Fearful Symmetry - the Fall and Rise of Canada's Founding Values. Brian Lee Crowley
form of welfare dependency. His most famous declaration about Canada’s values (“Canada is free and freedom is its nationality”) is far more stirring than its modern equivalent: Canada is free health care and medicare is its nationality. He once declared that “the role of government [is] ... not to force action in any one direction but to remove barriers to man’s own efforts to undertake personal and social improvement.... Man must be free to seek his own improvement and be responsible for his own destiny.”10 When Australia and New Zealand began experimenting with new state-provided social programs, according to Doug Owram, Laurier was quick to denounce these innovations as inimical to traditional Canadian values: “If you remove the incentives of ambition and emulation from public enterprises,” Laurier said on the subject in 1907, “you suppress progress, you condemn the community to stagnation and immobility.”11
William Lyon Mackenzie King, who eventually succeeded Laurier as both Liberal Party leader and prime minister, agonized in his early book Industry and Humanity over what he foresaw as the corrosive effects on Canadians’ character of the relatively activist government he was attracted to. And in fact his record as prime minister shows that he too was predominantly a traditionalist who thought that people were best left alone to resolve their own problems rather than having government play that role, although he certainly was not averse to introducing just enough minimal welfare state measures to keep the Liberals in office—welfare if necessary, but not necessarily welfare.
Mackenzie King was also surrounded by people who shared this world view. When, as Laurier’s minister of labour, Mackenzie King engaged in some unwonted interventionism (he used legislation to end a railway strike), Laurier thought this a very ill-advised innovation, and the minister was lectured in Parliament by a senior Liberal MP about this departure from the sound principle that the government that governed least governed best.
Immigration in the early days did not challenge this orthodoxy in favour of freedom and personal responsibility, even though Canada at the time was admitting newcomers at a ferocious pace. As Laurier’s minister of immigration, Clifford Sifton, famously remarked in 1922 of the millions of Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and other East Europeans admitted under his supervision: “I think a stalwart peasant in sheep-skin coat, born on the soil, whose forefathers have been farmers for ten generations, with a stout wife and a half dozen children, is good quality.”12
In other words, these were people inured to hard work and more than capable of looking after themselves. There was no question of people being admitted to fall on the public charge. Everyone, native born or immigrant, was expected to look after themselves, and unemployment was almost universally seen as a personal failure and disgrace.13
At about the same time, Stephen Leacock, one of the country’s most influential public intellectuals, was warning,
We are in the danger of over-government; that we are suffering from the too-great extension of the functions of the State; that it is doing already great harm to our economic life, and threatening greater still; doing a great deal to undermine the sounder principles of morality and self-reliance, and doing much to imperil the older and sterner spirit of British liberty on which our commonwealth was founded.... In my opinion we are moving towards socialism. We are moving through the mist; nearer and nearer with every bit of government ownership and government regulation, nearer and nearer through the mist to the edge of the abyss over which our civilization may be precipitated to its final catastrophe.14
Leacock feared that we were edging toward the abyss in 1924, when government spent about 11 per cent of GDP, roughly a quarter of what it controls today,15 which is itself down from its peak of over one-half of GDP in 1992.16
This deep suspicion of government programs was not limited to men, either. Ottawa’s future mayor Charlotte Whitton who, according to Dennis Guest, was Canada’s most influential voice on social welfare matters in the early thirties, was determined that any state aid to those in need be subjected to stringent rules, the most important of which was that those being helped,
must honestly and sincerely participate in the whole plan, which is the development of initiative and self-reliance and independence at the earliest possible date, and to such a degree and strength as to avoid future dependency.17
William Watson underlines that Whitton’s opposition to mothers’ pensions was entirely in line with the then reigning consensus.18 Those who thought about the welfare of the most vulnerable and how they could be helped most effectively were one in thinking that the problem of one-parent families was not one of income, but of character and values. Such welfare problems were best left in the hands of local agencies that could know each of their clients and support them in a way tailored to individual needs but always with the aim of ending dependence on charity or government aid at the earliest opportunity.
While the mythology of Canadian politics has it that the Great Depression put paid to classical liberalism in this country, the record shows quite the reverse. R.B. Bennett was on his electoral deathbed when he shifted half-heartedly to imitating the early stages of Roosevelt’s New Deal, much to the disgust of his predecessor as Tory leader, Arthur Meighen. His program was gutted by the courts and quietly shelved by Mackenzie King’s victorious Liberals, much to King’s satisfaction.19
This rejection of American-style interventionism wasn’t limited to a few plutocrats in private clubs in Montreal and Toronto and Anglos in Ottawa either. For example, the Quebec provincial government was firmly opposed to the New Deal style of politics. The Liberal premier of Quebec at the time, Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, scathingly called Roosevelt’s innovation “a socialistic venture bordering on communism.”20
Elite opinion did not see public spending as the solution to the country’s ills; rather it was the contrary. At the height of the Depression,21 at a time when the state in Canada was spending roughly a quarter of the share of national wealth that it spends today, the Globe and Mail could editorialize (under the headline “Crippled by Government”):
We have been indulging in a glorious spending spree much of the time since Confederation was established, mortgaging the future, signing notes for posterity to pay, and not at any time using such prudent measures as a well-ordered business would adopt to prepare in good years for the demands of the bad.
In 1938, the famous Rowell-Sirois Report22 was far from revelling in Canada’s great advance over other nations as a provider of social welfare services. On the contrary, the commissioners deplored our slowness in getting with the program of expanding the welfare state:
No person should be compelled by economic necessity to work or to live below a standard fixed by public policy. Canada for a number of reasons has been slower to accept this responsibility than have Great Britain, New Zealand or Australia.
While some, like James Struthers, have argued that the report served as a “blueprint for the development of the Canadian welfare state,”23 the predominant historical view is that the report and ideas were shelved and largely forgotten in the frenetic activity of post-war prosperity.24 Rowell-Sirois barely made a dent in Canada’s obstinate attachment to limited government and individual responsibility.
Not even the heady days of what was essentially central planning of the war effort in World War II could knock the Liberals, liberals, and Canadians off course. According to William Watson, “Following the New Deal we were probably the most laissez-faire country going. [Author Bruce] Hutchison regarded it as ‘the final tragedy of the war [that it] compelled a ministry devoted in theory to a minimum of government into complete and detailed control of the nation’s economy.’”25
Hutchison need not have worried; the tragedy was short lived. After a brief flirtation with the welfare state in the form of the Marsh Report, Canada’s equivalent of the Beveridge Report that led to the post-war creation of the British welfare state, Mackenzie King essentially reverted to laissez-faire form after the war, having seen off the threat of a briefly resurgent CCF with the Marsh diversion.
Mr. [Arthur] Meighen noted that