Standing on guard
Historical commentary at VIP dinner
following Information Access & Privacy Conference
by David W. Watts
June 13, 2013
Let’s face it: the phrase “stand on guard for thee” behind this year’s conference theme has become somewhat of a cliché. We have to stand through it while waiting for kickoff or dropping of the puck: preliminaries to the more important business on the turf or ice.
Six years ago we had had to sit through it as a slogan that helped elect a government that now seems intent on ignoring or dismantling many things for which Canada has stood.
No wonder we are cynical. Stand on guard for what? Give me a break!
Yet the organizers of this conference have chosen this as our theme, and I owe it to them and us to draw our attention beyond the familiar, jaded and cynical. So here goes.
We’ve been singing these words, now in our national anthem, for 105 years beginning at the tercentenary of the founding of Québec. By “we” I mean English speaking Canadians; the French words are almost three decades older, written for Saint-Jean Baptiste in 1880.
My parents’ generation sang it slightly differently. Instead of what we sing beginning with “From far and wide…,” with three “stand on guards,” they went through five:
And stand on guard, O Canada
We stand on guard for thee!
O Canada, glorious and free
We stand on guard, we stand on guard for thee
O Canada we stand on guard for thee!
One of those “stand on guards” came from a cross-Canada Royal Commission set up to look into the lyrics on an earlier version yet. The Commission decided that the phase “O Canada!” in the original was too repetitive, so they took one of those out, and put in an extra “We stand on guard” in its place. Allowing that we might want to broaden “sons command” to “all of us,” I think we may be finally getting it right!
What makes the “stand on guard” English mantra more remarkable is its absence in the French. The French first verse ends with the line, repeated once
Protégera nos foyers et nos droits
(Will protect our hearths/homes and rights)
That’s something like the English line in its place, but more meaty and specific. Those who have taken the U of A Access and Privacy Foundations course may recall the line, in Module One, “A man’s home is his castle” as an example of a belief in privacy long before privacy legislation or gender equality existed. Routhier’s linking “homes” and “rights” in his French version is right on the privacy mark in English common law.
Let’s go further and not just replace an English cliché with a French one: What is it, in the French, that will protect our homes and our rights? That comes in the preceding line:
ET ta valeur, de foi trempée
(Canada’s valeur, immersed in [her] faith.)
That’s a bit quaint, isn’t it? The only time re run into the word “valour” now is on medals and Boer War memorials!
But while “valor” may sound antiquated to us, in French it means something more current if we add an “s” to make it plural: (“tes valeurs”) our values, mentioned in Pierre Trudeau’s quotation at the end of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Obviously the Charter wasn’t around when “O Canada” was written and translated. But there were Canadian values known to the first French hearers of the song.
“O Canada” was written as an ode to Saint-Jean-Baptiste. The Saint’s day, June 24, has a significance for the beginning of Canadian exploration by both England and France: Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot) arrived on the Rock on that day in 1497, (hence Saint John’s NL) and Champlain entered the mouth of the river off the Bay of Fundy (Saint John NB) 107 years later.
While a coinciding of dates may be interesting, the theme of the Saint’s ministry is more important: The Baptizer preached a four-fold message: (1) a new order at hand, (2) preparing a way for it in the wilderness, (3) social justice and (4) a non-racial citizenship.
Think of it: new beginnings, in the wild country, social justice, and a pluralistic society. He was speaking in trans-Jordan 2000 years ago, but he could have been describing Canada.
How does this relate to our conference theme? More precisely, how are we standing on guard for, or protecting these values? The wilds are being overrun with development as we sell and lease the land and relax standards for environmental protection. Our social justice traditions are being displaced by “everyone for him/herself.
Multiculturalism? We pay attention to it to win votes, less to understanding it. A new order? Next year we’ll be spending to celebrate the centenary of the War of 1914-1918: the Great War, greatest in casualties till then, that led to the rise of new dictatorships, the Cold War and the troubles in the Middle East, a War whose outbreak was described by a statesman as “The lights are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again.”.
Access and privacy? They’re alive and thriving in a curiously inverted way: The powerful have access to what they need to know about us to maintain their hold on power and the privacy to cloak their actions and agendas from many of us affected by them. .
O Canada / Your values / steeped in faith
We stand on guard / to protect our homes and rights
Think of that next time you hear or sing our national anthem in either language.
Historical commentary at VIP dinner
following Information Access & Privacy Conference
by David W. Watts
June 13, 2013
Let’s face it: the phrase “stand on guard for thee” behind this year’s conference theme has become somewhat of a cliché. We have to stand through it while waiting for kickoff or dropping of the puck: preliminaries to the more important business on the turf or ice.
Six years ago we had had to sit through it as a slogan that helped elect a government that now seems intent on ignoring or dismantling many things for which Canada has stood.
No wonder we are cynical. Stand on guard for what? Give me a break!
Yet the organizers of this conference have chosen this as our theme, and I owe it to them and us to draw our attention beyond the familiar, jaded and cynical. So here goes.
We’ve been singing these words, now in our national anthem, for 105 years beginning at the tercentenary of the founding of Québec. By “we” I mean English speaking Canadians; the French words are almost three decades older, written for Saint-Jean Baptiste in 1880.
My parents’ generation sang it slightly differently. Instead of what we sing beginning with “From far and wide…,” with three “stand on guards,” they went through five:
And stand on guard, O Canada
We stand on guard for thee!
O Canada, glorious and free
We stand on guard, we stand on guard for thee
O Canada we stand on guard for thee!
One of those “stand on guards” came from a cross-Canada Royal Commission set up to look into the lyrics on an earlier version yet. The Commission decided that the phase “O Canada!” in the original was too repetitive, so they took one of those out, and put in an extra “We stand on guard” in its place. Allowing that we might want to broaden “sons command” to “all of us,” I think we may be finally getting it right!
What makes the “stand on guard” English mantra more remarkable is its absence in the French. The French first verse ends with the line, repeated once
Protégera nos foyers et nos droits
(Will protect our hearths/homes and rights)
That’s something like the English line in its place, but more meaty and specific. Those who have taken the U of A Access and Privacy Foundations course may recall the line, in Module One, “A man’s home is his castle” as an example of a belief in privacy long before privacy legislation or gender equality existed. Routhier’s linking “homes” and “rights” in his French version is right on the privacy mark in English common law.
Let’s go further and not just replace an English cliché with a French one: What is it, in the French, that will protect our homes and our rights? That comes in the preceding line:
ET ta valeur, de foi trempée
(Canada’s valeur, immersed in [her] faith.)
That’s a bit quaint, isn’t it? The only time re run into the word “valour” now is on medals and Boer War memorials!
But while “valor” may sound antiquated to us, in French it means something more current if we add an “s” to make it plural: (“tes valeurs”) our values, mentioned in Pierre Trudeau’s quotation at the end of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Obviously the Charter wasn’t around when “O Canada” was written and translated. But there were Canadian values known to the first French hearers of the song.
“O Canada” was written as an ode to Saint-Jean-Baptiste. The Saint’s day, June 24, has a significance for the beginning of Canadian exploration by both England and France: Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot) arrived on the Rock on that day in 1497, (hence Saint John’s NL) and Champlain entered the mouth of the river off the Bay of Fundy (Saint John NB) 107 years later.
While a coinciding of dates may be interesting, the theme of the Saint’s ministry is more important: The Baptizer preached a four-fold message: (1) a new order at hand, (2) preparing a way for it in the wilderness, (3) social justice and (4) a non-racial citizenship.
Think of it: new beginnings, in the wild country, social justice, and a pluralistic society. He was speaking in trans-Jordan 2000 years ago, but he could have been describing Canada.
How does this relate to our conference theme? More precisely, how are we standing on guard for, or protecting these values? The wilds are being overrun with development as we sell and lease the land and relax standards for environmental protection. Our social justice traditions are being displaced by “everyone for him/herself.
Multiculturalism? We pay attention to it to win votes, less to understanding it. A new order? Next year we’ll be spending to celebrate the centenary of the War of 1914-1918: the Great War, greatest in casualties till then, that led to the rise of new dictatorships, the Cold War and the troubles in the Middle East, a War whose outbreak was described by a statesman as “The lights are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again.”.
Access and privacy? They’re alive and thriving in a curiously inverted way: The powerful have access to what they need to know about us to maintain their hold on power and the privacy to cloak their actions and agendas from many of us affected by them. .
O Canada / Your values / steeped in faith
We stand on guard / to protect our homes and rights
Think of that next time you hear or sing our national anthem in either language.
Access and Privacy Foundation of Human Rights
Commentary by David W. Watts at opening reception
University of Alberta Access & Privacy Conference
Edmonton AB Canada Wednesday 13 June 2012
Why has the word “transparency” become an icon? It has replaced “accountability” and “responsibility.” Is it just the flavor of the week or is it the avant-garde of democracy: a fulfillment of the prophecy that “what was done in secret shall be shouted from the rooftops”?
French sociologist Jacques Ellul wrote “The lover does not write poetry to his beloved in her presence.” If someone is talking a lot about transparency or about anything else, it may be not because they have it but because they don’t: a cover for the fact that the Emperor has no clothes or, in the Western analogy, the barroom brawl that breaks out in a corner to distract people from the pickpocket working the floor.
Those of you who remember the Watergate Scandal that ended the Nixon presidency and created recognition of the need for access may recall “Operation Candor.” That was an Administration plan to flood the public and courts with a tsunami of irrelevant records to throw them off the trail. A few lawyers and a judge refused to be distracted by this sleight of hand. They continued to press for a few pertinent documents, the smoking gun was found, the President brought down, and the right of access to information established in the public mind.
In the current federal preoccupation with spending cuts and staff layoffs, it may appear that Access and Private are small potatoes. Imagine the type of reply we might expect from Peter Van Loan or John Baird to a critical question in the House of Commons:
“Mr. Speaker, when Canada’s men and women in uniform are risking their lives to uphold democracy in dangerous parts of the world, I’m sure most Canadians are not losing sleep that some left wing journalist or protester must wait a few months for Government to find the paper to fuel a self-serving inquiry to keep their names in the media.” or..
“Mr. Speaker, when Treasury Board is putting in long hours to balance the budget, I find it inappropriate that a few academics and agitators want more Access & Privacy spending to research petty misdemeanors by public servants of 35 years seniority who may not be able to hold their jobs in this time of restraint. Some sense of proportion please!”
(Would that get me a job scripting replies for the Government front bench in Ottawa?) To counter the replies I’ve put in the mouths, and don’t need to put in the minds, of Government spokesmen, I have news for them:
Access and Privacy are not latter-day, “soft” additions to “real” rights our forebears have written, protested, gone to jail and in some cases died for in the past. They’re not a recent add on at all, but are the foundation and bedrock of all our rights and freedoms. Let them go, and the whole structure we take for granted begins to crumble.
In the first constitutional or “rights” legislation enacted and still in effect in Canada, the 1774 Quebec Act, the Westminster Parliament established religious rights for Canadian Roman Catholics that existed nowhere else in the Empire, including Britain herself. It allowed not only individual practice of faith (that can be considered a privacy matter) but provided a parallel set on institutions for adherents (which is a matter of access). It also promised to protect “Indian lands” from encroachment: a collective form of what we call “private enjoyment” in landlord and tenant legislation today.
It became a basis of later linguistic and cultural legislation. If you’re a Québec nationalist, you can claim 1774 as recognition of a French society in North America. If you are a Canadian federalist, you can claim it as the foundation of a bilingual, multicultural, pluralistic state—claims that are not mutually exclusive but complementary.
This 1774 enactment was based not on Democracy—an idea that didn’t exist here for generations—but on privacy. The Quebec Act took its precedent from an Act passed 217 years earlier: the Act of Toleration passed when Elizabeth I came to the throne: an Act she signed with the words “I want no windows into men’s souls.”
Privacy is at the root of Canada’s constitution. It encompasses the first four fundamental freedoms (conscience, religion, thought, belief) and six of eight legal rights guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: (i) the right to life, liberty and security, (ii) from unreason-able search and seizure, (iii) from arbitrary detention including to habeas corpus, (iv) to be presumed innocent till proven guilty (v) against cruel and unusual punishment and (vi) against self-incrimination.
The use of data bases to send Rosh Hashanah cards from the PMO to potential Jewish supporters, or to identify opponents as targets for robo-calls—these are very much violations of this first fundamental right guaranteed Canadians: the right to be left alone.
Let’s go further. Later expressive rights that go beyond conscience ones—what our Charter lists as democratic, equality, mobility and language rights as well as the fundamental freedoms of expression, media, assembly and association, and the legal rights to counsel and to an interpreter—these are all examples of Access Rights.
Some of these entail access to power and to knowledge that is the source of power. Others require access to information to be meaningful. For speaking, writing and voting are meaningless without substances: without a basis for what is being advocated or decided.
As we mark the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, it’s worth remembering that in a democracy, a citizen’s right of Access parallels the remaining three basic rights of the sovereign: the right to be consulted, the right to encourage and the right to warn. But while the Head of State or her representative has weekly meetings with the head of government, the citizens have no such appointment unless they choose to vote and make an informed study to base that vote on. Where the monarch receives daily boxes of state papers to read and sign, members of the public must take upon themselves the responsibility to be informed.
The best known collapse of democracy and human rights in the 20th century took place not in a coup d’état but at the ballot box 80 years ago in the election of a minority government in Germany.
That government’s subsequent dismantling of democracy came about legally and democratically: through acts passed by the legislature, or executive decrees subsequently approved in a parliamentary vote.
The public, generally content with the state of the economy and the crackdown on dissidents and criminals, abdicated. It chose to ignore institutional changes taking place until the noose was around its neck.
Many of you know the lines of Martin Niemoller describing how that noose was placed: “First they came for the communists, and I did nothing because I was not a communist…”
In our own time and place, it would read like this:
- First they came for the demonstrators and I did nothing. I was not a trouble maker or a student, and I had a family to support.
- When they dumbed down Question Period, eliminated the census and eroded access to information, I didn’t do anything: I wasn’t a journalist, a researcher or a public speaker. I didn’t need access.
- When warned we were under surveillance, I didn’t object; I wasn’t doing anything wrong; those who were deserved what they got.
- At last the situation closed in. There was nothing that could be done: no space to think, no time to talk, no opportunity to act before decisions were made. Access, Privacy—and Democracy—were gone.
Hail the nurturers of our Dominion
Canada’s political and social evolution…under the regal watch of Victoria and Elizabeth II
“The Canadian psyche has come to internalize a number of feminine values—including… survival itself."
– David W. Watts
Edmonton Journal, Saturday, May 20, 2006
Two birthdays of queens – what would have been Victoria’s 187th next Wednesday and Elizabeth II’s 80th last month – remind us of feminine symbolist in the Canadian psyche.
Much has been made of the impact of the Crown on Canada’s historic development. The fact that it has been women who have worn that Crown for our most significant formative years has not been sufficiently explored, and deserves further attention.
Canada is the only country in the world that still officially recognizes Victoria’s birthday. Our put-in-the-garden spring weekend, numerous Victoria streets and parks, three cities and an Arctic island are reminders of a period of Canada’s evolution that included Confederation, the building the CPR, the formation of what became the RCMP, the signing of treaties with many of Canada’s First Nations and the establishment of seven of Canada’s provinces.
Most of our political institutions took shape in Victoria’s reign; the era she presided over is remembered as a time of largely unbroken peace – a peace that broke down in the century that followed.
It was against this backdrop, in contrast with the Civil War and Indian wars that tore our neighbour to the south, that the 1840 reformers and the Fathers of Confederation later resolved on a different kind of state: one based on “peace, order and good governance.”
British policy behind these events had less to do with our sense of nation-building than with a desire to di-militarize her colonies in North America. Victoria herself was deeply committed to peace, as her diaries make clear. This was the backdrop against which Canada emerged: the first modern state to be born without revolution or civil war.
The choice that our “executive authority is and shall continue to be vested in the Queen” recognized the unifying power, both personal and symbolic, Victoria held for many peoples. Our prairie First Nations identified her with White Buffalo Calf, a feminine healer in the own mythology, and smoked the peace pipe with her read-coated representatives. Their adoption of the Great White Mother as a protective figure contrasted with their attitude towards the Father in Washington.
When asked what women bring to public leadership, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright replied, “I’m not one who believes that if women ran the world, we’d have no more wars. But because relationships are so important to us, we’re more likely to look for a consensus than to polarize over issues.” That is the role that the two queens, Victoria and Elizabeth II, have had both symbolically and directly on our development.
Victoria had a direct hand in the choice of Ottawa as our capital. Sensitive to minorities—she was of German origin herself—she passed over four established cities to choose an obscure logging to because it bordered both French- and English-speaking populations.
Elizabeth II played a significant part in the patriation of 1982. Pierre Trudeau had gone head-to-head with the premiers and was telling politicians in London that they should “hold their noses” and pass his bill. The Queen worked behind the scenes to mediate concerns of the federal government, provinces, First Nations and sympathizers of each in Britain’s Parliament.
The shaping of contemporary Canadian society has taken place in her reign: the adoption of bilingualism and multiculturalism, greater self-government by First Nations and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Her contribution to these has been to provide a non-political backdrop to our evolution. Studies continue to show that a feminine figure is less polarizing than a male—an important counter to political leaders such as Diefenbaker, Trudeau and Mulroney, who evoked intense emotions.
Victoria’s reign began the year that Canada last flirted with republicanism, in the so-called “rebellions” of 1837. To prevent a repeat of the American revolution, the British government set up the Durham Commission, which began the process to self-government.
Elizabeth II’s reign began in the year of the appointment of our first Canadian-born Governor General and has spanned the period in which the institutional legacy we received has been modified to become thoroughly homegrown.
From 1837 on Canada has had a woman as head of state more than two-thirds of our 169 years: 63 under Victoria and 56 under Elizabeth, with shorter reigns of four kings in the intervening 50 years. Given the health of our present Queen, the period of feminine reign could run much longer. Even republicans have little appetite for change in her lifetime.
In the longer history of Britain, reigning queens have been the exception. Victoria and Elizabeth II share the stage with a host of Henrys, Richards and Edwards whose influence on Canada was nonexistent or marginal. But it is not only in length of years they reigned, but in when these years occurred, that the feminine influence is rooted in Canada.
It was against kings—Charles I and George III—that the English and American peoples rebelled and came of age in a father-son dynamic. It was under a queen—Victoria—that Canada chose evolution over revolution in a protracted mother-daughter relationship that became the model for the Commonwealth. It was under another Queen—Elizabeth II—that Canada adopted pluralism as an essential value rather than a superimposed unity.
That these two pillars, Evolution and Pluralism, emerged in Canada during female reigns is no accident. It fits with Madeline Albright’s observation that feminine leadership is more likely to emphasize consensus than polarization.
This was the modus operandi of ruling queens and empresses such as Elizabeth I of England, Maria Theresa of Austria and Catherin the Great of Russia. Unable to lead their troops in battle—the accustomed mark of kingship in their day, they had to devise other ways to win their subjects’ loyalty.
Constitutional monarchy still offers such consensus-building opportunities, both for the sovereign behind the scene and a public that adheres to a non-politicized head of state.
This influence of the “Queen of Canada” is reflected at more than the official levels of currency and postage stamps, legislation and the portraits in courtrooms and post offices. I believe it is reflected in the Canadian view of the state as a force in health, seniors and child care—what detractors call the “nanny state.”
There is a global dimension to this. As we come to recognize our collective survival is not at stake in Afghanistan, but in the ecological crisis, we will be turning to feminine leadership and values worldwide by the end of the 21st century. Women have shown greater concern for survival issues and less inclination to risk the whole for a part.
Phrases such as “Give me liberty or give me death” and “Better dead than red” have an unmistakably masculine ring to them. With the exception of Margaret Thatcher, women do not throw away their lives for abstract causes. The great warrior women—Deborah, Boadicea, Joan of Arc, Elizabeth I against the Spanish Armada—defended homelands. They were not on expansionary adventures of the kind our planet can no longer support.
Neither Victoria nor Elizabeth II have been described as wimpish by the politicians who worked with them. The verbal battles between the Queen and Margaret Thatcher became legendary. And Victoria told one of her prime ministers “Young man, I heard that idea from your father. He was wrong and you are wrong!”
There is a lesson for Stephen Harper here. Michaëlle Jean may not be as strong or as independently minded as our two longest serving queens. But the Canadian psyche has come to internalize a number of feminine values—including, as Margaret Atwood points out, survival itself—which he ignores at his own peril.
If Harper is savvy enough to work with and within this framework, he may be able to add to the Canadian consensus with innovations of his own. If he rejects the consensual approach for a superimposed scheme of his own, he may once again find himself on the outside looking in.
Long live the Queen!
Canada’s political and social evolution…under the regal watch of Victoria and Elizabeth II
“The Canadian psyche has come to internalize a number of feminine values—including… survival itself."
– David W. Watts
Edmonton Journal, Saturday, May 20, 2006
Two birthdays of queens – what would have been Victoria’s 187th next Wednesday and Elizabeth II’s 80th last month – remind us of feminine symbolist in the Canadian psyche.
Much has been made of the impact of the Crown on Canada’s historic development. The fact that it has been women who have worn that Crown for our most significant formative years has not been sufficiently explored, and deserves further attention.
Canada is the only country in the world that still officially recognizes Victoria’s birthday. Our put-in-the-garden spring weekend, numerous Victoria streets and parks, three cities and an Arctic island are reminders of a period of Canada’s evolution that included Confederation, the building the CPR, the formation of what became the RCMP, the signing of treaties with many of Canada’s First Nations and the establishment of seven of Canada’s provinces.
Most of our political institutions took shape in Victoria’s reign; the era she presided over is remembered as a time of largely unbroken peace – a peace that broke down in the century that followed.
It was against this backdrop, in contrast with the Civil War and Indian wars that tore our neighbour to the south, that the 1840 reformers and the Fathers of Confederation later resolved on a different kind of state: one based on “peace, order and good governance.”
British policy behind these events had less to do with our sense of nation-building than with a desire to di-militarize her colonies in North America. Victoria herself was deeply committed to peace, as her diaries make clear. This was the backdrop against which Canada emerged: the first modern state to be born without revolution or civil war.
The choice that our “executive authority is and shall continue to be vested in the Queen” recognized the unifying power, both personal and symbolic, Victoria held for many peoples. Our prairie First Nations identified her with White Buffalo Calf, a feminine healer in the own mythology, and smoked the peace pipe with her read-coated representatives. Their adoption of the Great White Mother as a protective figure contrasted with their attitude towards the Father in Washington.
When asked what women bring to public leadership, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright replied, “I’m not one who believes that if women ran the world, we’d have no more wars. But because relationships are so important to us, we’re more likely to look for a consensus than to polarize over issues.” That is the role that the two queens, Victoria and Elizabeth II, have had both symbolically and directly on our development.
Victoria had a direct hand in the choice of Ottawa as our capital. Sensitive to minorities—she was of German origin herself—she passed over four established cities to choose an obscure logging to because it bordered both French- and English-speaking populations.
Elizabeth II played a significant part in the patriation of 1982. Pierre Trudeau had gone head-to-head with the premiers and was telling politicians in London that they should “hold their noses” and pass his bill. The Queen worked behind the scenes to mediate concerns of the federal government, provinces, First Nations and sympathizers of each in Britain’s Parliament.
The shaping of contemporary Canadian society has taken place in her reign: the adoption of bilingualism and multiculturalism, greater self-government by First Nations and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Her contribution to these has been to provide a non-political backdrop to our evolution. Studies continue to show that a feminine figure is less polarizing than a male—an important counter to political leaders such as Diefenbaker, Trudeau and Mulroney, who evoked intense emotions.
Victoria’s reign began the year that Canada last flirted with republicanism, in the so-called “rebellions” of 1837. To prevent a repeat of the American revolution, the British government set up the Durham Commission, which began the process to self-government.
Elizabeth II’s reign began in the year of the appointment of our first Canadian-born Governor General and has spanned the period in which the institutional legacy we received has been modified to become thoroughly homegrown.
From 1837 on Canada has had a woman as head of state more than two-thirds of our 169 years: 63 under Victoria and 56 under Elizabeth, with shorter reigns of four kings in the intervening 50 years. Given the health of our present Queen, the period of feminine reign could run much longer. Even republicans have little appetite for change in her lifetime.
In the longer history of Britain, reigning queens have been the exception. Victoria and Elizabeth II share the stage with a host of Henrys, Richards and Edwards whose influence on Canada was nonexistent or marginal. But it is not only in length of years they reigned, but in when these years occurred, that the feminine influence is rooted in Canada.
It was against kings—Charles I and George III—that the English and American peoples rebelled and came of age in a father-son dynamic. It was under a queen—Victoria—that Canada chose evolution over revolution in a protracted mother-daughter relationship that became the model for the Commonwealth. It was under another Queen—Elizabeth II—that Canada adopted pluralism as an essential value rather than a superimposed unity.
That these two pillars, Evolution and Pluralism, emerged in Canada during female reigns is no accident. It fits with Madeline Albright’s observation that feminine leadership is more likely to emphasize consensus than polarization.
This was the modus operandi of ruling queens and empresses such as Elizabeth I of England, Maria Theresa of Austria and Catherin the Great of Russia. Unable to lead their troops in battle—the accustomed mark of kingship in their day, they had to devise other ways to win their subjects’ loyalty.
Constitutional monarchy still offers such consensus-building opportunities, both for the sovereign behind the scene and a public that adheres to a non-politicized head of state.
This influence of the “Queen of Canada” is reflected at more than the official levels of currency and postage stamps, legislation and the portraits in courtrooms and post offices. I believe it is reflected in the Canadian view of the state as a force in health, seniors and child care—what detractors call the “nanny state.”
There is a global dimension to this. As we come to recognize our collective survival is not at stake in Afghanistan, but in the ecological crisis, we will be turning to feminine leadership and values worldwide by the end of the 21st century. Women have shown greater concern for survival issues and less inclination to risk the whole for a part.
Phrases such as “Give me liberty or give me death” and “Better dead than red” have an unmistakably masculine ring to them. With the exception of Margaret Thatcher, women do not throw away their lives for abstract causes. The great warrior women—Deborah, Boadicea, Joan of Arc, Elizabeth I against the Spanish Armada—defended homelands. They were not on expansionary adventures of the kind our planet can no longer support.
Neither Victoria nor Elizabeth II have been described as wimpish by the politicians who worked with them. The verbal battles between the Queen and Margaret Thatcher became legendary. And Victoria told one of her prime ministers “Young man, I heard that idea from your father. He was wrong and you are wrong!”
There is a lesson for Stephen Harper here. Michaëlle Jean may not be as strong or as independently minded as our two longest serving queens. But the Canadian psyche has come to internalize a number of feminine values—including, as Margaret Atwood points out, survival itself—which he ignores at his own peril.
If Harper is savvy enough to work with and within this framework, he may be able to add to the Canadian consensus with innovations of his own. If he rejects the consensual approach for a superimposed scheme of his own, he may once again find himself on the outside looking in.
Long live the Queen!
Founding of Montréal is the birth of the Canadian spirit
Canada’s Pilgrim Mothers were on a mission to establish a healing place in the New World. With courage and determination, they succeeded
Three hundred sixty-five years ago (May 17, 1642) 50 women and men celebrated communion in a cathedral grove on an island in the Saint Lawrence. There had once been an Iroquois village near the site, but that day the forest seemed devoid of human habitation. The communicants gave thanks for the chain of events and years that had brought them here. Then they turned their attention to the reason for coming: the founding of a city.
Officiating at the mass was Barthelémy Vimont, SJ. The official leader of the expedition was Paul Chomeday, Sieur de Maisonneuve (“Newhouse”). But the real force and heart behind the venture was Jeanne Mance, a 35-year-old française described as “a nurse by calling, a businesswoman by nature, an adventurer by temperament and an angel by reputation.”
Mance was one of a group who can be described as Canada’s Pilgrim Mothers. They included women of wealth, culture, compassion and deep spirituality who came from a country that was at the apex of European civilization. Many of them thought their homeland was becoming materially decadent and abandoning its spiritual origins—origins that traced back to Chlotilde and to Jeanne d’Arc, who gave France a sense of purpose.
Like the earlier Jeanne, Mance and many of her contemporaries meditated regularly, and some of them saw visions and heard voices. It was through such manifestation that some of them had become connected across France.
Some of the women and a few men shared visions of an island at the meeting of two great rivers in the New World. There, they were convinced, they were to establish a haven and a healing place. Knowledge of North American geography pointed them to Mont Royal, described by Jacques Cartier in 1535.
In France in the 17th century, women had even fewer legal and property rights than elsewhere in Europe. Using male friends for cover—one even contracted a marriage of convenience with one of her late husband’s military confrères—the women developed plans in spite of the interference of family members, who tried to have them declared mentally incompetent. They raised funds and co-opted Jesuit missionaries (at a time before this was a religious term and meant simply “those on an errand”). In Maisonneuve, they found a man to front the stage of the expedition.
An “impossible” venture
When their sailing vessel pulled unexpectedly into Québec in August 1641 and they told Governor Charles Jacques Hault de Montmagny their purpose, he exclaimed, “Impossible! Mont Royale is too far from Québec for me to protect you, and too close to Iroquois country.”
Maisonneuve replied, “I shall go, even if every tree be an Iroquois!”
Now they had reached their destination. Maisonneuve had done his job in getting them there. Vimont had consecrated the venture in this first mass on site. The women came forward with the centrepiece of the mission. The first building to go up inside a protective palisade was a hospital—Hôtel Dieu—the first in the New World.
Ville Marie, as they called their settlement, was a city with a difference. It was built not for trade, not for defence, not even to evangelize—though some saw it that way—but to live among the aboriginals and to serve anyone in need.
In the years to come it served traders and became the base of a fur-trading empire. It also became a defensive point: the last to be surrendered to the British in 1760 after the fall of Québec. It became a city of culture. But the ideas of living together and service remained at its core.
How do we determine the birth of a country? What we celebrate July 1 dates back only 140 years, to the fifth of six British enactments under which we’ve been governed. If we include French governance arrangements, we have to add at least two more. Our First Nations point out that their tenure exceeds that of the Europeans by at least 20 to one. Their societies were linked by confederacies that cross present national boundaries: the Six Nations of the Iroquois in the east, and the Blackfoot Confederacy on the prairies.
Next year marks the 400th anniversary of the founding of Québec by Samuel de Champlain. Despite nationalist claims that this is a Québécois event, there is good reason to see 1608 as pivotal in Canada’s journey. The first common English translation of O Canada was in 1908 for Québec’s tercentenary. Before that, it was Québec’s national anthem, not Canada’s!
Yet there is reason for Canadians to recognize the founding of the city on the site of the former Hochelaga in 1642, as having even greater significance for Canada that that of Québec City. This for three reasons:
First, the founding of Québec was essentially a strategic move for commercial purposes. Although the building of Champlain’s habitation and New France are emphasized in hindsight, the relocation of the French colony from the Bay of Fundy to the banks of the Saint Lawrence was undertaken for the same reasons most corporate relocations are.
The founding of Montréal was something different, and the society that grew from it had a different orientation. If you are one who sees trade, defense and security as the primary issues, you will favour Québec; if you look to other values, Montréal may be your choice.
Holding the country together
Second, Montréal has held Canada together 150 years. Through conscription crises of the two world wars, depression and various acts of intolerance, the city around the mountain has mirrored the Canadian truce. Before multiculturalism was fashionable, French, English and Jewish people cohabited in Montréal. They may not have liked each other but they lived together. Canada’s pluralism is rooted there—a tribute to Mance’s vision.
In the last Québec referendum, it was Montrealers whose votes kept their province in Confederation, and kept Canada a tolerant, pluralistic state. It is the people of Montreal—the human microcosm of the UN that knows the futility of nationalism—that are the biggest obstacle to a successful third referendum. Major parts of the Montreal city state would seek to continue their affiliation with the Canadian meeting place, even with the loss of their Laurentian hinterland.
Third, Montréal marks the beginning of Humanitarian Canada, where the aboriginal word for “village” or “meeting place” that now describes us, was the primary raison d’être. The Pilgrim Mothers’ Divine Hostel was there to serve anyone who needed it. That is the reason for Canada before there was a Canada. When we’re doing that, we’re being what we’re meant to be. When we focus on the trappings and entrapment of statehood—defence, sovereignty (regional or Arctic), flag-waving and self-congratulation—we’re losing it.
Four hundred years hence, we’ll be part of a new political framework. The bankruptcy of military means to win hearts will be evident. Trade will be an engine and not the driver of our lives. We’ll have joined to meet the ecological challenge and discovered our plane in an interconnected cosmos. The national holidays of Canada, the U.S, Britain and most states will be about as important as medieval saints’ days still on a religious calendar.
Then it will be the story of our relationships—the discovery of our oneness—that matters.
In that perspective, the founding of Ville Marie/Montréal will be an important milestone.
Canada’s Pilgrim Mothers were on a mission to establish a healing place in the New World. With courage and determination, they succeeded
Three hundred sixty-five years ago (May 17, 1642) 50 women and men celebrated communion in a cathedral grove on an island in the Saint Lawrence. There had once been an Iroquois village near the site, but that day the forest seemed devoid of human habitation. The communicants gave thanks for the chain of events and years that had brought them here. Then they turned their attention to the reason for coming: the founding of a city.
Officiating at the mass was Barthelémy Vimont, SJ. The official leader of the expedition was Paul Chomeday, Sieur de Maisonneuve (“Newhouse”). But the real force and heart behind the venture was Jeanne Mance, a 35-year-old française described as “a nurse by calling, a businesswoman by nature, an adventurer by temperament and an angel by reputation.”
Mance was one of a group who can be described as Canada’s Pilgrim Mothers. They included women of wealth, culture, compassion and deep spirituality who came from a country that was at the apex of European civilization. Many of them thought their homeland was becoming materially decadent and abandoning its spiritual origins—origins that traced back to Chlotilde and to Jeanne d’Arc, who gave France a sense of purpose.
Like the earlier Jeanne, Mance and many of her contemporaries meditated regularly, and some of them saw visions and heard voices. It was through such manifestation that some of them had become connected across France.
Some of the women and a few men shared visions of an island at the meeting of two great rivers in the New World. There, they were convinced, they were to establish a haven and a healing place. Knowledge of North American geography pointed them to Mont Royal, described by Jacques Cartier in 1535.
In France in the 17th century, women had even fewer legal and property rights than elsewhere in Europe. Using male friends for cover—one even contracted a marriage of convenience with one of her late husband’s military confrères—the women developed plans in spite of the interference of family members, who tried to have them declared mentally incompetent. They raised funds and co-opted Jesuit missionaries (at a time before this was a religious term and meant simply “those on an errand”). In Maisonneuve, they found a man to front the stage of the expedition.
An “impossible” venture
When their sailing vessel pulled unexpectedly into Québec in August 1641 and they told Governor Charles Jacques Hault de Montmagny their purpose, he exclaimed, “Impossible! Mont Royale is too far from Québec for me to protect you, and too close to Iroquois country.”
Maisonneuve replied, “I shall go, even if every tree be an Iroquois!”
Now they had reached their destination. Maisonneuve had done his job in getting them there. Vimont had consecrated the venture in this first mass on site. The women came forward with the centrepiece of the mission. The first building to go up inside a protective palisade was a hospital—Hôtel Dieu—the first in the New World.
Ville Marie, as they called their settlement, was a city with a difference. It was built not for trade, not for defence, not even to evangelize—though some saw it that way—but to live among the aboriginals and to serve anyone in need.
In the years to come it served traders and became the base of a fur-trading empire. It also became a defensive point: the last to be surrendered to the British in 1760 after the fall of Québec. It became a city of culture. But the ideas of living together and service remained at its core.
How do we determine the birth of a country? What we celebrate July 1 dates back only 140 years, to the fifth of six British enactments under which we’ve been governed. If we include French governance arrangements, we have to add at least two more. Our First Nations point out that their tenure exceeds that of the Europeans by at least 20 to one. Their societies were linked by confederacies that cross present national boundaries: the Six Nations of the Iroquois in the east, and the Blackfoot Confederacy on the prairies.
Next year marks the 400th anniversary of the founding of Québec by Samuel de Champlain. Despite nationalist claims that this is a Québécois event, there is good reason to see 1608 as pivotal in Canada’s journey. The first common English translation of O Canada was in 1908 for Québec’s tercentenary. Before that, it was Québec’s national anthem, not Canada’s!
Yet there is reason for Canadians to recognize the founding of the city on the site of the former Hochelaga in 1642, as having even greater significance for Canada that that of Québec City. This for three reasons:
First, the founding of Québec was essentially a strategic move for commercial purposes. Although the building of Champlain’s habitation and New France are emphasized in hindsight, the relocation of the French colony from the Bay of Fundy to the banks of the Saint Lawrence was undertaken for the same reasons most corporate relocations are.
The founding of Montréal was something different, and the society that grew from it had a different orientation. If you are one who sees trade, defense and security as the primary issues, you will favour Québec; if you look to other values, Montréal may be your choice.
Holding the country together
Second, Montréal has held Canada together 150 years. Through conscription crises of the two world wars, depression and various acts of intolerance, the city around the mountain has mirrored the Canadian truce. Before multiculturalism was fashionable, French, English and Jewish people cohabited in Montréal. They may not have liked each other but they lived together. Canada’s pluralism is rooted there—a tribute to Mance’s vision.
In the last Québec referendum, it was Montrealers whose votes kept their province in Confederation, and kept Canada a tolerant, pluralistic state. It is the people of Montreal—the human microcosm of the UN that knows the futility of nationalism—that are the biggest obstacle to a successful third referendum. Major parts of the Montreal city state would seek to continue their affiliation with the Canadian meeting place, even with the loss of their Laurentian hinterland.
Third, Montréal marks the beginning of Humanitarian Canada, where the aboriginal word for “village” or “meeting place” that now describes us, was the primary raison d’être. The Pilgrim Mothers’ Divine Hostel was there to serve anyone who needed it. That is the reason for Canada before there was a Canada. When we’re doing that, we’re being what we’re meant to be. When we focus on the trappings and entrapment of statehood—defence, sovereignty (regional or Arctic), flag-waving and self-congratulation—we’re losing it.
Four hundred years hence, we’ll be part of a new political framework. The bankruptcy of military means to win hearts will be evident. Trade will be an engine and not the driver of our lives. We’ll have joined to meet the ecological challenge and discovered our plane in an interconnected cosmos. The national holidays of Canada, the U.S, Britain and most states will be about as important as medieval saints’ days still on a religious calendar.
Then it will be the story of our relationships—the discovery of our oneness—that matters.
In that perspective, the founding of Ville Marie/Montréal will be an important milestone.
Privacy, pluralism and the Canadian experience
a commentary to the 2005 Access & Privacy Conference
by David W. Watts
When we look at privacy protection we often focus on technology that invades, legislation that prevents, and procedures that regulate. We acknowledge principles that underlie this discussion, but usually take these as self-evident. We assume that we know what it is that we’re about, and that we simply need to get on with it.
Yet as human action and political choices spring from intentions, I want to focus on the shared attitudes and values in which a culture that respects personal privacy is rooted.
I’m going to do this by telling a story from the 16th century. We can join the dots to our own time to see that the cultural stream in which privacy struggles with control is an ongoing one. Keeping human values focused in our time rests on remembering who we are and where we’ve been on our journey, so we can see more clearly what we’re about. But first I’m going to review some high school constitutional history.
Canada’s first written constitution after the transfer to British administration was the Québec Act of 1774. It was intended as a temporary expedient by new colonial masters to win the loyalty of French Canadians at a time of unrest in the Thirteen Colonies to the south. It extended protection of the Roman Catholic faith, and with it, French culture to the people who had grown up in New France. Its effects went far beyond this.
It became the charter of French survival in the World. It became the basis of later policies of bilingualism and of our pluralistic, multicultural society. It helped to spark the US Revolution—the protection it extended to the “foreign” way of life here is one of the grievances cited in the Declaration of Independence. And because it was successful in its intent, and Quebeckers’ refused to join the Revolution, it laid the basis of the country we live in.
The Quebec Act was rooted in a rudimentary recognition of privacy. Pluralism is a conceptual product of our own time—one could not invoke it then. But Privacy was becoming accepted—privacy of thoughts and beliefs. This was a basis of the 1774 Act.
In the opening to the Quebec Act we find a reference to an earlier English statute: the 1558 Act of Toleration, the second act of Elizabeth I after she came to the throne. That Elizabeth, certainly the greatest Queen and possibly the greatest ruler England has ever had, came to power after a period of religious persecution.
And here’s the story, Elizabeth, the high-spirited redhead, the prodigy who spoke six languages and read the classics in Latin and Greek, was disowned by her father and declared a bastard by Parliament. Her mother was executed when she was three.
She grew up sent around from one house to another, waiting till she was of age to be married off to some other European dynasty in a beneficial alliance. Having been befriended and likely abused sexually by one of her guardians who was later executed, she learned to live by her wits and to distrust those who “loved not wisely” in her own words.
Under her half-brother Edward VI who succeeded Henry the VIII, she was able to come out of the shadows while Protestants persecuted Catholics to purge the English Church of foreign influences. But under her half sister Mary, “Bloody Mary” of folklore, the tables were turned. The Catholic Church was reestablished and Protestants went to the stake.
Elizabeth’s loyalties were suspect, even though she went along with Catholic ritual. She was arrested and interrogated on her beliefs. Those around her sister wanted her out of the way, either by execution like her mother, or by banishment to a foreign court.
Then Mary died, and Elizabeth came to the throne. She quickly showed she was going to be no figurehead. Her first act was to reestablish England’s national Church. Her second, the Act of Toleration, granted Catholics the right to the private observance of their faith. As the queen signed the bill into law, she said solemnly “I want no windows into men’s souls.”
What a beautiful and succinct affirmation of privacy! The Act it proclaimed was used in a way she could not have imagined 216 years later: to guarantee not only private rights but public exercise of a faith that was different from that of the majority. Britain had not gone that far in her own tolerance of dissent then, but she was prepared to grant that to her new colony in the New World.
So Canada’s first written constitution still in effect was based on a recognition of the right of privacy—a right that came to be prized by a young woman, who lived in the shadow of the axe through the religious purges. As “Good Queen Bess,” her reign was marked by policies of peace at home and the flowering of English culture.
Elizabeth’s greatest asset was not her political strength or smarts—which were considerable—but her vulnerability, and a knowledge of how to use this to forge a bond with her people. She came to the throne last in line, almost by accident. She was in frequent danger for her life, both before and after her ascent. She became beloved by sharing her vulnerability—asking for and depending on her peoples’ support and good will rather than relying on a doctrine of Divine Right of Kings.
Canada, too, is a country that does not exist by logic or natural right. Our greatest challenge in nation building—Pluralism—has become the factor that supremely unites us to each other and to our fellow citizens of Planet Earth. This is rooted in a 16th century Affirmation of Privacy: a Canadian and Human value most likely to be found among peoples and rulers that acknowledge their vulnerability to each other and in the cosmos.
Canada’s continuation as a presence despite our great diversity depends on continuing to respect this spirit of non-invasiveness.
War has not and does not define us
Old Testament mindset clouds Harper’s thinking
Edmonton Journal, Saturday, December 9, 2006
In the office of the history department of the University of Alberta, there used to be a sign: “If you want to know where it’s at, you’ve got to know where it’s been.”
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s recent speeches on Canadians, who we are and how we came to the present moment show a significant omission in his sense of “where it’s been.”
In remarks at a September rally in support of the military on Parliament Hill, he said, “Journalists exercise freedom of the press, but journalists did not create freedom of the press. All of our freedoms were created by the men and women of our history who were prepared to lay down their lives for those freedoms.”
Had he said “many of …” or even “almost all our freedoms,” his words might have passed un-challenged. But his categorical statement omits the uniqueness of Canada’s evolutionary tradition. And his contrast of the commitment of the media and the military professions was ill-chosen, because in fact, journalists have been in the forefront of the struggle for those freedoms.
Born without war
Canada was the first modern state to be born without revolution or civil war. But strangely, even when this congenial fact is pointed out to us, we diminish its importance. We say we won our independence peaceably because the Americans had fought for theirs earlier. Britain was therefore more willing to bargain than fight with the rest of her North American colonies. Or we regard our winning “responsible government” in Canada as simply apeing what Britons had fought for in their revolution and civil war in the 1600s.
Both of these explanations sell us short. Responsible government was negotiated not only because Britain was prepared to bargain, but because there were Canadian reformers who preferred this to taking up arms, and these same reformers later negotiated Confederation because they chose to talk to each other across the great divide of language and religion.
Responsible government did not, at first, include jurisdiction over Canada’s foreign affairs, but internally, it was more far-reaching than parliamentary government in Britain at the time. In Canada, control of the executive council (cabinet) passed solely to the elected Assembly in 1846. British governments then were still often led from the unelected upper house—just look at the number of 19th century British prime ministers who were “Lord So-and-so.” The House of Lords still had a veto over the Commons into the 20th century.
The Canadian struggle for responsible government began in Halifax—before Nova Scotia considered itself part of Canada—with Joseph Howe, editor of the Nova Scotian and the Morning Chronicle. Howe’s tirades against government corruption and mismanagement by the “Family Compact” landed him in court on libel charges. At one point it seemed he would go to prison. Whether he was one of those “prepared to lay down their lives for those freedoms” we cannot say, but his willingness to go that far ought to win him a place in Harper’s pantheon of “fighters for freedom.”
In Ontario and Quebec (Upper and Lower Canada) the struggle for self-government was first spearheaded by William Lyon Mackenzie and Louis-Joseph Papineau—who were also journalists. They eventually advocated insurrection: the “Rebellions” of 1837. The loss of life in these was a factor in Britain’s creation of the Durham Commission, but it was not sufficient to persuade colonial authorities to grant the “responsible government” Lord Durham advocated in his 1839 report. That came from the reasoned arguments and legislative strategy of reformers William Baldwin and Louis Lafontaine six years later.
1776: No shots rang out
Canada’s non-militaristic tradition goes back to 1776 when Québécois refused to join the American War of Independence. Other Canadians who decry Quebecers’ opposition to overseas wars and conscription need to remember that if it were not for Québec, we would not have an independent country in the first place. Through peaceful penetration inland, trading and intermarriage, French Canadian relations with the First Nations had been more collegial and respectful than those of their Anglo colonists to the south, a legacy that was nurtured by the British when they acquired Canada in 1763.
These French-Canadians and First Nations were joined by refugees from the American Revolution: “United Empire Loyalists” also opposed to the war. They settled here to give us our first significant English-speaking population: the “third pillar” of our society. They were joined by later Americans, some fleeing from slavery, some from other wars.
Their coming to Canada not only strengthened our commitment to find non-militaristic solutions—it also gave the U.S. a safety valve that spared it from further bloodletting and “settling scores” of the kind that followed the French and Russian resolutions. In the Vietnam War it probably saved Americans more Kent State massacres by permitting dissidents to settle in Canada. These myriad waves made up the Canadian character.
Canada’s involvement in the War of 1812 continued our response to the Revolutionary War. It was a joint defense of the Canadas, Upper and Lower, by children of those who had fought off American invasion or fled the new republic 30 years before. First Nations, French- and English-speaking inhabitants, Canadian volunteers and British regulars came together to repel American attempts to unite the continent and strike a blow at Britain.
It was to reduce her presence as a target in the New World that Britain threw her weight behind Confederation while many of her North American colonies preferred to maintain their own direct links to the U.K. A semi-autonomous, demilitarized dominion would create less of a provocation to the United States than a series of dependent colonies held by British troops. This danger continued to 1865, when some of Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet called for invasion of Canada to reunite the states from the Civil War, a course Lincoln rejected.
After Confederation, Canada faced the challenge of her own defence using local militias. In some quarters there were calls to raise and equip larger numbers of regular troops for self-defence, calls Sir John A. Macdonald and his successors chose to ignore. Sir John also ignored U.K. calls for more troops to assist in the Sudan in the uprising against British control now re-membered best for the murder of “Gordon of Khartoum.” Our first prime minister wondered how he could justify the blood of Canadians to put a collective face on imperial setbacks around the globe.
200 years of tradition
A majority of these Canadian foundations are more than 200 years old. The last was laid 120 years ago. They do not have prominence in the history we teach in schools—some of them are barely mentioned. Yet they lie deep within the Canadian psyche, and our more celebrated achievements—Pearsonian peacekeeping, for instant—are rooted in them.
Most Canadians’ awareness of our international presence goes back only to the “Great War” of 1914-18. They see that war through the prism of the later conflict against Hitler instead of the disaster that it was: the collapse of a century of order, a result of diplomatic blunders and stupidity that wiped out a generation of youth, fanned the fires of ethnic nationalism and paved the way for a later, more sinister conflict.
Granatstein points out that support for that war in Canada was greatest among those who had been here for the least amount of time, particularly recent immigrants from Britain. Seen this way, Québec’s 1916 anti-conscription riots were not a sign of disloyalty, but of greater attachment to a homeland by those who had been here longer.
Stephen Harper and his colleagues’ view of our world role is a reincarnation of the view of an earlier short-term prime minister. Arthur Meighen believed it was Canada’s duty to reply “Ready, aye ready!” whenever Britain called. As justice minister, he had given Canada conscription in the First World War. In a brief comeback as Conservative Party leader, he tried to force it equally on French- and English-speaking citizens in the Second World War. William Lyon Mackenzie King’s career was devoted to avoiding a repeat of that disaster.
Meighen was intelligent and decisive but dour, convinced he was right in every situation. A puritan and a westerner, he opposed efforts to make his party more palatable to voters by calling it “Progressive.” He was unstinting in his support of the military and it was his intransigence on military matters that cost him support in Quebec and finally elsewhere.
Under King as PM for much of the time between the two wars, Canada fostered a foreign policy of her own, as Laurier and Macdonald had done earlier. Our refusal to respond to Britain’s call for troops in the 1926 many Canadians as well as Britons saw our opposition to the Turkish campaign as “self-righteous” and asked why right we had to criticize the superpower we depended on for our defense.
The human cost
Harper and others who justify the human cost of our involvement in Afghanistan as the price of our influence in the world are trotting out the old theory of Canada “coming of age” in the First World War.
When they talk of building democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, they echo the 1914 propaganda of “making the world safe for democracy.” The First World War did no such thing. On the contrary, it destabilized the order that had grown up since the defeat of Napoleon and open the way for the dictators Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler.
An earlier generation believed that military training and “learning to kill” was good because it made boys into men. Harper and his unreconstructed warriors Toews and O’Connor may not go that far.
Yet they remain caught in an Old Testament mindset that the shedding of blood somehow assuages for human sins more than it adds to them.
The belief that democracy can be imposed by divine—or military—intervention smacks of the magical thinking of a literal six-day creation. It is also a denial of Canada’s 400-year tradition of largely peaceful evolution.
Old Testament mindset clouds Harper’s thinking
Edmonton Journal, Saturday, December 9, 2006
In the office of the history department of the University of Alberta, there used to be a sign: “If you want to know where it’s at, you’ve got to know where it’s been.”
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s recent speeches on Canadians, who we are and how we came to the present moment show a significant omission in his sense of “where it’s been.”
In remarks at a September rally in support of the military on Parliament Hill, he said, “Journalists exercise freedom of the press, but journalists did not create freedom of the press. All of our freedoms were created by the men and women of our history who were prepared to lay down their lives for those freedoms.”
Had he said “many of …” or even “almost all our freedoms,” his words might have passed un-challenged. But his categorical statement omits the uniqueness of Canada’s evolutionary tradition. And his contrast of the commitment of the media and the military professions was ill-chosen, because in fact, journalists have been in the forefront of the struggle for those freedoms.
Born without war
Canada was the first modern state to be born without revolution or civil war. But strangely, even when this congenial fact is pointed out to us, we diminish its importance. We say we won our independence peaceably because the Americans had fought for theirs earlier. Britain was therefore more willing to bargain than fight with the rest of her North American colonies. Or we regard our winning “responsible government” in Canada as simply apeing what Britons had fought for in their revolution and civil war in the 1600s.
Both of these explanations sell us short. Responsible government was negotiated not only because Britain was prepared to bargain, but because there were Canadian reformers who preferred this to taking up arms, and these same reformers later negotiated Confederation because they chose to talk to each other across the great divide of language and religion.
Responsible government did not, at first, include jurisdiction over Canada’s foreign affairs, but internally, it was more far-reaching than parliamentary government in Britain at the time. In Canada, control of the executive council (cabinet) passed solely to the elected Assembly in 1846. British governments then were still often led from the unelected upper house—just look at the number of 19th century British prime ministers who were “Lord So-and-so.” The House of Lords still had a veto over the Commons into the 20th century.
The Canadian struggle for responsible government began in Halifax—before Nova Scotia considered itself part of Canada—with Joseph Howe, editor of the Nova Scotian and the Morning Chronicle. Howe’s tirades against government corruption and mismanagement by the “Family Compact” landed him in court on libel charges. At one point it seemed he would go to prison. Whether he was one of those “prepared to lay down their lives for those freedoms” we cannot say, but his willingness to go that far ought to win him a place in Harper’s pantheon of “fighters for freedom.”
In Ontario and Quebec (Upper and Lower Canada) the struggle for self-government was first spearheaded by William Lyon Mackenzie and Louis-Joseph Papineau—who were also journalists. They eventually advocated insurrection: the “Rebellions” of 1837. The loss of life in these was a factor in Britain’s creation of the Durham Commission, but it was not sufficient to persuade colonial authorities to grant the “responsible government” Lord Durham advocated in his 1839 report. That came from the reasoned arguments and legislative strategy of reformers William Baldwin and Louis Lafontaine six years later.
1776: No shots rang out
Canada’s non-militaristic tradition goes back to 1776 when Québécois refused to join the American War of Independence. Other Canadians who decry Quebecers’ opposition to overseas wars and conscription need to remember that if it were not for Québec, we would not have an independent country in the first place. Through peaceful penetration inland, trading and intermarriage, French Canadian relations with the First Nations had been more collegial and respectful than those of their Anglo colonists to the south, a legacy that was nurtured by the British when they acquired Canada in 1763.
These French-Canadians and First Nations were joined by refugees from the American Revolution: “United Empire Loyalists” also opposed to the war. They settled here to give us our first significant English-speaking population: the “third pillar” of our society. They were joined by later Americans, some fleeing from slavery, some from other wars.
Their coming to Canada not only strengthened our commitment to find non-militaristic solutions—it also gave the U.S. a safety valve that spared it from further bloodletting and “settling scores” of the kind that followed the French and Russian resolutions. In the Vietnam War it probably saved Americans more Kent State massacres by permitting dissidents to settle in Canada. These myriad waves made up the Canadian character.
Canada’s involvement in the War of 1812 continued our response to the Revolutionary War. It was a joint defense of the Canadas, Upper and Lower, by children of those who had fought off American invasion or fled the new republic 30 years before. First Nations, French- and English-speaking inhabitants, Canadian volunteers and British regulars came together to repel American attempts to unite the continent and strike a blow at Britain.
It was to reduce her presence as a target in the New World that Britain threw her weight behind Confederation while many of her North American colonies preferred to maintain their own direct links to the U.K. A semi-autonomous, demilitarized dominion would create less of a provocation to the United States than a series of dependent colonies held by British troops. This danger continued to 1865, when some of Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet called for invasion of Canada to reunite the states from the Civil War, a course Lincoln rejected.
After Confederation, Canada faced the challenge of her own defence using local militias. In some quarters there were calls to raise and equip larger numbers of regular troops for self-defence, calls Sir John A. Macdonald and his successors chose to ignore. Sir John also ignored U.K. calls for more troops to assist in the Sudan in the uprising against British control now re-membered best for the murder of “Gordon of Khartoum.” Our first prime minister wondered how he could justify the blood of Canadians to put a collective face on imperial setbacks around the globe.
200 years of tradition
A majority of these Canadian foundations are more than 200 years old. The last was laid 120 years ago. They do not have prominence in the history we teach in schools—some of them are barely mentioned. Yet they lie deep within the Canadian psyche, and our more celebrated achievements—Pearsonian peacekeeping, for instant—are rooted in them.
Most Canadians’ awareness of our international presence goes back only to the “Great War” of 1914-18. They see that war through the prism of the later conflict against Hitler instead of the disaster that it was: the collapse of a century of order, a result of diplomatic blunders and stupidity that wiped out a generation of youth, fanned the fires of ethnic nationalism and paved the way for a later, more sinister conflict.
Granatstein points out that support for that war in Canada was greatest among those who had been here for the least amount of time, particularly recent immigrants from Britain. Seen this way, Québec’s 1916 anti-conscription riots were not a sign of disloyalty, but of greater attachment to a homeland by those who had been here longer.
Stephen Harper and his colleagues’ view of our world role is a reincarnation of the view of an earlier short-term prime minister. Arthur Meighen believed it was Canada’s duty to reply “Ready, aye ready!” whenever Britain called. As justice minister, he had given Canada conscription in the First World War. In a brief comeback as Conservative Party leader, he tried to force it equally on French- and English-speaking citizens in the Second World War. William Lyon Mackenzie King’s career was devoted to avoiding a repeat of that disaster.
Meighen was intelligent and decisive but dour, convinced he was right in every situation. A puritan and a westerner, he opposed efforts to make his party more palatable to voters by calling it “Progressive.” He was unstinting in his support of the military and it was his intransigence on military matters that cost him support in Quebec and finally elsewhere.
Under King as PM for much of the time between the two wars, Canada fostered a foreign policy of her own, as Laurier and Macdonald had done earlier. Our refusal to respond to Britain’s call for troops in the 1926 many Canadians as well as Britons saw our opposition to the Turkish campaign as “self-righteous” and asked why right we had to criticize the superpower we depended on for our defense.
The human cost
Harper and others who justify the human cost of our involvement in Afghanistan as the price of our influence in the world are trotting out the old theory of Canada “coming of age” in the First World War.
When they talk of building democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, they echo the 1914 propaganda of “making the world safe for democracy.” The First World War did no such thing. On the contrary, it destabilized the order that had grown up since the defeat of Napoleon and open the way for the dictators Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler.
An earlier generation believed that military training and “learning to kill” was good because it made boys into men. Harper and his unreconstructed warriors Toews and O’Connor may not go that far.
Yet they remain caught in an Old Testament mindset that the shedding of blood somehow assuages for human sins more than it adds to them.
The belief that democracy can be imposed by divine—or military—intervention smacks of the magical thinking of a literal six-day creation. It is also a denial of Canada’s 400-year tradition of largely peaceful evolution.
O Canada rooted in Québec’s faith
French explorers planted crosses in a way later generations would plant flags
Edmonton Journal, Saturday, June 23, 2007
O Canada! was written as a hymn for St-Jean Baptiste Day. First sung in French on June 24, 1880, in Quebec City, its English debut took place in 1908 for the tercentenary of Quebec.
As with so many aspects of our identify—flag, citizenship, constitution, foreign policy and the fact we’re called “Canadians”—our anthem is another instance where francophone Québécois developed our distinct symbols while the rest of Canada was content to be British North Americans and sing God save the King.
The French term for national anthem is hymne national—and O Canada is a hymn. This is clear from the third line in the French version: “As your arm can bear the sword, it can bear the Cross (Car ton bras sait porter l’épée, il sait porter la Croix).”
The cross refers not primarily to the crosses on churches but to the sense of mission that inspired the first settlers from France. Early French explorers and traders planted crosses in a way that later generations would plan flags.
A number of English translations were attempted before the 19089 version by Stanley Weir that we now sing—with a few changes. His versions were all patriotic songs, not hymns. It was only in 1980 that Parliament inserted the line “God keep our land glorious and free,” to replace one of Weir’s original six “O Canadas.” At the same time, “From far and wide” replaced one of the too-many “stand on guards.”
In the four verses of the original French lyrics—only the first is recognized as the national anthem—divine guidance is not an afterthought but the central theme. It is seen in a light beside the St. Lawrence, John the Baptizer’s presence foreshadowing the One to come, an appeal for love to fill our hearts and concluding with the cry “For Christ and King!”
In both official languages, these traditional words now sound strident and sectarian, which is why they have fallen into disuse. But behind old forms are truths that sill resonate.
First is the clear sense of calling of many of French Canada’s founders. New France’s social infrastructure was largely build up by women, many of whom shared this sense. Then there is the message of the Baptizer. The mission of a Middle Eastern prophet to prepare the way in the wilderness, to build a national identify on social justice, not ancestry, to look to One greater to come after—this call echoed in the wilds of a new country 16 centuries later and half a world away. It still moves us.
French-Canadians kept those values alive after the fall of New France and the takeover by the British. When Old France fell in the Revolution, they saw themselves as the remnant carrying the vision onward. This and not mere survival is what la survivance meant to generations of French Canadians.
Ironically, it was when English-speaking Canadians began to awaken to the unique spirit of their own Canadianism that French Canadians began to lose theirs.
In la Révolution tranquille secularism displaced spirituality, the state replaced the church as the guarantor of collective identity and Canadiens français came to describe themselves as Québécois.
Yet there are two links between the historic faith of English and French speaking Canada. Navigator Giovanni Cabotto (John Cabot) planted England’s flag in Newfoundland on Saint John the Baptist Day in 1497 – 37 years before Cartier and 337 years before the founding of Québec’s Saint-Jean Baptiste Society. That’s why the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador is called Saint John’s.
As well, the one scriptural verse that Canadians may recognizer as a national influence is Psalm 72:8, which gave Canada its official motto: “may he have dominion from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth.”
Anglophone Canadians who know this recognize the sea-to-sea part, and tend to ignore the river. Yet it is the river that resonates with French-Canadians.
English- and French-speaking Canadians each know one half of Canada’s motto. Discovering the other half can lead to the softening of solitudes in a new spirituality. And a part of that is recognizing John the Baptizer/Saint-Jean Baptiste as a shared symbol and the inspiration of Canada’s national hymn and anthem.
French explorers planted crosses in a way later generations would plant flags
Edmonton Journal, Saturday, June 23, 2007
O Canada! was written as a hymn for St-Jean Baptiste Day. First sung in French on June 24, 1880, in Quebec City, its English debut took place in 1908 for the tercentenary of Quebec.
As with so many aspects of our identify—flag, citizenship, constitution, foreign policy and the fact we’re called “Canadians”—our anthem is another instance where francophone Québécois developed our distinct symbols while the rest of Canada was content to be British North Americans and sing God save the King.
The French term for national anthem is hymne national—and O Canada is a hymn. This is clear from the third line in the French version: “As your arm can bear the sword, it can bear the Cross (Car ton bras sait porter l’épée, il sait porter la Croix).”
The cross refers not primarily to the crosses on churches but to the sense of mission that inspired the first settlers from France. Early French explorers and traders planted crosses in a way that later generations would plan flags.
A number of English translations were attempted before the 19089 version by Stanley Weir that we now sing—with a few changes. His versions were all patriotic songs, not hymns. It was only in 1980 that Parliament inserted the line “God keep our land glorious and free,” to replace one of Weir’s original six “O Canadas.” At the same time, “From far and wide” replaced one of the too-many “stand on guards.”
In the four verses of the original French lyrics—only the first is recognized as the national anthem—divine guidance is not an afterthought but the central theme. It is seen in a light beside the St. Lawrence, John the Baptizer’s presence foreshadowing the One to come, an appeal for love to fill our hearts and concluding with the cry “For Christ and King!”
In both official languages, these traditional words now sound strident and sectarian, which is why they have fallen into disuse. But behind old forms are truths that sill resonate.
First is the clear sense of calling of many of French Canada’s founders. New France’s social infrastructure was largely build up by women, many of whom shared this sense. Then there is the message of the Baptizer. The mission of a Middle Eastern prophet to prepare the way in the wilderness, to build a national identify on social justice, not ancestry, to look to One greater to come after—this call echoed in the wilds of a new country 16 centuries later and half a world away. It still moves us.
French-Canadians kept those values alive after the fall of New France and the takeover by the British. When Old France fell in the Revolution, they saw themselves as the remnant carrying the vision onward. This and not mere survival is what la survivance meant to generations of French Canadians.
Ironically, it was when English-speaking Canadians began to awaken to the unique spirit of their own Canadianism that French Canadians began to lose theirs.
In la Révolution tranquille secularism displaced spirituality, the state replaced the church as the guarantor of collective identity and Canadiens français came to describe themselves as Québécois.
Yet there are two links between the historic faith of English and French speaking Canada. Navigator Giovanni Cabotto (John Cabot) planted England’s flag in Newfoundland on Saint John the Baptist Day in 1497 – 37 years before Cartier and 337 years before the founding of Québec’s Saint-Jean Baptiste Society. That’s why the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador is called Saint John’s.
As well, the one scriptural verse that Canadians may recognizer as a national influence is Psalm 72:8, which gave Canada its official motto: “may he have dominion from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth.”
Anglophone Canadians who know this recognize the sea-to-sea part, and tend to ignore the river. Yet it is the river that resonates with French-Canadians.
English- and French-speaking Canadians each know one half of Canada’s motto. Discovering the other half can lead to the softening of solitudes in a new spirituality. And a part of that is recognizing John the Baptizer/Saint-Jean Baptiste as a shared symbol and the inspiration of Canada’s national hymn and anthem.
Three revolutions we skipped
our evolutionary tradition
- Edmonton Journal, Wednesday, July 14, 2004
In this month of national holidays, today marks the beginning of the fall of the ancient regime that was one of Canada’s parent cultures.
Canada missed that event by 40 years. After 155 years of cultivation, New France passed from French to British administration—beginning at the Battle of the Pains of Abraham and formalized at the Treat of Paris in 1763. As a result of this transfer, the Bastille, the guillotine and the call to arm ourselves “lest impure blood overflow our trenches” are not part of Canadian political culture.
In fact, the French Revolution cauterized the wound many French Canadians felt towards their ancestral home and launched Québec on her own course in the New World. New France had been a society shaped by spiritual values. The repudiation of faith and crown by the homeland finally convinced French Canadians they were on their own in the world.
La survivance that became Québec’s mantra until the Quiet Revolution was not simply a matter of continuing to eke out a cultural existence. It was a biblical metaphor, one that best translates into English as “the remnant,” and derives from the Old Testament story of the Hebrews who survived the Babylonian Captivity. After the 1789 Revolution, French Canada saw herself as the bearer of old France’s true values in a world of secularism.
Thirteen years earlier Canadians had bypassed another revolution: the American one. Québec’s refusal to join the Thirteen Colonies in the War of Independence led eventually to the appearance of a second major state in North America. In providing a haven for American refugees from that revolution, it gave Canada our first major English speaking population. This lad the basis for two aspects of our contemporary political culture: pluralism and an abhorrence of violence.
There was a third major political upheaval that Canada missed. Britain’s Puritan Revolution of the mid 1600s tore the kingdom apart in civil war and religious purges, beheaded Charles I and set up an 11-year theocratic republic. Apart from a fishing outpost in Newfoundland, Canada was under French tutelage at the time. The first major British initiative in Canada—the Hudson’s Bay Company—was established a decade after the restoration of the monarchy.
The Britain that acquired Canada in 1763 had had a century to recover from this trauma. It was now a multinational kingdom of Scots, English, Irish and Welsh, with a German on the throne. Our first British-crafted constitution, the 1774 Quebec Act, reflected this. It extended toleration to Roman Catholics—a tolerance unparalleled in the Empire. On that basis Canadians (read “Québécois”) chose to remain loyal to Britain in America’s revolution.
Canada has managed to bypass the major revolutions of the last four centuries. Our absence from the first and third—the English and French Revolutions—was fortuitous, as we passed from French to British administration at the right time to miss the civil strife of our two parent states. Our abstention from the second revolution—that American one—was a matter of choice. That choice continues to be a defining factor in who we are.
Confederation of 1867 was an outgrowth of Canadians’ choice to continue to evolve in connection—to each other, and to the world community than represented by the British Empire. It was facilitated by Britain’s wish to demilitarize her North American provinces—to reduce her defense expenditure, and to avoid provocation of the United States.
This has led to an absence of military heroes and the glorification of war in our tradition. The first lives lost in defense of our “Dominion from Sea to Sea” were not on the field of battle but in the mountain passes: 300 section hands, many of them immigrants, who died in snowslides that blocked the main line of our first transcontinental railway.
The losses in our domestic skirmishes—the 1837-38 rebellions, and the Riel-led uprisings of 1870 and 1885—were trivial by comparison. These events are now seen as tragedies—warnings and catalysts of situations that should have been resolved by political means.
More than 30 world states have their national holiday in July. This number increases significantly if we add former French colonies that celebrate July 14. Canada is one of a handful whose holiday marks a peaceful transition to self-government
Canada was the first modern state to emerge without revolution or civil war, a tradition that is more deeply rooted than most of us realize. Its continuation matters: not only to Canada and our ongoing evolution as a peaceful, pluralistic state, but important to a planet whose future depends on an ability to face change without violence.
The Canadian experience, so far, has provided a framework that can stretch without breaking.
our evolutionary tradition
- Edmonton Journal, Wednesday, July 14, 2004
In this month of national holidays, today marks the beginning of the fall of the ancient regime that was one of Canada’s parent cultures.
Canada missed that event by 40 years. After 155 years of cultivation, New France passed from French to British administration—beginning at the Battle of the Pains of Abraham and formalized at the Treat of Paris in 1763. As a result of this transfer, the Bastille, the guillotine and the call to arm ourselves “lest impure blood overflow our trenches” are not part of Canadian political culture.
In fact, the French Revolution cauterized the wound many French Canadians felt towards their ancestral home and launched Québec on her own course in the New World. New France had been a society shaped by spiritual values. The repudiation of faith and crown by the homeland finally convinced French Canadians they were on their own in the world.
La survivance that became Québec’s mantra until the Quiet Revolution was not simply a matter of continuing to eke out a cultural existence. It was a biblical metaphor, one that best translates into English as “the remnant,” and derives from the Old Testament story of the Hebrews who survived the Babylonian Captivity. After the 1789 Revolution, French Canada saw herself as the bearer of old France’s true values in a world of secularism.
Thirteen years earlier Canadians had bypassed another revolution: the American one. Québec’s refusal to join the Thirteen Colonies in the War of Independence led eventually to the appearance of a second major state in North America. In providing a haven for American refugees from that revolution, it gave Canada our first major English speaking population. This lad the basis for two aspects of our contemporary political culture: pluralism and an abhorrence of violence.
There was a third major political upheaval that Canada missed. Britain’s Puritan Revolution of the mid 1600s tore the kingdom apart in civil war and religious purges, beheaded Charles I and set up an 11-year theocratic republic. Apart from a fishing outpost in Newfoundland, Canada was under French tutelage at the time. The first major British initiative in Canada—the Hudson’s Bay Company—was established a decade after the restoration of the monarchy.
The Britain that acquired Canada in 1763 had had a century to recover from this trauma. It was now a multinational kingdom of Scots, English, Irish and Welsh, with a German on the throne. Our first British-crafted constitution, the 1774 Quebec Act, reflected this. It extended toleration to Roman Catholics—a tolerance unparalleled in the Empire. On that basis Canadians (read “Québécois”) chose to remain loyal to Britain in America’s revolution.
Canada has managed to bypass the major revolutions of the last four centuries. Our absence from the first and third—the English and French Revolutions—was fortuitous, as we passed from French to British administration at the right time to miss the civil strife of our two parent states. Our abstention from the second revolution—that American one—was a matter of choice. That choice continues to be a defining factor in who we are.
Confederation of 1867 was an outgrowth of Canadians’ choice to continue to evolve in connection—to each other, and to the world community than represented by the British Empire. It was facilitated by Britain’s wish to demilitarize her North American provinces—to reduce her defense expenditure, and to avoid provocation of the United States.
This has led to an absence of military heroes and the glorification of war in our tradition. The first lives lost in defense of our “Dominion from Sea to Sea” were not on the field of battle but in the mountain passes: 300 section hands, many of them immigrants, who died in snowslides that blocked the main line of our first transcontinental railway.
The losses in our domestic skirmishes—the 1837-38 rebellions, and the Riel-led uprisings of 1870 and 1885—were trivial by comparison. These events are now seen as tragedies—warnings and catalysts of situations that should have been resolved by political means.
More than 30 world states have their national holiday in July. This number increases significantly if we add former French colonies that celebrate July 14. Canada is one of a handful whose holiday marks a peaceful transition to self-government
Canada was the first modern state to emerge without revolution or civil war, a tradition that is more deeply rooted than most of us realize. Its continuation matters: not only to Canada and our ongoing evolution as a peaceful, pluralistic state, but important to a planet whose future depends on an ability to face change without violence.
The Canadian experience, so far, has provided a framework that can stretch without breaking.
A nation built on ethnic diversity
Multiculturalism isn’t a new phenomenon; it’s been with Canada forever
Edmonton Journal, Friday, August 13, 2004
Among an older generation of Canadians who finally have accepted bilingualism as a fact of our national life, there are still many who view multiculturalism as an afterthought: a 1970s Liberal idea that downplays Canadian culture to make everyone feel equal.
In one respect they’re right. An official policy of multiculturalism was first unveiled in 1971 when it became apparent that the second half of the report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism & Biculturalism was not acceptable to many Canadians. Expanding the second “bi” to “multi,” with grants to ethnic organizations and cultural programs, brought into the consensus many Canadians whose origins were neither Anglo nor French.
However, the roots of Canadian multiculturalism go much deeper. We need to be aware of these to see today’s Canada not as an aberration but an outgrowth of our history.
Our first nations, from the Micmac of New Brunswick to the Haida of British Columbia, represent a cultural spread that is enormous. (Try to imagine a composite Asian culture that encompasses Russia, China, Japan and southeast Asia and you get a parallel.)
Britain’s monarchy, which shaped our development, is itself a multicultural institution. French, Dutch, Scottish and Germans have sat on the British throne. Under one of these, England and Scotland joined to create a multi-ethnic kingdom. Under another, George III, whose grandfather spoke no English, our first written constitution—the Quebec Act—as passed. This document proved a watershed for North America and for the world.
In guaranteeing the French character of a newly acquired colony on the St. Lawrence, it laid the basis for what would become a modern pluralistic state north of the Great Lakes and the 49th parallel. In inciting the Thirteen Colonies to revolt, it led to parallel experiments that would attempt to submerge ethnic origins in the idea of a “united” and “all-American” culture. Significantly, it was the toleration of a distinct society in Quebec that became the 20th grievance of the Declaration of Independence, reflecting the fear that Britain would try to “introduce a (similarly) absolute rule on these Colonies.”
The other Europeans that explored and colonized Canada were ethnic mixes too. France is made up of southern Gauls and northern Franks; Spain is a union of Aragon and Castile. The idea of a single national culture is a myth.
Our coat of arms contains the symbols of Ireland, Scotland, England and France—the multicultural mix of Confederation. These peoples did not get along well in their homelands and often fought against each other. English Unionist and Irish Republicans are still at enmity in Northern Ireland, the Scots and English were last at arms in 1746, and French and English were enemies for more than 700 years beginning with William’s conquest of England in 1066. That post aboriginal Canada is built on accommodation of the longest and most bitter European rivalry is an achievement of the first magnitude.
The railways that brought the country together geographically also made it more diverse ethnically. The CPR imported Chinese and American labourers, the Grand Trunk recruited Irish and other European workers. The names of towns that followed in the wake of the railways show this diversity of our origins: Surrey and Sorrento, B.C., from England and Italy; Vilna and Barrhead, Alberta, from Poland and Scotland; Esterhazy and Stockholm, Sask., from Hungary and Sweden.
Ceylon (Sri Lanka) born, Oxford-educated John Murray Gibbon, Canadian Pacific’s public relations director in the 1930s, saw multiculturalism as one of our great untapped resources. He organized festivals of artists, dancers and musicians in CP hotels to celebrate this. It was the title of Gibbon’s 1938 Governor General’s Award-winning book that coined the phrase “Canadian mosaic.”
Multiculturalism a recent concoction?
It’s been with us from the beginning, as Canadian as maple syrup. It’s only our recognition of it that has come late.
Multiculturalism isn’t a new phenomenon; it’s been with Canada forever
Edmonton Journal, Friday, August 13, 2004
Among an older generation of Canadians who finally have accepted bilingualism as a fact of our national life, there are still many who view multiculturalism as an afterthought: a 1970s Liberal idea that downplays Canadian culture to make everyone feel equal.
In one respect they’re right. An official policy of multiculturalism was first unveiled in 1971 when it became apparent that the second half of the report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism & Biculturalism was not acceptable to many Canadians. Expanding the second “bi” to “multi,” with grants to ethnic organizations and cultural programs, brought into the consensus many Canadians whose origins were neither Anglo nor French.
However, the roots of Canadian multiculturalism go much deeper. We need to be aware of these to see today’s Canada not as an aberration but an outgrowth of our history.
Our first nations, from the Micmac of New Brunswick to the Haida of British Columbia, represent a cultural spread that is enormous. (Try to imagine a composite Asian culture that encompasses Russia, China, Japan and southeast Asia and you get a parallel.)
Britain’s monarchy, which shaped our development, is itself a multicultural institution. French, Dutch, Scottish and Germans have sat on the British throne. Under one of these, England and Scotland joined to create a multi-ethnic kingdom. Under another, George III, whose grandfather spoke no English, our first written constitution—the Quebec Act—as passed. This document proved a watershed for North America and for the world.
In guaranteeing the French character of a newly acquired colony on the St. Lawrence, it laid the basis for what would become a modern pluralistic state north of the Great Lakes and the 49th parallel. In inciting the Thirteen Colonies to revolt, it led to parallel experiments that would attempt to submerge ethnic origins in the idea of a “united” and “all-American” culture. Significantly, it was the toleration of a distinct society in Quebec that became the 20th grievance of the Declaration of Independence, reflecting the fear that Britain would try to “introduce a (similarly) absolute rule on these Colonies.”
The other Europeans that explored and colonized Canada were ethnic mixes too. France is made up of southern Gauls and northern Franks; Spain is a union of Aragon and Castile. The idea of a single national culture is a myth.
Our coat of arms contains the symbols of Ireland, Scotland, England and France—the multicultural mix of Confederation. These peoples did not get along well in their homelands and often fought against each other. English Unionist and Irish Republicans are still at enmity in Northern Ireland, the Scots and English were last at arms in 1746, and French and English were enemies for more than 700 years beginning with William’s conquest of England in 1066. That post aboriginal Canada is built on accommodation of the longest and most bitter European rivalry is an achievement of the first magnitude.
The railways that brought the country together geographically also made it more diverse ethnically. The CPR imported Chinese and American labourers, the Grand Trunk recruited Irish and other European workers. The names of towns that followed in the wake of the railways show this diversity of our origins: Surrey and Sorrento, B.C., from England and Italy; Vilna and Barrhead, Alberta, from Poland and Scotland; Esterhazy and Stockholm, Sask., from Hungary and Sweden.
Ceylon (Sri Lanka) born, Oxford-educated John Murray Gibbon, Canadian Pacific’s public relations director in the 1930s, saw multiculturalism as one of our great untapped resources. He organized festivals of artists, dancers and musicians in CP hotels to celebrate this. It was the title of Gibbon’s 1938 Governor General’s Award-winning book that coined the phrase “Canadian mosaic.”
Multiculturalism a recent concoction?
It’s been with us from the beginning, as Canadian as maple syrup. It’s only our recognition of it that has come late.