Читать книгу Fearful Symmetry - the Fall and Rise of Canada's Founding Values - Brian Lee Crowley - Страница 13

Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.

RALPH ELLISON, TIME MAGAZINE

The founders of Canada had high hopes for us. They thought that Canada was a land of great promise for the generations to come, as when Sir Wilfrid Laurier so famously proclaimed that the twentieth century would belong to Canada. This was no mere rhetoric, for Canada was a society characterized by tremendous dynamism. We (i.e., metropolitan and colonial Britain together) built the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) , a project almost unimaginably huge at the time. We built political institutions to govern a vast and sparsely populated territory. We performed feats of military prowess far greater than our small size might have led one to expect. And we attracted vast numbers of newcomers, hosting one of the largest inflows of people relative to our local population ever seen in history. Living in the shadow of America, where everything is done on a grand scale, makes it hard sometimes to recall that, relatively speaking, we had no reason to be ashamed of what we accomplished in our half of North America and much reason to be proud.

But proud as our forebears were of the country that they were building, they were very much of the view that its success was not an accident. On the contrary, they believed that Canada and Canadians succeeded as they did because they had been endowed by history and Providence with a very specific set of institutions and behaviours. Our success was bound up with our character, and our character was formed by the right kind of experiences. We could welcome people from all over the world and we could populate this huge and sometimes stern piece of geography and make it all work because of the kind of people we were and the kind of people newcomers were expected to become.

Central to this view of the character of Canadians and their institutions was a notion of individual freedom and responsibility, a belief that each of us was endowed with a nature that required us to be responsible and accountable for our choices. The corollary was that if we deprived men and women of their freedom and responsibility for themselves, we prevented people from being fully free and fully human. Dependence on the government or on charity was therefore to be abhorred, not chiefly because of the cost it imposed on those who paid, but because of the damage it did to those who “benefited.”

Our forefathers thought that human beings create themselves largely through their work. And just as our character is shaped by having to earn our way in the world, a different kind of character is formed when we make our way living off the efforts of others.

This is relevant to the story of what we have lost because out of our fear of Quebec separatism and out of our efforts to find something, anything, for our burgeoning labour force to do grew vast social institutions to give people the illusion of working or at least of not being unemployed. We tolerated an unemployment insurance program that paid large numbers of people not to work. We celebrated the emergence of schools and universities that provided a heavily subsidized, mediocre education but kept huge numbers of young people out of the workforce for a few more years. We pushed people into retirement as fast as we could. We enriched welfare to the point that, in the mid-1990s, over 12 per cent of the population of our then wealthiest province, Ontario, was claiming welfare from the province, a proportion that rose with each recession, but hardly declined again in the ensuing upturn.1 At roughly the same time, 1994, McGill economist William Watson was observing that “counting the children of the unemployed, roughly one-fifth of Quebecers are on social assistance [including UI] of one form or another.”2 Welfare does not exhaust the many forms of dependence we created; for example, we pulled many people into various forms of public employment that produced a real income but little real value (a theme to which I return in Chapter 5).

While many people regard this as just the kinder, gentler Canadian society helping out those marginalized by the baby boom, the fact is that this was quite an innovation in Canada. Contrary to an article of faith of our revisionist age, for years one of the things that distinguished Canada from the United States was Canadians’ unbreakable attachment to a demanding work ethic and a strong distaste for any kind of dependence on the public purse. In fact, one of the ways in which the founders of the Dominion thought that the new country distinguished itself from the United States was in the levels of welfare dependence to be found in the populist republic to the south. There voters could and did vote themselves benefits at the expense of the rich,3 a danger of American populist democracy against which Alexis de Tocqueville had warned in his classic Democracy in America. The liberty that was taken to be a British subject’s birthright was thought to be inimical to a radical democracy’s temptation to pursue an equality of condition for its citizens. Such an equality could only be achieved, Canadians believed, by a destructive levelling down of the achievements of society’s most successful members.

Richard Cartwright, a prominent pre- and post-Confederation politician, spoke for almost all his contemporaries when he said in the United Province of Canada legislature in 1865,

I think every true reformer, every real friend of liberty, will agree with me in saying that if we must erect safeguards, they should be rather for the security of the individual than of the mass, and that our chiefest care must be to train the majority to respect the rights of the minority, to prevent the claims of the few from being trampled underfoot by the caprice or passion of the many. For myself, sir, I own frankly I prefer British liberty to American equality.4

Charles Tupper, a Father of Confederation and briefly prime minister of the new Dominion, echoed these sentiments in the Nova Scotia legislature: “It is necessary that our institutions should be placed on a stable basis, if we are to have that security for life and property and personal liberty, which is so desirable in every country.”5

The divide that separated the “two solitudes” of French and English was bridged by a common understanding of the importance of work and the damaging nature of dependence. Étienne Parent, one of the great journalists, public intellectuals, and orators of French Canada in the first half of the nineteenth century gave a passionate speech at L’Institut canadien de Montréal in September 1847 on the theme Work and Humanity (Du travail chez l’homme):6

You will no doubt realise that by “idleness” I don’t merely mean the cessation of all work, but also this laziness of mind which prevents you from developing through your work all the potential of your intelligence, for your own benefit and that of all of humanity.7 [author’s translation]

Parent continued,

Yes, gentlemen, early on in life make regular continuous work a habit and I predict that you will derive great pleasure from your work, that you will love your work for itself over and beyond the personal advantages that you expect from it, just as I predict that idleness or inactivity, once satisfied our indispensable human need for rest, will become for you a source of unbearable boredom.8 [author’s translation]

And Parent issues a clarion call to action to ensure that everyone benefits from the moral advantages that work procures: “And so, gentlemen, let us ensure, through our laws, through our institutions, through our values and through our ideas, that each and every person works in our society.”9 [author’s translation]

Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the first French-Canadian prime minister, reflecting those same French-Canadian roots and the influence of British political liberalism, was a staunch believer in minimalist government and personal responsibility and abhorred any form of welfare dependency. His most famous declaration about Canada’s values (“Canada is free and freedom is its nationality”) is far more stirring than its modern equivalent: Canada is free health care and medicare is its nationality. He once declared that “the role of government [is] ... not to force action in any one direction but to remove barriers to man’s own efforts to undertake personal and social improvement.... Man must be free to seek his own improvement and be responsible for his own destiny.”10 When Australia and New Zealand began experimenting with new state-provided social programs, according to Doug Owram, Laurier was quick to denounce these innovations as inimical to traditional Canadian values: “If you remove the incentives of ambition and emulation from public enterprises,” Laurier said on the subject in 1907, “you suppress progress, you condemn the community to stagnation and immobility.”11

William Lyon Mackenzie King, who eventually succeeded Laurier as both Liberal Party leader and prime minister, agonized in his early book Industry and Humanity over what he foresaw as the corrosive effects on Canadians’ character of the relatively activist government he was attracted to. And in fact his record as prime minister shows that he too was predominantly a traditionalist who thought that people were best left alone to resolve their own problems rather than having government play that role, although he certainly was not averse to introducing just enough minimal welfare state measures to keep the Liberals in office—welfare if necessary, but not necessarily welfare.

Mackenzie King was also surrounded by people who shared this world view. When, as Laurier’s minister of labour, Mackenzie King engaged in some unwonted interventionism (he used legislation to end a railway strike), Laurier thought this a very ill-advised innovation, and the minister was lectured in Parliament by a senior Liberal MP about this departure from the sound principle that the government that governed least governed best.

Immigration in the early days did not challenge this orthodoxy in favour of freedom and personal responsibility, even though Canada at the time was admitting newcomers at a ferocious pace. As Laurier’s minister of immigration, Clifford Sifton, famously remarked in 1922 of the millions of Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and other East Europeans admitted under his supervision: “I think a stalwart peasant in sheep-skin coat, born on the soil, whose forefathers have been farmers for ten generations, with a stout wife and a half dozen children, is good quality.”12

In other words, these were people inured to hard work and more than capable of looking after themselves. There was no question of people being admitted to fall on the public charge. Everyone, native born or immigrant, was expected to look after themselves, and unemployment was almost universally seen as a personal failure and disgrace.13

At about the same time, Stephen Leacock, one of the country’s most influential public intellectuals, was warning,

We are in the danger of over-government; that we are suffering from the too-great extension of the functions of the State; that it is doing already great harm to our economic life, and threatening greater still; doing a great deal to undermine the sounder principles of morality and self-reliance, and doing much to imperil the older and sterner spirit of British liberty on which our commonwealth was founded.... In my opinion we are moving towards socialism. We are moving through the mist; nearer and nearer with every bit of government ownership and government regulation, nearer and nearer through the mist to the edge of the abyss over which our civilization may be precipitated to its final catastrophe.14

Leacock feared that we were edging toward the abyss in 1924, when government spent about 11 per cent of GDP, roughly a quarter of what it controls today,15 which is itself down from its peak of over one-half of GDP in 1992.16

This deep suspicion of government programs was not limited to men, either. Ottawa’s future mayor Charlotte Whitton who, according to Dennis Guest, was Canada’s most influential voice on social welfare matters in the early thirties, was determined that any state aid to those in need be subjected to stringent rules, the most important of which was that those being helped,

must honestly and sincerely participate in the whole plan, which is the development of initiative and self-reliance and independence at the earliest possible date, and to such a degree and strength as to avoid future dependency.17

William Watson underlines that Whitton’s opposition to mothers’ pensions was entirely in line with the then reigning consensus.18 Those who thought about the welfare of the most vulnerable and how they could be helped most effectively were one in thinking that the problem of one-parent families was not one of income, but of character and values. Such welfare problems were best left in the hands of local agencies that could know each of their clients and support them in a way tailored to individual needs but always with the aim of ending dependence on charity or government aid at the earliest opportunity.

While the mythology of Canadian politics has it that the Great Depression put paid to classical liberalism in this country, the record shows quite the reverse. R.B. Bennett was on his electoral deathbed when he shifted half-heartedly to imitating the early stages of Roosevelt’s New Deal, much to the disgust of his predecessor as Tory leader, Arthur Meighen. His program was gutted by the courts and quietly shelved by Mackenzie King’s victorious Liberals, much to King’s satisfaction.19

This rejection of American-style interventionism wasn’t limited to a few plutocrats in private clubs in Montreal and Toronto and Anglos in Ottawa either. For example, the Quebec provincial government was firmly opposed to the New Deal style of politics. The Liberal premier of Quebec at the time, Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, scathingly called Roosevelt’s innovation “a socialistic venture bordering on communism.”20

Elite opinion did not see public spending as the solution to the country’s ills; rather it was the contrary. At the height of the Depression,21 at a time when the state in Canada was spending roughly a quarter of the share of national wealth that it spends today, the Globe and Mail could editorialize (under the headline “Crippled by Government”):

We have been indulging in a glorious spending spree much of the time since Confederation was established, mortgaging the future, signing notes for posterity to pay, and not at any time using such prudent measures as a well-ordered business would adopt to prepare in good years for the demands of the bad.

In 1938, the famous Rowell-Sirois Report22 was far from revelling in Canada’s great advance over other nations as a provider of social welfare services. On the contrary, the commissioners deplored our slowness in getting with the program of expanding the welfare state:

No person should be compelled by economic necessity to work or to live below a standard fixed by public policy. Canada for a number of reasons has been slower to accept this responsibility than have Great Britain, New Zealand or Australia.

While some, like James Struthers, have argued that the report served as a “blueprint for the development of the Canadian welfare state,”23 the predominant historical view is that the report and ideas were shelved and largely forgotten in the frenetic activity of post-war prosperity.24 Rowell-Sirois barely made a dent in Canada’s obstinate attachment to limited government and individual responsibility.

Not even the heady days of what was essentially central planning of the war effort in World War II could knock the Liberals, liberals, and Canadians off course. According to William Watson, “Following the New Deal we were probably the most laissez-faire country going. [Author Bruce] Hutchison regarded it as ‘the final tragedy of the war [that it] compelled a ministry devoted in theory to a minimum of government into complete and detailed control of the nation’s economy.’”25

Hutchison need not have worried; the tragedy was short lived. After a brief flirtation with the welfare state in the form of the Marsh Report, Canada’s equivalent of the Beveridge Report that led to the post-war creation of the British welfare state, Mackenzie King essentially reverted to laissez-faire form after the war, having seen off the threat of a briefly resurgent CCF with the Marsh diversion.

Mr. [Arthur] Meighen noted that the word “relief” had been dropped from the [Unemployment Relief] bill, replaced by “the more dignified term ‘assistance.’” The feeling had grown up that claims for “assistance” were in the nature of rights, he said. With each succession of strength to that state of mind, the problem of relief became greater. “If one part of the country can say, ‘We are going to live off the other part, we are going to cast all obligations away,’ do you think civilization can exist on that basis?” asked Meighen.

Arthur Meighen, quoted in the Globe and

Mail, May 18, 1938

Economic policy in Canada during this period was dominated by the redoubtable Clarence Decatur Howe, who during the war became known as the Minister for Everything because of his role in directing the war production effort. But once the war was over, Howe couldn’t get rid of his central planning powers fast enough.

The real Liberal plan, whether by accident or design, was Howe’s. It was based on optimism about the economy, and skepticism about the potentialities of planning. It would not be the economic abstractions of doctrinaire planners in Ottawa that would shape post-war Canada. That would be left to business’s self-interest, guided, prodded and shaped by incentives that businessmen could understand. Post-war Canada would be a free enterprise society.26

Louis St-Laurent, who succeeded Mackenzie King as prime minister in 1949, was said to regard American levels of welfare dependence with distaste and typical Canadian moral superiority; he resolutely but ultimately unsuccessfully fought Jack Pickersgill’s attempts to extend Canada’s meagre unemployment insurance program to Pickersgill’s fishermen constituents in Newfoundland on the grounds that it would not be actuarially sound to include seasonal workers such as these, and it would encourage others to seek unemployment benefits in similarly unsuitable circumstances. As Watson remarked, St-Laurent proved right on both counts.

As late as the federal election of 1957, St-Laurent was opining:

Any ideas of non-essential interference by the Government is repugnant to the Liberal Party. We believe that the private citizen must be left to his own initiative whenever possible and that if some help is required for the individual, that which is afforded by the national government must encourage rather than replace the help which the community or the province with its municipalities can give.27

At the same time as St-Laurent was underlining Liberals’ attachment to small government and individual liberty, so-called progressive forces, represented by figures like Keith Davey and Tom Kent, were pushing the party in a new direction, especially after the defeat of the Liberals by John Diefenbaker’s Tories in 1957. Even then, however, the old roots of the Liberal Party in the founding traditions of Canada were deep and resistance to the reformists was strong. Right after the 1957 election, for example, former Saskatchewan premier and federal Liberal finance minister Charles Dunning argued against the party adopting a social welfare policy agenda. He noted that the ever-increasing number of social services created

a tremendous and expensive machine to bring about redistribution of wealth by taxation, and lessening the responsibility on the part of the individual citizen, and by doing so are decreasing both the dignity and freedom of the individual person. I know it may not sound like practical politics to be flashing this kind of red light, but surely we Liberals must get back to fundamental thinking in terms of principles.28

Nor was the traditional political philosophy of individual responsibility and initiative that animated all our national political leaders prior to the 1960s absent on the local level. Dunning, after all, was a former Liberal premier of Saskatchewan. In 1948, Maurice Duplessis left those listening to his government’s Speech from the Throne in no doubt where he stood: “We are of the opinion that state paternalism is the enemy of all progress.”29

To pick another example, almost seventy years ago, Nova Scotia’s greatest premier, Angus L. Macdonald, a Liberal, stood before a Toronto audience and gave a remarkable speech. He told that audience what his part of the country—the Maritimes—needed to overcome its underdevelopment.

The biggest obstacle to the region’s development was what he called “the tariff,” or the old National Policy of Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald. So what could Ottawa do to help?

THE TWO SOLITUDES RECONCILED

But the government dole will rot your soul back there in your home town.

So bid farewell to the Eastern town you never more will see.

There’s self-respect and a steady cheque in this refinery.

You will miss the green and the woods and streams and the dust will fill your nose.

But you’ll be free, and just like me, an idiot, I suppose.

Stan Rogers, The Idiot

The best way to kill a man is to prevent him from working by giving him money ...

And the best part is that your cities will be full of the walking dead.

Félix Leclerc, 100,000 façons de tuer un homme

[author’s translation]

First, he said, lower the tariffs—in other words, he called for a policy of free trade. Failing substantial reductions in tariffs, some compensation for the effects of those tariffs (such as reduced freight rates) would be a second-best policy, but better than nothing. Finally, and least satisfactory of all, he said, would be the granting of subsidies from the Dominion Treasury: “Subsidies do not increase the general level of the prosperity of the people. They may make the task of government a little easier. They may render the work of balancing the budget a little less difficult, but in the last analysis they do not add to the economic advancement of the people.”30

What about the CCF government of Tommy Douglas in Saskatchewan? While there is no denying that Douglas and his colleagues pushed the province and the country on welfare state issues such as hospital insurance and medicare, these are not programs that discourage work or the work ethic. Does the Douglas government (1944–61) disprove my contention that there was a broad social and political consensus against reliance on the state and in favour of work and a sturdy individual independence? After all, didn’t he create a brand new department of social welfare? True, but in Douglas’s own words, “We were not interested in paying able-bodied people merely because they weren’t able to work.”31 According to his biographer, Walter Stewart, under Douglas and the CCF,

“relief ” was gone, and in its place were two classes of people eligible for “social aid.” Those who were too old or too handicapped to work received support automatically, but anyone who couldn’t find a job elsewhere would be put to work clearing roads, fencing pastures, installing phone lines, or working in community pastures—what is today called “workfare” and is roundly condemned by every respectable left-winger.32

What was reviled as socialism in those days turns out to have been pretty mild stuff. Douglas certainly used the state to build infrastructure and to provide services that the private sector had been unwilling or unable to provide, but he also ran seventeen consecutive balanced budgets, significantly repairing the province’s finances. He had no interest in creating programs that would undermine people’s work ethic. Looking back from today’s vantage point, most observers agree that Douglas’s government, far from being the Red Menace, was best described as mildly reformist.