by Conrad Black
The attraction and retention of immigration, and the development and binding together of half a continent that was for most of Canadian history really just a ribbon between patches of territory that happened not to be American, was an arduous task without the national identity complex that accompanied it for two hundred years. Movements to continental and to Imperial free trade were generally resisted, and Canada advanced, unexceptionably, but almost imperceptibly, and certainly unflamboyantly, through and around the shoals of strengthening nationhood, from colony to dominion to junior ally and then to a rather important ally, as world wars and then a worldwide Cold War came, and ended victoriously. They were won by alliances distinguishedly led by the British and French, then the British, French, and Americans, then the Americans and the British, and then the Americans alone, at the summit of the world’s nations.
After the First World War, when Canada was a valued junior ally of its traditional senior kindred states, there was no question of hostility between any of these powers anymore, but the self-consciousness of subordinancy gave way to a Canadian self-doubt about its raison d’être as an independent country in an era when regions were coalescing, especially in the move to a federal Europe. The distinctions between Americans from the northern states and English-speaking Canadians were much subtler than those between the people from different regions of the United States itself, such as New England and Texas. Canadians often found it difficult to explain why their country should not unite with the United States, voluntarily, as there was no longer any question of it being swallowed by its neighbour in an act of aggression. After the British connection and biculturalism faded as plausible answers, there was recourse to platitudes about Canada being kinder and gentler (originally an expression of President George H.W. Bush about his own country, not Canada), and about more generous social programs.
Canada was gentler than the United States, but partly because it was less dynamic and motivated: its social programs were more generous, but its taxes were also higher. As a rallying cry, such feeble exhortations were never going to stir the population to demonstrativeness. Canadians had developed a very original and effective way of managing through their unique and amorphous problems: endless good-faith discussion and the massaging around of the country’s ample resources, like a liniment to heal the lesions, done gradually and with such sincere verbosity that wounds healed and attention moved on to new problems susceptible to the same sort of treatment. There was almost never the sudden clash nor even long-drawn trials of vigilance, just earnest altruism, solicitous but firming up when necessary, and backed by adequate tangible resources, the surest cure to most grievances. It was so implicit, colourless, and gradual, those who were in dissent were partly appeased, partly rebuffed, but mainly simply exhausted by endless and bountiful goodwill.
And then at the end of the twentieth century, after four hundred years of continuous Western history, as the United States completed a two-hundred-year rise from ambitious colonists to a national supremacy in the world without the slightest precedent or parallel in all history, American quality of governance suddenly declined. The country inexplicably wallowed in the debt of instant gratification and became distracted by military adventurism that was benignly intended but terribly costly for any possible benefit that it might bring to America. The United States ceased, for the first time since its earliest days, to seem strong in the world, or to have a mystique that dazzled, or even impressed, the world. It was almost dysfunctional, and rather inept and even corrupt and uncompetitive, in many fields. It was a convenient time for a great power to enter a period of sluggishness that is neither dangerous to the world nor irreversible, and it has assisted Canada to assume a confidence born not just of its own attainments but of the evidence of the ordinariness, in many ways, of what had always seemed a demiurgic and omnipotent adjoining nationality.
Canada’s hour, not of celebrity, much less of dominance, but of confidence and world significance, has struck, whether Canadians, so long accustomed to an almost furtive and tentative political distinctiveness, yet hear the peal of the summons or not. Most of Canada’s leadership elites cling to the attitudes of a dominion, a middle power. They have been so long waiting for their time, watching, like the rest of the world but from a ringside seat, the engrossing spectacle of America that they are slower than the Canadian people to answer the call of Canada’s status as one of the world’s ten or twelve most important countries.
PRELUDE
“The Land God Gave to Cain”:* Original Inhabitants and Early Explorers, 874–1603
1. Canada’s Original Inhabitants
When European explorers began to settle Canada, at the end of the fifteenth century, there were probably about two hundred thousand (so-called) Indians in what became Canada, though scholars bandy about a range of numbers. The Algonquin – including the Abenaki and Montagnais on the Lower North Shore of the St. Lawrence River (as Jacques Cartier named it), the Micmac and Maliseet in what became Acadia and Nova Scotia, and the Ottawa, and Huron, and Chippewa (or Ojibwa) north of the Great Lakes – were directly or indirectly threatened by the more bellicose and fierce Iroquois south of the Great Lakes. The Iroquois were divided into the Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga, and Mohawk. On the Great Plains were the Cree and the Blackfoot, north of them were the Athabascans, and on the west coast were the Salish on the mainland and the Haida on Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands). The Indians were splendid woodsmen and craftsmen, but they were a Stone Age culture and economy that had not discovered the wheel. Their religion was largely superstitious. A few of the Algonquin and Iroquois tribes engaged in conventional agriculture in southwestern Ontario and along the St. Lawrence valley, and some fairly substantial settlements were erected south of the Great Lakes. The far western Indians had plank houses and more complicated social structures, with nobles and slaves, which were already the subject of a good deal of abuse when the Europeans reached the Pacific in the eighteenth century. But most Indians were nomadic, moving on after they had hunted down, fished out, or chased off most of the game and fish.
The women of the tribes, with the approval of the elders, coupled physically with many young braves before selecting one and mating for life. There were some impressive native ceremonies, and remarkable skills, but it was, despite much subsequent romanticization, a very primitive form of society. The life expectancy was twenty-five to thirty years, about the same as for Europeans at the time, and the North American natives proved very susceptible to contagious European diseases such as smallpox. The main groups quarrelled with one another and almost all considered war a natural and desirable state. Prisoners, including women, were almost always tortured to death, and then scalped, and those who were captured usually awaited their fate with unimaginable and majestic stoicism, completely resigned to a horrible death. It was an interesting sociological divertissement for arriving Europeans, but not an attractive life, and problems were compounded by an Indian tendency to define a treaty or pledge in temporary and flexible terms, subject to change according to circumstances. This was a legitimate cultural difference, but it led to great animosity, as the Europeans accused the natives of treachery and were accused in return of hypocritical sanctimony. Both charges were often accurate.
European firearms, especially cannon, and superior military tactics generally conferred a huge advantage on them in any recourse to violence, and for a time Indians were susceptible to the idea that Europeans were supernatural, but the Europeans’ conduct soon disabused the natives of any such flattering concept. It soon emerged that native people had a great propensity to alcoholic consumption but a congenitally reduced capacity for it. In general, the French, British, and Dutch colonists, who were effectively the only nationalities that tried to set up permanently in what became the United States and Canada, except for a slight Spanish presence along what is now the Mexican border and the Gulf Coast, divided between those who despised the Indians and made little effort to develop any cooperative relat
ionship with them and those, like the founder of Quebec and of Canada, Samuel de Champlain, who saw them as interesting and talented candidates for religious conversion, education, and stable and useful alliances. The attitude of Champlain was entirely justified and vindicated, but not always emulated, though the French, because they were more interested in religious conversions and were soon less populous than the British colonists and less threatening to the Indians demographically, and were the pioneers in the fur trade, got on better with the Indians than the British did. It is fair to say that the Indians were capable people of much promise but that their civilization, though exceptional in some arts, crafts, and in physical prowess, was uncompetitive with much of Europe for the preceding two thousand years.
There remains the issue of the moral and legal justification for the occupation of the Americas by the Europeans. It was a rich and underpopulated area and the occupants were, from the standpoint of the potential of the human species, underutilizing it. Despite the sentimentality of Longfellow, James Fenimore Cooper, Chateaubriand (with his bunk about le beau sauvage), Indian society was not in itself worthy of integral conservation, nor was its dilution a suitable subject for great lamentations. To the extent that the Americas were underdeveloped, the arrival of the Europeans was a positive thing. Unfortunately, the conduct of the exploratory and colonial visitors was very uneven and frequently utterly reprehensible. The claim of a spiritual eminent domain grounded in the holy mission of Christianization is harder to sustain on sectarian grounds. But it must be said that the Christian missions were generally extremely humane, disapproved of feeding the native people’s addiction to alcohol, and tried to spread literacy and civility and to temper the exploitive abuses of the European commercial interests. The Jesuits, in particular, were astonishingly dedicated, venturing for years on end into the wilderness, sometimes forfeiting their lives to the savagery of their hosts or the elements, in pursuit of a civilized reconciliation of the best of both cultures, including the adaptation of native religious rites to Christianity. The Jesuits, Sulpicians, and Récollets (Franciscans) had a much more commendable record with the Indians than did the Puritans, who regarded them as almost irretrievable savages.
Where the Indians were essentially hunters and fishermen, exposure to the Europeans moved them swiftly from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, and copper pots and metal hatchets and knives and needles replaced the previous articles of stone and bone. Woollen clothing was much more comfortable and efficient than the costumes of animal hides the Indians had been using. Muskets assisted in the hunt and in internecine combat, but alcohol became a terrible problem and the Indians became more commercialized than they were qualified to be, which made them vulnerable to being manipulated corruptly, and in this sense the decline of the integrity and simplicity of their previous life was regrettable. The fur trade was ultimately tragic for the Indians and the French. It transformed the Indians into avaricious agents for the French, and it substituted for a real civilizing mission or durable colonial and nation-building objective for the French. While the British colonists (and Britain evicted the Dutch from North America in the 1660s) came in large numbers to build a new life and found a new country, the French came sparsely and sought only profit. There was constant strain between the French government attempting to counter the British in the New World and the commercial interests that directed the economic life of the French settlements and cared only for the profits generated by the fur trade.
2. The Early Explorers and Colonists, 874–1603
Centuries before any Western European dared to cross the North Atlantic, Vikings, Norsemen from Denmark and Norway, who had been in the habit of terrorizing the northern British Isles, moved steadily westward, stopping at the islands in the far northern Atlantic, the Hebrides, Iceland in 874, and Greenland in 986. The first individual name in Canadian history was Leif Ericsson, who landed in Newfoundland, Vinland it was called, apparently on the north coast near L’Anse aux Meadows in 1000, having taken as his mission in life the establishment of Christianity in Greenland. Leif, who was Erik the Red’s son, was from Greenland, and was converted to Christianity in Denmark before returning to his native island, where he won over his mother to the faith, but not his resistantly impious father. Leif’s brother, Thorvald, also travelled to Vinland and tangled repeatedly and with uncertain results with the Dorset Eskimos, whom the Vikings called Skraelings. While these voyages were shorter than those of Columbus and others to the south, where the world is wider, and were possible by island-hopping, they were astonishingly bold, in largely open boats with crews that did not exceed thirty-five men.
There is a good deal of evidence that fishermen from the Basque coast of Spain, the French coast of the Bay of Biscay, Portugal, and the west coast of England had been fishing off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland for at least a century prior to Columbus’s much celebrated discovery of America in 1492. Columbus alleged that he had visited Iceland in 1477. There was great demand for fish in Western Europe, and the astounding fecundity of the Newfoundland fisheries were a magnet, as fish could be salted and preserved for the return journey.
By the late fifteenth century, nation-states were starting to grow out of the Christian world that survived the collapse of the western Roman Empire and the assimilation of the barbarian tribes and clans and the repulse of the Arab Moors from France and Spain. The first great powers were Britain, France, the alliance in the Holy Roman Empire of Austria and Spain and most of the Netherlands, and the Turks, who periodically showed up at the gates of Vienna, capital of the far-flung Holy Roman Empire.
The English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese were all fascinated by tales of the wealth of the Orient, silk, spices, gems, and precious metals, and the theory that the earth was round was well-established by the late fifteenth century, so all of those countries sponsored missions across the western ocean in search of China and the East Indies. Ferdinand Magellan set out in 1519 for the Pacific, as he named it, and reached it through what became known as the Straits of Magellan, at the southern end of South America. His ship, the Trinidad, with four accompanying vessels, was commissioned by the king of Spain, the Holy Roman emperor Charles V (Magellan was Portuguese). It completed the first circumnavigation of the globe, though Magellan himself was killed in the Philippines.
Before this mission, a group of largely Italian navigators had sailed directly west, Columbus to the Caribbean, and in 1497 John Cabot, a Genoese of Venetian citizenship, to Newfoundland. He raised the funds in Bristol, Britain’s chief Atlantic port, and sailed from that port in a single ship with a crew of only eighteen. Cabot reached Newfoundland and Cape Breton and followed the coastline south for a while, convinced he had reached the outer approaches to Asia, before returning home. King Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty, was sufficiently impressed to give Cabot an annuity and encouraged his financial supporters in Bristol to fund a voyage of five ships in 1498. It was another remarkable feat of navigation and seamanship but generated nothing of economic interest, and Cabot did not return to North America. King Manuel of Portugal sent the Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci to the Caribbean and Brazilian coasts. Vespucci played a role in securing Brazil for Portugal, and his Christian name was the origin of the word America, but his principal message was that the Americas could not be part of Asia.
John Cabot’s son, Sebastian Cabot, conducted several expeditions, including the first known effort, in 1508, to reach China via a northern route through the Arctic. In 1526 he led a four-year expedition that explored the shores and rivers of Brazil, following which he carried on with expeditions to the New World for decades and received the titles of captain general and grand pilot of England and great navigator of Spain. The ambitious king of France, Francis I, got into the act by sending the Florentine mariner Giovanni da Verrazano to North American waters in 1524, where he explored the shore from Narragansett Bay to the Carolinas and carefully examined what became New York Harbor (though he failed to identify the Hudson River as
significant), whose entrance and the gigantic and graceful suspension bridge across it bear his name today. Verrazano did claim to have glimpsed the Pacific but likely saw Chesapeake Bay instead. By this time, the European monarchs were getting a little bored with fish, however much they enhanced the dining pleasure of their subjects. In order to secure royal or private commercial support, these sea captains, when they returned, made the most extravagant and spuriously corroborated claims for what they had seen and tended to be listened to with considerable skepticism by those who had underwritten their voyages and were hoping for the return of ships loaded to the gunwales with gold, silver, and the treasures of the exotic East.
The success of the Spanish in finding gold and silver in South and Central America had aroused the acute jealousy of the British and French. The strength of these national monarchies rose as they became defined national kingdoms with coextensive cultural identities, as the power of the papacy declined after the Western Schism from 1378 to 1417 – when there were two popes, one in Rome and one in Avignon – and with the Protestant Reformation. This began in 1517 with Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, nailed to the church door at Wittenberg, and it was followed by Calvinist and other outbreaks of dissent and by the apostasy of Britain’s King Henry VIII in 1529, following his failure to obtain a divorce from Pope Clement VII, who was heavily dependent on Emperor Charles v, the nephew of the queen Henry was seeking to divorce. (Luther was especially incensed that the popes, who were wealthier than “Crassus,” set out to build the most opulent edifice in the history of the world, St. Peter’s Basilica, with “the money of the poor rather than their own.”) St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Francis Xavier founded the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) to lead the counterattack on the Protestants in 1534, and the Roman Catholic Church launched the Counter-Reformation with the Council of Trent from 1545 to 1563.
