bout de papier, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1987) — Fall 1987 // Automne 1987, pp. 9–11
It would be absurd for an old newspaperman to expect, or want, a return to the politics and society of his youth. Ronald Reagan’s aching nostalgia and grand fantasy are not widely shared by Canadians. But today’s ruling generation, even if it reads history books, will not understand how drastically our nation has changed since 1925 when I first worked in the Ottawa press gallery.
Of those largely forgotten days two men will serve as monuments and public Directly below my seat in the uncrowded gallery sits William Lyon Mackenzie King, middle-aged, rotund, smiling and loquacious — not a likeable sort nor yet a success in government. Across the aisle stands Arthur Meighen — lean, pale, ramrod-straight and contemptuous of his successor. When Meighen arraigns the minority Liberal Government in sentences and paragraphs that need no editing, a red line moves up the Prime Minister’s bulging neck and covers his bald head. No one in politics but the icy Opposition leader can beat King. between these rivals was just beginning and would last for two decades until King’s final victory did not occur to me or the nation. That, meanwhile, King would be morally defeated in the 1925 election but would cling to power, that the Customs Scandal of 1926 would bring him to the brink of ruin and that the Constitutional Issue would lift him to the peak of his career to hold office longer than any other man in the English-speaking world — all this was unimaginable.
So was the strange mix of brilliance, honour and folly that distinguished Meighen’s career. The “ready, aye, ready” speech on the Chanak debacle, the Hamilton speech proposing a referendum before Canada entered any war, the attack on Ogdensburg defence agreement as “twilight twitterings” “, above all the arrogant underestimate of King as a windy “charlatan” were fatal mistakes.
Though Meighen was the finer human being of the two the myth of his superior talent is denied by the record. Doubtless Meighen possessed the finest intellectual machinery in our politics before the arrival of Pierre Trudeau but it was not made for government. It was made for law, business and, oddly enough, for enduring personal friendships beyond King’s grasp. But Meighen lacked King’s almost mystical antennae, his sure sense of the public will.
While I suspected none of these facts, I was awed by the decorous manners of Parliament. Today’s noisy brawls in Question Period were then unknown.
Once, from the treasury benches, the newly-arrived Charles Dunning interrupted Meighen by shouting “rats!”, a familiar term of offense. After Meighen had replied in language of classic scorn the master politician of the prairies looked like a whipped schoolboy. That suited King who needed Dunning but accurately saw him as a Liberal competitor.
It took me a long time to realize that in my young days the politicians and the people understood the nation’s business far better than we can understand it now.
Six decades ago, in the quiet town of Ottawa, Canada’s problems that seemed formidable were simple and easily comprehensible by modern standards. When the Commons might spend hours debating the cost of a minor road, wharf or post office and weeks on freight rates, grain prices or the tariff, the government appeared equal to its task. Of no contemporary government can that be said. But all the political parties and most of the citizens in earlier times had totally misconstrued the dangerous world around them.
It was a world recovering from the Great War and on its way to a greater while a prosperous Canada assumed that peace was guaranteed by a League of Nations. Besides, as Senator Raoul Dandurand, the Canadian delegate, informed the League at Geneva, his people inhabited a “fireproof house.”
Even King, after visiting Hitler not long before the second war, told me, in the third-floor sanctum of Laurier House, that the German dictator was a “simple peasant” who, justly awarded the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, would pose no threat to Europe.
If this delusion was remarkable in a seasoned and usually sound judge of men it must be remembered that the people of Canada, nearly all of them, were as isolationist as King and strongly opposed to foreign adventures. They and their leader enthusiastically applauded the Munich deal and praised Neville Chamberlain as the world’s saviour.
John W. Dafoe, the Winnipeg editor, was one of the few prominent Canadians who believed that the ultimate measure of appeasement must soon lead to war. Many of Dafoe’s readers and some of his closest friends deserted him. King had been deceived by Hitler and his own horror of war but he had not misunderstood the feelings of the vast Canadian majority (including, alas, this reporter).
Though he had written an unreadable book, “Industry and Humanity”, “, during his political apprenticeship to reveal the abuses of capitalism and to suggest incomprehensible reforms, King and the Liberal party still counted on the uncontrolled market, the Invisible Hand and sacred memory of Adam Smith to nourish Canada’s prosperity.
When Franklin Roosevelt introduced his New Deal (and saved the free enterprise system from self-destruction) King warned Parliament that the spending of government money would not cure the prevailing depression. Until R.B. Bennett devised a Canadian version of Roosevelt’s policy in a futile attempt to win the 1935 election the Conservative Party, except for its unchanging protectionism, was also devoted to the market.
The mythology of politics was nowhere more distant from the reality than in the old tariff issue. The two parties, alternating in office, tinkered with import restrictions, pushing them up or down, but John A Macdonald’s National Policy was always the spine of the national economy. A western protest movement called the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, headed by the saintly J.S. Woodsworth, advocated total socialist planning which must involve far more protectionism than the old parties favoured. That remains true now in the New Democratic Party, child of the C.C.F
The kaleidoscope of the Second World War revised the entire political pattern.
By 1943 the first believable opinion polls showed King’s government, the Conservative Opposition and the C.C.F. running neck-and-neck. M.J. Coldwell, the C.C.F. leader, seemed likely to become Prime Minister at the next election and he was well fitted for the supreme office. The supreme office.
But having refused King’s invitation to join the cabinet, Coldwell suddenly found himself outflanked by the Liberal strategy and the Conservatives could not discover a credible leader when Bennett retired to the ancestral womb and the British House of Lords.
Convinced that a radical new economic doctrine was required to solve the new problems of society, or at least to win a final election, King announced the postwar Welfare State. It was something like his vague youthful dream and neatly preempted the middle of the road to secure his last mandate in 1945.
From then no party challenged his basic reforms. Instead, his successors multiplied them, usually disguising their future cost. The nation was and is liberal in the strictly non-partisan sense of the word.
At this writing the conventional wisdom holds that North American society as a whole is moving ideologically rightwards and cutting back government when actually it is expanding and the N.D.P. (thanks mainly to the mistakes of the old parties) heads the polls.
Until very recent times no government or opposition seriously addressed Canada’s underlying dilemma, its changed position in the economy of a technological world, and party labels have lost their meaning. For example, Robert Stanfield (who should have been prime minister) was not a Conservative by accepted definition, nor are such men as Brian Mulroney and Joe Clark while the Liberal Party contains many right-wing conservatives and the N.D.P. not a few members skeptical of orthodox socialism.
Partisan geography likewise is changing. Who would have guessed thirty years ago that John Diefenbaker (who once told me than he didn’t know where he stood in the philosophical spectrum) would capture the ancient Liberal bastion of the West and, for one election, Laurier’s and King’s Quebec? The sweep of 1958 was repeated, in spades, by Mulroney in 1984 and its tide, like Diefenbaker’s, may be ebbing already.
Behind all this shifting scenery is a nation that has hardly begun to grasp the nature of its peaceful revolution. Three things, among others, are creating an incalculable future.
During the years of the long postwar boom, after the government of the able Louis St. Laurent had avoided reckless finance and reduced the national debt, Canadians became smug, fat and extravagant in a mockery of their historic character. The Trudeau Government piled up deficits without serious public objection, gutted the treasury and left a budgetary shambles to its successor.
But despite the appalling current figures the public still demands much more from government than it is ready to pay for and the moment of financial truth has been postponed, though not indefinitely.
Trudeau’s constitution, his masterwork, has established a Charter of Rights and Freedoms modeled on the American original and thus begun to politicize the Supreme Court. Like its counterpart in Washington, it will be compelled to render, with bland constitutional language, many decisions of a political nature, decisions vitally affecting the polity. This change alone must profoundly influence the collective and private affairs of our society with consequences unknown.
Against all expectation the birth rate has fallen so far that Canada must seek massive immigration to increase, or even maintain, its present population. The myth of a country dominated by people of British or French origin and hence an overseas appendage of Europe is the relic of an age now dead and buried.
To understand, reflect and govern a different age Canada needs what Dafoe called Great Parties but, he said, they had disappeared for good after the First World War. Apparently he was wrong since King soon organized the most durable party of modern times.
But today Dafoe’s prophesy has been confirmed. There is no Great Party. None commanding the nation’s full confidence. Nor are there in public life any great leaders comparable to Macdonald, Laurier, Borden and King. The cyclical weather of politics has produced a lesson of drought. Followership, too, has declined. Canadians who once conquered a wilderness and pushed the frontier from sea to sea expect miracles from politicians lacking the imagination, money and public trust to meet the new imperatives.
Nevertheless, as an old reporter sees it, the news is not all bad. On the contrary, I would guess that with Quebec’s rejection of separatism and its acceptance of the constitution we have turned our most important and dangerous corner since 1967.
With its mistakes innumerable and its existing politics of confusion Canada is, I believe, a stronger and more enlightened organism than it was at the beginning. No country on earth offers the average citizen a better life. But Canadians, always full of self-doubt, have never fully appreciated the unique good fortune.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1987) — Fall 1987 // Automne 1987, pp. 9–11. Read the rest of this issue →
