SOCI - Standing Committee

Social Affairs, Science and Technology

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37-1 37th Parliament, 1st Session (January 29, 2001 - September 16, 2002)
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Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Social Affairs, Science and Technology

Issue 8 - Appendix  A

Text of remarks by Desmond Morton, director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada to a parliamentary committee considering a law to proclaim Macdonald-Laurier Day, at the Parliament Buildings, April 25, 2001 at 3.30 p.m.

WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM MACDONALD AND LAURIER

This afternoon I invite you to recall the two prime ministers who gave shape to our country. Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir Wilfrid Laurier were not partners like Lafontaine and Baldwin nor W.L. Mackenzie King and Ernest Lapointe. They were political opponents, with all the differences our adversarial system creates. And they were surprisingly similar too, when faced with the responsibilities of power, because the hard realities of Canada don't change with a change of government. Indeed, that vital lesson and its consequences make it all the more worthwhile studying these two leaders because, along with their steadfast vision of Canada and its potential came that skill in compromise that history has shown to be indispensable for any common future.

This afternoon, I want to recall some of their words and the values they reflect because these might well be the basis of the remembrance and celebration intended by this bill. Remember, first, the golden-tongued Laurier, our seventh prime minister and the first French-speaking Canadian to hold our highest political office, a man of vision and courage, but also a man so lovable that he remained a hero and a friend, even to those who came to disagree with him. Early in 1904, at the Canadian Club of Ottawa, he tried out the phrase he would reiterate through that election year: " The nineteenth century was the century of the United States", he declared, "I think we can claim that it is Canada that shall fill the twentieth century." By mid-October, at Massey Hall, Sir Wilfrid Laurier had perfected the phrasing that would go down in our history books:

I tell you nothing but what you know when I tell you that the nineteenth century has been the century of the United States development. The past hundred years has been filled with the pages of their history. Let me tell you, my fellow countrymen, that the twentieth century shall be the century of Canada and of Canadian development. For the next seventy-five years, nay for the next hundred years, Canada shall be the star towards which all men who love progress and freedom shall come.

To those, sir, who have life before them, let my prayer be this: Remember from this day forth, never to look simply at the horizon as it may be limited by the limits of the Province, but look abroad over all the continent ... and let your motto be: "Canada first, Canada last, and Canada always."

Laurier could boast of a booming economy, belated beneficiary of Klondike gold, North America's "Last, Best West" and the National Policy of his Tory predecessor. Scottish-born, a Kingston lawyer, politically bred in the savage religious and racial rivalries of the 1840s and 1850s, John A. Macdonald had learned that any relationship with the French depended on respect: "Treat them as a nation and they will act as a free people generally do - generously. Call them a faction, and they become factious." In old age, he declared:

I have no accord with the desire expressed in some quarters that by any mode whatever there should be an attempt to oppress the one language or to render it inferior to the other; I believe that it would be impossible if it were tried, and it would be foolish and wicked if it were possible.

As prime minister, Sir John A. had a strategy of nationhood, with a great transcontinental railway to bind regions together; immigration to populate the land, and a National Policy of creating opportunities:

We must, by every reasonable means, employ our people, not in one branch of industry, not merely as farmers, as tillers of the soil, but we must bring out every kind of industry, we must develop the minds of the people and their energies. Every man is not fitted to be a farmer, till the soil; one man has a constructive genius, another is an artist, another has an aptitude for trade, another is a skilful mechanic - all these men are to be found in a nation, and if Canada has only one branch of industry to offer them, if these men cannot find an opportunity in their own country to develop the skill and genius which God has gifted them, they will go to a country where their abilities can be employed, as they have gone from Canada to the United States.

Macdonald dreamed that his small Canada of a few million people would someday be a great country. Macdonald faced all the growing pains of a country awkwardly cobbled together. He faced the long struggle to link the continent with a railway, a recurrent world-wide depression, the tragic Northwest conflict in 1885. In 1887, as Senator Kirby knows, Nova Scotia's Liberals even voted to secede.

Canadians were no easier on the sickly young man from St-Lin the Liberals chose as an interim leader. In December of 1886, Wilfrid Laurier came to Toronto to pass a crucial test of his career. A crowd of the curious and even the hostile gathered. They left, enraptured by a future prime minister:

I will say this, that we are all Canadians. Below the Island of Montreal, the water that comes from the north, from the Ottawa, unites with the waters that comes from the western lakes, but uniting they do not mix. There they run parallel, separate, distinguishable, and yet are one stream, flowing within the same banks, the mighty St. Lawrence and rolling on toward the sea, bearing the commerce of a nation upon its bosom - a perfect image of our nation. We may not assimilate, we may not blend, but for all that, we are still the component parts of the same country.

Laurier had also to battle for the hearts and minds of his own people, suspicious then and now of leaders who go to Ottawa and forget them. Here is Laurier at the Club National in Montreal:

Nous d'origine française, avons le sentiment de notre propre individualité. Nous voulons transmettre à nos enfants la langue reçue de nos ancêtres. Mais, en chérissant ce sentiment dans nos coeurs, nous n'admettons pas qu'il est incompatible avec notre nom de Canadiens. Nous sommes des citoyens du Canada, et nous avons l'intention de remplir toutes les devoirs que ce titre implique.

Cela dit, dès que nous invitons des hommes d'une autre race à notre table, nous affirmons qu'ils sont nos concitoyens, tout comme eux affirment que nous sommes leurs concitoyens. Notre pays c'est leur pays : leurs opinions politiques sont nos opinions politiques; nos aspirations, sont leurs aspirations. Ce qu'ils veulent, et ce que nous voulons, c'est que les droits des minorités soient respectés; que nos garanties constitutionnelles soient sauvegardées; que les provinces demeurent souveraines et que le Canada soit uni dans sa diversité.

In Parliament, in an English-speaking Ottawa, he was as uncompromising:

I am the son of a French Canadian, and I declare that je déclare que I am as attached to the language that I learned at her knee as I am to the life that she gave me. And on this ground, I call on every citizen of English origin, to each member of this race to whom the love of home and family is so strong, and each one of them will reply, I know well. that if they were in our position, they would do exactly what we are doing to protect their mother tongue.

Did the Twentieth Century belong to Canada? Not if Laurier's listeners had anticipated that we would become an imperial super-power, dominating and regulating a resentful world. But that was not how the Nineteenth Century had shaped our neighbour either. Between 1800 and 1900, Americans had built a unique and dynamic society, cruel and oppressive to many of its citizens, crudely opulent for others, but rich in opportunities and hope for almost all.

In Canada's twenty-first century, we need signposts to the kind of country we were intended to be. We need occasions to reflect on ourselves - critically, yet with a sense of achievement. Canadians are fortunate to have two early prime ministers who, different as they were, shared a generous, open and far-seeing vision of what Canada could be. It hardly matters which of them told us:

We are a great country, and shall become one of the greatest in the universe if we preserve it; we shall sink into insignificance if we suffer it to be broken.

It matters little because Canada is their common heritage. Let us find a little time each year to learn from their experiences.