Deja vu - 1926 and 2011?

Sometimes, the echoes from the past are eerie. Here I am today reading letters between Eugene Forsey (see my earlier post) and Roger Graham, historian and biographer of Arthur Meighen. The two men are talking about the King-Byng controversy back in 1926. King was leading a minority government that was in the process of being censured by parliament over a scandal. Roger Graham is noting how a later defender of King claimed that King was requesting to dissolve  parliament and have an election in 1926 (and not face the verdict of parliament) because he wanted a 'strong, stable government'.

Ring any bells? Replace King with Harper and change the years, and you this ought to sound familiar. Here is Graham on the issue:

'I'll wager King was not thinking of the need for a strong, stable Government when he asked Byng for a dissolution! Anyway what does "strong, stable Government" mean? I suppose that's for the P.M. of the moment to decide so that whenever the going gets rough in Parliament and "stability" is threatened he can hold out the threat of dissolution. Once "strength" and "stability" are achieved it is foolish, no doubt, to hold further elections because the stupid electorate might create weakness and instability.'

Graham was writing in 1962 about 1926. Surely, writes the historian of Mackenzie King, focusing on the numbers, those similar, similar numbers, that must be significant.

The Whimpy Kid of Confederation

Once again, I’m late on an issue, but it came back across my computer screen and hence my mind today, so here goes:

Michael Ignatieff just can’t buy any respect. Last month journalists and commentators heaped scorn on his comment  that  Quebec separation was a logical outcome of the way things had gone in federal provincial relations over the last several decades.

How could Ignatieff say these kinds of things? Doesn’t he care about Canada? And doesn’t he know that support for sovereignty is lower now than in a long time? These were the kinds of responses he got – gut reaction anger, indignation, etc, etc. (for criticisms, see here and here)

Yet what really did Ignatieff say? He said what many historians of modern Canada have shown – that the process of continuing to devolve powers to the provincial level, to continue to give up national control over all kinds of programs, is exactly what the sovereigntists want. He suggests that this continual denial of national responsibility for all kinds of issues, has allowed Quebec to achieve  virtual sovereignty. Canada and Quebec, he said, are already practically two different countries.

 

Is this assessment wrong?

This may hurt, but surely it’s also a pretty fair assessment of reality. When I heard the comments, I thought, ‘Oh, finally, Ignatieff is back on form.’ He’s no longer a politician, so he can finally start to call a spade a spade.

I recall having a conversation over drinks with a PQ strategist at a conference in London several years ago. He essentially gave me the same line. They were going to go for one tiny point after another. Nothing, on its own, would be big. But in the end, the province would be essentially separate. It is only a continuation of Quebec strategy since the 50s (from health insurance and old age pensions to foreign policy and childcare). Ultimately, the risk of actually separating, once all this was achieved, would be minimal. He said this with the most irritatingly, smug smile on his face, as if I was an idiot for thinking that a) the plan wouldn’t work and b) this wasn’t a good and inevitable idea.

So what does everyone do? They jump on Ignatieff for telling it like it is. What should we really be doing, if we really want Canada to survive intact? We should be demanding that the national government actually act like a national government, that it actually take on policy for the whole country. But then, of course, the target would not be Ignatieff. It would be the current government in Ottawa that, despite is ‘tough’ reputation, is in actuality acting like the whimpy kid of Confederation: refusing responsibility, giving up powers, withdrawing from areas it could arguably claim to control, and giving away tax powers and resources with which it could do things on a national level.

This is the issue that some opposition party ought to grab hold of: the ‘whimpyness’, for lack of a better term, of the Harper government. It constantly backs away from fights with the provinces, withdraws from any responsibility, and refuses to actually speak up for Canada.

Alas, though, with the NDP now courting Quebec and the Liberals in nowhere land, we truly are left without a national political party.

Stand Up for History, and for Archives

The Canadian Historical Association, among others, is urging us to stand up for the funding of the most essential tools to the study of history in this country: archives.

Read more below:

Dear CHA Members,

The full ramifications of the recent budget are only beginning to be understood but it is clear that in choosing what to fund and what to cut, the Harper government has gone to war against history, heritage, and ultimately Canada. 

The Executive of the CHA has met and considers these cuts to be grave threats to our archival institutions and our ability to use those as historians.  Quite simply, if carried out, the tools we depend on as historians, journalists, creative writers and artists, to preserve and share our national memory will be crippled.  New resources will not come to light, the digital tools that make our work lighter will not be developed, and existing archival resources will not be protected.

So far two of the key attacks on the past come in the elimination of the budget for local archives and the total elimination of the Canadian Studies program.

First, see the letter from Lara Wilson, chair of the Canadian Council of Archives to Minister James Moore, on our website at http://www.cha-shc.ca/en/Homepage_69/items/12.html. The total $1.7 million budget for the National Archives Development Program, which has supported over 800 local archives for 26 years is gone. 

Second, as of May 1^st, the entire program “Understanding Canada” from the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, which has supported Canadian Studies programs outside of Canada has been eliminated.  This program gave very modest support to associations in countries around the world that focus on Canadian Studies, and will result in most of these associations being unable to function.

This government is cutting the funding that Canada needs in order to know itself and be a united country as well as a country that is known and understood by others around the world.  We understand the economy is slow and the government is in deficit we note that it continues to spend on its priorities.

The executive has endorsed the letter from the Canadian Council of Archives and encourages all our members to email to Minister Moore, Minister Baird and Prime Minister Harper as well as your local MP to ask for the restoration of the National Archives Development Program and the Understanding Canada Program.   Bonus points if you still have energy for a letter to the editor of your local paper or a relevant blog. 

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s email is:  pm@pm.gc.ca

Heritage Minister James Moore’s email address is: james.moore@parl.gc.ca

Foreign Minister John Baird: bairdj@parl.gc.ca

Your MP’s email address can be found at: <http://www.parl.gc.ca/MembersOfParliament/MainMPsCompleteList.aspx?TimePeriod=current>

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The foresight of Eugene Forsey

I'm spending my time these days reading through the letters of Eugene Forsey. Who was Eugene Forsey? It's a complex answer for he was a unique man: he was a key intellectual on the left in Canada in the middle of the 20th century. He not only played a key role as a CCF thinker and intellectual, but he was a labour intellectual, someone who was a researcher for Canadian Labour Congress. But if you think you have him pigeon-holed, you're wrong. He was also a good friend of the Conservative prime minister Arthur Meighen. He was a British Canadian, with an emphasis on both of those terms, someone who failed to see a contradiction in them. The Conservatives under various leaders kept trying to get him to run for office. They did appoint him to the Board of Broadcast Governors after Diefenbaker won in 1957. But then Forsey later ended up as a Liberal Senator, largely I think because he agreed with Trudeau's approach on the constitutional question. He was, as I say, a unique man.

Here's Forsey at my institution, Trent, (one in from right) with a young Margaret Atwood (not to forget T E W Nind on left and Louis Haminsky on the right!)

In reading his letters, I'm reminded of how the past is always with us, but especially so in our politics.

Here is Forsey (in a letter to the editor of Saturday Night in 1951) explaining why it would be a bad idea to appoint a Canadian born Governor General: 'The appointment of a Canadian will throw the office into the whirl-pool of national politics and sectional, racial and sectarian feeling. The French-Canadians will insist, most reasonably, that every second, or at the very least, every third, Governor shall be a French-Canadian. The Irish Roman Catholics will insist on one of their number once in so many times. The various Protestant denominations will want their turn. The Maritimes will jib at a succession of "Upper Canadian" Governors. The Prairies will want their turn. So will British Columbia. Indeed, it may well prove that each individual province will press its own particular claim. One would think we already have enough of thiskind of trouble without deliberately inviting more.'

Of course, Forsey was exactly right - only the kinds of identities to be represented spread out to include more than religion and region.

But most importantly he was right, earlier in the letter, when he said it would cheapen the postion and make it impossible for the GG to act independently, to truly exercise his/her authority [ok, I added the 'her].  This is exactly what happend over the prorogue scandal. Michaelle Jean was doomed if she gave Harper the prorogation, but even more doomed if she didn't. She didn't have the room to move because she's nothing more than a patronage plum and pawn.

You don't have to be a great lover of British Canada to see that the position of GG is now in betwixt and in between. It hangs on to the vestiges of the British parliamentary model, simply replacing a token Canadian in place of the former British aristocrats. No one would accept a British aristocrat telling a Canadian prime minister what to do. But the nationalization didn't go far enough to confer enough authority on the (unelected) GG to actually exercsie the very few, but fundamentally important, remaining reserve powers of the Crown.

The consequences for Candian democracy are as profound as they are obscure. There are hardly any checks left on the authority of a prime minister with (or even without as we saw) a majority government. As the current government daily runs roughshod over the parliamentary process, it's one more thing to worry about...

Harper's history lessons

Ah, the creativity of our great and glorious leader Stephen Harper! Many Canadians are now tweeting history lessons about the NDP, following in the slippered footsteps of Harper the historian.  Check out the twitter feed #HarperHistory or more details here

In case you missed it, over the last week Conservatives of all stripes have been giving history lessons about how the NDP can't have a view on the war in Afghanistan because 73 years ago it didn't want to go to war against Hitler.


J S Woodsworth



Fact check: It was J S Woodsworth who headed a political party of a different name (ie the CCF not the NDP) who voted against going to war. But it was only Woodsworth who voted this way. The rest of the CCF voted to go to war. M J Coldwell then took up the leadership of the CCF in the Commons. If you're interested in Woodsworth - and why not, he was a fascinating man - take a look at the biography by Kenneth McNaught. Buy it or be cheap and read parts on Google books here.

Here are some of my favourites from the twitter feed:

'"The NDP refused to come to the aid of men when Mordor invaded Gondor."

"The NDP shamefully stood by in the fight against plaque and gingivitis."

"The #NDP didn't even support the fight against the Death Star!"

"The NDP were the 2nd gunman on the grassy nole "

"Sarah Palin can see the NDP from her house"

Peacekeeping and War

Noah Richler has a new book out called What We Talk About When We Talk About War (Goose Lane).

Check out the review of it at the literary blog Pickle Me This (here). I particularly liked her line: 'Peacekeeping was invented by men who’d learned too much about war, and forgotten by men who’d never known it at all.'

Enough said.

A little late

Who needs anniversaries anyway? Why did we talk about the Charter's 30th anniversary the other week, but now it's disappeared from our computer monitors and television screens?

Those questions are my own defence for being far too busy over the past week or so to blog about anything, even something as interesting as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. For what it's worth - and very late - here's my eighty two cents.

The Charter matters in modern Canadian history. It's that simple.

Just compare Canada and the United States in the early 1960s and then again today. In the early 60s, Canada was a fairly illiberal country in which a few intelligent thoughtful people were putting forward the idea that governments should protect rights, and many other Canadians (and Canadian governments) were ignoring the idea altogether. It was the United Statess with its Bill of Rights, with its civil rights movement, and with the Kennedys that was the symbol of the progressive, liberal society of the future (despite, or perhaps because of, all the blemishes).

Frank Scott

The lawyer and poet Frank Scott might have won a few key rights cases in the Supreme Court at the end of the 50s (against Quebec's Padlock Law, and against Maurice Duplessis himself in the Roncarelli case - for more see here and here). But in order to win, he had to work around the arcane technicalities of the British North America act and its eccentric federal/provincial divisions. In other words, civil rights victories often came about because lawyers could make other kinds of arguments and make them work for civil rights. Scott believed in the rights that could be read into the history of English Common Law, but the case was often difficult  to make.

Diefenbaker did give Canada a Bill of Rights, but it was a mere scrap of legislation - symbolically interesting, almost meaningless in practice. (This despite what Harper said the other week. Once again, Harper proves to be a very bad student of Canadian democratic history.)

As in the United States there were many Canadians - individuals and organizations - who fought for a more democratic society in these years, one that respected the rights of individuals and groups, and one that protected the rights of minorities and not (as had usually been the case in Canada) the rights of majorities to discriminate against minorities. (This is what really lies behind the conscience rights trumpeted by the Wildrose party in Alberta - a return to the freedom to discriminate. What's next? Are we going to go back to the time when there were restricted covenants on property sales? Shall we say gay people can't buy downtown Calgary condos because selling to gay people goes against the conscience of someone? Such was the thinking of an earlier Canada.)

But despite all the successes of various rights movements in these years, if it hadn't been for the Charter, many of the successes could have just as easily been dismantled over the past decades. This is what has often happened in the United States. Why didn't it happen in Canada? The Charter.

And, of course, it was all something of an accident. It might never have happened. If Joe Clark hadn't bungled his minority government budget in 1980, and if the Liberals hadn't agreed to let Trudeau have one more shot at the can, and if, and if, and if.... it goes on, then we wouldn't have the Charter.

But we do. And it matters. Before Harper took over, and with George junior in power down south, the situation had been reversed from the early 60s. It was Canada that was the beacon of a liberal, progressive society.

You can tell the Charter matters, if for no other reason, than because the Harper Conservatives don't want us to remember it.