bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1992) — Summer 1992 // Été 1992, pp. 11–12
by Heath Macquarrie, University of Toronto
Press. 1992, 378 pp. $35.00
Senator Heath Macquarrie was the Progressive Conservative Member of Parliament for the Prince Edward Island constituency of Hillsborough (still the dual riding of Queens when he was first elected in 1957) for over twenty years. He never became a cabinet minister, but was an active member of the Standing Committee on External Relations, was a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly, and travelled widely on parliamentary business over the years. He was appointed to the Senate in 1979 by Prime Minister Joe Clark
The excerpt printed here is from his political memoirs, Red Tory Blues, soon to be published by the University of Toronto Press.
Senator Macquarrie, like any good Maritimer, never lost touch with his Maritime roots. Politics is fiercely partisan in eastern Canada, but frequently the regional perspective will override party positions, as the following passage from his book demonstrates.
Rick Belliveau, Editorial Board The 1988 vote gave the Mulroney government a mandate for free trade. When the House of Commons met after the election the two opposition parties began a foolish and futile course of obstruction. The government’s eventual use of closure seemed justified. All Canadians can now hope that the measure will generally be beneficial. But sadly I am inclined to believe that it won’t be as helpful as its proponents declared it would be.
So refined are our modern polling techniques that a young ministerial executive assistant forecast the result for me in my office on the Thursday before the election. Based on knowledge of last-minute polling, he assured me there would be a majority government but that the likely result in PEI would be a Grit sweep. As I said to Isabel that night: ’Monday’s great national effort is almost an anticlimax.’
Even before this astute tip I had heard worrisome predictions about PEI. Naturally I hoped for the best. At such a volatile time I didn’t expect Conservative wins in the two seats where the incumbents weren’t running, Malpeque and Egmont. But Pat Binns, reoffering in Cardigan, was as close to the ideal MP as one can get. In Hillsborough, Tom McMillan was a credit to any constituency or any government. He was active, intelligent, personable, and, though young, highly experienced in politics. Even after a lifetime in politics I was shaken by the loss of Pat Binns and Tom McMillan. At a dinner at the Australian high commissioner’s residence on the Friday before the election, I was asked why PEI seemed to be so strongly against free trade. Although it was a difficult question I welcomed it, since it forced me to organize my thoughts on what motivated my own people.
Certainly it was not because of any demerits in our candidates. Nor was there any strong preference for John Turner as leader. Our provincial premier was actively supporting the Liberals, but in other provinces the views and efforts of the premier seemed not so significant. In my own early days in politics, many of our old people were fearful about voting PC lest their pensions be endangered. Some Liberal activists were both expert and active in sowing seeds of anxiety. In 1988 there were reflections of old-time scare tactics. Also it must be noted that in PEI, as in the Atlantic region generally, there are few big business establishments to mount the opposite type of pressures which were felt in more industrial areas.
But there were other reasons for PEI taking such a strong and contrary stand against the general trend in the country. Behind the Free Trade Agreement, with its stress on the value of great trading blocs, economies of scale, mergers, integration, and the like, there stands the suggestion that bigness of itself is a virtue or even a necessity in the modern world. In PEI we have to believe that small can be beautiful. If economic rationalization is the be-all and the end-all, our continuing existence as a province might someday be ruled counterproductive. When our ancestors, often with reluctance, joined others to form a Dominion, north-south trade with the United States was not considered the big thing. Rather were they sold on the great east-west economic movements which would build a great nation. Many Maritimers to this day have a small feeling of having sacrificed a good deal to join Confederation. This was somewhat relieved by aid from the central government, subsidies, grants, regional expansion funds, and a host of other compensations. If the vitality and clout of the federal government were to be diminished in a supranational trade bloc, what capacity would a Canadian government retain to redress some of the regional imbalances which so heavily burden the Maritime economies?
To a substantial degree it was a careful reflection, vague anxiety, and a degree of independent thought which prompted PET’s election performance on 21 November 1988.
Not surprisingly, in the months after the 1988 election I gave much thought to the effect of the Free Trade Agreement upon the Canadian people. Because of the procedures by which the measure was dealt with in the Senate prior to the election, I was never faced with the decision of being for or against it on a recorded vote. After the 1988 election the Liberal majority properly decided to cease their opposition to the FTA. Considering the result of the election and believing that the Senate should not oppose the legislation of a newly elected government, I had no difficulty in voting for the measure on 30 December 1988.
But there was more to it than the terms of the Free Trade Agreement. It seems to me that the present PC government has forgotten that an essential part of Canadian nationalism has been founded on a belief that mere imitation of the American way of life was an insufficient and erroneous way of expressing our national identity. To a large degree we share a great continent with the Americans. We are like them, but we are different. John A. Macdonald knew that. So did Robert Borden. Bennett, as he said at the Charlottetown meeting in 1935, most certainly did. John Diefenbaker did not wish to subsume our way of life under Americanism. I have an uneasy feeling that our present leader Brian Mulroney has no pulse beat for this kind of classic Canadianism.
I had this worry as I saw the cosy relationship developing between President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Mulroney. The Shamrock Summit of 1985 may have been good theatre, but it was not a great moment for Canadian nationalists. I used to be proud of Canada’s role in the world. We carved out a role for ourselves as a trusted peacekeeper. We were the voice of moderation at the UN and other international assemblies. John Diefenbaker refused to go along with the Americans regarding Cuba, in the early Castro days. Lester Pearson, even in the United States, called for a cessation of the bombing of North Vietnam.
But on the Gulf crisis of 1990-1 it would take a very sharp detective to see much difference between the views and utterances of Washington and those of Ottawa.
I am troubled not only in the field of foreign policy. I fear that a highly casual attitude pervades the present governing party when it comes to serious issues of Canadian nationalism. John A. Macdonald and his colleagues believed that a strong central government was necessary to counterbalance the enormous power of the nation to the south of us. The transcontinental railway for Macdonald was essential to our burgeoning nationhood. Borden opposed reciprocity which he saw as closely equivalent to commercial union which would precede political union. Another Conservative, R.B. Bennett, sensed that we must control our airlines and our airways. One of his greatest initiatives was the creation of the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Corporation (CRBC), the predecessor of the CBC. A prince of capitalism, he nevertheless saw the need for state involvement in the media. His enunciation of the media’s mandate in the House of Commons on 18 May 1932 reads well to this day.
First of all, this country must be assured of complete control of broadcasting from Canadian sources, free from foreign interference or influence. Without such control radio broadcasting can never become a great agency for communication of matters of national concern and for the diffusion of national thought and ideals, and without such control it can never be the agency by which national consciousness may be fostered and sustained and national unity still further strengthened…
The cruel slashes of 1990 in the spending of the CBC seem a far cry from the Bennett years. Even in the depths of a Depression profoundly more miserable than today’s recession, Bennett found sufficient moneys for the CRBC. In those days the total government budget was a mere fraction of today’s vast expenditure.
From the first day I entered the PC caucus in 1957 I heard a heavy strain of hostility to the CBC. Personally I thought that the CBC had done great things for the development of the Canadian intellectual and artistic community. When a CBC outlet was established in Prince Edward Island, the political awareness of all the media was uplifted, and coverage of public affairs increased on all the outlets. The cutbacks announced in late 1990 were hurtful to the CBC. Some of these were particularly difficult to justify. What kind of reasoning would put Windsor in the forefront for closure? Some funny things happen in the the world of politics. I had the feeling throughout the debates on the Free Trade Agreement, the 1988 election, and the Meech Lake Accord that the CBC’s ’neutrality’ had a noticeable and consistent slant to the PCs. I also thought it a remarkable coincidence that, amid the swirling criticism of station closures and 1100 job cuts at the CBC, its president, Gérard Veilleux, should be given the country’s highest public service award.
During the Mulroney years, there was also widespread criticism about the drastic cuts in the Via Rail service and the closure of many post offices in small Canadian communities, both in the name of restraint. Actually the nation’s rail passenger service was under the gun long before 1985. Railway abandonment was a complaint during the Trudeau years. Sometimes railway service was first downgraded and then withdrawn because the public weren’t using the service. It may be that this did happen, but there seemed to be a widespread deploring of the loss of our railways by many Canadians who, while they may have loved railways, didn’t use them. Once upon a time Canadians accepted the view that there were many services which were provided to the citizenry whether or not they were profitable. Today we have accepted too readily a user-pay mentality. We never would have built the country we have if such a view had prevailed in the great years of national Canadian development and growth.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1992) — Summer 1992 // Été 1992, pp. 11–12. Read the rest of this issue →
