with each recession, but hardly declined again in the ensuing upturn.1 At roughly the same time, 1994, McGill economist William Watson was observing that “counting the children of the unemployed, roughly one-fifth of Quebecers are on social assistance [including UI] of one form or another.”2 Welfare does not exhaust the many forms of dependence we created; for example, we pulled many people into various forms of public employment that produced a real income but little real value (a theme to which I return in Chapter 5).
While many people regard this as just the kinder, gentler Canadian society helping out those marginalized by the baby boom, the fact is that this was quite an innovation in Canada. Contrary to an article of faith of our revisionist age, for years one of the things that distinguished Canada from the United States was Canadians’ unbreakable attachment to a demanding work ethic and a strong distaste for any kind of dependence on the public purse. In fact, one of the ways in which the founders of the Dominion thought that the new country distinguished itself from the United States was in the levels of welfare dependence to be found in the populist republic to the south. There voters could and did vote themselves benefits at the expense of the rich,3 a danger of American populist democracy against which Alexis de Tocqueville had warned in his classic Democracy in America. The liberty that was taken to be a British subject’s birthright was thought to be inimical to a radical democracy’s temptation to pursue an equality of condition for its citizens. Such an equality could only be achieved, Canadians believed, by a destructive levelling down of the achievements of society’s most successful members.
Richard Cartwright, a prominent pre- and post-Confederation politician, spoke for almost all his contemporaries when he said in the United Province of Canada legislature in 1865,
I think every true reformer, every real friend of liberty, will agree with me in saying that if we must erect safeguards, they should be rather for the security of the individual than of the mass, and that our chiefest care must be to train the majority to respect the rights of the minority, to prevent the claims of the few from being trampled underfoot by the caprice or passion of the many. For myself, sir, I own frankly I prefer British liberty to American equality.4
Charles Tupper, a Father of Confederation and briefly prime minister of the new Dominion, echoed these sentiments in the Nova Scotia legislature: “It is necessary that our institutions should be placed on a stable basis, if we are to have that security for life and property and personal liberty, which is so desirable in every country.”5
The divide that separated the “two solitudes” of French and English was bridged by a common understanding of the importance of work and the damaging nature of dependence. Étienne Parent, one of the great journalists, public intellectuals, and orators of French Canada in the first half of the nineteenth century gave a passionate speech at L’Institut canadien de Montréal in September 1847 on the theme Work and Humanity (Du travail chez l’homme):6
You will no doubt realise that by “idleness” I don’t merely mean the cessation of all work, but also this laziness of mind which prevents you from developing through your work all the potential of your intelligence, for your own benefit and that of all of humanity.7 [author’s translation]
Parent continued,
Yes, gentlemen, early on in life make regular continuous work a habit and I predict that you will derive great pleasure from your work, that you will love your work for itself over and beyond the personal advantages that you expect from it, just as I predict that idleness or inactivity, once satisfied our indispensable human need for rest, will become for you a source of unbearable boredom.8 [author’s translation]
And Parent issues a clarion call to action to ensure that everyone benefits from the moral advantages that work procures: “And so, gentlemen, let us ensure, through our laws, through our institutions, through our values and through our ideas, that each and every person works in our society.”9 [author’s translation]
Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the first French-Canadian prime minister, reflecting those same French-Canadian roots and the influence of British political liberalism, was a staunch believer in minimalist government and personal responsibility and abhorred any form of welfare dependency. His most famous declaration about Canada’s values (“Canada is free and freedom is its nationality”) is far more stirring than its modern equivalent: Canada is free health care and medicare is its nationality. He once declared that “the role of government [is] ... not to force action in any one direction but to remove barriers to man’s own efforts to undertake personal and social improvement.... Man must be free to seek his own improvement and be responsible for his own destiny.”10 When Australia and New Zealand began experimenting with new state-provided social programs, according to Doug Owram, Laurier was quick to denounce these innovations as inimical to traditional Canadian values: “If you remove the incentives of ambition and emulation from public enterprises,” Laurier said on the subject in 1907, “you suppress progress, you condemn the community to stagnation and immobility.”11
William Lyon Mackenzie King, who eventually succeeded Laurier as both Liberal Party leader and prime minister, agonized in his early book Industry and Humanity over what he foresaw as the corrosive effects on Canadians’ character of the relatively activist government he was attracted to. And in fact his record as prime minister shows that he too was predominantly a traditionalist who thought that people were best left alone to resolve their own problems rather than having government play that role, although he certainly was not averse to introducing just enough minimal welfare state measures to keep the Liberals in office—welfare if necessary, but not necessarily welfare.
Mackenzie King was also surrounded by people who shared this world view. When, as Laurier’s minister of labour, Mackenzie King engaged in some unwonted interventionism (he used legislation to end a railway strike), Laurier thought this a very ill-advised innovation, and the minister was lectured in Parliament by a senior Liberal MP about this departure from the sound principle that the government that governed least governed best.
Immigration in the early days did not challenge this orthodoxy in favour of freedom and personal responsibility, even though Canada at the time was admitting newcomers at a ferocious pace. As Laurier’s minister of immigration, Clifford Sifton, famously remarked in 1922 of the millions of Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and other East Europeans admitted under his supervision: “I think a stalwart peasant in sheep-skin coat, born on the soil, whose forefathers have been farmers for ten generations, with a stout wife and a half dozen children, is good quality.”12
In other words, these were people inured to hard work and more than capable of looking after themselves. There was no question of people being admitted to fall on the public charge. Everyone, native born or immigrant, was expected to look after themselves, and unemployment was almost universally seen as a personal failure and disgrace.13
At about the same time, Stephen Leacock, one of the country’s most influential public intellectuals, was warning,
We are in the danger of over-government; that we are suffering from the too-great extension of the functions of the State; that it is doing already great harm to our economic life, and threatening greater still; doing a great deal to undermine the sounder principles of morality and self-reliance, and doing much to imperil the older and sterner spirit of British liberty on which our commonwealth was founded.... In my opinion we are moving towards socialism. We are moving through the mist; nearer and nearer with every bit of government ownership and government regulation, nearer and nearer through the mist to the edge of the abyss over which our civilization may be precipitated to its final catastrophe.14
Leacock feared that we were edging toward the abyss in 1924, when government spent about 11 per cent of GDP, roughly a quarter of what it controls today,15 which is itself down from its peak of over one-half of GDP in 1992.16
This
