Whose Canada Is This?

Pity the federal Liberals: confined to seemingly permanent Opposition, they await the deliverance that only power can bring. In this political purgatory they are now visited by further vexation: their legacy is cast in doubt. What legacy? Why, that tapestry of distinctive symbols (anthem, flag, citizenship), processes (a domestic constitutional amending formula, end of judicial appeals to London) and policies (admission of Newfoundland and Labrador as a province, nation-building enterprises like the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Trans-Canada Highway). Whence the doubt? It is to be found in The Strange Demise of British Canada: The Liberals and Canadian Nationalism, 1964–1968, written by C.P. Champion, a former lecturer in history at McGill University who now works as senior policy advisor to Jason Kenney, the minister of citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism.

Imbued with a confidence that often appeared condescending and paternalistic, the Liberals for long put themselves forward as the inventors of civic Canada: creators of a sheltering arc of institutions and policies intended to eliminate British symbols and references. It was an article of Liberal faith that history progressed in linear fashion, in this instance from the alpha British norm to the omega Canadian one. In the period examined in this book, the Liberals’ opponents—the Progressive Conservatives led by John Diefenbaker—were assigned the role of antediluvian colonialists insensitive to the cultural diversity that was a fundamental feature of the modern world. According to this script, the Tory invocation of “one Canada [of ] unhyphenated Canadians” united by old loyalties to Crown and mother country appealed to the past. By contrast, the Liberals presented themselves as ambassadors of the future.

This story has been told before, although not so close up; the temporal boundaries of Champion’s tale are tight—1964–68. In this telling, the Constitution Act, 1982 and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms are yet to come. Here attention is given to the new “distinctive Maple Leaf flag” and to unification of the armed forces with its object of diminishing the British military tradition (chapters seven and eight). The centennial decade must surely represent the apotheosis of Liberal civic nationalist policies.

Yet things are not what they seem to be. There is an unexpected twist in the book, one that might disconcert keepers of the Liberals’ civic flame. Some readers will be reminded of another book with a similar title, The Strange Death of Liberal England, by George Dangerfield, published in 1935. Dangerfield’s account of the destruction of the progressive forces that propelled the Liberal Party through the Edwardian period until the final disaster of the First World War is as elegant in presentation as it is compelling in argument. Indeed, it might very well be seen to be relevant in helping to explain the parlous condition of the Liberal Party of Canada today. That, however, is not Champion’s object. In fact, he does not mention the book, and for a startling reason: unlike Dangerfield’s sombre obituary for British Liberals, Champion’s excursion into pathology reveals a very different outcome: British Canada did not die. It still lives, rescued, improbably in light of their own burnished reputation for promoting Canadian symbols, by the Liberals!

Here is a plot twist to rival Conan Doyle’s resurrection of Sherlock Holmes after disposing of him and Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. It may also account for the genteel word “demise” in the book’s title. Is this intended as a clue that the conventional interpretation of what happened in Anglo Canadian relations during the 1960s is suspect, that Liberal nationalists were not the nihilists of British tradition they painted themselves to be?

Here is revisionism on a grand scale. Rumours of the death of British Canada are, it appears, greatly exaggerated. How did this happen? The short answer is that the Liberals “engineered the crisis of Britishness.” Anyone familiar with the Ottawa mandarins will recognize the names Champion cites: Pearson, of course, Norman Robertson, Arnold Heeney, Brooke Claxton, Escott Reid and more. It was they who set out to give the country its own “distinctive Anglo-Canadian sense of identity.” Why did they do it? Champion offers religion as one “catalys[t] in the development of national consciousness.” Most of the public servants already noted were Methodists, and almost all the Liberal nationalists, like their British counterparts, were non-conformists (dissenters from the established Church of England who tended to come from the less aristocratic ranks of society). In a waspish tone worthy of an Evelyn Waugh character, Toronto author Scott Symons, a High Anglican über-traditionalist, protested: “I instinctively hate the Canadian Awakening—because it is a state-subsidized release of the creative energies of that Methodistical Lower Middle Class at our expense.” Champion states that “Pearson and his contemporaries … inherited something of Methodism’s crusading mentality, [along with] an aversion to … tradition.” The “eminent Pearsonians” (the generic description Champion gives these men) grew to adulthood in an era when most Canadian families had a male relation who, if not a farmer or teacher, was a preacher. Hilda Neatby is quoted as saying that “it is hard … to do more than guess at the immense influence of English non-conformity,” referring to “the development of national consciousness among … Canadians,” a supporting comment to be sure but not one that illuminates the relationship. The reader cannot help wishing that Champion had probed the channelling of religious belief into nationalist action more deeply.

Methodism might be for the masses, but if there were any question that the Liberals who played such a prominent part in this account of British Canada’s demise (and resurrection) were representative of the society they later served, that doubt is dispelled in the chapter devoted to the influence of Oxford University. According to J.W. Pickersgill, another Pearsonian, Oxford was “the greatest of all schools of English Canadian nationalism.” The paradoxical result of this contact between Canadian colonials and the dreaming spires—but one at the core of Champion’s argument—is that Oxford “reinforced Britishness as well as Canadianism.” It both smoothed their hard-edged nationalism and made them “anglophiles at some level for the rest of their lives,” deeply attached to the English tradition of liberty.

Part of that tradition may be seen in Pearson’s commitment, once he was in office, to the principle of “unity in diversity,” the mustard seed of Pierre Trudeau’s later policy of multiculturalism. But Champion argues that had far deeper historical roots “that a successor state to a multiracial Empire should embrace a policy of multiculturalism could be seen as a fulfillment, rather than a contradiction, of its Imperial origins.” This appraisal might be viewed
by some as too charitable, both as an assessment of the benefits of imperial rule and of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, appointed by Pearson, whose terms of reference, Champion acknowledges, “had the effect of provoking a tide of ‘third element’ assertiveness.”

That euphemistic phrase hardly does justice to the strength of negative feeling the B and B Commission aroused in Western Canada. Contrary to being accepted as a reflection of British-inherited respect for diversity, the commission’s proposal for a new federal language regime was viewed through westerners’ eyes as tantamount to an expanded civic nationalism they had no part in defining. (Mitchell Sharp was one of the few westerners close to Pearson. The Western Producer, a farm paper, was unimpressed. It observed in September 1963 that “after graduating from the University of Manitoba and the London School of Economics, he became an easterner.”) On this subject, the author adopts, as did the government he studies, a Laurentian perspective. Take, for instance, his discussion of ethnic voting.

As Champion tells it, in the 1950s, the Progressive Conservatives with their “one Canada” appeal made converts among ethnic voters. But by the mid 1960s, Diefenbaker’s “stubborn defence of the Red Ensign is thought to have alienated much of this new support.” The Liberals, seeing an opening, set out to “[Court] Our Ethnic Friends” (the title of chapter six). No electoral or demographic evidence is provided to support this narrative, and in its absence there is good reason to doubt the claim. Who is an ethnic voter, and do all ethnic voters respond electorally the same way? Are there differences between urban and rural voters (ethnic or otherwise)? Are there variations in voting behaviour across regions? These questions are not raised by the author, let alone answered.

At its core this book is a work of history with the politics left out. As soon as they are introduced, difficulties arise. There is little doubt that in the West, ethnic (which presumably means non-English and non-French) voters strongly supported Diefenbaker in the 1950s. But that is not why the PC Party won in that region then or later. Two events that had nothing to do with ethnicity but everything to do with economics help explain the voting alignment. One was the sale of massive quantities of wheat to communist China. Delivery quotas were removed and farmers were told to grow all the wheat they could. The sale meant a dramatic rise in income for prairie farmers. The other event was really not a single happening but a series of government moves that indicated confidence in the region’s traditional institutions and way of life. Passage of the Agricultural Rehabilitation and Development Act and building the South Saskatchewan River Dam were two such actions. As a result, in four of five elections that took place in the decade 1962 to 1972, more than 48 percent of the seats won by the PCs in the Prairie provinces (when measured by the winner’s margin of vote) fell in the top quartile of all Tory victories. In 1968, Trudeaumania swept much of Canada, but it made little permanent dent in the Tories’ prairie stronghold.

Once Pearson came to power, relations between his government and the West soured. (It should be noted that Pearson led only one government [April 22, 1963–April 20, 1968], although Champion refers on several occasions to the governments of Pearson. Under the Canadian constitution, governments are appointed not elected. Controversy surrounding advice, by the prime minister, and exercise, by the governor general, of prerogative powers relating to the prorogation or dissolution of Parliament would have no meaning in a system where governments are elected.) Pearson appointed J.J. Greene as his minister of agriculture. A lawyer who sat for the Ontario seat of Renfrew South, Greene was the first non-westerner to hold the agriculture portfolio since Laurier appointed S.A. Fisher, a Quebec farmer in 1896. In 1964 the Pearson government introduced legislation that allowed railroads to apply to the Board of Transport commissioners to close branch rail lines and thus further accelerate the decline of rural communities. Before the decade was finished, the new Trudeau government introduced even more incendiary legislation. Called “Lower Inventories for Tomorrow,” it paid farmers not to grow wheat. This unnatural act, in the eyes of grain farmers, was compounded by the Liberals’ lacklustre record in selling their wheat. As a banner at a rally of disgruntled Saskatchewan farmers in 1969 reminded a visiting Trudeau: “Charisma Ain’t Sold No Wheat.”

Champion’s analysis of the competing symbols invoked during the flag debate reads like a case study, and is absorbing as such histories often are. Nonetheless, it affords a very narrow lens through which to interpret national politics. It needs to be said, however, that in the book’s early chapters there is confirmation that questions of cultural identity are inordinately complex. In itself, this may not be a revelation. Still, in this reader’s opinion, Champion offers the most thoughtful assessment of “The Challenge of Anglo-Canadian Ethnicity” (the title of chapter two) available to date, an investigation that chapter three, “Britishness as a Case of Multiple Identities,” complements. As befits the general theme of resurrection, he also demonstrates the relevance of André Siegfried’s unjustly neglected book, entitled simply Canada, in which that author, according to Champion, “perceived the degrees and ‘subtle’ distinctions among people of British origins in Canada.” One of the unintended consequences of closer attention to ethnic groups and multiculturalism in Canada has been a weakening of interest in what this book calls Britishness. Champion’s study goes some distance to rectify that omission, and while it is not the principal focus of his work it may be one of its most long-lasting contributions.

British Canada did not die. Rather it was saved by prominent Liberals who came to believe that their earlier preoccupation with designing distinctive symbols of Canadian civic nationalism could be reconciled with promoting, in the multicultural society of the new world, ancient British values of liberty and respect for rights. Surely, the saddest casualty of this “reconciliation” was the leader of the Opposition, John Diefenbaker, lifelong defender of monarchy, Parliament and the same ancient values—as he saw them. The unkindest cut of all must lie in Champion’s comment that “it could be argued that the Chief ’s homogenizing brand of ‘unhyphenated Canadianism’ was less British than Pearson’s adoption of unity in diversity.” Still, how accurate an observation is it? Diefenbaker selected the first woman member of Cabinet, selected the first non-English, non-French member, approached the man who became the first black member of Parliament to run, saw that the franchise was extended to aboriginal Canadians and promoted development in the North and in Western and Atlantic Canada. Arguably, his mistake was to wrap himself in the wrong flag. What might he have replied to the conclusion found here that “the Maple Leaf … became the quintessential icon for a Pearsonian conception of Canadianism,” except, perhaps, to note that the sugar maple does not grow west of Ontario.