Perhaps this approach is more in tune with how young people today go about things and what today’s world necessitates.
Spirit of the West
Aside from Quebec, the other great challenge to national unity has come from the West. The Laurier-King political coalition that led to Liberal dominance of federal politics from 1896 to 2006 was based on francophone Quebec finding common cause with western Canada.
That came to an end with John Diefenbaker’s sweep in 1957. Thereafter, whether Liberal or not, prime ministers from Quebec seemed largely unable to understand the West, causing alienation that reached its peak with Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program and his unilateral efforts on the Constitution.
But the fact the Liberals in 2015 won thirty-two seats west of Ontario means that the Harper defeat need not leave the West on the outside. All will depend on the eight members it has in the new Cabinet, how much scope and profile Mr Trudeau allows them, and how they can work effectively with Western Canadian governments.
The major unity problem now is the First Nations. There is every reason to expect Mr Trudeau to do his part of what’s needed. If he does, that will put pressure on the First Nations to do their part too. The outcome will depend on patient mutual accommodation.
Trouble Down the Road
Justin Trudeau has the ability to harness mutual accommodation and strengthen unity at home and, when the moment is right, to foster better relations with our southern neighbour.
However, mutual accommodation is a means to an end – not an end unto itself. It must serve a purpose, and a primary purpose at the moment is to get Canada on a sustainable economic path. The country has been living beyond its means (by $60 billion a year), has the G7’s highest debt as a percentage of household income, and is not competitive internationally in enough goods and services.
Canada’s economic ship is headed for the rocks. Mr Trudeau must chart a new course – and soon.
* Published in the Globe and Mail, June 13, 2015.
* Published in the Globe and Mail, July 7, 2015.
* Published in the Globe and Mail, June 22, 2015.
* Published in the Globe and Mail, November 6, 2015.