A tale of two countries

Canada and referenda

“You are going to hold a referendum. I do not advise you to do so. I have never seen anything so destructive to family relationships, social life, and the political community.”

That’s some Norwegian George Anderson spoke to in 1978 as part of the federal bureaucracy’s preparations for what became the first referendum in Quebec on secession. Anderson used the anecdote as the way into his discussion last week in the Globe - paywalled - of the looming Alberta secession referendum. Paul Wells offered a translation to French, under a different title, which effectively breaks the paywall.

Après un « oui », qui parlerait pour le Canada ?

Anderson spends most time pondering who would represent Canada in secession talks in the event of a “yes” vote, based mostly on the ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada in the Clarity Act reference. There is no constitutional or legal allowance for secession so the Court ignored the political and historical information to muse there might be a role for the provinces in the process.

Howard Anglin: In defence of a loose Confederation in an age of separatism

In another corner, Howard Anglin, once a top staffer to Stephen Harper, later to Jason Kenney, and now a student at Oxford on constitutional law, wrote about the need to loosen up the Canadian federation. He ignores that it is already the most decentralized federation on the planet, but spends much time on the origins of the notion of two solitudes in Canada from the romance novel where one can find it. All lovely stuff but really just the wanking we heard in the 1990s from the federal government under Brian Mulroney in the aftermath of the Meech debacle. All imaginary, all at odds with where Canadians generally want to go, and all of no use to anyone except those with space to fill and those willing to let anyone fill it.

What neither Anglin nor Anderson nor the nine Supremes pondered was Canada’s actual history of negotiations between two actual countries about their futures. The example is very much part of Canadian history and while it is the inverse of secession, it involves public votes on clear choices in not one but two referenda, differences between the Canadian federal and provincial governments, dramatic drifferences reconciled ina typically Canadian fix, and all the political fallout from the votes and the union of the two countries.

Who spoke for Canada then? What divisions were there? Have there been no other divisive referenda in Canada besides the two in Quebec?

All good questions.

Let’s get to them by way of a couple of recent trips to Ottawa.

There’s a statue in Ottawa honouring the women involved in the so-called Persons Case. While women got the right to vote in Canada in 1918, the challenge to who could sit in the Senate is more strongly remembered as a pivotal moment in universal female suffrage in Canada. The statue - really a cluster of statues - used to be on Parliament Hill but with all the renovations to the Centre Block, they’ve shifted it down by the temporary lodgings for the Senate in what used to be the Conference Centre where all those constitutional rackets in the second half of the 20th century happened. Before that it was the train station, which is the name I use for it.

Anyway…

“The Famous Five brought a case before the highest court in the British Empire.” the official blurb tells us,” to appeal a 1928 decision by the Supreme Court of Canada. That court ruled that women could not be appointed to the Senate because they were not ‘qualified persons’ which is the term used in the British North America Act, now called the Constitution Act, 1867. On October 18, 1929, the [Judicial Committee of the] Privy Council reversed this decision.”

“Although most women were given the right to vote in federal elections and to hold seats in the House of Commons in 1918,” another official description says, “their eligibility for appointment to the Senate remained in question.” The statue to the Famous Five women from Alberta is a short walk from the National War Memorial. A little while after I passed the statue and the memorial, I was wandering through one of the great museums of Canada, in themselves remarkable testaments to the enormity of Canada and Canadians in every respect. The irony of five Alberta women defining fundamental rights of Canadians and then the Alberta Court of King’s Bench ruling that upset a gaggle of Albertans trying to destroy Canada was a smack in the face to anyone even vaguely sensible of the world around them.

But that isn’t what struck me most forcefully.

It was the missing story. The Persons Case statue is now just a few short steps to the National War Memorial, a place I faithfully visit at least once in my trips to Ottawa. But there are two national war memorials in Canada just like there isn’t just one national story of women’s rights. There are two.

In the Canadian War Museum, after you get past the extraordinary maps describing warfare between the Indigenous peoples of Canada before Europeans arrived, after you get through colonial wars, and other landmark events, there is a map that beautifully describes the Canadian internment camps during the Second World War. Canada was coloured light grey on the map and all the bits that were not Canada before 1949 were darker grey. Absolutely consistent approach through the museum. Newfoundland and Labrador were dark grey. But shouldn’t there have been a note on that, a mention of the local internment camps in Newfoundland that were actually moved to Canada for security reasons given that Canada took responsibility for Newfoundland defence in co-operation with the Newfoundland government?

The internment camps are controversial, still. There are lots of things through the museum that remain sore subjects decades or even centuries after they happened. The museum permanent exhibit navigates all of them flawlessly. I know the guy chiefly responsible for putting it together. Known him for a very long time. Grew up in Rabbittown and will remain no matter where he is in some odd corner of the world for ever Newfoundland. He still bears the trauma of all of the petitions and screaming and pleading and fussing over what to say and how to say it about this, that, or another of the sore points. He was chiefly responsible because it took an army of people all equally talented, skilled, and knowledgeable and with great sensitivity to pull off this feat of explanation with respect and dignity while remaining appropriately provocative. We can allow him some pride in this feat now some 30 years old.

But there was all through it that nagging question in the back of my mind that had nothing to do with how the museum, but with how Canadian national institutions generally, and with how we all deal with the issue of Canada and Newfoundland and Labrador. Since 1949, Canadian history and Newfoundland and Labrador history are supposed to be the one, sometimes intertwined, sometimes side-by-side, and sometimes divergent as they always were but now officially one. There could hardly be a better metaphor for Canada.

Yet, often they aren’t. You get Canadian history up to 1949, sometimes with a mention that Newfoundland (and Labrador) was doing something else, and then from 1949 on there’s no question because it’s all Canadian. In the war museum, there are quite a few references to Newfoundland and Labrador, partly because the guy who oversaw the team putting it together was from here. But in the history museum, across the river in Gatineau from the war museum, there is not much beyond the story of the Beothuk extermination, completely fictional via Harold Horwood in Macleans in 1961 and not much else on Newfoundland and Labrador. The residential schools gallery includes Newfoundland and Labrador even though there never were any in the country. Never, not even after 1949. None. How radically differently the two countries dealt with Indigenous people bedeviled the negotiators for the Terms of Union. It continues to do so but that issue does not exist in the lies both of omission and commission in the official Canadian museum view.

The truth is inconvenient. The stark difference between the two countries as they were before 1949 is best shown in the way they treated Indigenous people. The controversy continues as people pretend the differences didn’t exist. Easier to ignore Newfoundland and Labrador’s history, to present a Harold Horwood fiction as if it were fact and just hide the rest rather than bring the two histories together, allow them to exist side-by-side, or use the differences to find a new way forward together.

There are other stark differences between the two countries, as they then were, that are valuable today. Take the South African War as an example. There’s a huge Maple-Leaf-Forever Canadian nationalist view of South Africa at the war museum. No arguments or complaints about it. But Newfoundland didn’t send soldiers to South Africa. The reasons are important. Newfoundland and Britain were locked in a long-term war of their own and Newfoundland’s resistance to the imperial call for soldiers to fight the Boers was not merely a matter of “we don’t have an army.” It was about 1890 and the British refusal to allow a trade treaty with the Americans. It as about 1894 and the financial crisis the British had a hand in causing and did nothing to clean up. It was about persistent British demands for the Newfoundlanders to defend British cable landing places in Newfoundland while Newfoundland scarcely had the money to do what it needed to do for Newfoundlanders.

And it is about Newfoundland’s persistent refusal to be bullied even by Britain, the Mother Country and Imperial power. It is also about hypocrisy. British hypocrisy. In 1907, with the French threat gone, but with a persistent demand for Newfoundland soldiers as part of an imperial force for a future war maybe against Germany, the British turned down a request for help raising a local volunteer force on the grounds the Royal Navy would keep any threats away from the island so the Newfies would have to look after themselves. A decade earlier the British argued the opposite.

Newfoundland turned down a demand for creation of a single British-controlled imperial army command because it would not surrender to the British control of Newfoundland forces implicit in imperial general staff scheme and let the British send Newfoundland troops anywhere the British wanted. That was in 1905. There’s a letter in the archives that makes the same arguments the Canadians also took around the same time or a bit later. Canada gets noted in Canadian history for its stand but Newfoundland is ignored largely because people inside and outside Newfoundland assume that Newfoundland was too tiny to matter.

All the same, the Newfoundland Division of the Royal Naval Reserve came out of Boer crisis, almost a decade before the Canadian’s created a navy. The Newfoundland Division was proportionately more successful than the Canadian equivalent and Newfoundland sailors crewed the first of His Majesty’s Canadian ships even during the Great War.

Even more important a story, the Governor in Newfoundland got so enraged at the Newfoundland refusal to follow orders during the Boer War, he tried to subvert the elected government of Newfoundland. He privately encouraged one of his own ministers to undermine Cabinet and the Prime Minister and trigger an election. That crisis led to the Governor’s premature removal by London, his quick replacement by a far more docile fellow named Cavendish Boyle, and to the British allowing the Newfoundland government to approve Boyle’s replacement in 1904. All of that was a quarter century years before the Chanak Affair or the King-Byng fling that weakened the power of the Canadian Governor constitutionally.

For a bit of added flavour, Boyle wrote a letter to his boss, the Secretary of State for Colonies not long after he got to Newfoundland to complain the Newfies weren’t doing things properly. The Cabinet would meet without him, make decisions, and then expect him to simply nod approval. Didn’t line up with his powers or his letter of authority from the King, Edward VII, Boyle asserted. Sounds very familiar to people these days but this was an issue at the time, resolved in Newfoundland when Boyle got a letter from the Secretary of State for Colonies explaining how these things work. He was a figurehead. A stand-in for the King. He was obliged to take the advice of the elected government. But here’s the twist: a decade later Edward VII himself ran into great problems when he began freelancing foreign policy without telling his elected government. That resolved when the Prime Minister wrote to the King and explained why, constitutionally, that was not allowed. It took the British a decade to get the King under the same control as his Newfoundland stand-in.

But there is still that stuff about referenda to consider. Newfoundland and Labradorians voted twice in 1948 on the future on their country. They settled on Canada by as close a margin as you might get. Newfoundland and Labrador was not a colony of Britian in 1948. It was a Dominion with a suspended constitution, which meant that while there was a Commission Government appointed by London instead of an elected ministry, that Commission ran Newfoundland and Labrador as it had been before 1934 except in defence and foreign policy and even then, the British role was as it had been before 1934, as in the Imperial General Staff affray or South Africa or Chanak.

A 51-49 split in a referendum suggests there’d be deep and lasting divisions across Newfoundland and Labrador, yet while there were individuals who carried grudges to their grave, while there are people like Greg Malone who write foolishness and see it treated as fact, some 96% of eligible voters turned out in June 1949 to elect their first provincial government. The Confederates became Liberals but the anti-Confederates did not form the Newfoundland National Party and promote secession. They became Pea Seas. Loyal Canadians. There was no fuss.

And to answer the questions left hanging from earlier, the national government of Canada negotiated with the national government of Newfoundland as the small country was then called. There were no separate talks between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia or Newfoundland and Quebec. Should Canadians ever need to negotiate some territory of Canada out of the Federation, the Government of Canada would quite naturally take the lead. We are not Americans. We do not need to have a portion of the constitution devoted to getting out of it because of some anal need to specify everything in unhealthy detail.

The strength of our political culture, our inheritance from Britain, more strongly and forcefully seen in Newfoundland’s constitution than in the Canadian one, is that much is left out. We have the ability to adapt based on agreements and understandings. If we don’t have a section of the constitution on how to split up the country, we’d figure it out if we needed to. There was no constitutional map on how to bring Newfoundland in, yet it worked. There’d be one worked out to leave as well. The only challenge might be for some people to understand how much Canadian history there is and how much of it isn’t all what they’ve been taught in schools or see in museums or even imagined.

We don’t need to go to the Norwegians to figure out how referenda work. Nor do we need to look at the distant past .In the 1990s, Newfoundland and Labrador held not one but two public votes on the future of sectarian education in the province. The division of public life by Christian sect was a central part of Newfoundland and Labrador’s culture from the very earliest days of self-government in the middle of the 19th century. It remained so after Confederation. Mixed marriages were not white and black. They were Orange and Green. Electoral districts in the 1950s distributions set out an equal number for Church of England, Methodists, and Roman Catholics. In 1982, to gain support for the Canadian constitutional changes that included a Charter of Rights to protect individual rights, Brian Peckford’s administration extended sectarian education rights to fundamentalist groups. This inadvertently set up the clash in the 1990s.

As much controversy as there was at the time, as common as the division of life on religious lines remained at the time, the second education referendum showed that even a majority of Roman Catholics wanted to get clerics out of teaching children anything. Perhaps the Mount Cashel scandal helped change minds but it was a radical change, all the same. In 1982, no one cared about the expansion. In 1995, about a dozen years later, a majority favoured a single multi-denominational school system, one that would have effectively ended sectarianism in school administration and one-sect schools. A second referendum two years later again, saw an increased majority on a clearer question of ending schools run by churches.

There was no great controversy after 1997 just as in 1949 and afterward. There were dissidents. A small coalition of Roman Catholics and Pentecostalists fought the change legally after the first referendum. Justice Leo Barry’s decision triggered the second referendum, which led to a second constitutional amendment that decisively stripped the churches of their control.

There are solitudes in Canada. When I used this word in 2016, I thought more of Lord Durham’s idea in his report after the 1837 rebellion, of two nations warring within the bosom of a single country than the literal definition Anglin used. I bent the notion of solitude - an intentional and peaceful separation - into one of isolation, alienation, and ignorance. Not positive by any means but (self-) destructive.

In the background, was Durham’s assessment of French Canadians - “There can hardly be conceived a nationality more destitute of all that can invigorate and elevate a people, than that which is exhibited by the descendants of the French in Lower Canada, owing to their retaining their peculiar language and manners…” - transferred in the condescending views popular in Canada of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians and Confederation.

The result was a notion that Canadians generally know nothing of Newfoundland and Labrador and care less. They lived separately but together, each ignorant of the other. Newfoundlanders and Labradorians have double alienation, a second solitude, having been separated by their own choice from their own history. They decided at some point that 1949 was Year Zero for them, that April 1949 was their Stunde Null, as Germans call 1945, and that everything before Confederation exists now only as fantasy, fiction, or fodder. As if to prove the point even the so-called nationalists focus only on 1949 and ignore all that went before unless they can fit it into a narrative of victimhood built on the phony conspiracy of 1948-49.

Since Confederation there has been across Newfoundland and Labrador an informal consensus that all before 1949 and indeed 1949 itself is not a fit subject for sensible discussion. There is no historical inquiry. No debate or discussion. We can argue about the causes of Confederation but the self-imposed amnesia, the voluntary alienation, the creation of our own Stunned Nullity is as unmistakeable as Terry Bishop-Stirling’s recent observation that the only people taking her Newfoundland history courses in the years before she retired were Mainlanders and new immigrants to Canada. The locals had no interest.

Howard Anglin uses solitudes to set up the alternative to his nonexistent, highly centralized federation called Canada. “Moving back from friendship to federalism,” Anglin writes, “love — caritas — means not imposing one vision of Canada on all regions. It means not asking why other parts of the country can’t be more like yours….” He drops this from nowhere, ignoring how much of the Alberta grievance argument is all about the rest of the country not being like them and wishing by threat of secession to force everyone to cave into their demands. Quebec is an especially favourite target of ire rooted in Alberta but, as evident in the argument about Equalization and the supposed theft of Alberta resources, the fixation is on outcomes - what Quebec’s or Nova Scotia’s provincial government does - rather than on incomes, which is what Equalization is all about. But it is also about forcing others to do as Albertans wish. Look at the demands now for many years that the federal government must aboilish Equalization or force other provinces to accept things Alerbtans claim they would not accept for themsevles, namely being told what to do by outsiders. Anglin simply ignores this to live in his fantasy forld.

Anglin is also not above quoting scripture for his own purposes, in this case some of Pierre Trudeau’s writings from the 1950s on funding for universities and how federalism works or ought to work. Yet at this moment when some Albertans this leaving Canada is the only course open, Anglin ignores Trudeau’s rebuff to the notion that secession is the only solution to Quebec grievances. It is a rebuff that could equally be made to those arguing either for Albertan independence on their way to becoming American or using the threat to get their way.

All that French Canadians desired and more, Trudeau argued, was available within Canada and within the structure of the Canadian federal state as it was not in theory but in practice. All Quebecois and Quebecoises had to do, Trudeau argued, was use the principles of democracy and federalism in the Canadian constitution to attain them. Look at the result, which is exactly and ironically as it turned out, what took place from the Quiet Revolution onward. It is also what annoys not only some Albertans but other Canadians. Albertans who find they do not have the clout within Canada they think they deserve need only do the same thing. So far they have not. They choose instead to simply invent arguments, as Anglin does, claim slights that do not exist, rub salt into their own imaginary wounds, and blame all their supposed suffering on others.

There are not two solitudes but many within in Canada as it turns out. There are many alienations, sometimes from one another, sometimes from what has gone before, and, as one might see in grievances in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario about Equalization or pipelines, alienation from reality. Ah, yes, you see, these are not Alberta’s gripes alone. There are other Canadians who find the same things troublesome for the same misguided reasons. They too would force their views on others just as some Albertans would if given the chance. But that has never been the way of this loose federation called Canada. Solitude, or more accurately alienation - self-alienation and blaming others especially those in Ottawa for provincial failings - is as Canadian as it gets.