Fearful Symmetry - the Fall and Rise of Canada's Founding Values. Brian Lee Crowley
‘assistance.’” The feeling had grown up that claims for “assistance” were in the nature of rights, he said. With each succession of strength to that state of mind, the problem of relief became greater. “If one part of the country can say, ‘We are going to live off the other part, we are going to cast all obligations away,’ do you think civilization can exist on that basis?” asked Meighen.
Arthur Meighen, quoted in the Globe and
Mail, May 18, 1938
Economic policy in Canada during this period was dominated by the redoubtable Clarence Decatur Howe, who during the war became known as the Minister for Everything because of his role in directing the war production effort. But once the war was over, Howe couldn’t get rid of his central planning powers fast enough.
The real Liberal plan, whether by accident or design, was Howe’s. It was based on optimism about the economy, and skepticism about the potentialities of planning. It would not be the economic abstractions of doctrinaire planners in Ottawa that would shape post-war Canada. That would be left to business’s self-interest, guided, prodded and shaped by incentives that businessmen could understand. Post-war Canada would be a free enterprise society.26
Louis St-Laurent, who succeeded Mackenzie King as prime minister in 1949, was said to regard American levels of welfare dependence with distaste and typical Canadian moral superiority; he resolutely but ultimately unsuccessfully fought Jack Pickersgill’s attempts to extend Canada’s meagre unemployment insurance program to Pickersgill’s fishermen constituents in Newfoundland on the grounds that it would not be actuarially sound to include seasonal workers such as these, and it would encourage others to seek unemployment benefits in similarly unsuitable circumstances. As Watson remarked, St-Laurent proved right on both counts.
As late as the federal election of 1957, St-Laurent was opining:
Any ideas of non-essential interference by the Government is repugnant to the Liberal Party. We believe that the private citizen must be left to his own initiative whenever possible and that if some help is required for the individual, that which is afforded by the national government must encourage rather than replace the help which the community or the province with its municipalities can give.27
At the same time as St-Laurent was underlining Liberals’ attachment to small government and individual liberty, so-called progressive forces, represented by figures like Keith Davey and Tom Kent, were pushing the party in a new direction, especially after the defeat of the Liberals by John Diefenbaker’s Tories in 1957. Even then, however, the old roots of the Liberal Party in the founding traditions of Canada were deep and resistance to the reformists was strong. Right after the 1957 election, for example, former Saskatchewan premier and federal Liberal finance minister Charles Dunning argued against the party adopting a social welfare policy agenda. He noted that the ever-increasing number of social services created
a tremendous and expensive machine to bring about redistribution of wealth by taxation, and lessening the responsibility on the part of the individual citizen, and by doing so are decreasing both the dignity and freedom of the individual person. I know it may not sound like practical politics to be flashing this kind of red light, but surely we Liberals must get back to fundamental thinking in terms of principles.28
Nor was the traditional political philosophy of individual responsibility and initiative that animated all our national political leaders prior to the 1960s absent on the local level. Dunning, after all, was a former Liberal premier of Saskatchewan. In 1948, Maurice Duplessis left those listening to his government’s Speech from the Throne in no doubt where he stood: “We are of the opinion that state paternalism is the enemy of all progress.”29
To pick another example, almost seventy years ago, Nova Scotia’s greatest premier, Angus L. Macdonald, a Liberal, stood before a Toronto audience and gave a remarkable speech. He told that audience what his part of the country—the Maritimes—needed to overcome its underdevelopment.
The biggest obstacle to the region’s development was what he called “the tariff,” or the old National Policy of Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald. So what could Ottawa do to help?
THE TWO SOLITUDES RECONCILED
But the government dole will rot your soul back there in your home town.
So bid farewell to the Eastern town you never more will see.
There’s self-respect and a steady cheque in this refinery.
You will miss the green and the woods and streams and the dust will fill your nose.
But you’ll be free, and just like me, an idiot, I suppose.
Stan Rogers, The Idiot
The best way to kill a man is to prevent him from working by giving him money ...
And the best part is that your cities will be full of the walking dead.
Félix Leclerc, 100,000 façons de tuer un homme
[author’s translation]
First, he said, lower the tariffs—in other words, he called for a policy of free trade. Failing substantial reductions in tariffs, some compensation for the effects of those tariffs (such as reduced freight rates) would be a second-best policy, but better than nothing. Finally, and least satisfactory of all, he said, would be the granting of subsidies from the Dominion Treasury: “Subsidies do not increase the general level of the prosperity of the people. They may make the task of government a little easier. They may render the work of balancing the budget a little less difficult, but in the last analysis they do not add to the economic advancement of the people.”30
What about the CCF government of Tommy Douglas in Saskatchewan? While there is no denying that Douglas and his colleagues pushed the province and the country on welfare state issues such as hospital insurance and medicare, these are not programs that discourage work or the work ethic. Does the Douglas government (1944–61) disprove my contention that there was a broad social and political consensus against reliance on the state and in favour of work and a sturdy individual independence? After all, didn’t he create a brand new department of social welfare? True, but in Douglas’s own words, “We were not interested in paying able-bodied people merely because they weren’t able to work.”31 According to his biographer, Walter Stewart, under Douglas and the CCF,
“relief ” was gone, and in its place were two classes of people eligible for “social aid.” Those who were too old or too handicapped to work received support automatically, but anyone who couldn’t find a job elsewhere would be put to work clearing roads, fencing pastures, installing phone lines, or working in community pastures—what is today called “workfare” and is roundly condemned by every respectable left-winger.32
What was reviled as socialism in those days turns out to have been pretty mild stuff. Douglas certainly used the state to build infrastructure and to provide services that the private sector had been unwilling or unable to provide, but he also ran seventeen consecutive balanced budgets, significantly repairing the province’s finances. He had no interest in creating programs that would undermine people’s work ethic. Looking back from today’s vantage point, most observers agree that Douglas’s government, far from being the Red Menace, was best described as mildly reformist.
Neither America nor Europe: Where Canada Fits In
In other words, the reigning political consensus, which was also a consensus on moral values, that characterized this country right up to the birth of the New Canada in 1960, took a quite different view of the role of