Big Dates in Canadian History
In 1497, John Cabot made landfall on Cape Bonavista in Newfoundland. In 1534, Jacques Cartier opened European-indigenous diplomatic relations by erecting a cross on the Gaspé Peninsula and kidnapping some young indigenous noblemen. In 1541, he returned to the St Lawrence basin and established a four-hundred-person colony at the site of present-day Québec City but evacuated and abandoned it in 1543. In 1577, Martin Frobisher and his crew made landfall in Baffin Island where they attempted to grow peas and mine (non-existent) gold before giving up on the colony, but not before doing some kidnapping to impress the locals.
In 1604, the French established the first sustained European settlements at Port Royal, founding the colony of Acadia. In 1763, New France became part of a bilingual British North America and the vast majority of present-day Canada was recognized as a possession of the British Empire. In 1784, this territory lost its southern colonies and the United Empire Loyalists flooded into Nova Scotia, Upper Canada and Lower Canada; and British North America became roughly co-terminous with present-day Canada.
In 1815, the War of 1812 ended with the British, their English and French subjects and their indigenous allies, the Iroquois, successfully repelling and American invasion and the resettling of the Iroquois in Lower Canada. In 1837, revolutionaries in Lower and Upper Canada marched on their legislatures demanding responsible government and representative democracy, causing a major governance crisis. In response to the crisis, the British Empire merged Upper and Lower Canada into a single colony with responsible government and representative democracy in 1840, creating Canada’s first bilingual parliament, giving rise to a series of governing coalitions comprising French and English parties.
In 1867, negotiators from Nova Scotia, Canada and New Brunswick created the Canadian federation at the behest of Whitehall, which was growing increasingly fearful of another war with the US. And in 1870, fearing its annexation by the United States, Canada admitted its first additional province, Manitoba, led by the Francophone Catholic Louis Riel. The next year, it added Prince Edward Island and British Columbia, producing a bicoastal nation-state. And in 1949, it incorporated the last of the separate British North American colonies, Newfoundland.
In other words, a credible story could be told that Canada was founded in 1497, 1534, 1541, 1577, 1604, 1763, 1784, 1815, 1837, 1840, 1867, 1870, 1871 or 1949. Making this list is the work of a historian. Selecting a particular year from that list, that is a political act because the year we choose conditions the meaning of Canada, not in the past but in the present and future.
Stephen Harper’s 1815 Nationalism
That is why, when Stephen Harper finally won a parliamentary majority in 2011, he created an entity called the 1812 Secretariat, a project that fizzled due to a lack of leadership, Harper’s own neglect and the failure of key US allies of Harper to assist with the project.
As I understand the original project, the hope was that Canada would be able to celebrate its two-hundredth birthday, its bicentennial, on February 17th, 1815, the day on which the War of 1812 ended. Had he pulled it off, it would have been an incredible propaganda coup for him and his party because this relocation of the date of Canada’s founding would have helped to change the values on which Canadian nationalism was based to values reflective of his party’s.
Harper was pretty clear as to what Canadian values should be when he and his party rewrote the citizenship guide for new immigrants in 2009 and when he spoke about what he deemed Canada’s foundational values: valour in battle, loyalty to Crown and country, steadfastness in one’s alliances, pride in self-reliance. Harper’s Canada was a partnership among three founding peoples, the French, English and Indigenous who made that partnership real for the first time on the battlefield in the early nineteenth century. These three founding peoples graciously invited the world to come to their country and share in their social contract. Canadian history, according to his manual, was not always harmonious. Indigenous people and Francophones continued to struggle to assert their independence, their rights within the federation; and phenomena like separation referenda and constitutional brinksmanship, events like the Quiet Revolution and Northwest Rebellion were part of Canadian history, that conflict was as important as compromise in the growth of the nation.
Harper’s inability to delegate, the weakness of his front bench and the unwillingness of the otherwise conservative-aligned US war re-enactor community to assist his project in any way led to successive defundings and abandonment of the project by 2015.
Pearsonian Nationalism
This raises an important question: what theory of Canada was Harper seeking to replace? For lack of a better term, I will describe the competing theory of Canada that he sought to supplant as Pearsonian nationalism, a theory of Canadian nationhood that came to be propounded as the normative theory of Canada beginning with Lester Pearson’s election as Prime Minister in 1963.
The previous six years had been hard on Canada’s natural governing party. It had lost three elections to John Diefenbaker’s Tories. Prior to those losses, the Liberals had held power continuously since 1921, interrupted only by a single Tory government during the Great Depression and a brief constitutional crisis from which they had emerged victorious in 1926.
When they returned to power, the party set about restoring its status as Canada’s natural governing party by building a new, self-conscious nationalism that reflected its values.
Whereas Conservative minority governments, be they those of Harper (2006-11), Diefenbaker (1957-58, 1962-63) or Meighen (1925-26) tended to govern not through formal agreements and coalitions but rather through brinksmanship, Liberal minorities (1921-30, 2004-06, 2019-present) typically make formal, brokered agreements with other parties that are negotiated in public view. So, it was natural that a key value represented in Pearsonian nationalism was elite brokerage, compromise and coalition-building.
Whereas, the Tories had, until the leadership of Robert Stanfield, had described Canada as a hierarchical nation derivative of and loyal to the British Empire and Commonwealth, based on a “one language, one Queen” theory of the nation, the Liberals, who dominated Québec in every election but one between 1896 and 1984 and had contributed Canada’s only Québecois prime ministers prior the 1984, saw the country as a more egalitarian Anglo-French partnership. This made sense as the Liberals’ base, even outside Québec, was largely Catholic whereas the Tories relied mostly on Protestant voters. It was natural, then, for Pearsonian nationalism to be based on the idea of two founding peoples. And also, that independence from Britain would be emphasized in contradistinction to the Tory idea of loyalty to Britain.
Holding power with only a nine-month break in 1979, from 1963 to 1984, the Liberal Party formalized, elaborated and entrenched its values as the values of Canada.
In 1963, Pearson initiated Canada’s official bilingualism policy which was developed by a royal commission over the next seven years and implemented in 1970 by his successor, Pierre Trudeau, making French a national official language with equal status to English for the first time.
In 1965, the Maple Leaf was adopted as Canada’s flag, replacing the Union Jack, British North America’s official flag since 1763. The new flag depicted a red-coloured sugar maple leaf a variety of Maple that grows in Canada’s Atlantic and Central Canada but not in the West and whose leaves do indeed turn red in the autumn.
In 1967, Pearson dropped all racially based immigration restrictions and, in 1971, Trudeau followed this with the adopting of official multiculturalism. The idea was that Canada would be a colourblind secular state that nonetheless gave priority to its two founding peoples with respect to language and culture. And, in 1980, Canada retired its long-time anthem God Save the Queen and replaced it with O Canada, an unofficial patriotic song composed in 1908.
In 1982, by agreement with nine of its ten provinces, Canada officially patriated its constitution, adding a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, ending oversight of Canada’s constitutional matters by the British House of Commons and House of Lords, making it fully independent within the British Commonwealth.
Finally, the country retired the centrepiece of Diefenbaker’s Tory nationalism. While it had technically been a bank holiday since 1879, Dominion Day, which celebrated the day the British parliament recognized Canada’s confederation in 1867, had not been a national festival of any kind. The federal government and its public broadcaster had played no role in promoting or participating in the festivities. Diefenbaker changed that by making the day the centrepiece of his Canadian nationalism, which had stressed Canada’s preeminent place in the British Empire and Commonwealth.
In 1982, following constitutional patriation, it was changed to Canada Day, effectively conflating the brokered negotiations among English and French elites at the 1867 conference with the creation of Canada, itself.
Because this nationalism did not merely sanctify a set of policies but the process by which policy is made, national projects produced by negotiation among the provinces and federal government have a special exalted status as part of the Canadian social contract. The Charter of Rights, Medicare and the Canada Pension Plan are baked into Pearsonian nationalism not simply by virtue of when and by whom they were enacted by the process by which they were.
The Curdling of Pearsonian Nationalism
But we all know that something has gone terribly wrong with that nationalism. Somehow the grandiose inclusive project of the Canadian multicultural mosaic, the dream of bilingualism, the universality of healthcare and retirement security, the shared flag and anthem—something has gone very wrong; these things have stopped working. While neoliberalism and its attack on the welfare state has, of course, played a part; while Stephen Harper’s incomplete efforts to redesign our nationalism has helped to weaken the Pearsonian nationalism; something darker has happened, poisoning, curdling the nationalism so lovingly crafted and carefully enacted by the Liberal Party from 1963-82.
The Liberal Party has, itself, made the undoing and replacement of this nationalism with something strange, grotesque and threatening. I will explain what that is in my next essay.
