Fearful Symmetry - the Fall and Rise of Canada's Founding Values. Brian Lee Crowley
of bankers and politicians. Furthermore, the downturn coincides with the arrival in office of a Democratic president and Congress who seem determined to raise taxes, expand health care coverage, tackle the entitlement mess in social security, and run multi-trillion-dollar deficits to finance these changes and pay for huge stimulus and bailout packages. All of this is going to be painful. But Americans are a resourceful, irrepressible, and inventive people who have seen worse and always triumphed over adversity. I see no reason to think this time will be any different. The question is not if America will rise again from its economic difficulties, but when, and how much damage will be done by poor policy in the meantime to its economy, the greatest wealth-generating machine the world has ever seen.
2
Our Forgotten Political Tradition Vindicated
Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
RALPH ELLISON, TIME MAGAZINE
The founders of Canada had high hopes for us. They thought that Canada was a land of great promise for the generations to come, as when Sir Wilfrid Laurier so famously proclaimed that the twentieth century would belong to Canada. This was no mere rhetoric, for Canada was a society characterized by tremendous dynamism. We (i.e., metropolitan and colonial Britain together) built the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) , a project almost unimaginably huge at the time. We built political institutions to govern a vast and sparsely populated territory. We performed feats of military prowess far greater than our small size might have led one to expect. And we attracted vast numbers of newcomers, hosting one of the largest inflows of people relative to our local population ever seen in history. Living in the shadow of America, where everything is done on a grand scale, makes it hard sometimes to recall that, relatively speaking, we had no reason to be ashamed of what we accomplished in our half of North America and much reason to be proud.
But proud as our forebears were of the country that they were building, they were very much of the view that its success was not an accident. On the contrary, they believed that Canada and Canadians succeeded as they did because they had been endowed by history and Providence with a very specific set of institutions and behaviours. Our success was bound up with our character, and our character was formed by the right kind of experiences. We could welcome people from all over the world and we could populate this huge and sometimes stern piece of geography and make it all work because of the kind of people we were and the kind of people newcomers were expected to become.
Central to this view of the character of Canadians and their institutions was a notion of individual freedom and responsibility, a belief that each of us was endowed with a nature that required us to be responsible and accountable for our choices. The corollary was that if we deprived men and women of their freedom and responsibility for themselves, we prevented people from being fully free and fully human. Dependence on the government or on charity was therefore to be abhorred, not chiefly because of the cost it imposed on those who paid, but because of the damage it did to those who “benefited.”
Our forefathers thought that human beings create themselves largely through their work. And just as our character is shaped by having to earn our way in the world, a different kind of character is formed when we make our way living off the efforts of others.
This is relevant to the story of what we have lost because out of our fear of Quebec separatism and out of our efforts to find something, anything, for our burgeoning labour force to do grew vast social institutions to give people the illusion of working or at least of not being unemployed. We tolerated an unemployment insurance program that paid large numbers of people not to work. We celebrated the emergence of schools and universities that provided a heavily subsidized, mediocre education but kept huge numbers of young people out of the workforce for a few more years. We pushed people into retirement as fast as we could. We enriched welfare to the point that, in the mid-1990s, over 12 per cent of the population of our then wealthiest province, Ontario, was claiming welfare from the province, a proportion that rose with each recession, but hardly declined again in the ensuing upturn.1 At roughly the same time, 1994, McGill economist William Watson was observing that “counting the children of the unemployed, roughly one-fifth of Quebecers are on social assistance [including UI] of one form or another.”2 Welfare does not exhaust the many forms of dependence we created; for example, we pulled many people into various forms of public employment that produced a real income but little real value (a theme to which I return in Chapter 5).
While many people regard this as just the kinder, gentler Canadian society helping out those marginalized by the baby boom, the fact is that this was quite an innovation in Canada. Contrary to an article of faith of our revisionist age, for years one of the things that distinguished Canada from the United States was Canadians’ unbreakable attachment to a demanding work ethic and a strong distaste for any kind of dependence on the public purse. In fact, one of the ways in which the founders of the Dominion thought that the new country distinguished itself from the United States was in the levels of welfare dependence to be found in the populist republic to the south. There voters could and did vote themselves benefits at the expense of the rich,3 a danger of American populist democracy against which Alexis de Tocqueville had warned in his classic Democracy in America. The liberty that was taken to be a British subject’s birthright was thought to be inimical to a radical democracy’s temptation to pursue an equality of condition for its citizens. Such an equality could only be achieved, Canadians believed, by a destructive levelling down of the achievements of society’s most successful members.
Richard Cartwright, a prominent pre- and post-Confederation politician, spoke for almost all his contemporaries when he said in the United Province of Canada legislature in 1865,
I think every true reformer, every real friend of liberty, will agree with me in saying that if we must erect safeguards, they should be rather for the security of the individual than of the mass, and that our chiefest care must be to train the majority to respect the rights of the minority, to prevent the claims of the few from being trampled underfoot by the caprice or passion of the many. For myself, sir, I own frankly I prefer British liberty to American equality.4
Charles Tupper, a Father of Confederation and briefly prime minister of the new Dominion, echoed these sentiments in the Nova Scotia legislature: “It is necessary that our institutions should be placed on a stable basis, if we are to have that security for life and property and personal liberty, which is so desirable in every country.”5
The divide that separated the “two solitudes” of French and English was bridged by a common understanding of the importance of work and the damaging nature of dependence. Étienne Parent, one of the great journalists, public intellectuals, and orators of French Canada in the first half of the nineteenth century gave a passionate speech at L’Institut canadien de Montréal in September 1847 on the theme Work and Humanity (Du travail chez l’homme):6
You will no doubt realise that by “idleness” I don’t merely mean the cessation of all work, but also this laziness of mind which prevents you from developing through your work all the potential of your intelligence, for your own benefit and that of all of humanity.7 [author’s translation]
Parent continued,
Yes, gentlemen, early on in life make regular continuous work a habit and I predict that you will derive great pleasure from your work, that you will love your work for itself over and beyond the personal advantages that you expect from it, just as I predict that idleness or inactivity, once satisfied our indispensable human need for rest, will become for you a source of unbearable boredom.8 [author’s translation]
And Parent issues a clarion call to action to ensure that everyone benefits from the moral advantages that work procures: “And so, gentlemen, let us ensure, through our laws, through our institutions, through our values and through our ideas, that each and every person works in our society.”9 [author’s translation]
Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the first French-Canadian prime minister, reflecting those same French-Canadian roots and the influence of British political liberalism, was a staunch