24
Fragments of a Past—I
THE LEADERSHIP ROLE OF THE francophones in imagining Canada began in part as a conscious policy of the anglophone reformers to undo the damage done during the 1830s by the Château Clique and the Family Compact. They were sending an unequivocal message to the colonial authorities that they would play neither the racial nor the class game. This was an example of the force of the public good adjusting a specific situation to meet its own much higher standards. It also shows the extent to which the country was not the product of a reaction but the creation of a positive, intellectual idea. In short, Canada coalesced in the 1840s on the basis of ideas, thanks to the pact of the real reformers.
Austin Cuvillier, a well-known Quebecer, was specifically chosen as the first Speaker of the Unified Parliament of Canada to demonstrate through real power the reformers’ message that the assimilation strategy was dead. Speaker, in the days before responsible government, was a crucial position. Whoever sat in the Chair was, in many ways, the formal weapon of the majority in its struggle against non-responsible government.
Remember, this was not simply the majority party. It was a coalition chosen by the electors to put the well-advertised reconciliation in place. I say well-advertised because the Address to the electors of Terrebonne was only one of many public explanations of the reform idea. LaFontaine, as I have mentioned, had lost his seat in the first Union election because the governor’s gangs blocked the polls. Baldwin then gave up one of his two seats, so that his ally might enter the legislature, and wrote to his electors in the fourth riding of York explaining the situation:
The return of Mr. LaFontaine by an Upper Canada constituency will be a substantial pledge of our sympathy with our Lower Canada friends and form the strongest bond of union between us.1
In 1842 LaFontaine became the first prime minister of a responsible Canadian government. He had at first wanted an arrangement involving the leadership of two equals, but Baldwin refused, insisting that the other take charge.
The two leading positions in the civil service went to well-known francophones. Étienne Parent became the chief civil servant—the greffier or what we now call Clerk of the Privy Council—a position he went on to hold for thirty years, which included serving for the first five years of Confederation. René-Édouard Caron became president of the Executive and Legislature Councils. The other senior positions were fairly spread among anglophones and francophones.
This first tentative experiment with democratic government in 1842 wasn’t permitted to last long. The governor died and a new retrograde governor arrived. But on the positive side, the old parliamentary anti-reform forces which replaced LaFontaine and Baldwin in power had already begun to come to terms with the new configuration of the country. In fact they did more than come to terms in a Machiavellian manner. They actually seemed to understand the nature of the new experiment, or rather the normalization of the old peculiar idea that cooperation among communities was normal in a northern, marginal country. It was they who introduced a law re-establishing French as one of the two official languages. All parties supported it. The interdiction—which had never been respected—had lasted only three years.
Still today negative nationalists in Quebec repeatedly go back to the technical point that the intent of the union, and therefore eventually of Canada, was the assimilation of francophones. That is incorrect. It was the calculation of the British government and British colonial authorities that union would cause assimilation. It was neither a Canadian idea nor a Canadian initiative. This British calculation was based on the assumption that the union would exist in an atmosphere of sectarian divisions. That is, their strategy was based on believing Lord Durham’s naïve and ignorant assertion that “two nations were warring in the bosom of a single state.” From the first moment of the new arrangement, the anglophone reformers sought reconciliation with the francophone reformers.
Immediately, the union was stood on its head by the citizenry—by the phenomenon of citizens serving the public good. The union therefore meant the exact opposite of that which London had intended. It became, very precisely, the central tool which would insure there was never assimilation. What’s more, intelligent anglophone conservatives, who would have gone along with the assimilation strategy, almost immediately understood that everything had changed and so they scrambled to form their own reconciliations.
When a few years later Cartier and Macdonald began their long-running alliance, it was in many ways a perfect illustration of this idea of reconciliation. They each came from the extremes. Cartier had been a particularly brave young Patriote leader under Wolfred Nelson at St. Denis. And Macdonald had opposed the Rebellion Losses Bill. The experience of cooperation taught them a kind of tough moderation which would become characteristic of the Canadian conundrum.
Macdonald made only two major mistakes in his career. First, there was his handling of the Métis crisis. By then Cartier was dead and Macdonald had no first-rate francophone ministers. The political impetus in Quebec had gone over to the opposition. He was suffering from the syndrome of most long-lived governments—his ministers, whether francophone or anglophone, were more the creatures of power than the wielders of it. His mistake had to do not so much with francophone relations, as with the West and how it should be governed. In a sense he was as new to it as everyone was, understood little of the West and was more interested in fending off his troublesome supporters in Ontario than in understanding a distant cause. The West had been Cartier’s great interest. He had been the one who understood it and its geopolitics. Macdonald was out of his depth. None of which excuses a major error or makes up for the tragedy. He saw it as a question of public order and somehow didn’t understand the rest.
His second error was his belief that he could play D’Alton McCarthy on a line, as he had played so many other ambitious individuals and unpleasant questions, until they tired themselves out. That was his down-to-earth way of avoiding extreme explosions. But he hadn’t really grasped McCarthy’s puritanical edge. Nor did he understand that this was the face of the new racial nationalism which would dominate so much of the twentieth century throughout the western world. He couldn’t see that the drive which appeared anti-francophone was actually a mirror image of the nationalism being introduced into Quebec.
It was nineteenth-century nationalism gradually taking on its twentieth-century face; what would eventually be called Maurrasian nationalism, after Charles Maurras, the right-wing French nationalist who combined intellectual and romantic arguments about community, blood and race. Maurras avoided the worst of the fascist arguments. He was of a more sophisticated school. His publication—L’Action française—influenced similar schools of thought in several countries. Abbé Groulx’s magazine, at first also called L’ Action française, and then L’Action nationale, was a direct imitation. In 1945 Maurras was condemned by the French courts for collaboration with the Germans and he was thrown out of the Académie française.
Maurras was the respectable, then semi-respectable, then criminal and now again surprisingly respectable intellectual face of retrograde nationalism in the west. His strange combination of intellect, romanticism and plain prejudice produced arguments which could not be dealt with in a normal debate. He had found a way to so twist the general understanding of the public good and decent human relations that it would take decades before a language to counteract him effectively could be found.
D’Alton McCarthy belonged to what might be called the founding generation of Maurrasian nationalism. In that sense it isn’t surprising that Macdonald at first didn’t really understand what McCarthy represented. By 1890 the prime minister had begun to put a face on this phenomenon—“The demon of religious animosity which I had hoped had been buried in the grave of George Brown has been revived. . . . McCarthy has sown the Dragon’s teeth. I fear they may grow up to be armed men.”2
In spite of these two running sores, Macdonald’s attitudes towards reconciliation were unchanged. For example, in that same year, 1890, he was actively blocking the Manitoba government’s attempts to weaken French rights. “I have no accord with the desire expressed in some quarters that by any move whatever there should be an attempt made to oppress the one language or to render it inferior to the other; I believe that would be impossible if it were tried, and it would be foolish and wicked if it were possible.” Cartier’s biographer quite fairly says that Macdonald had been inspired by him “with the spirit of nationhood.”3
One of the factors which gave francophones such weight in the designing of the country is that they have tended to send their best leaders to the federal level. LaFontaine, Cartier, Laurier, Lapointe, Trudeau; whatever you think of their politics, they were players of the highest quality.
Curiously enough, Lucien Bouchard goes out of his way in his memoirs to say about the Trudeau–Marchand–Pelletier commitment to federal politics—“. . . for once English Canadians would see something else arrive in Ottawa than second-rate francophones with second-rate intellects, ready to trade whatever they had or didn’t have in their guts for pensions and titles.”4 Of course, every parliament—including provincial legislatures—has its share of time-servers from every region. There are also large quantities of modest, useful local politicians.
But the francophone leadership in Ottawa over a century and a half has most of the time been of the first level. And for much of that same time the provincial leaders have been less impressive. Some of the best—Félix Marchand, T.D. Bouchard and Adélard Godbout—because they worked against the negative nationalists of their day—have been erased from the public memory or dismissed in some way as a northern equivalent of Uncle Tom.
We all have the right to dislike or dismiss those we disagree with. But this systematic elimination from respectable consideration and often more or less from the public memory of the most successful francophone federalists creates a distortion of history which is helpful to no one. It is particularly harmful to the francophones’ sense of themselves and of their accomplishments. It can’t help but be profoundly disturbing to the citizenry to give such strong support to remarkably active leaders only to discover that the hands which write our history eliminate these same figures the moment they leave power. It is as if democratic legitimacy were rejected by a part of the intellectual élites; as if in a paternalistic manner, they are certain that they know better. The citizenry supported Pierre Trudeau for fifteen years. Yet to utter his name in Quebec in public debate in other than condemnation is to eliminate yourself from ‘serious’ consideration. It could be argued that, whatever the man’s failures, what is involved here is more contempt for the citizen than for Trudeau. Since his successes are quite simply not mentioned, that contempt can only be interpreted as ideological certainty in the inquisitorial tradition. In fact the phenomenon is not primarily tied to specific events. Otherwise why would the names of LaFontaine, Laurier and Cartier be denigrated and more or less eliminated in the same way?
This rewriting of history by simply dismissing the most important figures on the other side began not so long ago. According to the historian Jean Hamelin it was “l’école paranoïaque”—the Montreal School—which introduced this tack. “It was Brunet who reinvented LaFontaine as a traitor.” Why? Because he drew Quebec into Canada. Brunet accused the reformers of being very confused and easily won over to the anglophone cause. For Séguin it was necessary to “unmask the imposter” of the LaFontaine tradition. And, as an inheritor of the Montreal School tradition, it isn’t surprising to find Fernand Dumont describing the arrival of democracy in the 1840s as only “apparent.” “It consecrated the failure of the social project of the Patriots.”5 All of this is based on an ethnic interpretation of the Rebellions and a denial that there was any larger, shared, social cause. It is also based on ignoring the reform legislation which the LaFontaine government enacted in a very short space of time.
Interestingly enough, the historical method in question was invented and perfected in Moscow. The cutting and pasting of group photos and documents to eliminate individuals no longer in favour was just an extreme version of this ideological cleansing of the public memory. What’s more, such rewriting through erasure is almost identical to D’Alton McCarthy’s approach to debating ideas. When Laurier was responding to McCarthy’s anti-French bill in 1890, he mocked the manner in which Baldwin and LaFontaine were described by McCarthy as “petits politiqueurs.”6 It was exactly the manner in which Cartier would later be discarded by the negative-nationalist school as a ‘railway lawyer.’
Of course Baldwin and LaFontaine were anything but small-time politicians. They were engaged in that most complex of public acts—attempting to match imaginative initiative with careful moderation. This requires a great deal more intelligence and courage than does the abrasive monotheism of a large number of the political leaders whose memory has been retained for admiration.
The key negotiations leading to Confederation took place in Quebec City in 1864. The resulting resolutions more or less became the constitution and the quasi-totality of these agreements are still in the constitution as reformulated in 1982.
The negotiations took place on the cliffs of the St. Lawrence, in a building which stood exactly where Champlain had climbed most days from his house below up to his headquarters. Negotiations are negotiations, but in 1864 they took place in a conscious belief that they were part of an historical continuity. The legislature later burnt down and there is now a park on the cliff’s edge, with a statue of Cartier. I brushed away the snow last winter to read the quotations chosen for the monument.
In a country like ours
All rights must be protected
All convictions respected.
It’s worth noting in passing that Cartier invented the Canadian army with his militia bill and was its first minister. The structure of the country and the communication system represented a vision of the future. But the army was a victory over the past. After all, it meant that Canada’s first minister of defence, or militia as it was then called, had begun his career as one of the few successful armed rebels of 1837.
But let me come back to this idea of Canada as a country largely imagined by francophones. One of the confusing details has been the facility with which anglophones cede power to francophones when many in the latter group say what they really want is something more like duality of power. Rather than deal with this, the anglophone tends to say, ‘Well, look, you just run it.’ That was what Baldwin did in the first days of the Union.
The Montreal School or a PQ minister would insist that this is just a clever way of getting a francophone to “remettre le Québec à sa place,” as Jacques Parizeau puts it.7 According to this argument, power is given to the wrong francophones; people who are creatures of the ‘English.’ But, with the sole exception of Jean Chrétien, those francophone leaders have been elected with majorities in Quebec as well as strong representation elsewhere. So again the negative-nationalist argument is actually an insult to the intelligence and competence of francophone voters. In a curious attempt to distract us from this insult we are constantly told that these choices are not the result of stupidity or incompetence but of a debilitating psychological state. The voters apparently can’t help themselves. Their subconscious dominates.
Fernand Dumont says that “the worst fault—défaut—of Quebec francophones is their contempt for themselves—le mépris de soi.”8 Ex-colonials often do have a problem with self-respect. In Canada, anglophones suffer from it as much as francophones. But for neither is this an all-consuming problem. It’s just one of our many characteristics. And to the extent that it is a serious problem, it is that of the élites, not the citizenry in general.
It is interesting that Mr. Dumont, a noted social analyst, so easily applied to society as a whole an analysis of his own personal psyche. Had he sought about him, he might have found he shared it with others in the élites and—no doubt to his consternation—in the anglophone élites. Even in our worst characteristics there seem to be signs of a shared culture; a distressing absence of solitudes.
There are two fairly standard approaches to political power used by those who seek it. Some seek power with the assumption that the citizenry are the source of legitimacy and are to be treated with respect. Others concentrate on identifying whatever insecurities there are in the citizenry and on exploiting them. This is done by exaggerating those insecurities in order to create an atmosphere of fear.
Public figures who do this are usually precisely the individuals within society who suffer the most from a “mépris de soi.” And they attempt to draw everyone else into their personal problem, as if it were a societal problem, until in fact it becomes central to the setting of public policy. This is a situation which the citizenry in general have a great deal of trouble focusing on. It seems so odd that those who seek power most ardently are often those most racked by insecurity. And the more assertive they are, the more this is likely to be the case.
The tragedy for the citizen is that nothing is more harmful to the service of the public good than a leader driven by his inferiority complex. This is one of the keys to demagoguery and to the modern false Hero. If the leader has contempt for himself, on winning power he cannot help but have contempt for the citizen. He assumes that the only way to lead is through emotional blackmail and the unleashing of fear. The magic of public office turns personal insecurity not into self-confidence but into superiority, which is an aggressive form of insecurity. But you can’t serve the public good in a democracy if you have contempt for the citizenry. At best you can offer a noblesse oblige or corporatist version of service; in other words, you know what the people need and you will give it to them.
And what of dismissing people like LaFontaine, Cartier, Laurier, Lapointe and Trudeau on the basis that they are somehow creatures of another community than the one which produced them? It is true that politics is complicated and requires compromise. It is also true that to lead a large, complex country you must attempt to keep the whole in mind and so not become the servant of one part only. After all, the core of the original pact, which still holds true, is that progress and the public good were best served by an alliance of reformers across community lines. These men, by all accounts, were particularly intelligent, extremely tough and did not suffer from a mépris de soi. Put aside for the moment your views on their politics. They would have been rather difficult people to push around; to treat as your creature. My impression is that in the push-and-shove business of politics, they pushed more than they were shoved.
But what about the question of the anglophones so often being ready to cede power? Not all anglophones and not in all regions and not all the time, but enough to give parliamentary majorities on a regular basis. To suggest that there is somehow a large conscious or subconscious plot by millions of anglophone voters to elect captive francophones would suggest an astonishing contempt for that mass of citizens, to say nothing of an addiction to conspiratorial theories in the one who believes it. The continuing Montreal School view of the citizenry seems to be that the francophones are naïve and craven and waiting to be saved, while the anglophones are evil and Machiavellian and must be kept at a good distance.
Reasonable people can only ignore this and question more closely the anglophone attitude. It doesn’t seem to be based on a desire for a unitary or even a centralized country. Over the last century and a half, power has slipped as you would expect, back and forth, between the two levels of government. There have been more or less four periods during which Ottawa seemed to set the course and four during which it was the provinces. We are clearly now in a period dominated by the provinces. But at no time has there been even the possibility of a centralized, let alone a unitary, state. This became clear the moment Oliver Mowat took over as premier of Ontario in 1872. And if further confirmation were needed, it came when Mowat teamed up with Honoré Mercier, premier of Quebec as of 1887, to oppose Ottawa’s use of certain central powers, such as the provision for the disallowance of provincial legislation, even though the constitution clearly gave Ottawa that right.
What can be said is that most anglophones do not want a pretend country—one which is little more than a treaty between independent groups. I think that is because francophone Canada is at the core of how anglophones see the country and therefore themselves. As I said earlier, this is not because the anglophones have no core of their own. Rather, it is simply what it sounds like. Francophone Canada is at the core of how anglophone Canada sees itself and the country. This does not lessen the role of Westerners or the perception of their role in the country. It is simply a central characteristic of the nation.
Séguin, in a standard formula, insisted that “the English majority in the federal parliament will always form an all-powerful block against the French Canadian block, however solid it is.”9
The truth is that anglophone Canada hasn’t managed to form a block more than twice, in a century and a half. Francophones are usually, therefore, in a position to hold the balance of power or to be a key part of the balance of power, which is very healthy because it breaks up the idea of minority. For linguistic reasons, if for no other, the sense of being a minority continues among francophones and will continue. And a theoretically dangerous balance of power is there and always will be. But the political reality is, as I said in earlier chapters, that the anglophones also see themselves as a minority. And the regional realities mean that they are broken up into anywhere from four to six quite different voting groups.
The point is that, whoever runs it, most anglophones seem to want the country they feel they agreed to in 1841. Their fear is neither of regionalism nor of particular words like ‘distinct’ nor of inequality between provinces. Whatever the rhetoric, everyone knows there has never been equality and that equality in this context has nothing to do with individual rights but only with a theoretical concept of administration. Alberta would be horrified if it found its new power and influence in the federation cut back severely because it was to be in strict equality with, for example, New Brunswick. The concept of the equality of provinces is just as rhetorical and abstract as that of a distinct society. To the extent that it is a reference to a real view of Canada, equality is used to mean that the provinces should have less to do with each other and therefore have less concern, let alone responsibility, for other provinces and therefore the citizens within them. It is a concept entirely aimed at allowing richer provinces not to share with the poorer.
The underlying concern is that the agreement of the 1840s established an idea of government by shared principles, not by group interests. Our experience over the last 150 years has been that each time group interest surges, it endangers the shared principles—whether it was the expulsion of the Japanese Canadians and the Chinese head tax in B.C., the racial problems and eugenics under Social Credit in Alberta, the language and school questions in Manitoba, the rise of the Orange Order in Ontario, the very marginal methods used by Duplessis to stay in power in Quebec, the class exploitation in Newfoundland or the mistreatment of Blacks in Nova Scotia. Not that the federal government has been innocent of unprincipled action. You have only to look at the role of the Ministry of Immigration on the Jewish question during the 1930s and 1940s.
However, the complexity of the central government offers some hope of righting the balance sooner or later. And the tension between the federal and the provincial governments offers another mechanism for the protection of the public interest. Our experience suggests that political movements which say they are seeking clarity of purpose through concepts like the equality of provinces are often using a metaphor which disguises their group interests. The strength of the federation is that it hampers that clarity.
Nevertheless, our attention is constantly drawn to arguments over which level of government should exercise which power. The rise to levels of hysterical fervour of the extremely mediocre religion of efficiency has become part of this argument. And overlap between levels of government is condemned as inefficient, when it is often a necessary and useful aspect of federalism. It is particularly useful to the citizen.
In these arguments, one level criticizes the other’s management of a particular responsibility—which is a healthy phenomenon—and the other usually offers a nationalistic reply. In other words, rather than deal with the criticism, they invoke local or national pride. Even what criticism there is, is increasingly muted because the growth of the technocracies has led quite naturally to discreet behind-the-scenes negotiations and tacit agreements. This is classic corporatism which, needless to say, leaves the citizenry out of the discussion.
But if federalism works, it is precisely because the citizen has a mechanism to look at most issues from two points of view—those of two levels of government. For federalism to work, we need the two levels criticizing each other. We need the chicanes.
Instead, we are told that these arguments are all about the battle between national unity and provincial rights. About centralization versus decentralization. So all disagreements are reduced to a curious combination of ideology and abstract management theory. We are not allowed to interpret them as real debates over content, policy and the service of the public good.
Today the federal government decentralizes in part by cutting transfer payments. In several of the largest provinces the immediate reaction has been to move away from the universality of health and social care. So the initial experience of massive decentralization actually seems to be confirming the fear that regionalism would mean the breaking of the original reform contract which created the country. And yet . . . and yet as W.L. Morton told Charles Taylor, the journalist and writer, fifteen years ago, Canada can “only survive through the recognition of legitimate regional differences.”10
This is a conundrum of the sort which makes the country seem impossible, when it is actually complex and interesting. Our difficulty is somehow to take the time to find arrangements that work, while avoiding the false simplifications of extremists who attempt to exploit the period of gestation. That exploitation is dangerously easy because a nation caught up in full consideration and doubt can be misrepresented as merely lost in confusion.
The old Privy Council chamber in the East Block where the Cabinet used to meet has a window just behind the prime minister’s chair. Since 1913, if he turned away from his ministers and looked back over his right shoulder, he could see the statue of the two friends, LaFontaine and Baldwin, standing together, up on the ridge of the Ottawa where they are visible from all directions. In historic terms they stand on the banks of the nation’s oldest highway, running from the Maritimes, through Quebec and Ontario to the West.
I have always imagined that their statue was placed there to remind the prime minister, should he care to look out the window, that Canadian democracy, being particularly decentralized, complicated and open, flourishes on moderation. But it is a particular sort of moderation. You might call it stubborn moderation or idea based. The key to it is a balancing act between imaginative initiative on the one hand and a constant consideration of the community as a whole on the other.
Or it might be enough if the sight of the two reformers still together reminded the prime minister of Jacques Godbout’s phrase—“You can’t commit suicide if you have two heads.”11
The Cabinet no longer meets in that room and trees have grown up, blocking the view, the way special-interest groups, lobbyists, departmental rivalries, consultants, specialist turf wars and the tactics of short-term politics have grown, blocking our view of the underlying shape of the Canadian experiment. In many ways these élites are, or act on behalf of, the Compacts and Cliques of today, smothering the government with modern courtiers and the born-dead language of briefing books and press releases. From time to time when I am in Ottawa, I go to the old Cabinet room to contemplate the view that isn’t there and think about the virtues of selective forestry.
There is a Pathé newsreel of Wilfrid Laurier’s state funeral—February 22, 1919. The film lasts several minutes and was edited to cover the entire event. It begins with a long shot on the Royal Victoria Museum down on Argyle Street. The building would later become the Museum of Man and is now the Museum of Nature. In 1919 it was acting as parliament’s temporary quarters, fire having destroyed the centre block in 1916. You can see that it is one of those cold,
white Ottawa days. All the double doors of the museum swing open at once and the ruling élite of Canada pour out onto the snow, close to two thousand of them. They follow the coffin on foot in a great procession behind the governor general in an open carriage with an enormous buffalo rug thrown over him and the widow’s closed carriage, along Argyle, then right all the way up Bank, right again on Wellington past the Parliament Buildings, past the Château Laurier and left down Sussex Avenue to the Basilica, which still stands just opposite the new National Gallery. It’s a long, cold walk for men who make their living with words.
The camera pans the streets. They are jammed. People must have come up from Montreal and from throughout the surrounding area. Many of them are simple people; farmers, factory workers. You can tell from their clothes. Everyone is dressed in the best they can manage, even if it is only to wait in the street. There are women wearing flowered hats in the summer style. It must be their one good hat.
A camera has been placed by the Basilica’s doors. The ruling élite file in, three across. You see them all in close-up. The older men are in large fur coats. Some wear ceinture fléchée, in the nineteenth-century style, pulling the bulk of fur in around their waists. There are a good number in their seventies, perhaps eighties. They were born with the Union. A few had perhaps been born with the Rebellions. A few might have known LaFontaine, who lived on till 1864. He was only fifty-seven. Baldwin had died six years earlier, even younger at fifty-four, so racked by the death of his wife from the effects of childbirth that he left instructions in his will for the equivalent of a Caesarian operation to be carried out on his own body—which was done—and their two coffins to be chained together. Many in the procession would have seen Macdonald and Cartier in action, some would have worked with them, or with Edward Blake, or Joseph Howe, or Thomas D’Arcy McGee.
The younger men wear cloth coats with the fur hidden on the inside, only the trim showing. The modern style is more discreet, more urban, less a frank admission of the north. Abruptly Mackenzie King files by, young and plump and somehow filled with the suggestion that he will inherit the mantle.
In a few minutes of film a century of power is caught at a pivotal moment—a half-century of the past, a half-century of the future. The older men in the procession had spent much of their lives learning how to cooperate beyond their community interests, only to have that reconciliation ripped apart by the war which had just ended. Laurier almost alone of the leading figures had managed to keep himself at the level of the larger, longer-lived public interest. And now the younger men among them will have to begin pulling it all back together again. As they do, everything will begin changing around them—women getting the vote, social-democrats launching their ideas, the West pushing itself forward with new populist ideas. Only Quebec will be blocked, as the full inheritance of the Ultramontane negative nationalism comes into effect, decades after the death of Bishop Bourget and his ideologues.
But the funeral, caught on those few moments of film, is like a reconstitution of the LaFontaine–Baldwin union, around the body of the man who intellectually took the pact out of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, and did so in spite of destructive forces roaming on all sides. He worked and acted in such a way that the ethical foundations of reconciliation and of the public good were there to be built upon, not just by Mackenzie King in Ottawa, but by the CCF and the positive nationalists, such as Georges-Émile Lapalme and the young men of the Quiet Revolution forty years later.
As I watched the newsreel the first time, it was as if I could hear a Greek chorus of disaster rhetoric rising in the background. In 1840 the chant had been that the Union would lead to the assimilation of the more than half-million francophones. In 1867 it was said again. Yet by then there were a million francophones. Laurier was criticized by some nationalists for opening the West to immigrants. The critics believed that these immigrants would drown out the French Canadians and their role in the country. But by the time of his death the francophones were almost two and half million and showing no signs of assimilation, in spite of the inadequate education system the church was permitted to administer by those same negative nationalists.
The francophone community was growing and, beyond the seemingly endless grip of the negative school, it was a strong community. Yet it wasn’t growing at the same speed as the anglophone population and was slipping formally into a minority position. The stupidity and prejudice of movements like the Orange Order was partly to blame for this, as was the Ultramontane movement, which had isolated the francophones in an anti-reform social order which could only grow from within. Nevertheless the country adjusted to these changes and the community went on increasing in size.
As recently as 1982 Quebec was said to be on its knees, though no one saw any concrete signs of this, and the total francophone population in Canada was six and a half million. Today it is seven, along with a remarkable increase in semi-francophone anglophones produced by an immersion schooling system which teaches three hundred thousand students a year and continues to grow.
Many people, including many anglophones, are rightly concerned about the slow but continuing slippage in the national percentage of the francophone population. The growth, thanks to the immersion schooling system, of a large group which lies somewhere between anglophone and francophone is a partial countervailing force. It is particularly interesting because it strengthens the francophone idea across the country. And curiously enough, although the population percentage has slipped, the role of francophones in Ottawa is at a level of influence reminiscent of the days of the Union, with record levels of deputy ministers, assistant deputy ministers and the head of the civil service.
The other thought that went through my mind was just how wrong Robert Borden had been and how right Laurier. Further along on the same reel there was a short sequence of the Princess Patricias returning home, also in 1919. It had been the first regiment to go over and had been raised privately by Hammy Gault, an elegant, adventurous young Montreal millionaire. The film showed him dashing down the plank, leading his regiment off the boat. He was determined to look fit, despite having lost a leg. Thirty-five years later, he was the grand old man, the honorary colonel of his regiment which had become part of the professional army. As the son of one of his young officers, I was taken along with my family to spend a few days with him in his country place south of Montreal. He was still dashing about. If you wanted to sail with him, you had to swim out to his boat, moored in the middle of his lake. He was a frightening figure for a boy, as he unstrapped his leg and threw himself into the water. A proper hero.
But Hamilton Gault or Talbot Papineau—descendant of the rebel—who was killed serving in the same regiment, or any number of other heroes didn’t make Borden right. He thought he could get the British to fight the war properly. He literally abandoned the country he had been elected to lead and tried instead to lead his army by concentrating on his role in the Imperial War Cabinet in London. We know that his strong common sense made him a great ally for British prime minister Lloyd George as they struggled with the Byzantine politics of a war which can now be seen as a largely pointless massacre organized by criminally incompetent generals.
But what power did they really have? Even Lloyd George and French prime minister Clemenceau, with their direct legal responsibility, national prestige and power within their respective parliamentary systems, weren’t able to fire their own generals without risking the loss of power. The link between nationalist propaganda and the ‘gallant’ generals was so close in this first modern war that blame somehow fell inevitably on the politicians. You couldn’t criticize the generals and continue to fight the war. They were the necessary false Heroes of blindly stupid warfare driven by the latest management methods and technology.
The emotions and unleashed violence of war almost always make it democracy’s most difficult test. Put another way: democracy is not designed to fight wars. Elected representatives can’t really control generals, any more than kings could, unless they were warrior kings. Fighting and killing is a very different, peculiar kind of business.
That’s why, if your country is not directly involved, the best strategy is strictly to limit your participation. If you must give men, give fewer than you have so that when the inevitable call for reinforcements comes, you will have them.
Besides, the history of warfare does not turn upon the raising of ever-larger numbers of men. It is not filled with larger armies beating smaller armies. Quite the contrary. Quantity is usually a crutch for mediocre generals.
Borden allowed himself to be caught up in the excitement of the struggle—the tragedy, the tragedy of his men, the enormous Canadian army. He gave himself up to the tactics of war management which, given the power of the general staff, was scarcely influenced by politics, even if the politicians tried their hardest to act like managers. He didn’t seem to understand that the responsibility of a prime minister is not war tactics but the strategy of how to get his country through the crisis of war.
Borden was so lost in the details of the military catastrophe that he hardly saw how Canada was being pulled apart. While he was standing up in London for an honourable and honest administration of the war, at home his party had slipped into the most divisive of partisan tricks, playing on differences between communities and regions and, of course, profiteering.
Empires have a great deal of difficulty drawing lessons from their military experiences. The very nature of empire is the continuity of war. The lessons they draw tend therefore to be concentrated on tactics. For smaller countries the lessons are far more straightforward and they are strategic. For those who are only indirectly involved in a conflict, the first lesson is: limit your involvement. If you don’t, the maw of war and the empires, ever hungry for men, weapons and money, will draw you in and bleed you white, with consideration only for their larger needs. These are needs which you could never satisfy because they are already beyond the capacity of the empire. If not, why would they plead such dependency on the contributions of the smaller nations? If necessary, they will interfere in your home affairs in order to force you on. And when it’s over they’ll give you a hearty thanks and erase you from their memories and their history books.
Past wars are the glories of empires. There is no room for the shadow of junior allies. We know this from the popular media in which Americans or Englishmen are constantly winning world wars single-handedly. But historians are no different. Take British accounts of the Boer War. A popular but representative example would be Thomas Pakenham’s 1979 account. You look expectantly for some mention of the drama the war created for Canadians; of Laurier putting out the fires of militaristic ardour as Canada was divided by the cries of loyalty to or betrayal of the empire; of the governor general intriguing to undermine the government. But no, all you find is one sentence referring to “colonial patriotism” and two passing references to the courage of Canadian troops; four words in total.12
It is argued that Canada bought its independence on the battlefields of the First World War. I doubt it. The foundations of independence were already in place, put there piece by piece from LaFontaine–Baldwin to Laurier. It was enough to have the presence of mind to exercise that independence. Besides, there were many other countries which signed the Treaty of Versailles without contributing more than half a million men and leaving sixty thousand dead on the field. There were other ways, less profligate with the blood of its citizens, less divisive, for the government to accomplish its aim, if that was its aim.
This is not such a complicated thought. Even in the crucial Rowell–Sirois Report on Dominion–Provincial Relations, undertaken in the late 1930s, the following paragraph appears:
Collective action through the agency of democratic government implies a common purpose and an agreed method of achieving it. If the common endeavour is one with respect to which deep impulses in the community arouse differing conceptions, it is likely to break down and the consequent disharmony will embarrass all the common enterprises which have been entrusted to the government.13
Rowell, in his earlier life, had been a strong supporter of conscription and so had joined the breakaway Liberals in Borden’s wartime coalition. He had chaired the federal Cabinet’s war committee and was able to witness at close range the strains imposed on the country.
After his mammoth efforts, Borden retired to play golf and sit on boards of directors. Still, the experience of that war made the élite far more careful when the next one came around. In that case there actually was a cause—a great cause—although the anti-Semitic, anti-Asian attitudes of the federal and some of the provincial governments showed that they only partially understood what it was. Mackenzie King’s maniacal care prevented the extremes from getting control of the national agenda, as they had during the First World War, although the conscription issue once more did damage. And again the conscriptionists were wrong. The problem was not a shortage of men, but the lack of conscious understanding of how much Canada should try to do. Our élites had still not worked out how to balance national limitations against the endless void of war.
And yet . . . and yet there was the cause. And this remains one of the illustrations of how difficult the negative-nationalist movement in Quebec has found it to reconcile their beliefs with the realities of history. Their effect on Quebec school textbooks has been that the Second World War, apart from an introduction on European fascism, tends to be reduced to little more than the conscription crisis. Unless you look very closely you won’t realize that tens of thousands of francophones volunteered and went to fight, alongside anglophones, indeed to die. You won’t realize that the Chaudières, a francophone regiment, landed in the first wave on D-Day, let alone that that beach, one of the five, was given over to a Canadian force. I think of some of the wonderful men I met as a child, such as General Jacques Dextraze, a young hero of the Normandy campaign who went on to become perhaps the finest of Canada’s postwar chiefs of staff. Their contribution to an unquestionably great cause is erased, along with that of Canada as a whole.
Again, the question at hand is not so very difficult. You can be right to oppose conscription, but wrong not to accept that there is a greater cause. And if you cannot assume the burden of that contradiction, then you will probably be unable to question why your particular cause led you into such a flawed position. In practical terms, the arguably correct position of opposing conscription has somehow made it impossible to examine the Maurrasian argument which some used to take advantage of that situation in the name of a contradictory project.
The probable explanation is that of a mythology gone wrong and thus reliant on the idea of victimization. The victim sees all events through his own prism—the prism of the wrong which he has identified as having been done to him. This is a classic characteristic not of nationalism, not of francophones, not of Quebec, but of narrow or negative nationalism. You can find it today in part of the separatist/sovereigntist movement, just as you can in part of the movement which has produced the Reform party or Mike Harris’s false conservatism. In these cases the other, as I said in the opening pages of this book, doesn’t really exist, let alone the other victim. As the one to whom things have been done, the victim has no responsibility beyond his immediate concerns. It is a form of professional innocence.
Nor, of course, is there room for non-victims among those identified as belonging to the group victimized. In the case of the Second World War, their role is erased, and with it the remarkable contribution of francophones. This approach is part of the same phenomenon which requires the dismissal or disparagement of those who succeed in the federal system.
I am not engaging in a discussion of the merits of loyalty or patriotism. The restrained feelings of Canadians in general in the period after 1945 mirrored their restraint after 1918. The fundamental distrust of Heroism translates into an unwillingness to base mythology on military triumphs or sacrifices. They knew the contribution on all sides had been far more than required. They must have felt, when they watched the German film footage of the Canadians at Dieppe, what an earlier generation seems to have felt when they saw the Group of Seven’s war paintings, indeed, speaking for myself, what I feel when I look at these images today. This shale and those cracked boulders on the beach of Dieppe are bodies. These men walking calmly like everyman through history, half-dressed, barefoot, bandaged, helping each other along, were your next-door neighbours, your family. Who sent them there to risk death in that way?
It wasn’t so surprising that, when the Korean War came around, leading conservative historians like Donald Creighton and even Harold Innis, who had begun as a conservative and had served in the trenches more than thirty years before, opposed any participation. The cause at hand was not clear. The hand of the empires was too obvious.
Nor was it surprising that one of the things which convinced Canadians Brian Mulroney was unsuitable for public office was the manner in which he cavalierly committed Canada to the Iraq War. Put aside the issue of the war itself and our minute contribution.
President George Bush asked Brian Mulroney to fly down urgently to discuss the Iraq crisis over dinner. Mulroney flew off, which was fine, but he returned the next day to announce Canada’s commitment to American policy. Many, including Mulroney, thought that early consultation was a sign of his special relationship. He was clearly thrilled to be treated as such an important person. It was as if his personal relationship to the élites of the empire overwhelmed the possibility, even the need, of carefully considering Canada’s situation and interests before making any public comments.
Consider the situation from Washington’s point of view. They had just lost part of their oil supply. Much of what remained was in easy striking distance of Saddam Hussein’s forces, which at that point many people thought were quite effective. A pro-American oil-producing coalition had yet to be put in place.
George Bush’s military, economic, diplomatic and security advisers would have laid out for him the situation and the key relevant factors. They would have immediately reminded him: 1) that America’s nearest supplementary supply of energy lay in Canada; 2) that during the previous oil crisis Canadians had begun to pull the plug on their oil exports. The president’s first job, lying somewhere between tactics and strategy, was therefore to lock in the Canadian supply. He picked up the phone and invited Brian Mulroney to dine because he needed his advice on matters of international importance.
And so that vivid incarnation of self-loathing rushed down, thrilled in the manner that an eighteenth-century salt-tax collector in France—the personification of the insecure nouveau riche on the make—would have been if invited to the royal table, even if the subject at hand were the king’s need of a loan. A meal and a few words were enough to secure the courtier’s commitment.
The American president did his job. The prime minister was right to go. It was just that he didn’t seem to be aware of even the basic lessons in geopolitics which run through the Canadian applied memory. Either that or the excitement of being included made him lay Canadian considerations aside.
What had he forgotten? Care and reticence are always the proper reactions when invited to go to war. When the invitation comes from an empire, be doubly careful.
By committing himself almost immediately, Mr. Mulroney made an open debate on the subject impossible. Abruptly, to have reservations was to be anti-American. With the unnerving skill of a profoundly colonial person, he had reconstituted the argument over war exactly in the form it had taken in 1914. Was the colony to be with or against the empire? It was a return to the attitude of Robert Borden without Borden’s circumspection and sense of duty.
In 1937, in ones and twos, in small groups, spread out over the months, some 1,500 Canadians left Canada secretly to fight in Spain, against fascism and for democracy. Approximately half were killed defending the Spanish republic. The Canadians were the seventh-largest group in the International Brigade, but they were the third-largest on a per-capita basis, coming after the French and the Polish/Ukrainian contingents.
They left Canada secretly because right-wing groups had pressured the government to put participation by individuals in the Spanish conflict under the Foreign Enlistment Act. Its effect would be to make enlistment a criminal offence. After a lobbying campaign led by Premier Duplessis, who said they were all communists, the Act was revised in July 1937 to cover Spain. Duplessis’s objection was not surprising for someone who saw himself as leading a nationalist Christian campaign.
Of course some of the Canadian volunteers were communists. Others were CCFers and Liberals. Some were simply independent-minded people who believed in the cause of democracy. The RCMP, already launched on its anti-communist campaign, did what it could to stop them going.
In April of 1937 many of the volunteers came together in Spain to debate the creation of an autonomous Canadian battalion. They decided it would be named after Mackenzie and Papineau because they believed that the two rebellions of a century before had been to all intents and purposes a single cause—not that of race but that of justice. They sent off a message to Mackenzie King, asking for his support. “We implore you from the depths of our hearts to do everything to help Spanish democracy. In so doing you are serving your own interests. We are here for the duration until fascism is defeated.”14 There was no reply.
When the war was lost and they were evacuated, the Canadian government was of no great help in seeing that they got home, but at least they did not prosecute them on arrival. They were left alone. The journalist Greg Clark waited on the quay for the boat which carried many of them into Halifax. “I don’t recollect ever seeing soldiers who inspired in me so strange a mingling of reverence and humiliation and embarrassment at meeting their gaze.”15 When World War Two came, some were at first banned from volunteering, but the barriers gradually fell.
It would be difficult to think of a purer expression of idealism, whatever the politics of the men, than this group going off one by one to fight fascism three years before the rest of the world got around to it. In the years after the Second World War they asked the Canadian government to recognize them as veterans. After all, they had attacked the same enemy. They had simply done it a little faster than their nation had.
This slightly romantic request was not so much about money as recognition. The costs would even then have been small. The government ignored them, although it was only too pleased to bask in the fame of Norman Bethune—who had been in the brigade’s medical corps—as his reputation grew over the years. They found Bethune’s mantle particularly useful in China where he was an official martyr of the revolution. The others were forgotten.
In 1996 they were made citizens of Spain and those still alive and able went over to be officially honoured on the sixtieth anniversary of their arrival to take up arms for democracy. The French government then recognized their own ex-brigade members as full veterans of their regular army. We still haven’t done it. The only gesture has been a plaque put up in the Ontario legislature during Bob Rae’s short-lived government.
These small symbolic acts are just that—small and symbolic. But it is important in history formally to make note of our errors and lapses. That’s how we keep ourselves more or less on track. If you look back through Canadian history in search of whom these men resemble, you do indeed fall upon the volunteers who followed Mackenzie and Papineau in a simple democratic cause. Within five years most of the young leaders of that idealistic and rebellious movement were out of prison, back from exile and members of the Union parliament. One of them, LaFontaine, was prime minister, Cartier soon would be. The leaders eventually came home and were re-elected. Even Wolfred Nelson, who had commanded at St. Denis, was soon a front-bench supporter of LaFontaine. For the government to recognize the Spanish volunteers now might have the strangely salutary effect of reminding our ministers, and perhaps us, of the origins of Canadian democracy and of the line which runs through, from the Rebellions to the late-twentieth century.