9

Poverty

“Thou barren waste; unprofitable strand,

Where hemlocks brood on unproductive land. . . . ”

Standish O’Grady, The Emigrant—Winter in Lower Canada

IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE twentieth century, Canada managed to produce a social equilibrium which, whatever its flaws, has been admired as remarkably successful. As the century wore on, so this equilibrium began to come apart, as in other western countries. The reigning orthodoxy has it that our loss of prosperity is the result of interfering with natural economic forces. Therefore the solution to the problem is to let free those natural forces.

What this misses is that social equilibrium and economic prosperity are not actually the same thing. In the case of Canada, the latter has been very much the product of the former—that is, economic prosperity grew out of social equilibrium. Why? In large part because Canada is essentially a poor country. Yes, it has some good farmland and lots of natural resources. But the exploitation of natural resources does not tend to produce a stable, balanced economy. To the contrary. Commodity markets were and are subject to incessant devastating swings. This sort of economy almost invariably produces an extreme social divide between a few rich and many poor. As for land, our climate severely limits its value. Of course, there is more to our economy than natural resources and agriculture. However, for industrial activity and the new high-tech industries, Canada is geographically on the edge of the developed nations and lacks a critical density of population, both characteristics necessary for industrial success. The question of density is even central to the high-tech field, which needs a large, educated population to generate research and development and to consume the products.

That Canada managed to turn its unfavourable circumstances into a positive situation—one of the most prosperous of societies—was dependent on its ability to recognize and come to terms with the essential poverty of this place. Such poverty, combined with the energy of the refugee population and the absence of effective élites capable of enforcing a subservient social order, produced an early egalitarianism. Most people were rural and had land. That meant most men had the vote from very early in the nineteenth century. So the roots of practising democracy are deeper here than in most of the western nations. What’s more, the simple feat of survival in this difficult northern place meant favouring cooperation over competition. I’m not simply referring to the old barn-building bee. What was needed was far more than cooperation for a few decades, just long enough to turn the frontier into a settled area. Canada exists in a permanent state of marginality which from the beginning was as true of the cities as of the countryside.

This early egalitarianism, marked by an individualism which was understood to mean cooperate or perish, was the key to turning Canada from a place of poverty into one of reasonable social equilibrium; or at least one in search of a reasonable social equilibrium. Those are the roots of the astonishing levels of government involvement in the economy every step of the way, from the early land settlements and railway building on. The Red Toryism which George Grant wrote of grew not out of English conservatism, but of Canadian poverty.

In his “Address to the Electors of Terrebonne,” LaFontaine argued in favour of the Lower Canada/Upper Canada coalition of reformers in the name of that egalitarianism.

The only way in which [the authorities] can prevent us from succeeding is by destroying the social equality which is the distinctive characteristic as much of the population of Upper Canada as of Lower Canada. This social equality must necessarily bring our political liberty. . . . No privileged caste can exist in Canada beyond and above the mass of its inhabitants.1

It would be decades before the political leadership found ways of making this egalitarian poverty work. The levels of hardship should never be underestimated. Jean-Baptiste Meilleur, the first superintendent of Lower Canada education, “underline[d] with insistence the poverty of the people”2 in his 1843 report to the government. The statistics on immigration versus emigration show that from 1861 to 1901 Canada was losing more than it was gaining—often close to twice as much. And until 1941 there was still a heavy emigration. It could be said that those who stayed were, at least in part, those ready to come to terms with the situation.³

This question of systemic poverty always makes me think of the explorer David Thompson, halfway up the Black River with two Native companions. In a comedy of errors their canoe overturned and everything was lost in a waterfall, except for the canoe itself, an axe, a gun and a small tent. They were dressed in a single layer of light clothing and it was the early black-fly season. “We had no time to lose . . . we divided the small tent into three pieces to wrap round ourselves, as a defence against the flies in the day and something to keep us from the cold at night.”

The most obvious tent to be spread around in Canada was education—public universal education. It began in Prince Edward Island in 1852, when the first solid reform government passed the Free Education Act. This seems to have been a conscious attempt to give leasehold farmers the ability to deal with the owners. Nova Scotia had been working in the same direction and Charles Tupper eventually led the way. Lower and Upper Canada, as so often, were engaged in similar struggles. Politicians like LaFontaine and Cartier, with the support of superintendents of education like Meilleur and Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau, fought against the Ultramontane movement, while politicians like Baldwin, with the support of Egerton Ryerson, fought against Bishop Strachan and the Anglican desire for an élite-based education. That Ryerson won while Meilleur and Chauveau were defeated would slow French Canada’s ability to deal with systemic poverty.

It’s worth taking note in passing of the Trinity yell—Trinity being the Anglican college founded in Toronto by Bishop Strachan as a last intervention when his view of education had been rejected by Upper Canada:

We are the salt of the earth

So give ear to us

No new ideas shall ever come near to us

Orthodox, Catholic, crammed with divinity

Damn the Dissenters

Hurray for old Trinity.

As the actual history of the college shows, Strachan’s attitudes failed to take hold even in his own college and the cry remains only as something resembling an ironic football chant in a college known for intellectual questioning.

It’s also worth noting that Tupper, like Ryerson, like Meilleur, sought out the elements relevant to their systems not in England, where the class system dominated education, and not in France, where the church still dominated, but in places like Prussia, Holland, Scotland, Switzerland, Massachusetts and New York. There the ideas of universal education had made the greatest progress. This was long before the American systems would decline back into the English model of unbridled opportunity, with money and influence giving itself the best schools by creating a large private sector, leaving the underfunded public schools for everyone else.

Throughout the Canadian colonies the principal opposition to free universal education came from the élites who would have to finance it through taxes. They portrayed it as everything from authoritarian (i.e., Prussian) to communistic. Emily Carr wrote of how English settlers in Victoria took a generation and a half to stop sending their children to private schools and accept the Canadian public schools.4

The success of the public system could be seen at the turn of the century. Out of a population of five million, one million were in school. Only seven thousand were in university. Eighty-three per cent of the population could read and write. In Toronto alone, there were 150 publications.5 The Canadian answer to systemic poverty was constructed first and foremost on a successful public education system.

This was bolstered by continual government intervention in the economy at all levels. We tend now to run all western mixed economies together as if they have been part of exactly the same process for the last 150 years. But government intervention in Canada became a core policy in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, when most other western nations were still caught up in the dream of the self-regulating market-place, competition, the invisible hand, free trade and other dreams of the early to mid-industrial revolution. Canada couldn’t afford such romanticism.

The third element in the Canadian answer was the redistribution of wealth. By the turn of the century this had already moved beyond the traditional liberal and social-democratic ideas—of redistribution among individuals—to that of regional redistribution. Prairie protestors were calling for “nation-wide calculations of income” and “nation-wide redistribution of wealth.”⁶ It was an idea which was eventually formalized as Transfer Payments, a remarkably original approach towards governing a federal state in which some regions were richer, others poorer. It was becoming clear to those thinking about the public good and struggling to serve it that, left to its own devices, particularly in a resource-based economy, the market-place would tend to accentuate rather than minimize these differences.

These three elements—public education, government intervention in both social and economic structures, and transfer payments—allowed us to build prosperity on the foundations of systemic poverty. A number of other countries existing on the margins—the Scandinavians are the most common example—went down not dissimilar routes. And it was on the basis of the social equilibrium created by these policies that the business sector was able to blossom.

This is the principal difficulty which Canada has with the sweeping absolute economic truths we have imported and accepted over the last decade. In order for market forces to be accepted as the great leader, all physical realities must be taken to be the same. The only variables relate to becoming competitive and specialized. But this is an astonishingly abstract theory. In fact, delusion would be a better word than theory. All physical realities are not the same, nor can they respond to circumstances in the same way. The new truth tries to obscure this stubborn reality by assigning blame to those who can’t keep up. Indeed, the whole theory of a single economic model for all circumstances isn’t even good capitalist theory. It is essentially a derivative of very old-fashioned turn-of-the-century management methodology in which content is treated as interchangeable filler for the ideal management form.

The history of Canada bears no relationship to these economic theories. Of course there are always moments when belts must be tightened or when some economic factor such as debt must be concentrated on. But these are the details of ongoing management. They aren’t meant to be the driving force of civilization. To believe that you can re-launch the Canadian social equilibrium by embracing romantic universal economic theories is to undermine precisely what the society is built upon. This is one of the reasons why the cut-backs of the last decades and the opening up to monolithic economic forces has produced more poverty than prosperity. These policies are a romantic and highly abstract denial of concrete experience.

Neither materialism nor utilitarianism has ever been central to this society. The two central founding agreements—the LaFontaine–Baldwin handshake and 1867—were not driven by economics. If anything, they involved economic sacrifice. In the late 1840s we were in a deep depression brought on by British free-trade policies. With a single, unified voice the economic élite of Montreal—that is, the dominant economic élite of Canada—called for annexation by the United States as the only road to prosperity. The population of Lower and Upper Canada—anglophone and francophone—ignored them. They seemed to understand that—as Harold Innis noted—“materialism is the auxiliary doctrine of every tyranny.” Even the building of the railroad was not primarily an economic act. Had economics been the driving force we would have saved ourselves time and money by going the American route. And Laurier’s refusal of the Empire Pact was in part a refusal of an economic life-insurance policy.

It is hard to digest these arguments today. Everything has changed, we tell ourselves, as if somehow economic interest has transformed itself over the last century to become more intelligent or more suited to leading a society. Somehow we have become too sophisticated to continue on the principles which built the country.

But what precisely does our new sophistication consist of? In what way are we thinking at a more complex level about how a country functions than that of LaFontaine, Baldwin, Cartier, Macdonald, Laurier? I read their speeches and arguments. I read the arguments we are offered today by Messrs. Chrétien, Martin, Bouchard, Harris, Klein, Tobin. I do not detect an intellectual progress. I notice a net regression in sophisticated analysis and the virtual disappearance of intellectual discourse. In its place are simplistic formulae, emotional manipulation and a slavish adherence to the most banal economic clichés of our day.

We are now in the grip of a corporatism which makes very effective use of the new means of communication. This allows materialism and utilitarianism to be presented as romantic, noble, courageous, masculine, intelligent, fun and, in complete contradiction with all of the preceding, as inevitable. Innis put it that “The shell and pea game of the country fair has been magnified and elevated to a universal level.”7 Today that country-fair game is called consumption and globalization.