What is Canada? Is it its provinces? Is it its peoples? Is it just an idea? That is as fundamental as it gets. The Fathers of Confederation were a small population of English-speaking and French-speaking British subjects trying to pull a nation together to compete with and contain the emerging nation to the south of our borders. They created a country with the second largest land mass in the world that had no way of protecting itself and no clear idea of its future.
We are certainly less grandiose than our American neighbours to the south. We lack the braggadocio and pretentions. The United States is a country based on ideals that seem to hang around just off-stage. It is a country of vaudeville and Washington, Disney World and Guantanamo Bay, Las Vegas and Los Alamos, that enjoys the warmth of the art of Norman Rockwell and the chill of the sins of Al Capone, that takes town hall politics to the world stage, and while a country reluctant to go to war, it then does not know when to come home.
When John Porter published The Vertical Mosaic, his report on Canada’s sociological development, in 1965, he explained that it was the safety valve of the United States that drew away the more radical elements of our society. He believed that this kept Canada from having to deal with home grown trouble makers. He was just a few years ahead of us becoming more aware of the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) and the eventual murder of Labour Minister Pierre Laporte.
English-speaking Canadians still look with jaundiced eye on the Péquistes of la Belle Province who cheerfully screw les anglais by demanding pacifying transfers of federal monies and responsibilities to Quebec. Les notables (Quebec’s bilingual and wealthy elites) who perpetuate this foolishness are actually repressing their own people with it and doing little harm to Canada’s increasingly more powerful English-speaking majority.
This self-defeating tribalism in Quebec has also contributed to the shifting the power centre of Canada from Montreal to Toronto and to points west. Instead of speaking out on behalf of the French-speaking Canadians in other provinces, the Quebec Péquistes reject them and further narrow their field.
The drain to the safety valve of the United States that Porter indicated turned out to be on the right wing of the political spectrum throughout the rest of the 20th Century. While the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney was supposed to have heralded the growing strength of the right in the 1980s, it was actually the merging of the Western Reform and the Conservative Party that brought in a truly right-wing government. Porter’s safety valve had become redundant.
Canadian voters are obviously reluctant and concerned about the agenda of Stephen Harper and his Conservative government but there has been little to spark their enthusiasm to the left.
It is from this cauldron of concern from which a new consensus needs to emerge. We will write more about it.
– 30 –
Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]