Catatonic Canada

...They were British.The national flag contained a Union Jack...

...With the Suez Crisis of 1956, Canadians, like the rest of the world, could see that Britain as an international power no longer mattered...

...Douglas, had he been speaking 30 years earlier about right-wing nationalists, would have used a different metaphor...

...WhenTito finally died, following his limbs into limbo or worse,andthe predictable prepared appreciations appeared on page and screen, I considered it a sure sign of God's mercy that He had not permitted Evelyn Waugh to live into these dark days...

...nationalists must have some reason for believing that their dreams will come true, or else they...

...A cabinet decree issued while we were still at peace in August 1939, invoking a law passed by the federal parliament in 1914, empowered Ottawa to control the price of automobiles throughout the Second World War...

...The law calling this frontier Albion into existence provided for an Established Church and a hereditary peerage . Fifties historians regarded it as having been deservedly entitled ''The Canada Act ." Being British, however, did not mean being committed to political reaction .Even the Loyalists, as the late W.L...

...In 1980 choosing a Brit had come to symptomize the worst sort of colonialmindedness...

...As a Canadian he would have had a mind that necessarily moved along international lines...

...131-3...

...Waugh, who once said that all fates are worse than death, was regarded in his lifetime as a disgruntled curmudgeon, aneccentric who flourished an ear trumpet at table, as one who dearly loved a lord and was nostalgic for a time when nobles led lives of extravagant waste while the vast majority of the citizenry was consigned to grubby oblivion...

...Whether true or false, their picture of Canada as a manifestation of British world culture in North America was at least a coherent one...

...This simplification of the man has shown up quite often in reviews of the diariesand,morerecently,the letters.t That Waugh had contempt for politicians is certainly true but it did not approach Belloc's who had sat twice in Parliament...

...No longer...

...Federally ordered school busing is a Canadian impossibility, and so is the issuing of federal injunctions against school prayer...

...Born a hundred miles further north, he would have had access to a world culture...

...The book's ideological tone is set by a quotation from Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality used as a heading for the.first chapter: "The Poetsened Canadianism, actually berated Ottawa for not calling out the army to protect innocent Montrealers from priest-led separatist demonstrators...

...July 1st became Canada Day, and we were left in Orwellian doubt as to whether there ever had been a Dominion Day...

...The Board had no option but to cave in...

...Hadn't he heard of Canada, where the very last thing the average pioneer wanted was frontier democracy...

...Loyalists and Quebeckers might look back on different pasts...

...In 1964 they were amalgamated with the army, ordered into green commissionaire-style uniforms, and given the all-purpose label,the Canadian Armed Forces...

...The reverent tone with which telecasters sent Tito on the way to his Particular Judgment suggested that this butcher had been one of the architects of victory in World War iI...

...16THE AMERICAN SPECTATORMAY 1981...

...both were what Arthur Lower, another Morton contemporary, called Canadians in the making...

...Like the West, Quebec too has been moved by the new national mythologists from being a beneficiary to being a victim of British rule...

...The Quebec Act of 1774, for which Jefferson had such harsh words, was their culturalMagna Carta...

...The most influential among them having got their doctorates either in Britain or from Britons, they took for granted that Anglo-centricity was an intellectual virtue...

...The degree to which the unauthorized has become the authorized may be gauged not just from the rising popularity in Canadian Studies circles of such platitudinous prairie Marxism, but from the fact that the Mounties themselves are currently under investigation for wrongdoing, it used to be popularly claimed that a Mountie always gets his man...

...FLQ terrorists were simply over-enthusiastic patriots...

...Britain, it now appears, was no better than any other imperialist power...

...First to go were the Royal Canadian Navy and the Royal Canadian Air Force...

...grade-school children learned by heart the names of the Royal Family, and being a British subject automatically entitled you to vote in Canadian elections . But nowhere was there a more obvious old-country glint than in the eyes of fifties intellectuals . In books with such titles as Dominion of the North, The Kingdom of Canada, and The North Atlantic Triangle they placed Canada's past firmly in an-imJohn Muggeridge is an instructor at Niagara College of Applied Arts and Technology in iWelland, Ontario . 12John Muggeridge CATATONIC CANADA Getting by un-Britishly . perial perspective . Their thesis was that Canada had attained nationhood not by breaking with the British Empire but by imitating it...

...their Aid Programs sent tractors to lands ploughable only by water buffalo and installed electric-razor outlets in facilities designed for use only by Sikhs...

...Thenceforth it was pro-monarchists who were out of the intellectual mainstream...

...It was all a question of escaping the written-constitution syndrome . Morton points out that the Crown is Canada's equivalent of "We, the People . . ."For Canadians, in other words, the authority to govern comes from the authority which governs.We are prosecuted by Crown Attorneys, investigated by Royal Commissions;we funnel our political grievances through Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition . THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1981 Who shall guard the guardians...

...BUtaccording to Last-Cannon-Shot theorists British rule in North America did more than just provide Canadians with a focus for national loyalty...

...But what the Mortons and Martins liked best about the Anglo-Canadian system was the way in which it facilitated government action...

...They felt more at home in the Province of Quebec than they would have done in the State of Louisiana...

...another such executive order, this time issued without reference to previous legislation, sent 15,000 Canadians into combat in France when the specific conditions under which they had enlisted included a government undertaking that they would not be sent overseas...

...The revised standard edition of Canadian history is nowhere more clearly reflected than in the two volumes of Robin Martin's 1972 history of British Columbia, The Rush For Spoils and Pillars of Profit...

...both were social conservatives...

...Cosmopolitanism came naturally to Canadians...

...Lawrence Valley created a true community of interests among its inhabitants...

...Such lapses were the penalty for having turned their backs on Europe...

...Through Canada's connection with Britain she had access to what Chester Martin, a constitutional historian from the Morton era, called "a teeming laboratory of constructive statesmanship...

...now what he always seems to get is his innocent victim of police brutality...

...Certainly, however, his action was popular with Canadian voters, particularly voters who, since October 1970, have steadily supported his party, and even intellectuals, despite all their talk of bleeding hearts and bleeding country, were as much pro-separatist as they were anti-interventionist...

...Dismayed by Welfare State England, Waugh had .thought of moving to Ireland, but in the end decided o stay in his native land when he realized life could be tolerable there if he pretended he was a tourist...

...Nationalism is above all an ideology of hope...

...He calls them ''unreconstructed North Americans" and asserts that they favored representative institutions every bit as strongly as did the signers of the Declaration of Independence . Where they dif-fered with Jefferson's party was over the question of legitimacy...

...Why, the guardians themselves, of course, in the name of the British parliamentary system...

...A year late r, after a few months of acrimonious debate, the Union Jack went, being replaced by a red, white, and not-blue maple-leaf flag...

...Twenty years later Canada's largest newspaper, the Toronto Star, described the Queen as a foreign ruler and wondered how much longer Canadians, a majority of whom now came from countries outside the British Isles, would go on accepting her as their head of state...

...For a few years after 1956 the pilgrimages to Duke continued, and John Diefenbaker went on shaking his jowls in favor of the Commonwealth, but even he was realist enough in 1958 to sign the North American Air Defense Agreement...

...As for advancing the valid claim that the sort of public-sector empire-building that Ottawa and Quebec City are currentlygoing in for is a prime cause of inflation: in today's intellectual climate it would be tantamount to treason...

...Above the 49th Parallel Indians were pacified, whiskey traders put down, railways chartered, and administrative structures set up before the arrival of settlement...

...the Anglo-Canadian system was looked "upon not only as a guarantee of Quebec's collective rights, but also as a countervailing force to nativist extremism...

...At graduate school one of the first things we-learned to show a proper scholarly condescension toward was Turner's Frontier Thesis...

...The Actors' Union threatened strike action, and in the end Ottawa got into the act by refusing to grant the old-country candidate a visa on the grounds that the Board had failed to make an adequate search for a Canadian...

...We literally legislate morality...

...He would have been like his predecessors at the Canadian Forum, pro-British and anti-separatist...

...Catholic power in Quebec committed suicide, and separatism by going Marxist went respectable...

...today you must believe in the virtue of government-run auto insurance...

...Didn't he know that Canadians, far from shunning old-world loyalties, positively revel in them, so much so, in fact, that Northrop Frye calls us a garrison society...

...he belonged to it . Like the Loyalists, he took for granted the inherent benevolence of the British system of government .At Westminster the struggle for freedom was over ; ignorance, stupidity, even wickedness might triumph there for a season, but never permanently.However deeply England slept, one day she would wake up again;1984 was a physical impossibility . As Morton saw it, what the Loyalists opted for in choosing to stay British was ideological stability .In rejecting the overtures and later resisting the armies of the Continental Congress they had escaped the whole sterile argument over whether a particular course of legislative action enhanced or violated certain enumerated rights...

...They have now appointed a non-British Canadian and next year, no doubt, we can look forward to a production of Hamlet in parkas...

...In what was one of the last loyalist stirrings in Canada, an irate Conservative opponent of the new flag asked why, after we had been following a cross since the Crusades, we should now have to turn around and follow a leaf, but no one took up his challenge...

...Perhaps it was inevitable...

...Thanks to them a new British North America arose beside the ashes of the old one, "the very image and transcript," as its first governor boasted, "of the British Monarchy...

...Having ended Custer's Last Stand, the Sioux Chief, Sitting Bull, moved to Canada where, still anointed with war paint, he tamely submitted while Major James Walsh of the North West Mounted Police rode into his camp with six companions to procure the return of stolen horses...

...By staying British, Canada had stayed enlightened...

...The New Romans themselves admitted as much by making their annual push northwards to our Stratford Shakespearean Festival, listening clandestinely to the Voice of Britain in America as heard through the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and enrolling in droves at such institutions of higher learning as Massey College, Toronto, where gowns are worn and port circulates in the best Oxford manner...

...The standard whereby Waugh judged the modern world will be missed by anyone who does not take his Catholicism seriously...

...authority, far from being the enemy of freedom, was its precondition...

...Until around 1960 the ideological Children of Light in Quebec were federalists...

...It is no surprise that John Kenneth Galbraith cut his academic teeth in Canada...

...Enemies of the Left are per se enemiesof the new Canada...

...Waugh might have been depressed by this *A Little Order, Little Brown,.1981, $12.95, "Our Guest of Dishonour," pp...

...In 1980, for the first time in the Festival's history, public criticism was leveled against the Board of Governors for appointing a British director...

...Canadianism began here...

...He tried to explain North American history solely in tei-ms of North America, arguing that the Frontier, not Europe, had shaped the American psyche...

...To Morton's generation Rousseau was anathema, equality a false American god, and the uniqueness of the British system consisted in its capacity both to civilize man and to save humanity...

...Whether or not Trudeau tell us it was gold and silver, but for thedid exercise more than minimum force-philosophers it was iron and corn which first civilized man and ruined humanity...

...Fading images quickly lose their credibility, and as the pace of change quickened, so did the need for it come to seem more obvious...

...French Catholics joined English Protestants in giving it their allegiance because a government committed to hierarchy and kingship suited them better than one dedicated to liberty and equality...

...The sad fact is-that Canadian neo-Conservatives have no Ronald Reagan to vote for, and no prospect of finding one...

...On dune and headland sank the fire...

...The great advantage which scholars such as Morton saw in this arrangement was its flexibility...

...they might speak different languages and practice different religions, but ideologically they were on the same wavelength...

...There was no point, however, in blaming Turner for his terrible simplifications...

...Canada in the interim had gone from being a nation ofenlightened counter-revolutionaries to being a colony of oppressed subject peoples...

...It was a leading fifties assumption that theytoo liked the Union Jack better than the Stars and Stripes...

...it kept them in touch with the world at large...

...Thencame the debunking sixties...

...To be a good Canadian it used to be necessary to salute the Union Jack...

...Neo-Loyalists such as Morton never tired of contrasting the efficiency of constitutional monarchy with the cumbersomeness of the American congressional system, and their favorite example of this difference was the history of the West...

...a 1968 Liberal Party majority at Ottawa, with what then Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau, for want of a better title, called "The Omnibus Bill," amended the Canadian Criminal Code to allow legal abortion, homosexuality, and gambling...

...During the War of 1812, as every schoolboy once knew, they even fought for it, Quebec Militia havingstood shoulder to shoulder with Redcoats at the Battle of Chateauguay in 1813, less than sixty years after they had been ranged against each other on the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec...

...Canadians, enjoying as they did what their imperial birth certificate, the British North America Act of 1867, calls "a constitution similar in principle to that of the United Kingdom," could assign to their Queen "by and with the Advice of the Senate and the House of Commons" exclusive power to "make laws for the Peace, Order and good Government of Canada" without so much as raising a civil libertarian eyebrow...

...The victory of Loyalism, so fifties mythology asserted, not only gave Canadians a separate existence in North America...

...it has quickly found its way to the shelves of every university and college library in the country) refers to the erstwhile heroes of the Canadian West as "instruments of racist..,and class oppression...

...We have lost hope in it . We tune out the media profs who tell us that they have found a way out of the impasse over offshore mineral rights, and the Ottawa-desk men who explain to us the importance of preserving French in Medicine Hat, Alberta, not because we are too lazy or too unlettered to follow their line of reasoning, but because we have come to the conclusion that it leads to a dead end...

...what chiefly distinguished her was the" slickness of her propaganda, peace, order, and good government being simply a cover-up for colonial exploitation...

...John's...

...Marshall McLuhan with his vision of a global village was typically Canadian...

...The old arguments that Canada is a beneficiary of British rule no longer hold water...

...It served as the basis for a workable national mythology...

...Josip Broz and Yugoslavia are oddly central to Waugh's ultimate assessment of World War II and the peace that followed it...

...The United States, said Northrop Frye, is trapped in an eighteenthcentury trance...

...To be a good Quebecker you used to have to go to Mass on Sundays...

...Americans, to use the title of a 1968 book contributed to en masse by Canadian pundits, were the New Romans--powerful, practical in a limited sort of way, but unpolished, possessing know-how but lacking savoirfaire...

...Major Walsh has been publicly stripped of his buttons...

...at least he would never have been foolish enough to conclude that history is a North American affair...

...The fact that leftism is by all accounts the most discredited of world ideologies sufficiently explains the current mood of disillusionment with constitutional reform...

...Morton, author of The Kingdom of Canada,claims, were Tories only by force of circumstance...

...In 1953, Tito came on a state visit to England, and Waugh mounted a campaign of protest, one sample of which is to be found in Donat Gallagher's collection of his journalism.* Waugh felt that "an imposture was being attempted on the British public by representing Tito as a gallant ally when in fact he had been a treacherous enemy and as a liberal statesmafi when he was in fact a doctrinaire Marxist persecuting the Church in a way of which the general public was kept ignorant...

...From the start there was the masterly command of tThe Letters of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Mark Amory, Ticknor & Fields, $25.00...

...Nor was this closing of ranks by the conquered with their conquerors a result simply of blind obedience...

...In the pre-Third-World fifties (ah, blessed THE AMERICANSPECTATORMAY198113 thought...

...I do not aspire to advise my Sovereign in her choice of servants...

...By contrast, Tommy Douglas, a leader of the federal left-wing opposition, complained that the government had used "a sledgehammer to crush a peanut...

...Sympathy for FLQ aims if not for their methods is a theme that runs through the literature generated by that crisis...

...By 1978, what with prime ministers beginning to replace the Queen on banknotes and miniature Canadian flags beside the words "Canada Post Postes Canada" appearing on mail boxes, the de-Britishing of Canada had reached the point where as acute and well-briefed an observer as William Safire could describe us as "a parliamentary republic...

...The British Community of Nations was their own ideological turf, one international grouping into which the United States could not follow them, and they used to like nothing better than to make scholarly pilgrimages to the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at Duke University in North Carolina, where they would discourse on Britain's role as a Third Force or talk portentously about the need to heal the rift among English-speaking peoples caused by the American Revolution...

...Like all liturgical revolutions Canada's developed a momentum of its own...

...Like the rest of us he knew that it was time for Canadians to start following a nonBritish star, even though as things now stand it is extremely unlikely that the last guided missile in defense of United States rule in North America will be launched by a Canadian...

...To them rebellion in the name of popular sovereignty was unjustifiable;they wanted to go on living in a North American way, but under British institutions . So they moved to Canada . And in Morton's view they could not have hit on a wiser destination . Morton not only documented the Loyalist Tradition...

...According to the Anglophile school ofwestern mythologists, Sitting Bull and his compatriots put themselves peacefully under Ottawa's jurisdiction because they knew in their hearts that the Great White Squaw in whose name Ottawa did business meant well...

...it was still possible to talk with a straight face about Britain's civilizing mission, and no faces were straighter than those of Canadian academics...

...Because it has been presidedover by doctrinaire leftists such as Trudeau and Levesque who have succeeded in identifying their particular brand of statism with Canada's emerging nationhood...

...When in the middle fifties Sir Tyrone Guthrie and his merrie troupe of Old Vickers were brough t over at public expense to put on Shakespeare in a small Ontario railway town that happened to be called Stratford, the consensus was that it was the best thing that had happened to Canadian culture since Rhodes scholarships...

...It emancipated Canadian Catholics over half a century before a similar happy fate befell their coreligionists in Britain...

...Canada, being British, can move with the times...

...But the most remarkable expression of the changed attitude among Canadian intellectuals towards separatism was their response to the FLQ crisis of October 1970...

...Some years back Quebec's provincial legislature legally placed a crucifix behind the Speaker's chair, and more recently the highest court in Canada has upheld the legality of a Quebec law closing all but French-speaking public schools to the children of immigrants from foreigncountries as well as from other Canadian provinces...

...Then, one day the government quietly dropped "Dominion" from its vocabulary (despite the fact that the British North American Act expressly designates us "OneDominionunderthe nameof Canada...

...Andso did French Canadians...

...both equated revolution with treason...

...the armed forces wore British-style uniforms...

...in America's it depended on lynch mobs and vigilantes...

...Their ambassadorsmisspelled proper names...

...Questions such as whether or not the new constitution should have an entrenched bill of rights may excite the fancy of cabinet ministers and academics, but what they inspire in most Canadians is a mounting desire to switch channels . This is not to say that we lack interest in our collective future...

...And finally, even the Britishness of the Stratford Festival has come under attack...

...today one has to pay comparable homage to Petro-Canada, and even Joe Clark's Conservative administration did not dare to tamper with the state-owned oil company...

...14John's College, Oxford, began his public career in the Canadian High Commissioner's Office in London, and later won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work at the United Nations in defusing the Suez Crisis of 1956...

...In Trudeau's Canada, where the only Britishism to survive is a predisposition in favor of government intervention, we are resident aliens.[] RalphMcInerny WAUGH AT PEACE Any writer who can make Dickens an instrument of torture has more than talent...

...It is the Ottawa authorities, who are perceived to have overreacted...

...British Canada gave them what, in the nature of things, the United States could riot: an officially recognized collective existence...

...Then came the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s...

...Today the task of publicly defending the real meaning of the Crown has largely devolved on the Canadian League of Monarchists, a doughty band of old believers centered in Montreal who publish a newsletter, keep a media watch, and are Her Majesty's best gift tO talk-show moderators and letters-column editors...

...Can-adians spent the decade in an orgy of throwing out British models...

...The confiscatory taxes of the Socialist State enraged him but he did not, as so many English authors did, escape taxation by going abroad, there to pay lip service to the "progress"being made at home...

...Meanwhile,a new un-British version of THE AMERICANSPECTATORMAY1981 Canadian history is in the making...

...Thomas Jefferson might rail all he liked at George III for "abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighbouring province," but the inhabitants of the neighboring province in question blessed that king for having done so, even naming their sons after him...

...In Canada's West order came out of the barrel of a Mountie's revolver...

...separatists in those Britannic days were billed as Catholic reactionaries, and in the late thirties the Canadian Forum, L 'Osservatore Romano of enlight-when, political kidnapping and murder having taken place, he called out the army and invoked the War Measures Act-~ cannot be known for certain uhtil all the facts come out...

...Martin has government and big business join hands in looting the natural resources and destroying the indigenous culture of unoffending pre-industrial North America...

...Poor old Frederick Jackson...

...below it the settlers had to contend by them:,elves with wilderness living, as v,,~'i as w~th their own anarchic natures...

...The last cannon shot in defense of British rule in North America, to borrow a quotation much favored by firstyear history lecturers and givers of papers at national unity conferences twenty yearsago, was indeed destined to be fired by a French Canadian...

...Oxford was their Athens...

...it refined them...

...EvelynWaugh's debut as a writer did not suggest that he meant himself to be taken seriously on any score...

...Their Frenchness and Catholicity are guaranteed by imperial statute...

...Canada, they argued, was a UK on the St . Lawrence ; its founding fathers were the Loyalists who fought for George III during the American Revolution and later fled north to escape the horrors of republicanism...

...He suffered the misfortune of coming from an isolationist tradition...

...Fifties historiography insisted that the coming of British rule to the St...

...In 1953, one of Canada's most influential journalists wrote an essay called "The Real Meaning of the Crown"in which he argued that the British system is ideally suited to a politically and culturally divided society such as Canada...

...Out of the seminar-room window have gone Dominion of the Nort/J, The Kingdom of Canada, and North Atlantic Triangle...

...At Ottawa the only right worth bothering about was the right to govern...

...he might even have got accepted at St...

...What Lower saw the British Empire providing them with was a medium through which to express their likemindedness...

...we watched it happening...

...Under the British dispensation, Morton felt, Queens and Parliaments knew their business...

...Waugh might hope for the success of the Conservative Party, but he did not vote...

...The imposture proved all too successful both in Britain and the United States...

...In the land of the ordered free even taboos come under parliamentary jurisdiction...

...Nations need more than clever lawyers and well-informed journalists to keep them going .They need credible ideologies .Canada's has died, and no amount of redistributing power among its various levels of government can bring it to life again...

...Thus spake Anglo-Canadian liberals of the last generation...

...His first novel, Decline andFall (1928) was a lovely jeu d'esprit which owed more to P.G...

...Canadidns can get things done "Britishly...

...They took their inspiration from Oxford and Westminster...

...must change their THE AMERICAN SPECTATORMAY 198115 dreams...

...When in the late sixties and early seventies, for example, John Diefenbaker beganrightly pointingout thatthe Trudeau policy of transferring royal prerogatives from the Queen to her transAtlantic stand-in, the Governor-General, was closet republicanism, the media depicted him as a man with a royalist obsession...

...Inevitably the new history recasts empire-builders as imperialists...

...The argument was that a home-grown director could do as good a job, if not a better one...

...precedent for political change comes not from the interpretations which ivory-towered judges place on 200-year-old documents, but from the latest development in cabinet procedure at Westminster...

...No wonder Te Deums were sung, so argued Lower and his contemporaries, in Quebec churches on the occasion of Nelson's victory at Trafalgar...

...Thanks, moreover, to the precedent it established, provincial governments in Canada to this day have exclusive jurisdiction over property, civil rights, and education...

...Talk about crushing peanuts with sledgehammers...

...so was Lester B. Pearson, who studied at St...

...We have been demythologized . I thappened in the last 25 years . When I first came here in the late fifties Canadians knew very well who they were supposed to be...

...Why, then, has this necessary adaptation to a changing global reality proved so disastrous...

...Sohas the idea of Canada been divorced from that of Britain...

...Being British meant above all being able to see the wider implication of things...

...History, moreover, or at least history as it was written by the above-mentioned lecturers and paper-givers, proved that French Canadians could not have deployed their artillery more sensibliy...

...Gilbert Pinfold, the hero of Waugh's most autobiographical fiction, is thus put before the reader: "There was a phrase popular at the time, 'It is later than you think.' It was never later than Gilbert Pinfold thought...

...The Canadian intellectual world is a statist's paradise...

...The Mounties, it argues, were "A crucial part in the conscious scheme by which powerful economic and political interests destroyed the economy and way of life of entire peoples and wrested a vast territory from its inhabitants for a pittance...

...CBC documentaries about "Quebec on the March" were no longer complete without footage of Roman Catholic statuary being reduced to rubble, or be-jeaned students burning Union .Jacks, while a chapter on "The Decolonizing of Quebec" became required writing for college history text authors...

...Wodehouse than to Gibbon...

...A 1973 study of Canada's national police force called characteristically An Unauthorized History of the R.C.M.P...

...Ralph Malnerny is Michael P. Grace "Professor o3' Medieval Studies at the University of Notre Dame.but I doubt that he would have been surprised...