Canada has come a long way

As one who spent his very enjoyable undergraduate years in Ottawa 50 years ago, it was an uplifting experience to return to Ottawa this past weekend for the Governor General's Awards for the Performing Arts. Of course, I have often been to Ottawa in the intervening years, but had never seen so vividly there the progress that Canada has made in the project, begun in 1867, of making a success of the world's first and only trans-continental, bicultural, parliamentary and federal democracy.

That project was considered a long shot at the start, by many Canadians, by many British colonial officials, and by our American neighbour. The Americans had urged the French Canadians and British Nova Scotians to join their Revolution; and narrowly missed seizing the territories that became Canada in the War of 1812. In 1867, the United States had just suppressed a southern insurrection and suffered 750,000 dead in a population of 31-million, smaller than Canada's today, and had the greatest army and the greatest generals in the world, and was not at all pleased by the British government's kindly disposition to the Southern insurrectionists and slave-holders in the late war.

John A. Macdonald, joined by the Quebec Conservative leader, George-Étienne Cartier and the normally inflexible Liberal leader in Toronto, George Brown, proprietor of the Globe and Mail, with a number of other very able men such as Montreal industrialist Alexander Galt and Quebec Irish leader Darcy McGee, formed in 1864 what was called the Great Coalition of the then unhappily United Province of Canada. (Quebec and Ontario had combined into one jurisdiction after the Mackenzie-Papineau uprisings of 1837 with the declared and fatuous aim, both unjust and impossible, of relieving the French Canadians of what was presumed to be the intolerable burden of being French.) This coalition essentially was united by the conviction that if something coherent and imbued as a project with some sweep of grandeur were not attempted, the scattering of settlements along the northern border of the United States would fall into the lap of the United States, either from inertia, or following a twitch of the mighty and restored American state, now deprived by an assassin of the sage and humane leadership of their country's saviour, Abraham Lincoln.

Macdonald in particular convinced a largely, but not entirely, skeptical Colonial Office in London that unless this were done, with the support from the London financial community to endow the new entity with the instances of a state, including a trans-continental railway soon, the Empire's premier colony would vanish into the embrace of America.

British official opinion, having strenuously resented the American exit from their Empire (after the British had evicted France from Canada to assure American security and at great expense to the home country; and after watching the long struggle with slavery in America with no great sympathy for those who claimed America was the beacon of liberty for the world), were now resigned to America's permanence. Moreover, by 1867, it was obvious to the more perceptive British statesmen, including Benjamin Disraeli, that Bismarck's artfully aggressive leadership of Prussia was about to shift the balance of power in Europe. The German Empire, as it was soon to become, would be too strong for Britain to assure the balance of power it had promoted and manipulated among the major European states since the time of Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey more than 300 years before, and the goodwill of America could become necessary to the British national and Imperial interest. It was time, at last, for Britain to conciliate America.

Yet at the same time, the British were not willing to let Canada slide into America's control. This, at least, was something they could help prevent by empowering Macdonald and his allies. And so Confederation was enacted. There has not been an aggressive American threat to Canada ever since.

But it was a very long time before the bicultural aspect of Confederation had any observable consequences outside Quebec and a few neighbouring communities. And we should be proud of the distance we have come in this area. Indeed, what I saw in Ottawa sharply reminded me of how strong and effective the original official character of Canada as a country of two official languages has become (notwithstanding the hackneyed allegations of tokenism that now are common).

When I was an undergraduate there, Ottawa still had the ambiance of a colonial city. The Union flag (Great Britain) or the Red Ensign were on the masts of the capital, and next to the Chateau Laurier, the Lord Elgin (the name originating with a distinguished colonial governor instrumental in the achievement of responsible government in the 1840's) was the most prominent hotel. There was no National Arts Centre, nor much else to indicate biculturalism, or, apart from the rather imposing Parliament Buildings, which looked down on the belching saw and pulp mills of the E.B. Eddy Company in Hull, anything to inform the visitor he was in the capital of a serious country.

In the decades since, the great world capitals of that time, Washington, London, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, and others, have continued to be so. But Ottawa, though hardly comparable to those immensely historic cities, has become, visibly, the capital of an obviously important country, true at last to the original raison d'être of the founders of Confederation. The only other cities that have made any comparable progress on a similar civic mission are Brasilia, and in special terms of restitution and extension of former and interrupted greatness, Berlin and Beijing.