3
Imaginary Options
CONTAINED WITHIN EACH NEGATIVE myth lies an imaginary solution. That it is imaginary is the source of its charm. We caress ourselves with its promise. Sometimes we wrap ourselves in it as if it represented the life we already lead.
For a start, there is our self-eliminating creation myth: that we exist only in reaction to America. This can easily be turned into a positive. Since we are Canadian by negativism, we are positively American. For example, the ‘natural’ north–south flow makes us their greatest trading partner. We know them, they know us, each better than we and they know anyone else. We have, therefore, a special relationship.
And not just Canada as a whole. The Maritimes had, have a special relationship with New England. The old sailing-ship days are evoked. Nationalists in Quebec search back for old trading routes through New York. Bernard Landry talks of how much easier it is to do business south of the border, even though more than 90 per cent of Quebec companies that set up outside of Quebec do so in the rest of Canada. Businessmen in Ontario invoke their close U.S. relations, by which they usually mean they work for American companies. Albertans talk of their unity with the American west against the American and Canadian east. Again, the bedrock of this mythological unity is that a remarkably high percentage of the élites are American employees dependent on the sale of their natural resources for use south of the border. And, of course, British Columbia is California north, beneficiary of an intimate agreement on outlook with Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles. It isn’t clear what this agreement might be. I’ve never heard anyone in those American cities mention it.
But what is a special relationship? The two words imply that each nation or corresponding region is willing to limit its self-interest in order to benefit the other. In other words, a special relationship is a very special friendship. But surely we would all know about these self-limitations on self-interest if they existed.
The reality is that nations rarely alter their self-interested actions for reasons that aren’t related to power—that is, to dominance or dependence. In other words, the great powers don’t have many special relationships. Canada does not have a special relationship with the United States any more than they do with us.
Trading goods with someone is not the basis of leverage let alone friendship. America has no exclusive need of our goods. Most of it they could get elsewhere. And what we have that they do need is bought in good part through companies they own. The real meaning of what we call ‘free trade’ agreements is that we have agreed to surrender any real power over the shape and use of that ownership. In other words, those agreements have little to do with freeing up trade and a great deal to do with removing the mechanisms of the citizens’ power through their governments.
What about holidaying en masse in New England or Florida or California? A holiday is not a relationship. It’s a holiday. The British flood into the south of Spain. Northern Europeans invade the south of France. No one pretends that there is a special relationship at play. One group wants sun, the other sells it.
The Roman Empire did not have special relationships any more than the British or French did. Great powers don’t need them, except in so far as someone challenges them or occupies a space capable of affecting the great power.
For example, the United States has a limited special relationship with Germany, because the Bundesbank decides European monetary policy. And with France, to the extent that France challenges American cultural and military policy in Europe and foreign policy elsewhere. Britain rarely has even the hint of one, because its position vis-à-vis Washington is in general one of dependence. In other words, special relationships are about geopolitics. Between nations they usually take the form of an agreed stand-off or an agreement to act together. There are elements in the Canada–U.S. trade agreements which attempt to accomplish this—the arbitration panels. But Canada’s general dependence is such that Washington simply ignores the results they don’t like. If Canada wanted to have a real relationship with the United States, it would have to succeed at a very different international strategy which would lessen our dependence by developing with other countries long-term counterbalancing coalitions of interests capable of occupying real geopolitical space.
Instead, our attempts at independent action are so spasmodic and scattered that the effect is simply to annoy Washington, rather than to establish a recognizable relationship.
As for the regions, they have no cards to play except those of acquiescence. This is particularly true of the narrow nationalist governments in Quebec, who must build into their theory of independence the acquiescence of Washington. Which means that they must base the reality of any possible independence on their unquestioning acquiescence to Washington.
The Western victimization mythologies convert into assertions of self-creation. For example, British Columbia is its own creation. British Columbians have always had to make a special effort to remember that they are part of Canada.
Even recent histories keep coming back to what the historian Jean Barman calls British Columbia’s ambivalence towards Canada. She quotes another historian, Keith Ralston, writing in 1982—“A settled community grew up on the Pacific coast and in the valleys and plateaus of the Western Cordillera which owed next to nothing to any link with the Canadas, and practically everything to its oceanic ties to the rest of the world.”1
Of course, the region is very different from the others, and why shouldn’t it be? The more different the better. Each citizen and the citizenry as a whole have everything to gain from developing our particularities.
But no, British Columbia did not pop out of an egg. Wherever you drop into its history, the influences in and out are clear. And few of these influences support the contention of a little movement called Cascadia which today seeks to tie Vancouver closer to Seattle and Portland. B.C. did not, as they say, remain “tied economically and culturally to the rest of what was then a San Francisco-focused region”2 after joining Confederation. Nor was that tie clear before they joined.
The colony in those early years did contain a prosperous group of Americans who remained relatively silent on public affairs. Their influence was limited to business. As for the anti-Canadian party of colonials, it was more or less the anti-reform party, in other words, the Western equivalent of the Family Compact and the Château Clique. The pro-Canada party stood for political-social reform and had a long-term economic view. The ‘popped-out-of-an-egg’ school of British Columbia history inevitably reduces joining Canada to an act of bribery. But if the economic advantage lay that way, then it did not lie to the south. So by their own argument the colony was not tied to a San Francisco-focused region. And the steady growth and prosperity of British Columbia proves that argument. Confederation did indeed pay off the debt, cancel road tolls and—thanks entirely to the determination of a French Canadian, Georges-Étienne Cartier—bring the railroad beyond the foothills over the mountains to the sea, thus making Vancouver the entrance and the exit to a continent, instead of just a regional city like Seattle. But Confederation also brought a much wider suffrage—the beginning of the long road to universal suffrage—and free public education. What’s more, Confederation arrived under the impetus of all the interesting voices in the colony: Amor de Cosmos who had come from Nova Scotia, John Robson and Dr. I.W. Powell, both Canadian, and Dr. Robert Carrall from Cariboo. The intellectual and ethical forces in the province—the creative, progressive voices—were pro-Confederation.
The illusion of self-generating isolation turns its back on that very complexity which makes each region uncover its best. Take art as a small example. Emily Carr is the quintessential B.C. painter. For a long time she was more or less ignored at home. How did she become accepted for what she was?
Marius Barbeau, the great French-Canadian ethnologue, used his base at the National Museum in Ottawa to save much of what we know of Quebec folklore and Native folklore. He also had a particular interest in the Tsimshian people in B.C. Through this, he came to know about Emily Carr. Her painting, centred on the essential West Coast traditions—that is, of the Natives—struck few chords in the local white population. They were busy imitating irrelevant English imagery and rejecting any Native role in the land they wished to claim entirely for themselves.
In 1927 Barbeau convinced Eric Brown, at the National Gallery, to mount a show which hung the works of West Coast artists such as Carr along with Native art. To understand how revolutionary an idea this was, you have only to look at the scandal unleashed in the art world when in 1984 the Museum of Modern Art in New York hung a show demonstrating the links between “Primitivism” and twentieth-century painting, highlighting figures such as Picasso and Braque. Interestingly enough, the very idea of hanging art and artefacts together, suggesting an inclusive, animist approach towards art, may be a Canadian invention. In a sense this is a demonstration of our long-standing acceptance that place and humans are part of a continuing whole; as opposed to the rational view that humans must humble nature in order to reconstruct it in their own image. On November 9, 1848, Paul Kane opened “one of the first public one-man shows held in Canada” in the old City Hall, which still exists as part of the St. Lawrence Market in Toronto. He hung 240 oil and water-colour sketches along with the Native artefacts collected on his two-and-a-half-year trip across the continent.3
The 1927 Ottawa show was the turning point in Carr’s career. On that trip, she met the Group of Seven, as recorded in her diary: “I wonder if these men feel as I do, that there is a common chord struck between us. . . . Oh, God, what have I seen? Where have I been? Something has spoken to the very soul of me, wonderful, mighty, not of this world. Chords way down in my being have been touched. Dumb notes have struck chords of wonderful tone. Something has called out of somewhere. Something in one is trying to answer.”4
Of the seven, Lawren Harris in particular became her friend and supporter. In many ways he was the most exciting of the Group. He was also pure Ontario, of the tractor fortune. Over the years he kept encouraging her and buying her pictures. It wasn’t until 1938 that Vancouver accepted her. In 1940, Harris settled in Vancouver where he became an artistic focal point. He played a role in the lives of many young artists, directly or indirectly. One was Arthur Erickson, whose genius would affect architecture across Canada.
Years later, a French-Canadian prime minister, an admirer of Erickson’s work, would ensure that he built the Canadian embassy in Washington. In the courtyard of that embassy there is a massive carving by the Haida Bill Reid. These two remarkable objects—the building and the sculpture—are among the most important images of Canada abroad.
It was in good part Barbeau and Carr, and indirectly Harris, who brought the West Coast Native images into the Canadian imagination until they became central to the way Canadians saw themselves. And Erickson has had a key role in crystallizing this effect. What he concluded with the union of architecture and Haida sculpture in Washington, he had begun with his anthropological museum in Vancouver. Perhaps the final key event came from that same French-Canadian prime minister via Douglas Cardinal, the Métis architect from Manitoba, who built the Museum of Civilization in Hull. Its Great Hall, which is the West Coast personified, has become one of the dominant and official images of the national capital.
All that this little dithyramb illustrates is how British Columbia’s real mythology—its images, its buildings, its traditions, its sensibility—is caught up in a complex web with French Canadians, Prairie Métis, Torontonians and Ottawa civil servants. And this is only one example among thousands, even in the same domain of art. The role that Vancouver now plays in the careers of key contemporary painters, such as the Maritimer Mary Pratt and Attila Lukacs from Alberta, is a continuation of this web.
Sometimes the imaginary solution is tied even more firmly to the denial of context. For example, as our southern cities, in particular Toronto, have grown larger, so an urban mythology has developed which sees them as northern representatives of more southerly city-states. Thus Toronto and Montreal are somehow extensions or reflections of New York and Paris. This is the ‘world-class’ syndrome, the school of the aggressive inferiority complex. The only way in which this illusion can be made to work is if these cities are seen as their own reason for existence—self-defining, self-creating, self-justifying—cut off from the rest of their province.
This is a point of view which cuts across political and social lines. It cannot see what lies to the north as of any great relevance. Some will see it as vacation land. But the actual role of a city in a large territory and its relationship to this hinterland is lost in the desire to be New York North. That so little of the population lives outside of the cities somehow seems to discount the 95 per cent of the territory which does lie to the east and the west and the north. The desire to pretend that cities are free-standing city-states leads many within them to discount the role of nature in the mythology of the country as somehow outdated. Now that we’ve grown up, they seem to be saying, we can discard the relevance of our backyard.
This is one of the central urban Canadian imaginary solutions—that ours is not a northern country and that what comes with northernness is to be demeaned and disliked. The language surrounding winter, for example, has moved in the last quarter-century from one of acceptance, even pleasure, to one largely of dislike and suffering. The stock urban phrases greeting the arrival of snow are now negative. This can be seen as a frivolous delusion, but if your language refuses your physical reality, then your problems are serious.
Let me use an even more practical illustration. Public places in Scandinavia are equipped with enormous coat- and boot-check facilities. People can get in and out of theatres in seconds. In Canada there are sometimes no facilities at all. Often what there are, are closed. At best there is a modest infrastructure, as if we lived in some temperate climate where it rains from time to time. Vancouver aside, this is a curious form of self-denial. People are constantly stuffing large winter coats under seats or sitting with them over their knees for hours; anything to avoid the long coat-check queues.
If you take this minor sign of a temperate delusion and apply it to the essential infrastructure questions of the enormous territories lying to the north of our southern cities, you begin to understand why those in North Bay or Chicoutimi or Prince George so often feel hard done by.
Denial of context is one of the ways we try to compensate for a very real sense of alienation. On the prairies, for example, there is a tendency to assert that the present is the sum total of reality. Thus society is both what you see and what you experience in a direct way—it is reduced to the actual.
Actually that is hardly a description of a society, let alone of a civilization. If anything, this is a self-demeaning way to deny that you are part of a civilization—of any civilization.
A society is the totality of its experiences—seen, unseen, actual and remembered. To deny that is to step into the old European model of imposed mythologies.
The prairies are not a place recently opened up by a variety of European farmer/rancher settlers, some of whom then moved into resource exploitation. This view arbitrarily sets the parameters of the society at the arrival of my great-grandparents from Ontario, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century in Winnipeg, along with tens of thousands of others from Canada and the outside world, who then spread out across thousands of miles of plain. This arbitrarily truncates memory, experience, responsibility and imagination. What remains is a perpetually new, artificial idea of the society.
Yes, a certain aspect of prairie life is new to the place—the copy-cat European society. But the prairies are far more interesting than that, far more integrated into a long historic process. The fixing of self-invention in the late-nineteenth century is, of course, primarily aimed at denying relevance to the roles of Natives, French Canadians and Métis.
However hard those who win power try to eliminate the memory of those from whom they took it, the nature of a civilization remains tied inescapably to the effect of one era on another. Thus the French explorers were led through the West by the Natives, for whom this was home, a known place, a place in which they had found out how to live over centuries. The French were followed by the English. All of these explorations were simply adjustments of Native knowledge to serve European knowledge; a different view of need. The whole process was dependent on the concrete debt of the Europeans to the Natives.
Over the next two centuries a society developed based on the fur trade and on a further contract—both social and economic—between Europeans and Natives. The long-term role of this society, from the 1640s to the 1830s, has been eloquently described by the historian Gerald Friesen,5 to say nothing of Harold Innis, perhaps Canada’s greatest thinker. The West was ‘opened up’ over these two long centuries. The East–West movement of the country was settled in place. The essentially pacific relationship between the aboriginal and European civilizations was established. It’s worth remembering that Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de la Vérendrye, the man who solidified this process, was not merely some European explorer, but a Canadian born and bred. Between 1730 and 1749 he created a series of Native–French alliances. Alliances. These remain central parts of the treaty fabric and the political structure which define the shape and nature of Canada to this day. Note that his alliance with the Cree-Assiniboine-Ojibwa against the Dakota to the south was a key step in determining the East–West movement and in narrowing down where the as-yet-unimagined Canadian border would fall.
As Friesen points out, La Vérendrye’s Native treaties brought “. . . relative peace in the western interior for most of the eighteenth century.”6 As for the nineteenth, it was a time when all of those patterns were further accentuated. If the Hudson’s Bay Company was the dominant legal player, the Métis were the dominant society. The francophone and anglophone Métis population made up the vast majority of the total population. But more importantly, they represented the melding of the groups who had dominated Western society for two centuries. And their society was a further adjustment of how a civilization could function on the prairies—a true marriage of the Native and the European.
The result was a further solidification of the shape of the territory. The Battle of Grand Coteau in 1851, during which the Métis from the Red River Valley defeated the Sioux from further south for control of key buffalo hunting grounds, was a central event in this process—one of the defining Canadian battles and victories, without even the presence of any European apparatus. The Métis were defending a northern prairie society which would eventually evolve into Canada.
Indeed the Métis were, as W.L. Morton pointed out, the “one distinctly Western group of people.”7 In fact they were and are the living illustration of the triangular foundations of Canada: Native-francophone-anglophone. They dominated, settled, farmed and defended much of the prairies for close to a century. Their leaders are the great names of the West—Gabriel Dumont, Cuthbert Grant and, of course, Louis Riel.
The final stage in the formalization of the West was purely Canadian. As Morton put it, “the institutions of the Prairie West were Canadian institutions and . . . the people who worked those institutions and determined the political development of the West were in the overwhelming majority of Canadian birth and ancestry. . . .”8 What’s more, this continuity was there to be found in the active bilingual administration of the province until 1890—the administrative laws which still stand.
It was into this land, shaped by 250 years of treaties, battles, economic activity, cultural compromise and social habit, that my great-grandparents and a flood of others arrived in the latter part of the nineteenth century, very late in the day. Their way had been prepared by what can only be described as the reality of our civilization.
They spent the next quarter-century taking power and attempting to wipe away any memory of all that came before. Theirs was to be the creation myth. This is not to say that busting sod and living in huts and losing crops and fighting prairie fires and building cities and all the rest of that late-nineteenth-, early-twentieth-century experience was not a great adventure.
But, by trying to erase the past as a central factor in their own society, these newcomers condemned themselves to the victim mythology. To deny reality is to formalize marginality. Winning power does not authorize the elimination of context. To the extent that they rejected 250 years of reality, just because their particular group hadn’t been present, so they rejected the reality of their own past as Westerners. They reduced their civilization precisely to the bias of inferiority proper to a group recently arrived and dependent on central Canada.
A well-balanced society is produced by each wave of dominant forces assuming the full implications of the past. In practical terms this may appear to require practical generosity towards the losers. But it isn’t generosity. It is the assumption of the full social contract of the society by those with the power to shape it. In Western terms, this begins with language rights, Métis rights and Native rights. If this isn’t done, the victors will have locked themselves into a self-destructive conundrum of power and victimology.
Another imaginary solution to our negative myths requires a simple change which will transform everything. Such a change usually has profoundly religious properties. It is a lay version of the miraculous event or of the victory of the just or is some combination of both. These miraculous alterations will automatically simplify our lives by eliminating the need to consider anything else as real.
For example, there is the constant cry from Ottawa circles for a strong central government or a strong united Canada. What could this mean? Canada has never had a strong central government in any sense that could be understood by any other nation-state. During the two world wars more power did flow to the centre and Ottawa did overstep its constitutional boundaries. But even so, the mixing of these two phrases—a strong central government and a strong united Canada—has always suggested the possibility of an essentially unitary state. Not only that, by insisting on this fictitious possibility, the eager centralists have simply handed ammunition to the Parti Québécois, which can thus claim that it is fighting against a powerful or potentially all-powerful central government.
Who wrote these words for Lucien Bouchard during the referendum campaign?:
A No means that Jean Chrétien can say to us, I want absolute power over what happens in Quebec from now on, I want to be master of Quebec’s future, I want you to hand over to me the French language, the culture of Quebec, I want you to hand over employment, I want you to hand over all the policies which shape the identity of Quebec. It is I, Jean Chrétien, who from now on will decide for you. . . . We will be alone, disarmed, dispersed, divided, weakened . . . 9
It would be easy to point out that this is drivel; that the laws and the constitution render it fabulation; that it is pure fear-mongering; or that, charitably, in the heat of a campaign many things are said on all sides. But the important point is that the real authors of this paragraph—those who handed the ammunition to Mr. Bouchard so that his words would appear to convey some reality—are the strategists in Ottawa who constantly evoke the possibility of a strong central government.
What makes their fabulation even more contemptible is that, for twelve years now, the Mulroney and Chrétien governments, while constantly evoking central power and national standards, have been busy dismantling what central power there was and cannibalizing the few national standards that existed. The result is that a powerful government, such as that in Quebec City, can still claim it is powerless before Ottawa.
This is a double game of bravado in which the citizens are treated by both sides as idiots. Ottawa and Quebec City are incapable of admitting in public that an equilibrium does exist, even if both sides find the equilibrium inadequate or unfair. That, behind the scenes, a real discussion over continuing adjustment in that equilibrium goes on every day is not the point. What matters is the use of the public, through fear-mongering, in order to influence these back-room negotiations. It is in this context that the 1996 program initiated by Heritage Minister Sheila Copps, to spend millions on distributing flags, can be understood. Once you have removed all content from the public debate and reduced it to the mythology of promise, as illustrated by catch phrases, well, there isn’t much room for debate. Waving flags becomes the sentence structure of mythological promise.
Not that flags don’t have a certain role in society. They have always existed as rallying points in battles or marks of belonging to a community. Or, indeed, they are part of the pleasant expression of nationalism. But when they are used to replace reality, in place of ideas and purpose, to marshal unleashed emotions, then you know you are on the dangerous ground of deformed mythology, mystification and negative nationalism.
A few other phrases, in this case used by the PQ leadership, will illustrate the quasi-religious nature of these sorts of solutions. It was said repeatedly that a Yes vote would end the squabbling, bickering, petty quarrelling. A Yes would be la fin des chicanes. What’s more, Quebecers would decide their future on their own. And ‘English Canada’ would be obliged to accept whatever they decided.
These are three interesting assertions. Pas de chicane dans ma cabane is the old phrase. ‘No squabbling in my house.’ This is the classic mother’s order to fighting children. Go and play outside. It was a theme Lucien Bouchard and Jacques Parizeau came back to repeatedly in the twenty-six referendum speeches and press conferences I read.
Mr. Bouchard: “As for me, what I want is that we stop squabbling among ourselves. I want the petty quarrelling to stop.” He worries that his son thinks “politics is quarrelling.” That federalism is “bickering over power.” “We have lost ourselves in constitutional bickering.” “But why do we quarrel? Why? Because we are in a situation made for constant bickering.”
The solution is to break up Canada.
That won’t be done with bickering. Precisely because the aim of sovereignty is to bring the quarrelling to an end.” “We will have solidarity on the aims, we’ll all aim in the same direction, there will be no more bickering with those people in Ottawa . . . No, it’s going to be just us—nous autres—making our decisions. That’s beautiful isn’t it?”10
Well, actually, what is suggested here is not beautiful. What he is doing is taking an old phrase about family bickering and applying it to the political process. But politics is about debate—about discussing differences; looking for compromises. The false-populists have always hated this process. Mike Harris hates it, just as the Italian politicians Gianfranco Fini and Silvio Berlusconi do. Just as the American neo-conservatives do. They promise, as the 1930s’ corporatists promised, that they will bring public matters back to the intimacy of family and everyone will be in agreement on the aims and the directions. At the heart of their argument is disdain for the essential democratic function of citizens and their representatives caught up in endless debate. They say this is childish, a waste of our time.
La fin des chicanes has been, from its beginnings in the nineteenth century, one of the great anti-democratic themes of the corporatist movement. It reduces the citizenry to a limited role in deciding on how best they can be in solidarity. The state-initiated referendum has always been part of this logic. Stop the talk, we’re going to decide, yes or no. At that point the citizen’s role is to wave one flag or the other and cheer for one side of the simple question or the other. In other words, we are reduced to children. As for the serious matters of state, they will be decided by the representative interest groups around various tables. In this atmosphere, where each group knows what the interests of the other groups are, the emphasis can be kept on a type of solidarity which could best be described as smooth functioning. In that sense there is almost no difference between Mr. Harris’s politics and Mr. Bouchard’s.
But democracy isn’t a simile for solidarity. It requires, above all, having enough confidence to enter into long debates and negotiations filled with disagreements and disinterest.
What about the second phrase—Quebecers will decide on their own? It’s a pretty idea. But no one decides anything on their own. Not if they live in a society. They live beside individuals, groups with whom they have long-standing relationships. Just as democracy is based on debate, so societies are based on the reality of all the people involved. You do not decide on your own because the person next to you is as real as you are and has as many emotions, ethics, children and needs, both spiritual and practical, as you do. When a society acts as a society, most matters are decided with as much care as possible for all the people concerned; which requires the involvement of those people.
That is why it is so difficult to make changes in the fundamental organization of societies. Because if it is done arbitrarily, the reverberations become uncontrollable and they reverberate on through history, often becoming worse and worse over the years, until some extreme event burns out the process and leaves a sort of dark, still water from which rebirth is sometimes possible. That is the meaning of the long-lived bitterness to be found on borders and between communities in Europe. Nothing is done alone. If it is, it is the beginning of an unpredictable, unfathomable series of events.
At some level—conscious or unconscious—both parties were perfectly aware of this during the 1995 referendum debate. And that explains the use of the third phrase: that ‘English Canada’ would have no choice but to accept whatever the other party decided. The national government’s position that it would not negotiate in the case of a Yes victory was met by Mr. Bouchard’s assertion that the Quebec government would force the Canadian government to negotiate: “The beauty of the situation is that we won’t have to convince anyone, they will be forced to negotiate.” “But, if they agree to a partenariat with us, it will be because they have been forced to do it. Because we will force them. . . .”11
Of course, neither side really means exactly what they say. But the rhetoric does mean something; above all that a Yes vote would be the end of debate and the beginning of les chicanes. That, after all, is one of the results of unleashing the uncontrollable reverberations which I described a moment ago.
What makes these phrases possible—the end of bickering, we’ll decide on our own, they’ll have to accept what we decide—is the reduction of the other person to merely the other. Categorization, typology. The English Canadian. English Canada. “Nous autres,” in Mr. Bouchard’s words, versus eux. Us against them.
Again and again during the referendum the complexity of Canada was reduced to this two-camp formula. Those outside Quebec were le Canada anglais. More often than not they were described as right-wing. To vote Yes was “to erect a dike which will protect us, in Quebec, from this invasion of the temptation of the right.”12 In a surprising return to the rhetoric of the Franco-German century of hatred and war, the phrase “l’autre côté de la rivière”—the other side of the river—was used repeatedly to describe where ‘English Canada’ lay. That Quebec is in the centre of Canada, not on one side of it, isn’t the point. Nor that the Ottawa River is not the much-battled-over Rhine. Nor is it that one of Mr. Bouchard’s first acts on taking power was to agree to the sort of anti-debt law which lies at the core of the American neo-conservative ideology being enacted by Mr. Harris.
What matters in such a situation is the reduction of the fellow citizen or even neighbour to an unknown other, across the river, fundamentally different from “nous autres.” This facilitates the reduction of complex and interesting questions, containing real demands and grievances on both sides, to emotion and a Yes versus a No.
In all of this, the approach is very much like that of Mr. Harris, for whom those who disagree are automatically marginal to Ontario reality. They are rival interest groups, not citizens who disagree. And the corporatist idea of minimal debate and maximum action means interpreting a general election victory as if it were a referendum blank cheque. Changes are made rapidly in great multifaceted sweeps, making sensible debate impossible. Are you for or against? The citizen is again reduced to the emotive monosyllabic Yes versus No.
It wasn’t until a few days before the 1995 referendum vote that Mr. Bouchard softened his vocabulary—as if realizing the implications of his rhetoric, should the Yes side win—and dropped into one speech a few sentences about “the neighbour with whom we have always lived.”13
Again, my purpose here is not to accuse one person or another. The problem lies in our false expectations from mythology or rather our slippage into easy mystifications. This affects all of us, whatever our politics.
Take a minor comic example. In the spring of 1996, the stage and film genius Robert Lepage told a Swedish newspaper that English Canadians were the moneymakers, while French Canadians were the makers of culture. Perhaps he was thinking of himself versus the gold magnate Peter Munk. On the other hand, Laurent Beaudoin, the central force behind Bombardier, the most impressive industrial undertaking in Canada, is unlikely to agree. Nor would millions of people around the world who read Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood. For that matter, Robert Lepage himself wouldn’t agree, since his first large public was in anglophone Canada. And it is there that he has found many key supporters for his work.
It was probably just one of those phrases thrown off by citizens struggling to deal with what others don’t understand about who they are. In that sense we do miss the easy dominant mythologies which most countries have and to which people can pay lip service with an occasional nod in that direction. We are vaguely embarrassed by our lack of a facile discourse.
That our situation is unusual causes us to miss the role these myths usually play elsewhere. They are largely a steam-release device in societies with profound, real divisions. Put another way, they are face-saving mechanisms. America, for example, continues its fundamental battles over social organization, race, the nature of justice and fairness. Indeed the country is built upon the need for successive victories by one internal group over another—the colonist over the Native, the republican over the loyalist, the north over the south. In Britain and France great schisms of class and race lurk just beneath the surface, to say nothing of regional humiliations. Remarkable mythological unity deals with much of this tension.
Canada, on the other hand, suffers from an almost anarchic surface—a cacophony of mythologies, positive and negative, contradictory and often ridiculous. And this does make it difficult to express in a useful way those problems of maladjustment which do exist. After all, “the initial bias of prairie politics was the fact of political subordination in Confederation,” as W.L. Morton put it.14 And the difficulty of being a francophone in Canada and in North America is very real. The population numbers are real; as is the dominant sound of English on the continent. To be a francophone is to make an effort every day.
Few of these problems and others like them are now tied to concrete political structures. Most political structures are capable of change, for better and worse. The Canadian has more parts to it than most and so is capable of constant mutation. It’s just that the myths and the public discourse seem to be immobile. As a result, they rarely relate to the reality of concrete changes. More than anything else these problems are tied to how we imagine ourselves. The playwright René-Daniel Dubois has put it in a way which could be applied to any group or area in the country: “What do you know about the pain of those who live among us? Because you cannot formulate it, you scorn it? You don’t have the right to denigrate like that, without understanding the pain of a people who die in silence.”15
Again, this silence is not the product of the cacophony of myths and is only in small part due to political structures. Above all, it is an expression of our psychological state.
In a curious way this is worsened, not eased, by the fact that beneath the disordered mythological surface there is relative agreement on the most important questions of society, race, justice, fairness and even language. That is why those who seek to create disagreement over things which matter, or who have no concept of a social contract, insist so on the importance of superficial deformed mythologies. This is as true of those who vaunt a common-sense revolution as of those obsessed by flag campaigns or by reducing societal relationships to “nous autres” versus those on the other side of the river.