January 17, 2006

When did ‘Canadian Values’ become such an issue?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

A lot of things have changed in the world of Canadian politics since I was a university student four decades ago.

Back then, for instance, our professors told us that our British-derived Westminster form of “responsible government” was superior to the American separation of powers model, with its rigid divisions between executive, legislative and judicial branches.

Our system, in which Parliament was supreme, was more flexible and adaptable. We did not have a constitution “cast in stone.” And we did not have to worry about unelected judges with lifetime tenure having the final say on how we would be governed, by exercising the awesome power of judicial review through reference to that constitution.

Today, of course, we have become worshipers of the Charter of Rights and are saddled with a constitution that is virtually impossible to amend.

Another example of Canada’s more enlightened political culture, we were taught, was our tolerance for ideological diversity.

Canada had no foundational myth nor was it formed around some great political vision. While the American idealists who had fought for independence and founded the United States were larger-than-life heroes, bold political theorists, revolutionaries with transcendental goals, Canada’s “Fathers of Confederation” were neither great thinkers nor orators, but simply colonial politicians.

The 1867 British North America Act united four British colonies into a Dominion of Canada. It was a compact of provinces and/or “founding nations,” not a new American-style social contract inspired by, in the words of the United States Constitution, “we, the people.”

The U.S. developed what Abraham Lincoln called a “political religion.” The various written documents--the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, among others--are still revered, and serve as a canon of political literature.

Indeed, the followers of political scientist Leo Strauss at times sound as though the U.S. Constitution is, if not actually a revelation from God, then at least semi-sacred and divinely inspired.

The historian Richard Hofstadter once said of his country that “it has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.” And “Americanism” has indeed at times been moralistic, rigid and doctrinaire.

But since Canada was formed by a union, at the time, of British and French colonial subjects, with their differences of language and religion, it was more comfortable with ideological diversity and could deal with it in a more rational manner. There was no overarching definition of what it meant to be a “Canadian.”

No one had a monopoly on the “spirit” of the nation. Television ads for soap and cars did not wave Canadian flags in viewers’ faces. There was no “Canadian way of life.” Nationality was related to community, not ideological commitment.

The U.S. House of Representatives actually included the notorious “Committee on Un-American Activities” (HUAC), to investigate “subversive activities.” It was a vehicle for unscrupulous politicians to impugn the patriotism and smear the reputations of those whom they deemed ideologically suspect. It was finally abolished in 1975.

But a “House Un-Canadian Activities Committee” would have been an oxymoron. So we could argue that the U.S. was a more politically intolerant nation that repressed minority opinion with recurring waves of McCarthyist demagoguery and witch-hunting, whereas a non-populist, non-ideological society like ours allowed more freedom because there was less need to enforce ideological conformity.

As the philosopher George Grant wrote in his 1965 Lament for a Nation, “To be a Canadian was to build a more ordered and stable society than the liberal experiment in the United States.”

Yet today, as the fractures between east and west, anglophone and francophone, multicultural big city and “old stock” rural region, continue to widen, our most prominent political leaders, Liberals in particular, prattle on endlessly about so-called “Canadian values,” which mostly boil down to feel-good platitudes.

They wrap themselves in the Maple Leaf while delivering speeches full of empty bombast and self-congratulatory rhetoric, boasting about what wonderful patriots they are.

When did we become just a second-rate version of America?