Canada’s Muddling Accession <br>To National Greatness <br>Is a Tale of Our Time

The National Post will next week generously serialize excerpts from my just published book, “Rise to Greatness, The History of Canada From the Vikings to the Present” (Random House Canada). Its editors have asked me to explain why I wrote the book, and I hope readers will indulge this explanation. When I was in school, the explorers (Jacques Cartier, Samuel de Champlain, La Salle, La Verendrye, and some of the soldiers and traders such as Frontenac and d’Iberville), were presented as adventurous people. Their stories were compelling and it was relatively easy to remember some of their exploits.But the history of Canada was mainly a recitation of a sequence of dates of events, and there was not much interpretation or glamorization of the events, nor much effort to connect them sequentially in a causal way. The milestones of Canadian history just happened, as if as flukes: As the U.S. Civil War ended and that country emerged with the largest army and greatest generals in the world and looked somewhat covetously at Canada again, as they had in the War of 1812, the British colonial office threw the settlements strung along the northern side of the U.S. border together and called them a country, as the best chance of keeping Canada out of the hands of the Americans. There is some truth to this muddling-through history of Canada, but it is not the whole, nor even, in my opinion, the principal part of the story.The British policy of remaining aloof from the main continental European powers, assisting now some and now others to assure that no country became durably predominant in Europe, originated with Henry VIII’s great minister, Cardinal Wolsey. The British defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 ended the apparent leadership of Europe by Spain. Cardinal Richelieu, the great sponsor of Samuel de Champlain, founder of Quebec, expanded France and asserted an absolute monarchy (1624-1642), and made France the continent’s leading power through Louis XIV, the French Revolution and Napoleon. Canada, and the fighting in and around it, were a factor in these wars and the resolutions of them, from before Richelieu almost to the mid-18th century, but Canadian histories have rarely situated this country in that international context.Canadians were in an ambiguous condition for most of their history as an ostensibly autonomous country, but dependent first on the British for protection from the United States, and then somewhat overwhelmed by the proximity of their powerful neighbor. The difficulty Canada faced after the War of 1812, which was entirely provoked by Britain’s high-handed abuse of its naval superiority over the United States, but which was mainly fought in the approaches to Montreal and what is now Toronto, was that Canadians had to extract their autonomy and then their full independence from the British, but not in a way that irritated the British to the point of conceding Canada to the United States in exchange for some other consideration.From Waterloo, in 1815, Britain was both the leading power in Europe and the holder of the balancing scales of the continental powers. This became steadily more complicated as Russia, Prussia, Italy and Japan joined the ranks of the Great Powers between 1700 and 1870. The defeat of the insurrection and abolition of slavery in the United States Civil War in 1865 made that country a great power in the world, but one that had renounced any interest outside the Americas in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, and evinced none for many years.Yet from its own Revolution almost to the First World War, the United States had an intermittent interest in taking Canada. The dramatic events of 1871, when Bismarck defeated France, annexed Alsace and Lorraine and united Germany under Prussia, meant that Germany became, instantly, an immense rival to Great Britain. A military power clearly stronger than France, and an industrial power at least as great as Britain, was going to make it much more difficult for the British to continue to assure inconclusive squabbling and competing among the continental powers while the British took what they wanted on the other continents by virtue of their unchallengeable naval superiority.The rivalry with Germany intensified in the later 19th century, especially after Germany began an ambitious naval building program. This required Britain to placate all the Great Powers that were not allied to Germany, including the United States, as well as to be more appreciative of the people and resources available to the British in their Empire.At the Washington Conference over the then vexatious issue of fisheries in 1871, John A. Macdonald, the prime minister of the new Confederation of Canada but considered by the Americans to be merely a colonial official in the British Empire, had to fight his way past the condescensions of the Americans and the irresistible impulse of the British to concede the U.S. whatever it wanted, as long as Canada paid for it. The same problem was evident in the Alaska Boundary dispute 40 years later, when Sir Wilfrid Laurier found himself trying to assert himself against both the Americans and the British.The tortuous history of Canada has been that it had to start as a French country or it would have been subsumed into the British colonies to the South, and it had to become British-ruled once New France was self-sufficient, because France could not maintain it in the face of British naval superiority. The British American colonies had to cease to be British, driving British loyalists into Canada, to give the British an incentive to protect the British and French Canadians from the Americans. The French and English Canadians had to work it out between themselves so they could jointly winkle self-government from Britain while retaining British protection from the Americans.And even after the First World War, where Canada’s performance was sufficiently significant that the British and the Americans had to accept Canadian independence as a substantial country, British colonial attitudes perished slowly. Canadian self-consciousness opposite the over-powering intimacy of the mighty United States also took decades of agonizing progress until Canada could come together into a coherent nationality. This process was of course complicated by the independent aspirations of Quebec nationalists.Canada’s emergence was thus always gradual and subtle and never lent itself to ringing phrases and stirring anthems. But a great country resulted and the apparently unheroic nature of its development made it even more heroic. It isn’t hard to stir people up with “Give me liberty or give me death!” but responsible government, confederation, and the Notwithstanding Clause are a challenge.To my knowledge, the history of Canada has never been explained before as the inexorable progress from utter obscurity to being one of the ten or 12 most important countries in the world, not by a series of flukes, though many developments were fortuitous, but by the determined belief of successive leaders, starting with Champlain, that something unique and distinguished should be built in the northern half of this continent.From Champlain’s grand vision of New France to Carleton’s enlightened quest for a bi-cultural British colonial state, to the Baldwin-LaFontaine-Hincks establishment of an autonomous state affiliated to Britain, to the Macdonald-Cartier-Brown creation of what remains history’s only trans-continental, bicultural, parliamentary confederation, and to the present, a magic thread of pragmatic, adaptable determination has created a country that is now important to the world. It need no longer just tug respectfully at the trouser-leg of the Americans or British, though that impulse persists, and it need not be hobbled by a priggish and hidebound official clerisy, though to some degree, it still is.It was determined in 1920 that Canada should open its own ministry in Washington. It took seven years to do it, though three quarters of the activity of the British embassy in Washington was Canadian affairs. That mentality, though much diminished, lingers yet. I don’t think Canadian history has ever been presented in this perspective, its development tied to European and Anglo-American relations, and the complexities of international events skillfully navigated by the statesmen who built the country. That was my reason for writing about what is, contrary to what most of us were implicitly brought up to believe in our schools, an interesting story.cbletters@gmail.com From the National Post.

Canada’s Muddling Accession <br>To National Greatness <br>Is a Tale of Our Time

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