What Dominion Day Signifies

In the early 1980s, towards the end of the premiership of the first Trudeau, the name of the day celebrating the birth of our country was changed to “Canada Day.”  The change was made in a most underhanded fashion.  The bill underwent all of its readings in a single day.  The members of Parliament present were almost certainly too few to constitute a legitimate quorum – no count was taken, the speaker simply declared a quorum.  As dishonest and dirty as this was, in a perverse sense it was a fitting manner for this change to be accomplished.  This change was one more in a long series of attacks on the traditional symbols of the country that was born on 1 July, 1867.  The series had started with the replacement during Pearson’s premiership of the flag that had been baptized the Canadian flag in the blood of the soldiers who fought under it in two World Wars with one deliberately designed to not evoke the heritage of the Canada of Confederation.  It had continued throughout the almost two decades of Liberal government punctuated only by Joe Clark’s brief premiership.  The change of the name of the country’s birthday encapsulated all these previous changes.

 

The new designation of the holiday merely states the name of the country in conjunction with the word day.  As far as national holidays go, this is as minimalist as it comes.  The great Canadian novelist Robertson Davies mocked it in disgust as a “wet” designation, being one letter removed from the name of a brand of ginger ale.  The norm for countries that celebrate this kind of holiday is for the designation to say something meaningful about the country and the event celebrated on the day.  The United States and Mexico, for example, both call their holidays on 4 July and 16 September respectively, Independence Day (contrary to a popular misconception Cinco de Mayo is not Mexico’s national holiday and is more widely celebrated in Mexican communities in the United States than in Mexico).  The old designation of our holiday, Dominion Day, was such a name that said something about both our country and how she came to be.  1 July was the day when the British North America Act came into effect making Canada the first Dominion in the British Empire. 

 

The Liberals’ objection to this designation was based entirely on ignorance.  “Dominion” denoted neither colonial status nor subservience.  It was essentially the equivalent, prior to the Statute of Westminster, to what is now called a “Commonwealth Realm”, i.e., a country that governs herself through her own parliament under the reign of the shared monarch.  The designation spread throughout the British Empire as she transformed herself into the Commonwealth, with Australia becoming the second Dominion in 1901, but its origins were here in Canada where it was chosen by the Fathers of Confederation themselves.  They had originally planned on calling us “the Kingdom of Canada” but, advised by London that this might look to our southern neighbours like we were deliberately poking them in the eye they chose “Dominion” out of Psalm 72:8 to be a less provocative synonym for “Kingdom.”   Although “Commonwealth Realm” has succeeded “Dominion” throughout the Commonwealth, “Dominion” remains the official title of Canada for, although the Liberals removed it from the designation of the holiday they did not remove it from the designation of the country.  Contrary to another widespread misconception, the British North America Act was neither repealed nor replaced in the 1980s.  It was renamed the Constitution Act, 1867 when the power to amend it was transferred to Canada’s parliament, but it remains in our constitutional law where it continues to call the union formed by Confederation “One Dominion” with the name “Canada.” (1)

 

As a national holiday, Dominion Day was in one sense similar to the American Independence Day and in another sense the opposite of it.   The holidays were similar in that they both celebrated what made their respective countries what they are.  Dominion Day commemorated Canada’s becoming a self-governing Dominion within the Empire that was evolving into the Commonwealth.  Independence Day commemorated the Thirteen Colonies’ declaration of independence from the same Empire.  They were the opposite of each other because that which made Canada what she is and that which made the United States what she is were the opposite of each other.  The United States was born out of a revolution and it is a revolution that she celebrates every 4^th of July.  Canada became what she is by rejecting that revolution and this is what Dominion Day signifies.  In his Considerations on France (1796) Joseph de Maistre wrote "Le rétablissement de la monarchie, qu'on appelle contre-révolution, ne sera point une révolution contraire, mais le contraire de la revolution” which in English is usually shortened and slightly paraphrased as “what is needed is not a revolution in the opposite direction but the opposite of a revolution.” (2)  The path that led from the parting of ways with the Americans over their revolution to Confederation and the formation of the Dominion of Canada could be described as “the opposite of a revolution.”

 

This is the real reason why the Liberals, big and small l, hated the word “Dominion” so much. It perpetually reminded them that Confederation was not a progressive project and that at the foundational level Canada was built in opposition to their philosophy and ideals.  In the twentieth century, they had put a lot of effort into deluding themselves that this was not so.  Just as they deluded themselves into thinking that the American capitalism that was uprooting families and communities, replacing the traditional surroundings of those families and communities (both countryside and buildings that looked like they were made for humans rather than machines) with a world of unfeeling steel and concrete, eliminating the sacred – the portion of time and space set apart from commercial activity for higher purposes -  while erecting altars to mammon, and mechanizing every aspect of life (3) was somehow a reactionary force in the world so they deluded themselves into thinking that the country that until the 1970s was far more rural than her southern neighbour, which resisted the secularizing and socially progressive trends that the United States succumbed to shortly after the Second World War until close to the end of the twentieth century, which has never had a separation of church and state and over which a traditional, hereditary, king reigns is somehow a more progressive product of the same Modern thinking that produced the United States.  The Liberal Interpretation of Canadian History which dominated the Canadian history classrooms of the twentieth century the way its ancestor the Whig Interpretation of History had dominated the history classrooms of the previous century taught that Canada’s national story is identical to that of the United States, the story of a country that forged a new identify for herself by breaking with the parent country, except that in Canada’s case this was done diplomatically and peacefully, rather than through revolutionary war.  Donald Creighton, who derided this as the “Authorized Version”, told Canada’s true story in such histories as The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, The Road to Confederation, Dominion of the North, Canada’s First Century and, of course, his masterful two volume biography of Sir John A. Macdonald.  Creighton laid waste to the Liberals’ cherished idea of Canada as a politer America-lite throughout his career as the dean of Canadian history.  That single word “Dominion” in our country’s title and the older name of her national birthday testified to the truth he spoke against the lies the Liberals told themselves. No wonder they hated that word so much.

 

That our country was born, not out of a revolution but out of “the opposite of a revolution” is very much something worth celebrating.  Indeed, we were very fortunate that we did not need the type of “opposite of a revolution” that Maistre had in mind, the type that restored Charles II to his throne and the status quo ante of the Church of England after the Cromwellian rebellion, but that our “opposite of a revolution” consisted of not participating in the American revolution and so retaining our ties to both Great Britain (and the larger Empire, now Commonwealth) and through her to the older civilization of Christendom. 

Sadly, many Canadians are not as appreciative of this as they ought to be.  After the Liberals resumed government in 2015 attacks on our country’s history and traditions resumed.  One conspicuous form these attacks took was attempts to “cancel” our historical figures, most notably Sir John A. Macdonald, the leading Father of Confederation and our first prime minister.  Neoconservatives rightly opposed these attacks and defended Sir John, but as these same neoconservatives are extremely pro-American to the point of often speaking and acting as if they preferred the United States to our country, valued America’s constitution and traditions over ours, there was always a question of how much they knew about and how well they understood what they knew about the man they were defending and what he stood for.   Would they understand the previous paragraph or the argument of this entire essay?

 

I pray that they and all my countrymen would come to a full appreciation of how due to the efforts of our forebears from the Loyalists through to the Fathers of Confederation our country has roots deeper and older than herself or the Modern Age.

 

Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the King!

 

(1)   Senator and constitutional expert Eugene Forsey was very pleased to realize that the Liberals had ultimately failed to remove Dominion from the official designation of the country.  See the chapter on him in Charles Taylor’s Radical Tories.

(2)   The full, literal, translation is “The restoration of the monarchy, which is called a counter-revolution, will not be an opposite revolution, but the opposite of revolution.”

(3)  This critical description of American capitalism is not from the perspective known as socialism but from a perspective in which capitalism and socialism are two sides of one coin.  While socialists see the uneven distribution of wealth as the problem in capitalism and diagnose the ownership of private property as the cause and liberals (liberal is to capitalism what socialist is to socialism, a capitalist is someone who owns and uses capital) see inefficiency and too little individual freedom as the problems caused by state control in socialism what the two systems have in common is more important than what distinguishes them.  They are both ultimately expressions of Modern man’s choice of mammon over God.