by Conrad Black
It is all, in a way, a legitimization. All Canadians, as a group, are becoming less self-conscious, dour, and envious, without metamorphosing into opinionated braggarts or snobs of a kind whose traits they have had plentiful occasion to remark in other (kindred) nationalities. Even after all that has been accomplished and secured, and the unmistakeable reduction to the human, if still very imposing, scale of the United States, Canadian nationalism is not the quiet and inborn confidence of other great nationalities. Even now it tends to be strung between reactive Tory humbug, reflexive leftist envy and sanctimony, and the obtuse inertia that more or less animates the senior central official clerisy. Canadians should already have ceased to describe themselves in diminutive (and largely false) terms such as “punching above our weight,” which they haven’t done for decades, though they did in the world wars.
In 1940, when France was overrun by Germany, King exhorted Quebec to take up the fallen torch of France, though he did nothing to encourage it in his relations with de Gaulle, and Quebec was not interested. With America’s retrenchment after the second Iraq War, no Canadian official has recognized Canada’s duty and opportunity, not to replace America – no country could do that – but to fill some of the space that has been vacated. It is as if no one with any authority has recognized how the world and Canada’s place in it have changed.
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There is again an opportunity to bring Quebec completely into a renewed Confederation through constitutional renovation and French-English rapprochement. It is a chance for a de-escalation of the brinkmanship of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown rejections, the 1995 referendum, and the Clarity Act. Most of Meech Lake would have to be retrieved, including a federalization of the Senate and the Supreme Court, but not an amendment veto for every province, nor a raft of statutory, but not constitutional, enactments.
What has become the somewhat anachronistic position of governor general will have to be revisited eventually. The occupant of that post will someday have to be the real chief, or at least co-chief, of the Canadian state and not just a stand-in for a non-resident monarch. The post will have to be filled by a less absurd formula than, as it is now, by a monarchist detritus of the worthy, lofty, public service apparat and as a method of recognizing multicultural factions, which it has been since 1989.
Canada’s senior civil service is less corrupt than America’s, less hidebound than the British, and almost free of the pseudo-Cartesian dirigitis of the French and the European Union. But most of its members are faceless, terminally earnest, have little imagination, and robotically defend the sagging rampart of Canadian national diffidence. They need, at the least, a little fresh air and companions from the terrestrial world, and should not be choosing (and sometimes managing) the person charged with convincing the world that anyone lumbered with the colonial title and status of governor general personifies the Canadian state and people. And the Senate has excavated new depths of public disregard or even embarrassment. This hodgepodge of federal institutions will need to be altered significantly, but not unrecognizably, to adapt to the much more complicated and substantial country that Canada has become since 1867. Because of the complexity of the country and the necessity for compromise, changes as fundamental as these are laborious.
Quebec’s premier, the estimable Philippe Couillard, or a successor, will have to be a stronger and more agile federalist than we have had in Quebec since the senior Johnson, to attract that province to the virtues of participating fully, but with full retention of its culture and prerogatives, in the life of the whole country as Canada quickens its progress among the world’s great nations. And Canada will need a federal leader with more imagination than Stephen Harper has shown to date, though perhaps less impetuosity than Brian Mulroney bravely showed, to resolve the last of the constitutional impasse. The challenge is to blend satisfactorily the rights of the founding cultures at the federal level with the appropriate jurisdictions of the provinces, and to restore the reciprocity of Canada–Quebec interest in a successful federation. The country has resolved knottier problems.
Canada, by its nature, has avoided the immense dramas of many other prominent countries, as these usually translate into revolutionary or military bloodshed and the passionate and poignant cultural treatment such people and events incite. Canada’s way to greatness is not that of nation states defined by sole possession of a rich language and culture, nor the way of the United States, which was able to represent itself as the world’s champion of human freedom, a magnet to all. This is a role it partially performed, to the great benefit of many hundreds of millions of people in all parts of the world, as it turned its possession of the temperate centre of a whole continent to a scale of national strength and activity which the world had never before thought possible. Canada will not follow the Spanish, French, British, Germans, Americans, Russians, and Chinese in contending for the sceptre of the world’s pre-eminent nation. But it does possess the ability to gain the world’s admiring attention, by continuing to build a country all would wish to emulate. It should aspire to be and can become the world’s laboratory for sane government and civil society. It has been relatively advanced in the acceptance of immigration of all kinds, and in the treatment of behavioral minorities; less successful in dealing with the problems of native populations; and does run relatively clean governments. Its courts and legal system are in the top rung of liberality and fairness, though it is backsliding as a carceral state, and in Canada as elsewhere lawyers are in danger of becoming more of an exploitive cartel than a learned profession disinterestedly promoting the rule of law.
And there is a vast blank page for sensible Canadian approaches to new notions of taxes, incentives to poverty reduction, alleviation of extreme income disparities, treatment of criminals (there is no excuse for prisons for non-violent people, though all crime must be punished), delivery of social services, and even for the determination of the rights of the unborn and of the apparently incurably ill. Canada is uniquely equipped to lead the world out of what has become, especially in the United States, a sterile and uncivilized shrieking match between left and right, and into the exploration of sensible public policy in a liberal society devoted altogether to individual rights and dignity.
In his 1945 poem “Canada: Case History,” distinguished Western Canadian poet Earle Birney wrote,
His uncle spoils him with candy, of course,
Yet shouts him down when he talks at table.
You will note he’s got some of his French mother’s looks,
Though he’s not so witty and no more stable.
He’s really much more like his father and yet
If you say so he’ll pull a great face.
He wants to be different from everyone else
And daydreams of winning the global race.
Parents unmarried and living abroad,
Relatives keen to bag the estate,
Schizophrenia not excluded,
Will he learn to grow up before it’s too late?
Like Frank Scott’s poem about Mackenzie King (end of Chapter 7), there was much truth in this, but it was an amusing, though ungenerous, description of Canada at the end of the Second World War, in which the country had made such a distinguished effort in the ultimate just cause. It was, perhaps, a more complicated process to deal with the Americans, British, and French, and their espousers in Canada, than Earle Birney realized. And Canada progressed more quickly out of what he thought to be national adolescence than he seemed to fear it would. That progress has continued these seventy years; we now know that Canada almost certainly has grown up.
Once again, and once more by a narrow margin, the country is passing out of crises: Quebec separatism and American psychological domination. History is almost always a guide, and again the ambitious if often imprecise plans of the builders of this country throughout its history, which have evolved and moved on to ever higher stages, will take Canada to a new summit of national development. Canada always seemed to su
rvive precariously, almost inexplicably and even accidentally, but this has made its progress more ineluctable, until it finally, suddenly, has metamorphosed into a strong country.
It advanced in almost imperceptibly small increments: a “gentlemen’s agreement” (on a few hundred immigrants) with Japan (in 1907), a Halibut Treaty (in 1923), the King-Roosevelt defence agreement at Ogdensburg (in 1940), abolition of appeals to the U.K. Privy Council (in 1949), but it never stopped advancing.
It is the chief contention of this book that for more than four hundred years there has been a continuous thread of genius and determination to create and build and improve an original and distinguished political society in the northern half of this continent. The thread has almost snapped many times, but has never been severed. Though Canada’s progress has often seemed to be a freakish sequence of usually trivial events, only rarely punctuated by anything grand and dramatic, it has been invincible. The past reveals the future.
1. A nineteenth-century Norwegian artist’s conception of Leif Ericsson’s landfall at Labrador c. 1000 A.D. It accurately portrays the modest size and primitive nature of his open vessels. (Photo Credit 1)
2. The usual fantasized portrayal of Champlain’s arrival among the native people. Despite the Stone Age, pre-wheel, and incessantly barbarous nature of indigenous society, Champlain really respected the native people and was the last Canadian leader to do so until John Diefenbaker 350 years later. The commercial antics of his countrymen (and the British, and Dutch) soon disabused the natives of over-reverent attitudes to the newcomers. (Photo Credit 2)
3. Another imaginative rendering of Champlain, in Georgian Bay in 1615. He rarely entrusted his transport to the natives and the place of the clergy was generally somewhat less prominent than is depicted here. (Photo Credit 3)
4. Armand Jean Duplessis, Cardinal and Duke de Richelieu (1585–1642), Louis XIII’s cunning, cultured, and omnipotent prime minister. He dismissed the Estates General and made the fateful decision that France should be an absolute monarchy and avoid any notions of democracy or power-sharing. He extended France’s borders by war and diplomacy and orchestrated the Thirty Years War to fragment Germany. Richelieu was a patron of Champlain and supported New France. (Photo Credit 4)
5. Champlain’s Habitation, the first European effort at residential construction in Canada, built in 1608–1610. B is a bird-house; C and D are barracks; H is Champlain’s own quarters; 4 leads to a quay. (Photo Credit 5)
6. The building of Quebec, which began in 1608, but this looks more like Champlain’s revisions and stone enhancements of 1620. (Photo Credit 6)
7, 8, 9, 10. Seventeenth-century French officialdom were look-alikes: clockwise from top left, Louis XIV (1638–1715); his capable and innovative finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683); New France’s Great Intendant Jean Talon (1626–1694), who vastly increased the population, agricultural production, and industrial base of the colony and was the forerunner of later successful public-private sector cooperation under such strong ministers as Francis Hincks, Clifford Sifton, and C.D. Howe; and Quebec’s formidable first bishop, Saint (as of 2014) François-Xavier de Laval-Montmorency (1623–1708). (Photo Credit 7)
11, 12, 13, 14. Clockwise from top left: Pierre de La Vérendrye (1685–1749) (at Lake of the Woods), born in Trois-Rivières, he shipped overseas to join the French army and was wounded at Malplaquet, and returned to explore and trade from Lake Superior to Hudson’s Bay, the Dakotas, and almost to the Rocky Mountains; Major General Sir Isaac Brock (1769–1812), a brilliant and farsighted commander who forced the surrender of a larger American force at Detroit and saved Upper Canada at Queenston Heights, where he died in the tradition of Wolfe and Nelson; Louis-Joseph Papineau (1786–1871), legislator, tractarian and seigneurial rebel, he lost his following with his agnosticism and annexationism; William Lyon Mackenzie (1795–1861), “a bristling terrier,” editor, rebel, first mayor of Toronto, the pugnacious grandfather of Canada’s most cautious prime minister. (Photo Credit 11)
15. Lord Elgin (1811–1863), personally selected by Victoria to introduce responsible government as governor general (1847–1854); had been governor of Jamaica and went on to be representative to China, Palmerston’s postmaster general, and viceroy of India. (Photo Credit 15)
16. Sir Francis Hincks (1807–1885), Irish immigrant, merchant, banker, editor, railway promoter, principal collaborator of Baldwin and LaFontaine, premier of Canada 1851–1854, won a public exchange in the British press with Disraeli and Gladstone over responsible government, governor of Barbados and British Guiana, and Macdonald’s Dominion Finance minister. (Photo Credit 16)
17. George Brown (1818–1880), founder of the Toronto Globe, a founder of the Canadian Liberal Party and the Anti-Slavery League, “shuffled” out of the premiership by Macdonald after four days in 1858. Very hostile to French Canadians and to Roman Catholic “priestcraft,” he joined with Cartier and Macdonald to design and promote Confederation. (Photo Credit 17)
18. George-Étienne Cartier (1814–1873), railway lawyer and promoter, Conservative leader in French Canada, co-premier of Canada (1856–1862) and Macdonald’s Defence minister (1867–1873), put through the Civil Code and moved creation of the Canadian Pacific Railway. (Photo Credit 18)
19. English mobs burned down the Parliament buildings in Montreal in 1849 to protest the Rebellion Losses Bill, disqualifying Montreal thereafter as the capital of Canada. (Photo Credit 19)
20. The Battle of Batoche in the Métis Revolt, 1885; twenty-four were killed and about seventy-five wounded. This was one of the supreme crises of Macdonald’s career as there was talk of annexation to the U.S., and Canadian Pacific was almost bankrupt. Macdonald brilliantly refinanced CP as a national security measure, sent forces west by rail, crushed the revolt, completed the railway which was profitable at once, and he was reelected twice again. (Photo Credit 20)
21. The trial of Louis Riel, 1885. Riel declined to plead insanity, though he almost certainly was, and was found guilty of treason. The judge ignored the jury’s recommendation of mercy and imposed the death sentence. This was backed by Macdonald, in one of his few serious political errors, as there was no need for such a draconian penalty and it aroused French sentiment, including even Laurier. Riel seemed to wish martyrdom, though he may have changed his mind later, and he was hanged on November 15, 1885, aged forty-one. He was mad, heretical, and corrupt, but the Métis had some legitimate grievances. (Photo Credit 21)
22. Donald Smith, Lord Strathcona (1820–1914), co-founder of the Canadian Pacific Railway, drives the last spike to complete it, November 7, 1885, nine days before the hanging of Louis Riel. A Scottish immigrant, he served nearly twenty-five years as a Hudson’s Bay factor in Labrador, and twenty years as a provincial and federal legislator, became head of the CPR, the Bank of Montreal, Hudson’s Bay Company, chancellor of McGill University, and Canadian high commissioner in London until he died at ninety-three. Edward VII, in respect for his philanthropy, called him “Uncle Donald.” (Photo Credit 22)
23. Robert Laird Borden (1854–1937), prime minister of Canada 1911–1920, here walking with Winston Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty, in London in 1912. Borden had opposed Laurier’s plan for a Canadian navy, and accepted Churchill’s proposal that Canada simply give Britain the money to build British ships in British yards and man them with British sailors, and defer a Canadian navy. Borden was a competent prime minister, but was lumbered with an obsolete deference to Britain, and ignorance of, but not hostility to, French Canadians. (Photo Credit 23)
24. Prime Minister Borden visiting convalescing Canadian soldiers in a military hospital in Britain in 1915. He almost succeeded in his ambition to visit with every single wounded Canadian in the military hospitals of France and Great Britain, and was a very conscientious war leader, and a sensible and moderate voice in Allied councils, getting along well with President Wilson, Prime Minister Lloyd George, and Premier Clemenceau. (Photo Credit 24)
25. Mack
enzie King and his beloved dog, Pat, to whose gestures King attributed vast insights and spiritual motivations, walking in front of Laurier House, on Laurier Avenue, where Laurier and then King lived for nearly fifty years. Lady Laurier left the house to King but disputed that Sir Wilfrid had named King his successor. (Photo Credit 25)
26. The successors to Robert Borden as Conservative leaders, Arthur Meighen (1874–1960) and R.B. Bennett (1870–1947). Both were briefly prime minister, but though very capable men in some ways, were considered by the public to be bombastic, and impulsively belligerent, and were tactically no match for King. (Photo Credit 26)
27. Regina riots, July 1, 1935: A “trek” eastwards by disgruntled residents of conservation work camps for the unemployed, organized by the Canadian Communist Party, was deemed to be an insurrection by Prime Minister Bennett, and stopped in this fracas at Regina by the RCMP. Two people were killed and it was a political debacle for Bennett, who was defeated a few months later by the returning Mackenzie King. (Photo Credit 27)
