April 2005
by Barry Stagg
It is not a trite comment to state that the 1967 model of Canada worked well enough. The indisputable fact of Canada's centennial speaks to the practical efficacy of the parliamentary federation formed in 1867. To illustrate this essential point it is good to summarize the basics of 1967 Canada.
These are the features that formed the rubric of Canada for its first one hundred years: It was a parliamentary democracy. It was and remains a federation. Its parliaments were modelled on the British Westminster model. Its Constitution, in the ancient and unique British tradition, was largely unwritten even though the British North America Act represented a partial constitution largely with respect to the seminal process of formulating a parliamentary federation. Government, by and large, was small despite the considerable expansion of social services since the war . Government administration, except in the inevitable enclaves of Ottawa and the provincial capitals, was minimalist if not genuinely small. The concept of the public administration of Canada as a village of civil servants, mentioned approvingly by Donald Savoie, still existed. Government was not a dominant national industry in Canada's centennial year of 1967.
The contrast between 1967 Canada and the continental governments could not have been more stark. One only has to look to F.A. Hayek and his description of World War II era governance in Europe to realize that the evolvement of government as a prime industry had long been an irreversible reality in Europe. It was a socialist well into which the ambitious careerist could dip deeply and confidently. Hayek, in his brilliant pamphlet, "The Road to Serfdom", published in 1944, makes these critical points: Naziism was a perverse, murderous form of collectivism, whether called socialist or not. The Allied countries were united in fighting and defeating the Nazis. Nevertheless, the other countries of Europe, and the Americans as well, were falling into the socialist based trap. They were embracing and institutionalizing collectivist, statist government, displacing the less certain tenets of liberal democracy.
It is no small wonder that the post-1968 changes to Canada's political system, so called reforms, chiefly appealed to its small parochial elite, the Montreal-Toronto intelligentsia who fit completely the standard continental European definition of a provincial elite. The 2005 embrace of a form of government and practices of administration that border on the absurd are clear indications that the implementation of the misfit European system has been an abysmal failure.
The excesses of centralization are all the more difficult to both sustain and to justify in Canada because Canada is such a small country by population. It should not be this hard to govern this country, no matter how scattered the population.
While the United States, with its huge population and dense economic structure, is a natural recipient for the complexities and dubious benefits of a central administration, Canada is unsuited for this model. It simply does not need the centralized structure that, for better or for worse, has overtaken the continental European democracies. Instead, Canada needs the very pragmatic model that it was using in 1967 and which, in its simplicity, worked well enough. It bears stating that it was working well enough for both the English and French components of Canada. While friction and dispute were common and perhaps of chronic permanence, nevertheless, the country had a solid and organically based way of governing itself. The people, from sea to sea, were able to manage their country peacefully and without any excess of government intervention.
This brings up the question of today's purveyors of Canadian ideas, the cognoscenti, if you will. Too many Canadian writers, especially the clever ones who consider themselves internationalists and citizens of the world, and more cultivated than their lumberyard and lumberjack neighbours, look to define Canada in terms of its quasi-missionary contribution or projection to the rest of a grateful world. It is as if they embrace a kind of Canadian peace corps without the attendant military might that such an entity co-existed with in the United States.
Instead of this thoroughly hothouse conceit, Canadians thinkers need to look for an internal Canadian vision, an image of Canada that defines us to ourselves and is of ourselves and our actual, uneven, asymmetric existence. This must be in the sense of a continually evolving picture of the interaction and mingling between our many and varied parts. Simply put, Canada is too young to have acquired the old man's heart that callow teenage philosophers imagine they have acquired. The affectation of tired, venerable social wisdom that Canadian writers of the serious but prosaic variety try to project is as bogus as the republican ideals that Trudeau naively but autocratically sought to implement after 1968. In fact, they are two sides of the same utopian coin.
The argument made is that the search for a domestic Canadian vision has been short- circuited since 1968 by the unimaginative importation, by Trudeau, of a cosmopolitan central planning model from Europe where, unfortunately, it has evolved out of Europe's own pathological domestic contortions. The two World Wars are vivid examples of these destructive convulsions. After all, Canadians left Europe over the centuries to become North American and did form the North American based country of Canada. But they did it in North America, away from the chronic tribal conflicts of that small European continent. We need to reinstate our own still maturing quest for Canadianism and to shelve the conceit that Canadianism is encapsulated in a vain sense of worldliness and camaraderie between our own domestic commissars and their similarly self-anointed counterparts in the rest of the world.
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