How often do you get a blast from the present while reading history books? It certainly happens when the subject is Canadian unity.
For instance, if you heard a Quebec politician complain about a supposed fiscal imbalance within our federation because “the share of income tax collected by the province . . . is still clearly inadequate” and claim that “by so often giving short shrift to Quebec’s pleas up to now, the federal government has acted as though it meant to put a brake on our province’s social and economic development”, you could be forgiven for believing that former Parti Québécois premier Bernard Landry had made a comeback. In fact, a Liberal Premier, Jean Lesage, uttered these criticisms in 1963. [1]
Or if you heard it said that in Canada “there is not room enough, under the same flag and the same laws, for two or three angry, suspicious, obstructive nationalities” you might think you’d overheard Liberal leader Stéphane Dion rehearsing his lines for the next election – or for the next referendum on Quebec sovereignty. Instead look back. Look way back. The person who said it was, in fact, Father of Confederation Thomas D’Arcy McGee, in 1862. [2]
Recently, those of us worried about Canadian unity have been troubled that, no matter how hard we try to get along, no matter how hard we try to avoid having to constantly assess the current temperature of our relationship, we always seem to be on the brink of yet another crisis. Bizarre as many will find it to be in agreement with the noted nationalist Lionel Groulx, many will suspect that he was correct to assert in 1943 that “When a country’s leaders are always talking about union and national unity, it shows that these things do not exist except as ideals.”[3] How is it that those words sound so painfully relevant today? How can he sound more relevant than contemporary politicians?
The truth is that Canadian unity never did have much of a chance to succeed, except for a brief moment at the time of Confederation. At Charlottetown, it seemed as though a carefully crafted system of federalism would give Canada a chance to succeed. The key was a system of divided powers that would bring together folks from various regions of British North America and let them pledge allegiance to the new nation without having to give up any of their own local particularities. If our story has instead been one of constant strife and noisy bickering, it is largely because that institutional structure – and the ideas behind it – have not been respected.
Canada has never really been united as a nation, in good part because true federalism was never given a fighting chance. Right after Confederation Sir John A. Macdonald came to power. He was a masterful political operator who had been very clear, before 1867, that his own strong preference was for a centralized legislative union. He had claimed such an arrangement “would be the best, the cheapest, the most vigorous, and the strongest system of government we could adopt.”[4] And once in power he devoted himself to bringing it about despite the actual provisions of the British North America Act.
It only took about 10 years for Macdonald to bring in a “National Policy” of high import tariffs and protectionist regulations. It wasn’t just anti-free-trade, it was also anti-decentralist. It was implemented nationwide despite protests in the west, in part, because it was very popular in central Canada where the votes were. This pattern, of politically rewarding but divisive centralization, would repeat itself many, many, many times over, and would be taken to an almost unbearable extreme by Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
Worse yet, because a decentralized structure was essential to accommodate Quebec, centralizing politicians have been forced to improvise what later came to be called “asymmetrical federalism” to avoid tearing the country apart. Thus we’re also united in our disunity by successive prime ministers alternately bullying the provinces with their centralizing national schemes, and keeping busy trying to appease nationalist Quebecers by promising them more – money, autonomy, love – than there is. Nobody has tried governing the country the way it was meant to be governed – the way the Fathers of Confederation agreed it would be governed.
If politicians chose to take federalism seriously, they would not spend their time and energy dreaming up national economic or social programs that always seem to pit one part of the country against the others. They would simply let what Russell Kirk called conservatives’ “affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems”[5] work its magic and trust that local governments would know how to take care of vulnerable citizens.
Instead we have a prime minister (Conservative Stephen Harper) telling Quebec nationalists in the Saguenay that they should reject those who “want us to believe that the Quebec nation and Canadian unity do not go together”[6], an opposition leader (Liberal Stéphane Dion) who believes “the federal government is, essentially, a money-redistributing machine”[7], and a Quebec intergovernmental affairs minister (Liberal Benoît Pelletier) who believes Ontarians have a responsibility towards Canadian unity “and that responsibility is, I would say, mainly represented by the principle of equalization”[8] or, to be blunt, by the principle of always giving more money to Quebec.
There is an unfortunate, glib and quite mistaken belief among Canada’s governing elite that it is precisely by not thinking about what we’re doing that we have succeeded so brilliantly. In fact so far we have managed, with increasing difficulty, to avoid being torn apart by compulsive and unsuccessful centralization. But the crises have become more, rather than less, frequent: the Parti Québécois and the first separation referendum, the National Energy Program, Meech Lake, Charlottetown, the second separation referendum, the rise of the Bloc… Sooner or later, if we keep stumbling, we’re going to fall. And there is a clear alternative: respect Canada’s federal structure.
Canada is a federation because there was no other kind of government acceptable to all of the different parts of British North America. There’s a reason Lord Durham rejected federalism in his 1839 report; it would not have been conducive to the assimilation of the French, an option he so famously preferred.[9]Lower Canada together into a political unit at all. Federalism created Canada, and if anything is going to save Canada from secessionist perils (from Quebec or, as is increasingly likely, from Alberta), it’s true federalism the way it was meant to be. But for the same reason, federalism was the only way to bring Upper and Lower Canada together into a political unit at all. Federalism created Canada, and if anything is going to save Canada from secessionist perils (from Quebec or, as is increasingly likely, from Alberta), it’s true federalism the way it was meant to be.
Moreover, it would be quite easy to live according to the rules as they were initially set out. All we’d have to do would be to keep every level of government well within its own sphere of jurisdiction, to trust that the various local governments would respond to the desires of their own citizens and, if they didn’t, to leave it to their voters to throw them out, instead of asking federal politicians to dictate British Columbia’s social programs or Prince Edward Island’s economic development from Ottawa.
Oh sure, it would take some courage and even a little self-restraint on the part of federal politicians slowly to disengage themselves from local affairs. But if they were smart (now you laugh), they’d use national unity as their main argument for doing so. For if provinces were mostly left to their own devices, they’d get busy trying to make their own little gardens grow instead of watching suspiciously every one of the federal government’s moves and keeping track of how much other provinces got in grants and transfers.
Nobody knows where different provinces would choose to go, what kinds of public services they’d provide and what economic policies they’d pursue. Possibly each region would be markedly different from all the others. We don’t know and more importantly, we can’t know. That’s great.
It beats what we do know, which is that sooner or later excessive centralization is going to tear the country apart. The best way to keep Canada together is to give a fighting chance to true decentralized federalism.
What we need is the principles of 1867. What we need is a blast from the past.
Brigitte Pellerin is a columnist with the Ottawa Citizen. Visit her website at: www.brigittepellerin.com
Endnotes
- Specifically, during his budget speech (he was also minister of finance) of April 5, 1963. See Dennis Gruending (ed), Great Canadian Speeches, Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2004 (p. 181)
- Great Canadian Speeches, (p. 29)
- Great Canadian Speeches, (p. 148)
- Great Canadian Speeches, (p. 33)
- The second of six “canons of conservative thought” as described in The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, Seventh Revised Edition, 1993, (p. 8).
- “Harper embraces nationalist voters as allies,” Globe and Mail, December 19, 2006, p. A5.
- “Ottawa’s new power couple,” Maclean’s, January 22, 2007 (p. 32).
- “Ontario reminded of its duty to Canada: Quebec questions ads on equalization reform,” Ottawa Citizen, January 29, 2007, p. A3.
- Bayard Reesor, The Canadian Constitution in Historical Perspective, Prentice-Hall, 1992 (p. 25)
