Canadian Identity: A Polemic
Before we sell our birthright, know what we are giving away. We now have more material wealth than the USA, our long-term piggy bank is much, much bigger. Giving it away for shiny beads is not the worst of that bad bargain; it is our cultural richness that makes us priceless. That identity has been lost in the last few decades and replaced with flag waving multi-culturalism. We define ourselves by saying “we are not American”, but can we answer the follow-up question, “What’s the difference?” We can boast about this multicultural heaven, but the stories that made this tolerant country possible are no longer told. American children are carefully indoctrinated with their founding mythology but do our children know of the events that made Canada unique amongst the Western democracies? Albeit with good intentions, we have abrogated that responsibility.
Pierre Trudeau pandered to ethnic communities to offset the appearance of favoritism towards Quebec. Official bilingualism was a tough sell, especially in the west with other minority language groups. His 1971 address to the Ukrainian-Canadian Congress became iconic to “progressive” Canadians. In my view it was egregious, another step toward a nation without a shared identity. He argued that “Uniformity is neither desirable nor possible in a country the size of Canada … There is no such thing as a model or ideal Canadian.” He asked, “What could be more absurd than the concept of an ‘all-Canadian’ boy or girl.” Canada, an amalgam of diversity, should be bound together with “compassion, love, and understanding.” This warm and fuzzy binding is the craziest of glues and renders us dumbfounded as we are denigrated by the latest gargoyle to spew American Manifest Destiny. Enriching as our exotic tapestry of diversity is, it cannot endure without a strand that weaves us together. If all that identifies us is our niceness, why not join up as the 51st state? The vast majority of Americans are trustworthy neighbours, as nice as apple pie and have more money to boot.
Pierre Trudeau’s calculating praise of multiculturalism has entrenched the myth that multiculturalism is our font of unity. Cultural diversity does have many rewards, literary richness, linguistic melding, tolerance of difference etc. But it has also provided fuel for this country’s version of the identity politics that emerged here and elsewhere in the intervening decades. All cultures are created equal and are praiseworthy except the dominant culture. Each should be proud of her/his/their own history except those privileged by the sins of their grandfathers. The paternalistic Eurocentric intellectual tradition of the Western World is merely one of many ways of seeing reality and must be deconstructed etc. etc. The lite-left with this facile rigmarole– like all populist movements- is zealous, acts from moral certainty, has herd instincts, and communicates in Orwellian mantras. The Liberal Party of Canada followed that siren call leftward while at the same time reducing the science of climatology to a pious religion. Seeing that we had dug ourselves into a carbon fueled hole they thought it logical to take the shovel away and whack the culprits on the head with it to ensure they would stop digging. Keeping the shovel and digging a staircase to get out of the hole was an impure thought, an heretical departure from doctrinal truth.
This populism of the left leavened its mirror image, the libertarian populism simmering on the right; ‘one man - one gun - one vote and I don’t have to get vaccinated if I don’t want’. While our image here and abroad evolved as a multicultural heaven, the Social Credit >Reform>Canadian Alliance moved from the fringe of Canadian politics to achieve a hostile takeover of the Progressive Conservative Party, renaming it the Conservative Party of Canada. This American usage of the word ‘conservative’ is more informed by American “bro” pop culture (i.e. Fox News) than by Canadian history. That misusage, in my view, obscures the essence of the Canadian identity.
These rival populist movements have lured followers to either end of the left-right political spectrum. Both major parties have ceded the centre. Tommy Douglas was correct when he called the Progressive Conservative and Liberal parties of his day Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee. They were very similar. But having two centrist parties enables Canadians to refresh the political landscape without bulldozing it flat. This centrist tendency is a defining strand running through Canadian history. It is frayed by the present polarization that mimics American politics.
HOW WE DIFFER FROM OUR SOUTHERN NEIGHBOURS
Canada and the United States can be understood if seen in mirror image. They are physical embodiments of an old argument. The republics of The United States violently emerged from the liberal ideas flooding Europe in the 18th century; ideas, in the American context, well represented by Thomas Paine. The parliamentary democracy of Canada emerged from the rejuvenation of conservatism in the wake of the terrors of the liberal revolutions in America and France; ideas, in the British context, best expressed by Edmund Burke. (See Yuval Levin, The Great Debate, 2014) These men were well acquainted with one another. Burke had been sympathetic with the demands of colonial Americans regarding their participation in British government, but as the militant liberal uprising unfolded, he saw its propensity to violent mayhem. His prescient Reflections on the French Revolution (1790) foretold the French Reign of Terror as well as the recurrent militaristic excesses of right-wing liberals ever since.
We must define terms. Americans use the word “conservative” as meaning traditional, reactionary or right-wing. But populist right-wing militancy is a liberal heresy. The “Patriots” who stormed the American Capitol in January 2020 are its most recent incarnation. They style themselves as “proudly conservative” but in truth are proud of being individualistic, reactionary, 18th century liberals: small government, unfettered capitalism, disdain of elites, wide open iNET and “I can say whatever the f--- I want, this is America.” (In Homo Deus, 2015, Yuval Hariri agrees that most American “conservatives” are actually liberal.)
To understand the ideas that shaped Canada the word conservative has a different meaning. Canadian conservatism is defined in the Burkean sense. Put simply, Paine and Burke debated about human nature. The liberal, Paine, saw the individual as the well spring of human progress. Individuals, unshackled from the customs of the past, guided by their reason, would make sensible choices for self government and human progress. The conservative Burke argued that individuals are flawed and require a community, its institutions and cultural habits – the accumulation of past learning – to thrive. Human progress and personal contentment flowed from the present society and the accrued wisdom of its past.
Each of us hears an internal dialogue between those contradictory views of humankind. Our liberal mind yearns for individual fulfillment, our conservative mind yearns for the village. Few of us hear only one side of that debate. As individuals, nevertheless, and as countries we skew one way or the other depending on our experience and present circumstance. Healthy individuals and stable societies balance and blend these contradictory ideas. Political party labels have little to do with these “small l” liberal and “small c” conservative ideas. In Canada the Burkean mantle has been worn from time to time by all major parties. (Enter Mark Carney, stage center) In the USA, William F. Buckly embraced elements of Burkean thought but the doctrinaire belief in laissez-faire capitalism entangles the American Burkean with right-wing liberalism. Presently, David Brooks of the NYT is a man with Burkean instinct.)
The United States has a liberal ethos with traces of conservatism, the parliamentary democracy of Canada has a conservative ethos with traces of liberalism. The USA, a triumph of reason, is brand new. It severed ties to the past and is governed by a hastily drawn, now immutable, constitution. In the decades that followed the uprising against British rule, some American leaders tried to splice those ties back together, to introduce some conservatism into their new institutions, but, on the whole Thomas Paine and individualism won the argument.
Canada, a triumph of wisdom, is much older than the United States. It did not begin in 1867; our central idea was here as the pyramids were being built. We are governed by laws long in the making and customs that developed over the centuries to ensure personal fulfillment and liberty. “An Englishman’s home is his castle”, etc. We muddle through. There is no better example of this than the present moment. Our government has not broken stride in its response to an existential threat at the same time as it was replacing the Prime Minister and is soon to elect a new parliament.
One contribution of liberalism to modernity is the freedom of expression. Burkean conservatives and liberal ideologs differ, however, on how to achieve that. A Burkean conservative cautions that enabling freedom of speech without assuring that listeners or readers can judge the quality of speech reduces us to babble. Americans cite John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) as a source from which their illustrious constitutional framers drew. In it, John Milton was speaking of the right of members of Parliament to publish without fear; “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely.” Note that knowledge is placed ahead of speech and argument. “It is not possible”, he wrote, “for man [individuals alone] to sever the wheat from the tares.” Therefore, the author’s identity had to be known to his readers (Take it whence it came.) and care had to be taken to protect “the weak and the misled.” Proponents of a wide-open internet, such as Elon Musk, should hear Milton’s wise caution. Politicians who gave succor to the anti-vaccine truckers' convoy that besieged our Parliament in the name of freedom of expression missed an opportunity to be sage, to provide those who were misled with knowledge.
Canada is also younger than the United States. We did not sever our European ties in the 18th century and so Canada has also been influenced by the modernization of conservative political ideas in 19th century Europe. Traditional right-wing conservative Monarchies faded or collapsed in the wake of violent revolutionary liberalism. They achieved democracy through centrist constitutional monarchies that balanced liberalism with 19th century conservative ideas, such as social democracy and its left leaning socialist variants, ideas that were and are anathema to America. The first country to adopt universal health care, for example, was Bismark’s Prussia, hardly a liberal domain. Senator Bernie Sanders, eccentric in the USA, would pass with little comment in the Canadian political scene.
This “small c” Burkean conservative impulse is the prime ingredient of the Canadian identity and it was deliberately imbedded in our public institutions. Those who built them were very fearful of mob rule and the vicissitudes of public sentiment. They held a cautious regard for democracy and saw the parliament as both an expression of public will and a bulwark against public whim.
From the Magna Carta forward the British Parliament evolved to protect the realm from a mad or errant king. Burke foresaw that the greatest danger of liberal republics was not that a madman could come to power, “the rub” was the public insanity that put him there. Right-wing populists are angered when they are labeled fascist, but one recurring contradiction within such reactionary liberal movements is that they gravitate to strongmen, idealized individuals who “say it like it is.” Those who recoil at seeing fascism as a liberal heresy should read The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism (Ishay Landa, 2010)
Canada and the USA are unique but they complement each other. Canada has been like the older sister of the USA who tries to keep her impetuous younger brother out of trouble. For example, when the USA was attacked in 2001 Canadians stood and died with them in Afghanistan, but when asked to join the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Canada tactfully agreed to do so if the USA could convince Turkey to go, knowing full well it would never do so. This temperate approach to diplomacy is now replaced by uncharacteristic anger and we have become the battered wife tip- toeing around an abusive husband.
How did we get here?
Canadians are to blame. We have allowed our sustaining myths to be swamped in the shallow noise of American popular culture, numbed by unfettered digital information, hidden by faddish denigration of our past, untold by elders to their children, and no longer explained to children by teachers. In their place we have celebrated the present: our multi-cultural and inclusive nation. As laudable as that is, it cannot continue if we no longer know and share the stories that made us unique. I am not talking about historians, many of whom have failed us by causing us to judge as opposed understand the past; I am talking about our story tellers.
Hopefully artists will now step up in writing and film to celebrate and share our foundational tales. Each is a story of survival against the odds, ingenious adaptation, and each is soaked with blood. By accident of history Canada’s founding language groups; Indigenous, French, Métis and English had suffered catastrophic loss. Each survived against the odds by making the welfare of the community paramount. These threads have been chafed and strained by terrible wrongs as our shared history wound them into a unifying strand. Waxed by grudging compromise, however, that strand became our identity. We must now tell those stories to our children and to the world.
STORIES I WAS TOLD
1. Northern Lights
I learned to read in a one room country schoolhouse in rural New Brunswick more than seventy years ago. One story from a ‘Reader’ we were issued told of a team on an Arctic expedition that was collecting artwork for a museum. They tracked the frozen coastline on sea ice by dogsled with their Native guide. The journey was several weeks long and so they left carefully marked caches of food at intervals for their return trip. On their way back a severe storm stranded them for days and when it cleared, they could not locate the next cache. At the point of starvation, they were driven to slaughter and eat one of their dogs. As they desperately searched the forlorn coast, they stumbled upon another Native man sheltering in a tiny hastily built igloo. He had narrowly escaped when his dog team and sled plunged into a crevasse that had suddenly opened during the violent storm. On foot and without food, he was at the point of death. He said that he had stumbled on their missing cache a few hours back the coastline. The rocky cairn that had marked its location had been toppled in the storm. He could lead them to it. They were surprised that it was still there untouched. He explained that those who travelled the sea ice could never take from someone else’s cache.
Our teacher used the story to explain the difference between reason and wisdom and between custom and law. It would seem logical or reasonable for a starving man to use the cache, she said, but it would not have been wise. When survival depends on group cooperation it requires individual sacrifice for the common good. No doubt, she told us, he had learned this from stories of heroes passed down by his elders as they sat in the glow of an oil lamp in their igloo in the Arctic winter. He would sooner die of starvation than survive with shame. He was not following a written law, just a custom handed down from the past for the common good. That, she explained, is why we don’t say we follow British law; we say we follow ‘British common law and customs.’ She gave the example of our custom of leaving churches unlocked … a place where anyone could seek refuge. “Bad boys might steal candy from a store or criminals rob a bank, but no one would steal from a Church.” There were no special laws about stealing from a church, it was just our custom. Were she here now she would decry booing anyone’s national anthem. It is not against the law, but it is not our custom to do such things. It shows bad manners. “We are better than that” she would say. “Those who think freedom comes from saying whatever you want whenever you want are slaves of selfishness.”
Every Native grouping across our country has similar tales to share; survival within nature and the wisdom that comes from living at the edge. The horrific impact of forced assimilation of Canadian Natives in the last two centuries has been rightly exposed and overdue apologies given. Despite despair and abiding anger, the road forward proposed by those worst affected is surprisingly temperate and forgiving. Such wisdom and humility became a recurring feature of the Canadian story. Witness, for example, the Honourable Wab Kinew the premier of Manitoba or Honourable P.J. Akeeagok the Premier of Nunavut.
The original Canadians migrated in distinct groups from various parts of Asia over millennia via the shores of the Pacific and the Arctic. Canada has thus been multicultural and multi-lingual from its beginning. Knowledge of those ancient peoples is dramatically unfolding as our tools for peering into the past improve, as indigenous peoples proclaim their own stories in word and art and as non-indigenous Canadians become more enlightened and more curious about those who came before. One thing Prime Minister Stephen Harper got right was his amplification of the story of the Franklin expedition where modern hubris met traditional wisdom.
2. The French Fact
The permanent European settlement in Canada begins with the founding of Nouvelle France in 1604. It gave the name Canada to our country and profoundly shaped its identity. The accidental arrival of Virginia bound colonists to the shores of the Gulf of Maine in 1620 brought to Nouvelle France unwanted neighbours who were their bitter rivals. Each group had collective memories of centuries of horrendous Anglo-French and Protestant-Catholic wars. European tribal rivalries entangled with long standing disputes between rival Native alliances and a European civil war ensnarled a North American one.
Samuel Champlain is best known for his amazing accomplishments as an explorer and cartographer. It is his advocacy for religious tolerance in intolerant times and his admiration and advocacy for Natives that set him apart. He had sailed on a Spanish ship to the Caribbean as a young man. In his published travelogue of his exploration of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico he denounced the inhumane treatment of Natives by the Spaniards. In Nouvelle France he learned their languages, described their customs with fascination, and encouraged intermarriage. He attempted to broker peace between the Wabanaki and Iroquoian federations which had been at war longer than anyone he met could recall. (He noted that the Natives did not speak of war or peace, they spoke of war or trade. How apt today!). The failure of that mission led to recurrent hostilities between French colonists and the Iroquoian federation. Champlain is rightly called the Father of Nouvelle France but arguably, more than any other, deserves the title Father of Modern Canada. After his death, a Jesuit priest wrote, “Would to God that all the French who first came to this country had been like him; we should not so often have to blush before our Indians.”
Every Canadian should read Champlain’s account of the athletic and daring Native canoeists who demonstrated to his men how to shoot the Lachine rapids. Native Canadians and The Coureur de Bois made the colony of Canada a fur trading powerhouse. They opened the continent to European eyes long before the trivial contributions of latecomers such as Lewis and Clarke. At the same time, farmers and fishermen in the French colonies of Acadia and Canada survived the harsh northern climate as habitant listening to les vents des les fissures during long cold winters. Acadian farmers diked wetlands to create fertile farms, and along the St. Lawrence, houses with elongated and elevated eaves held insulating snow on the roofs. Like those who came before, living close to the edge, they adapted to survive. Close knit villages, strong family ties, the parish priest, a rich musical and story telling tradition; a stable conservative society.
In 1759, 115 years after Champlain’s death, Quebec fell to British forces midway through the Seven Years War. That battle set our future path, but our identity was forged by the unusual people and events around it. To understand the exceptional nature of those happenings, consider the animosity between the colonists of Nouvelle France and New England during their previous 140 years as neighbours on the Gulf of Maine. The level of hatred and cruelty toward one another is shocking. God fought on both sides. Recurring guerilla wars between Anglo-French, Wabanaki-Iroquois alliances … tit for tat bounties for scalps, beheadings, torture, mutilations, kidnappings, and massacres had been the norm. One might compare that frontier to the seething deep seated tribal/religious hatreds that roil the Middle East today.
In 1749 the British military constructed a fortress and fledgling settlement on the south coast of Nova Scotia to project British control of old L’ Acadie and to protect its New England colonies from harassment by the French Navy harboured just up the coast at Louisburg. The British had chosen a world class harbour, known as Kjipuktuk (Great Harbour) and renamed it Halifax. Between 1750 and 1755 father Le Loutre, a French missionary, made coldly calculated use of the Mi'kmaq to make several murderous raids on the new settlement. These gruesome attacks included scalpings and beheadings and were followed by vicious pursuit, revenge killings and pitched battles that culminated in the infamous Le Grand Dérangement, the expulsion of many Acadians from Nova Scotia between1755 and 1763.
In the summer of 1758 Louisburg fell to British forces leaving the Gulf of Saint Lawrence undefended and Quebec open to seaborn armies and naval assault. Henri-Marie Dubreil de Pontbriand, the Bishop of Quebec since 1740, realized that British victory was probable and despite ill health declined to go home to France “until peace has returned.” By June of 1759 British victory appeared inevitable and so he penned a circular letter to parish priests giving them instructions as to their deportment if their parish was occupied. That letter is a Canadian foundational document and all Canadians, especially new Canadians, should know the name Pontbriand and in my view, understand his gift to human civilization. It is called Canada.
He assured priests “If these gentlemen [the British] are willing to leave me amidst my flock, I shall remain; if they force me to leave, I shall have to yield to force.” He instructed them that they should “not be armed” and that they could, if required, take an oath promising to do nothing “directly or indirectly against the conqueror”. In keeping with Jesus’ admonition to turn the other cheek, he told them to accommodate their enemies if they wished to hold their own religious services in the village church at their preferred time and to hold Catholic services later. “In sermons and even in conversation everything that might irritate the new government will be avoided.”
As the war worsened, he moved upriver to Montreal which was safely under French control. After the fall of Quebec in September until his death the following summer of 1760 he corresponded with Father Briand his Vicar General in Quebec as well as the newly installed British Governor, General Murray. He advised Briand “avoid falling out with the governor to avoid greater troubles.” He counselled him “to act with all possible prudence” and stressed that “Only spiritual matters must concern us.” In keeping with a request from Murray regarding wounded soldiers he advised Briand, “be careful that neither priests nor nuns speak of religion to English who are ill.” It is said that in the winter of 1760 nuns could often be seen toboggining with the crippled soldiers in their care.
Pontbriand’s wisdom in these circumstances amazes. That same winter in neighbouring Nova Scotia a New England colonial militia led by Lt. Moses Hazen burned the Acadian village of Pointe St. Anne (Now Fredericton, New Brunswick) and killed and scalped six men for bounty. Hazen himself burned a house with a mother and her children trapped inside. (It should be noted that even General Amherst the British commander, himself no angel, disapproved of Hazen’s actions. Years later Hazen joined the “Patriots” and became a Brigadier General under Washington. Quelle surprise!)
Weeks after the surrender of Quebec Pontbriand wrote to Murray: “If my health allowed me to do so, I should have the honour of going to assure you of my very humble respects.” Of the seminaries and nunneries in Quebec, he said: “I hope that they will conduct themselves in such a way that they will not merit any blame. I am recommending that to them explicitly, as well as to all the clergy.” He went on to say, “For my part, I shall always act according to the principles of the Christian religion and as do all bishops who have diocesans who are subject to two sovereigns.” [Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God’s. Matthew 22:21]
The separation of church and state that grew from this moment is crucial to understanding Canada. In my view, it is as remarkable an event in human history as is the Magna Carta. The USA boasts of religious freedom but “In God Is Our Trust” has mixed relegious and politcal spheres since its inception. Canada is unique because corrollary to Pontbriand’s sheilding the church from political interference, the political sphere was freed from clerical dominance. Inadvertently perhaps, Pontbriand’s circular harbinges both freedom of and freedom from religion. Elsewhere inter-religious strife has killed tens of millions in the intervening centuries and continues to this day. Canada has had meddlesome Roman Catholic priests and provincial Premiers who were also Protestant Christian radio evangelists, but the arc of Canadian political history leads to religious freedom via a secular state.
It used to be, and should be again, impolite, unCanadian - to ask a politician his religious views and un-vote-worthy for a politician to wear religion on his sleeve or in his costume. Unfortunately, Canadians outside of Quebec, no longer understand that our tolerance and our religious freedom stems from the unwritten agreement or “custom” to keep religion, and other tribal markings, out of the political sphere. Our rush to be tolerant and multi-cultural, and political pandering to those who accent ethnicity by their garb in the public square, has eroded that foundational compromise. That is a slippery slope. There are many reasons I do not want to be American. Highest amongst them is the dangerous and unapologetic intrusion of the Protestant Christian-right into the political sphere in the USA. Now that it acts in tandem with the proto-fascist right-wing of American politics, it is positively frightening.
Pontbriand recommended his Quebec vicar Briand to Murray and assured him that any priests departing from his instructions would be dealt with firmly. This remarkable olive branch offered while the war raged on was not characteristic of that long sad chapter. Some have said he was simply trying to save the Roman Catholic Church in Quebec. I think he was bigger than that. Regardless, it was his wisdom that preserved the French in North America. Canada, like many a sturdy old edifice, sits on a field stone foundation. Quebec is Canada’s split- granite cornerstone and Pontbriand and Samuel Champlain stand like enlightened bookends at either end of the 150 years of Nouvelle France.
General Murray’s response to Pontbriand was equally temperate and laid the groundwork for peaceful coexistence, however grudging, between French and English speakers, Roman Catholics and Protestant Christians for centuries to come. Despite many tragic blunders we have had peace, order and tolerably good government to this day. Murray worked with Church officials to alleviate the hardships endured by the habitants through the ongoing war. He budgeted for the deserving poor at their request. (Canada’s first written social safety net). At considerable cost to his own career, he stood between the habitant and unscrupulous English merchants who arrived to share the spoils of war. He also signed a peace treaty with the Huron Nation, allies of the French and his recent opponents, that has been upheld to this day. The articles of capitulation of Quebec by the French to the British, a second timeless Canadian foundational document, could be an excellent model for the restoration of civil society in any present-day war zone.
Generals Wolfe and Montcalm led their armies onto Les Plaines d’ Abraham and each died in the ensuing battle. This has always struck me as a metaphor for Canada. Fighting is mutually assured destruction. Canada would long since have been subsumed into the rapacious behemoth to the south had it not been for the French Fact.
It is noteworthy that Trump’s dark expansionist fantasies do not extend to Mexico. He does not want them in his white world. Canada is his Ukraine and Alberta his Crimea. His Putinesque delusion is that we could easily be assimilated into his USAR. To that I say, “Vive le Quebec.” What Pierre Trudeau should have said to the Ukrainian-Canadian Congress is, “If you value the true north being strong and free understand and accept the blessings of the French Fact. You do not have to speak French and you are welcome to celebrate and preserve your ethnicity, but if you want to be an ‘All Canadian’ politician you are encouraged to learn la belle langue.” Many Ukrainian Canadians have done just that in the intervening years. Slava Ukraine.
3. Spem Reduxit
American school children could tell you their origin story; how the common people revolted against a tyrannical King, threw his tea in the harbour and defeated a foreign army to win independence and liberty. Glory, glory, hallelujah. Many Canadian school children, and Canadian newcomers are familiar with that American telling of the story. Unfortunately, most could not tell the Canadian version of those events.
It was more than a tea party. The United States emerged in 1783 from a brutal civil war that pitted colonist against colonist. The self-styled Patriots who sought to overthrow the government fought those native-born Loyalists who supported law and order based on the customs and common law of their British past. Most battles did not involve foreign troops; colonists fought colonists. The rebels terrorized their law-abiding colonial neighbours. They coined the word “lynch” to describe their extra judicial killings, tarred and feathered native born officials who upheld the law, smoked out or burned-out neighbours who attempted to remain neutral, and formed violent underground militias such as the Sons of Liberty, experts at intimidation and extortion. Tens of thousands of Loyalists died and seventy thousand were stripped of their property and exiled as terrorized and penniless refugees to live in tents in the frozen wilds of Canada. There, in concert with the French Canadiens who had lived in Canada and Acadia for 150 years, they fashioned our federal parliamentary democracy.
Despite suffering terrible loss the Loyalists overcame their bitterness as they rebuilt their lives. They carved farms out of the wilderness. Those Loyalists who were evacuated by the British Navy to the mouth of the Saint John River formed a new colony they called New Brunswick. They gave their new home the Latin motto Spem Reduxit, hope restored. Within a generation both French and English British North American colonists had become timber barons exporting lumber out of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the Bay of Fundy to Europe. By 1850 Canadians and Canadiens thrived as ship builders and sea captains during the Golden Age of Sail. The British merchant fleet was then the largest the world had ever seen. More than half of its fleet was of Canadian origin. They were entrepreneurial and not risk adverse but the financial institutions that evolved were prudent and stable. Get rich slowly and keep it safe. The grandchildren of those impoverished refugees were conservative in their outlook and their ideas meshed tolerably well with the traditional beliefs of the Roman Catholics of old L’ Acadie and Quebec. Together French and English-speaking Canadians developed responsible government and shaped the Confederation of the British North American colonies in 1867, a nation so vast with an imagination so large that it required unique cooperation between its private and public sectors to fulfill dreams such as the Canadian Pacific Railway.
4. The Greatest Blunder
The three-hundred -year European search for a North West Passage to the Pacific ironically gave Canada a second passage to the Atlantic. Hundreds of rivers wend through North America’s largest watershed to empty into the Hudson and James Bays. Canada’s northern gateway was remote but it competed with the St. Lawrence in the lucrative fur trade. The “English adventurers” of the Hudson Bay Company (HBC) were largely Scots who found manning a fur trading post more agreeable than did the English because they were more experienced with northern climes. Native trappers became skilled traders and fed the HBC trading posts in competition with the French speaking voyageurs who paddled the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence gateway in freight canoes to make direct contact with Native trappers and traders. French, Scots and various Native linguistic groups converged to exchange furs in kind with “Beaver Made” currency. For many Native tribes it was the first close contact with European diseases. The Native trappers were so important to the HBC that they were given the smallpox vaccine shortly after its development in the 1790s. This on a continent where pestilence had frequently been weaponized.
It is unfortunate that Canadians are more familiar with Hollywood’s wagon trains and gun slinging cowboy sheriffs than we are with this remarkable convergence of peoples. The stories of Native trappers and fur traders and their industrious and entrepreneurial wives is fodder for epic tales set on a vast and magnificent canvas. The development of the Métis Nation, despite19th century bigotry that would have embarrassed Champlain, is another case of adaptation for survival against the odds. It is material for romantic cross-cultural love stories and tragic heart breaks. Hollywood created the “western” and sold it to the world. We need to develop the “north-western”. One of those should celebrate the epic story of Louis Riel. His life and death are a tragedy of errors that strained our unifying strand of secularity almost to its breaking point. I was first told his story as a “Hero or Villain” exercise. This approach blunts inquiry, the original meaning of the word history. It leads us to judgement as opposed to understanding. Every Canadian should know of him and the other remarkable players in this drama. As Burke predicted, each of them was deeply flawed. Their stories underscore the fragility of Canada’s unique religious and linguistic compromise, our font of wisdom.
These stories and countless others can be shared with the world now that computing technology makes electronic story telling more affordable, our vast telegenic landscape more accessible, and linguistic barriers more easily overcome. They could answer the question “What’s the difference?” not just for young Canadians, but for our American neighbours. They need wisdom now as they also face an existential crisis. It would be arrogant, or at least mischievous, to say we are “the last best hope of earth” but I do know that Canada can be a light unto the world in these darkening times.