Mark Carney's take on Canadian history

From the media, I got the impression that Prime Minister Carney made a faux pas when he gave a speech about Canadian solidarity on the Plains of Abraham last week.  In fact, his staff has started to say he made the speech at the Citadel of Quebec, as if the Plains of Abraham was maybe the wrong place to praise Canada. 

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.

Book Notes: Ibbitson on Dief and Pearson

I’ve been reading John Ibbitson’s The Duel: Diefenbaker, Pearson, and the Making of Modern Canada.  It’s a puzzle.

On the one hand, a big, skillfully written, and handsomely published trade-market book on a consequential moment in 20th century Canadian politics might seem another blow to the Canadian-history-is-dead doomsayers. On the other, the still-dead crowd might point out that this lively, readable political biography by an award-winning, bestselling national journalist did not get the buzz and attention it might have been expected to generate. I haven't been reading much about it, and never saw much sign of it on the bestseller lists – not that they are such a great neighbourhood for a writer to be found in these days. And lack of attention is one of the doomsayers' key plaints. The Duel was featured on the Witness to Yesterday podcast last month: Ibbitson interviewed by Greg Marchildon)

And the book itself? “One purpose of this book has been to dispel the false narrative that the two Pearson governments accomplished much while the three Diefenbaker governments accomplished little,” Ibbitson declares. I’m not sure that purpose is fulfilled. Often enough, the case rests on Diefenbaker having initiated a study of some question that Pearson later turned into policy. Ibbitson wants to give Diefenbaker shared credit for medicare, for instance, on the grounds that while Pearson’s government implemented medicare, Dief made it possible by naming Emmett Hall to undertake the royal commission report that recommended it.

Ibbitson reports, “Diefenbaker had cannily appointed his friend Emmett Hall … knowing full well where the judge’s sympathies lay.” I’ve always heard Hall’s sympathies initially lay elsewhere, and that his endorsement of medicare shocked the conventional wisdom. Here as elsewhere, a little more evidence might help Ibbitson’s contrarian claims for Diefenbaker.

With my interest in our dreadful party leadership selection processes in Canada, I was particularly interested in anything new on how Dief came to win the Conservative Party leadership in 1956, and how he came to lose it in 1967. I recall interviewing John Courtney, the Saskatchewan political scientist, who described how Diefenbaker, long unpopular within his own party, spent his time as an MP travelling the country signing up new party members, so that when the leadership race began, no one else had any chance of amassing the lead in delegates Dief already had. 

This was a profound innovation: Dief was the first Canadian politician to seize party leadership -- against the established party powers -- by taking control of the membership lists. It's the way everyone has sought to claim leadership ever since, right down to the million-dollar vote-buying orgies of today’s political parties. Of all this, Ibbitson says simply, “He was the people’s choice.” Who have we heard that about recently?

Dief’s departure was equally consequential. He never really accepted that a party convention could remove him from leadership (though it did, in the end, with much consequent difficulty), but equally he did not accept the party caucus could remove him either. He did much to establish the understanding that loyalty runs in one direction only, and that retirement from political leadership in Canada must be left solely to the inclination of the leader himself (usually on election night). Ibbitson does not enlighten us on that one, either, though the question could surely be relevant to the story of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s looming choices.

The Duel is well-written, a nicely structured dual biography going back and forth between two well-described colourful and significant protagonists. Didn’t quite break new ground for me, I guess, but it deserves readers.

Comment From Helen Webberley (Melbourne, Australia)

The post needs a title. [Fixed, thanks.] I did not do any history courses after the WW1 and its aftermath, and I certainly know precious little about the 1950s.
And nothing whatsoever about Diefenbaker! But I think historians today
can learn a great deal about earlier crisis eras.

Comment From Jared Milne (Alberta)

I caught your review of John Ibbitson's book about Diefenbaker and Pearson.  ... I do think that Diefenbaker is one of our most underrated Prime Ministers.

My own ranking of our PMs puts Diefenbaker much higher on the list than most rankings do, because besides the most obvious positives of giving First Nations people the full voting rights that were 93 years overdue and nixing his predecessors' awful racist immigration quotas, he also did a lot of good bread-and-butter things like complete the Trans-Canada Highway, started the path to medicare by creating federal hospital insurance (which is a better support for Diefenbaker's claiming credit for a part in universal healthcare than anyone he appointed), and made Prairie Canadians feel like we really had a seat at the table with his agricultural reform and the National Oil Program.

Diefenbaker might not be one of the all-time greats, but I often don't think he gets enough credit for the things he did right.

History versus politics: the apology to interned Italians in the Second World War

On Thursday, the prime minister will offer a formal apology to Italian enemy aliens who were interned in Canada during the Second World War, despite comprehensive historical evidence that the internment conformed to international law, was directed against individuals with links to Fascist organizations developed in Canada by Mussolini's diplomats during the 1930s, and (from more than 122,000 Italian-Canadians) covered only some 600 people, many of whom were released on having demonstrated that their internment was misguided or having committed to peaceable behaviour.

The evidence is comprehensively presented in Enemies Within: Italian and Other Internees in Canada and Abroad, a collection of essays edited by Franca Iacovetta, Roberto Perin, and Angelo Principe, and published in 2000 by the University of Toronto Press after a previous campaign for such an apology. 

Interning known and suspected supporters of an enemy power in wartime hardly seems like something for a state at war to apologize for. However, there are a lot of Italian-Canadian voters determined to get their share of the apologies going around. Yeesh.

Previous note on this subject here.

Update, May 26:  Russ Chamberlayne responds:  

Perhaps with wise advice from Stephen Harper, Bill Clinton et al., the Trudeau government might want to set up an Apology Secretariat in its own high-profile building (the Repentagon?).

 

    

Is there, you know, politics in Canadian politics?

Gail Campbell, who has been studying the origins of politics in the 19th century Maritime provinces, has a sharp little essay at Acadiensis online in which she notes that much political history in the academy these days tends to lump the two major Canadian parties together as generically neoliberal.

In recent years, the analysis of Canadian political history has tended to drift away from a nuanced analysis of party politics and toward a more general, often confusing overview that conflates the two major parties into a single ideological framework. At best, Canada’s system is discussed in terms of ‘brokerage politics’ with two ‘big tent’ parties, each with a small loyal core, vying for the same supporters. This situation has, according to a widely held view, resulted in the triumph of ‘neoliberal policies’, for which we can read ‘Capitalism’. The problem with this characterisation is its narrow economic focus and lack of sophisticated analytical framework or theoretical perspective. It tends to originate in and reflect a dismissive condemnation of both major parties.

She notes that responses to the Covid-19 crisis in Canada undermine this analysis: 

While the country’s only NDP government invests in ordinary Canadians who are at risk of losing their jobs in the face of a changing, and changed, world, and the federal Liberals invest in those same Canadian workers as well as in small and medium-sized Canadian businesses struggling to retain and support their workers as they adapt to their own changing and changed circumstances, Conservatives on both levels of government remain firm in the belief that big business, not big government, is the best guarantor of economic recovery. These approaches surely reflect significant differences in ideology, as well as in approach.

It all leaves her a little sceptical about the influential "liberal order framework" analysis, which:

while broad and ambitious in its conceptualisation, also promotes a dismissive approach towards analysis or even consideration of the ideological differences between the two political parties that had emerged by the 1850s.

Update, July 8:  Helen Webberley comments from Australia:

"Conservatives on both levels of government remain firm in the belief that big business, not big government, is the best guarantor of economic recovery”. What a tragic belief to hold, in Canada of all places ☹. At least your blog post’s heading is cute.