The Beatty Lecture
It’s an honor to be asked to give this lecture.
I was at the Steven Leacock lunch yesterday, and it said something wonderful about your community. Thanks to Leacock, humor one of the traditions that ties the McGill community together. I have to warn you, however, that you’re about to enter humor free zone. This is going to be an earnest and relentless lecture, just the kind my Scottish Presbyterian forebears used to like.
My subject is “Canada in the World: The Challenges Ahead”. We’re in a struggle to reinvent our country, to maintain our unity at home and project our influence abroad. I’m a historian by training and my instinct in face of the dramas that we face as a country is to step back and think for a moment about our history. Before we can reinvent ourselves tomorrow, we need to understand how this country was made. One of my themes is the way in which the national identity and the nation-building of Canada was structured by forces outside us, chiefly by the forces and ideologies of empire.
I can detect three stages in this story. First from Confederation until 1945, Canadian identity was essentially shaped by Imperial Britain. Then during the period of the Cold War, when our national identity was defined chiefly by our relations with Imperial America. And now in the present, when that imperial order may be passing, but a multilateral order has failed to take its place. Part of our difficulty of defining our own place in the world has to do with the fact that while that old Cold War order has died, a new one has not taken shape. We’re lost, but so is everybody else.
I have most to say about the present, but I’m going to take you through some more remote parts of our story because I think we need to reckon with the nation-building of our past. So I’m going to go back to Confederation. I’m going to go back to John A. Macdonald and the National Policy. Macdonald famously said that he was born a British subject, and a British subject he would die. For Macdonald, Canada’s role abroad and identity at home were both defined by its partnership in the most powerful force of globalization of its time, the British Empire.
Macdonald’s masterstroke of nation building, the CPR was also an empire-building project designed to link Britain to its possessions in India and Australia. The railway would draw to Canada’s shores the excess population of Britain, and Canada would be peopled by Anglo-Saxon stock. Canada’s place in the world would be as the communications highway of Empire, its granary and in time of war, its armory. Macdonald’s vision of Canada tied us together from ocean to ocean. It settled the Prairies and it guaranteed our survival, and next to the United States our survival was by no means assured in the generation after Confederation.
But the nation-building project that Macdonald inspired left scars that have endured to this day. The West for example, was settled as a colony. Its lands and resources administered by the Department of Interior in Ottawa. The freight rates that Western farmers paid were set in boardrooms here in this city. So, Western alienation is not a new phenomenon over the last 20, 30 years, it goes back there from the beginning. It’s as a consequence of the failure to allow full self-government on the prairies for the first 50 years after Confederation.
As a vision of Canada which saw it as a white Anglo-Saxon bastion of Empire, it had no place for the Métis, no place for the Aboriginal peoples of our country. The Macdonald who built the railway was also the Prime Minister who executed Louis Riel, and French Canada never forgave him.
The imperial image of Canada had no place for the French reality. It was in the West, with the execution of Riel, followed by legislation in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta limiting the right to public education in French, that Quebecers’ disillusionment with the Canadian federation began. That’s also why the expression “the national dream,” so often used by Pierre Berton, rings false for many Quebecers.
For the Aboriginal peoples of the plains, the national dream meant the cession of land through treaty, the reserves, a school system designed to turn them into Canadians. Residential schools inflicted scars that should teach us all that you can’t build a nation by forced assimilation. Residential schools didn’t just harm those who attended, it harmed us all. It was a nation-building project that did harm to our nation.
The third group of people, the 15,000 Chinese laborers who hacked their way through the Rockies laid the steel that tied us together. If you were one of them, you expected that your country would show you a little gratitude and instead you were barred from citizenship and Chinese immigration was limited by poll tax.
These three exclusions, of first nation’s peoples, the Métis and the Chinese were mandated by Imperial ideologies that restricted citizenship to those of British and white stock and defined national unity in terms of ethnic majority and dominance.
Ladies and gentlemen, these were bad ideas, and they did us harm, and truth requires us to acknowledge the harm they did to us all.
Now, none of these bad ideas was original to Canada. South of the border, anti-Chinese sentiment was if anything worse, and south of the border railway agents and the US cavalry waged a war of extermination against Aboriginal peoples. And the idea that the nation must be under a dominant ethnic majority was a common place of nation-building ideology everywhere, in Bismarck’s Germany and France’s Third Republic. But these ideas of nation-building exterior to us flowing through our best minds in the 19th century were the procrustean bed on which Canadian identity was forged.
It was Quebec that set Canada free. English Canada has always believed that Quebec constitutes the main obstacle to the national dream. But we must understand that today’s Canada owes a great deal to French Canadians’ rejection of the imperial idea of Canada. The great Laurier was the first Canadian prime minister who understood that the imperial connection might hold meaning for English Canada, but it profoundly alienated Quebec. It was during the conscription crisis of 1917 that the hour of truth sounded for the imperial ideology. An English Canada that found its patriotic raison d’être in the expression “For King and Country” was astonished to see Quebecers question why they should die in the trenches at the Battle of the Somme. Quebec nationalists like Henri Bourassa who opposed conscription forced the whole country to confront the fact that the imperial and English definition of Canada had no place for the reality of Quebec. It is ironic but true that Quebec nationalists were the ones who helped us to understand that Canada could not survive as a colony. To survive, it had to become an independent state.
It’s Quebec that made Canadians understand that we could not survive as a colony and would have to become a nation. We need to remember how long that took. It wasn’t until the Westminster Statute of 1931 that Canada acquired for the first time the right to have a foreign policy of its own. Even in 1939 when my uncle and my father went off to war, Britain declared war believing that its dominions would automatically follow suit. English Canada was still in the grip of an imperial conception of our identity, but Prime Minister King insisted that the Canadian Parliament decide the matter for us. Our entry into the Second War was a crucial moment in our emancipation.
Our real emancipation as a nation began with Vimy in 1917, but was consecrated in the blood and struggle of the Second World War. When we honor our veterans this November, we should remember them as nation builders because our nation was built in wartime sacrifice. We won our independence in the world through the sacrifice at Vimy, at Monte Cassino where my uncle fought, the Normandy beaches, and the liberation of Holland. The bravery and hard work of women at home in munition factories helped them and their children understand ourselves as a sovereign people. At war’s end, we could demand a prominent place in the creation of the UN and NATO because we had paid for it in the coinage of power and sacrifice.
We had created the sinews of that independent national power in an Army, a Navy and an Air Force and to this day unpopular as it may be to say so, military capability remains the sine qua non of international independence and influence. The Second World War was also a nation-building experience in another and also darker sense of the word. We interned Ukrainians and other nationals from the belligerent powers in World War One, and in World War Two we made the mistake a second time when we deported thousands of Japanese to the interior of BC.
Canada again was not alone in being swept by these exclusionist ideologies. We were not alone in interning enemy aliens, but let’s remember that Canada interned the Japanese before the Americans did. And when the Americans justified their exclusion of the Japanese, they cited Canadian action as justifying precedent. It’s not a happy story. I love my country, but we owe it a duty of truth. The internment of the Japanese and of the Ukrainians in the First World War, which the prime minister just apologized for two weeks ago, shows that when we build a nation upon exclusion, we lay a heavy charge on the generations that come after us.
Let me now turn to the second phase, the phase that begins with the Cold War, nation building in Canada between 1945 and 1989. The British Empire was gone. Canada was an independent state, but now our economic and political destiny was linked to the new empire to the south. American global leadership gave Canada its place in the Cold War world. The purpose of our foreign policy was to help America build a new multilateral order. It stood on three pillars: military deterrence of the Soviets and the Chinese, a defensive alliance of liberal democracies, and a rule-based international order structured around the United Nations.
When the United States provided clear leadership, Canada knew its way in the world. We were present at the creation of the UN and NATO, we fought with the Americans in Korea, we invented peacekeeping and downsized armed forces to fit that mission. In the Cold War, Canada also found a way to assert its independence. We recognized Cuba, and the Americans didn’t like it. We recognized China, they liked it even less. We disagreed about Vietnam, they liked it the least of all. And we learned that the price of disagreeing with the Americans was not as high as we thought.
Our problem is not that we can’t muster the courage to disagree. Our problem is to get them to listen when we do. Getting them to listen means reminding them that it doesn’t pay to take Canada for granted. They need our oil, they need our electricity, they need our water and they need our safe borders. The quid pro quo from our point of view is they ought to play by the rules. Lumber and beef are not side issues to Canadians, and the failure to solve these problems makes us think, “Can these folks be trusted?” Straight talking on these issues is crucial to any relation with the Americans. But we also need to convey the message that Canada is also willing to pay its way.
Our relationship with the Americans works so long as we don’t behave like free riders. If we shoulder our proper share of the defense of North America, if we defend our sovereignty, we can agree to disagree. We can agree to disagree on issues like ballistic missile defense. But if we fail to do our fair share but reserve the right to give them little lectures from time to time, we’ll be dismissed as boy scouts. I have nothing against the scouts, but we live in a world of adults and in such a world, strength comes from capability, not from sermons.
In a world where the key public policy issue for every nation on Earth is, ‘What do we do about the Americans?’ anti-Americanism is the form of patriotism that this country can least afford. We have an inferiority complex about the Americans that we’ve turned weirdly into a superiority complex, and my view is that an inferiority complex and a superiority complex are lousy ways to relate to the Americans. We need to build an identity beyond complexes, an identity secure not in some invidious or envious comparison to the Americans, but in a very centered sense that we are different. We have always been different. We always will be. We need to remember that if the 20th century belonged to the United States, and it definitely did, there is no guarantee that the 21st century belongs to the United States. Proving your patriotism by being anti-American is going to look pretty parochial in a world where global dominance is shifting eastward to China and India.
Now, while we were learning to live beside the most powerful nation in the world, we were also undergoing the most revolutionary transformation in what it means to be a Canadian.
There are three distinct aspects to the story of what happened to our country beginning in the ‘60s. The first was the decision to open our doors to multicultural immigration. The second was to do justice to Aboriginal claims. And the third, evidemment, was the Quiet Revolution in Quebec. These stories belong together, although we disaggregate them and tell them separately, but we need to bring them together because they change the master narrative of our country’s history. The 1960s marked the moment when Canada backing into changing the way we were building the nation. All three transformations have profoundly enriched and deepened our sense of ourselves as a people. We went from the suppression of difference to the recognition of difference, from majority rule to minority rights, from exclusion to inclusion and we’re profoundly better as a result of these tumultuous experiences.
The story begins with a transformation of our immigration policy. My dad arrived on the Montreal docks as a teenager in 1928 with nothing and ended up as an ambassador of his country. I feel intense, if borrowed pride about that story, but it’s a Canadian story. There must be hundreds of people in this room who could tell a similar story about their own families.
But we need to remember the darker aspects of our relation to immigration. In the 1930s, we’d actually turned away desperate Jewish refugees seeking a port in the storm of fascism. After the war, it was only after the war, only in the ‘40s and ‘50s that we began to become a place of refuge for the displaced and disinherited. We need to confront the fact that it was only after 75 years of building a white only Canada, that we decided to build a rainbow Canada. Chinese, Japanese, East Asian and Aboriginal Canadians did not secure the right to vote in British Columbia until 1949.
This is the Canadian story we need to remember. In the late 1950s and 60s, the barriers against Asian, East Asian and black immigration began to come down and we quietly dismantled a centuries-old assumption that Canada could only hold together if the common stock of the people was Anglo-Saxon and French. We embarked on a radical new vision of the nation based not on common origins, but on common citizenship. This revolution has had the biggest impact on our relation to the world.
Immigration collapsed the Canadian illusion that we were a safe haven from the troubles of a tormented world far away. The refugees from that world began showing up on our doorstep. Immigration also transformed the issues that mattered to Canadian foreign policy. Between 1867 and 1967, the core issue in Canadian foreign policy was European security. Not anymore. Now, the stability of Haiti, the future of Somalia, peace in Sri Lanka, the capacity of Nigeria to hold together as a state, the fate of the Palestinians have all become issues which engage millions of Canadians because these places and their conflicts are our citizens’ second homes.
The arrival of a multicultural Canada also coincided with the Aboriginal revival and the insistence that the Aboriginal presence be honored as central to our identity as a people. We went from nation-building as forced assimilation, to nation-building as inclusion and we are still in the middle of this process. Difficulties remain, as anybody who lives in Davis Inlet or Attawapiskat will tell you. But there are also amazing achievements to celebrate: more Aboriginal peoples in positions of Canadian leadership, more in higher education, more land and territory restored to Aboriginal self-government.
Most important for our identity has been breaking the silence about the histories of exclusion on which our nation was built. What we did at home was profoundly influenced by what was happening abroad. The Aboriginal revival in Canada was part of a global Aboriginal revival as you can tell the minute you set foot in New Zealand, Australia or Bolivia. In the same way, the multicultural revolution in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver was mirrored in London, Paris, Hamburg, Boston and New York.
These two revolutions, the multicultural and the Aboriginal coincided with the third and for Canada the most transformative of all, the Quiet Revolution in Quebec. The Quiet Revolution was a challenge to the English narrative of nation-building. English Canadians discovered that our national dream was not theirs and that our history was not theirs. They had bitter and very real memories of exclusion. Instead of thinking of Quebec nationalism as a threat, English Canadians need to understand how profoundly positive the Quebec challenge to Canada proved to be. It was Quebecers who took the lead in the reinvention of our country in the 1960s.
The entrenchment of bilingualism and equal language rights, the charter, new social programs like Medicare and Pensions, anchors of common citizenship that all Canadians think of as their birthright were essentially invented by the brilliant Quebec generation that went to Ottawa in the ‘60s. The generation that went to Quebec City instead contributed important things to the evolution of the Canadian model of government. We forget the key icons of nationalist achievement in Quebec like taking hydro into public ownership were profoundly in the Canadian grain. What René Lévesque did with hydro, Adam Beck had done in Ontario with hydro two generations before. This understanding of the functions and role of government is very distinctive to the political traditions of our country. Quebec nationalists were more deeply Canadian in their progressive vision of government than they ever wanted to admit.
The challenges Quebec faces as a society remain essentially the same as those confronting the rest of Canada. How to sustain the fiscal basis of the social programs that make us distinctive, how to invest in people, how to keep an economy inventive, productive, job-creating when we have commitments to social protection, how to manage the arrival of a multicultural society, and how to respond justly to the Aboriginal challenge. We talk as if our policy agendas were completely different. They’re the same, and we’re wasting time with division when we need to get our problems sorted out together.
The multicultural reality of Montreal has exposed the reactionary and outdated side of a nationalist discourse based on the fiction that the Quebec nation is composed of a pure laine and vieille souche monolith. The discovery that the Quebec nation does not include the whole population of Quebec explains, I believe, the defeat of the separatist project in the referendum. As Governor G, Adrienne Clarkson, has said, “It was the arrival of a multicultural Canada that sounded the death knell of the two solitudes.”
Instead of two solitudes, English and French Canadians have had to create a new identity corresponding to the reality we see in the streets of Toronto and Montreal. On both sides, people in Quebec and Canada are seeking a civic idea of Canada, based on a common attachment to the values of tolerance and respect. The central question for Canada and for Quebec is the same: what is the citizenship contract, the common values that connect Canadians of different origins to a common project? Individual rights are no longer enough. By liberating the citizen, we may impoverish the community. Our political challenge is to lead a dialogue on citizenship and on practical ways to guarantee equality and respect while avoiding the tyranny of the majority.
Canadians are struggling to adapt to a citizenship where majorities prevail, but they cannot dictate policy because all communities are equal. All are at the table, but they’re no longer sharing the same myths and the same origins. This is the challenge we face now, to maintain democratic civility, plus the capacity to make some choices together when we no longer share the same myths of origin. We’ve had a revolution of inclusion all right, and now that everybody wants to be included the question is, how do we keep this show on the road? How do we hold ourselves together?
We talk obsessively about the national question, the linguistic question, the French-English question, alienation in the West, but the sleeping giant that’s coming at us is social inequality. It’s the class issue and when race and class combine, we don’t have multicultural ‘communities’ anymore, we just have ghettos. We have ghettos of race and religion, reinforced by the exclusions of class, and we betray the promise of Canadian life when we do. We’ve managed inclusion through rights, but the charter of rights and freedoms is not enough.
And we’ve got a bigger problem than social inequality. We don’t agree now on the political rules of the game. The constitutional rules of the game are up for grabs. At Meech Lake and at Charlottetown, political elites sought to entrench new rules based on the recognition of Quebec as a distinct society. The rights of Aboriginal self-government and the rights of all provinces to constitutional vetoes. Canadians looked at those packages, both of them and balked at the price. We know we need new rules, and we can’t seem to agree on what they are but at least we know one thing, we don’t want another Meech and we don’t want another Charlottetown. We don’t want to roll those dice again.
So while the stalemate continues, the strains on our federation grow. Beneath the current talk about fiscal imbalances, is a questioning of a logic of equalization between regions and provinces. We are questioning whether Canada is a community of fate, in which we share our wealth and work together to protect each other against misfortune. That’s the big issue here looming just beneath all this back-and-forth about fiscal imbalance.
Now, how long we can manage the politics of inclusion without new constitutional rules is anybody’s guess. We’re a country that’s testing to the limits the capacity to survive by agreeing to disagree. A few simple rules would help I think, until we can muster the political will as a community to do something better. Levels of government in Canada should begin to get it into their heads and the feds need to learn this, that all levels of government in this country are equal. Equality means they should stay out of each other’s jurisdictions. National unity in my view is not a synonym for asserting federal power. This country is too complex and it’s too diverse to be run from Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal or anywhere else for that matter. Canadians want strong provincial, municipal and Aboriginal governments that represent their interest, but clear majorities also want to live in one country, not in ten balkanized principalities.
We are a country, not ten rival feudalities. To avoid balkanization, we need a federalism based on respect and recognition. Respect for the jurisdictions of others, and recognition that not all provinces are the same, but respect is a two-way street.
Quebec cannot demand that the federal government respect the jurisdiction of the Quebec government if at the same time its ministers insist that Quebec lead its own international policy. Quebec can always promote its interests in the economic sphere, but it is the Canadian federal government, with the support of other levels of government, that must speak for Canada.
Quebec admits, as one of its ministers says, that we should speak with a united voice, but it contests the idea that it should be a single voice. Nations that cannot speak with one voice, cannot protect their interests. And nations that cannot project their basic unity abroad and export their quarrels into every foreign jurisdiction and every foreign meeting end up being a laughingstock, and we’ve got to stop that. So, we need to have a conversation. Compromise is possible but let’s be clear, foreign affairs is a clear federal jurisdiction.
Maintaining a coherent national voice abroad is hard if we’re divided at home, and our difficulties here, we’ve got to get our story straight because our place in the world is shifting as we speak. The Cold War ended with a victory for American policies of containment but once victory had been achieved, American leadership was lost and with it was lost the guiding star of Canadian foreign policy. America has been drifting, and we’ve been drifting ever since. Middle powers like Canada leverage influence by securing power within multilateral institutions. Canadian influence since the end of the Cold War has waned because the institutions in which are influence depends, the UN and NATO have languished for lack of leadership by the US.
If we feel rudderless in our foreign policy and our projection of power and influence abroad, it’s because we’ve always found our way in the world by exploiting our imperial dependencies to our own advantage. We did this with the British, we did it with the Americans, now the Americans don’t know where they’re going and we don’t know either. This fact helps to explain the essential deep disarray at the core of our foreign policy. Nothing in Canadian foreign policy seems absolutely essential or necessary. We don’t have a system of triage. We don’t have a way to distinguish the vital from the merely important, or the fashionable. We do a little development, but not enough. We do a little governance promotion, but not enough. We promote UN reform but half-heartedly, knowing that we cannot hope for very much since we’re not on the Security Council and the Americans don’t care for a reform in any form.
So, what’s the way forward? We need to decide, and this is a tough choice for us, we need to decide that if the Americans will not lead, we will have to create alliances with the countries that will lead. The crucial fact is that the price of saying no to the Americans is actually going down, not up and this gives us a historic opportunity. This isn’t an invitation to provoke them, to ignore them or to defy them. It’s an invitation for us to decide that we will not wait for them to lead. We must take advantage of this fact to build in concert with others, a rule bound multilateral order that seeks to reduce the inequalities in the global system, inequalities that now threaten our very national security.
The inequalities between people in zones of danger and zones of safety, between those who have enough to eat and those who do not, those who live in safety and those who live at peril of their lives. We can’t live in a world this unequal, this divided, and we can’t keep it at a safe distance from ourselves. We can’t do all of this, we need to focus. And how do we do so? As I was writing this my Hungarian wife found a wonderful poem by one of the great Hungarian poets which struck me immediately. Attila József was a Hungarian poet, and one of his poems ends with these beautiful lines, creating order in our common matters. “Creating order in our common matters, this is our task, and we know it will be hard.”
In other words, we must cultivate our garden. This is not a recipe for quietism or for withdrawal, it means we have to set our house in order at home. It means that Canada matters to the world less for specific policies than for our example to the world. If every democracy in the world is wondering how to create a new contract that’ll turn ghettos into communities, to turn those who are excluded into full citizens, if that’s the central political task of every liberal democracy of our age, then what matters most is that we do it right. This is what we have to show to the world.
We must survive. We are a blessed country. We are rich, we are prosperous and we’re free. And if we can’t make this work, there is no country in the world that can, and no one will. So how do we do it? I really don’t know all the answers. I’ve only really offered you one in the course of this talk. My belief is you can’t get a community of political equals, a community of inclusion unless you speak the truth at all times, no matter how painful and difficult. The foundation of political community is political truth. We have to tell the truth to each other. We must tell the truth about our past, including all these painful stories. We can’t communicate to the fellow citizens who’ve been the victims of these kinds of inclusion unless we take this reality inside ourselves and understand, this is us.
For an English Canadian like me, the principal duty of being a citizen today is a duty of truth – the truth of history, the truth of the Aboriginal reality, the truth of the Quebec reality. Recognition must start with truth. And putting in place new rules depends on building a shared truth. That is why I have placed such emphasis on the painful passages in our history.
We can’t mean anything to the world unless we stay united. National unity is the precondition for any influence we hope to have in the world. Our unity matters not just to us, but to the world. We need to show that a politics of inclusion is not a politics of chaos, that our respect for difference can go hand in hand with rules and boundaries for tolerance. We need to show that we can maintain national unity without caving into every regional interest, but rather creating and sustaining a vision that Canadians do want something more than living in regions. They want our country, and they deserve nothing less.
We need to remember finally, simple things, why we need a country. Why in all this loose talk about a globalized borderless world, national identity matters so much. Because nations are what keep us free, that keep us safe, that give us purposes larger than ourselves. Individualism is not enough. The good life is not enough. We need the bigger frame, the larger meaning, the purpose that gives a sense to our lives. And the name of that purpose, the bigger frame, the larger meaning is Canada.