In 1960 MacLean’s magazine, which according to the best available research once graced grocery checkouts across the country, produced a book called Canada, Portrait of a Country. It collected words and images from the magazine to, in the words of its editor Leslie F. Hannon, reflect the country “in a contemporary light,” weaving “the threads of the Canadian fabric…into a truthful and deeply textured tapestry.” It was also intended to help “correct some of the regrettable misconceptions of Canada held both at home and abroad.”
This time capsule – pre-Trudeau Sr., pre-Charter of Rights and Freedoms, pre-Quebec separatism, even pre-maple leaf flag – depicts a Canada rapidly fading from living memory, restrained about its accomplishments yet optimistic. Most of the contributing authors, then household names, would today require Googling, perhaps even Stephen Leacock, Hugh McClennan and Gabrielle Roy. Pictured within are Christopher Plummer, Oscar Peterson and an unrecognizably young William Shatner, on his way “from Stratford to Broadway.” Not even Star Trek was a thing yet.
A sober realism colours the book even when celebrating First World War flying ace Billy Bishop or Marilyn Bell, the first person to swim across Lake Ontario. Stories of city and the great hinterland alike aren’t sugar-coated. “The People who were Murdered for Fun” describes the extermination of the Indigenous Beothuk in Newfoundland via disease, starvation and violent conflict with Europeans. The Niagara Falls of the 1870s is dubbed “one of the most ruthless and ingenious clip joints in history.” Still, the book’s tone and message are fundamentally positive; Canada is portrayed as growing, forward-looking and full of potential.
Fast-forward 63 years. The 1867 Project: Why Canada Should be Cherished – Not Cancelled, just released by the recently founded Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, describes a far different Canada, a country gripped by aggressive amnesia and calculated self-loathing. Twenty tightly edited essays portray our politics and society in stark, often highly personal terms, making the case that, instead, Canada “should be cherished not cancelled.” One section is devoted to objectively appraising our history, a preceding section setting the stage with an analysis of our underlying intellectual and societal malaise. Finally, the book concludes with several essays charting the potential for national renewal.
One of the strong threads running through the volume is highlighted in the subtitle: cancellation. Multiple essays explore the by-now sickeningly familiar practise of attacking, discrediting and banishing from public life and cultural memory historical figures as well as current commentators, academics, politicians, corporate leaders and prominent professionals. The common theme: being offside with the views – originally of a vocal minority, now the official line in many institutions – dominating current discourse in Canada and elsewhere.
How we got from “correcting regrettable misconceptions” about Canada to burning down the house in a mere 60 years is bewildering. The ideological capture of our elites has a lot to do with it.
Ideological Capture
In The 1867 Project’s first section, Queen’s University Professor of Law Bruce Pardy shows how society’s broad acceptance of Enlightenment values – freedom of conscience, the centrality of reason, the scientific method, the rule of law – has been replaced by “four destructive doctrines.” Combining critical theory, post-modernism, (so-called) social justice and critical race theory, this ideology dominates the thinking and motivation not merely of an activist fringe but of our cognitive elites, such as they are – academia and educators, the media, politicians and bureaucrats. Increasingly, even corporate Canada.
Each of these doctrines bubbles up in the book’s essays, but Pardy traces the tide of cancellation and intolerance largely to post-Second World War philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Trust a German academic to gild naked self-interest with a patina of smart-sounding theoretical babble, in this case his concept of (note the internal contradiction) “repressive tolerance.” Boiled down it means “anything I like will be allowed, anything I dislike will be suppressed, persecuted and silenced.” Well done, Herb, pass the Pilsner and pretzels!
Marcuse’s playbook is front and centre in essays by Gordon Clark, who describes censorship in Canada’s media, in Bruce Gilley’s account of the firing of Professor Frances Widdowson from Mount Royal University in Calgary, and in David Haskell’s description of how critical race theory is bulldozing logic, fairness and democracy in Ontario education, notably the Waterloo School District.
A self-avowed Marxist, the prickly Widdowson was clearly naïve in believing a contemporary Canadian university was a place for open inquiry and debate. Perhaps this was because, coming from the Left, she’d been with the in-group most of her career? Ultimately, even tenure wasn’t enough to protect her from the mob, in this case her own administration and enraged colleagues and students. Questioning the tenets of Indigenous scholarship, specifically the particulars of Indigenous scientific concepts, was enough to get her turfed. She continues to fight her dismissal and is currently challenging her ouster via arbitration through her union, which could spark more political fireworks.
Lebanon-born Rima Azar found it easy to integrate here because ‘Canada was founded on the notion that individuals should be treated as equal before the law with neither favouritism nor prejudice shown based on irrelevant characteristics.’
Rima Azar, a health psychologist from Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, and financial analyst and Financial Post columnist Matthew Lau round out the first section. The latter provides compelling data suggesting that Canada, despite the assertions of our prime minister and many others, is not a systemically racist country. But let’s not confuse ourselves with the facts.
Azar, meanwhile, introduces one of the volume’s sub-themes, the immigrant’s experience and how that illuminates our current mess. She describes Lebanon as “a rotting sectarian system” where “public posts are…divided by religious quotas.” By contrast, she found it easy to integrate here because “Canada was founded on the notion that individuals should be treated as equal before the law with neither favouritism nor prejudice shown based on irrelevant characteristics.” Dismayed by the spread of identity politics in her adopted country, Azar maintains that “Canada matters more than our tribes.” It’s hard to argue with the clear insight of a newcomer, unaffected by our native biases.
Invasion of the History Snatchers
Is the Magna Carta, signed by King John of England in 1215, the foundation of our fundamental freedoms or, as Monty Python’s Flying Circus character Mr. Badger believed, merely “a piece of chewing gum on a bedspread in Dorset”? That 50-year-old Monty Python sketches seem increasingly apt in describing 21st century Canada is no longer surprising. In fact, part two of The 1867 Project makes a strong case that our elites favour Mr. Badger’s chewing gum hypothesis.
Several essays lay out what is, by any reasonable and factual standard, Canada’s actual history. Dorchester Review editor Chris Champion provides an excellent description of some thorny aspects: colonialism and abolitionism in the Canadian context (including a discussion of the historical ubiquity of slavery). These place the former Canada and Great Britain in the context of their contemporaries rather than current ideological fashions. Champion rightly contends that empires and superpowers inevitably occur, so pick your poison. Would you rather be ruled by British or American power or by, say, Russian or Chinese?
Signed by King John of England in 1215, the Magna Carta laid the foundations for constitutional monarchy and for individual rights and freedoms, a legacy bequeathed to Canada 650 years later – as virtually every Canadian citizen clearly understood until approximately 40 years ago.
It is historian and well-known columnist John Robson who addresses the heritage of Magna Carta and how our parliamentary traditions grew from it. More important, Robson points out that until almost yesterday our politicians were aware of this heritage. Notable among these were the Fathers of Confederation, as they struggled to devise a country with a working federation. These foundational historical and political traditions, what as Robson says “every schoolchild and politician knew,” have now been cast down the memory hole. And we are the worse for it.
Feminist critic Janice Fiamengo completes the general historical review with an account of women in early Canada. She showcases women’s tangible contributions, from facing the crushing hardships of rural life to the highest cultural and political strata. Learning how contemporary women viewed their society, juxtaposed with contemptuous 21st century hindsight, is enlightening. Journalist and author Sara Jeannette Duncan, for example, who began writing at 24, viewed her era of the late 19th century as “a golden age for girls, full of new interests and opportunities.” It was with such optimism in the face of adversity that these women also bore the generations who built Canada.
The balance of part two picks up the cancellation theme with regard to specific historical figures. As described here and observable elsewhere, the methods of the cancellation mob and current historical revisionists are nothing if not consistent: vicious and simplistic. They take an incident or episode – real, exaggerated or imagined – fry it under the spotlight of hypersensitive woke sensibilities and howl for blood. Erasure is demanded regardless of what else the person may have achieved, or any good that might outweigh the accusations. The accusations all suffer from the same modern affliction of “presentism,” the belief that history must be judged solely by our (or rather, woke ideology’s) current, narrow standards.
The book’s cancellation list comprises Edward Cornwallis (founder of Halifax), educator Egerton Ryerson, judge Matthew Begbie and of course our first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald. (There are many more, of course.) Their alleged misdeeds all have to do with our Indigenous peoples and revisionist scholarship. The accusations, meant to discredit and erase these men, take malign interpretations of incidents and spin them into narratives of intolerance and racism.
In four essays, Leo J. Deveau, Peter Shawn Taylor, Lyn McDonald and Greg Piasetzki offer what can only be described as true, balanced assessments of history. Current interpretations of specific events – for Cornwallis a bounty paid for Mi’kmaq scalps during wartime (in the 1740s), for Begbie his sentencing to death of six Tsilhqot’in chiefs involved in an 1864 massacre – negate any good they may otherwise have done in their lives. These apparently justify their literal erasure from the public square, by removing their names and statues from view.
The authors set the record straight. Regarding the two examples cited above, Deveau describes how Cornwallis was simply retaliating against French tactics: (their) “authorities at Louisbourg were already paying bounties to the Mi’kmaq for British prisoners and/or their scalps.” Cornwallis’ countermove was undeniably tough, arguably brutal, but not obviously motivated by racism and was justifiable by the standards of war at the time.
Lyn McDonald shows that the accusations that Egerton Ryerson ‘inspired’ the Indian Residential School system (decades before its creation) are a frame-up. The real Ryerson lived and collaborated with natives, supporting their economic and social development.
Taylor argues persuasively that Begbie’s decision was fair, not foul. Famous for criss-crossing B.C. on foot and horseback, he adjudicated 52 murder charges over 13 years, resulting in 38 guilty verdicts. Of these he granted 11 clemency, including to seven natives. In the Tsilhqot’in case, Taylor maintains, “it is clear that Begbie showed a far greater concern for [Chief] Klatsassin’s legal rights” than the accused could expect from contemporary colonial officials. Multiple witnesses placed him and his party at the crime scene. A jury acquitted three of the accused, while Begbie sentenced five (and later a sixth) of those found guilty to death. A 1993 provincial inquiry into the case, Taylor notes, took “no position on the killings, or Begbie’s role in the final outcome.” Hardly an ironclad case for cancellation.
On even flimsier if not downright counter-factual grounds, statues of Ryerson and Macdonald are toppled and their names removed from universities. Lyn McDonald shows that the accusations that Ryerson “inspired” the Indian Residential School system (decades before its creation) are a frame-up. The real Ryerson lived and collaborated with natives, supporting their economic and social development.
Piasetzki’s case for the Conservative Sir John A. reveals the prime minister as tolerant and caring of First Nations in the face of a critical Liberal opposition. The latter repeatedly slammed Macdonald for his generosity toward Canada’s Indigenous. The essays present persuasive evidence that specific contemporary accusations against him are exaggerated at best, fabricated at worst, shamelessly wielded to facilitate the cancellation of our nation’s central founder.
Oxford ethicist and theologian Nigel Biggar, author of the recent book Colonialism, a Moral Reckoning, provides powerful commentary about historical cancellation in a conversation with Jordan Peterson. Biggar maintains that implicit in the demands to cancel historical figures is the cancellers’ belief that they are morally superior to their forebears. There is no attempt at human understanding, appreciation of context, or recognition that people – then as now – despite all their flaws, usually believe they’re acting with good intentions. Not to mention the dearth of evidence that presentism is even correct in presuming we are demonstrably more enlightened and virtuous than our ancestors.
Ideas or Identity?
The book’s concluding essays are, like contemporary Canada, bound by the miserable topic of race and identity. Jamil Jivani describes how racism, re-emerging in a new form he calls “remix-racism,” casts old prejudices in the mold of current leftist ideology. His personal experience – as a writer, commentator and radio host – show that the media establishment and corporations will only accept spokespeople from minority communities who toe their ideological line. They essentially pick who may speak for communities and who may not. Black conservatives like Jivani are fired and, typically, silenced. That has thankfully not worked out in the case of Jivani who, though purged from the airwaves, is now running for the federal Conservative nomination in the Ontario riding of Durham.
Educator Marjorie Gann follows with instructive context on the history of slavery, which permeates modern debate whether it’s relevant or not. Gann describes the global nature of enslavement in the early modern era in varied societies from Europe to Asia, Africa and the Americas. It might shake current thinking to know, as Gann details, that Indigenous nations themselves held slaves. Her account of Europeans captured and enslaved by natives in the colonial era, in what is now B.C. and New Brunswick, are eye-opening, as is the fact that the towering historical figure Joseph Brant, Chief of the Six Nations, also held slaves.
Two essays then highlight both challenges and hope for Indigenous Canadians. Peter Best uses the case of Cindy Dickson, member of the Yukon’s Vuntut Gwichin First Nation, to illustrate how rights believed to protect all Canadians are being eroded in Indigenous communities, often at the active behest of First Nations leadership. Dickson tried to run for elected office but was denied by local officials who restrict candidacy to reserve residents. Bizarrely, Yukon courts ruled that her rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms were being violated, but that band officials had the right to do so. Dickson’s recent appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada is currently awaiting a decision. By contrast, Joseph Quesnel makes the case that if Indigenous Canadians could be freed from the inflexible federal yoke, and First Nations were required to govern more transparently, an “economic spring” might arise in these communities.
Additional clear-eyed insight into Canada’s actual reality – in contrast to the prevailing narrative of self-loathing – is provided by another outside voice, Gourav Jaswal. The Indian entrepreneur pronounces claims of Canada’s systemic racism “absurd,” particularly when compared to his own country. He points to an acquaintance of Indian origin who, despite being an elected representative in B.C., believes she is being held back by Canadians’ racial prejudice. Nonplussed, Jaswal points out that because his family is from the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, he could never expect to be elected – even as dog-catcher – in Goa, where he currently lives.
Here it’s worth recalling another B.C. immigrant success story, former Liberal MP and cabinet minister Hedy Fry. In 2001 she accused fellow British Columbians, residents of Prince George specifically, of radical racism, saying that “crosses are being burned on lawns as we speak.” A medical doctor from Trinidad, Fry immigrated to Canada in 1970 and by 1977 was president of the B.C. Federation of Medical Women. She later rose to be president of both the Vancouver and B.C. medical associations, as well as of course an MP and federal minister. Her unhinged tirade likening British Columbians to KKK terrorists was entirely fictitious, of course, and she was forced to apologize in the House of Commons. But why would someone whose “lived experience” decisively contradicts a narrative of Canadian racism even say such a thing?
The 1867 Project concludes with essays from Ven Venkatachalam and Mark Milke, the book’s editor and executive director of the Aristotle Foundation. Both present a wealth of data showing the success of immigrants to Canada in terms of employment, education and general integration into society. This underscores their further point of how well-accepted immigrants are by their fellow Canadians, in stark contrast to many other countries.
A warning from across the centuries: Some today see parallels to the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD, while others call for a well-thought-out campaign to recognize, diagnose – and stop – Canada’s cultural train-wreck. Depicted, The Course of Empire Destruction, by Thomas Cole, 1836.Milke wraps up the book by asserting that Canada does indeed have an identity: “One that prizes freedom and values responsibility…derived from historic British understandings and interpretations of liberalism.” Classical liberalism, that is – what today is basically viewed as conservatism. Milke argues forcefully that Canada must rally around ideas, such as those presented in the book, that are demonstrably good. He finishes with a final irony: that Pierre Trudeau himself would oppose the identity politics so beloved by his son.
A Glimmer of Hope?
The 1867 Project hangs together very well overall – always a challenge in an essay collection – the entries collectively spanning many of modern-day Canada’s socio-cultural and political flashpoints. The individual contributions, if at times veering into the very personal, are engaging and instructive, and stand on their own. A number originated as articles for C2C Journal. The book provides an incisive reading of our national pulse.
Can we do better than the Ancients? Will observing and diagnosing our slow-motion cultural train wreck stop it? If so, then The 1867 Project is even more important.
Which brings to mind the, as we say these days, “live debate” about the state of Western civilization. Are we literally in end times comparable to, say, the fall of ancient Rome? Some commentators cite specific events – the brief reign of weak teen-aged emperor Romulus Augustulus or the able but ultimately futile campaigns of the early Byzantine general Belisarius – as mirroring this or that modern trend, calling a warning to us from across the centuries. Which begs the question, can we do better than the Ancients? Will observing and diagnosing our slow-motion cultural train wreck stop it? If so, then The 1867 Project is even more important.
There may be small cracks forming in the cancellation monolith. A statue of Queen Elizabeth II, toppled on Canada Day 2021 during protests over alleged (but, to this day, never-excavated let alone confirmed) unmarked graves at a former Kamloops Indian Residential School, has been returned to its place near the Manitoba legislature. Perhaps this signals a small restoration of sanity. That said, the nearby statue of Queen Victoria – pulled down during the same protests – has not been brought back. As the book also argues, much work remains to be done.
John Weissenberger is a Calgary geologist with a strong interest in history.
Source of main image: Blake Elliott/Shutterstock.
