person. I know it may not sound like practical politics to be flashing this kind of red light, but surely we Liberals must get back to fundamental thinking in terms of principles.28
Nor was the traditional political philosophy of individual responsibility and initiative that animated all our national political leaders prior to the 1960s absent on the local level. Dunning, after all, was a former Liberal premier of Saskatchewan. In 1948, Maurice Duplessis left those listening to his government’s Speech from the Throne in no doubt where he stood: “We are of the opinion that state paternalism is the enemy of all progress.”29
To pick another example, almost seventy years ago, Nova Scotia’s greatest premier, Angus L. Macdonald, a Liberal, stood before a Toronto audience and gave a remarkable speech. He told that audience what his part of the country—the Maritimes—needed to overcome its underdevelopment.
The biggest obstacle to the region’s development was what he called “the tariff,” or the old National Policy of Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald. So what could Ottawa do to help?
THE TWO SOLITUDES RECONCILED
But the government dole will rot your soul back there in your home town.
So bid farewell to the Eastern town you never more will see.
There’s self-respect and a steady cheque in this refinery.
You will miss the green and the woods and streams and the dust will fill your nose.
But you’ll be free, and just like me, an idiot, I suppose.
Stan Rogers, The Idiot
The best way to kill a man is to prevent him from working by giving him money ...
And the best part is that your cities will be full of the walking dead.
Félix Leclerc, 100,000 façons de tuer un homme
[author’s translation]
First, he said, lower the tariffs—in other words, he called for a policy of free trade. Failing substantial reductions in tariffs, some compensation for the effects of those tariffs (such as reduced freight rates) would be a second-best policy, but better than nothing. Finally, and least satisfactory of all, he said, would be the granting of subsidies from the Dominion Treasury: “Subsidies do not increase the general level of the prosperity of the people. They may make the task of government a little easier. They may render the work of balancing the budget a little less difficult, but in the last analysis they do not add to the economic advancement of the people.”30
What about the CCF government of Tommy Douglas in Saskatchewan? While there is no denying that Douglas and his colleagues pushed the province and the country on welfare state issues such as hospital insurance and medicare, these are not programs that discourage work or the work ethic. Does the Douglas government (1944–61) disprove my contention that there was a broad social and political consensus against reliance on the state and in favour of work and a sturdy individual independence? After all, didn’t he create a brand new department of social welfare? True, but in Douglas’s own words, “We were not interested in paying able-bodied people merely because they weren’t able to work.”31 According to his biographer, Walter Stewart, under Douglas and the CCF,
“relief ” was gone, and in its place were two classes of people eligible for “social aid.” Those who were too old or too handicapped to work received support automatically, but anyone who couldn’t find a job elsewhere would be put to work clearing roads, fencing pastures, installing phone lines, or working in community pastures—what is today called “workfare” and is roundly condemned by every respectable left-winger.32
What was reviled as socialism in those days turns out to have been pretty mild stuff. Douglas certainly used the state to build infrastructure and to provide services that the private sector had been unwilling or unable to provide, but he also ran seventeen consecutive balanced budgets, significantly repairing the province’s finances. He had no interest in creating programs that would undermine people’s work ethic. Looking back from today’s vantage point, most observers agree that Douglas’s government, far from being the Red Menace, was best described as mildly reformist.
Neither America nor Europe: Where Canada Fits In
In other words, the reigning political consensus, which was also a consensus on moral values, that characterized this country right up to the birth of the New Canada in 1960, took a quite different view of the role of the individual, of government, and of the effects of government intervention on people’s character than the one that prevails today. The view that predominates today on both sides of the border is of Canadians as kinder and gentler than their American neighbours, as more willing to use the power of the state in pursuit of public goods, as more welfare-minded, more socially left wing. It is also a view that could establish itself only by defeating and then consigning to a trunk in the never-visited attic of our collective memory the older view that had defined Canada for almost the first century of its existence and for many decades prior to 1867.
This revolution in Canadians’ intellectual and moral self-understanding was fed by many tributaries. We were certainly well plugged into the broad intellectual currents washing over Western civilization. For instance, the influence of Marxism, some branches of feminism, post-structuralism, and other “radical” philosophies in the universities and elsewhere helped to create fertile soil for new ideas across the West, while simultaneously demonizing the bourgeois virtues.33 Starting in the 1960s it became fashionable in intellectual circles to believe that individuals were the creation and the prisoners of social forces over which they had little control, and that the employer-employee relationship was essentially an exploitative and purely materialist one in which all the benefits were economic, and those flowed predominantly to the owners of capital. During the decades stretching roughly between the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, it was not clear to many which side would win the Cold War, and Western capitalism’s ultimate decisive triumph as the superior economic system had not yet been satisfactorily demonstrated. The alternative collectivist models of Russia, China, Cuba, and even, incredibly, Albania exercised a peculiar fascination over many. Vietnam and the counter-culture produced a vibrant movement of protest and questioning of authority throughout the Western world, including the authority of traditional values and behaviours.
AND YOU THOUGHT MARX WAS DEAD AND GONE . . .
My daughter and a friend, who were in high school, were offered a job in a fast-food restaurant. This was to be their first experience of work, and they were suitably excited and a little anxious at this new transition to adultlike responsibilities and status. The mother of the friend squashed all of that simply by observing to the children that they would be crazy to take such work, which was obviously purely exploitative, all the benefit flowing to the restaurant, and none to the workers. In the vernacular, they were simply going to be “ripped off” rather than participating in a mutually beneficial exchange of values—some moral, some economic, some social, some cultural. Disillusioned and newly suspicious, the children declined the jobs and for years afterwards had a jaundiced view of and fraught relationships with employers.
Private communication with author
