Vol. 60, No. 3 — March 1979 —
Canada and its History
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History, it is said, is a great teacher.
What does Canadian history have to say to the people it has
shaped? For one thing, that we have never been without dissension.
And for another, that we have always managed to find the way
ahead...
The story is told of a high school student who querulously
asks his teacher why he should be forced to learn history.
"Do you know what happens to a man who loses his memory?"
the teacher asks in return.
One thing that happens, presumably, is that the man also
loses his identity. This may explain why Canadians, in their
seeming indifference to their own history, have been restlessly
searching for a distinctive national identity for many years.
The identity has been there all along, of course, as any
Canadian in another country soon discovers. And so has a national
history as remarkable in its own way as any in the world.
But like our national character, our history is full of
subtleties, complexities and contradictions. It defies simple
interpretation. It is hard to digest.
This is one of the reasons why Canadians - particularly
English-speaking Canadians - have long been in the habit of
importing history from other countries for popular consumption.
When the British Empire was at its zenith, the main source
was Great Britain, as witness the prevalence across the country
of Marlborough, Wellington and Nelson streets.
Since the British connection with Canada has loosened, Canadians
have turned to the mass media of the United States for their
popular history and heroes. No less a personage than the president
of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, A. W. Johnson, recently
complained:
"The plain truth is that our kids know more about the Alamo
than they know about Batoche or Chrysler's Farm. They know
more about Davey Crockett than Louis Riel." As if to emphasize
Johnson's point, Maclean's magazine felt obliged
to print a footnote to the quotation: "Riel's headquarters
were at Batoche, Saskatchewan; British troops defeated a U.S.
force at Chrysler's Farm in Upper Canada during the War of
1812."
Why this ignorance? Partly, it seems, because Canada lacks
a national mythology. We are short of the epic poems, folk-songs
and historical novels that immortalize a nation's Francis
Drakes, Robert Bruces and Paul Reveres. Only among French-speaking
Canadians are historical heroes generally recognized: Dollard,
Madeleine de Verchères, Champlain, La Vérendrye.
Among their English-speaking compatriots there is a curious
lack of appreciation of such giants of the wilderness as Samuel
Hearne, Alexander Mackenzie, Simon Fraser and David Thompson,
who accomplished adventurous feats of exploration second to
none.
It is perhaps more serious that - up to the latest generation,
at least - Canadians should know more about Abraham Lincoln
than about his great contemporary, Sir John A. Macdonald.
Macdonald did as much for his country as Lincoln did for
his. Or more - in American terms he might be called Abraham
Lincoln and George Washington rolled into one. Not only did
he hold a political union together, he played the leading
part in creating a new nation. Yet this man of magnificent
vision and purpose seems to be remembered by his countrymen
mainly as a merry buffoon, an inveterate boozer and shamelessly
tricky politician. His immense accomplishments are taken for
granted in Canada today.
A comparison of the careers of the two North American leaders
in the 1860s makes an interesting study of the differences
in the Canadian and American political traditions. The chief
preoccupation of both statesmen was to preserve an imperilled
union - in Macdonald's case the united Province of Canada,
consisting of the present-day Quebec and Ontario. But while
the United States tore itself asunder in a bloody civil war,
Canada fused itself into a greatly expanded federal state.
Lincoln would be assassinated in the aftermath of the Civil
War; Macdonald would live to realize his dream of a Canadian
Confederation stretching from coast to coast, and would actually
cross this fledgling nation on the great railway he had struggled
so hard to have constructed. He died peacefully in office
at the age of 73.
If Canadians do not remember Macdonald as well as they should,
it is because he was a typically Canadian compromiser. The
results of compromise are seldom spectacular. There was little
sound and fury in our first Prime Minister's career.
The road to Confederation was paved with compromise
If there is one consistent theme running through the Canadian
story, it is compromise. At least two of the most critical
junctures in our history came as a result of key individuals
submerging their own perceived best interests in a greater
cause.
In 1841 Louis Hippolyte Lafontaine, leader of the French-Canadian
reform movement, joined Robert Baldwin to form the government
of the new united Province of Canada. Lafontaine had strong
reasons to abhor this union, which deprived Quebec of its
traditional political autonomy. It was well within his political
power to demolish it. By forming his alliance with Baldwin,
Lafontaine placed himself above language, religious and regional
factiousness.
Twenty-two years later, with the union threatening to fly
apart, it was the turn of an Ontario Orangeman to put his
ideals ahead of his prejudices. For many years George Brown,
founder of the Toronto Globe and leader of the "Clear
Grits", had been an implacable opponent of French-speaking
and Roman Catholic influence in Canadian colonial affairs.
He despised John A. Macdonald, who was his opposite in practically
every personal and political characteristic. Yet the dour,
hitherto inflexible Brown found the moral courage to join
in a coalition with Macdonald and George-Etienne Cartier to
save the union.
Moreover, Brown had the foresight to begin working with
his former political foes towards a general federation of
all the scattered British North American colonies. He bowed
to the need to bring two distinct lingualistic groups together
in the formation of a new and different nation. Well might
he say, as if in wonderment at his own acts, "Where, sir,
in the pages of history shall we find a parallel to this?"
As the distinguished Canadian historian W. L. Morton once
pointed out, the events leading to the Confederation represented
a defeat for "the politics of ascendancy". As long as one
racial group demanded ascendancy over the other (usually,
but not always, the English over the French) the old Canadian
union would not hold. The resolutions framed at the Quebec
Conference of 1864 affirmed the partnership of French- and
English-Canadians in the embryonic nation, and the pact eventually
sealed in 1867 enshrined the political principles the two
language groups had in common. According to Morton:
The union of British North America was proposed, not to
achieve sought-after privileges and liberties, but to preserve
an inheritance of freedom long enjoyed and a tradition of
life valued beyond any promise of prophet or demagogue. Confederation
was to preserve by union the constitutional heritage of Canadians
from the Magna Carta of the barons to the responsible government
of Baldwin and Lafontaine, and, no less, the French and Catholic
culture of St. Louis and Laval.
This is an oblique way of saying that the Fathers of Confederation
rejected the republican principles of the United States in
favour of a constitutional monarchy. Canadians of both founding
races had been resisting annexation by the United States ever
since the American Revolutionary War. When it came to forming
their own federation, the leaders of the British North American
colonies made it clear that they wanted to build a different
society from the one across the border. They were North Americans,
yes; Americans, no.
It is popularly assumed today that Canada at the time of
Confederation had no choice but to remain part of the British
Empire. Actually there is considerable evidence to suggest
that the political leadership of Great Britain, then going
through an anti-colonialist phase, did not much care whether
Canada was absorbed by the American republic or not. According
to Macdonald's biographer, Donald Creighton, it was mainly
up to the Canadians. He wrote that the first Prime Minister
believed Canadian nationhood must move towards two objectives:
Canada must, in the first place, maintain a separate political
existence on the North American continent; and in the second,
she must achieve autonomy inside the British Empire-Commonwealth.
Obviously the first national objective was the more basic
and also the more difficult to achieve, for the North American
continent was dominated by the United States and, of the two
imperialisms, American and British, the former was by far
the more dangerous.
The building of a nation with a heritage all its own
The history of Canada since Confederation has seen fitful
advances towards these objectives. While steadily achieving
more and more independence from the British Crown, Canadians
developed and maintained a way of life that was North American,
but distinct from that of their neighbours to the south. Canadians
insisted on doing things their own way through their own institutions,
mostly British institutions adapted to North American conditions.
They took what they deemed best from the American system -
municipal government and public education, for example - and
arrived at a system that was neither British nor American.
They built Canada into a nation with a heritage all its own.
If the Canadian character is often defined in negative terms
- in terms of what Canadians are not - it is largely because
of the sheer size and power of the United States and the pervasiveness
of American culture. In their attempts to remain separate
from the United States, culturally as much as politically,
Canadians have left themselves open to the accusation of being
petulantly anti-American. Actually, their rejection of American
ways has been more a matter of recognizing flaws in the American
society and resolving not to let them develop here.
The settlement of the Canadian West offers a case in point.
During the first five years of the new Dominion, the vast
reaches of the Canadian prairies from the Red River to the
Rocky Mountains were populated almost exclusively by a few
thousand Indians and Métis. Practically the only other
human inhabitants of the Canadian plains were whisky traders
and wolf hunters from the "wild west" of the United States.
The plains Indians were mercilessly exploited by the American
traders. In May, 1873, a party of them, along with some "wolfers",
massacred 20 or more Indian men, women and children in the
Cypress Hills, near the present boundary between Alberta and
Saskatchewan. Slaughters of this kind were not uncommon across
the American border, where the saying, "the only good Indian
is a dead Indian", was put into practice with bullets. In
Canada, by contrast, the shocking incident prompted Macdonald
to hasten the formation and dispatch westward of the North-West
Mounted Police.
In an astonishingly short time, this intrepid band of 600
red-coated men had expelled the whisky traders, won the confidence
and friendship of the natives, and established a regime of
strict law and order. Through the diligent efforts of two
of its top officers, the Cypress Hills murderers were tracked
down in Fort Benton, Montana, where an American court rudely
refused to extradite them for trial. When one of the party,
arrested on Canadian soil, was brought to trial in Winnipeg,
he was acquitted for lack of evidence. But the message of
the police action was clear to all concerned: that this was
a land of peace and justice where the law would be administered
impartially, and where it was meant to be obeyed.
The drama of men fighting nature, and not each other
In the Canadian West, by common consent, public order came
before the oft-abused individual liberty which was the touchstone
of American democracy. The early Mounted Police symbolized
the differences in the society on either side of the 49th
Parallel. To the south, lawmen and judges were elected, and
they frequently indulged in graft and other kinds of lawlessness.
To the north, the lawmen were members of an incorruptible
uniformed constabulary, subject to strict military discipline,
who never drew their fire-arms until reason and force of will
had failed.
The rarity of violence on Canada's western frontier might
lead to the conclusion that its history is dull. Certainly
it seems to pale in comparison to the American Old West, so
exhaustively celebrated in song and story. This is natural
enough; an orderly, law-abiding society does not inspire many
movies or paperback books.
There is drama in Canadian history - and not only in that
of Western Canada - but it is more the drama of men fighting
nature than of men fighting one another. True, there was violence,
and plenty of it, during the earlier years of settlement.
But there has been relatively little strife on Canadian soil
since the War of 1812, perhaps for the very reason that nature
in one of the world's biggest, coldest and most rugged countries
presents such a formidable challenge. Struggling against the
elements, wresting a living from an inhospitable land, Canada's
pioneers had little time or energy to spare for hatred. Traditional
animosities from the old countries of Europe were buried in
an atmosphere of common hardship.
Three steps backward for every one forward - and yet...
The historian A. M. R. Lower has written that Canadians
must seek their collective soul in the land, for Canada has
none of the social common denominators which normally unite
a nation. Certainly the land, in all its vastness and harshness,
has left its imprint on the way Canadians traditionally have
behaved.
From its earliest days, Canada has been a place where people
have countered adversity by sharing things in the common interest.
This inborn generosity - along with the vastness of our spaces
- has made it possible to offer a home here to millions of
people from all over the world.
Like history in general, the history of Canada seems like
a matter of taking three steps backward for every one forward.
Canada has never been without difficulty and dissension. Yet,
in the long run, Canadians have always managed to find the
way ahead.
In recent years there has been a long-overdue public awakening
to Canadian history as a spate of popular books on historical
subjects has been published, often being adapted for film
and/or television. They are worthy of study, as is our history
as a whole.
It tells a story of divergent political interests restlessly
moving, not without a struggle, towards common ground; and
of diverse people somehow finding a way to live together peacefully
in spite of the differences among them. If Canadian history
has a lesson to teach, it is that great things can come of
gradualism, conciliation, tolerance and moderation. In this
new time of trial for Canada, Canadians should know their
own history for their own good.
Published by RBC Financial Group. All editions from the RBC
Letter collection are available on our web site at www.rbc.com/responsibility/letter.
Our e-mail address is: rbcletter@rbc.com.
Publié aussi en francais.
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