By John Ralston Saul
Published June 1999
March 10th 1998 was the 150th anniversary of Canadian democracy. On March 10, 1848, Louis LaFontaine, with Robert Baldwin and the great reform coalition of progressive forces, formed the first responsible government of the two united Canadas. A few weeks before, on February 2, James Uniacke and Joseph Howe had beaten the Canadians to the goal of responsible government when they took power in Halifax.
The Nova Scotia date has now gone by, unnoticed. There are no plans that I know of to mark the Canadian anniversary.
This is not some arcane event out of the past. It is perhaps the determining act in the Canadian experience. A constitutional arrangement — 1867, for example —is important. But surely it is no more important (perhaps less important) than the shifting of power —of legitimacy — from the colonial elites to the enfranchised citizens. Perhaps more important, the reformers’ arrival to power marked the victory of a highly original and conscious idea of Canada.
If we can’t even remember that date and that event, it isn’t surprising that we are confused today about what the country is, what it should resemble, how it needs to compare with those of other Western democracies. We have slipped into a mythological delusion that the birth of Canada was almost an accident — driven by loyalty to Britain and fear of the United States. The very idea of that, from the 1840s on, there was a Canadian project on and that it was perfectly conscious, highly intellectual, clearly well thought out and debated, is now ignored.
Today’s rhetoric is full of self-interest as the key to social structures, economics as the great helmsmen whom citizens must follow, social justice as a short-lived, financeable aberration of the 1960s and the 1970s. What is this rhetoric but an ideological position dependent on the denial of 150 years of our real experience?
“The only questions I ask myself,” Joseph Howe argued, “are, what is right? What is just? What is for the public good?” When he resigned from the government in 1851, Baldwin spoke of disastrous “consequences of that reckless disregard of first principles, which if left unchecked, will rip society apart.”
And LaFontaine launched the united reform movement with this statement:
“The only way in which the authorities can prevent us from succeeding is by destroying the social equality which is the distinctive characteristics as much of the population of Upper Canada as of Lower Canada. This social equality must necessarily bring our political liberty. … No privileged castes can exist in Canada beyond and above the mass of its inhabitants.”
This is not some marginal radical on a soapbox. This is the central figure in the founding of Canada. Nor were he and his friends romantics. They were inventing a radically new idea of democratic individualism, based neither on the European concept of class struggle nor on the American belief of unlimited rights. Rather than individualism as opportunity, the Canadian reformers proposed opportunity balanced by general results — a balance of personal freedom and the public good.
The ideas of 1848 are sometimes disregarded because of their flaws, and because many groups were left out. But you can’t deal with the past by eliminating whatever doesn’t meet today’s standards. The initial democratic victory was a first in a series that were part of the fight that Nellie McClung later called “the fair deal.” And whatever the flaws of that first victory, it nevertheless contained the essential principles of the Canadian experiment.
For a start, there was the idea of government as the citizen’s tool for leading society. “It is the first duty of government,” Howe said, “to take the front rank in every noble enterprise, to be in advance of social, political and industrial energies, which they have undertaken to lead.” Note the priorities — “social, political and industrial.”
There is no need to choose between February 2 and March 10. Nova Scotia was first. But because the Canadian event involved two groups, it already contained the complex marriage of democracy and federalism. LaFontaine spoke of “a binding handshake” and of the “moral obligation” to reach beyond the self-interest of one community in search of “the common interests.” What he meant was that communities could not live together in a democracy if they were linked by only compromises over their self-interest. What would hold them together was the ability to reach above their self-interest in search of a shared idea of the common good.
The 10th of March also matters because it was put to the extreme test by the neo-conservatives of the day. On April 25, 1849, they came out of their houses, rioted and burned down the parliament buildings in Montreal rather than accept the transfer of legitimacy from themselves to the voting citizenry. LaFontaine and Baldwin held firm and didn’t give into them. The originality of the Canadian idea was revealed in this, the reformers’ first full use of public authority. They refused to overreact. As the great historian W. L. Morton put it, they decided “not to answer defiance with defiance, but to have moderate conduct shame arrogant violence.”
This idea of democratic government was tied to a wave of reforms in public education, justice and public administration. These foundations of our society are only now being thrown into question by the return of the old, interest-driven politics.
We apparently have time in our official calendar for flag days and other manifestations of nationalism without content. Would it do us any harm to set aside a day in the bleak month to remember the ideas that constitute the foundation of our democracy? Instead of public-relations-style attempts at patriotism, we might use that time to talk among ourselves about the ways in which Canadians ideas have evolved, and about the role of the individual citizen in our democracy.
