The whole thing rather played into my concern that the prime minister, a banker by trade, is big on economic development (and mostly by the private sector) but not much oriented to other important elements of national identity, including history.
But then I read the speech. I think he got a bad rap, too much of it influenced by the Quebec nationalist trope that the one thing to know about the history of the Québécois is that they have always been oppressed. To my surprise, Carney's take on the long sweep of Canadian history seemed to be a pretty fair and sophisticated one.
I wondered if John Ralston Saul had been at the prime minister's elbow recently: the reference to Charles Taylor, the emphasis on three founding people, "the fundamental insight that unity does not require uniformity."
The speech surely goes off track when it says, "The Plains of Abraham mark a battlefield, and also the place where Canada began to make its founding choice of accommodation over assimilation." No, the Plains were and remain a battlefield. Better perhaps to have said, "The City of Quebec marks a battlefield and also the place ....."
But broadly, I find that Carney's speech is alive to the reality of conflicts, of disagreements, of conflicting identities that have always existed within Canada, while still insisting that accommodation and tolerance have also been vital to Canadian progress.
I thought he was justified in quoting Georges-Etienne Cartier saying Canadians were "of different races, not for the purpose of warring against each other, but in order to compete and emulate for the general welfare." It's a claim that I have quoted in print myself, but no doubt he and his speechwriters would have found it elsewhere.
Carney might had alluded to George Brown's observation that a century after the conquest, "here today sit the descendants of the victors and the vanquished ... seeking amicably to find a remedy for constitutional evils complained of not by the vanquished but by the victors," with "the representatives of the French population discussing in the French tongue whether we shall have it." That was pretty on the nose when he said it in 1865; maybe it still is.
We have not seen the Carney government give much suggestion that it thinks cultural or historical aspects of Canada should be significant in our current crisis. It would be nice to hope this speech leads to a change in that.
In any case, it's better than just calling for more Macdonald statues, which seems to be widespread in Canadian historical chatter these days.
