SOME CANADA DAY REFLECTIONS

AGAINST CANADA'S LIBERAL REVISIONIST HISTORY

In honour of “Canada Day,” tomorrow, regularly scheduled programming is momentarily interrupted.

For reasons which have largely animated this substack for over a year now, and won’t be repeated in this post, anti-Canada-ism has become something of a thing, in Canada. As we approach Canada Day (though as we’ll see, there’s grounds for those who persist in calling it Dominion Day), July 1, municipal governments in two of the country’s major cities have attempted to largely cancel Canada Day celebrations. And the current Prime Minister is famous for his remarks that Canada doesn’t have a culture, is a post-national country, and his conviction that Canada is so shameful that on Parliament Hill it was necessary to fly the flag at half mast for some bizarre length of time.

Happily, these attitudes have inspired some pushback, including the publication of a book titled The 1867 Project: Why Canada Should be Cherished — Not Cancelled. Let me be fully up front; I haven’t read the book. I have though seen several hours worth of online interviews and discussions with the editor and some contributing authors. So, I’m assuming they’ve accurately represented the content and spirit of their book. With that assumption, here’s my response.

While I’m certainly sympathetic to efforts at resisting the tradition-destroying impulses of those I’ve named on this substack as spatials, this particular response seems to me to be not only misguided, but a part of the problem. This theme to which I’ve repeatedly returned, that anything resembling the original right has been written out of history by the complete hegemonic victory of the left, finally winning the French Revolution by the early 20th century — probably, largely, won by the end of WWI — is well represented in this case.

These authors, who’d present themselves as resisting the left/spatialist agenda, in fact are just engaging in a bit of Kabuki theater, themselves promoting another strain of left/spatialist strategy. Effectively, the book seems to be a liberal revisionist history of Canada. This interpretation is profoundly misguided. And I don’t only mean that in a political theory sense, in the spirit of those on the dissident right who complain that such liberal revisionism constitutes an aspiration to return us all to the “golden days” of the 90s or maybe the 80s, when the left wasn’t crazy, etc. In the process, such aspirants oddly ignore that it was the apparent liberal golden age of those decades that led us precisely to the current “crazy.”

That’s not even my objection. I’m not even sure if that analysis is exactly correct. But it’s irrelevant to my point, which is that Canada has never been a liberal nation at its demographic foundation. Now, there’s long been disputes among Canadianist historians and political theoreticians about, for example, the extent that Canada’s founding fathers were inspired by John Locke, and the like. I don’t care. Let’s, for the sake of argument, grant those claims. Let’s say the political elite — and Canadian confederation was very much a project of a trans-Atlantic mercantile and political elite — were liberal Lockeans. (Ignoring the fact that some political theorists dispute that even Locke was a liberal.) My point is that the political motivations and inspirations of the founding people in the regions of Canada have never been liberal.

On the contrary, they’ve been rightwing in that original, Nisbetian, French Revolution sense that on this substack I’ve dubbed as temporalist. Let’s quickly consider three main populations. Ontario was largely populated and, as is widely acknowledged in Canadian historiography, it’s political culture was informed by the vast number of United Empire Loyalists who fled the American Revolution. These were people who explicitly rejected republicanism in preference to maintaining monarchical government. And, contrary to how our American cousins sometimes like to delude themselves, monarchy in the English tradition has always been about a pluralist society, and was never a form of absolutist royal dictatorship. Some of the Tudors and certainly some of the early Stuarts had such inclinations and aspirations. But they never achieved such power or status and even the aspirations were a blip in English history.

Instead, the Loyalists were fleeing the real tyranny of a Rousseau-like popularly sovereign Social Contractarian republic. Similarly with the Ultramontanists of Quebec, who explicitly and fervently rejected the vicious and cruel attacks on the Catholic Church by the French Revolutionaries. (Though, as we saw in our discussion of the peasants in the French Revolution, it is possible to defend the church without sacrificing social pluralism.) They even more explicitly than the Loyalists rejected the Rousseauian fanatics. And as a result, despite eventual incorporation into Canadian confederation, Quebec enjoyed a more conservative (in the Burkean sense of the word) history and culture far longer than did the French, thanks to this break with their homeland. In fact, it’s fair to say that the French Revolution didn’t triumph in Quebec until the 1960s.

On the western prairies, as I’ve discussed elsewhere on this substack and in my doctoral thesis, by the early 20th century, their inspiring political commitment was to a communitarian, pluralist populism. These agrarian radicals, as they came to be called, worked hard to create communal life in the harsh rural conditions of western Canada. They aspired to build a strong culture of what these days is called participatory, or grassroots, democracy, treating their farmer associations, in their own words, as “schools of citizenship.” They created alternate, parallel institutions to advance their economic interests. These sheltered them from exploitative government policy — e.g., in the form of the trade tariffs that benefited the industrial heartland, but drove their costs up to the of level of penury at times — and the business practices of the railway companies and the banks which profited from reducing the farmers’ share of the economic pie.

What all these people and their political identities and movements had in common are the rejection of the social engineering state (however cloaked in popular sovereignty platitudes); the corrosive impact of unfettered, invasive markets, with their unleashed commercialism; and the radical Rousseauist individualism, which required the destruction of the historical institutions of English pluralism: crown, church, and the intermediary institutions of community life which sheltered people from both those other forms of left/spatial civic colonization.

That’s the real political history of Canada. And I’m well aware that among those who’d like to cancel Canada, knowing that real history would only fuel their aspirations and feelings of righteousness. However, trying to defend and save Canada on the grounds of a liberal revisionist fantasy is as politically misguided as it is historically myopic. If such a thing is even possible, the Canada worth saving is the Canada of the real Canadian history. All the rest is just leftist/spatialist internecine squabbles.

So, on that cheerful note. Happy Canada (or, if you prefer, Dominion) Day, to compatriots and sympathizers alike. ;-)

For those keen to see where the main line of analysis on this substack is heading, stay tuned. The next instalment will be sooner than you think. So, if you haven’t yet, please…

And if you know anyone you think might be interested in my peculiar take on politics and the world, please…