John Ralston Saul. Watching Canada's “Grand Experiment”

John Ralston Saul.  Watching Canada’s “Grand Experiment”
Fail

John Ralston Saul feels (completely admirably) near-despair at the present crumbling of the great and unique Canadian vision of an ever-opening and inclusive egalitarianism.  Articulate, alive, travelled, experienced, he feels concern that made him write FAIR COUNTRY (2008).  It addresses the  present crumbling that incarnates his own near-despair. 

FAIR COUNTRY is really two books.  In the one Saul writes history, flawed but fascinating, about what he sees as the Aboriginal roots of much that is best in Canadian civilization.

His argument goes back to the long beginning when the arriving Europeans lived with and learned from the Aboriginal idea of discussion and negotiation in a circle of social and philosophical inclusion.  Saul quotes enough from great Indian and Inuit speakers to make his point about their rich understanding.

He reminds his readers of the long period of real military alliance when respect for and close observation of Indian strategy also shaped the thought and skill of their non-Indian peers.  So much of “Canadian” thinking and acting is drawn from the long association, Saul believes, we are blind to it, responding, often, in Aboriginal-taught ways without consciousness of doing so.

From that core beginning, Saul moves from hope and celebration to near-despair.  He describes the persistent destruction of the Canadian vision in the hands of the elites who are self-willed colonials of U.S. Empire.  In that section especially he is – as the sub-title of his book says – “Telling Truths About Canada”.

Coincidentally, Mel Hurtig has published a book almost at the same time and similarly entitled it:  THE TRUTH ABOUT CANADA.  Both men seem to be suggesting that the normal, authoritative sources are not telling the truth about Canada: press, media, governments, opposition parties, police, the courts.  And both men are correct.

Hurtig meticulously uses – quite largely – the research and reporting of the European-centred Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to reveal how Canada persistently has retreated from ideals of egalitarianism and the well-being of the Canadian people.

The two books touch many of the same deep ills in quite different ways.  They might well be read together.  They are both important to an understanding of the huge struggle Canadians must involve themselves in to gain back the fairness and hope of our “Canadian civilization” (as Saul names it).

Saul’s book has designs on the reader.  It wants the reader to come away knowing specific things.  And so Saul structures the book in ways that I believe are untrue to history.

In the first place, in relation to the U.S.A. – he admits that colonials develop a fawning denial of their own place and a sick reverence for the imperial power.  But he will not touch the fact that colonials are coerced, bribed, suborned, cajoled, and trapped into their colonial position and their colonial-mindedness – as well as, sometimes, willing it themselves. 

Throughout his book, in fact, Saul protects the U.S.A.  He appears to be manoeuvring to make sure he can’t be called anti-American.  And so he has the Canadian elite obsessively colonial-minded, but the U.S. has nothing to do (as he presents the matter) with that condition.

Even dealing with Euro-Canadian history, he leaves out the U.S. involvement.  He cites the key document of 1763 – The Royal Proclamation, which insists the sale of Native lands follow due and public process (and is still legally functioning in Canada).  He cites, too, The Quebec Act of 1774 which strengthened francophone legitimacy and area of power – and set limits to the takeover of Indian land.

He fails to mention that those two acts had much to do with the 1776 U.S. War for Independence.  The U.S. rejected The Royal Proclamation and by the nineteenth century, having grabbed all Indian land, declared the acquisition a product of war.  That means U.S. Indians have no indigenous rights.  In addition, the U.S. overrode the Quebec Act and drove violently to the Pacific.

Both of those facts are key to understanding the Euro-Canadian and Indian alliance as well as how and why Euro-Canadians learned the Aboriginal circle of inclusion. It tells, also, much about why early Canadians clung to the British connection.

Saul ignores that aspect.  By the same token, U.S. “Manifest Destiny” (that it should own Canada), and its incessant incursions upon Canadian sovereignty forced the real (though often strained) Canada/Britain alliance and made the connection extremely important to Canadian survival.  Saul never grants that fact, identifying an important flaw in his thought throughout the book. 

His treatment (or lack of it) of the Canadian participation in Afghanistan, for  instance, is alarming.  George Bush tried to drag Canada into committing troops to the Iraq War.  Chretien refused with his famous “proof is proof” statement.  But (to lower Imperial pressure?) he agreed to commit Canadian troops to Afghanistan. He committed Canadian troops to an openly Imperial  adventure.  A Canadian reason for being in Afghanistan – except as colonials taking Imperial orders – is very hard to find.

Saul says nothing to that effect.  In fact, he says warm things about the good officers in Afghanistan. (Hillbilly Rick Hillier, the killer general souped-up with U.S. training?)

Nothing can explain Saul’s silence, anymore than anything can explain a woman-of-conscience, Adrienne Clarkson, Governor General, travelling to Halifax to wish farewell to the first Canadian soldiers posted to Kandahar Province.  Except as a member of the elite which Saul so savagely excoriates, Governor General Clarkson had no business wishing Canadians soldiers away to fight a plainly U.S. Imperial war as lackeys of the U.S.A.

Incidentally, there is – in the Governor General’s position - support for Saul’s claim that Euro-Canadians deny the Aboriginal people their place in Canada.  So far, we have had an oriental Governor General and a Black one – but not an Aboriginal one.

Saul’s bias is reflected in his failure to know, fairly, the role of the Imperial Unity Movement (1884-1891), the Canada First Movement (1868), and so-called other “reactionary”, “racist” loyalisms.  They have been actively misrepresented by highly biased historians – and Saul, unfortunately, follows their lead.

Of Charles Mair, poet and Canada Firster, Saul suggests he was a racist.  “Of course, Mair didn’t get along with the Metis.  Perhaps it all came back to the idea that the Athenian must be of pure blood.” (p. 31)  In fact, living in St. Albert just before the Riel Rebellion, Mair twice travelled the (then) long journey to Ottawa (1883 and 1884).  He paced the halls of Parliament, telling all MPs who would listen that if something wasn’t done to provide justice for the Metis, there would be trouble.  John A. and the rest ignored him. 

The other Canada Firster beaten up by biased historians, Colonel George Denison, at first refused to go to the action against Riel because of his disgust at Ottawa’s political failure. Then when the remarkable leader, Poundmaker, was jailed, Denison was furious and joined the group that fought (and succeeded too late) to have the Indian leader released.  A police magistrate himself, Denison said the Poundmaker was “convicted on evidence that, in an ordinary trial would have assured his acquittal without the jury leaving the box….”

If Mair and Denison were racists, what were John A. Macdonald, his party, and the opposition members who failed to demand justice for the Metis before the Riel Rebellion and were content to jail the great Poundmaker?

Saul’s statement that the Canada Firsters understood Canada First to mean Britain first is simply and seriously wrong. (p. 257)

In the same spirit of error, Saul misunderstands Macdonald’s famous (1891) remark: “a British subject I was born, a British subject I will die”.  The remark arose from a very strong movement (of the elite Saul dislikes) to establish a Commercial Union between Canada and the U.S. (intended by many to lead to political union).

Learning of the power behind the movement Denison and friends – to balance and fight it in 1884 – worked on an expanded Imperial Unity Movement, using Britain to help hold off the U.S.A. from absorbing Canada.

The battle was joined and had political vigour.  Meetings and speeches and pamphlets followed one upon the other.  A Canadian in New York, Augustus Wiman, had much to do with “Commercial Union”. (He founded the famous Canadian Club in New York, partly to propagandize for Commercial Union.) The famous annexationist, Goldwin Smith, was a leading Canadian supporter.

My own research leads me to be sure the U.S. president was aware of the Commercial Union Movement, but kept a low profile on the matter. Waiting….

The Toronto Globe hired a special editor, Edward Farrer, to further Commercial Union.  He set to work, we are told, to produce a limited number of pamphlets to provide to key U.S. leaders, telling them what ways to cajole and force Canada into Commercial Union.  A worker in the compositing room became alarmed and got the information to Denison and his friends.  They convinced the worker to pull proofs of some of the pages and get them “out” and to sign a sworn affidavit.

The pages were put in the hands of John A. Macdonald.  It was at the time when the key “Commercial Union” election of 1891 was about to be fought.  In the election, Macdonald reported on the pamphlet and to declare his position as opposed to union with the U.S.A. he made his famous statement: “A British subject I was born.  A British subject I will die.”  There was no Canada when he was born, and in 1891 Canada was still not fully independent of Britain constitutionally.

Finally, Saul follows the Northrop Frye colonized reading of John Richardson’s WACOUSTA, getting it all wrong.  Frye’s “garrison mentality” theory about Canada is the total opposite of Saul’s Aboriginal expanding circle vision – and so Saul should have been aware of Frye’s biases.

Frye’s “garrison mentality” is the theory of an intellectual and political colonial.  He believed Canadians were alien from the landscape, that Canadian literature is inferior, and that Canadian society is an artificial, frightened set of “garrisons” alien to and afraid of the great land they are set upon - and the Aboriginal people of that land.

In fact Major John Richardson (part Indian) created a bizarre white man posing as an Indian (Wacousta), trying to get revenge for an Old World quarrel. Indians help to destroy Wacousta, and at the end of the novel white and Native people are living in peace and harmony. They are living, in fact, something like the condition John Ralston Saul believes grew into the expanding, egalitarian, Aboriginal-inspired discussion and negotiation circle.

For reasons he alone can explain, Saul begins his book with a gifted insight into Canadian character and its possibilities in a very difficult world. And then, for some inexplicable reason, (1) he erases the U.S. as a causative factor in the growth of Canadian colonial-mindedness. And (2) he accepts the propaganda from the elite he despises about the independence fighters of the nineteenth century and one of the anchor novels of Canada: WACOUSTA. It was the first novel written by an anglophone Canadian and is a key text in our cultural development.

Maybe John Ralston Saul sees only the industrial and financial elite in Canada, and fails to see there is one, too, in the life of our culture, doing its own work to destroy “Canadian civilization”.