that the authors of The Canadian Century have reminded us of Laurier’s plan, it is easy to see why the actions we took in the Redemptive Decade brought Sir Wilfrid’s prescriptions to mind. We thought we were just wrestling with the problems of the day, but now we can see that both the problems, and the right way to solve them, are bred into Canada’s deepest history and character.
All of these reforms and the benefits they conferred on Canada, this return to Canada’s roots in Laurier’s plan, might have been enough to give Canada a shot at making the twenty-first century Canada’s century. But the authors show that in fact our neighbour and long-time friendly competitor, the United States, is also contributing. Its contribution, sadly, is to stumble economically, leaving the field open for Canada to shine. Truth be told, American public finances are in a mess and that mess is deepening. If we want to see what would have become of Canada had we not lived through the difficult changes of our Redemptive Decade, we need look no further than Washington, DC, where unreformed entitlements and undisciplined borrowing are hobbling America’s power to be a world leader and to outshine Canada on the economic front.
You don’t need to agree with every one of the authors’ prescriptions to be infected by their optimism about Canada’s prospects. They are surely right to say that Canada cannot rest on its laurels from the Redemptive Decade. It would be easy to slip back into persistent government deficits, to allow stimulus spending to endure long after its justification has disappeared, and to fail to achieve for Canada the competitive tax advantage Laurier recommended. On the other hand, perhaps they are too optimistic about the appetite on both sides of the border for the kind of institutional deepening of our bilateral relationship that they recommend, and about Canada’s prospects if we are so closely tied to an America with major economic problems.
Still, it is refreshing and encouraging to see these important policy thinkers in our country pointing out that Canada doesn’t need to take a back seat to anybody, and that our fate lies within our own hands if we have the courage, the energy, and the enthusiasm to grasp it. It is not often that Canadians talk about moving out of America’s shadow—for far too long we have simply assumed that being in that shadow was the natural order of things. Crowley, Clemens, and Veldhuis remind us that Sir Wilfrid Laurier thought that all things were possible for us, and today they show, with an impressive array of facts to support their argument, that Laurier’s plan for Canada can still carry us through to that Canadian century we have all been eagerly awaiting for over a hundred years.
Toronto, January 2010
The good Saxon word, freedom; freedom in every sense of the term, freedom of speech, freedom of action, freedom in religious and civil life and last but not least, freedom in commercial life.
Sir Wilfrid Laurier, 1896
We are a free and happy people, and we are so owing to the liberal institutions by which we are governed, institutions which we owe to the exertions of our forefathers and the wisdom of the mother country.
Sir Wilfrid Laurier, 1877
Let us remember what Sir Wilfrid said and why he said it. “As the nineteenth century was that of the United States, so I think the twentieth century shall be filled by Canada,” he told the Ottawa Canadian Club in 1904. Later that year he repeated himself, telling another audience: “I think we can claim that it is Canada that shall fill the twentieth century . . . For the next seventy-five years, nay the next hundred years, Canada shall be the star towards which all men who love progress and freedom shall come.”
Robert Bothwell and J.L. Granatstein
part I: How to Have Your Very Own Century
chapter one
LAURIER’S PLAN FOR CANADA
When in 1904 Sir Wilfrid Laurier1 proclaimed that “the twentieth century would be filled by Canada,” this was no mere boastfulness. We were one of the richest countries in the world; we enjoyed boundless natural resources, an energetic population, a privileged place in the great commercial empire established and defended by the imperial metropole, Britain, and reasonable access to American markets.
We had built a national railway across the vastness of the West, and immigrants were arriving on our shores in larger numbers, relative to our population, than anywhere else in the world. In the first twenty years of the twentieth century, our population grew by an unprecedented two-thirds.2 Canada was a magnet to the world. Our future seemed assured.
Laurier had a plan to make sure that this unprecedented flowering would be no seasonal bloom, briefly drawing every passerby’s glance before withering away. He was putting in place a plan to fill, not a decade or two, but a full century with Canada’s rise to prominent adulthood on the world stage. It was a plan that found its roots deep in Canada’s origins, in the ideas of its founders, and in the hard work and dogged determination of those who had already been building the country since the founding of the first colonies.
But just as Wayne Gretzky was rightly called hockey’s Great One because he saw each play unfolding in his mind and knew what each player would do before he did it, Laurier was the one who saw and understood what had to happen for Canada to become a great nation. The whole plan was sketched out in his mind, and for almost sixteen years he patiently coached all the players in Canada, and slowly, methodically, he shaped our institutions, our landscape, and our relations with Britain and America to the end of making Canada the most prosperous, dynamic, and attractive country on earth.
Like all great leaders, it was less that he invented anything new than that he learned the secrets of how to call forth from each and every person the very best they had to offer, so that what emerged under his wise and thoughtful ministrations was simply the potential that he saw still slumbering within our awakening nation.
And that great awakening, that rise to full consciousness of Canada under his stewardship, remains a tale of heroic exploits still recounted in hushed and admiring tones by those who have not forgotten just how distinguished that period of our history was. For we were not merely talking about overtaking America as the world’s awakening economic giant and the light unto the benighted masses of foreign lands; we were hard at work creating that future every day.
This was in marked contrast to the doldrums into which Canada, like much of the world, had sunk in the thirty years following Confederation. The new country, so full of promise, seemed in those early years to have lost something of its effervescence, even though no one can deny the great achievements of the era—the admission of three new provinces, the purchase of Rupert’s Land, the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), and the country’s survival of the upheaval and division of the Riel Rebellion. Still, having achieved the Herculean feat of piecing together the country, the government and the people then seemed progressively to lose economic energy, while indulging in fits of patronage, scandal, timidity, and self-destructive protectionism.3
Then, in 1896, came Laurier.
By 1910, half a million immigrants had entered Canada on Laurier’s watch, many of them bound for the West, where the expansionist settlement policies of aggressive Minister of the Interior Clifford Sifton and his successors had made our “last best west” a magnet for the world’s dispossessed. In that first decade of the new century,
