“No Merely Passive Spectator”: Canada in a Modern World
Goldwin Smith sat in his home waiting to die. Much in the world around him had changed in his eighty-six years, and from the steps of his stately mansion in Toronto he could see how time had quietly transitioned the landscape around its rolling green lawns into an increasingly crowded and chaotic urban scene. “Great changes I have seen in all departments of life,” he wrote to an old friend in 1909. “Still greater changes seem to be at hand.”1 It appeared that time had acquired a more turbulent rhythm, ushering in changes at a rapid and dizzying pace.
Indeed, at the turn of the century it was hard to ignore how much had seemed to change in the preceding decades. Commenting in 1890 on the time that had passed since Confederation, the Dominion Illustrated observed: “It has been an important – in some respects, a very critical – period all the world over ... In these changes, Canada has been no merely passive spectator.” The article added that the creation of Canada as a self-governing “nation” within the British Empire made it “the first of its kind in modern times, and to the student of politics it is of exceptional interest.”2 The sense that political reordering was shifting toward something new and distinctly modern became a defining characteristic of late-nineteenth-century intellectual debate. The volume of discussion in the pages of English Canadian periodicals on the future of Canada and its place in the world certainly reflected the exceptional interest that the federation of British North American colonies produced. The coalescent developments of Canadian Confederation and anxieties of what was widely perceived as a “modern” age generated sustained deliberation on the nature of political order and the ways in which it was transforming.
A century and a half after Confederation, however, the tendency to focus on its political development and its nationalist commemorations has had the effect of minimizing or overlooking altogether its reverberations in political thought both in Canada and in the wider empire. Confederation cannot be understood as a single moment, nor as a narrowly political process defined by political and legal figures alone. Confederation was also an intellectual process that prompted reconfigurations in the nature of political association in the British Empire and Canada. For many who lived through the decades that followed Confederation, the creation of a new political jurisdiction signalled an important transition point in the political development of the British Empire or of the wider Anglo-American world. For this reason, debates about the future of Canada and the empire often acquired existential significance, harkening the broader reconstitution of political society. Many of the columns and pages examined here pulse palpably with anxiety prompted by the sense that everything was changing. For Goldwin Smith, whose attempts to make sense of the changes he witnessed ultimately yielded acrimony and isolation, the search for order produced only further uncertainty. Guesses at the Riddle of Existence, a collection of his essays published in 1896, confirmed that, for all of the social and political changes about which he dedicated so much of his life to describing, there could be no conclusions, just guesses.
This book has examined how the political jurisdiction created by Confederation prompted new ways of thinking about the nature of political order, highlighting the role that a group of public authors had in shaping ideas of political association. For many English Canadians who belonged to this Confederation generation, the changes that they sensed in the nature of political order seemed to be leading toward some form of greater consolidation based on lines of racial community. For others, it became more logical to look to the Canadian state as a natural and legitimate basis of political association, even though its geographic and demographic diversity seemed to be at odds with the idea of a united polity. In their descriptions of nationality, constitutionalism, citizenship, and loyalty, they revealed that the creation of Canada fundamentally affected the understanding of political association in the British Empire.
The idea of a global British community was a powerful one in the late nineteenth century, and many English Canadians who lived through the Confederation years saw local political reordering as one part of an evolving narrative. Imperialism was not only a cultural expression of nationality, but also a way of ordering the world and designating lines of exclusion. The same modern changes that motivated imperialists encouraged others to see a new era of national development where the territorial, constitutional state formed the basis of political community. Although the celebration of a new Canadian “nation” appealed to a wide breadth of writers, it is worth noting that the most systematic articulation of Canadian nationalism as separate and distinct from the British Empire by Woodstock lawyer William Norris received critical and even antagonistic reaction. Norris’s idea of a nation as a constitutional unit based on the sovereignty of a politically defined group of people may appear relatively unimaginative in the twenty-first century, but in his day it was quite unique. Unlike many of his imperialist contemporaries, Norris became a largely obscure figure after he died, indicating how his insistence that Canada be considered a fully sovereign political nationality was by no means an obvious or particularly popular notion in the late nineteenth century. Canadians later on in the twentieth century would breathe new life into his ideas without ever knowing his name.
While it was easy at the time to criticize Norris as a rather peculiar thinker, it was harder to ignore the fact that the Canadian state assumed a more central place as a reference point in discussions of nationality, constitutionalism, citizenship, and loyalty. Though less direct in their framing of Canadian nationality in independent terms, numerous other writers contributed to a process of transforming Canada from a political jurisdiction created by an imperial statute into a political community. While their exchanges argued for different political solutions, they were ultimately questions of order that sought to make sense of what seemed to be a chaotic and rapidly changing world.
There is no definite date or moment to cap off the end of one generation and the beginning of a new one, but the start of a new century signalled a clear transition. By 1900, many of the prominent names and voices that appeared regularly in Canadian magazines had died or retired, and new names would assume greater prominence on issues related to Canadian identity and its future. The magazine culture that forms the principal analytical corpus for this study had also changed by the turn of the century. New titles like Maclean’s and Weekend (both established in 1905) were aimed more at entertainment than extensive deliberation of current social, political, and philosophical questions.3 In the decades after the turn of the twentieth century, new preoccupations over European imperialism, the devastation of unprecedented warfare, and economic disruption would come to the forefront of daily concern.
To understand Confederation today, we need to avoid the tendency to see it as a stable moment that developed in a linear path of political development over time. This is a difficult task. In its landmark Reference re Secession of Quebec in 1998, for example, the Supreme Court of Canada declared that the British North America Act, 1867 was an “act of nation-building.”4 This viewpoint is not a particularly surprising assumption, given the general tendency to look to the political debates on Confederation and the lives of the particular “Fathers” as principal sources of understanding the development of Canada. The popular sesquicentennial commemorations of Confederation in 2017 appeared to reinforce this view. But as John Sanborn argued in the Canadian Legislative Council debates on Confederation in 1864, “if we desire to have a Constitution which would afford good hope of permanency, it must be planted deep in the affections of the people.”5 He was arguing here for the Confederation arrangement to be “submitted to the country,” a motion that was ultimately denied. What happened instead was a process of retroactive legitimation that has sought to naturalize the British North America Act as the Canadian constitution and the framework and basis of a Canadian nation that organizes categories of citizenship and loyalty.
Beyond the legislative and legal initiatives that formed the basis of the new Canadian state, it is important to consider specific ways in which these concepts become understood and internalized by parts of the population. The development of broader public understandings of Canada in the decades following Confederation was fashioned by aspects of public discourse that consciously sought to imbue the political jurisdiction with particular meanings. It was through a process of gradual conceptual change that a dominant paradigm would emerge that regarded Canada as a distinct nationality based on a constitutional framework and consisting of a community of people united by common citizenship and loyalty. Of course, not everyone accepted this idea, but it became the principal way that English Canadians have tended to understand the meaning of the political jurisdiction created in 1867. In this way, this understanding of Canada has also formed the basis against which others have dissented and constructed alternative visions of political association.
The shaping of political concepts can be a powerful exercise, effectively establishing normative frameworks of identity and drawing lines of exclusion. Indeed, the ideas examined in this study have had a lasting influence on Canadian society and political thought. Constitutionalism, national allegiances, and values of citizenship have been persistent features of debate and controversy. The writers examined here held different political views and had contrasting understandings of Canada’s future. The questions of order that they asked never received final or definite answers, but continued to shape the development of modern Canada throughout the twentieth century as new generations sought to explain what “sort of thing” Canada is and what their relationship to it ought to be. As there has never been a clear or singular answer, it is only in the absence of historical hindsight that claims of fundamental “Canadian” characteristics or enduring values can be made.
Much, of course, has changed over the years, and yet it is the persistence of anxieties, especially concerning evolving scientific and technological innovations, demographic changes, and global geopolitical pressures, that shape so much of the conversation. History brims with anxiety. Every generation has a tendency to designate its position at the culmination of a dramatic narrative of human development. The end, it seems, is never ending, and the sense of a world overturned only energizes new questions of order.