29

The Belt Clingers

HOW IS IT THAT WE HAVE BEEN HERE so long—some almost 400 years, some 200, many 150 or 100—and yet our élites still struggle hopelessly with their own colonial mind-sets? Is it because we have a small population which does not therefore feel self-reliant? Or live in a poor northern place which cannot convince itself that it is at the centre of something? Certainly you’ll find that same longing among Scandinavians. In their case it is directed at western Europe.

Perhaps colonial relationships, being bogus from the outset, can’t help but leave suppurating sores. Perhaps the sharp contradiction between the western rational idea of civilization and the reality of a northern country is unresolvable.

One factor that does keep the colonial mind-set alive is the way in which we cling to the belt-line of our southern border. This lop-sided occupation of our territory has created a completely false mythology—a mystification—by which the vast majority of the population are able to pretend that they are a people of central North America, not of the northern half. To turn seriously towards what lies north of the belt-line—for more than a holiday—requires a difficult reconstruction of most of our lives. And yet not to do so is to become an exile in our own country; to render ourselves irrelevant to what Canada really is.

It is worth placing our endless constitutional debates in this context. Those who favour provincial autonomy (ranging from more of it to an absolute separation) have interesting, critical things to say about our current national structures. But I wonder whether most of our fundamental problems lie not between the federal government and the provinces, but inside the provinces themselves. They are too big. Most of them, on their way from the south to the north, run through three complete geographic and climatic regions.

The differences between the north of each province and its south are greater than those between the various urban souths from east to west, including Ottawa. In fact, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver have more in common with each other than with their northern cities and regions. We know that Toronto pays no attention to Sudbury and North Bay and that there is a schism in the province. The result is a justifiable anger in the north against the south. The same is true in Lac Saint-Jean, which feels ignored by Montreal and Quebec City. Many of the regional nationalist voting patterns have more to do with a real physical and psychological independence from the rest of the province than from the rest of Canada. You find the same patterns in Prince Rupert and Prince George. Even Edmonton and Calgary clearly belong to two separate worlds. Indeed the NDP and Reform voting patterns in Ontario and the West also have a great deal to do with the permanent condition of northern alienation. In the Western provinces, northern alienation is of increasing importance, and is slowly overtaking the traditional West versus East variety.

The utilitarians think we have too many provinces. Perhaps we have too few. It’s curious, considering the enormous imaginative leaps that our early political leaders took, that they didn’t see the extent to which they were deforming the country by handing these gigantic northern hinterlands over to the young southern settlements. They created a new colonial situation. After Paris and London as the centre, then Montreal, then Ottawa, suddenly all the southern cities were turned into new colonial powers. And they went on to treat the north exactly the way empires treat colonies. They bled it without great consideration for the north’s own desires, interests and needs.

The creation of these enormous north–south slices drew the whole northern logic of the country down into a southern illusion.

And that illusion could only be filled with dissatisfaction. It encouraged laziness in the south, where much of the élite lived and still lives off the hinterland’s resources without putting anything back into those areas. And so this structure also slowed the real development of the north.

It would have been far better to have created a series of northern provinces. Their focus would have been northern, gazing out from capitals like Chicoutimi, Sudbury, perhaps Prince George. Edmonton would have had its own northern logic, as would Labrador. Even Cape Breton is a strangely classical colonial appendage to an unrelated capital area. With eighteen or so provinces the internal national debate would have been drawn upwards towards the centre of the country, where the various provinces met, instead of lying flaccid on the American border. Divided up in this way it would have been possible to establish three or four francophone-dominated provinces. Riel’s original idea was to maintain a limited territory in which the Métis would be a majority. The clear toughness of a province speaking from Chicoutimi would have been good for everyone. The energy level of these northern centres of government would have kept us closer to the unusual track imagined by the early élites. In other words it would have protected us from the predictable, colonial relationship proper to living along the American border.

Such a situation would have allowed us to develop an unchallenged northern sense of the sort the Norwegians and Swedes have. What is artificial in Canada is not the east–west flow, but the unnatural, forced, north–south flow within eight provinces. I insist on this, not because it is likely to change, but because it is important to focus on what doesn’t work very well in our structures. Compared with the unresolvable divisions within the provinces, our federal-provincial differences are quite positive.

As the southern cities grow ever larger, so it becomes more difficult for them to feel part of the whole. Increasingly they are coming to resemble isolated city-states, cut off from their hinterland. Increasingly they act like indifferent blood-suckers of the northern resources. In part this is because of the lobbying power inside those governments of the natural-resource industries. These are the organizations which live off the hinterland, while offering back very little beyond basic jobs. Increasingly our city-state élites fall into the trap which their Argentinian equivalent have suffered from. “A collective refusal to see, to come to terms with the land: an artificial colonial, fragmented colonial society, made deficient and bogus by its myths. . . . The land that was the source of their wealth became no more than their base.”1

V.S. Naipaul’s language may seem too harsh for the Canadian situation. But, when you pay attention to our élite’s reactions to the events and crises of each day, you can’t help but be struck by how isolated they seem to be from the reality of this society. They show signs of having lost the solid instincts of a properly functioning élite.

“Base Canada,” Louis-Edmond Hamelin asks, “can it go on dragging in its southern manner the immense North? Is it too much to think that one of the North’s major problems is the South?”²

I would say no. It is not too much. The provincial governments, driven by the natural-resource lobbyists, tend to act with all the down sides of a national state and few of the up sides. The situation is a betrayal both of the north and of the northern idea.