Fearful Symmetry - the Fall and Rise of Canada's Founding Values. Brian Lee Crowley
on people’s character than the one that prevails today. The view that predominates today on both sides of the border is of Canadians as kinder and gentler than their American neighbours, as more willing to use the power of the state in pursuit of public goods, as more welfare-minded, more socially left wing. It is also a view that could establish itself only by defeating and then consigning to a trunk in the never-visited attic of our collective memory the older view that had defined Canada for almost the first century of its existence and for many decades prior to 1867.
This revolution in Canadians’ intellectual and moral self-understanding was fed by many tributaries. We were certainly well plugged into the broad intellectual currents washing over Western civilization. For instance, the influence of Marxism, some branches of feminism, post-structuralism, and other “radical” philosophies in the universities and elsewhere helped to create fertile soil for new ideas across the West, while simultaneously demonizing the bourgeois virtues.33 Starting in the 1960s it became fashionable in intellectual circles to believe that individuals were the creation and the prisoners of social forces over which they had little control, and that the employer-employee relationship was essentially an exploitative and purely materialist one in which all the benefits were economic, and those flowed predominantly to the owners of capital. During the decades stretching roughly between the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, it was not clear to many which side would win the Cold War, and Western capitalism’s ultimate decisive triumph as the superior economic system had not yet been satisfactorily demonstrated. The alternative collectivist models of Russia, China, Cuba, and even, incredibly, Albania exercised a peculiar fascination over many. Vietnam and the counter-culture produced a vibrant movement of protest and questioning of authority throughout the Western world, including the authority of traditional values and behaviours.
AND YOU THOUGHT MARX WAS DEAD AND GONE . . .
My daughter and a friend, who were in high school, were offered a job in a fast-food restaurant. This was to be their first experience of work, and they were suitably excited and a little anxious at this new transition to adultlike responsibilities and status. The mother of the friend squashed all of that simply by observing to the children that they would be crazy to take such work, which was obviously purely exploitative, all the benefit flowing to the restaurant, and none to the workers. In the vernacular, they were simply going to be “ripped off” rather than participating in a mutually beneficial exchange of values—some moral, some economic, some social, some cultural. Disillusioned and newly suspicious, the children declined the jobs and for years afterwards had a jaundiced view of and fraught relationships with employers.
Private communication with author
Not to be neglected in the list of ways in which Canadians’ old values began to fall into desuetude was the extent to which Canada copied American innovations. As is so often the case in Canada–U.S. intellectual history, America led the way with bold social experiments that didn’t really pan out. America drew back, but Canada rushed in and embraced the American innovations as the latest thing.34 Yet once the Americans had abandoned them, Canadians then deluded themselves that their now “distinct” approach demonstrated how different they were from the people they had originally copied, whereas in reality it proved the less flattering proposition that we are slower to learn from our mistakes.
The “War on Poverty” of Lyndon Johnson was one such innovation, an innovation whose failure was later documented in exquisite detail in Charles Murray’s path-breaking 1984 book, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980. Even before Murray interred the remains, however, politicians in the United States had begun to back away from Johnson’s faith in state action as the saviour of the poor and disenfranchised. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, social commentator and later Democratic senator, quickly saw the faults of the traditional American approach to welfare, especially as it had been expanded under Johnson. Moynihan’s provocative 1965 study, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, for the first time cast light on the potential social consequences of the American welfare system and the so-called War on Poverty. Richard Nixon, after becoming president, shut down the Office of Economic Opportunity, the central agency of Johnson’s “unconditional war on poverty,” and after Nixon’s 1972 re-election, he told a reporter the sixties had been a failure because “the government threw money at the problem.”35
Here at home, the Canadian left, far from being reflexively anti-American as it is today, drew much inspiration from such U.S. social policy, and the CCF and its successor, the NDP, were at least as inspired by American Progressivism and the Social Gospel movement36 as by British Labourism and Fabianism. In the period that interests us, Cy Gonick, influential editor of the iconic (on the left) Canadian Dimension, wrote admiringly of American social policy and lamented Canada’s status as laggard. “The United State has discovered poverty,” Gonick wrote in May 1964; “it is curious that this subject is being ignored by Canadian counterparts.”37 Welfarism was part of the new spirit of the age and Canada had a lot of catching up to do.
Canada is often regarded as a welfare state—particularly by its American neighbours. However, this is only a recent phenomenon. Until the 1960s the timing, extent and progression of Canadian welfare legislation lagged the US experience.
Douglas A. Allen, Welfare and the Family
We caught up with a vengeance, rapidly surpassing the United States, and were soon breathing down the necks of some of Europe’s welfare states with regard to the size of our social welfare apparatus. In one of those intellectual inversions with which history is replete, we began to associate the values of Canada’s first century with foreign values, American values, values that had nothing to do with us. We literally suppressed or at the very least forgot our history because it suddenly became inconvenient when faced with the need to rationalize the rapid spurt of growth in the welfare state.
So no change in the general zeitgeist of the post-war industrial world can prove a sufficient explanation for Canada’s sudden embrace of the welfare state, an innovation to which Canada had so far proved remarkably resistant. Others will find the popularity of left-wing ideas, the counter-culture, feminism, effective contraception, cities and city life, the attractions of Keynesian-style demand management, rejection of tradition and the rise of relativism and hostility to authority and other ideas abroad in the West at this time to be sufficient explanation of the direction Canada took in these years.
But the very ubiquity of those ideas makes them unsatisfying as an explanation as to why Canada suddenly fell in line with them so comprehensively after having resisted their rise so energetically over previous decades. Marxists and feminists in the universities were no more common in Canada than the United States, and Keynesian acolytes and big-government apologists were no rarer in the halls of government on their side of the border than on ours.
Yes, Rowell-Sirois eventually gained some traction, and programs like equalization and regional development, old-age pensions, and family allowances and unemployment and hospital insurance all predate (some barely) 1960,38 although these programs were tiny compared to their present-day equivalents. It is also the case that these programs on the whole were not ones that created individual dependence on the state for one’s livelihood. No one ever stopped working because they got state-financed hospital care. Unemployment insurance in this period created little disincentive to work, and old-age pensions offered meagre support for those past the age where they could work. Creating individual dependence on the state, as we shall see later, was really a new feature of the Canadian state’s expansion from the mid-sixties onward.
The state had been expanding on both sides of the border for years. I pointed out earlier that when Stephen Leacock warned of the impending arrival of socialism in Canada in 1924, the state in Canada