12
East–West
THE NATURAL FLOW IN CANADA IS east–west. Received wisdom has it that this east–west flow was the artificial creation of nineteenth-century central government initiatives, such as the railroad and the Nation Policy. But that argument reduces history to little more than mechanisms and economics. It would be more accurate to say that those policies gave a nineteenth-century form to something which already existed.
Let me put it another way. It is possible through massive governmental intervention to force a social-political-economic flow as important as the one discussed here onto a completely different path. But if that requires ignoring the elements of reality—the desires of the population, the nature of the borders, the various regional forces, the historic patterns—then the result will be failure, poverty, disorder and discontent. These elements of reality are not simply a banal current-affairs snapshot of where power lies at a given moment. Indeed those snapshots may themselves be artificial impositions or simply options for which other choices exist.
A refusal to come to terms with the fundamental forces driving or struggling within a country or ready to impose themselves upon it from without is an ideological act which will finish as ideology invariably does. Those are the penalties of pretending that reality is an illusion.
Governments are most successful in altering the social-political-economic flow within a country when several real possibilities already exist within the constraints of reality. Policies can then be developed to favour one over the others. Some may be more difficult to achieve, but that is a matter of tactical skill not strategic impossibility. Social structures, for example, can be encouraged into different patterns.
The Canadian government intervened in the twentieth century to favour a more balanced social structure, which seemed to reflect the tendencies already driving within the society, even though these ran against the more class-based approach south of the border. In other words, we were faced by a choice over the meaning of individualism. Did it mean opportunity or a combination of opportunity and results? The Canadian government favoured the latter. That this combination put limits on the possibilities attached to both opportunity and results was merely an expression of the more cooperative tradition of egalitarianism in Canada.
But let me go back to the larger question of the natural flow in North America. This is one of those ultimate questions which must encompass everything—economics of course, culture, ideas, ways of life. If the natural flow were indeed north–south, it would be hard to explain how Canada comes to have one of the oldest constitutions in the world and a relatively successful social structure. The country may have political problems, but these don’t resemble the implosions of an ideological illusion.
Nevertheless, in this north–south theory there is apparently a centre to the continent, presumably with ever-increasing extremes towards the north, at the end of which the flow bounces off a northern wall back to the extreme south. The same reverberation effect must exist somewhere in the south. The Arctic Sea is apparently the clear wall off which these flows bounce. To the south the barrier is a little less clear.
You will note that this is not a centripetal argument. The centre in this case is a horizontal line running east–west somewhere south of the Canada–U.S. border. Everything runs up and down through it.
This is odd, because the poles of power inside the United States—with the exceptional particularity of Chicago—lie in the east and the west. In other words, the theory seems to be that if you are an American most things will run more or less east–west. But if you are a Canadian, they must run north–south.
This would suggest that our theory is based not on geography or history or even serious economics, but on political prejudice and a colonial psychosis. That the people most likely to advance the north–south argument belong to the right wing in anglophone Canada and the PQ in francophone Canada rounds out the psychosis argument nicely.
But there are other peculiarities attached to this view. For example, one of the very few interesting international initiatives—perhaps the only—undertaken by Ottawa over the last decade has been its leadership role in the creation of the Arctic Council. It took seven years of diplomatic pushing for this to come into being, with all the countries bordering on the Arctic Sea as members and its headquarters in Ottawa. The importance of the Inuit populations and of environmental questions have been built into the centre of the structure.
Most of the resistance to this body came from Washington, which feared it would have a weak position on the Council, given America’s small role in the Arctic. In other words, the natural, inevitable, uncontrollable north–south flow is natural, inevitable, etc., only as far as the northern coast of the continent’s mainland. Then, for reasons somewhat hard to grasp, it comes to an abrupt end, so that the east–west flow which governs the United States can be reasserted as an east–west sweep across the Arctic Sea. Curiously enough this change in direction of natural forces comes just in time to cut Canada off from its Arctic Islands and from any natural relationship with the Russian north.
Would it be churlish to point out that this dogma of Canada’s necessary submission to a natural north–south flow seems to lack a bit of internal logic? It doesn’t even meet the rather low-level standards of rational argument.
Perhaps I’m being unnecessarily pedantic. After all, natural forces don’t require logic or explanation. Like all mystical phenomena, they carry the revealed truth. Their very existence is a proof of truth.
Or perhaps we are dealing with an artistic phenomenon. It could be argued, for example, that the north–south theory is a late-blossoming expression of surrealism.
In any case, the reaction of the Canadian political and economic élites to the Arctic Council initiative has been to ignore it. They are willing to believe in a north–south flow, so long as it doesn’t continue across the Arctic Sea. As Paul Painchaud of Laval University puts it—“We have so long neglected the only international and regional system to which we really belong: the circumpolar system.”1 This represents a fundamental failure of our élites. And, even in practical economic terms, that’s too bad, because Russia lies just on the other side. And its serious northern economic and environmental problems offer a remarkable opening for Canadian expertise.
It is as if what those obsessed by natural free-market flows—the neo-conservatives, Ralph Klein, Bernard Landry, the Business Council on National Issues—actually mean is that we are the north and our interest should therefore be to the south, even if it means turning our backs on the reality of our own northernness. It is as if north–south actually means south with us sitting as a detail on the northern tip; as if to think in a northern manner would involve too active an approach towards opportunity or, worse still, would involve thinking of yourself as being at the centre of an opportunity, instead of being a passive beneficiary on the edge. For most of our élite, the north–south argument is a passive expression of their desire for a life of reaction not action.
This idea that we live at the tip of a northern extreme is rarely discussed in a sensible manner. What does it mean? We’re not discussing a cake. The north may be white part of the year but its role is not that of the icing.
Nor is the north limited to the Arctic or the Barrens or the north of our bigger provinces or even the land just to the north of our southern cities. Remember that until the Western provinces were created, that territory was called the North-West. The whole country—even those southern extremes of British Columbia and Ontario, which by virtue of their role in our society are appendages of the rest—is northern. That’s why the rural idyll, so powerful in Europe and the United States, scarcely exists in Canada, even in farming areas, with the possible exception of Prince Edward Island. The country’s vocation, practical existence, strengths and weaknesses all come from the reality of the place. That is, our destiny is tied to the territory of which we are custodians—that is, the northern half of the continent.
We almost never engage in calm, open discussion of this reality because the implications would be too embarrassing. They would gradually focus on the failure of an élite to function.
Apparently we are to imagine ourselves as the upper fringe of something which takes place elsewhere. This is why the levels of American ownership, and its implications, have for some time been rarely discussed and to all intents and purposes are now never discussed. These are at levels unprecedented for a western country—officially some 25 per cent of the economy, which is five times that of most developed countries. However, that statistic is dependent on using a measuring stick—the share ownership level of what constitutes ownership—set naïvely high, as if it took 51 per cent of the shares to control a company. In most cases of wide-spread public-share ownership, 20 per cent is more than enough to give that control. The real figure of effective foreign ownership is thus probably closer to 50 per cent.
Since the artificial enforcement of a north–south economic structure through the FTA and NAFTA, this figure has been growing at unprecedented rates. Statistics Canada: “the foreign controlled share of corporate revenues earned in Canada rose by more than a full percentage point to 29.8%” in 1995.2 Quebec is a slight exception to these statistics because of its quantity of locally owned small to medium-sized companies. At one level that is an advantage. At another it is central to the province’s economic problems—and to Canada’s as a whole—because the revenue growth for the larger foreign-owned companies is three times that of the smaller Canadian-owned firms. Ineffective though the large corporations tend to be in real capitalist terms, they control the shape and direction of the economy and so profit from it without an appropriate contribution to real growth, new thinking and real risk.
Of course there are exceptions to this rule. Some of the large corporations do their share or more than their share of risk-taking and new thinking. And some subsidiaries find ways to act as if they were not subsidiaries. Nevertheless there are three practical problems tied to such high levels of foreign ownership. Subsidiaries tend to be passive. The result is a loss of initiative and real growth needed to bring wealth to Canada. And our trade surplus in goods and services must be enormous in order to make up for the growing drain of profits sent home to foreign owners. Our élites are eager to talk to us of the disastrous drain of interest paid on foreign debts. They are careful to avoid the subject of the disastrous drain through ownership patterns of the profits earned in Canada. Both have the same effect of bleeding capital out of the economy.
To suggest publicly that any of these realities constitutes a problem is said to be a sign of anti-Americanism or nationalist protectionism or old-fashioned socialism or indeed of general old-fashionedness in a new global economy. Why such an aggressive refusal even to discuss calmly an identifiable anomaly? Why such ad hominem? In the rules of classic rhetoric, this sort of response is a tactic consciously used to avoid the other side’s exposing a real weakness.
A reasonable interpretation of this situation might be that our élites have failed to understand the nature of the responsibility incumbent upon those with power. In short, they are failing to do their job as businessmen, economists or political leaders. They have difficulty with this idea because responsibility is something which seems to come into effect only as you approach the centre of the north–south flow. They see themselves as a passive force on the fringes of reality. The marginal dreamer believes that to assume responsibility would be risky and therefore irresponsible. And so, what would be unacceptable in any other developed country, they consider normal.
The continent can be looked at in quite a different way. It is very large and is, as it has always been, broken up into areas which run according to different patterns. Of course these are not mutually exclusive patterns. And there are variations in the way they intersect.
The United States has traditionally moved in two swaths east to west—one across the southern American states, the other across the north. Canada does the same in a single swath. It did so long before the Europeans arrived. The geography determined part of the pattern. This physical state has produced massive political-economic east–west explanations—Harold Innis’s staples theory for a start. And there is Donald Creighton’s Laurentian theme—“. . . the St. Lawrence is the one great river system that leads from the Atlantic seaboard to the heart of the continent of North America. . . . The river has inspired a generation of Canadians to build a great territorial empire, both commercial and political, in the western interior of the continent.”3
But again, such long-lived, complex patterns are not the product of one or two mechanistic factors. There are any number of related elements. Perhaps the most important is the simple reality or logic of living in the north. It has always been quite different from that farther south. As I have already discussed, different tribes, with different assumptions about how life could and should be lived, created a soft east–west border long before the French–English struggle began. And the old pattern was merely confirmed by the new immigrant invaders as they advanced across the continent with aboriginal help.
La Vérendrye, in 1734 on Lake Winnipeg, allied himself with the Cree and the Assiniboine, which meant the Dakota would be his enemy,4 just as Champlain more than a hundred years before had allied himself with the Huron and Montagnais, making the Iroquois his enemy. In fact you can see the whole east–west story unfold, as in a prophecy understood by none of the participants, when Champlain on his first visit in 1603, without knowing where he really was or what lay ahead, allied himself with the Etchemins, Montagnais and Algonquins at Tadoussac. The Hurons were in turn their allies, and so on. When he came back in 1608 he reconfirmed the alliances and went to war on their behalf.
The shape of Canada was decided that first summer, on a beach at low tide straight across the Saguenay from Tadoussac, when Champlain went by small boat to join a Native feast. As so often in this country, the site is unmarked. You get to it through a farmer’s property and the beach lies probably more or less as it was, unless the river has changed the configuration over four centuries. It is the sort of place which is good for nothing except watching the sun rise or structuring half a continent.
What formalized the modern east–west flow of Canada had only very late in the day to do with government-led economic initiatives coming out of Ottawa. It was set in place by Indian alliances with the French and the French Canadians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and with the English coming from even farther north later in the seventeenth and on into the eighteenth. And these alliances were based on an acceptance of the northern nature of the place and all that that would imply.
Later on, economists would pin down the common features of the north—in a utilitarian manner—by concentrating on commerce. The north was furs and logs. But most of the economists had little to say about the logic of a northern experience, or the expectations it permits or prevents. Yet these are quite particular. To point out that there were 4,736 lynchings of blacks in the United States between 1882 and 1962 is neither to judge that nation nor to suggest that blacks did not suffer from racism in Canada. It is a number which simply highlights how different the experience was running east to west across the southern part of the continent.5 On the other hand it is interesting to note that ten of the thirteen American states which do not have the death penalty run either immediately along the Canadian border or on the border of another state which also doesn’t have it and is itself on the Canadian border.6 In a very inexact way this suggests a different political experience in the north. I suppose you could say it suggests that the border was drawn a little too far north and that those states might have comfortably fitted into the Canadian pattern. Indeed the voting patterns in those states tend to resemble those in Canada, not those in the rest of the United States.
The east–west movement opened with the ports on one coast and thousands of kilometres later reopened on the other. The east–west idea is not about limited ends rebounding to a centre. Whatever Toronto or Montreal may think of themselves as centres, the east–west flow has always been one of continual movement. In Newfoundland the whole society faces the sea, not the land, not the Rock. Its imagination and what riches it has have been fed from the water. Halifax, at its height, functioned as one of the two doors into and out of the interior. In periods of poverty it sends its own people on to the West.
They’re Calgary roughnecks from Hermitage Bay. . . .
In the taverns of Edmonton fishermen shout.7
The tragedy of Maritimers and Quebecers having to send their people on down the line after three hundred years in the same area is not something central Canadians and Westerners spend a lot of time trying to understand.
But the great double door which opened onto the West was Montreal. The city’s wealth, its growth, its remarkable culture came, from its days as a village and the birth of the fur trade all the way up to today, out of the role it played as the entrance to all that lay farther west. Montrealers talk of holidaying in Maine or Florida, but their city was built on the proceeds of reaching westward to northern Ontario and the prairies and Vancouver. This was true of the great staple trading businesses, of banking, of much of the manufacturing; but also of ideas and concepts. We have become used to creative figures who combine stage and dance exporting their ideas from Montreal and Quebec City to the world, just as anglophone writers from Toronto and other cities do. But francophone thinking on politics, economics and society in general has been exported almost solely on this east–west line, and is responsible for much of the imagining of how the rest of Canada would function. There isn’t much sign of this intellectual force having any impact on a north-south axis, any more than I’ve noticed any particular effect of the Toronto political, economic and social intellect on New York or that of Vancouver on Los Angeles.
In spite of Montreal’s crisis, some of the east–west dynamism remains today. Companies like Bombardier are now as important to Toronto as to Montreal. And for all the protests that Quebec was left out of the final reformulating of the constitution, its affairs and concerns still dominate the east–west national debate. However much the West protests about the power of the centre, it talks about Quebec. Newspapers devote a great deal of space covering the province in detail, so that anglophones actually know quite a bit about what is happening there, from politics to culture. The Globe and Mail has five permanent correspondents. This is not a very convincing solitude.
On the other hand, Quebec papers maintain no reporters beyond Ottawa. This is said to demonstrate a lack of shared activity and a lack of interest. But there is enormous real shared activity—political, social and economic. The absence of francophone reporters from Quebec anywhere beyond Ottawa—with the exception of French-language CBC—is therefore more a denial of reality than reality itself. The francophone élites read English-language papers in detail and the press rely heavily on news services. Radio-Canada makes an effort to fill the gap. And there is a relatively high level of bilingualism, at any rate in the Montreal area. On the other hand, it can’t be denied that by refusing to cover the rest of Canada directly, the élites who do read the English-language press impose an artificial isolation on those who do not. And this has a limiting effect on the ability of the anglophone provinces to explain themselves to francophones. It is a situation which represents not so much a lack of east–west interest as an artificial political limitation.
In more utilitarian areas such as agriculture, the east–west system remains more or less as important as it has always been. One example: the prosperity of Quebec dairy farmers turns on an agreement that B.C. farmers will produce less than their population quota in order to drink Quebec milk. More precisely, Quebec holds 48 per cent of the national quota for industrial milk. That is not unfair. That’s as it should be in an east–west system.
But Montreal’s crisis today comes in large part from its loss of a three-hundred-year-old vocation—the vocation which took it from the status of a small village to that of the country’s leading city for more than a century. This loss came through no particular fault of its own. To the contrary. Its ability to deal with languages and different communities makes it potentially a city of our times. Nor was its vocation lost because of the need to deal over the last forty years with the unreasonable domination of a small anglo community in the business sector or the imbalance in social conditions. These could have been handled—however uncooperative the players in the 1960s and 1970s—without destroying the city’s role. These problems were not even, at heart, a matter of economics, but of political options.
That ever since 1976 there have been respites of a few years between the political crises which hit Montreal does not ease the situation. People are not like dogs. They have a different quality of memory. They can see ahead. They know that a two-year truce is nothing more than that. And so the energy and investment go elsewhere. Even the francophone economic leadership are gradually moving their investments elsewhere because they don’t accept the situation. A few festivals and a few international organizations are not a replacement for the vocation which made Montreal a great city and the de facto capital of Canada. In fact the extent to which the city is now dependent on what are essentially marginal activities demonstrates the depth of the crisis.
It is remarkable to look at the manner in which, from the early 1600s, small groups of men leapfrogged westward into the unknown. These were great strategic leaps of the imagination; not careful tactical ploys. In 1615 Champlain, following the lead of Étienne Brûlé five years before, led a party of fifteen francophones and a Huron escort out of the tiny village of Quebec in a remarkable leap 1,500 kilometres to Huronia. He paddled up the St. Lawrence, past what would be Montreal and on up the Ottawa, past the site of the future capital, named through a French corruption of an Indian word. In our desire to denigrate politics we talk today of the place as artificial and out of the way. Whatever the problems of its politics, Ottawa was never out of the way. It was a long-standing Native settlement, in good part because it was placed at a strategic point on what had always been and would continue to be the great river highway to the north and the west, delivering first fur, then lumber back the other way. Champlain went on up the Ottawa to the Mattawa, down it to Lake Nipissing, across it to the rivière des Français, down it to Georgian Bay. Thirty-five portages, many several kilometres long, plus fifty patches of rapids to be negotiated. Then down the coast of the bay through thirty thousand islands to the kingdom of Huronia on the southern shore where the soil was rich.
As for that coast, it has changed little over the centuries. It is too rough, too poor; most of it exposed rock, twisted and tortured, in pink, black and grey. They say it is the oldest exposed rock in the world. The violence of its beauty became one of the great inspirations of the Group of Seven. In the late-nineteenth century the trees were cut, the mass of gigantic fish removed as through a sieve, all in one of those fast-grab, quick-profit sweeps. Money came and went in a few decades, and the population with it. The trees have now grown back and the great archipelago sits—a few cottages here and there, usually without electricity—much as Champlain first saw it.
On Frying Pan Island, out near the main channel where the water is almost always difficult, there is a monument:
Samuel de Champlain by
Canoe
1615
“As for me, I labour always to prepare a way for those willing to follow it.”
Even now it is moving, eerie, to imagine him, there with his Huron allies almost four centuries ago, their canoes pulled up in this little natural harbour a few metres away, a small protection for one night from la mer douce—the fresh water sea—as he called it, wondering where this great leap would drop him and whether he would be able to leap back east by a completely different route.
Having led the way into the Great Lakes, Champlain would be followed by others leaping onward in three different directions—west, north-west, where they would eventually collide with the English, and south down the Mississippi. This last was the only real failure, because the Americans, expanding westward, would make that line impossible to hold. The continent runs east–west, not north–south.
Interestingly enough, the narrow or negative nationalist schools have most often celebrated precisely this failure on the Mississippi, as if it had been a triumph. This seems to be an expression of their north–south obsession. It is as if they are desperate for anything which might demonstrate a link to the great American empire—even a defeat—as opposed to the broad reality of the history of which they are actually a central part.
The real drive was west and north-west, jumping off le large, as the Manitoban Métis call it, into the sea of the prairies and on to the port of exit-entry on the Pacific coast.
When the railway did come in the late-nineteenth century, it was merely a conversion of the age-old east–west waterway transport route into modern mechanics. At that point, a north–south commercial route might have been easier. But it would be a mistake—of the sort typically found in ideologues, particularly those seduced by utilitarian logic—to conclude that facility equals destiny and that therefore the conversion of the waterways into railroads was an artificial aberration which temporarily cheated some universal, all powerful, commercial logic. To the contrary. The eradication of centuries of social, political, military and economic flow, because of a temporary technological facility in another direction, would have been an aberration. Only a century later we can see that that facility has been bypassed by new technologies—planes, communication networks—which can serve the east–west flow as easily as any other without any particular mechanical acrobatics. Indeed, they can do it more easily than at any other time in our four centuries of evolution, providing there is a social will to continue developing a particular idea of society.
We spend little time thinking about the effect on the whole of Canada of Vancouver as one of the key points of east–west transit—westward, on from the city across the Pacific and eastward off the ocean, through the city and on into the country.
Vancouver has never been a wall, in spite of its flawed racial record. It has, from its beginning, been an active point of transit, not simply for goods, but for immigration from Asia. After all, the most important of east–west and west–east movements is not commercial, but human. And after the human comes ideas, social structures and politics. And from all of this comes travel. Because of the city’s role as one of the great opening doors to human movement, its schools have always had to struggle—as they do today—with balancing normal education alongside language and other basic training for the children of immigrants. It is the city where Canada first succeeds or fails in its old idea, going back to Baldwin and Egerton Ryerson, that the citizen is created in the public-school system.
Vancouver has been key to Canadians imagining themselves, not simply as a Pacific nation, but as people with a particular approach to issues. As Gerald Friesen points out, there were at least six hundred Canadian missionaries in China during the 1920s.8 Our early recognition of China came out of that. Most of our China hands of the postwar period, right up through the 1970s, were sons of those missionaries. Our early wheat sales and our ethical confusion today are all outgrowths of that long-standing reach across the Pacific.
What does this mean in practical terms? The western provinces export less southward—just over half—than does the rest of Canada. And a quarter of the West’s exports continue straight on west to the other side of the ocean.9 That quarter is continuing to grow.
As for the east–west movement over the whole continent, John Helliwell has recently done a study of trade patterns in the context of population densities and distances.10 He finds—despite our external trade being concentrated on the United States—that internal east–west trade remains the dominant factor. Quebec in particular succeeds at—or is reliant on—the east–west versus north–south flow; in part because of centuries of established east–west commercial movement, in part because of the facilitating aspects of French being one of the national languages. More than half of Canada’s total trade was east–west in 1989. Given our small population this represents a high penetration and so the percentage has been dropping. But what Helliwell finds is that the east–west trade in services—that is, the more sophisticated commodities of modern exchange—has not been slipping. It continues to run two to three times the value of north–south exchanges.
This is only economics, but the persistence in east–west services, despite the artificial reorganization of the economy to attempt to force it onto a north–south pattern, tells us about something beyond economics. Harold Innis’s great work was to carry the idea of physical communications on into that of the “communication of ideas.”11 How, over time, have the ideas of civilizations been carried? How have civilizations imagined themselves? In part through the physical means of transport—the rivers, the communication devices. Marshall McLuhan described how Innis investigated “the trade routes of the mind.”12
When I talk of Canada’s originality lying in its idea of what a country could be, a non-linear country, I am exploiting that Innisian concept—that idea of a country of the imagination, a country imagined in permanent movement, leapfrogging as the coureur de bois mentality did, down the river, then leapfrogging with the ideas of a northern complex nation, more inclusive than exclusive, running over great distances east to west.
It is interesting to think about what infuriates—or is it frustrates and insults?—many francophones and anglophones about the artificial imposition of the north–south flow over the last few years. One of the elements is the curious alliance of right-wing economists and businessmen, anglophone and francophone, with the Parti Québécois in order to bring it about. Perhaps more upsetting is how their alliance demonstrated to what an extent their idea of what a nation should be is static. It sits like a heavy, passive denial of the growth of a few tiny poverty-stricken colonial pockets of internal and external refugees, Native, francophone and anglophone, surviving on the northern half of North America, into a remarkably successful middle-class society. And it denies the successful growth of sixty thousand poor French colonials into eight million francophones within a society which, whatever its flaws, with its good periods and bad periods over the last century and a half, has on balance encouraged the expansion of that phenomenon. And there seems to be no understanding that an impossibly fragile little economy on the northern margins has slowly been turned, through our east–west structures, into one strong enough to belong, in however fragile a manner, to the Group of 7 economic leaders.
In this north–south assertion, all accomplishments of the past are denied. We spring from the earth, victorious children of a new truth, freed apparently from centuries of failure, from generations of parents who must have been failures, from centuries of leaders who can only have been mediocre failures.
Like all denials of a real past, this forces us to embrace self-loathing and enter into the mind-set of the craven. But above all it is a self-indulgent, self-congratulatory denial of the movement of ideas and of the imagination through which Canada grew over four centuries on an east–west axis.