The Origins of Canadian Politics: A Comparative Approach PDF
Preview The Origins of Canadian Politics: A Comparative Approach
THE ORIGINS OF CANADIAN POLITICS This page intentionally left blank THE ORIGINS OF CANADIAN POLITICS A Comparative Approach Gordon T. Stewart UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA PRESS VANCOUVER 1986 THE ORIGINS OF CANADIAN POLITICS A COMPARATIVE APPROACH ©University of British Columbia Press 1986 This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Stewart, Gordon T. (Gordon Thomas), 1945- The origins of Canadian politics Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-7748-0260-X 1. Canada - Politics and government. 2. Comparative government. I. Title. JL75.S84 1986 320.971 C86-091349-X International Standard Book Number ISBN 0-7748-0260-X Printed in Canada CONTENTS Preface vii Chronology xi Introduction 1 1. The Background: England, America and Canada, 1688-1828 9 2. Instability, 1828-1864 32 3. Stability, 1864-1914 59 4. Conclusions and Consequences 91 Notes 103 Bibliography 117 Index 125 This page intentionally left blank PREFACE The need for a fresh look at the origins of Canadian politics struck me with some force as I examined, over the last five years or so, the papers of John A. Macdonald, Wilfrid Laurier, and their cabinet colleagues of the late nine- teenth and early twentieth centuries. As I read the views and came to understand the assumptions and beliefs of these post-Confederation Cana- dian politicians on such matters as patronage deployment, the role of the prime minister, party leadership, and the nature of government power, I became convinced that what appeared to be a post-Confederation political culture had been largely moulded in the pre-1867 colonial period of Cana- dian history. While I knew the large body of scholarly work that traced aspects of the Canadian political tradition back to loyalist and pre-conquest French-Canadian sources (work that was initiated by Louis Hartz's approach to European settler societies like Canada and the United States as fragments of broader European cultures), I did not know of any sustained analysis that tried to assess how the working of politics during the entire colonial period from 1760 to 1867 created a distinctive and enduring pattern of Canadian politics. The politics of the British colonial period tend to be viewed by post- Confederation historians and political scientists as parochial, personal, com- plex, and obscure (if occasionally dramatic), not easily susceptible to useful generalizations that can be applied to the entire subsequent sweep of Cana- dian history. The more I read in the Macdonald and Laurier papers, the more I thought about the matter, the more certain I became that this long formative stage of Canadian politics needed to be brought squarely into the analytical picture. The central question to be answered is a simple one — how did the workings of Canada's colonial political system lead to perma- nent characteristics of modern Canadian political culture? viiV Preface From the outset I opted for a comparative approach to this question because comparison with Britain and America makes distinctive features of the colonial Canadian political landscape stand out in sharper relief. An internal recounting of politics in Upper and Lower Canada would merely have repeated a whole school of authoritative Canadian scholarship. I did not wish to repeat or summarize that but rather to concentrate on identifying those trends that were influential in the Canadas and which set Canadian politics apart from British or American politics in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. In pursuing this comparative approach, I used the "court-country" description of the political spectrum partly because I started right back in the seventeenth century to get at the origins of the modern Anglo-American-Canadian political world but also because the "court-country" duality has been applied very successfully by John Murrin in his recent work comparing England and America from 1688 to the 1820's. By adopting and adapting Murrin's framework, I could take stock of where the Canadian colonies stood in relation to Britain and America in the very middle of the colonial period. This "court-country" concept may be permissi- ble as a device for discussing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British politics, but it does become an anachronism when applied to nineteenth- century politics in Canada. In the nineteenth century, the "court" orienta- tion developed into a statist outlook by which administrations of the day deployed patronage and influence to shore up their positions, stimulated and participated in economic growth, and tried to free themselves as much as possible from close legislative supervision; the "country" tradition by this date implied an emphasis on elective rather than appointive officialdom, a desire to make executives more controllable by legislatures, and a penchant for small government frequently answerable to the electorate. In the course of my analysis, I begin to substitute statist for "court" or use the two in tandem after the 1840's. However, right to the end, I continue to use "court" as a heuristic device so the reader can fully appreciate how trends identified from the late eighteenth century were continued in various guises into post-Confederation Canada. I am not making an idiosyncratic effort to stretch the already over-long life of the "court-country" concept beyond its legitimate historical period but simply drawing attention, by use of this arresting anachronism, to the historical origins of the statist tradition in Canada at both the federal and provincial levels. In concentrating on such themes as patronage, power, and influence, I may appear cynical to some readers. It is essential to understand that my object is limited to answering the particular question posed above. This does not mean that I think Canadian politicians of the colonial and post- Confederation periods were selfish men seeking only to improve their own and their parties' welfare. All of them thought that what they were doing was Preface ix in the best interests of the colony, province, or federation. This is as true for the Tory ruling groups in the pre-1837 Canadas as for Macdonald and Laurier after Confederation. These politicians had ideas about economic growth, about Canada's place in North America, and about her role in the British Empire. Some of them even had ideals about the nature of the good society. All of them tried hard to ameliorate Canada's complex ethnic and religious tensions. In short, like most politicians, they were a mixture of selfishness and idealism, busily building their own careers and parties while striving to serve the public interest. I hardly deal at all with this ideological dimension, but those readers who are not well read on this well-worn topic can turn to such introductions as William Christian and Colin Campbell, Political Parties and Political Ideologies in Canada or, for a full dose of idealism, to Donald Creighton's ever readable biography of Canada's great- est politician, John A. Macdonald. A more recent account that comple- ments this study even better because it offers an empirical check on all those general and theoretical comparisons of Canadian and American political cultures going back to loyalist times, is Roger Gibbons and Neil Neville, "Canadian Political Ideology: a Comparative Approach," Canadian Journal of Political Science 18 (1985): 577-98. If this book eschews conventional political ideology, it sins in perhaps an even more shameful fashion for these days because it appears to neglect social history. In this view of things, it is old-fashioned; it concentrates on high politics. I have no defence against such a charge — it is true. However, it is most important to notice that I do relate political developments to the material conditions in Canada between the 1790's and 1910 by outlining how economic and social conditions provided a favourable setting within which certain political tendencies could flourish. I hasten to add that I have nothing against social history. On the contrary, my own earlier work on religious revivalism in late eighteenth-century Nova Scotia was solidly within that field, consisting as it did, in its later stages, of a detailed community study of Yarmouth to uncover connections between wealth, property, social status, and response to evangelical religion. I did not take such an approach in this analysis of the origins of Canadian politics simply because I was trying to answer different kinds of questions. Much of the best and most stimulat- ing recent work in Canada is being done in the field of social history, and my concentration on high politics is not a statement about the value of a particular kind of history writing. Surely the one great strength of the discipline of history is that it allows for a variety of approaches to the study of the past. There is a tendency among contemporary historians in Canada to cleave even more strongly to social history and its ramifications because of a widespread belief that all the great political history writing of the past two generations of scholarship has answered all the big questions. It has not.
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