7

Ideas over Facts

“The facts are too overwhelming to be denied or even struggled against—except by something stronger than a fact: an idea!”1

ANDRÉ LAURENDEAU RECORDED with approval this piece of testimony heard in Winnipeg. It was 1964 and he was travelling the country as co-chair of the Bilingualism and Biculturalism Commission. The fact in question was the proximity of the United States and all that that implied, given the standard geopolitical interpretations of a country’s ‘situation.’ But the sentence might just as accurately have referred to the absence of a dominant, monolithic culture in Canada or to the astonishing and—in the conventional, factual sense—impossible geography of the country. For that matter, it might have referred to any number of the characteristics of the Canadian condition.

Laurendeau’s acceptance, that an idea could in practical terms be stronger than facts, is not an expression of sentiment or emotion or dreaming or even of an aspiration. All of these imponderables do exist in each of us and, providing they don’t dominate our actions, are necessary, even positive elements. But an idea is quite another matter. It is something solid; far more solid than the squalid little herds of facts so often marshalled to justify what is presented as the inevitable.

Canada either is an idea or does not exist. It either is an intellectual undertaking or it is little more than a resource-rich vacuum lying in the buffer zone just to the north of the great empire. And despite protestations to the contrary, that vacuum would be as vacuous in British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec as in the Maritimes or Ontario.

At each stage in our political development the idea has been clear, even if only in a nascent form. The union of francophone and anglophone reformers in 1841 was not a mere political manoeuvre. And none of them saw it as such. Even the opponents opposed precisely because it did represent an idea of how to organize social relationships—that is, it represented an idea of a society. It was an original, inclusive and long-term idea imagined by men who could think well beyond the fractious daily dramas of two small and backward colonies. The same could be said for some of the breakthroughs in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.

The practical ideas surrounding public education, property ownership, a widely based franchise, a multilingual, multi-denominational society were unprecedented in the west. The idea of creating a nation as a mechanism for reform, as opposed to a military or economic or tribal reason, was even more original. In a sense, these nineteenth-century activists were inventing what many other countries wouldn’t arrive at until halfway through the twentieth century—a middle-class society in which social democracy would mix public and private forces. This was unrelated to the negative idea of the ‘bourgeois’ society which the Europeans were then struggling with.

I say unprecedented, in spite of the great enfolding myth of originality which floats, as it always has, up from the south. Remarkable though the American ideal was and is, it was, as I have said, not so much original as the logical continuation of the European experiment. As such it continued the assumptions of a class-based society. The American leap from thirteen colonies to a new European idea of the nation was remarkable and yet predictable. The concept of the Lower and Upper Canadian reformers in 1841 was a leap into the imagination.

No one had attempted such a thing elsewhere. It was neither predictable nor inevitable. It was a new idea about social relationships and—looking at the American and European nations as they struggle today to adapt to their suddenly more complex societies—it was an astonishingly modern idea.

We tend to miss the dimensions of this originality because of the close relationship in Canada between theory and practice. Throughout the west we are used to ideas being presented as great abstractions filled with the promise of a perfectible future world. In other words, we are used to ideals being presented as if they were ideas—which is like ideologies being presented as if they were ideas. For example, the American ideal—from its very beginning—contained, indeed survived upon, slavery. Yet this didn’t seem to matter. The ideal was untouched. After all, in political philosophy an idea is often presented as a promise for the future. It then dons a great mythological robe which embraces that future, while unconscionable acts are done under its folds.

The Lower and Upper Canadian reformers lived in such marginal societies that there was little temptation—let alone possibility—to go down that grandiose route. Ideas might be original and designed to evolve over the long term, but they were to be applied immediately or they could not exist.

Those in search of purer intellectual excitement might gaze enviously at larger societies where wonderful ideals could be presented as ideas, however undermined they might be by reality. From their point of view the Canadian experiment wasn’t even an idea. It was merely a matter of practicalities. Indeed, if you gaze through the close-up focus of the cynic, every action can be interpreted as low-level political manoeuvring.

But draw back and examine the shape of these practicalities. Compare them with the concrete conventions accepted elsewhere. You quickly see the ideas. What’s more, you see their originality.

In 1867 the reformers managed to step away from what were by then relatively sophisticated party strait-jackets, in order to think about the larger interest. When you read the lengthy interventions of Cartier and Macdonald, it is clear that their idea of the public good was a continuation of the reform coalition of 1841.

Curiously enough, Confederation has been described by various political groups as a small c conservative project. The opponents—Antoine-Aimé Dorion, Joseph Howe and others—of course had their arguments, some of them perfectly valid. But for the most part theirs was the static, fearful position. None of the key players—not Cartier, Macdonald, Brown, McGee or Tupper—were small c conservatives. They all had an original and long-term idea of their undertaking. They were closely linked to ideas of social equality. Just as Baldwin had taken steps towards universal public education and LaFontaine had fought against those Seigneurial Rights which Papineau supported, so Tupper and Cartier were closely tied to the drive for universal public education. Cartier’s distrust and dislike of the church’s rising power led him to take a series of initiatives in the direction of government-led and government-inspired education. These were eventually swept away by the Ultramontane grip on politics and nationalism.

Invariably the sign that we are drifting into trouble is that we abandon the concept of a country of rather unusual ideas and embrace instead the facts of power. Suddenly everything is seen through the myopic eye of the simpleton’s realpolitik. That was what happened in 1914–18, and indeed that has been happening with ever greater speed for the last decade. The failure of élites is important in any country. It is particularly important in a country which has been built upon the development of non-conforming ideas in marginal geography with a small population.

What we have experienced over the last decade has been a rush to conformity among our élites. As they have embraced the rise of corporatism in the west, so they have accepted the simultaneous revival of the rather inane absolutes of nineteenth-century economic theory. These theories of trade, globalization and so on are claimed to be fact-based. The result has been a false conformity to a false universal reality.

“Where was the spirit broken,” one of Monique Proulx’s characters asks, “at what precise instant did her life swerve towards the disaster of banality?”2 Laurendeau ruminated on “the need for conformity” which Canadians, like everyone else, feel. But it is precisely because Canada is an experiment that it can only develop by rewarding non-conformity.

And one of the central non-conforming ideas of Canada is that its principal creative decisions have not been driven by economics. Neither 1841 nor 1867 was an economic scenario. Both led to economic difficulties. In fact, they involved backs being turned on economic imperatives in order to concentrate on political, community and social imperatives. That economic plans were subsequently put in place was hardly surprising. But neither those plans nor the expectation of them drove the agenda. The same was true of Laurier refusing the Empire Pact. After all, the received wisdom of the day—to which the other dominions and colonies tended to subscribe—was that the empire route was the road of prosperity. And the gradual creation of social programming from Mackenzie King on constantly came in the face of opposing market-place arguments.

Economics was always perceived as a tool of society; something to be conceived in light of society’s choices about itself. With the arrival of Brian Mulroney this delicate balance was reversed and we slipped into following empire trends. The provinces—Ontario and Quebec in particular—have accepted this reversal. They have even played a role in pushing Canada down the conventional route.

In the process of embracing these absolutes we have forgotten the originality of our experiment. “The middle road is the only one that does not lead to Rome,” Arnold Schönberg said. But our élites are in a conforming mind-set and they dream of Rome along with dozens of other similar élites elsewhere. The middle way is the most difficult. It requires the constant use of the mind, the expending of energy to not do as the facts dictate.

The burden of originality doesn’t lessen with time. No doubt Canadians, and in particular their élites, feel the burden of holding themselves apart in order to deal with a different idea of what a country can be. And so they have slunk into the universal mould. Even so, whatever short-term comforts conformity brings, there is nothing to be gained by dressing in other people’s clothes.