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C A N A D I A N S A N D FOREIGN POLICY
FRED ALEXANDER, a d i s t i n g u i s h e d h i s t o r i a n a n d the first A u s t r a l i a n to be a w a r d e d a Senior Research F e l l o w s h i p of the C a n a d a C o u n c i l , makes i n this b o o k a frank a n d f r i e n d l y attempt to e x a m i n e the v i e w s o n v a r i o u s aspects of C a n a d a ' s external relations expressed to h i m b y a n o c c u p a t i o n a l a n d r e g i o n a l cross-section of C a n a d i a n s (many of w h o m are n a m e d i n the text) d u r i n g the course of h i s recent coastto-coast i n v e s t i g a t i o n . C a n a d i a n - A m e r i c a n relations l o o m large i n the resultant analysis, w h e t h e r the subject matter is economic or strategic, c u l t u r a l or p o l i t i c a l . O t h e r i m p o r t a n t questions d i s c u s s e d cover the extent to w h i c h C a n a d i a n n a t i o n a l i s m is restricted b y s u r v i v i n g p r o v i n c i a l r e g i o n a l i s m ; the significance of s p i r i t u a l a n d idealist influences; current i n t e r n a l p o l i t i c a l trends; a n d the i n c r e a s i n g significance of A s i a a n d the Pacific i n the o v e r a l l attitude of C a n a d i a n s to the C o m m o n w e a l t h a n d the w o r l d at large. T h i s book, w h i c h is b e i n g p u b l i s h e d s i m u l t a n e o u s l y i n C a n a d a , A u s t r a l i a a n d the U n i t e d K i n g d o m , has the general q u a l i t y of h i g h l i g h t i n g t h r o u g h the eyes of a n i n d e p e n d e n t observer the i m p o r t a n t p r o b l e m s of C a n a d i a n attitudes to foreign p o l i c y a n d that special q u a l i t y w h i c h is d e r i v e d from the author's integrity a n d g o o d h u m o u r e d detachment n o less than the s h r e w d n e s s a n d rare penet r a t i o n of some of h i s judgments. PROFESSOR
a graduate of T r i n i t y C o l l e g e , M e l b o u r n e , a n d of B a l l i o l C o l l e g e , O x f o r d , is Professor of M o d e r n H i s t o r y a n d H e a d of the D e p a r t m e n t of H i s t o r y i n the U n i v e r s i t y of Western A u s t r a l i a . H e has been D i r e c t o r of A d u l t E d u c a t i o n , D e a n of the F a c u l t y of A r t s , a n d C h a i r m a n of the Professorial B o a r d of that u n i v e r s i t y . H e is c u r r e n t l y President of the Western A u s t r a l i a n b r a n c h of the A u s t r a l i a n Institute of International Affairs. PROFESSOR FRED ALEXANDER,
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THE RECORD OF AN INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATION
CANADIANS
AND
FRED
FOREIGN
POLICY
ALEXANDER
Professor of Modern History, University of Western Ausfra/ia
1960
UNIVERSITY
OF TORONTO
PRESS
COPYRIGHT, CANADA,
1960
BY THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Printed in Australia
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I
PAGE
INTRODUCTION
1
1 Objectives and Methods 2 A Central Theme 3 Personalities and Acknowledgments II
ECONOMIC REALITIES
15
1 An Industrial Revolution 2 Psychological Consequences 4 Canadian Oil 5 Surplus Grain 6 International Unions III
STRATEGIC INTERESTS
32
1 Prewar Strategic Relations 2 Early Postwar Changes 3 Ogdensburg to NORAD 4 Resultant Dissatisfactions 5 Realistic Requirements 6 Persistent Problems IV
POLITICAL TRENDS 1 2 3 4
V
CULTURAL CONSIDERATIONS 1 2 3 4
47
Political Systems and International Diplomacy C.C.F.-C.L.C. New Party Prospects A Liberal Revival? Question: Are Canadian Party Politics More Basically British or North American?
The The The The
Pervasiveness of American "Cultural" Penetration Forces of Resistance Role of the C.B.C. Canada Council
65
CHAPTER
VI
PAGE
IDEALIST AND SPIRITUAL INFLUENCES
78
1 Churchmen and Politics 2 Idealism and the Individual 3 Religion and Canadian-American Relations 4 Non Roman Catholics and Canadian Nationalism VII
NATIONALISM AND REGIONALISM
89
1 The Search for a Positive Nationalism 2 Industrialisation and the French Canadians 3 Economic Realities and the Maintenance of a Distinctive Canadian Identity VIII
SOUTH OF THE BORDER
111
1 Americans' Ignorance of Canada 2 United States Grievances and Criticisms 3 "Taking Canadians for Granted" IX
THE WORLD AT LARGE
1 2 3 4 X
127
China and the Pacific A Modus Vivendi with Moscow? India, the West Indies and Immigration Canada and the Commonwealth
CONCLUSION
140
APPENDIX
144
Extracts from the Reports of the Hays-Coffin Special Study Mission to Canada INDEX
156
i
INTRODUCTION
A WISE American once remarked that no man should write about a foreign country or its people if he has lived there less than six weeks or more than six months. The views expressed in this little book will, it is hoped, evoke some critical comment, from Canadians and from others. The circumstances in which the views were formed should, however, free the writer from the two objections implicit in the dictum quoted. For Canadians and Foreign Policy is the outcome of a non-statistical survey of Canadian opinion deliberately conducted in such a way as to ensure a reasonable coverage of Canadian viewpoints, on Pacific and Atlantic coasts, throughout the Prairie Provinces, as well as in different parts of Ontario and Quebec, without subjecting the writer to the danger of unconsciously absorbing the views of those Canadians to whom he might have been attracted socially, x>r with whom he would have been preoccupied professionally, had he stayed longer in their country. As it was, he entered Canada via British Columbia in September 1958, and he left it from New Brunswick shortly before Christmas of the same year. During the intervening weeks he was constantly on the move eastward across the Dominion, discussing much the same questions with Canadians of all classes and creeds, with only those inevitable variations of subject matter and of emphasis which spring from differences in the human interest, age, sex, vocation and environment of the person interviewed.
1 At the risk of boring general readers and with no wish to depress this little book to the level of a pseudo-scientific treatise, something may perhaps be said about the techniques used in the 1
CANADIANS AND FOREIGN POLICY
investigation of which it is the outcome. These have evolved experimentally over a quarter of a century as the result of the writer's periodic attempts to counteract the isolation of teaching modern history and of commenting on current events in the University of Western Australia, the attractive campus of which has the doubtful distinction of being the furthest removed from that of any other university in the world. This experimental evolution of a technique began in 1932 when the Rhodes Trust financially aided, and its Secretary the Marquess of Lothian otherwise assisted, an informal investigation of frontier problems in and around the then notorious PolishGerman Corridor. The technique took more formal shape in 1939-40 when a Rockefeller Fellowship in social science made possible a survey of American attitudes on Pacific questions, to be conducted in different parts of the United States. In the prevailing isolationist sentiment of that country in early 1939 the topic had seemed one of potential if somewhat remote significance to an Australian. The outbreak of war with Nazi Germany encouraged him to keep a third ear to the ground as he moved slowly on his investigation from California to New York, for the possible benefit of the sometime Rhodes Trust Secretary, by then His Britannic Majesty's Ambassador in Washington, D.G, and, later in 1940, of Australia's first Minister to the United States. A by-product of this American fellowship investigation was also a first glimpse of Canada, incidental to a trans-Dominion lecture tour under the auspices of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs on the way home from New York to Perth, W.A., vit Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton, and Victoria, B.C. The investigational techniques were further sharpened and adapted to the attitudes of diverging racial, religious and cultural groups within a single national community by a Carnegie Corporation grant for a five months' South African survey in 194950. At the end of this examination of prevailing political, social and economic attitudes of Afrikaners and of English-speaking South Africans, the ground previously covered in the United States was briefly revisited. Detours to Montreal and Toronto brought the first indication of changing views from some of those politically self-conscious Canadians who in 1940 had talked freely and confidently to an Australian cousin of substantially won freedom from "Downing Street domination". By 1950, the same spokesmen were evidently more than a little concerned with some .of the fruits of wartime and early postwar experiences with
2
INTRODUCTION
Washington. These experiences suggested that Uncle Sam could be just as tough as John Bull—and sometimes, perhaps, a little less polite about it all. The two samples of Canadian politico-social fare in 1940 and 1950 had whetted an appetite for more, and preparatory steps were taken periodically during the mid fifties to brush up on the background of Canadian history with the more or less willing collaboration of West Australian undergraduates. By the middle of 1958, the challenging political situation created by the two successive Diefenbaker electoral victories and the generous cooperation of the Canada Council prompted the attempt to apply to the current Canadian scene the techniques which had been tested in the United States and South Africa. From the critical viewpoint of either the professional sociologist or the historian the techniques still no doubt remained more Alexandrine than scientific. In the search for an occupational as well as a regional cross-section, a beginning was usually made at the Faculty level. Canadian experience was in fact to confirm that of other countries: not only does a university teacher invariably find colleagues on other campuses who talk the same language as himself and discover some who are specially interested in particular questions he raises; a Faculty member is also an invaluable guide to completion of the rest of an investigator's cross-section. A Faculty member is usually well up on local scandals of a politico-economic character; if he does not himself know who is the real shaper of policy within a certain group or institution, he can be relied on to find someone who has the requisite information. In this way it did not prove difficult, from Vancouver, B.C., to Fredericton, N.B., to construct a cross-section which included effective spokesmen for different newspapers—not always the occupants of editorial or managerial chairs; some influential business men whose activities were significantly reflective of the economy of the region in question; local representatives of political parties and of tradeunion organisations; publicists other than those of the daily press; civil servants of national, provincial and local governments and their more reticent Service counterparts; and, last but not least important in most provinces, the lay or clerical spokesmen for different religious denominations. After two or three weeks' work had been done on common questions originally listed for discussion and on others subsequently added at the suggestion of particular persons interviewed, some sort of a pattern of Canadian attitudes began to
2
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emerge on fundamental issues, whether economic, strategic, political, cultural or even spiritual in character. Emergence of such a pattern was usually recognised as the signal to transfer attention from the occupational to the regional side of the crosssection. This in fact meant moving successively in the first six weeks from British Columbia through each of the Prairie Provinces and thence in turn to Toronto, Kingston, Hamilton and Windsor in Ontario and to the national capital. From Ottawa the inquiry led to Montreal and the city of Quebec and ended with a brief, direct contact with the outlook of a Maritime Province, in Fredericton, New Brunswick. In each of these locations the machinery for making an occupational cross-section was put into operation. A certain variety of emphasis was deemed permissible where peculiar economic or social characteristics of the region seemed to demand this. The objective throughout was nevertheless as much to guard against and correct purely regional interpretation of national issues as it was to obtain first-hand evidence of significantly local developments. Since the attitudes of most Canadians on foreign policy are deeply affected by the relations between the Dominion and its southern neighbour, it seemed wise to preface the Canadian investigation by spending a couple of weeks in California, chiefly in San Francisco. More significantly perhaps, at the end of the Canadian investigation, opportunity was taken of the practical assistance of the social science officers of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York and of the Commonwealth-Studies Center at Duke University in Durham, N.C., to spend a month discussing the American side of some of the vexed questions of Canadian-American relations, chiefly at Princeton and Yale and in New York and Washington, before crossing the Atlantic and re-examining the evidence, against a broader background of Commonwealth studies, in the United Kingdom. Though the method of investigation throughout was mainly oral, every opportunity was taken to collect relevant material, whether in the form of official documents and reports (which in Canada can on occasion claim recognition for literary as well as other merits—notably in the case of the reports of the Gordon Commission on economic resources and the Fowler Commission on broadcasting) or of books and pamphlets published in Canada or of the daily and periodical press. A portable transistor radio eased the task of random monitoring of radio programmes; information regarding the content and quality of Canadian television programmes was obtained for the most part at second hand. 4
INTRODUCTION
The scientific limitations set to conclusions drawn from the use of such techniques must be readily apparent. The speed with which the survey was conducted produced all the obvious disadvantages offsetting the advantages claimed in the opening paragraphs above. Key persons in different fields of Canadian life who had been marked down for interview were sometimes absent from their normal habitat on the only appropriate occasions. Though sometimes discussion with a less exalted substitute proved unexpectedly rewarding, it was just not possible to fill the gap on all occasions. And while the regional character of the cross-section was felt to be reasonably comprehensive, a Nova Scotian or a Newfoundlander might well object to the soundness of general conclusions regarding Atlantic attitudes drawn from viewpoints expressed either in New Brunswick or by Maritime expatriates making their fortunes elsewhere in the Dominion.
2 By the time the investigation was two-thirds complete certain tentative hypotheses began to suggest themselves. In the form in which they finally survived the testing and the new evidence gathered in later weeks, and as they have since been reformulated outside Canada, after collation and examination of notes taken and material collected, they may be stated briefly here. Indeed, if this little book has a central theme, it is that in their attitudes to foreign policy Canadians today reveal much less than is popularly believed of that traditional conflict between East-West (European) and North-South (American) influences which was so much talked about in prewar years. This has given place to an internal contest, dimly felt, perhaps, but widely pervasive, between increasing if sometimes secret acceptance of North American realities and a Canadian nationalism which too often is highly romanticised. The expression of this nationalism ranges all the way from emotional hysteria to coldly deliberate self-sacrifice. It is coloured throughout, on the one hand, by a strange mixture of materialistic self-confidence and secret doubts and, on the other, by a responsiveness to idealist and spiritual influences which is itself both emotional and intellectual but is undoubtedly one of the most attractive characteristics of contemporary Canadians, west as well as east of Ottawa. Evidence supporting the central theme of the preceding para5
CANADIANS AND FOREIGN POLICY
graphs will be found in the substantive chapters below where an attempt is made to combine the investigator's descriptive record with an analysis of the more significant subjects into which the investigation classified itself: the economic, the strategic, the political, the cultural and the spiritual. 3
It remains to list with appreciation some of the more significant conscious and unconscious contributors to the oral and written material on which this book has been based. The list is not comprehensive. Amongst names deliberately omitted are those of most civil servants and of all Service personnel. Not that the writer recalls a single case of indiscretion in factual statement or critical comment which such a speaker might regret having made in the presence of an outside observer. Part of the British governmental tradition which Canadians have made their own is the anonymity and high sense of responsibility of the public servant. It seems fitting that both should be respected here while tribute is also paid in passing to the intellectual quality and personal accessibility of both national and provincial officers and, incidentally, to the ease with which some at least among them are able to write really readable prose—even verse, it is understood, upon occasion. Among university hosts, guides, philosophers, friends and critics the list may properly begin (in the order of the investigation) with Presidents Norman A. MacKenzie, Andrew Stewart, Claude T. Bissell, A. Davidson Dunton and Colin B. Mackay of the universities of British Columbia, Alberta, Toronto, Carleton and New Brunswick respectively. To these should be added the Principal and Vice-Chancellor of McGill, Dr. F. Cyril James, and his academic neighbour on the hill, Monseigneur I. Lussier, Recteur of the French-speaking Université de Montréal. Of relations with these dignitaries it may perhaps irreverently be remarked that two incidents stand out. The first is the memory of the U.B.C. Golden Jubilee, when President MacKenzie used a second special Convocation to confer honorary doctorates on a Lieutenant-Governor, a Prime Minister, a Premier, two Opposition leaders and (for good measure) the Chairman of the Canada Council, and subsequently entertained four hundred at a banquet for which guests were bidden for 7.30 P.M. and at which the proposer of the last toast began his speech at 12.15 A.M. The second recollection is of a delightful, late-Fall drive from
6
INTRODUCTION
Toronto, Ontario, to Rochester, N.Y., for a weekend conference on Canadian-American relations under the auspices of Professor Mason Wade, with the President of the University of Toronto as chauffeur and a second mutual friend, Professor Alexander Brady, as co-passenger. As a method of cornering a member of that elusive species, the North American university president, the device is strongly commended to all nomadic investigators. Faculty members, who often extended their help beyond their own departments within their several universities and in the communities outside, included, at the University of British Columbia, Deans G. F. Curtis and F. H. Soward, Professors Stuart Jamieson and G. Davies, Dr. D. C. Corbett and Mr. J. S. Conway; at the University of Alberta, Acting Dean C. F. Bentley, Professor L. G. Thomas, Dr. D. W. Farnham; in Winnipeg, Professor W. L. Morton and Dr. M. S. Donnelly of the University of Manitoba and Dr. Kenneth McNaught (now of the University of Toronto) ; in Ontario, Professors Alexander Brady and G. W. Brown, Provost D. R. G. Owen and Drs. J. M. S. Careless and J. T. Saywell of the University of Toronto, Professors G. F. G. Stanley and R. A. Preston and Dr. D. M. Schurman of the Royal Military College, Kingston, and Dr. F. W. Gibson and his colleagues in history at Queen's University in the same city, Dean H. S. Armstrong, Professor E. T. Salmon and Dr. W. M. Kilbourn of McMaster University, Hamilton, the Reverend Fathers D. J. Mulvihill and E. C. Garvey of Assumption University, Windsor. Profitable discussions took place in Ottawa with Mr. Frank Underbill, formerly of the University of Toronto, with Professor G. Buxton of the bilingual University of Ottawa and with Dean J. A. Gibson of Carleton University, at McGill with Professors Maxwell Cohen, F. R. Scott and H. D. Woods and Drs. M. K. Oliver and J. C. Weldon and, at the University of Montreal, with Deans F. A. Cadique and Pierre Dansereau, Vice-Dean Guy Frégault and Dr. Michel Brunet. At Laval University, Quebec, Monseigneur Arthur Maheux, Abbé Gérard Dion, Dean Maurice Lebel, Professors J. C. Falardeau and H. Fontaine and M.-E. Guay were warmly hospitable and co-operative indoors while the temperature outside touched 15° below zero. At the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, in comparable weather, Deans A. G. Bailey and F. J. Toóle, Professors Jean I. Hubener, W. S. MacNutt and W. Y. Smith, dispensed generous hospitality, intellectual and otherwise. Among the many journalists with whom quips, facts and ideas were exchanged and by whom meals and liquid refreshments
7
CANADIANS AND FOREIGN POLICY
were so frequently provided, it seems somewhat churlish to list only Messrs. Ross Munro and Carlyle Allison of the Southam Press (then in charge of the Vancouver Province and the Winnipeg Tribune respectively); Mr. J. W. Brehaut of the Calgary Herald-, Mr. Tom Kent, editor of the Winnipeg Free Press-, Mr. B. T. Richardson of the Toronto Telegram-, Mr. Oakley Dalgleish, who brought together most of the members of his editorial staff on the Toronto Globe and Mail for a two-hour, two-way luncheon conference; Mr. R. A. Graybiel of the Windsor Daily Star-, Mr. Arnold Edinborough, then about to leave the Kingston Whig-Standard to take over the editorship of Saturday Night; Mr. Blair Eraser, the lively Ottawa correspondent of Maclearfs; Messrs. George Ferguson of the Star and Roger Fontaine of La Presse, in Montreal; and Lorenzo Pare of UAction catholique and Langevin Cote of the Legislative Assembly press gallery, in Quebec. The number of politicians, both amateur and professional, who were interviewed was legion; yet there were significant omissions. The Prime Minister was seen and heard at close range at the U.B.C. Jubilee marathon dinner referred to above, but Mr. Diefenbaker escaped personal interview by arranging a visit to Australia (among other places) to coincide with the writer's arrival in Ottawa. The defeated C.C.F. leader, Mr. M. J. Coldwell, was met in Vancouver during the same jubilee celebrations but had left for overseas before a promised second meeting could take place. The C.C.F. view was received without difficulty in many places: in Vancouver, by courtesy of its founder's daughter, Mrs. Angus Maclnnis (nee Grace Woodsworth) and her husband, recently retired from the House of Commons through illness; in Winnipeg, from the party's provincial leader in the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba, Mr. Lloyd Stinson, whose political astuteness has not obscured the social convictions he used to display from a United Church pulpit; in other provinces, with differing displays of responsibility but always with enthusiasm, from a number of rank and file members, not all of them in university common rooms. Among Conservatives in office it was fascinating to compare and contrast the views and the personalities of three provincial premiers. The young and ebullient Mr. Duff Roblin, just learning his premier's paces in the minority administration of the province of Manitoba, gave the impression of being on the threshold of a career of still greater promise, not necessarily within the provincial field alone. When first interviewed in his 8
INTRODUCTION
office, however, Mr. Roblin seemed singularly ill-fitted for anything suggestive of the label "conservative", even with a little c. On the other hand, Mr. Leslie Frost, Ontario's veteran Premier ("Prime Minister" on the door of a provincial office is more than a little misleading to overseas visitors), delivered himself for half an hour of a string of Rotarian-type platitudes which seemed fully suggestive of the party tag—until the last ten minutes of the interview, when his realistic summary of current trends and future possibilities in Canadian politics provided a salutary lesson for an overconfident Australian observer as yet imperfectly aware of the infinite variations possible in trans-Dominion party politics. The third example, the approachable Hugh John Flemming of New Brunswick, revealed a combination of Scandinavian-type popular royalty and common-sense administrator which appeared to offer much in that realistic reappraisal of Maritime Province potentialities to which consideration is devoted in chapter vn of the text below. The most surprising contrasts among politicians observed or interviewed were those provided by the accredited representatives of, first, Social Credit and, second, the Liberal party. Neither the programme of Premier Bennett in British Columbia nor the replies of Mr. E. C. Manning to questions put to him in the Premier's office in Edmonton measured up to the preconceived conceptions of Social Credit which still persist in at least some countries overseas. The record of Mr. Bennett's Administration would suggest that the nearest acceptable political synonym for Social Credit in British Columbia would be "conservative" if not "reactionary". Mr. Manning's administrative realism, on the other hand, still seems to remain consistent with a degree of continuing evangelical appeal, even to Albertans of the post-economic depression era—as witness the "follow me" implications of the Premier's regular Sunday Baptist broadcasts. Of the Liberal party more below; enough here to record some personal surprise at Mr. Lester Pearson's apparently successful (and seemingly satisfying) subordination of the international idealist to the party political leader. The writer's failure, at the end of a very cordial and frank discussion in the Opposition Leader's Ottawa rooms, to obtain any prevision of a new Canadian Liberalww may help to explain some of his earlier difficulty in discovering representative Young Liberals in Toronto, notwithstanding the invoked assistance of colleagues knowledgeable in political science. For the record it is nevertheless remarked that efforts did eventually discover one or two of 9
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the species, among whom Mr. R. G. Dry den may not object to his name being added to the list of Canadians with whom the time of day was passed with some evidence of mutual satisfaction. It may be added, too, that, if age did not in this case preclude, "Young Liberal" would not unfittingly cover the impression Created by a stimulating interview in Quebec with the former federal Cabinet Minister and new provincial leader of the Liberal party, M. Jean Lesage. From political leaders to executives of labour unions is a transition which seems more natural in view of the importance attached in the text below to current C.C.F.-C.L.C. negotiations for the emergence of a new political party. Here again it Was not possible to meet certain leaders through sheer force of circumstance, but deliberate intention was also responsible for the inclusion of men less widely known, who might perhaps more readily reflect rank and file views. Canadian Labour Congress officials were initially represented by Mr. George Home, then still at Vancouver Federation of Labour headquarters. Sharp contrast, yet in the main confirmation, was to be offered in Ottawa by President W. Smith of the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway, Transport and General Workers, the large nation-wide union which is proud of its record of organised activity outside an international union; a significant variant had already been detected during discussions with Mr. Jerome Hartford at U.A.W-C.I.O. headquarters in Windsor. Frank illustration, based on personal experience, of some of the difficulties of trade unionism in the province of Quebec was given in Montreal by M. Ivan Legault. This and a stimulating, inside story of the past history, current problems and likely future trends in FrenchCanadian unionism which was provided in Quebec City by the Secretary General of the Canadian and Catholic Confederation of Labour, M. Jean Marchand, helped to make up for disappointment at the unavailability in Montreal of French-speaking officers of the United Steelworkers of America whose names had emerged from some good talk in Toronto with the Steelworkers' national education director, Mr. Gower Markle. A very profitable two hours of discussion did, however, take place in the Steelworkers' Hall at Kingston, Ontario, with four local union leaders selected more or less at random, without advance notice of the subject-matter, through the good offices of Mr. Rolland Doucette, area representative of the Steelworkers of America. On industrial management and allied economic issues, the most rewarding discussions in Vancouver took place with the Hon. 10
INTRODUCTION
J. V. Clyne (formerly Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of British Columbia and now Chairman of the Board of MacMillan and Bloedel Ltd.), Mr. J. N. Frane (Canadian Pacific Railway vice-president for the Pacific region), Mr. David Kinnear (director and general manager of the British Columbia division of the T. Eaton Co. Canada Limited), Mr. R. G. Miller (assistant general manager of the Canadian Bank of Commerce) and Mr. Walter Koerner of Alaska Pine & Cellulose Ltd. A cross-section of independent Canadian oil-company representatives was met in Calgary. In Winnipeg, the Farmers' Union viewpoint was vigorously presented by Mr. Jim Paterson, president of the Manitoba Farmers' Union, immediately following his return from a tour of the province. Useful documentary material on the work of the Farmers' Union in Saskatchewan had already been provided by the Union's secretary in Saskatoon, Mr. Stuart Thiesson, while, in Regina, the vice-president of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, Mr. C. W. Gibbings, had discussed the effects of United States practices in surplus-grain disposals in the light of his own part in the remedial negotiations in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. In the provinces of Ontario and Quebec discussions with men in business and banking ranged from those at Hamilton, "the Pittsburg of Canada", with Mr. George Elwin, vice-president and treasurer of the Steel Company of Canada, and with the president of Lifesavers of Canada, Mr. M. B. Bates, to those with Mr. R. J. Lyons, director of production volume and planning at the Chrysler Corporation in Windsor and to much good talk in Montreal with Mr. Raleigh Parkin of the Sun Life Assurance Company, and a small group of past and present economic advisers to the Banks of Montreal and the Royal Bank of Canada, including Messrs. Douglas Monteath and Edward A. Walton and Dr. Donald B. Marsh. For business contacts in Vancouver and Montreal it is a pleasure to acknowledge the considerable help of Mr. C. A. Allen, Australian Trade Commissioner in Vancouver, and of the Assistant Trade Commissioner in Montreal, Mr. G. W. Temby. Matters cultural and spiritual were covered directly or indirectly, outside colleges and universities, by men and women of widely diverging professional interests. Pride of place is given here to officers of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation not only because of the judgments passed in chapter v below on the C.B.C.'s actual achievements and potential significance but also because the general manager of the Corporation (as he then was) had arranged facilities even before the writer left Australia which 11
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enabled him to profit by the varied experience of regional directors Kenneth Caple and James F. Finlay, in Vancouver and Winnipeg respectively, and of Mr. Frank W. Peers, national supervisor of talks and public affairs in Toronto. Many of the lay and clerical members of different denominations were met in university colleges or common rooms, but a very clear recollection persists of the penetrating and humorous comments made in Winnipeg by the Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, the Most Reverend W. F. Barfoot— "I suppose you'd like to know if all Anglicans vote Conservative and travel C.P.R."—and of an informative discussion with Bishop N. R. Clarke in Edmonton. The most stimulating analyses of the respective socio-political roles of the Roman Catholic and the United churches in contemporary Canada were given by laymen—by Mr. Murray G. Ballantyne in Montreal and Professor George W. Brown in Toronto. Others who contributed directly or indirectly to the mass of oral or written information on which this book is based were Mayor William Hawrelak of Edmonton, son of a Ukrainian migrant to Alberta, Dr. Edgar Mclnnis, president of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, and Dr. J. Roby Kidd, director of the Canadian Association for Adult Education, who drew generously on his wide range of experience of public opinion throughout the Dominion in suggesting lines of investigation and in commenting critically on tentative conclusions. Perhaps the most stimulating single interview in any part of Canada was the tightly packed hour spent with Dr. Omond M. Solandt, now a vice-president of the Canadian National Railways in Montreal. (Those who know anything of Dr. Solandt's distinguished record as the first chairman of Canada's Defence Research Board from 1947 to 1956 will not be surprised that the hour's discussion did not include a single reference to railroads!) An exception to the principle of the anonymity of the public servant is made to record appreciation of the many facilities provided in Ottawa by the writer's Balliol contemporary Dr. George Glazebrook, formerly of the Department of History in the University of Toronto, now head of the Commonwealth Division and of the Historical Division in the Department of External Affairs, and in Winnipeg (and elsewhere) by Mr. Derek Bedson, formerly private secretary to Mr. John Diefenbaker, now Clerk of the Executive Council in the province of Manitoba. The length of this list of Canadians who contributed consciously or otherwise to the making of this book should be 12
INTRODUCTION
sufficient safeguard against any of its statements or opinions being attributed by readers to a particular person named, except where the text clearly indicates that this was the writer's intention. The readiness of almost all those approached to talk freely and frankly on different aspects of their contemporary life is here acknowledged with warm satisfaction; it would be a poor return for so many courtesies and so much frankness if it were not made perfectly clear that anyone listed above is as likely to reject as to support inferences drawn or conclusions presented below. For these the writer takes exclusive personal responsibility. Especially is it desired to dissociate the Canada Council from any share in the detailed planning or execution of this investigation. Status as one of the Council's first senior non-resident fellows undoubtedly opened many doors throughout the Dominion. The writer's good fortune will also be obvious in having in the Hon. Brooke Claxton, as chairman of his sponsoring organisation, not only a former Minister for Defence during the formative years 1946 to 1954 but also the possessor of a valuable private library of printed and manuscript material on Canadian foreign policy and related questions. A considerable experience in respect to research fellowships, both at the receiving and at the supervising end, will, it is hoped, permit a warmly appreciative reference to the wisdom and tolerance of the director of the Canada Council. Dr. A. W. Trueman's unusual combination of restraint in suggesting procedures of investigation or persons to be interviewed and of cordial co-operation in response to specific requests for guidance or other forms of assistance suggests that the Council's future senior fellows may rely on a generosity of treatment which will continue to compare well with the best traditions of American and British educational foundations, which have much greater experience behind them. Lest there be any lingering suspicion in a reader's mind that what appears below represents the Council's influence in any degree, it may be added that publication was deliberately decided upon without any request for Council sponsorship, financial or otherwise. While this Canadian investigation would not have been possible without the Council's fellowship it is a pleasure also to record one more obligation to the social science officers of the Rockefeller Foundation for their assistance with inquiries made in the Atlantic coastal States and in Washington, D.C., and to the Senate of the University of Western Australia for the requisite study leave from teaching and administrative duties as the head of the Department of History in that university. To Mr. G. C. 13
CANADIANS AND FOREIGN POLICY
Mclnnes, Senior Political Counsellor at Canada House, and to Mr. E. R. Denney, Official Secretary, Office of the Agent General for Western Australia, the writer is indebted for many courtesies while this manuscript was being prepared in London. In the first of his two stimulating Alan B. Flaunt Memorial Lectures at Carleton University, Ottawa, in January-February 1958, on "Canada and Its Giant Neighbour", Dr. Jacob Viner of Princeton explained his eagerness to abandon an early emphasis on the personal, for a more strictly impersonal treatment of his subject. He quoted with telling effect the "Damn your Ps!" comment of a friendly critic of the draft of a recent heavily autobiographical work by a distinguished compatriot and contemporary of the present writer. While in general endorsing the sentiments involved, it is proposed here to reverse the procedure. The first personal pronoun, which has been deliberately excluded from this Introduction will be allowed its natural, though, it is hoped, severely restricted, place in what follows. For Canadians and Foreign Policy is the result of an investigation highly personal in its planning and in its techniques as well as in the selection of the material it produced and in the conclusions drawn from that material.
14
II
ECONOMIC REALITIES
THERE can be no question that economic affairs tend to dominate public discussion in contemporary Canada. As the next chapter will reveal, economic issues confuse and complicate more fundamental considerations in North American strategy. There is also sufficient material basis for the ordinary Canadian's everyday existence in the second half of the twentieth century to encourage pressmen and politicians to play up particular economic phenomena in confident expectation that these will capture at least passing attention by substantial sections of the general public. Even purely cultural considerations are continually affected by the balancing of special costs against national objectives. More and more aspects of regional relationships with the nation's capital and with other parts of the Dominion are being affected by the inexorable requirements of economic change. These have come to condition both the emotional and the intellectual reactions of seemingly self-contained communities, such as the French Canadians in the province of Quebec and the allegedly forgotten men of the Maritime Provinces and their recent recruits in Newfoundland. All this is easily understandable if it is recognised that in recent times Canada has been passing through a form of industrial revolution comparable in its temporarily distorting and exaggerating effects upon the national life with those produced in the United Kingdom around the time of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars and in South Africa before and since the second world war. Canadians are rightly proud of the economic progress they have made in the forties and fifties of this century but they seem reluctant to apply an economic historian's standards of comparative measurement to assess current economic phenomena and the impact of these on other aspects of the nation's life and thought. 15
CANADIANS AND FOREIGN POLICY
1 The extent and significance of recent economic changes were certainly the first impressions which forced themselves on me when I returned to British Columbia in the Fall of 1958 after an effective absence of nearly two decades. I continued to be impressed by these phenomena of Canada's mid-century industrial revolution wherever I went in the Dominion. In Vancouver, the revolution was apparent in the striking rate of progress in this young city, founded only in 1886 and now comprising a population of over 650,000. There, too, the talk was general of current (often conflicting) plans for exploiting latent power resources, with or without the co-operation of the United States, by damming or diverting the Columbia, the Fraser or the Peace River. In the Prairie Provinces, it was not only that oil had partially transformed the economy of Alberta, but also that the significance of grain-producing interests was declining in the national economy as a whole and that those interests were themselves undergoing a change in character, which tended to fit them more naturally into the business mentality already prevailing in more urbanised areas. In Ontario and Quebec, the shrinking countryside and the rising factories and many-storeyed offices told their own tales of persistent industrialisation and growth of tertiary services. Even the province of Quebec, with its once closely interwoven rural, economic, social and religious organisation, could now be classified—for what such classifications are worth—as 70 per cent urban. Finally, the historically important Maritime Provinces, increasingly remote from the rapidly expanding domestic markets of Upper Canada, were being forced to consider an alternative to defeatist acceptance of the loss of bright young men going West to make their fortunes. This alternative was being sought by cold and careful calculation of the potentialities of a still significant if restricted economic and political existence within the inevitably modified economy of contemporary Canada. Some Maritimers at least were coming to recognise that this second best might be won by combining local courage and ingenuity with the fullest possible exploitation of financial and other resources controlled by political and administrative leaders of the once abused Confederation. At first sight, the outward reactions of many with whom I talked or whose newspapers I read in the several provinces gave little indication that a majority of Canadians recognised the realistic requirements of so rapid and so extensive a mid-century 16
ECONOMIC REALITIES
industrial revolution. Too frequently the prevailing psychological response was a mixture of healthy self-confidence, and at times excessive self-assertion, with a peculiar sensitivity and even an underlying fear for the future. This fear sometimes revealed itself in symptoms suggestive not of self-confidence but rather of an inferiority complex. My considered opinion on leaving Canada nevertheless was that these widely publicised popular reactions served only to obscure what I felt to be the really significant fact which an objective observer should report; namely, the very solid achievement and, in general, the very real satisfaction of most of those directly concerned with the several manifestations of the Dominion's continuing industrial revolution. These men, I felt, were grappling realistically and pragmatically with the current demands of the revolution, notwithstanding periodic public and political clamour for root and branch action which might more speedily solace national self-esteem.
2 The disturbing outward marks of rapid industrial change upon which public criticisms tend to concentrate almost all concern Canada's relations with the United States. Periodically, as I crossed the Dominion, I met with press or individual protests at Canada's being subjected to a variety of economic controls by its powerful southern neighbour. The pages of such newspapers as the Vancouver Sun, the Calgary Herald and the Toronto Globe and Mail continually reiterated two grievances which the detached reader felt to be highly charged with anti-American sentiment. The first was that the management of Canadian industry is gravely restricted by detailed direction from parent companies within the United States. The second is that Canadian labour is enslaved by the domination of union bosses presiding over powerful international union headquarters located south of the border. I made it my business wherever possible to check on each of these widely publicised charges of external economic control, beginning with the complaint of external direction of Canadian industrial management. My talks with senior executives of lumber companies on the Pacific Coast revealed a point of view which was in the main confirmed by what I subsequently heard from those concerned with very different industries in Ontario and Quebec. Without denying the existence of some striking exceptions I would say dogmatically that the great majority of 17
CANADIANS AND FOREIGN POLICY
Canadian businessmen who are actively engaged in exploiting Canada's many undeveloped resources are substantially satisfied with the status quo in Canadian-American economic relations. A typical example of this realistic attitude was provided by the representative of an important Pacific Coast organisation who, though born outside North America, had proved himself a lively and public-spirited Canadian who could be unsparing in his criticism of some American practices. A paraphrase of his argument appears in my notebook as follows: This matter of Canadian-American relations is—or should be regarded—as a purely business question. This is the way Americans themselves treat what are for them purely economic transactions, dominated by the profit and loss considerations of private business with no political overtones. With us, however, the economic issues are distorted by a section of the press and are exploited by politicians looking for vote-winning electoral slogans. Let's be frank about the true nature of this CanadianAmerican business relationship. We Canadians have much to contribute to the economic development of North America. We have valuable raw materials; we have manpower and some experience and a real interest in our country. We also have a certain amount of capital. The Americans, on their side, have much more specialised "know-how" in certain fields. They have a great deal more capital and they are much more ready to put their capital into speculative economic enterprises than the rank and file of Canadian investors seem to be. In addition, the Americans have personal qualities of drive and enterprise which some Canadians lack. And what's the outcome? Canadian-American relations may well be a marriage of convenience rather than of love but the marriage works very well, to the substantial satisfaction of both parties. As individual partners they get along very well and their resultant offspring is surprisingly healthy. As so often happens elsewhere, the real threat to the marriage comes from those outside it—from a section of the Canadian press and from politicians ready to play on public sensibilities for their own purposes. As to the complaint of non-use of Canadian personnel noted above, the record would seem to disprove the charge. Examples 18
ECONOMIC REALITIES
were cited in many different provinces of the pains taken by parent companies in the United States to seek out and train promising Canadians—sometimes through lengthy periods in the parent organisation—for eventual appointment to top positions in the subsidiary company. When an American executive with special qualifications is sent to Canada and left there he reportedly outdoes Canadian-born associates in other independent companies in his personal contributions to local charitable and educational organisations. An example given me in an Ontario city was of the American president of a Canadian subsidiary who was then spending most of his leisure organising the local university's building-fund campaign. A similar instance cited by a Pacific Coast banker was of the American executive widely respected for his work in local charities and other community activities. "This American has proved himself one of the best Canadians I know" was the significant tribute. I should add that I heard the same sort of comment more than once in other provinces. Nor is this mutual respect and ease of personal relations between Canadians and Americans north of the border confined to those on the top rungs of the ladder who may be able to pay their way in some of Canada's more exclusive and not always mausoleum-like professional and business clubs. I recall the Canadian head of an American subsidiary who invited me to test the soundness of comment such as that given above by calling in a young Harvard graduate who had been working with him for some months. The young man was introduced with the leading question: "You came here of your own choice; do you have any difficulty in working or in otherwise getting on with your Canadian-born associates?" The reply came pat enough, with something of a sting in the tail: "No difficulty at all; but I doubt whether I'd have come if I'd ever read any Canadian newspapers beforehand!" In its October 1958 Letter (Number 60), the Empire Trust Company of New York published the results of a survey by means of questionnaires to "166 U.S. corporations known to have substantial Canadian subsidiary operations". The Letter reported that approximately two-thirds of the companies had responded, including "thirteen U.S. parent corporations with assets of $1 billion and more", while 94 had provided detailed answers. Having examined a copy of the detailed analysis of these replies forwarded by the Trust Company to a Canadian bank, I have no difficulty in accepting the general argument of the Letter that the situation was steadily improving. From the 94 detailed 19
CANADIANS AND FOREIGN POLICY
answers it appeared that 47 per cent of the subsidiary companies had had Canadian presidents in 1955. This percentage had risen to 50 by 1958, while, taking the four highest positions in a subsidiary, the increase had been from 57 to 61 per cent. It was also noteworthy that the percentage of Canadian presidents rose to approximately 75 in the larger companies. Well might the Hays-Coffin Special Mission declare, in its second Report at the end of December 1958 (see Appendix below), regarding the desire for employment of Canadians in key positions in subsidiary companies: Our feeling on this subject is that the issue today is a diminishing one. Progress is being made and the leaders of industry are setting a good pace. On the related question of the degree of external control by parent companies it would be surprising indeed if there were not instances in all industries where the considered over-all advantage of an extensive North American business network did not sometimes operate at the expense of the immediate profits of a particular Canadian subsidiary. No casual investigator—for that matter, few resident critics—could claim to speak with authority of the number of occasions on which controls of this sort are in fact exercised and with what degree of economic loss of opportunity or hard cash to the subsidiary company. The frequency, however, with which the story of the external prohibition of a sale of motor cars to Communist China by the Ford Motor Company of Canada was repeated to me in different parts of the Dominion—I did in fact hear the story ad nauseam—suggests that other telling examples are not easily come by. Though this is not to say that such illustrations do not in fact exist,* I prefer to cite the sincerity and enthusiasm of the automobile executive in Windsor, Ont., who spoke from personal knowledge of the keen interest of executive officers of a subsidiary in their own efficiency and autonomy and of the infrequency with which they are required to send reports to their parent body. One might even go further and say that some restrictions on absolute autonomy and self-containment actually make sense—as, for example, when a Canadian automobile plant still obtains highly specialised parts from a factory across the river where these can be made more cheaply than by the establishment in the local * The decision of the Aluminum Co. of Canada to decline a possible $1,000,000 sale to Communist China at the end of January 1959 was a later somewhat similar example.
20
ECONOMIC REALITIES
plant of some highly expensive piece of overhead machinery which would not be used, in the existing state of the Canadian industry, to its full capacity. To dismiss entirely all current complaints at American administrative controls as not seriously touching those actively engaged in Canadian management would, however, be going beyond the facts as I saw them. There are some significant exceptions to the argument of the preceding section. I was made uncomfortably conscious of the first of these when I talked with some independent Canadian oil producers whose headquarters are in Calgary; the second striking example concerns the rather different problem of the primary producers of grain.
3 A casual visitor without expert knowledge of all the ramifications of the oil industry must needs be on his guard in offering any generalisations regarding the grievances of Canadian oil producers. In fairness to spokesmen for these independent companies it also should be emphasized that those with whom I talked in Calgary themselves underlined the complexities of the existing situation. They even stressed the fact that, after allowing for the undoubted presence of American interests and American operators in Albertan oilfields, some 98 per cent of those employed in this oil industry are Canadians. My Calgary informants were again extremely reluctant to direct their complaints against Americans as such. The burden of their argument was that the independent Canadian oilmen, including some who had first backed their faith in the potentialities of Canadian oil before larger concerns were interested, were now prevented from exploiting yields to full capacity and so adequately financing developmental projects because the major oil companies were able, in effect, to restrict the total output from the Canadian fields. This they did by voluntary restraints upon the import of oil, especially to the West Coast of the United States which hitherto had taken some 60 per cent of Canada's oil exports to its southern neighbour. They also stepped up the relative supplies of crude oil sent to eastern Canadian oil refineries from the fields controlled by major companies elsewhere—in Venezuela and the Middle East for example—where operating costs were lower than in Canada and where there were greater risks of future political conditions unfavourable to exploitation by foreign companies. 21
CANADIANS AND FOREIGN POLICY
When all this had been said by my Canadian acquaintances in Calgary to lessen the anti-American implication of their complaints, I was still left with the impression that Calgary is one of the few places in Canada where the impact of the American businessman has left a certain personal distaste behind it with contemporary Canadians actively engaged in the oil industry. Whether the American oilman is more brash than other industrial compatriots or whether his methods of transport and general behaviour on short visits to Alberta have contributed something, it is difficult for a visitor to judge from necessarily second-hand evidence. Suffice it to record that I left Calgary with the distinct feeling that among independent Canadian operators in this line of business there was personal soreness and a sense of frustration which I had not encountered on the Pacific Coast and which I was not to meet with in the same degree anywhere else in Canada. And this was before Mr. Joseph Barber of the Council on Foreign Relations of New York published his Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, among the many stimulating pages of which is to be found the entertaining story of the old lady of Calgary, widow of one of the pioneers of the Prairies, who was overwhelmed to the point of exasperation by the hospitable welcome given to her by American oilmen's wives in the club which proudly and prominently displayed a large portrait of her late husband. After I had left Alberta I was to hear and read a good deal more of the factor of oil in Canadian-American relations. It only served to confirm my Calgary impression that this is probably the most serious continuing economic issue between the two countries. The United States interests immediately concerned do not appear to have given sufficient thought to Canadian claims that Canada's oil industry should be considered as a significant economic war-potential industry. It may be convincing to argue, as do the author and sponsors of the CanadianAmerican Committee's Report on Oil and Canadian-American Relations (see chapter vni, section 3, below), that on a long view, Canadian legislative action to route crude oil from Alberta to Montreal refineries to the exclusion of cheaper Venezuelan and Middle East oil would be "an inflexible and expensive device for partially resolving what may still turn out to be a temporary difficulty", in view of the expected revival and increase in the demands of the market in the western United States for Alberta's oil during the next few years. Acceptance of this argument demands greater restraint in Canada than may be politically 22
ECONOMIC REALITIES
practicable or psychologically intelligible. As the above Report itself remarks: . . . it should be emphasized that the choice facing Canada is not an easy one. Should she follow the lead of the United States and, by introducing special measures, make herself more selfsufficient in oil? Or should the more persuasive forces of supply and demand be allowed to determine Canada's oil trading pattern of the future, even though several years may pass before the United States again becomes an expanding market for Canadian crude? Though there is no evidence that the Hays-Coffin Special Mission had had an opportunity of reading the above-mentioned document, which appeared in late October 1958, before it drew up its Second Report in December, it is relevant to recall that the Second Report confirmed the statement in the First Report that the oil question was a "major source of irritation" between the two countries. The later Report described it as "even more acute at present" and went on to state, in paragraph 9 of its Recommendations, that "although the voluntary oil import quotas do provide some protection to domestic producers of oil, the net effect is detrimental to the interests of the United States and its Government". Much might also be written of commonly expressed criticisms of American commercial policy generally—and especially of its uncertainty—and of the alleged grievances felt by Canadians at their difficulty in obtaining shares or directorships in the parent companies of subsidiaries and at their inability to see the separate balance-sheets of subsidiaries. But these in toto make relatively minor complaints for the nation at large. Of many comments read or heard on the latter question the best discussion is that given in the Hays-Coffin Second Report, in section IA1 of its analysis of "Current problem areas in United States-Canadian relations". My own inquiries support the conclusions of the Special Mission: The consensus seems to be ( 1 ) that stock participation has been overplayed as a real issue; (2) that it is not a deep-seated problem among serious investors; (3) that it can be a "two-edged sword" for the Canadian investor; and (4) that the arguments for availability of stock probably outweigh the arguments against, if no serious operational pioblems would be created and if the favor23
CANADIANS AND FOREIGN POLICY
able public-relations effect would be important to the particular business.
4 Much more significant is the second substantial, anti-American grievance already noted, that of Canadian grain producers. There is no doubt of the Canadian farmer's strong sense of grievance today but how much of it should be attributed to United States policies and practices is a moot point. Some of it springs naturally enough from the gradual decline of his prosperous position in the boom years of the late forties. Much of his dissatisfaction is undoubtedly traceable to his conviction that in the Canadian community only he and his fellow farmers have missed out in the general industrial transformation which has given tariff benefits to manufacturers, disguised social services to all urban residents and increasing sops to organised industrial workers. All these benefits, it is felt, have helped to narrow the margin between rising farm costs and declining grain prices. Nevertheless, while his present position is not in any way comparable with the condition of despair which in the late twenties and early thirties made him peculiarly susceptible to the hot gospels of Social Credit and C.C.F. campaigners, the Canadian farmer today is ripe for an emotive expression of grievances against someone. Of course, the government in Ottawa is always fair game and may be susceptible to political appeals or threats— as witness Conservative Government subsidies which have attracted the critical attention of such bodies as the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations—but external provocation in plenty has been provided by United States authorities. The disposal of American surplus grain at uneconomic prices by varying devices has without doubt still further depressed the Canadian farmer's return from the sale of his grain in world markets. As I worked eastward through the Prairie Provinces I found many manifestations of the mounting and justifiable irritation of Canadian farmers over American surplus-disposal policy and practice. In Saskatoon, for example, I came across the resolution passed at the Eighth Annual Convention of the Saskatchewan Farmers' Union in December 1957: Whereas Canada's share of world wheat trade has suffered through American disposals programmes to the extent that our 24
ECONOMIC REALITIES
share of the world wheat trade has declined to 22 per cent from a previous level of 40 per cent. Therefore be it resolved that our federal government be urged to take immediate aggressive action to regain Canada's share of the world market. Some of the political difficulties confronting Ottawa authorities in complying with this demand for "aggressive action" are discusáed in chapter iv below. Inability of most farmers to appreciate these difficulties may have drawn some 'of their irritation from American authorities to their own government. It was not, indeed, easy to determine the extent to which farmers' grievances were primarily or even secondarily antiAmerican. There is no doubt that the several farmers' organisations have made the Canadian farmer well aware of the extent to which grain prices on the world market have been affected by United States disposals policies. If his own organisations had left him in any doubt about it, the polemical editorials of Prairie Province newspapers must surely have removed this. It is nevertheless important to realise that the Canadian farmer's removal from actual participation in marketing and the interposition of government and other agencies between him and the actual fruits of his farm management and personal labour have over the years made him at least as ready to blame his own government and its agencies as those which operate to his disadvantage in the United States. Potentially significant anti-American feeling in agricultural areas thus tends to be softened and to some extent absorbed in the general dissatisfaction of the farmer at his weakened position in the Canadian economy as a whole in the second half of the twentieth century. On occasion, indeed, I found that farmers who had some knowledge of the working of the United States political system of pressure groups were inclined to be less critical of the farm bloc of the American Middle West for its influence on Congress and Administration in Washington than regretful that their own group leaders were not more effective in Ottawa. Besides the mere extent of anti-American sentiment arising from surplus-grain disposals, there is a larger issue here which is relevant to the general topic of this chapter. Not only is the relative importance of agricultural production in the Canadian economy being considerably reduced as the result of the current industrial revolution; a visitor is also able to detect evidence of a certain change in attitude of at least some farmers towards their 25
CANADIANS AND FOREIGN POLICY
occupation and towards other Canadians in different occupations. I was much impressed, for example, by the views expressed to me in Edmonton by Acting Dean Bentley of the Faculty of Agriculture of the University of Alberta regarding the extent and the significance of "vertical integration" and contract farming in its various forms in his province. Dr. Bentley emphasized the difficulty of extending such practices to crops where markets are unpredictable and where supplies cannot readily be regularised and systematised. In some fields of rural activity, however, such as poultry and sugar-beet farming, the growing of oil seeds and tomatoes and hog raising, much has already been done in Alberta to increase efficiency and to remove most of the farmer's uncertainty as to the lack of at least a minimum return from his labour. The further fact that others than the farmer usually provide the capital necessary for his equipment and even for his raw materials in these forms of contract farming has a potential influence on the mental outlook—and, possibly, the political affiliations—of the traditionally individualistic and capitalist farmer. Dean Bentley's indication that already about 5 per cent of all agricultural production in Alberta is under contract farming and his estimate that in ten years the proportion would be more than 20 per cent gave food for thought. So, too, did the Dean's tentatively ventured prediction that the application of vertical integration was already beginning to have a significant influence in raising standards of production in the Atlantic Provinces and Quebec, where existing conditions did not provide much more than bare subsistence farming. (In 1951, some 35 per cent of Canadian farm families had a gross annual income of less than $2,000, at a time when the average income of the entire Canadian labour force was estimated to be $3,000.) I was much interested on arriving in the province of New Brunswick some two months later to read a press report of the annual convention of the New Brunswick Federation of Agriculture, held in the Lord Beaverbrook Hotel at the attractive provincial capital of Fredericton. Following a discussion on "Vertical Integration and Contract Farming" a resolution was carried favouring the plan, "providing such a system could be put into operation through their own co-operative groups". Significant of what was happening elsewhere was the suggestion by the additional report that "they would be opposed to the plan if it were controlled by the processing firms, for such would make the farmer merely a hired hand of the big firms". From none of the above should it be inferred that farming, 26
ECONOMIC REALITIES
whether for North American markets or for export overseas, has ceased to be an important element in the Canadian economy of the second half of the twentieth century. Though the Gordon Commission's Report estimated that, by 1975, only 7 per cent of the total population of Canada would be engaged in agriculture, the adoption of more businesslike as well as more scientific methods may well ensure that as numbers involved go down production per head will go up. And if all those are included whose economic life is indirectly associated with that of agriculture, the percentage may rise to something like one-third of the total population of the Dominion. The point I desire to emphasize in this section is that, with the indirect as well as the direct consequences of the mid-century industrial revolution, farming in Canada is rapidly passing from a way of life into a business enterprise. I therefore left the Prairie Provinces with the conviction that I should be on guard against any generalisation put to me, whether political, social or economic, which tended to write off the Canadian farmer as a species distinct from all other citizens of the Dominion today.
5 The point made in the preceding sentence provides a useful warning of the need for realism in approaching the other contentious matter in respect to which the more or less gloved fist of American materialism is alleged to dominate an increasingly significant section of Canadian economic life—the relation between American-directed "international" unions and the Canadian labour movement. The two points I would make here are, first, to emphasize the strength and determination of Canadian labour as an industrial force in 1958-9 and, second, to stress the avowed interest of almost all its leaders, national, provincial and local (other than those in Quebec), to move into the political arena. The second of these subjects belongs more appropriately to chapter iv; the first is both historically and currently connected with prevailing criticism of the extent and effect of the international affiliations. If, as stressed above, it is essential that Canadians today accept the fact that they are now in the middle of a continuing industrial revolution, it is equally important that they also recognise that the rapid growth of the Canadian labour movement is one of the inescapable features of that revolution. And, though 27
CANADIANS AND FOREIGN POLICY
Canadian labour leaders have many links with industrial labour in the United Kingdom—some directly personal, as an interviewer's ear quickly detects—the present strength of industrial unions in Canada would not have been possible without the generous support of American workers' organisations, mostly C.I.O. in affiliation, the meteoric rise of which has itself been so largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. I am indebted to two men now in British Columbia for some perspective on this question. Over a luncheon table in the U.B.C. Faculty Club, Professor Stuart Jamieson first gave me a personal sketch of the history of the trade-union movement in the Dominion, which I was later to follow in greater detail in the pages of his Industrial Relations in Canada. A prominent business executive in Vancouver who is now much occupied with labour problems (and who shall be nameless for the purpose of this narrative) was detached enough to point out that the present tension in labour-management relations on the Coast owes at least something to the fact that, in the earlier, carefree days of rapid expansion, many Canadian employers were extremely slow to lend a helping hand to the effective organisation of their employees. Whatever weight is given to this opinion, there is no escaping the fact that the year 1958 saw a mounting tension between management and union leaders. This was particularly noticeable in British Columbia, but its counterpart was to be found elsewhere, sometimes in less strident form. Part of the explanation may be found in the fact that most of Canada was in 1958 feeling some effects of the economic recession south of the border. Individual employers told me regretfully that, while prices had been high and export markets keen, they had not greatly resisted union claims for increases in wages and better working conditions, much of the cost of which could be passed on to customers. They professed themselves to be indignant that, when trade conditions were less favourable, union officials should be unwilling to consider the capacity of industry to meet still further increases in labour costs. Employees, on their side, pointed to the opposition being staged against hitherto accepted union rights and privileges by so-called "right to work" legislation in the United States and to the boasts by some Canadian employers, in Ontario as well as British Columbia, that similar legislation would shortly find its way onto provincial statute books. But, whatever the reasons, I certainly found labour and management preparing for what each regarded as a defensive offensive. In the accompanying battles of words much heat and 28
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ink were expended on the fact that the great majority of the members of Canadian trade unions belong to "internationals", to which they contribute funds and by the rules of which Canadian branches are legally and constitutionally bound—under pain of excommunication pronounced, if need be, by avenging international officials from whatever centre in the United States might happen to be the accredited headquarters of the international union. I have a very clear recollection of the satisfaction with which one executive vice-president told me that he was preparing to use the argument of external dictation if the proposed political alliance of C.C.F. and C.L.C. should ever produce a new political party in Canada. "A Canadian political party directed from within the United States; what a target that would make in an election campaign!" To an outside observer there is, indeed, much that appears strange in this straddling of the political frontier (as mere branches of large and predominantly American international unions) by organisations of Canadian workers who in 1956 emphasized their sense of Canadian union solidarity by forming a national trade union body, the Canadian Labour Congress, which has since considerably strengthened its hold over the Canadian labour movement. Discussions with Canadian industrial unionists nevertheless failed to reveal any sense of inconsistency in this dual North-South and East-West administrative relationship— except with the members of some of the older craft, A.F. of L. type Canadian unions. The reasons for this absence of embarrassment are not hard to discover. In the first place, the Canadian union executive declines to accept the fact of external domination in the internal affairs of his union. He claims to enjoy all the autonomy he can use in his own affairs. The Gordon Commission itself remarked that there was no convincing evidence that decisions regarding strikes were made by international headquarters rather than by local union officials and members. On the contrary, I found some evidence to suggest that international headquarters are inclined to curb Canadian union enthusiasm for strike action in circumstances where the wider experience of the central body suggests that a strike might be ineffective or that other methods might be more successful. An Ontario newspaper publisher, for example, who was accustomed to having to negotiate with a number of unions, some of which were international and some not, volunteered the opinion that, in his experience, restraint usually came from the international headquarters and impatience from the local branch. 29
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Nor can there be any doubt that the Canadian branches of an international union appreciate the strength which lies behind them if they do become engaged in a really serious trial of strength with local managements. The past record and present relations appear to have convinced Canadian industrial unionists that their international affiliates can be and in fact are very forthcoming and generous when help is actually needed. Sure, we belong to the international [said one of them]. Sure, it's true that the constitution is determined and headquarters officers elected at meetings where our votes only count for much the same as comparable branches of similar strength in different parts of the United States. But, in matters specially concerning Canada, we're listened to with respect and no one tries to interfere with us as long as we pay our dues and observe the working of a constitution properly drawn up and generally agreed to. So what? Let's cut the cackle and get on with the job of protecting the Canadian worker's interests. God knows it looks as though he's going to need someone to protect him properly if things go on getting much tougher. Of course, it's not always as simple as this sweeping statement might suggest. Canadian employers have some reason to complain at suggestions of more or less automatic application of wage rates and of other agreements accepted by management in the United States where the market in the industry is larger and profits higher than within the same industry in Canada. Other employers talked to me with obvious sincerity of needless delays in securing decisions because the local union representative felt he should refer the matter elsewhere. ("Sometimes in exasperation I find it cheaper and quicker to pick up the phone, call Long Distance and settle the matter direct.") Yet much of the sting falls out of the Canadian management argument against international union formulation or influencing of Canadian union policies when it is pointed out that the same Canadian management may be a subsidiary of a parent company located in the same American State, or even city, as the headquarters of the offending international. And that brings the argument of this chapter full circle. In respect both to management and to labour the continuing industrial revolution which is doing much to change the face of contemporary Canada, and to affect the lives of Canadians for good or ill in so many different ways, has been very closely influenced, 30
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has been greatly stimulated and assisted—has even in some degree been directed and controlled—by comparable economic forces and economic organisations centred in the United States. Some of the economic phenomena which have been the subject-matter of this chapter are, strictly speaking, peculiar neither to Canada nor to the United States; they are North American economic phenomena. How far they should be given free rein to influence all aspects of life in the Dominion is a question which cannot be answered properly until a comparable analysis has been attempted of the strategic, the political and the cultural circumstances of Canada today.
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THE sensitivity of Canadians on strategic questions which so much impresses an overseas investigator is by no means an exclusively postwar phenomenon. Adequate appreciation of current trends of Canadian thought on defence, whether in politico-administrative, Service or unofficial circles, requires some recognition of both prewar and early postwar conditioning factors. 1
Defence is a field of national activity in which Canadians have long felt the difficulty of revolving at one and the same time on an east-west and a north-south axis. Political leaders from Wilfrid Laurier to Mackenzie King were acutely conscious of the potential threat to their developing trans-Atlantic autonomy in too direct an involvement with either the defence or the foreign policies of the United Kingdom. The older Canadian Services were in fact closely linked by tradition and practice with their opposite numbers in the British Army and the Royal Navy— before, during and after the first world war. These traditions and practices, while occasionally producing some irritations among individual members of the Canadian Services, continued through the interwar years without any significantly strong counteracting southward pull from within United States military or naval establishments. The inevitable reaction of political leaders was to keep as tight a rein as possible on Canadian Service chiefs. They also continually asserted their country's freedom from advance commitments to the United Kingdom or to any other country which might conceivably cause serious tension in Canada's relations with a North American neighbour who, with highly exceptional inter32
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ludes, was traditionally isolationist and, at the best, continental in its thinking and planning on the related questions of defence and foreign policy. It is worth adding to this prewar background that, while Canadian-American relations had greatly improved throughout the half-century preceding the outbreak of the second world war (which had included the brief period of active wartime association in 1917-18), the earlier military history of the two Noith American countries had been concerned more with armed conflict between them than with joint co-operation in some form of common defence. As Canada's official war historian has remarked, "the history of Canadian-American relations is the story of a progress from hostility to alliance".
2 In the internar years Canadians were aware of the potential strength of the naval forces of the United States, but the subject was not much discussed. I can still vividly recall the irritation with which Canadian fellow undergraduates at Oxford in the early twenties resisted my attempts to explain away their talk of Canadian "neutrality" as made possible only by the protective mantle of the United States. Seen agaiast this prewar background of strict Service subordination to political control within Canada and very limited contacts with United States defence planning, whether at the governmental or the Service level, the changes of the two decades since the outbreak of the second world war are little short of staggering. The extent and variety of the top-level associations of Government in Ottawa and Administration in Washington, the frequency with which top-secret information is exchanged and contacts, formal and informal, facilitated between Service personnel—all these developments have made possible a realistic approach, political and technical, to Canadian participation in some form of joint North American defence. The political condition conducive to this new co-operation in joint "continental" defence, without prejudice to some retention of historic east-west strategic associations, was provided in the early postwar years by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Informed Canadians with whom I talked were ready enough to discount earlier exaggerated claims regarding Canada's role in "bridging the Atlantic" by the formation of NATO. They nevertheless insisted that Canada's share had been second only to that of the United States and of the United Kingdom. It had 33
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been "neither perfunctory nor negligible", for Canada had been responsible for much of the political development in the early stages of the new organisation. The prominent part Canadian representatives continued to play in NATO down to 1954 also had important by-products for Canada's strategic relations with both the United Kingdom and the United States. The former's recognition of Canada as a free and equal partner in NATO finally served to resolve the Downing Street complex which had still persisted with some Canadian politicians who had fought hard for effective autonomy in the twenties or thirties. As far as the United States was concerned, NATO gave Canadians the opportunity to participate, as of right, in high-level planning discussions, alike in pursuance of genuine international objectives and in service of distinctively Canadian interests. Where the latter might require some safeguard against too close a strategic or political involvement with the United States, NATO at least provided the protection of numbers. To quote the pithy conversational comment of one prominent Canadian closely involved in many NATO discussions, "there's much less risk of rape when at least four are in the bed!" As to technical collaboration, the postwar record of the several Canadian Services would seem, on the whole, to indicate the presence of the psychological atmosphere conducive to a closer, realistic association with United States Services without prejudice to the considered retention of overseas professional links and the establishment of some special Canadian characteristics and requirements. Discussions with serving officers and others suggest four relevant comments here. First, while the earlier postwar years revealed some signs of deliberate attempts to impose clearly recognisable Canadian labels on all three Services and a measure of Service integration enforced from above, there has since been a certain reversion to type, with Navy, Army and Air Force each working out for itself those practices which experience has suggested are most conducive to realistic efficiency. I particularly liked the story of the very junior naval officer of the early postwar period who returned from his first lengthy sea-going cruise and explained to a fond Mama the marked roughening of his accent: "There's no promotion in the R.C.N. nowadays unless you really speak like a Canadian." But the fact that the story was told me in an officers' mess, in the past tense and with an accompanying grin, seemed significant. Indeed, I heard complaints that specialist Royal Navy instructors continued to be 34
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imported needlessly even sometimes to the surprise of the instructor himself after a brief testing of the technical competence of his Canadian fellows. The Canadian Army, I was told, has no inferiority complex to work out in its psychological associations with the British Army. The Canadian experience of working alongside, and frequently under the direction of, the British Army in both world wars and the frank exchanges between Canadian and British wartime commanders would seem to have left what are mainly feelings of mutual respect. British regimental traditions appear to have persisted and to have moulded Canadian Army practice on British lines. It would be going beyond the evidence to suggest that this factor contributed to the resistance to use of standardised North American equipment, but it should be recorded that some criticism was heard inside and outside other Canadian Services of an alleged tendency of Canadian Army chiefs to conduct their postwar planning on the more or less automatic assumption that they would be fighting the next war, like the last two, in Western Europe rather than in North America. The Service most readily drawn to the conception of North American continental defence is the Royal Canadian Air Force. There seems no doubt that senior wartime members of the R.C.A.F. were conditioned for this closely integrated collaboration with the U.S.A.F. by the persistent refusal of the R.A.F. to accord separate recognition to its warmly regarded Canadian comrades during and after the Battle of Britain. Of recent years, there certainly has been the closest of personal relations between members of the two North American Air Forces; Canadian officers and others spoke with frank appreciation of the facilities as well as the friendship accorded them south of the border. The fact that most of the problems of continental defence in North America are concerned with the danger of airborne attack underlines the significance of this psychological conditioning of the R.C.A.F. It could not, however, have developed into its presentday practice had not the march of postwar events also produced the politically predisposing conditions and the machinery for inter-governmental planning between Ottawa and Washington. 3
I am indebted to Colonel C. P. Stacey, at the time Director of the Ottawa Historical Section of the Canadian General Staff at Ottawa, now retired, for frank discussion of the origins and 35
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implications of the first concrete manifestation of United States and Canadian governmental acceptance of the principle of joint planning of North American defence. Colonel Stacey's earlier published account of events leading to the establishment in 1940 of the Canadian-American Permanent Joint Board on Defence abundantly illustrates the absence, on either side of the border, of any political or administrative organisation for joint defence prior to the immediate prewar tensions of the late thirties. Even then, the secrecy which surrounded the first conversations between the Chiefs of Staff of the two countries in January 1938 may be compared with that in which the Anglo-French military staff conversations took place in the decade preceding the outbreak of the first world war. It did not, however, require the actual involvement of both countries in hostilities to produce the decision and public pronouncement of August 18, 1940, following the meeting of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Mackenzie King at Ogdensburg, for the immediate establishment of the Permanent Joint Board on Defence. The wartime record of this body, which comprises two national sections, each with a civilian chairman and one representative of each of the three Services together with one from the Department of State or External Affairs who acts as secretary of his section, has been traced by Col. Stacey from the Canadian official records and may be consulted in the International Journal (Toronto, 1954) put out by the Canadian Institute of International Affairs. Since the end of the second world war, the effectiveness of the P.J.B.D. has apparently varied considerably with the circumstances of the day. At no time did it set out to be an executive body but it clearly was a valuable wartime instrument for round-table discussions, in which original divergence of views was apparently more often on individual Service than on National lines. For the first few years after the war, moreover, the Joint Board was responsible for shaping, in the first instance, all the more important decisions regarding Canadian-American defence policies. Its continued existence today is, moreover, a clear indication of the basic difference between the prewar and the postwar conditions under which high-ranking Service personnel of the two countries are enabled —indeed, required—to approach the common problems of continental defence affecting the two countries. To what extent it has been possible to subordinate Service chiefs, who have thus in a sense been given the green light for at least preliminary negotiations, to adequate supervision and 36
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ultimate control by their political superiors and to what extent the undoubtedly increased standing of postwar senior officers in both Canada and the United States has enabled them to predetermine lines of future strategic collaboration between their two countries—these are questions to which a lay investigator finds extreme difficulty in giving precise answers. But since these were questions very much in my mind and often on my lips when discussing strategic trends, I offer the following tentative comments for what they are worth. More than one former Minister answered directly that his personal experience of Cabinet discussions indicated that full responsibility continued to remain, in practice as well as in theory, with postwar civilian authorities. It is equally clear, however, that Canadian Service chiefs and their senior officers have in recent years enjoyed increased facilities for full and frank discussion with their opposite numbers in the United States. Of this fact I obtained confirmation during later talks south of the border. "Canadians may not actually see the most secret documents but there is very little in our planning which is in fact withheld from their responsible Service chiefs" is the relevant paraphrase of one conversation in my Washington notebook. From this a third point would seem to follow. While decision may well continue to rest with civilian Ministers, whose responsibility no doubt includes the resolving of differences in viewpoint between the several Services in their own country, it appears that negotiations nowadays are usually well advanced before a matter reaches the P.J.B.D. The implication is that Service chiefs may thus go a long way towards shaping the policy which eventually reaches the Cabinet with the recommendation of the Joint Board. It may be that recognition of this fact was one of the considerations which led the governments of Canada and the United States, following President Eisenhower's visit to Ottawa in July 1958, to establish a joint Cabinet Committee on Defence. The Committee consists of three Ministers for each Government—the Canadian Ministers of Defence, External Affairs and Finance respectively—and such other ministerial members as the agenda for a particular meeting might suggest. Even if it is sufficient to regard this new joint Cabinet Committee on Defence as merely a logical complement to the Cabinet Committee which Ottawa and Washington constituted in 1953, and which has since held four bi-annual meetings to review issues in the field of economics 37
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impinging on political relations between the two countries, the creation of the new defence body attests the significance of the issues thrown up by the steadily increasing contacts between the Armed Services of the two neighbouring countries and by the substantial contribution Canada now undoubtedly makes to some degree of integration of North American defences. My fifth comment must be that, however effective the political controls, postwar governments in Ottawa have not succeeded in preventing the growth of increasing suspicion and dissatisfaction among the Canadian public at the consequences of successive emphases on continental defence in which those governments have concurred.
4 Dissatisfaction springs from a number of different sources. There is a certain uneasiness at the suspected influence of postwar Service chiefs in Canada as in the United States. This uneasiness merges into the more general and more widespread fear of United States domination in matters economic which has already been noted in chapter n above. The corresponding difficulty of successive governments in Ottawa in giving their public full details of inter-governmental arrangements with the United States has been heightened by the inevitably secret character of most of the defence discussions. Resultant fears, doubts and suspicions among the general public and the readiness of a section of the Canadian press to play these up in antiAmerican terms have all been coloured considerably by the strident criticisms of certain retired Service chiefs who, in the words of one Canadian critic who stands above the battle, waited until their pensions were due "before beating their swords into pen nibs". I did not find widespread uneasiness at the growth in influence of Canadian Service chiefs or at the possibility that they might be exercising a disproportionate influence on the shaping of Canada's defence policy. This fear was, however, voiced occasionally during conversation in some academic circles; it might also be read between the lines of such published comment as Professor George F. G. Stanley's review article "Soldiers and Politicians" in the 1958 Queen's Quarterly. The known activity of the P.J.B.D. in shaping wartime and early postwar defence policy doubtless combined with the prestige of Canadian chiefs to minimise criticism by compatriots, many of whom had them38
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selves been Servicemen in the second world war. I did, however, detect considerable suspicion of the extent to which Canadians might suffer indirectly from the far greater influence which the Pentagon was believed to exercise over United States defence and foreign policies. Such suspicions served to feed the widespread fear that increasing emphasis on continental defence was in fact placing Canadians more and more within the orbit of an ostensibly North American defence programme which in fact was proving to be a United States programme to which Canada was being encouraged, if not required, to contribute heavily and in which she was coming to hold an increasingly dangerous, subordinate position. I, heard a good deal in different parts of Canada of DEW-Line and other "incidents" which had revealed the extent to which common air defence projects had allegedly placed Canadian soil under "foreign" control and had even denied responsible Canadians access thereto without the permission of United States authorities. Most of these incidents had proved on investigation to be lacking in factual foundation or to have been grossly exaggerated, but the feelings originally aroused by them persisted among many Canadians who might or might not have read the eventual official explanations. I couldn't help feeling that some of those who had first seized on and publicised the complaints had been less concerned to give prominence to the minimising evidence subsequently produced. As an outsider I was also left with the impression that such incidents were sometimes warmly welcomed and promptly fitted into an already preconceived pattern of Canadian-American relations. This kind of emotive comment on current Canadian defence policies was still further coloured by the participation of distinguished sometime Service chiefs, notably Major-General W. H. S. Macklin, formerly Adjutant General of the Canadian Army, and the former Chief of the General Staff, LieutenantGénéral Guy G. Simonds. These critics enjoyed a position of detachment which could not very well extend to a third distinguished ex-Service leader, Air Marshal W. A. Curtis, who left the R.C.A.F. to become vice-chairman of the board of A. V. Roe Canada Ltd. The much publicised views of these gentlemen varied a good deal in their form as well as in their content; together they had the effect of increasing public nervousness as to the consequences of successive postwar governments' policies. It should be said in passing that this nervousness is not to be identified with purely partisan domestic political prejudice 39
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though this did enter into the picture and added its share of confusion. The alleged weaknesses of the Liberal Government's defence policy was a common platform topic for Conservative candidates before as well as during 1957. Nor should the sincerity of such Opposition criticism be questioned unduly; a long period out of office necessarily made the Conservatives unaware of many of the details of Canadian-American inter-governmental negotiations in strategic as in economic matters. Since 1957 the Liberals have been less fortunately placed during their short period in Opposition; both the knowledge and the temperament of their present leader, Mr. Lester Pearson, preclude irresponsible exploitation of the Conservative Government's intensification of continental air defence which was revealed by the North American Air Defence (NORAD) agreement of December 1957. Such criticism as the Liberals were able to level at the precipitate presentation of this significant integration of Canadian-American control of their joint air defence organisation did nothing to calm Canadian fears of undue subordination to the United States. But at least the Liberal leaders' hands were tied by the fact that they were aware that common control of North American air defence forces is a logical even if not an inevitable consequence of the Liberal Government's active co-operation in the establishment and working of the triple chain of warning stations thrown across Canada southwards from the Arctic DEW-Line, a system which was built by the United States at a cost of more than $500,000,000. The former Service chiefs have not felt any corresponding need for self-restraint in their criticisms of Canada's current strategic situation. This, it may be noted in passing, is a little strange. Commenting on a particularly sharp press statement by one of the generals, a former Liberal Cabinet Minister remarked to me that he was quite sure the officer had raised no voice against the defence project in question when he was still in the Service and the project was about to go up for Cabinet approval. The two Army officers agreed in criticising what they regarded as excessive concentration of Canadian defence expenditure on protection against one only of the forms which enemy attack might possibly take. In an article in the special Canadian Supplement to the London Times (November 1958), LieutenantGénéral Simonds declared that air defence could not be valid in the age of the hydrogen bomb and the intercontinental ballistic missile. He favoured a combination of experimental research on effective defence against ballistic missiles, a substantial Canadian 40
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contribution to atomic submarines capable of launching missiles and a really well-equipped, self-contained tri-service force similar in capability to the United States Marine Corps, though smaller in size. These, in his view, were much preferable to costly and fruitless efforts to keep up Canada's end in an air-defence programme undertaken "merely to satisfy powerful, organised pressure groups in both Canada and the United States". Earlier in the same month, Major-General Macklin had made a somewhat similar plea for more flexibility in defence at a McGill University conference on world affairs attended by delegates from two Canadian and thirteen United States universities. The Toronto Globe and Mail reported him as having said that Canada was headed for one of three fates: Ending up sooner or later locked up with the United States in fortress America with a very hostile Communist world all around; Winding up in the middle of a devastating nuclear war; Losing her democratic system and winding up under some sort of dictatorship brought about by inflation resulting from a crushing financial burden of defence. It does not require much imagination to guess at the cumulative effect upon the rank and file of Canadian citizens of such attacks as these and of the editorial support they received from some influential newspapers. The ordinary Canadian is no doubt less concerned with strategic than he is with economic issues; public fear of United States "domination" was probably more influenced by the latter than the former. Controversies on continental defence had nevertheless become a major public issue by the latter part of 1958; the attacks of the former Service chiefs raised doubts in some minds whether there were not other Canadian experts still in the Services who shared the views of Generals Macklin and Simonds. I was indeed present at one informal gathering of senior journalists in Ontario when the chairman dogmatically asserted that to his knowledge this was the case, that there was considerable dissatisfaction among serving officers, some of whom maintained silence for reasons of self-advancement while others did everything possible to avoid NORAD postings which would place them under the command of United States officers. Of the soundness of this observation more anon; that it could be made without arousing immediate protest is some indication of the extent of the prevailing public 41
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uneasiness at the increasing integration of Canadian-American defences. It was at this point that the Diefenbaker Government announced, on September 23, 1958,* its intention to suspend production of the Canadian-manned supersonic jet interceptor, the CF-105 "Arrow", built by Avro Aircraft Ltd. In view of the publicity which had been given to the performances of the "Arrow's" prototypes, on which some $400,000,000 had already been expended or approved, this decision, with its accompanying announcement of the Government's intention to purchase from the United States by 1960 unmanned "Bomarc" interceptors for two R.C.A.F. squadrons, at a cost of $164,000,000, made defence policy an item of outstanding news value. The threatened unemployment within Canada for exceptionally qualified products of Canadian universities was loudly deplored. There were public statements in support of the "Arrow", not only by interested parties such as Air Marshal W. A. Curtis but even by the NORAD deputy commander Air Marshal C. Roy Slemon, formerly chief of the air staff, R.C.A.F. All these were part of the diet of news fed to a Canadian public already emotionally disturbed and intellectually confused by the rapidity with which major decisions regarding continental defence were being made in its name and at its expense without any clear assurance that a real contribution to Canada's security would result from it all.
5 After this depressing record of public dissatisfaction and confusion which I encountered more or less continuously and often in highly emotive form during my three months in Canada, it may seem rather strange that the dominant impression formed of the attitudes of those directly concerned with the shaping and application of policy was one of realistic search for defence policies which would fit the changing requirements of Canada's North American setting in the contemporary world. As with the hard facts of economic life, so with strategic circumstances; much press clamour and widespread public uneasiness at allegedly increasing United States influence and control persisted alongside steady and, it would seem, consistent attempts of responsible government representatives and professional officers. These followed a course that aimed to meet the requirements of Canada's geographic position and secure the maximum co-opera* The final decision to cease production was announced on February 29, 1959.
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tion which both formal and informal negotiations could secure from the more powerful strategic partner to the south while continually seeking to preserve Canada's identity wherever possible. In elaboration of this central theme I should emphasize in particular my failure to find any evidence to support the rather grave allegation quoted in the preceding section, of intra-Service dissatisfaction with the main course of current defence policies. In what seemed to me quite frank discussions with serving officers in all three branches of the fighting forces, I frequently detected evidence of some difference in emphasis but no suggestion of basic disagreements which might undermine effective loyalty or active co-operation. On the contrary, the prevailing attitude of serving officers seemed to be very similar to that of those in key managerial positions in Canadian industries. Canada in the second half of the twentieth century finds itself in a remarkably fluid situation. The general course of strategic, as of economic development is being determined by natural forces or by government decisions outside the control of individual Service officers. Their responsibility, like that of Canadians in important industrial managerial positions, has become very largely professional or technical in character. The job of Canadians in the Services, whatever their rank or posting, is thus felt to be one of making the most of the particular professional tasks assigned to them. If this involves active collaboration with United States forces, under NORAD or in any other form, considerations of personal pique do not seem to enter into the professional relationship even where it involves taking orders from an officer of superior rank who is of different nationality. Personal discussion with serving officers left me in no doubt that they were as well aware as any journalistic or other civilian critic in Toronto or Montreal that the Canadian-American strategic relationship is not one of perfect equality. They were aware, for example, that, notwithstanding the NORAD agreement, certain vital features of the North American continental defence organisation remain subject to exclusively United States control. Only the President of the United States could decide to launch the hydrogen bomb which the Strategic Air Command holds for "massive retaliation" in the event of an outbreak of nuclear war. And no purely Canadian forces can secure the American-made nuclear weapons which might play a vital part in a Canadian defensive operation. These limitations to Canadian equality in Canadian-American continental defence activities are recognised in the Canadian 43
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Services but they are accepted as part of the terms of reference within which the Services are required to do their professional job. I have no reason to believe that Canadians in the several Services are not pressing on with that job to the best of their professional ability without any acute sense of embarrassment or frustration. As to those who shape the high policy within which the several Services operate, it is again desirable to emphasize the extent of the continuity which has prevailed, despite the rapidly changing qualitative character of armaments in the postwar world. Secondly, I would suggest that the available evidence reveals a persistent effort by successive Canadian Governments, Liberal and Conservative, and their Service chiefs to ensure that each additional step which Canada has taken in the direction of integrated North American defence has been accompanied by the maximum protection of Canadian interests and the preservation of Canadian identity as far as these are consistent with the over-all objectives of a co-ordinated continental defence programme. Reference has already been made in the preceding section to the amount of information and other technical co-operation given to the R.C.A.F. by the U.S.A.F. under circumstances which have rarely permitted public acknowledgement. A more significant illustration concerns the much criticised decision in 1954 to construct and staff the Arctic DEW-Line in such a way as to give United States personnel controlling positions on Canadian soil. The Cabinet Minister responsible at the time of the DEW-Line agreement drew my attention to the fact that proper provision had been made to enable Canada to assume control at such time as changing conditions made this possible. While the first draft of this chapter was being written in London, a press cablegram from Ottawa dated January 20, 1959, announced that the R.C.A.F. would take over the manning of the operational positions of the DEW-Line stations progressively from the beginning of February. Only the minimum of United States Service personnel necessary to maintain liaison between the U.S.A.F. and the American civilian contractor responsible for logistic support would remain on the DEW-Line. The argument of the preceding paragraphs is not intended to suggest that top-level Canadian defence planning since the second world war has been perfect or that public criticism of particular decisions is not permissible and sometimes highly desirable. The decision which confronted the Diefenbaker Government between September 1958 and February 1959 regarding the "Arrow" and 44
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the "Bomarc" involved a combination of strategic, economic and political considerations on which opinions of the most highly informed persons might well differ. The general theme here presented nevertheless is that, notwithstanding the contrary implications of much vigorous and emotive public comment, including that of former Service chiefs, the evidence as I found it in Canada between September and December 1958 pointed to both past and current efforts of responsible political heads and their Service advisers to chart a realistic course, between the stern necessities of geographic situation and the desired retention of the maximum degree of national independence consistent with the mid-century international strategic situation.
6 Despite the wide divergence of published views on current defence policies, I found general agreement among Canadians on one aspect of Canadian-American strategic relations. It was argued that the United States government, on the one hand, required Canadians to recognise that, given the modern form of airborne attack which Canada might expect as the result of her Belgianlike bottleneck position in the postwar situation, it was sound commonsense to sink a substantial part of Canada's defence forces and her other defensive resources into the larger North American defence scheme. On the other hand, there was no United States reciprocal recognition of the part which Canadian defence production industries could play in the equipping of United States as well as Canadian forces in the common task of continental defence. The argument then usually went on to stress the refusal of United States Services to grant substantial contracts to Canadian industries. If the requirements of North American defence were to overrule considerations of Canadian national autonomy, should not the same consideration extend to defence production no less than to fighting forces? I heard this criticism of integrated defence policy in different forms in different parts of Canada, but its most striking manifestation emerged during the controversy over the future of the "Arrow". If a major reason for the Diefenbaker Government's hesitation about putting the "Arrow" into full production was the disproportionately high cost for equipping only nine R.C.A.F. squadrons, and if the "Arrow", as reportedly stated by no less a person than the NORAD chief, United States General Earle Partridge, was in fact superior to anything the U.S.A.F. had on 45
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or near production, would not a solution be for the U.S.A.F. to buy the "Arrow" for its own units and so reduce the production cost per aircraft to a figure which the Canadian government might afford? As the Montreal Star said editorially on December 3, 1958, "the Government's decision next March on the fate of the Avro 'Arrow' must be a political one. . . ." And so this chapter on strategic interests merges naturally into the subject of the next, "Political Trends".
46
IV
POLITICAL TRENDS
THE implication of the concluding paragraph in the preceding chapter is that, in the view of many Canadians, the government of the United States is unwilling—or unable—to discipline its own defence-production industries to the point of recognising Canadian industry's ability to make a necessarily limited but more effective contribution to the technical equipment of what has in effect become, in certain respects, a common North American defence organisation. Perhaps the significant word in this sentence is "unable". The complaint does at all events provide a convenient starting point for a discussion of political conditions in contemporary Canada in so far as they affect external relations and, in particular, the relations between Canada and the United States.
1 My discussions both in Canada and in Washington convinced me that these two friendly nations of North America are considerably handicapped by having two sharply diverging governmental systems. The handicap is increased by the fact that so few Canadians and Americans appear to be fully alive to this difference in political organisation and to its potential consequences. Nor is this altogether surprising. Each country boasts of being a democracy; but the democratic system of the one is based on the British type of responsible government, and that of the other rests on the doctrine of the separation of powers. While Canadian governments in international negotiations may therefore normally proceed on the assumption of having full legislative as well as administrative authority behind them, their opposite numbers in Washington have to face not only the constitutional limitations inherent in the existence of an indepen47
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dent legislature but also the risk of active opposition from political pressure groups operating in Congress and elsewhere in support of private economic interests. This constitutional difference is a more serious obstacle to effective Canadian-American co-operation than is generally recognised in Canada outside administrative circles. It is not merely that those actually engaged in negotiations are handicapped by their different terms of reference or authority, as it were. When they have succeeded in overcoming this difference and administrative agreement has been arrived at on behalf of the two countries and is in fact being implemented, there is often very good reason for not calling further attention to the extent of the concessions made from the American side. More publicity might provide opportunities for interested parties in the United States to revive their pressure-group activities on the emotional ground that the Administration in Washington had once more yielded to foreign pressure and "sold its fellow countrymen down the drain", etc., etc. This is not mere idle theorising. My discussions with officials both in Ottawa and in Washington left me satisfied that a very great deal more negotiating is constantly going on at the administrative level than the Canadian public realises. While some of this does not produce results, other negotiations lead to agreements which may never be placed on paper but are quietly put into effect to the mutual advantage of both countries and, frequently, to the special gain of Canada. Take, for example, the vexed question of United States disposal of surplus grain, to which reference was made in chapter n. I have good reason for believing that inter-governmental negotiations in 1958 did greatly lessen what could otherwise have been the much more serious impact of the disposal of American surpluses after the very good 1958 harvest. But the last thing that . Canadian negotiators could do was publicly to proclaim the success of their efforts or even to give prominence to the fact that the Canadian viewpoint was sympathetically received, if not fully endorsed, in federal administrative circles in Washington. If the result of such publicity were not politically fatal to American administrative collaborators, at least it would be a warning to them not to be so co-operative next time Canadian negotiators came south from Ottawa. Often, indeed, the Canadian public is unaware that significant negotiations are taking place. As a second illustration I would cite the matter of United States defence contracts for Canadian 48
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industries. Any discussions which might have been proceeding on this important question between the September 1958 announcement of the Diefenbaker Government suspending production of the "Arrow" and its final decision on this matter in February 1959 were bound to be kept as quiet as possible to minimise the effectiveness of counter activity by pressure groups working on behalf of American defence production industries. On the more general question of sharing costs and production of new equipment for North American air defence I happened to know that negotiations had been taking place throughout October and November, but though I made it my practice to read current newspapers very carefully I recall only one published reference to the presence of negotiating officials in Ottawa. This was so brief that I could not find it in my press-cutting file when I came to draft this chapter! It is not merely that the differences in governmental machinery impose restraints on negotiating officials and minimise publicity regarding successful results. The prevailing ignorance of the differences in both countries creates its own kind of problems, psychological and otherwise. Canadians are continually irritated by the inability of so many Americans to appreciate the reality of the autonomy enjoyed by an overseas member of the British Commonwealth in the contemporary world. The very publicity attendant upon a visit to Canada by a member of the Royal Family revives naïve remarks by American tourists or business associates—as innocent of any malice, no doubt, as they are ignorant of the real facts—regarding the persistence of an annual royal tribute paid by Canadians to the successors of George III. The frequency with which Canadians hear statements by Americans regarding continued subordination of the Parliament at Ottawa to that at Westminster is peculiarly annoying to those who played some part, however indirect or largely passive, in events leading to the Balfour Report of 1926 and the Statute of Westminster, 1931. Nor is all the irritation confined to the Canadian side of the border. I found State Department officials and others in Washington convincingly sincere in their professed desire to welcome all forms of inter-governmental negotiation and discussion, formal or informal. Some of these, however, and particularly younger men who had not fully acquired the restraint which comes with long experience of the frustrations of governmental administration, were a little inclined to be impatient at the failure of Canadian politicians and administrators to appreciate the 49
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complexities of the United States governmental machine. Quite apart from the precautions which need to be taken to allow for the interest or opposition of legislative and other branches of the United States political system, the mere task of obtaining the views of all governmental agencies directly or indirectly involved in some aspect of Canadian-American economic relations is (it was impressed upon me) a lengthy job. During the course of this it is not surprising if a number of different strands of red tape may have to be disentangled before talks with Canadian colleagues can be resumed. Such difficulties are in part a consequence of a different governmental system; in part they spring from the much greater size of the United States—a fact which is too readily forgotten by those who work in the more highly concentrated and Cabinet-integrated federal government departments in Ottawa. I was to receive a significant concrete yet still only partial illustration of this complexity of federal administration in the United States when I wept south from Washington, D.C., to Duke University, North Carolina. During some incidental discussion on the role of the Secretary of State in the formulation of American foreign policy, on which a former pupil of mine had been working at Duke in preparation for a PH.D. in politic science, it was pointed out to me that the State Department is now only one of 46 agencies of executive departments of the United States government intimately involved in the formulation of foreign policy. Some 90 per cent of the budget appropriations for foreign relations now fall outside the jurisdiction of the State Department. Two further facts—that the roles assigned to these agencies and their directors are anything but specific and that a particular subject of Canadian-American negotiation, such as the disposal of grain surpluses, may impinge on some departmental interests which are primarily domestic in character—underline the administrative difficulties which face State Department officials in Washington when they enter into talks with External Affairs representatives from Ottawa. Nor can the rights and susceptibilities—there is no need to say departmental prejudices—of such officers of the State Department be disregarded when they see impatient Canadians trying to break through accepted bureaucratic barriers and seeking to secure action through political channels, more or less over the head of the State Department. More will be said in chapter vm in appreciation of Canadian-American inter-parliamentary committees meeting alternatively in Washington and Ottawa and of the initiative of a few individual Congressmen. This, however, is 50
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the place to note the administrative complications as well as the political developments when one group of parliamentarians is without experience of the restraints inevitably associated with a system of separation of powers. The last impression which M.P.s from Ottawa, or any other group of Canadian "visiting firemen" in the American capital, can afford to give to sympathetic friends in the State Department is that they would like to try a little log-rolling of their own in the intricate politico-administrative web that exists in Washington, D.C. t
Before leaving Australia in August 1958,1 had expected to find evidence of considerable re-orientation of Canadian political parties after the two successful electoral victories of the Progressive Conservatives, in June 1957 and March 1958, under the dynamic and demagogic leadership of Mr. John Diefenbaker. What I was not in the least prepared for was the potentially revolutionary change in Canadian party alignments implicit in the proposed formation of a new political party by arrangement between the C.C.F. (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation) and the C.L.C. (Canadian Labour Congress). This remained for me the outstanding development in internal political organisation during my stay in Canada, with highly significant possible longterm effects on Canada's external as well as internal programmes. Elsewhere, national politics were surprisingly tranquil. Conservatives were happy to continue basking in the sunshine of their remarkable and still almost unbelievable electoral success. Their leaders seemed bent on combining relaxation with international "education without tears" by dashing off in rapid succession to the uttermost ends of the earth, including even Australia and New Zealand. The Liberals, as will be noted below, were deliberately concentrating on internal structural reforms and were apparently postponing serious thought regarding the issues upon which their humiliated and depleted party might eventually fight its way back to electoral victory and national office. By contrast, the C.L.C. and the C.C.F., in their 1958 spring and summer national conventions respectively, had taken the bold step of seeking a combined solution of the post-electoral problem of the C.C.F. and of the increasingly strong demands of the powerful political wing in the Labour Congress. Endorsing in principle the formation of a new left-of-centre political party, in which the C.C.F. would be merged and with which the C.L.C. 51
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would in fact if not in name be very closely associated, the two national conventions threw back to their respective provincial organisations the responsibility of experimental investigation of local affiliations and of preliminary planning of the merger. This was not a mere "passing of the buck". In effect it was a decision to launch both the national labour movement and the existing third political party on a two-year campaign of self-education and propaganda, from the fruits of which would be constructed the constitution of the as yet unnamed new party when both national conventions met again in 1960. Since the potential consequences of, and the immediate sequel to these convention resolutions seemed to me imperfectly appreciated within Canada and have passed almost unnoted elsewhere, it may be useful to cite portion of the texts of the two resolutions. At Winnipeg, in April, the C.L.C. declared that the time had come for a fundamental re-alignment of political forces in Canada. There is the need for a broadly based people's political movement, which embraces the CCF, the labour movement, farm organizations, professional people and other liberally-minded persons interested in basic social reform and reconstruction through our parliamentary system of government. Such a broadly based political instrument should provide that Labour and other people's organizations may, together with the CCF, participate directly in the establishment of such a movement, its organizational structure and basic philosophy and program, as well as in its financing and choice of candidates for public office. There was no question of hostility to the C.C.F. The resolution placed on record the organised labour movement's recognition of the "tremendous contribution" of the C.C.F. "with its limited facilities". It was equally clear that what was needed was not just a revival of the C.C.F. Specific reference was made to the C.L.G's intention of "participating in and initiating the creation of a new political movement" which it did not, however, seek to dominate and which would provide for "the broadest possible participation of all individuals and groups genuinely interested in basic democratic planning necessary to such reforms". The corresponding resolution of the C.C.F. at its national convention in Montreal in July was characteristically more ideological in the phrasing of its preliminary clauses. The con52
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vention then went on to welcome the C.L.C. Winnipeg resolution and to authorise its own national council and national executive ... to enter into discussions with the Canadian Labour Congress, the Canadian and Catholic Confederation of Labour, interested farm organizations and other like-minded groups and individuals looking toward the achievement of the objectives set out and to present the results of such discussions to the next regular or to a special convention of the CCF for action. Further, that the National Council and Executive initiate and conduct the fullest discussion on this matter within the party, that any draft Constitution for such proposed broader political party be submitted to the CCF members, through their clubs and associations, for study and recommendation, before being submitted to the Convention and that any other propositions concerning the above, which are to be put before such Convention, shall be circulated to CCF clubs and associations at least two months prior to the Convention. Probably the first of the Canadian provinces in which C.L.C. and C.C.F. regional officers took up their exploratory, educational and propagandist task was British Columbia. When I arrived in Vancouver in September the first fruits of the C.L.C.-C.C.F. discussions were beginning to reveal themselves. I was permitted to attend a C.C.F. provincial council in Vancouver at which reports were submitted on the results of the first highly successful local conference of C.L.C. union and C.C.F. members, in one of eight areas into which the province was divided for the purpose of implementing the national conventions7 resolutions. The Same C.C.F. provincial council meeting also revealed some of the serious difficulties likely to be encountered at other area conferences. British Columbia was ripe for discussions of this sort partly because of the mounting tensions in labour-management relations on the Coast, to which reference has been made in chapter n. An additional reason was that both C.C.F. and C.L.C. leaders in Vancouver were aware of the rapidly declining popularity of the Bennett Social Credit provincial government in Victoria, B.C. Negotiations in British Columbia might therefore serve the double purpose of long-range national planning and more immediate provincial political advantage. As I moved eastward I encountered conditions which varied 53
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considerably and were sometimes much less favourable to the proposed C.C.F.-C.L.C. merger. In Alberta, Social Credit was still able to cast something of its old magic spell as long as Premier E. C. Manning continued to wave his political wand. In Saskatchewan, the difficulties which the C.C.F. Premier, Mr. T. C. Douglas, was reported to be having with some of his farmer supporters did not there encourage a new left-wing crusade. In the neighbouring province of Manitoba, Mr. Lloyd Stinson's C.C.F. minority held the balance between Conservative Government and Liberal Opposition in the Legislative Assembly. I was not therefore surprised to hear a good deal in Winnipeg of plans to carry out the national conventions' programme, though Mr. Jim Paterson, the president of the Manitoba Farmers' Union, whom I met in Winnipeg shortly after he had returned from a tour of all branches in the province, told me he was satisfied that his Farmers' Union would not support the proposed C.L.C.-C.C.F. merger. In Ontario, with its well-entrenched Conservative Government but increasingly strong body of industrial unionists the interest of labour was evidently keen. It was in Toronto, moreover, that I received the first non-partisan confirmation that I was not as mistaken as my Conservative and Liberal friends in Vancouver and in the Prairie Provinces had been disposed to declare me when I suggested that the C.C.F.C.L.C. merger proposal was something which other Canadian parties would do well to take seriously. This confirmation came from the Toronto Daily Star which in early November incurred the considerable cost of sending the chief of its Ottawa bureau, Mr. Mark Harrison, on a nation-wide fact-finding tour. His objective was to examine the progress, if any, being made in what the Star rightly interpreted as the C.L.C.-C.C.F. intention of exploiting the post-March electoral "opportunities for a historic transformation of Canadian politics . . . replacing the old Liberal party with a new labour-farmerliberal alliance". Mr. Harrison's report was published on Monday, November 17, and the four successive days; it was given frontpage prominence. Since the present record aims to be répertoriai and not prophetic in form I venture no predictions as to the outcome of the rather prolonged 1958-60 period of gestation following the C.L.C.-C.C.F. marriage ceremonies of spring and summer 1958. On one point in Mr. Harrison's survey I found myself in complete agreement. While there is always a possibility of pre-natal accident, all the evidence points to the fact that a new party will 54
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be born in 1960. The name its parents give to the infant has yet to be determined, and opinions vary considerably as to its prospect of living to a vigorous manhood, but its birth now seems assured. The arguments against the success of the new party with which I myself met and which are reproduced in Mr. Harrison's report may be brought under two main headings. The first concerns the difficulties which the C.C.F. is expected to have in retaining the support of farmer and other middle-class members of the party whose economic interests or prejudices have hitherto made them critical of urban industrial xand transport unions. I myself detected, even in Vancouver, some evidence of this distaste of respectable C.C.F. doctrinaires for too close a personal association with "selfish" union members allegedly concerned not with ideas and causes but only with extra wages or improved working conditions. On the other hand, while I respected the previously quoted statements of men, such as Mr. Jim Paterson, who are closely in touch with farmers' organisations, I thought my Liberal and Conservative acquaintances were a little too eager to emphasize the inevitable conflict of opinion between the independent individualism of "capitalist" farmers and the collectivism of urban trade unionists and to predict that "the price of greater union support is likely to be the loss of a large slice of traditional Prairie support". This smacked to me somewhat of wishful thinking. On a long view, I thought it tended to ignore the changes in economic habits and outlook of those engaged in Canadian agriculture, to which reference was made in chapter n. In brief, while I felt that the C.C.F. might well encounter difficulty in carrying over some of its traditional supporters in the early years of the new party, the latter's urban working class affiliations might, in the long run, have a stronger appeal to the less prosperous farmer than was generally appreciated. Mr. Harrison's argument that "the farmer by nature is a capitalist... interested in keeping wages low" may have been true of the past. It is likely to be an oversimplification of the farmer's outlook in the future. The second ground for denying the new party any substantial prospect of success was the past record of union leaders in failing to influence the behaviour of union members at political polling booths. I heard much talk from Vancouver to Montreal of the so-called "independence" ("indifference"?) of the Canadian worker, of his distaste for being "pushed around" by his union in matters other than those directly concerning his 55
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industrial welfare. This point was emphasized very strongly in regard to members of the older unions of the A.F. of L. type who are stated to believe that more can be gained for their material welfare by bargaining realistically with employers and with whatever brand of government is in office, Liberal or Conservative, than by identification with any one political party. Mr. Harrison summed up the craft unionist's alleged attitude as follows: Many union men may not have the nerve to stand up and object if their "local" votes to contribute funds to the C.C.F., but when they go to vote on election day, they'll go on supporting the old parties as before. I discussed this argument on several occasions with union leaders who had indicated their strong support for the C.C.F.C.L.C. merger. Somewhat to my surprise they accepted the accuracy of the statement that in a great many locals the tradition was strong that politics and religion had nothing to do with the real business of the union. The representative of an international union in one city in Ontario told me quite frankly that of ten locals which came under his supervision he would not at present openly discuss C.C.F.-C.L.C. merger plans with the rank and file of members in more than two. In the remaining eight locals I know that the ordinary member is not yet ready for campaign talks of this sort. What I do here is to work on the executive officers of the local; I'll get round to the individual members in due course. It's all a matter of political education. This emphasis on political education is highly significant. Fewr Canadians who dismiss more or less lightly the prospects of the new C.C.F.-C.L.C. party's success appear to have appreciated the extent to which this emphasis on the two needs of political action by union leaders and political education of union members has made headway in Canadian unions in recent times. It is not only that more and more of the key positions in the C.L.C. are coming to be filled by men formerly active in the C.C.F., like its vice-president Mr. Stanley Knowles. My personal experience in talks with relatively small men in union executive posts outside as well as within the capital cities, is that they are now convinced that political action holds the only answer to the immediate 56
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problems of industrial unionism in contemporary Canada. I recall an incident towards the close of a two-hour conference in eastern Canada with what had been constituted at my request as a crosssection of local union officers. When one after another they all endorsed the proposed merger I jokingly asked who had "rigged'' the conference. The reply was sharp though good-humoured: You \von't find an industrial union executive with more than five years' experience in this part of the country who won't talk the same way if he's frank with you. After all, what has been our experience? For years now we've been fighting our union battles with management in the old way. After arguments or strikes or threat of strikes we've won successively most of the issues we've raised. And what's happened? Management has gone to its pals in provincial office—it doesn't much matter whether they have been Conservatives or Liberals—and we've watched the passage of newmeasures amending labour legislation and robbing us of two-thirds of the fruits of our industrial victories. And we've had no party of our own in the provincial legislature to fight the new bills on our behalf. There's only one answer: we must have our own party in Parliament. Three further points are relevant to this discussion. First, while the proponents of the new party are—with one or two possible exceptions, surprisingly near the top—determined and confident, they have no exaggerated expectation of early success in reaching government benches, at least in the federal scene. They hope that gains at the next quinquennial elections, at the expense of the Liberals and/or with the support of voters who in 1957-58 were attracted by the "progressive" emphasis in the Diefenbaker Conservative programme, may see the new party in the House of Commons as the official Opposition. From that point, movement to the Government benches would await the emergence of sensational electoral issues arising out of economic depression, international tension or any of the other factors which traditionally contribute to a sharp swing of the pendulum in Canadian national politics. The second point is that interest in the exploratory educational and propagandist campaign of the two inter-convention years is being kept at its highest by the wisdom of the Winnipeg and Montreal convention managers in not committing C.L.C. or C.C.F. in advance to either the exact name or the precise plat57
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form of the new party. Once either of these has been determined critics will have a better target at which to aim. Meanwhile, varying the metaphor, I may quote the comments of a tradeunion executive in Kingston, Ontario, who shrewdly remarked that it was difficult to be sure that the baby would be cross-eyed until it had actually been born! The name to be selected will undoubtedly be a difficult choice. It seems safe enough to predict that the new organisation will not be officially labelled "Canadian Labour Party" for C.L.C. officials wish to retain "Labour" to indicate the industrial activities of the unions. These, they intend, shall remain the continuing specific function of their constituent unions. The term "Socialist" is also unattractive, partly because of the ease with which (thanks to the late Senator McCarthy and also to something in Canada's own politico-social traditions) "Socialism" in North America can be presented as identical with "Communism". The name I heard least unfavourably discussed was "Canadian Social Democratic Party" —for democracy is still a term to conjure with on political platforms north and south of the border while it might be hoped that only European immigrants would be unduly put off by thoughts of the allegedly poor showing of Social Democrats in Central Europe. The third incidental point concerns the related question of the new party's platform. Until the national conventions of 1960 have pronounced on this, details must remain uncertain. It seems clear enough, however, that, while somewhere left of centre, the new party will seek to escape the vaguely doctrinaire socialism of the old C.C.F. Trade-union spokesmen were at some pains to impress upon me their conviction—expressed sometimes with a slightly shamefaced grin—that much of the C.C.F.'s failure in the past was due to the fact that most Canadians regarded it as "a bunch of idealist egg-heads—professors, parsons and all that". If the merger is to make an effective appeal to workers the platform of the new party must be more concrete than vague, safe rather than revolutionary. Just how this is to be achieved in practice is, fortunately for the C.L.C.-C.C.F. planners, a problem for 1960. The outside observer may nevertheless predict a certain rightwing trend away from earlier C.C.F. programmes. This adds a further argument for those who doubt whether the C.C.F. can carry many of its existing supporters into the new movement. On the other hand, it indicates very clearly that the new party is in fact directed chiefly against the Liberal party, whose spectacular collapse at the federal elections of March 31, 1958, pro58
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vided C.L.C. supporters of political action with a seemingly heaven-sent opportunity which might not recur in their generation.
3 "If there is any logic in Canadian affairs", Mr. Lloyd Stinson said to me in Winnipeg in mid October, "now is the time when there should be a good chance for a third party to slip in and take the place formerly occupied by Liberals against the older Conservatives." Most Liberals to whom I spoke of this C.C.F.-C.L.C. dagger pointed at their throats behaved as though they were convinced that Canadian politics had nothing to do with logic. I found a few exceptions: Mr. Arnold Edinborough in Kingston, Ontario; Mr. Tom Kent in Winnipeg; M. Jean Lesage, the new provincial leader of the party in Old Quebec; and one Young Liberal in Toronto. All responded with varying degrees of enthusiasm to the suggestion that there was an urgent need for the emergence of a new Liberal party with a new political philosophy in keeping with the conditions of the second half of the twentieth century. What was wanted, in short, was a new liberalism which was neither Adam Smith nor John Stuart Mill nor even Lord Keynes but something that could be regarded as contemporary Canadian and would make an incisive appeal somewhere between the ideas of Tories on the one hand and Socialists on the other. Such views, however, I found highly exceptional. The Liberal party certainly accepted the need for reorganisation both in the provinces and at the centre. From the end of September onwards the new leader, Mr. Lester Pearson, barn-stormed the country and to local organisers and party members delivered himself of a series of strong fighting speeches which were prominently reported in the Canadian press. Strangely enough, however, the published speeches were for the most part concerned with foreign affairs and Mr. Pearson's oratorical shafts were directed at Mr. John Foster Dulles rather than at Mr. Diefenbaker or C.GF.-C.L.C. conspirators. The central reorganisation which followed Mr. Pearson's return to Ottawa certainly produced what looked to the outsider like a more streamlined party machine, but there was no clear indication as to the fuel which it would burn. My own discussions suggested two reasons for this. The first was that, as already indicated* few Liberals of influence felt the threat from the proposed new left59
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of-centre party to be real. A complementary consideration which the Liberal leaders appeared to find compelling was the conviction that, since the real opponent still was the Conservative party, it was dangerous to give undue weight to particular issues so early in the life of a new federal parliament. The following is a relevant extract from my notebook summary of a discussion with one prominent Liberal in late November: The Conservative honeymoon is not yet over. Mr. Diefenbaker won victory for his party by going far beyond the known views and accepted beliefs of the hard Tory core of the Conservative party. Of his many "progressive" promises, it's still too soon to judge which will cause him most difficulty and so provide the Opposition with effective slogans on which to fight the next federal elections and to prepare for that fight in the House of Commons. It would be easy to label such views as sheer expediency or political opportunism. Certainly they did little to suggest that the new controllers of the Liberal party machine, however anxious they might be to correct the weakness and aloofness of the past and to get "grass roots" down once more in the several provinces, saw much to be gained by precipitate appeals to potential supporters, particularly young men and women with a politico-social "fire in the belly". On the contrary, I even heard talk of suggestions that the most effective electoral device would be to hoist Mr. Diefenbaker with his own progressive proposals by swinging the Liberal party well to the right and so, as it were, repay the Prime Minister in kind and "dish the Tories" by tactics which would make Disraeli turn in his grave. The prospect of any such sharp Liberal move to the right was in fact negligible. Tempting as it might be to encourage the return of Liberal financial subsidies which had miraculously moved to the Conservatives the moment the electoral landslide took place—one shrewd if cynical Manitoban remarked that "the very telephone dripped cheques" that morning—such a swing was not consistent with either the character or the outlook of the new parliamentary leadership of the party. The absence of some attempt by Mr. Pearson to give his party a new ideological liberalism nevertheless remained with me as my most striking impression of the Liberal party at the end of 1958. It helped to explain both the difficulty I had personally experienced in discovering Young Liberals in Canadian universities and the com60
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plaint of an attractive hostess, wife of a well-known Liberal journalist, that all the nice young men at — seemed to have joined the Conservative party.
4 The reluctance of many of my Canadian Liberal friends to commit themselves or their party to ideological labels at this distance from the likely date of the next federal elections drew attention to the significance of the answers I received to another basic political question I kept asking as I moved eastward from Vancouver to Fredericton. Do Canadian political parties more closely resemble United States parties in their emphasis on regional group and interest associations and in the importance which their electorate attaches to governmental administration rather than to parliamentary discussion? Or have differences of principle in the past run deep between Canadian Conservatives and their Liberal opponents, even allowing for the inevitable emergence of exciting ad hoc electoral issues? In other words, does the Canadian party system continue to function, as that of the United States allegedly does, because there are two sides to every office—an inside and an outside—rather than two sides to most questions? Or is the relevant current factor that the Canadian political scene is now about to witness one of those rare ideological revolutions, comparable with those of the days of Peel and Disraeli and of the early 1920's in Great Britain, from which will emerge a new stratification of party politics, a more or less consistent and continuous conflict of principle between a party (or coalition of parties) of the right and a new left-of-centre party? The answers I received to this fundamental inquiry were about evenly divided. There certainly is a solid body of informed opinion in Canada today which believes that, in this matter of party politics, Canadian electors are more interested in appointing men to carry on the government of the country for a period of years than they are to choose between advocates of substantially divergent and persistently held theories of government. A variant of this answer took the form of strongly expressed antagonism to the importing into Canada of class-based antagonisms allegedly peculiar to the old world of the United Kingdom and Europe. The assumption is that Canadian social and political history is a middle of the road affair; to introduce a political Labour party, in name or in fact, would be a retrograde step, 61
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to be deeply deplored by all true Canadians. The corollary to this argument is that it would be prejudicial to the material interests of Canadian workers. "When Fm about to receive a deputation of trade unionists," said youthful Conservative Premier Duff Roblin of Manitoba with obvious sincerity, as he sat on his office desk in Winnipeg and dangled his legs in easy informality, "I ask myself what I can do to help this responsible section of my fellow Manitobans. Then I find myself thinking of their impending alliance with my C.C.F. opponents. My attitude unconsciously changes to one of suspicion and caution lest I give away something which may be turned to my political disadvantage." My general impression after an interview in Ottawa with the Liberal leader of the federal Opposition (which ranged over so much ground in highly stimulating fashion that I may possibly be guilty here of unintentional misrepresentation) is that Mr. Lester Pearson is among those who would put the analogy between Canadian and United States parties closer than the ideological similarity with British party relationships, I certainly left Mr. Pearson's office with the feeling that, though he had lost none of his intellectual and idealistic convictions on international issues, he was unlikely to precipitate the Canadian Liberal party on a course of domestic ideological endeavour sharply left or right of that "progressive" programme to which Mr. Diefenbaker committed his somewhat dazed but still rejoicing Tory followers in the last federal election campaign. Some of my Canadian academic friends suggested a variant to the answer outlined in the preceding paragraphs. Concentration of electoral interest on effective government at the federal level was not to be interpreted (I was told) as implying the absence of a healthy intellectual and ideological curiosity in provincial politics. If it should happen that the sweeping victory of Mr. Diefenbaker has had the effect of removing effective opposition in the House of Commons until the approach of the next federal elections provides the necessary clarification of potentially votewinning issues, it need not follow that Canadians will lack intellectual or ideological stimulus in their political life. This may well be provided, at the provincial level, by such things as an effective conflict between left and right in a C.C.F.-C.L.C. tussle for power with a reactionary Bennett-led Social Credit government in British Columbia or the emergence of a healthy pro62
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vincial opposition to the monolithic Duplessis Union Nationale régime in Quebec or in clarification of the respective appeals of Progressive Conservatism, traditional Liberalism and what the C.C.F. and C.L.C. can devise in the way of a programme which will appeal alike to industrial workers in Winnipeg and the less successful farmers elsewhere in Manitoba. Strangely enough, it fell to a Conservative politician to give the answer to my basic question which was most directly opposed to that which I had carried away from my talks with Mr. Duff Roblin and Mr. Lester Pearson. Mr. Leslie Frost, the 64-year-old Conservative Premier of Ontario very considerately gave me the best part of an hour on a busy morning during which he was frequently called away to the telephone in an adjoining room. After I had stated my basic question in something like the form in which it appears at the beginning of this section, Mr. Frost treated me to a lengthy discourse on the nature of progressive conservatism in the Canadian, and particularly the Ontario, scene. I was warned (in terms with which, by this period of my stay in Canada, I had become rather wearily familiar) against identifying Conservatism as practised in Canada with that which existed in other parts of the world. The Premier went out of his way to explain his own efforts to keep his ideas, and their practical application in provincial administration, in line with the changing requirements of the age. The implication was that neither he nor I need worry greatly about the emergence in Canada of Old World slogans and organisations as long as there continued to be Progressive Conservatives like Leslie Frost (and possibly John Diefenbaker or Duff Roblin) to prevent the votes of sensible Canadian workers being cast for Liberal, C.C.F. or any other new-fangled political party. At this point the eloquent platform orator suddenly gave place to the shrewd political observer with many years of practical experience and some reading of politics behind him: Mind you, I think you're right in suggesting that the next twenty-five years in Canada will see the emergence of an increasingly stratified conflict between a Conservative-Liberal or Liberal-Conservative party of the right and some sort of Socialist party of the left. The speaker then voluntarily suggested the analogy between Canadian politics in the 1960's with those of the United Kingdom of the 1920's: 63
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I don't know whether the right in Canada will be predominantly Conservative or predominantly Liberal. Much will depend on circumstances and individual leadership. If Lloyd George had played his cards differently I believe that the present political alignment in Great Britain would not be between Conservative and Labour but between Liberal and Labour. The Conservative politician then re-entered the room and the interview terminated very quickly. I left the Premier's office with the assurance ringing in my ears that, whatever the future might hold, the immediate present was safely controlled. For as long as Mr. Leslie Frost was likely to have to worry about it, sufficient Ontario workers would vote with other traditional Conservatives to ensure the continuance of enlightened and "progressive" provincial administration in Toronto!
64
V
CULTURAL CONSIDERATIONS
THE question posed in the concluding section of the preceding chapter produced, as indicated, widely diverging answers from Canadians. On the broader issue of the cultural influence of the United States upon its neighbour, I found at least superficial agreement on the nature, if not also on the degree of the influence. Difficulties in measuring intensity and extent spring not only from differences between the situation in the several provinces but also from the pervasive character of the cultural penetration. On this last fact most Canadians are agreed, however much they may differ in the inferences they draw from it.
1 Obviously the influence tends to be greatest near the border. In a city such as Windsor, Ontario, which lies just across the river from Detroit, one feels the impact immediately. When I arrived by an overnight train from Toronto the early morning paper I bought came from Detroit. As I was driven to breakfast with a friend, the dominant feature on the landscape was the skyscrapers of the neighbouring automobile metropolis. Casual conversation a few hours later with the general manager of the Windsor Daily Star revealed the fact that the several members of the manager's family had all spent the previous evening across the river—one at an advance technology class where the lecturer was a distinguished Faculty member of a mid-western American university, the others at a Detroit concert hall where the singer was a world famous prima donna whose much publicised temperament had recently led to her exclusion from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. In both cases these Canadian residents of Windsor had reached their destinations with less 65
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time and trouble than Americans of corresponding income groups living in uptown Detroit or its outlying districts. In this and similar cases, frontier formalities are negligible. When a few weeks before visiting Windsor I had driven from Toronto to spend a university weekend at Rochester, in upstate New York, neither of my two Canadian companions was required to do more than exchange verbal pleasantries with United States and Canadian officials on the outward and inward journeys respectively. The full range of cultural influences in all their variety is no doubt felt most strongly in Canadian higher-income groups whose mobility is naturally more marked than that of Canadian workers, rural as well as urban. Obvious examples are the members of big industrial and financial houses in Toronto and Montreal. Yet even in the Prairies the wealthy farmer allegedly winters in Florida. (His poorer brethren seek supplementary incomes from unskilled work in adjacent Canadian cities; the intermediate farmer shifts his family to the amenities of a small city house and practices "curling" with his cronies.) In Winnipeg, I was told that there is a regular migration southward of music-lovers during the opera "season" at Minneapolis. Wives of the well-to-do in Vancouver rely on renewing their wardrobes on visits to San Francisco or, possibly, Seattle. There's a constant crossing and recrossing of the eastern maritime frontier between New Brunswick and Maine. A note of caution may perhaps be introduced at this point. Most Canadians when they talk emotively about American cultural penetration are disposed to concentrate on the more popular media of mass communication. Attention will be given to these below. Meanwhile, an Australian observer is impressed by his Canadian colleagues' ease of access to American cultural influences of the highest quality—whether by visits to learned societies or American universities or by frequent academic exchanges or by enjoyment of the generosity of a wider range of American research-foundation grants than are available to those in more distant parts of the overseas Commonwealth. It is much to the credit of Americans, individually and collectively, that in their varying forms of higher educational facilities they rarely appear conscious of any barrier between themselves and Canadians—except, perhaps, that few of them show any real desire to go to Canada other than for a holiday in the summer or, occasionally, to one of the many intellectual get-togethers with which American Faculty members quench their thirst for 66
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cultural stimuli (and perhaps for other things) as well as satisfying their reputedly gregarious national instincts. It is also fair enough to suggest that Canadian scholars in return make substantial contributions to North American culture, technological and otherwise, sometimes by permanent residence in research institutes and on university campuses south of the border. Though I heard recurrent complaints at the consequent loss to Canadian scholarship and research, pure and applied, which results from the greater facilities and higher salaries offered in the United States, I think it may generally be conceded that, in its higher forms, the over-all cultural relationship between the United States and Canada is substantially beneficial rather than injurious to both countries. When we come to the mass media of communication it is evident that the giver is almost always American and the receiver Canadian. Newspapers and periodicals provide an obvious illustration. During my two weeks in New York after leaving Canada I made several fruitless efforts to buy copies of Canadian magazines on stands where United Kingdom as well as American papers were readily available. In any Canadian town, by contrast, the better-known American periodicals are displayed with a prominence at least equal to and usually greater than that given to Maclean's or Saturday Night. (That there should be a corresponding shortage of Canadian dailies and periodicals in England is more intelligible, though Canada House in London has the more important papers readily available, albeit some five or six weeks out of date by contrast with the service provided at the office of the Agent General for Western Australia in the Strand where any visitor may consult in comfort up-to-date airmailed copies of the Perth, W.A., press.) In addition to the ready accessibility of American journals to all Canadians, those Canadians who live reasonably near the border (and this covers some of the more thickly populated regions of both Ontario and the Far West) have access to, and make regular use of American television and radio stations. In so far as the film industry is still a powerful "cultural" medium, American movies exercise an influence on Canadian life at least as great as they have on any other part of the world outside the United States itself. To all these influences should be added the sales impact of American manufacturers, whether through the specially designed advertising in Canadian editions of American periodicals or through the direct sales techniques of Canadian subsidiaries of American firms. Consciously or unconsciously, Canadians themselves contribute 67
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substantially to this intelligibly North American appetite for United States news and views which exists north as well as south of what is largely an artificial political frontier. An Australian visitor cannot fail to be impressed by the coverage which all Canadian newspapers, give to United States affairs in sharp contrast with what he is used to in the coverage of American news in the Australian press and with what he will seek in vain of Canadian news in United States papers—of which more in chapter VIH.
2 There is no denying the effect of all these influences of the United States on the Canadian rank and file. The point is so obvious that it should require no further illustration for either residents of, or visitors to, the Dominion of Canada. It helps to explain the ease with which non-Americans so often arouse the anger of Canadians by confusing them with nationals of the United States. Such mistakes are in fact a good deal easier for a foreigner to make than informed Canadians readily recognise. One reason why the error causes so much irritation is that responsible Canadians today are deliberately engaged in what may be described as a cultural resistance campaign designed to preserve and to develop a distinctively Canadian way of life. This campaign reveals itself every now and then in positive forms readily recognisable, as indicated in the next section of this chapter. Some of this resistance is less deliberately organised, being merely the natural persistence of cultural characteristics carried through from original British, French and other European countries of origin. Of continuing European cultural influences on contemporary Canada the most striking example, the French-speaking Canadians, will be considered in a different context in chapter vu. Canadians themselves attach considerable importance to the fact that other European migrant groups—Italians, Poles, Ukrainians, for example—are allowed, if not encouraged, to combine loyalty to their new Canadian national community with retention of many of the cultural characteristics of their country of origin. My attention was frequently invited to the absence in Canada of the levelling devices adopted in the United States, at elementary schools and elsewhere, to ensure the Américanisation of the polyglot population attracted there during the period of unrestricted mass immigration. The Canadian aim, I was told, was 68
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to enrich and not to depress to a cultural lowest common denominator, as it were, the resultant civilisation of Canada as a community of communities, English, French and something more. United States visitors to Canada on whom I tested this contrasting interpretation of Canadian and American migrant assimilation policies were generally disposed to dismiss the distinction as either non-existent or merely a rationalisation of the relatively recent nature of the Canadian problem and the inability as yet of Canadian officialdom to grapple effectively with it. My own discussions with the Canadian-born off spring of' European migrants suggest that the difference is real whatever its cause and however short-lived it may eventually prove to be. Mayor Hawrelak of Edmonton, for example, seemed at first extremely reluctant to discuss the alleged characteristics of Ukrainians in Canada or to recognise the existence of a "Ukrainian" attitude. He was, however, quite ready to talk about the interests and views of "Canadians of Ukrainian ethnic origin" most of whom, like his own father, had come to Canada before the first world war, but had been reinforced by others during the period of the economic depression of the early thirties and by some since the second world war. He admitted their continued cultural and political interest in European affairs, their general hostility to Russian communism and their sympathy with anti-colonialism in any part of the world. He was nevertheless strong in his insistence on their primary concern with increasing use of their opportunities as Canadian citizens; he stressed the changes in their standing which had resulted from the service by many of them in Canadian fighting forces during the second world war and denied the existence of any significant racial or cultural links between those of Ukrainian ethnic origin in Canada and in the United States. One point made by Mayor Hawrelak seemed to me significant in its bearing on the deliberate encouragement or unconscious persistence of British cultural and political traditions in Englishspeaking Canada. This Canadian university-educated son of a Ukrainian migrant, who, like his national and ethnic contemporary Mayor Stephen Juba of Winnipeg, had evidently mastered the techniques of local politics, spoke with feeling of the strength of the attachment of Canadians who came from the Ukraine to the British Commonwealth. It was into the British way of life that Ukrainians came in those 69
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years before the first world war. They and their children do not forget that it was through British institutions that they received the opportunities which had been denied them in Europe. Here is a point of contact not readily appreciated with that substantial nineteenth- and twentieth-century migration to Canada of English and Scots whose natural desire to retain their familiar institutions and way of life reinforced the more artificial or deliberate determination of the descendants of United Empire Loyalists in Ontario and the Maritimes to retain a civilisation which, if it is not in some respects more British than the British, is at least quite deliberately not American. The emotional factor implicit in the preceding sentence should not be ignored in any realistic assessment of the cultural resistance movement in contemporary Canada. It would be well, however, to avoid giving too much importance to any deliberately anti-American motivation in the emphasis on retention of Old World cultural habits and associations. This is my necessarily somewhat superficial impression of prevailing policies and features of life in English-speaking Canadian universities. Generalisation in such a matter is admittedly difficult and dangerous. But though I was not engaged on any survey of Canadian universities as such, I was given the freedom of Senior Common Rooms in a great many institutions of higher learning across the Dominion and heard and took part in many frank discussions at both Administration and Faculty levels. I must record that this experience (in which my Australian remoteness from controversial North American issues was some guarantee of an absence of the studied restraint which might have applied in the presence of an American visitor) does not confirm the impression recorded by Mr. Joseph Barber that, in some respects, university teachers "constitute the core—the atomic pile—of the Club resistance to Americanizing influence". I did nevertheless detect a number of significant differences between Canadian universities in general and many comparable institutions in the United States. Some of the differences result in part from the difference in the size of the student population and the more selective recruitment of undergraduates which tends to place Canadian universities in a position intermediate between American and Australian tertiary institutions—as the latter are in a sort of middle position between Canadian and United Kingdom universities. From my personal experience in talking to Canadian history or political science classes in different universities or in 70
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discussing curricula and teaching methods with Faculty members, it would appear that many Canadian universities are taking a greater interest in the undergraduate than sheer weight of numbers permits in most United States junior colleges or their equivalent. There also appeared to be greater emphasis on tutorial methods in undergraduate courses, a consequent attempt to devote more time to intellectual standards and an opposition to the introduction of more purely utilitarian subjects. Nor is it entirely irrelevant to remark at this stage on the evidence I frequently detected of the influence of the old British-type universities of Nova Scotia as well as those of McGill and Toronto on the staffing and early development of some of the younger Canadian universities of the West. This reminded me forcibly of the strength of the influence of New England universities which I had felt so markedly when I first worked in Californian universities in 1939-40. On the other hand I should record some contrary impressions of life in Canadian universities which to an Australian were more suggestive of United States than of British academic influence. The greater size of Canadian as compared to Australian universities has already produced some characteristics that might more fairly be described as North American than as anything else. The university president in Canada would seem to approximate more closely to his United States counterpart than to a British or Australian vice-chancellor. At least some Canadian Faculty members also seemed to be living under the sense of strain so often sensed by a visitor to campuses further south. Yet even this statement requires qualification. At the Universities of Toronto and British Columbia and at McGill and Queen's Universities, I felt strongly the comparisons with traditions and practices familiar to any university man who has worked in the United Kingdom. Nor did I detect any note of insincerity in the praise, if not envy, with which some members of the Faculty at such places spoke of the standards and facilities of graduate schools in many United States universities in addition to Yale or Harvard or Princeton. At the risk of making confusion worse confounded, these inconclusive and not always clearly consistent comments on Canadian culture at the tertiary level in English-speaking Canadian universities may perhaps fittingly conclude with the strong personal impression that, as a graduate of the universities of Melbourne and Oxford, I felt more at home academically in the University of Toronto than I have ever felt in a university 71
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in the United States, despite many happy and stimulating memories of experiences on and associations with campuses south of the Canadian border. 3
Having questioned Mr. Barber's casting of Canadian university teachers in the role of leaders of the Canadian resistance movement and having suggested that Canadian universities may absorb as much as they resist United States influences, I should name, it seems, some focal instrument for the national resistance to American cultural penetration. If this must be done, I should select the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for that distinction. Even here, as will appear, the choice requires some qualification. I make no apology for beginning an appreciation of the role of the C.B.C. by quoting at length from the Fowler Report (Repon of the Royal Commission on Broadcasting) of March 1957. For this Report, like that of the Gordon Commission referred to in chapter n, deserves to become a Canadian classic. The central problem is stated early in the readable pages of the substantive first volume of the Fowler Report: The central unique fact about Canadian broadcasting is that we are here in North America, a nation of 16 million people living beside a nation of 168 million, which speaks the language of our majority and is rich, inventive, with a highly developed broadcasting system of its own. . . . . . . as a nation, we cannot accept, in these powerful and persuasive media, the natural and complete flow of another nation's culture without danger to our national identity. The Commission went on to insist that there was nothing in this attitude which was hostile to the United States: The same attitude would apply equally to the flooding of Canada by cultural influences from the United Kingdom or France. It is only the accident of geography and the technology of broadcasting that make the threat to our national identity greater from the United States. In no field of national activity, moreover, does a visitor find so frank a recognition of the cost of deliberately choosing to maintain something distinctively Canadian instead of considering the cheapest means of satisfying individual or regional demands: 72
CULTURAL CONSIDERATIONS
The natural flow of trade, travel and ideas runs north and south. We have tried to make some part, not all, of the flow run east and west. We have only done so at an added cost, borne nationally. . . .To apply this principle to broadcasting in Canada, it is necessary to provide quite substantial sums of money for the creation and distribution of radio and television services across Canada and this requires a further agency to spend the money and administer the broadcasting system. Public acceptance of this policy of building up the C.B.C. and its associated commercial stations as a nationally creative as well as a nation-wide servicing agency has not been unanimous. There was originally considerable opposition to the establishment of C.B.C. television as such, the argument being that United States stations might be left to supply this costly service. This they could in fact provide at a fraction of the cost of an independent Canadian television organisation forced to bear an overhead cost relatively high in proportion to the number of its viewers, apart altogether from the additional expenditure involved in the making of special Canadian programmes instead of drawing on United States mass production in this as in so many other fields. The fact that the former chairman of the C.B.C., Mr. A. Davidson Dunton, has now succeeded Dr. Claude Bissell as president of Carleton University in Ottawa enabled me to press this latter point a little further than I might have felt proper to do in a personal interview a year earlier. I was left with the impression that, while considerations of Canadian autonomy counted sufficiently with Members of the House of Commons not only to ensure the inauguration of Canadian television but also to continue to provide the C.B.C. with public funds (a total in the financial year 1957-58 of $13,078,849 for radio and of $28,098,332 for television), opposition still persists. The predominantly profit motive of Canadian commercial stations naturally draws them towards the purchase of readily accessible and cheaper United States televised film programmes in preference to those made in Canada which they are required to take from the C.B.C, despite the fact that they may draw sponsors' revenue from these C.B.C. programmes while the C.B.C. bears the cost of their preparation. It is nevertheless important to stress that I heard no direct attack by Canadian commercial interests on the Canadian programmes as such. Indeed, some of these are avowedly presented by private organisations as a contribution to the development of Canadian culture. Thus the International 73
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Nickel Company of Canada joined with the C.B.C. in sponsoring the December 1957 production of a full-length presentation by the Stratford Players of Peer Gynt as a contribution to original Canadian television programming. Again, the main Canadian television theatre programme which carries most of the plays in English which are written, acted and produced by Canadians bears the significant title "General Motors Presents". In so far as commercial interests are allegedly threatening the accepted Canadian radio and television policy the attack is indirect—upon the weaknesses of this or that particular C.B.C. programme rather than by reference to the alternative United States feature which is available, which is probably cheaper in both senses of the word and which might be equally or even more acceptable to the ordinary run of Canadian viewers. Here enters one of the major complications which confront Canadian authorities in broadcasting, as in all other fields of cultural activity. I have no desire to be insulting to either Americans or Canadians—comparable conditions are suggested by a brief acquaintance with the fare provided on B.B.C. and I.T.V. programmes respectively in London, and by A.B.C. and Australian commercial stations in Melbourne and Sydney—when I say that the lower the individual Canadian's educational standard the more deeply he is likely to be affected by the cheaper forms of American cultural penetration, of which, incidentally, the technical level may be very high. The peculiar problem which this presents to those responsible for C.B.C. policy is that they are aware that, in regions near the border, viewers must be attracted to C.B.C. television programmes in competition with those of United States stations by the inclusion in the former of at least a substantial proportion of American programmes or of American-type programmes made in Canada. It is also a highly relevant consideration that sponsors will generally be found more readily among Canadian subsidiaries of American firms if the programme in question is American in source or in type. And C.B.C. governors and directors cannot be blind to their need to supplement the total 1957-58 government grants of $41,177,181 referred to above by a gross commercial revenue of $28,410,514. No better illustration could be provided of the central argument of this chapter than the evidence graphically presented on pages 20 and 21 of the C.B.C.'s 1957-58 Annual Report on the sources of radio-network and of television-network programmes. Of the former the C.B.C. was responsible for 94 per cent as against 2 per cent from each of the United States and the United 74
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Kingdom. Of the latter, on the English network the CB.C source was estimated to be 57 per cent as against the United States 39 per cent and the United Kingdom 1 per cent; the United States percentage was reduced to 5 on the French network and the C.B.C. increased to 72 while France was the source of 14 per cent of the programmes. This summary substantially confirmed and generalised the comments made by C.B.C. regional directors and other officers with whom I talked in different parts of Canada. I wish to record dispassionately my impression of the high sense of personal responsibility—even a sense of mission—by which I felt so many C.B.C. staff members are guided in their realistic effort to grapple with the problems and the opportunities of these two related media, radio and television. Their technical achievement in respect to the latter only a few years after the television service was first introduced is indeed remarkable. By the end of the year 1957-58, six C.B.C. and 31 privately owned stations were carrying English programmes and two C.B.C. and five privately owned catered for French-speaking viewers. It was estimated that an average of some 10,500,000 Canadians watched some part of English or French television each evening. The number of Canadian households with television sets was put at more than three million—71 per cent of the population—and it was estimated that these sets were used on the average for more than 24 hours per week. One striking contrast between Canadian and American experience, to which I am able as a random listener to give some personal confirmation, is that while American radio programmes have greatly deteriorated with the development of television— this I can attest from casual listening both in California and on the east coast of the United States—there has been both an increase in the number of licenses to owners of radios in Canada since the introduction of television and a deliberate attempt made to raise the quality of C.B.C. radio services. Ironically enough this fact has received some recognition on the United States side of the border. In Vancouver I was told by the C.B.C. regional director, Mr. Kenneth Caple, that audience research had revealed an appreciative American reception of both C.B.C. radio and some television programmes on the northwest Pacific coast. I was able myself to confirm a comparable appreciation by American receivers of radio programmes emanating from stations in southern Ontario. All this with deliberation and at considerable cost. My section 75
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on the C.B.C.'s self-imposed task may fittingly conclude, as it began, with a quotation—this time from the concluding part of the Fowler Report: The forces of economics are against us ... as they have been against many odd Canadian dreams and aspirations in the past. But this is one we had better work at, for it is readily important if we are to keep a Canadian identity and culture; if there is, in fact, to be a Canadian force in the world. And that may be important to many people—both inside and outside Canada. 4
If the C.B.C. is thus directly or indirectly the outstanding instrument of Canadian resistance to the persuasive cultural penetration from the south, the openly avowed national agency for the positive encouragement of Canadian culture is the Canada Council, established by a statute of the federal parliament which received the Royal Assent on March 28, 1957, as the sequel to the 1951 Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, presided over by Vincent Massey (later Governor General of Canada). The Act authorised the Council to allocate under certain conditions, within ten years, a capital sum of $50,000,000 for the additional space in university buildings required to meet the growing need for university graduates. A further $50,000,000 was vested in the Council as an endowment fund, the revenue from which (estimated at something over $2,000,000 per annum) was, according to the Act, to be used "to foster and promote the study and encouragement of, and the production of work in, the arts, humanities and social sciences". The Canada Council consisting of seventeen men and four women drawn from every province in Canada, did not hold its inaugural meetings, under the chairmanship of the Hon. Brooke Claxton, until as recently as April 30 and May 1, 1957. It is not yet possible to gauge the extent to which the Council will succeed in producing the cultural wealth which, by contrast with Canada's recent material prosperity, was, in the view expressed at the opening ceremony by the Council's vice-chairman, the Very Rev. Fr. G. H. Levesque, O.P., "less obvious than our poverty". The first Annual Report of the Council tabled in the House of Commons by Prime Minister Diefenbaker on February 10, 1958, and the first issue of the Council's Bullçtin in October 1958, covering activities of the subsequent three months, revealed an expenditure of $8,869,900 on 28 grants from the University 76
CULTURAL CONSIDERATIONS
Capital Grants Fund. An estimated contribution in scholarships, fellowships and similar grants to 467 beneficiaries, coming within one or other of ten categories under which scholarships, fellowships and other grants are made to individuals, totalled $955,400. An additional 30 individuals including an actor, an author, a soprano, an anthropologist and a sociologist, received $52,107 for travel and special projects, while 96 organisations, ranging from art galleries and concert associations to a symphony orchestra and a poetry magazine, received $1,217,735. In the period down to March 31, 1958, the subject distribution was $806,850 to the arts and $600,300 to the humanities and social sciences, the comparable figures from April being $439,535 and $978,857 respectively. A qualitative estímate of the value of these first fruits of the Canada Council would obviously be beyond the capacity of a single observer so near the event; in the present personal context the attempt might even be a trifle embarrassing. But the potential significance of the Council's contribution to Canadian culture cannot be questioned. Nor should it be ignored that, as in economic, strategic and political fields, the Dominion has through the Canada Council publicly demonstrated that, in matters cultural, it is a self-supporting and a contributing nation —no longer a colonial or near-colonial mendicant, content to enrich its citizens' culture largely through the generosity of older societies. One is tempted to add: other Dominion Governments please copy!
77
VI
IDEALIST AND SPIRITUAL INFLUENCES
IN previous attempts to examine trends of thought and opinion affecting attitudes on foreign relations—notably in the United States in 1940 and in South Africa in 1950—1 have always given lay and clerical representatives of different religious denominations a prominent place in the occupational and regional cross-section of persons to be interviewed. The obvious combination of religious and racial factors in conditioning the outlook of French-speaking Canadians in the province of Quebec appeared to warrant the general application of this practice to my Canadian investigations. It came, therefore, as something of a shock when I was strongly counselled by Faculty friends and advisers at the University of British Columbia to put any such thought out of my mind as far as Vancouver and the Coast were concerned. By the time I had entered the so-called Bible Belt at Edmonton, however, it was clear that religious influences continued to play a lively part in conditioning thought and action in the Prairies, whatever I might or might not find to be the case in Ontario. Clearly, it was not going to be easy to make sweeping generalisations regarding the nature and extent of the influence which organised religion and other spiritual forces exercised upon Canadians in their relations with foreign governments and peoples.
One generalisation may now be made with some confidence. Outside the province of Quebec at all events, organised religions in Canada cannot be said to function as political pressure groups in the same way as they undoubtedly do in the United States and in South Africa, avowedly or otherwise. The nearest to an 78
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exception is the United Church of Canada which, in addition to the effectiveness of its social programme in such matters as liquor legislation, as directed particularly by the Rev. James R. Mutchmor, does deliberately seek to extend its official interest to the field of international relations. Shortly after I arrived in Canada in September this was revealed by the highly topical and contentious resolution carried by the Eighteenth General Council of the United Church in Ottawa urging the Canadian Government to move for the recognition of Communist China and its admission to the United Nations. By the time I reached Toronto, the Church's Board of Evangelism and Social Service had published as a 48-page booklet the full text and resolutions of its committee on the Church and International Affairs which had been submitted to the Ottawa General Council—under the horrendous title Deliverance or DOOM. Very great care has to be taken in describing the work of United Church officers, in carrying out this and other general resolutions, as political pressure-group activities, in the sense in which this term is understood elsewhere in North America and overseas. It is true that campaigners like Mr. Mutchmor (whose advocacy of total abstinence borders on the fanatical, though it is not nowadays, I was told, as fully supported within the Church as he would like it to be) attract a great deal of attention in the press and elsewhere. It is also clear that close contact is maintained between the Church's social headquarters and the appropriate Ministers in the federal Government. But the real influence which may thus be exercised on government policy, in matters foreign as well as domestic, has to be qualified in a number of respects, some of which are significant. The first point to be noted is that even the United Church is careful to couch most of its resolutions in very general terms. The 1958 resolution regarding Communist China was in this regard highly exceptional. Most of the other "Findings and Resolutions"—on disarmament, technical assistance, trade and immigration policies, refugees, the United Nations and world food needs—were unlikely to cause acute embarrassment to a Canadian government though they were not necessarily without real value merely for that reason. The second qualification is that the United Church has rarely succeeded in persuading other religious denominations to join with it in joint demonstrations and united pressure upon government authorities. I left an interview with the Anglican Primate in Winnipeg under the impression that, as far as the Anglican 79
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Church of Canada was concerned, this undoubtedly was the case, though it had not been for the want of asking by United Church authorities. Thirdly, it would seem that Canadian custom is to proceed by rather different methods in influencing governments. I recall two interviews in Edmonton, one with the Baptist Premier, Mr. Manning, and the other with a United Churchman, Mr. George Prudham, who had been a Liberal Cabinet Minister in the St. Laurent national government at Ottawa until his retirement shortly before the 1957 elections. Both gentlemen assured me that, in their experience, deputations to Cabinet Ministers from Church bodies were highly exceptional. Yet a well-informed United Church layman, Professor George Brown of the University of Toronto, insisted that steps were taken to see that the point of view of members of an organised religious community such as the United Church was known to responsible Cabinet Ministers and others. The procedure would seem to be less to dictate than to inform and, no doubt where necessary, to seek to persuade. The same point was made at a small luncheon group of Anglican clerics and teachers which the Provost of Trinity College in the University of Toronto was good enough to arrange for me. I gathered that the Rev. Leonard Hatfield, secretary of the Council for Social Service of the Anglican Church of Canada, maintained close contact with Ottawa—a possible reason why he was not available when I tried to see him towards the end of my stay in Toronto. From this point emerges another relevant consideration—the potential responsiveness of English-speaking Cabinet Ministers by reason of their own personal prominence in different religious denominations, mostly non-conformist. It is not only that provincial Premiers such as Mr. Manning in Alberta and Mr. Douglas in Saskatchewan have been, and even continue to be, active in the work of their respective churches; both Prime Minister and Opposition Leader at Ottawa are also practising Christians who maintain close contact with fellow members of their own denominations. To their names could readily be added those of other influential members of all political parties in the national and provincial legislatures. The only comparable analogy I can make from personal experience is with the direct personal contact between Dutch Reformed Church Predikants and Afrikaner politicians in the Union of South Africa.
80
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2 From this very real relationship between Canadian churchman and Canadian politician springs the central and more general point I wish to make in this chapter, the seriousness with which a great many Protestants in Canada, as individual citizens, take their membership of particular religious communities. Christianity in English-speaking Canada may not be very effectively organised in political pressure groups; I would nevertheless venture the opinion that the English-speaking Canadian of the rank and file is a great deal more responsive to arguments on spiritual and idealist grounds than his contemporaries in most countries of the western world where material civilisation is reasonably comparable with that of Canada today. This is a qualitative judgment difficult to prove or, for that matter, to disprove. It springs from more than such quantitative evidence as is offered one of the increase in postwar Protestant church membership—an increase said to be higher than the increase in total population. It was certainly not suggested in the early days of the investigation by the views of my mentors in the at times brash and pseudo-sophisticated, but' very pleasant, environment of Vancouver. I can only express it as a totally unexpected conclusion which was gradually borne in upon me as I moved from the Prairies into Ontario and, later, into the Maritimes. I suggest that any politico-social observer who places emphasis on material progress in mid-century Canada to the exclusion of this persistence of a certain genuinely idealist or spiritual outlook is likely to miss something which has a significant bearing on some of those aspects of Canadian foreign policy to which reference will be made in chapter ix. This outlook may be in part an offshoot of the seriousness of Canadians which impresses so many Americans (see chapter vm), and it certainly is very different from the mateship and decency or sense of fair play which produces some degree of tolerance among Australians in their attitudes to one another arid to other peoples. Whatever its origin and essential nature, I suggest that it gave something to Lester Pearson and the late Sidney Smith when they took the stand in the name of Canada on behalf of the principles of the United Nations Charter or in support of an international police force or even of the Colombo Plan—something which I am quite sure an Australian Minister for External Affairs has never been able to feel he had behind him in anything like the same degree. 81
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A cynic may possibly object that Canadian politicians and Canadian citizens have derived a certain self-satisfaction and some self-glorification from the prominence of Canada on postwar international platforms. It may also be true that Canadian motives are as mixed as those of most nations when such things as missionary and mercantile considerations become confused in national policies. But enlightened self-interest and idealist conviction are not mutually inconsistent. My feeling is strong that a great many Canadians are convinced that Canada is a "have" instead of a "have-not" nation, that it is a sated power with no dominating motives of economic or territorial aggrandisement shaping its foreign policies. On this view—and I heard it expressed with evident sincerity on many different occasions, in quite different circles—Canada is able and has the duty to consider how its vote is cast in the interests of less fortunate peoples. I believe it was because a great many Canadians considered that Mr. Pearson was giving practical expression to such views that they supported his international activities—and sometimes went out of their way to let him know this by church resolutions and other means. I have Mr. Pearson's assurance that he was conscious of having such a body of idealist Canadian support behind him regardless of party political affiliations. I very much doubt whether any Australian postwar Minister for External Affairs could make a similar declaration with complete conviction, except perhaps in the hopeful days immediately after the cessation of hostilities. The reader may well be reluctant to accept the qualitative judgment of the last few paragraphs from a single investigator. I nevertheless urge him to keep it at the back of his mind when he reads more detailed factual analyses of the Dominion's record in postwar international organisation such as are given in Professor F. H. Soward's 1950 volume for the Canadian Institute of International Affairs—Canada in World Affairs, IV: 1944-46— and his later (1956) analysis with Edgar Mclnnis, Canada and the United Nations. The dangers inherent in an excessively idealist approach to, or rationalisation of, national policies in North America are real— whether one is concerned with United States foreign policy before and since 1945 or with some aspects of contemporary Canadian attitudes. These dangers may be left for later consideration in chapter ix; suffice it for the moment to emphasize the presence of a powerful idealist and spiritual conviction among many Canadians as a significant general, predisposing, 82
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underlying influence affecting the general foreign policy of Canada today. 3
The bearing of religious conviction and religious organisation on the specific question of Canadian-American relations is a good deal more difficult to assess. All the churches, including the Roman Catholic, have their links with corresponding religious denominations in the United States, but the movement of men and the interplay of ideas seem to vary considerably from province to province and from denomination to denomination. I was told, for example, that there was, or that there had been, a great deal of contact between the smaller sects north and south of the border in the Prairie Provinces. The United Church also maintains its American associations in matters of common interest, but in its peculiar form it is essentially a Canadian creation. Strangely enough, the movement of men and of ideas appears to be greatest in the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches—outside Quebec. The more remote historic links between Episcopalians in the United States and the Church of England in the United Kingdom may help to explain the fact that the Anglican Church of Canada provides a certain recruiting ground for at least some of the more wealthy Episcopalian parishes south of the border. This was undoubtedly so during the years of the economic depression of the early thirties. I was told that some contact is also maintained between the bishops in the two countries. It may even be that sacerdotal ties are reinforced by an alleged similarity in conservative outlook of many Anglican parishioners in Canada and Episcopalians in the United States. This, however, is an argument of doubtful validity because of the element of nationalism within the Anglican Church of Canada to which reference is made in the section which follows. It was with considerable surprise that I learnt of the extent of American influence within the Roman Catholic Church in Canada, outside Quebec. Like too many foreigners I had been ready to treat the terms "Roman Catholic Canadians" and "French-speaking Canadians" as substantially synonymous, whereas in fact approximately one-third of Canada's 43.3 per cent Roman Catholic minority is resident outside the province of Quebec. Some of this third are French-speaking, as in Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario and New Brunswick; others again brought their Roman Catholic religion with them from Italy or Poland or have 83
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accepted it in place of the Orthodox Christianity which they knew in the Ukraine. There is, however, a substantial IrishCanadian element which helps to explain the growing influence of an English-speaking priesthood, many of whose members have been trained in American Roman Catholic seminaries. With the consolidation and growing strength of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States and the increasingly proselytising character of its work, inside and outside the Union, it is not surprising that a visitor should meet evidence of this influence of the Irish-American priesthood, particularly in Canadian regions close to the border, as in southern Ontario. In terms of general international outlook and of Canadian-American relations particularly, this influence may doubtless be regarded as one tending to make for a closer similarity in viewpoint between English-speaking Roman Catholics in the two neighbouring countries. In this respect a Canadian Roman Catholic institution like Assumption University in Windsor must inevitably have some such synthesizing effect since a number of its students come from across the river; some at least of its teaching staff with whom I talked expressed views wrhich I would have labelled IrishAmerican rather than distinctively Canadian. A visitor should not of course believe all the stories he hears of conflict between the French-Canadian hierarchy in Quebec and their English-speaking and allegedly American-influenced co-religionists elsewhere in the Dominion; but I saw and heard enough at first hand not to dismiss such reports as being entirely without foundation. I liked particularly the story told me by a senior member of the clergy in Quebec of his irritation at the attitude of an American-trained priest who was one of two table companions between whom he sat at an official luncheon in southern Ontario (the other was a distinguished Protestant layman). The Frenchspeaking cleric's annoyance began when the local priest indicated in response to a question from his visiting colleague that no provision was being made for Italian and Polish immigrants in his congregation to be ministered to by clergy who spoke their native language. Insult was added to injury when the parish priest proceeded to justify his indifference to the linguistic needs of his non-English-speaking minority by asking: "What do you think would happen in Chicago if every Italian-speaking immigrant demanded educational and religious instruction in his native tongue?" But the real point of the story, to the teller of it, was the immediate response of the Protestant layman who leant across 84
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the table towards the parish priest and remarked, "Come off it, Padre, you're in Canada now!" I could also sympathize with the irritation caused in FrenchCanadian Roman Catholic circles by a specimen of Catholic propaganda emanating from the United States and used in Toronto. In explanation of the Papal See's encyclicals on communism and socialism the aim of the pamphlet was to make clear that these implied no attack upon other governmental systems which did not conflict with the fundamental tenets of the Church. In particular, the Papal command implied no lessening of a reader's continued loyalty to the lay authorities of a republic —and this in a document designed for new citizens of Canada under the House of Windsor!
4 The peculiar if changing bearing of the Roman Catholic Church in Quebec on national-provincial relations is the subject of special consideration in chapter VIL Some reference may here be made to the character of the contribution made by the several Protestant churches of Canada to the growth of that sense of Canadian nationalism which is the subject matter proper of the next chapter. The obvious example of a Canadian, nation-making influence by a single denomination is provided by the United Church of Canada. Though the failure of the union of 1925 to bring in many of the Presbyterians, who still retain their separate organisation, is an obvious limitation of the United Church's effectiveness as a national unit, I was impressed by the argument of the Rev. E. J. Thompson of St. Stephen's (United Church) College in the University of Alberta that, especially in a Prairie province which in its pioneering days had been a congeries of peoples, his denomination could in fact prove a uniting church as well as a United Church at the provincial level. From the national viewpoint the Church helps to break down provincial barriers through such nation-wide organisational activities as the General Council meeting every two years, the deliberate efforts to bring about exchanges of ideas at the formative level by joint meetings of the four university United Church colleges in the West, which now take place at Banff, and by co-ordinated activity in the home mission field, in frontier regions in the North. This unifying influence has come the more readily to the United Church because, as Anglicans pointed out to me, that 85
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Church took over the highly centralised machinery of the Methodist Church. This organisational facility contrasts sharply with the evident difficulties of the Anglican Church of Canada, which is strongest in Toronto and neighbouring dioceses but has lost some of the strength it had in northern Saskatchewan and in outlying districts of Manitoba, where old-established farming families have been selling out to New Canadians from Europe. I got the feeling, moreover, from discussions with Anglican clergy and laymen that not only did the character and organisation of the Anglican Church of Canada make it less suited than the United Church for the presentation of an impressive solidarity on social and political subjects—I heard an amusing account of the fate of a motion, introduced at a 1956 Anglican Synod, commending Lester Pearson's policy on Suez—but that such solidarity was also felt by some to endanger the standing of members of the Anglican Church with their fellow Canadians. The prevailing popular impression that Anglicans are both non-Canadian and Conservative has already been hinted at in the Introduction. One bishop went so far as to imply that he discouraged laymen from raising politico-social questions at Anglican Church gatherings because of the ease with which the utterances of certain parishioners of known Tory convictions might be misinterpreted outside and so lessen the continued effectiveness of the social as well as the spiritual work of his Church in that community. It is nevertheless important to stress that the Anglican Church of Canada, notwithstanding its sacerdotal and doctrinal associations with the Church of England in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the world and the close personal links which many of its members feel with "the Old Country", is now a Canadian church. Its national name and administrative practice mark it off sharply from the Anglican Church in both South Africa and Australia. I met nothing in my contacts with lay and clerical members of the Church in Canada to compare with the persistent nostalgia I had felt so often displayed when I heard Anglican clergy talking in Cape Town—that ultramarine characteristic of the Anglican Church in South Africa (if the modified epithet is permissible) so often seized upon by Dutch Reformed Church Afrikaners to deny true South African loyalty to their Englishspeaking compatriots. The contrast with the Church of England in Australia is also substantial. Canadian Anglicans were genuinely surprised when I told them that there had as yet been only one native-born Australian Anglican archbishop. While some bishops of the Anglican Church of Canada-were born in the United 86
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Kingdom they are now the exceptions rather than the rule. As to recruitment of clergy there is nothing comparable with the deliberate search of South African and Australian bishops for English clergy willing to accept parishes overseas which has continued throughout the twentieth century. Where such English appointments have been made to Canadian parishes in postwar years the appointment has been the sequel to migration, not the cause of it. And this despite a serious shortage of clergy for outlying Anglican parishes, accentuated, I was told, by the natural attractions of metropolitan livings with greater amenities and by the occasional poachings of predatory bishops. As a non-Anglican I may perhaps add the impression that wise leadership appeared in fact to be enabling the Anglican Church of Canada to make a substantial contribution to that reconciliation of a growing sense of Canadian national responsibility with the spiritual and other experiences originally gained from and continually maintained with those of like minds and hearts overseas and, to a lesser degree, elsewhere in North America. I had the feeling—possibly unjustified—that the more centralised and ostensibly more democratic machinery of the United Church did not always make its leaders as readily responsive to some of the finer requirements of national character. The rigidity of the policy applied in the name of the United Church on the liquor question invites attention to one aspect of Canadian life in many provinces which I find difficult to regard as either enlightened or civilised since it is calculated to confuse consumption of alcohol (surreptitiously, I often found, in hotel bedrooms, even by gatherings of learned societies) with prostitution and other lucrative forms of organised vice. The manner in which the General Council of the United Church arrived at its decision in the Crowe case, which was to become notorious as I moved across Canada, was also, in my view, inconsistent with an outsider's faith in the effectiveness of the Church's administrative procedures. As a visiting Fellow on many Canadian campuses, from Manitoba to New Brunswick, I was continually subjected to a running fire of comment on the sequel to the dismissal of Associate Professor Harry Crowe from his post in history at United College in the University of Manitoba, after his private and personal letter to a colleague had been photostated by the principal of the College before it reached the person to whom it had been addressed. I have no intention of commenting on the rights and wrongs of this controversy or of the highly critical 78-page report of the Committee appointed by the Canadian 87
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Association of University Teachers. Since I had no opportunity of hearing at first hand—except in the press and over the air— the case for the principal and the trustees of the College in Winnipeg, I left Canada, in December 1958, hoping that the reinstatement of Professor Crowe, announced earlier in that month, had made possible an honourable and ultimately happy end to a regrettable academic cause célèbre. It would seem that subsequent developments did not justify this hope. What is relevant to the present discussion is the fact that the General Council of the United Church at Ottawa in September 1958 should have seen fit to confirm the action of the College principal and trustees after its committee had heard two of the latter but had given no opportunity to Professor Crowe, or to those of his colleagues on the Faculty who had publicly condemned the principal's action, for presentation of the case against the trustees. In the course of many informal comments which I heard on the Crowe case, from Canadian university administrators as well as professors and lecturers and from laymen outside the academic profession, I cannot recall a single justification for the General Council's action. The fact that this hasty decision should have been taken by the Council suggests that there is some ground for a different line of critical comment, which was not confined to the United Church, put to me regarding organised religion in Canada. I was warned not to ignore the fact that the expression of Church viewpoints was confined very largely to older members of the Church. I was urged to give due weight to the increasing recruitment of younger men into all Canadian churches, both as clergy and as worshippers. It was predicted that, when the influence of this postwar recruitment was fully felt at the policy-making level, the result would be to strengthen the responsiveness of Canadians to idealist and spiritual factors influencing foreign policy which I had myself detected in so many places and which has been made the central theme of this chapter. It is also fair to add, with respect to the United Church's attitude in the Crowe case, that, after I had left Canada, the sub-executive of the General Council did eventually issue a statement, which, while reiterating "confidence in Dr. Lockhart as a man of integrity", expressed the opinion that "Professor Crowe was justified in protesting the use to his detriment of his private letter", declared that the United Church had always "stood for academic freedom" and placed responsibility for what had happened at United College with its autonomous Board of Regents over which the Church had "only limited control". 88
VII
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As a fairly close student of Canadian writings and speeches on international and intra-Commonwealth affairs between the two world wars and as a flying visitor to Canada in 1940 and 1950, I had for years been inviting Australian undergraduates to contrast the reluctance of their governments in Canberra—especially before the second world war—to develop distinctively Australian policies, which would show proper regard for geographic situation and resultant strategic requirements, with the aggressive nationalism of Canada during the interwar years and since. With this background of personal interpretation, I was somewhat bewildered, and a good deal embarrassed, to discover in the closing months of 1958 just how elusive this Canadian nationalism could be. There were times when I was tempted to exclaim, "There ain't no such animal!" Of negative manifestations, Fd seen evidence in plenty on paper, and some of it still survived for a visitor to hear and feel. Since the twenties and thirties Canadians had been determined that they were not going to be "dominated by Downing Street", though the phrase had lost much of its fire by the late fifties. In postwar years the emphasis had been more on not being "pushed around by Washington" and even this has come to sound rather like a cliché to some of those who go on using it. The positive characteristics of this presumably existent Canadian nationalism, however, are less easily identified and defined than, for example, Afrikaner nationalism or, for that matter, even Australian nationalism. Each of the latter, though differing widely from one another, can nowadays be said to reach right across the South African Union or Australian Commonwealth. In the North American Dominion, by contrast, regional89
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ism is still a living force—a force which seems to deny the possible existence of Canadian nationalism as a positive reality.
1 It was probably a good thing that my investigation began in Vancouver, for the regionalism of British Columbia in both geographic and racial terms poses the problem of Canadian nationalism very directly. Even to an Australian who has lived more than a quarter of a century of his adult life in the western State of the Australian Commonwealth, which emphasized its geographic remoteness from the federal Commonwealth to the extent of carrying a secession referendum during the economic depression of the early thirties, it was a shock to discover the extent to which the Rockies remain a mental as well as a physical barrier to continuing contact between Canadians on the Coast and those in and east of the Prairie Provinces. The sense of separateness persists despite the impressive industrial and other developments which command a visitor's attention in British Columbia. The only comparison I could make with the impression left by my weeks in Vancouver in September-October 1958 was with the mixture of self-confidence and of inferiority complex which I had found so marked in California in the days before its rapid wartime and postwar industrial development. Nor was it merely that the southward pull and the links between Vancouver, Seattle and San Francisco, to which reference has been made in chapter n, were weakening the historic and racial bonds as well as the economic ties between the Coast and industrial and financial centres of Canada in Toronto and Montreal. My preconceived, bookish concept of Canada as a community of communities, as one part of the British Commonwealth where accident and conviction were together contriving to bring French-speaking and English-speaking Canadians into some acceptance of tolerance and mutual respect and even, on occasion, of overriding national loyalties—this concept received little support in British Columbia. In my personal talks with a reasonably wide cross-section on the Coast I scarcely ever heard mention of French-speaking Canadians or of their significance, in Quebec or elsewhere in Canada. During the spate of speeches at the Golden Jubilee dinner of the University of British Columbia only one of the post-prandial orations on the ties, academic and otherwise, between the province and the nation made even passing reference to the French Canadians. 90
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My three weeks in the Prairies did little to correct this sense of the strength of regional forces which had been a dominant impression on the Coast. The potential importance of the contributions of non-British racial elements did, indeed, emerge both in Alberta and in Manitoba. But the climatic conditions of late autumn and an early approach of winter combined with the size and the similarity of a predominantly agricultural economy to create a sense of sameness, sometimes of drabness and even of detachment from the main streams of Canadian life and thought. Such strong regional impressions were reinforced, while I was still no further east than Winnipeg, by depressing accounts of the deterioration of life in the Maritime Provinces and by the deep regret of Maritimers that circumstances had forced them and their latest Atlantic recruit, Newfoundland, into the much distrusted Confederation. These accounts came chiefly from Nova Scotians or residents of neighbouring provinces who had left their beloved birthplaces for their own financial advantage. Though often successful, they showed no signs of returning to contribute to the rehabilitation of the Maritimes, but they continued to talk emotionally and nostalgically of the persistent disabilities and sufferings which their native provinces had incurred for the advantage of other parts of the Confederation, especially Ontario. From too easy an acceptance of other reports of the alleged aloofness, selfishness and superiority of Montreal and Toronto and of the mutual recrimination of these two prosperous cities I was reasonably well protected by my Australian background. As a young man in Melbourne, I had grown to take the brashness and wickedness of Sydney more or less for granted; as a West Australian by adoption, I had later learnt how it was sometimes possible to play off the rivalries of great eastern cities to western advantage. I had even watched Western Australians develop a reluctant respect for the national services rendered by eastern wealth, through federal channels, to relieve disabilities of outlying regions. Indeed, while still in those Prairie Provinces which had, on the whole, confirmed the impressions of regional strength formed on the Coast, I had begun to feel that the regional argument was overworked. I had at least felt something of the unifying forces operating, as it were, below the surface, within this prevailing regionalism. One such force—perhaps the most powerful—has already been discussed in another connection in chapter v. The carefully planned coast-to-coast programmes of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation do as much to break down regional influences as 91
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they serve to strengthen Canadian culture against American influences. The technical cost of such national television and radio facilities is high but it is part of the price Canadians pay for harnessing technological advances to national ends. Air transport is another example of a modern unifying force. It was not clear whether the attempt of private airlines to break through the monopoly of the Trans-Canada Air Lines (T.C.A.) would be endorsed by the Air Transport Board which was taking evidence in different parts of Canada at the same time as the investigation on which this little book is based was being conducted. The fact that the attempt should have been made, and supported as strongly as it was opposed, is some measure of the increased demand for air services which have been breaking down the huge distances that divide the different Canadian provinces from one another. Some of the unifying influences are by-products of other developments. Among these may be placed the effect on men from different provinces who fought side by side in the last world war or in Korea. National Defence training is also spread over different parts of the Dominion so that men born and bred in one province may for the first time experience life in two or three other regions before they are released. No less strong may be the effect of religious denominations with the central organisation of a United Church or of a powerful trade union with nation-wide administration or affiliations, like that of the exclusively Canadian Brotherhood of Transport Workers, on the one hand, or those of "international" unions on the other. By and large, the most powerful challenges to the persistence or intensification of narrow provincial loyalties are those which spring from one or other of the major economic changes incidental to the Canadian industrial revolution. This is most strikingly illustrated by recent trends in the province of Quebec and in the Maritimes, to which the next two sections of this chapter will in turn be devoted. It is well to insist at the beginning, however, that the economic is not the only factor operating to give sense and direction to the positive Canadian bilingual and bicultural nationalism which, I submit, may be felt pushing its way through the historic crust of regionalism in many parts of Canada.
2 For the half-century since André Siegfried's penetrating analysis of Le Canada: Les Deux Races, a revolution has taken 92
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place not only in the internal economy of Quebec but also in the efforts of different groups of the Roman Catholic intelligentsia to achieve two things at once: to bring French-Canadian lay conduct under the influence of advanced Roman Catholic thinking in Rome and, at the same time, to adapt accepted canons of Catholic teaching to the hard realities of actual economic and social change in Quebec. Elsewhere in Canada there has been a correspondingly significant, if correspondingly limited, response from English-speaking Canadians, at least eastward from Winnipeg. In Siegfried's day, the province of Quebec could rightly remind an overseas French student less of political thought and socio-economic practice in contemporary France than of that with which historical study had made him intellectually familiar in French society of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Life in the predominantly rural society of early twentiethcentury Quebec was closely knit; the economic, the social and the spiritual threads were very much interwoven around the person of the local parish priest. The nearest equivalent to the latter's role in any other part of the then British Empire overseas, was the Predikant of a back-veldt district in the Orange Free State or the Transvaal—except for the much more extensive character of South African land holding. In such circumstances it is not surprising that apologists for the British Empire saw in the self-governing Canadian Dominion no longer two nations "warring in the bosom of a single state" but still two racial and separate areas, living together in a form of ideological, peaceful co-existence in which each tolerated but on the whole disliked and as far as possible ignored the other's way of life. This conception of Quebec's role in the Canada of half a century ago was scarcely consistent with the concept of a developing Canadian nationalism as a positive force in North America. The situation as I found it in the province towards the end of 1958 is greatly changed from that outlined above, but it would be a serious mistake to suggest that the narrow provincial nationalism that was Quebec half a century ago has entirely disappeared. I would prefer to suggest three different lines of approach to an appreciation of contemporary Quebec. There is first a certain survival of the old traditional rural Quebec in which the influence of the parish priest outside the cities remains strong and perhaps not greatly altered in its direction. In the province as a whole, control of this older French-Canadian nationalism is, for the time being, exploited, in the name of 93
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French-Canadian provincial autonomy, by the Union Nationale. The able and aggressive leader of the Union Nationale, Premier Duplessis, is fully aware of the economic changes which the industrial revolution has brought to the province, but he has managed so far to turn them sufficiently to his administrative and electoral advantage with the aid, among other things, of heavily weighted rural constituencies.* The second line of approach invites attention to a conflict or series of conflicts which are taking place within the Frenchspeaking and Catholic intelligentsia. On the one hand, there is a group of historians centred at the French-speaking University of Montreal. It is small perhaps, but highly self-conscious and eager to establish itself as a "school" with a following, and seeks to perpetuate the conception of French Canada as something which stopped developing with "the Conquest" by the British in 1763. On the other side are to be found responsible Church leaders who, while respecting the racial and linguistic loyalties of the French Canadian, see his spiritual development as involving only one adaptation of the current teachings of the Roman Catholic Church as an international body with \vorld-wide (and Canadawide) responsibilities in the second half of the twentieth century. Closely connected with this second group, but more immediately concerned with economic and social realities in Quebec than with overriding spiritual principles, are those whose influence is best represented by the Faculty of Social Sciences at Laval University in Quebec, just as the first of the three groups is headed by the historians at the University of Montreal and the second is personified in the Recteurs of the two French-speaking universities, Laval and Montreal, and by some members of the hierarchy, from Cardinal Leger down\vards. The third line of approach emerges naturally from an examination of one section of the work of the Laval social scientists, that which is centred in the Department of Industrial Relations. This leads the investigator to a consideration of the views of organised workers in the now 70 per cent urban province of Quebec. In particular, it directs attention to the significant changes taking place in the Canadian and Catholic Confederation of Labour (C.C.C.L.), including its relationship with the pre* The text of this chapter, which was in the publisher's hands when M. Duplessis died in September 1959, remains unaltered either in substance or in form, since the chapter is primarily a record of impressions formed on the spot in 1958. Its argument would, however, seem to have been strengthened by the appointment to succeed M. Duplessis, as party leader and provincial premier, of M. Jean-Paul Sauve, son of a federal Cabinet Minister under the late R. B. Bennett who himself rose from Lieutenant to Brigadier during service in the Canadian Army in the second world war.
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dominantly, but by no means exclusively, English-speaking C.L.C. The strength of the resistance to bilingual, bicultural, Canadian nationalism which comes from Premier Duplessis and the Union Nationale is threefold. It has continuing constitutional significance and it has both economic strength and great politicoadministrative power behind it. Yet each of these sources of immediate strength may prove to be highly vulnerable in time. The constitutional strength of M. Duplessis' position is strikingly illustrated by two recent developments. The first is his successful refusal to allow the institutions of higher education in Quebec to accept the substantial financial assistance which the federal government is offering over a ten-year period through the Canada Council. The second is the swing of Quebec to the Conservatives in the federal elections of March 1958, allegedly on the influence of the Union Nationale. On the former academic issue, the Premier's stand in the name of provincial rights may in the long run prove suicidal, but it makes a certain immediate appeal outside as well as inside the province—however much it may embarrass university administrators. The second illustration is perhaps more significant. The swing of Quebec federal electorates away from their traditional Liberal affiliations was a warning which no Ottawa political authorities present or future can entirely ignore, for Quebec has held the balance in federal politics more than once. The economic strength of Premier Duplessis' position is closely linked with his internal political and administrative control of the province. Aided by the over-representation of rural constituencies, the Union Nationale in Quebec, like the Afrikaner Nationalist Party in the Union of South Africa, has a strength in the Legislature much greater than its numerical following, at least in urban areas. Holding 73 out of 93 seats in the present Legislative Assembly, moreover, the Premier conducted himself with an authoritarian disregard for the privileges of a parliamentary Opposition which has done more than provoke protests on grounds of civil and political liberty. It has also led to charges which I heard repeated, both openly and privately, that governmental patronage is now the order of the day in Quebec and that few economic concerns can get far without the Premier's blessing —given at a price. The immediate advantages of this alleged Duplessis politicoadministrative dictatorship are, I found, subject to two main lines of attack. Both come significantly enough from French-Canadian 95
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sources. The most impressively publicised is that from the pages of Le Devoir, the Montreal daily paper of which the director is M. Gérard Filion and the editor-in-chief M. André Laurendeau. These two gentlemen have been conducting a vigorous and relentless campaign against what they present as the scandals of the Duplessis administration of their province and the Premier's denial of elementary rights of freedom of parliamentary and press criticism to his opponents. When I was in Montreal and Quebec I heard considerable private discussion of one particular form of Le Devoir's argument which was directed not only against the Premier but also against powerful English-speaking interests in the province for allegedly tolerating M. Duplessis because of the profits they indirectly make from his patronage. The argument was presented in the form of "La Théorie du roi nègre", a provocative title which M. Laurendeau had given to an article published on July 4, 1958, and which recurred in subsequent references in Le Devoir to "Un Silence héroïque" (November 5) and a third discussion under the original title, on November 18. Contrasting the vigour with which English newspapers in Montreal such as the Star and the Gazette attacked alleged financial improprieties of a federal government in Ottawa or a provincial administration in Victoria, B.C., Le Devoir claimed that, when the Duplessis Government was under question, whether for alleged financial impropriety or for interference with political and press freedoms, the English newspaper proprietors of Montreal looked the other way. The inference was that they had too many other financial interests in the province for the success of which the continued goodwill of the Premier was essential. Using by analogy an interpretation of British colonial administration in "colonies of exploitation" wrhich would more readily be accepted in Cairo than in Whitehall, M. Laurendeau argued that the English press proprietors of Montreal were behaving as though they believed "Chief" Duplessis might be free to misconduct himself with his "native subjects" in Quebec as long as he did nothing to interfere with the freedom of the English to go on making their fortunes: II faut obtenir du roi nègre qu'il collabore et protège les intérêts des Britanniques. Cette collaboration assurée, le reste importe moins. Le roitelet viole les règles de la démocratie? On ne saurait attendre mieux d'un primitif. . . . Je ne prête pas ces sentiments à la minorité anglaise du Québec. Mais les choses se passent comme si quelques-uns de ses chefs 96
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croyaient à la théorie et à la pratique du roi nègre. Ils pardonnent à M. Duplessis, chef des naturels du pays québécois, ce qu'ils ne toléreraient de l'un des leurs. The comments I heard in Montreal and Quebec on this "roinègre" argument varied considerably, from those who regarded it as "sheer rubbish" to those who merely regretted that Premier Duplessis' non-French collaborators had not been broadened to include American financial interests who had "bought" economic privileges in the province. The other line of French-Canadian resistance to M. Duplessis is economic rather than political and comes from the Canadian and Catholic Confederation of Labour. The C.C.C.L., which was once disposed to regard M. Duplessis as the champion of French-Canadian working class interests together with those of provincial "nationalism", have, since his use of police as strikebreakers in the asbestos strike of 1949, come to treat the Premier as a declared opponent. And the C.C.C.L., as will later be demonstrated, is now an increasingly influential and increasingly class-conscious organisation, decreasingly French-Canadian and provincial in its outlook. Turning now to the several groups of French-Canadian intellectuals of Montreal and Quebec, the only comparison I can make with the role of the historians, including M. Michel Brunei, whom I met at the University of Montreal is drawn from Geneva in the early thirties when the old League of Nations still attracted to the Swiss centre some of the best brains and finest spirits from all countries in the world. After some weeks of temporary service on the League Secretariat and, later, as a member of the Australian delegation to a League Assembly, I had been tremendously impressed by the freshness and vigour of the intellectual life encountered in hotels and restaurants, at diplomatic or press gatherings or in the corridors of the Palais des Nations—when one day, through a local Swiss resident, I met a member of the Genevese intelligentsia. Shut off and completely aloof from the international millstream below, this gentleman and his friends maintained in their ivory towers a contempt for the intellectual ferment and madness of the political market place that was Geneva. So, too, was I impressed by this group of historians at the University of Montreal whose Canadian history ends at 1763, who distinguish sharply and fatalistically between Canadien and Canadian and who refuse to admit that the two can ever fuse in any degree despite the (to them) deplorable 97
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changes which economic depression followed by war brought to the traditional, the real, French-Canadian society which had survived from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Incidentally, this Michel Brunet concentration on the "Conquest" and its precursors reminded me of equally pathetic if not tragic preoccupations of some Afrikaner historians at Stellenbosch with the most minute details regarding the Voortrekkers and the stillcontinuing battles of the Boer War. It is easy to predict that this abstract, defeatist, intellectualised concept of French-Canadian nationalism has no future. It unfortunately has a present. Though I found critics of Brunet and his friends even in their own university and no sympathy whatever for them at Laval, they lend a certain intellectual substance to the strange combination of genuine spiritual other-worldliness of rural curés and the more coldly calculated political materialism of the Duplessis machine. To many French-speaking Canadians who are not products of the classical secondary schools or universities there must be a certain persuasiveness in a simplified version of the argument which Michel Brunet presented to an English-speaking audience under the auspices of the Gray Lectureship in the University of Toronto, around the time of my visit there. He chose the challenging title "Canadians and Canadiens: Why Are They Not Alike?" When the Canadians look at the Americans they remind them that there are two English-speaking nations in North America. They are right. When they look at the Canadiens they pretend that there is only one nation in Canada. They are wrong. There are two nations in this country—or at least one and a half: the British American nation which is now called the Canadian nation and the nation canadienne that has been [sic] obliged to add the word française when the British Americans named their country Canada. The first nation forms a true Nation-State under the leadership of the Ottawa government. The second one is a weak minority group submitted to the economic and political pressure of the Anglo-Canadian majority. It has not been completely overwhelmed and assimilated because it has remained the majority of the population in Quebec. These two nations co-exist within a Federal State. . . . Elsewhere Professor Brunet had written even more frankly of the choice which lay before the young men of Quebec: 98
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Youth must choose: Become solely Canadian and resign itself to the disappearance, gradual or brutal, of the minority to which it is heir, for the profit of the majority in order to create a British and monarchic nation-state, a man usque ad mare\ or remain French Canadian by basing itself on a Quebec capable of organising and maintaining the French-Canadian nationality. . . . One reason why this persuasively reactionary apologia for a narrow, nostalgic, French-Canadian nationalism limited to Quebec does not appeal to the Church leaders of M. Brunet's own University of Montreal, and still less to the more closely Churchcontrolled Laval, is that the universities' executive chiefs know that acceptance of the Brunet political philosophy would turn Montreal into a state university controlled by the nominees of Premier Duplessis and would greatly threaten the existing autonomy of Laval. Even as things are, a visiting investigator may read between the lines of his correct and courteous reception by a Recteur or his colleagues. I think it no exaggeration to say that a running fight is already being waged between the ecclesiastical executives of Montreal and Laval and the Duplessis machine. On the whole, victory appears to rest with the spokesmen for the Church rather than with the provincial potentate whose authority could be greatly increased were the Brunet thesis widely accepted. Even so, there have been some trials of strength and a Recteur has had to know on occasion how to reculer pour mieux sauter. But clerical leadership in Quebec is not merely concerned with the strategy or the tactics of this new version of the old struggle of Church versus State in the peculiar provincial setting of Quebec. Not all Church leaders in French Canada are French Canadians by birth; those that are have had long periods of training and administrative experience in Rome and elsewhere. They are thus able to see the broader responsibilities as well as the local difficulties and the wider opportunities of the Roman Catholic Church. Though their immediate day-to-day concern is with the spiritual welfare of French-speaking Canadians in Quebec, they are not unmindful of the political implications arising from the presence of some two million Canadian Roman Catholics outside the province. And, Canadian politics apart, the spiritual responsibilities of the Quebec hierarchy, unlike the pastoral preoccupations of the local curé, must be to keep the Church in the province, for that matter the Church in Canada, fully in line with the Church of Rome. So the Cardinal himself, 99
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in a Quebec sermon on no less significant an occasion than the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary celebrations, chose to speak of patriotism as something of real value in the eyes of the Church only if it led further, for an international perspective was necessary to give nationalism a healthy character. I have already remarked on the fact that, between the hierarchy's anxiety to keep French-Canadian Catholics in line with the spiritual requirements of the Church as an international body and the material concern of Catholic trade-union executives with protecting French-Canadian workers, vigorous efforts are being made to build an intellectual bridge through the activities of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Laval. The immediate agency is the Laval Department of Industrial Relations, of which the director and leading spirit is the Abbé Gérard Dion. Between the stimulating talks I had with the Abbé (supplemented by careful reading of articles in the Laval quarterly Relations industrielles and other material with which he generously "documented" me) and the frank exposé of current trends in the policy of the C.C.C.L. which I owe to its Secretary General, M. Jean Marchand, I felt there was indeed a mutual awareness of a common problem though each man aproached it by a different route. For M. Marchand, as a French-Canadian trade-union leader, the problem is to shape union policy vis-à-vis both employers and other workers, inside and outside the province of Quebec, in the way most likely to protect the interests, present and future, of the French-Canadian employees in the economic circumstances of the second half of the twentieth century. To the Abbé, as priest and social scientist, the question is how this can be done so that the material progress of the Roman Catholic workers does not take place at the expense of their spiritual loyalties, or, to put the same point from a different angle, how the Church, by applying its spiritual principles, its wisdom and its international experience in realistic recognition of changed and still changing economic and social conditions, can help the trade unionists to advance their material interest without lessening the essential ties between them and the Church and so prejudicing their spiritual welfare. That industrial developments have already brought about some change and some weakening of these links between unionist and priesthood cannot be questioned. As with the eighteenth-century peasant in France, whose attachment to his Church was as much a matter of habit and social custom under the old régime as of intellectual conviction, so the Quebec habitant who moved to the cities away from his traditional economic and social environ100
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ment tended to feel himself to some extent removed from his religion. The Church, being unable to provide him with the same personal contact with his curé in urban parishes of some 10,000 persons, sought not only to prevent Quebec unions from falling under the control of American "international" unions but also to maintain its contact with the worker. It did this through the specially organised C.C.C.L., the constitution of which was closely tied to the social doctrines of the Church and in which the priest as "chaplain" occupied a place of considerable significance, acting to some extent as intermediary between employer and employee. In the building trades in particular, where the Church had a special interest because of its own considerable building programme and of the conditions it could therefore exact from contractors, the C.C.C.L. organisation worked very well during the twenties and thirties. The decentralized character of industrial development in the province also assisted the C.C.C.L. in its original form. The second world war brought a number of significant changes with the Canada-wide nature of the federal government's greatly accentuated industrial programme and a levelling-up of Quebec wages to national standards. New industries broke through the older Church associations; union leaders and members became increasingly suspicious of chaplain-priests as excessively ready to accept in negotiations the viewpoint of employers, who were not slow to try to use priests for their own purposes. The end of the wartime ban on strikes; a change in C.C.C.L. leadership in 1946 and marked progress made by the new leaders in even the building trades where the Church influence had been so strong; the trial of strength between the C.C.C.L. and Duplessis in the famous asbestos strike of 1949—all these contributed to a changed relationship between the C.C.C.L. and the Church, the consequences of which are not yet fully worked out. There are still in fact diverging views in both organisations. Within the C.C.C.L., the locals in large basic industries where there is a Canada-wide economic structure (such as the aluminum industry) feel the need to work for closer contact with C.L.C. unions in the same industry in other provinces, in what is felt to be a common struggle against the same type of employer throughout Canada. This would suggest an end to the characteristically French-Canadian Catholic and nationalist phase of the C.C.C.L. during its first quarter-century of existence. (The change here was nicely pin-pointed for me by the comment of one Quebec unionist who measured the "progress" of the pre101
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ceding decade by the remark: "Ten years ago we FrenchCanadian workers hated our English employers; now we only hate our employers.") Its logical consequence would be not only the "de-confessionalizing" of the C.C.C.L.—now about to take place, I was assured—but also some amalgamation or affiliation between the C.C.C.L. and the C.L.C.-for which the C.C.C.L. executive was authorised by its 1958 Convention to negotiate. But there are other unions among the 100,000 members of the C.C.C.L. with its 450 locals spread over the whole province of Quebec, plus a few in Ontario and New Brunswick. In these smaller decentralised industries, catering for local markets, where the influence of the priest is closer and more personal, the attitude of C.C.C.L. union members is more conservative. If economic factors are dominant in the larger groups, older nationalist and religious influences persist in smaller units. I felt in my frank discussions with Secretary General Marchand that he was acutely conscious of the fact that undue haste in accelerating the, to him, inevitable association of C.C.C.L. with the C.L.C. might have the effect of splitting the former in two or of causing it to disintegrate altogether. And this at a time when the C.C.C.L.'s continued strength is greatly needed to protect its members against a potential alliance between employers (whether the capital comes from American, EnglishCanadian or French-Canadian sources) and the Duplessis political machine. Corresponding differences exist within the Church in facing this changed position of French-Canadian and Catholic workers. I was told of some bishops who wished to keep the C.C.C.L. as it was, as the Church's main instrument for maintaining contact with Roman Catholic workers. Others, again, realistically recognise that nearly two-thirds of the 300,000 unionized workers in the province of Quebec belong to C.L.C. unions; the view of such bishops is that the Church should recognise the fact that, in existing conditions, all French-Canadian trade unions, C.C.C.L. and C.L.C. alike, are more mature. They are therefore no longer willing to accept assistance of chaplain-priests whose very presence tends to create a suggestion of external dictation. The Church should therefore recognise all trade unionism as such and seek to exercise its influence on it through other and more spiritual channels. The alternative would be to risk a fatal antagonism between priest and industrial worker. Then, as a Montreal Catholic remarked to me, the Church in Quebec would have a revolution on its hands with which those of eighteenth102
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century France and twentieth-century Spain would pale into insignificance. The work of the Department of Industrial Relations in Laval University's Faculty of Social Sciences has undoubtedly done, and is still doing, much to provide the bridge between Church and Union in contemporary Quebec. How far it has succeeded in this task may be suggested by the following extracts from the sermon given by the Archbishop of Quebec, Monseigneur Maurice Roy, Primate of the Roman Catholic Church in Canada, on the occasion of the traditional mass preceding the opening of the Annual C.C.C.L. Congress on September 22, 1957, on the relations between the C.C.C.L. and the Church. With all due apology for my translation of the Primate's French, the following are the significant passages: Perhaps you are sometimes under the impression that the Episcopate is less interested in your Union movement because it intervenes less frequently than you desire. If this is your view you have not sufficiently appreciated the fact that the maturity of your movement and the complexity of social life make the hierarchy's intervention less necessary or less appropriate and require that you should assume your responsibilities as Catholics more completely. In the first years of your Union movement, the hierarchy and the clergy had to play a certain role. . . . This period of early growth is past. Your movement has attained manhood. The corollary, or to be chronologically correct, the preliminary to this significant archiépiscopal declaration may be found in the "Preface" written by the Abbé Dion to the Report on the 1957 Twelfth Congress on Industrial Relations held on May 6 and 7, 1957, in the Concert Hall of the impressive Chateau Frontenac in Old Quebec. It should not be forgotten that labour unions are autonomous and democratic organisations. They themselves will determine their own attitudes. What has been done and is being done by the Department of Industrial Relations at Laval is, however, only one facet of the work of the Faculty of Social Sciences at that university. It would be an impertinence for an overseas visitor to attempt a general appreciation of that Faculty or of the contribution which Laval as a whole is making to the Massey Report's concept of 103
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Canada as one bilingual, bicultural nation, rather than two distinct and separate co-existing communities. It is evident, however, that within Laval University as a whole considerable changes have been taking place. The scholars of the Church, who even in earlier times had not neglected scientific studies but had little thought for technologies, are now, with their lay colleagues, making full use of textbooks and other works in English, and even using English as a medium of instruction, I was told, and welcoming visiting English-speaking scientists and scholars to work at Laval. In the social sciences generally, I could not hope, in the time at my disposal, to make a detached analysis similar to that attempted in the work of the Department of Industrial Relations. But my discussions, for example, with the Professor of Sociology, M. Jean-C. Falardeau, left me with the conviction that the French-speaking scholars of Laval, unlike the defeatist historians of Montreal, see their French-Canadian culture as something dynamic rather than static. They too are working for the survival of French-Canadian culture but they are also trying to find the answer to the question, survival for what? To quote Professor Falardeau, from an article written in August 1958: Un programme culturel et politique pour le Québec ne doit rien avoir de rétrospectif, rien de défensif, rien de mesquin. Il ne doit pas être conçu dans la perspective d'une pure nostalgie verbale du passé. Il doit être à la mesure des problèmes d'une province urbaine et industrielle. S'il doit s'inspirer de l'esprit et non seulement de la lettre de la constitution canadienne, il doit aussi reconnaître les impératifs technologiques de notre époque, lesquels entraînent les individus dans de nouveaux espaces professionnels et territoriaux, et les impératifs géographiques, lesquels rendent notre province économiquement et socialement solidaire de tout le Canada. En dernière analyse, un tel programme devra trouver sa principale inspiration dans les impératifs même de notre culture repensés pour le XXe siècle. Some response to all this is coming from English-speaking Canadians outside the province of Quebec. It is not merely that Laval University has large numbers of English-speaking students studying French at its summer courses. Ordinary FrenchCanadian citizens of both Quebec and Montreal told me how different was their reception today from that of ten or fifteen years ago when as visitors to Ontario Torontonians, hearing them speak French in the streets, treated them as aliens. 104
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It is well not to exaggerate; French-Canadian nationalism still has long traditions of self-containment and exclusiveness behind it. The strength of Premier Duplessis rests on more than the fact that he can wield both political and powerful material weapons— what his opponents frankly call corruption. His position is also sustained by his ability to exploit the instinct of the older generation, in city and country alike, to retain what they know and cherish of their historic cultural and religious nationalism. It even wins grudging sympathy from the hearts of declared political opponents—I have one clearly in mind as I write—whose heads tell them it is sheer nonsense to refuse federal subsidies for university education merely in the name of provincial autonomy. Nevertheless, faced as he is by the strengthening opposition of modernists, both lay and clerical, it seemed to me that Premier Duplessis and his friends were fighting a losing battle. /Meanwhile the capital sums allotted from federal sources through the National Conference of Canadian Universities (which by 1959 amounted to some $17 millions) and through the Canada Council continue to accumulate in block accounts held to the credit of the Quebec universities which as yet* cannot afford to defy their provincial Treasurer by accepting them. And meanwhile the French-Canadian worker acquires more and more of the taste for the comforts, from television to electric cookers, which he associates rightly or wrongly with the English-speaking way of life. When an aged curé gives the sermon in his urban parish church instead of the younger priest who knows him better and this older curé warns him of the danger of learning English too well, he laughs or turns away. For a French-Canadian 'petit bourgeois or industrial worker is as coldly realistic in material matters as a Parisian. Against this combination of intellectual initiative and economic necessity the older forms of Quebec nationalism seem doomed, however long the ability of Premier Duplessis and the strength of his machine, plus the influence of the defeatists of Montreal, may prolong the rearguard action against the inevitable.
3 In his famous Report written 120 years ago on The Affairs of British North America, Lord Durham passed some very critical * But note the comment of an academic correspondent in Montreal who wrote, after the death of M. Duplessis, of anticipatory excitement among his colleagues at the imminent prospect of "carving up a melon"!
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comments on certain aspects of life in Upper Canada. To these criticisms a Select Committee of the House of Assembly of Upper Canada made this telling reply: .
His lordship's personal observation was confined to his passing up the river St. Lawrence, and crossing Lake Ontario, in a steamboat occupied exclusively by his family and suite; a four days' sojourn at the Falls of Niagara, and a twenty-four hours' visit to the Lieutenant-Governor at Toronto. I feel very conscious of comparable limitations in any comments I make in this chapter on conditions in the Maritime Provinces after having visited only one of them. The considerable differences between that province, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, not to mention the newly incorporated province of Newfoundland, might well suggest that silence would here be the better part of valour. Yet I heard so much of the grievances of the Atlantic Provinces before I visited one of them and I saw enough from New Brunswick of what is being done, jointly and severally, to improve the situation in all four of them, with federal co-operation, that some reference is both necessary and, it is hoped, permissible. And, as far as it goes, such comment as I can offer tends to support the general theme of this chapter, that economic forces and a certain intellectual triumph of realism over romanticism is strengthening national bonds between eastern provinces and the economic and political centres of the Canadian Dominion. Again, there is need for caution. The Maritimers are a proud people in their way no less than the French-Canadians of Quebec. While "Confederation" is not for them synonymous with "Conquest"—after all the 1867 federation was freely accepted while the treaty of 1763 was the result of military defeat—they recall their historic significance in the early history of Englishspeaking Canadians and the hopes of their leaders in 1867 that the Maritimes would be the scene of many new and flourishing industries within the new Confederation. Today, they naturally resent the fact that their young men have felt the need to "go west" for fame and fortune, just as Newfoundlanders recall that they were once a separate Dominion, their status in which contrasts somewhat sharply with their present designation by their fellow Canadians as "Newfies". It is also well to remember that there is considerable racial and religious mixture in the Maritimes and that some of the Atlantic Provinces have had close personal 106
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links with the United States and with the West Indies which distinguish them from other Canadian provinces. From current vital statistics the following relevant extracts speak for themselves. Total population to June 1, 1958, is estimated at: Newfoundland 438,000; P.E.I. 100,000; Nova Scoria 710,000; New Brunswick 577,000. Racial origins as given in the 1951 census were as follows:
English Irish Scottish French German Dutch
Newfoundlandd
P.E.L
278,199 53,334 5,389 9,841
29,711 19,019 31,595 15,477
Nevo Brunswick Nova Scotia
150,757 71,750 69,250 197,631 2,623 5,920
240,793 76,479 160,586 73,760 28,751 20,819
As to religious denominations, Newfoundland has some 34 per cent Roman Catholic, 30 per cent Anglican and 24 per cent United Church; in New Brunswick some 51 per cent are Roman Catholic with the Baptists as the largest Protestant denomination (17.6 per cent) and the United Church and Anglicans 13.9 and 11.6 per cent respectively; Nova Scotia, by contrast, is about two-thirds Protestant while the Roman Catholics again form the largest single denomination in Prince Edward Island. Such divergences are sufficient to counsel caution regarding generalizations covering all four provinces; yet it is on a common attempt to find a solution to economic needs which is consistent with provincial self-respect that I concentrate my necessarily limited impressions formed from New Brunswick. First, there is the establishment of the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council with headquarters in Halifax and an Agent General in Trafalgar Square, London. This office, maintained jointly by the four provinces in the proportion 3:3:3:1 is at least valuable as a symbol of the new co-operation between all four— a co-operation, moreover, which is not hostile to the Confederation and not to be interpreted as a party political move since two of the provincial governments are Conservative and two Liberal. I had the pleasure of discussing this inter-provincial programme on two occasions with the Conservative Premier of New Brunswick, Mr. Hugh John Flemming, and of reading the speeches he had given to the periodic conferences of Atlantic Provinces. These have been meeting since 1956; the fifth was held at St. 107
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John's, Newfoundland, at the end of September 1958. On that occasion it was impressive to read the record of "tremendously helpful developments for regional improvement" achieved since the 1957 meeting. It was also significant to note the recognition that these advances involved not only provincial initiative and inter-provincial co-operation but also federal aid from Ottawa, including the Special Adjustment Grants for the Atlantic Provinces, financial assistance for the construction of thermal plants and inter-connecting transmission lines in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and federal subventions on Nova Scotia and New Brunswick coal used to generate electricity. What I think impressed me most in discussions with the Premier of New Brunswick and his assistants—notably his economic adviser, Professor W. Smith, head of the Department of Economics in the University of New Brunswick—was the absence of any exaggerated optimism. Instead, I felt a warm but realistic determination to work out an economic rehabilitation for the Atlantic Provinces within the known technological potentialities of the Canadian economy of the second half of the twentieth century and with the full co-operation of federal authorities. Discussions which I read of political negotiations with Ottawa suggested that spokesmen for the Atlantic Provinces had not abandoned any of their disabilities arguments—for example, heavier transport rates, absence of wealth from new adjacent northern regions, the relatively high burden of taxation. What did seem extremely significant was that a mutual understanding was being reached at the expert, official level which made it possible to take full administrative advantage of the new, nonpartisan, non-recriminatory political note in which these federalprovincial negotiations were being carried on by the heads of the several governments. Two further comments suggest themselves from my New Brunswick notebook, though neither is directly relevant to the above main argument of this section. In respect to CanadianAmerican relations I was assured that the persistent antiAmerican sentiment which had been handed down from father to son in United Empire Loyalist households was now rapidly dying out. In any case, seen as part of the new inter-provincial approach on the Atlantic Coast, this influence would tend to be lessened by the close relations between New Brunswick and Maine and the considerable tourist traffic in the area, and also by the fact that Canada's latest province has no deep-seated hostility to the United States since Newfoundlanders have long 108
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had direct and cordial relationships with Americans on the Atlantic coast to the south. Something more will also be said in chapter ix of the special concern of the Atlantic Provinces with the West Indies. The concluding comment will link this third section with that which preceded it. I had the good fortune of a long talk with the French-speaking native son of New Brunswick, the Hon. Mr. Justice J. E. Michaud, Chief Justice of the Court of Queen's Bench in the province. Educated in four different provinces of Canada, the Chief Justice has brought to his honourable office a wide range of experience including service as a federal Cabinet Minister under Mackenzie King until 1945 and membership of the Cabinet War Committee. Since his return to the province of his birth, Mr. Justice Michaud has regularly travelled the province on circuit and has had unusual opportunities for comparative assessment of the postwar attitudes of his French-speaking compatriots. He emphasized the extent of the changes he had detected since before the war. Previously French Canadians in New Brunswick had had few contacts with French-speaking people elsewhere; they tended to live to themselves, nursing perhaps some anti-British Acadian prejudices but not unmindful of the fact that their own seigneurs had deserted them. Since the war, they are becoming increasingly bilingual, their educational standards generally are improving and they are travelling more. Some of the more highly educated among them are going for postgraduate studies to United States universities as well as to the bilingual University of Ottawa. Many have been seeking improved vocational and professional opportunities in distant parts of Canada, other than Quebec, where there are French-speaking people to welcome them. The over-all effect of this trend is to strengthen, as it were from below and outside, the search for a French-Canadian nationalism within Canadian nationalism, not alongside it, which has already been noted in intellectual circles in Quebec. Once again, however, a word of caution. As I strove to follow up the stimulating points made by Mr. Justice Michaud, I learnt enough of the persistence of older influences, particularly in remote rural areas under the spiritual leadership of older curés. But I gathered also, that, at the four French-speaking university colleges in New Brunswick (where tertiary education is excessively decentralised) there are both lay and clerical teachers of whom at least some have close contacts with Laval. I was also told that two of the four Roman Catholic bishops in the province are reported to 109
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take a broad rather than a narrow view on the subject of FrenchCanadian nationalism.
These were some of the thoughts in my mind as I left Fredericton, N.B., for New York. I had heard and seen enough to confirm the main argument which had been shaping itself elsewhere in Canada: that for a combination of economic and intellectual, if not also spiritual reasons, there were clear signs of movement towards a more positive nationalism in Canada despite the persistent strengths of regionalism in many places. What, I wondered, would I find of American reactions to some aspects of this postwar Canadian nationalism when I recrossed the border at Vanceboro, Maine, and re-entered the United States?
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VIII
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BEFORE I began my Canadian investigation proper, in Vancouver, I had attempted to condition myself during a couple of weeks in San Francisco and Los Angeles, by seeking such superficial evidence as a returning visitor might quickly detect of Californian awareness of Canada and Canadians. To what extent, I asked, is there a Pacific Coast consciousness which cuts across the political frontier and links Californians with British Columbians in a sense of common mission? What common interests, if any, are there which tend to separate Californians and British Columbians from their fellow Americans or fellow Canadians as the case might be? When I re-entered the United States on the Atlantic instead of the Pacific Coast three months later my perspective was somewhat different. I was looking now for the American response to some specifically Canadian attitudes which had thrust themselves upon me during the intervening months. This chapter will record something of that response as I found it in university circles as far removed as Yale, Princeton and Duke, among State Department and other officials in Washington, as well as in casual conversations with Americans who had no specific claims to knowledge of international affairs, in New York and elsewhere. But the general question of the extent of American awareness of, and interests in, Canada still remained with me. It should probably be dealt with first in this report.
1 The attitude of that mythical American, the man-in-the-street, may be summed up as a mixture of ignorance, goodwill and detachment. His ignorance is reflected in and maintained by the treatment given to Canada in the American press; his goodwill is 111
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genuine and general but it is qualified by the detachment with which he regards Canadian affairs. This contrasts sharply with the mixture of curiosity and anxiety he nowadays displays regarding events in Mexico, Cuba, the Middle East, Poland or Quemoy. The absence of Canadian news of any moment in American newspapers was my first and my most striking impression in San Francisco and Los Angeles; it continued to surprise me even in New York and Washington, D.C. A juicy scandal, an exciting event in the world of sport, some new opportunity for investment in a Canadian adventure and, on occasion, a seasonal reminder of tourist facilities—these were the only subjects on which there appeared to be a spontaneous journalistic interest in Canada. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that in my first two weeks in California I was inclined to write off the press coverage of Canadian affairs as little better than that of remote Australia or New Zealand. Nor was it much better on the Atlantic coast. The New York Times and the Washington Post offer their readers a skeleton of news to which the former gives a degree of respectable coverage with the despatches and comment of its own Ottawa correspondent; the latter relies instead on the analyses sent from Montreal by Mr. George Ferguson, well-known editor of the Star. Neither newspaper gave anything like adequate coverage to the two-day session of the eight members of the Canadian Parliament and the corresponding number of Senators and Congressmen who met in Washington while I was there, shortly after the opening of the eighty-sixth Congress in mid-January 1959. A few weeks earlier, when the second Report of the Hays-Coffin Congressional study mission to Canada was published, it received close attention by newspapers throughout the Dominion but press coverage in the United States was extremely poor. Congressmen Hays and Coffin in their first Report (committed and ordered to be printed on May 22, 1958) remarked that the New York Times was the only United States newspaper to maintain an office and an American staff in Ottawa, though the Chicago Tribune had a full-time reporter on duty in Canada and Fairchild Publications maintained a bureau in Montreal. The Associated Press and the United Press were content to receive their Canadian news from the Canadian Press or the British U.P., in a form not specially directed to American readers. In the interim recommendations for that first Report the authors sug112
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gested that "American coverage of Canadian news might well merit a careful review" even though freedom of the press meant "freedom not to cover as well as freedom of coverage". In their Second Report of December 19, 1958, the two authors (Mr. Hays had by then lost his seat in the House of Representatives) noted that there were also in Canada a number of "stringers", full-time correspondents who represented several newspapers instead of a single publication, but they strengthened their previous comment and recommendation. Re-emphasizing the "lack of adequate press coverage of Canadian matters in the United States" they expressed the opinion that the United States press would do well to re-evaluate its current policies both in respect to "news gathering on the scene and adequate handling of the copy filed". They added the specific recommendation that "some widely representative professional group such as the Society of American Newspaper Editors place the subject of coverage of Canadian news high on the agenda of one of its meetings and invite representative Canadian and United States reporters and editors to speak on the subject". What is true of journalism applies even more forcibly to printed books. It would seem that the small minority of the American public who read (and will buy) books have acquired a reputation for lack of interest in Canadian subjects. As one United States publisher remarked dispassionately in 1958, "Books on Canada . . . are not easy to sell in this country. Indifference to our northern neighbours is giving way slowly, but it is still hard to get people interested in things Canadian." Since newspaper circulations probably and book sales certainly have some relationship to the education of the potential purchaser, these two manifestations of the American public's indifference to, and lack of printed material regarding, Canadian affairs bring the inquiry round to the place which Canada is allotted in the primary, secondary and tertiary curricula of United States schools and colleges. I made some tentative and rather depressing personal inquiries on this far-reaching question when in California. But these were too few to have any specific value. Fortunately, through the good offices of Professor Mason Wade of the University of Rochester, N.Y., and of Dr. Robin W. Winks of the History Department at Yale, I am able to include in this section the results of several recent educational surveys which have been made on this subject, with characteristic American pedagogic thoroughness, and to supplement these con113
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elusions with some qualitative comment from other American scholars and teachers. One survey of the coverage of Canadian affairs in primary and secondary schools in the United States was directed by Dr. M. Hall James, Dean of Women at Quinnipiac College, New Haven, Conn. It was an exploratory investigation sponsored by the December 1953 meeting of the Canada-United States Committee on Education, a body set up in 1944 "to provide, through education, mutual understanding and respect between the two nations and to work on educational projects of common concern". The conclusions which emerged, after a survey based on questionnaires and supplementary letters, are not easily reduced to statistical form. The Director felt it possible, however, to offer the following observations as the result of the survey "relative to the teaching of Canada in the public schools, and in some teachers' colleges in the United States": Some study of Canada is presented in each of the 48 states. The study of Canada is required in some states in the United States. The most extensive study of Canada is in the fifth and sixth grades of the elementary school. Original units of study and a variety of supplementary reading and visual material are used. The time allowed is from two to nine weeks. Canada is studied in the junior high school in the required course in Geography. Many special textbooks on Canada are available for use in the elementary and junior high school. The study of Canada in the senior high school is an integral part of the courses in World History and World Geography and follows the textbook coverage of Canada. Some teachers colleges include the study of Canada in their professional and academic courses. Courses of study in many states and in some counties and cities include excellent units of study on Canada. The Canadian Information Service provides a vast amount of authentic reference material for use in the teaching of Canada in the public schools of the United States. Despite the vagueness of these observations and certain disturbing qualifications to be found in the full text of Dr. James's report, there is doubtless enough in what has been quoted above 114
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to reinforce such personal comment as I heard from a few American parents (including Congressman Coffin) and to warrant the inference drawn by Mr. Robin Winks that "students entering American universities and colleges have at least a small amount of information at their disposal", though, qualitatively, this "generally leaves much to be desired". What opportunities such students have to supplement or to build on their primary- and secondary-school knowledge of Canada at American universities was the subject of part of Mr. Winks's own investigations. I am grateful to him for the privilege of having seen the manuscript of two articles by him: "Thirty Years After: Canadian History in the Universities of the United States", prepared for publication in the March 1959 issue of the Canadian Historical Review, and "Canada, Still the Unknown Country", which adds further information regarding high-school pupils and which was written for Social Education (December, 1958). Mr. Winks's main article aims to bring up to date information collected in 1927 by Professor Reginald G. Trotter of Queen's University, Kingston, before the tremendous increase in student enrolments and new courses offered in American universities; the other tests the continuing validity of conclusions drawn by the president of the University of Maine, some ten years ago, regarding the knowledge of their respective countries by high-school students in Canada and the United States. As to the state of knowledge on leaving high school, Mr. Winks concluded that "despite a world war which brought Canada and the United States together in a mutual defensive network and despite a 'cold war' which has made Canada America's first line of defence, it cannot be said that American high school students knew more of Canada in 1956 than they did in 1931 or 1945". Clearly American high school students are well disposed toward their Canadian neighbours. They generally are aware of Canada's importance to us and of our importance to Canada. On the other hand, they are factually ignorant of Canada, do not understand that she is a totally independent nation, and are confused concerning her culture. They do not appear to be substantially better informed than were their parents. . . . That Canada remains "the unknown country" . . . is both true and unfortunate. 115
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Those high school students who go on to university will not compulsorily remedy the limitations of their school-leaving situation. None of the courses on Canada offered at American universities are obligatory. "Most Americans have no further formal instruction on matters Canadian after they leave or complete their pre-college schooling." If they want optional undergraduate courses or facilities for graduate study in Canadian fields, much depends on the university to which they go and when they go there. Of some 400 tertiary educational institutions examined by Mr. Winks, 51 list a course in Canadian history in their most recent college catalogues. But "eight of these courses have not been offered recently". Of 38 institutions which replied in full to questionnaires and "which are actively offering work in Canadian history", only 17 offer the course every year. The number of students enrolled in such courses is averaged out by Mr. Winks at 519 in any given year of the five years 1953 to 1958—a total which "does not appear to be substantially larger than in 1927". Some work is, however, being done at graduate schools. In 1957 (to continue the summary of Mr. Winks's conclusions), 53 doctoral dissertations were under way at 23 American institutions, while 30 master's theses were being written on Canadian subjects at 14 American institutions, 12 at one university, Wisconsin. A significant factor stressed by Mr. Winks is "the high mortality rate of courses in Canadian history", sometimes because the individual professor who was personally responsible for introducing the course has moved on. Mr. Winks does not indicate what proportion of the doctoral theses are being prepared by Canadians. I should not be surprised to find the proportion to be high, for several of my Faculty friends at American universities, including Yale and Princeton, told me that they had been unable to interest their young American graduates in taking Canadian topics even though the material for the research was readily accessible. One reason offered was that Americans found Canadian subjects dull—"they don't find Canada sufficiently exotic" was one revealing comment, to which further reference will be made below. The generalisations of the preceding paragraphs may require qualification in particular states of the Union and among certain occupational groups of Americans. Greater knowledge of Canada is highly probable in border regions; there are, for example, significant pockets of French-speaking people of Canadian origin 116
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in the state of Maine—which may, incidentally, have had something to do with Congressman Coffin's interest in CanadianAmerican relations. The reported influence of the C.B.C. on some American listeners and viewers has already been noted in chapter v. I myself collected quite an imposing list of Canadian contacts among professional people in California. But the regional argument can be overdone. Regionalism nowadays is less generally a factor of importance in the United States than in Canada and it is constantly being subjected to the centralising influence of economic and other forces in the United States today. It may be relevant here to quote from an interim report of tentative impressions of my first few weeks in California and British Columbia; this report was forwarded to the Canada Council from Alberta on Canadian Thanksgiving Day in mid October 1958: Stress should also be laid on the most striking impression made by this return visit to California: the effect of increased industrialisation and westward move of both capital and labour on the outlook of Californians to the rest of the United States. Little trace was found of the localism and inferiority complex detected in 1939-40 and to a lesser extent ten years later. Most Californians now seem to see their present and their future as part of the United States as a whole, not as a special Pacific Coast region. The implication is that, as far as California is concerned, solutions to the problems of Canadian-American relations must be sought, not on the Pacific Coast, but as part of the wider relations between the Governments of the Dominion and of the United States. So much for the element of ignorance which was posited at the beginning of this section as part of the attitude towards Canadians of the American-in-the-street. What of the second element, the mixture of goodwill and detachment? There is no denying the goodwill and the friendliness which Americans have for Canadians. It reveals itself in all sorts of ways but most significantly, perhaps, in the form which Canadians fin most exasperating—their acceptance, in effect, as fellow Americans who for some incomprehensible reason still remain part of the British Commonwealth. Canadians' irritation at this backhanded compliment to their respected personal qualities but their limited national importance is increased by the assumption by too many Americans that Canadians, being decent, sensible, responsible people, can be relied upon to act sensibly in political matters of 117
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moment. Unconsciously of course, the assumption is that sensible political behaviour is identical with the prevailing attitude of the government and people of the United States. But the more or less unconscious assumptions of this sort of casual goodfellowship coupled with ignorance don't end the factors conducive to American neglect of the finer points of Canadian national attitudes and personal susceptibilities. It is a hard fact of contemporary American life, of which too few Canadians are aware, that the people of the United States, who in less than two decades have jumped from a natural isolationism into a rather emotional, daily preoccupation with the problems of international leadership, find it pretty tough going to live up to their new role in world affairs. Very naturally they tend to concentrate attention on those countries and those peoples which are actual or potential troublemakers. Whether the reaction is one of ideological hostility, as with Peking and Moscow, or of generous financial assistance to under-developed or politically doubtful regions—in which traditional humanitarian motives are linked with quite sensible considerations of enlightened selfinterest—in either event, the attitude is one of active and continuing interest. It contrasts very sharply with the casual assumption that there's nothing to worry about in a Canada which is inhabited by sensible people most of whom speak English and who pay their way and more. How different it would be if, instead of the eminently respectable, former United Church or Baptist leaders of the C.C.F., Canadian discontents had thrown up a really vigorous Communist party north of the "undefended frontier"! In early January 1959, as I waded through papers and American press headlines on the daily doings in Havana in a vain search for some effective coverage of current Canadian-American inter-parliamentary committee discussions in Washington, I couldn't help wondering if it mightn't be a good idea to write to some friends I had made in the Prairies and suggest that they try the effect on Americans of dressing up one of their independent oilmen in Calgary'to look like some kind of Canadian Castro.
2 Not all the grievances, however, are on the Canadian side of the border. Americans have no monopoly of ignorance of the realities of life in the neighbouring country. I can't, unfortunately, produce a comparable survey of Canadian school 118
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curricula to set alongside that of Dr. May Hall James. In Alberta, however, I talked a good deal with one of the few United States scholars teaching American history in Canada, Wallace D. Farnham, and I can quote from Dr. Farnham's stimulating address to the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association in June 1958, on "The Study of American History in Canadian Universities". This is a careful little monograph, the solid research for which should not be ignored because it is refreshingly readable in form and occasionally flippant in tone. It begins by recognising that "the necessity of studying some American history is generally admitted in Canadian history departments", though, with a few exceptions, the undergraduate enrolments in American history courses in Canadian universities, as with Canadian courses in the United States, is small. As for graduate specialisation, in the year 1957-58 "two graduate students wrote Master's theses wholly in the field of American history; there was no doctoral research". There are only two full-time teachers of American history in Canada, and three others who devote as much as half of their time to the subject: The composite professor in American history courses, if I may take the liberty of fabricating one, is a native Canadian who has earned a PH.D. from a North American university, specialises in Canadian history and spends most of his time teaching it and has done no research in American history. . . . Two of those who teach American history are members of the leading professional group in the field, the Mississippi Valley Historical Association. Eight reported research and writing, but three of these had produced only review articles and three others discussions of Canadian-American relations. Dr. Farnham was impressed by the fact that American history appeared to be studied in Canada less for the sake of its own intrinsic interest than as part of, or something incidental to, the history of Canada. He found little evidence that "Canadians had shed their 'colonial' sensitivity and had turned to mature scholarship in place of national self-justification". He suggested that Canadian interest in American history was still in the "borderlands" stage: I wonder also, and this is pure speculation, whether the necessarily frequent glances at, the United States along the path of 119
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Canadian history have not satisfied many that the Americans were getting their due. Has it perhaps seemed unnecessary to hire specialists in American history because Americans were not difficult to understand? Besides, any alert Canadian could get insight into American life without burying himself in it! Hence the general conclusion: "We may allow for exceptions and still conclude that in the historian's circus in Canada the United States is a side show and not a featured act." My own discussions in Washington and elsewhere would suggest that many Americans who are brought into active administrative, political and business associations with Canadians feel that the "side show" does not produce sufficient real understanding even to facilitate the most effective Canadian-American collaboration. "Canadians want to have it both ways" was a complaint I heard with some frequency. "They insist on recognition as a completely independent nation yet they are hurt if we don't automatically grant them the special treatment of a privileged North American relative. They won't face the fact, in particular, that because they have insisted to the world that Canada is an independent nation-state, we can't very easily give them something which we have to refuse to Venezuela or to some other independent Power which claims treaty rights or special interest." This argument was usually linked with complaint at failure of Canadians to recognise the vast international responsibilities which now fall on the United States and also the complexities of the internal administration in Washington, to which reference has already been made in chapter iv. "When, in addition, Canadians start trying their hand at log-rolling within our political system and tell us how we should conduct our internal affairs as well as our foreign policy. . . . Well, I ask you!" The slight tone of exasperation detectable in such remarks as this would not of course be allowed to appear in high-level administrative discussions or, probably, in many others except, perhaps, late in the evening when the bottle was getting empty and when, after all, there was only an Australian roughneck in the party. It seems desirable to reproduce the tone, however, even if it is only an undertone, and to extend such qualifications of the goodwill-friendship theme to frank discussion of what an Australian investigator can record of the off-the-record views of Americans and Canadians about one another. This is a touchy subject on which rash generalisation may well do more harm than good. I'd preface even a sketchy attempt to 120
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deal with it by insisting that nowhere in Canada did I have direct evidence of the hostility of an individual Canadian to an individual American, or vice versa. Such attitudes are of course bound to develop as they do between nationals of the same community. I did hear at second hand, for example, of the unhappiness of some American wives of Canadians who had trained and married south of the border and subsequently returned as married men to work in Canada. Even these cases I should think were exceptions which prove the rule that the two peoples get on easily enough in their personal relations, that they make their inevitable re-adjustments, both south and north of the border, much more readily than other national migrants do, whether in North America, in the United Kingdom or in Australia. I consider it not unfair to suggest, however, that if some Canadians think some Americans brash and loud, most Americans think Canadians generally are not only quiet and stand-offish on occasion but also—let's be frank about it—rather dull and often very drab. Even an overseas visitor to North America may detect the contrast with the friendly, talkative habits of the curious American which he finds among reserved Canadians in trains, in cafés and even in some private homes. American women, moreover, find a sharp contrast in the apparent readiness of their Canadian sisters to leave public life in many forms to their husbands and to their brothers. This American contrast is not of course confined to Canadian women. I recall the comment of an American-trained sociologist on the habits of Australian women, that "Australian mateship is purely masculine". Perhaps the northern climate, and especially the rigours of the long Canadian winter, contribute to this prevailing picture of the life and habits of Canadians as producing something normally lacking in colour and variety during the greater part of the year—except, of course, for the Mounties! This is not to deny the accepted tourist attractions to Americans of Quebec and of the splendid camping and fishing facilities in summer. The prevailing view still seems to confirm that seemingly strange comment noted in the preceding section, that Canada is not sufficiently "exotic" to invite American graduate researchers in considerable numbers. I have no means of knowing how many Canadians are aware of the view presented in the preceding paragraphs or whether they deeply resent it when they recognise it beneath all the postprandial perorations about the close friendly feelings which the two nations have for one another. Americans may not be 121
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conscious of causing offence—they rarely are—but they do sometimes complain at what they regard as displays of jealousy, at the petulant impatience of Canadians, which they feel springs from an inferiority complex. This applies particularly to economic relations. It may suffice to quote, in illustration, the Canadianborn economist Jacob Viner, on Canadian complaints at the consequences of the American capital "invasion": It seems . . . to my perhaps prejudiced view that much of the complaint suffers from lack of historical perspective and of due sense of proportion, and that some of it displays at least slight traces of either genuine or contrived hysteria. And, to conclude the section, here, too, is a telling story by the same writer, not perhaps entirely apt in the analogous roles it suggests for either his native or his adopted fellow countrymen: An English eighteenth-century parson, Philip Henry, sought in marriage the only daughter and heiress of a Mr. Matthews, a rich and aristocratic-minded squire. When his daughter pleaded with him that he should not reject the parson's suit, Mr. Matthews demurred. He allowed that Mr. Henry was a gentleman, a scholar, and an excellent preacher, but he was poor, his manners and bearing were not always quite comme il faut, and they did not even know where he came from. "True", said Miss Matthews, "but I know where he is going, and I should like to go with him." My own personal opinion, for what it is worth, is that Canadians, including Canadian businessmen, would do well for themselves if they responded in the spirit of this Miss Matthews to the opportunities for partnership with American business. 3
Of all existing difficulties in Canadian-American relations the one of which Canadians seem most resentful and to which sympathetic Americans are now giving most corrective attention is the tendency allegedly prevailing south of the border to "take Canadians for granted". I was very considerably impressed by the variety of the corrective measures being taken by Americans, collectively and individually, to bring both the realities of the Canadian situation and the grievances felt by Canadians before the notice of their fellow countrymen. Pride of place is given here to the results of the initiative in 122
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1957 and 1958 by Congressmen Brooks Hays of Arkansas and Frank M. Coffin of Maine. Both at that time members of the House of Representatives and of its Foreign Affairs Committee, the two men (as Mr. Coffin put it to me in his suite in the Capitol) had seen how the keen interest which their fellow Committee members displayed in other countries seemed to make it difficult for them to find time for consideration of CanadianAmerican relations. With the concurrence of the Acting Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the two Congressmen constituted themselves as a special study mission, made visits to Canada in December 1957 and January 1958 and presented a First Report in May 1958. Following a second visit to Canada in September and October, a more lengthy analysis with more elaborate recommendations was submitted. As the recommendations of these two Reports are reprinted as an Appendix to this little book, the reader may be left to examine for himself the methods used by the Mission, the detailed conclusions drawn and the recommendations submitted. It may be added here that I heard enough in Washington to satisfy me that the two Congressmen had not laboured in vain. Though there is insufficient evidence to suggest that their Reports made any substantial impact on the American public, they have had more than a nuisance value as far as the Committee of Foreign Affairs is concerned. Four members of that Committee now sit with four Senators from the better-known Foreign Relations Committee on the American panel which meets the eight members of the Canadian federal Parliament; the two Reports have thus become significant data papers for Congress as a whole. There is also evidence that the Reports, together with the Canadian-American inter-legislative discussions, have produced an appreciable increase in critical Congressional interest in Administration policies and in their departmental exploration and execution. Whether this increased interest is always fully appreciated at the bureaucratic level is perhaps a different but in any case a relatively negligible matter. Outside the field of Administrative and Congressional exploration, it is also possible to record evidence of a series of unofficial inquiries and investigations which, having regard to the way in which policy-making is influenced in the American form of democracy, must again be regarded as significant. The very nature of this function, however, makes the compilation of a comprehensive list very difficult. I mention only those with which I was brought into some sort of contact. I first heard, 123
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outside New York, of a committee formed by the influential Council on Foreign Relations in that city which had devoted several meetings in the second half of 1958 to an examination of different aspects of current issues in Canadian-American relations. As far as I am aware, no published work is likely to emerge from these meetings; the Minutes remain confidential in accordance with the rules of the Council and I made no attempt to inspect them. But the composition of the Committee, the inclusion on it of members of New York financial, mining, investment, steel and oil concerns, together with experts in economics and international affairs, and the inviting of distinguished Canadians to particular meetings, testified to the level of importance which the Council evidently attached to the committee's activities. I learnt something also of the initiative of the World Peace Foundation in sponsoring conferences and continuing study groups, one in Canada and one in Boston, on economic relations. By sheer accident, moreover, I came upon one of the most fruitful of all these committees in the middle of January 1959, when paying an official courtesy call on the President of Duke University, N.C., with the Chairman of the Duke Commonwealth-Studies Center, over whose Australian fellowship committee I have the privilege of presiding. President A. Hollis Edens happened to mention his personal interest in my recent Canadian investigation and showed me, in evidence of this interest, the latest communication from the National Planning Association's Canadian-American Committee. This body, which consists of some forty Americans and Canadians, widely representative in their several locations and interests, had its first of three meetings to date at Montebello on November 15 and 16, 1957. Its formation had been announced by the National Planning Association, on July 16 of that year, "to study the problems created by increasing interdependence between the United States and Canada". Its members were to consist of "leaders of the private economy from each country, with membership equally divided between the two," selected to represent "agriculture, business, labour and the professions". Its twice yearly meetings and the work of research director and assistant director are financed by private enterprise—"business firms, economic organizations, foundations and individuals"—in both countries, including a Carnegie grant of $150,000, spread over three years, for the Committee's research programme. The proceedings of this committee, the record of which I was 124
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privileged to consult, are confidential until, after specialist analyses have been prepared in accordance with Conference decisions and circulated for discussion, an agreed report is released to the press jointly by the National Planning Association in the United States and by a non-profit organisation, "The Private Planning Association of Canada", incorporated for the purpose. The Committee issued its first policy statement on October 24, 1958, at the time of its third meeting at the Chateau Frontenac, Quebec—an analysis of Canadian-American commercial relations. Of two Reports, on "Wheat Surplus Problems and Their Impact on Canadian-American Relations" and "Oil and Canadian-American Relations", the latter was written by John Davis, "currently Director of Research and Planning for the British Columbia Electric Company and author of various studies on energy and natural resources for the recent Royal Commission on Canada's Economic Prospects". It was prepared under the direction of a sub-committee of six Americans and Canadians whose names and responsible positions indicated their peculiar fitness to supervise the study of which the Report was the outcome. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that I should rate this Report as the most impressive of the many statements and documents I have read on the contentious issue of oil in Canadian-American relations. I would repeat that the list of groups and individuals mentioned in this section is almost certainly incomplete. I make no apology, however, for concluding with this reference to the work of the unofficial Canadian-American Committee. Not only is it in its membership one of the most significant committees which could have been constituted in North America, but it also has the very great advantage that anything it presents to the Canadian and American public should at least be free from the suspicion of either patronage or propaganda since it comes simultaneously from both sides of the border. The value of its dispassionate analyses to both United States and Canadian Governments and to their administrative agencies should be considerable. How long it will take to get through to the general public in both countries is another matter of considerable importance. For, in the long run, Canadian-American relations are the concern of the Canadian and American peoples whose personal relations with one another, it may be repeated, continue to be influenced by a curious combination of friendship and ignorance, detachment and suspicion. Each of the two North American 125
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neighbours normally tends to take the other for granted until the latter does something which indicates that he has a personality of his own which his neighbour finds difficulty in recognising, let alone understanding.
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IX
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A KINDLY Canadian critic, to whom the argument of the preceding chapters had been submitted in outline, made a pertinent comment. "What you propose to do", he said in effect, "is to tell your readers a good deal about those aspects of contemporary life and thought in Canada which go to the shaping of our foreign policies. You'll also have much to say about economic, strategic and cultural relations with our North American neighbour, the United States. But that, after all, comes very close to the domestic affairs of the Dominion. When do you propose to talk about Canadians and foreign policy?"! The point was well taken but the plan of my little book remained unchanged. It was designed to be the record—as honest and as objective as I could make it—of an actual investigation. And the record reveals that Canadians in the latter part of 1958 were in fact very largely preoccupied in their thinking on external relations with problems directly or indirectly concerned with the United States. Canadian-American relations so much dominated the scene that other questions were thrust into the background or, sometimes, viewed through Canadian-American spectacles—by no means rose-coloured. Surprisingly enough, too, I discovered that Canadians, like Australians, for all their apparently greater maturity in political experience, still tend to concentrate attention on domestic rather than on external affairs.
1 These two observations are strongly supported by the answers to my questions regarding the Pacific in general and China in particular. To an Australian investigator it was important to try to discover whether Canadians had acquired a greater sense of the 127
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significance for them of the Pacific Ocean and Asia than the very slight interest I had been able to detect outside British Columbia on previous visits to the Dominion. My Canadian friend and well-informed fellow student of Commonwealth affairs, Dr. Gwendolen Carter, of Smith College, Mass., had for some time been assuring me that this was the case but the evidence was difficult to detect from a distance. The Pacific therefore had a prominent place on the list of questions I brought with me to Vancouver in September 1958. Then came events in Quemoy and what Canadians regarded as Mr. John Foster Dulles' supreme act of "brinkmanship"; China policy became a major subject of public discussion in all parts of Canada. And though the Quemoy danger receded as I moved eastward across the Dominion, the forthright speeches of Mr. Lester Pearson in different parts of the country, and the confusing comments of his successor whether at the United Nations or elsewhere, kept the related questions of recognition of Peking and admission of Communist China to the United Nations well in the foreground of public discussion. Here certainly was a subject of foreign policy overseas on which Canadians were ready to talk freely and frankly. In summarising their comments, whether made to me personally or as I read them in tKe press or heard them over the air, the first point to make is that they contained much evidence to suggest a real appreciation of Asian developments apart from the immediate problem of Quemoy and the offshore islands. There is very good reason to believe that Canada's prominent role in Korea and Indo-China not only reflected the old Liberal Government's recognition that both war and peace are indivisible in any part of the atomic world but also provided enough Canadians with concrete evidence of the fact. For members of Canada's Korean Force came from all over the Dominion; I found curious pieces of evidence in a number of different places of the resultant continuing local community interest in Asia. I thought this a significant factor, comparable in its way with the pockets of localised interest in China which I had found in different parts of the United States—even in the Southeast—during 1940. The latter I had been able to trace to the continuing interest of small religious communities the pastors of which had felt the call of the overseas mission field and for years had continued to correspond with their old parishioners from their new mission stations. (Incidentally, one potential influence on Canadian attitudes to China which I did not succeed in exploring sufficiently to my satisfaction was that of missionary activity in Asia. It appears to 128
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have been real yet its influence never seems to have had the persistent political and popularly persuasive emotional significance it undoubtedly had in the United States until the world economic depression in the early thirties and later the postwar policies of Peking at first limited its strength and then changed its direction.) To this general politico-strategic interest in the Pacific of an increasing number of Canadians who hitherto had thought only of North America and Europe should be added the factor of trade. Perhaps it was the effect on British Columbia of the North American economic recession of 1958; there was, however, no doubt of the readiness of Canadians on the West Coast to talk about the desirability of exploring the commercial potentialities of the China market by recognition of Communist China. Canadian opinion didn't seem to be unanimous on this point. I heard more than one comment about wishful thinking and the traditionally mythical character of that China market. But the trade factor was there and the arguments arising out of it were peculiarly involved with those domestic doubts about the interference of parent American companies with Canadian subsidiaries desirous of trading with Peking to which reference has been made in chapter n. Indeed, the dominant impression I formed regarding Canadians and China was less that they had strong convictions of distinctively Canadian interests in Asia (apart from the factor of moral obligation, of which more in the next section) than that they were deeply concerned at their* risk of indirect involvement in the consequences of United States Far Eastern policy, of which they disapproved. Of the extent of Canadian disapproval of the policy which State Department and White House had followed in recent years in their dealings with Peking I can report dogmatically and with conviction. The prevailing Canadian view was that United States policy was unrealistic, excessively ideological and dangerously emotive. This applies to American policy generally regarding China; on the specific question of Quemoy and the offshore islands both press and public were loud in their denunciation of brinkmanship. There was no denying the strength of the feeling of Canadians on this point. While I would think it fair to say that opinion in the United States itself remained divided on this matter, in Canada the only variation I detected was in the vigour with which the policy of Secretary of State and President was denounced. Most of the odium was directed against Mr. Dulles. Even Mr. Lester Pearson went so 129
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far as to describe the Secretary's Quemoy statements as "idle and unrealistic" while the Vancouver Sun declared editorially that Mr. Dulles was "the most dangerous man in the world". My own experience in talks with Canadian newspapermen, bankers, industrialists and labour-union leaders suggested that Canadian opinion ran somewhere between these two statements. One Pacific Coast banker, for example, whose other views labelled him conservative, volunteered the opinion that the Dulles policy over the offshore islands was "nothing short of an international tragedy". An influential and widely respected western editor told me unequivocally that, in his view, there was no question on which Canada and the United States were so deeply divided as over the attitude of Washington to Quemoy. To this I may add that while I heard or read expressions of Canadian doubt on the benefits which might be expected to follow recognition of Peking or the admission of Communist China to the United Nations I did not hear a single expression of support for United States policy on Quemoy. The strength of Canadian feeling on this subject calls for further comment. I venture to emphasize that the reason why Canadians were so critical about Quemoy is to be found less in their support for a different, distinctively Canadian policy regarding China than in the fact that "brinkmanship" over Quemoy pinpointed the very unpalatable fact of Canada's more or less automatic involvement in the consequences of United States foreign policy. Concern about Asian policy thus became a subsidiary factor in, or illustrative of, the more grave and persistent problem of Canadian-American strategic relations. I heard or read many frank and irritated statements on this, apropos of Quemoy. Of course it's true to say that Ottawa has given Washington no commitment to support its policy on the subject of the offshore islands. But if war should break out between the United States and Communist China over this question, where would Canada be? We'd find ourselves in the war, lock, stock and barrel, as the result of a United States policy which we did not support and of which we did not approve. I repeat, therefore, the statement made at the beginning of this chapter. While there is some significant evidence that Canadian postwar horizons have extended across the Pacific as well as across the Atlantic, even Asian problems tend to be looked at in terms of Canadian-American relations. 130
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One incidental additional point may be made here. The Canadian criticism of United States policy in the Pacific had some significant effect upon American opinion. I had two clear indications of this. The first concerned the consequences of the decision of Mr. Oakley Dalgleish to reprint as advertisements in the New York Times the articles which he had published in favour of recognition after returning from his 1958 visit to Peking. Mr. Dalgleish informed me that the Globe and Mail received a considerable and highly commendatory mail from United States citizens on these reprints. A similar story may be told of the sequel to the publication in the monthly letter of the Royal Bank of Canada of an address by the president of the Bank on trade with China. Though this issue of the monthly letter was not distributed by the Bank outside Canada it evidently got through to United States readers. I understand that it produced a lively inward correspondence for the Bank from American citizens, much of it welcoming the president's argument though some of it was highly critical. The moral of these two incidents seems to be twofold: first, Canadian views are not as little noted south of the border as is sometimes believed and, second, Canadian (and for that matter Australian) authorities may not always secure the maximum influence for official viewpoints on international issues which differ from those of the government of the United States when they rigidly refrain from giving publicity to those views among American critics of the policy prevailing in Washington.
2 If it is correct to emphasize the close relation between Canadian attitudes on Pacific questions and their deep concern at United States policy in this area, it is fair to suggest that, to a lesser extent, Canadians also find their attitude to Soviet Russia complicated by their mixture of respect for the hard realities of United States policy towards Moscow, on the one hand, and a certain suspicion of its ideological overtones on the other. The realistic appreciation explains NATO and the prominent part which Canada played in the establishment of that organisation and in the working out of its details. Yet even NATO itself was also for Canada a means of ensuring an opportunity to participate in the making of decisions which might otherwise be determined too readily by prevailing emotions in Washington. This is the place to write of one factor which has influenced 131
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Canadian attitudes but which does not lend itself to statistical measurement—the surviving suspicion of the policies, external and internal, of a nation which could allow itself to be stampeded into the excesses of McCarthyism. It is not that there are many Canadians who are ideologically sympathetic with Communism or with fellow-travellers. The left-wing intellectuals in the C.CF. may not be referred to by their fellow Canadians as "egg-heads" with the same frequency as in the United States, but the individual toughness of the Canadian and his belief in his economic future nevertheless discourage any indigenous growth of left-wing sentiment upon which Moscow and its friends might play. Most postwar immigrant groups have also been solidly anti-Communist and I myself saw and heard enough to satisfy me that the government's warm response to appeals for help for Hungarian refugees in 1956 reflected a prevailing national feeling of hostility to Soviet policy in Hungary as well as of sympathy for its victims. The fact nevertheless remains that Canadians suspect that Washington's relations with Moscow, as with Peking, may continue to be coloured by neo-McCarthyism to an extent dangerous to the security of Canadians. While, therefore, individual Canadians may view varying Soviet Summit proposals with some suspicion, they tend as a nation to be more ready to examine these with care than do most of their southern neighbours. This was certainly my general impression of discussions on CanadianSoviet relations; it was also the central theme of one very impressive address which the late Dr. Sidney Smith delivered after he left the presidency of the University of Toronto to follow Mr. Pearson as Minister for External Affairs in Ottawa—the second of the two Henry Marshall Tory Lectures which he delivered at the University of Alberta on the occasion of its October 1958 Jubilee Celebrations, which I had the privilege of attending as the representative of the University of Western Australia: I have described the world as now having entered an era of virtual nuclear stalemate. When both sides have the power of inflicting appalling damage on the other, it is perhaps improbable that either of the great antagonists will be willing to run the risk of precipitating a general war. But the present equation of mutual terror is highly precarious. A miscalculation could upset it. A local war could spread to engulf it. In such circumstances, it seems to me that the diplomacy of the West must now be looking far beyond the urgent objectives 132
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of the past decade, beyond the provision of defensive strength and unity, for some positive policy which will supplement all that we have understood by "containment", for some accommodation with the Soviet Union which will introduce a measure of stability into a highly precarious international situation. The defensive strength that we have now amassed suggests to my mind that we can safely embark on such a search, so long as we keep our wits about us and continue to test every proposal against the touchstone of our vital security interests. And the assessment that I have made of Soviet intentions suggests that such an effort would not be foredoomed to failure, since, while there can be no doubt of the rooted animosity of the Soviets toward us, the evidence would seem to indicate that they are not so deluded by Marxist doctrine as to be incapable of adjusting to the realities of the nuclear age. It is no reflection on the intellectual courage of the late Dr. Sidney Smith and his advisers, or on their imaginative initiative in this search for "a new positive policy" to supplement containment, to emphasize that they, and most of their fellow Canadians with them, were urged to this endeavour by the insecurity which they continually felt in their postwar Belgian-like, bottleneck position in an age of acute Soviet-American tension. In other words, in their attitude to Moscow, as to Peking, Canadians are continually conscious of the liabilities as well as the assets of their peculiar position vis-à-vis their southern neighbours. 3
It is in respect to their relations with less-developed nations that Canadians show themselves at their best, with a strong sense of moral obligation and spiritual responsibility, strengthened by confidence and pride in their domestic prosperity and qualified only by the occasional embarrassment of impinging domestic realities. Their own emergence, at some effort, from a position of colonial inferiority to one of complete constitutional autonomy makes Canadians very sympathetically disposed towards all movements of colonial peoples for independence. This helps to explain the cordial relations with India though these have also been strengthened by Mr. Nehru's personal standing in Canada, by the frequency with which Ottawa and New Delhi representatives have found themselves in the same lobby at United Nations and 133
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other conferences and by the fact that Canadians who experienced their own peculiar form of neutralism in the intra-Commonwealth discussions of the interwar years find less difficulty than other members of the old Commonwealth in understanding the postindependence neutralism of New Delhi. Other members of the old Commonwealth, who still find themselves charged with continuing economic responsibilities or strategic interest in non-selfgoverning territories, find this natural sympathy of Canadians for anti-colonialism a little trying, though, to do Canadian governments justice, the latter have usually been careful not to let this sympathy run to more than "abstention" when it comes to voting at international gatherings where the "colonial" interests of other Commonwealth members are involved. The positive interest in the progress of under-developed countries displays itself in a readiness to contribute generously from the fruits of the prosperity which the wartime and postwar industrial revolution has brought to Canada. An obvious example is the Colombo Plan, in respect to which I can report that the official actions of the government in Ottawa have warm support in all parts of Canada—including Quebec, where anti-colonialism strikes a peculiarly sensitive chord. The welcome given to Asian and West Indian students in Canadian technical colleges and universities is another illustration. A third example is provided by Canada's response at the 1958 Montreal Conference to the United States suggestion that increased contributions to the International Monetary Fund and to the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development be considered in order that services to under-developed countries might be maintained and extended. Canadian spokesmen not only favoured the proposal that all I.M.F. quotas and capital subscriptions to the Bank be doubled but also agreed to special additional increase of both for Canada as well as for Western Germany and Japan in line with the importance of these three countries in world trade. It was natural that Canadians should take an active interest in the projected formation of the West Indian Federation in 195758; natural also that this interest should be displayed more actively in the Maritimes and eastern Canada generally. For there had long been an historic link between eastern Canada and the West Indies which dates back to the days of the eighteenthcentury mercantile system, when Canadian lumber, flour and salted fish were exchanged for sugar, molasses and rum from the West Indian islands. This mutual economic association later 134
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fluctuated but was strengthened by preferential trade treaties from 1898 to 1926. As late as 1947-48 Canada's exports to the islands totalled $40,000,000 and her imports from them $58,000,000. Canadian banking and investment in the West Indies goes back to the establishment of a branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia in Jamaica in 1889; today this bank alone has 18 branches in the islands. A steamship service to and from the Maritimes was heavily subsidised by the government of Canada as well as receiving some support from the British colonial authorities. When federation was foreshadowed it received a warm welcome in Canada. Translating the welcome into concrete action was a little more difficult, as I was to detect during the closing weeks of my Canadian visit. The appropriate gestures had been made with cordiality from the Canadian side and with some expectations in the islands. Mount Allison University in New Brunswick had organised with the College of the West Indies an impressive couple of conferences during 1957, one in the islands and the other on the mainland. Canadian economists, historians and political scientists had offered their advice generously; there was some vague talk of linking the Federation with the Dominion in a free-trade area; technical assistance for the economic development of the islands seemed a natural form of Canadian co-operation. On March 10, 1958, Prime Minister Diefenbaker announced that a long-term plan of economic assistance "was being worked out". The future of the Federation was much under discussion when I was in eastern Canada; on December 13, 1958, the Toronto Financial Post ran a special supplement, "The West Indies: A Feature Report". Some commentators, however, were beginning to emphasize that a major problem of the new Federation would long continue to be the size and growth of its population. It was suggested that Canada's most helpful contribution would be more facilities for selected West Indian labour to migrate from the Federation to the Dominion. This, however, was a ticklish subject. Some trade-union leaders told me quite frankly that such a policy would in their view be most, unacceptable to Canadian workers. In such circumstances I was not surprised to find little evidence of active co-operation by Canadian immigration authorities. Indeed, I began to understand why it was that Sir Grantly Adams as Prime Minister of Barbados had sought to trade some of the sweet words about economic co-operation for a few positive indications as to the limits of West Indian immigration to Canada. He contrasted the vagueness and uncertainty of 135
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Canadian immigration policy with the restrictive but known quota system of the United States and went on to say that "there was an air of hypocrisy" about Canadian immigration policy. The latter seemed in practice to operate on the basis of colour but did not openly say so. The Canadian defence that the policy was "based on selection" was scarcely satisfying as no one outside the Department of Immigration appeared to know what was the basis or criterion of selection. This criticism provides a useful peg on which to hang some comments on the broader question of the attitude of Canadians towards non-white residents. I found this one of the most puzzling questions which I faced during my investigation. In British Columbia I had been prepared to find a substantial carryover from the prewar friction with even Canadian-born Japanese, but my friends in Vancouver confirmed the general argument of Professor H. F. Angus in the first chapter of his 1953 volume Canada and the Far East, 1940-1953, that the aftermath of a certain wartime hysteria on this subject had been very healthy. I did nevertheless notice press reports of difficulties being experienced by Orientals in respect to housing in certain suburbs of Vancouver which might well have appeared in United States newspapers. My difficulties on this subject were not lessened by the critical comments which were frequently directed to me after lectures given in different parts of Canada on postwar Australian foreign policy. I was accused of inconsistency in stating that Australia though still maintaining the policy of complete exclusion of non-whites from permanent residence—the socalled "White Australia Policy"—had since the second world war pursued with substantial success a policy of increasingly close Australian-Asian relations. This, I said, Australia had done by a generous policy of admitting Asian students for training and of otherwise taking an active part in technical assistance programmes and in other forms of Colombo Plan aids and improved economic and diplomatic associations with southeast Asian countries. When I replied to these criticisms by suggesting that a frank and open policy of complete exclusion of Asians from permanent residence on economic and social as distinct from racial grounds was less likely in the long run to cause dissatisfaction than one of non-exclusion in theory but non-admittance in practice, my Canadian audiences appeared unconvinced. They seemed at least satisfied that existing immigration policy in Canada was no serious barrier to close relations with the new members of the British 136
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Commonwealth or with other groups like the West Indian Federation which would eventually join the Commonwealth.
4 On the general question of Canada and the Commonwealth I must also confess freely that I left the Dominion in a state of considerable confusion and uncertainty. On two or three points there is no difficulty. With the new postwar members of the Commonwealth, as already indicated, Canadians have easy and cordial relations. Similarly, I personally met with nothing but the most friendly reception as an Australian and I am sure this attitude extends to governments as well as peoples of both Australia and New Zealand. I should not feel the same confidence in making any statements regarding Canadian relations with the Union of South Africa because of the complications of South African racial policies. Canadians find Apartheid difficult to reconcile with their own attitude towards Asian and African peoples with whom they do not have to live in close proximity. The difficulties involved in relations between English-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking "Europeans" in South Africa are understood a little better, but the problems of a multi-racial white society do not really constitute a bond between the two countries. Even in Quebec I found little interest in Afrikaner nationalism, perhaps because its close association with Calvinism evokes no sympathy among French-speaking Roman Catholics. Elsewhere in the Dominion I found Canadians critical of what they feel to be Nationalist-Afrikaner departure from "democratic" principles. As to the Commonwealth as a whole rather than its several overseas members, I had much difficulty in obtaining a clear picture of Canadian attitudes. Among older Canadians, mention of the Commonwealth usually produced an assurance of active goodwill and eagerness for close collaboration. On analysis this attitude usually proved to resolve itself into either one or other of two: nostalgic and often racial feeling for the United Kingdom or intellectual conviction of the value of the Commonwealth as a multi-racial international body, a United Nations in miniature. Each of these pro-Commonwealth sentiments was significant and deserves closer examination but neither seemed to touch the younger generation of Canadians very deeply. The nostalgic link with the Commonwealth via the United Kingdom is a good deal stronger than I had expected to find it. 137
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During some fifteen or sixteen lectures to Canadian groups in different parts of the Dominion I invariably found that, during the discussion period, someone in the audience would rise to make sure that I understood how deeply he "and a great many more Canadians" deplored the weakening of Canada's unity with Britain over Suez in 1956. There had also been, I felt, a great deal of sympathy with the Diefenbaker line on the subject of increased economic ties with the United Kingdom, even among those who felt that the policy was impracticable. Since, however, any revival of political association with the United Kingdom in its older Imperialist form was quite out of keeping with immediate prewar and postwar trends in Canada, this older, nostalgic, racial association with the United Kingdom tends to express itself in terms of warm support for the "Commonwealth" where Australians of similar views would speak quite frankly, as Prime Minister R. G. Menzies often does, of the "British Empire". Declared support for the Commonwealth among the second group of Canadians who are deeply attached to the principles of a humanitarian and multi-racial association of nations can also confuse an investigator. This frequently amounts to no more than a desire to welcome new Asian and African members and to use co-operation with them, inside and outside the United Nations, as a means of checking "dangerous" persistence of colonialist or aggressive tendencies elsewhere. When I talked to either of these two groups about the desirability of building up a closer relationship between the members of the Commonwealth as a unit, in potential counterblast to excessive United States influence, I found surprisingly little positive response. Even Mr. Lester Pearson, though sympathetic to all possible forms of closer collaboration and contact between Commonwealth members, talked from his personal knowledge of the difficulties of trying to make the Commonwealth function as a diplomatic unit—there were too many points of divergence between its several members. And there was, I found, surprisingly little knowledge of the affairs of countries like Australia or New Zealand—almost as little as there is of Canadian affairs in either of those two Dominions. With younger Canadians, in particular, I found not only lack of knowledge but also lack of interest. Applied to my general question of the possibility of building up a stronger Commonweath diplomatic association as a sort of substitute for the older Imperialist east-west counterweight to excessive North Americanism earlier in the twentieth century, my younger Canadian academic friends were disposed to say quite 138
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bluntly that, in their view, such talk of the Commonwealth was mere ballyhoo, that, to the rank and file of Canadians, the Commonweath was little more than a blessed word, that it had no concrete reality for them. I should conclude by mentioning one variant of this "debunking" of the Commonwealth idea which I found, in Toronto of all places. I was privileged to read a brilliantly written Data Paper on "Canada and the Commonwealth" written to express Canadian viewpoints at a forthcoming intra-Commonwealth conference. This paper not only debunked several of the more emotional forms in which Commonwealth sentiment had expressed itself in the past. It also seemed to me to reflect something of a reaction to allegedly unrealistic glorification of the Commonwealth consequent upon the electoral victory of Conservatives in federal politics—as reflected in the Prime Minister's earlier efforts at trade diversion from the United States to the United Kingdom and his 1958 visit to Commonwealth countries overseas—and to the perhaps excessively vigorous presentation of the Conservative viewpoint in recent Canadian historiography. Like all debunking of emotive argument this implied depreciation of the Commonwealth seemed to me likely to do as much harm as good. For what it is worth I record the impression as another illustration of the extent to which Canadian attitudes on external relations may be coloured by considerations which are largely domestic in character.
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CONCLUSION
THE central theme which seemed to emerge from this survey of Canadian attitudes on foreign policy before it had been written has already been stated in the Introduction. Such particular inferences as it appeared reasonable to draw from each set of facts examined have been discussed in their several contexts. The following brief concluding comments suggest themselves to me after re-reading the text as a whole for the first time. The first concerns the question of Commonwealth relations discussed in the preceding chapter. I am again impressed, as I was after a similar inquiry in South Africa eight years earlier, by the need for more specific efforts to ensure direct and continuing contacts at various occupational and professional levels—economic, political, cultural and scientific—between the several overseas members of the old Commonwealth. Between the historic centre of the Commonwealth and the other member nations old and new, there is a fairly steady flow though even this is not as strong as some would wish and, as far as the older overseas members are concerned, tends to be too much of a one-way traffic. But between countries like Canada and Australia there is a very limited direct interchange. Young Australians in search of adventure frequently break their journey to the United Kingdom and Europe and work for a time in Canada as typists, nurses, journalists or television and radio announcers or technicians. At almost every address I gave in Canada on Australian foreign policy an Australian materialised from the audience to chat a while and sometimes to bring himself or herself up to date on events at home. The reverse does not hold. It is comparatively rare for a Canadian to visit Australia except in the direct line of business or diplomatic relations. Yet there are obvious points of common concern which might be explored by individuals, to their mutual advantage, and be 140
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exploited directly or indirectly by governments, in the national interest. Academic exchanges and postgraduate training form one obvious line of development where hitherto relatively little has been done. A prerequisite is, of course, financial assistance in the form of scholarships, fellowships, and travel grants. But something more is needed than an overhead organisation, such as that of the Canada Council and, perhaps, the new Commonwealth Scholarships Scheme foreshadowed in very general terms at the 1958 Montreal Conference. In the initial stages some degree of individual canvass will be required if potential applicants of the requisite quality, from either country, are to be encouraged to choose Canadian and Australian graduate schools, as the case may be, in preference to those already known to them in the United States or the United Kingdom—and known to them not merely by general reputation but also by reason of the fact that some of their own university teachers have direct personal contacts on the campus in question. There's a certain vicious circle here which has to be broken through even when funds are available. I am not, I hope, improperly revealing knowledge originally obtained from confidential sources when I say that the first Australian to be awarded a junior non-resident Canada Council fellowship (for which he had applied) declined it in preference for one which I had been instrumental in securing for him, of similaV monetary value, from a United States foundation, which enabled him to go to an American university much better known to Australian students. Some progress has already been achieved by the exchange of Canadian and Australian professors organised with Carnegie funds through the Canadian and Australian Humanities Research Councils. I am happy to testify to the valuable academic ambassadorial work done in this way by Drs. Claude Bissell and Maurice Careless of Toronto but there is still more personal liaison work of this sort to be done before an effective academic flow between the two countries can be steady and mutually valuable. What applies to higher education must also be relevant to other fields. More pumps than the academic need effective priming. And if I am not in danger of mixing metaphors I shall add that Canadians and Americans are not the only friendly and (in the main) English-speaking peoples whose relations may suffer from taking one another too much for granted. My second comment is a final reference to Canadian-American relations. In the text above I have been inclined to deprecate the impatience with which Canadians tend to press their grievances 141
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upon their southern neighbours, sometimes in a way calculated to exasperate those in authority in Washington who are doing their best to help under conditions of difficulty and counter-pressure of which Canadians are often ill-informed. Having briefly refreshed my memories of former visits to the United States under circumstances which enabled me to see those pressure groups at work, I'm not sure that I should counsel Canadians to soft-pedal too much in making nuisances of themselves in Washington. If I may very generously paraphrase the relevant remarks on this point of a New Zealand friend with considerable experience in the United States capital: "The backroom boys in the State Department are pretty tough guys. They can take it. And if your Canadian friends stop jumping on their toes you can be sure that American vested interests won't!" From this I pass somewhat awkwardly to my third and concluding comment. However tactically important it may be for Canadian negotiators to keep up their pressure south of the border, I feel there is real danger in this agitation being allowed to retain some of its present highly emotive if not hysterical forms within Canada. If I may parody a famous mot, I suggest that anti-Americanism should be a commodity for export only. At home the emphasis should be on those other more healthy forms of national self-consciousness, the significance of which remains with me as perhaps my most dominant impression of contemporary Canada. For they reflect the determination of a great many Canadians to fight, and if need be to accept a lower standard of living, to preserve what they can enjoy and respect as something distinctively Canadian—to preserve it not only against too pervasive a penetration from the south but also against the potentially centrifugal forces of Canada's own history and geography. I believe this last point to be of great importance and I conclude this little book as I did the second of two C.B.C. broadcasts recorded in New York shortly after my arrival from Canada: I left Fredericton, New Brunswick, for Boston and New York tremendously impressed by the stimulating character of the challenge which now presents itself to the peoples of Canada. The avowed determination of Canadian leaders in so many different walks of life to preserve their distinctive existence as a separate community of communities, while recognising the facts of North American life in this second half of the twentieth century, is something which commands respect. If I were a Canadian I 142
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should feel proud to help in taking up this challenge in continued and realistic service to ideals and practices which owe much to the traditions of two continents, of two religions and two languages, and of more than two races.
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APPENDIX
Extracts from the Répons of THE HAYS-COFFIN SPECIAL STUDY MISSION TO CANADA Author's Note (1) The two Reports of this unofficial Mission which are frequently referred to in the text above—especially in chapters n and vin—are worth reading in full. The Recommendations only are reproduced here. (2) Both Reports were printed by the U.S. Government Printing Office (Washington, D.C.) in 1958. The First Report bears the date May 5, and the Second Report December 19. (3) Readers of the full texts of the two Reports may detect the significant absence of any evidence of direct contact between the members of the Special Study Mission and representatives of Canadian labour unions. I was informed by Congressman Coffin that an effort had been made to offset this omission by discussions with United States labour representatives regarding the critical comments made by Canadian businessmen.
FIRST REPORT (pp. 13-15) In this section of our report we have most clearly in mind that the Committee on Foreign Affairs has only general jurisdiction over our relations with other countries. In several vital areas the specific jurisdiction lies in such committees as Agriculture and Ways and Means. What we here attempt to do is to chart the broad directions which our policy should take if the United States is to make a major contribution to better, more mature United States-Canadian relations. We do not attempt to prescribe for our northern neighbor, but it is obvious that better relations are a two-way street. 144
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/. Trade information A primary task in the field of better economic relations is the compiling of more detailed authoritative statistics on a regional basis as to the origin and amount of United States exports to Canada, as well as to imports from Canada. These data should be kept up to date and be of such nature that the advantages and disadvantages to any area of a change of tariff policy could be predicted. The dissemination of such information would in many instances underscore the mutual advantage of more trade between the two countries. Even where a net disadvantage to either country were revealed, it would at least be seen in perspective. This project might well be a joint enterprise by both Governments. 2. Surplus agricultural commodities Prior to and while carrying out the sales for local currencies of surplus agricultural commodities such as wheat to foreign governments, the United States should pay particular attention to Canada's interests. In view of her heavy dependence on wheat exports, careful consideration should be given by our Government to the effects of any sales on the Canadian economy. Not only should the executive department proceed with this awareness, but Congress should also realize that a temporary solution of a United States farm problem could create serious problems for Canada. Commercial markets, capable of making payments in dollars, should not be approached through the mechanism of Public Law 480. In short, a certain amount of forbearance is indicated. The possibilities, advantages, and hazards of a joint United States-Canadian wheat marketing corporation should be explored. 3. Changes in United States trade policies (a) Changes either in the form of quantity limitations or tariff levels, should wherever possible be preceded by the fullest attempt to explore alternatives, explanation and discussion. These steps should involve more than the particular official directly responsible and his opposite number to the end that there shall be a minimum of misunderstanding and acrimony. (b) Changes in tariff classification should always be the subject of a deliberate process of consideration and review. (c) Studies should continually be made with the objective of 145
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exploring the feasibility of reducing or abolishing tariffs on an item-by-item basis. (d) Increased attention should be given to the task of reducing the redtape involving a businessman who seeks to export an item to either country. 4. Congressional awareness The vital role which Congress plays in determining United States-Canadian relationships, for better or worse, must no longer be ignored. The fact needs to be constantly borne in mind that, unlike the parliamentary system of Canada, the executive branch does not necessarily speak for the legislative branch. It is not enough that there be continuing liaison between the Cabinets of the two nations. The following fields of activity should be explored. (a) Congressional representation, in observing status, on the Canada-United States Trade Committee (at present, a committee of the two executive branches). Our information is that Canadian parliamentarians would understand the need for such liaison under our system. (b) Formal recognition of Canada-United States relationship as a continuing area of interest by a subcommittee or a joint committee. (c) Periodic visits to each country by the parliamentarians of the other. 5. Citizen efforts For many years the Chamber of Commerce of the United States and the Canadian Chamber of Commerce have jointly sponsored a Canadian-United States Committee. Recently the Canadian-American committee has been established to stimulate research in problems in this area. The work of both is valuable and could well be even more significant. Through such private sponsorship, • activities similar to the following might well be carried out. (a) Citizen-group visits to the capital of the other country. (b) Activity by the major service clubs. They have a membership in both Canada and the United States, and are uniquely qualified to foster projects and programs to bring about a better understanding, such as, for example, educational exchanges on a much wider scale. 146
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6. Communication mediums Although freedom of the press means freedom not to cover as well as freedom of coverage, it may be suggested to the newspapers, radio, and television that American coverage of Canadian news might well merit a careful review. 7. Travel restrictions Increased knowledge by Canadians and by United States citizens of the problems and attitudes of each other is essential to understanding and cooperation. Travel increases this understanding. To that end every effort .should be made to eliminate unnecessary restrictions on the free flow of people between the two countries. 8. The challenge -for business Economic facts cannot be ignored, but their impact on people can be changed by sensitive and intelligent effort. This kind of effort is in the long-run interest of American stockholders and business leaders with investments in Canada. Financial and personnel policies, promotional programs, community participation —all demand much in imagination and sensitivity. The American business community in Canada can render itself and the cause of better Canadian-United States relations a great service by making a conscious effort to follow the example of leaders in this field of being good citizens away from home. 9. Déjense economy The existing harmony and mutuality in defense planning could be strengthened by rationalizing, where feasible, roles, assignments, and procurement. Certainly in defense planning thought should be given to avoiding unnecessary duplication. CONCLUSION
Canadian and United States interdependence demands a new category of relationship. Canada does not stand in a position toward us of a "foreign" country. By no means should it be considered as a poor relation. The concept to be realized in the best interests of both countries is that of free and powerful nations of different background and capabilities, united through a basic agreement on values *and aspiration, and voluntarily joined in enterprises, domestic and foreign, calculated to strengthen the chances for a world reflecting their common values. This is the challenge for Canadian-United States relations.
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SECOND REPORT (pp. 38-43) 1. INTERPARLIAMENTARY UNDERSTANDING We heartily endorse the proposed meeting between representatives of the Canadian Parliament and the United States Congress. We sincerely believe that meetings between the two groups of parliamentarians will, because of the differences between the Canadian and the United States parliamentary systems, facilitate better understanding of mutual problems. In Canada the executive leadership is identical with legislative leadership. In the United States, even when the executive and legislative branches are controlled by the same party, there is no guarantee of legislation to carry out administration policies. Because of the separation of powers of the executive and the legislative branches in the United States, information flowing to the Executive does not necessarily reach the Congress and, consequently, action may be taken in ignorance of that information. Since Congress has responsibility for so many matters in the field of economic relations and trade, it is vital that these matters be brought to the attention of the Congress and that a forum be provided for discussion of these matters with our counterparts across the border. Although this interparliamentary working group is informal in both structure and procedure, we hope that it will develop an agenda, hold well-planned periodic meetings, and will gradually involve a large number of parliamentarians of both countries. 2. CABINET MEETINGS
Regularity and frequency of meetings have not characterized the Joint United States-Canadian Committee on Trade and Economic Affairs. The Canada-United States Ministerial Committee on Joint Defense is only beginning to function. We feel that the success of both committees will depend on more constant communication and conference at the career-staff level, adequate staff preparation for committee meetings, and more frequent meetings. There also exists a need for an appropriate intergovernmental vehicle through which all current problems between the two countries could be viewed in perspective. Such would seem to be a prerequisite to the making of top-level decisions by both Governments which might well affect several problem areas. 3. A FIFTH DIMENSION FOR BUSINESS AND LABOR
We have attempted, in our discussion of United StatesCanadian business problems in the text, to give as thorough and
148
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balanced a discussion of the problems as practicable. We deliberately refrain from specific policy recommendations because of the conviction that a long stride toward solution lies in the development of a sophisticated understanding of the issues. In the United States, management and labor have four points of view to consider as they engage in their own affairs or in collective bargaining: their own internal organizations, each other, government, and the public. To the extent that both United States management and labor take part in decisions affecting Canadian operations, a fifth factor is involved—the Canadian public. This Canadian public may consist of specialized fragments, such as investors, community leaders, employees, union leaders and members, or consumers. But all share the same basic antipathy to any real or fancied slight to their instinct for sovereignty. Consequently, the decision-making processes of management and labor should, for their own self-interest, take this fifth factor into account. Education on this point imposed from without would be futile. Our earnest hope is that within the houses of labor and management more sensitive attitudes and policies could be developed. The Chamber of Commerce, the CanadianAmerican Committee, and banks could well take the lead insofar as management is concerned. The combined AFL-CIO, generally internationally minded, could perform a useful leadership role for the ranks of labor. 4. MONETARY EDUCATION
We have already mentioned the possibility of educational programs in currency premiums sponsored by the Treasury Department, possibly in conjunction with banks and chambers of commerce in the areas of greatest Canadian business and tourist visitation. The international service clubs could perform a useful service in popularizing such programs. 5. TARIFF AND TRADE LAWS AND ADMINISTRATION
We can do no better on this point than to repeat the recommendation in our earlier report: (a) Changes either in the form of quantity limitations or tariff levels should, wherever possible, be preceded by the fullest attempt to explore alternatives, explanation, and discussion. These 149
CANADIANS AND FOREIGN POLICY
steps should involve more than the particular official directly responsible and his opposite number to the end that there shall be a minimum of misunderstanding and acrimony. (b) Changes in tariff classification should always be the subject of a deliberate process of consideration and review. (c) Studies should continually be made with the objective of exploring the feasibility of reducing or abolishing tariffs on an item-by-item basis. (d) Increased attention should be given to the task of reducing the redtape involving a businessman who seeks to export an item to either country. 6. TRADE INFORMATION
We think one of the best antidotes for irresponsible or unrealistic protectionism is knowledge. By knowledge we mean more than the general, unthinking acceptance of the principles of liberal trade policies. We feel the time has come in the United States when both officials and private citizens need to have a clearer understanding of the impact of imports and exports on all parts of the economy. Trade policy is one of the most difficult subjects an industrialized nation faces. For this subject to be handled successfully and consistently, a high degree of citizen understanding is demanded. This is why we recommend in the first report the accumulation and maintenance of regional statistics relating to imports from and exports to Canada. Preliminary study indicates that such a service would be expensive. Nevertheless, we feel that information of the source of our exports and destination of goods we import is essential. This kind of information should not be confined to United States-Canadian trade but should ultimately extend to all our foreign trade. 7. NEW APPROACHES TO COMMODITY STABILIZATION
As we have studied the United States-Canadian problems relating to commodities we have come to realize that a bilateral approach frequently offers less opportunity for a workable solution than an approach involving a number of nations. The trade front of the cold war has recently been highlighted by the relative ease with which the Communist bloc can enter any commodity field and wreak havoc by lower than economic prices. The implications of these commodity forays are more 150
APPENDIX
ominous today when so many nations in Latin America, Africa, and south Asia are predominantly dependent on a single commodity. We would underscore the importance of the report of the special studies project of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund entitled "Foreign Economic Policy for the Twentieth Century."1 The report urges that the United States encourage the formation of regional arrangements which would strive for "a joint accord on monetary and exchange arrangements, a common discipline on fiscal matters, and a free movement of capital and labor" (p. 29). The basic objectives of such arrangements are well stated: Regional arrangements can spur world economic development. They can make possible more rational international economic relationships. Instead of large numbers of states dealing with each other bilaterally, large trading areas can regulate their relationships to bring about the greatest mutual benefit. In addition, such arrangements will permit weaker economies to withstand more effectively the impact of selective trade offensives by larger states, such as the Soviet bloc (p. 29). The report recognizes the inherent difficulties in international commodity stabilization proposals, but adds: But the situation in a number of countries is now so acute and the outlook ahead so grim that immediate action is required to avert crises and to deal with these problems on a long-term basis (p. 32). It suggests exploring such possiblities as extending international credits to ease balance-of-payments difficulties through such agencies as the International Monetary Fund and ¿he ExportImport Bank; agreements between producing and consuming countries to set periodic limits on price fluctuations; regional common markets; regional payments unions; and commodity agreements. In November 1958, the United States and the Latin American nations met to discuss proposals aimed at reducing excessive commodity instability. We believe that similar talks within the framework of NATO would be a constructive approach, whether or not immediate specific agreements are attainable. We think that concerted emphasis on these problems, possibly on an 1 Doubleday & Co., Inc., Garden City, N.Y., 1958.
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industry-by-industry basis, would have two beneficial effects. They would help develop the potential of NATO in the economic area and might well be a constructive factor in the current efforts of nations in Western Europe to achieve practicable trading relationships among themselves and with other nations. 8. AGRICULTURAL SURPLUS DISPOSAL
Pending any long-range approach to the problems created by agricultural surpluses which might arise out of efforts suggested in the preceding section, the chances for easing of United StatesCanadian tensions probably lie in courses of conduct consistently followed rather than in any new organizational framework. These courses of conduct should, at the minimum, consist of a vigorous compliance with the terms of the International Wheat Agreement, and systematic consultations between industry representatives, between the agriculture officials of the two countries at the career-staff level, and between the Cabinet level officials in the Joint United States-Canadian Committee on Trade and Economic Affairs. 9. POLICY
In our view, although the voluntary oil import quotas do provide some protection to domestic producers of oil, the net effect is detrimental to the interests of the United States and its Government. The oil available in the United States and Canada constitutes a reserve for defensive purposes regardless of whether it is in Canada or the United States. The United States is becoming less and less self-sufficient in its oil resources and consideration should be given to the development of alternative sources close at hand, specifically Canada. Furthermore, the oil import quotas have contributed to developments in Canada which ultimately may have the effect of displacing markets for Venezuelan and other foreign oil, with an obvious impact on United States foreign policy and on the United States position in the cold war. We cannot maintain friends if we refuse to trade with them and if we do not endeavor to protect their interests. Any oil policy of the United States, while granting the greatest possible protection to United States producers, must also take into consideration the marketing needs and requirements of our friends. Otherwise, we are faced with deteriorating situations in 152
APPENDIX
many countries where oil is produced. Consequently, we recommend the abolition of the oil import quota system, at least insofar as Canada is concerned, in order to better serve our defense and foreign policy needs. We are not informed as to the extent to which the executive branch is aggressively studying the probable extent of usable oil reserves in the Western Hemisphere. We would urge such a continuing study. Comprehensive studies such as that of the Paley Commission should be subjected to scrutiny and revision as new data become available. 10. DEFENSE COOPERATION
In view of the increased Canadian reliance on United States produced weapons, particularly in the missile and other advanced categories, consideration should be given by the Department of Defense to permitting greater access by the Canadians to United States defense procurement contracts. The Canadians have extensive capabilities in the components field and if the Canadians are going to purchase from us, then we should, in turn, permit them to participate in the components business. It is suggested that consideration be given to the means whereby such an end can be secured; specifically, to the question of the applicability of the "Buy American" status to procurement in Canada and to improved procedures to inform Canadian manufacturers of proposed procurements and of invitations to bid. The recently established Canada-United States Ministerial Committee on Joint Defense, which is to be composed of representatives of the United States and Canadian defense agencies, would appear to be an appropriate vehicle for discussing this proposition and for laying some sort of groundwork for positive action. 11. COLUMBIA RIVER POWER DEVELOPMENT
On the basis of recent, informal remarks by Mr. Green, the Acting Prime Minister of Canada, and Chairman McKay of the United States Section of the International Joint Commission, it appears that there may be an early settlement of United StatesCanadian differences over developmnt of the Columbia River. In view of the long history of this matter, while developments are encouraging, we would recommend that, in the event substantial roadblocks should prevent final settlement, this matter be referred to the highest levels. 153
CANADIANS AND FOREIGN POLICY
12. FISHERIES
In many of our recommendations, the action we suggest involves a greater degree of forbearance on the part of the United States than of Canada. In fisheries the reverse is true. In the current dispute over extending jurisdiction beyond the traditional 3-mile limit, we are inclined to urge more forbearance on the part of Canadian interests. We fear, apart from the fact that economic and trade patterns have long been based on the 3-mile concept, that attempts to assert a wider range of purely national jurisdiction will turn back the clock in the dramatically successful area of fisheries cooperation. 13. ALASKA INTERNATIONAL RAIL AND HIGHWAY COMMISSION
We hope that the Congress will give its fullest support to the Alaska International Rail and Highway Commission. We hope also that there will be the closest cooperation with the Canadian interdepartmental group which is working on the problems of transportation in western Canada. 14. CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING
On the governmental level, we suggest that the feasibility of making available a Fulbright-type grant for study in Canada be seriously considered. On the academic level, there is ample room for increased emphasis in school curricula on Canada and Canadian affairs. We acknowledge the many efforts of such private groups as universities, service clubs, the Chamber of Commerce, the Canadian-American Committee in promoting better understanding. We hope that the years ahead will see a multiplying of meetings, institutes, conventions, round table, and panel discussions. We hesitate to prescribe for the press. We merely report and commend a suggestion given us by a concerned Canadian editor. This suggestion was that some widely representative professional group such as the Society of American Newspaper Editors place the subject of coverage of Canadian news high on the agenda of one of its meetings and invite representative Canadian and United States reporters and editors to speak on the subject.
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CONCLUSION
This report would not be complete without some reflection on the potential future course of United States-Canadian relations. Each country has had considerable experience in pioneering new types of governmental organisation and in adjusting the delicate balance of interests between closely related but not identical governments. From the time of the American Revolution the United States developed a unique Federal system. Canada has evolved from a British colony to an independent nation, federal in internal structure and tied to the mother country by membership in the British Commonwealth. Both the United States and Canada have been among the most active participants in such international organizations as the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the Colombo Plan. It may well be that we have reached a stage where the cooperation possible between the two North American neighbours can be much greater than is usually found, even among allies and traditional friends. Such cooperation must develop within the context of world relationships and responsibilities. Internal differences will continue to exist. But the realization that full strength for the free world depends largely on the ability of the Western Hemisphere to provide a firm economic and military base on which to build emphasizes the need for the closest kind of coordination, especially between the United States and Canada. The most important factor in this development will be the attitude which each country takes toward the relationship. Common trust, forbearance, and frank and open exchanges of opinions are the only foundation on which a fruitful relationship can be built. Beyond this, necessary mechanisms can be formulated to deal with specific problems and to formalize cooperation wherever necessary. From our experience in this area we may develop techniques and approaches which can be used in strengthening our bonds with other free nations, demonstrating to the rest of the world that free societies can cooperate without fear and without domination of one by another.
155
INDEX
Adams, Grantly, 135 Afrikaner, 89, 95, 98 Agriculture; see Economy, Canadian Air Force, 35; see also Defence Alberta; see Provinces; Universities Allen, C. A., 11 Allison, Carlyle, 8 American Federation of Labor ( A.F.L.), 29 Anglican; see Churches Angus, H. F., 136 Apartheid, 137 Armstrong, H. S., 7 Army, British and Canadian, 32, 35; tee also Defence "Arrow", The; see Defence Asia: Canada and India, 133-134; Canadian trade with, 129; increased Canadian interest in, 128-129, and effect of U.S. policy thereon, 129-130, 132; migration from, 136; missionary influence in, 128-129; within the Commonwealth, 138; see also China; Immigration; Pacific Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, 107 Australia, 86, 89, 90, 112, 137, 138, 140 Australian, 81, 82, 87, 89, 91, 97, 136, 140
Avro Aircraft Ltd., 42 Bailey, A. G., 7 Ballantyne, Murray G., 12 Banff, 85 Banks: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 134; Montreal, 11; Nova Scotia, 134; Royal Bank of Canada, 11, 131 Baptist; see Churches Barber, Joseph, 70 Barfoot, W. F., 12 Bates, M. B., 11 Bedson, Derek, 12 Bentiey, C. F., 7, 26 Bible Belt, 78 Bilingualism, 104, 109 Bissell, Claude T., 6, 7, 73, 141 Boer War, 98 Bomarc interceptor; see Defence Boston, 127, 142 Brady, Alexander, 7 Brehaut, J. W. 8
156
"Brinkmanship", 128, 130 British Columbia; see Universities; Provinces British Commonwealth, 117, 134, 137139, 140, 141 British Empire, 93, 138 Broadcasting: and nationalism, 91; C.B.C., 11, 12, 72-76, 91, 142; Fowler Commission, 4, 72-74, 75-76; programme sources (U.S., U.K., France, Canada), 75; statistics, 74-5; T.V., effect on sound broadcasting, 75; see also U S. culture and Canada Brown, G. W., 7, 12, 80 Brunei, Michel, 7, 97-99 Cadique, F. A., 7 Calgary, 2, 21-22, 118 California, 111, 113, 117 Calvinism, 137 Canada and the Far East, 136 Canada and the United Nations, 82 Canada Council, 3, 13, 76-77, 95, 105, 117, 141 Canada House, London, 14 Canada in World Affairs, 82 Canada-United States Committee on Education, 114 Canada-United States Trade Committee, 146
Canadian-American Committee, 22, 124125, 149, 154 Canadian-American inter-parliamentary committee, 118, 123, 146, 148 Canadian-American relations: see Asia; Canadian-American Committee; Defence; Economy, Canadian; Education; Friendship; Government; Tourist traffic; U.S. culture and Canada Canadian and Australian Humanities Uesearch Councils, 141 Canadian and Catholic Confederation of Labour (C.C.C.L.); see Labour Canadian Brotherhood of Railway, Transport and General Workers, 10, 92 Canadian Information Service, 114 Canadian Historical Association, 119 Canadian Historical Review, 115 Canadian Institute of International Affairs 2, 12, 36
INDEX Canadian Labour Congress ( C.L.C. ) ; see Labour Canadian Labour Party, prospects of formation of; see Labour; C.C.F.-C.L.C. Canadien, 97, 98 Canberra, 89 Caple, Kenneth, 12 Careless, J. M. S., 7, 141 Carnegie Corporation of New York, 2, 124 Carter, Gwendolen M., 128 Chambers of Commerce, 146, 149 China: recognition of Peking, 79, 128, 130; see also Asia; Quemoy Christianity; see Churches; Religion, organised Churches: Anglican, 12, 79-80, 83, 86, 87; Baptist, 80, 118; Methodist, 86; Roman Catholic, 12, 83, 84, 92-105, 109; statistics for Maritime Provinces, 109; United, 12, 79, 83, 85, 87, 88, 92, 118; see also Idealism; Religion, organised Clarke, N. R., 12 Claxton, Brooke, 13, 76 Clyne, J. V., 11 Coffin, Frank M; see Hays-Coffin Special Study Mission to Canada Cohen, Maxwell, 7 Coldwell, M. J., 8 Colombo Plan, 81, 134, 138, 155 Columbia River power development, 153 Commonwealth; see British Commonwealth Commonwealth of Australia; see Australia Companies, Canadian subsidiary, 17-21 Confederation, Canadian, 91, 106 Congress and Canadian-American relations 50, 146, 148, 154; see also Hays-Coffin Special Study Mission to Canada "Conquest", 94, 106 Conservative; see Parties, political "Containment", 133 Conway, J. S., 7 Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (C.C.F.), 8, 24, 118, 132; see also Parties, political Corbett, D. C., 7 Cote, Langevin, 8 Council on Foreign Relations, 124 Crowe, Harry, 87-88 Cultural considerations: Ch V, passim; Canadian and Canadien, 97-99; see also U.S. culture and Canada Curtis, G. F., 7 Curtis, W. A., 39, 42 Dalgleish, Oakley, 8, 131 Dansereau, Pierre, 7 Davies, G., 7 Defence: and nationalism, 92; "Arrow", The, 42, 44, 45, 46; Bomarc interceptor, 42, 44; DEW-line, 39, 40, 44; NATO, 33-34, 151, 152; NORAD, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45; officers' attitudes, 6, 42; Permanent Joint Board on (P.J.B.D.), 36-38; Research Board, 12; Service chiefs, 32, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42; U.K.-Canadian relations, 3446; U.S. Asian policy and, 130; U.S.-
Canadian relations — before World War II, 32-33 —since, 35, 149, 153; and Ch. Ill passim; see also Air Force; Army; Navy Denney, E. R., 14 DEW-line; see Defence Diefenbaker, John G., 8, 60, 76, 135, 138
Dion, Gerard, 100, 103 Donnelly, M. S., 7 Doucette, Holland, 10 Downing Street, 2, 89 Dryden, R. G., 10 Dulles, John Foster, 59, 128, 129, 130 Dunton, A. Davidson, 6, 73 Duplessis, M., 63, 94-98, 102, 105 Durham, Lord, 105 Durham, N. C., 4 Dutch Reformed Church, 86 Economic recession; see Economy, Canadian Economy, Canadian: agriculture, 24-27, 145; economic recession, 28; Gordon Commission on, 4, 27, 29, 125; grain surplus disposal programme, 24-27, 48, 125, 145, 152; industrial revolution and, 15 et seq., in Maritimes, 16; in Quebec, 16, 100-104; in Vancouver, 16; oil, 21-24, 125, 152, 153; U.S. and, 17-27; see also Companies, Canadian subsidiary; Industry, Canadian; Labour Edens, A. Hollis, 124 Edinborough, Arnold, 59 Edmonton, 2, 78 Education: Canadian history in U.S. universities, 116-118; correctives to ignorance, 122-126; educational exchanges. 146-154; lack of U.S. graduates' interest in Canada, 116; limits to Americans' knowledge of Canada, 115-117, and vice-versa, 118-120; U.S. primary and secondary curricula and Canada, 113114; see also Scholarships; Universities Eisenhower, D., 37 Elwin, George, 11 Empire Trust Company of New York, 19 External Affairs, Department of, 50 Falardeau, J. C., 7, 104 Farmer; see Economy, Canadian Farmers' Union, 11, 54 Farnham, D. W., 7, 119-120 Federation of the West Indies; tee West Indies Ferguson, George, 8, 112 Filion, Gerard, 96 Finlay, James F., 12 Fisheries, 154 Flemming, Hugh John, 9, 107 Fontaine, H., 7 Fontaine, Roger, 8 Foreign Affairs Committee; tee HaysCoffin Special Study Mission to Canada Foreign Relations Committee; see HaysCoffin Special Study Mission to Canada France, 72, 93
157
CANADIANS AND FOREIGN POLICY Frane, J. N., 11 Fraser, Blair, 8 Fredericton, N.B., 3, 4, 26, 110, 142 Fregault, Guy, 7 French-Canadian, 10, 83, 84, 90, 93, 95, 97-102, 104-105, 106, 109 Friendship: of Americans for Canadians, 117, coupled with ignorance and detachment, 118, and with some criticisms of Canadians' personal characteristics. 120
Fowler Report; see Broadcasting Frost, Leslie, 9, 63 Fulbright-type grant, 154 Garvey, E. C., 7 Geneva, 97 Geography, 89 Germany, Western, 134 Gibbings, C. W., 11 Gibson, F. W., 7 Glazebrook, George, 12 Gordon Commission; see Economy, Canadian Government: effect of U.S. and Canadian Government co-operation on foreign policy, 47-50; popular ignorance of current practices, 49-51; see also Parties, political Graybiel, R. A., 8 Gray Lectureship, 98 Great Britain; see United Kingdom Guay, M.-E., 7 Habitant, 100 Hamilton, 11 Harrison, Mark, 54-6 Hartford, Jerome, 10 Hatfield, Leonard, 80 Hawrelak, William, 12 Hays, Brooks; see Hays-Coffin Special Study Mission to Canada Hays-Coffin Special Study Mission to Canada, 20, 23-4, 112, 113, 124, 144155
History: American, in Canadian universities, 119-120; Canadian Historical Association, 119; Canadian Historical Review, 115; French Canadian school of, 97-99; Mississippi Valley Historical Association, 119; relationship of Canadian history to American history, 119-120, its place in U.S. schools and universities, 115-117 Home, George, 10 Hiibener, Jean I., 7 Hungary, 132 Idealism; Ch. VI passim; see also Churches; Religion, organised Ideological influences: and racial, 93; communist, 118, 131; see also Idealism Immigration: Asian and West Indian, 135, 136; assimilation policy, 68-9 India; see Asia Indo-China, 128 Industrial Relations in Canada, 28 158
Industry, Canadian; see Economy, Canadian
International Journal, 36 International Monetary Fund, 134, 151 "International" unions; see Labour James, F. Cyril, 6 James, M. Hall, 114 Jamieson, Stuart, 7, 28 Japan, 134, 138 Journalists, 7-8; see also Press Juba, Stephen, 69 Kent, Tom, 8, 59 Kidd, J. Roby, 12 Kilboum, W. M., 7 King, W. L. M., 36, 109 Kingston, Queen's; see Universities Kinnear, David, 11 Knowles, Stanley, 56 Koemer, Walter, 11 Korea, 92, 128 Labour: Canadian Brotherhood of Railway, Transport and General Workers, 10, 92; C.C.C.L., 10, 53, 94, 97-103; C.L.C., 10, 95, 102; Hays-Coffin Mission and, 144, 148-149; "international" unions, 27-29, 56, 101; U.A.W.-C.I.O., 10; United Steel workers of America, 10; see also Parties, political Laurendeau, Andre, 96 League of Nations, 97 Lebel, Maurice, 7 Le Canada, les deux races, 92 Le Devoir, 96-97 Legault, Ivan, 10 Leger, Cardinal, 99-100 Lesage, Jean, 10, 59 Leyesque, G. H., 76 Liberal; see Parties, political Liquor question, 79, 87 Lockhart, W. C., 87 Los Angeles, 2, 111, 112 Lothian, Marquess of, 2 Lussier, I., 6 Lyons, R. J., 11 McCarthyism, 132 Mclnnes, G. C., 14 Maclnnis, Angus, 8 Maclnnis, Mrs. Angus (nee Grace Woodsworth), 8 Mclnnis, Edgar, 12, 82 Mackay, Colin B., 6 MacKenzie, Norman A., 6 Macklin, W. H. S., 39, 41 McNaught, Kenneth, 7 MacNutt, W. S., 7 Maheux, Arthur, 7 Manitoba; see Provinces Manning, E. C., 9, 80 Marchand, Je»n, 10, 100 Maritimes; see Provinces Markle, Gower, 10 Marsh, Donald B., 11 Massey, Vincent, 76, 101 Melbourne, 91
INDEX Methodist; see Churches Michaud, J. E., 109 Miller, R. G., 11 Monteath, Douglas, 11 Montreal, 2, 4, 52, 90, 96, 105, see also Universities Montreal Conference, 1958, 134 Morton, W. L., 7 Moscow; see Soviet Russia "Mounties", 122 Mulvihill, D. J., 7 Munro, Ross, 8 Mutchmor, James B., 79
112;
National Conference of Canadian Universities, 105 Nationalism, Canadian: and Afrikaner nationalism, 137; French-Canadians and, 93-105, 109-110; industrial change and, 100-102, 107-108; Laval, social scientists and, 94; Montreal historians and, 94, 97-9; positive and negative characteristics of, 89; religion and, 85-87, 92; and Ch. VII, passim National Planning Association, 124, 125 NATO, 33, 34, 131, 151, 152; see also Defence Navy, 34-35; see also Defence Nehru, Jawaharlal, 133 New Brunswick, University of; see Universities New Delhi, 133, 134 "Newfies", 106 Newfoundland: see Provinces New York, 2, 110, 112, 142; Empire Trust Co. of, 19 New Zealand, 112, 137, 138, 142 NOR AD; see Defence Nova Scotia; see Provinces Ogdensburg, 36 Oil industry; see Industry Oliver, M. K., 7 Ontario; see Provinces Ottawa: 2; aid from to provinces, 108; and New Delhi, 133; and Washington, 48-51, 130; see also Universities Owen, D. H. G., 7 Pacific; see Asia; China; Pacific Coast Pacific Coast: and China, 129; CanadianAmerican relations on, 111, 117, 127131; see also Immigration Pare, Lorenzo, 8 Parkin, Raleigh, 11 Parties, political: Canadian, American & British compared, 61-63; C.C.F.-C.L.C., 10, 29, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 62, 63; Conservative, 51, 57, 61, 63, 64, 95; Liberal, 9, 57, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64, 95; Social Credit, 9, 53, 62; Union Nationale, 94, 95; Young Liberals, 9, 10, 59, 60; and Ch. IV, passim; Partridge, Earle, 45 Paterson, Jim, 11, 54, 55 Pearson, Lester, 9, 40, 59, 60, 62, 63, 81, 82, 86, 128, 129, 138
Peers, Frank W., 12 Peking; see China Permanent Joint Board on Defence (P.J.B.D.), 36; see also Defence Prairies; see Provinces Presbyterian; see Churches Press, 7-8; Associated Press, 112; Calgary Herald, 17; Chicago Tribune, 112; Hays-Coffin Report and, 112, 147, 154; inadequacy of U.S. press coverage of Canadian affairs, 112-113; Le Devon, 96-97; Maclean's, 67; Montreal Gazette, 96; Montreal Star, 46, 66, 112; nonavailability of Canadian papers in U.S., 67; New York Times, 112, 131; Saturday Night, 67; Toronto Daily Star, 54; Toronto Financial Post, 135; Toronto Globe and Mail, 17, 41, 131; United Press, 112; Vancouver Sun, 17, 130; Windsor Daily Star, 65 Preston, R. A., 7 Prince Edward Island; see Provinces Private Planning Association of Canada, 125 Protestants, 81; see also Churches; Religion, organised Provinces: Alberta, 80, 83, 91; Atlantic, 106-110; British Columbia, 1, 53, 90, 91, 117, 129; Manitoba, 83, 86; Maritime, 81, 91, 106-110, 134; New Brunswick, 1, 83, 106, 107, 108, 109; Nova Scotia, 106, 107; Ontario, 81, 83, 84, 91; Prairie, 1, 27, 54, 81, 83, 90, 91; Prince Edward Island, 106, 107; Quebec, 1, 78, 83, 84, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 132; Saskatchewan, 86; see also Ch. VII, passim Prudham, George, 80 Quebec: Archbishop of, 103; city, 4, 95, 100, 137; see also Provinces Quemoy, 112, 128, 129, 130 Racial: statistics for Maritime Provinces, 107; see also Nationalism, Canadian Regina, 2 Regionalism, American & Canadian compared, 117; see also Ch. VII, passim Relations industrielles, 100 Religion, organised: and Canadian-American relations, 83-85; and nationalism, 85-87; and politics, 79; as pressure group, 78; statistics for Maritime Provinces, 107; see also Churches Report of the Royal Commission on Broadcasting, 72; see also Broadcasting Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 76, 101 Report on the Affairs of British North America, 105, 100 Richardson, B. T., 8 "Right to work", 28 Roblin, Duff, 8, 9, 62, 63 Rochester, N.Y., 7 Rockefeller: Brothers Fund, 151; fellowship, 2; Foundation, 13 Rockies, 90 Roe, A. V., Canada Ltd., 39
159
CANADIANS AND FOREIGN POLICY Roman Catholic; see Churches Roosevelt, F. D., 36 Roy, Maurice, 103 St. Stephen's 85
(United Church)
College,
Salmon, E. T., 7 San Francisco, 4, 90, 112 Saskatchewan, 80 Saskatoon, 2, 24 Sauve, J.-P., 94 Saywell, J. T., 7 Scholarships, 134, 141 Schurman, D. M., 7 Scott, F. R., 7 Seattle, 90 Services; see Defence; Air Force; Army; Navy Service clubs, 146, 154 Siegfried, Andre, 92, 93 Simonds, Guy G., 39, 40, 41 Sleman, C. Roy, 42 Smith, Sidney, 81, 132-133 Smith, W. Y., 7, 108 Social Credit, 9, 24 Solandt, Omond M., 12 South Africa, 2, 80, 86, 87, 89, 91, 95, 137, 140; see also Afrikaner Soviet Russia: Canadian & American attitudes to compared, 131-132; Sidney Smith on, 132-133 Soward, F. H., 7, 82 Stacey, C. P., 35, 36 Stanley, G. F. G., 7, 38 State Department, Washington, D.C., 50, 51, 111, 142 Stellenbosch, 98 Stewart, Andrew, 6 Stinson, Lloyd, 8, 54, 59 Strategic: Ch. Ill passim; see also Defence Suez, 86, 138 Surplus-grain disposal programme; see Economy, Canadian Sydney, 91 Temby, G. W., 11 Thiesson, Stuart, 11 Thomas, L. G., 7 Thompson, E. J., 85 Toole, F. J., 7 Toronto, 2, 7, 80, 85, 86, 90, 106, 141; see also Universities Tory, Henry Marshall, 132 Tourist traffic: American interest in, 112; between New Brunswick and Maine, 108; Hays-Coffin Report and, 147 Trade, 129, 145, 149, 150 Trans-Canada Air Lines (T.C.A.), 92 Trotter, R. G., 115 Trueman, A. W., 11 Ukrainians in Canada: Mayor Hawrelak on, 69; nature and significance of their influence, 68-69; their pro-British sentiments, 69
160
Underbill, Frank, 7 Union Nationale, 94, 95 United Church; see Churches United College: at University of Manitoba, 87-88; St. Stephen's, 85 United Empire Loyalists, 108 United Kingdom, 72, 86-87, 137, 138, 140
United Nations, 79, 81, 129, 130, 133, 138, 155 Universities: Alberta, 7, 132; Asian and West Indian students in Canadian, 134; Assumption, 7, 83; British Columbia, 6, 28, 78, 90, 136; Carleton, 7, 73; College of the West Indies, 135; comparison between Canadian, British, American and Australian, 70-72; Duke, 4, 50, 111, 124; Effect on of Canada Council, 76, 105; Laval, 7, 94, 99, 100, 103, 104; McGill, 6, 7, 71; McMaster, 7; Manitoba, 7, 87; Montreal, 6, 7, 94, 97, 99; Mount Allison, 135; National Conference of Canadian, 105; New Brunswick, 7, 87, 109; Ottawa, 7, 73, 109; Princeton, 4, 111, 115; Queen's, Kingston, 7, 71, 115; Quinnipac College, New Haven, 114; Toronto, 7, 71, 80, 132; Western Australia, 2, 132; Wisconsin, 116; Yale, 4, 111, 115 University teachers, Canadian: alleged hostility to U.S. cultural influence, 7071; Association of, 87-88 Upper Canada, 106 U.S. culture and Canada: Ch. V passim; its benefits, 66-67; its pervasive influence, 65-66, 67; resistance to of European and distinctively Canadian cultural characteristics, 68-71; role of Canada Council, 76-77, of C.B.C., 72-76; see also Education; Friendship U.S.S.R., see Soviet Russia Vancouver, 3, 10, 53, 81, 90, 111, 128 Vertical Integration, 26 Victoria, B.C., 2, 53 Viner, Jacob, 14, 112 Voortrekkers, 98 Wade, Mason, 7, 113 Walton, Edward A., 11 Washington, D.C., 99, 112, 118, 120, 130, 131, 132, 133, 142 Way of Life, Canadian; see U.S. culture and Canada Weldon, J. C., 7 West Indies, 134, 135, 137 Wheat Surplus; see Economy, Canadian White Australia Policy, 138 Windsor, House of, 85 Windsor, Ont, 4, 11, 65 Winks, Robin W., 113, 115-116 Winnipeg, 2, 52, 88, 91, 93 Women, Canadian, 121 Woods, H. d., 7 World Peace Foundation, 124