The Conservative Dominion of Canada

A gross number of years ago, the British North America Act was passed by both Houses of Parliament in February, signed into law by Queen Victoria on March 29th, and came into effect on July 1st. This piece of legislation established a new country in North America – the Dominion of Canada.

The Conservative Party was in power in London when the BNA Act was passed and the Conservative Party under the leadership of Sir John A. MacDonald formed the first government in the new Canadian Parliament in 1867. While the Grits in the 20th Century would claim to be the “natural governing party” of Canada – and did everything they could, by hook and by crook, to transform the country so that their claim was a reality – Canada was founded as an essentially conservative country, loyal to the traditions we had inherited from Europe.

The Province of Quebec, which before 1867 had been Lower Canada, had been guaranteed its culture, language, and religion by Parliament and the Crown after it had been won from France in the Seven Years War in the late 18th Century. That culture was a very conservative one, including the strict practice of the Roman Catholic faith, and remained so until the 1960’s when Quebec underwent the “Quiet Revolution”. Today, secularism and socialism are prevalent in Quebec, which went NDP in the last federal election, and it often seems like Quebec’s zeal to protect her French language is all that remains of her old conservatism.

English-speaking Canada has solid conservative roots as well. Since 1867, the name “Canada” has referred to the entire country established in that year. Before 1867, the name “Canada” referred to the territory that is now the provinces of Ontario and Quebec. Ontario, or Upper Canada as it was called prior to Confederation, was where the United Empire Loyalists had fled after the American Revolution. The United Empire Loyalists, like the Americans, had been British subjects living in the 13 Colonies. When the American leaders decided to declare their independence from Great Britain and to form a Republic, the Loyalists were those who wanted nothing to do with the project, who were loyal to the king and saw no compelling reason to throw off the old order in favour of a new one. This was a very conservative attitude and the American leaders referred to the Loyalists as “Tories”, which was the name of the conservative party in Great Britain at the time.

The War ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1783. In this treaty, the British government recognized the independence of the 13 colonies, that would then form the American Republic. It is this recognition and not their sinful act of rebellion against their God-given king that granted legitimacy to the American Republic. The Loyalists, facing persecution from the triumphant rebels in the former colonies, fled to territory that was still under British control. For most of them that meant Canada.

The United Empire Loyalists are sometimes slandered by pseudo-conservatives in Canada. The slander generally takes the following form: “The Loyalists chose to remain subjects of the king rather than to become free Americans, indicating a preference for being ruled, which manifests itself today in the willingness of Canadians to go along with the tyranny of big government and socialism”. This reasoning, however, is utter nonsense.

What such liberals – for although they call themselves conservatives, people who hold such views of our country and its founders are actually liberals – ignore is the fact that it was the “free” American Republic that introduced socialism and big government to North America. The American government brought in their progressive income tax a few years before we brought in ours. Canada’s income tax goes back to 1917. America’s goes back to 1913 (1). Our government sold income tax to us as a “temporary measure” to pay for WWI, a war we had been fighting for three years already when the income tax passed Parliament. That was the same year the United States joined that war – four years after they had reintroduced their income tax.

In the Great Depression in the 1930’s, American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the American welfare state in the “New Deal”. This created pressure on our government to follow suit, and similar programs were introduced up here later that same decade. The attitude of the two governments towards socialism could not have been more different however. FDR, in his first year in office, became the first American President to recognize the Bolsheviks as the legitimate government in Russia. While he was doing so, the Holodomor – the state generated famine that killed several million Ukranians – was underway. In contrast with FDR, whose soft-spot for Stalin would later be the cause of Eastern Europe’s being dominated by the Soviet Union for 40 years, our Prime Minister at the time, R. B. Bennett (a Tory), was zealously fighting the Red Menace in its domestic manifestations in the form of the unions and the Communist Party of Canada.

The bill which introduced liberal immigration to the United States of America was the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. In Canada, the equivalent legislation was passed two years later in 1967. Both Canada and the United States passed legislation which made private acts of discrimination illegal in certain circumstances. This legislation invented a previously non-existing “right” for ethnic minorities to not be discriminated against in hiring, promoting, firing, and the renting and selling of property and in doing so placed new limits on the rights of property owners and business owners. This legislation was the necessary first step towards “affirmative action” which is a euphemism for “reverse discrimination”. The United States passed this legislation in 1964. Canada passed this legislation in 1977.

Do not mistake me. I am not pointing all of this out in order to “bash” the United States. Our government has gone a lot further than the American government has in most of these negative directions.

My point is, that since the American Republic went down most of these roads before we did, our having gone down those same paths cannot be attributed to the fact that our country’s founders were loyal to the British Crown. That loyalty is in fact a conservative trait. The great shapers of conservative thought – Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Benjamin Disraeli, T. S. Eliot – were all royalists.

When the Fathers of Confederation brought the British provinces of North America together into the Dominion of Canada in 1867, the Dominion was established as a confederation of provinces under a constitutional, parliamentary monarchy, modeled after the parliament in London with which it would share a monarch. The upper house of the Canadian parliament would be a Senate rather than a House of Lords because it was considered more suitable for our situation here in North America. The British North America Act, the written part of our constitution (for we also inherited the unwritten British constitution, including the Common Law and the prescriptive rights of Englishmen), designed which areas of responsibility would belong to the federal government and which to the provincial.

It was a very conservative constitution.

The Liberal Party under Lester Pearson and Pierre Eliot Trudeau in the 1960’s, 70’s, and early ‘80’s did everything they could to tear Canada away from her roots and re-shape her into a progressive, socialist, left-wing utopia.

The conservative resistance to this revolution was not what it should have been, in part because conservatism was divided. I do not refer to the fact that the conservative vote was divided between the PC party and the Reform Party/Canadian Alliance. I refer to the fact that patriotic love for Canada and respect for Canada’s own branch of the English tradition was separated from conservative economic and social views. So-called “Red Tories” (2) displayed the former but little to none of the latter. Western populists associated with the Reform Party had many conservative economic and social views but were often hostile to Canada and its traditions.

Of the two parts of conservatism, patriotism and reverence for tradition, is by far the most important. Social and fiscal conservatism are meaningless without it.

Today, on our one hundred and forty-fourth birthday as a country, with the Conservative Party in power with a majority government, it is time for Canada’s conservatives to reflect upon the roots and traditions of Canada, and to blend a love and deep respect for for those traditions and roots and the country to which they belong with sound notions of fiscal responsibility, private property, economic liberty and support for traditional morality and social institutions.

Only then will Canadian conservatism truly be whole again.

Happy Dominion Day!

God save the Queen!

(1) If we count the income tax introduced by the Republicans during the war of 1861-1865 and later abolished it goes back even earlier than this. This income tax was abolished because it was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Hence, income tax had to be reintroduced to the USA by constitutional amendment – the sixteenth.

(2) “Red Tory” has numerous meanings. It was originally coined to refer to people in the Conservative Party influenced by the ideas of George P. Grant, a traditional conservative who naively believed socialism was less destructive of the social order than capitalism is. Those who self-identified as “Red Tories”, however, (which Grant did not) seldom possessed the classical philosophy, Christian faith, and social conservatism of Grant. The term eventually came to mean little more than “a socially liberal, progressive socialist who is a member of the Conservative Party” and small-c conservatives tend to use the term with this meaning as an insult.

Canada, Past, Present, Future

I sometimes say that I am a patriot of the Canada my father grew up in. This is, of course, a way of expressing disapproval of many significant changes that occurred in Canada in the 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s, some before I was born, others in my early childhood. It should not be taken as suggesting that the only Canada I have ever loved is one that never saw for myself, one that passed away before I was born. I grew up on a farm in rural Manitoba. Time moves slower in the country than in the city, and the rural Canada I grew up in was still in many ways recognizable as the Canada that existed before Pierre Trudeau started messing around with it.

“Protestant, small town, British, virtuous”. Those are the words Michael Ignatieff, leader of the Liberal Party of Canada uses in True Patriot Love, the history of his mother’s family, to describe the Canada his uncle George Parkin Grant loved, and famously lamented over.

Grant, who was born into a family of illustrious Canadian educators and intellectuals, was a professor of philosophy at Dalhousie University and later professor of religion at McMaster. In 1965, two years after the opposition brought down the Diefenbaker administration over his refusal to allow American nuclear arms on Canadian soil, Grant wrote Lament For A Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. Grant believed that the collapse of the Diefenbaker administration spelled the end of Canadian sovereignty and that we would be swallowed up in the continental and world empire of the United States of America.

The booklet, Lament for a Nation earned George Grant, a Christian conservative, a place alongside Oswald Spengler, Evelyn Waugh, and James Burnham, as a twentieth century conservative prophet of doom. Ignatieff, who believes his uncle was wrong, says that his uncle “gave up on his country at exactly the moment when it roused itself to action”. As evidence he goes on to list the very changes I referred to in the first paragraph of this essay.

Ignatieff writes that “the modern Canadian welfare state – medicare and the Canada Pension Plan – was created, distinguishing us ever more sharply from the United States”, a curious assessment on the part of a historian. Surely Ignatieff must realize that the modern welfare state is an American construction? Canada, like many European countries, has gone further down the road of welfare statism than the United States went under Roosevelt in the 30’s, or under LBJ in the ‘60’s, but for all that the welfare-states origins lie clearly within the United States of America.

Ignatieff goes on to list such things as “the repatriation of the Canadian constitution, the next-to-last symbol of our dependency on the British, and the creation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, incarnating a distinctive national rights culture; and we gave ourselves a national anthem and a flag.”

We already had a flag actually, the Canadian Red Ensign, and there was nothing wrong with it. In Lament For A Nation, which was published the year the current flag was adopted, George Grant pointed to Diefenbaker’s stand for the Red Ensign, as leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, as evidence that Diefenbaker’s “basic principles were far removed from any petty sense of self-importance”. The Red Ensign, versions of which remain as the provincial flags of Ontario and Manitoba, speaks of our roots and identity as a country that is at the same time British and North American.

It was, of course, because the Red Ensign identified Canada as being British, that it had to go, even though the Ensign, which includes the fleur-de-lis of Quebec in the shield of arms, also speaks of our country’s French heritage, while the current flag speaks of neither. The Liberal Party elites who insisted upon all of these changes are often thought of as being extremely anti-American and in a certain sense, the worst possible sense, that is correct. Yet, in their attitude towards Canada’s British roots, heritage, and identity they showed themselves to be the most American of all Canadians. They spoke condescending of all the things they were getting rid of – the Red Ensign, “Royal” in the title of several government services, and the name of the country “The Dominion of Canada” as our “colonial trappings”.

What utter nonsense. The Red Ensign, far from being a colonial flag, was the flag our soldiers fought under in World War II, a war which we entered upon our own Declaration of War. The Liberal elites, ignorant of Canada’s history, considered “Dominion” to be a synonym for “colony”.

Sir. John A. MacDonald and the Fathers of Confederation wished to name our country “The Kingdom of Canada” and proposed such as the name in the early drafts of the British North America Act. This met with opposition in London based on the fear that such a title would prove provocative to the United States. The term “Dominion”, taken from the 8th verse of the 72nd Psalm was adopted as a substitute for “Kingdom”, being intended to convey the exact same meaning.

John G. Diefenbaker, in an address given to the Empire Club of Toronto on March 9, 1972 and later printed as the 4th chapter “Towards a False Republic” in his book Those Things We Treasure, describes some of the underhanded tactics the Liberal Party elites were using to strip Canada of her royal heritage:

An “Information Canada” booklet entitled How Canadians Govern Themselves states on page 3 that “…we are no longer a Dominion.” This statement is a direct contradiction of the British North America Act which gave the name “Dominion of Canada” to our country, and that was the name included in the Treaty of Versailles, the operative Statute of Westminster and the Canadian declaration of war in 1939.

The repatriation of the British North America Act, which made Canada’s constitution amendable by our own Parliament, was probably a good thing. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms was not. Despite the lofty title of this document, the basic right of property is omitted altogether, whereas all of the other most basic freedoms and rights of a civilized, free society, previously protected by ancient prescription under Common Law, find themselves spelled out in sections 2, and 7 through 13, where they are compromised by the weasel clause in section 1, and the notwithstanding clause in section 33. Do we really want the government to pass a law giving itself the power to arrest some and hold them indefinitely without trial despite the rights listed in section 11 of the Charter, which all Canadians had before the Charter was passed? That is exactly what the Charter allows the government to do.

In all of these changes Michael Ignatieff sees the Liberal Party leading Canada into shaping its own identity and future as a country. They look more like acts of sabotage to me.

I hope that George Grant was as wrong about Canada being doomed to become a colony of the United States as he was wrong about socialism being “an essentially conservative force”. In chapter 5 of Lament For a Nation, Grant argues that American corporate capitalism (which he distinguishes from “early capitalism” which was “full of moral restraints”) is a powerful force for progress in the world. Grant was hostile to and suspicious of progress, which he regarded as social upheaval and change which threatened the tranquility of everyday life, rather than as societal improvement. With this attitude I am in full sympathy. I do not however, accept Grant’s conclusion that socialism must therefore be conservative. Grant wrote:

Yet what is socialism, if it is not the use of the government to restrain greed in the name of social good? In actual practice, socialism has always had to advocate inhibition in this respect. In doing so, was it not appealing to the conservative idea of social order against the liberal idea of freedom?

Socialism, far from restraining greed, encourages it. Socialism encourages among the lower classes the greed which it condemns in the upper classes. As the former in any society will outnumber the latter by far, socialism results in a net increase in greed in society. Socialism cannot appeal to the conservative idea of social order because it has historically been defined as opposition to the institution of private property, an institution as foundational to conservative order as it is to the freedom of the classical liberal.

Grant was correct in seeing corporate capitalism as a progressive force and in seeing progress as being a bad rather than a good thing. Instead of pursuing the silly argument that socialism, the economic doctrine beloved of revolutionaries around the world, was somehow “conservative” he should have pursued his thought on “early capitalism”, inhibited by Protestant morality, beyond the two or three lines he devoted to it as it was a thought far worthier of such a great Christian thinker. He could, for example, have considered the arguments of Wilhelm Röpke, the German economist who combined the Austrian school’s arguments for the free market, with arguments that such a market could only function within the framework and on the foundation of Christian moral and social order.

Grant’s views on socialism led to his being dubbed a “Red Tory”. I however, would associate that term with someone like Dalton Camp, a politician who hid his revolutionary socialist agenda behind a conservative mask. Grant, in contrast, was an actual conservative, a defender of the ways and mores of everyday life in traditional, Christian, small town, Canada, against the forces seeking to overwhelm and swamp that life.

Despite the revolutionary agenda of the Liberal Party in the ‘60’s and 70’s, I believe that the Canada George Grant loved, the Canada I love, is still out there, in the small towns, churches, and homes of rural Canada, and perhaps, hidden deeply, in parts of urban Canada as well. Canada became a country under the reign of Queen Victoria. Historian W. L. Morton, in his history The Kingdom of Canada, described the moment when Queen Elizabeth II opened Parliament in person in 1957, the first Canadian monarch to do so, as the moment Canada truly became the “Kingdom of Canada” Sir. John A. MacDonald had envisioned.(1) On this, the 143rd anniversary of the enactment of the British North America Act and the birth of Canada as a sovereign country, Queen Elizabeth is visiting her North American kingdom once more. May that inspire hope that the traditions of our country may yet be preserved in recognizable form for generations to come.

Happy Dominion Day
God save the Queen

(1) As an interesting aside, the first viceroy Queen Elizabeth II appointed upon ascending to the throne, and the first ever Canadian born Governor General, Vincent Massey, was uncle-by-marriage to George P Grant.