WILL CANADA CONTINUE TO EXIST?

Without a common ethnic identity, without much remembered (or imagined) history, without external walls, the Canadian community either exists as a political entity within which all who live here act as citizens, involving themselves with others in "a not too-strict account of how much the [tax] bargain is worth," in Michael Ignatieff's phrase, or there is no particular reason for the Canadian community to exist at all.

Richard Gwyn, Nationalism Without Walls, 1995

Why Does Canada Exist?

In some ways Canada is a remarkable country. But nearly the most amazing thing about it is . . . that it exists at all.

So close to the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA -- the most powerful nation in world history, the Earth's Only Superpower, and a nation with a history of (occasional) irresistible imperialist urges -- how did Canada manage to become a separate and (sort of) independent nation? Why did it take the form it did? Why has it continued to exist?

The answer seems to be . . . by a number of close shaves.

Three Crucial Moments for Canada's Existence in the 18th Century

The French Lose Quebec to the British

On 13 September 1759 the British forces under General James Wolfe (1727-1759) barely defeated the larger French forces under the Marquis de Montcalm (1712-1759) before Quebec City at the battle of the Plains of Abraham. The French forces then ran for the safety of the city walls.

Why did they then surrender the next day? Because Montcalm had died of his wounds? So had Wolfe; on the day of the battle. Why did the French not try to hold the city?

I don't know. Perhaps if they had held on, they could have held out.

The French Nearly Win Back Quebec; But Lose It Again

It is little remembered by anyone that the French later in 1759 nearly took back the city of Quebec. Yes, they did!

They besieged it. But the next spring, 1760, they saw a big British fleet coming up the St. Lawrence river. The French then gave up without a fight. Why did they do this? Why didn't they put up a fight?

I think we must conclude that the British wanted Quebec more than the French. The British were willing to send fleets and soldiers sufficient to take Canada. The French were not willing to send fleets and soldiers sufficient to hold it.

Two American Forces Invade

Canada was then nearly lost to the United States in 1775. American general Richard Montgomery took Montreal and marched on Quebec City. There he met his fellow American general Benedict Arnold (1741-1801). They attacked together in late December. They nearly succeeded. But in the snowstorm during which they launched their attack Montgomery was killed and Arnold wounded. American troops then lost heart. (Unknown to them, the British enemy was almost out of ammunition.) Some Americans surrendered.

The battle was lost, the city was lost. The remaining Americans besieged the city till spring. At that time relieving British ships and reinforcements came up the St. Lawrence and forced them to retreat.

The War of 1812

In the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States, Americans thought that taking Canada would be, in former president Thomas Jefferson's words, "a mere matter of marching:"

"The acquisition of Canada this year [1812 -GS] as far as the neighbourhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching, and will give us experience for the attack on Halifax next, and the final expulsion of England from the American continent.¹

So the United States invaded Canada numerous times in that war.

But British Major-General Sir Isaac Brock (1769-1812) turned out to be a prescient commander. He took Detroit by surprise and threw back the Americans at Queenston Heights. The United States, however, won every naval battle on the Great Lakes and a few battles north of them -- e.g., Chippewa and Moraviantown. The American army thoroughly burned the Upper Canada capital of York (present-day Toronto). But it never managed to hold territory north of the Great Lakes. Incompetent generals; militia that wouldn't fight; leaders without grit or persistence; unexpected resistance from British forces, Indians, or Canadian militia; the fog of war; the halfheartedness of many of the troops fighting in an alien land: all took a toll. British North America survived again . . . by the skin of its teeth.

Just one example:

The United States won the battle of Chippewa in the Niagara Peninsula on July 5, 1813. Encouraged, the victorious Americans marched on Niagara Falls. At the battle of Lundy's Lane a few days later America had excellently-trained troops for once, and fine leadership under General Winfield Scott (1786-1866). The American soldiers valiantly stood their ground and blazed away at their enemies for hours across a graveyard.

But -- unluckily for them -- their British and Native Canadian enemies, for once, had twice the number of troops as they. And the British and Indians were no cowards. They blazed away and held their ground exactly like the Americans. Each side took about 800 dead. Their leadership wounded, finally the Americans withdrew, and shortly crossed back to the United States.

Another grave threat to British North America, the region that would become the Canadian nation, ended.

The Time of Tension Before the American Civil War

In the decades after the War of 1812, the United States occasionally adopted a belligerent attitude, and threatened British North America numerous times. There were numerous problems between the countries, including (I am told) the utter abhorrence by Canadians of slavery. (Canadians, however, were not above practising some forms of racial discrimination until about 1960.) In addition there were boundary disputes between the two countries.

Both sides on the frontier feared invasion by the other. Britain, the colonial power, settled several disputes with treaties that hardly favored British North America (see the the Convention of 1818, the 1842 Webster-Ashburton Treaty, and the Oregon Treaty of 1846 establishing the 49th parallel as the western border. Also see the 1903 Alaska boundary settlement.). But, while Mexico in 1846 lost much of its territory to the expanding United States, the vast majority of the territory of British North America managed to remain intact.

The Civil War

During the American Civil War (1861-1865) a faction in the United States again wanted to invade and annex British North America as punishment to Britain for its sympathy with the South. (The South supplied necessary cotton to the textile factories of Britain.) But this was forestalled by the action of Canadian Confederationists. By joining Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in 1867 into a new nation and rapidly expanding it west through foresight, military occupation, railroads, and settlement, the Fathers of Confederation reduced the American threat.

The threat of Canada's absorption by the United States slowly diminished, especially after the Washington Treaty of 1870, despite cross-border Indian migrations, American whiskey traders, the Cariboo and Yukon gold rushes and other problems. Because of reduced tensions, British troops departed permanently in 1871.

The Threat of Free Trade

In 1911 the United States and Canada negotiated a free trade agreement. The Liberal federal government of Canada under Sir Wilfrid Laurier (1841-1919) championed the agreement in a federal election.

But the protectionist Conservative forces waved the Union Jack and raised the threat of American annexation. Conveniently for the Conservatives, American annexationist Champ Clark (1850-1921), speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1911 to 1919, spoke of his vision of the Stars and Stripes floating as far as the North Pole. The Liberals were defeated. Free trade between the two countries, and with it the feared annexation of Canada, did not come into being. American dreams of Canada's absorption were frustrated.

French-English Cultural Divisions

If Canada ever ceases to be a nation, it may be because of French-English disharmony.

Canada had been formed in 1867 because of military necessity. The British provinces felt threatened by recurring Fenian raids across the border from the United States. They feared that the victorious Union Army might invade and conquer them. The Canadians had formed their country despite a profound, severe linguistic, religious and cultural division: that between the original French European settlers from Normandy and Brittany and the later English-speaking British Europeans who conquered them in 1759. The British had gone on to dominate the new British North America which became called Canada.

Ill feeling arose periodically between the French-speaking Catholic people, primarily in Quebec, and the new British colonists, some of whom stayed in Montreal and dominated it, and some of whom spread through the West. Upper Canada, organized about 1790 in the then-wilderness of what is now Ontario, gradually became the populous center of British North America. York, or Toronto as it became called in the 1830s, grew from a few streets several miles east of Fort York to a major, if for a long while stultifying dull and British, city. It gradually came to rival Montréal, Canada's largest city. Most of Canada became culturally British-American (except for Lower Canada, known after 1848 as the province of Québec).

In Québec, nationalists struggled to find their role. France was gone, severed from Canada. Quebeckers still had their religion and their language; could they maintain their identity as French-speaking Catholics? Until the 1960s they tried. Then, as part of the Revolution Tranquille ("Quiet Revolution"), they fairly suddenly abandoned Catholicism.

Instead, a growing minority took up separation from Canada: independence (or, as it would be known later, sovereignty). In the 1960s occasional bombings caused damage and took one life.

Then in 1970 the separatist Front de Libération Québécois struck. It kidnapped a British trade representative and issued a manifesto of demands. The cell was found after a week and escorted out of the country.

Separatism, like a specter, kept returning.

In 1980 a referendum was held about whether Quebec should offer the federal government an arrangement conferring up itself "sovereignty-association," basically an offer of independence for Quebec with some ties to Canada. It was defeated by a vote of about 59% to 41%, losing even in French-dominated parts of Quebec.

But the specter of separatism seems never to die. In 1995 it was back again. Inadequately opposed by the federal government, it nearly squeezed through. If a few tens of thousands of voters had switched sides it would have passed. The Canada we have known would soon have ended.

In 2003 Separatism in Quebec seems moribund, but it may rise again to split the Canadaian nation.

American Hopes for Canada

In Canada, almost no one has ever urged Canadians to let themselves be annexed to the United States. Not even prominent Americanophile industrialist Conrad Black has done that.

But in the late 19th century expatriate Oxford history professor Goldwin Smith, living in Toronto, wrote repeatedly of his conviction that Canada would inevitably be absorbed by the American colossus. Smith believed that this was not only inevitable, but that it would be beneficial.

Like Thomas Jefferson, Speaker Clark (in the previous section) was merely one of a long list of Americans who have felt that Canada was certain to become part of the United States. John Adams (1735-1826), the second president of the United States, was another. George Ball, American undersecretary of state in Lyndon Johnson's administration (1963-1969), was another. The usual American annexationist mentality has held that Canada would be far better off as part of the United States, and that part or all of Canada's territory and natural resources would be very useful to America.

American proposals to annex Canada have usually been for domestic consumption. The United States has never to my knowledge made a formal proposal to Canada on the subject. Traditionally the prospect of annexation (having one-tenth of the population of the United States, Canadians would never be offered a merger) has had a mixed appeal to Canadians.

On the one hand, if the border were to disappear, Canadians would benefit from free trade and the right to migrate freely to better jobs. On the other hand, Canada would surely be even more penetrated and dominated by the United States and its culture than it is now. And is there any country in the world more influenced by, even dominated by, American culture than Canada?

Cultural Considerations of Annexation

If Canada were annexed, would it be possible to maintain an officially French language and culture in Quebec? Would anything remain of English-Canadian culture? Would Canada's rate of violent crime triple to match American levels? Would everything distinctive about Canada, everything that Canadians have tried to build here in opposition to the United States, perish?

In the 19th century many Canadians treasured their British heritage and were suspicious of republicanism. They associated republicanism with rioting and disorder. (So did John Adams and United States treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton.) Many Canadians imagined that they were building a British nation in North America.

But over decades the strong pull of the nearby and prosperous United States began to predominate over the ties with distant and economically fading Great Britain. Canadians in the late 19th century began to import American rather than British technology, and to organize their industry on American models. American-born Canadian industrialists like Sir William Van Horne (1843-1914) and Clarence Decatur Howe had enormous influence on the industrial culture of Canada.

Canadians long lived behind a tariff wall with the United States, a wall individuals loved to breach in order to obtain American merchandise. But Canadians, for all their admiration of American business and efficiency, have shown much less desire to emulate every feature of American government, ideology and culture. A few have even tried to build a country here that is distinctly different from America: an alternate North American culture. Originally, of course, the plan had been to build a British nation. But by the 1960s the dream had evolved, to become one of building a distinctive progressive Canadian nation. This hope was at its height during the 1967 World's Fair at Montreal.

For instance, the United States has historically had little use for socialism. Canada, by contrast, has experimented with it; it has adopted a single-payer system of so-called socialized medicine. In addition, it adopted for some decades what was retrospectively named the liberal view of Canada.

The liberal view of Canada was an aggressive national plan. It involved building public institutions, government agencies, and government-controlled corporations -- for instance, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Air Canada, Canadian National Railways, and Petro-Canada -- to control what prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau termed the "commanding heights" of our culture and economy.

New Trends

But in recent years a countertrend resulting from the neoconservative movement in the United States has reduced the domination of the liberal view of Canada. Air Canada, Canadian National Railways, and Petro-Canada have been privatized (CN is now largely American-owned). The budget of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was greatly reduced. Treasured successful Canadian multinational corporations like Nortel Networks (formerly Northern Telecom, and before that Northern Electric, a subsidiary of Bell Canada) have become, essentially, American corporations.

Coming to the Crunch

So the question has gradually become: Has Canada any further reason for existing?

Clearly, for all Canada's facade of British institutions and heritage, it will never become the British nation the Fathers of Confederation imagined in 1867. Has it become an alternate form of North American nation to the American model? I think so. Can it remain such an alternative?

Or is Canada destined to be, in the words of a Maclean's magazine article in November 2002, an "America Lite"?

An American-born economist working in Toronto, Sherry Cooper, belled the cat in summer 2002. She maintained that Canada should give up its currency, the Canadian dollar, and adopt the American dollar.

But if Canada were to give up its own currency, would it have any levers of national power left? Might it share the fate of Argentina, which, after adopting the American currency in addition to its own, first prospered, then endured three years of severe recession and unemployment?

I think Argentina's decline has not resulted from adopting American currency, but from the determination of its various states to continue a welfare state which Argentina cannot afford. But, though there would be some economic advantages to adopting the American currency, Canada would lose the flexibility of deliberately having a weaker currency to boost exports. Tied to the U.S. dollar, Canada would be even more closely controlled by American policy than is the case today.

Do we really need more of that?

Will Canada continue to exist?

As a geographic region, sure. As a country? . . . Well, for a while . . .

Canada, Mexico, Central America and South America seem likely to be absorbed into an American-dominated American (economic) Union. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) signed between the United States, Canada and Mexico in 1993 seems likely to be the first step in that union. In the Union Canada will play a role like that of Belgium beside France: a slightly-different, minor variant on the dominant culture.

This doesn't seem so bad a fate, especially since closer ties of trade and movement such as prevail in the European Union will mean our increasing prosperity.

Being in the Union will undoubtedly mean irritations. The United States has already used its superior economic power to violate NAFTA with tariffs on Canada's softwood lumber and wheat. In further violation of NAFTA it prevents Mexican truckers from operating in most of the United States. NAFTA already limits what laws Canada and Mexico may adopt; later agreements would doubtless further restrict their freedom to act. Doubtless some of us will chafe at our governments' decreased ability to do something wild and crazy.

But,after all, should governments do wild and crazy things?

No. We in non-Hyperpower North America will just have to give up, metaphorically speaking, womanizing, getting plastered and generally carrying on badly. Occasionally, we may be limited in what we can do in our own houses, our own bedrooms even.

But, though irritating and to an extent unfair . . . it shouldn't be so bad.

# # # # #

[To Be Revised]

Notes

¹ Robert Fulford, "Blood and Bondage: Can Americans rise above a history steeped in past misdeeds?" Review in the Ottawa Citizen, March 22, 1998.

Partial Bibliography

Hibbert, Christopher. Wolfe at Quebec. 2002.

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