Article One by Barry Cooper
Biography & Books

ust because Canada exists doesn't mean it ever was founded. In fact, the whole notion of founding a country is alien to Canadian experience. Founding is something undertaken by a Machiavellian "new Prince," but Canadian sovereignty has devolved historically from the very old British crown. The Americans and the French, with their fancy republican ways, speak easily enough about their founding fathers - Washington, Madison, Robespierre, Marat and all the rest. Canadians don't.

True, we use the same patriarchal language and speak of the fathers of Confederation, but nobody talks about the fathers of Canada, which indicates clearly enough that Confederation was an episode in Canada's evolution, not a brand new beginning. A few intellectuals might indulge in loose talk about the Canadian founding, but they ought to know better.

Usually the act of founding is accompanied by a heavy traffic in high-minded ideas intended to make the new citizens feel good about the violent things they are doing. Truths are held to be self-evident. The founders promise liberty, equality and sisterhood, or peace, bread and other people's land. None of that has ever happened in Canada, though political parties, such as the New Democrats or Reform, have staged founding events to haul themselves into existence.

Unfounded though Canada is, our early political life was not hostile to ideas. They were not expressions of grand new principles but, as contemporary politicians would have said, embodied "well known" ideas. They were well known because they were part of a tradition the origins of which were discreetly shrouded in the mists of time. Chief among them were the principles of parliamentary government and of liberalism. They remain important today. Indeed, many of our difficulties, as well as our successes, are a direct reflection of the extent to which we have maintained liberal and parliamentary government, or drifted away from it.

At the closing of the first session of the first parliament of Upper Canada in 1792, Governor John Graves Simcoe reminded his advisors, "that this province is singularly blest, not with a mutilated constitution, but with a constitution which has stood the test of experience, and which is the very image and transcript of that of Great Britain."

The sentiments were recalled in the British North American Act of 1867, when Canada received "a Constitution similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom," and, in a more muted way, in the 1982 constitution as well.

In fact, parliamentary government in North America began long before the American Revolution. In its primitive form, elected assemblies could not control the executive. After the publication of Lord Durham's famous Report, the course toward responsible government and today's parliamentary institutions was set, at least in eastern Canada: the Crown is advised by a council that is supported in an assembly that in turn raises and spends money. Parliamentary government is finely balanced between executive decisiveness and the need for prudent and public justification of policy before the sceptical eyes of a "loyal opposition", which is also a government-in-waiting.

Responsible government, parliamentary government properly speaking, came to the old colonies of British North America around the middle of the nineteenth century. On the prairies, however, it was delayed "for the purposes of the Dominion" until 1930, when the provinces gained control over resource revenues. The timing could not have been worse. A decade of severe deflation, followed by the massive centralization of wartime, meant that political leaders in the West were deprived of practical education in the ways of parliament that their colleagues in the east had experienced for a least a generation before 1870.

In consequence, while liberalism in the West has been robust, it is also often extra-parliamentary. From the nineteenth-century agrarians to today's Reform Party, populist liberalism has mounted a serious challenge to the conventions of parliament. When sovereignty is thought to be vested in "the people" and not in the crown, the implications for cabinet, the executive and for the assembly are huge. Populist measures - the initiative, referendum and recall, for example - are in fact incompatible with parliamentary government. You can have one or the other, not both.

As a result, the populist liberalism of Canada's west has been a recipe for distress. Sometimes it has been dismissed as a reflection of the unwillingness of Parliament in Ottawa to respond to the interests of Westerners. From the National Policy of Sir John A. Macdonald to the National Energy Programme of Pierre Trudeau, evidence to support this view is not hard to find. But more than interests are involved. Injured pride, not neglected interests, lies behind the ambivalence of many Westerners towards parliamentary government and "Ottawa."

Pride matters. Indeed, human beings are especially proud when they rise above their interests, which is why the pride of Westerners is especially insulted when the beneficiaries - easterners for the most part - are so palpably ungrateful.

In so many ways Quebec is a mirror image of the west. There "Ottawa" carries the same ambivalent symbolic charge, but for quite different reasons. In Quebec, the levers of parliamentary power have been energetically grasped, but diverted to distinctly non-liberal purposes.

It is useful to recall that in Quebec liberalism came ashore with the soldiers of General Wolfe in 1759. In those days, its most important element was freedom of religion, which opened the way for non-Roman Catholic and often English-speaking traders to settle in the newly acquired colony and to prosper. Once again the effect of this infusion of liberal enterprise led to the recommendations of Lord Durham. But many French-Canadians were less interested in individual liberty than in sheltering their community from the malign outside forces that the entrepreneurial English liberals seemed to represent. This is why Durham's name is still mud in Quebec.

The same religious solidarity of the eighteenth-century resistance to liberalism could be detected in the writings of Abbé Lionel Groulx fifty years ago. With the massive and rapid secularization brought about by the Quiet Revolution, the words changed, but the music remained the same. The elegant Hegelian rhetoric of a sovereigntist such as the late Fernand Dumont, for whom every distinct society achieves fulfillment and proper form as a state, or the claims in favour of "deep diversity" made on behalf of Quebec by a federalist such as Charles Taylor, resonate with the same anti-liberal communitarian survivalism pioneered by François-Xavier Garneau a century and a half ago. Garneau's long poem, Louise, as his multi-volume Historie du Canada, were as much a littérature de combat as anything from the pens of contemporary Quebec nationalists, whether sovereigntist or not. Plus ça change. . . .

In fact, many things have changed since the days of Simcoe, Durham and Macdonald, but the principles they espoused can still be detected without too much effort. And yet, pure parliamentary liberalism has never worked in Canada. All Canadians, and especially those in the unmovable centre of the country, Ontario, should be grateful for the impurities supplied by the communitarian realities of Quebec and the extra-parliamentary populism of the west. They provide the colour and flavour to Canadian politics, the leaven that makes federalism work, even though it violates not a few of the explicit intentions of the fathers of Confederation.