Constant Struggle: Histories of Canadian Democratization 9780228009948

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constant struggle

rethinki ng cana da i n th e wo r l d Series editors: Ian McKay and Sean Mills Supported by the Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University, this series is committed to books that rethink Canadian history from transnational and global perspectives. It enlarges approaches to the study of Canada in the world by exploring how Canadian history has long been a dynamic product of global currents and forces. The series will also reinvigorate understanding of Canada’s role as an international actor and how Canadians have contributed to intellectual, political, cultural, social, and material exchanges around the world. Volumes included in the series explore the ideas, movements, people, and institutions that have transcended political boundaries and territories to shape Canadian society and the state. These include both state and non-state actors, and phenomena such as international migration, diaspora politics, religious movements, evolving conceptions of human rights and civil society, popular culture, technology, epidemics, wars, and global finance and trade. The series charts a new direction by exploring networks of transmission and exchange from a standpoint that is not solely national or international, expanding the history of Canada’s engagement with the world. http://wilson.humanities.mcmaster.ca A New Perspective on the Internment and Dispossession of Japanese Canadians Edited by Jordan Stanger-Ross

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Canada and the United Nations Legacies, Limits, Prospects Edited by Colin McCullough and Robert Teigrob

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Undiplomatic History The New Study of Canada and the World Edited by Asa McKercher and Philip Van Huizen

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Revolutions across Borders Jacksonian America and the Canadian Rebellion Edited by Maxime Dagenais and Julien Mauduit

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Left Transnationalism The Communist International and the National, Colonial, and Racial Questions Edited by Oleksa Drachewych and Ian McKay Landscapes of Injustice

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Canada’s Other Red Scare Indigenous Protest and Colonial Encounters during the Global Sixties Scott Rutherford The Global Politics of Poverty in Canada Development Programs and Democracy, 1964–1979 Will Langford Schooling the System A History of Black Women Teachers Funké Aladejebi Constant Struggle Histories of Canadian Democratization Edited by Julien Mauduit and Jennifer Tunnicliffe

constant struggle Histories of Canadian Democratization

Edited by Julien Mauduit Jennifer Tunnicliffe

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021 ISB N ISB N ISB N ISB N

978-0-2280-0866-8 978-0-2280-0867-5 978-0-2280-0994-8 978-0-2280-0995-5

(cloth) (paper) (eP df) (eP UB)

Legal deposit third quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Constant struggle : histories of Canadian democratization / edited by Julien Mauduit, Jennifer Tunnicliffe. Other titles: Constant struggle (2021) Names: Mauduit, Julien, 1979– editor. | Tunnicliffe, Jennifer, editor. Series: Rethinking Canada in the world ; 9. Description: Series statement: Rethinking Canada in the world ; 9 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210232838 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210232862 | i s b n 9780228008675 (paper) | isbn 9780228008668 (cloth) | isbn 9780228009948 (eP DF ) | isbn 9780228009955 (ePUB ) Subjects: lcsh : Democracy—Canada—History. | lcsh : Liberalism— Canada—History. Classification: lcc jl 186.5 .c 66 2021 | ddc 320.971—dc23

This book was typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Questioning Canadian Democracy

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part one | openings 1 The Search for Canadian Democracy: Transnational Insights into Democratization 33 Dennis Pilon 2 First Nations, Colonialism, and the Issue of Equality from the Ancien Régime to Contemporary Democracy 58 Denys Delâge and Jean-Philippe Warren

part two | democratic limits and paradoxes, 1820s–60s 3 Democracy in a Settler State? Settler Colonialism and the Development of Canada, 1820–67

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Angela Tozer 4 “A Terrible Engine in the Hands of the Provincial Administration”: The Corporate Franchise State and Joint-Stock Democracy in the Last of the Atlantic Revolutions 116 Albert Schrauwers 5 Incorporating Contributory Democracy: Self-Taxation and Self-Government in Upper Canada Jeffrey L. McNairn

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6 Conceptualizing Democratic Conservatism in 1850s Canada 172 E.A. Heaman 7 A Tendency towards Mobocracy? The Democratic Realities of Nineteenth-Century British North America

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Colin Grittner

part three | struggles around “liberal democracy,” 1940s–90s 8 Human Rights Activists’ Struggles to Forge a More Egalitarian Democracy in Canada in the 1940s and 1950s

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Ruth A. Frager and Carmela Patrias 9 “Will Freedom Survive?”: Reconstruction, Self-Disciplined Democracy, and the Stirring of a New Right in Canada, 1943–54

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Will Langford 10 The Real World of Democracy? C.B. Macpherson’s Critique of the Cold War Reification of “Liberal Democracy,” 1965

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Ian McKay 11 Recognition as Regulation: Liberal Democracy and Sexual Citizenship in Canada 319 Leonard Halladay

part four | history and beyond 12 Community and Expertise in Canadian Democracy since 1920 355 Shirley Tillotson 13 Reckoning with the Realities of History: The Politics of White Supremacy and the Expansion of Settler Democracy in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Henry Yu Bibliography Index

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Acknowledgments

Like all edited volumes, this project is the culmination of a great deal of hard work from a number of different people and, as such, many acknowledgments are necessary. First, we would like to thank all of the contributors. Without their passion for history, their ideas about democracy in Canada’s past, their willingness to engage in conversation, and their commitment to this project, this volume would never have been possible. We would also like to thank Xavier Bériault, Tarah Brookfield, Josh Cole, Francis Dupuis-Déri, Mackenzie Gillies, Dan Horner, and David Tough, who contributed to the workshop and the initial conversations that provided the basis for this collection. We are particularly grateful to the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History for sponsoring the initial efforts and the workshop that inspired this collection. As the director of the Wilson Institute, the co-editor of the Rethinking Canada in the World series at mqup , and a contributor to this volume, Ian Mckay championed this project, offering invaluable advice and providing feedback on the collection generally and our introduction more specifically. We are deeply indebted to him and full of gratitude for all his support. Many thanks to Maxime Dagenais, whose expertise helped us in many ways, particularly through the logistical aspects of organizing the workshop. He was full of encouragement and advice, and his personality made working with the Wilson Institute so enjoyable. Beyond Maxime and Ian, many individuals at McMaster supported this process, including the faculty members, the administrative team, and the graduate students. We are very appreciative of all of their contributions to the project.

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The Wilson Institute and the McMaster Socrates Project provided the resources to organize a series of talks prior to the workshop, which aided in our design of the project and for which we are deeply thankful. We thank Lisa Chilton, Geoff Eley, James Kloppenberg, and Nancy MacLean for their admirable and inspiring presentations. The workshop led to this edited volume, and Jonathan Crago of mqup was indispensable in our efforts to make it to press. Jonathan’s support for our project, through the review and funding processes, made trying to publish during a global pandemic less overwhelming, and for that we are very grateful. We also wish to acknowledge the work of all the members of the mqup team for their help and professionalism. Finally, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers who contributed to improving the manuscript. On a more personal stance, we would like to thank our families. Jennifer would like to thank Bruce, Adam, and Emily for their continued love and support, and for all of the laughter. Julien would like to thank Sophie, Lila, and Jack for their unconditional enthusiasm.

constant struggle

in t ro du cti on

Questioning Canadian Democracy Julien Mauduit and Jennifer Tunnicliffe

The greatest intellectual confusion arises from the use of these words: democracy, democratic institutions, democratic government. So long as we are unable to define these words clearly and to agree on their definition, we shall live with an inextricable confusion of ideas, to the great advantage of demagogues and despots. Alexis de Tocqueville (L’ancien Régime et la Révolution)

Tocqueville was right. Two hundred years later, most regimes in the world claim to be “democracies,” yet a buzzing confusion continues to surround the word, and the power of “the people” remains limited. The ambiguity around what “democracy” means results in part from its polymorphous history, evolving in various forms throughout the world. But, as Douglas Lummis remarks, the word has also been consciously overworked, stretched, and abused to justify revolution, counterrevolution, terror, and compromise, and it has been applied to everything from representative institutions and free-enterprise economies to state-run economies and dictatorship by plebiscite.1 Embracing institutions and social phenomena throughout global history, political scientist David Held identifies no fewer than ten different “models” of democracy.2 Canada’s own history with democracy is intimately linked to that of a broader Western “liberal democracy,” which a growing body of literature now suggests is in danger.3 In Canada and around the globe, there is a widely reported sense that this model is succumbing to disillusionment, apathy, and cynicism. Contemporary Canadians increasingly question the future direction of their “democratic

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institutions,” particularly in light of record-low voter turnout at the polls, damaging partisanship in Parliament, and the challenges the digital age pose to the democratic process. For many scholars, “postmodern liberal democracies” are suffering a loss of citizen trust because they have become dominated by powerful transnational business corporations that centralize economic and political power rather than empowering “the people.”4 The covid -19 crisis has amplified these concerns, demonstrating how quickly democratic practices around the globe, including basic parliamentary activities, can be suspended, and how the liberty of individuals to move, to assemble, to demonstrate, and to engage in commerce can be significantly limited without the people’s formal consent. The fragility of democracy has been exposed. Yet, as documentary filmmaker and author Astra Taylor reminds us, “Though the headlines tell us democracy is in ‘crisis,’ we don’t have a clear conception of what it is that is at risk.”5 While most Canadians assume that they live in some form of “democracy” – one of the “best” in the world according to The Economist’s “Democracy Index”6 – and that they should protect its values, there are good reasons to critically re-examine Canada’s history with democracy. We have a rich scholarship upon which to build: historians have examined the formation of the state and the evolution of governance in Canada, historicizing the interplay between the state and civil society, exploring how power has been asserted and challenged, and analyzing how these dynamics have both expanded and limited the authority of governments over time and space. But there are still many historians (and scholars generally) who use the word “democracy” without engaging in serious discussion about its actual meaning (past or present), how it has been understood, and why it has been, and remains, a site of political contestation. The very concept has too rarely been at the centre of the discussion. Moreover, contemporary events, ranging from the growth of right-wing politics to an upsurge in social movement activism, have led to a renewed questioning of democracy. Critical race and feminist scholars, queer theorists, and settler colonial scholars, for instance, have brought forward new perspectives that expose the many barriers to political and economic participation created by “official democracy.” With these challenges to our understanding of democracy and its effect, the time seems ripe for a reassessment of democracy’s history in Canada.

Introduction

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This volume emerged out of a workshop hosted by the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University in May 2019. We conceived of the project as an opportunity to revisit conversations around the history of democracy in Canada, to bring together scholars who had long been engaged with these topics and those newly orienting their work in this direction. We also wanted to create a space to connect historians with scholars who place the history of Canadian democracy within other disciplinary languages, conceptual frameworks, and bodies of work. We invited participants to travel back and forth between abstraction and historical experiences and, in doing so, hoped to remind non-historians of the richness, uncertainty, subtlety, and sometimes specificity of democracy as an evolving empirical reality. The contributors to this volume focus on key aspects of Canadian democratization, rigorously questioning the process itself, exploring its limits and contradictions, highlighting the continued struggle for its realization, and considering alternative ideas and practices that have existed and have influenced the concept’s gradual acceptance in Canada. They do so by approaching the study of democracy from a variety of perspectives, which reflects the definitional challenges of studying democracy. As historian James Kloppenberg notes, “disagreements about democracy constitute its history.”7 Our goal is thus not to present one vision or approach to studying Canada’s history with democracy but, rather, to illuminate some little-explored and important features of the past, and of the democratic ideal more broadly; to nuance narratives of democracy’s supposed ineluctable progress; and to challenge the assumption that it has necessarily been beneficial for “the people.” We hope that a better understanding of the historical conditions that shaped our current system – both from within and from without our national framework – will contribute to a better appreciation of the challenges we face in the present and future. We initially asked the contributors to consider two related questions: How has democracy been understood by those who have advocated for or resisted it? What historical realities have shaped the democratization process? The question of how Canada changed into a “democracy,” if in fact it ever did, has always been contentious in a sprawling country that emerged from a settler colonial process, whose head of state is a monarch who was sworn to uphold one particular religion, and which lacks a founding written constitution with heart-warming passages about individual and collective

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freedom. In some cases, struggles for democratization failed. Yet, as historian Allan Greer remarks, a fuller understanding of politics demands the consideration of “the discontinuities in the history of democracy: paths not taken, projects defeated and unrealized, impulses nipped in the bud, dreams forgotten.”8 As several chapters in this volume show we must look for democracy outside the conventional narrative – for example, in First Nations communities, in corporations, or within “conservative” political thought. Other chapters conversely demonstrate that democracy cannot always be found in the places we have been taught to look for it: in the political reforms leading to Confederation, in the welfare state, or within the expansion of twentieth-century liberalism. This collection therefore suggests that, rather than looking for a simple narrative or a “onceand-for-all” birth-date, scholars must be alert to the slower, untidier, and incomplete processes of democratization in Canada. The collection is divided into four parts. Part 1 introduces two themes touched upon (implicitly or explicitly) in subsequent chapters: the definition of democracy and the methods of studying the democratization process, and the challenge to the Canadian Eurocentric narrative. Parts 2 and 3 provide historical case studies of two key periods of Canadian democratization: the ambiguous decades leading to Confederation (from the 1820s to the 1860s) and the rise of “liberal democracy” in the twentieth century. Part 4 reflects more broadly on Canada’s democratic experience and its meaning, past and present, appealing to readers’ critical perspectives on their own citizenship. The contributors present democracy as a political, intellectual, cultural, economic, legal, and social phenomenon shaped by a wide range of actors. They consider and connect diverse topics, from enfranchisement to public taxation, from human rights activism to conservatism, from forgotten utopias to corporate interests. Collectively they offer a renewed, and sometimes unsettling, depiction of Canada’s democratization process. Canada’s history with democracy is unique, but as the contributions to this volume reveal, it cannot be understood within a national vacuum, particularly in light of the major global phenomena and challenges that all modern “liberal democracies” are facing.9 Indigenous histories, Canada’s colonial era, and the political changes from Confederation through to the 1982 constitutional repatriation have been shaped by transnational, continental, and transatlantic dynamics, with events such as the American Revolution, the

Introduction

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world wars and the Cold War, and the global democratization of the modern era significantly influencing Canadian experiences. This volume shows that Canada’s history echoes this global dynamic, characterized by settler colonialism, the rise of the liberal market economy, the expansion of the welfare state, transnational activism, and neoliberalism. Imperial connections also inspired experimentation with democratic practice, at times accelerating the process and at other times confining it. Proximity to the United States, and the shared history of these modern polities, meant that Canadian democratization was, through a network of social, economic, and political connections, deeply influenced by the American example – both as inspiration and as counter-model. The history of democracy in the northern part of North America was also greatly affected by the relations between the diverse peoples that lived in or moved through its territory, from its first peoples to the varied settlers who helped frame Canada’s democratization process. Canada’s democratic experience should therefore have relevance to any scholar who wishes to investigate modern democratization and to engage with the current democratic unrest. The fact that our nation remains highly rated by organizations that measure the health of democracies around the world – however problematic these measurements can be – should alone make it worth the attention of global scholars of the phenomenon of democracy. But the ways in which Canada’s history with democracy overlaps with, borrows from, or even influences other histories are not insubstantial. As a plurinational state that emerged from the historical conditions of settler-occupied lands and with an ideology of white supremacy, through the conquest of one European empire by another, Canada’s history provides a valuable parallel for other states with plural communities of identities.10 Moreover, by looking outside of the traditional arenas of politics, we discover an extraordinary diversity within Canada’s past of visions of how “the people” can participate in decision making. This collection highlights but a few of these, from Indigenous consensual practices to private and public corporations to theoretical alternative models and beyond. Finally, and purposefully, we have tried to situate our study within the larger project of renewing Canadian political history by exploring a key but arguably understudied topic in the historiography, by bringing together various methods of inquiry, by pushing to expand our understanding of what constitutes “politics,” and by

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incorporating some new actors and new themes into the study of democracy.11 Yet many voices and histories are still missing. It is not our intention to delineate the scope of study on the struggles surrounding Canadian democracy, and our collection does not aim for comprehensiveness but, rather, at stimulating productive discussion. We acknowledge insufficiencies in this volume’s attention to gendered, racialized, ethno-nationalist, and legal histories, and a wide range of other topics. Nevertheless, we highlight some of the many histories of Canadian democratization to encourage further conversation around the experiences of democracy (or lack thereof) in Canada.

d e m o c r acy The first major challenge to a study of the democratization process is the concept of democracy itself. What is democracy? Answers range from a formal system of popular voting to general ideals of human equality and human rights. The lack of consensus over definition has caused some scholars to label democracy a “contested concept,” especially given that conflict over its meaning often replicates the relations of power behind the democratization process itself.12 Etymology and ancient history offer a first way to delineate the concept. The word “democracy” derives from ancient Greek and is associated with the idea of “the people’s power” as comprised of kratos (power) and demos (people). Democracy has thus often come to mean a political regime in which the people rule. Thucydides captured some of its spirit: “Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people … No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service of the state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty.”13 But exactly who comprises “the people” has varied across history. The ancient Greek demos refers only to native adult male residents of the polis and, consequently, excludes a large majority of the inhabitants. Despite these limitations, Greek democracy was still imagined to be a project whose purpose was to mitigate the social and political power of wealth by basing itself on an unfiltered “direct” rule and, thus, allowing a demos to effectively come to collective decisions.14 Relying exclusively on ancient Greek history to define democracy is problematic, however, particularly given that we do not know precisely where, why, or how the idea was first formulated. While some

Introduction

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scholars challenge the conventional Eurocentric understanding of the concept, anthropologists also caution against fixing a single definition as there have been many appropriations of, and adaptations to, its practical meaning at various levels and in multiple contexts.15 Historian Josiah Ober offers an alternative explanation of the ancient word itself, arguing that Demokratia would be better understood as the “capacity to effect change in the public realm” by an empowered demos rather than simply as a political regime.16 This broader perspective increases the difficulty of reaching any agreement over definition, but Jacques Rancière, Pierre Rosanvallon, Sheldon Wolin, and Jacques Derrida have each asserted that this elusiveness comes out of democracy’s very nature: democracy bears multiple characteristics, including paradoxes, and it is best understood as an ongoing process in which action – experiment and empirical realities – is as important as theory.17 These scholars reject deterministic narratives and suggest that words such as “transition [to democracy]” are misleading since they convey the idea that we know what is (and is not) a “real” democracy.18 This debate over definition is key to analyses of the democratization process as reflected in this volume. Political scientist Dennis Pilon (chapter 1) insists that democracy is fixed in its essential meaning. He understands it as relational, about social power rather than institutions, and tied to the ability of the masses to influence political decisions, and he argues that interpreting it otherwise nurtures definitional and methodological imprecisions that limit our study and understanding of the democratization process. Pilon uses an extensive international literature on democratization studies to highlight how “democracy” is a cultural and political by-product, and he encourages Canadian scholars to further explore its conceptual dimensions in order to better define what is, and is not, “democratic,” and how we should approach the democratization process. Other contributors also emphasize democracy as an ongoing process but use their specific histories to identify multiple democratic visions and realities that have existed in Canada’s past, suggesting that a too narrow definition has the potential to obfuscate our understanding of historical realities. A second major challenge is recognizing and responding to the tensions and inconsistencies that exist between democracy and two other important forces of the modern age: liberalism and capitalism. A prime example is the common use of the term “liberal democracy,”

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a phrase that encourages the conflation of liberalism and democracy despite the very different nature of the two and that, according to Pilon (chapter 1), particularly blurs the actual historical struggle that shaped Western democracies. Certainly, the “family of liberalisms” described by Michael Freeden reflect uneven democratic features.19 Thomas Paine’s version advocated for a radical democratization in the late eighteenth century, considering the ideal regime to be a republic that would rule for the “common interest,” encourage citizens’ involvement, and allow civil society (which he called “the democracy”) to use economic exchanges as a pacifying means for common prosperity.20 Twentieth-century philosopher John Dewey conceived of liberalism and democracy in terms of “social action,” promoting a way of life based on science, experimentation, and education, and supporting cooperation over capitalistic competition.21 Liberal philosopher Karl Popper, however, believed that only the state, rather than “the people,” should remedy the inequalities generated by capitalism thanks to scientific and top-down methods.22 Since “liberal democracy” emerged in Canada out of what historian Ian McKay terms the “Liberal Order,” its democratic roots seem even less obvious.23 Many of the chapters in this collection highlight the multilayered tensions between democracy and liberalism in Canada’s history. Pilon, Albert Schrauwers (who focuses on nineteenth-century corporations), and Will Langford (who studies the post-Second World War new right) all present the “Liberal Order” as fundamentally undemocratic and “liberal democracy” as framed to serve a capitalist economy rather than “the people.” C.B. Macpherson, the subject of McKay’s chapter, viewed liberal capitalism and democracy as being in conflict with one another, while Joseph-Charles Taché, analyzed by E.A. Heaman, considered liberalism as individualizing and as more suited to economic interests than to collective power. Furthermore, Ruth Frager and Carmela Patrias’s chapter, along with Leonard Halladay’s chapter, demonstrates that human rights as a liberal product are not by themselves factors of democratization and that individual rights are sometimes gained to the detriment of a genuine collective democratic improvement. These chapters, each in its own way, show how historicizing democracy necessarily means challenging the tendency to use it to justify liberalism.24 If democracy’s main characteristic is its dedication to equality, then the democratic credentials of capitalism are suspect25 – another

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point of discussion for this collection. Albert Schrauwers (chapter 4) and Jeffrey L. McNairn (chapter 5) both propose that democratic practices can emerge from a capitalistic culture and that, in certain forms, corporations have been (or could have been) real vectors of democratization. Yet, professing individual freedoms, such as the liberty to accumulate wealth, also fosters inequity and injustice, as demonstrated by Angela Tozer’s chapter on British colonial reform movements and their devastating effect on Indigenous peoples. The ancient Demokratia was framed precisely to rule against the power of wealth,26 and most European Enlightenment philosophers explicitly feared that a democratic regime would allow the majority (the poor) to interfere with the liberty of the minority (the wealthy), what Montesquieu termed the “tyranny of the majority.”27 For instance, from a political and theoretical perspective, the ideal of equality holds that citizens have equal power to shape the world in which they live.28 In its broader social understanding, equality refers to a collective responsibility for the care of the whole community, with democracy becoming a carrier of the common good requiring both cooperation and a degree of selflessness.29 This egalitarian spirit signifies that, in theory, a sound democracy can hardly be limited to formal or legal equality, or through such means as enfranchisement. Several chapters in this volume demonstrate, however, that, as has the concept of “the people,” the concept of “equality” has regularly been weaponized. Denys Delâge and Jean-Philippe Warren (chapter 2), Angela Tozer (chapter 3), and Henry Yu (chapter 13) exemplify how the notion of equality has been used against Indigenous peoples, generating at best ambiguous democratic gains, while Leonard Halladay (chapter 11) illustrates how a “rights-based equality” proved an uneven victory for lgbtq+ individuals in Canada. Democracy has faced many adversaries, due in large part to its potential radicalness. Leading thinkers, philosophers, and policymakers rarely interpreted the democratic principle as beneficial. Even its supporters, including philosophers Hannah Arendt and Claude Lefort, feared a blind quest for equality could generate totalitarianism.30 Plato considered democracy to be less preferable than monarchy, aristocracy, or even oligarchy31 Hobbes argued that democracy creates disorder and diverts individuals from sound decision making.32 Founding historical moments, such as the American Revolution or Canada’s Confederation, were driven by similar perspectives, which associated “democracy” with chaos or anarchy.33

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What Colin Grittner (chapter 7, this volume) presents as a “fear of mobocracy” among the founders of Canadian Confederation – a fear that generated intense opposition to democratic reform – was mirrored in the minds of mid-twentieth-century social science experts who profoundly doubted the people’s capacity to make the right decisions to manage the new welfare state (see Tillotson, chapter 12, this volume). The benefits of collective decision making have thus remained a subject of deep scholarly disagreement.34 Influential thinkers such as Walter Lippmann, Joseph Schumpeter, and Samuel Huntington openly denigrated the effectiveness of democratic practices, the latter going so far as to state that American democracy should be governed in cooperation “with a small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers.”35 Since democracy has become a widely accepted mantra, its radical egalitarian spirit has been somehow abandoned, reappropriated, tamed, or even perverted in the modern Western “liberal democracies.” One of the main features that allows “democracy” to be accepted is the principle of political representation, whereby political power effectively remains in the hands of representatives, thus allowing democratization by only partially empowering “the people.” A tacit consensus from opponents of those more sympathetic to democratization was built on the idea that there are limits to how a population could control political activities.36 Representative government was, according to Grittner (chapter 7, this volume), conceived and used against the interests of the poor in the nineteenth century and, Langford (chapter 9, this volume) argues, was later diverted to serve big business. It is thus questionable whether the various electoral practices of modern liberal democracies even meet a democratic standard. Specifically considering Canada, one might ask: Who are the sovereign “people” and what is “the people’s” power? This is difficult as it primarily requires recognizing Canada’s history as a settler state and the tragic consequences this had for Indigenous peoples. Recent work by Adam Dahl attempts this in the American context, revealing how American democratic culture has been shaped by settler colonialism and how Indigenous populations have been explicitly “othered” and excluded from “the people” in order to build a settler understanding of democracy.37 A structural challenge to Canadian democracy, as in any “settler democracy,” is therefore its imperial past, including centuries of dispossession of Indigenous lands for (largely European) settlers.

Introduction

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The recent Truth and Reconciliation process perfectly illustrates how basic democratic principles seem incompatible with the settler colonialism from which Canadian liberal democracy emerged. Furthermore, conventional narratives of democracy ignore its non-Western and Indigenous genealogies.38 For instance, the political practices of the Haudenosaunee nation were taken seriously by the American Founding Fathers, even if their goal was to build a more hierarchical system for the United States.39 Denys Delâge and Jean-Philippe Warren (chapter 2, this volume) remind us that democratic practices based upon social and material equality and care for the community predated the first French settlers in what would become Canada and that Indigenous peoples’ cultures deeply influenced Enlightened philosophers. Their chapter surveys the long history of the relations between Indigenous peoples and settlers to challenge the whiggish narrative of Canadian democracy, arguing that British modernity actually destroyed Indigenous democratic traditions, often in the name of “equality” and “democracy.” Recognizing the Eurocentrism implicit in the accounts of many scholars encourages the inclusion of previously excluded or alternative understandings of democracy, and it can also lead to questions pertaining to how it has been weaponized as a tool for imperialism. In 1917, American president Woodrow Wilson declared that “the world must be made safe for democracy.” The conviction of Western nations that democracy must be exported, even imposed, to “civilize” other peoples has been an important chapter of modern history. From this narrow perspective, the Cold War became the decisive struggle between what was perceived as the democratic world and the totalitarian Communist Bloc.40 The intellectual consequence of this viewpoint not only diminishes our understanding of the history of democracy but also indirectly reproduces a history of exclusion steeped in Western imperialism. This is made clear in Henry Yu’s contribution to this volume (chapter 13), in which he argues that Canadian democracy cannot be properly understood without reckoning with its racial dimensions and, in particular, with its intimate ties to white supremacism. The Canadian democratization process, much like that of settler states around the world, has been advanced primarily through deprivation, violence, and ethnic cleansing, all of which served white imperialism. Despite its nebulous history, democracy, in our view, entails some central propositions. Citizens comprise “the people” – and

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in a genuine democracy this encompasses all inhabitants – who rule through direct voting, the use of representatives, or some other measure. A democratic state and its institutions have the mandate to treat and help citizens equally, to respect individual or collective differences, to empower the powerless, to address inequities, and to not exclude anyone from the body politic or from full and equal membership in the polis. Beyond its political power, “the people” is a dynamic social force, a community of individuals endowed with the ideal of caring for all and nurturing each member: democratic principles can thus be analyzed in any social structure.41 As noted throughout this collection, democratic values include not only fairness and justice but also benevolence and cooperation.42 These remarks constitute a first venture into our collective discussion of “democracy” as an elusive, but meaningful and powerful, concept that has instilled both fear and hope. Democracy has been and remains a recurring point of contention among intellectuals and of constant struggle between its supporters and its adversaries.

c a n a d ia n d e m o c rati zati on There is little agreement as to when, or even if, democracy emerged in Canada. Outlining the events and institutional developments that played a key role in the process of Canadian democratization is therefore problematic: what from one angle was obviously a liberaldemocratic breakthrough (e.g., the country’s mid-nineteenth-century Confederation)43 was from another a reassertion of conservative principles of hierarchy, racial exclusion, and monarchism – one whose property-oriented “liberalism” lacked any far-reaching doctrines to empower the average adult resident.44 Canada’s history with democracy might therefore be better understood as a multi-layered process, one shaped by top-down, state-centred, and institutional pressures, and constantly renegotiated through public discourse, while simultaneously influenced from below by non-state actors. Conventional histories of Canadian democracy have most often focused on the expansion of the franchise and the development of elected assemblies. This approach puts institutions and constitutional developments at the centre of the democratization process and presents Canada’s history with democracy through the lens of Euro-Canadian political rights and privileges. It has also been used to support a narrative of continual progress and democratic

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expansion within Canada. Scholars such as Janet Ajzenstat look to Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 to find the origins of “liberal democracy,” emphasizing the influence of thinkers such as John Locke on “colonial liberals” and elite “radicals” in the Canadas, which caused them to support political systems in which the people’s representatives would participate in the colonies’ institutions.45 The first of these elected assemblies was established in Halifax in 1758. The Constitutional Act, 1791, expanded this form of parliamentary activity to the two Canadas, granting these assemblies the right to levy taxes to pay for local administration. Voting in each colony was limited to “persons” (British subjects) who were at least twenty-one years old, who held property of a certain value, and who had not been convicted of a serious offence. Of course, this limited political democratization did not create a democracy. The act of 1791 was, above all, a pragmatic reaction to the ongoing Age of Revolution and, as such, was consciously anti-democratic. John Graves Simcoe, the first lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, explained, “The establishment of the British institutions offers the best method gradually to counteract, and ultimately to destroy or to disarm the spirit of democratic subversion.”46 The period from the 1820s to the 1860s has garnered much of the attention from historians and political scientists interested in the democratic impulse in Canada, and these key decades are the focus of part 2 of this collection. Frustration with oligarchic and imperial systems led to various calls for reform in the 1830s, which ranged from moderate demands for fairer elections and more power for the elected house to the implementation of an American-style republic. The 1837 Rebellion was the first major and general internal conflict over a democratic transformation of the British colonies, pitting supporters of the monarchy and the privilege of British subjects against republicans championing a combined political, social, and economic democratization of the two Canadas.47 In his contribution to this volume, Albert Schrauwers (chapter 4) explores the economic dimensions of the Rebellion, arguing that republicans attempted to create a democratic form of capitalism, which he labels a “joint-stock democracy.” The republicans’ defeat, he concludes, crushed this alternative economic vision, paving the way for an undemocratic capitalism that became the core of the emerging “liberal-corporate order.” While each territory followed its own path, reflecting local cultures and traditions, the attempted revolution of 1837 revealed the rising

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power of a “people” across British North America. Allan Greer’s study of the habitants in Lower Canada, and Rusty Bittermann’s examination of the Escheat movement in Prince Edward Island, show the strength of an active public and its role in the democratization process.48 At times this public was comprised of established, propertied settlers, and at times it included politically marginalized groups utilizing new political channels. For instance, Julia Roberts presents Upper Canadian taverns as colonial public spaces in which men and women from various social and cultural backgrounds shaped politics from below.49 Jerry Bannister’s study of governance in Newfoundland and Jeffrey L. McNairn’s work on public debate in Upper Canada both demonstrate the rising authority of a “bourgeois public sphere” and a “public opinion” emerging out of newspapers and voluntary organizations in the early nineteenth century. In Newfoundland, this led to the establishment of a colonial parliament in 1832, while in Upper Canada it countered the anti-democratic sentiment of the period and forced politicians to adjust to a nascent form of “deliberative democracy.”50 In his contribution to this volume, McNairn (chapter 5) examines 1830s Upper Canada, showing how corporations for public goods and municipal corporations provided democratic tools with which a vibrant civil society composed of merchants, farmers, and artisans could surpass political division to organize for collective benefit. He argues that these corporations marked the emergence of a “contributory democracy” in which settlers self-organized taxation as well as public improvements, democratizing both the taxation process and some of the state’s prerogatives. The dramatic and violent push for democratic change of the 1830s accelerated political reform, with responsible government introduced in the colonies by 1848, compelling colonial governors to share executive power with the people’s representatives in the Legislative Assembly. Was this the decisive turning point towards a sound democratic regime? This political reorganization, secured by politicians such as Joseph Howe, Robert Baldwin, and Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine, empowered the people’s representatives and, indirectly, the Canadian “people.” Political scientist John Ralston Saul credits these reformers as Canada’s democratic founders.51 For other scholars, however, the move towards responsible government should not be confused with support for democracy. For French-Canadian women who had gained access to the polls in 1791 through their right to property, granted by the Coutume de Paris, and then formally lost

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this right in 1849, the advent of responsible government certainly did not signal greater political rights.52 Historian Gordon Stewart argues that neither La Fontaine nor Baldwin were democrats: “They simply wished to open up the system, break down the power of the narrow elites, and give power and influence to elected leaders.”53 However, a radically different story emerges when we explore Canadian democratization beyond a British-centred narrative. In her contribution to this volume, Angela Tozer (chapter 3) analyzes public debt, imperial capitalism, and settler colonialism to revisit the very foundations of modern Canada. As the attraction of capital was conditioned by colonial assets, she argues that the appropriation of Indigenous peoples’ land became key for white prosperity and supremacy, while political reforms such as responsible government were only a means to that end. This dispossession, Tozer asserts, calls into question the possibility of any form of genuine democracy in Canada, past or present. In her contribution, E.A. Heaman (chapter 6) asserts that alternative, and more “democratic,” visions of Canada’s future did exist, among them French Canadian intellectual Joseph-Charles Taché’s Confederation project. Heaman presents Taché, who is known as a “conservative,” as “weirdly” democratic and at odds with the essentially anti-democratic political culture of the 1850s and 1860s. Despite being receptive to conservative standards (Catholicism, monarchy, loyalism), Taché favoured a more “universal” suffrage, fairer elections, and a form of balanced association between settlers, both French and British, and the sovereign Indigenous and Métis nations in the Plains. Yet, while Taché’s arguments shaped aspects of the British North America Act, his vision of a “democratic, plural Canada” did not prevail. The architects of Canadian Confederation also rejected American republicanism, which they viewed as a democratic model believed to be less stable and less principled than a constitutional monarchy, especially given the devastation of the recent Civil War.54 In fact, if Confederation is viewed from a transatlantic and imperial perspective as a project of increased political freedom for Canadians in lieu of real independence, it appears to be explicitly anti-democratic. The British North America Act, 1867, was passed by the British Parliament with no “Canadians” at the table, even if a small but influential group led by John A. Macdonald largely drafted the text.55 Involvement of “the people” in the process of Confederation was notably limited. No popular votes on the issue were held in the

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Canadas, although it played a role in elections in New Brunswick and Newfoundland, with pro-Confederation forces winning the day in the former and anti-Confederation forces in the latter. Colin Grittner (chapter 7, this volume) pushes this idea further, arguing not only that Confederation was undemocratic but also that it was explicitly designed as a bulwark against democratic advancement: fear of democracy as a form of mob rule was so deeply embedded in the minds of elites in British North America that Confederation was designed to create a new form of national government that could restrict electoral privilege, strengthen legislative councils, and “hive” off democracy to the provinces where it could do less damage. Beyond the extension of federalism to the colonies, then, the major political impact of Confederation was to empower the function of the prime minister and not that of “the people,” which is apparent in the history of the franchise. The first federal franchise act was not passed until 1885, and it continued the practice of restricting both voting rights and the ability to run for a seat in the lower house to British males over the age of twenty-one who met specific property requirements.56 Grittner presents this act as the culmination of Confederation’s anti-democratic project. The struggle of women to gain the vote lasted more than a century; First Nations women did not receive the franchise until 1960. Historian Veronica StrongBoag demands we rethink the idea of democracy in Canada from this perspective, arguing that, with few exceptions, government “by the people” has meant government by men, and very few at that.57 Moreover, secret ballot legislation was only passed in the 1870s, and elections continued to be influenced by physical intimidation, administrative manipulation of election logistics such as voters lists, and other forms of electoral corruption. For Dennis Pilon, these franchise reforms were more a “part of a contested process of establishing, maintaining, and advancing an economic and governing order” than they were about democratic ideals or political equality.58 This anti-democratic culture ruled the Dominion into the early twentieth century.59 It would not be until the First World War that Canadian politicians would begin to openly speak of democracy in a positive light, and Francis Dupuis-Déri suggests that, even at this point, it was more of rhetorical turn than a true embrace of democratic principles: the fight for democracy became an effective discursive tool that could be used to mobilize soldiers and positively distinguish Canada, and its allies, from the German enemy and from

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revolutionary Russia.60 This was also, however, a period in which requirements for the franchise began to shift. To gain support for conscription in the 1917 election, Prime Minister Borden’s Wartime Elections Act and the Military Voters Act extended the vote to female relatives of men serving with the Canadian or British armed forces as well as to all servicemen, at the same time temporarily disenfranchising conscientious objectors and “enemy aliens.” The following year, after a decades-long struggle, most women in Canada gained the right to vote in federal elections.61 This victory did not signal the end of gender inequality in politics, however, nor did the franchise became universal as voting restrictions continued for racialized and religious minorities into the 1960s, as Henry Yu (chapter 13, this volume) reminds us. The changing meaning of the term “democracy” in the public sphere and these small-scale democratic reforms nevertheless encouraged various groups of settlers to ask for more power for themselves, often in the name of democracy. Studies of civil strife in the early twentieth century show that protest movements shaped the political realities in Canadian society. Women’s activism extended beyond the franchise, intersecting with movements for greater equality, power, and diversity in a range of political institutions and social structures. Working-class and popular activists protested, and lastingly changed, the economic and social insecurity suffered by working Canadians.62 Populist movements and parties originating in the Prairies in the early twentieth century vehemently attacked Canada’s electoral system for being “undemocratic” and controlled by corporate capitalism and partisan politics.63 Christian voluntary associations fuelled a Social Gospel theology that upheld activism on behalf of the excluded and an intensified interest in understanding how urbanization, industrialization, and capitalism worked together to make equality in Canada a myth. One goal was to contain the diffusion of socialistic responses to Western modernity. Decades of labour organizing and the arrival of activist emigrants from Europe nurtured a socialistic and cooperative popular culture that exploited the failure of the ruling Liberal and Conservative parties to address the social, economic, and regional interests of “the people.” These forces formally entered the political arena through several new political parties, including the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ccf ) in 1932, a self-identified “social-democratic” party. The ccf worked to incorporate labour and agrarian interests, was committed

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to the extensive nationalization of economic enterprises and economic planning in Canada, and argued for generous social programs, business regulation, and progressive taxation.64 The ccf rarely used the term “social democracy.” Nonetheless, that became the term most often used, often in left-wing critiques, for its approach.65 And with the ccf ’s coming to power in Saskatchewan in 1944 and its subsequent morphing into the New Democratic Party in 1961, the party, one might argue, worked to install an egalitarian thread into Canadian politics. Yet how far the state at either the federal level or the provincial level has ever embraced any sort of social democracy has been the subject of a lively debate. Some see the arrival in Ottawa of a “government generation” in the 1940s, one unafraid of an implicitly more democratic state/citizen relationship, with average Canadians afforded enhanced access through income supports such as family allowances and unemployment insurance. For them, Leonard Marsh’s Report in 1943 recommending a comprehensive welfare state has attained iconic status.66 Others point out how minimally such policies affected stark imbalances of power in Canadian society, even questioning whether the “Keynesian Revolution” ever really happened. Not only did Ottawa eschew comprehensive economic planning, income redistribution, and constitutional changes empowering the population and guaranteeing individual rights, but it worked actively to disorganize the ranks of democrats and fill the coffers of the corporations.67 Limited as Canada’s “new democracy” may have been, many Canadians today include in their understanding of democracy (and see as “core Canadian values”) ideals of equality as expressed in publicly funded health care, basic education, and healthy food and water, all upheld by a state vested with the right and the duty to engage in comprehensive planning, to safeguard the citizenry, and to provide for a more “equal playing field” by equalizing disparities between regions.68 For instance, according to scholars such as Shirley Tillotson and David Tough, changes in tax practices – towards a public system with a broad tax-paying base – not only stimulated the growth of the welfare state but also redefined political engagement and encouraged a wider level of democratic participation on the part of the average Canadian.69 However, do reforms that lead to an enhanced welfare state mean Canada has become a genuine democracy? Tracing the evolution of these policies and their relationship to democracy has led to mixed critiques. Ian McKay argues

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that socialist parties (and the ndp in particular) became increasingly integrated within the “liberal order” project, resulting in a “passive revolution” in Canada’s democratic history, one in which the liberal state absorbed many of the energies of people once committed to its thorough democratization.70 The tensions between liberalism, democracy, and increased demands for greater equality in the post-Second World War period are taken up in part 3 of this collection. Despite the many policies endorsed by the people’s representatives to build a welfare state, the absence of a coherent and widely accepted paradigm for Canadian democracy suggests both its incompleteness as a project and its vulnerabilities to its opponents. This historical reality is illustrated and explored in Will Langford’s and Shirley Tillotson’s contributions in this volume (chapters 9 and 12, respectively). Langford studies former cbc general manager Gladstone Murray to demonstrate how conservatives worked to limit popular pressure for democratization (and the emergence of a genuine welfare state) in the post-Second World War era. This political network, argues Langford, consciously perverted democratic rhetoric to promote in the public debate ideas of a “self-disciplined democracy” based on a discourse praising “responsible” and “enlightened” enterprise, to the benefit of big business interests. Conversely, and through a reflection on her personal scholarship, Tillotson revisits the means by which the established elite asserted its authority within the emerging welfare state, despite apparent democratic gains and a discourse of mass participation. Particularly, she analyzes this ambiguity by considering how notions such as “community” and “expertise,” used in the public sphere to promote fairer taxation or enhanced social policies, were also used to re-secure the position of propertied dominant classes. The inconsistencies in the democratization process also emerge when we look at the relationship between democracy and rights and freedoms in Canada’s past. Canadians have yet to fully recognize their history of violence and intolerance towards racialized, religious, and other minorities. Henry Yu emphasizes the need to acknowledge this past and, specifically, Canada’s history of white supremacy to understand how democracy itself has been used as a tool for exclusion.71 Many scholars have highlighted the important role that minority groups and early civil liberties activists played in combatting this exclusion.72 Beginning in the early 1930s, these groups challenged

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discrimination in the courts, called for the repeal of unfair laws, and pushed for expanded rights and freedoms in Canada, often openly associating human rights with the democratic ideal. Ruth Frager and Carmela Patrias (chapter 8, this volume) illustrate this convergence of the ideas of democracy and human rights by outlining how rights activists of the 1940s and 1950s mobilized support for their cause by appealing to the need to protect democracy. In identifying four different understandings of democracy employed by these activists, Patrias and Frager not only expose the malleability of the concept in the postwar period but also reveal how a narrow interpretation of human rights perpetuated forms of discrimination that countered the inclusivity their activism sought to promote. While several contributors illustrate how democracy was mobilized in various ways in post-Second World War Canada, that Canada  was  a democracy and that democracy was indisputably good seemed less up for debate in this period. Ian McKay (chapter 10, this volume) focuses  on influential political thinker C.B. Macpherson who, in a 1965 radio lecture series, attempted to destabilize Cold War polarities by challenging the West’s supposed claim to democracy and critiquing “liberal democracy” as potentially serving  undemocratic interests. Macpherson promoted an alternative democratic vision of liberalism, one that embraced more egalitarian relations; however, according to McKay, Canadian audiences of the time (scholars and citizens alike) missed the subtleties of this redefinition, and his vision was largely discounted. The election of Pierre Trudeau in 1968, with his espousal of “participatory democracy” in a “Just Society” and his push for establishing the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, seemed like an opportunity for an expanded democracy, yet the 1970s and 1980s demonstrated the limitations of governmental commitment to democratization, which appeared more rhetorical than substantial.73 Whereas the Charter helped cement a rights consciousness within Canadian society, scholars have extensively questioned its democratic impact, and the efficacy of human rights policy more generally, on promoting true equality or empowering “the people.”74 Leonard Halladay (chapter 11, this volume) further illustrates this critique, examining the quest for equality and recognition of queers in Canada, particularly by means of the Charter, to demonstrate how a neoliberal right-based approach can expand some liberties but at the expense of a genuine democratization. The “fraught” relationship

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between rights and democracy, according to Halladay, has generated new forms of exclusion (within and beyond lgbtq+ communities), highlighting the limits of Canadian “liberal democracy.” As several chapters in this book detail, Canada’s history with settler colonialism has raised questions about Canada’s democratic past as “democracy” was used as an imperial tool to assimilate Indigenous peoples and to challenge Indigenous sovereignty. First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities were dispossessed of their lands, forcibly moved, banned from practising their cultures or speaking their languages, and subjected to violent repression by the state – imperialist policies that hardly correlate with democratic values.75 The principle of compulsory enfranchisement, introduced in the Indian Act, 1876, offered the franchise to those who were willing to give up their treaty rights and their distinct status. As such, its purpose was assimilation rather than the expression of genuine democracy, and so Indigenous peoples viewed (and continue to view) enfranchisement – which was granted only in 1960 for all “status Indians” – with suspicion and hostility. Being denied the vote is only one way in which Indigenous peoples were “othered” by the state and purposefully kept on the outside of Canadian “liberal democracy.”76 Yet First Nations are important actors in Canadian history. Their influence was feared by French colonial authorities who considered them responsible for the spirit of liberty in the settlement, and a notable portion of French settlers (i.e., the fur traders, or coureurs de bois) followed their egalitarian rules and practices.77 If we associate democracy with ideas of equality or with the people’s rule, then Iroquoian societies were examples of democracies well before the arrival of Europeans. Joan Sangster shows that nineteenth-century North American suffragists admired what they saw as the “matriarchal and egalitarian” nature of Haudenosaunee society, which put a greater political value on women than did Euro-Canadian society.78 One could argue that the Wendat (Huron) nation was governed by democratic practices, with their society characterized by direct ruling, radical equality, care for the community, and the absence of coercive institutions.79 Similarly, the Plains Métis called themselves Otipemisiwak (people who own themselves) and lived in a well-established organization that some nineteenth-century Euro-Canadians described as excessively democratic.80 Today’s most influential narrative of democratization, which is Canada’s British heritage, ignores the many influences of both Indigenous peoples and other minorities.

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A final standard by which Canadian democracy can be critically evaluated concerns this political connection to Britain. While the public commemorates 1867 as the birthdate of Canada, for several scholars it was not until Britain’s adoption of the Statute of Westminster in 1931 that Canada began its road to independence, a fundamental step for any democratic country.81 The statute altered the imperial relationship by removing the power of the British government to legislate on behalf of the dominions without their consent, and it endorsed the principle that the dominions were autonomous and equal communities within the Empire. However, in international law, no such thing as a “Canadian citizen” existed until 1947, despite the reality that many residents in the country had been so naming themselves (and their newspapers) for generations.82 It was not until 1982 that the Canadian government “repatriated” its Constitution from Westminster, giving Parliament and the provinces the power to directly amend constitutional law and entrenching a charter of rights and freedoms for citizens. Through the governor general’s constitutional power, however, Canadian laws continue to require royal assent, epitomizing not only how democracy is an ongoing process and experiment but also raising questions as to whether or not the popular election of a lower house is enough to make Canada a political democracy and how to reconcile the hereditary origins of the monarch’s power, and the structural inequities associated with this power, with basic democratic features such as the people’s sovereignty. This constitutional ambiguity has also been reflected in debates over changing understandings of Canada’s federal structure and its implications for democracy. The ongoing jurisdictional struggles between provincial governments and Ottawa, and questions over how well the federal government represents the interests of the different regions, and “peoples,” of the country, demonstrate some of the democratic challenges of a federal system. For example, could the principles of democracy and self-representation be used to justify a Quebec secession, and, if so, what are the implications of this for Canadian democracy?83 Questions such as this, and this broad overview, reveal that the history of democracy in Canada has been one of constant struggles between the many and diverse groups who defended, resisted, or transformed the application of its values. Canada’s democratization process has been, at its core, a history of power relations between Indigenous peoples and the settlers and colonial structures that

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constrained them, between wealthy and powerful elites and the poor or the powerless, and between state actors and civil society. All of the chapters in this book reflect this historical reality, and it shapes the discussions within over how best to define democracy itself. The struggles continue to this day, and we hope this book suggests that, if democracy means more than a few elected institutions and basic individual rights, then readers – scholars and citizens alike – have a great deal of work to do to clarify their relationship with it. no t e s 1 Lummis, Radical Democracy, 14. For the Canadian case, see Greer, “Historical Roots of Canadian Democracy,” 7. 2 Held, Models of Democracy. 3 For recent contributions, see Allan, Democracy in Decline; Savoie, Democracy in Canada; Held, Models of Democracy, ix; Brown, Undoing the Demos; Broadbent, Democratic Equality; MacLean, Democracy in Chains; and McKay, “Liberal Democracy in Crisis.” 4 Wolin, Politics and Vision, 586–93. See, for Canada, Marland, Brand Command. For more global examples, see Chomsky, Who Rules the World?. 5 Taylor, Democracy May Not Exist, 1. 6 “Democracy Index,” The Economist, https://www.eiu.com/topic/ democracy-index. 7 Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy, 6. 8 Greer, “Historical Roots of Canadian Democracy,” 8. 9 Anderson, Transnational Democracy; Manfredi and Rush, Judging Democracy; Muhlberger and Paine, “Democracy’s Place in World History”; and Allan, Democracy in Decline. Transnational studies on Canadian democracy’s history include: Hinther, Perogies and Politics; Iacovetta, “Recipes for Democracy”; and Schrauwers, Union Is Strength. 10 Argument recently made by William A. Macdonald around the concept of “mutual accommodation.” See Macdonald, Might Nature Be Canadian? 11 On the renewing of political history, see, for example, Canadian Historical Review 100, no. 4 (2019) (special edition). 12 Paley, “Anthropology of Democracy,” 476. For further discussion, see Pilon (chapter 1, this volume). 13 Cited by Held, Models of Democracy, 13. 14 Ober, “Public Speech.”

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15 Keane, Life and Death, x; Isakhan and Stockwell, Secret History; Isakhan and Stockwell, Edinburgh Companion; Bernal, Black Athena; Paley, “Anthropology of Democracy”; and Stasavage, Decline and Rise. 16 Ober, Demopolis, 28; Ober, “Public Speech”; and Vodovnik, “Lost in Translation,” 43–6. 17 Rancière, Haine de la démocratie; Vodovnik, “Lost in Translation”; Malet, Démocratie à venir; and Isakhan and Stockwell, Secret History, 2. See also Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future; Wolin, Politics and Vision, 601–5; Wolin and Schaar, Berkeley Rebellion; and Dahl, Preface to Democratic Theory. 18 Paley, “Anthropology of Democracy.” 19 Freeden, Liberalism Divided; Freeden, Liberal Languages; and Mack and Gaus, “Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism.” See also the history of liberalism provided by Dewey’s Liberalism. 20 Wolin, Politics and Vision, 281; and Rosanvallon, Capitalisme utopique, 144–7. See also how Jonathan Israel inserts Paine into the “radical enlightenment” intellectual tradition that, according to him, built the basis of modern Western democracies (Isarael, Revolution of the Mind). 21 See in particular Dewey, Liberalism; Dewey, Democracy and Education; and Dewey, Public and Its Problem. 22 Wolin, Politics and Vision, 500–2. 23 McKay, “Liberal Order Framework”; and Poklington, Liberal Democracy. 24 Rosanvallon, Capitalisme utopique, 157–8; and Rosenblatt, “Liberal Democracy.” For further discussion, see Pilon (chapter 1, this volume). 25 Christiano, “Democracy”; Broadbent, Democratic Equality; Wolin, Politics and Vision, 558–9; Vodovnik, “Lost in Translation,” 41, 47, 52; Landemore, “Grand nombre,” 283–99; Broadbent, Democratic Equality; Aristotle, Politics, 109; Pilon, “Contested Origins”; Wiseman and Isitt, “Social Democracy”; and Wolin, Politics and Vision, 521–2. And, more broadly: Marx, Capital; Gramsci, Prison Notebooks; and Galbraith, Affluent Society. 26 Wolin, Politics and Vision, 525–8; Rosanvallon, Capitalisme utopique, 147–8, 157–61; and Ober, “Public Speech.” 27 According to Sheldon Wolin, modern philosopher John Rawls epitomizes this “liberal dilemma.” See Wolin, Politics and Vision, 529–36. 28 Christiano, “Authority of Democracy.”  29 Wolin, “Tending and Intending a Constitution.” 30 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism; and Lefort, L’invention démocratique. 31 Johnstone, “Anarchic Souls.” See also Plato, Republic. 32 Hobbes, Leviathan (1651).

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33 Vodovnik, “Lost in Translation,” 40; Dupuis-Déri, Démocratie; DupuisDéri, “Histoire du mot ‘démocratie’ au Canada”; and Pilon, “Contested Origins.” For a different interpretation, see Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy. In that sense, John A. Macdonald echoed what Michel Ducharme calls “modern liberty” (see Ducharme, Idea of Liberty, 5). For similarities with Europe, see Eley, Forging Democracy. 34 Scholars who support the benefits of collective decision making include: Waldron, “Wisdom of the Multitude”; Rheingold, Smart Mobs; Surowiecki, Wisdom of Crowds; Sunstein, Infotopia; and Landemore, Democratic Reason. Among modern philosophers opposed to this idea, see Caplan, Myth of the Rational Voter. See also Vodovnik, “Lost in Translation”; Dupuis-Déri, Peur du peuple; and Wallerstein, “Democracy, Capitalism, and Transformation,” 91. 35 Huntington, “Decline,” 98; Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy; Lippmann, Public Opinion. 36 Locke, Second Treatise; Parry, “Locke on Representation”; Goyard, “L’idée de representation”; Pasquino, “Concept de représentation politique”; Bertram, “Rousseau’s Legacy”; Fralin, Rousseau and Representation; and Urbinati, Mill on Democracy. Political theorist Bernard Manin argues this is a question of method and that a genuine democratic regime can be based on elections if the mechanisms of representation meet the democratic spirit. See Manin, Principes du Gouvernement représentatif. See also Pilon (chapter 1, this volume). 37 Dahl, Empire of the People. See also Stasavage, Decline and Rise. 38 Muhlberger and Paine, “Democracy’s Place in World History”; Isakhan and Stockwell, Secret History; and Stasavage, Decline and Rise. 39 This historical fact has generated a historiographical debate, summarized by Stubben, “Indigenous Influence.” See also Muhlberger and Paine, “Democracy’s Place in World History,” 40–1. 40 Some scholars continue to claim that democracy should be exported to non-Western societies: Fukuyama, “End of History”; Diamond and Plattner, Global Resurgence; and Huntington, “Democracy’s Third Wave.” 41 Christiano, “Democracy.” For Canadian examples, see: Nightingale, Workplace Democracy; Grant, Drama of Democracy; Fallis, Multiversities; and Fuji Johnson, Democratic Illusion.    42 Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue. In particular, see Tozer (chapter 3, this volume); Frager and Patrias (chapter 8, this volume); Mckay (chapter 10, this volume); Tillotson (chapter 12, this volume); and Yu (chapter 13, this volume). 43 See Ajzenstat, Canadian Founding.

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44 McKay, “Long Liberal Revolution.” 45 Ajzenstat, Once and Future Canadian Democracy, 27, 50–1. Some scholars do go further back to find the origins of democracy in Canada. See, for example, Marc Chevrier, who proposes thinking of New France as a proto “modern republic” (Chevrier, République québécoise). 46 Quoted by Taylor, “Late Loyalists,” 3. 47 Makenzie’s Gazette, 23 December 1840, quoted by Gates, “Decided Policy,” 197; Schrauwers, Union Is Strength; Palmer, “Popular Radicalism”; and Richard, “Bank War.” 48 Greer, Patriots; and Bittermann, Rural Protest. 49 Roberts, Mixed Company. 50 Bannister, Rule of the Admirals; and McNairn, Capacity to Judge. 51 Saul, Extraordinary Canadians. 52 Greer, “République des hommes.” 53 Stewart, Origins, 52–3. 54 LaSelva, Moral Foundations, 121; and Pilon, “Canadian Confederation and Democracy.” 55 Stacey, “Britain’s Withdrawal.” 56 Strong-Boag, “Citizenship Debates.” See also Emery, Elections. 57 Strong-Boag, “Ballot Box.” 58 Pilon, “Contested Origins,” 113. 59 E.A. Heaman’s book on taxation is a good illustration of the antidemocratic spirit that dominated Canada until the First World War. See Heaman, Tax. 60 Dupuis-Déri, Démocratie; and Dupuis-Déri, “Histoire du mot ‘démocratie’ au Canada.” 61 This applied to women age twenty-one or older, not alien-born, who met the property requirements in the provinces in which they lived. 62 See Heron, Canadian Labour Movement; Kealey, Workers; Sangster, Transforming Labour; Milligan, Rebel Youth; and Heaman, Short History. 63 Laycock, Populism and Democratic Thought, 69. 64 Erickson and Laycock, “Party History.” 65 See in particular Naylor, New Democracy; and Naylor, Fate of Labour. 66 See, among leading scholarly examples, Granatstein, Ottawa Men; and Owram, Government Generation. See also Marsh, Report on Social Security. For the Quebec context, see Marshall, Social Origins. 67 See, in particular: Campbell, Grand Illusions; Dickinson and Russell, Family, Economy and State; Christie, Engendering the State; Olsen, “Locating the Canadian Welfare State”; and Langford, Global Politics of Poverty.

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68 See, for an informative overview, Harell, Soroka, and Mahon, “A Dirty Word?” 69 Tillotson, Give and Take; Tough, Terrific Engine. See also Heaman and Tough, Who Pays for Canada? 70 Evans, “Protest Movement to Neoliberal Management,” 48; and McKay, “New Kind of History.” 71 Yu argues the institutions set up to exclude non-whites from voting created the “delusion of democratic majorities,” which was used to reassert the power of whites. See Yu, “Anti-Asian,” 31–2. 72 Walker, “Race,” Rights and Law; Bangarth, Voices Raised; MacLennan, Toward the Charter; Clément, Human Rights in Canada; and Lambertson, Repression and Resistance, chap. 1. 73 Litt, Trudeaumania. 74 Knopf and Morton, Charter Politics; Ignatieff, Rights Revolution; Mandel, Charter of Rights; Howe and Russell, Judicial Power; and Smith, “Social Movements and Judicial Empowerment,” 347. 75 Among many others, see Daschuk, Clearing the Plains, on how EuroCanadians “cleared the plains” for settlement. 76 Many Indigenous peoples preferred to maintain their traditional systems of governance rather than to adopt European-style “democracy.” See, for example, a petition sent on behalf of the clan mothers of St Regis to the governor general in 1898, a copy of which is reprinted in Sangster, One Hundred Years of Struggle, 51. See also Grinde and Johansen, Native America and Democracy. 77 Havard, Histoire des coureurs de bois. 78 Sangster, One Hundred Years of Struggle, 47. 79 Delâge, Bitter Feast. 80 Paine, “Hunters who Owned Themselves.” 81 Lyon, “Statute of Westminster.” 82 Kaplan, Belonging. 83 Norman, “Démocratie et sécession,” 124; Charbonneau, “Droit des peuples,” 111; and Lombart, “Droit à l’autodétermination.” Some scholars defend the legality or the morality of Quebec secession. See Turp, “Droit de faire sécession”; Nielsen, “Secession”; and Gauthier, “Breaking up.” For an opposed argument, see Buchanan, Secession.

pa r t o n e

Openings

1 The Search for Canadian Democracy: Transnational Insights into Democratization Dennis Pilon

The study of Canadian democratization is in its infancy. Thus far, Canadian political scientists have catalogued some of the key changes to political institutions that have allowed for greater public influence on government, but they have largely failed to explain why such reforms occurred or how, if at all, they might be related to broader democratizing trends across Western countries. Meanwhile, Canadian historians have claimed to find proto-democratic developments across a wide swathe of nineteenth-century Canadian experience, but they have accomplished this by utilizing rather broad and problematic definitions of just what constitutes democracy. The historical reconnaissance required to explore where, when, and how Canadian democracy can be said to have emerged will require paying attention to changes in discourse, mapping the impact of social and political struggles, and assessing questions of who has power. There is both a conventional literature and a critical literature covering how Western countries became minimally democratic, and these should be brought into dialogue with the Canadian experience as they examine changes in discourse, the composition of different classes and their impact (or not) on the party system, and the unpredictable role of events in creating openings for democratic reform. This chapter sketches out the key contributions of these literatures to demonstrate how they might be related to Canadian circumstances and should inform current explorations of the Canadian democratization process. This chapter advances in three stages. It is organized to develop a coherent and informed analysis of the shortcomings of existing

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Canadian work on democratization by bringing it into dialogue with the comparative literature on the topic and then by using those insights to offer cautionary suggestions regarding how to go forward. Thus it begins with the existing work on Canadian democratization to showcase, by scrutinizing and comparing specific claimed examples of “democracy” and demonstrating how comparative work shows the weakness of these democratic claims, how the absence of an appreciation of comparative work can lead to problems. From there it segues to a review of the development of the field of democratization studies, noting the emergence of new ideas, the debates among scholars, and the fact that there is consensus on some points and not on others. This review helps put the specific examples addressed in the first section into the broader debates about how to understand and explore democracy. Finally, with this snapshot of what comparative scholars have produced, the chapter shifts to a discussion of how that work can help inform, clarify, and sharpen how Canadianists take up further research on Canadian democratization. Of course, any attempt to contextualize and direct the debate in any given academic field will likely be controversial and highly debatable. Furthermore, this chapter is not merely a neutral summary of comparative democratization insights; rather, it uses insights from the field to develop its own particular arguments about what democracy is, where it comes from, and who is responsible for it. As such, I expect (and welcome) a critical dialogue with other Canadian democracy scholars that may advance, problematize, or even repudiate the arguments that appear here.

w h at is a n d is n ’ t democracy? Deciding what is and isn’t democratic has engendered considerable debate, both academically and in the public sphere. Many accept elections and representative institutions as a form of democracy in what is seen as a necessarily pragmatic accommodation with the scale of contemporary sovereign states. Others, drawing from ancient Greek practice, argue that true democracy is a matter of scale and maximal inclusion, thus privileging a local and participatory approach. More debate centres on whether democracy should be understood primarily as a set of procedural rules for public input or whether it necessitates a more substantial division and allocation of economic, social, and political power. And a host of other definitions abound. This is

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why scholars will often concede that democracy should be understood as an “essentially contested concept.”1 While there is much to recommend this judgment, comparative democratization scholars have set out to understand how mass influence has been brought to bear on modern state forms and government over the past two centuries and, this being the case, have operated on a narrower understanding of the term.2 After all, to address questions of when and how different countries have become democratic requires a clear working definition that allows distinctions to be made. Without one, we cannot distinguish between democratic and non-democratic states, say with confidence when a country has moved from being non-democratic to democratic, or assess how it did so. Fine-tuning such a definition has been the work of democratization research, and it has involved successive challenges to a series of conflations of democracy with various historical practices, processes, and institutions that were not, in fact, always utilized to achieve democratic ends. However, via this process of challenge and elimination, the research has been able to better pinpoint those factors and historical moments that did contribute to democratic breakthroughs. Bringing these comparative insights to bear on Canadian circumstances, researchers need to beware of conflating the country’s historical democratization process with various practices, processes, and institutions that seem familiar and democratic to us today – things like voting, elections, responsible government, free public debate, and so on – but that may not have been necessarily associated with democracy in the past. Indeed, unproblematically characterizing historic examples of such things as manifestations of democratic processes or sentiment leads to what Italian political scientists Giovanni Sartori once called “concept-stretching” – that is, weakening the explanatory power of the concept by applying it too broadly and indiscriminately.3 Examples of this conflation problem would include too easily equating democracy with historic examples of voting to make decisions, any broadening of the franchise in elections, the achievement of responsible government, and/or the existence of public and media debate. Each example warrants more scrutiny to demonstrate why such conflation is problematic. It is understandable given the ubiquity of voting and elections in our modern democratic sphere to associate the two. But historically voting and elections preceded the democratic era by several centuries. Voting was a common way of making decisions in the Middle

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Ages for a host of institutions (e.g., the church, various aristocratic bodies, etc.), and elections were held for all manner of institutions. But neither was understood to embody or amount to a reflection of any democratic sentiment. Voting rights were often a matter of customary privilege, royal favour, or inheritance, while, in the case of certain civic bodies, participation was decided and weighted in terms of wealth and social status.4 Such criteria were clearly incompatible with even the broadest understanding of democracy. And, of course, the ancient Greek democrats eschewed voting and elections altogether as fundamentally undemocratic, preferring instead consensus forms of decision making and choosing representatives by lot (e.g., sortition).5 Thus, finding examples of voting in various public bodies in the pre-Confederation Canadian colonies does not easily translate into evidence of some sort of prefigurative “joint-stock democracy.”6 Some have argued that the widely distributed male franchise in colonial Canada was an indicator of broad democratic values, particularly after the achievement of responsible government.7 Early democratization research did focus heavily on the franchise and its extension as a marker of democratic advance, but later work severely qualified such claims. First, changes in franchise laws were, until the late nineteenth century, often minor and explicitly crafted as anti-democratic reforms. The backers of the United Kingdom’s “great reform acts” of 1832, 1867, and 1885 understood their efforts as bulwarks against democracy, not as some path towards it.8 Second, the franchise was usually extended on the basis of property ownership, not simply on membership in the political community. Thus, when some Canadian women voted in the early to mid-nineteenth century they did so on the basis of owning property, not democratic inclusion.9 Third, franchise laws were often reversed or suspended for different groups for political reasons, or circumscribed by other laws (e.g., registration laws, poll taxes, literacy tests, etc.) that had the effect of limiting whether subaltern groups could gain access to the vote at all. Alexander Keyssar’s work on the American franchise in the nineteenth century charts how it was often readily extended to poor and immigrant farmers in rural areas but withheld or withdrawn from working-class communities in urban areas.10 These decisions were made in response to political developments such as the ability of existing elites to effectively manage rural voting populations or the eruption of hard-to-control urban radicalism.11 Meanwhile, in the uk , restrictive voter registration laws

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prevented most working-class men from voting until after the First World War.12 Of course, possession of the franchise said little about whether any individual could use it or use it free from either financial or physical coercion. Nearly all voting in nineteenth-century Canada was “open” via a voice vote at the voting location, leaving the economically insecure farming population – the overwhelming majority of the non-Indigenous population – subject to coercive influence from local government officials (politically appointed) and business leaders. Politically, farmers had to worry about access to the government patronage jobs or merchant-sponsored work off the farm that were crucial to their survival. Additionally, farmers and townspeople might face considerable physical harassment at the polls at the hands of rival gangs of politically sponsored thugs.13 So just having a vote did not automatically translate into having democratic power. Indeed, in some cases a broad extension of the franchise was a way of binding the masses to the polity without granting them any real power at all. For instance, the new German state adopted full manhood suffrage in 1871, but the elected legislature had no power over the governing executive or its decisions. It was, in Karl Marx’s colourful (and accurate) phrasing, little more than a “talking shop.”14 Another problematic conflation involves casting political struggles to parliamentarize the executive as democratic initiatives. Though quite common in Canadian political science and history, this view is mistaken in a number of ways.15 The first problem involves the elision of the British term “responsible government” with complete parliamentary control of the executive. In fact, the British Whigs who secured it in a series of stages (arguably stretching from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to well into the nineteenth century) understood responsible government to mean that the Crown would govern with Parliament, not that Parliament would subsume the executive. It was only in the mid-nineteenth century that royal power had diminished to the point that one could say that the United Kingdom’s executive had been effectively parliamentarized.16 The second problem is that the historical record simply does not support the view that those struggling for parliamentary control over government were democrats. All Western countries in the nineteenth century witnessed campaigns to subordinate executive power to legislative oversight and control, but the struggle primarily pitted liberals against conservatives, with neither admitting any democratic sympathies.

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Liberals sought to rein in royal and/or aristocratic privilege, and to expand the influence of merchants and industrialists over governing, through a controlled and narrow franchise, usually defined in terms of property ownership.17 In other words, efforts to empower legislatures were about creating what Ian McKay calls a liberal order, not democracy.18 Liberals envisioned a governing process controlled by property owners and subject to the rule of law, primarily to facilitate and expand capitalist property relations, free from arbitrary state actions. Klaus von Beyme highlights how the European process of parliamentarization only occasionally coincided with genuinely democratic struggles.19 Countries that gained legislative control over the executive in the nineteenth century all did so with very restricted suffrages (e.g., the United Kingdom, the Netherlands). In other cases, the early extension of the franchise proved to be the major stumbling block in advancing parliamentary control as both conservative and liberal elites feared the democratic implications of combining a mass suffrage with parliamentary control over the government. Indeed, this was why political elites in both Germany and Sweden did not relinquish control of the executive until the end of the First World War. Some scholars do argue that early parliamentarization did eventually contribute to the democratization of a number of Western countries, and there is something to such arguments, but that is a different proposition than one that characterizes parliamentarization as a democratic process in and of itself.20 Another limited approach in the search for Canadian democracy mistakes examples of public deliberation, either in person or via newspapers, as de facto proof that a kind of democracy had been established in the pre-Confederation colonies. Jeffrey McNairn argues that the “increasing credibility of public opinion” in the early 1840s “swept away the original understanding of Upper Canada’s constitution, establishing deliberative democracy in its stead.”21 McNairn’s media analysis definitely provides evidence of support for the view that the public should influence government, but it also provides evidence of the opposite view as well as considerable ambiguity as to who, in such claims, comprised “the people.” After all, liberals commonly referred to “the people” as the source of government authority in the nineteenth century, but they understood the term to include only people of standing (i.e., people with property). Thus, while McNairn establishes that there was much debate about who should govern and influence governing in colonial Canada, it

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is a stretch to argue from his evidence that the colonies were democratic or democracies. At the very least, McNairn fails to establish how such deliberative moments in civil society could compel state actors of the period to act on the outcomes of such deliberations, surely a minimum condition in assessing whether the democracy has any substance. In the end, public deliberation can be shown to exist in all sorts of undemocratic contexts. After all, no less an authority than E.P. Thompson documented the existence of a considerable radical press and subaltern resistance to authority throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but this did not bring him to conclude that England was therefore a democracy.22 Democracy as a historically informed concept cannot simply be reduced to decision-making rules, or an electoral process, or the public airings of rival views, or the relationship of the executive to the legislature. Rules, processes, and institutions are not intrinsically democratic but only ever a means to democratic ends. So the question is not whether people could vote and deliberate but whether, by voting or deliberating, we could say that they exercised any real power – that is, had influence over decisions that would affect the community.23 Thus, knowledge about any given context – the political divisions, the nature of social inequalities, the order of historical events – is crucial to determining whether anything approaching a democratic situation exists. That democracy has always been tied up with questions of power is why it has generally been feared by the powerful and lauded by the powerless. Democracy’s promise (and threat) was always that it would alter the balance of social power that governed society. In Greek times, that power manifested itself locally, thus the focus on small-scale deliberation and maximal participation. But the modern period has seen a shift of power from the local to the national state level in concert with the development of capitalism, which explains why comparative studies of democratization have focused on the state level, assuming that the state in modern society has played a key role in shaping and sustaining the unequal relations of power in civil society.

w h e r e d o e s d e m o c racy come from a n d w h e n d o e s i t arri ve? The academic literature on democracy is enormous, much of it debating normative considerations of how democracy should function and what should be done to facilitate this. A considerable

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subliterature focuses on typologizing different “models of democracy” and detailing their contexts, what appear to be their animating logics, and their institutional designs.24 But the field of democratization studies is more narrowly concerned with how nation-states have become and remain democratic as well as how democratic rule breaks down. Here democracy is generally understood as involving elections that feature a broadly inclusive mass electorate, government that is accountable to an elected legislature, and a free and fair electoral process (i.e., one that is non-coercive, nonpartisan). Early work in the field focused almost exclusively on the franchise, taking American experience with a broadly extended white male franchise in the early to mid-nineteenth century as indicative of the democratization process more generally. But revisionist work has challenged just how broad this franchise ever was, while others have highlighted the limits of solely focusing on the franchise as an indicator of democracy. Thus, democratization work highlights the need for all three elements – a broad franchise, a parliamentarized executive, and free and fair elections – to exist simultaneously if the minimal conditions of democracy are to be met. Taking Seymour Martin Lipset’s seminal 1959 journal article, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy,” as the rough starting point for democratization studies, the field has shifted focus over its sixty-year history from explanatory schema highlighting institutions, to society, to questions of agency and contingency, and finally to a more critical approach to institutions. As noted, early work explored reforms to institutions, primarily in the United States and the United Kingdom, focusing on changes to franchise laws or the balance of power between executives and legislatures.25 Though much of this work was produced before 1959, its findings and assumptions continued to influence the field, particularly work that assumed that either franchise or parliamentarization struggles alone could be equated with democratic campaigns. Lipset’s 1959 intervention decisively shifted the debate away from changes in institutions to changes in society itself, particularly the impact of broad social and economic changes on individual consciousness/interests associated with modernization. Society-centred scholars continued to debate the social origins and requisite social conditions required for democracy for the next two decades. Meanwhile, the dramatic rise of “Third Wave” democracies from the grip of authoritarian rule in the 1970s brought questions of agency and contingency to the fore,

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with a focus on elite negotiation, pact making, event sequencing, and shifting class coalitions as being key to democratic transitions. More recently, scholars utilizing critical social theory have refocused attention on the role of institutions in democratizing processes, highlighting the institutional terrain of politics as a key site of democratic struggle. These shifts in focus have reflected developing intellectual debates and advances in research as well as the influence of emerging historical events related to democracy. Lipset is often credited with founding democratization study proper in the social sciences with his focus on the social factors required for democracy to emerge and survive. He was the first to provide data for the oft-noted observation that democracy appeared to arise first in the most developed and modern economies – that is, in Anglo-American and Western European countries.26 Comparing countries using various economic indicators (e.g., percentages of the workforce engaged in farming as opposed to industry, levels of urbanization, sales of consumer durables, etc.) Lipset confirmed that countries that fell below a certain level of development were far less likely to be democratic or to remain democratic. Why economic development had this impact was less clear. Here he utilizes modernization theory to explain the connection. Modernization theory argues that economic development that shifts countries away from farming and towards more industrial production also changes the social processes of such countries, leading to a new kind of socialization that is amenable to democratic rule. Key here was the increasing individualization of such societies, aided by the urbanization of workers and the introduction of mass, mandatory education for children. These changes, Lipset argues, led people to challenge traditional forms of knowledge and reasoning, breaking down traditional forms of social control. Economic development also allowed for increasing class and social mobility, and it was these groups (a rising, expanding middle class in particular), Lipset claims, that demanded democratic rule. Later Lipset and Stein Rokkan would develop a more detailed model of their approach, one that links the fate of different classes and elites to the particular historical events and political/institutional developments that came to pass in North America and Western Europe.27 Eventually, modernization theory was criticized as an explanation with no moving parts, one that largely described changes in demography and economic development, effectively correlating them with

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shifting institutions and historical events but without really showing any actors doing anything to make this so.28 While subsequent work would try to add rational micro-foundations to help explain individual decision making or to highlight how the cultural norms of different elites and the public could influence democratization efforts, the theory continued to struggle to explain how specific people in particular circumstances made decisions, were influenced by their changing context, and came to understand their choices as involving an acceptance of, or active desire for, democratic rule.29 Nor could the theory effectively grapple with the impact of power inequalities, especially in cases in which the public appeared to want democracy but elites would not concede it. Modernization theory provided little insight into just what it was that pushed different elites to persist or to give way. Research continues to support modernization’s basic correlation insight – that is, that increasingly diversified and advanced economies with high levels of urbanization and education are the most likely to have and sustain democratic rule.30 But how and why this is so, or how it came to be, remains largely opaque within this framework. Research in historical sociology would attempt to fill in the gaps in the modernization approach by addressing questions of how change occurred and what social forces were primarily responsible for motivating it and acting to make it happen. In The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, Barrington Moore argues that the nature of crossclass struggle and/or alliance-making was a crucial determinant in whether countries became democratic, fascist/authoritarian, or communist, with the role of the peasantry being crucial.31 Specifically, he argues that, where the peasantry was significantly weakened, as in the Anglo-American countries, the middle classes overcame aristocratic resistance to mount a successful bourgeois revolution and eventually secured democracy. However, where the peasantry remained strong, as in Germany and Japan, the middle and upper classes conspired to install more reactionary authoritarian regimes. Finally, where a bourgeois middle class and aristocracy were weak, the peasantry was able to mount a successful communist revolution against the upper classes, as in Russia and China. Moore’s model overcame the functionalist limits of modernization theory, offering a class-based understanding of social and institutional change. Where modernization theory casts political and institutional change as

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somehow resulting from the choices of individuals (and sometimes elites) transformed by the social conditions of modern economies, Moore highlights how collective actors had a decisive impact in responding to changes in the structure of their economies, ultimately determining the shape of their new governing orders. Moore’s research sparked a debate within democratization studies about classes – specifically, which should be credited with championing democracy or, at the very least, could be considered causally crucial in bringing it about. Lipset highlights the expanding middle class he associates with economic modernization as fuelling democracy, but his argument relies on implied individual self-interest rather than on demonstrating any specific middle-class activism that could be said to have caused the outcome. Moore’s comparative approach identifies a strong bourgeois middle class alongside a weak aristocracy or traditional ruling class as necessary for the path through modernization to lead to democracy. Coming from the Marxist tradition, Goran Therborn counters, in “The Rise of Capital and the Rule of Democracy,” that the working class was actually the author of democracy, though he notes that nowhere was it able to secure democracy entirely through its efforts.32 Therborn inserts two key insights into the debate. First, he argues that it was the internal contradictions of capitalism specifically that created the historic opening for democracy; second, he demonstrates how democracy was a historic and contingent outcome rather than the product of any laws of social development. Therborn’s 1977 New Left Review article introduced a set of conceptual and methodological distinctions that have remained key points of reference in the field. Conceptually, Therborn distinguishes between the implicitly Weberian understandings of class utilized by previous scholars in democratization studies and a more relational Marxist approach. As he points out, modernization scholars basically had no explanation of what was driving economic change, other than suggesting rather teleologically that innovations in technology or trade somehow transformed societies from feudal into industrial economies. Marxists, by contrast, underlined the historical process of forcibly altering the social relations that undergirded feudalism to create openings for capitalism. In the United Kingdom this involved developing a state power that could sponsor the widespread enclosure of common lands and physically deprive peasants of their customary economic rights, effectively “freeing” them to become the paid wage

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labourers that were crucial to capitalist exploitation. At the same time, changes in these economic relations fuelled important political reforms as an emerging bourgeoisie sought political influence at the expense of an aristocracy that no longer ruled the economy. Yet herein lay one of the key “contradictions of capitalism” that Therborn alludes to and that would eventually create an opening for working-class influence. Where feudalism had been characterized by a united ruling class that used political power to take the economic surplus peasants produced directly, he argues that capitalism was defined by a “disunited ruling class” that secured the economic surplus indirectly, by controlling the work process and exploiting their workers as well as competing against other capitalists to reap greater profits. Thus, it was this uniquely divided form of the “rule of capital” under capitalism that created space for the working-class organization and resistance that would, under various circumstances, lead to democratic breakthroughs. The “circumstances” part of the argument is crucial. As the relationship between the class system and institutional political arrangements in his schema is not law-like but historical, Therborn underlines the importance of contextual factors (e.g., the balance of class forces in different locales, their history of alliances and conflict, as well as the impact of unpredictable historical events such as war or invasion). While contributing to debates about how to understand the social origins of democracy, Therborn’s emphasis on the importance of historical context also contributed to an emerging focus in democratization studies on agency and contingency. The dramatic rise of “third wave” democracies in the 1970s, as authoritarian regimes in southern Europe and Latin America gave way to democratic rule, underlined how abruptly change could occur and how it could do so in a wide range of locales. In reaction, academics began to pay closer attention to the precise manner in which transitions to democratic rule took place, the actors involved, the character of the negotiations, and the kind of alliances required to make a deal. A subfield in democratization emerged, stressing what it called “transitology,” or the process by which elite actors negotiated political change, focusing extensively on pact-making, the sequence of events, and the relationship between elites and broader social and class forces.33 While much of this work focused on contemporary examples of transition, historically minded scholars returned to past events to add more detail to how historic transitions to democracy were

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accomplished. Some, like Ruth Berins Collier, focused on the order of institutional development, arguing that various changes to the franchise or increasing parliamentary control of the executive were all “steps toward democracy.”34 Others, like Rueschemyer, Huber, and Stephens, followed Therborn’s lead and tracked the political coalition-making between classes in different locales to further identify how the balance of class forces and the order of historical events influenced the kind of coalitions that emerged as well as the strength of their relationships.35 Not that such research settled any long-standing arguments. Collier argued that her research debunked claims that the working class was responsible for fuelling Western democratization, while Rueschemeyer et al. claimed their work confirmed the key role of the working class. A recent contributor to this debate has even argued that conservatives were actually the authors of modern democracy, though his evidence is more limited, primarily demonstrating that varying conservative reactions to democracy were critical in determining whether or not democracy stabilized in interwar Western Europe.36 Addressing this impasse in democratization studies and in line with a broader academic return to focusing on institutions (e.g., historical institutionalism), work emerged that paid closer attention to the role of institutions in the historical and contemporary struggles over democracy. Collier had already highlighted the important role of institutions as a path towards democracy, arguing that incremental changes in the franchise in both the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as battles to parliamentarize the executive, should also be seen as democratizing moments in that they eventually contributed to its achievement. With this understanding, she argues that the middle class was more important than the working class in pushing democracy forward.37 But Klaus von Beyme, examining the various campaigns to parliamentarize executives across Western Europe in the nineteenth century, argues that such efforts were seldom motivated by democratic goals.38 As such, it would be incorrect to credit their middle-class champions as key democratic activists as their stated goals were quite different. Thus, while one might argue that bourgeois forces unintentionally opened the door for later more genuine democratic reforms, getting to democracy would take pressure from different groups of actors. Geoff Eley, studying the rise of the electoral left across Western Europe, argues that it was the working class that actually formulated the models

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of modern democratic engagement through its invention of the mass party form of political organization.39 In contrast to cadre- or elite-dominated parties, these mass parties welcomed – indeed relied on – working-class membership participation to formulate policy, run for office, and mobilize more broadly. It was their mobilizing and electoral success that ultimately forced democratic concessions from traditional power brokers in situations of real or imagined crisis. Furthermore, as the first mass membership democratically controlled political organizations in Western countries, their example created a contagion from the left that influenced all political players throughout the twentieth century. In contrast to earlier, more simply descriptive approaches to institutional study, these latter efforts examine how social power inequalities gave institutions shape while also shaping challenges to them. As such, institutions were not merely reflections of cultural norms, or functional responses to community needs, or neutral conduits simply registering public influence, but political accomplishments in their own right. Understood relationally, institutions could be seen as a means of maintaining social hierarchies, as a key part of reproducing not just social inequalities but also the power dynamics that fuelled them. For instance, work on voting system reform across Western countries highlighted how electoral institutions were seldom judged in terms of abstract values or functional performance but, rather, politically in terms of who might benefit or suffer from any reform. Indeed, the widespread introduction of proportional voting across Western Europe around the First World War was less about political inclusion than about a deliberate anti-democratic or democracy-limiting reform in the face of what was perceived by conventional elites to be a rising threat from working-class parties and organizations.40 At its root, the broader debate here is about whether democratization as a process should be understood as a continuous or a dichotomous phenomenon, as something that builds incrementally from non-democratic reforms and struggles or as something distinctively separate in terms of when it can be said to have been actually secured and by whom.41 The field of comparative democratization studies has not converged on any one approach as definitive. In some ways, the different approaches complement one another, focusing more closely in different areas of interest. In other ways, however, the differences reflect more fundamental theoretical and methodological disagreements

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about what democracy is or has been and how to go about studying it, particularly regarding questions about its emergence and reproduction. The latter are key debates as how one understands where democracy comes from and what sustains it ultimately informs what might contribute to its decline or even its ultimate demise.

a dva n c in g t h e s t u dy of canadi an d e m o c r acy a n d d e mocrati zati on As scholars interested in Canadian politics turn to questions of the country’s democracy and its origins, there is a great deal they can take from comparative studies of democratization and from comparing Canadian developments with other case studies. The most obvious benefit would be an ability to see where various events or processes occurring in Canada were also occurring elsewhere and explore to what extent Canadian experience was similar or different from them. For instance, the struggle for responsible government in the various Canadian colonies was occurring during the same period that most European countries witnessed struggles to bring their executives under legislative control, suggesting that Canadian efforts were not entirely unique. As European efforts to parliamentarize the executive were usually divorced from and opposed to campaigns for democratic rule, this should raise questions about the easy conflation of responsible government with democracy in the Canadian context. In other words, comparison can and should sharpen our ability to explore what was at stake in different campaigns for reform in different places and at different times. Just focusing on the broadest understanding of Canadian political developments, one can see how the various comparative approaches could help shed more light on questions of where Canadian democracy has come from and why. Clearly, Canadian experience fits within the mould of Lipset’s modernization theory in terms of its economic and political development and its individuating tendencies, in line with other Western countries. The transitology literature raises questions about how and when Canada shifted from an elite to a liberal order and from a liberal order to democracy, with particular attention to who negotiated said changes, their supporters, and the sequence of events leading to reform. Class theorists would explore pressures for and against democracy from an organized politics divided on the basis of competing material interests, with

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Therbornesque approaches highlighting the specifically capitalist nature of their conflict. Historical and critical institutionalists might examine how politics and political disputes gave shape to different electoral and political party institutions and the struggles over them. And yet the comparative democratization literature does not exhaust the insights that might be brought to bear on the emerging field of Canadian democratization studies. As historians move back and forth between theoretically informed assumptions about democracy and the concrete episodes of democratic struggle, I would argue they need to work through five key issues that complicate studying democracy and democratization, issues that touch on definitions, social theories, actors/influencers, historical processes/results, and questions of power. Specifying what we mean by “democracy” If there is one key problem in the emerging field of Canadian democracy and democratization that outstrips all others it is a rather fluid sense of what democracy is. Here we continually see scholars importing contemporary assumptions about voting, elections, parliamentary supremacy, and deliberation as evidence and confirmation of democratic sensibilities and practices in the past. The problem basically involves an elision of democratization with democracy. In other words, scholars are mistaking practices that may have eventually contributed to a transition to democracy for manifestations of democratic sentiment in that particular moment. As noted, in examining Western democratization trends Ruth Berins Collier makes this mistake, crediting middle-class champions of various franchise and parliamentary reforms with bringing about democracy rather than crediting more working-class forces.42 While she is correct that prior reforms aimed at creating a liberal order did eventually open space for more democratic demands, it is historically anachronistic to characterize such reforms or reformers as “democratic” when the historical record shows clearly that they were not. In approaching these past episodes of institutional struggle and reform we need to “make strange” what we think democracy is, particularly at the institutional level (e.g., voting, elections, etc.). We need to inoculate ourselves against the infection of “what is” democracy in our contemporary political imaginary, which can lead to misrecognition of it in the past.

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However, in saying that we must approach identifying democracy in the past in creative ways, I am not joining the chorus of voices that appears to suggest democracy is anything anyone says it is, that claims democracy is an “essentially contested concept.” This mistakes the politicking over the term for its actual substantive meaning. Laurence Whitehead once observed that the term “democracy” has risen and fallen in popularity, depending on how attractive and useful it was seen to be by elites.43 And, as Dupuis-Déri notes in his work, Canadian mp s only began calling Canadian governance democratic during the First World War, without changing anything about it either concretely or substantively.44 Thus democracy can be – indeed, has been – wielded as political discourse, both negatively and positively. It has been wielded ideologically to denigrate liberal reformers in the nineteenth century and to elide an essentially liberal order with democracy in the twentieth century. But if the discourse surrounding democracy is flexible, it is because the thing itself is not. In fact, I would argue that it is precisely because “democracy” is rather fixed in its essential meaning that there is so much struggle over it. Though the twentieth century would bring a “muddle” over democracy, C.B. Macpherson once noted that, in its most basic sense, the term has actually been clearly understood for most of human history – to help the many and hinder the few, or empower the powerless and limit the powerful.45 No amount of spin can entirely excise the radical kernel that always lurks within democracy and threatens to break out – the threat of equality. This is why there is so much struggle over its institutional parameters and why billions of dollars are spent in modern American election cycles – precisely to manage that threat. Put simply, democracy can be defined as the idea that the great mass of people should be able to influence the decisions that affect their own lives. Essentially, this is the substance of what is and has been at issue with democracy as both a contemporary and a historical phenomenon.46 The relationship of liberalism to democracy Some of the confusion about democracy is rooted in its problematic association with other concepts and theoretical traditions, specifically liberalism, particularly in the formulation “liberal democracy.” It is deeply ironic that some of the nineteenth century’s greatest opponents of democracy should now be confused with it, credited with

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inventing it, calling for it, and obtaining it. And it is unfortunate that a host of patently undemocratic “liberal” institutional arrangements have now somehow become accepted as hallmarks of democratic governance. For instance, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries things like the “separation of powers” and houses of “sober second thought” were both understood as bulwarks against democracy.47 While we can see nineteenth-century liberals working with more democratic forces in different places and different times across Western countries, the liberal default was opposition to democratic rule for reasons that were fairly clearly stated at the time (even if they tend to be obscured today): their belief in the primacy of property rights over human rights.48 It is time to recognize that, for a number of reasons, the conceptually sloppy amalgam that is “liberal democracy” actually limits our understanding of past events. First, in contemporary usages, “liberal” and “liberalism” are actually mid-twentieth century conceptualizations that meld a variety of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers and political traditions, subsuming Whigs, utilitarians, radicals, and others in a way that buries their considerable differences and obscures their historical development and influence over time.49 Second, as a term denoting the governing structures of twentieth-century Western countries, “liberal democracy” only briefly surfaces in the 1930s, then increases somewhat in use in the 1950s, and takes off stratospherically as a descriptor from the 1980s on.50 Thus it is hard to argue that the term is either historically accurate or deserves any special consideration in conceptualizing historical events or processes. In other words, it should be judged by how well it helps us to understand history, to work out what was going on during particular historical events. At this point it would be helpful to recall that the term “liberal democracy” is itself a part of history, part of the broader post-Second World War ideological project sponsored by the American state to actively redefine “democracy” in the face of various leftist/nationalist threats, some real, most imagined. For American social and academic elites and their transnational allies, the interwar period had dangerously dualized democracy as consisting of a battle between a populist “people” ranged against an intransigent plutocracy. Cold War liberals sought to equip various social elites (media, politicians, academics) with intellectual resources to challenge left economic populism by redefining what democracy would involve and who

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“the people” were understood to be. This typically involved narrowing the definition of democracy to competitive elections and replacing the people with pluralist group competition.51 Of course, there were critical theoretical responses to such efforts (see McKay, chapter 10, this volume) as well as social challenges to the narrowness of Western democracy as practised in the 1960s and 1970s, but neither managed to dislodge dominant usages and understandings of liberal democracy. Separating “liberal” from “democracy” will allow historians to better explore what was going on in the different periods of social and political struggle in Canada. For some, it will allow them to embrace a history of what is more properly understood as a struggle to establish a liberal order rather than confusing this with democracy or the efforts to establish one. Additionally, this will aid our understanding of Canadian democratization and what role struggles over that liberal order played in the more democratic developments that came later, particularly in terms of the distinct social forces primarily responsible for driving each. Demoting political theory and political theorists Part of the problem concerning the confusion of liberalism with democracy is rooted in how essentially liberal theorists are pressed into service as democratic theorists. A case in point would be John Locke. A naïve reading of Locke from a contemporary perspective might easily mistake his calls for popular influence over government or respect for the rule of law as democratic commitments.52 But such readings divorce Locke from his own historical context, in which his meaning was understood differently – in his time “popular influence” meant adding men of property to the aristocratic voting ranks while the rule of law was primarily understood as defending the rights of property from arbitrary incursion and seizure by the Crown.53 Even if, in the nineteenth century, Locke were misunderstood as some sort of democrat (evidence from the period would suggest he was not), the case for his influence over political actors and their actions is weak, typically invoked in a rather whiggish story of the ascendance of Enlightenment thinking over more traditional views. Too much study of democracy begins with these sorts of “great thinkers” whose views are held to have influenced the events that followed, to have equipped various actors with the ideas and rationales motivating their

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behaviour. The problem is, historical accounts of politics and political actors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries paint a much more complex picture of actor motivations than one that simply credits so-called “great thinkers” with passing down their ideas to actors who take them up. In fact, in examining actual democratizing struggles, it seems influence flows the other way – from the historical events that theorists then try to fit into their philosophical models.54 This being the case, we need to demote the theorists from their place of pre-eminence in talking about democracy. Even when we do see historical actors invoking political thinkers, their use of such theorists and their ideas usually amount to post hoc justifications for positions the advocates already held. In other words, historical actors may wield so-called “great thinkers,” but the insights seldom tell us why the actors are really doing what they are doing. In most cases they simply act as an ideological cover for the real reasons, which were usually less publicly attractive (e.g., serving their self-interest rather than any claimed public interest). Nor do these theorists hold a balanced range of opinion – nearly all are anti-democrats: Plato, Aristotle, Adam Smith, Locke, J.S. Mill, and so on. Instead of “reading down” from the great theorists, assuming that somehow their influence trickled down to influence affairs more broadly, we need to “read up” from actual practice. Colin Grittner does this effectively in his discussion of nineteenth-century conservative strategies to limit democracy, where he concretely identifies what conservative actors think is at stake and the actions they take to pursue their objectives (chapter 7, this volume). Exploring what people actually do will tell us more about where democracy comes from than will trying to map the ideas of political thinkers onto historical events. In other words, democratic theory should develop out of an analysis of concrete political struggle to gain minimal democracies, not the other way around. Here historians, by virtue of their method, play a key role in exploring, testing, and, indeed, developing theoretical ideas about democracy. Distinguish between democracy and “actually existing democracy” Studying concrete events will also help us distinguish between democracy as an idea and what actually emerges from democratic struggle, what elsewhere I dub “actually existing democracy.”55 There is a tendency in Western countries to talk about democracy as if it is an

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end state, an agreed-upon outcome, a space where conflict occurs within certain prescribed and agreed-upon boundaries. This is how political science as a discipline tends to talk about democracy and democracies – in what might be called “ideal type” terms – as if the definitions expounded by academics allow or limit the behaviour that follows. But historically analyzed, democracy is never really designed or adopted; instead, we read that it is secured, conceded, allowed, granted, or simply somehow accomplished. This is so because, up until the point that democracy suddenly arrives, a host of very important and powerful people did not want it, vocally opposed it, and worked hard to avoid it. The day after democracy is achieved, they are still there, and, far from accepting it, they continue to oppose it, though now they shift tactics from outright opposition to a battle over its scale, depth, and scope. In other words, democracy, as we have known it historically over the past century, was not an accomplished fact but a tenuous compromise between two opposing forces – one wanting a thorough and substantive democratization of everyday life, the other preferring that property and various kinds of social privilege structure human governance – with neither able to entirely get what it wanted. To grasp this dynamic and keep it front and centre, we must distinguish between the ideals of democracy and the historical reality, calling what we have “actually existing democracy” in order to underline how the reality embodies this tension between democratic and anti-democratic forces, which also helps explain its occasional bouts of instability and violence. This tension is readily visible historically in the interwar instability in Europe, where anti-democratic forces were often blatant in their anti-democratic views and efforts, and succeeded in pulling down rather weak democratic edifices in Italy, Spain, and Germany. But anti-democratic forces were there in Britain and North America as well, limiting what governments would do to respond to the economic crisis of the 1930s. The Cold War imperatives following the Second World War isolated the worst of these anti-democratic forces from mainstream politics, but (with the end of the Cold War) they now appear to be making a comeback. Recognize how democracy is relational If our contemporary democracy is under threat, how should we respond? Many books are filled with suggestions about how to buttress our democratic institutions and processes. Some talk as if

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institutional safeguards are the way forward (e.g., term limits, bans on “extremist” politics), or some kind of cultural reconditioning (e.g., public education campaigns), or a change in the scale of democracy (e.g., through the use of technology or supranational governing bodies), or the use of more deliberative fora (e.g., citizens’ assemblies), or the creation of more local power (e.g., neighbourhood participatory budgeting), and so on. But institutions, processes, and scales – these are only ever a means to democratic ends, they cannot assure democracy in and of themselves. And this is why so many familiar markers of democracy – voting, elections, the franchise, parliamentary control of the executive, deliberative fora, etc. – can mislead us. Democracy is ultimately a relational concept. It is about power, not about institutions.56 Understood relationally, democracy is a relationship among people for their collective self-governance, and, as such, it is affected by all other social relations of power and power inequality (e.g., class, gender, race, colonial dispossession, etc.). And this means that we can never simply read off democracy from institutions or processes; instead, we must actively judge the depth of the governing relationship to assess whether anything approaching democracy is going on. This involves concretely exploring the degree to which the great mass of people really does have the ability to influence the decisions that affect their own lives.

c o n c l u s ion The story of our democracy – its origins, key actors, and events – matters. It matters because, depending on where we put our emphasis, we may understand quite differently what does or does not potentially produce democratic outcomes. Janet Azjenstat argues that Canadian democracy has its roots in 1688 when the British Parliament gained more influence over the Crown. John Ralston Saul credits Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin as Canada’s democratic founders when they secured responsible government in 1848 in the United Province of Canada. Meanwhile, Ian McKay suggests that Canada’s liberal order stretched well into the twentieth century, with some sense of democracy only arriving around the 1940s. Depending on who is right, the political forces driving reform and the events precipitating change look very different. One case involves pitched physical battles between British Tories and Whigs over the precise relation of Parliament to everyday governance in

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the seventeenth century, another divides different factions of liberal political forces within a colonial legislature over how patronage and government investment will be decided in the mid-nineteenth century, while the last pits social outsiders – farmers, immigrants, the working class – against a dominant Laurentian political elite in the early to mid-twentieth century against a backdrop of war, general strikes, and economic depression. This debate matters to us today as commentators in Canada and abroad lament what they argue are indicators of democracy’s decline: falling voter turnout, increases in public support for extremist and intolerant politics, and a pervasive feeling of ennui about what to do about it. Who has the most interest in furthering democratic rule? What are the contextual factors that have contributed to its rise and stabilization? While the past does not provide a roadmap for the future, research into Canadian democratization may help contemporary democrats better understand what gave rise to Canadian democracy and the social forces and historical factors that have influenced its development. not e s 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Green, “Democracy”; and Whitehead, “Vexed Issue.” Grugel and Bishop, Democratization. Sartori, “Concept Misformation.” Myers, Parliaments and Estates; and Colomer, Handbook of Electoral System. Cartledge, Democracy. Schrauwers, Union Is Strength. Saul, Extraordinary Canadians. Levin, Spectre of Democracy; and Saunders, “Politics of Reform.” Sangster, One Hundred Years of Struggle. Keyssar, Right to Vote. Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy. Blewett, “Franchise”; and Matthew, McKibbon, and Kay, “Franchise Factor.” Pilon, “Contested Origins.” Draper, “Marx on Democratic Forms.” For an example of this conflation of responsible government with democracy, see Ajzenstat, Once and Future Canadian Democracy. Hanham, Nineteenth Century Constitution. For the Canadian context, see Martin, “Influence of the Crown”; and Patterson, “Enduring Canadian Myth.”

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Losurdo, Liberalism. McKay, “Liberal Order Framework.” Beyme, Parliamentary Democracy. For scholars who credit early parliamentarization as a “step towards” democracy, see Collier, Paths toward Democracy; and Ziblatt, Conservative Parties. McNairn, Capacity to Judge, 17. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class; and Thompson, Customs in Common. Pilon, “Actually Existing Democracy.” For an example of the “models” approach, see Held, Models of Democracy. See Seymour, Electoral Reform; and Munro, Government of American Cities. Lipset, “Some Social Requisites.” Lipset and Rokkan, “Cleavage Structures”; and Rokkan, Citizens, Elections, Parties. Przeworski and Limongi, “Modernization.” For attempts to add micro-foundations to modernization theory, see Diamond, Spirit of Democracy. Przeworski and Limongi, “Modernization”; and Boix and Stokes, “Endogenous Democratization.” Moore, Social Origins. Therborn, “Rule of Capital.” See O’Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule. Collier, Paths toward Democracy. Rueschemeyer, Huber, and Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy. Ziblatt, Conservative Parties. Collier, Paths toward Democracy. Beyme, Parliamentary Democracy. Eley, Forging Democracy. Ahmed, Politics of Electoral System; and Pilon, Wrestling with Democracy. For the continuous view, see Collier, Paths toward Democracy; Markoff, “Where and When”; and Ziblatt, Conservative Parties. For the dichotomous view, see Rueschemeyer, Huber, and Stephens, Capitalist Development; Eley, Forging Democracy; and Pilon, “Actually Existing Democracy.”

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Collier, Paths toward Democracy. Whitehead, “Vexed Issue.” Dupuis-Déri, “History of the Word ‘Democracy.’” Macpherson, Real World of Democracy. Pilon, “Actually Existing Democracy.” Diamond, “Conservatives, Liberals”; Williamson, “Labour Party”; and Russell, “Second Chambers.” Pilon, Wrestling with Democracy; and Losurdo, Liberalism. For an illustrative snapshot of this diversity in practical politics, see Hawkins, Arts of Politics. To get a sense of when the term “liberal democracy” comes into regular usage, see the results of Google Ngram Viewer search of the term: https:// books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=liberal+democracy&year_ start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3. Fowler, Believing Skeptics; and Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy. For academic versions of this argument, see Ashcraft, Locke’s Two Treatises; and Faulkner, “First Liberal Democrat.” See McNally, “Locke, Levelers”; and Wood, “Radicalism, Capitalism.” Eley, Forging Democracy. Pilon, “Actually Existing Democracy.” Pilon, Wrestling with Democracy.

2 First Nations, Colonialism, and the Issue of Equality from the Ancien Régime to Contemporary Democracy Denys Delâge and Jean-Philippe Warren

The conventional narrative of Canadian democratization is one in which democracy arrived with British colonization and gradually expanded with, among other reforms, the push for responsible government and the broadening of the franchise. This whiggish history of democratic progress, questionable in general, is profoundly flawed when it comes to the political inclusion of Indigenous societies. On the one hand, in and around the St-Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, Indigenous communities organized themselves in complex and relatively egalitarian ways long before the advent of modern democracy. On the other hand, when it comes to the case of Indigenous nations, British colonialism was particularly anti-democratic. Even once Canada began to democratize (to the extent that it did), the Canadian state intentionally excluded Indigenous peoples from this process, turning democracy itself into a tool to be used against them. Democracy is most often described through the prism of the freedoms it allows: freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, free elections, and so forth. But democracy can also be described through the ideal of equality. “Liberty,” according to Alexis de Tocqueville, “has shown itself to men in different times and in different forms; it has not been linked exclusively to one social state, and you find it elsewhere than in democracies. So it cannot form the distinctive characteristic of democratic centuries. The particular and dominant fact that singles out these centuries is equality of conditions; the principal passion that agitates men in those times is love of this equality.”1 This observation is a good starting point for analyzing the place reserved for Indigenous nations in the French and

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then the British and Canadian regimes. We see in the following pages that the hierarchies of the Ancien Régime were able to create a space of relative equality for Indigenous nations, although they were themselves organized according to principles of gifts and counter-gifts that directly contradicted the medieval hierarchical organization. We then see that the democratic equality inspired by liberal philosophy required a cultural assimilation that broke the circular logic of Indigenous nations living in the northeast part of North America and thus, even more head-on their traditional organization. Until the mid-twentieth century, Canadian history is based on what seems at first glance to be a puzzling contradiction: while First Nations practised forms of democratic proceedings based on broad exchange, consensus, and lack of coercive power, as the Canadian system emerged from a monarchical regime and became more democratic they were pushed ever further outside that system. We therefore find ourselves with the paradox of a New France that is apparently open to difference and a British North American regime that, as early as the nineteenth century, undertook a policy to physically and culturally exterminate Indigenous peoples. While the French king’s subjects included the entire population ready to submit to his sovereign will, the demos of liberal democracy, based on a first-past-the-post majority vote and indirect representation, excluded a large number of people who, it was claimed, did not have the capacity to fully participate in informed debate. This was so much so that, at the same time as Canadians were invited to celebrate the creation of a great nation that, in the words of Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier addressing Toronto’s Massey Hall in October 1904, would be “the star to which all men who love progress and freedom shall come,” Indigenous peoples were treated as outcasts, relegated to the margins, and silenced. To simplify a complex history, let us divide the powers that participated in the colonization of North America into two groups: (1) New France, which, in the seventeenth century, based political integration on full subjection to the king as a continuation of the feudal system, and (2) British North American society, which, in the nineteenth century, based political integration on the participation of free citizens in a covenant. Although rooted in a more archaic system than that which presided over the later British colonization, New France encouraged more alliances and cross-breeding with Indigenous peoples by calling for settlers and Aboriginals to become

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one people. Although Champlain’s famous invitation to his allies, “our young men will marry your daughters, and we shall be one people,”2 first expressed a “weapon of empire” aimed at subordinating Indigenous nations to the French king,3 it envisaged a possible integration of Indigenous peoples into New France on the basis of a common submission to the French monarch. Things were different in the nineteenth century, when British power sought to assert its domination on the basis of an ability to take part in a rational debate defined in the terms of Western (i.e., white, bourgeois, and patriarchal) culture. Thus, the advance of modernity, far from following a whiggish interpretation of history, served to crush and marginalize Indigenous peoples, who represented in the dominant imagination precisely what liberal democracy had to overcome: ignorance, paganism, laziness, and irrationality.

hi e r a rc h y a n d e q ua l it y i n new france Several structural elements explain the close relations between settlers and Indigenous peoples in New France. First, French immigration was low and their settlement was on a “widow land,”4 the Iroquoians who had occupied the area having disappeared around 1580.5 Moreover, the latter, who had traditionally provided the nomads with the indispensable corn flour, without which they could not have survived the winter, were replaced by the first settlers of New France, who dispensed wheat flour to the Indigenous populations of the region.6 Second, the economy of the French colony rested essentially on the fur trade, for which Indigenous peoples provided the labour. Since French goods were more expensive than English goods,7 this forced the coureurs de bois (traders) of New France to go deep into the territory in order to deal directly with the Indigenous populations and to seal alliances with them. The imbalance in the male-female ratio, caused by male-dominated French immigration, encouraged marriages à la mode du pays, eventually leading to the creation of Métis inland communities. Finally, Indigenous military support was needed to defend a fragile French colony against British colonial expansion. All these aspects of colonization were decisive. However, it is important to note that it is also because New France was more archaic than the British American colonies that it was able to integrate First Nations to a greater degree than was the latter. New France’s close

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diplomatic, social, and political relations with the Indigenous peoples was due, among other things, to its Ancien Régime character. The verticalization of power specific to the medieval world allowed a certain integration of Indigenous populations through their submission to the king. In a monarchical regime, the diversity of languages, customs, and even laws (patois, legal pluralism, arbitrary territorial division, nobility privileges, local particularities, layering of feudal relations, local cults, etc.) is not contradictory to the affirmation of royal sovereignty. On the subject of the Ancien Régime, Hyppolite Taine provided a lapidary formula, true in its simplicity: “Bureaucracy at the center, arbitrary, exceptions and favors everywhere, such is the summary of the system.”8 Indigenous nations could therefore retain their customs and languages (and even, to some extent, their religion, as long as they adhered to the doctrine of the “Two Reigns”), with the only requirement being to agree to submit to the legitimate regalian authorities as part of the Kingdom of France. The issue of freedom, of course, was central to the confrontation between Indigenous nations and European powers. But it was generally framed in terms of the degree of equality that each group was to enjoy in the new environment created by colonialism. Because their societies were characterized by their lack of political coerciveness, Indigenous peoples justly considered themselves much freer than Europeans who had to comply with other people’s (e.g., kings, priests, employers) orders. Colonial powers had a completely different understanding of what it meant to be free than did Indigenous peoples. For those powers, the opposite of the notion of authority was insubordination and, according to several French explorers, the biggest flaw of the “savage” was precisely that he “does not know what it is to obey.”9 The “savage” freedom that Indigenous peoples enjoyed at the time of the conquest of northeastern North America was, in the eyes of the French accustomed to the Ancien Régime’s strict hierarchical structure of political and religious subjection, synonymous with disorder, chaos, and regression. No prospect of salvation, no prospect of progress could result from such licence and anarchy, which reduced men, it was said, to the rank of brutes. The king’s agents and the priests therefore sought to impose a yoke on Indigenous peoples, much as was done to domesticated farm animals. As Father Le Jeune explained it in 1634: “They [the “savages”] imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of Wild ass colts, rendering no homage to any one whomsoever, except when

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they like. They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs.”10 According to the colonizers, it was precisely in this supposed inability to show self-control and moderation that the savage recognized himself, his inclinations (including those of a sexual nature) being described as irrepressible. “There is nothing so difficult as to control the tribes of America,” argues Father Le Jeune, adding that “all these barbarian peoples … are born, live and die in a liberty without restraint; they do not know what is meant by bridle or bit.”11 In this perspective, the savage who wandered freely in the wilderness could only live in the cultural realm by agreeing to specific regulations: the freedom he thought he enjoyed in the forest was seen as slavery in civilized society. Hence the importance, as was announced in the Jesuit relationship of 1611, of “slowly training the senses of the Savages” and progressively bringing them to civilization (i.e., the Kingdom of France, which saw itself as the most advanced society in the world) and salvation (i.e., the Kingdom of Heaven, which Christians reserved for the truly deserving). In this sense, the “tribes” and “peoples” of North America resembled the children described in sixteenth-century European pedagogical books. Just like the ruthless children in these books, Indigenous peoples needed to be chastised, punished, disciplined, and trained. In both cases, it was a question of “taming” rebellious natures; of putting a bridle around the neck of people “without faith, without law, without king”; and of breaking down resistance by aggressive methods in order to turn them into docile subjects. However, it must be understood that, to a great extent, the perpetuation of traditional values and knowledge was tolerated: missionaries could praise the wisdom and kindness of the Savages; and soldiers could praise their skills in battle. Once submission to God the father in the spiritual order and to a fatherly king in the temporal order had been established,12 nothing prevented anyone, within the framework of this obedience, from doing as he or she wished, perpetuating activities and maintaining thoughts that did not contradict the multiple hierarchies that intertwined in the French society of the Old Regime. This even allowed certain Savages to be recognized as seignors in Sillery, although intrigues at the court and the demographic pressure of Quebec City inhabitants gradually stripped them of this title.13 Initially, the Ancien Régime did not aim for the eradication of the Other as Other but only for its incorporation into a feudal regime in

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the form of the commendation, which granted subordinates land in exchange for a number of benefits, including military and economic aid. In the political sphere, Jean Bodin, theorist of the monarchy, described feudal relations as “recognition and obedience of the free subject of the sovereign prince” on the one hand, and “protection, justice, and defence to the subject” on the other hand. Thus, he argued, the subjects “owe to their prince fealty, subjection, obedience, aid, and assistance,” and “the prince is obliged to maintain by military force and the force of the laws, the safety of his subjects with respect to their persons, belongings, and families.”14 Such a system had the peculiarity of favouring both a hierarchy of political relations (through the acceptance of submission to a lord) and a certain equality (through the interdependence of the subject and the benefactor, each of whom assisted the other). A similar reciprocity existed in the religious order between God and the faithful, even if the increase of divine transcendence led to an ever greater unilaterality. It was this “alliance,” which could be interpreted in more or less unequal terms depending on the contexts and ambitions of each partner, that structured the relationship between French settlers and Indigenous peoples in North America. In New France, Iroquoians, Algonquians, and Sioux nations agreed to take an oath of “faith and homage” to the French king as long as the latter assisted them in return. While the French, in official declarations, insisted on the obligations of Indigenous peoples to the Crown, First Nations recalled that they had never “committed” their freedom in their negotiations with the French. For example, allied nations (Mi’kmaq and Abenaki) were able to challenge the treaties by which the king of France ceded Acadia in 1713 and New France in 1763.15 To the English merchant Alexander Henry, who, in 1761, first came to negotiate at Michillimackinac, or Turtle Island, in Lake Huron, the Ojibwa chief Mineweweh replied: “Englishman, although you have conquered the French, you have not yet conquered us! We are not your slaves. These lakes, these woods and mountains, were left to us by our ancestors. They are our inheritance, and we will part with them to none.”16 The ambiguity of feudal relations tainted the paternal metaphor used to structure relations between the French and First Nations. How, one wonders, could nations that repeated that they were the “children” of their “father” (a.k.a. the king of France) not accept the obligations that flowed from such submission? The reason lies

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in the fact that the Iroquoian kinship system, in which the father is a provider and protector without moral authority over his children (they being the responsibility of the uterine uncle), was the key diplomatic reference for Indigenous people.17 What presented itself, from the European point of view, as complete submission (Indigenous peoples are the children of the French king, therefore they must obey him in full) was understood, from the Indigenous point of view, as a treaty between sovereign nations (the French king being the father of Indigenous peoples, they could expect protection and assistance from him, while preserving their freedom to do as they pleased).

e q ua l it y in g if t soci eti es The society of the Ancien Régime was fundamentally unequal, while being regulated by a complex network of alliance between individuals, classes, groups, bodies, and communities. Multiple ranks, varied conditions, and unequal burdens did not prevent the expression of an interdependence between “subsidiary” freedoms. The motto Le roi en son Conseil, le peuple en ses états (the king in his council, the people in their estates) expresses in a basic formula the decentralized and interlocking distribution of power in ancient France. In New France, the prohibition of assembly and petition or the absence of freedom of the press were counterbalanced by the ties that united the seigneur and his censitaires, the priest and his parishioners, the governor and his subjects, or the merchant and his engagés. Much different were the peoples of what would become northeastern North America and,18 in particular, nations composed of hunter-gatherers, whose social relationships may be described as egalitarian. In spite of the existence of multiple social separations (between young and old, men and women, etc.), as well as the presence of various symbolic distinctions, the social structure of these nations contrasted sharply with that of French feudal society and its multiple compartments. Instead of being consumed by ambition, they cultivated a levelling of conditions. “The chiefs who are most influential and well-to-do,” noted Nicolas Perrot, “are on an equal footing with the poorest, and even with the boys – with whom they converse as they do with persons of discretion.”19 Similarly, Father Charlevoix noted: “In this country all men believe themselves equally men, and what they esteem most in a man is the man himself. No preference is given to birth, no pre-eminence is attached

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to that merit which inspires pride and which serves to make others feel their inferiority.”20 While it was fantasized that the display of European wealth would impress Indigenous peoples, the latter were scandalized by the gulf that separated those who were extremely poor from those who were extremely wealthy. Father Charlevoix never ceased to rave about this relative denial of the relations of domination between members of a community. It is infinitely surprising to find that men who, on the outside appear to be entirely barbarous, treat each other with a gentleness and consideration that is not found among the common people in the most civilized nations … One is no less charmed by the natural, unaffected gravity which reigns in their manners, their actions and even in the majority of their pastimes; and also by that politeness and deference which they show to their equals, and the respect of young people to the aged; and lastly, never to see them quarrel among themselves, with those indecent expressions, and the oaths and curses, so common amongst us. All which are proofs of good sense, and a great command of temper.21 Charlevoix, like Lahontan, was convinced that the spirit of concord that reigned among the peoples of northeastern North America stemmed from a generalized contempt for money and material things. “This doubtless comes partly from the fact that mine and thine, those cold words, as St. John Chrysostomos calls them, which while extinguishing in our hearts the flame of charity ignite that of greed, are not yet known among these Savages.”22 Indigenous people seemed to accumulate goods only to immediately redistribute them – recognition and prestige, and thus moral authority, being acquired through prodigality. In the northwestern part of the continent, the ritual of the potlatch pushed this tendency to its climax by scuttling accumulation in order to better celebrate the necessity of exchange. That the (relative) indifference to material goods had something to do with the equality that prevailed in the Indigenous societies visited by the French is partly true. But one could go further and say that equality in these societies was primarily motivated by a collectivist conception of life. Whereas in the modern world the individual is equal to others because he or she possesses him- or herself and owes nothing to anyone,23 a member of an Amerindian community was

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equal to others because he or she never fully possessed him- or herself and owed everything to everyone. In the Indigenous societies of northeastern North America, humans, animals, plants, nature, stars, storms, seasons, and shadows all interacted without clearly distinguishing between the “material” and the “spiritual.” Not only did Indigenous communities encompass all living and non-living things, but everything was in constant dialogue with everything else because it was everyone’s duty to tirelessly maintain, deepen, and renew the primordial alliance without which chaos would triumph. Humans were indebted to the forces that both inhabited and overwhelmed them, and with which they interacted through dreams and rituals. Such a way of thinking contains no internal enemies. As egalitarian societies, Indigenous societies rejected the internal division, hierarchy, and inequality sanctioned by central, monopolizing institutions. In return, outside the circle of kinship between humans, animals, and spirits were the “others,” the “non-humans,” the “no-bodies,” the cannibals, those who eat and annihilate “real” people. Outside the vast circle of the covenant, the enemies to be fought were numerous and always threatening. To prevent the break-up of communities and open warfare, it was necessary to constantly reiterate the gift and counter-gift that linked the various components of the community. For this reason, debt was the driving force behind the circulation of beings, things, and symbols. To receive too much, to accumulate too much, would have caused a scandal because it would have meant a visible refusal of the counter-gift. There was therefore a constant obligation to redistribute: rituals, dreams, myths needed to be constantly circulated to strengthen the community and to produce meaning, solidarity, and security. On the other hand, not receiving was just as unacceptable: it was tantamount to cutting oneself off from others. It was therefore necessary, simultaneously, to be both debtor and indebted. In other words, one had to continuously give, receive, and give back. Among the many testimonies to this social imperative, let us look at that of Jean-Baptiste Truteau. Living among the Arikaras of Dakota at the end of the eighteenth century, Truteau was amazed by a practice that seemed to him foreign to the one that generally prevailed in the Western world: Indians consider it an honor to assist one another with food and the tools they use. They continuously make presents, be it of horses or merchandises, in such a way that it could be said that

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what belongs to one belongs to the other. They hasten to help each other in case of need. They have no interest in amassing riches; and far from the sentiment of civilized nations, among which a man is honored and respected to the extent that he is rich, it is necessary to be brave, courageous, generous, and of good counsel in order to be a man and respected among them.24 In this quote from Truteau, let us emphasize mutual assistance, recognition of the needs of others, the gentleness of social relations, and hospitality. The behaviour of the Indigenous peoples could not have contrasted more with that of Adam Smith’s baker, who does not make his bread out of charity but, rather, to sell it to foreigners according to his interests (which allows him not to feed the needy, even if the they are starving to death). Politically, the philosophy described by Truteau gives an eminently democratic character to discussions and debates. In societies in which power is not vertical, the power of leaders is found in their tongues: it was their ability to rally, to convince, and to bring about consensus that made people listen to them. Leaders were not followed because they commanded; rather, they were adhered to because of their eloquence, wisdom, bravery, or experience. Let us listen to the explorer and interpreter Nicolas Perrot: “Subordination is not a maxim among the savages. The savage does not know what it is to obey. It is more often necessary to entreat him than to command. The father does not venture to exercise authority over his son, nor does the chief dare to give commands to his soldier – he will mildly entreat; and if any one is stubborn in regard to some [proposed] movement, it is necessary to flatter him in order to dissuade him, otherwise he will go further [in his opposition].”25 Father Charlevoix writes in a similar spirit that the Indigenous chiefs “request or propose rather than giv[e] orders[,] and … they never exceed the bounds of the little authority they have.”26 He continues: “One would think at first that they have no form of government, that they acknowledge neither laws nor subordination, and that living in an entire independence, they offer themselves to be solely guided by chance, and the wildest caprice: Nevertheless, they enjoy almost all the advantages that a well regulated authority can procure for the most civilized nations. Born free and independent, they look with horror even on the shadow of a despotic power.”27 Other European observers did not fail to point out the dignified nature of Indigenous councils, the protocols for speaking out, the

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tireless efforts to build consensus. Father Lafitau describes the function of “captain,” or chief, among the Iroquois as follows: As soon as the tree has fallen, (that is, as soon as a chief is dead,) the tree must be planted again. The matron, who possesses the chief authority, after a conference with those of her own tribe, whose approbation she obtains for the man whom she has chosen, she always respects the right of seniority, and in general her selection falls upon him, whom she considers most fit by his good qualities, to support his elevated rank. Then the election is complete; its announcement is made to the village, the chief elect is presented, and at once proclaimed and acknowledged, and afterwards is presented to the other villages … The authority of the chief extends properly over their tribe, whom they regard as their children; they commonly call them their nephews; it is rare that they make use of terms equivalent to that of subjects; although they possess real authority and of which some of them make ample use, they nevertheless affect so great a leaning toward liberty, that it would seem that they are all equals. They have no mark of distinction – no crown, no sceptre, no guards, no consular ax; they are notwithstanding obeyed, but that obedience appears to be voluntary; the manner in which it is yielded serves to restrain the chiefs from commanding what might create uneasiness or give rise to opposition.28 French explorers, who initially thought First Nations were barbaric, after longer observation decided they came closer to what seemed then to be the height of civilization: antiquity. In the midst of racist and imperialist statements, a discourse emerged that associated the Indigenous mode of organization with that of the Roman republic. Jesuit missionaries compared Indigenous speaking skills to those of the great orators who, in their rhetoric courses, were touted as models. In 1634, in awe, Father Le Jeune saw “upon the shoulders of these people the heads of Julius Caesar, of Pompey, of Augustus, of Otho, and of others.”29 Father Lafitau also compared the customs of contemporary Native Americans to those described in ancient Greco-Roman accounts.30 Le Jeune, Lafitau, and others helped draw a connection between Indigenous nations and Roman citizens, between the savages and the first Christians, between First Nations heroism and the rhetorical skills and the writings of Homer, Herodotus, and Plutarch.

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t h e e n l ig h t e n m e n t a nd the ques ti on o f e q ua l i ty Confronted with societies that proved more egalitarian than their own, the French were forced to adjust their mode of colonization (whose imperial character was in no way erased), according to the expectations of those with whom they sought to engage in exchange. The royal power bent to the requirement of Indigenous diplomacy, showering the ambassadors of the allied nations with gifts. Merchants organized ceremonies of gift exchange and smoking before the opening of the trade. The theology of Christianity, based on the figure of a flawless and transcendent God who dwells little in the world, and on a conception of the human race as eternally indebted, gave way to a cosmology in which debts were reciprocal. In order to better connect itself to Indigenous spirituality, the Roman Catholic religion used the pantheon of saints and demons to incarnate spirits and interpreted miracles in terms of special magic powers much more so than did Protestantism, which was centred on worship and predestination.31 The obligation of the French of New France to open up to First Nations was the source of many writings on social change. If the critical view of French institutions was not new, having appeared during the Renaissance along with a certain desacralization of tradition, the ethnological knowledge of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had the effect of amplifying this critical distance. As early as 1658, Father Le Jeune, in Jesuit Relations, wrote an eye-opening chapter entitled: “Of the Difference between the Manners and Customes of the French, or the Europeans, and Those of the Savages.”32 For the senses, nothing in nature, he wrote, is beautiful or ugly, good or bad in itself; our senses are only a raw material fashioned by our culture and our education. In short, for the missionary, with the exception of God, everything is relative: “The world is full of variety and change, and one will never find unalterable permanence. If one were mounted on a tower high enough to survey at his ease all the Nations of the earth, he would find it very hard, amid such strange varieties and such a medley, to say who are wrong and who are right, who are fools and who are wise.”33 Many lay and religious observers began painting the image of the “Good Savage.” They clothed him in the values of a nascent modernity: liberty, equality, fraternity, the right to happiness.34 Charlevoix

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evoked, among other things, the freedom that everyone enjoyed in Indigenous societies, where chiefs proposed rather than commanded.35 The study of Indigenous societies revealed everything that, in French society, was contingent, superficial, artificial, even factitious, and, in particular, it revealed the incessant quarrels over precedence and the unbridled quests for distinctive signs of class and status. The idea emerged that the frugal life of First Nations was all the more valuable because it was accompanied by more happiness and freedom than was that of many Europeans who “never enjoy[ed] the true pleasures of life.”36 It was emphasized how the absence of greed and envy fostered self-help and cooperation, and brought Indigenous nations closer to the Christian ideal.37 Relying on publications that exposed the “strange” mores of Amerindian peoples, French thinkers began to reflect on the natural equality between humans and questioned Western social organization, which was based on a jumble of statutes and privileges. The philosophers of the Enlightenment read the Jesuit Relations, the memoirs of Lahontan, and, more generally, the writings coming out of New France.38 Sometimes the influence was even more direct and personal. Father Charlevoix, a professor at the Jesuit College in Quebec City, historian and traveller, ended his teaching career in France, where he had Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a student. Rousseau, author of the Social Contract and of the treatise on new pedagogy known as Emile, therefore drew on the knowledge of a master marked by his North American experiences. How can we fail to recognize in Rousseauist philosophy the echo of the following passage from Father Charlevoix’s writings: “As they [First Nations] are not slaves to ambition and interest, and that there is scarce any thing but these two passions which has weakened in us that sense of humanity which the Author of nature had graved in our hearts, the inequality of conditions is no way necessary to them for the support of society.”39 Such a passage was made to please the author of the Discourse on the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men. Representations of Indigenous cultures served as inspirations and models for European reform movements, just as, it should be emphasized, it did for the birth of the social sciences.40 The egalitarian program of republicanism (i.e., the abolition of privileges, the dissolution of corporations, the prohibition of slavery, and equality before the law) found confirmation in the example of the societies of northeastern North America.41 The Ancien Régime had

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postulated that freedom was only possible through submission to a legitimate authority (which Dante summarized in the oxymoron “yoke of liberty” [iugum libertatis]), whereas the “meeting of the two worlds” revealed the freedom that flourished in the “state of nature.” However, what this discovery seemed to justify was less the possibility of a democracy, as we understand it today, than the reborn ideal of a republic. Indigenous societies demonstrated how power can be based on eloquence, self-control, and martial virtues. Interestingly, in French speeches the greatness of these societies was regularly associated with the beauty and virility of male Indigenous bodies that seemed to reproduce in real life the scenes of classical paintings. “Tall, erect, strong, well proportioned, agile,” having “nothing effeminate in their appearance,” and having “strong and powerful” heads, Indigenous men resembled, Le Jeune assures us, the images of the Roman emperors found on ancient engravings and medals.42 The French were able to appreciate the “republican” character of Indigenous societies because they were, of necessity, in a position of relative equality with them. Merchants who negotiated in the Pays d’en Haut had to submit to long and complex negotiations. Agents of the king were forced to sign treaties that were accompanied by palaver and harangues full of metaphor and wisdom. Missionaries had only their word to persuade people who were not afraid to criticize their teachings and to demonstrate their faulty logic. Some people were surprised to think that it was indeed these so-called primitive societies, where nobility and rank were granted according to personal merit, that realized the ancient ideal of the republic.

l ow e r c a n a da , u p per canada, a n d u n it e d canada At first glance, one might assume that the British would deal with Indigenous peoples much as had the French after the latter ceded New France to Britain. Did not the treaties concluded by the British with the Domiciliés (Domiciled Aboriginals) of the Seven Fires (or Seven Nations) established in the “Province of Quebec,”43 as well as the one concluded in 1766 with Pontiac’s troops, recognize the First Nations as at once allies and subjects? The economy of the colony remained centred on the fur trade, even though the logic of the market economy increased with the rise in export volumes. Didn’t the American War of Independence, and then that from 1812 to

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1815, force British power to depend on Indigenous warriors for its defence? Didn’t the British renew the French policy of handing over the king’s annual gifts to the allied nations until 1858?44 Nevertheless, distinctive features soon appeared, the first being the greater distance the British authorities maintained from the allied First Nations. The British introduced indirect rule by raising the Iroquois League to the status of a privileged ally through which other nations had to pass in order to reach the governor, who retained, as under French rule, the metaphorical designation of “father.” This created a greater distance between the British and all non-Iroquois nations.45 If, in the time of the French regime, one could have fooled oneself into thinking of the French colonials as comprising one nation among others within a network of continental alliances, this was not nearly so possible under the consolidated British regime. The second distinctive and fundamental feature of British rule was the introduction of private property with the Royal Proclamation of 1763. The Royal Proclamation recognized Aboriginal title to the land and provided a mechanism for its transfer by treaty for the settlement of privately owned lands. As early as 1764, land along the banks of the Niagara River was acquired, and, with the arrival of Loyalists and allied Indigenous nations after the American Revolution, treaties secured land south of the territory of what became Ontario. Contrary to this, in New France, where definitions of land were based on the distinction between direct and useful domain, the absence of a clear notion of private property had favoured the integration of Indigenous peoples. In New France, the rights of Indigenous groups over hunting and fishing could be juxtaposed to the rights of the king over the oaks, of the priest over the tithe, of the lord over the cens, of the peasants over the harvest, and of the gleaners over whatever remained in the fields.46 The replacement of the fur trade by the timber industry and the massive influx of settlers in search of agricultural land instigated a “land rush” channelled by the privatization of the territory. In the nineteenth century, the policy of territorial expropriation followed its course. The Canadian state was founded on and at the expense of Indigenous lands.47 In Upper Canada, the 71,000 settlers of 1806 had grown to 432,000 by 1840, while the 125,000 inhabitants of Lower Canada in 1791 were 475,000 by 1825, and over 1 million by 1860. Decimated by disease, First Nations were expelled from their ancestral lands and regrouped into reserves. By the time of Confederation,

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almost all of Ontario had been ceded. The eleven numbered treaties that were signed between 1871 and 1921 resulted in the same transfer process for Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, an eastern part of British Columbia, and the Mackenzie River basin in the Northwest Territories. The expropriation and suppression of First Nations was the alpha and omega of the Euro-Canadian nation-building policy. Angela Tozer (chapter 3, this volume) demonstrates how these were central features of British settler colonialism, limiting the potential for democracy in what would become Canada. Many French people had imagined that the “Savages” were incapable of freedom because they were insubordinate and engaged in licentious behaviour. “Slaves” of the devil, of their impulses, of their superstitions, and of their manitous, they suffered from an excess of freedom: they were unable to accept the yoke that liberates. For the French, the question of equality (and inequality) was central. The English, on the other hand, saw freedom more as the absence of external constraints. The individual in English philosophy did not need the detour of society to realize himself: he was, to a great extent, innately liberated, finding within himself the resources of his emancipation. This free being was one capable of reason. “Reason,” Locke once said, “must be our last judge and guide in everything.”48 The problem was that this reason, supposedly objective and universal, was composed of principles peculiar to British culture: private property, trade capitalism, and vocational work (the Beruf of the Protestant ethics) that were in direct contradiction to the logic of gift giving that was at the heart of Indigenous social organization. The British believed that the Indigenous way of life was incompatible with the colonial universe because it knew neither private property nor the family production unit, nor salaried work, nor male agriculture, nor the segmentation of the spiritual and material universes characteristic of modern cosmogony. The norms and traditions of Indigenous culture were alien to the values of work or freedom as understood within Protestantism and the liberal philosophy of the time, according to which only European-style agriculture imposed the discipline of regular work – a determining factor in the progress of civilization. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about the Amerindians: “They never will adapt themselves to civilisation, not because they are incapable of behaving like us, but because they scorn our way of living and consider themselves our superiors.”49 Tocqueville was right: Indigenous peoples refused a liberal

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organization that broke the balance created by the cycle of gift giving, that accentuated class relations, that further stratified society, that repressed lineages, that denied enjoyment of property to non-owners, and that silenced the spirits. Colonial modernity was incompatible with the preservation of Indigenous nations’ traditional social order in northeastern North American. The British authorities readily recognized the impossibility of collectively integrating Indigenous nations into the colonial system. They represented Indigenous societies as belonging to the first ages of humanity – that is to say, to the age of immature and irresponsible childhood. Adam Smith reframed the ancient pattern of the ages of humanity so that it fit within the terms of liberal philosophy. In doing so he described the conditions and rules of progress: sedentary and male agriculture, private property, the production of a surplus for the market, and the diversification of occupations.50 For him, there was no doubt that it was necessary to convert the so-called “Indians,” to extricate them from their state of nature and to inscribe them within a notion of equality defined by possessive individualism and private property. This evolutionary paradigm leads either to the physical elimination of the Other, which generally characterized the genocidal policy of the United States (“The only good Indian is a dead Indian”) or to ethnocide, which is more characteristic of Canadian history (“Kill the Indian, save the man” or “Kill the Indian in the child”). In the Canadian case, the “protection” of the Other involved imposing a terrible constraint through re-education, expropriation, deportation, the abduction of children, and political and cultural dissolution. Canadian legislation defined an “Indian” as a minor or ward under the authority of a guardian. The federal government took up the role of eradicating the supposedly archaic gangue within which each Indian was “prisoner.” The solution made traditional social reproduction impossible. This is why an educated “Indian” lost his Indian status: being now “civilized,” she was no longer “Indian” but had become “white.” The so-called equality of nineteenth-century Canadian society was based on an intense rivalry between individuals perceived as small entrepreneurs. While Indigenous societies generalized indebtedness to better remind their members of their irreducible interdependence, Canadian society postulated an individual autonomy that generated oppression and exclusion within the community itself. Only those

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who accepted the game of privatization and intense competition (of which there were increasing signs in the retreat into the nuclear family, the monetarization of the economy, the commodification of labour, the exploitation of what had become known as “natural resources,” bureaucratic rationalization, the disenchantment of the world, the creation of an immense class of destitute citizens, etc.) were able to make the transition to the new, “enlightened” society. These were the people who could participate in the democratic debate. All others joined the long list of those who were excluded: children, women, “savages,” the insane, the idle – that is, all the unfit who paid the price for the “great confinement” of which Michel Foucault speaks. “Indians,” it was said, had only to break with their old habits and adopt the ways of the dominant group (just like the poor who haunted the great cities of the British Empire) to be welcomed as equal citizens. The establishment of industrial schools to re-educate Indians on the model of those created to reform delinquents illustrates the equivalence between poverty and savagery in the minds of the colonial elites. Also similar were the challenges and problems associated with assimilating Indigenous peoples in North America and educating the popular masses in England. “Our desire,” declared the reverend Wilson in 1885, “is simply to do the same for the Indian children of Canada that Dr. [Thomas] Barnardo has been doing for the street children of London and other English cities.”51 Indigenous peoples, like the impoverished people who haunted the large cities of Britain, had to break with their unhealthy habits and adopt the ways of the dominant group. Reverend Edward F. Wilson, founder of the Shingwauk Industrial Home in 1873, wanted “to wean our [Indian] boys altogether from their old savage life; to instill into them civilized tastes, to teach them English thoroughly, to encourage their intercourse with white people, and in fact to make Canadians of them.”52 There was no possibility of a collective future for First Nations. Equality was only accessible to “Indians” if they renounced their land, their world, their culture, their identity, and themselves. It was unthinkable that Indigenous communities could appropriate modernity by creating their separate collective way, whereby they could define equality in their own terms. The Indigenous condition was only conceivable in the past tense. Numerous commissions of inquiry conveyed this message, the most famous being those of Darling (1828), Bagot (1844), and Pennefather (1858). Even British associations

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defending the Aboriginals of the Empire, such as The Aborigines’ Committee of the Meeting for Sufferings (1839), underscored the thesis that the process of civilization was unavoidable while objecting to brutal exactions and expropriations without “fair” compensation. The will of the Canadian racial state to civilize and assimilate eventually culminated in a sort of apartheid with the creation of reserves. This act of domination through the reduction of the Other has of course been resisted,53 but it has never been fully contradicted. It was also in the name of democratic equality (in addition to racism and colonialism) that Indigenous peoples were removed from representative institutions. They would only be accepted as citizens if they accepted the rules of mainstream Canadian political thought: majority rule rather than unanimity; the right to use coercive power to impose laws rather than the right to withdraw dissidents in the absence of consensus; democratic practices based on formal equality of men (later women) rather than on the kinship system run by women; concentration of military power rather than its dispersal into private clan enterprises; and the constitution of a central state with power divided into three branches (legislative, executive and judicial) as opposed to the Iroquois constitution, whereby the League Council exercised legislative, executive, and judicial functions and wherein real power remains at the level of villages and member nations. Evidence that Canadian policy was heading nowhere may be found in its aporetic nature: at the same time as the colonial powers sought to break the traditional culture of Indigenous nations (through the prohibition of traditional religious rituals, including totem poles) in order to assimilate them into the dominant order, they locked them up on reserves, lacking the possibility of circulating without authorization (whites were also prohibited from entering a reserve without authorization). Private property was celebrated by preventing Indigenous peoples from owning even the spot of land on which their homes stood. Farming was promoted by granting Indigenous people only the worst land, far from markets. Citizenship was defined by territory for everyone except for “Indians,” whose “identity” was defined by blood. An enlightened and free press was encouraged for white citizens, while traditional political assemblies were forbidden for Indigenous groups. Canadian men (and later women) were granted democratic rights, but Indians were denied the right to vote until the 1960s. The introduction of a pseudo-election system for

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Indian bands at the end of the nineteenth century, heavily censored and “vetoed” by the Department of Indian Affairs, condensed the contradictions of a policy that ended up locking Indians into a tragic (and literal) “no man’s land.” At the end of the nineteenth century, Indigenous peoples were free neither to pursue their traditional activities (seasonal migrations, religious rites, etc.), nor to exercise democratic rights (apart from petitioning and forming embassies, as was the case under the British monarchy). These obstacles were justified by the fact that they did not belong to the circle of equals and, therefore, of citizens. They were children in relation to adults, primitives in relation to civilized people, pagans in relation to Christians, ignorant people in relation to educated people. For some this inferiority was worthy of pity, for others it was worthy of contempt: but it prevented almost all Indigenous people from engaging in full democratic participation. Only when Indigenous peoples came to see nature as a resource to be exploited; their neighbours as clients or employees; their possessions as objects to be bought and sold; and themselves as rational totalities in search of material success (the famous “homo economicus”) – in short, only when they became equal in their reciprocal indifference (the anonymity of the masses) and in their unequivocal interest in mutually exploiting one another (the progress of society stems, according to Adam Smith, not from human benevolence but from profound selfishness) could they integrate into the Canadian demos.

c a n a da Brian Gettler points out the absence of Indigenous-related debates in the preparatory documents leading to Canadian Confederation.54 Kent Monkman’s nude Berdache (two spirits) painting of himself sitting on a Hudson’s Bay Company blanket in front of the Fathers of Confederation, The Daddies, is a remarkable illustration of the radical otherness of Indigenous peoples in Canada.55 As soon as the federation was created, Canadian prime minister John A. Macdonald became the architect of the iniquitous and racist Indian Act, 1876. Indigenous peoples did not have access to their individual democratic rights until after the end of the Second World War. For “Indians,” obtaining the right to vote federally in Canada did not come until 1960, and in Quebec, the last province to recognize it, it came only in 1969. This integration into the mainstream political arena culminated

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in the publication, in 1969, of the aptly named White Paper, in which the Canadian government recommended granting Indians, Inuit, and Métis exactly the same rights as other Canadian citizens. The key word in the document is “equality”: equality of status, equality of opportunity, legal equality, and economic equality. According to the report: “The policies proposed recognize the simple reality that the separate legal status of Indians and the policies which have flowed from it have kept the Indian people apart from and behind other Canadians. The Indian people have not been full citizens of the communities and provinces in which they live and have not enjoyed the equality and benefits that such participation offers.”56 This White Paper argues that this different treatment, this regime of exception, this separate path had opened the door to economic, social, and cultural discrimination. To cure this problem, the solution was not to continue a regime of exception but, rather, to foster complete equality in all domains of social life: “This Government believes in equality. It believes that all men and women have equal rights. It is determined that all shall be treated fairly and that no one shall be shut out of Canadian life, and especially that no one shall be shut out because of his race.”57 To realize this equality, the Canadian government believed it was necessary to abolish the Indian Act and wind down the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. No more “Indian,” no more “Indian problem.” First Nations opposed this form of “equality by assimilation.” In responding to the White Paper, Harold Cardinal, president of the Indian Association of Alberta, largely inspired the “Red Book,” entitled Citizens Plus.58 While denouncing the colonial legacy, the Red Book demanded the maintenance of institutions that recognized the existence of Indigenous communities beyond individual rights. The existence of the national character of all Indigenous communities was thus affirmed. Instead of conceiving of equality in terms of individual political and social rights, Cardinal defined equality as egalitarian relations between nations. This was because Indigenous peoples signed treaties with the Crown as sovereign entities.59 In other words, while the Canadian government sought to abolish the distinctions between Indians and non-Indians in a quest for formal and individual equality, Indigenous spokespersons, in the quest for substantive and collective equality, sought to maintain these differences (at least temporarily), even if this meant keeping a regime that had been discredited.

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Two First Nations gains, one in the Supreme Court of Canada (Calder, 1973) for British Columbia and the other in the Quebec Superior Court (Malouf, 1973), forced the Canadian government to recognize the existence in Canadian law of Aboriginal title. In 1982, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau recognized the Aboriginal and treaty rights of Indigenous peoples in section 35 of the Canadian Constitution. Through numerous subsequent decisions (Delgamuukw, Van der Peet, Miskisew, Sioui, etc.), the Supreme Court of Canada confirmed the existence of an Aboriginal right, which could no longer be ignored.60 In 1996, the Dussault-Erasmus Commission of Inquiry recognized the inherent right of Indigenous people to self-government and access to self-governing lands and resources. Although the report was largely shelved, the creation of Nunavut in 1999 was in keeping with its spirit. Today, the debate continues to rage between two understandings of equality. On the one hand, there is an attempt to cultivate in Indigenous populations the virtues of success in a liberal society: each monad, freed from its social ties, is indifferent to the rest of the community, and people and things are seen as mere (human and natural) resources. Equality guarantees them the exercise of certain rights, including those, as affirmed in the American Constitution, of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. On the other hand, there is the attempt to promote a political autonomy that fosters the perpetuation of equality based on an unending cycle of reciprocity. In the words of the historian Georges Sioui, this would “bring about a spiritual healing, the re-circularization that we all need so desperately if we wish to prevent the loss of the Circle – that is, of life, this marvelous gift that we possess as a species belonging to the Circle.”61 Which conception of equality will prevail? This remains an open question.

c o n c l u s i on It is certain, as we note above, that the clash of cultures during the first centuries of contact gave rise to a degree of self-doubt among Europeans and that this inspired the philosophers of the Enlightenment in their criticism of feudal society. French people were amazed to find in North America an equality that reminded them of the ancient republican ideal. In the United States, several authors argue that the American Constitution of 1787 is modelled in some respects

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on Indigenous societies, most notably the Iroquois Confederacy. The contribution of the Iroquois Confederacy to the Constitution of the United States was recognized by the US Senate itself.62 The Canada of 1867 did not recognize such a debt. Not only was Confederation created to facilitate the colonization of the West and the systematic and massive expropriation of local populations, but it extolled the spirit of a triumphal Victorian era. The policy of “aggressive civilization,” notably through the establishment of the residential school system, aimed at getting rid of the “Indian problem” either by assimilating Indigenous communities into the liberal system or by recognizing them as genetically inferior and parking them in isolated camps known as reserves. They would be equal in the same manner as whites were equal or they would be marginalized and left to live according to their traditional codes until the day they simply disappeared. They would be offered a democracy in which they could be undifferentiated citizens or reserves in which they could perpetuate their difference at the price of being condemned to the status of second-rate, if not third-rate, citizens. They would obtain equality at the price of their identity, or they would maintain their identity on the margins of a democracy that was being built not only without them but largely against them. Today, we know that equality for Indigenous peoples implies that they can appropriate modernity and define it collectively, for themselves, in their own way. It implies a recognition of their national character. Equality for Indigenous peoples will only come about when colonial and postcolonial relationships are replaced by nationto-nation, peer-to-peer arrangements. It is with this other form of equality, political and collective, that we are invited to engage today. not e s 1 Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Schleifer), 3: 874. 2 Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, Relation of 1633, 5: 210–11 (Le Jeune reports Champlain’s words); Deslandres, “Nos garçons se marieront à vos filles,” 10; Jennings, Iroquois Empire, 362; and Delâge and Warren, Piège de la liberté, 338–9. The Iroquois will attempt to do the same. Champlain, Œuvres, 2: 785, 3: 989–90; and Delâge, “Kebhek,” 114–20. 3 The expression “weapon of empire” was coined by Havard, Empire et métissages, 647–51.

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4 The expression is from historian Francis Jennings to replace the myth of the virgin land. See Jennings, Founders of America, 180–1. 5 Tremblay, Iroquoiens, 10, 34–5, 52, 113–15, 118, 121. 6 Vincent and Bacon, Récit de Uepishtikueiau, 15–17, 22–4. The Innu oral tradition of the French arrival in Uepishtikueiau (Quebec) bears witness to this, while highlighting the territorial dispossession that followed. “After a year, the French had to grow wheat. They had to produce their own flour and they had to grow wheat in Uepishtikueiau … They had to surround their garden with a wooden fence. Then, while the Innu were not there, while they went inland, they had to enlarge it, they had to enlarge the land on which they grew their wheat … They had to enlarge their fence according to what they were growing. They had to enlarge it more and more and the Innu had to leave their land at Uepishtikueiau.” Personal translation (Jean-Baptiste Bellefleur, Unamen-shipit, 1993). See Vincent and Bacon, Récit de Uepishtikueiau, 23–4. 7 Colden, History of the Five Indian Nations, 73; O’Callaghan, Documents, 9:408; and Bacqueville de La Potherie, Histoire de l’Amérique septentrionale, 4: 205, 211–12. 8 Taine, Origines de la France, 1: 78. 9 Perrot, Memoir, 1: 145. 10 Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 1634, 6: 243. 11 Ibid., 12: 60. 12 Merrick, “Fathers and Kings.” 13 Lavoie, C’est ma seigneurie, 60–9. 14 Quoted by Osiander, Before the State, 432. 15 Archives nationales de France (hereafter anf ), C11A, vol. 36, fol. 134. 16 Henry, Attack at Michilimackinac, 44. 17 Charlevoix, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, 2: 162; anf , C11 A-13, fo 234-62 ; Lafitau, Mœurs, 1: 82, 145, 150, 167; Cook, “Onontio Gives Birth”; and Cook, “Kings, Captains and Kin.” 18 We do not take into account the hierarchical societies of Lower Louisiana, such as that of the Natchez family. 19 Perrot, Memoir, 136. 20 Charlevoix quoted by Delmas and Penn, Written Culture, 167. 21 Ibid., 158. 22 Charlevoix quoted by Sayre, Modernity and Its Other, 161. 23 Macpherson, Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. 24 Truteau quoted by Parks, De Mallie, and Vézina, Fur Trader, 281. 25 Perrot, Memoir, 145.

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36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

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Charlevoix, Journal of a Voyage, 296. Ibid., 246. Lafitau quoted by Doucet, Fundamental Principles, 15–16. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 1634, 6: 227; Sagard, Histoire du Canada, 2: 343; Lahontan, Œuvres, 1: 632–3n485. Doucet, Fundamental Principles. Delâge, “La religion,” 57–63. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, 1658, 44: 277–309. Ibid., 297. Delâge, “Influence des Amérindiens.” Charlevoix, Description générale, 3:308; Leclercq, Nouvelle relation; Parks, De Mallie and Vézina, Fur Trader, 308–9; Hauser, “Berdache,” 59; and Désveaux, Quadratura, 374–5. Charlevoix, Letters to the Dutchess, 247; and Lahontan, Œuvres, 849–65. Charlevoix, Letters to the Dutchess, 142. Rousseau writes: “I have spent my life reading travel reports.” See Rousseau, L’Amérique, II: 423. Charlevoix, Letters to the Dutchess, 246. Lafitau, Mœurs. Spitz, Amour de l’égalité. Le Jeune, Relations, 6: 228. Lozier, Flesh Reborn, 10; Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance. Rhétoré, “Symbole d’alliance,” 99–117. Delâge andt Sawaya, Traités des Sept-Feux, 37–42. Greer, Property and Dispossession. Tozer, chapter 3, this volume. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 14. Tocqueville, Notes Taken in Lower Canada. “A nation of hunters can never be formidable to the civilized nations in their neighbourhood” (Smith, Wealth of Nations, 566). Algoma Missionary News, 1 July 1885, quoted by Wilson, “No Blanket,” 75. Ibid., 74. Servais, Jésuites chez les Amérindiens, 589, 607–8. Gettler, “Indigenous Policy.” Hauser, “Berdache,” 59; and Désveaux, Quadratura Americana, 374–5. Canada, Indian and Northern Affairs, Statement on Indian Policy, 4. Ibid., 7. Weaver, Canadian Indian Policy.

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Borrows, Canada’s Indigenous Constitution. Morin, Construction du droit des autochtones, 237. Sioui, Huron-Wendat, xii. Among the fathers of the US federation, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams shared a good knowledge of Indigenous nations. See Stubben, “Indigenous Influence,” 719.

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Democratic Limits and Paradoxes, 1820s–60s

3 Democracy in a Settler State? Settler Colonialism and the Development of Canada, 1820–67 Angela Tozer

Knowing, and what it means to know, produce the death worlds bodily and otherwise, including the environmental disasters all around us, which began in the moment of colonization and racial slavery. These death worlds are both historical and urgently present, and through them we might conceive of forms of relationality in which new modes of human-ness might be possible. The demand here then is to think of new possibilities for human life beyond capitalist modernity.1 This chapter shows how capitalism via settler colonialism spread to Turtle Island, which foreclosed, and forecloses, the possibility of democracy in Canada. To do so, it looks at how the Canadian settler state was established in three parts: with the formation of Canada’s public debt, with John George Lambton’s (Lord Durham’s) role in appropriating Indigenous living spaces, and in John Stuart Mill’s white supremacist understanding of the body politic. This interconnected trinity of settler colonialism – public debt financing, expansion over Indigenous living spaces, and white supremacy – brought the Canadian settler state into existence.2 In view of Canada’s settler colonial history and current imperialist actuality, then, this chapter asks: What kind of democracy is possible in Canada? What does it mean to call an occupying white supremacist settler state oriented around the mobilization of capital democratic? Looking beyond finding democracy in this context, the conclusion stresses the

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importance of the Land Back movement to a possibility of democracy that includes Indigenous self-determination, Black liberation, and a political economy that considers the dignity of non-human beings. All forms of democracy – direct, representative, constitutional, and so on – offer different means to the same apparent end. The demos (the people) have access to kratia (government/rule). The Oxford English Dictionary includes a simple and clear description of democracy as a “form of government in which the sovereign power resides in the people as a whole.” To define democracy as a people having power means that democracy might have emancipatory potential. Democracy can manifest in various ways, as many chapters in this volume attest. However, as the history of Canada’s public debt demonstrates, the Canadian settler state operates in the service of capital, not “the people” (however defined, as centred on whiteness or otherwise). The question then becomes: Can democracy be deployed to dismantle settler colonialism? This consideration must also extend to non-human lifeworlds.3 Arguably, Canada’s public debt encoded an expansionary directive over Indigenous living spaces predicated on a white supremacist assimilationist/eradication logic that structured racialized power imbalances made permissible through institutionalized anti-Blackness.4 The system that makes genocide, environmental destruction, and the commodification of living beings possible is called capitalism. Brenna Bhandar argues that settler colonialism is an iteration of capitalism.5 As a settler state, Canada is organized around a system of public debt and state credit, both of which derive from a white supremacist understanding of the settler body politic. This system of public debt/state credit is inherently racialized and makes expansion over Indigenous living spaces, and the exploitation of other-than-human-beings, possible. As Patrick Wolfe observes, “imperialism is not the highest stage of capitalism but its foundational warrant.”6 Capitalism is not just an economic system; rather, it generates a particular type of governance and organizes the body politic around the mobilization of capital.7 If Canada’s capitalist order via settler colonialism is understood to be antithetical to Indigenous self-determination, Black liberation, and the dignity of non-human beings, then democracy (in which the demos have access to kratia) is not possible.8 Historians of the nineteenth century, including those discussed in this collection, agree on one point: Canada, despite Confederation,

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was far from democratic.9 Ian McKay’s “liberal order,” E.A. Heaman’s “conservative order” (chapter 6, this volume), and even Fred Burrill’s “settler order”10 can coexist, without contradiction, in the massive ocean of ideas, peoples, and events that make up Canada. However, capitalism is the water in which all of these orders swim (Burrill, perhaps, would not disagree with this). Arguably, understanding Canada as a “liberal order” has relied on a “methodological Whiteness” that is made possible not by ignoring racism but by understanding “racism-without-colonialism.” This being the case, Canada is analyzed not as a settler state but, rather, as a liberal state.11 Canada is akin to other states in which the legal fiction that evolved out of the “Doctrine of Discovery” sustains their sovereignty claims.12 This chapter clarifies why capital “required a separate state in northern North America.”13 To say capital required a separate state does not mean that capital is an intentional agent of change; rather, capital is simply how certain human beings conceptualized their external worlds, which were made real through unequal racialized and gendered access to power. For example, loans were determined depending on the “creditworthiness” of the settler state, which was understood to be governed by elite British men. The racialized and gendered power relationship between credit/debt gave white settler states access to financing that facilitated the appropriation of unceded and unsurrendered Indigenous living spaces. Public debt financing gave those living spaces market value by making “dead capital” in land productive. It also made deeply destructive largescale development projects possible.14 Canada has a distinct political economy that shapes it as a settler state – for example, the role of Crown lands and tools of jurisdiction (such as licensing) that attempted and attempt to concretize Crown sovereignty over Indigenous living spaces.15 Beginning in the 1830s, British imperial policy laid down the structures of settler colonialism after what was called the Colonial Reform movement lobbied for the production of “self-sufficient” settler colonies. Both Durham and Mill supported the Colonial Reform movement that emerged in the late 1820s and early 1830s with arch colonial reformer Edward Gibbon Wakefield at its helm. The goal of Liberals who supported the Colonial Reform movement was to advance “civilization” in what would become Canada through a manifestation of capitalism known as settler colonialism, or what they called “proper

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colonization.” In this they were explicit. The Colonial Reform movement focused on standardizing settler colonialism across the British Empire. Furthermore, this standardization process, or “systematic colonization,” these colonial reformers argued, needed to be enacted in imperial legislation, with the understanding that colonial governments could not overturn imperial measures. The turn in imperial legislation to institute the principles of the Colonial Reform movement began with the South Australia Act, 1834, which legislated many of the central tenets of this “colonial reform” policy.16 The Colonial Reform movement centred on four major elements, arguing that: (1) the settler colony had to have a representative and responsible government (in order to eventually become “independent”); (2) the population had to be ethnically British, or at least Western European; (3) the colony would take out a public debt; and (4) the population had to be concentrated and static, or “settled, with the “sufficient price” of land, which limited population sprawl. Karl Marx famously criticized Wakefield’s idea of the “sufficient price” as a method to make land, and therefore sustenance farming, inaccessible to labourers, the intention being to reproduce their status as wage-earners in the settler colonies. Marx used Wakefield’s idea of a sufficient price to show how capitalists had to construct their societies artificially in order to create a labour force.17 However, in doing so, Marx, like Wakefield, imagined the settler colonies as empty of Indigenous peoples, and he characterized these spaces as “virgin soil.” Unlike Wakefield, however, Marx saw the settler colonies as a place to subvert capitalism rather than to extend it. For him, the settler colonies offered an ideal place for British labourers to escape wage labour and to become farmers.18 How each element of “colonial reform” was implemented depended on the colony in question. For example, in what became Canada, the close proximity of the United States led to fears (and the reality) of British emigrant flight to cheaper lands. This made high fixed land prices inversely proportional to maintaining the desired labour force.19 Two central tenets of the Colonial Reform movement were established in Canada and continue to this day: (1) a public debt issued as securities on a global money market that created an economy discrete from Britain’s and (2) Canada’s white supremacist order, which was established through the intentional creation of a white body politic. This chapter makes it clear that these structural foundations of the Canadian settler state cannot simply be removed

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in order to create a “democratic” Canada. It first looks at the Welland Canal as an early example of how public debt financing worked, and it then turns to Lord Durham to demonstrate how settler public credit was derived from Indigenous living spaces that were coded as “wastelands,” or, in today’s idiom, “dead capital.” Through a discussion of Durham’s fixation on the “improvement” of “wastelands,” I show how public debt financing encoded an expansionary mechanism within the settler state. This calls into question just how democratic a state that occupies and spreads over Indigenous living spaces can be. I then look at Mill and his ideas about representative government and colonial “independence” to show how white supremacist assimilationist logic founded the settler state and, indeed, continued to organize Canadian society (see Yu, chapter 13, this volume). I conclude by looking at anticolonization possibilities (such as Land Back) as a viable path towards democracy.

t h e o r ig in o f c a n a da’ s publi c debt and e xpa n s io n ov e r in d ig e nous li vi ng spaces Canada’s public debt played a key role in appropriating Indigenous living spaces. An occupying settler state predicated on the absorption of Indigenous lives and spaces cannot be said to be democratic. The Canadian governance model is more akin to imperialism, which the public debt exemplifies. Public debt financing functioned as a tool for imperial expansion.20 Public debts issued as securities on the London Stock Exchange (formalized in 1801) spread the risk of private investment in private development to “the public,” which facilitated speculation. Public debts quickly became a new speculative frontier that converted Indigenous lands into real estate based on the perceived future value of these lands on the London money markets.21 The bursting of the Latin American debt bubble in the 1820s attests to this speculation. To be clear, in Canada, the risk of development has been spread to the public in the service of capital. Arguably, this is Canada’s first principle. In this way, capital, not the people, directs governance in the Canadian settler state. Debt financing worked well to funnel British capital into the settler colonies to pay for territory appropriation and development. Loans included both the principle plus interest. To receive a loan the financially struggling colony of Upper Canada in the late 1830s had to at least appear to have the ability to generate enough future

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revenue to pay back the principle plus interest. Thus, the initial colonial loan amount did not reflect the present market value of land but the future value. In one way or another land had to be disciplined to produce that future value. This expansion directive resulted in the manic absorption of Indigenous living spaces to pay back the principal plus interest of the loan. There are two major points to take from this: first, that land had no (or very low) market value in the early to mid-nineteenth-century settler colonies – a fact that Wakefield frequently lamented;22 second, land had to be given a market value as securities, and this value was based on assumptions of its future value. Both Wakefield and Mill argued that capital poor colonies had credit for such loans due to the promise of future revenues that could be made from Indigenous living spaces. As Mill put it, a “loan on the security of that future fund” from future land sales could pay for the emigrants and colonial development.23 To secure such massive loans the colonial government explicitly leveraged Indigenous lands as credit. The evidence of this process is explicit: Charles Poulett Thompson (or Lord Sydenham, the first governor general of the united Province of Canada) had orders from Lord Howick (the brother-in-law of Durham and son of British prime minister Grey) that the “Upper Canadian Legislature” should resolve “the question of Clergy Reserves” as “a sine qua non to the promise of a Loan.” Without reforms to develop lands the colonial government would not receive, in this case, an imperial loan guarantee.24 The British North America Act consolidated all colonial provincial debts into the government of Canada’s “Dominion” debt in 1867. In other words, the pre-Confederation debts merged as Canada’s public debt in 1867.25 Public debts issued as securities on the London Stock Exchange became very large, very quickly. For example, the South Australian Loan Market capitalization on the London Stock Exchange was £10,000 in 1837 and grew to approximately £5.5 million in 1880.26 It is difficult to make a straightforward comparison with the British North American colonies as the merging of both Upper and Lower Canada in 1841, and Confederation in 1867, consolidated individual provincial debts. Upper Canada first had its debt issued as securities on the London Stock Exchange in 1837. In this year (keeping in mind Upper Canada’s merging with Lower Canada in 1841) this debt had a market capitalization of £200,000, which increased to just

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over £2.2 million (and inscribed stock at around £586,000) a few months before Confederation in January 1867.27 Settler colonial governments commonly funded private companies to build public works, railways, canals, and a multitude of other projects through these public debts. For the United States this meant a $172 million debt in 1830 – 25 per cent of which went to railway companies.28 Indebtedness became a feature of the Upper Canadian government as well. For example, the British American Land Company paid the Upper Canadian government a sum of approximately £24,500 Sterling for its ongoing debt.29 The colonial government supported companies to develop the colony. Such companies were vital in making the colony “self-sufficient,” but they did not have enough private capital investment to support themselves. The government loaned money to these corporations, and even invested in their securities, to stimulate economic development. For example, on 20 January 1826, the Upper Canadian government passed An Act to Authorize the Government to Borrow a Certain Sum of Money, Upon Debenture, to be Loaned to the Welland Canal Company. The Upper Canadian government used its public debt to pay for private development and thus shifted the risk of such investments onto the public.30 The well-known story of the Welland Canal Company provides a pertinent example of how this public funding of private companies was dependent upon appropriating Indigenous living spaces. Through this process, Upper Canada bound its economy to the success of private corporations. The Welland Canal also set the stage for Durham, who had to deal with the fallout from the failures of public debt financing. The canal connects Lake Ontario to Lake Erie and travels through land near Niagara Falls. Albert Schrauwers (chapter 4, this volume) provides an excellent detailed synopsis of the founding of the Welland Canal, and he notes that the company moved to incorporation so as to induce capital investment. Jeffrey L. McNairn’s insights (chapter 5, this volume) into corporations “as an institutional form of democracy” nuance the concept of corporations with a fascinating look at the “public-utility corporation.” However, even in a corporate history that accounts for the collective interests of merchants, farmers, and artisans in a settler society, it is difficult to see democratic intentions within corporations of settlers working for their own interests. It is important that they were settlers, and it is important that they worked to appropriate Indigenous living spaces.

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In January 1824, the Upper Canadian legislature passed an act to incorporate the Welland Canal Company. In this act, the government granted the company permission not only to survey lands around the District of Nigeria and the Grand River but also to select sites for mills, warehouses, and manufacturing, and to purchase those sites. The act also allowed the company to make reservoirs, tunnels, and aqueducts and to “feed” the canal with “brooks, streams, springs, [and] water courses” within a thousand yards from “any part of the Canal” or newly made reservoirs. At the same time, the colonial government allowed the Welland Canal Company to appropriate unceded and unsurrendered Indigenous living spaces outside of treaties. It authorized the Welland Canal Company to take Indigenous living spaces first and then to “compensate” later. This effectively circumvented treaty relationships and the land policy outlined in the 1763 Royal Proclamation. In chapter IX, the incorporation act states: “if any part of the said Canal shall pass through any tract of land in the possession of any tribe or tribes of Indians in this Province, or if any set occasioning damage to their property or their possessions shall be done under the authority of this Act, compensation shall be made to them therefor, in the same manner as is provided with respect to the property, possessions or rights of other individuals.”31 The British Crown had initially agreed to grant the Welland Canal Company one-ninth of the estimated costs of building the canal, and this sum, along with the money the company could raise with its own private securities, would pay for the canal. The Upper Canadian government approved a second charter that raised the authorized amount of company stock to £200,000.32 Individuals subscribed £93,000, of which £10,000 was forfeited due to economic issues in Upper Canada. At the time, this stock was not sold on the London Stock Exchange because it would have taken an impractical amount of time to receive any funds bought by investors.33 The inability of the Welland Canal Company to fund itself marked the beginning of its financial troubles. This resulted in a series of interferences on the part of the Upper Canadian government into the company’s affairs. What this points to is that, while a company could sell, or be valued at £200,000, in reality it did not have access to these funds unless investors bought the securities. In 1827, a year after work began on the canal, the Upper Canadian legislature passed an act that enabled it to invest £50,000 of Welland Canal Company stocks “on behalf of the public.”34

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Upper Canada tied its fiscal well-being to the success of the Welland Canal Company, and if the company had failed the government would have lost a significant amount of money and, most significantly, would not have been able to generate future revenue for debt repayment. As time progressed, the private Welland Canal Company slowly turned public. In 1837 an act raised the capital stock to £597,300, of which the Upper Canadian government held £454,500 (£209,500 was a consolidation of previous loans and subscriptions). After the financial panic of the late 1830s, the Upper Canadian government purchased the Welland Canal Company through an act of the legislature. The Welland Canal did not even produce enough revenue to pay for itself, and it failed as a private company. Upper Canada bought it out in 1841 in the hope that it would still produce a revenue. Despite the shortcomings of the Welland Canal, the Upper Canadian government turned to building the Cornwall Canal and the Beauharnais Canal (in which Wakefield, not coincidentally, was involved), and enlarging the Lachine Canal. By the 1840s, the Beauharnois Canal was complete and the Welland Canal opened for nearly two decades.35 The Welland Canal project cut through Indigenous living spaces and greatly changed the land and the water around it. Indigenous peoples never consented to forego their sovereignty in these living spaces – a sovereignty that includes the authority to approve development projects. From the British perspective, the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee had ceded the land where the company built the canal in the Upper Canadian Treaty process, beginning in the 1780s. However, as the act to incorporate the Welland Canal Company attests, the colonial government understood these Indigenous living spaces to be unceded and unsurrendered, hence, as “any tract of land in the possession of any tribe or tribes of Indians.” At the same time, there is debate about what the treaties meant and whether they included waterways, the growth of settlements, and large environmentally damaging development projects such as the Welland Canal. The externalities of the canal project altered the water in and around the land. Evidence has shown that these treaties did not cover aquatic spaces, and, according to the act of incorporation, the Welland Canal Company could take unceded and unsurrendered Indigenous living spaces outside of treaties.36 When the Upper Canadian government granted to the Welland Canal Company the authority to greatly reshape the waterways and the land around them, it did so under the

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assumption that the Crown was entitled to that water. Furthermore, in the case of the Six Nations of the Grand River, land surrenders for places such as some parcels of land in the town of Brantford in 1829 were a part of ongoing negotiations. Importantly, the “true value” of land for the Six Nations exceeded its market price.37 In 1847, the Welland Canal Company received money from the Six Nations Trust. This trust fund, and others like it, held money from land sales and rent from unceded and unsurrendered Indigenous lands. There is no record of this money being paid back.38 Furthermore, John Henry Dunn, the receiver general who negotiated the Upper Canadian government loans, happened to be the president of the Welland Canal Company and, throughout the 1830s, was also appointed as a manager for the Six Nations Trust.39 Since the 1820s, the Six Nations have been protesting the damage caused to the lands by the extensive flooding from the Dunnville Dam (named after John Henry Dunn).40 The initial Six Nations petitions against the Welland Canal and the environmental destruction it caused have continued to the present day. Nearly two hundred years later, the Six Nations and the Canadian government are still trying to settle the amount owed for this flooding.41 Public debt financing and the case of the Welland Canal sheds light on how settler societies asserted sovereignty over Indigenous lands and peoples through the development of “wastelands” and, in so doing, created actual wastelands unfit for human and other-than-human habitation.42 “Wastelands” were spaces that had not yet realized their full value in the market. Today, some economists refer to these spaces as “dead capital.” The disquieting conclusion to be drawn is that if capital is to live, then beings, water, and land must die in the process of becoming commodified and entering the market.

l o r d du r h a m a n d the logi c of t h e “ was t e l ands ” The history of the bonds between private companies and colonial governments preceded the Colonial Reform movement and highlights many of the issues mid-nineteenth-century colonial reformers meant to fix. For example, the problems with funding the Welland Canal was indicative of the lack of accessible capital for colonial development. In the case of Upper Canada, access to the London money markets after the late 1830s proved a viable solution to this,

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and Indigenous living spaces were leveraged as credit for loans. The debates in this period about colonial wastelands and the Durham Report reveal the explicit intent behind this process. It was no coincidence that the Ripon Regulations, the South Australian Act, and the Durham Report – Canada’s mile marker on the “road to Confederation” – centred on land reform. Durham’s quest to make lands profitable, with a focus on the Clergy Reserves, highlights the way settler colonial policy literally distributed the wealth from Indigenous living spaces to British investors.43 Durham resented his appointment as governor general and high commissioner of British North America. He took the position only after having turned it down twice, saying: “I did not want it. I abombinated it.”44 Despite his reluctance, Durham arrived in what became Canada on 29 May 1838 and departed on 1 November 1838. The scholarship that details Durham’s mission to Canada generally focuses on political ideas about responsible government and the impact of the Durham Report.45 Little, until recently, has been said about his involvement in the implementation of settler colonial policy in what became Canada. The Durham Report stressed both settler emigration and land development, which is why Ann Curthoys reads it as a “manifesto for effective settler colonialism.”46 Durham seemed to have arrived in Canada with a settler colonial agenda, and his connection to the New Zealand Company attests to this. In 1825, he became the governor of the New Zealand Company with the expressed purpose of appropriating Maˉori lands.47 The complicated history of the New Zealand Company involved both Durham and, later, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, although the latter eventually distanced himself from the company.48 Wakefield touted New Zealand as an ideal place for the principles of the Colonial Reform movement. He had called it “the finest [country] for British settlement.” He went so far as to remark that New Zealand’s climate made women more attractive, noting that “some ladies … appeared ten years younger than when I parted from them in London.”49 The New Zealand Company engaged in very questionable land “purchases” from the Maˉori and prompted some staunch opposition from the Colonial Office. The language nineteenth-century European observers casually deployed about Canada – its “emptiness,” how it appeared “thinly peopled” – did not apply in the same way to Aotearoa/ New Zealand. This could account for some of the different ways the Colonial

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Office chose to “protect” the Maˉori in Aotearoa. Some observers noted that an “aboriginal race … still survive[d] side by side with European colonists,”50 and others spoke of Aotearoa as “already tolerably well peopled by a race possessing strong mental and bodily powers.”51 Maˉori pressure, the British government’s desire to assert sovereignty against other European nations, along with a growing British humanitarian sentiment regarding “protecting” Indigenous peoples led to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, with over five hundred signatures from Maˉori leaders. Only thirty-nine Maˉori leaders signed the English-language version of the document. This caused a situation in Aotearoa in which the true intent of the treaty was misrepresented. For the Maˉori, the treaty never meant ceding land and sovereignty; for the British, the treaty meant an assertion of sovereignty and exclusive land title rights.52 One of the most pressing issues that Durham faced upon his arrival was Upper Canada’s massive public debt. Michael Piva argues that financial crisis was a “primary motive” for union in Upper Canada.53 The Durham Report explicitly comments on Upper Canada’s massive debt and suggests a union between Upper and Lower Canada. It notes that, as early as 1822, a union would have ameliorated Upper Canada’s financial problems by giving it access to Lower Canada’s customs revenue.54 An exploration of the Durham Report shows how the Upper Canadian government legally codified Indigenous lands as both recognized and unrecognized in order to open it up for white settlement and development. For example, the Upper Canadian government organized unrecognized lands as Crown and Clergy Reserves that it distinguished from “Indian” reserves or government-recognized lands. Within this logic, the Crown and Clergy Reserves allowed for consolidating Crown and clergy land sales and rents into the assets of the Upper Canadian government’s coffers. This is why the receiver general’s journals could record “Indian Accounts” that were distinct from other land sales accounts even though both received money from the sale and renting of Indigenous lands. Only the sales and rents from the government-recognized lands went into an account that the government held in trust for Indigenous peoples.55 The moniker reformers gave to unceded and unsurrendered Indigenous living spaces – wastelands – had a slippery meaning. It did not mean exclusively unceded lands and waters, nor did it mean Crown or Clergy Reserves. Defining spaces as going to “waste”

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because resources and living beings were not exploited as commodities on the global market facilitated a process of ceding land as it evoked an intense British cultural understanding of proper land use. The term itself justified taking over Indigenous living spaces. A year after Wakefield’s testimony for the 1836 Select Committee on the Disposal of Lands in the British Colonies, the two rebellions broke out in Lower Canada, and he went with Durham to Upper Canada. This committee on how to “dispose,” or make profitable, colonial lands inquired into the best methods of developing wastelands in the colonies.56 Although not directly about North America, the committee’s report often referred to the North American colonies.57 Wakefield took a clear position in his testimony about the “disposal of lands.” The land would become a “pre-eminent security” if it could be used as collateral to raise more funds to pay for emigrants to develop it to give it a higher market value. When asked, “How would you propose to carry your views into effect; by the anticipation of the land revenue?,” Wakefield answered that money could be raised “upon the security, for each colony, of the land to be … sold in that colony.” This money could then bring in British emigrants to develop those colonial lands and lay the foundations for a “civilized” settler society.58 On other occasions, Wakefield went so far as to argue that “the land is held by the Government as a trustee for the people,” characterizing the settler colonial process itself as being for “the people.” He then went on to say that the “extinction of Native Title was the indispensable first step in the work of laying open land for appropriation and use by the industrious settlers.”59 Juxtaposing the land “held by the Government” for “the people” with “Native Title” created a racialized binary that distinguished between two types of land tenure – one legitimate for “the people” and the other to be extinguished. “The people” technically could include Indigenous peoples, but, importantly, it did not include Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty over their own living spaces.60 “The Government” reserved that right for itself. As Glen Coulthard argues, this “developmentalist rationale” legitimized the appropriation of Indigenous living spaces through an appeal to the “public good.”61 This also highlights how appropriation, not dispossession, more accurately describes settler colonialism from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.62 Indigenous peoples still lived in those spaces; however, the lands and waters were alienated into a market economy.

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Wakefield’s ideas about the proper “disposal” of lands in the colonies are scattered throughout the Durham Report as well. Durham singled out the expenditure on Crown and clergy lands and wanted to “improve” them or, in other words, make them produce a revenue.63 The Durham Report viewed what it saw as opposition to “improvements” with hostility. It wanted to create a system of “emigration on the greatest possible scale” as well as methods to “encourage the investment of surplus British capital in these colonies,” which went hand in hand.64 In fact, emigration on “an extended scale” was considered to be “a cure for political disorders.”65 The official returns of the Durham Report included a survey of some 17 million acres of Upper Canada, and it stated that less than 1.6 million were “yet unappropriated.” In Upper and Lower Canada, Clergy Reserves claimed 3 million acres, with a few exceptions that remained “entirely wild to this day [i.e., 1839].” The Durham Report attacked the system of clergy reserve lands that the Constitutional Act, 1791, established because those lands “retard[ed] more than any other circumstance the improvement of the colony.”66 Audra Simpson argues that the settler state deploys “self-authorizing techniques and frameworks that sustain dispossession and occupation.” Ideas of an “imagined space of just settlement” accent the Durham Report,67 which identifies two methods of dealing with the inhabitants of “conquered territories.” In “an old and long settled country, in which the land is appropriated, in which little room is left for colonization,” the people would make up the majority of the new population. In the case of a “new and unsettled country,” and here it refers to the British North American colonies, the legislator would “establish those institutions which would be most acceptable to the race by which he hoped to colonize the country.” Whereas in the “settled country” the people would get the benefit of “the first care of a just government,” in the “unsettled country” the people “who happen at the moment to inhabit a portion of the soil” would have neither their “interests” nor their “institutions” supported. This explicitly refers not to Indigenous peoples but, rather, to the French.68 The Durham Report cites the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which, in many ways, set up a nation-to-nations treaty process between the Crown and Indigenous nations.69 However, it focuses on the Royal Proclamation’s policies towards the French, not towards Indigenous nations. This silence regarding Indigenous peoples does not mean that reforms did not include them. As Brian Gettler writes

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of Confederation, the absence of Indigenous peoples’ land questions shows the “unquestioned and unquestioning belief that the state already had ‘solved’ relations with Indigenous peoples.”70 The Durham Report wanted to standardize policy to improve the wastelands. This land appropriation was not as straightforward as granting lands to settlers to have them improve the colony; rather, it involved a complex financing system that grew alongside the colonial public debt market on the London Stock Exchange. Canada inherited British North America’s colonial debts, which, with the British North American Act, became the Dominion’s public debt. This debt became the predominate way of acquiring capital for development and expansion across Indigenous living spaces. As long as the public debt exists, Canadian citizens will continue to pay for Canadian imperialism, which relies both on Indigenous living spaces for its national credit and on the exploitation of those spaces to pay back the principal and interest of the loan amounts. The public debt epitomizes Canada’s capitalist essence.

john s t ua rt m il l a n d t he whi te s upremaci st o r d e r o f t h e s e ttler state Mill whole heartedly agreed that a public debt should finance settler colonial development and British emigration. The working of the scheme will be as follows. A sum of money, say 100,000l., is raised on the security of the sale of lands. With this sum a great supply of labour is taken out; this certain supply of labour induces capitalists to emigrate (many have already expressed that intention); these capitalists will purchase lands, and the proceeds of the sale, after paying the interest of the loan, will be employed in carrying out more labour. This, again, leads to further purchases of land, and the price is applied to further emigration; and so the stream of emigration is perennially kept up, without any advance of money beyond the original one.71 Note that the “security of the sale of lands” meant that settler credit derived from Indigenous living spaces. Mill, and other colonial reformers, viewed settler colonialism as a perpetual motion machine that converted land into market value, which paid for “civilized” settlers, who then “improved” lands to increase their market value,

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and so “the wheel of human intercourse turn[ed] naturally round.”72 These ideas about an initial public debt as the impetus for perpetual settlement serve as an example of how capitalism began to be seen as natural – as something that simply needed the right conditions to spontaneously exist and continually self-reproduce. Mill staunchly supported the Colonial Reform movement, and he perhaps explains it best when, in the second volume of The Principles of Political Economy, he writes: “the planting of colonies should be conducted, not with an exclusive view to the private interests of the first founders, but with a deliberate regard to the permanent welfare of the nations afterwards to arise from these small beginnings.” He goes on to argue that Britain had a strong “obligation” to build and to “keep open a bridge” between itself and the settler colonies “by establishing the self-supporting system of colonization.” He wanted this connection to “increase in breadth and depth as it flowed on.”73 Duncan Bell argues that Mill always viewed the settler colonies as “embryonic nations, bound ultimately for independence.”74 Mill also invested in the Colonial Reform movement because it served his proselytizing. He saw it as a vehicle to spread “civilization” around the entire globe and as one faction of the “civilizing mission.” He noted that settler colonialism concerned “the future and permanent interests of civilization itself,” which “far outstretches the comparatively narrow limits of purely economical considerations.”75 Mill’s understanding of civilization highlights the white supremacist program that settler colonialism spread to non-European spaces. Whiteness, as Rinaldo Walcott notes, “relies on a phenotype,” but it is also a “structure” that “keeps in place a post-Columbus global compact in which not-white people are generally and ideologically positioned as less than in a crude and rank order of beings.”76 Within white supremacist ideology people are differently racialized based on how close they are to the norm of whiteness. White supremacy, or the structures and ideologies that uphold whiteness, also “instituted antiblackness.” This created the two sides of a white supremacist spectrum: whiteness and blackness.77 White supremacy does not just mean the exclusion of Indigenous, Black, or other racialized peoples, nor does it just mean the condoning of, and/or violent attacks on, racialized bodies that Langford (chapter 9) and Frager and Patrias (chapter 8) discuss in this volume. White supremacy is also the erasure of the epistemologies and

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histories of racialized peoples according to rhetoric that confirms and reifies the universal nature of specifically European cultural formations. However, at the same time, in a settler state founded on white supremacy, including Indigenous, Black, and other racialized peoples in the body politic serves to reify the settler state and to erode Indigenous rights to lands and waters upheld in nationto-nations treaties relationships. This is because racialized peoples are “included” in a system that denies their knowledge systems and experiences, and Indigenous peoples are “included” in an occupying state. A more accurate word for inclusion in these instances would be assimilation. The white supremacist order in Canada cannot be said to be democratic. For Mill, settler colonial spaces had the potential to actualize his dreams of a “perfectly civilized” society.78 Conveniently, Indigenous peoples did not factor into his idealized notions of “good government.” Mill’s excessive language relating to the “unoccupied parts of the earth’s surface,” both in publications and in private letters, reflected mid-nineteenth-century British liberal imaginative conventions pertaining to settler colonies.79 Mill’s dreamscape of the settler colony included its “self-sufficiency” and eventual independence from Britain. It was to be a society comprised of British settlers. The fictional absence of Indigenous peoples worked to consolidate a vision of this “perfectly civilized” society despite Mill’s knowing that Turtle Island was populated by Indigenous peoples. Mill, Durham, Wakefield, and other colonial reformers needed a morally uncomplicated and ethically unchallenged British population – something that was impeded by the presence of a multiplicity of Indigenous nations, communities, and governance systems. An exploration of Mill’s ideas about representative government can help clarify why an all white population was necessary to colonial self-sufficiency, and it also highlights the white supremacist colouring of Canada. Mill wrote about representative government in the context of debates about the British reform bills, and he applied these ideas to empire. He characterized representative government as natural and potentially good for all humanity, not just as a system of government unique to Britain’s history, geography, and cultural practices. Mill’s definition of nation is nebulous and relies on a “feeling” of identity. According to Mill, nationality does not depend on race, language, or religion (he notes that Switzerland’s population had a sense of national identity despite displaying all three differences).80 Race did

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not have the same connotations in the mid-nineteenth century as it did once science explicitly linked it to biology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For example, the Durham Report classified the French and English as distinct races. Race and nationality, although linked, formed two distinct categories. While it was possible for a myriad of races to have a national “feeling” and to have representative government, for Mill, representative government and “free institutions” were “next to impossible” outside of a uniform nation for the simple reason that, outside this context, “[the] united public opinion necessary to the working of representative government cannot exist.”81 Disorder would be the result of a disunity of nationalities within any given population.82 Here, the necessity of a homogenous population to the establishment of a settler state becomes clearer and explains why Mill, Durham, Wakefield, and others saw large-scale British settler emigration as part of the requirement for a “self-sufficient” colony. This uniform population had to exist before a national government would be possible. Mill believed that representative government only worked with population uniformity: “it is in general a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of governments should coincide in the main with those of nationalities.”83 He proposed assimilation as the solution to the problem of there being multiple nationalities in one state. He gave the example of France, where “nobody can suppose that it is not more beneficial to a Breton, or a Basque of French Navarre, to be brought into the current of the ideas and feelings of a highly civilized and cultivated people – to be a member of the French nationality.” The “absorption” of “an inferior and more backward portion of the human race” would create a unified nationality ready for “free institutions.” He saw Bretons and Basque peoples as a “half-savage relic of past times.”84 Mill did not aim to “extinguish” but, rather, to “soften” the “extremes” in order to create a “united people.” This particular ideology of uniformity through assimilating distinct groups into a “superior” group had genocidal consequences for Indigenous peoples in what became Canada.85 Even before Mill wrote on representative government, his passion for liberal freedom did not extend to Indigenous peoples. In fact, he supported what would become genocidal policy. His response to criticisms of Andrew Jackson’s notorious Indian Removal Act, 1830, which displaced some forty-six thousand Indigenous people from 25 million acres of land, reflects Mill’s early thoughts on a unified nation

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with a homogeneous population:86 “the conduct of the United States towards the Indian tribes has been throughout, not only just, but noble.” Criticizing “mischievous remarks” decrying Jackson’s presidential message, Mill took issue with those who saw the removal of Indigenous peoples as imposing upon them “hardship” and “injustice.” According to him, many efforts had been made to “civilize” them. He argued that the American government’s expenditure on this cause included “sums so large, as to form a very important item in the moderate expenditure.” His rationale cast the Indian Removal Act as something that was necessary to the American government’s exhaustive attempts to civilize Indigenous peoples.87 Mill’s ideas about population uniformity had white supremacist overtones that echoed throughout the British Empire. During the debates about responsible government in Jamaica, a scheme formed that proposed that some “60,000 people of colour now in Canada” be “all taken to Jamaica” as “labourers.” The Jamaican government engaged in this project with the sanction of “Her Majesty’s Ministers and the concurrence of the Canadian Ministers.” They “expected” the Black emigrants from Canada “to be prepared to enter into labour contracts upon their arrival” under a three-year indentured contract. While the governor of Jamaica noted that these schemes proved largely unsuccessful, he urged the Africa Aid Society to help this immigration along with the newly passed Immigration Act, 1858.88 The removal of “coloured people” from Canada would do its part to ensure an ethnically British population, and it highlights the fissures in the meanings of race in a settler state. In theory, when Indigenous peoples assimilated, their living spaces became assimilated along with them, and this is what led to the attempted termination of treaty rights.89 The settler state segregated “coloured people” who had no claims to land but who had been racialized as labour in a transatlantic system of slavery. The settler state, therefore, deployed both assimilation and segregation, and in both cases it aimed to achieve a white body politic.90 The history of Canada’s body politic as confined to a system of British (and in some places French) cultural, social, and political organization plays out in Canada today in a myriad of ways. In the 2019 federal election, while ndp candidate Jagmeet Singh was campaigning in Montréal, a white voter told him to “cut off” his turban to “look like a Canadian.” While distasteful to many, most Canadians, racialized or not, knew exactly what this meant.91

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Whiteness is both “the very thing that constitutes the state” and “the very thing that is forgotten.”92 Whiteness relies on anti-Blackness as its foil. Anti-Blackness gives whiteness meaning. A system whose first principles are dehumanization and violence cannot be democratic. As Katherine McKittrick puts it, Black peoples, knowledges, and history “are not ‘Canada,’ are not supposed to be Canada, and contradict Canada; they are surprises, unexpected and concealed.”93 Diversity is a red herring in a settler state predicated on the destruction of Black lives, knowledge systems, and kinship networks. We need to imagine “human life beyond capitalist modernity” in order to begin the project of democracy. We need to imagine life as not confined within the settler state. We need to think of, even believe in, lifeworlds far beyond the reach of capital.

c o n c l u s io n s : d is m a n tli ng settler colo n ia l is m , l a n d bac k , and democracy Canada is a settler state predicated on an appropriation of Indigenous living spaces that is legitimized by white supremacist rationality. The governance model of the settler state supports the mobilization of capital. Public debt financing and the idealization of a uniform national population ready for settler self-government reflected a shift in imperial policy towards colonial self-sufficiency. The idealization of a uniform national population resulted in an expansionary directive pertaining to Indigenous living spaces, which, in turn, resulted in white supremacist assimilationist understandings of the body politic. Both of these historical phenomena have current repercussions for Canada as a settler state. The first is that, as a settler state, Canada derives its state credit from Indigenous living spaces. This imperialist relationship between Canada and Indigenous nations, which centres on the “release” of capital to global markets, orients the settler state around expansion. The “creditworthiness” of white settler nations racializes the state credit/public debt relationship. The supremacy of whiteness is direct anti-Blackness, which is deeply rooted in settler state politics and devalues Black lives. The second repercussion is that Canadian citizenship, as it stands now, cannot account for rights guarantees for groups that exist outside of Canadian sovereignty but live inside Canada’s claimed territorial borders. Marie Battiste argues that treaties laid the foundation for democracy and need to be honoured, and she offers a way out of this colonial relationship.94

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However, this would mean that Canada would first have to prioritize its nation-to-nations treaty obligations. In an era of pipelines, commercial fisheries, and clear-cut logging that disrespects treaty relationships and non-human lifeworlds, it is clear why the settler state cannot just turn away from these deeply harmful development projects. The pre-eminent position of capital in the Canadian settler state makes the necessary changes for the sustainability of life economically, politically, and socially untenable. At the same time, the claims to Indigenous living spaces, through the logic of recognized and unrecognized lands, was a type of fiscal warfare that defined a narrow space for Indigenous peoples, the ultimate desire being that they would disappear so that the entirety of the settler state’s lands and waters could be valued for their credit.95 Perhaps disentangling Indigenous living spaces from credit/debit markets would mean allowing the Canadian public debt to fall into arrears, as it almost did in the case of Upper Canada. Without development it is not clear how Canada would produce revenue to pay back the principle plus interest of the public debt. Defaulting on the public debt might sever the ties that bind Indigenous living spaces to global markets. Could this bankrupt and creditless state be reimagined as something democratic? Settler states superimpose themselves on top of living communities. There is a difference between a “multicultural democracy,” in which the Canadian settler state still holds the highest authority over territory and law, and, as Audra Simpson shows, “embedded sovereignties” within Canada’s claimed geographical borders.96 Chelsea Vowel argues that settler anxieties about creating a version of Canada in which Indigenous self-governments supersede Canadian sovereignty simply do not reflect historical or contemporary circumstances. These anxieties about Indigenous self-determination somehow harming Canadian democracy indicate an inadequate understanding of the differences between liberal democracy and democracy.97 As Vowel quips about Indigenous sovereign governments, “Okay, but what is so terrifying about that exactly?” The terrifying part would be that Canada would no longer have absolute authority over territory. Without the exclusive rights to land and water, development projects such as pipelines would have no state guarantee, which could devalue state credit.98 Some scholars accept the possibility of “reconciling Aboriginal rights and Western democracy.”99 However, in a settler state,

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democratic expressions of citizenship through voting, freedom of the press, or other forms of democratic practice that give the demos access to power (real or imagined) reify the Canadian settler state as the exclusive sovereign over its claimed territory. In this sense, even if Canadian citizens achieve the highest ideals of democracy, in doing so they would be legitimizing an occupying state. This is not to argue either that Indigenous peoples should not vote in Canada or that their human rights should not be guaranteed so that they may avoid being assimilated into the state. However, the history of Canada highlights the contradictions between the ideal of democracy for all and Canada’s ongoing settler colonialism. Indigenous peoples have had to seek redress for Canada’s imperialism by appealing to standards of international law to bind Canada to some form of legal recourse.100 They have sui generis rights to their living spaces, and these rights are distinct from the rights of minoritized and racialized peoples who cannot legally, politically, morally, or ethically challenge the settler state’s sovereign claims over territory. Critics of multicultural rhetoric and policies show how categorizing Indigenous peoples as a racialized minority population within the settler state denies Indigenous governance systems that exist outside of Canadian sovereignty – systems that pre-date not only Canada but also the formation of European nation-states.101 As Audra Simpson shows in the case of Haudenosaunee sovereignty, this plays out as a politics of refusal of Canadian and/or American citizenship.102 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang deftly observe that Indigenous peoples have “creation stories, not colonization stories” about how they came to be in this particular place.103 Canada’s colonization story includes a blueprint to expand over Indigenous living spaces in order to release dead capital into the market for credit and profit. One of the goals of this chapter is to recognize Canada’s historical context so as to understand the structural changes needed in order to effectively rematriate living spaces back to Indigenous peoples outside of Crown sovereignty.104 Indigenous peoples need their land and water to sustain their communities, and the rematriation of Indigenous living spaces is central to any question of democracy in Canada. Land as property does not capture the complexities of rematriation. Mishuana Goeman shows that land means more than just property and revenue production. She notes that “experiences of land become expressions of self, and, through the shared experience

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of naming, connections to others are formed.”105 As Thomas King puts it: “Land contains the languages, the stories, and the histories of a people. It provides water, air, shelter, and food. Land participates in the ceremonies and the songs. Land is home.”106 Space assigns meaning to people as the landscape imprints a sense of self, and language blooms through descriptions of and relationships to the environment. When land is understood as more than property, its rematriation has the capacity to heal and to revitalize. The rematriation of land offers a tangible path to dismantling settler colonialism and to new understandings of what can constitute democracy. In Canada, the question of democracy is fundamentally the question of dismantling settler colonialism. The tangible practice of land rematriation should play a central role in establishing democracy in Canada. However, Canadian jurisprudence does not, as it stands, provide legal recourse for Indigenous peoples to resume their exclusive sovereignty within their living spaces.107 Much of Canada’s claimed territory is currently tied to a matrix of global debt markets. Currently, land held as private property can change its legal status in a few ways – for example, by being converted to a trust or given as an “ecological gift.” A trust has legal requirements of incorporation as a non-profit, and this would, in part, place restrictions on any attempts to alienate land to global markets and to remake it into real estate. However, this legal classification does not safeguard the land “in perpetuity.” Legally, the highest title in land is still held by the Crown, who can appropriate it in any number of circumstances.108 These contemporary issues are very much tied to the ways in which Canada grew as a settler state and attached its economy to development projects, thus ensuring that a public debt bloated the market value of land with the promise of future revenue: a historical imagining of the future that persists into our present. not e s 1 Walcott, “Against Social Justice,” 97–8. 2 This chapter takes settler colonialism to mean the specific form of mid- to late-nineteenth-century colonialism whose purpose was to produce an independent settler state. Note that the definition of settler colonialism is heavily debated within the literature. Using a strict definition of settler colonialism as the “elimination of the native,” seventeenth-century Puritan colonies in New England can be included here. Another example is James

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Belich’s exploration of the explosion of the “Anglo-World” in the 1830s, which takes the approach that settler colonialism cannot be confined to this periodization (Belich, Replenishing the Earth). For a concise criticism of Belich’s dismissal of Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s role in the spread of settler colonial policy, see Ballantyne, “Theory and Practice of Empire Building,” 93. This means respecting non-human beings as deserving of dignity for their own sake. See, for example, Simpson, “Looking after Gdoo-naaganinaa”; and Whetung, “(En)gendering Shoreline Law.” Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism.” Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property, 81. Wolfe, “Recuperating Binarism,” 267. To understand the relationship between liberalism and capitalism, see Polanyi, Great Transformation. For the relationship between liberal governmentality and capitalism, see Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. For a recent example of how capitalism forms the basis of the settler state, see Gettler, Colonialism’s Currency. As Rinaldo Walcott argues, “‘Black freedom’ is in distinct opposition to something called capitalism.” See Walcott, “Against Social Justice,” 96. See, for example, E.A. Heaman (chapter 6, this volume) and Colin Grittner (chapter 7, this volume). Burrill, “Settler Order Framework.” Howell and Richter-Montpetit, “Racism in Foucauldian Security Studies,” 3. Understanding Canada as a liberal state evolved out of Foucauldian theory, which influenced works such as Allan Greer and Ian Radforth’s edited collection, Colonial Leviathan. However, it should be noted that Greer has recently acknowledged that a major fault with that work was the lack of understanding of the formation of a settler state. See Greer, “Settler Colonialism,” 20n37. See McKay, “Liberal Order Framework,” 628; Heaman (chapter 6, this volume). See, for example, De Soto, Mystery of Capital. De Soto’s argument that Indigenous peoples need to own their land in fee simple private property to release “dead capital” into the global market economy influenced Canadian Indigenous policy, particularly during Stephen Harper’s prime ministership. “Dead capital” also plays a significant role in Tom Flanagan’s ideas on the Indian Act. Gettler, Colonialism’s Currency; Pasternak, Grounded Authority.

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16 Frederick John Robinson, 1st Earl of Ripon, or Lord Goderich, mentioned that “the plan of disposing of land by public sale adopted by Government … was adopted in 1831; in the same year in Australia that it had been adopted in the North American colonies.” House of Commons, Report from the Select Committee on the Disposal of Lands in the British Colonies Together with Minutes of Evidence and Appendix (1 August 1836), 40. See also Hastings, “Wakefield Colonization Plan,” 292; Prichard, “Wakefield Changes His Mind,” 1963; and Burroughs, “Wakefield and the Ripon Land Regulations.” 17 Marx, Capital, 1: 932. 18 Ibid., 931n1. 19 Burroughs, “Wakefield and the Ripon Land Regulations,” 464. 20 See Kim, “Settler Modernity.” 21 I would like to thank Henry Yu for his insightful comments at the Realities of Canadian Democracy symposium at the L.R. Wilson Institute in May 2019. He discussed with me how the public debt system literally made land “real.” 22 For example, see Wakefield, Letter from Sydney. 23 Mill, “New Colony,” Examiner, 6 July 1834, reprinted in Robson and Robson, Newspaper Writings, 735–7. 24 Charles Edward Poulett Thompson, Baron Sydenham to Earl John Russell, 20 August 1839, in Knaplund, Letters from Lord Sydenham, 25. 25 Section 111 of the British North America Act stipulates that “Canada shall be liable for the Debts and Liabilities of each Province existing at the Union.” Sections 112–16, however, made those provinces owe that debt to the Canadian government at an interest, and the Canadian government in turn owed the entire combined debt to debt holders. 26 Guildhall Library, Course of the Exchange, 24 January 1837 and 6 February 1880. 27 Ibid., 24 January 1837 and 1 January 1867. 28 Davis and Huttenback, Mammon, 12. 29 This is the amount “actually paid” from the American Land Company to the receiver general. Lord Glenelg to Lord Durham, 19 July 1837, “Papers of the 1st Earl of Durham,” Library and Archives Canada (hereafter lac ), mg 24-a 27. 30 An Act to Authorize the Government to Borrow a Certain Sum of Money, Upon Debenture, to be Loaned to the Welland Canal Company, 20 January 1826, Statutes of Her Majesty’s Province of Upper Canada, chapter 22.

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31 An Act to Incorporate certain persons therein mentioned under the style and title of “The Welland Canal Company,” 19 January 1824, Statutes of His Majesty’s Province of Upper Canada, 4th Session of the Eighth Provincial Parliament of Upper-Canada (York: Charles Fothergill, 1824), 93, 101. 32 Aitken, “Financing,” 142. 33 Ibid., 138, note 6. 34 House of Commons, Dispatch from the Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, York, Upper Canada, 28 February 1828, Parliamentary Papers, 1780–1849, 3–4. 35 Shortt, “Financial Development of British North America,” 378–9. 36 Lytwyn, “Waterworld,” 15. 37 Hill, Clay, 170. 38 Monture, Global Solution, 44. 39 Six Nations, Land Rights, 27. 40 “The Petition of John Brant,” 1829, Western Libraries, Six Nations of the Grand River Fonds, John Brant Letter Book 1828–32, afc 406-f 1, box afc 406-1/1. 41 Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, “Canada’s Response to Haudenosaunee Six Nations Counteroffer,” https://www.aadnc-aandc. gc.ca/eng/1100100016343/1100100016344. 42 For an elegant argument about the settler state’s production of wastelands unfit for human and other than human habitation, and the apocalyptic fallout for Indigenous peoples, see Simmons, “Settler Atmospherics.” 43 Mark Rifkin refers to debt dependency systems as debt sovereignty. See Rifkin, “Debt,” 44. 44 Durham, Report, 13. 45 Key works on Durham include: Ajzenstat, Political Thought of Lord Durham; Henderson, “Banishment to Bermuda”; and New, Lord Durham. 46 Curthoys, “Dog That Didn’t Bark,” 35. 47 Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, 2: 308. 48 Prichard, “Wakefield Changes His Mind,” 253. 49 E.G. Wakefield to Robert Rintoul, 17 April 1853, 28. Edward Gibbon Wakefield Papers, ms 35261, bla . 50 North British Review 44 (March–June 1866): 405. 51 Dr Hodgkin to Benjamin Hawes, 27 November 1837, in Aborigine Protection Society, On the Colonization, 44. 52 Orange, Treaty of Waitangi, 1. 53 Piva, “Financing,” 93.

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54 Durham, Report, 101. 55 Government of Canada, “Receiver General Journal,” Receiver General’s Office, 1848/08-1857/12, rg 19-d -2, vol./box no. 2018, lac . 56 United Kingdom, Select Committee on Disposal of Lands in British Colonies, report, minutes of evidence, appendix (Paper Series, House of Commons Papers Paper Type, Reports of Committees Parliament, 1836 Paper no. 512, chair/author, ward , Henry George).  57 For a few examples, see ibid., 32, 40, 108, 118, 121, 140, 182–5, 190. 58 Ibid., 101. 59 Quoted in Prichard, “Wakefield Changes His Mind,” 262–3. 60 The Eurocentric understanding of sovereignty cannot be applied to Indigenous uses of the word to describe their discrete systems of selfdetermination, which exist outside of the control of settler state sovereignty. J. Keˉhaulani Kauanui points out that the concept of sovereignty is debated within Indigenous studies. See Kauanui, Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty, 25. 61 Coulthard, Red Skin, 175. 62 Although “dispossession is conventionally treated as a self-evident and circumscribed practice of unjust taking and subtractive action,” this does not explain capitalist accumulation outside of a land dispossession framework (e.g., how public debt financing leveraged Indigenous living spaces as credit). See Byrd et al., “Predatory Value,” 2. 63 Government of Canada, “Dispatch from the Earl of Gosford,” 19 July 1837, no. 76. Papers of the 1st Earl of Durham, lac , mg 24-a 27. 64 Durham, Report, 242. 65 Ibid., 243–4. 66 Ibid., 156. 67 Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus, 21. 68 Durham, Report, 44. 69 Borrows, “Wampum at Niagara,” 164–5. 70 Gettler, “Indigenous Policy.” 71 Mill, “The New Colony (2),” Examiner, 6 July 1834, reprinted in Robson and Robson, Newspaper Writings, 736–7. 72 House of Commons, Accounts and Papers, 1831–32. 8 vol., contents of the fifth volume, Report Respecting the Canada Waste Lands, 23. 73 Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 2: 561–6. 74 Bell, “Mill on Colonies,” 37. 75 Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 2: 586. 76 Walcott, “End of Diversity,” 395.

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77 Walcott, “Against Social Justice,” 93. 78 J.S. Mill, “Wakefield’s The New British Province of South Australia,” Examiner, 20 July 1834, reprinted in Robson and Robson, Newspaper Writings, 738–42. 79 J.S. Mill to Henry George, “Letter on the Chinese Labour Question,” 23 October 1869, file 28-12, Mill-Taylor/45, lse Library, British Library of Political and Economic Science. 80 Mill, Considerations, 343. 81 Ibid., 344–5. 82 It is worth noting here that there was opposition to Mill’s views, notably John Acton and his argument for “multinationality,” or the existence of many nations within a state. See Massey, “Acton’s Theory of Nationality,” 497. 83 Mill, Considerations, 347. 84 Ibid., 349. 85 See Palmater, “Genocide,” for an unpacking the relationship between policy, legislation, and genocide. 86 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization,” 16. 87 Mill, “Conduct of the United States Towards the Indian Tribes,” Examiner, 9 January 1831, reprinted in Robson and Robson, Newspaper Writings, 235–7. 88 Charles Henry Darling to Lord R. Churchill, 5 November 1860, co 137/351/41, Charles Henry Darling Collection, vol. 156, fol. 249–16, National Archives of the United Kingdom, London, England. 89 Battiste, “Narrating Mi’kmaw Treaties,” 8. 90 Wolfe, “After the Frontier,” 40. 91 bbc News, “Jagmeet Singh: ‘Cut Your Turban Off,’ Voter Tells ndp leader.” 2 October 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada49901451. 92 Dionne Brand, in R.W.B. Jackson Lecture (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education), Rinaldo Walcott in Conversation with Dionne Brand, 7 December 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wuBjTnWtiQ. 93 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 92. 94 Battiste, “Narrating Mi’kmaw Treaties,” 9. 95 Pasternak, “Fiscal Body,” 325. 96 Wiener, “Neighbours Up North”; Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus, 12. 97 Vowel, Indigenous Writes, 127–9. For an illuminating critique of liberal democracy and Indigenous sovereignty, see Curry, Indigenous Sovereignty; Rollo, “Mandates of the State.” 98 Vowel, Indigenous Writes, 131.

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99 Fitzmaurice, “Genealogy,” 15. 100 Anghie, “Vattel,” 83, 95. 101 For further discussion about the complexities of Indigenous rights claims within a settler state, see Turpel, “Indigenous People’s Rights”; Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular; Corntassel and Holder, “Indigenous Peoples”; and Povinelli, Cunning of Recognition. 102 Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus, 21. 103 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization,” 6. 104 For two recent examples of land rematriation projects, see: King and Pasternak, Land Back; Vowel, “Back 2 The Land: 2Land 2Furious,” https://ca.gofundme.com/f/back-2-the-land-2land-2furious. 105 Goeman, “Land as Life,” 75, 87. 106 King, Inconvenient Indian, 120. 107 King and Pasternak, Land Back, 24. 108 Another recent examples of land rematriation is Quebec resident Grégoire Gollin’s “ecological gift” of sixty hectares of lands to Kanesatake. “Developer Offers to Give Land Back to First Nation Where Oka Crisis Happened.” cbc News, https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/kanesatakepines-gregoire-gollin-1.5204242.

4 “A Terrible Engine in the Hands of the Provincial Administration”: The Corporate Franchise State and Joint-Stock Democracy in the Last of the Atlantic Revolutions Albert Schrauwers

Allan Greer’s reconnaissance of the “Historical Roots of Canadian Democracy” points to two distinct and familiar forms of electoral politics in the pivotal decade of the 1830s in Upper and Lower Canada: that found in the parliamentary system and that found in the less state-centric self-management of rural communities.1 He pointedly remarks, however, that what distinguishes these fora from the liberal democracy of our era is the greater scope of public debate back then. In that period public debate included direct attacks on those “creatures of government” – corporations like the Bank of Upper Canada – that would not be tolerated in a “private” institution today. William Lyon Mackenzie, for one, sought to establish a republican state in which incorporated trading and banking corporations would be banned as “political engines” fostering an accumulation of wealth that threatened “democratic” equality. This was the decade that marked the “high point and defeat” of civic republican adversaries of the corporation like Mackenzie.2 However, it is important to underscore that liberalism was just as antagonistic towards corporations, albeit for different reasons.3 Given Liberal political economy’s individualist emphasis and its suspicion of the corporate form, where does the corporation fit in the development of the liberal democratic Canadian state? Colonialism in the eighteenth-century mercantilist era had frequently been experienced as “corporate rule,” with the corporation

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serving most state functions. The corporation was, after all, a delegation of the state’s sovereignty. Throughout the globe, colonialism first presented itself with a corporate face, whether as the Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada, the East India Company in India, or the United East Indies Company in the Netherlands East Indies. The British East Indies Company, it was said, was “a state in the disguise of a merchant”;4 at the apex of its power it ruled one-fifth of the world’s population with a quarter-million troops and greater revenues than Britain itself.5 These companies exercised territorial rule. They were able to wage war and sue for peace, raise taxes, and administer justice. As McNairn notes (chapter 5, this volume), municipal government and a host of local infrastructure projects were also granted to delegated corporations with similar “police powers.” I highlight the governmental aspects of the corporate form with the designation “franchise state.”6 If we are to create a chronology of the corporate order in Upper Canada, 1825 would be a critical date. In that year, the political economy of the embattled colonial state was reformed on a liberal capitalist basis. I argue that liberal ascendency and the capitalist transition was abetted by a corresponding corporate revolution that began that year and that created an undemocratic franchise state that managed transnational markets and propped up the colonial state while isolating it from legislative oversight. I specifically examine the role played by the Bank of Upper Canada, the Canada and Clergy Corporations, and the Welland Canal Company7 in effecting the market revolution that linked the isolated province to colonial commodity chains.8 Viewed in this way, the nature of the political contests between civic republicans and the Family Compact concerning corporate governance takes on a greater meaning, which includes its larger role in managing the market revolution in the second St Lawrence commercial empire. Following historian Donald Creighton’s inspiration, I argue that the fight for democratic control of joint-stock companies was an underlying contributing factor to the Rebellions of 1837.9 To understand the political positions adopted in regard to corporations during this period, I contrast the chartered corporations controlled by the Family Compact with the “joint-stock” companies that fostered the growth of the Reform movement in Upper Canada. The process of chartering a corporation granted it specific and powerful advantages, like limited liability and “separate

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personality” (the ability to own property and sue at law distinct from its shareholders). There was no general legislation allowing incorporation, so each corporate charter required a special legislative act. Both laissez faire liberals and civic republicans objected to these privileges. According to these critics, incorporation created a “licensed monopoly.” While similar in organization, the unchartered joint-stock company was technically illegal and denied these privileges. Unchartered joint-stock companies had been banned under the British Bubble Act, 1720. These companies were treated as mere partnerships and were limited to six shareholders. The Bubble Act was repealed in Britain in 1825, and the jointstock form was increasingly adopted by those lacking the political connections to secure incorporation, even though it continued to lack limited liability and separate personality. The year 1825 thus marks the opening of a competition, which concluded in 1837, between political and economic movements predicated upon this crucial difference between incorporated corporations and unincorporated joint-stock companies. During this period civic republicans like Mackenzie organized to constitutionally eliminate the chartered form, a social movement that I call “joint-stock democracy.” The reform movement sought not only to capture the state but also to capture the “franchise state” for republican democracy. There is a growing international literature that points to the parallels in the political organization of corporations and the states of which they were a part, with distinctive social movements demanding democratically organized public corporations in England, the United States, and Upper Canada during this period.10 These studies highlight early international civic republican economic critiques of the corporate revolution. In this chapter, I focus on these contests over corporate governance during the early nineteenth century in Upper Canada: How and why was corporate governance then the subject of political agitation or its suppression? I point, in particular, to the corporate franchise state’s role in the regulation and policing of colonial trade and its establishment of the preconditions for the market revolution. The civic republican critique of the corporation’s anti-democratic effects has now been lost as the corporate “franchise state” has been ideologically integrated into liberal democracy. Here, I point to republican models of an alternative form that actually existing democracy could assume within a differently constituted capitalist economy.11

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s ha p in g t h e m a r k e t in the li beral order In the early nineteenth century corporations were entities that delegated state authority to favoured subjects for public purposes, usually religious, educational, or municipal.12 As McNairn (chapter 5, this volume) also confirms, political scientist David Ciepley asserts that “the practice of chartering corporations can be thought of historically as state-building at one remove – the building of a ‘franchise state.’”13 Corporations, as joint-stock associations, were a political strategy for delegating governmental (not specifically “economic”) tasks to subsidiary jurisdictions. These joint-stock associations were granted legal standing by being incorporated by state legislatures on a case-by-case basis, with each association defined by its public rather than by its private character. As James Taylor argues, “In all cases, while private profit was served, what justified the delegation of state powers were the public benefits resulting from incorporation.”14 Corporations were, in other words, quasi-state enterprises accountable to all in the public sphere rather than private businesses as conceived today.15 When we speak, then, of state formation in the nineteenth century we need to include the corporation. It was only later that the corporation “shifted from [being] a quasi-public agency – in principle accountable to all, embedded within an institutional structure that served the public sector – into a private agency, protected from government accountability by individual rights and legally accountable to no one but its owners.”16 By emphasizing the governmental aspects of corporations we alter their perceived relationship to the market. They are no longer the non-political market participants of economic theory but, rather, as business historian Alfred Chandler long ago argued, they act as the “visible hand of the market,” displacing market transactions with hierarchical administration.17 Chandler’s insight points to a paradox: just as Liberals were preparing a legislative program to create laissez faire markets, those markets were subordinated to a newly emergent corporate order dedicated to hierarchically organizing economies of scope and scale. Corporations should be viewed as a critical means by which a capitalist transformation was pioneered and the “liberal order” established in Upper Canada. I thus shift attention from the state to its “franchise” – the corporation – as a form of social technology for implementing governmental programs of improvement. In the Upper Canadian case, I

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am specifically concerned with how the Family Compact introduced chartered corporations in order to manage the staple trade of the emergent second St Lawrence commercial empire, to maintain colonial ties, to recreate the British hierarchical social landscape, and to manage colonial settlement. It introduced a development project in the modern sense of the word – a “high-modernist state scheme” intended to initiate liberal markets in land, money, and labour.18 This amounted to, as Tozer highlights (chapter 3, this volume), the systematic introduction of Wakefieldian settler colonialism. The civic republican jeremiad against this settler capitalist order, and its attempt to create a democratically organized alternative, was crushed with the failed Rebellions. The Family Compact’s joint-stock republican alternative demonstrates that capitalism is not inherently undemocratic but that, in the Canadian context, a form of non-democratic “gentlemanly capitalism” became the norm, as it did in Britain.19 The Family Compact’s corporate order was a neo-mercantilist means of restricting colonial trade to imperial circuits. This corporate order reflects the evolution of those “company states,” like the Hudson’s Bay Company, that, as delegations of state sovereignty, had exercised territorial rule, raised taxes, and administered justice in their quest for trade monopolies. After 1834, an analogous means of regulating the market can be discerned in the introduction of municipal corporations to replace the magistrates of the Courts of Quarter Sessions in municipal governance.20 An examination of these civic corporations demonstrates the Family Compact’s attitudes towards market exchange and how its corporate “policing” of the economy ideologically situated it between laissez faire liberalism and the civic republicans, with whom it shared basic assumptions about “public economy”: “The notion of ‘public economy’ is not so much an intellectual construction based on abstract theorizing as an historical shorthand for the social practices of economic and legal actors that established the conditions for hiring, working, manufacturing, buying and selling.”21 It is a practice-based approach rooted in common law. Legal scholars have shown that all aspects of American economic activity in this period were publicly regulated according to a common law vision of the “well-ordered market” and “public economy” (as opposed to private enterprise).22 Public economy was not entrenched in a national constitutional framework but, rather, in state and local government. These domains of authority have been only tangentially examined.23

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In Upper Canada, the Tories embraced this common law legal approach that defended a broad range of regulatory practices governing commodified exchange. Upper Canada, like most American states, practised widespread economic regulation: “While not uniquely Canadian, interventionism and the intimate relationship that is forged between business and government tended to be more pronounced in British North America than in the United States or even Great Britain. Regardless of international trends, the local leaders in the towns and cities of Upper Canada continued to regulate the market-place with the intention of creating a dynamic and orderly urban economy.”24 For example, in 1835, shortly after Toronto was incorporated and had completed the construction of its market building, it published extensive bylaws for the control and licensing of trade within the city. These regulations determined when, where, and by whom particular commodities could be sold, what weights and measures were to be used, and what taxes should be administered. At the same time, it posted regulations for licensing inns and taverns, and actively sought to suppress the formation of “combinations of workers” (i.e., unions) through the application of the British “anti-combination law.”25 These priorities were reflected in the discourse of political economy, which covered the economic policy of the state and the close relationship between the polity and the social and economic order.26 In Upper Canada’s King’s College, John Strachan contemplated a single department of “Mental Philosophy; moral and intellectual philosophy; Christian ethics; and political economy.”27 The liberal conception of a self-regulating market in the private sphere, distinct from the polity, was first made by David Ricardo only in 1817 and did not become common until mid-century.28 Before the middle of the nineteenth century, it was rare to separate economics from ethics and, hence, from those policies necessary to sustain the virtuous character of the state.29 The discourse of political economy had always faced a “‘tricky adjustment’ between the liberal element concerned with commercial freedom and a pastoral element concerned with the welfare of the population.”30 It is this latter regulatory aspect that, when viewed from the side of the general public, has been described as a “moral economy.”31 Tories and republicans, both Upper Canadian and American, subscribed to “a moral vision of law which recognized an objective, organic common good apart from the aggregation of private interests and which appreciated the

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importance of commercial restraint.”32 Laissez faire liberalism, in contrast, sought to eliminate the licensing process altogether under the cautionary maxim “caveat emptor.” The pastoral or regulatory element meant that almost all modes of selling and a variety of occupations were considered “privileges” to be specially licensed by local government.33 We have seen that this was especially true of corporations, “licensed monopolies” having the exclusive right to earn profits in the provision of a public service. Here, however, Tories and republicans differed; while Tories viewed themselves as the natural leaders of these franchise governments, civic republicans feared that the inequities of wealth they created would undermine democracy as they did in “Old Corruption” in England. Public antagonism towards and fear of such monopolies appears to be well founded as studies of early American corporations show that monopoly was a characteristic of the corporate economy from its inception and not the result of a decrease in competition with the growth of large national and international conglomerates at the turn of the twentieth century.34 Although the Family Compact shared a capitalist orientation with merchants, it is difficult to fit the corporate order I have just described within a liberal laissez faire market framework, although together they have been dubbed “commercialist.”35 They did share a vision of the relations of property, citizenship, and the state – and, hence, of liberalism’s limited conception of democracy and its comfort with Tory class and gender exclusions.36 They also shared a common desire to be freed of onerous British tariffs so as to breathe life into colonial trade. However, liberalism in this period was emphatically individualist and laissez faire, not corporate and regulatory.37 Foundational liberal thinkers, including Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and David Hume, had long been hostile to the corporate form, whose “exclusive privileges” were considered an encroachment “upon natural liberty.”38 For laissez faire Liberals, the most egregious sins of the corporation were monopoly, limited liability, and the separation of ownership from control (as illustrated by the exclusion of foreign capital from the board of the Welland Canal). Each of these sins transgressed the code of British commercial integrity, with its emphasis on competition and personal accountability. For laissez faire merchants, a “nation’s pre-eminence was held to derive from its exacting commercial standards. The law of partnership embodied

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the natural order, upheld the principle of personal responsibility and allowed free play to economic forces: companies acting under different laws undermined this system and represented an unnecessary and destructive interference with the providential dispensation.”39 Traces of this early liberal position can clearly be heard in the refusal of Lieutenant-Governor Francis Bond Head to allow the Bank of Upper Canada to suspend specie payments in the financial crisis of 1837–38: “a suspension by banks of their cash payments with specie in their vaults, is equally in America, as it is elsewhere, inconsistent with commercial integrity, which, in plain terms, means a bank honestly liquidating, so long as it has the power to do so, whatever it has promised to pay on demand.”40 For Bond Head and the laissez faire liberals, no bank was too large to fail. Attorney general and member of the Legislative Assembly John B. Robinson (like American jurists Lemuel Shaw, James Kent, and Joseph Story) was noted for his pro-development judgments and suspicion of the threat of populist restrictions on property,41 yet he was also concerned to preserve the police powers of the boards of police (one early form of municipal government in Upper Canada) under which “Peace, Order, and Good government” was established. Whereas republicans favoured restrictions on property originating in legislative action (such as Mackenzie’s proposed constitutional ban on corporations), Tories favoured those restrictions being applied by magistrates bearing police powers under common law. The confluence of these two forms of policing, the corporate franchise state and local police government, flow together in the municipal corporation. It is no surprise, then, that in the United Kingdom, political debate on types of franchise in local government (municipal corporations) mirrored the debate on the form of corporate governance in jointstock companies.42

t h e c o r p o r at e revoluti on The Family Compact introduced the corporate revolution to Upper Canada. The roots of this group lay in the United Kingdom’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the subsequent banking revolution that funded the British state: this established the parameters for “Gentlemanly Capitalism.”43 The new dependence of king on Parliament was offset by the creation of the national debt and the Bank of England, allowing for the establishment of a strong centralized

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“military-fiscal” state; this was the “political engine” of imperialism (see Tozer, chapter 3, this volume). The Crown was abetted in creating this military-fiscal state by a combination of inter-marrying noble “improving landlords” and private city bankers. This group of “gentlemanly capitalists” possessed wealth in land and finance but not in manufacturing. These gentlemanly capitalists dominated Parliament and cabinet, where they used their influence to control the process of corporate chartering, thereby ensuring their being named directors of these companies. Britain exported this “revolution settlement” to its settler colonies. Hence, around 1825, the loose group later known as the Family Compact established the Bank of Upper Canada, created the provincial debt to fund infrastructure improvements, took control of the new Welland Canal Company, and abetted the sale of the Crown and Clergy Reserves to two land companies that subsidized the provincial civil list and the “established church.” In this way it set a developmental agenda that established the basic liberal capitalist order of Upper Canada. The Family Compact governed in large part through its corporate franchise state, which was insulated from the elected legislature. The Family Compact possessed a “providential vision” of the province’s idyllic agricultural future and its place in ruling it;44 it aspired to the gentlemanly status of the English gentry, emulating its emphasis on improved farming on landed estates, a public debt off which it would live, and corporate banking. J.K. Johnson expresses an increasingly common argument that the members of the Family Compact “were not a political elite taking political decisions in a vacuum, but an overlapping elite whose political and economic activities cannot be entirely separated from each other. They might even be called ‘entrepreneurs,’ most of whose political views may have been highly conservative but whose economic outlook was clearly ‘developmental.’”45 The corporate order they created sought to police emerging markets so that a specifically British gentlemanly capitalist regime would take form. “Since there was little to conserve in the ‘boundless wood’ of early nineteenth-century Upper Canada, an important material responsibility of this emergent (and not resurrected) aristocracy was to preside ‘patriotically’ over measured, centralized and administratively planned development.”46 I would point to the Family Compact’s general disdain for those who engaged in “speculative” mercantile activity and to the roots of its corporate activity in the law as the key features of its developmental outlook:

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it was less interested in directly embracing market activity than in regulating it and directing its flow according to the norms of common law “public economy.” Although not inspired by Wakefieldian theories of systematic colonization (see Tozer, chapter 3, this volume), this developmental outlook shared its central tenets and was increasingly brought into alignment with it, as we shall see.47 Despite a thriving timber trade and the potential for industry, the Family Compact envisioned a developmental path focused on export agriculture feeding into the St Lawrence commercial network with Britain. This was not a self-evident path, given the costs of canal-building and the formidable British tariffs that blocked this circuit (Upper Canadian wheat was locked out of British markets from 1820 to 1823).48 This providential vision was political, not simply economic: it sought to establish a stable and enduring tie to the British Empire and to recreate England’s ordered hierarchical rural countryside in the years to come. This developmental plan first found expression in the legislative debates and commission reports on “improvements to inland navigation” between 1819 and 1825, when the nascent Family Compact coalesced and took up senior roles in the executive government.49 This commission, known as the Commission for the Improvement of Internal Navigation, chaired by John Macaulay, was set up after the passage of the imperial Canada Trade Act, 1822, which established the legal framework for trade along the St Lawrence. John B. Robinson and John Strachan presented the commission’s report to a joint committee of the Legislative Assembly and Legislative Council in 1825.50 Its call for canals along the St Lawrence and Welland Rivers was a mercantilist attempt to literally steer the as yet nonexistent agricultural production of the upper lakes through British imperial circuits rather than through the already anticipated American route via the Erie Canal to New York. The rough outlines of the second commercial empire of the St Lawrence had been drawn not as “nature’s” route, as was touted, but as a governmental creation. I would like to contextualize this assemblage of canal, banking, and land corporations and its role in governing the second St Lawrence commercial empire in terms of Karl Polanyi’s model of the “Great Transformation,” or market revolution. Markets in this period were “mere accessories” in the provisioning of goods and services, and no free market economy yet existed. Creating a capitalist market was a political project, but it was not the same “free trade” project as that

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desired by laissez faire merchants. Rather, this project, a Benthamite “self-regulating market” disembedded from society and subject only to supply and demand, required that all inputs to production be commodified, including what Polanyi calls the “fictitious commodities” of land, labour, and money.51 A true self-regulating economy separate from the state requires a disembedded “market society” of individualistic profit maximizers whose rational judgment is possible only when all elements of production are a priced commodity. The fictitious commodities are crucial pre-determinants of market production but are not genuine commodities themselves since they are not manufactured for the purpose of sale: they are created through a complex legal regulatory system that disembeds them from nature, humans, and social relations. This is the same legal system that allows the corporation to be recognized as a person, able to sue and be sued, and to possess property in its own name. They are all legal abstractions of social relations, not things. Unlike “real” commodities, these fictitious commodities could not exist without the powerful legal ideology of the state and of the lawyers who shaped the institutions through which they were produced. Reifying land, money, and labour so that they could be “freely” exchanged requires the franchise government of the corporation. The “visible hand” of the corporation was the legal mechanism through which these fictitious commodities were created and regulated. Chandler’s metaphor points to the ironic ways in which the corporation replaced dyadic laissez faire market transactions with the more efficient hierarchical administration of commodity chains that generated economies of scope and scale. The new bank and land corporations served to “manufacture” the fictitious commodities of money and land. These commodities could be produced by no one else, hence, in the words of the day, they were known as “legislated monopolies.” In their operations they (re)created the gentlemanly order that managed trade, emigration, class differentiation, and property-based citizenship rights without themselves engaging in trade. The corporate franchise state was governed by the legal profession, the Family Compact, and not by the merchants who traded in actual commodities. The bank, land, and canal companies collectively regulated the commodity chains, the economies of scope and scale, of the new St Lawrence commercial empire, ensuring that it adhered to gentlemanly values, bolstered the British connection, and reinforced the social inequalities that guaranteed the continued rule of the Family Compact.

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The impact of this franchise government was clearly antidemocratic. It nominally adhered to the laissez faire liberal credo of limiting the scope of state action; however, in so doing, it placed this sphere of government in the unaccountable hands of the Family Compact, freed from direct control by the elected Legislative Assembly. Mackenzie made numerous attempts in the assembly to open the inner workings of the Bank of Upper Canada to public scrutiny – all to no avail. He was met with William Allan’s intransigent silence when, in a public inquiry, he called him to answer even basic questions. These corporations also generated income that largely isolated the state from the need for taxes and, hence, from dependence on the Legislative Assembly. This financial independence allowed the lieutenant governor to act more autocratically and also guaranteed the salaries of those Family Compact members serving as Crown officers. Thus, this corporate revolution, designed to reform the province’s economy on a Liberal capitalist basis, freed both the state and its franchise government from elective oversight. The Welland Canal serves as a potent example of how these franchise states sought to manage trade under the control of a lawyerly cabal. While much has been made of William H. Merritt’s entrepreneurship in the construction of the Welland Canal, it should be recognized that this was a long-discussed government plan and that it was the legislature, not Merritt, that suggested incorporation as the appropriate vehicle once it recognized its own financial inability to construct the canal.52 Merritt’s eventual petition for a charter for the Welland Canal Company only succeeded because of the ardent support of Robinson, who ensured that the terms of the charter would leave the Family Compact in control. Although the company was founded in order to secure foreign capital investment, board members had to reside in Upper Canada and have shares worth £250 (twenty shares). Shareholder votes were graduated with five shares required for one vote; twenty for two votes; fifty for three votes, and one hundred and up for four votes. Only eight men, all Family Compact members, qualified for director on the seven-member board, and the graduated voting scale limited the power of the large foreign investors.53 These foreign investors could be reassured, however, that the “honesty” of these gentleman would ensure that their money was responsibly spent. In time, as government loans were converted into stock, the Family Compact directly appointed directors to the board to represent its interests – just, as we shall see, it did with the Bank of Upper Canada.

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I highlight this model of corporate governance because it parallels the Family Compact’s ideal of gentlemanly government: power in public corporations was to be vested in those “pure, disinterested, and patriotic gentlemen” who, as men of property, would not be swayed by speculative motives, as would merchants.54 These gentlemen derived their status from the legal credentials that made them the “keystone for the province’s social pyramid” on “material, ideological and spiritual grounds.”55 In 1826, Archbishop Strachan, executive and legislative councillor, was to write to the lieutenant-governor: “Lawyers must, from the very nature of our political institutions – from there being no great landed proprietors – no privileged orders – become the most powerful profession, and must in time possess more influence and authority than any other. They are emphatically our men of business and will gradually engross all the colonial offices of profit and honour.”56 And, indeed, “by the third decade of the nineteenth century most lawyers were office-holders of one kind or another [including, I would add, corporate directors], and most office-holders in the provincial capital were lawyers.”57 Corporate governance was no more democratic than was the Legislative Council; and the corporation, as a franchise government, served to isolate the canal from the direct control of the elected Legislative Assembly. Ensuring the successful completion of this imperial commodity chain involved the assemblage of both technological and institutional regulatory elements: just as the new canals sought to literally steer the direction of trade, new commercial banks regulated credit and, hence, flows of capital. British wholesalers established themselves in Montreal during this period, opening trade in Upper Canada to a new breed of specialized local merchants who replaced earlier transnational merchants like William Allan, who had drawn on direct British sources of credit and merchandise.58 These new merchants depended upon the new Bank of Upper Canada, also founded in 1825, to fund their trade. The Bank of Upper Canada controlled the province’s paper currency and, hence, the province’s economy, given the absence of government-minted specie.59 The Bank’s notes were the primary means of monetizing the province’s barter economy. Paper currency was then an innovation used only in narrow circumstances; paper notes were issued by banks for short threemonth periods to cover specific commercial transactions that stood as collateral. Banknotes would be issued for no other purpose than

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fostering short-term trade and, hence, were of little use to farmers in need of a loan or mortgage. These bills replaced an older payment technology, the “bill of exchange,” in which an individual merchant’s iou to a distant commercial partner would be paid by a third party for a commission. This limited a merchant to trading with locations where he had such a third-party payer. Anonymous banknotes that were drawn on banks, not on individuals, could be paid directly to wholesalers and flowed much more easily without the need for these third parties, thus reducing transaction costs.60 However, it is important to underscore that these banknotes were not a “commodity money” (such as gold or silver coin). Each banknote was an “iou ,” a promise to pay in specie (not actually specie) that the Bank was unable to pay on demand as it was legally required to. The Bank issued more than three times as many notes as it had specie to redeem, on which it gained 6 per cent interest (i.e., it earned interest on its debt, not its assets). It is for this reason that Karl Polanyi refers to the banknotes of this period as a “fictitious commodity.”61 The alchemy of the banknote was compounded by the legislated limited liability of the shareholders; should the bank fail, they were responsible only for the value of their shares, not for the total bank debt. By borrowing a banknote the merchant placed the transaction under the regulation of the bank that had to approve the loan, hence the appearance of freedom of exchange granted by the anonymous note was actually now policed. Solicitor General Henry John Boulton, the author of the bank incorporation bill, admitted it was a “terrible engine in the hands of the provincial administration.” It was easy for the Bank to “acquire the most entire Controul or monopoly of the Merchantile transactions of the town … and then by a sudden refusal to accommodate the same persons any farther, which they can always find plausible reasons for doing, and by requiring prompt payment of all paper outstanding, may throw the whole Business of a flourishing town into disorder.”62 Mackenzie wholly agreed with him: “The powerful, and in the hands of a bad administration, the irresistible and corrupting influence which it would exercise over the elections of the country, constitutes an objection more imposing than all others united. No matter by what means an administration might get into power, with such a tremendous engine in their hands, it would be almost impossible to displace them without some miraculous interposition of providence.”63 Pointedly, Boulton

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asserted that the Bank of Upper Canada would never dishonestly disrupt trade due to the gentlemanly honour of its directors (who were assumed to share the same gentlemanly honour as the directors of the Welland Canal). The Bank of Upper Canada thus served to foster “free” markets by issuing an anonymous currency to serve as a general means of exchange yet nonetheless regulating the flow of transactions to at times meet its political agenda of maintaining the imperial market circuit. The Bank was replacing the mercantilist state as the very visible hand administering that commodity chain. Civic Republicans like Mackenzie opposed the Bank of Upper Canada as a “licensed monopoly” and clearly recognized its role in policing the economy. In proposing a democratic joint-stock alternative, Mackenzie wrote: “Archdeacon Strachan’s bank … serves the double purpose of keeping the merchants in chains of debt and bonds to the bank manager, and the Farmer’s acres under the harrow of the storekeeper. You will be shewn how to break this degraded yoke of mortgages, ejectments, judgments and bonds. Money bound you – money shall loose you.”64 Mackenzie here points directly at the Bank’s use of the province’s draconian debt laws to police its borrowers: debt was the unspoken doppelganger of the province’s credit economy. Debt laws allowed any delinquent debtor to be jailed indefinitely until the debt was repaid – a third of those held in the Toronto gaol in the 1830s were held for unpaid debts. The Bank was known to have initiated hundreds of lawsuits for the recovery of debt during the depression of 1836 and to have driven merchants to do the same with farmers.65 That the Family Compact in Toronto was able to wrest control of the original Kingston “Pretended Bank of Upper Canada” with the provincial government’s assistance speaks to those political aspects of controlling trade that could not be left to speculative merchants. The provincial executive controlled a quarter of the Bank’s shares and appointed four of its fifteen directors. Elsewhere, I point out that the Bank’s directorate during the 1830s was dominated by executive and legislative councillors, and by the magistrates of Toronto (the same group that policed the Toronto public market).66 Mackenzie publicized the names of the Bank’s shareholders in 1831, noting that the government, its officers, and legislative councillors owned 5,381 of the bank’s eight thousand shares.67 Merchants were a complicit part of this “gentlemanly order” as the primary beneficiaries of bank loans and as a minority of bank directors. As the primary

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users of banknotes, however, merchants were also most subject to its policing. William Allan (executive councillor, legislative councillor, and magistrate) became bank president in 1822 – the only one of the board with commercial experience. The gentlemanly capitalists of the Family Compact played an equally critical role in establishing the second of Polanyi’s fictitious commodities – land – by replacing land grants with sales in 1825. The Upper Canadian state largely transferred the responsibility for these land sales to two land corporations, just as it had passed its constitutional monopoly to “mint” money to the Bank of Upper Canada.68 This was Upper Canada’s “enclosure movement,” a moment of “primitive accumulation” by which paupers were denied access to land and were transformed into a working class.69 It was similarly a means of extinguishing Aboriginal title and disenfranchising Aboriginal peoples (as it did paupers) (see Tozer, chapter 3, this volume). In 1825, the Colonial Office imposed a uniform method of land sales known as the New South Wales System on all the settler colonies, replacing Upper Canada’s prior policy of land grants to Loyalists. The colonial state was increasingly wary of the American “later Loyalists” it had induced to immigrate with land grants. It was heavily dependent on British subsidies as it was unable to raise taxes through the legislature without ceding some local control of spending to these immigrants. In order to circumvent its dependence on taxes, it sold its reserve lands (equal to two-sevenths of all Crown land) to the two chartered land companies (the Canada Company and the Clergy Corporation) from whom it and the Church of England would receive annuities. These grants paid the salaries of the “civil list,” the Crown officers who composed the Family Compact. As with the Bank of Upper Canada and the Welland Canal, I want to focus on these land companies’ role as a franchise state policing the market and its implications. David Gagan’s study of Peel County during the 1830s illustrates the two major means of purchasing land: from early Loyalist grantees or from the sale of a Crown reserve from the Canada Company. These early Loyalist grantees included the Family Compact.70 Gagan concludes that “the first twenty years of the region’s history of settlement leaves little doubt that, whatever ideological and family bonds held the ‘Family Compact’ together, they shared at least one material interest – the profits to be made from the vacant lands on York’s frontier of economic development.”71 He

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points to Toronto Township as an example: 20 per cent of the land was held by the Canada Company and the Clergy Corporation, and more than 30 per cent of the southern half then under settlement was owned by members of the Family Compact.72 The Family Compact received its grants by executive order, a process that its members, as government officials, controlled, and through this they became the province’s largest landholding class. Land in Peel was thus open for purchase from either the individual members of the Family Compact or from the Canada Company and the Clergy Corporation controlled by William Allan and Archbishop Strachan,73 who were also the founders of the Bank of Upper Canada. Land was clearly the basis for an aspiring Upper Canadian oligarchy of “gentlemanly capitalists” working hand-inhand with the financial services sector, as they were in Britain. The bank and land corporations were managed by the Family Compact (who also served as the province’s executive officers), hence serving as a “franchise state” controlling large parts of the provincial economy. The annuity the Family Compact paid the colonial state freed it from the need for legislated taxes and thus isolated it from legislative influence. It also made the colonial executive dependent on the success of this capitalist transformation. The shift to land sales after 1825, while not inspired by Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s theories of “systematic colonization,” was largely consistent with it and later shaped by it (see Tozer, chapter 3, this volume). By shifting to land sales, the province was turning its back on earlier experiments in pauper emigration from Britain. Land sales would be restricted to those importing sufficient capital, leaving paupers to form a new working class to fill the farm labour gap. This was an attempt to overturn the egalitarian effects of the earlier land grants to paupers. The means of creating a class society took care to see that land was sold only at an artificially set “sufficient price,” thus assuring that labourers did not become landowners too easily.74 The price for land was thus set by the land companies, the Upper Canadian state, and its major landholding officers at a level prohibitive to the poor. The intent of this was to create the third of Polanyi’s fictitious commodities – “hired labour” – by means of an “enclosure movement.” Wakefield referred to the open labour market that would be created by systemic colonization as “natural slavery,” leading Marx to crow that he had given the capitalist game away.75 The land “market,” in other words, was a highly regulated

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attempt to recreate the hierarchical rural landscape of Britain and to insulate the province from the egalitarian American example. The governmental impact of transferring the task of land sales to corporations implied far more than replacing grants with an economic transaction: it was the delegation not only of land alienation to a franchise government but also of control of colonization itself. The Canada Company was created to manage British emigration to Upper Canada, and its purpose was to avoid the direct governmental expense of Wilmot Horton’s system of assisted emigration for paupers. The British state transferred this expense to the Canada Company, who introduced innovative marketing campaigns and helped to organize transport in an effort to induce specifically British emigration and so dilute the threat of both French and American settlers.76 This control was not lightly passed to the company; rather, it depended on the weight of its board of directors. The company was under the control of gentlemanly capitalists like Edward “Bear” Ellice, brother-in-law to the British prime minister, deputy-governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and one of no fewer than three members of Parliament on the board.77 Their aim was not to “shovel out the paupers” but to recreate a British gentlemanly order in Upper Canada. It is also important to underscore that the new emphasis on land sales changed the method of obtaining citizenship rights – itself dependent on property – from loyalism to purchase, thereby excluding paupers.78 Shaping citizens into liberal rights-bearing capitalists required careful management. As with the Bank of Upper Canada, this shaping of “economic man” was accomplished by the land companies through the threat of the province’s debt laws. Those “normal” British settlers with enough capital to purchase the land outright at its “sufficient price” passed the bar of liberal citizenship; their property was said to grant them the independence of will required of a political agent. Liberalism’s commitment to democracy was limited to those of property who could appropriately contribute to governing a state whose primary function was to secure property by disciplining the propertyless. Hence, those who purchased land on instalments found themselves policed by the company for the duration of their mortgage. Aspirant farmers might easily provide for their own subsistence on free land (as had earlier pauper “assisted emigrants”), but the cost of the artificial mortgage of the level required by the sufficient price was impossible for paupers to work off: “The system of selling land

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on credit, and contracting debt at stores, hath proved ruinous of late years to settlers without capital, who have no other means of extricating themselves than selling their properties.”79 These mortgaged farmers were only allowed to continue on their lots at the company’s discretion. The company withheld title of the land until the last payment was made, and it could use this dependency to devastating political effect. This granted the farmer only conditional citizenship rights, unlike the case with the earlier grantees, whose property and political rights began with settlement. In other words, this marks a change from direct state supervision of settlement duties on the part of magistrates to the franchise state’s corporate supervision of settlement through the artificial debt mechanism. In either case, the aim was to instill “loyalty” in (sometimes conditional) citizens.

r e p u b l ic a n is m : t h e fi ght for “ jo in t- s to c k d emocracy” I have indicated that, in Upper Canada, 1825 was a key year. On the one hand, that was the year that chartered banking and land corporations controlled by gentlemanly capitalists initiated the corporate-led market transformation described above. On the other hand, it was also the year in which the British Bubble Act, 1720, was repealed, which legalized an alternate form of unincorporated jointstock company. The laissez faire liberal critique of the corporation was in large part responsible for the repeal of the Bubble Act, which had prohibited the formation of unincorporated joint-stock companies unless they had a parliamentary charter to ensure they served the public weal.80 Rather than protecting the public, chartering simply nurtured “old corruption” – that is, the establishment of corporate franchise states by those gentlemanly capitalists who controlled the parliamentary process. The repeal of the Bubble Act opened the door for joint-stock companies with more than six partners to be formed under partnership law, hence without separate personality or limited liability.81 The repeal not only resulted in a fundamental change in business organization but also in an associated democratic political movement: “joint-stock democracy.” In introducing the concept of joint-stock democracy I seek to underscore the political and economic agenda of the larger social movement and not to limit it to the introduction of an electoral mechanism to the corporate form of governance, as does Pilon

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(chapter 1, this volume). I argue that this social movement was predicated upon civic republicanism and fought for a democratic republican form of state; however, as a movement, it clearly argued that the chartering of corporations produced a “moneyed aristocracy” that was antithetical to a democracy based on “equality of opportunity.” Joint-stock democracy conceptually highlights this anti-corporate agenda of the civic republican political movement and recognizes its own conception of the franchise state. The civic republicans sought to capture both the state and the corporation for democracy, and they sought to do so through combined political and economic action. Civic republicans had made common cause in the liberal anti-corporate critique. They, like liberal merchants, objected to corporations as licensed monopolies and to grants of limited liability that promoted speculation by protecting shareholders from accountability. However, unlike liberal merchants, civic republicans placed less emphasis on the preservation of liberal civil liberties and property rights than on the maintenance of an independent (not self-sufficient),82 egalitarian, small-holding agrarian citizenry. This independence was said to immunize the citizenry against corruption and was a prerequisite for the franchise. A virtuous, independent citizenry leading a simple and frugal life was thus able to put general interests before private interests.83 These general interests were expressed, for example, in “public economy” market regulations that regularly overrode liberal property rights in the name of the common good. Republicans argued that “the concentration of wealth in a small number of hands undermined political freedom and thereby threatened the very foundations of society.”84 Between 1826 and 1844 in England, the repeal of the Bubble Act had fostered a similar social movement championing joint-stock democracy, which combined “strictly economic goals with subsidiary political aims.”85 The popular credit movement found in Upper Canada during the same period (before the Rebellions of 1837–38) finds its roots here.86 This new joint-stock possibility offered civic republicans an alternative to the corporate order. The most immediate effect of the repeal was to encourage the spread of the Scottish system of unincorporated joint-stock banking. The Bubble Act had never been applied to Scotland, and the development of these unincorporated banks more closely adhered to liberal ideals of competition and individual accountability. Democratically organized

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unincorporated joint-stock banking spread to Upper Canada only in 1835, after a Legislative Assembly report by mla Charles Duncombe declared its legality here and provided a template for its creation. This provoked what I elsewhere term the “Bank War” against the hegemony of the Bank of Upper Canada. 87 The institutional development of this popular credit movement was intimately intertwined with that of the reform movement as a whole and with the Rebellions, during which the civic republicans were to lose the battle on both fronts. The florescence of joint-stock democracy as a social movement can be placed in the context of the Great Reform Act and the growth of voluntary associations and “deliberative democracy” in the public sphere.88 Following McNairn, I view the joint-stock company form as a voluntary association that serves as an “experiment in democratic sociability” and hence also as a vehicle for politically inflected economic experiments: Upper Canadians grew accustomed to coming together to further common goals; to working with others of different social, occupational, religious or national backgrounds; to devising and abiding by mutually agreed upon rules; to discussing topics of common concern; to speaking in front of others; to listening to others with opposing views; and to disagreeing without attacking the speaker, offending others, or trying to mandate uniformity. In voluntary associations people learned and practiced the norms of reasoned discussion and mutual respect vital to sustained public deliberation.89 Voluntary associations (including companies) fostered a civil society that was “the training ground, and eventually the power base of a stratum of bourgeois men, who were coming to see themselves as a ‘universal class’ and preparing to assert their fitness to govern” in the public sphere.90 These cases of joint-stock driven democratization thus raise the “vexed” old problem of the relationship of liberal democracy to capitalism.91 Both liberals and civic republicans were aspirants to this new sphere of deliberative democratic debate, although, as we shall see, liberalism was more exclusionary than inclusive: deliberative democratic debate had real limits. The civic republicans articulated a clear alternative to both Tory corporate and liberal laissez faire capitalism.

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The civic republican conception of deliberative democratic debate differed from that of those liberals with whom they shared a suspicion of chartered corporations. In the liberal vision, the emphasis was placed upon universal civil rights that were protected from majority rule, and this formed a limit on democratic discussion. Once institutionalized, only this could ensure the freedom of the individual pursuit of individual, state-protected interests – property and trade in particular. The liberal public sphere was thoroughly bourgeois, with private property the sole basis for participation. The standard of “reasoned debate” that guided public opinion in civil society was predicated upon rising above “mere self-interest” – a disinterestedness that came only with wealth – and hence excluded discussion of material inequality. By implication, “those who spoke of such things as the difficulties faced by craftsmen and small proprietors” – as the Upper Canadian republicans did – “articulated ‘special interests’” that rendered them ineligible.92 The exclusion of republicans from the propertied public sphere of deliberative democracy effectively silenced the grievances of artisans and farmers. Republican concerns for political liberty were combined with their discomfort with the economic threats to their livelihoods – and hence to their property-based citizenship rights – created by the banks and land companies. Their civic republicanism served to create an oppositional counter-public that sought the democratic organization of both joint-stock companies and the state. Reformers built a social movement to safeguard their livelihoods from being undercut by a “moneyed aristocracy,” and they did so through a combination of voluntary political associations and structurally similar joint-stock companies, both democratically organized to fundamentally reform and support a republican democratic state. This social movement was characterized by a common associational form for both the economic and the political institutions it created as well as by a common form of influencing the public sphere: the petition.93 Joint-stock democracy was thus a politico-economic movement that lay outside the realm of the liberal public sphere. Elsewhere, I document the shared leadership and organizational practices of the host of economic and political joint-stock associations through which the reform movement took shape (see figure 4.1).94 These associations included the Farmers Storehouse company (a cooperative and credit union), the Upper Canada Central Political Union, Shepard’s Hall (a meeting place for the associated

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organizations, including Mackenzie’s newspapers), the Canadian Alliance Society, the Mechanics’ Institute, and the Bank of the People, among others. Although they differed in purpose, all of these organizations took the form of democratically run “voluntary associations” with explicit constitutions regulating membership, voting, rules of order, and objects of the association. As already noted, all utilized similar political practices (i.e., petitions) to gain legitimacy in the public sphere and legislature. These associations were the crucible within which a civic republican “family compact” could form; just as the chartered corporations of the franchise state were pulled into a tight network through the overlapping directorships of Family Compact members so, too, the reform movement, as a movement, was pulled together through the election of a small coterie of local leaders serving in multiple director roles in these reform organizations. Most of these men, like Samuel Hughes, president of the Farmers’ Storehouse and active reform leader “north of the Ridges,” remain in the shadow of Mackenzie and are not remembered today. However, they gave the movement its broad public appeal. Besides shared leadership and organizational form, these organizations shared an institutional home – Shepard’s Hall – and espoused clear civic republican policies that conjoined politics with economics. There, political unions met in the same place as the Mechanics’ Institute and Mackenzie’s newspaper office, which became focal points of joint-stock democratic debate. When faced with the corrupting influence of aristocratic wealth ensconced in government, markets, and banks, this “active citizenry” was driven to creatively develop new institutional forms to preserve their livelihoods. As the Colonial Advocate reported: “These repeated shocks acted like electricity on the people – a new light arose, a new era commenced, they have found out that ‘Union is strength.’ They saw their beloved country going to ruin, and like men came forward to rescue her from her impending doom.”95 Reform efforts to ensure the preservation of livelihoods focused on the creation of new credit institutions that could match the “aristocratic” Bank of Upper Canada. A series of petitioning movements sought to legalize a variety of community cooperative credit institutions, such as the Farmers’ Storehouse and the Bank of the People, that served both a daily livelihood as well as a citizenship function: these institutions preserved livelihoods and hence property-based voting rights. They thus became inseparable from the political identity and survival of their participants. Over the course of

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Figure 4.1 Joint-stock reform movement. Each box represents a joint-stock association, with the earliest at the top (1825) and the last at the bottom (1837). The circle within the box contains the total number of leadership roles. The connecting lines with numbers give the number of overlapping leaders between those organizations. Many of the same individuals served as those overlapping leaders in multiple associations.

its development, this movement became increasingly republican and called for the end of legal incorporation as a permanent means of protecting the democratic state from the “moneyed aristocracy.” These unincorporated joint-stock companies were in immediate conflict with both the Tory corporate order and with laissez faire liberal mercantile interests. As popular credit institutions, these reform-owned companies directly subverted the Tories’ use of debt as a disciplinary tool. Competition in the banking sphere

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also revealed the weakness of the Bank of Upper Canada: competitors returned its banknotes for redemption more quickly, depleting its supply of specie. Small loans (as low as £5) to farmers by the Farmers’ Storehouse, which accepted crops as collateral, could save that farmer from merchants’ demands and the spiral of lawsuits that would ensue whenever a farmer’s credit was questioned. The Farmers’ Storehouse also acted as a wholesaler, directly competing with both local merchants and Toronto wholesalers. Farmers, having discovered “union is strength,” proved a powerful collective threat to the mercantile system. In the economic depression of 1836–37, this competition was heightened as it threatened more than simply incomes: it was a threat to a weakened state’s governmental order and the continuation of the St Lawrence commercial empire.

t h e l ib e r a l - c o r p orate order The Rebellions of 1837–38 eliminated the threat of joint-stock democracy in short order, leaving only that uneasy ideological alliance that historians dub “commercialism,” or what I prefer to call the “liberal-corporate order.”96 Although the Tory corporate franchise state and laissez faire liberalism have been theoretically merged as “commercialism,” I have been at pains to highlight certain historical cleavages, especially around the policing of economic activity by various types of corporations. These policing functions did not end with the Rebellions, even as the Family Compact lost political control of the state apparatus. It is their governmental functions, I would argue, that explain “why the business corporation (along with municipalities, churches and universities) was able to escape the sword of liberalizing egalitarianism.”97 When we speak of the hegemony of liberalism in our existing Canadian liberal democracy, we need to foreground its undemocratic doppelgänger – the franchise state. No radical change in business incorporation procedures occurred before Confederation, with another two hundred corporations being granted legislative charters between 1841 and 1867. Twelve general company registration laws were passed in specific sectors during that period, although they were rarely used until 1860, and thirty corporations that could otherwise have been established through them sought legislative incorporation instead. The sectors in which general registration was possible were almost entirely in

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the provision of public services or utilities, beginning with mutual insurance, building societies, toll roads, banks, telegraphs, harbours, gas and water services, and so on.98 The overall governmental nature of “economic” corporations in this period is thus clear. Successful incorporation continued to depend upon legislative patronage, and the corporations so established, though containing an elective element, restricted their franchise to shareholders (i.e., to “property holders”), as did all liberal elective systems. The provision of “public services” was thus directed by the same propertied political class as directed them in the earlier period outside of direct democratic control. Corporations continued to serve as franchise states, their internal governance methods mirroring those of the larger political system of which they were a part. Canada was thus like jurisdictions such as the United States, Britain, France, and Germany, where the “cultural models” of a country’s political forms were said to have “overdetermined” the shape of their emerging corporate orders.99 The rapprochement of liberalism and the corporate order was made possible by the legal fiction that the corporation had a “separate personality” from its shareholders. In this era, shareholders were conceived as those owning a share. Over time, as the share itself became a form of property (a commodity to be bought and sold), the “separate personality” of the corporation was further reified as a grant of personhood.100 The liberal rights-bearing individual was never a real person but, rather, an intellectual construct, an “abstract principle” granted conditionally on the basis of property, gender, and class.101 For liberals it was thus easy to deny women, the propertyless, or the “irrational” Aboriginal person their civil rights – and equally easy to grant these rights to a legal property-holding fiction. It was by this means that the corporation was “privatized,” removed from political discourse, its public nature denied. Business historian Alfred Chandler refers to the corporation the very “visible hand of the market,” but his theoretical impact lies entirely in how liberal economic theory obscures that act of governance. If, as historian Ian McKay writes, we look at our reconnaissance of the Canadian liberal revolution in Canada as a “project of rule,” we need to look beyond the liberal illusion of private corporate personhood to the corporation’s role in non-democratic governance: we need to see how our “actually existing democracy” is the product of vested interests that opposed democratic reform and upheld social privilege. As Pilon (chapter 1, this volume) argues, “Democracy is ultimately a

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relational concept. It is about power, not about institutions.” Here, I return to Allan Greer’s astute observations. He notes that, although the 1830s reform movement first succeeded in placing popular government at the centre of public debate, many forms of exclusion and domination remained obscured as their focus on citizens continued to bar women, Aboriginal peoples, and people of colour from political recognition – all forms of exclusion we are successfully fighting. Rather than using the reform movement as a model for contemporary action, he says, we should use that era as a benchmark. The liberal-corporate order has successfully narrowed the scope of democratic politics and blocked the vast majority of the population from influencing the decisions that affect their own rights by shrouding the corporate franchise state under the cloak of individual private rights: “Whereas Mackenzie and his radical contemporaries in both the Canadas combatted ‘irresponsible’ public authority, that is to say powerful interests capable of distorting the democratic process by influencing the electorate or its representatives, corporations are now considered beyond the purview of politics.”102 Our theoretical toolkit needs to expand to recover their viewpoint and to envision what democratic corporate governance would look like. not e s 1 Greer, “Historical Roots.” A similar concern marks McNairn (chapter 5, this volume). 2 McKay, “Liberal Order Framework,” 635. 3 Roy, Socializing Capital, 46; and Ciepley, “Beyond Public and Private,” 139. 4 Stern, Company-State. 5 Robins, Corporation That Changed the World, 79. 6 Ciepley, “Beyond Public and Private,” 151. 7 Space limitations prevent me from addressing the Grand River Navigation Company discussed by McNairn (chapter 5, this volume), which, like the Canada Land Company, was a key tool in disenfranchising the Mohawk nation from its lands and rights, as Tozer (chapter 3, this volume) highlights. This company follows the same pattern discussed in this chapter as well as illustrating Tozer’s argument regarding settler colonialism. 8 Canadian historians have generally avoided participating in the broad American debate not only on the early nineteenth-century “market revolution” that integrated subsistence-oriented farmers in frontier regions into

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transnational commodity chains but also on the social and cultural effects of that integration. For a summary of the American literature, see Sellers, Market Revolution. For the Canadian case, see Schrauwers, Union Is Strength. Schrauwers, Union Is Strength. Ibid.; Alborn, Conceiving Companies; Pearson, “Shareholder Democracies?”; and Freeman, Pearson, and Taylor, Shareholder Democracies. In “Road Not Taken” I discuss these civic republican alternative models as they were developed by rebellion leader Charles Duncombe for the reform of the American state. Maier, “Revolutionary Origins,” 55; and Risk, “Foundations of the Business Corporation.” Ciepley, “Beyond Public and Private,” 151. Taylor, Creating Capitalism, 4. See Pearson, “Shareholder Democracies,” on the failure of historians to explore the territory between private enterprise and public scrutiny expected in this era. Roy, Socializing Capital, 41. Chandler, Visible Hand. Scott, Seeing Like a State; and Polanyi, Great Transformation, 68–76. Smith, British Businessmen. Schrauwers, “Gentlemanly Order,” 21–2. Novak, “Public Economy,” 7. Ibid., 8; Matthews, “Large Propertied Interests”; Matthews, “Local Government”; and Hibbits, “Progress and Principle.” Appleby, “Vexed Story of Capitalism”; and Freyer, Producers versus Capitalists. Matthews, “Local Government,” 299. Schrauwers, “Gentlemanly Order”; and Correspondent and Advocate (Toronto), 31 May 1835. McCoy, Elusive Republic, 6; and Burchell, “Peculiar Interests.” McNairn, “Why We Need,” 144–5. The concept of the “economy” as a self-regulating market dates from the publication of Ricardo’s 1817 Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (Dix, “Ricardo’s Discursive Demarcations”; and Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy, 224ff). Eighteenth-century writers “discuss trade, agriculture and manufacturing as distinct entities and there is no sense in which these entities spontaneously combine to form a self-regulating system” (Firth, “From Oeconomy,” 21).

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Calhoun, Roots of Radicalism, 51; and McCoy, Elusive Republic, 6–8. Firth, “From Oeconomy,” 20. Novak, “Public Economy,” 8; and Matthews, “Large Propertied Interests.” Hibbits, “Progress and Principle,” 527. Novak, “Public Economy,” 32. Bunting, “Origins.” See Ducharme, Idea of Liberty, 17–19. Burchell, “Peculiar Interests.” Semmel, Rise of Free Trade Imperialism, 116. Smith cited by Maier, “Revolutionary Origins,” 58–9. Taylor, Creating Capitalism, 7. Baskerville, Bank of Upper Canada, lxxx, 119. Hibbits, “Progress and Principle,” 518–28; Novak, “Public Economy”; and George and Sworden, “Courts and the Development of Trade.” Freeman, Pearson, and Taylor, Shareholder Democracies, 35–6. Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism. Fraser, “Like Eden”; and McKim, “Upper Canadian Thermidor.” Johnson, “U.C. Club,” 162; and Baskerville, “Entrepreneurship.” Baker, “Providential Order,” 191. Gambles, Protection and Politics, 166–7; and Harrington, “Edward Gibbon Wakefield.” Firth, Town of York, xxv Fraser, “Like Eden,” 153–99. McKim, “Upper Canadian Thermidor,” 257. Semmel, Rise of Free Trade Imperialism; Polanyi, Great Transformation, 68–76. Aitken, Welland Canal Company. Ibid., 58, 78. Ibid., 120. Baker, “Providential Order,” 190. Ibid., 191. Ibid. McCalla, Upper Canada Trade, 20. It is important to underscore that the province used “Halifax currency” as a “unit of account” against which the actual foreign coins in circulation as a “means of exchange” were measured; there were, however, no coins (specie) in Halifax currency other than (initially) the notes of the Bank of Upper Canada. The rate of exchange in this period was £1 sterling = £1.217 (McCalla, Planting the Province, 245–7). George and Sworden “Courts and the Development of Trade,” 262–3.

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61 Polanyi, Great Transformation, 68–76. 62 Colonial Advocate (Toronto), 18 May 1826; and Baskerville, Bank of Upper Canada, 32. 63 Colonial Advocate, 16 September 1830. 64 Correspondent and Advocate, 30 July 1835. See Schrauwers, “Money Bound You.” 65 Schrauwers, “Union Is Strength,” 66–97. 66 Schrauwers, “Gentlemanly Order,” 22–6. 67 Colonial Advocate, 3 March 1831. 68 The colonial office also authorized land companies for Australia, New Zealand, and Lower Canada, demonstrating that the Canada Company was not the inspired product of one entrepreneur, John Galt, but part of a more general British governmental strategy. The Canada Company was based on the Australian Company. The strategy was to introduce markets in land and, in the case of Lower Canada, involved a limited attempt to end feudal tenure with the Canada Tenure Act, 1825. The British Benthamite Parliamentarian behind both the Canada Company and the Canada Tenure Act was Edward “Bear” Ellice, deputy-governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company and an early adherent of Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s theories of “systemic colonization.” He sold his Lower Canadian seigneury to Wakefield’s North American Colonial Association of Ireland in 1839. 69 See Neocleous’s analysis of “systematic colonization” in Neocleous, “International Law as Primitive Accumulation.” 70 The concentration of land in the hands of the Family Compact was compounded by a regulation in 1830 that allowed the auctioning of loyalist land grants for unpaid taxes; these loyalist holdings were narrowly concentrated in the hands of a few Compact members who were able to pay the few “pennies per acre” required. 71 Gagan, Hopeful Travellers, 29–30. His conclusions are comparable with similar results derived by Clarke in the Western District (see Clarke, “Role of Political Position”); or Lord Durham’s estimation in 1839: “The Bench, the magistracy, the highest offices of the Episcopal Church, and a great part of the legal profession are filled by adherents of the [Family Compact]: by grant or purchase they have acquired nearly the whole of the waste lands of the Province: they are all-powerful in the chartered banks, and till lately, shared among themselves almost exclusively all offices of trust and profit” (Durham, Report, 105). 72 Almost all of the 230,000 acres available for disposal in Peel (excluding the Crown and Clergy Reserves) had been alienated by 1840. Sixty-six per cent of this was by grant: 54 per cent was in the form of free grants

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(including to members of the Family Compact); a further 27 per cent had been granted to the children of Loyalists, and 11 per cent to military claimants (Gagan, Hopeful Travellers, 22). Most of this land remained unsettled, with two-fifths of landholders being non-resident. Of the seventeen hundred families in 1835, Gagan estimates one-quarter were tenants or squatters either because they could not afford the “upset price” of unpatented land or because they were unable to purchase land at any price. On the eve of the Rebellion, he concludes, Peel County “was no longer, if it ever had been, a frontier of cheap land awaiting the poor, but industrious immigrant” (34). William Allan was responsible for sales of Crown reserves outside of the company’s Huron Tract; Strachan’s son-in-law, Thomas Mercer Jones, was responsible for the Huron Tract. Clarke and Buffone, “Manifestations of Imperial Policy.” Semmel, Rise of Free Trade Imperialism, 111–12. Wahl, “Business of Settlement,” 18–53. Ibid., 194; and Browde, “Settling the Canadian Colonies,” 305. This was most clearly expressed in the writing of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who considered the individual a weak bearer of civilization. He argued that the “keystone of successful colonization was central government regulation of who could own land” and that “every new government, therefore, possesses the power to civilize its subjects” (Harrington, “Edward Gibbon Wakefield,” 342). Shirreff, A Tour, 364–5. Johnson, Making the Market, 94–9. Ibid., 115–19. Freyer, Producers versus Capitalists, 4. Ibid., 37; Ducharme, Idea of Liberty, 105. Ducharme, Idea of Liberty, 25. Alborn, Conceiving Companies, 4. See also: Pearson, “Shareholder Democracies”; and Freeman, Pearson, and Taylor, Shareholder Democracies. Schrauwers, Union Is Strength. See Schrauwers, “Road Not Taken,” for a full discussion of Duncombe’s economic thought and the banks he sought to foster in both Upper Canada and the United States. McNairn, Capacity to Judge. Ibid., 63. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere.” Appleby, “Vexed Story of Capitalism.”

“A Terrible Engine” 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102

Calhoun, Roots of Radicalism, 122. Schrauwers, Union Is Strength, 130–1, 143–6. Ibid. Colonial Advocate, 3 January 1833. Ducharme, Idea of Liberty, 17–19. Roy, Socializing Capital, 46; Ciepley, “Beyond Public and Private.” Risk, “Business Corporation,” 272–80. Dobbin, Forging Industrial Policy. Ireland, “Capitalism without the Capitalist.” McKay, “Liberal Order Framework,” 625. Greer, “Historical Roots,” 23.

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5 Incorporating Contributory Democracy: Self-Taxation and Self-Government in Upper Canada Jeffrey L. McNairn

Two petitions were presented to the Upper Canadian assembly on the same day in 1836 asking to be taxed. In one, ninety residents of West Gwillimbury township recounted attempts to improve a road with funds raised by private subscriptions and small grants from the legislature. Yet, “desirous still, that the said road should be maintained even at their own expense,” they requested to be taxed further. In the other, eighty-eight residents along Yonge Street sought either new taxes in the townships adjacent to the road or the incorporation of a company to undertake its improvement. Paying for local public works brought neighbours together and turned them towards the state when they needed public authority to facilitate their cooperation. From the late 1820s, the incorporation of companies or municipalities was one option. It tied contribution to consent, reframed taxes as contributions made compulsory to ensure the viability of joint efforts, and reconceived of the state as facilitating such shared commitments rather than constraining liberty by external command. Later in the century, the liberal historian Goldwin Smith thought “a municipality seems more akin to a joint-stock company than to a nation.” Smith condescended to such transactional associations of local taxpayers for parochial purposes in contrast to the supposedly nobler purposes that befit a nation. He also thought it justified a more limited municipal (as opposed to national) franchise. In the 1830s – in the context of widespread property ownership and a colonial state of limited fiscal capacity and only attenuated mechanisms of popular consent to taxation – joint-stock companies incorporated for public purposes marked the emergence of contributory

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democracy. As Shirley Tillotson (chapter 12, this volume) argues, formal inclusion in political bodies involved contested claims about capacity, interests, and contribution. In Upper Canada, contributing to the corporation’s purpose in pursuit of shared interests entailed rights to participate in its democratic practices. Long before democracy came to the nation, corporations institutionalized self-taxation and self-government and suggested the possibility of a more decentralized, pluralist state.1 This is not the usual story of corporations and democracy in Upper Canada. The typical narrative sees corporations as top-down creatures of an undemocratic state; it focuses on banks, large-scale enterprises such as canals (and later railways), and land companies; and it emphasizes, as does Albert Schrauwers (chapter 4, this volume), special privileges granted to state favourites that further concentrate economic and political power. In Donald Creighton’s telling, leading export merchants – encountering opposition from locally oriented, tax-adverse farmers and those they elected to colonial assemblies – found allies in appointed executive and legislative councils. Transferring greater political power to recalcitrant petty producers seemed ill-advised.2 Many Upper Canadian reformers did grow suspicious of the Bank of Upper Canada (chartered in 1822), the Welland Canal Company (1824), and the British-chartered Canada Company (1826) as dangerous monopolies insulated from accountability to the elected assembly. William Lyon Mackenzie’s draft constitution for a republican Upper Canada prohibited incorporated banks and trading companies and stipulated a three-fourths legislative majority “for creating, continuing, altering, or renewing any body politic or corporate.” Today, confronting powerful multinational corporations able to bend governments to their will, historians of democracy have recovered this older understanding of the corporation as an artificial creature of the state to which limited public authority was granted for a public purpose rather than as purely private, profit-seeking entities that ought, like individuals, to possess civil rights and to be shielded from excessive state interference.3 The standard story captures important themes on the relationship of corporations to democracy but obscures corporations as an institutionalized form of democracy, the more direct conceptual and genealogical link between them. It also severs corporations for providing public goods from municipal corporations and voluntary

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contributions whose purpose is to pay for those goods from taxes. Even as some corporations proved concerns about rent-seeking by vested interests to be warranted, the public-utility corporation emerged from a vibrant civil society; reflected broad coalitions of local merchants, farmers, and artisans; and won support from conservatives and reformers alike. Incorporation shaped thinking about how to organize private interests for collective benefit, how to encourage social solidarity through collective contribution, and how to win consent to coercive public authority by pairing taxation with self-government. A more voluntarist, contractual, and associational theme needs to be added to existing narratives of the relationship of corporations to democracy. Doing this addresses two problems in Upper Canadian historiography: (1) the seeming absence of taxation as a locus of popular contestation in stark contrast to the experience of much of the Atlantic world;4 and (2) the seeming inevitability, by mid-century, of a centralized colonial state. Before parliamentary democracy emerged in the 1840s (which focused attention on legislative-executive relations and empowered a centralizing “colonial leviathan”),5 and long before electoral democracy with its emphasis on the social breadth of the franchise, corporations for public goods institutionalized the norms and practices of contributory democracy. They focused attention on contribution as a prerequisite for inclusion and empowered a plurality of political entities. Thinking beyond the Upper Canadian case, such an approach reminds us to look for democracy in unexpected, often quotidian places and to challenge (as Tillotson also recommends) grand narratives in which predictable heroes and villains struggle over “democracy” defined to embody the narrator’s preferred values. We can then recognize that concepts like the taxpayer franchise that Goldwin Smith deployed to limit electoral participation had been used to expand it. Similarly, while the possibility that self-interested individuals could provide public goods is now deployed by libertarians and public-choice theorists to insist that taxpayer-funded public provision is unnecessary or inefficient, such efforts had created new, more accountable, political entities and had oriented individuals towards, rather than away from, the state as integral to their joint commitments.6 Stipulating definitions of democracy facilitates broad comparisons and judgments about how Canada failed to measure up (and perhaps continues to do

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so), but it distracts us from the contingent and constant struggles over democratizing norms and procedures that occurred across much of Canadian history.

t h e f is c a l c o ns ti tuti on Taxation entailed consent in Upper Canada from its inception as a British colony created in the aftermath of the American Revolution. The age of revolution also instilled a fear of the democratic potential of that principle, reinforcing a reluctance to tax. The result was an impoverished colonial state and experimentation with other ways of providing public goods. The Constitutional Act, 1791, empowered an elective assembly to consent to colonial taxes and reiterated the pledge Britain made in the Declaratory Act, 1778, not to impose internal taxes on its North American colonies and that the net revenue raised from imperial duties would remain in the colony from which they were raised. Thus, potential emigrants were assured that, “under this guarantee [Upper Canada has] … an exclusive right of self-taxation.” William Lyon Mackenzie similarly reminded Upper Canadians that “British freedom” meant that no earthly power “ha[d] a right to take away or appropriate your property without your consent.” Taxes were “a voluntary gift and grant from the people.”7 The revolutionary slogan “no taxation without representation” was routinely invoked as a demand for elected representation in institutions that taxed, to avoid taxes imposed by institutions without such representation, and that public revenue be controlled by the assembly rather than the appointed legislative council or lieutenant-governor with which it shared law-making power. Yet the principle of self-taxation never animated the sort of tax revolt in Upper Canada that reconfigured constitutions elsewhere in the Atlantic world. The corollary of consent in Upper Canada was not a state able to tax and borrow to finance territorial expansion and state capacity – “a Hercules in the cradle,” as one tax historian refers to the United States, or the “fiscal-military state” in the British case.8 Instead, the colonial state was fiscally starved for fear greater taxation would require more robust forms of consent than periodic elections to the colonial assembly using a propertied franchise that excluded most taxpayers. Fiscal incapacity was easily read off the colony’s annual report to London. Provincial revenue of less than £26,000

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was reported for 1821. Only about a third of this was raised on the authority of colonial legislation, while two-thirds arose from indirect taxation of imports. At mid-decade, the provincial establishment consisted of a mere forty-seven offices, ranging from the chief justice (with a salary of £1,000) and seven other executive councillors, to thirteen clerks, a door keeper, office servant, messenger, and housekeeper. Their salaries, combined with those of thirteen legislative officers, consumed about a third of total revenue. Additional funds were available without increasing the executive’s dependence on the assembly by reserving to the Crown one-seventh of the land surveyed in each township. The Canada Company was chartered in Britain in 1826 to fund the colonial executive through annual payments for its purchase of Crown lands it resold to settlers and to provide local infrastructure. In 1828, the company contributed some £22,500 to the public purse and had expended £37,500 on local improvements since commencing operations.9 In 1835, a reform-dominated assembly declared that the company’s charter violated the Declaratory and Constitutional Acts, insisting that, as the people’s representatives, they controlled public funds regardless of their source. Only then could the assembly protect constitutional liberty and ensure that “all the natural resources of the country be efficiency directed to the many and urgent objects of public improvement without resorting to present taxation, or those further loans which must be eventually paid by increasing the burthens of the people.” Distrustful of spending favoured by the executive (including its own salaries and loans to the Welland Canal Company, with which many were associated), the assembly insisted on control of public revenue to avoid taxation, not to better fund “many and urgent” public works. Indeed, a hand-written note appended to the annual report for that year declared, “There are no Public Taxes.” Revenue was raised by fines, fees, rents, licences, public lands, and custom duties rather than by direct taxes, which were limited to a property assessment for local purposes.10 Although authorized by the assembly, local assessment was administered and expended by justices of the peace (jp s) appointed in each district by the lieutenant governor. The maximum rate they could impose remained unchanged from 1803 to 1841. The resulting sums – an average of just over £1,200 per district in 1830 – often proved inadequate for even basic administrative and judicial functions, but magistrates could appropriate as much as £50 in aid of

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any local public work. Such constrained taxing authority hindered state-led development and insulated large, often absentee landowners from significant taxation, but it also relieved pressure for more democratic forms of local government. “Not being representatives of the people,” concluded one pamphleteer, magistrates could exercise only the most circumscribed power to tax. While annual township meetings of “inhabitant householders paying, or liable to pay, any assessment or rate” elected parish officers, they had no taxing authority and those they elected were superintended by jp s. The colony’s annual report for 1830 reminded British officials that “There is no municipal Body in the Province having Corporate powers”; there was no body in Upper Canada governed by those who contributed to it.11 In sum, the democratic and developmental potential of “no taxation without representation” was held in abeyance. In one example of the transnational comparisons of tax burdens commonly made between colony and republic, a district sheriff estimated that, to finance public works, residents of New York State willingly paid roughly seven times the taxes paid by Upper Canadians.12 Given the fiscal incapacity of an undemocratic state many distrusted, Upper Canadians experimented with alternative ways of meeting the demand for such internal improvements. The corporation was the most constitutionally generative of those experiments since it was a public authority governed by those it taxed. Mackenzie’s vertical notion of taxes – the people’s “voluntary grant” to the Crown – was reworked into a horizontal notion of taxes as a relationship among taxpayers who bound themselves to each other to pay collectively for what they could not achieve alone.

vo l u n ta ry c o ntri buti on No one complained that their taxes were too low: opposition to new taxes and evasion of existing ones were common. However, many did complain about inadequate streets, roads, bridges, and harbours. One improver lamented: “our farmers want good roads and are not disposed to pay for them.”13 Perhaps. Certainly, many hoped that others might pay in their stead or distrusted unaccountable political structures, but contributions to public goods were not limited to taxes. When improvements benefited contributors, there was a disposition to self-tax. Local infrastructure increased the value of private property, reduced the cost of getting goods to and from

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markets, undermined local monopolies, and created opportunities for social esteem by being lauded as “public spirited,” “enterprising,” or “patriotic.”14 Joseph-Charles Taché, discussed by E.A. Heaman (chapter 6, this volume), thought Anglo-Americans excessively individualistic and self-centred. Yet, as John Brooke notes regarding development politics in New York State, the benefits from public infrastructure were widespread “to the extent that they might reasonably see a public good in their collective private interests.” Contributing more to roads “is for the good of the public at large,” reasoned a “British Subject” from the other side of Lake Ontario, but “what is more, each individual will derive benefit more than commensurate to his labour or his outlay.” Indeed, the real “tax” was the cost of bad roads.15 Many did contribute considerable time, money, and materials to local improvements, making a commitment to each other by doing so. Inhabitants of Richmond “volunteered and actually performed” 226 days of labour to remove stumps and widen a road through the township. Those attending the Warwick township meeting came unanimously “under a voluntary engagement to perform a certain number of days labour on the Sleigh Road.” At the capital, the two bridges that spanned the Don River in the 1820s were referred to as the York Subscription Bridges to denote their origins, and, in 1830, 120 subscribers, ranging from tradesmen to prominent officeholders, pooled their contributions to improve Yonge Street. Examples could be multiplied and extended to other public goods, including a fire alarm and town bell in Toronto and a fire engine and wages for a chimney sweep in Cobourg.16 Recognizing their interdependence, self-regarding individuals affiliated with each other to tax themselves. One commentator thought such “voluntary contributions entered into by the people” were “the best evidence that can be induced” of their ability to pay higher taxes to fund such improvements.17 Perhaps. Voluntary contributions were also evidence of a disposition to contribute when obligations were self-imposed and decision-making democratic. Subscribing to public goods created latent voluntary associations. To better sustain such efforts over time, their associational character might be formalized. The Ernest Town and Kingston Road Society, whose members pledged to collect £100 annually by voluntary subscription for work on the road between Kingston and Napanee Mills, joined hundreds of other voluntary associations as “experiments in democratic sensibility” – bodies created and

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governed by their members.18 Those associations devoted to public goods raised questions about taxation and authority with particular immediacy. While frequently a response to state incapacity, voluntary contribution was not independent of the state or antithetical to public provision (as public-choice scholarship intimates). As the opening example from West Gwillimbury suggests, private subscription might pave the way to taxation. It might also leverage rather than replace public money since the willingness to contribute vouched for the project as one worthy of state aid.19 Voluntary contribution also relied on the state to help overcome coordination problems: legally demarcated and regulated public roads defined the object of private initiative; current taxes, such as the statute labour required of householders on township roads, could be supplemented, as was the case at Richmond; and pre-existing institutional mechanisms, such as the annual township meeting, could be repurposed. Crucially, the ability and willingness to subscribe relied on private property rights created and enforced by the state; public money for a bridge across the Grand River was justified, in part, on the grounds that “the precarious tenure under which they [white people] hold their possession to these lands [granted to the Six Nations], do[es] not enable them to contribute largely to any public work, however much they may desire to do so.”20 But not everyone desired to contribute. The law might then be called on to discipline those with an inadequate sense of justice or their own interests. The same self-regard that disposed people to contribute might encourage free-riding. From a change in circumstance, failure of will, temptation for instant gratification over distant or longer-term interests, or the sort of antisocial avarice Taché condemned, not everyone who benefited subscribed and not everyone who subscribed paid. As a result, projects might be undermined or defeated; the more capital-intensive ones among them exposed the legal context of self-taxation. Workers forced the contractor for one of the bridges across the Don River to sell his own property to pay their wages when the promised subscription fell short. Construction of another bridge spanning the Thames was to be financed by a donation from a stagecoach company, an appropriation of district funds by local magistrates, and voluntary contributions. When this subscription too failed to realize the entire sum promised, the head of the committee supervising construction became personally liable to the contractor for the outstanding balance.21

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While individual workers and contractors could enforce their bargains at law, groups of subscribers could not. The individualism of the common law denied the associative character of their shared commitment to each other. The law distinguished sharply between a contractual obligation it would enforce and what Chief Justice John Beverley Robinson called “a mere benevolent intention.” Subscribers had no collective legal identity by which to turn to the courts to enforce their members’ promises or to contract with others. They were “a mere voluntary association” of discrete individuals. While contributors likely understood their subscription as a shared commitment to pursue an objective jointly, subscriptions were most enforceable if they could be construed instead as “a distinct promise of each” subscriber to someone else. This third party could then sue those who failed to keep their promise.22 Convinced that the potential for effective state enforcement would help them achieve their collective aim, forty-nine men pledged cash, labour, timber, and provisions for a bridge at Asphodel to a third party, thereby disaggregating their association into forty-nine individual contracts with a common outsider. Voluntarily subjecting themselves to a greater risk of state coercion, these men carefully spelled out their individual rights and commitment to due process. The subscription paper each signed included details of how a public meeting was to be convened to choose their common agent and how they could be called on to meet their commitment.23 Coercion could not be dispensed with, but it could be governed by democratic norms and procedures. In his discussion “of the origin of government,” David Hume chooses the example of two neighbours agreeing to work together to drain a common meadow. In groups of any size or duration, however, it is difficult to coordinate such cooperation and “difficult for them to execute it; while each seeks a pretext to free himself of the trouble and expence, and wou’d lay the whole burden on others.” “Political society,” argues Hume, “easily remedies both these inconveniences.” This is why he thought: “bridges are built; harbours open’d … every where, by the care of government.” Yet, faced with their own government’s fiscal and democratic deficit, one “political society” to which Upper Canadian contributors turned was the corporation – a self-governing and self-taxing association able to order its affairs without recourse to the sort of legal workaround devised at Asphodel.24

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a m o r e e f f ic ie nt system A public meeting late in 1835 endorsed the principle of incorporating the village of Dundas. Having experimented with different ways of funding public services, inhabitants proposed to bind themselves to each other as a corporation whose elected officers would be authorized to tax them. A second meeting to finalize the terms of their association drew large numbers opposed to incorporation. The local newspaper thought that most opponents belonged to the ranks of the town’s less propertied, who likely feared increased taxes, but they were led by George Rolph, a former reform member of the assembly and prominent landowner. To the proposed resolution setting a maximum rate of assessment, Rolph moved that a fire company – an unincorporated voluntary association – be formed instead. An elective taxing authority was unnecessary “as he held the liberality of private individuals was sufficient to effect all the purposes of an incorporation.” The local editor was incredulous: “it was a wonder the word liberality did not freeze upon his lips as it had long ago done in his heart; if we may judge from his subscriptions. What has he subscribed to? – Was it for the fire engine he talked so much of? no ! no! Was it toward repairing the streets and the bridges? – not one farthing.” Failure to contribute reflected poorly on Rolph’s moral character. More important, it undermined the viability and fairness of the voluntary efforts he now championed to ward off being incorporated with his neighbours. How could Rolph expect others, “possessing far less means and far less stake in a pecuniary point of view in the prosperity of Dundas,” to contribute when he did not? At the initial public meeting, other property-owners had resolved to pool their contributions in the form of taxes for goods that many were already contributing to voluntarily and to compel free-riders such as Rolph to contribute alongside them. Their democratizing tax project stalled, however, when the second meeting adjourned, “no decision having been come to on the point of assessment.”25 As William Blackstone, the pre-eminent eighteenth-century authority on English law, insisted, corporations were fictional creatures of the state. Public authority was delegated to an “artificial person” possessed of a single will to contract, to sue and be sued, and to own property that was distinct from the wills of its members. Such privileges, granted by special statute and therefore subject to

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the vicissitudes of colonial politics, heightened anxiety that corporations might become engines of favouritism and corruption. Yet these privileges were also essential to facilitate the efforts of pre-existing associations in civil society to provide public goods in a more democratic manner than the colonial state. As Blackstone noted (and Upper Canadians learned from experience), contributors formed “a mere voluntary assembly,” which “could neither frame, nor receive, any laws or rules of their conduct; none at least, which would have any binding force, for want of a coercive power to create a sufficient obligation.” Numerous such assemblies already contributed to public goods in Upper Canada, but problems of coordination and free-riding brought some of them to seek incorporation to create a sufficient obligation grounded in self-government. Corporations were, Blackstone continued, “bodies politic” – their internal regulations “a sort of municipal laws” or “by-laws and private statutes” that turned a voluntary association or joint-stock company into “this little republic.”26 If dedicated to providing public goods, it was also a little contributory democracy. As the colony’s first municipal charter, partly copied from New York City’s, put it, “a more efficient system” than unelected magistrates and voluntary contributors was needed and “none appears so likely to attain effectively the objects desired as … the Incorporation of the Inhabitants, and vesting in them the power to Elect” officers and “the levying of such moderate Taxes as may be found necessary for Improvements and other Public purposes.”27 The decade before the Rebellions was a particular moment of incorporation as democratizing tax project. Seventy-three acts of incorporation were passed in Upper Canada between 1815 and 1841, but most dated from 1828 onwards. Each was the result of a private initiative that harnessed the mechanisms of deliberative democracy – voluntary associations, newspapers, and public meetings – to petition the assembly for a charter. The merits of individual projects and the balance they struck between benefits offered and privileges sought frequently divided legislators, but the corporate form did not. Eleven of these statutes incorporated towns and were passed by assemblies with a conservative majority, not because reformers opposed incorporation but because they tended to favour such terms as the secret ballot, which depressed support from conservatives in the assembly and legislative council. A reform majority passed the Township Officers Act, 1835, which, in the words of the Kingston Spectator, “reduce[d] the townships into so many corporations.” Each was

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directed by commissioners elected annually by adult “householders or freeholders,” which is why the Cobourg Reformer equated the measure with Britain’s Municipal Corporations Act passed the same year, which replaced 178 “rotten boroughs” in England and Wales with ratepayer-elected councils.28 Roughly equal numbers of non-municipal charters were secured from the conservative-dominated assembly of 1831–34 and from the shorter reform-dominated assembly of 1835–36. The Upper Canada Herald chastised those reformers who praised American enterprise and public works while opposing the means, whether it was public borrowing or incorporation. Yet it is telling that the Herald drew its examples of such opposition exclusively from Lower Canada. While Upper Canada chartered fewer corporations than many American states relative to its population, it frequently copied statutory provisions from New York State and chartered two and a half times the number of corporations as the more populated Lower Canada. The proportion of those charters granted specifically for public works was also much greater in Upper Canada (over 70 per cent) than in the other British North American colonies and greater than it would be in the period after its union with Lower Canada in 1841.29

h a r b o u r a n d town Two early, well-documented efforts at incorporation – a harbour at Cobourg and the town of Kingston – highlight their shared genealogy as manifestations of the norms and practices of contributory democracy. Such corporations were grounded in individual interests and autonomy yet acknowledged the importance of groups; involved more direct and substantive forms of consent and accountability than the constitution of 1791; and were based on individual contribution and organized in civil society yet were public bodies able to exercise coercive authority to further joint projects. The precise terms of each corporation’s charter and how it exercised those powers determined what sort of contributory democracy each would become, but all institutionalized a more democratic politics of collective action. The Cobourg Harbour Company (1829), the first of fifteen harbour companies incorporated in Upper Canada, arose pragmatically from the inadequacy of a private subscription effort in the winter of 1820–21 and the failure to secure provincial grants in 1821 and 1825.30 A public meeting in 1827 turned to the idea of a private loan

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to be financed by ten annual subscriptions and future toll revenue. More than 160 men subscribed (equivalent to more than a third of adult males in the township). It was a diverse group. Among their number were leading landowners and local merchants, some of whom pledged more than twelve pounds per year, but about half pledged the minimum one pound. Subscribers included the district’s most prominent Orangeman, a Roman Catholic priest, and local conservatives and reformers. Pursuing overlapping material interests promoted social solidarity when economic inequality, kinship, religion, and politics might divide. To ensure users of the future harbour contributed, the meeting resolved to petition the assembly for the authority to impose tolls. To address possible defection from their own ranks, it proposed that any arrears in annual contributions be recouped by a public auction of the defaulting subscribers’ property by the district sheriff (i.e., that their voluntary subscription be enforced in the same manner as their district property tax). They needed the state, but in seeking to use it for their own purposes they defined its authority and their obligations to it. The petition, determining who would contribute and at what rate, expressed self-taxation in its purest form. Yet anticipating the inevitable shifts in population and property-ownership over a decade cast doubt on the viability of the petition’s proposed tax mechanism, which also lacked any mechanism for spending the revenue it raised. The suggestion by an assembly select committee, composed of both conservatives and reformers, that the state appoint commissioners to manage the funds and to build the harbour was dismissed in favour of incorporation, an institutional contrivance that addressed the problem of tax-compliance and governance simultaneously.31 A joint-stock company was authorized to construct and operate the harbour. It had the power of eminent domain to repurpose private land for the public project and to levy tolls. Payment of these user-fees could be compelled by its own officers, who, like district sheriffs, were authorized to seize private goods and vessels and sell them at public auction to recover debts. The company’s charter also determined its relationship with its constituent members. Subscribing to a loan over ten years became subscribing to stock to be paid in ten instalments. This obligation was also made binding since default led to forfeiture of the stock, which could be resold to others willing to assume the obligation. In turn, subscribers had the right to be informed of the corporation’s finances and to elect seven

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directors annually from among their own number by secret ballot. Directors could make bylaws and hire administrators, but only a majority of subscribers could order additional instalments be paid – that is, could tax themselves further to fulfill the objectives of the corporation. Such formal mechanisms of accountability surpassed anything available to taxpayers at either the local level or the provincial level. The Cobourg Harbour Company was a self-governing association of voluntary contributors exercising public authority.32 In 1829, the assembly also passed the first municipal incorporation bill for the colony’s most populous town, Kingston. Proposals to incorporate Kingston in the 1790s, even though its officers would initially be Crown appointees, were rejected by the British Secretary of State for fear such a corporate body would still become “a most powerful Engine” of popular politics.33 Rather, as Kingston’s population grew, additional police and tax powers were delegated to local jp s in 1801, 1816, 1824, and 1826. Such delegations made the town a distinct unit of obligation but preserved its administration by unelected magistrates. As a result, the town became a flashpoint in the contest over the attenuated relationship between taxation and consent in the colony. By 1828, reformers in the assembly steadfastly refused to further empower magistrates anywhere in the colony, but the assembly’s 1829 bill to replace magistrates at Kingston by incorporating the town was lost in the legislative council precisely because a self-governing association of citizen-taxpayers clashed too obviously with the colony’s fiscal constitution.34 Anxieties of revolution in the 1790s had become anxieties about unadulterated forms of contributory democracy. Samuel Ogden’s experience paying various local taxes and challenging his assessment before Kingston magistrates transformed this obscure tenant into the colony’s foremost theorist of contributory democracy. Ogden’s sixty-page Reflections on the Management of Civil Rule, published in 1827, proceeded from two premises: first, “the unavoidable wants of a state, or government, require that every member of a community, possessing the means, shall contribute towards defraying the necessary public expenses”; and, second, only a “well-regulated order” could protect “the fruits of self-industry” of those members from expropriation by the more powerful. Only then would taxation have “a tendency to promote genuine improvement, [to] produce[] a common good.” Unaccountable to those they could compel to surrender a portion of their labour, taxation by jp s had

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instead “a tendency to produce public burthens, [to] become [] a common evil.” Such “absolute power” enabled them to harass individual taxpayers like Ogden with impunity, shift the burden of taxation to those least able to protect themselves, and substitute their own interests for the town’s “social compact.” Tenants (again like Ogden) paid for road improvements when “every person possessing common sense, knows that the streets of a city or town, are, as a public passage, held as a common right, but beyond that, are made partially profitable, to the proprietors of the houses.” Property-owners ought, then, to pay for such improvements. On the expenditure side, public money was “directed to self interest and self desire” rather than “general advantage.” Funds for sidewalks, for instance, were allocated “more to satisfy private desire than to serve a public purpose.” Predictably, the most recent improvements had been laid out in front of the residence of a magistrate’s son. Like everyone, magistrates were self-regarding individuals tempted to shift obligations to others and benefits to themselves, but they alone had the public authority to effect such transfers, making Kingston taxes an unjust transfer from the poor to the rich.35 Including labour in his definition of property and all heads of household with means in the obligation to contribute, Ogden enlarged the universe of taxpayer-citizen. Focused on questions of power, Ogden extended the problem of taxation from public finance to civil rule. Ogden’s personal tax revolt was soon generalized. A public meeting and petition sought the town’s incorporation: police powers were to be vested in an elective town council (half of its members chosen annually); town officers, including those who assessed and collected taxes, were to be elected annually by secret ballot; “every Householder of the Town paying a Police tax” was to be entitled to vote; and the town’s accounts were to be published annually. Those who contributed were to be given the capacity to judge those who managed their contributions, but the corporate form also gave them the capacity to do things collectively – another aspect of democratic practice. Yet, just as with the case later at Dundas, some of those most able to contribute were the most opposed to contributory democracy. A move at the public meeting to limit the right to vote to the more restrictive provincial franchise was, according to one account, “carried by a majority of Electors” present but lost because the town taxpayers it would disenfranchise insisted that the obligation to contribute correspond to the right to vote. Their

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insistence dampened support for the petition to the assembly, and a counter-petition from prominent townspeople opposed to being governed and taxed by all taxpayers helped defeat the measure in the legislative council.36

i n c o r p o r at in g t h e c ontri butory self Incorporation empowered those who contributed and disciplined those who refused. Those most able to contribute, like George Rolph, sometimes opposed more democratic taxing authorities and were frequently the target of such discipline. On analogy with “the citizen who finds that he must, on fear of punishment, pay taxes for public goods in excess of the amount that he might voluntarily contribute,” libertarians and public-choice theorists associate taxation with potential theft. Self-taxing for public goods had instead brought Upper Canadas to believe that compulsory contributions paired with democratic procedures redressed the “selfish and unnatural conduct” of those who undermined the collective action from which they benefited.37 Widespread willingness to finance a harbour at Cobourg or Samuel Ogden’s principle that “every member of the community, possessing the means, shall contribute” suggests how self-regarding interests could promote cooperation rather than atomism and avarice, especially when fiscal contribution brought political voice. Properly fashioned, public authority was not antithetical to individual interests but, rather, essential to their pursuit. These were surely the lessons of efforts to purchase a fire engine for Dundas, build a bridge at Asphodel, or improve Kingston sidewalks. Ogden had nothing to say about those not “possessing the means,” and by “every member of the community” he meant every head of household. So, he had nothing to say about its other members – mostly women and children – either. The link between property-ownership and contribution meant female heads of households were taxed and women owned shares in many colonial corporations. Three women, for instance, were among the initial subscribers to the Cataraqui Bridge, but the statute that incorporated subscribers stipulated that “any femme covert” had no “right to be regarded as a Member of the Company, but that her husband shall be regarded as the Stockholder in her stead.”38 Before the provincial franchise was explicitly defined as male in 1849, the masculinist state ensured that incorporation did not extend public authority to wives.

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Public infrastructure such as the Cataraqui Bridge increased land values and encouraged further emigration and settlement, intensifying Indigenous dispossession. As Angela Tozer (chapter 3, this volume) points out, the need to generate wealth to fund such public works (directly or through public debt) further accelerated the process. Ogden supposed poor settlers and labourers, as “the first encounterers of the wilderness, ha[d] enough to struggle with” without burdensome taxation, but a petition of “Indian Chiefs” sought to exempt members of the Six Nations from paying tolls to cross the bridges that now spanned the Grand River. Their petition went unanswered. Over their protests, Six Nations funds held in trust by the Crown were invested in the Grand River Navigation Company (1832). Coerced to contribute, their fund was depleted, their landholdings reduced by expropriation and trespass, and their fisheries disrupted by this colonialist perversion of incorporation, which denied both self-taxation and self-government.39 Yet, within the settler legal order, the corporate form offered Indigenous peoples possibilities for economic gain and standing as belonging to self-governing entities. Three Mississauga “Indian chiefs,” seeking, they said, to increase the value of their property, were successful in their petition (with eight others) to be incorporated as the Credit Harbor Company (1834). They soon owned half its stock. On the other hand, efforts at incorporation oriented towards self-government and protection from further dispossession rather than public infrastructure were stymied. In 1836, the “Chiefs and Warriors of the Indians at St. Regis” in Lower Canada petitioned that their chiefs “be incorporated as a Body Politic to manage the affairs of the St. Regis Indians, so far as relates to Upper Canada.” The petition was ignored. The colony’s highest court had already rejected the argument that – having been granted land collectively by the Crown in 1784 – the Six Nations had been constructively incorporated. Neither legislature nor courts would construe First Nations as public authorities able to contract, to sue and be sued, and to own property.40

p l u r a l is m f o r e stalled Incorporation created territorial and functional intermediate authorities that stood in increasing numbers between the individual and the colonial state. Within the limits set by their charter, each was a self-governing association independent of direction by exec-

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utive authority. As such, they troubled imperial officials as a means to organize Kingston in the 1790s and colonial officials as a means to organize the Six Nations in the 1830s. Poised between state and civil society, corporations seemed especially ambiguous as democratization accelerated in the Atlantic world. Were they legally sanctioned special interests antithetical to the imagined unity of “the people” or did they offer mechanisms of self-government for diverse inhabitants to pursue shared interests? Alexis de Tocqueville, for instance, worried that the state, increasingly legitimated by a democratic majority, would centralize authority and thereby threaten personal liberty, local autonomy, and social pluralism. He hoped that regularized associations, such the elective townships created in Upper Canada in 1835, would prove training grounds for self-government and provide a pluralist alternative to unitary conceptions of state sovereignty.41 Only detailed investigation can assess the democratic opportunities and risks created by each public-service corporation. The older, transnational language of corporations as premodern privileges and parasitic monopolies persisted in Upper Canada alongside the numerous efforts to incorporate contributory democracy. The East India Company’s monopoly on the legal importation of tea (until 1834), the Canada Company’s funding of the colonial executive without legislative oversight, and the interlocking leadership of that executive with the Bank of Upper Canada and Welland Canal Company (graphically displayed by Schrauwers, chapter 4, this volume), fed reformer suspicion. Mackenzie became so fearful (despite having supported various incorporation initiatives) that his draft republican constitution prevented even a fully elective legislature from creating “bodies politic” by a simple majority. For most reformers, however, more corrosive to a pluralist reading of the public-service corporation was the failure of some of them to raise sufficient capital for public goods, the reason they existed. In the case of harbours, especially, development enthusiasts routinely underestimated the cost of construction; at least six followed the Welland Canal Company in petitioning for public loans to complete construction. Aversion to increasing public indebtedness and the risk of direct taxation such indebtedness posed, not corporations per se, made many reformers anxious.42 Rather than a means to coordinate private contributions for a public work, they feared that harbour companies risked becoming the means of funnelling public money to private shareholders.

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Elected conservatives were more supportive of such loans, but they too began to draw a starker line between public and private, which such corporations blurred. If some struggled to complete construction, better the colonial state itself undertake the task as a step towards depoliticizing major public works and presenting them as a matter of central administration. In 1839, one conservative committee chair looked forward to a time when harbours would “be constructed and sustained at public expense instead of being left to the management of private enterprise.” The next year William Henry Draper, chairing another committee, touted the advantages that “would result from making all Harbours public works.” In 1827, Draper had served as secretary to the public meeting that had resolved to finance the Cobourg harbour by subscription. In 1840, he distinguished private corporation from public work. It was a distinction that divorced the public service corporation from corporations for municipal government and voluntary contributions from taxation, writing both out of the history of democracy in the colony.43 In 1841, the newly emphasized distinction laid the groundwork for a series of steps towards a more centralized, uniform, and interventionist “colonial leviathan.” After resolutions adopted that year by the assembly pertaining to its relationship to the executive, questions of democracy came to orbit around “responsible government.” From that year, all money bills were to be introduced by the executive, leaving elected representatives to consent (or not) to the plans of governors and ministers. A central board of works appointed by the governor, also created in 1841, undertook major public works with provincial revenue. Elective district councils were established the same year to consent to local taxes, but they were supervised by wardens appointed by the governor, who, in turn, appointed those responsible for the district’s local works. District treasurers who oversaw local taxation were selected by the governor from a list supplied by the council.44 “No taxation without representation” meant representative local and provincial bodies able to sustain strong, unelected executives and the administrators they appointed. Taxes remained central to democratic struggles after 1841, but the corporation was increasingly repositioned as a means to organize private affairs rather than as a means to create multiple centres of more direct forms of self-government and self-taxation. It was the road abandoned and the story forgotten. The British governor largely responsible for these measures, Charles Poulett Thomson (Lord Sydenham), claimed that “the practical

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conviction of better roads, better streets, [and] Quays” could displace “theoretical discussions” of the constitutional questions about imperial sovereignty and parliamentary government he wished to skirt. Elective district councils, for instance, would instill “habits of self-dependence” in colonists who would have to pay taxes to secure local improvements.45 Many Upper Canadians had already developed habits of self-reliance and vernacular answers to constitutional questions by experimenting with associational forms to pool their contributions to public goods. When confronted with legal and coordination problems, they experimented with forms of public authority to facilitate that cooperation. Working with neighbours to widen a rural road or construct a harbour reconfigured taxation and political obligation: taxes were less extractions by the Crown than necessary contributions to public goods; political obligation was less what subjects owed the state in a vertical relationship of allegiance to sovereignty than what individuals owed each other. Taxes not only sparked conflict but also recognition that institutional spaces were needed within which individuals could mediate such conflict and find new forms of solidarity if public goods were to be provided more effectively. The principle of consent to taxation and the corporate form were adapted from Britain and the United States, but their particular history in Upper Canada arose from quotidian experience coordinating with neighbours in the context of the colony’s fiscal and democratic deficit. Although the pluralist possibilities of incorporated contributory democracies were forestalled, the principles were entrenched by such experience. It was the attendant norms and practices that mattered, not whether the term “democracy” was applied to them (it wasn’t) or whether any of those involved were what we might choose to call “democrats.” Historical context mattered too in determining whether, as in the case of Upper Canada, those norms served to democratize the status quo: whether they were used to extend or limit voting rights; to build or undermine cross-class solidarity; to discipline free-riders and oligarchs or stigmatize vulnerable populations as tax-evaders; and to empower or neuter the institutions required to tax fairly and effectively.46 In the seventeenth century, John Locke argued that “barely travelling freely on the Highway” was sufficient to give tacit consent to the established government. Upper Canadians became convinced that coming together to pay for that highway was sufficient to insist on more express forms of consent capable of restructuring the established government.47

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no t e s 1 Journals of the House of Assembly of Upper Canada (hereafter jha ), 26 January 1836, 29; Smith in Heaman, Tax, 297. Although comparable to ratepayer democracy, as an analytical category “contributory democracy” extends our gaze to forms of contribution other than local property taxes and to corporations other than municipalities. I emphasize capacity in McNairn, Capacity to Judge. This chapter, part of a larger project on taxation and public goods such as roads, foregrounds contribution and interests. 2 Creighton, Commercial Empire. Lower Canada looms larger in Creighton’s argument than Upper Canada. 3 Mackenzie’s draft constitution, 13 November 1837, in Forbes, Canadian Political Thought, 38–42. For this recovery, see Greer, “Historical Roots”; and Schrauwers, Union Is Strength. For the vast American literature, see Lamoreaux and Novak, Corporations and American Democracy. 4 There is no index entry for taxes in Craig, Upper Canada. Paying taxes is not an example of how colonists related to the state in Johnson, In Duty Bound. 5 Greer and Radforth, Colonial Leviathan. 6 Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy. 7 An Inhabitant, “Sketches of Upper Canada,” in Gourlay, Statistical Account, 203; and Mackenzie, “An Appeal to the People of Upper Canada, From the Judgments of British and Colonial Governments Respecting that Province,” included with Colonial Advocate, September 1830. 8 Edling, Hercules; and O’Brien and Hunt, “Rise of the Fiscal State.” 9 Upper Canada Blue Books, 1821, 1828, 1830, Library and Archives Canada (hereafter lac ), mg 11-co 47; Weekly Register, 29 May 1825; and Browde, “Settling the Canadian Colonies,” 311, 313. 10 Blue Books, 1835, and jha , 15 April 1835. Canada Company funding did not impress Lieutenant-Governor Sir Peregrine Maitland either: “There is in my mind something not very flattering to the respectability of the government in the circumstance of the Governor, Judges, and all the principal officers in such a province as this is, receiving their Salaries out of the Installments of a Joint Stock Company” (Gates, Land Policies, 168). 11 Prompter, Series of Essays, 16; and Blue Books, 1830. 12 Henry Ruttan, “Second Report of Select Committee on Finance,” jha , app., 1836–37, 4. 13 M’Adam, Upper Canada Herald, 15 March 1836. 14 G.O., Canadian Freeman, 16 December 1830.

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15 Brooke, Columbia Rising, 58; A British Subject, Patriot, 31 December 1833; and Canadian Freeman, 18 November 1830. 16 lac , rg 5-a 1, Civil Secretary’s Correspondence, Upper Canada (hereafter Sundries), 19 February 1831 and 9 January 1835; Upper Canada Gazette, 15 April 1822; Canadian Freeman, 22 July 1830; Patriot, 7 July 1835; and Reformer, 2 December 1834. 17 United Empire Loyalist, 22 December 1827. 18 Ibid., 20 January 1827; Upper Canada Herald, 8 January and 4 March 1828; and McNairn, Capacity to Judge, chap. 2. 19 For the compatibility of private fundraising with taxation, see Tillotson, Contributing Citizens. 20 “Report of Select Committee on Petition of Jedediah Jackson, and others,” jha , app., 1832–33, 206. 21 James Bryne, Sundries, 6 February 1828; and Roswell Mount, Gore Gazette, 7 February 1829. 22 For the first two quotes, see Robinson in Belcher v. Cook, Upper Canada Queen’s Bench, 4: 401; and Patton v. Melville, Upper Canada Reports, 21: 263, where a note due a deceased treasurer of a building committee was paid to his estate rather than the committee’s new treasurer. For the third, see, Thomas v. Grace, Report of Cases Decided in the Court of Common Pleas, 15: 462. Broadly speaking, you could not sue yourself: an individual could not be both the plaintiff (as a member of the group) and a defendant sued by the group. I am indebted to Risk, “Golden Age,” 309. 23 jha , select committee report, 24 December 1823, 580; and Upper Canada Statutes (hereafter ucs ), 4 Geo. IV, c. 29, “An Act granting to His Majesty a sum of money for the purposes therein mentioned.” See Butterfield, Making of Tocqueville’s America, especially 95–6, 99, 103–10. 24 Hume, Treatise, 538–9. 25 Dundas Weekly Post, 19 January 1836. 26 Blackstone, Commentaries, 1: 455–6. 27 ucs , 4 Wm. IV, c. 23 “An Act to extend the Limits of the Town of York; to erect the said Town into a City; and to Incorporate it under the name of the City of Toronto,” contradicting Isin, Cities without Citizens. 28 Kingston Spectator, copied British American Journal, 20 April 1835; Reformer, 20 October 1835; and ucs , Wm IV, c. 8, “An Act to reduce to one Act of Parliament the several Laws relative to the appointment and duties of Township Officers …” 29 Upper Canada Herald, 16 May 1837. Research by Jim Phillips summarized in Girard, Phillips, and Brown (History of the Law in Canada, 1: 628–36), suggests that, from 1820 to 1850, two-thirds of corporations for

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33 34 35 36

37 38 39

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transportation infrastructure in British North America were chartered in Upper Canada. Risk (“Nineteenth-Century Foundations,” 304), calculates that the pre-union period (1791–1840) accounted for a larger percentage of harbour, canal, and bridge incorporations (80, 61, and 42 per cent, respectively) than the post-union period (1841–67), but only a small proportion of financial institutions, railways, and manufacturing and mining concerns. Risk, “Nineteenth-Century Foundations,” gives examples of provisions copied from New York at 273, 277–8, 281, 297, 300. On corporate law and liberalism in Lower Canada, see Fecteau, “Petites républiques.” Kingston Chronicle, 15 December 1820; York Weekly Post, 12 April 1821; and jha , 2 April 1821 and 10 March 1825. “Report on Cobourg Harbour,” jha , app., 1828, no. 23. ucs , 10 Geo. IV, c. 11, “An Act to Improve the Navigation of Lake Ontario, by authorizing the construction of a Harbour at Cobourg, by a Joint Stock Company.” Duke of Portland, in Isin, Cities without Citizens, 110. See Hugh C. Thomson and Peter Perry, United Empire Loyalist, 2 February 1828, regarding Belleville. Inhabitant, Series of Reflections, 3, 12, 14, 42, 49, 53, 59–60. Right, Upper Canada Herald, 15 January 1828; Upper Canada Herald, 12 February 1828; Chronicle and Gazette, 27 December 1828; and An Elector, Chronicle and Gazette, 3 January 1829. Buchanan, Limits of Liberty, 56; and British Whig, 20 January 1836. I owe the Buchanan reference to E.A. Heaman. ucs , 8 Geo. IV, c. 12, “An Act to Incorporate certain Persons therein mentioned, under the Style and Title of ‘the Cataraqui Bridge Company.’” Inhabitant, Series of Reflections, 10; jla , 25 January 1836, “petition of Henry Brant and fifteen others, Indian Chiefs, residing on the Grand River”; Hill, Grand River; and Hill, Clay We Are Made Of, 178–80. ucs , 4 Wm. IV, c. 32, “An Act to Incorporate certain persons therein mentioned under the style and title of the President, Directors and Company, of the Credit Harbor”; “Message from the Lieutenant Governor with a Petition from Certain Chiefs of the Credit Indians,” jha , app., 1836, 132; jha , 17 December 1836; and Doe Ex Dem. Jackson v. Wilkes, 5 Wm. IV, Upper Canada Queen’s Bench, 5: 150, which Harring, White Man’s Law, 67–8, misreads. Levy, “Pluralism without Privilege?,” 101–4. Aitken, Welland Canal Company, 120–4.

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43 Mahom Burwell, “Report of Select Committee on Petition of John Bostwick, Esq. and others,” jha , app. 1839, 740; and Draper, “Report on the Petition of William Chisholm, Esq.,” jha , app. 1839–40, 1, no. 28. The nature of equality in relating contribution to voice also distinguished corporations for public goods from municipal corporations. Shares in the former were private property and votes were proportional to the number of shares owned. For municipal corporations, embedded in a longer history of representative government, ratepayers had one vote regardless of the value of property they owned and upon which they were assessed. 44 Radforth, “Sydenham.” 45 Ibid., 75, 83. 46 The uneven trajectories can be traced in Heaman, Tax; and Tillotson, Give and Take. 47 Locke, Two Treatises, 348.

6 Conceptualizing Democratic Conservatism in 1850s Canada E.A. Heaman

Joseph-Charles Taché was Canada’s Tocqueville – that is, its foremost early theorist of democracy. Janet Ajzenstat sees Durham in this light, but she’s wrong. Durham was concerned with the “British-liberalism-in-a-colonial-context” problem, and that’s not a democracy problem.1 Taché, by contrast, came out swinging, in 1857, in favour of “universal suffrage.” It wasn’t really universal, of course: he was no fan of women’s rights. But he did advocate the abolition of property and racial disqualifications: any man of sound mind and age of majority should vote. Democracy is an ideal, never entirely met in practice, and political scientists could, no doubt, identify democratic failings in Taché’s proposals. Still, if we measure Taché’s argument against such academic criteria for democracy as those proposed by Dennis Pilon (chapter 1, this volume), a parliamentarianized executive, free and fair elections, and broad enfranchisement, it’s clear that Taché’s was genuinely – even weirdly – democratizing. He had a parliamentarianized executive and he badly wanted more enfranchisement and freer and fairer elections. Nor was Taché’s argument merely academic: he wrote it in a newspaper series, republished as a monograph, that became a kind of first draft of the British North America Act. That’s well known. A booklet by Jean-Charles Bonenfant begins with the observation by Joseph Blanchet in 1865, that: “in the division of powers between the local governments and the central government, the plan of the conference was almost word for word the work of Monsieur Taché.”2 Taché, a prominent public intellectual and architect of the late-Victorian Canadian state, is well known among francophone scholars – there

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exist two biographies – and historians of mid-Victorian politics and the state, especially readers of Arthur Silver and Bruce Curtis.3 Michel Ducharme, a prominent historian of Canadian political ideas, closely examines Taché’s conservative-liberal arguments in a recent collection of essays on Taché’s polymath writings.4 And yet Taché’s foundational Canadian text has never been translated into English and gets overlooked by political scientists puzzling out the British North America Act.5 I see several reasons for the neglect of Taché’s democratic manifesto. First, its radically democratic appeal was entirely at odds with the essentially anti-democratic political culture of the day, so well captured by Colin Grittner (chapter 7, this volume). Second, the odd balance of federalism and nationalism alienated both federalist and nationalist scholars, who had little to gain in excavating it. Third, the unusually cosmopolitan and transnational quality of Taché’s vision and project also came to work against him over time. His reflection on what Canada could and should do with itself reflected profound engagement with what other North Atlantic countries were doing with themselves, scrutinized very closely from his complex standpoint as a legislator, an administrator, and an intellectual. Taché saw in Britain, France, and the United States a series of ironic gaps and contrasts between their ways of describing and of negotiating their worlds. Those ironic gaps were, by dint of Canada’s history and geography, inscribed into Canada as a spectrum of choices. The cultural pluralism seen in the Canadas and, more broadly in British North America, long understood to be a significant cause of political and economic weakness, promised, on Taché’s reading, to be a source of strength. The strange pleas for conservatism and democratization and for federalism and nationalism conspired to make his project invisible to later generations, but so, too, did his remarkable and ultimately successful translation of a transnational perspective into a national one. Canadians forget those rich and complex arguments at their peril. A closer reading of that complex document is long overdue. These are preliminary reflections on how a Taché chapter would figure in a larger project I’m pursuing on history, civilization, and conservative politics in the Canadas. Civilization projects are sometimes self-civilizing processes and sometimes imperial projects. Taché mediated between the two in ways that complicated the Anglo-Protestant versions formulated in England, the United States,

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and Toronto. My analysis meanders decade by decade (it’s becoming a method) towards and then beyond the 1850s – that is, to the “end” of civilization and the beginning of assimilation (following John Tobias’s triptych of “Protection, Civilization, Assimilation”).6 This chapter is about the 1850s, understood as the moment when Canadians began to imagine a transcontinental state and “civilization” project. Taché was at the vanguard of this. He had already established himself as an important cultural broker, nationalist politician, and scientific expert. After acquiring an md in 1844, he practised medicine at Rimouski for twelve years. A “seminal figure in the development of French Canadian literature,” he helped found the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste (ssjb ) in 1842 and the Mouvement littéraire in 1860.7 He also threw himself into the intense politics of the day: he was acclaimed as the mpp for Rimouski in 1848, supporting the nationalist party in which his uncle, E.P. Taché, was prominent, and, during the Rebellion Losses riots, he shot dead a rioter attacking L.-H. Lafontaine’s house. He was an energetic politician, doing important work on agricultural education, roads and pilotage, seigneurial reform, and sanitary reform. He also represented Canada at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1855 and again in 1867. But his seigneur-friendly reforms and other things compromised him, and in December of 1856 he quit politics to co-found (with Hector Langevin) the Courrier du Canada, where he published his constitutional reflections beginning in July 1857. Biographer Éveline Bossé observes that, under his direction, the Courrier du Canada was, like other journals of the day, ripe with polemics.8 Upper Canadian premier John A. Macdonald knew how to value such things. In 1859, Taché quit the journal to become an inspector of asylums and prisons. He also wrote memoranda for Macdonald and served as deputy-minister for agriculture and immigration from 1864 into the 1880s. That was a big job, and Taché made the most of it. He orchestrated the census of 1871, which Bruce Curtis describes as a project of “feudal science” that showcased Taché’s nationalist and ultramontane leanings. Taché’s ultramontanism has made him seem uninteresting. When Taché says that “authority is important,” everyone knows he means the Pope and everyone yawns. It’s all too predictable. But viewed up close, there’s not much here that’s predictable. Early scientists, ultramontanes, and conservatives weren’t usually democrats. Moreover, those democratic and pluralist leanings made him hostile to any

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state-led imposition of “civilization” on Indigenous peoples on the grounds that they didn’t want it. Taché’s project was antagonistic to the spirit that, for S.F. Wise, made the British North America Act “a triumph of Upper Canadian ‘imperialism.’”9 The founders distorted Taché’s constitutional reform to make it more patrician and Toronto-centric. And yet in many ways Taché got what he wanted. Macdonald thought that the constitutional division of powers would work against the provincial governments, reducing them to insignificance. According to Richard Gwyn, Canadians of the 1860s didn’t have much use for an interventionist state and didn’t see it coming.10 But Taché did. He wanted a busy provincial state able to sustain French-Canadian nationality, culture, and politics, and ward off Anglo-Protestant supremacy. That’s exactly what he got in Quebec, albeit without the democracy and transnational alliances that he also tried to engineer. It is worth digging beneath the patrician, Toronto-centric overlay to the more democratic and pluralist vision that underpinned it. Bruce Curtis describes Taché as an early sociologist, combining a grounding in European social science and Canadian censuses, as well as Catholic inventories of the faithful and the faith, and tending to inspire similar inventories in subsequent nationalist writings. But it is also worth noting that Taché insisted his project was grounded on his reading of history.11 Taché’s project was always intended to challenge a Toronto-centric reading of Canada or British North America. In the mid-1850s, those two strands were coming together in distinctly sinister ways. During an economically expansive moment, Canadians debated the obstacles to growth and prosperity, which many Anglo-Protestants blamed on backwards-looking and “inferior” Franco-Catholic institutions and culture. When Sir Edmund Head arrived in Canada in 1856, he praised English racial superiority. Taché’s was just one response among many, including Étienne Parent’s recommendations for more commercialism and Antoine Gérin-Lajoie’s arguments for northern colonisation.12 Taché first produced an optimistic analysis of Canada’s resources and future in 1855 for a competition, whose winning essay was to be distributed at the Canadian section of the Paris Exposition.13 But his essay lost to one by John Sheridan Hogan, a Toronto journalist, whose work he then had to circulate. One can only imagine the injury to Taché’s feelings caused by the hurtful clichés in a chapter entitled “The Habitant, or Lower Canadian Farmer.” It began: “No person can contrast more strongly than the habitant

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of Lower Canada and the farmer of Upper. The latter is enterprising, adventurous, and cosmopolitan in his feelings.” Hogan’s habitant preferred to remain at home mired in poverty. “In vain for him has the magnificent West been opened up, in vain for him have America and Europe been filled with accounts of prosperity in it.”14 French Canadians were amiable, simple, happy, and civilized: “all that America can teach them in enterprise would not exceed what they could teach America in the finest features of civilization – namely, gentleness and good manners.” But they were “unquestionably far behind the rest of America” in enterprise. Happily, the recent reform of feudal tenure, Hogan reassured readers, promised to enable them to acquire and hold property in their own right. Nothing had done so much good for America “as the feeling that a man could win for himself an estate … It has infused the poetry of refinement, respectability and civilization into natures accustomed to all the rudeness of extreme poverty, and all the slavishness incident to long-continued and debasing servitude.” Hogan rode such sentiments into the legislature, winning a seat in Grey County in 1857 (two years before his fatal mugging on a Toronto bridge). If Taché’s early essay was an inventory of Canadian resources, institutions, and people, his 1857 essay invoked history and political theory to repudiate Hoganesque attacks. Hogan was just the tip of the iceberg: Taché was also rebutting arguments for western expansion published by George Brown and William McDougall in the Toronto Globe in 1856. That expansionism informed the platform of a reform convention in January 1857 as well as Brown’s maiden speech in the legislature two months later. According to Doug Owram, upon realizing that Canada West was running out of good farmland, the expansionists looked to maintain growth and immigration through a new frontier, a “last, best west,” that new scientific reports were describing as suitable for development. “What gave the expansionist movement its power,” Owram argues, “was a fusing of enthusiasm for the North West with a recognition of the crucial position Canada had reached.”15 Brown had championed responsible government on a tempered British constitutional model – very unlike the Jacksonian model of rule by the ignorant masses – and saw in it a sturdy basis for a transcontinental nation.16 For Brown, civilization owed something to its vigorous French forebears in North America. During the Confederation debates of 1864, a moment when he was trying to be especially conciliatory, Brown spoke admiringly of the fur traders, with their “vigorous

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habits, the power of endurance, the aptitude for outdoor life.”17 They laid the foundation for the new project of spreading the “western bounds of civilization” clear across to the Pacific Ocean. Now, however, “progress” required something more.18 But instead of modernizing Canadian institutions and politics, on Brown’s reading, the corrupt Tories running the country kept pandering to those backwards populations, well knowing that modernization would spell their political doom. Two kinds of history competed in Canada: history as a zero-sum dispute for power among predatory politicians versus an expansive, progressive version of history grounded in increasing wealth and liberty, which Enlightenment theorists had called “civilization.” By espousing liberty and commerce, Britain had broken out of the cycle of rise, corruption, and decline. Canada West would be to the transcontinental polity as Britain was to the empire/world: a natural focus for prosperity and liberty. As I argue elsewhere, George Brown believed that “Canada West was naturally destined for transnational economic and political hegemony, so long as the obstacles obstructing it – backwards, illiberal French Canadians to the east, backwards, illiberal Indians to the west, and corrupt, illiberal Toryism in its midst – could be restrained either politically or constitutionally.”19 “Wrong!” exclaimed Taché. He had an equally compelling counter-vision: a democratic French, Catholic, Métis, and Indigenous civilization stretching east and west from the Canadas. He was every bit as confident and expansionist as Brown; it’s magnificent riposte. Brown and Taché marshalled every iota of intellectual, cultural, and political capital they could to project competing visions of British North America. And they told very different stories of civilization. Taché thought strategically about populations as political subjects and objects. When he drafted the first modern census of Canada, in 1871, Bruce Curtis shows that Taché wanted to demonstrate that Anglo-Protestants were not the demographic power that Brown thought they were. So he defined people by their descent: they were not English or French Canadian but, rather, Canadians of English, or Irish, or Scottish, or French descent. “English Canadians” outnumbered “French Canadians,” but Canadians of “French” descent outnumbered a more fragmented non-French identity. It was a sleight of hand, but more than a sleight of hand because it challenged Brown’s “rep by pop” project. By advocating universal

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suffrage, Taché was messing with Brown’s “rep-by-prop” project. “Rep by prop” is something I invented in my last book: Brown complained that English Canadians were more populous and wealthy than French Canadians but that the current Constitution let the poor govern the rich. If French Canadians were more numerous than they were wealthy, it’s easy to see why Brown would oppose universal suffrage and Taché support it. Far from being radical, Taché’s argument wasn’t even democratic enough for his constituents in Rimouski: he quit politics in December 1856 to avoid certain defeat by the “democrat” party. But George Brown, too, was only the tip of the iceberg. To debunk Brown, Taché had to debunk just about everything known to be true about the demographic and political trajectory of North America. Everyone “knew” that the larger lessons of history pointed to Anglo-Protestant supremacy on the continent. That’s what George Brown foresaw because that’s what Lord Durham foresaw because that’s what Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw, and, indeed, that’s what Benjamin Franklin foresaw in 1750. Given the unprecedented rate of demographic expansion in the Thirteen Colonies, Franklin observed, Americans could occupy and populate the western territories if the French did not beat them to it.20 By the 1830s, Tocqueville confirmed that trajectory: the British race was irresistibly taking control of the continent, swallowing up or destroying obstacles in its path. Tocqueville penned an eloquent eulogy for the loss of that “great French nation in the American wilds.” New France had equalled Europe in size, wherein mighty rivers flowed, Indian tribes heard no “tongue but ours,” and settlements bore dear and familiar names like Louisbourg and Montmorency. But nothing remained of this “magnificent inheritance” save for Lower Canada, the debris of an old people, lost in the midst of the flood of a new nation. Around them the foreign population grows larger constantly; it extends on all sides; it penetrates into the ranks of the former masters of the land, dominates their towns, and denatures their language. This population is identical to that of the United States … One cannot conceal from oneself the fact that the English race has acquired an immense preponderance over all the other European races of the New World. It is very superior to them in civilization, industry, and power.21

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In the 1830s, Lord Durham had translated that reflection into a Canadian assimilation project to be accomplished through the tyranny of the majority. But the expected Anglo-Protestant supremacy was yielding to a manifestly resurgent French Canada. Brown saw an artificial blip, resulting from corrupt politics. If the corrupt state could be checked, then the economic and demographic force of the British race could do in British North America what it had done in the United States. Taché, however, saw those processes working to amplify the French race in North America. It was, he argued, all plainly visible in Canada’s history, if you knew how to read it. Taché recognized that Brown, like Tocqueville and Franklin, were predicting a rupture with history. If you looked at North America in 1750 or 1830 or 1857, you saw a very plural world with a great many French, Métis, and Indigenous peoples. The Tocquevilles and Browns saw past that world to predict its erasure, and, in so doing, they enabled that erasure. Taché, by contrast, still saw that plural world and he wrote it into his understanding of Canada’s past, present, and future. He wrote it into his understanding of relations between state and society, which rested on Tocqueville’s analysis of those relations. A bit of background: my larger analysis begins with David Hume’s History of England, understood as the original liberal-conservative self-civilization project. Hume argues that the public is more liberal than the state and that it is public opinion that moderates and civilizes the state. (A broad change in public mores made predatory, murderous princes no longer acceptable in modern Britain. If princes had their way, they’d be as predatory and murderous as ever.) Private people, doing their private thing, were the most dynamic and liberalizing thing about modern Britain. Adam Smith took up this view, as did Tocqueville: “the collective force of citizens will always be more powerful to produce social well-being than the authority of government.”22 In Sheldon Wolin’s formulation: “If the concept of political power was as old as Thucydides or as young as Machiavelli, and that of economic power as old as Harrington or as young as Marx, the concept of social power may be said to be as old as the Scottish thinkers of the eighteenth century and as young as Tocqueville.”23 But if the public, or “social power,” checked the state, what checked the public? For Hume, history checked the public. All knowledge was experiential knowledge (i.e., history), and history was largely a tapestry of unintended consequences. Beware whiggish reform projects,

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Hume concludes in his History of England: progress should be gradual, “enlargement” rather than revolution. But Tocqueville describes the Americans as shrugging off history and, with it, any check upon public opinion. They recognized no values but wealth or “greed” and no philosophy but that of change itself – in short, of destruction. Moreover, there was no room for disagreement: the United States was characterized by a strange political unanimity around the pursuit of wealth and equality. Democratic public opinion stifled independence of thought and drowned out classic conservative checks upon it both locally, where the state was wholly subservient to opinion, and federally, where the state was becoming ever weaker and more irrelevant. In the United States, “civilization” was whatever white settlers did – namely, egotism, greed, and destruction. It was the “misfortune of Indians” to meet with and fall under the power of “a civilized people, which is also (it may be owned) the greediest nation on the globe.” Tocqueville’s racial reflections (reflecting a certain biological determinism visible in French thought from Montesquieu and Buffon through to Cuvier) are particularly pessimistic: the French assimilated, the stoic Indian refused civilization, and the Métis struggled between those competing internal impulses for and against a civilization that they could neither understand nor master. Tocqueville’s readings of frontier households are massively culturally overdetermined, whether in the “civilization” seen in a white settler cabin or in the cultural decay seen in a Métis cabin. The cabin that he actually describes seems quietly well ordered, as an Indigenous woman, dressed in French peasant style but with loose hair and feet, sits on a mat sewing moccasins and rocking a child “whose copper skin and features proclaimed its double origin.” For Taché, by contrast, New France’s magnificent heritage persisted. Taché saw something remarkable that the professional historians have only recently rediscovered. French-speaking Catholics – Eurowestern, Indigenous, and Métis – persisted and even thrived not only in Lower Canada but also across North America. Everywhere that French immigrants and French Canadians fanned out across the continent (as, indeed, they continued to do through the nineteenth century) they left material legacies in their choices, institutions, and relationships. Historians in recent years writing French Canada into a “Vast Early America” narrative emphasize that persistence from the Maritimes to the west coast and including the area around the Great Lakes. Even in areas of American

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expansion, “Métis” and “Creole” peoples showed no little ingenuity in pursuing political, economic, and social ends that sometimes rested on “lumping” and sometimes “splitting” claims in relation to Indigenous and Eurowestern communities and authorities in their vicinity.24 Robert Englebert and Bronwyn Craig, for example, see “une certaine continuité culturelle créole face à la perturbation géopolitique anglo-américaine” (a certain creole cultural continuity in the face of Anglo-American geopolitical perturbation) accomplished by strategic use of church and courts, brandished under the banner of American liberties.25 Taché saw a vast early French America, the French social fact irrepressibly shaping institutional and political choices, as an inversion of the usual top-down political history. For Taché, persistence wasn’t just a historical fact but also a philosophical one, reflecting a natural experiment visible in the workings of Canadian history. There was some small grain of truth to the supremacist story: Anglo-Saxons were different from everybody else in North America. Hogan’s stereotypical habitant – primitive, polite, unenterprising, and lacking the incentives of liberal property relations – applied in some faint measure to all the non-Anglo-Protestant nations: the French, the Métis, and the “Indian.” But to say this was to make two important points: on the one hand, that those peoples tempered their greed and egotism with salutary social, political, and cultural checks; on the other, that they had a shared interest in imposing comparable restraints on Anglo-Protestants. Together, these different identities and interests could wield a social power to check and inhibit the tyranny of the majority and the state. The best society, according to Taché, balanced material, moral, and intellectual qualities of peoples. Canadian history was a better place to find that balance and learn that lesson than either British or American history. But first you had to make a move that few had made: you had to take Canadian history seriously. If you reasoned from British and American history to Canada, you could be easily fooled into thinking that the essential character of Canada was its growing Anglo-Protestantism. But that was not the right lesson to learn either from Canadian history or, no less relevant, from French history. Taché knew this precisely because he shared Tocqueville’s love of classic French civilization. But he also saw in Canada something new and vigorous, the promise of a separate nationality, more noble and worthy of the vigour of a new nation.26 This was Canada’s historical trajectory, and it would continue as such so long as

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Canadians remained respectful of history. Canada had an admirably pluralist history, an admirably pluralist present, and a conservative attachment to history and authority. All these things added up to a promising, conservative, and pluralist future. Yes, New France had been conquered by the English, but that was not the end of the story. Civilization in New France had been built upon a racial alliance and intermingling: this was both a historical and a philosophical fact. It offered a natural experiment about what people look for in civilization and what follows from that choice. Taché argued that Indigenous peoples were a “proud and intelligent race by nature.” When given a choice between French and English allies, they consistently chose the French.27 What proud and intelligent people would not, given a genuine choice? The English traders were hostile to the Indigenous peoples: they huddled on their eastern seaboard and cultivated a harmful trade in spirits and divisive politics, aiming thereby to “make the race totally disappear.” The French, by contrast, bringing French cultural genius and Catholic devotion, fanned out, “went everywhere,” and pushed knowledge to the centre of the vast continent. French and Indigenous together formed a powerful and consequential historical alliance. There was a natural shared interest in collaboration that was, Taché observed, still noticeable in the west. There, the “French” name and language were a kind of passport that inspired respect, while the “American” was everywhere despised by “des sauvages.”28 French and Indigenous allies built up a great civilization, but they were, Taché conceded, defeated in 1760. Amidst so much good work, material interests were neglected in ways that let the more predatory English colonizers win their wars of conquest, separation, and erasure. The American Revolution severed restraints when it severed historical ties. Anglicans alone understood the right course, and they came to Quebec as Loyalists. They tried to take the land for themselves, but the French nationality and religion implanted there could not be overcome. The habitants proved no less impervious to the lure of the French and American Revolutions, both of which issued special invitations to them. Together French Catholics and Anglican Loyalists maintained stable, British constitutional forms through repeated trials and wars. The northern nation balanced moral, material, and intellectual qualities, while the materialist southern nation spiralled dangerously out of control. True civilization needed all three constituents.

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And, if you looked west, what did you see? Where English expansionists saw, virtually, an empty land, Taché saw land with people living on it. If you tallied these people up, you saw a surprising number that you could reasonably, in a well-crafted census, classify as French or Catholic. Thanks to the fur-trading heritage and missionizing efforts of the Roman Catholic Church, most people were neither English nor Protestant. Taché wrote the figures and the argument directly into the opening pages of his confederation blueprint. There was, in Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc ) territory, a “population indigène” of 300,000 (it’s hard to be sure, he noted with his census-taker’s eye, but his brother, Alexandre Taché, bishop at St Boniface, said there were no more than 300,000, so he used that number), and perhaps twenty thousand either white or mixedrace. There were also another five thousand employees of the hbc along with their families. Among the employees, Taché noted, more than half were French Canadians, and the great majority of those constituting the other part were “sauvages ou métis”: most of that population was Catholic. The twenty thousand colonists were also more than half French Canadian and Métis and were Catholics; about seven thousand were of diverse origins and mostly Protestant. The immense majority of the 300,000 “sauvages” were pagans who believed in a supreme being, a future life, and good and bad spirits. It was impossible to say how many of them were Catholic, but certainly the immense majority of Christians there were Catholic.29 Looking west, thus, Taché saw the makings of a new, Métis civilization. It’s not perfectly clear what Taché meant by “métis.” He used the lower-case word to refer to mixed populations, alongside bois-brulé, for example; he also used the capitalized version alongside “French Canadian” as something that sounded more like a formal people. He used his brother’s headcount, but his brother used the term “métis” to denote cultural rather than biological traits. The younger brother was an Oblate and, in 1844, co-founder of the flourishing mission at Île-à-la-Crosse (in Saskatchewan), where he saw signs of an earlier Haudenosaunee migration that had produced a “métis” population by the 1860s. According to Timothy Foran, for Alexandre the term’s “racial importance was preceded by its religious and linguistic meaning.”30 In the summer of 1857, while JosephCharles Taché was publishing his analysis, Alexandre was making arrangements for residential schools at Île-à-la-Crosse, Lac SainteAnne, and Lac La Biche.31 Understanding Catholicism and speaking

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French as the key constituents of “civilization,” Bishop Taché had a western-based civilization project that paired with his brother’s eastern cultural and political projects. Piety and politics dovetailed: there were always political consequences to being Catholic in the Canadas. It was, after all, the younger brother who demanded and got a more zealous Catholicism from the elder brother with the plea that, given Alexandre’s sacrifice of parents, friends, family, and nation “to save the souls of the poor Indians of Red River,” surely Joseph-Charles could not refuse to occupy himself “seriously and practically” with his own soul.32 Both brothers were prominent cultural brokers and ambitious political networkers; together, they championed an ambitious transcontinental social and political project founded on the complementary strengths of the diverse peoples across British North America. A key element in the project was a predicted FrenchCatholic diaspora. Qua demographer, Joseph-Charles Taché could foresee what a high birth rate and low mortality rate would produce: revenge of the cradles.33 But the best lands in Canada East were densely settled; the next generation must look elsewhere for land. Western Canada seemed, to the Taché brothers, the best destination, and they persuaded many like-minded politicians of this. Henri Bourassa later took it as established fact that George-Étienne Cartier, supported by Macdonald, “undertook to make Manitoba a second Quebec.” The governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company who oversaw the sale of Rupert’s Land in 1869, Sir Stafford Northcote, also believed: “The French are earnestly bent upon the establishment of a French and Catholic power in the North-West to counteract the great preponderance of Ontario.”34 According to Macdonald, so did McDougall, who, his gubernatorial ambitions frustrated by Louis Riel, saw a “plot among the French Canadians of Lower Canada to keep the British immigrant out of the Red River Settlement, and make it a purely French.”35 Macdonald dismissed this as nonsense. Habitants, métis, and missionaries would mediate between eastern and western populations and keep the west French and Catholic. Joseph-Charles Taché learned much from his brother, but he had his own personal experiences with, and sympathies for, Indigenous peoples. In the early years at Rimouski, his biographer observed, Taché lived largely outdoors, like a voyageur, and “s’asseyait dans les Wigwams des Micmacs et des Montagnais” (sat in the wigwams of the Mi’kmaq and the Montagnais). His friends called him “the

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Iroquois.” It’s hard to know exactly how to read this, but it’s clear that Joseph-Charles Taché sought out Montagnais-Maskapi, Innu, and Mi’kmaq companions and admired their customs and stories.36 His own folk tales, written soon after the British North America blueprint, were voyageur-centred romanticized tropes, but they presented Indigenous peoples as indispensable teachers, guides, and business partners to the voyageurs.37 It may be that Taché derived some part of his admiration for democracy from his own, or vicariously from his brother’s, involvement with Indigenous and Métis peoples, and observations of their democratic and consensual (social-power-based) political traditions.38 Taché’s blueprint for British North American confederation sought to extend eastern Canadian civilization westward while still preserving a special place in it for les sauvages on terms of their own choosing. Canada must offer them something more than “civilization,” which they did not want had consistently rejected. Statesmen must abandon the fantasy of making them settlers or labourers. Pure-blood Indians, Taché argued, preferred happiness and contemplation to the constraints and worries that came with comparative wealth. Say what you like, build whatever theories and experiments you like, the experience of three centuries disproved such hopes.39 There must be no state-paid civilizers and no state-paid missionaries. Christianity did offer the best path to gradual civilization, but it must be church-led, not state-led; the state should do no more than protect Indigenous peoples from the feral dregs of “civilization” by providing them with large reserves where they could continue to hunt, to herd, and to trade. Taché well understood the contradictions and corruptions of a state-funded civilizing project and that Catholic missions needed no state sponsorship. Civilization, for Taché, must respect the will of the people. If Canada was not going to wage the kind of war of extermination seen in the United States, then it must woo the people through treaties and alliances. It must “stoop to conquer,” to use John A. Macdonald’s political formula for governing French Canada, a formula voiced both in a private letter in 1856 and again during the Confederation debates. That formula may help to account for Macdonald’s Gradual Civilization Act, 1857, and later enfranchisement acts in 1869 and 1885, respectively. But Macdonald insisted on a property franchise, the property being carved from reserve lands. Taché’s enfranchisement would not have been so predatory. The naturally “proud and

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intelligent” Indigenous peoples of Canada must share the same political and civil rights of other Canadians and be governed, like them, by the usual combination of administration, persuasion, and consent. Under those conditions, they would be natural allies against predatory Anglo-Protestant expansionism, whether emanating from Washington or Toronto. So long as Canada’s western expansion was more civilized than the United States’ western expansion, Indigenous peoples could be counted on to reaffirm their historic choices. In treaty negotiations, if offered reasonable terms, they would prefer Canadianization to Americanization. Authority should not overrule their political agency. So long as Canadian statesmen could keep American invaders and encroachers out of western Canada, ensuring that Indigenous people could continue to exercise their judgment, so long could those statesmen expect that judgment to favour Canada. But Canada would remain an attractive partner only so long as its French and Catholic elements retained their political influence as a check on predatory Anglo-Saxon impulses. Taché’s vision rested on a reading of Canadian history, but it also rested on a cosmopolitan reading of international history that looked at least as much to France as to Rome. The France of Napoleon III, and of the Universal Exposition of 1855, was a thriving, confidently modernizing French nation-state, and Taché could claim that Gallic self-confidence on display as his heritage. Canada won great honours at the Exposition, and Taché was made a knight of the Legion of Honour. Relations between England and France improved, and Canada could be expected to benefit from better trade and capital flows, and increased immigration. I’ve argued that the Exposition made Taché see Canada as a kind of commodity, something to be sold to the wider world, and that a bigger Canada was an easier sell. Wooing more French immigrants to Canada was always a priority for Taché, as his enemies complained, seeing him as working to obstruct non-French immigration.40 It was always about demography for Taché, and always about democracy. That’s another lesson one could learn from Louis Napoleon’s France. Between 1848 and 1851, Napoleon III seized control by promising to restore universal suffrage. According to Gareth Stedman Jones: “Bonaparte’s innovation was to accept popular sovereignty and restore universal suffrage – hitherto the nightmare of all conservatives – but to set them within a strongly conservative and nationalist framework. He appealed over the heads

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of the National Assembly to all classes – to the middle classes as much to the peasantry, requiring order and tranquility, and to the working classes through his restoration of universal suffrage and his vague promise to address the social question. The idea that not only representative government, but also political democracy, could be appropriated for the populist politics of the right was wholly new.”41 We don’t have to accept Stedman Jones’s larger argument – that Marx misread politics as economics – to see a lesson about the viability of democratic conservatism on a French model, one that had no English precedent. Champions of French Canadian political enfranchisement had always rested on a purported intrinsic conservatism. This was Guy Carleton, Lord Dorchester’s argument in the aftermath of the Conquest, and it was also how Charles Buller made the case to Sir Robert Peel in September 1841: “The French Canadians, if rightly managed, are the natural instruments by which the Government could keep in check the democratic and American tendencies of Upper Canada.”42 And that’s how E.P. Taché had framed French Canada in April 1846 in his famous “last cannon-shot” speech: French Canadians were “in our habits, by our laws, by our religion … monarchists and conservatives.”43 Joseph-Charles Taché’s innovation was to argue that democracy and conservatism mutually reinforced one another. Taché’s conservatism wasn’t Hogan’s backwardness. He identified three political styles: the conservative, the emancipator, and the agitator. All three types could be seen in all kinds of political parties and nations. The conservative elements in a society deferred to authority, whether social, religious, political, or some combination of all of three. Thus, for example, the Roman republic was conservative because it was grounded on respect for the authority of the parent and master. But the fabulous stories that the Romans called religion couldn’t adequately repress disorder in either the mind or the heart. That was one cause of their decline; another was the “vast and profound wound” that was slavery.44 By Taché’s logic, “conservative” was a positive rather than a negative descriptor. It was, if less secular, not incompatible with Hume’s arguments for conservative checks on reform. The second type of political style, the emancipator, retained respect for authority and religion but not enough to sacrifice his interests, liberties, or “individualism.” Carthage was too emancipatory, as were the Latin American republics. The third type, the agitator, was the antithesis of authority and made for the worst kind

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of political society. The spirit of agitation was the spirit of complaint and discontent, of overexcited intelligence and ulcerated hearts. Agitators seized their chances at moments of crisis, but they usually didn’t get far because everyone wanted to lead, no one wanted to follow. Examples were socialism, communism, Mormonism, knownothingism, and a slew of other semi-political, semi-religious sects that degraded American public life.45 In Canada, Taché assured his readers, the conservative element predominated, especially in Lower Canada, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. The “liberal conservative” version of this element was closely connected with the established churches: Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Presbyterian. There was, nonetheless, a certain emancipatory element to be found in Canada, in both religious and political circles, nurtured by the proximity of the United States. Happily, there was almost no agitating element whatsoever – only a few fanatical sectarians and free thinkers, connected with the worst elements of France, England (Chartism), and the United States. Where most political commentators saw mutually reinforcing political problems, Taché saw mutually checking ones. Tocqueville regretted the tremendous gap between an unstable and “irresistible” American greed and the Ancien Régime that was lost – lost as much in France as in the United States. Durham read that binary into Canada as a double threat to British constitutionalism and loyalty that continued to resonate with the Anglo-Protestant expansionists two decades later. They felt themselves threatened and inhibited on two fronts by pushing American greed and the drag of an Ancien Régime French-Catholic backwardness. For Taché, it was obvious that these things cancelled one another out. Canada, unlike France or the United States, could have an expansive and stable democracy precisely because its cultural diversity was hardwired. For Taché, being “enterprising” was neither a political virtue nor a political style: it was a social quality, an element in the balance of the moral, the intellectual, and the material. Taché strenuously advocated moral and intellectual checks on unrestrained greed. Modern materialism had its place in world history but no more than its place. Taché was unimpressed by the Anglo-Protestant version of modernity that Tocqueville called civilization. The recent comparative history of Canada and the United States, understood as the interaction of the moral, the intellectual, and the political, as well as the conservative, emancipatory, and agitating elements, was the real

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lesson in modern civilization. This was also obvious in the discussion of “our institutions.” Civilization, Taché explained, to count as civilization, must include taste in arts, perfected disciplinary education, an administrative regime frankly accepted as a social necessity, and the protection of all. This was Taché’s career summarized, but it was also an anti-Tocqueville checklist that repudiated the greed-andchange ethos described in Democracy in America. And yet Taché did not so much reason against that book as reason with the logic of both book and author. Back in France, Tocqueville became a politician, albeit only until the events of 1851 cast him back out of public life. The lesson of Democracy in America, properly understood, was not American anti-statism but French statism. But you had to be a Francophile to notice it. Canada didn’t have much of a state by European standards, Taché admitted, but it had enough for its needs. Canadians didn’t need such a developed state as England or France because Canada had none of the political and religious pestiferous miasmata that emanated from the poverty and proletarianization found there. Canada did have much too much political passion and partisanship, enough to discourage and drive out the sober people of merit and science who, Taché argued, were most needed to fill the upper judiciary and administrative functions of the state. (Taché saw bureaucrats much as Tocqueville saw the aristocracy, as a stabilizing element.) Representative institutions did have their disadvantages as well as their advantages. But constitutional reform, Taché concluded, could remedy the most dangerous of those problems. After “our institutions” came two sections of “our neighbourhood.” This was Taché’s cue for a vehement attack on the United States: its institutions, culture, and history. Impossible not to see in the Americans a tendency to encroachment and conquest, notwithstanding their declarations to the contrary. That lurking spirit of conquest – discernible in peacetime when there were not enough mouths to apostrophize material prosperity – debunked the United States’ history and institutions. Above all, Taché saw a territorial ambition that must drive North and South into war against one another and further propel them northwards into Canada, southwards into Mexico, and westward into a war of destruction against the western Indigenous peoples who rightly despised and fought their oppressors. This was not greatness, it was not liberty, it was not equality: it was mere right of the strongest. Even France, long an

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admirer, now understood that. In page after page of bitter recrimination, Taché denounced the “revolting tyranny” of the Americans in their treatment of Catholics, Blacks, and Indigenous peoples. Honest, patriotic, and knowledgeable Americans did exist but were without influence over the masses, who tolerated only mediocrity and, miseducated, took effrontery for capacity, appearance for reality, charlatanism for knowledge. Nothing worse could happen to Canada than to mix “our interests” with theirs, Taché concluded in the “voisinage” section. Something else was urgently needed and that something was Confederation, the subject of his next section, which moved quickly and dismissively through previous proposals, including that of “mylord Durham,” who turned the public into mere “spectators at a spectacle.”46 Durham misunderstood the poor and humble Canadiens and so failed to understand their strengths. History had proved them right and him wrong. Taché also refuted liberal historians who claimed that the union had saved French Canadian nationality. We were not in peril, he argued: our nationality was still fresh and lively and stronger than ever. The fact that assimilation had been tried and failed was an important lesson, one that made him supremely confident in the historical destiny of his nation. French Canadians had an internal momentum as irresistible as American egalitarianism, largely impervious to the lures and impositions of greed, revolution, or tyranny. Confederation must build upon careful consideration of British, American, and Canadian constitutions to determine what would best suit Canada, Taché argued. No constitution could do its work if the spirit of religious and political authority did not already have a hold on the people. American history proved that patriotism alone couldn’t master the passions of the masses. But Americans had made useful innovations, such as the federal system, that would suit Canada. So would (among other things) an upper house organized to represent region, fixed electoral mandates, the secret ballot, judicial inquiries into electoral violence (the bane of Canadian politics for Taché), and, of course, universal suffrage as a good and useful simplification that better accorded with the principle and dignity of human solidarity.47 Universal suffrage coupled with universal access to state office would together drive out those classes that held themselves above the law. Universal suffrage was also the only possible alternative to liberal rights. Taché understood that rights talk was

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incompatible with the kind of deference to authority that he sought to preserve. That much was clear from the so-called “statolatry” of the sectarians and idolators,48 the socialists and utopians, who saw the emancipatory and agitational uses of the right of contract. Properly managed, universal suffrage posed no such threat to conservative institutions and deference. And that, o my children, is how the Canadian Constitution lost its rights. That’s how we got a constitutional act without any federal rights and only the bare minimum of provincial ones – namely, the rights of the religious minority to separate schools. This is not to say that Taché repudiated liberal rights wholesale. In fact, he drew up a checklist of valuable civil rights, including protections for the self, property, thought, expression, religion, and other recognizably liberal rights. He remarked that civil rights were more valuable than political ones. But he also insisted that liberties and civil rights, far from being “absolute,” must be checked by “the right of a society to protect itself inside and outside” against abuses, crimes, and armed factions, just as the inviolability of property must yield to important and necessary public interests. The argument was self-contradictory, and we may accuse Taché of wanting to eat his cake and have it too. But the gist is clear and meaningful: Taché wanted civil rights in place as a basic condition for political life, but all his definitions of human flourishing were in the realm of the political rather than the legal. Rather than giving any content to that political life, he wanted to define it in terms of minimal conditions of participation. No one would be permitted to block anyone else’s access to power, whether by law, franchise, violence, or factionalism. It is an astute admission that minimal conditions for political participation are always political rather than legal, articulated by someone who thought hard about such matters. Ultimately democracy, not rights, was supposed to be the most important fact about political life in Canada. The one tended intrinsically towards collective social power and deference to authority, the other towards individualism and liberalism. This was political philosophy and also observed history. The European Revolutions of 1848 had seen a violent agitation for rights yield to a widespread conservative backlash as Europe corrected itself in a way that the United States, to Taché, seemed less able to do.49 Canada faced a series of political choices that, without being exactly democratic, were nonetheless either democratizing or undemocratizing, what we might call oligarchizing.

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Taché looked at the more remote consequences of these choices and he unhesitatingly chose democratization. We might paraphrase Curtis and describe this as “feudal constitutionalism.” Taché might beg to differ. First, it was relentlessly political in very modern ways. Universal suffrage put checks on arbitrary power squarely in the political rather than in the legal realm. The division of powers was another political check to either state or democratic tyranny because it would foil appeals to identity politics on the part of agitators and emancipators. Taché observed: “The federal power, thus, will have nothing to do with nationalities, with the particular interests of the provinces, with the diverse elements composing them; all those things fall under exclusive control of local governments, on attributions that the federal government dare not encroach upon, and with which it must not be able to enter into conflict.”50 The framers of the British North America Act evidently agreed with Taché, even as they deleted his accountability mechanism of universal suffrage. Second, to write the federal state out of identity politics was not to write out the state altogether. Taché had just spent a decade busily engaged in one statist improvement project after another and would do even more under the new constitution. Where Tocqueville saw the decay of the federal state in the United States, Taché actively promoted a new, science-based interventionism. His various projects were neither fully state nor fully civil society: they imbricated both those realms. But the primary emphasis was on the state and civil associations working together to produce voluntary self-government, whether in agricultural education or cholera prevention. Professionalized science, religion, and the press all served such orchestrations. The prevention of epidemics, Bruce Curtis notes, required both civic and moral virtues, but it also required an informed citizenry and the circulation of scientific knowledge.51 The community that avoided an epidemic – as Canada did in 1866 – was a community living right in terms of health, education, and morality. Enlightened statesmanship and bureaucratic administration played a useful role in that outcome. Here again, Taché complicated an American binary – state strength and weakness – with an English-French overlay that was more solution than problem. In the United States, the federal state was constitutionally and practically weak (for purposes of protecting wealth, especially slave wealth, from federal taxation). But

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individual states exercised a “police” power not subject to the same checks, and they used that power to drive administrative reform as well as racial and cultural supremacy projects.52 In that binary between a centralized, impotent federal state and an active local administrative state, Taché saw something useful for Canada. It was further reinforced by another binary – namely, “diametrically opposed” English versus French theories of the state. Taché preferred the French model that yoked civilization and the state to the English severing of them. Because the French understood the state as the collective representative of the people, they had bigger expectations of surveillance, protection, and support for projects that individuals could not sustain alone, including much-admired monuments, immense museums, superb libraries, and such durable institutions as the railway networks.53 Doctrinaire liberalism, by contrast, made the English blind to anything but reductive materialism. In fact, around the Atlantic, a new state managerialism was on the rise. Sophia Rosenfeld has recently argued that democratization and knowledge-based policy amplified one another: “Informationdriven improvement schemes typical of enlightened monarchs and early republics morphed in the course of the nineteenth century into formal ‘policy-making’ on topics ranging from trade to crime to labor conditions, that is, new areas of human welfare. As a result, the practice of political decision-making became ever more dependent upon basic truths spelled out by elites in their capacity as ‘experts’ (as they were first termed in Anglophone and French settings in the nineteenth century) and Fachmann (as German speakers called them at the same moment).”54 Taché admitted as much when he preferred English to American bureaucrats. English historians, including Joanna Innes, Arthur Burns, and Boyd Hilton, see a long-term trajectory of improved efficiency that, in the 1850s, particularly concerned the machinery of the state, law, sanitation, housing, industrial relations, conditions of work, psychiatry, and penology.55 (Hilton also sees William Gladstone taking a liberal turn in his budget of 1853, “a budget in which the people’s role was not to be moralized but to impose its own morality on potentially corrupt governments by taking control of the purse strings.”)56 Taché’s binary, however exaggerated, made a powerful argument for federalism in Canada. Taché envisioned a busy provincial state in Quebec doing the sorts of things that made the French state and civilization such magnificent partners. It is obvious from his description

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of political styles and administrative responsibilities that he believed the Union was sacrificing a progressive, interventionist conception of the state in Canada East to doctrinaire liberalism and materialism in Canada West. His casual early list of the types of responsibilities to be left to the provinces was: “education; science and arts; administration of civil justice; encouragements to agriculture; to fisheries; roads and bridges, etc., etc.”57 The emphasis was on self-civilization projects. Taché knew that he was one of the best, most progressive expert-statesmen around, owing nothing to English Canada. Confederation was a means to a more effective and more civilizing state in Quebec, always understanding that the state was only as civilizing as it was democratically accountable. Taché fearlessly took the argument to its ideological heartland: political economy. The properly civilizing state would patronize economic redistribution as well as arts and sciences. “From the economic point of view, the most equal distribution of public wealth, the French system seems superior, because the state always has larger ideas and more generosity than speculative associations always aimed, first, at lucre … The English system is good for creating colossal fortunes – but therein also creating an immense poverty.”58 Secondary effects in France were better armies and navies,59 better administrators, better education, palaces, public works, professors teaching pure science, and the preservation and augmentation of artistic riches. From Taché’s perspective, the whole “backwards French Canadians” trope rested on English-Canadian obstructionism and ignorance. Les Anglais were so wedded to their individualism and materialism that they couldn’t even see civilization – necessarily a collective moral and intellectual purpose – under their very noses. The irony! The federal state would be weak, as Tocqueville’s American federal state was weak because it was restrained by democracy and liberal political economy. It would be the branch of government mandated to govern the economy, to grow and govern commerce.60 Precisely for this reason, propertied interests would conspire to check it, just as they did in the United States. Meanwhile, identity interests, amplified locally, would be free to pursue intervention and redistribution. Identity and interest would dovetail in ways that the federal government could not obstruct but that it must, nonetheless, subsidize. Where Brown advocated confederation in part to check a supposed fiscal transfer from English to French, Taché foresaw that federal subsidies would continue. The government devoted to the pursuit of wealth and power

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would underwrite local civilization projects. Because civilization was collective and liberalism was individualizing, because liberalism was particularly suited to economic interests, rights talk was more a threat than a bulwark to provincial projects. American local governments exempted themselves and so must their Canadian counterparts. That was obvious when you took the Roman Catholic Church’s perspective. The Church predated liberal rights talk and would outlive it. And, on my reading, that would be Taché’s third objection to the “feudal constitutionalism” argument. The Church was not feudal except when feudalism was modern. When something else was modern, so was the Church. Throughout, the Church would remain as young and vigorous as ever. “Full of life and youthful vigour” was a phrase used by Leopold Ranke in a recent history of the papacy, a phrase that seems closer to Taché’s description of Canada as a new and vigorous nation than to Tocqueville’s “remnant of an old race.” Taché believed that the Roman Catholic Church could trounce liberal constitutionalism in a fair fight. The Canadian natural experiment was being everywhere repeated as Catholic communicants multiplied, their numbers reaching an astounding 150 million. Both numbers and vigour were noted by the historian-statesman T.B. Macaulay in an 1840 review of Ranke. He quoted Ranke’s argument that the Roman Catholic Church “saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.” (Gustave Doré immortalized this scene in an engraving in 1869.) Macaulay concurred, noting that the Church’s power was “now greater far than it was when the Encyclopaedia and the Philosophical Dictionary appeared.”61 Again, in Napoleon III’s France, “the political and cultural climate was favourable for a Catholic reconquista,” the foundations of which had been laid by H.F.R. Lamennais’s clerical liberalism during the July Monarchy.62 The Church was Taché’s trump card. It was a better civilizing power than any constitution. It accounted for the cultural and

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political organization of the French Canadian people as well as their demographic rebound, and it bespoke a future as well as a past of king-making from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Led by exceptionally able prelates, including Ignace Bourget in Montreal and ElzéarAlexandre Taschereau in Quebec City, it was modelling its own version of a busy, administrative state-within-a-state, with impressive powers of social engagement, accomplished by a small army of personnel and volunteers.63 Catholics were at the forefront of a new associational life, including such institutions as the Institut canadien de Québec, where Taschereau and Taché crossed paths with Francois-Xavier Garneau and other intellectuals.64 State and Church would cooperate and mutually reinforce one another, their partnership entrenched in the constitutional protections for separate schools that ensured Catholic institutions.65 From within the federal civil service, Taché would carefully negotiate the fit, for example enlisting a Rimouski curé to help him with statistics. But the success of the elder Taché was not matched by the younger in Manitoba, and probably served to undermine it. The Taché brothers built the foundations for a French-Métis western expansion that never occurred. French Canadians did leave Quebec to seek a livelihood in huge numbers, but they went south to American mill towns rather than west. There were many reasons for this choice. Many clerics and pundits distrusted western emigration and urged the colonization of northern Quebec instead. Many French Canadians preferred to sojourn and dreamed of returning home. As well, the first and second Riel uprisings generated an anti-French rhetoric in Ontario that made Quebec seem uniquely safe for French Canadians. In later years, a deeply disappointed Alexandre Taché blamed Quebec’s indifference to the west for the failure.66 Without that French Canadian westward diaspora, the Métis and Indigenous people could not hold their own against the influx of non-French settlers. But Taché’s portrayal of a great French and Indigenous civilization, cemented by the Métis, hid many internal tensions. The Métis in the new province of Manitoba found themselves repeatedly at political odds with Bishop Taché when, for example, he favoured Quebec immigration against their own best interests. They were also expanding further west as the buffalo migration patterns changed and were developing a summer buffalo hunt that included cows and that lost much meat to heat spoilage, to feed the pemmican trade, and that had already begun

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to affect buffalo migrations (and possibly their numbers) by the 1840s. Migratory herds across present-day Manitoba and northern Saskatchewan were moving downriver into Saskatchewan and taking Cree, Assiniboine, Ojibwa, and Métis with them, the latter unable to return to Red River in winter but beginning to winter near the herds. By the 1850s, American traders were also joining the competition with their own carts and winter huts, and communities were experiencing serious food scarcity. The competition and scarcities drove political and ethnic tensions on the plains, but they also underwrote large-scale alliances, according to George Colpitts: “In the parkland areas, the warfare in bison territories necessitated that headmen of extraordinary personal qualities, talent, and perceived spiritual power step forward to gather otherwise autonomous bands onto a concerted war footing, or, by the 1860s, to coordinate multiethnic bison hunting into distant and dangerous territories” that would persist as a source of strength in treaty negotiations with the Canadian state in the 1870s.67 Back in Canada, western and eastern francophone and Catholic voices reinforced one another to achieve gains, but they could not stop Macdonald from privileging Ontario’s version of western expansion. The Taché brothers had voice enough to advance their vision but not influence enough to force it on John A. Macdonald. They were sympathetic and influential brokers in their own way, but that was never going to be enough. Indigenous and Métis people lacked civil and political rights as well as political accountability in Macdonaldian Canada. Instead of being given a vote they were, on the motion of Oliver Mowat, made wards of the federal state, while enfranchisement was determined provincially.68 When Indigenous would-be voters from Garden River attended the polls at Algoma in 1867, a returning officer declined to register them without evidence of real property, such as a location ticket.69 Those decisions ensured that the future Dominion would reflect not the Taché, but the Toronto-centric vision. The consequences were catastrophic for Indigenous peoples. As wards of the federal state, they were wholly at the mercy of greedy expansionists in Ottawa. But the slow civilization project that both brothers pursued, intended to protect Indigenous peoples while proselytizing to them and settling French Catholics on their traditional homelands, was never going to work. Protection was incompatible with expansion, and the governance of expansion lay in Ottawa.

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There’s a shadow almost-history of Canada that Max Hamon describes as “a Canada that never was,” a Canada that embraced métissage.70 Hamon argues that Louis Riel never fell into Tocqueville’s depiction of a Métis people trapped between white and Indigenous heritages. Born amidst and shaped by Indigenous and Métis family and kinship relations, educated in Montreal at the most prominent French Canadian school, the Sulpician seminary, Riel was not trapped and limited but richly enabled by his complex and diverse identity. He saw himself as an heir of different, parallel, and ultimately dovetailing models of civilization, uniquely able to translate them into one another and thereby lend leadership and consilience to them both. It was uniquely his own political and cultural vision, but it was also a product of his relationship with Alexandre Taché, even as it repudiated the political conservatism of both Alexandre and Joseph-Charles. But it is important to note that Joseph-Charles Taché wrote the dream of a Canada that embraced métissage into his prototype for the Canadian Constitution. He advocated a democratic, plural Canada, one that strengthened and respected the Indigenous, Métis, French, and English peoples of Canada. He argued for universal suffrage and was unusually sensitive to the threat that liberal individualism and rights posed to existing customs and institutions. He saw an opportunity for political alliances that could balance the moral and the material and check supremacy projects. It was an impressive attempt. But the crux of that alliance, for Taché, must be the Roman Catholic Church. Nothing else could rein in dangerous ambitions and passions. Only the Church could bring into play the powerful and humble cultural and political brokers needed to ally east and west, French and English, Eurowestern and Indigenous, past and future. Whether or not he saw himself making a choice, still, he made the choice to marginalize Indigenous peoples within a settler colonial project. The Bible and the plough would be tyrannically imposed upon them by the federal state. Taché doesn’t rank alongside Tocqueville as a political theorist, but the comparison isn’t wholly negative. Tocqueville lamented that civilization – the state, history, and the civilizing power of public opinion – were all being destroyed by an insatiable, uncheckable greed. Taché underestimated his ability to check that greed. But his optimism was both naïve and realistic, both a failure and a success. Only if we argue that hatred and plunder can be practically checked can we actually check them. I’m reminded of the review by Michael

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Ignatieff of Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger: yes, modernity produced “an existential resentment of other people’s being,” but it also produced some useful improvements to life, health, and politics.71 Taché anted up. He recognized that American ambitions threatened a status quo that needed reforming anyway. Absent that threat, he might have recommended something very different. As it was, he made an impressive argument for greater democratization and accountability that deserves attention in any broader history of democracy in Canada. no t e s

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My sincere thanks for helpful advice to Max Hamon, Bruce Curtis, the other participants in the workshop, and especially Jennifer Tunnicliffe and Julien Mauduit. Ajzenstat, Political Thought of Lord Durham. André Siegfried, also so described, is even less credible, for reasons discussed in Heaman, Tax. Bonenfant, French Canadians, 3. Curtis, Politics of Population; and Silver, French-Canadian Idea. Ducharme, “Taché et son projet de confédération.” Smith, “Ideological Origins”; and Russell, Constitutional Odyssey. Tobias, “Protection, Civilization.” Rehill, “Canadian Cultural Intersections,” 530. Bossé, Taché, 142. Wise, “Conservatism and Political Development,” 198. Gwyn, John A. Curtis, “Taché et la science de l’inventaire social.” Neill, Canadian Economic Thought. Taché, Esquisse sur le Canada. Hogan, Canada, 26–9. Owram, Promise of Eden, 45. Careless, Brown. Parliamentary Debates on the Subject of the Confederation of the British North American Provinces (Toronto: Hunter, Rose, 1865), 104. Careless, Brown, notes that the word was ubiquitous in Brown’s journalism. Borealia Blog, “Confederation and Political Reason,” 28 June 2017, https://earlycanadianhistory.ca/2017/06/28/confederation-andpolitical-reason/. Franklin’s much reprinted essay in 1750 observed the rate of increase; in 1754 he warned that the French might get there first; in 1759 he reiterated

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these points in regard to keeping France out of Canada in the postwar settlement. See Hodgson, “Franklin.” “Les quatre cent mille Français du Bas-Canada forment aujourd’hui comme les débris d’un peuple ancien perdu au milieu des flots d’une nation nouvelle. Autour d’eux la population étrangère grandit sans cesse; elle s’étend de tous côtés ; elle pénètre jusque dans les rangs des anciens maîtres du sol, domine dans leurs villes et dénature leur langue. Cette population est identique à celle des États-Unis,” in Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Mansfield and Winthrop), 392. See also Bergeron, Tocqueville et Siegfried. “Je suis persuadé, au contraire, que dans ce cas la force collective des citoyens sera toujours plus puissante pour produire le bien-être social que l’autorité du gouvernement.” Translation taken from Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Mansfield and Winthrop), 86. Wolin, Tocqueville, 458, 262. Wulf, “Vast Early America”; Teasdale, Fruits of Perseverance; Barman, French Canadians; and Marrero, Detroit’s Hidden Channels. Englebert and Craig, “Conquête, liberté et adaptation,” 49 and passim. “Il nous semble, en effet, que cette idée de constituer pour nous une nationalité à part, avec des lois à elle, des institutions séparées, une organisation distincte, une existence à soi en un mot, est une idée beaucoup plus large, beaucoup plus noble, plus digne de la vigueur d’une jeune nation” (Taché, Des provinces, 132). “Cette différence dans le génie et le caractère des deux populations … avait frappé d’abord les sauvages, race fière et intelligente par nature, aussi ont-ils toujours préféré les français…” (Taché, Des provinces, 91). Taché, Des provinces, 91. Ibid., 32–3. Foran, Defining Métis, 9–10. Ibid., 67. Bossé, Taché, 49. Fournier, “Revanche des berceaux.” Creighton, “Confederation and the Canadian West.” Macdonald to Rose, 21 January 1870, in Pope, Correspondence, 121–2; observation of Henri Bourassa, quoted in: Kennedy, Liberal Nationalisms, 153 (writing in 1916). Bossé, Taché, 36. Rehill, “Canadian Cultural Intersections.” Paine, “Hunters Who Owned Themselves”; and Heaman, Short History. Taché, Des provinces, 225.

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40 William Dixon to J.C. Taché, 17 September 1868, with enclosure, London Standard, 16 September 1868, Library and Archives Canada rg 17, vol. 24, 2,117. See Heaman, Inglorious Arts. 41 Stedman-Jones, Karl Marx, 337. 42 Monet, Last Cannon Shot, 90. 43 Ibid., 3. 44 Taché, Des provinces, 84. 45 Ibid., 85. 46 Ibid., 135. 47 “L’admission du suffrage universel comme s’accordant mieux avec la dignité et le principe de la solidarité humaine et comme moyen de bonne et utile simplification” (Taché, Des provinces, 173). 48 Ibid., 178. 49 On 1848, Christopher Clark, “Why Should We Think about the Revolutions of 1848 Now?,” London Review of Books, 4 April 2019. 50 “C’est ainsi que le pouvoir fédéral n’aurait rien à faire avec les nationalités, avec les intérêts particuliers des provinces, avec les divers éléments qui composent les populations; toutes ces choses tombant sous le contrôle exclusif des gouvernements locaux, sur les attributions desquels le pouvoir fédéral ne pourrait empiéter et avec lesquels il ne doit point pouvoir entrer en conflits” (Taché, Des provinces, 182). 51 Curtis, “Morale miasmatique.” 52 This is the argument of Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion. See also Einhorn, American Taxation. 53 “C’est la mise en pratique de ce système qui a créé les monuments qu’on admire dans le monde; qui a fondé ces immenses muses, ces superbes bibliothèques; établie ces institutions durables” (Taché, Des provinces, 212). 54 Rosenfeld, Democracy and Truth, 64. 55 Hilton, Age of Atonement, 268; Innes and Burns, “Introduction,” 5; and Innes, Inferior Politics. 56 Hilton, Age of Atonement, 341. 57 Taché, Des provinces, 211, 206. 58 Ibid., 213. 59 Taché’s admiration of the French army would seem misplaced after 1870 but was characteristic of the 1850s. See Crossland, “Fearing for Merseyside.” 60 Smith, “Ideological Origins.” 61 Macaulay’s review was published in the Edinburgh Review in 1840 and reprinted in T.B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays: Contributed to the Edinburgh Review (London, 1850), 535–56.

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62 Den Boer, “Historical Writing,” 193; Ruggerio, History of European Liberalism, 174. 63 Perin, Ignace de Montréal; Young, Patrician Families. 64 Young, Patrician Families, 276. See also Lamonde, Social History of Ideas. 65 Fecteau, Liberté du pauvre. 66 Painchaud, “French-Canadian Historiography”; and Huel, Archbishop Taché. 67 Colpitts, Pemmican Empire, 191, 216, 264. 68 Martel et al., “Quebec and Confederation,” 92. 69 Kirkby, “Reconstituting Canada,” 503. 70 Hamon, Audacity of His Enterprise. 71 Ignatieff, “Which Way.”

7 A Tendency towards Mobocracy? The Democratic Realities of Nineteenth-Century British North America Colin Grittner

In the Politics, Aristotle outlined what would become his three classical forms of rule. The best rule of one over the many he called monarchy; the best rule of the few over the many he called aristocracy; and the best rule of the many over the many he called politeia. This latter form combined the rule of the few and the many and has been translated variously as polity, constitutional government, or “the regime called regime.”1 Aristotle also recognized the potential perversion of these forms. Monarchies could devolve into tyrannies, and aristocracies into selfish oligarchies, when rulers neglected the common good. For the corruption of politeia, however, Aristotle reserved a different term: democracy (dêmokratia). Whereas politeia represented perfected government by the many, democracies reflected distortions that worked strictly in the majority’s interest and, in the most extreme cases, empowered demagogues to rule by decree and extinguish minority rights.2 Although Aristotle viewed democracies as preferable to tyrannies or oligarchies, they nonetheless offered flawed political organization and thereby obstructed the virtuous life necessary for human happiness.3 British North America, like much of the Atlantic world, continued to grapple with these negative understandings of democracy well into the nineteenth century. Despite a new celebratory language that emerged in the United States in the 1790s, most people across the Atlantic world continued to associate democratic rule with majoritarianism, demagoguery, and the failure of ancient republics.4 Even

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by the mid-nineteenth century, as historians Joanna Innes and Mark Philp note, the term “democracy” still encompassed “insurrectionary movements … and crowd phenomena, as much as it did any particular institutional setup.”5 Such wariness remained particularly strong within Great Britain and its empire. Britons had connected American and French revolutionary violence, Napoleonic despotism, and Irish insurgency with the growth of democratic experiments.6 Although Britons recognized within their Constitution the democratic elements crucial to participatory government – a recognition in place since the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 – these global events reinforced the belief that such elements required a strong counterbalance to avoid tyranny of the majority.7 British North America’s inheritance of British constitutional traditions embedded these British conceptions of democracy within colonial structures of power. Although Anglo-American histories of democracy rarely mention British North America – something Maxime Dagenais has recently pointed out – the imperial connection had conveyed democracy’s “negative baggage” throughout the Empire and across the Atlantic.8 British North America’s close proximity to the United States, moreover, helped to reinforce these misgivings. Loyalist traditions still associated democracy with upheaval and mob rule, as S.F. Wise argues, and colonists had confronted American democracy directly during the War of 1812.9 Yet, by the 1830s, this proximity also brought with it something else: close contact with American celebrations of democracy, which Americans increasingly associated with the republican principle of popular sovereignty.10 Although constitutionalist forces ensured republican rule would never take hold in British North America, questions as to the appropriate extent of this popular sovereignty would nonetheless take root and grow into the 1840s.11 British North America’s transition to responsible government during the 1840s and 1850s polarized these democratic debates further as legislative power became concentrated within the people’s assemblies. Subsequent expansions to the electoral franchise would, moreover, shift the colonies closer to white manhood suffrage. While democracy’s advocates viewed these changes as legitimating inevitable rule by the people, its detractors worried that British North America had begun its slide into the corrupted form of rule presaged by Aristotle. These latter British North Americans, coming from different political backgrounds, would increasingly direct their

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legislative efforts towards stemming the democratic tide. This chapter argues that, in doing so, these detractors eventually conceived of three possible solutions to what they considered British North America’s growing democratic surplus. The first solution centred on the limitation of popular participation in government by restricting electoral privileges. By rejecting or suspending extensions to the electoral franchise, formal political power might remain concentrated among the colonies’ propertied classes and thereby out of reach of many of the people. The second solution sought the compartmentalization of democracy within the people’s assemblies by strengthening colonial Legislative Councils. By making the upper houses elected rather than appointed, and by placing higher qualifications on electors or candidates, these legislative bodies might gain the legitimacy and strength necessary to counter the people’s will as represented by the Legislative Assemblies. The third solution took elements from these first two responses but looked towards a weightier sphere of government that superseded that of the provinces. By creating a new national level of government that curtailed democracy federally, the dangers of democratization might be isolated provincially and quarantined from the common good. After much debate and experimentation, British North Americans ultimately arrived at the last of these solutions – Confederation – as their attempted bulwark against the risks of majority rule.

p r e l u d e : o l ig a rc h y and responsi ble g ov e r n m ent British North America’s colonial constitutions, as based on the British mixed constitution, took Aristotle’s politeia as a source of inspiration.12 By combining the one, the few, and the many, and by giving each its own representation within Parliament, all interests within British society would theoretically receive a co-equal voice in the country’s direction. Within this idealized system – one in which the Crown, Lords, and Commons all had the power to limit offensive legislation – no one group could govern in its own interests to the detriment of another. The many could not dominate the few, and the few could not dominate the many. Problems could only arise if the mixed constitution lost this balance that secured the common good. In the case of British North America, as Angela Tozer (chapter 3, this volume) discusses, widespread Indigenous dispossession and

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settlers’ easy access to Indigenous land ensured little opportunity to achieve this idealized balance in the first place. British North America, unlike Great Britain, never had a landed aristocracy of its own. It thus never had a nobility that might sit by birth between the Crown and Commons as an equivalent to the House of Lords. While the British North American legislatures all contained upper houses, it fell to colonial governors (as representatives of the Crown) to select from the people those who might serve as so-called legislative councillors. Formally, these councillors – as drawn primarily from the colonies’ wealthiest inhabitants – had the task of preventing democratic excess and checking legislation that did not sustain British interests. A select few usually held the government’s executive positions as well, thereby controlling the direction of government and how it spent its money.13 With so much power concentrated within these councils, councillors soon began to exploit their elevated positions not only to sustain elite interests but also to achieve their own personal interests. As they resisted calls for wider civic participation, they also worked to further enrich themselves and to elevate the statuses of their frequently interrelated families. As a result, by the 1820s, many British North Americans had begun to see their upper branches of government as oligarchic. Across the various colonies, these perceived oligarchies received a variety of names: the Family Compact in Upper Canada and Prince Edward Island, the Château Clique in Lower Canada, and the Council of Twelve in Nova Scotia.14 By the 1830s, those who viewed their Legislative Councils as oligarchic pressed for increasingly extreme responses. At perhaps the most basic level, these reformers demanded a separation of executive powers from the colonial upper houses. Independent executives would, at the very least, reformulate the Legislative Councils as nominally co-equal bodies to the Legislative Assemblies. Yet, to secure the people’s interests, most British North American reformers wanted to move well beyond a mere separation of powers. Some pursued what they called “responsible government,” which took a variety of forms but generally sought executive accountability to the people’s elected representatives.15 Others championed republican government, which would have placed sovereignty directly into the people’s hands.16 To varying degrees both of these groups also wanted to make their Legislative Councils elected in order to break

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their colonial oligarchies. While those who favoured responsible government tended to view the elective principle as an alternative to executive responsibility, those who championed republicanism presented it as an essential element to their preferred project of rule.17 Once these latter republicans recognized that Great Britain would not acquiesce to their sweeping demands, they took up arms against the colonial state in 1837 and 1838.18 In the aftermath to the Canadian Rebellions, British officials concluded that British North American governance could no longer go on as before. Lord Durham, in his Report on the Affairs of British North America, suggested a number of democratizing reforms to soothe political tensions and to prevent future crises. These reforms included removing executive powers from appointed bodies and replacing them with advisers who “possess[ed] the confidence of the existing Assembly.” Such a change, Durham predicted, “would induce responsibility to every act of the Government.”19 Although each of the British North American colonies would reformulate their Executive Councils by 1840, it would take longer for the introduction of what we now recognize as responsible government. Beginning with Nova Scotia and the Province of Canada in 1848, then Prince Edward Island in 1851, and finally New Brunswick in the mid-1850s, executive power became fully accountable to the colonial lower houses.20 In principle, the governor would now follow the will of the premier and his cabinet, and the premier and his cabinet would adhere to the decisions of the people’s assemblies. As a result, the Colonial Office in London could no longer suppress local legislation, and colonial governors could no longer interfere with legislation they disliked. The colonial premiers, moreover, now instructed governors directly as to appointments to the Legislative and Executive Councils. Instead of the governors’ trusted favourites, newly minted councillors now sat as the favourites of the political leaders who selected them. As reform appointees took their seats in the Legislative Councils especially, these upper houses became increasingly amenable to further reforms themselves. Responsible government had thus fundamentally altered the balance of power in British North America. The rule of the many, through their elected representatives, had effectively supplanted the narrow rule of the few, as selected by the governors. The door was now open to the further democratization of British North America, should the people so desire.

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t h e f irs t r e s p o n se: li mi ti ng e l e c to r a l p r i vi leges The far-reaching constitutional changes of the late 1840s and early 1850s led to growing worries among British North American reformers and conservatives alike. The general shape of these concerns depended upon one’s stance towards responsible government in the first place. While reformers of all stripes had eventually agreed on the necessity of the responsible system, they fundamentally disagreed as to how they should use their new legislative powers. Many of British North America’s leading reformers, and especially those who had fought for responsible government during the 1830s and 1840s, were, fundamentally, moderates at heart. As historian Michael S. Cross argues, they represented an “element that prepared to countenance change, but not rapid change; that accepted a wider measure of popular participation in governance, but not democracy; that recognized the future was speeding down on them, but wished to preserve the best of a gentry past.”21 In adopting this position, reformers like Robert Baldwin and George Brown in Canada West, Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine in Canada East, and Joseph Howe in Nova Scotia channelled the whiggish sensibilities of Edmund Burke, who, a half-century earlier, warned that constitutional reform should always “proceed by insensible degrees.” Only through gradual and cautious amendment might the nation derive “all the benefits which may be in change, without any of the inconveniences of mutation.”22 For these reformers, the responsible system had offered a way to root out Tory favouritism and undercut oligarchic rule. Instead of a means to a greater democratic end, they viewed responsible government as something of an end in itself. More radical reformers found this restrained approach increasingly exasperating.23 Unlike their moderate allies, they saw the responsible system as a means to secure further democratic reforms that ended legal impediments to popular political participation.24 Inspired not only by Jeffersonian republicanism and Jacksonian populism but also by British Chartism, Irish nationalism, and French Jacobinism, these radicals pressed new reform governments to use their newly acquired powers to extend voting rights far wider than ever before.25 As a result, a spate of electoral franchise reforms swept across the colonies shortly following responsible government. Whereas property-based franchises had held sway in British

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North America since the eighteenth century – all based on the English forty-shilling freehold franchise and all formerly protected by the colonial ruling elite – radical reformers moved quickly to expand electoral privileges well beyond those of freeholders. In the more land-rich provinces of the Province of Canada and New Brunswick, this legislative push resulted in extensions of the franchise to £5 leaseholders and £100 wage-earners, respectively.26 In Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, where arable land proved more difficult to own, radicals pushed their franchises away from property qualifications altogether. Nova Scotia implemented a male taxpayers’ franchise in 1851, followed by what legislators called manhood suffrage in 1854.27 Prince Edward Island opted instead for a statute labour franchise in 1853. Because all Island men had to perform statute labour anyway, this reform nominally approached manhood suffrage as well.28 As these radical reformers pressed ever closer to a manhood suffrage regardless of economic background, they also endorsed new restrictions within franchise laws to further empower white male settlers. Early British North American franchise legislation had never made distinctions on the bases of gender and race in the same way it did on the basis of religion, disenfranchising primarily Roman Catholics.29 Many property-holding women, alongside some First Nations men, had taken advantage of these statutes to cast votes in early elections.30 To help rationalize the enfranchisement of poorer white men, radical reformers increasingly highlighted the perceived political incapacities of women and racialized peoples and targeted them as comparably unfit for electoral participation. Louis-Joseph Papineau, for instance, had juxtaposed republican understandings of masculine independence with women’s subordination and fragility when he pursued women’s disenfranchisement in Lower Canada in 1834.31 Such a position mirrored American precedents of the 1820s, whereby American states began to combine white manhood suffrage, women’s disenfranchisement, and racial disqualifications within their state constitutions.32 In effect, these republican legislators used women and racialized groups as political foils. By attacking inhabitants’ political faculties on the bases of gender and race, and not on the basis of property, they sought to further emphasize the political autonomy of all white men as potential patriarchs, whether they owned real property or not. While British North American radicals of the 1840s and 1850s rarely any longer identified as republicans, their pursuit of an

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expanded franchise led them down similar paths. Women suffered first in this regard, finding themselves statutorily disenfranchised across every British North American colony by 1851.33 In a particularly revealing comment – and one that elicited laughter from legislators – Nova Scotian Irish nationalist Laurence O’Connor Doyle insinuated that women were more likely to vote for the most handsome or generous candidate than for the most qualified one. This inability of women to select appropriate legislators, according to Doyle, contrasted with the supposed diligence of workingmen to select their own representation.34 Such perceptions of incapacity and deservedness also led to new racialized disqualifications, targeting Indigenous peoples specifically. On Prince Edward Island, questions surrounding First Nations obligations towards taxation and statute labour led to new forms of electoral exclusion following 1853.35 In Nova Scotia, legislators compared the public contributions of white settlers to the supposed itinerancy and poverty of Indigenous peoples to further enfranchise the former and to disenfranchise the latter in 1854.36 This sort of legislative contrast echoed Nova Scotians’ use of Black freeholders’ racialized poverty to defend enfranchising white ratepayers three years earlier, whether or not they held landed property of their own.37 In all these cases, radical reformers used the supposed shortcomings of gendered and racialized groups to buttress the political capacities of white male settlers no matter their economic conditions. For moderates like Baldwin, Brown, La Fontaine, and Howe, however, these moves towards white manhood suffrage called forth the spectre of an unrestrained “pure Democracy.”38 Countries that had foolishly taken that path – namely, France and the United States – afforded “the strongest possible testimony to the danger of that movement.” “In France,” as Brown’s Toronto Globe explained, “Universal Suffrage chose a chamber which … destroyed the liberty of the press, and then attacked the electors from whom their own existence was derived.” “In the neighbouring Republic” – that is, the United States – “we need not say what unchecked democracy has done, for the cries of the enslaved and unrequited labourer are for ever reaching the most distant parts of the earth.” To avoid these perils of “mobocracy,” moderate reformers strove to maintain restrictions on formal electoral participation.39 In the Province of Canada, for instance, Baldwin and La Fontaine had done their utmost to resist substantive extensions of the franchise in the first years following

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responsible government. In doing so, they adhered to the more conventional position that anything beyond the forty-shilling freehold would politically empower those who lacked tangible connections to the common good.40 Yet, in the heady days following responsible government, when unabashedly democratic parties like the Clear Grits grew in prominence, such a position became increasingly difficult to defend. By the end of 1851, the pace of reform had already outstripped Baldwin and La Fontaine and the duo had stepped down from office. In the aftermath of these resignations, George Brown took the lead in resisting democracy within the Canadian Reform Party. As Elsbeth Heaman notes, Brown would continue to view property ownership as central to formal civic participation across the Province of Canada.41 While responsible government may have opened the possibility of expansive franchise reform, Brown persisted in challenging such “loose and revolutionary sentiments” as constitutionally dangerous.42 Although the Clear Grits managed to compel the enfranchisement of leaseholders in 1853, Brown ultimately sided with John A. Macdonald to ensure that the democratization of Canadian politics went no further. Once Brown took control of the Grits in 1857, he reorganized the party’s platform away from universal household suffrage and back towards the representation of property.43 Through these efforts, the Canadas’ political parties had ensured for the time being that the “owners of property” need not give way “before ragged and penniless demagogues.”44 In Nova Scotia, Joseph Howe held similar views regarding democracy. Although Howe may have led Nova Scotia’s charge for responsible government in the 1830s and 1840s, he had always believed “anyone worth his salt could easily acquire a 40-shilling freehold in Nova Scotia.”45 Much like Baldwin, La Fontaine, and Brown, he thus resisted any further use of the responsible system to allow for greater popular participation in government.46 In fact, Howe had made his sentiments so clear that his more radical colleagues refused to act upon democratic reforms while Howe sat in the legislature.47 Fortunately for these associates, Howe would travel to London in November 1850 to secure a railway loan. He would not return until the following April, after the legislature had recessed for the summer.48 Without Howe’s presence to “keep the discordant elements of the party in line,” Howe’s radical colleagues jumped at the opportunity to establish a ratepayers’ franchise for future

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provincial elections.49 This qualification, based upon the payment of county and poor rates, would more than double the existing provincial electorate created by the forty-shilling freehold.50 Because of the province’s inability to manage taxation, the ratepayers’ franchise failed during 1851 general election. Colonists from all backgrounds immediately demanded the legislation’s replacement. In response, Nova Scotia would implement something even more inclusive in 1854: a new form of white manhood suffrage. Howe disliked the manhood suffrage legislation of 1854 just as much as the ratepayers’ franchise of 1851.51 Yet, with both reformers and conservatives supporting the change, Howe was in no position to press his objections. By 1860, however, Howe had become both Liberal leader and provincial premier. With the levers of political power firmly in his grasp, Howe made his move in 1863 to curtail democracy by striking at the province’s manhood suffrage law. The way Howe saw it, manhood suffrage “ha[d] been tested in the unfailing crucible of experience, and by experience ha[d] it been condemned.” With the United States in the midst of its Civil War – a war that Howe blamed on democracy itself – Nova Scotia had to ensure that only “sterling men of the country” received votes on election day. Manhood suffrage had apparently done the opposite. It had instead given “the refuse of society” – those who were “too dissipated, too idle, too thriftless to acquire property” – “an undue amount of political power” through sheer weight of numbers. These men without property, according to Howe, had amply demonstrated that Nova Scotia had pushed its democratic institutions too far. Many of them had voted for unfit candidates, such as convicted felons who had “been three times in Rock Head Prison.” A great many more had apparently sold their votes to the highest bidder, “trading away their independence for lucre.” To save Nova Scotia from these “evils of universal suffrage,” Howe saw no other course than “to purge our constitution” and confer a “more extended power … on the property holders of the country.”52 Howe ensured the Franchise Act, 1863, would do these very things. Using updated tax rolls to determine possession, the law stipulated that only Nova Scotian men assessed for $150 worth of real estate, or a combined $300 worth of real and personal estate, would qualify to vote at future provincial elections.53 Contemporaries estimated that the new act would reduce Nova Scotia’s electorate by at least one-quarter and as much as one-half.54 No British North American

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province had witnessed, let alone attempted, a disqualification of this size before. Although Howe had taken a principled stance against democracy, those whom he looked to purge ultimately had the last word. A defection within the Legislative Council resulted in a crucial amendment: Nova Scotia’s new franchise would come into effect only after the next provincial election of May 1863.55 All those men disenfranchised by the Election Act – men Howe characterized as “void of … education[,] public spirit, or intelligence” – retained the right to air their grievances at the coming contest. The election resulted in the most lopsided defeat in Nova Scotia to date.56 Despite the results, Howe remained unrepentant. Although he and his party lost their positions, the new Franchise Act remained in place. It had taken twelve years, but Howe had bought his province back from universal suffrage.57 On the eve of Confederation, Nova Scotia’s “progress of democracy, or rather the tendency towards mobocracy,” had found itself curtailed.58

t h e s e c o n d res ponse: e l e c t iv e l e g is l ati ve counci ls British North American conservatives, like moderate reformers, similarly worried about the threat of democracy in the era of responsible government. Unlike their reform rivals, they viewed this threat as inherent to the responsible system itself. For most British North American conservatives, responsible government had swung the pendulum too far: instead of creating constitutional balance, it had simply replaced one imperfect form of government with another. Rather than colonial oligarchies, one now witnessed the incubation of majority rule. The Rebellion Losses crisis previewed for conservatives what might continue to happen when the people, through their representatives, held too much legislative power unchecked. In 1849, the year following the installation of responsible government, Canada’s Reform government passed what conservatives considered the most unjust legislation imaginable. The so-called Rebellion Losses Bill compensated anyone in Canada East who had lost property during the uprisings of 1837–38, including those who had fought the colonial state.59 Through its new powers of appointment, the government packed the Legislative Council with a dozen sympathizers to get the legislation to pass.60 After delaying as long as he could, the governor general, Lord Elgin, bowed to the responsible

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system and signed the bill into law on 25 April 1849.61 By the end of the day, the Montreal market building that housed Parliament burned in the twilight. The opponents of the responsible system had wielded the torches. Elgin himself suffered a shower of eggs and stones as he raced out of the city. When Parliament reconvened in late May, stones rained upon the governor once more.62 Such violence, moreover, had radiated outward from Montreal. Demonstrations in Quebec, Bytown, Hamilton, and Toronto devolved into brawls.63 The responsible system had empowered the people’s representatives, and these representatives had produced the Rebellion Losses Bill. Mayhem was the result. Canada’s Rebellion Losses controversy pushed conservatives towards increasingly experimental solutions to correct this perceived constitutional imbalance. Unlike moderate reformers, who looked to fight democracy head-on, these conservatives soon adopted a different tack: to manipulate democratic institutions in such a way that it reinforced the interests of accumulated wealth. These ideas emerged soon after the Rebellion Losses Bill came into effect. As Peter Way notes, Canadian conservatives responded to the legislation “by organising Constitutional Societies to promote conservative policy.”64 The British American League represented the largest of these bodies. From the outset, the League’s various branches (formed by conservatives from all backgrounds) focused on the question of constitutional change. While League members rejected anything that severed the British connection, some suggested that the trappings of democratic rule – namely, a popularly elected upper house – might solve their constitutional problems.65 These conservatives recognized that responsible government had shackled the colony’s Legislative Council. Instead of checking dubious legislation like the Rebellion Losses Bill, legislative councillors now passed whatever party measures they received from their party leaders. The elective principle, these conservatives argued, could both break this party dependency within the upper chamber and offer popular legitimacy to whatever decisions it made. When combined with strict property qualifications for electors and candidates, the province’s Legislative Council might stand toe-to-toe with the Legislative Assembly as “a much more conservative body than we have at present.”66 The British American League would not survive past 1850. Oldschool Tories and new-school conservatives could not agree as to the direction of constitutional change. Even so, League members

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who supported the elective principle had used their limited time to spread their message across British North America.67 By the end of the year, the Province of Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island had all heard either motions or formal resolutions to make their Legislative Councils elective. Within the decade, each of these colonies debated elective legislation as well. These motions, resolutions, and bills, moreover, had all arrived from leading colonial conservatives, such as Nova Scotia’s J.W. Johnston and Canada West’s Henry Boulton.68 The Rebellion Losses Bill had proven to these conservatives that the colonial upper houses (as “but the subservient instrument[s] of the Provincial Government[s]”) no longer had the power to curtail populist legislation under responsible government.69 Whatever the majority desired, the majority had received.70 The elective principle, they agreed, offered the best possible solution. Only through “perfectly independent” elected upper chambers could the legislature apply a “wholesome control” over the people’s representatives. For Johnston and Boulton, the colonies needed such control to restore in “our constitution[s] that stability without which any constitution is worth but little.”71 A potential flaw rested within this plan, however. Two popularly elected legislative bodies risked a duplication in representation. To address this problem, Johnston and Boulton suggested separate franchise and candidacy qualifications for each of the legislative bodies. For the upper houses, they agreed with the British American League that weighty property qualifications were needed for both candidates and electors. Johnston, for instance, originally thought no less than £1,000 worth of real property for candidates and £100 for voters would suffice.72 This latter qualification, by point of contrast, was a full fifty times greater than the old forty-shilling freehold. For the lower houses, Johnston and Boulton settled on something more radical. Instead of property qualifications, they proposed “a more extended franchise” that enfranchised household heads more generally.73 Johnston even went so far as to advocate “universal suffrage” (much like Joseph-Charles Taché, as Elsbeth Heaman notes in chapter 6, this volume).74 Such an approach, in essence, channelled the ideal of Aristotle’s politeia and its balance between the many and the few. Within the Legislative Assemblies, an expansive franchise would extend democracy significantly so that the vast majority of householders might formally participate in government. Within the Legislative Councils, however, the elective principle and property

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qualifications would confer legitimate authority upon propertied representatives to offset this democracy and defend the interests of accumulated wealth. In this way, the houses could conceivably work in tandem to represent all classes of society and thereby secure the common good. Resistance to this plan emerged almost immediately. While most colonial conservatives would fall behind the elective principle, the majority believed that universal suffrage went a step too far. John A. Macdonald, for instance, made it clear that “he was not in favour of universal suffrage, but completely opposed to it” no matter what changes arrived alongside.75 Reformers like George Brown and Joseph Howe, on the other hand, fought the elective principle with all their might. These reformers (in the words of Nova Scotia’s Liberal premier, William Young) worried deeply that elective Legislative Councils would “strike a fatal blow at the [responsible] system of government” by “denud[ing] [the Legislative Assembly] of all real practical power.” More specifically, they feared that the proposed “superior franchise” for Legislative Council elections would “strike a death blow to the power of [the lower house]” in terms of its control over public spending.76 A newly reinvigorated upper house that represented the province’s landed wealth might legitimately dictate how government made use of that wealth. Control over revenues could conceivably shift from the lower house to the upper, thereby stripping the people of their greatest privilege. As George Brown exclaimed in the Toronto Globe: “Instead of advancing in liberal opinions we are going back – instead of the control of the public will being more direct it is more remote … No wonder that Conservatives rejoice … and that it is supported by Conservative votes.”77 Elective upper houses not only threatened to curb the democratization of British North America: if pursued to their fullest extent, they offered the possibility to undercut responsible government itself. Because of such resistance, Johnston and Boulton would never see their plans come to their fullest fruition. Nova Scotia, alongside New Brunswick, would never make their Legislative Councils elective. The Province of Canada would implement the elective principle in 1856, but not in the way Johnston and Boulton had hoped. While candidacy qualifications for the upper chamber would quadruple those for the lower house – £2,000 worth of real property versus £500 worth – both houses would use the same five-pound freehold and leasehold franchise for voters.78 The

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electorates represented would thus remain identical despite the differences in candidates’ wealth. Prince Edward Island would also make its upper house elective in 1862, but its design would swing to the opposite extreme. Instead of different qualifications for candidates, it would only enforce different qualifications on electors. With the Island’s Legislative Assembly still chosen through its statute labour franchise, Island conservatives ensured to impose £100 freehold and leasehold qualifications on Legislative Council electors.79 In other words, near-manhood suffrage would govern the Island’s lower house, but only propertied inhabitants would vote for members to the upper chamber. Although these designs did not quite mirror those of Johnston and Boulton, colonial conservatives had nonetheless created elective Legislative Councils in two of the British North American colonies. Democracy, theoretically, faced a greater check within these legislatures by means of the greater representation of accumulated wealth. It now remained to be seen how these new elective bodies would use their powers to assert themselves in the face of the people’s houses.

t h e t h ir d r e sponse: b r it is h n o rt h a m eri can uni on Unfortunately for British North American conservatives, the elective principle quickly failed to live up to expectations. As I argue elsewhere, the theory of an independent and active upper chamber never materialized when put into practice.80 In the Province of Canada, for instance, the £2,000 property qualification for legislative councillors had made candidacy largely inaccessible. The most talented candidates preferred to sit in the lower house anyway. There they could flaunt their abilities to party leaders and represent much smaller constituencies that required less onerous travel. As political talent remained pooled within the Legislative Assembly, a full two-thirds of Legislative Council seats went uncontested by 1864.81 In 1859, the Legislative Council showed a glimmer of independence when it, as a self-declared “co-ordinate and co-equal branch,” refused to pass supply.82 Yet such defiance proved fleeting when some absentees returned mere days later.83 Conservatives witnessed similar failures on Prince Edward Island as well. Although some premiers attempted to lead from the elective upper house, they quickly found themselves overshadowed as supply remained entrenched within the Legislative

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Assembly.84 Even worse, elected councillors proved less conservative and more partisan than hoped. As one newspaper editor later fumed, “these Councillors were put in by the property-holders to look specially after their rights of property.” When they passed party legislation that ignored these rights – such as new direct taxes on property – they “grossly violated the sacred trust reposed in them.”85 Despite elected upper houses, the people (through their representatives) continued to exert themselves with little opposition under the auspices of responsible government. With the elective principle “not so fully succeed[ing] … as we had expected,” conservative legislators again searched for a solution to their colonies’ perceived democratic surplus.86 As part of this pursuit, they soon turned their attention towards the proposed union of the British North American colonies. With Great Britain pushing for colonial union by the mid-1860s – and with the American Civil War revealing that “purely democratic institutions could not be conducive to the peace and prosperity of nations” – conservatives in particular recognized an opportunity to contain the spread of democracy within their provincial structures of governance.87 Lords Durham and Sydenham had offered something of a template during the late 1830s and early 1840s with the formation of British North American municipal governments. For their lordships, elective municipal institutions – when combined with an extended municipal franchise – allowed the people to participate in government and to learn British constitutional practices in isolation from the country as a whole. The people could act as they pleased at the local level because the “superior trust” of national politics remained protected from their whims.88 British North American federation, if designed around strong federal institutions and a greater representation of the few, offered the potential to establish a similar relationship between spheres of government. Instead of creating new lower levels, however, Confederation promised a sphere of government that superseded even that of the provinces. With this weightier sphere in place, and with appropriate constitutional safeguards erected, democracy would find itself hived off in a provincial space where it could do less damage. Majoritarian tendencies might continue to run wild, but they would do so only within the less consequential provincial realm. From this perspective, it thus comes as no surprise that conservatives from across the colonies took the lead in both pursuing and

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promoting Confederation (with moderate reformers more mixed in their responses).89 In fact, from the start of the Quebec Conference in October 1864, John A. Macdonald already had the general scheme broadly planned out. Macdonald urged his fellow delegates to leave “all sectional prejudices and interests” to the “local legislatures.” Only with the provincial legislatures properly subordinated could Canadians “have a strong and lasting government under which we can work out constitutional liberty as opposed to democracy, and be able to protect the minority by having a powerful central government.”90 Within this scheme, a strong federal structure would guard against democracy’s tendencies towards majoritarian rule and, in so doing, protect minority rights. Later in the same speech, Macdonald expanded upon what minority he had in mind. For Macdonald, the new federal Parliament needed “to represent the principle of property” as forcefully as possible because “the rights of the minority must be protected, and the rich are always fewer in number than the poor.”91 Rather than a mere branch of the legislature, Canada’s wealthy few would have the highest level of government standing guard against the majority in defence of their own interests. Macdonald and his colleagues in Quebec ultimately designed Confederation to fit this general purpose.92 To achieve a strong federal structure, the proposed division of powers heavily favoured the new Dominion government. The provinces would receive only limited and exclusive powers; all residual powers not outlined within the Constitution would fall under federal jurisdiction; and the lieutenant governors, as Dominion agents, would have the right to withhold assent to provincial bills. If that was not enough, the federal government would also retain the right to disallow any provincial legislation.93 In fact, Macdonald and his colleagues had created a distribution of powers so lopsided that commentators concluded they sought to “make [the provinces] merely large municipal corporations.”94 The selection and composition of the new federal Parliament, moreover, looked to complete this protection of accumulated wealth. For the federal upper house – which, following the Canadian “experience in both systems,” would be appointed rather than elected – the representation of wealth required that “[a] large qualification should be necessary for membership.”95 The framers of Confederation eventually settled on a $4,000 property qualification for future senators: half that of the Canadas’ unworkable £2,000 requirement but incalculably higher than those

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of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, whose legislative councillors still sat solely at the Crown’s pleasure.96 The situation for the popularly elected lower house proved a little more complex. According to Macdonald, “insuperable difficulties would have presented themselves if we had attempted to settle … the qualification of electors” at Quebec.97 The delegates had consequently agreed that “it [would be] left to the Parliament of the Confederation, as one of their first duties, to consider and to settle by an act of their own the qualification of the elective franchise.”98 The various provincial franchises would double as the federal franchise for the Dominion’s first elections.99 Even so, Macdonald made it clear that the federal franchise needed definite limitations. In his opening remarks to the Quebec Conference he insisted that, for “the Lower House the basis of representation should be population, not universal suffrage, but according to the principles of the British Constitution.”100 These “principles” implied restrictions that would ensure all segments of the population had their voices heard, and not just the vocal majority by strength of numbers. At the Province of Canada’s subsequent Confederation Debates, Macdonald reiterated that “the House will of course understand, that universal suffrage is not in any way sanctioned, or admitted by these resolutions, as the basis on which the constitution of the popular branch should rest.”101 Macdonald did not stand alone either. Apparently, “not a single member of the [Quebec] Conference … was in favour of universal suffrage” and “everyone felt … that classes and property should be represented as well as numbers.”102 The Province of Canada and New Brunswick had retained property-based franchises even though they had modified their former forty-shilling freeholds. Nova Scotia, moreover, had just returned to a property-based franchise after its experiment with white manhood suffrage. For the moment, these provincial restrictions on democratic civic participation would have to suffice for the Dominion’s new House of Commons as well. When the new Parliament of Canada sat for the first time in late 1867, its members held their seats either by the selection of those who possessed property or because they owned substantial property themselves. The provinces might continue to march towards majority rule, but the new federal Parliament, with its overarching powers, would serve to minimize the effects and ensure the continued representation of the nation’s accumulated wealth.

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c o n c l u s io n : b r it is h north ameri ca’s a n t i- d e m o c r at i c project On 27 July 1885, John A. Macdonald famously declared that the passage of his recent Electoral Franchise Act was “the greatest triumph of [his] life.”103 Just over a month later, Macdonald explained what he meant. Writing to former governor general Lord Carnarvon, Macdonald touted the Electoral Franchise Act, 1885, as nothing less than “the completion of the Federal Constitution which you had so great a hand in constructing.”104 At Confederation, the British North America Act had left the federal franchise in the hands of the provincial governments. Since that time the provinces – as the new hubs of Canadian democracy – “had begun to tinker at their electoral franchise, & in some cases … with the desired object of affecting … the Federal Parliament.”105 Ontario, Quebec, and Nova Scotia had all disenfranchised federal employees following Confederation, and much more extensive reforms threatened on the horizon.106 Canada’s Electoral Franchise Act, 1885, as designed by Macdonald himself, put a stop to these trends. Not only did the legislation give the Dominion its own franchise law but it also imposed some of the highest property qualifications found anywhere in Canada ($300 for cities, $200 for towns, and $100 for rural areas, alongside disqualifications for peoples of Indigenous and Chinese descent).107 Only the province of Quebec enforced restrictions that were similarly high.108 In fact, Macdonald pursued the “protection of property” to such an extent that he strove to enfranchise women who satisfied the legislation’s new property requirements.109 While the push for limited women’s enfranchisement failed, the greater representation of accumulated wealth certainly succeeded. The House of Commons would now operate under one of the most restrictive franchises found anywhere in the country, and it did so outside the purview of the increasingly democratic provincial governments. With these restrictions in effect, and with his goals finally realized, Macdonald concluded: “the Constitution has at last been perfected.”110 Canada’s Electoral Franchise Act, 1885, had, in effect, represented the culmination of a near century-long project to curtail democracy in British North America. Like Aristotle two millennia earlier, like much of the British Empire, and like countless other British North Americans, John A. Macdonald had worried deeply about democracy as a flawed form of rule. While constitutional government

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demanded representation of the people, it also demanded the representation of interests beyond those of the majority. With the transition to responsible government beginning in the late 1840s, both moderate reformers and conservatives had grown increasingly wary as to where responsible government might lead. Moderates, although fundamentally in favour of the responsible system, resisted its use to establish further popular rule in the colonies. Wishing to preserve their newfound executive powers, they confronted calls for greater democracy in an attempt to either stave them off or even roll them back where necessary. Conservatives, on the other hand, tended to view democracy as inherent to responsible government itself. In replacing government by the few with government by the many, the responsible system had opened the door to the tyranny of the majority. As opposed to attacking this democratization directly, many conservatives adopted a different strategy and sought to turn democratic tendencies against themselves. Elective Legislative Councils, when combined with restrictive property qualifications for electors and candidates, promised newly reinvigorated upper houses that could forcefully represent the interests of the wealthy few. Universal manhood suffrage in the lower houses would help to further separate the representation of the people from that of accumulated wealth and thus provide the constitutional balance necessary to halt majoritarian tendencies. The failure of elective Legislative Councils sent conservatives searching for another means to restrain British North American democracy. Confederation eventually offered them their solution. Through a federal design that placed almost supreme powers in the hands of the central government, conservatives (alongside some moderates like George Brown) had found a way to potentially hive off democracy within the provincial sphere. Restrictive property qualifications for both electors and senators sought to ensure that the new federal government represented the wealthy minority to the greatest extent possible. The passage of the Dominion’s Electoral Franchise Act, 1885, brought this plan to its fullest realization. As the democratic tide continued to turn at not only the provincial level but across the Atlantic world, the House of Commons, in tandem with the Senate, would continue to limit majority rule and protect the interests of accumulated wealth at the highest level. Canada’s architects of Confederation, steeped in earlier political philosophies and conflicts, had thus never wanted to build a democracy at all. The framework

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they conceived in 1867 made manifest the anti-democratic worries of the former British North American period. As these same designers secured positions of legislative power during Canada’s infancy, they used all their influence to guide, coax, and compel the new nation away from the democratic path. It would take Wilfrid Laurier’s rise to power in 1896, and his repeal of the Electoral Franchise Act in 1898, to officially interrupt this anti-democratic project.111 With the provinces once again taking control of the federal franchise, and with near manhood suffrage now the norm in most provinces, Canada’s electorate expanded considerably.112 Women’s suffrage at the provincial level, established two decades later, would grow the federal franchise further.113 As these changes arrived, a new democratic reality slowly began to emerge. Canadians may classify their nation as a democracy today. But, if they do, they do so in spite of its original design and intent, both grounded in anti-democratic ideas stemming from Canada’s British North American past. no t e s I wish to thank Elsbeth Heaman, Denis McKim, Stéphanie O’Neill, and my fellow participants at the Realities of Canadian Democracy Conference for their insightful comments and suggestions. Parts of this chapter have appeared in “Constitutional Conservatism, Anti-Democratic Ideology, and the Elective Principle in British North America’s Upper Legislative Houses, 1848-1867,” in Reforming Senates: Upper Legislative Houses in North Atlantic Small Powers, 1800–Present, ed. N.H. Bijleveld, Colin Grittner, David E. Smith, and S.W. Verstegen (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), 93–106. I thank Routledge for its permission to reprint them here. 1 For these terms, see Aristotle, Aristotle’s Politics, III.7. For the components of politeia, see ibid., IV.8. For a discussion of this translation question, and the decision to avoid translation, see Simpson, Philosophical Commentary, xxii–xxvi; Mulhern, “Politeia”; and Balot, “Mixed Regime,” 106. For polity, see Aristotle, Politics of Aristotle (Barker), 114; Aristotle, Politics of Aristotle (Simpson), 89; and Aristotle, Politics (Reeve), 78. For constitutional government, see Aristotle, Aristotle’s Politics (Jowett), 136; Aristotle, Aristotle’s Politics, 23–4; and Aristotle, Complete Works, 2030. For “regime called regime,” see Bates Jr, Aristotle’s “Best Regime,” 84–7. 2 Aristotle, Politics, III.8: VI.4.1,291b30–1,292a37. On the connection between tyranny and democracy, see Jordovic´ , “Aristotle.”

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3 For the ranking of democracies, see Aristotle, Politics, IV.13.1,332a7. For political organization and happiness, see Aristotle, Politics, III.6; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I.8–11. 4 Cotlar, “Languages of Democracy,” 21–5; Innes and Philp, “Introduction,” 2; Innes and Philp, “Synergies,” 210; and Roberts, Athens on Trial, 197–207. 5 Innes and Philp, “Introduction,” 2. 6 Dagenais, “Canadian Rebellion,” 8. Perhaps the best recent history of democracy in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world – Joanna Innes and Mark Philp’s Re-Imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions – also makes no mention of British North America. John Roper’s older Democracy’s Critics makes the same exclusion. For the quotation, see Innes, Philp, and Saunders, “Rise of Democratic Discourse,” 114. 7 Philp, “Talking about Democracy”; Innes, Philp, and Saunders, “Rise of Democratic Discourse,” 115; Innes, “People and Power,” 129; and Roper, Democracy and Its Critics, 148–52. 8 Innes, Philp, and Saunders, “Rise of Democratic Discourse,” 114. 9 Wise, God’s Peculiar Peoples, 48–52, 57–60. For more on loyalism and democracy, see Cotlar, “Languages of Democracy,” 13–14. 10 Wise, God’s Peculiar Peoples, 52–7. For the association between democracy and popular sovereignty, see Smith, “Fortunate Banner,” 29, 35–9. 11 For this ultimate victory of constitutionalism over republicanism, see Ducharme, Idea of Liberty, 160–84. For a different framing, see McKay, “Liberal Order Framework,” 632. 12 Those who subsequently built on Aristotle – from Polybios to Montesquieu – offered of course further inspiration. For a concise summation, see Hansen, “Mixed Constitution,” 509–23. See also Innes and Philp, “Introduction,” 2. 13 Durham, Report, 59. 14 Creighton, “Economic Background”; Robertson, “Politics and Religious Controversialism”; and McKim, “Upper Canadian Thermidor.” 15 McNairn, Capacity to Judge, 43. 16 Ducharme, Idea of Liberty, 93–127. 17 For an example of those who favoured responsible government, see Joseph Howe with his 1837 resolution and address to the Crown: Nova Scotia, Journal and Proceedings of the House of Assembly, 3 March 1837, 89–91; and 13 April 1837, 199–200. For those who favoured republicanism, see the Parti Patriote’s Ninety-Two Resolutions of 1834: Lower Canada,

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Journals of the House of Assembly of Lower Canada, 21 February 1834, 310–35. See also McNairn, Capacity to Judge, 35–7; and Ducharme, Idea of Liberty, 110. Ducharme, Idea of Liberty, 179–81. Durham, Report, 140–1. Buckner, Transition, 290–332. New Brunswick fits somewhat awkwardly into this transition. While the colony theoretically received responsible government in 1848, New Brunswick’s governor did not fully accept his responsibility to the executive until 1856. For a full discussion, see Marquis, “Contesting,” 237–8; and Buckner, Transition, 306–9. Cross, Robert Baldwin, 284. See also Saul, Extraoridnary Canadians, 17. Burke, A Letter, 81. Wise, “Through the Lace Curtain,” 59–60. For a contemporary example, see W.O.B., “A Voice from Lanark No. III,” Globe (Toronto), 20 October 1849, 1. Dewar, “Charles Clarke,” 237. In their own ways each of these ideologies stressed expanded electorates, whether to end aristocratic privilege, overturn elite corruption, establish equality, or empower ethnic majorities. Chartism, in particular, emphasized universal manhood suffrage as the sine qua non of democratic reform. For Chartism and democracy, see Innes, Philp, and Saunders, “Rise of Democratic Discourse,” 121–8 (and, more specifically, 123 for the Chartist emphasis on franchise reform). For Irish nationalism and democracy, see Colantonio, “‘Democracy’ and the Irish People”; and Connolly, “Limits of Democracy,” 183–8. For Jeffersonian republicanism, Jacksonian populism, and democracy, see Cotlar, “Languages of Democracy”; and Smith, “Fortunate Banner,” 28–33. For examples of how British North Americans drew inspiration from these ideologies, see Bittermann, Sailor’s Hope, 94, 130; Robertson, “Whelan, Edward”; Fergusson, “Doyle”; Ducharme, Idea of Liberty, 99–102; Wise, “Through the Lace Curtain,” 54–5; Schrauwers, “Road Not Taken,” 147; and Mauduit, “Canadian Interference,” 244–5. Province of Canada, An Act to extend the Elective Franchise, 1853, 16 Vic., c. 153; and New Brunswick, An Act to regulate the Election of Members to serve in the General Assembly, 1855, 18 Vic., c. 37. Nova Scotia, An Act to extend the Elective Franchise, 1851, 14 Vic., c. 2; and Nova Scotia, An Act concerning the Elective Franchise, 1854, 17 Vic., c. 6. Prince Edward Island, An Act to Extend the Elective Franchise, 1853, 16 Vic., c. 9; Prince Edward Island, An Act to consolidate and amend the

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Laws relating to Statute Labour, 1851, 14 Vic., c. 12; and Grittner, “Working at the Crossroads.” For religious disqualifications, see Garner, Franchise and Politics, chaps. 10 and 11. See Garner, Franchise and Politics, chap. 12; Picard, “Femmes et vote”; Cuthbertson, Johnny Bluenose, 9; Klein, “A ‘Petticoat’ Polity?”; Bradbury, Wife to Widow, 260–88; Brandt et al., Canadian Women, 113–15; and Noel, Along a River, 212–29. “Parlement Provincial du Bas-Canada. Chambre D’Assemblée. Débats,” La Minerve, 3 February 1834, 1 (debates of 25 January 1834). See also Noel, Along a River, 212–29; Ducharme, Idea of Liberty, 119–22; and Baillargeon, To Be Equals, 15–18. For a fuller discussion of this republicanism from a Jeffersonian perspective, see Onuf and Sadosky, Jeffersonian America. Innes and Philp, “Synergies,” 207, 211. For more on this argument, see Grittner, “Greater Expectations,” 612–17. For other discussions of women’s formal disenfranchisement, see Baillargeon, To Be Equals, 14–20; Brookfield, Our Voices, 23; Sangster, One Hundred Years of Struggle, 20–2; Garner, Franchise and Politics, 155–60. “Provincial Parliament. House of Assembly,” Novascotian (Halifax), 7 April 1851, 6 (debate of 12 March 1851). See Prince Edward Island, Journal of the House of Assembly, 1859, app. A, 2–3. See also Grittner, “Working at the Crossroads,” 114–15. See Nova Scotia, An Act concerning the Elective Franchise, 1854, 17 Vic., c. 6, s. 3. For example, see “Rights of Man – Slavery in Nova Scotia,” Sun (Halifax), 17 January 1851, 2. See also Grittner, “Greater Expectations,” 617. One sees race used in a similar way as Great Britain debated its Second Reform Act during the 1860. See Hall, “Rethinking Imperial Histories.” “What Is Mr. Johnston Going To Do for Nova Scotia? Chapter II,” Novascotian (Halifax), 27 February 1854, 8. “The Great Exhibition,” Globe (Toronto), 17 May 1851, 2. Cross, Robert Baldwin, 294. Heaman, Tax, 27. See also Careless, Brown of the Globe, 1: 303; Hodgins, “Democracy and the Ontario Fathers,” 85–7; and Dewar, Charles Clarke, 100. “Meeting at Pickering,” Globe (Toronto), 11 April 1850, 2. Wise, “Through the Lace Curtain,” 64. For the original platform, see “Our Platform,” North American (Toronto), 22 November 1850.

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44 “Manhood Suffrage in Nova Scotia,” Globe (Toronto), 13 April 1863, 2. 45 Beck, Joseph Howe, 2:43. See also Library and Archives Canada (hereafter lac ), mg 24-b 29 Joseph Howe Fonds, vol. 6, Letters from Howe, p. 161, “Draft of Report on general state of the Province – to accompany Blue Book for 1847.” 46 “Provincial Parliament. House of Assembly,” Novascotian (Halifax), 4 May 1863, supplement, 1 (debates of 6 April 1863). 47 Reform representative William Chambers argued in 1863 that, “had Mr. Howe, who was at that time in England, been present, I do not believe that measure would ever have received the sanction of the Legislature. He was always opposed to this tinkering with the franchise, and expressed his disapproval on his return.” See “Provincial Parliament. House of Assembly,” Novascotian (Halifax), 20 April 1863, 5 (debates of 4 April 1863). J. Murray Beck argues something similar. See Beck, Joseph Howe, 2:43. 48 Joseph Howe to Sir Gaspard Le Marchant, 23 October 1863, 12, lac , mg 24-b 29, Joseph Howe Fonds, vol. 35, Private Letters, 1863–68; and lac , mg 24-b 29, Joseph Howe Fonds, vol. 43, Diary etc. 1850, 1852, 1855, 10. See also Beck, Joseph Howe, 2: 35. 49 See Annand, Speeches and Public Letters, 55–6; Beck, Joseph Howe, 2: 42. During Howe’s absence these radical allies had also privatized the province’s telegraph line and withdrew King’s College’s permanent grant, similarly to Howe’s chagrin. See Conrad, Ocean’s Edge, 271. 50 Nova Scotia, 14 Vic., c. 2, s. 1. See also Garner, Franchise and Politics, 217. 51 “Provincial Parliament. House of Assembly,” British Colonist (Halifax), 7 February 1854, 2 (debates of 4 February 1854); and “Provincial Parliament. House of Assembly,” British Colonist (Halifax) 9 February 1854, 2 (debates of 7 February 1854). 52 “Provincial Parliament. House of Assembly,” Novascotian (Halifax), 30 March 1863, 4 (debates of 19 March 1863); “From Our Halifax Correspondent,” Eastern Chronicle (Pictou), 9 April 1863, 2; and “Provincial Parliament. House of Assembly,” Novascotian (Halifax), 4 May 1863, supplement, 1 (debates of 6 April 1863). 53 Nova Scotia, An Act to regulate the Election of Members, 1863, 26 Vic., c. 28, s. 1. 54 For the one-quarter assertion, see “The New Franchise Bill,” Novascotian (Halifax), 30 March 1863, 1 (“From Tuesday’s Chronicle”). For the onehalf assertion, see “The Franchise and Representation Bills,” Colonial Standard (New Glasgow), 31 March 1863, 2.

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55 “The Franchise Bill,” British Colonist (Halifax), 21 April 1863, 2. See also Beck, Joseph Howe, 2: 169. 56 Beck, Joseph Howe, 2: 173. 57 Joseph Howe to Sir Gaspard Le Marchant, 23 October 1863, 12, lac , mg 24-b 29, vol. 35, Private Letters, 1863–68; and Joseph Howe to the Duke of Newcastle, 8 July 1863, 2. lac , mg 24-b 29, vol. 35, Private Letters, 1863–68. 58 “Democracy in British America,” Acadian Recorder (Halifax), 4 July 1863, 2. See also “The Elections,” Novascotian (Halifax), 4 May 1863, 2; Windsor [pseud.], “To the Editors of the Sun,” Sun (Halifax), 30 March 1863, 2. 59 Careless, Union of the Canadas, 123–4. 60 British American League, Minutes, 14. 61 See Province of Canada, An Act to provide for the indemnification of parties in Lower-Canada, 1849, 12 Vic., c. 58. 62 See Messamore, Canada’s Governors General, 62–3. 63 See Radforth, “Political Demonstrations and Spectacles”; Way, “Canadian Tory Rebellion,” 10–30; and Cross, “Stony Monday,” 177–90. 64 Way, “Canadian Tory Rebellion,” 20. 65 Allin, British North American League, 9–10. 66 British American League, Minutes of the Second Convention, 3 November 1849, app. xxv. 67 See MacNutt, New Brunswick, 362; and Allin, British North American League, 24–6. See also “New Brunswick on the Canada League and Annexation,” Independent (Toronto), 25 October 1849, 4. 68 For Nova Scotia and the Canadas, see Johnston, Speech, 5; Nova Scotia, Journal and Proceedings of the House of Assembly, 27 March 1850, 600–2; Province of Canada, Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, vol. 10, 22 May 1850, 17–18; and 3 June 1850, 40. Boulton’s nephew, William Henry Boulton, would go on to propose the elective principle twice more during the same session. See Province of Canada, Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, vol. 10, 24 June 1850, 91–4; and, 5 August 1850, 245. For New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, see New Brunswick, Journal of the House of Assembly of the Province of New Brunswick, 22 April 1850, 334; and “The Legislative Council,” Islander (Charlottetown), 22 March 1850, 3. 69 Johnston, Speech, 5. 70 For more on Johnston’s position on responsible government and democratic excess, but from a judicial perspective, see Phillips, “Judicial Independence,” 723–4.

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71 Province of Canada, Debates of the Legislative Assembly of United Canada, vol. 9, pt. 1, 22 May 1850, 134; “Provincial Parliament. House of Assembly,” British Colonist (Halifax), 3 February 1852, 2 (debate of 31 January 1852). 72 “Provincial Parliament. House of Assembly,” British Colonist (Halifax), 3 February 1852, 2 (debate of 31 January 1852). While Boulton never offered exact numbers, his discussion of pounds rather than shillings surely meant that he had in mind qualifications greater than the forty-shilling freehold. See Province of Canada, Debates of the Legislative Assembly of United Canada, vol. 9, pt. 1, 3 June 1850, 365. 73 Province of Canada, Debates of the Legislative Assembly of United Canada, vol. 9, pt. 1, 22 May 1850, 134. 74 See “Provincial Parliament. House of Assembly,” Novascotian (Halifax), 21 April 1851, 4 (debates of 20 March 1851); and “Provincial Parliament. House of Assembly,” Novascotian (Halifax), 21 March 1853, 7 (debates of 5 March 1853). For more on Johnston’s understanding of democracy, see “Provincial Parliament. House of Assembly,” British Colonist (Halifax), 9 February 1854, 23 (debates of 7 February 1854); and 17 March 1857, 2 (debates of 14 February 1857). 75 “House of Assembly,” Globe, (Toronto), 12 May 1858, 2 (debate of 11 May 1858). 76 Nova Scotia, The Debates and Proceedings during the Third Session of the Twenty-First Parliament of the Province of Nova Scotia, 26 February 1858, 107–8. Although he took a more moderate tone, Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine also had difficulty “ascertain[ing] in what way the elective principle could be introduced with safety into the present constitution.” See Province of Canada, Debates of the Legislative Assembly of United Canada, vol. 9, pt. 1, 22 May 1850, 136. 77 “Elective Legislative Council,” Globe (Toronto) 4 June 1853, 2. 78 For the candidacy and franchise qualifications for the Canadas’ elective Legislative Council, see Province of Canada, An Act to change the Constitution of the Legislative Council, 1856, 19 and 20 Vic., c. 140, s. 4. For the lower house’s candidacy qualification, see Great Britain, An Act to re-unite the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, 1840, 3 and 4 Vic., c. 35, s. 28. For the franchise law itself, see Province of Canada, An Act to extend the Elective Franchise, 1853, 16 Vic., c. 153, s. 1. 79 Prince Edward Island, An Act to change the Constitution of the Legislative Council, 1862, 25 Vic., c. 18, s. 7. 80 See Grittner, “Constitutional Conservatism,” 100–1.

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81 Ajzenstat, “Bicameralism,” 12–13; Emery, Elections in Oxford County, 102–4, 117–19; and Hart, “Elective Legislative Council,” 199–201. 82 Province of Canada, Journals of the Legislative Council, vol. 17, 29 April 1859, 421; and 3 May 1859, 438. 83 Province of Canada, Journals of the Legislative Council, vol. 17, 29 April 1859, 468. For the fleetingness of this attempt, see Province of Canada, Confederation Debates, 9 February 1865, 117. See also Hart, “Elective Legislative Council,” 217–18. 84 MacKinnon, Government of Prince Edward Island, 104. 85 “The Legislative Council Elections,” Presbyterian and Evangelical Protestant Union (Charlottetown), 7 November 1878, 8. 86 Province of Canada, Confederation Debates, 6 February 1865, 35. 87 For the quotation, see Province of Canada, Confederation Debates, 7 February 1865, 59. More generally, see Smith, British Businessmen, 4. 88 For the quotation, see William Kennedy and Adam Thom, “General Report of the Assistant Commissioners of Municipal Inquiry,” Durham, Report, app. C, 6-7. For a more general discussion of both these events and the ideas of liberal governmentality that inspired them, see Grittner, “Bludgeons and Ballots,” 312–15, 326–8. 89 While George Brown supported the federal principle, Joseph Howe proved resistant because it stripped away provincial rights. 90 Bernard, “Hewitt Bernard’s Notes,” 95. 91 Ibid., 98. 92 Smith, British Businessmen, 130; Hodgins, “Democracy and the Ontario Fathers,” 86–90. 93 Morton, “Conservative Principle,” 536. See also Moore, 1867, 114–28; Moore, Three Weeks, 144–50; and Heidt, “Introduction,” 6. 94 For the quotation see Bernard, “Hewitt Bernard’s Notes,” 122. See also Smith, British Businessmen, 100; Moore, Three Weeks, 146; and Gilding, “Silent Framers,” 391. 95 Bernard, “Hewitt Bernard’s Notes,” 98; and A.A. Macdonald, “A.A. Macdonald’s Notes,” 133. 96 For the Dominion qualification, see Great Britain, British North America Act, 1867, 30 Vic., c. 3, s. 23, ss. 3. For New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, see Bourinot, “Constitution of the Legislative Council,” 141–73. By point of contrast, New Brunswick would finally codify its qualifications for legislative councillors in 1868 by pegging the property requirement at only $2,400. See New Brunswick, An Act relating to the Constitution of the Legislative Council, 1868, 31 Vic., c. 30, s. 3, ss. 3. 97 Province of Canada, Confederation Debates, 39.

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Ibid. See Great Britain, British North America Act, 1867, 30 Vic., c. 3, s. 41. Bernard, “Hewitt Bernard’s Notes,” 97. Province of Canada, Confederation Debates, 35. Ibid., 39. Sir John A. Macdonald to Sir Charles Tupper, 27 July 1885, Sir Charles Tupper Fonds, vol. 30, lac , mg 26-f . The phrase’s notoriety derives from Gordon Stewart’s article of the same name. See Stewart, “John A. Macdonald’s Greatest Triumph.” See also Strong-Boag, “Citizenship Debates,” 76; Pilon, “Contested Origins,” 115; and Brookfield, Our Voices, 68. Sir John A. Macdonald to Lord Carnarvon, 9 September 1885, Sir John A. Macdonald Fonds, vol. 526, pt, 2, p. 279, lac , mg 26-a . Ibid. Chief Electoral Officer, History of the Vote, 46; and Grittner, “Statesmanlike Measure,” 94. For a contemporary understanding, see Dominion of Canada, Hansard, 3rd session, 5th Parliament, vol. 18, 16 April 1885, 1,133. Dominion of Canada, An Act respecting the Electoral Franchise, 1885, 48 and 49 Vic., c. 40, s. 3–4. Chief Electoral Officer, History of the Vote, 94. For the quotation, see Dominion of Canada, Hansard, vol. 18, 27 April 1885, 1,389. See also Grittner, “Macdonald and Women’s Enfranchisement”; and Strong-Boag, “Citizenship Debates,” 77–80. Sir John A. Macdonald to Lord Carnarvon, 9 September 1885, Sir John A. Macdonald Fonds, lac , mg 26-a , vol. 526, pt. 2, p. 279. Dominion of Canada, An Act to repeal the Electoral Franchise Act, 1898, 61 Vic., c. 14. Chief Electoral Officer, History of the Vote, 52–7; and Ward, Canadian House of Commons, 221, 225. For a good outline of this relationship between provincial and federal women’s suffrage, see Campbell, “War-Time Elections Act.”

pa r t t h r e e

Struggles Around “Liberal Democracy,” 1940s–90s

8 Human Rights Activists’ Struggles to Forge a More Egalitarian Democracy in Canada in the 1940s and 1950s Ruth A. Frager and Carmela Patrias

“What is democracy except the guarantee of human rights?” a ccf activist asked rhetorically in the early 1950s.1 As this quotation suggests, Canada’s human rights advocates strove to mobilize support in the 1940s and 1950s by appealing to the need to defend – and, indeed, enhance – democracy by combatting prejudice and discrimination. As Dennis Pilon (chapter 1, this volume) emphasizes, during these particular decades many Canadians viewed or depicted democracy as indisputably good, despite the fact that such views had been relatively uncommon earlier in Canadian history.2 In these two decades, organized campaigns in support of human rights challenged widespread racist discrimination in employment, housing, and the provision of services in Canada. This unprecedented development is especially noteworthy given the myth of racelessness that still held sway in Canada at this time.3 Many of the same mid-twentieth-century events and processes motivated both the promoters of democracy and the advocates of human rights. During the 1930s both groups were alarmed by growing support for right-wing movements that denied civic and political rights in Europe and Canada, especially the rise of Nazism and fascism. During the same period, human rights advocates were also troubled by the intensification of local anti-Semitism and increased hostility towards Japanese Canadians. During the Second World War, government officials, leading politicians, and the heads of big business upheld the value of democracy to promote Canada’s mass

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mobilization for the war against Nazism and fascism, and, as Will Langford (chapter 9, this volume) shows, in some cases to contain the growing strength of allegedly anti-democratic organizations, particularly labour unions and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ccf ).4 Human rights advocates – including notable supporters of the ccf and the labour movement – saw an opportunity to promote their cause by pointing to the contradiction between Canada’s declared war aim of fighting the racism of the Nazis, on the one hand, and the actuality of racist discrimination at home, on the other hand. Thus, for example, some champions of human rights raised their voices against the expulsion of Japanese Canadians from the west coast in 1942 and, especially, against the deportations to Japan at war’s end. Amidst the struggles against totalitarianism during the Cold War, activists intensified their appeals to democracy and their promotion of human rights. Even during these decades, however, the conceptualization of both democracy and human rights remained imprecise and fluid. The goal of this chapter is to shed light on the meanings of the two concepts by exploring how human rights advocates understood and employed the idea of democracy during the 1940s and 1950s, although, being activists, not scholars, they seldom stopped to articulate their views in a systematic way. These activists often simply assumed that Canada was more or less democratic and that Canadians valued democracy. Because they generally believed that a basic level of equality was inherent in democracy, they argued that the promotion of democracy necessitated fighting against certain forms of prejudice and discrimination. Beyond this, the meaning of democracy for these activists fluctuated. Even in the relative absence of careful articulations of the meaning of this concept, it is clear that democracy meant different things to different groups of human rights advocates. In our examination of human rights campaigns, we found that, although the activists themselves did not necessarily classify their ideas as explicitly promoting liberal, social, cultural or Christian democracy, their views generally fell into these four – sometimes overlapping – categories. Despite the diversity of views among them, mid-twentieth-century human rights advocates all saw themselves as the proponents of a more inclusive democracy. Yet, from today’s perspective, their conceptualization of human rights appears narrow: they generally focused on combatting discrimination based on race, creed,

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and national origin, neglecting to consider discrimination based on sex, ability, age, and sexual orientation, all of which are widely recognized today as serious forms of discrimination.5 For example, despite the fact that the ccf ’s Status of Women Committee issued a rare call in 1948 for women’s “full equality in all phases of life,” including economic equality,6 most anti-racist activists did not even recognize sex-based discrimination. When we interviewed Kalmen Kaplansky, former head of the Jewish Labour Committee and one of the most committed activists in the struggles against racist and religious discrimination, we asked why so many human rights activists in this period ignored women’s rights. He replied that women were just not considered equal at that time as they were expected to be mothers and to concentrate on looking after their families.7 In abiding by such notions of common sense, the overwhelming majority of human rights activists in the 1940s and 1950s reflected the deeply engrained sexism that was so prevalent in Canadian society more broadly. Moreover, there was nothing inevitable about the limited gains made in the 1940s and 1950s. Progress was quite uneven, and the achievements of these two decades were the products of intense struggles. As human rights activists appealed to a more inclusive conception of democracy to push for anti-discrimination legislation, they often found that even when they were finally able to convince politicians to enact such anti-racist measures, they still had to pressure highly reluctant government officials to enforce these new laws.8 Although more gains were to come in later decades, especially with the implementation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the history of human rights in Canada is by no means one of inexorable progress. As Leonard Halladay (chapter 11, this volume) reveals, for example, Canada’s eventual legal recognition of lgbtq+ rights did not unequivocally signify a move towards greater inclusivity. By emphasizing identity- and culture-based rights, the campaign to obtain such legal recognition served to obscure inequality based on socio-economic differences and racialization within this minority group. It also substituted the quest for legal recognition for more varied goals pursued by collective action in civil society.9 While we stress the limitations and unevenness of human rights gains, we also explore the strong social-democratic strand within anti-discrimination campaigns from their very inception in Canada. Thus, our chapter challenges historians who argue that human rights advocates only eventually moved beyond a limited conception

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of discrimination as resulting from the acts of aberrant individuals. Their interpretation relegates to the 1960s and beyond rights activists’ understanding of – and struggles against – systemic discrimination.10 Consequently, we stress that, well before the 1960s, social democrats insisted that racism was intrinsic to the capitalist system. Regardless of their political orientation, some of the most committed human rights activists in the 1940s and 1950s were members of racialized minority groups who had experienced discrimination themselves. They included African Canadians, Japanese Canadians, and, especially, Jews, and they succeeded in forging alliances with key English Canadians, including some Christian clergy and members of the Anglo-Celtic elite, as well as anglophone and francophone labour leaders. While we analyze the distinctive character and significance of the relationship between ideas of democracy and human rights in Canada, we also explore the roles of members of racialized minority groups in judiciously conveying transnational – especially American – influences to inform and propel Canada’s rights struggles.

l ib e r a l d e m o cracy In the context of both the Second World War and the Cold War most human rights advocates stressed democracy to distinguish Canada’s political system from totalitarianism of the right and of the left. For liberal human rights advocates, a key reason for combatting racist and religious prejudice and discrimination was that their existence in the “free world” undermined democracy. In 1940, president of the Canadian Jewish Congress and prominent entrepreneur Samuel Bronfman was talking about Nazism when he emphasized the need to protect democracy against “totalitarian barbarism.” “Nazi and Fascist propaganda and the anti-Canadian propaganda of ‘L’Achat Chez Nous’ have resulted in certain economic discrimination against Jewish labour and business,” he explained. He added that “the non-sectarian principle in employment is one of the pillars of democracy and now that democracy and totalitarian barbarism are so clearly understood, it is our duty as Canadians and Jews to eliminate from our ranks discrimination against Jewish employment and services and to practice wholeheartedly the principle of tolerance as an example to other Canadians.”11 Eight years later, an American trade-union leader speaking at the Race Relations Insti-

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tute in Toronto argued that it was essential to fight against racism to prevent communism from undermining the “democratic way of life.” “Communism,” he maintained, “always makes great headway in areas where social injustice and racial prejudice are rife” because members of oppressed minority groups are disillusioned by the shortcomings of democracy.12 Their emphasis on equality of opportunity as a feature of democracy illustrates the importance of individual rights in the thinking of liberal human rights advocates. They believed that racial discrimination denied individual freedom by preventing minority group members from developing “to the highest potentiality of which they were capable.”13 Muriel Jacobson (a staff member of the Canadian Association for Adult Education) approvingly quoted prominent Ottawa judge Joseph Thorson’s pronouncement about reducing prejudice: “Free nations must prove by their example that it is possible to maintain a society in which the sanctity of the individual is safe-guarded.”14 In fact, many of these adherents of liberal democracy strove to tackle prejudice and discrimination without acknowledging that racism benefited certain people concretely in the competitions for relatively scarce resources such as jobs, housing, and access to higher education. Instead, they tended to argue that the whole nation was disadvantaged when racialized individuals were not able to live up to their full potential and contribute fully to the country. Moreover, they held that racial equality would strengthen Canada by promoting national unity. In addition, as a 1949 editorial in Food for Thought (the Canadian Association of Adult Education’s magazine) explained, the prejudiced person suffers because prejudices “warp our judgment and hinder our powers of rational thought. In that sense all prejudice is dangerous because it is damaging to the personality of the one who holds it.” Moreover: “Prejudice and discrimination are a contagious disease in the body of a nation and must uncompromisingly be combatted as detrimental to the common good of this country.” Hence, everyone would gain if prejudice and discrimination were eliminated.15 Yet occasionally some of these human rights activists also acknowledged that it would not be possible to tackle prejudice and discrimination without attacking certain forms of economic injustice in Canada. The same Food for Thought editorial explained that it was necessary to “eradicate from our social system those evils like unemployment, bad housing, and other forms of economic injustice”

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because these evils “create such insecurity in groups and individuals that they seek compensatory security by persecution of others.”16 The editorial was describing scapegoating, viewed by many human rights activists as a crucial source of racial prejudice. Thus, for example, The Races of Mankind, an American pamphlet widely disseminated in Canadian anti-discrimination campaigns, declared that “freedom from fear is the way to cure race prejudice … Every labor decision that lessens the terror of being ‘laid off’ and gives a man self-respect in his employment, every arrangement that secures the little farmer against losing his acres to the bank – all these and many more can free people from fear. They need not look for scapegoats.”17 Because they saw a link between bigotry, discrimination, and the economic bases of inequality, many human rights activists – including liberal democratic ones – believed that state intervention, particularly in the form of anti-discrimination legislation, was required to combat racism. Some liberal human rights advocates’ willingness to adopt this expanded role of the state reveals their willingness to compromise with the left – specifically the ccf – in order to preserve the hegemony of the liberal order in Canada.18 Based on their research, most human rights activists had concluded by 1949 that “the attack on discrimination promises better and more immediate results than the attack on prejudice.”19 Because of the novelty of this approach, they experimented with different types of legislation. Leading the way, the ccf government in Saskatchewan introduced a bill of rights in 1947. When the bill proved relatively ineffective, human rights advocates threw their support behind American-style fair practices acts that targeted discrimination in specific areas, such as employment and housing, one at a time. In so doing, they also emphasized the educational value of the laws. In an article entitled “Laws Also Educate,” Manfred Saalheimer (a Canadian Jewish Congress official) stressed “the tremendous educational process that exists in the very act of passing a progressive piece of legislation.” He maintained that, “when undemocratic practices exist and the government fails to establish the fact that such practices are illegal,” it contributes to the growth of “such undesirable practices.” Since “ninety percent of our population are fair and law-abiding citizens who are guided by the standards which society has recognized … if the law indicates that public policy is opposed to hiring procedures based on race, religion, colour or national origin, the bulk of the people will not only conform but will

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recognize the fair practices as the only right ones.” He then stressed that recent experience with fair employment practice laws in six US states proved this kind of legislation really worked. 20 “It is more effective to win a judicial decision against a restrictive covenant,” declared another human rights activist at the end of the 1940s, “than to utter pious sentiments about anti-Semitism.” He continued: “it is more effective to secure opportunities for colored girls to train as nurses than to teach ‘the scientific facts about race’ [and] it is more effective to work for adequate educational opportunities for Canada’s Indian wards than to teach white children the legends of their Indian ‘brothers.’” Like Saalheimer, he also believed that “the direct attack on discrimination” should be supplemented by educational campaigns against prejudice.21 Judge Joseph Thorson took a much broader view of the role of the state in fighting racism. He believed that Canada’s steps to establish a welfare state after the Second World War constituted a significant move towards reducing prejudice. Moving Canada towards a fairer distribution of wealth, the postwar social safety net was built on the assumption that “everyone is essentially his brother’s keeper.”22 Indeed, the postwar acceptance of relatively moderate state intervention in economic and social life to limit inequities and to ensure social stability provided the context for the anti-discrimination campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s. Yet the reactions of critics to anti-discrimination legislation illustrate just how innovative the ideas and practices of postwar liberal human rights activists were. These reactions also highlight the salience of democracy in this period, for these critics, like the human rights activists, portrayed themselves as champions of democracy, freedom, and individual rights. They objected to fair practices legislation on the grounds that it interfered with the rights of employers. State interference with property rights, especially the rights of employers, they believed, struck at the foundations of the capitalist system. In making these arguments, these critics revealed the centrality of property rights to common conceptions of liberalism.23 The critics’ fears came sharply into focus in Manitoba, in 1953, when the province introduced a fair employment practices bill that would prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of race, creed, and national origin. Reacting to the bill’s enactment, former Social Credit mla Salome Halldorson called it “a blow to democracy,” arguing that it struck at “the freedom of choice.” “The employee has

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his freedom,” she believed, “but under the Bill the employer would not.” The “statism” in the bill, she added, “approaches communism; the next step will be that the state becomes the sole employer.” Liberal Michael Hryhorczuk described the bill as “a wedge driven into our free enterprise system.” 24 Similar views appeared in influential central Canadian newspapers as well. An op ed piece by J.D. McAree, entitled “It is Not a Crime to Be an Anti-Semite,” which appeared in the Globe and Mail in early 1948, started out by defending “the right of human beings to have their own private thoughts … Indeed, to have prejudices seems to us one of the essential rights guaranteed to us under freedom of conscience.” He then declared: “We believe in the right of private employers to choose whether they shall employ Protestants or Jews or Roman Catholics.”25 In another Globe column several months later, McAree continued this line of argument, explaining that “the operator of a boarding house ought to be permitted to exclude Jews or atheists [and] a Protestant owner of real estate ought to be able to refuse to rent to a Roman Catholic.”26 Opponents of various forms of anti-discrimination legislation often appealed to the property rights that, they believed, were intrinsic to democracy. As we have seen with Halldorson and Hryhorczuk, these ideas were closely linked to opposition to government intervention in the business world.27 A 1952 article in the Financial Post, for example, strongly condemned Ontario’s new law that prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of race, creed, and national origin, explaining that “employers are disturbed with the trend toward complete government controls. They see the Act as the wellknown thin edge of the wedge.”28 A Globe and Mail editorial that similarly critiqued this measure used far more intemperate language, declaring that the individual employer “has the right to pick and choose his associates … unless he is living in a slave economy.”29 The editorial described the defence of property rights as a defence of democracy, suggesting that only an authoritarian state would impose unfair limitations on the employers’ and landlords’ prerogatives. These differing views of rights and democracy testify to the contested nature of these concepts in this period as well as to the salience of invoking the need to protect democracy. These differences also testify to the tensions between liberty and equality that Mauduit and Tunnicliffe emphasize in the introduction to this volume. The attitudes of the opponents of anti-discrimination measures harkened

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back to the heritage of nineteenth-century classic, liberal political economy, which, as Samuel Moyn explains in his examination of these issues in the United States and Europe, stresses “bars to state intervention in the ostensibly private domains of contract and property.”30 In many ways, this orientation has intensified in the current neoliberal period with its shibboleths of the free market and free trade. But in the 1940s and 1950s in Canada, as Ross Lambertson documents, there was “an ideological shift from classical liberalism to reform liberalism” such that “the right of minority-group members to live free from racial or religious discrimination outweighed the virtues of a society premised on the classical-liberal value of freedom of contract.”31 In Canada in these years, the human rights advocates who supported a newly modified form of liberal democracy – which sanctioned limited state intervention to protect minority rights – often needed to collaborate with advocates of social democracy, including labour activists.

s o c ia l d e mocracy The chief social democratic advocates of human rights in Canada during the 1940s and 1950s belonged to the Jewish Labour Committee (jlc ), the ccf , and sections of the labour movement. We begin with the jlc because this organization played such a key role in enhancing ccf ers’ and labour organizers’ awareness of – and determination to fight against – prejudice and discrimination. An affiliate of an organization by the same name in the United States, the jlc was established by Eastern European Jewish immigrants and their offspring, many of whom were members of Jewish socialist organizations such as the Workmen’s Circle and the Labour Zionists, as well as labour unions such as the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (in which Canada’s Jewish workers tended to be concentrated). While some of these immigrants had not become radicalized until they experienced additional hardships in Canada, the socialist convictions of many of them had originated in their involvement in Jewish socialist and labour organizations in Eastern Europe. They saw competitive capitalism and economic insecurity as the main causes of anti-Semitism and other forms of racist antagonism.32 While Canadian and American members of the Jewish Labour Committee worked closely together, as did liberal Jewish human

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rights activists on both sides of the border,33 the jlc was more influential in the human rights campaigns here than it was in the United States. This was partly because the initiative behind labour’s fight for fair practices legislation had more diverse sources in the United States than it did in this country. In addition to the Jewish Labor Committee, the Negro Labor Committee as well as the Catholic and Presbyterian labour groups were active in fighting discrimination in the United States but were largely absent in Canada.34 The unique presence of the ccf in Canada also provided a distinct and valuable path for the jlc to expand its influence here. Canada’s jlc activists expressed concern that labour’s enemies used racism to weaken the labour movement: “Anti-Semitism, anti-Negroism, anti-Catholicism, anti-French, anti-English as the case may be, and union-smashing are all parts of a single reactionary crusade of hatred and destruction.”35 As Kalmen Kaplansky (executive director of the jlc from 1946 to 1957) explained, since the search for scapegoats was intensified by economic hardship, “the effort of organized labour to achieve security and improve economic condition” would make “an important contribution towards the elimination of prejudice and hostility among the many racial and religious groups in Canada,” thereby enhancing democracy.36 The modest financial contributions from the jlc and related Jewish organizations initially paid for the human rights campaigns in Canada’s two main labour federations. As Maurice Silcoff (manager of one of the Canadian locals of the United Cloth Hat, Cap, and Millinery Workers’ International Union) explained, his local decided to tax itself two dollars per head for this purpose in “the re-affirmation of our belief in freedom and democracy and the Trade Union Movement.”37 Like their liberal counterparts, social democratic human rights advocates spoke out against the totalitarianism of the right and the left. Many leading Jewish human rights advocates and social democrats in Canada, such as Moishe Lewis and Michael Rubinstein, as well as Kalmen Kaplansky, were more familiar than most other Canadians with the anti-democratic features of Bolshevism, fascism, and Nazism either through personal experience or by communicating with Jews and socialists in Europe and closely following developments there.38 In their analysis, Nazi anti-Semitism was closely tied to the repression of the labour movement in Germany and in German-occupied territories. Their most sustained campaign

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to publicize repression by the Bolsheviks concerned Victor Alter and Henryk Ehrlich, two Jewish members of the Bund (a Jewish socialist organization) in occupied Poland, who were arrested and later murdered by the Soviets between 1939 and 1941.39 In the context of Canadian party politics, jlc activists – as anti-communist, Jewish leftists – worked within the ccf . Like the liberal human rights activists, social democratic activists believed that racist discrimination threatened to undermine democracy. Unlike some of these liberals, however, they did not generally brandish the threat of communists making inroads in Canada but, instead, argued that discrimination in employment and housing, restrictive covenants, suppression of trade union rights, and religious intolerance would foster a cynical attitude towards democracy among Canadians.40 The importance of class politics to the jlc is revealed, for example, in a 1958 incident in which a Windsor representative of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners wrote to Sid Blum, asking him to intercede directly with Samuel Bronfman, head of Seagram’s, on behalf of an African Canadian worker who, together with a number of other African Canadians, faced discrimination at the Calvert Distillery Plant in Amhertsburg, Ontario. Blum replied: “As a director of a Jewish labour organization, I feel I would be treated the same as any other labour representative in any approaches to an employer, Jewish or otherwise.” He continued: “Some people may think that the proper way to fight discrimination is for a labour person of one religion to appeal to a boss of the same religion. It is hoped that their similar religion could override all their other differences. I don’t agree with this position.” He then urged the Windsor union representative to contact the Ontario Department of Labour to launch an appeal under the Fair Employment Practices Act.41 Meanwhile, as head of the jlc , Kaplansky had initially had difficulty convincing some immigrant Jewish socialists to prioritize anti-discrimination activities. After all, they commonly highlighted class oppression, as well as anti-Semitism, and believed that only socialism would bring about true equality.42 They were not satisfied by a vision of a society that had eliminated racist and religious discrimination while maintaining dramatic economic inequalities.43 Looking back over the Jewish labour movement’s struggles against both Jewish and non-Jewish employers in Toronto’s clothing industry, for example, one Jewish leftist declared rhetorically: “Why should

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I feel better if I am exploited by a Jew?”44 But in the absence of an immediate socialist revolution, the stings of anti-Semitism motivated some to agree with Kaplansky. Besides, as one leftist Jewish clothing worker explained: “Just because we had a hard life to make a living, we wanted our children should have it better. So no matter how poor a cloakmaker was, he wanted his son to be a doctor, a lawyer.”45 At a time when Jewish access to law schools, medical schools, and hospital internships was limited, struggles against racist and religious discrimination made sense. Kaplansky himself had little patience with the argument that piecemeal reforms were not important because socialists should focus on bringing about the revolution.46 For Jewish socialists, the struggle against racism was not just a matter of moderate reforms – even if they had to frame their concerns in this way when lobbying government leaders for anti-discrimination legislation. As the jlc ’s 1957 Report declared in Yiddish: “our [anti-discrimination] work is built on a larger idea of freedom, on all our socialist beliefs.”47 These Jewish activists believed that racism was not the product of individual pathology but, rather, was intrinsic to the capitalist system: employers stirred up these animosities to divide the working class, thereby enriching themselves while various groups of workers quarrelled with one another over the crumbs. From this point of view, the fight against discrimination was also necessarily a fight for major changes in society.48 They resembled some of the rights activists in the United States and Europe described by Samuel Moyn: activists who pushed not only for status equality for members of racialized groups but also for distributive justice – thereby repudiating dramatic material inequality – at least for male citizens.49 In their radical vision of an end to both racism and class oppression, the jlc activists differed markedly from the present-day advocates of identity politics who, as Nancy Fraser explains, have “aimed more at valorizing cultural difference than at promoting economic equality.”50 Yet Canadian historians of human rights have tended to overlook the extent of this radicalism when focusing on the 1940s and 1950s. These Canadian Jewish radicals experienced tensions between their ultimate commitment to overturn what they saw as the structural causes of racist and class-based injustices and their more short-term commitment to more modest goals, such as concrete anti-discrimination legislation. This balancing act could be particularly difficult, especially because certain kinds of anti-racist human rights gains could

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help legitimate liberal democracy. In fact, Canada’s Jews were on the cusp of dramatic upward mobility, a change that helps account for the impending decline of socialist convictions among them. One of the reasons that Canadian Jewish activists had been originally drawn to the ccf was that the party’s founding program, the 1933 Regina Manifesto, called for “equal treatment before the law of all residents of Canada irrespective of race, nationality or religious or political belief.” Implicit in the manifesto’s preamble was the view that racist, religious, and political intolerance were the products of competitive capitalism.51 Nevertheless, jlc activists found that many English Canadian and French Canadian members of the ccf and the labour movement were oblivious to the nature and significance of prejudice and discrimination in their midst, as well as in Canada more broadly. Thus, the jlc embarked on major educational campaigns within these organizations. Not wanting to reduce the impact of this work by revealing how closely it was tied to Jewish organizations, it established more broadly based organizations, such as the Joint Labour Committees to Combat Racial Intolerance, in key locations throughout Canada. They often selected English Canadian and French Canadian leaders as the public representatives of the anti-discrimination campaigns.52 Many English Canadian ccf members and labour leaders were receptive to the jlc ’s efforts. Some of them, such as M.J. Coldwell, the party’s leader from 1942 to 1960, for example, argued that “racialism” was incompatible with Christianity. “All men being the children of God,” he maintained, “are brothers.” Influenced by the Social Gospel, Coldwell’s position demonstrates how the categories of social democracy and Christian democracy could closely overlap. Other ccf ers, like mps Angus McInnis and Alistair Stewart, based their human rights advocacy on secular humanist ideas.53 Moreover, the continuing influence of the jlc and the ccf in Canada, particularly in the labour movement, meant that the promotion of social democracy continued, even as advocates of cultural democracy gained ground.

c u lt u r a l d e mocracy Human rights advocates – primarily liberal ones – also employed the term “cultural democracy” in their campaigns during the 1940s and 1950s. American historian Stuart Svonkin believes that Jewish human rights advocates introduced the term when they were trying

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to find a balance between cultural conformity and what they saw as cultural fragmentation in the post-Second World War United States. This approach allowed both for involvement in a common culture and for preservation of a measure of cultural diversity.54 Cultural democracy carried a similar meaning in postwar Canada. It referred to the preservation of some aspects of the distinct cultures of minority groups and, more broadly, to cultural tools and methods for combatting prejudice and discrimination. In promoting cultural democracy, some influential Canadians, such as W.M. Haugan (an official in the Citizenship Branch of the Department of State), like their American counterparts, advocated a compromise between cultural conformity and excessive diversity. Placing himself squarely in the liberal camp, Haugan maintained that “the inherent value of the individual is a basic principle of democracy.” “Therefore,” he argued, “the individual must be free to choose the group with which he wishes to be identified and still retain his equality of status. Some people are consciously or unconsciously drawn towards the dominant group while others hold tenaciously to their ethnic background. This should be their right.” In this context, he lauded a middle path between “cultural assimilation[, which] would mean reduction of all to one common form and expression” and “cultural pluralism[,which] would mean many more or less rigid divisions.” He explained that “midway between is a cultural freedom, a cultural democracy, which will permit individuals to remain part of a minority group, to merge with a dominant group, or to unite with others to form new variations of the cultural theme.” After stressing that “cultural democracy” rested on “mutual respect,” he continued: “With the centripetal forces of common interest in Canadian democracy, with the cohesive effect of participation in community activity, and with the free interplay of socially equal groups, Canadian culture can be enriched and will continue to develop to limitless achievement. Only in such a pattern is there opportunity for fulfillment of the creative power and potential growth of the human personality.” In short, cultural democracy would be good for individual development, and the individual who was thus able to develop more fully would be better able to contribute to the country.55 Although multiculturalism would not become official Canadian policy until 1971, this was a dramatic departure from the widespread insistence on Anglo-conformity that Howard Palmer has documented so well for the early 1900s.56

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The group relations movement was associated with cultural methods of ending racist and religious discrimination and prejudice in both countries. According to Svonkin, its coming to the fore in the United States signalled a conservative shift away from acknowledging that individuals derived power and material benefits from racism towards a focus on relations and attitudes that could be eliminated through psychological and other cultural remedies without challenging the prevailing economic and political order. As Svonkin explains, “the intergroup relations movement’s sociopsychological model of prejudice led its practitioners to see social conflict as a product of individual pathology, not systemic inequality.” 57 Influential Canadian students of human rights believe that Svonkin’s description of the American intergroup relations movement is applicable to Canadian human rights advocates before the 1960s.58 We have reached somewhat different conclusions. As indicated by our discussion of social democratic human rights advocates, in particular, our investigation suggests that, although Canadian human rights advocates adopted many of the ideas and methods of the group relations movement in the United States, the influence of activists who saw racism as a product of economic and social inequality was significant in the Canadian human rights movement from its inception, and their influence remained strong throughout the period under discussion. A very clear example of Canadian human rights activists’ awareness of new developments in the United States is presented in Manfred Saalheimer’s 1944 report on his meeting with Max Horkheimer, one of the Marxist social scientists from the Frankfurt School who had fled from the Nazis to the United States before the Second World War.59 According to Saalheimer, although Horkheimer continued to believe that anti-Semitism had its roots “to a good deal” in economic conditions, he shifted his attention to the psychological roots of this form of prejudice because he became convinced that it would be impossible to change the economic structure of the United States. In the late 1940s and 1950s, group relations activists offered Canadians new tools that promised to eliminate prejudice and discrimination without challenging existing socio-economic structures in fundamental ways. Having concluded that the wartime propaganda campaigns against prejudice and discrimination had not been successful enough in changing the attitudes of many Canadians, group relations advocates believed that ignorance alone was inadequate to explain why many Canadians subscribed to racist

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stereotypes. Because prejudice had deep psychological roots it was relatively unaffected by propaganda. Influenced by social psychologists and other social scientists, group relations professionals began to rely on small workshops in workplaces, union halls, and various clubs and associations that purported to offer participants experience with prejudice and discrimination. Ideally, participants came from a variety of minority groups. Interaction among them during the workshop was seen as a step towards overcoming prejudice. In a workshop organized for francophone municipal workers in Montreal, in 1952, for example, “socio-drama,” or role playing, was used to allow participants to feel the effects of employment discrimination. One participant acted out the role of a Jewish job applicant, another played the role of the racist interviewer. A discussion by the entire group followed. Another workshop employed an approach labelled “Rumor Clinic” to demonstrate how rumours can generate prejudices.60 In the context of postwar Canada, the attention given to active citizenship, and the upsurge in programs designed to encourage civic participation, had special significance, especially once Canadian citizenship finally achieved official legal status in 1947. Canadians of different political orientations believed that well-informed, engaged citizens were key to safeguarding democracy. 61 Human rights advocates shared these views. The various cultural tools that they devised to educate Canadians about the nature and consequences of prejudice and discrimination spoke of their awareness of the complexity of changing deeply held beliefs. But to give legitimacy to their quest, and to convince municipal, provincial, and federal governments to pass legislation against discrimination, they required broad citizen support. The Springfield Plan, an American plan to combat racist prejudice and discrimination through the public school system, was introduced as a pilot project in Welland, Ontario, in 1947 and formed part of the promotion of active citizenship in postwar Canada. Its promoters maintained that tolerance of diversity was a key component of democracy. School inspector Clare MacLeod, a key figure behind the implementation of the Springfield Plan in Welland, entitled his study – based largely on the plan in Welland – Citizenship Training. The book focused on shoring up democracy by combating “the race haters, the bigots, the snobs, and the ‘scapegoaters’ [who] are quite numerous in our society.”62 Like the group relations workshops discussed earlier, moreover, the creators of the Springfield Plan believed that education could not stop with book learning but must

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be based on pupils learning through experience. In the school, pupils formed their own committees on citizenship, on health and safety in the school building, and on school beautification and cleanliness, as well as a committee for the publication of a school newspaper. To gain exposure to the practice of democracy outside their schools, pupils attended meetings of the school board and the city council.63 The work of the Co-operative Committee on Japanese Canadians (ccjc ) provides another good example of what was meant by active citizenship. In 1949, when the Canadian Association for Adult Education’s monthly magazine, Food for Thought, published a special issue on “group relations,” the authors highlighted the activities of the ccjc and reinforced the theme that the commitment to democracy necessitated a commitment to combating racism. This argument was combined with an emphasis on how human rights activists could use the tools of democracy to obtain gains. These gains, in turn, would improve the nature of “group relations” (a term that was often used to refer to promoting inter-group tolerance). When reporting “outstanding efforts to improve intercultural relations in this country,” the magazine’s editor praised the ccjc as “a watchdog of democracy” that had continued since 1945 “to press for full citizenship rights for the Japanese-Canadians.” Consisting of a broad coalition that included Christian groups, women’s organizations, labour organizations, the Toronto Civil Liberties Association, and Japanese Canadian groups, as well as others, this organization had played a major role in the fight to stop the postwar deportation of people of Japanese ancestry. Since this coalition also helped Japanese Canadians finally obtain the vote in British Columbia at the end of the decade, Food for Thought’s editor declared that the coalition’s work “provide[d] a unique example of how enlightened public opinion can express itself through democratic processes.” These gains led to the conclusion that “democracy will work – if enough effort and good will is directed toward making it work.”64 The magazine’s editor focused especially on how the ccjc had worked to stop the postwar deportation by reaching out to even more groups and mounting extensive political campaigns. ccjc activists exerted pressure on the government in a number of ways by holding dozens of public meetings across the country, circulating thousands of petitions, sponsoring editorials in many leading newspapers, and sending “an avalanche of letters” to the office of the prime minister. The ccjc also raised funds to test the legality of the deportation

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orders, and it took the legal challenge all the way to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. While the King government argued that the deportation was legal as a result of orders-in-council under the War Measures Act, supporters of the ccjc argued that these orders-in-council were, in fact, unconstitutional, especially since the country was no longer experiencing a wartime emergency. Although the Privy Council sustained the legality of the orders-in-council, the King government finally gave up the deportation policy in response to all the public pressure. As the magazine’s editor explained, “The energetic and persistent campaign carried on by the Co-operative Committee was an inspiration to the thousands of Canadians who wanted to see justice done but did not know how to make their opinions felt.” The editor proclaimed that, “without such a committee, the vocal anti-Japanese minority would have continued to make their attitude prevail.”65

c h r is t ia n d e m ocracy Many human right activists promoted the idea that a commitment to Christianity necessitated a commitment to eliminating prejudice. Even though this approach overlapped with other categories of democracy in the postwar human rights campaigns, we have set out Christian democracy as a separate category because it was so important.66 In these years, most advocates of Christian democracy were Protestants. As we discuss elsewhere, Roman Catholics – with notable exceptions – tended to be much less involved in human rights campaigns even though Catholics were, of course, sometimes the victims of prejudice and discrimination.67 Although some Catholics participated in the Brotherhood Weeks organized by the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews, Catholic leaders tended to fear that interdenominational collaboration would lead to secularization. In the 1950s, when the campaigns for anti-discrimination legislation intensified, the Catholic Register criticized the secular humanism that it saw as inspiring such efforts.68 At one point, the newspaper went so far as to publish an editorial entitled “The Heresy of Democracy,” which approvingly quotes the warning of a Cincinnati judge that too many Americans adhered to “the religion of mystical democracy,” which ignored the primacy of God and gave “primary place to the things which ought to be secondary, such as brotherhood [and] tolerance.”69 Although such open condemnation of democracy

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was rare in this newspaper, Catholic leaders were apparently also wary of human rights campaigns because they feared these would undermine guarantees of religious education in the separate school system of provinces like Ontario.70 The advocates of Christian democracy, some of whom were African Canadians, promoted brotherhood and tolerance together with Godliness. Thus, the Ontario-Quebec conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church declared in 1943 that “legal protection … should be exercised to ensure justice by eliminating discriminatory practices which are repugnant to democratic principles.” This appeal was legitimated specifically in terms of “the liberty which is fundamental in our Christian, democratic society founded upon the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man.”71 Similarly, the president of the ywca declared in 1944 that racism contradicted Christian principles of brotherhood and stood in the way of peace.72 As we have seen, the Co-operative Committee on Japanese Canadians mobilized citizens to join a broad coalition to oppose the postwar deportation of people of Japanese heritage, and this growing opposition was based on an appeal to democracy. It was also based on the idea that the deportations were unchristian.73 Thus an editorial in the United Church Observer in early 1946 proclaims: “Our religion and our faith demands something better” than submitting the Japanese Canadians to deportation. “We boast that we are a Christian country. Then let us prove our Christianity by applying the principles of brotherhood and mercy towards those of our own citizens who for no crime, no reason whatsoever save the accident of birth are being kept in a state of tension, anxiety and suspense while we debate and discuss their future … Let the Government put an end to all this, and do the right, just and Christian thing by stopping the deportation order.”74 Meanwhile, H. Christensen, a United Church minister from Saskatchewan, uses more colourful language to express similar views about the postwar deportations: “the way we have treated these unfortunate people is simply a crime,” and “our boasted Christian civilization must stink in the nostrils of the angels of God.”75 This appeal to Christian values was especially interesting since, despite the missionaries’ efforts, a significant number of people of Japanese heritage were not, in fact, Christians. The Federal Council of Churches’ 1949 Statement on Human Rights “termed opposition to discriminatory practices a Christian duty,” officially declaring that “all the rich gifts which God imparts

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to men should be available to all without distinction as to race, colour, sex, birth, nationality, class or creed.”76 A few years later, when R.S.K. Seeley, an Anglican minister who was also head of the Toronto Association for Civil Liberties, was crafting his official submission to the Special Committee of the Senate on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, he appealed to the “Christian doctrines and the Christian values which have been accepted by our society” to call for a Canadian declaration of human rights. Seeley declares that “every individual man is of supreme value in the sight of God … and must therefore have freedom to respond to the call of God and be given opportunities whereby the whole of his personality may be fully developed to the glory of God and in the service of God.”77 Similarly, a 1951 article in the United Church Observer appeals to “the democratic principles of brotherhood” and explains that “a civilization built on hatred, fear and suspicion is bound to crack, for God’s will and purpose is love.”78 But who was included in the concept of Christian democracy? While some of the above statements apparently encompassed people without regard to race or even creed, the concept of Christian democracy sometimes privileged Anglo-Saxons. Although this appears not to have been common in this time period, an article in the United Church Observer in 1949 proclaims that the “democratic way” is “the Anglo-Saxon inheritance.” The author insists that “every citizen of all racial origins in Canada should be taught the freedom and enrichment of mind and spirit that has accompanied the use of the Anglo-Saxon speech for nearly two thousand years.” In denouncing bilingualism in this context, he even goes so far as to assert that “the use of French … becomes the tool of an anti-democratic tyranny that seeks to control every department of life, religious, political and economic. It retards the progress that would be possible if the French and English were united in one speech and faith.”79 Did Christian democracy encompass non-Christians? Its proponents did not explicitly consider them, except for Jews, and their attitudes towards Jews varied. On the one hand, those who fought prejudice and discrimination by stressing Christian democracy sometimes took care to focus on what they saw as the values that were embodied in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Yet, on the other hand, some of the human rights advocates who appealed to the values of Christian democracy clearly saw Jews as problematic outsiders. It is additionally problematic that these discussions of

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Christian democracy did not explicitly consider members of other non-Christian religions in Canada. Entitled “Christianity’s Debt to Judaism,” a 1942 article in the United Church Observer stresses that Jews had developed ethical monotheism and that Judaism had provided the foundation for Christianity.80 A 1949 editorial in Food for Thought stresses the need to combat prejudice and discrimination because “the highest value in a Christian democratic society, such as we in Canada claim to have, is the individual human being.” This editorial then goes on to proclaim that “good group relations are … morally right, in accordance with our Hebrew-Christian standards of ethics.”81 In an article on anti-Semitism in the United Church Observer in mid-1944, Watson Thomson (superintendent of adult education at the University of Manitoba) begins by proclaiming: “When a Jewish synagogue can be burned down, in a nominally Christian and democratic country – as happened just the other day – with no more in the way of public protest than there was, it is time … to examine the foundations of our Christian-democratic society.” “How is it that such things should be intensifying,” he asks, “at the very time when we fight what is supposed to be a ‘people’s war’ of the ‘United Nations’ for the defence and the victorious extension of democracy?” While promoting “faith in universal brotherhood,” he maintains that, “as a people, we simply do not know enough to be adequately protected against … fascist tricks.” Hence “we are not quite sure whether maybe there isn’t some truth in these stories about Jews being unscrupulous in their business dealings. And, after all, have they not some collective guilt for their rejection of Jesus, the Christ?” He then argues that, “if some Jews, or even many Jews, have manners and morals we dislike, there are historic reasons for it in which Christendom is very much involved.” Without explaining these reasons, he continues: “the point is whether a man is inevitably such-and-such because of his ‘race’; and … the answer to that is a categorical no.” In explaining why so much animosity was being directed against the Jews in particular, he asserts that “it is because the Jewish people more than any other group have stood, ever since Moses, against idolatry, against superstition, against the arrogance of tyrants and priests, for equality, realism and social justice … To all such enemies of humanity [like Hitler] the sceptical, equalitarian temper of the Jewish people must need be anathema.” “And that is why,” he declares, “Protestants, who also give a high place in the

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Universe to human reason, should stand solidly with the Jewish people and their values against the enemies of reason, progress and the dignity of the human person.”82 A month later, this newspaper carried an article by Rabbi Abraham Feinberg, one of the leading human rights activists in this period, in which he calls for “a more co-operative relationship and a deepened understanding” between Christians and Jews. He asserts that “a truly devout Christian, whose doctrine progresses from professed ritual into practiced conduct, to whom Christian love is not only a glorious affirmation of theology but a performed glory of life, can never be prey to anti-Semitic propaganda. He can never be taught to hate anyone; to him Israel is the God-chosen revealer of the divine way, the foundation of his own spiritual fabric.” Feinberg also declares that “a genuinely-pious Jew can never turn against Christianity” because “the Divine Image has been impressed alike on every human creature, and … all the children of men are Children of God.” After stressing “the common heritage of Christianity and Judaism, which they together must preserve,” he emphasizes again that “every man, of whatever class, creed, or colour, is shaped after God’s image, every man has a spark of divinity.” “Here,” he declares, “is the germ of democracy – and the exact opposite of Nazism.”83 Thus, while appealing to Christians by stressing the Jewish foundation of their faith, Feinberg’s approach is still more inclusive inasmuch as he also stresses that every human being has the divine spark. But an earlier “Prayer for Race Relationship” in the United Church Observer focuses more specifically on the figure of Christ: “grant that by the power of Thy Pure Spirit we may be conformed unto the likeness of Christ Jesus, in whom all racial and class barriers are done away, and He becomes all in all.” This prayer clearly calls for the conversion of the Jews: “Speed the time, when the lost sheep of the house of Israel together with the fullness of the Gentiles shall be brought into the fold of Christ, the shepherd and bishop of our souls.”84 While devout Christians may have felt that it was progressive to welcome people of all races to embrace Christianity as brothers, this, of course, left non-Christians outside the fold. An article in this newspaper a month later is scathing towards Canadian Jews. The author, W.H. Colclough, asserts that Jews needed to stop and think about why people dislike them so much and then take serious measures to improve themselves. Colclough maintains that “this tendency to opposition [to the Jews] was not

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born from propaganda, racial prejudices or religious intolerance but from actual association in the business and social world where the Jew failed to make himself wanted.” He condemns what he maintains is the widespread tendency of Jewish businessmen to refuse “to recognize and respect certain ethical and business standards set up by the Gentile organizations.”85 When Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath replied to Colclough on the same page of the United Church Observer in 1943, he condemned and refuted Colclough’s allegations concerning Jewish dishonesty. More broadly, Eisendrath sets Colclough’s allegations in the context in which “millions of Jews [are being] murdered in Nazioccupied Europe,” and he concludes that “all such generalizations as Mr. Colclough has advanced are unjust, un-British[,] unscientific, unchristian and incidentally, un-Jewish too.”86 Thus, although some Christian spokespeople displayed considerable ambivalence about Jews, both rabbis, as well as key Protestant leaders, appealed to Christian values to combat prejudice and discrimination, even as the advocates of Christian democracy failed to consider the positions of other non-Christian groups in Canada.

c o n c l u s i on Waging their campaigns in the wake of the Holocaust and amidst the escalation of the Cold War, Canadian human rights activists in the 1940s and 1950s were convinced that racist prejudice and discrimination posed a threat to democracy. The rise of Hitler and the Nazis to power in Germany had revealed the power of racial ideology to direct public discontent against democratically elected governments with catastrophic results. Contrasting Western democracy to Soviet totalitarianism was, for human rights activists, not empty Cold War rhetoric. They were appalled by the widespread rights violations in the ussr . They also believed that the Soviet regime threatened Western democracies by posing as the champion of oppressed and exploited minorities and inflaming race-based tensions in the West. Thus, while using the concept of democracy was strategically advantageous during the Cold War, Canadian human rights activists believed that eradicating racism was of the utmost urgency to safeguard democracy in the postwar world. The broad political context thus meant that, much more so than earlier, it was advantageous for human rights advocates to frame

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their appeals in terms of the need to preserve democracy by advancing human rights. As such, the appeal to democracy was, in part, a tool to be used. But this was by no means a strategic ploy for these activists’ ideals encompassed an intense commitment to both democracy and human rights, which they saw as deeply bound together. Yet, as we have seen, different human rights activists meant different things by democracy. While they all viewed a degree of equality as inherent in the very conception of democracy, they differed in terms of how they envisioned the more inclusive democracy for which they fought. The very few who advocated a fundamental commitment to women’s rights constituted the rare exceptions to the vast majority of human rights advocates who, during this period, focused exclusively on combatting prejudice and discrimination based on race, creed, and national origin. Many of these were advocates of liberal democracy who stressed that members of minority groups should be incorporated into society on an equal basis in terms of access to necessities such as employment, housing, and public services. While these rights advocates stressed the sanctity of the individual and equality of opportunity, they tended to ignore the fact that certain people benefited concretely from racist forms of discrimination. In this, they had much in common with rights advocates who promoted cultural democracy. In fact, the categories of liberal democrats and cultural democrats often overlapped. Together, their activism was essential in combatting the opponents of antidiscrimination legislation who claimed that it was undemocratic for the state to interfere with “free enterprise,” while insisting that the sanctity of property rights meant that people like employers and landlords should have the freedom to discriminate against members of minority groups. While some antiracist activists viewed moderate social welfare measures as central to eliminating basic forms of insecurity that could lead to scapegoating, others were more radical in their conception of a much more egalitarian democracy. For members of the Jewish Labour Committee, their antiracist commitment was an intrinsic part of their socialism. Unlike advocates of liberal democracy, they were dissatisfied by a vision of a society that would eliminate racist discrimination while maintaining severe class inequality. Far from viewing racism as stemming from the acts of aberrant individuals, they insisted that it was inherent in the capitalist system, especially since dividing the working class was central to capitalist hegemony while acute individual economic insecurity was central

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to scapegoating. Given the predominant political tenor of the Cold War period, however, their promotion of concrete measures such as anti-discrimination laws often had to be framed in more moderate terms in support of the rights appeals of those activists who were committed to liberal democracy. At the same time, some rights activists looked to Christianity as the inspiration for their commitment to a more inclusive democracy based on “the brotherhood of man.” Although, as we have seen, there was sometimes considerable ambivalence, at best, towards non-Christians, many of the Christian democrats who were human rights activists stressed that all human beings – regardless of race – were equal in the sight of God. While some of these Christian activists’ visions of equality encompassed a social democratic orientation, others were liberals. In Canada today, we are facing the deprecation of democracy – and the promotion of property rights over human rights – by leaders of the Fraser Institute and highly influential neoliberal politicians.87 Elsewhere, too, right-wing demagogues are empowering bigots of all kinds who spew hatred not only against racialized groups but also against women’s rights advocates, lgbtq + individuals, disabled people, and members of other marginalized groups. Last year, the twenty-six richest people on the planet owned as much wealth as the bottom 50 per cent of the world’s population.88 Struggles to forge a more egalitarian democracy are as urgent as ever. not e s 1 Lloyd Harrington, “Human Rights in Canada.” Canadian Forum 33 (December 1953): 199. Harrington was quoting from Max Beer, “Can We Save the Bill of Human Rights?,” Commentary (October 1953), 10. 2 Pilon (chapter 1, this volume); Dupuis-Déri, “History of the Word ‘Democracy.’” 3 On the myth of racelessness, see, for example, Backhouse, Colour-Coded, 13–14. 4 Langford (chapter 9, this volume). 5 On the extent to which these human rights activists ignored sex discrimination, see Frager and Patrias, “Human Rights Activists”; and Clément, “I Believe in Human Rights,” 111. On other forms of discrimination, see Clément, Human Rights, 65, 123, 132–6; and Smith, “Social Movements.”

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6 Library and Archives Canada (hereafter lac ), Canadian Labour Congress Fonds, mg 28 I 103, vol. 459, file 22, “Report from the Status of Women Committee to the Ontario ccf ,” 1948. 7 Interview with Kalmen Kaplansky, 30 June 1995, Ottawa. 8 Patrias and Frager, “These Are Our Rights.” For an example of how hard rights activists had to push the Ontario government to enforce anti-discrimination legislation, see Lambertson, “Dresden Story.” 9 Halladay (chapter 11, this volume). 10 Dominique Clément asserts that “Canada’s human rights history is not a linear narrative,” yet he occasionally slips into this. See, for example, Clément’s Human Rights, 87, 122. For a strong argument against the Whiggish approach, see Walker, “Decoding Rights Revolution.” Yet while Walker explains that the history of human rights in Canada is not one of linear progress, he argues that rights advocates in the 1940s and 1950s believed that discrimination stemmed from the acts of aberrant individuals and that these activists failed to understand the systemic nature of discrimination. On this last point, see also Walker, “Jewish Phase,” 1–3, 18. 11 Winnipeg address by S. Bronfman, 1940, Jewish Historical Society of Western Canada Collection, lac , mg 28, V 114, vol. 9, file cjc Conference. 12 Globe and Mail, 17 April 1948, 4. 13 Food for Thought, October 1949, 4. 14 Ibid., February 1959, 205–6. 15 Ibid., October 1949, 3, 6. See also Food for Thought, December 1948, 39. 16 Food for Thought, October 1949, 3. 17 Benedict and Weltfish, Races of Mankind, 25–6. 18 McKay, “Liberal Order Framework,” 643; and Lambertson, Repression and Resistance. 19 Food for Thought, October 1949, 39. 20 Ibid., October 1949, 39–41. 21 Ibid., 53. This writer only signed his initials (H.L.R.), not his full name. 22 Food for Thought, February 1959, 205–6. 23 On the centrality of property rights, see, for example, Macpherson, Real World of Democracy, 38–41; and McKay, “Liberal Order Framework,” 627, 638. 24 Excerpts from Winnipeg Free Press, 20 April 1953, Canadian Jewish Congress, Western Division, Correspondence, 1949–53, lac , Jewish Labour Committee Fonds, mg 28 v 75, vol. 21, file 2. 25 Globe and Mail, 2 January 1948, 6. On McAree’s role at the Globe, see Jamie Bradburn, “Historicist: Of Mail and Empire,” Torontoist,

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36 37 38 39 40

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43 44 45 46 47 48

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20 December 2014, https://torontoist.com/2014/12/historicist-of-mailand-empire/. Globe and Mail, 27 April 1948, 6. See, for example, Financial Times (Montreal), 20 April 1951, 5. Financial Post (Toronto), 12 January 1952. Globe and Mail, 27 February 1951, 6 (emphasis added). See also the editorial in Globe and Mail, 16 April 1953, 6. Moyn, Not Enough, 62. Lambertson, Repression and Resistance, 377. Patrias and Frager, “These Are Our Rights,” 18–21, 28. Frager and Patrias, “Transnational Links.” Patrias and Frager, “These Are Our Rights,” 31. “Press statement on the background of the Labour Committee to Combat Racial Intolerance,” Provisional Labour Committee to Combat Racial Intolerance, lac , jlc , vol. 41, file 4. Reports of Activities for Improved Human Relations, 1951, lac , Kalmen Kaplansky Fonds, vol. 20, file 20-12. Correspondence of Jewish Labour Organization, lac , jlc , vol. 7, file 7. As Catherine Collomp, “Anti-Semitism,” points out, this was also the case in the United States. Smith, Unfinished Journey, 211. Address to the ccl 7th Convention by Michael Rubinstein, National Chairman, jlc , 1959, lac , jlc , vol. 9, file 12, Correspondence, Michael Rubinstein, jlc Montreal, 1959. Sid Blum to George McCurdy, 1 August 1958, lac , jlc Fonds, vol. 8, file 17, Miscellaneous Correspondence, Windsor, 1951–59. Interview with Kalmen Kaplansky, 30 June 1995, Ottawa; and Frager, Sweatshop Strife, 43–7. See also Collomp, “Anti-Semitism.” Collomp argues that the Bundists were more clear-sighted than either the communists or other socialists in “recognizing that the fight against anti-Semitism was not secondary to the goal of socialist revolution, but part of it.” Interviews with Kalmen Kaplansky, 30 June 1995; and Ben Kayfetz, 29 April 1997. Interview with Sadie Hoffman, 1985. Interview with Bessie Kramer, 1984. Interview with Kalmen Kaplansky, 30 June 1995. jlc Report, Yiddish section, n.p., lac , jlc, vol. 50, file 50-23, 1957. Address to the ccl 7th Convention by Michael Rubinstein, National Chairman, jlc , lac , jlc , vol. 9, file 12, Correspondence, Michael Rubinstein, jlc Montreal, 1959.

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49 Moyn, Not Enough, 8–9. 50 Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism, 4. Fraser also explains that the proponents of identity politics have tended “to subordinate social struggles to cultural struggles, the politics of redistribution to the politics of recognition.” 51 “Regina Manifesto,” Programme of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation adopted at First National Convention, Regina, July 1933, 1. See also Patrias, “Socialists, Jews,” 268. 52 Patrias and Frager, “These Are Our Rights,” 18–20. 53 Patrias, “Socialists, Jews,” 270. 54 Svonkin, Jews against Prejudice, 22. 55 Food for Thought, October 1949, 13–16, 50. Instead of characterizing cultural democracy as a mosaic, Haugan likened it to the multifaceted diamond, whereby “it is the facets that give life, sparkle and radiance to the stone.” See also the editorial on page 6, which proclaims that, in addition to the English and the French, “other groups have made an important contribution towards the emerging pattern of our Canadian Democracy, and should be encouraged to maintain and develop their own cultural heritage as a contribution to and enrichment of our Canadian cultural pattern.” 56 Palmer, “Reluctant Hosts,” 297–306. 57 Svonkin, Jews against Prejudice, 5, 40. 58 See, for example, Walker, “Jewish Phase.” Walker does not recognize the radicalism of the Jewish Labour Committee. 59 On the Frankfurt School, see Jay, Dialectical Imagination, especially chapter 7. On the émigrés’ role in the American human rights movement, see Svonkin, Jews against Prejudice, 33–40. 60 Conférence Ouvrière en Relations Humaines, two workbooks, Journées d’Études, n.d., lac , jlc , vol. 35, file 19. 61 Faris, Passionate Educators. See also Kuffert, Great Duty. 62 MacLeod, Citizenship Training, 25; and Frager and Patrias, “Springfield Plan,” 128. 63 Frager and Patrias, “Springfield Plan,” 131. 64 Food for Thought, October 1949, 17, 29–30, 43. 65 Ibid., October 1949, 29–30, 43; and Lambertson, Repression and Resistance, 106–42. 66 On religion and human rights in this period, see Egerton, “Age of Human Rights”; and Tunnicliffe, Resisting Rights, 43–4. 67 Patrias and Frager, “These Are Our Rights,” 13–14. For a different interpretation, see Lacroix, “Immigration, Minority Rights.” 68 Catholic Register, 23 March 1946, 20 January 1951, 14 April 1951; and Ben Kayfetz to Sol Grand, 21 June 1948, Ontario Jewish Archives,

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76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83

84 85 86 87 88

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Canadian Jewish Congress, Chronological Correspondence Files, rg 290, 1947-8, file fepc 1947–48. Catholic Register, 17 August 1957. See also 28 August 1954 and 14 April 1951. Catholic Register, 23 March 1946; 20 January 1951; and 14 April 1951. United Church Observer, 15 October 1943, 8. President’s Address to the Annual Meeting, lac , ywca Collection, vol. 8, file: Annual Meetings, Memoranda, 1944. See, for example, United Church Observer, 1 December 1945, 7. Ibid., 1 March 1946, 4. Paul H. Christensen to Tommy Douglas, 5 December 1945, Saskatchewan Archives Board, Douglas Papers, vol. 297, ccf , r 33.I LIII 878 (58) Japanese Canadians, file: pamphlets, M.J. Coldwell, Am I My Brother’s Keeper?. United Church Observer, 1 January 1949, 1, 28. Unfortunately, the report on this statement did not specify why issues of class and sex were included or how these particular issues were conceptualized. Food for Thought, February 1951, 6. United Church Observer, 1 July 1951, 27. Ibid., 15 January 1949, 11. Ibid., 1 January 1942. Food for Thought, October 1949, 2–4. United Church Observer, 1 July 1944, 11. Ibid., 1 August 1944, 11. For the emphasis on all men as the children of God, see also, for example, the account of the efforts of the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews to promote Brotherhood Week in Food for Thought, October 1949, 22–3. United Church Observer, 14 February 1943, 9. Ibid., 15 March 1943, 10. Ibid. On neoliberalism in Canada in recent times, see, for example, Gutstein, Harperism, 12–29, 34–6, 44–5. Oxfam International, “5 Shocking Facts about Extreme Global Inequality and How to Even It Up,” 21 January 2019, https://www.oxfam.org/ en/even-it/5-shocking-facts-about-extreme-global-inequality-and-howeven-it-davos.

9 “Will Freedom Survive?”: Reconstruction, Self-Disciplined Democracy, and the Stirring of a New Right in Canada, 1943–54 Will Langford

“Will freedom survive?” Gladstone Murray wanted to know. Peace had arrived at the end of the Second World War. It was accompanied by expectations of full employment, social security, and a rising standard of living. For the former Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (cbc ) general manager, the question was whether Canada would be reconstructed through evolution or revolution. The unavoidable choice was between “a mixed economy wherein free men and women independently and co-operatively plan, organize, direct and control our economic affairs through voluntary action, and a totalitarian economy whereby, by default, the Government takes over the direction and control of industry, business and agriculture, enforcing co-operation by police power.” With that stark contrast drawn, Murray looked to the postwar future: “In the era now opening, freedom and responsibility are inseparable … All real progress is applied idealism. What makes history is when conservatives become aggressively idealistic.”1 This chapter has a lot to say about Gladstone Murray and his ideas. By positioning Murray within reconstruction debates and showing how big business was compelled to respond to changes in how Canadians understood democracy, my larger purpose is to consider how some aspects of right-wing politics were reshaped. For Murray was a public relations expert and ideological entrepreneur directly funded by some of the richest corporate executives in Toronto and Montreal. I argue that, in seeking to reinvigorate classical liberalism,

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Murray suggested one possible course for forging a new right rooted in militant individualism. Right-wing politics have been little explored by Canadian historians, especially beyond the confines of the Conservative Party.2 Rich people’s movements, generally organized by business interests, were one component of a wider political right.3 Though there are distinctions to draw among business actors, the continuity of their general ideological commitments is striking. Reflecting on turn-of-thetwentieth-century French Canadian business spokespeople, historian Fernande Roy argues that liberalism was a discourse of the powerful. There was much more to conserve – in terms of property rights and individual liberties – than there was to change. Those preoccupations informed a conservative liberalism open to adjustment, so long as liberal tenets were guarded and radical transformations avoided.4 However, the content, character, and expression of business-backed campaigns changed over the course of the twentieth century. A significant revision began to occur during the reconstruction period. A surge in political demands for popular power and expanded entitlements brought new visions of democracy to the fore during the Second World War and, from 1943, shaped lively debates about the postwar future. Targeted racial and religious exclusions on the franchise remained, while new categories of “enemy aliens” were interned and denied the vote during the war. Yet a broad mass electorate entered reconstruction debates convinced that its contributions to a common war effort should be reflected by the state. From this perspective, democracy meant more than political and civil rights. As Ruth Frager and Carmela Patrias (chapter 8, this volume) emphasize, activists conceiving of democracy in different ways advocated human rights measures. Many Canadians also demanded that the state provide programs and services that would secure people’s well-being and realize their social citizenship. Workers further insisted on industrial democracy, wherein the state would uphold working-class power in the workplace through collective bargaining rights and union security measures. On the defensive and in need of a new political program, some Montreal and Toronto economic elites committed themselves to a North American-wide campaign to “sell free enterprise.” They aimed to limit the welfare state and union strength that were corollaries of social and industrial democracy. If big business has often been described as an opponent of democracy, the rich people’s movement

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that mobilized during reconstruction was compelled to resort to democracy and had to frame the interests of the well-propertied minority in ways that appealed to the majority’s sense of a common good. Corporate executives often spoke for themselves. Yet they also relied on experts, including public relations professionals who sought to impress upon the public that democracy, freedom, and capitalism were irrevocably linked. Gladstone Murray was a leading voice in the “ruthless and uncompromising” campaign for what he called “Responsible Enterprise.”5 Historians of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ccf ) have identified Murray as among the most vicious anti-ccf speakers in 1940s Ontario.6 He was that, and considerably more. In offering a broader account, my work benefits from the growing historiography on neoliberalism as well as from studies by Peter McInnis, Don Nerbas, and Elizabeth Fones-Wolf.7 As a contribution to the present volume, in this chapter I consider how the wealthy and their allies sought to redirect and limit popular pressure for democratization in mid-twentieth century Canada, and I highlight the transnational free market ideas relevant to this cause. Murray sought to articulate a positive program that would reassert big business interests by securing a wider constituency. The project was ostensibly aloof from party politics, though destroying the ccf would preserve a predictable two-party system. “Democracy,” he felt, “is the whole trend away from the rigidity of status to freedom of opportunity.”8  But would freedom survive demands for “root-and-branch” reform? Ambivalent about the political choices of ordinary people, Murray nonetheless recognized that popular understandings of democracy were widening. Citizens had to be persuaded that their own well-being depended on capitalism. Drawing in free market ideas and framed by an imperial narrative of Christian civilization, Murray advanced a vision of elite democracy in which a more informed, spiritually rooted, and liberal citizenship was necessary. In a responsibilized, “self-disciplined democracy,” citizens would actively restrain their material demands on the state and on employers. In the process, Murray sought to shrink newly expanded understandings of citizenship entitlements and limit the scope of popular socio-economic expectations. By the mid-1950s, Murray’s own views migrated away from reformism as his influences became more libertarian than neoliberal in a changed postwar context. Attention to Murray’s activities offers a revealing window

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on debates concerning the reconstruction of Canadian democracy.  Backed by big business, drawing on transnational ideas, and seeking to reach the “middle elements” of society, the “Responsible Enterprise” campaign gave direction to an emergent new right.

r e c o n s t ru c t in g democracy Gladstone Murray (1893–1970) was a public relations professional. The son of a teacher, he grew up on a Fraser Valley farm. At university in 1911, he co-founded McGill Daily to protest the cliquishness of campus fraternities. A Rhodes Scholarship took him to Oxford, but the Great War interrupted his studies and he served as an officer in the British army and flying corps. After the war, he began his career as an anti-socialist journalist in the British newspaper empire of fellow Canadian anglophile Max Aitken. In 1924, he was appointed director of publicity at the British Broadcasting Company (bbc ). His responsibilities included the editorial line of the company’s radio stations.9 In Murray’s telling, the General Strike of 1926 was a defining moment of his career and political outlook. It strengthened his antipathy to organized labour and leftist politics, and led him to champion public relations work as essential to countering subversion. Mass communications were instrumental means of suasion in mass democracy. Nearly two million British trade unionists staged a nine-day general strike in early May. They acted in solidarity with over 1 million coal miners, who had been locked out by mining corporations trying to impose wage cuts and longer working hours. The strike interrupted newspaper production, and the bbc , though still a private company, emerged as the voice-piece of an intransigent government. Murray oversaw the emergency news service opponents derided as the “British Falsehood Company.” Convinced that the general strike was “a revolutionary movement,” Murray strove to contribute to its repression. “Broadcasting,” he later commented, “became as much a part of the machinery of the State as the police force.” He was pleased that the strike was “broken so effectively that communist subversive influence in the British labour movement was killed for generations.”10 Murray remained with the subsequently nationalized bbc before being hired as general manager of the reorganized Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (cbc ) in 1936. At the cbc , Murray advanced a vision of elite democracy shaped by paternalism and a pedagogy of cultural uplift. The cbc ’s advocates

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were interwar, middle-class nationalists who believed that public radio was a necessary bulwark against American commercial broadcasting.11 Murray concurred, even if he was far more concerned with advancing the cause of empire than with putting Canada first. He argued that public broadcasting, operated at arm’s length from the state, would enrich the Dominion and “provide a new means of eliminating prejudice and re-enforcing common citizenship.”12 That mission required an expert-managed, programmed pluralism, not concessions to mass culture. Murray insisted that: “To attempt to give the public what it wants by dishing up trash is a fundamental fallacy long ago exploded in the experience of both radio and the press. The highest measure of success is achieved by appreciation, not by depreciation. Public taste is fashioned as we go along.”13 Gentrifying listener tastes suggested improving citizens by instilling middle-class norms. But broadcasters approached the task with caution, feeling radio had the ability to reach, and sway, listeners in their homes. These anxieties were gendered. The “housewife” was often the object of custodial care. Murray regularly invoked radio’s intimacy and felt that it required restraint. As historian Len Kuffert argues, a tone of polite conversation came to define public broadcasting’s style by the 1940s.14 Murray resigned his cbc post under pressure in early 1943, just as the cbc was taking up measured debate about reconstruction on programs such as “Of Things to Come.” A House of Commons committee had questioned Murray’s ready, and unevenly documented, use of his expense account.15 Murray relocated from Ottawa to Toronto’s financial district, where he set about becoming a public relations consultant. From 1943, the transition to peace became a paramount domestic and international issue. In Canada, wartime transformations left open many questions about the character of postwar society, not least that concerning the distribution of power and well-being. Hopes for the future, as well as fears of postwar depression, informed visions of a reconstructed nation. Economic planning, social security, and a social minimum became central to public debate as never before. Reconstruction debates had a different tenor from preceding political considerations, although rising popular concern with social citizenship carried forward (and even though reconstruction was a concept previously invoked by some during the First World War and the Great Depression). In the 1930s, anxieties over joblessness, the

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preservation of social order, and the cost of relief permeated official discussions.16 Simultaneously, ordinary people responded to deprivation by exerting bottom-up pressure for an entitlement to welfare. Some made appeals couched in a gendered language of respectable citizenship; others participated in relief strikes and movements of the unemployed.17 If extra-parliamentary dissent was repressed, the crisis yielded a widely held common sense idea about social obligation and the belief that the state should provide assistance to those in need without intruding on their private decisions.18 The terms of reconstruction discussions were shaped by three developments. First, the wartime command economy markedly increased the role of the state. Production and labour markets were regulated; wage and price controls were instituted; government boards rationed key commodities; and Crown corporations started up several new areas of production.19 Civil servants, partly influenced by Keynesianism, assumed a greater role in managing the economy. A more complex government emerged, with more capacity to exert relatively autonomous influence.20 This interventionism shifted perceptions of what the state might achieve and how it would need to respond to popular opinion, especially as workers, consumers, and taxpayers were urged to do their part in the war effort.21 Second, full employment decisively reshaped the labour market, and workers responded by exercising their collective power. Rankand-file militants mobilized on the shop floor to win gains on their immediate wage and workplace concerns. By 1943, a strike wave comparable only to the 1919 workers’ revolt marked wartime industry.22 Industrial union membership also rose dramatically. The Congress of Industrial Organizations used its new-found strength to demand not only collective bargaining and union security but also state intervention to bring about industrial democracy. Equally, labour federations called for the creation of a welfare state.23 Labour’s powerfully put demands greatly shaped reconstruction debates. Third, popular expectations provoked reconfigurations in partisan politics. Supporting wartime strikes and civil liberties, the ccf emerged as a viable third party. It had a well-defined social democratic vision of state-led, expert-informed economic planning, significant public ownership, and social legislation.24 The apparent popularity of a socialist path to reconstruction provoked internal debates in the Liberal and Conservative Parties, and eventual cooptation of the spirit of reform.25

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Plans for peace proliferated in wide-ranging debates on the postwar future. Proposals varied, but there was growing agreement that postwar prosperity lay in the planned introduction of some form of welfare state.26 Federal, provincial, and municipal governments engaged in reconstruction planning, and they often solicited citizen views.27 At the federal level, the Advisory Committee on Reconstruction was chaired by McGill University principal Cyril James. On matters of social policy, the committee deferred to Leonard Marsh, its research director and a social scientist belonging to the League for Social Reconstruction. Borrowing from the Beveridge Report in Britain, the Marsh Report (1943) proposed a comprehensive welfare state.28 A department of reconstruction was subsequently created to coordinate government policy. The actual scope of reconstruction measures was restrained. The federal government’s “reconversion” strategy focused on unmaking wartime controls, selling off most Crown corporations involved in manufacturing, and encouraging private industry to invest in greater productivity.29 Indirect Keynesian economic management provided a monetary and financial structure for the transition.30 To contain strike action and to induce unions to self-regulate, a new framework for industrial relations was imposed from 1944. Certified and granted security by government labour boards, unions gained access to collective bargaining at the expense of abiding by the rules of industrial legality. Reworked labour policy was accompanied by the introduction of family allowances, a financial transfer meant to stimulate postwar spending while undercutting worker demands for higher wages.31 “Rehabilitation” programs sought to reintegrate veterans into the workforce.32 Yet more extensive social security programs were not implemented as the federal government deferred change and instituted tax cuts.33 An expansionary capitalism gradually emerged by 1948. The wartime contexts that had spurred demands for economic planning and social security receded. As well as capital fared in all of this, the outcome was far from apparent during the 1940s. Representatives of big business were active participants in reconstruction debates. Opinions were mixed. Some executives openly opposed planning;34 others looked to accommodation, even if they also hoped to temper postwar expectations.35 No matter their specific prescriptions, the big bourgeoisie approached reconstruction fearing the erosion of their power and anxious about union rights, planning, the mixed economy, and the welfare state.

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These sentiments had begun to build during the Great Depression, an experience that presented a paradox for big business. On the one hand, there was no fundamental transformation of the existing order. This was in marked contrast to the United States, where the New Deal spurred a conservative business counter-offensive from 1934. In Canada, balancing budgets, keeping taxes low, and limiting spending largely remained government priorities. If big business preferred voluntary self-regulation, a series of reforms implemented by the Bennett government was useful. New government coordination, regulation, and stabilization measures in the wheat, banking, housing, and manufacturing sectors deferred to established corporations, protected markets, and addressed the crisis of profitability.36 On the other hand, political economy changes began to shift power away from monopoly capitalists who had consolidated their position during the Laurier boom.37 By the mid-1930s, it became clear that orthodox policy prescriptions shared by the Liberal and Conservative Parties offered no solution to the crisis. New partisan movements emerged on the right as business-dominated big-tent politics frayed. They included: several small fascist parties; the Reconstruction Party, informed by H.H. Stevens’s populist defence of small business and “Christian economics”; the conservative French Canadian nationalism of Maurice Duplessis’ Union Nationale; the Social Credit monetary reformism spearheaded by William Aberhart; and the quixotic New Democracy initiative attempted by William Herridge. By 1938, some economic elites envisioned dispensing entirely with partisan democracy and forming a National Government.38 Such disaffection with liberal democracy was a sign of the weakening influence big business carried into reconstruction debates. Jeffrey McNairn (chapter 5, this volume) and Albert Schrauwers (chapter 4, this volume) show, in much different fashions, how corporations and democracy had a complex relationship in the early nineteenth century, with incorporation either contributing to democratization by allowing new forms of self-government or limiting the scope of democratic possibility by guarding private property rights. Certainly, from the late nineteenth century, the big bourgeoisie – wielding the money that sustained the Liberal and Conservative Parties – had secured government-business cooperation through cabinet-level sympathizers. The height of big business involvement in partisan politics came in the 1911 federal election, when wealthy financiers and industrialists were elected as Conservative mp s, having openly

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campaigned on the idea that they were progressives with the expertise needed to rightfully govern capitalist modernity.39 Politicians, then, were the key proxies of the economic elite belonging to an older right. The pressures of the Depression and the war called into question that relationship, and the classical liberal ideas underpinning it. To deal in synecdoche, consider the views of former prime minister Arthur Meighen, a friend of Gladstone Murray. Paralleling ex-American president Herbert Hoover, Meighen attempted to assume the mantle of old right statesman during the 1940s. When Meighen addressed reconstruction, he did so as a senior executive of a Toronto investment banking firm. Taking a viewpoint further contextualized by Shirley Tillotson (chapter 12, this volume), Meighen was aggrieved at cries for a “New Order.” “You cannot Beveridge a country into prosperity,” he declared, deriding support for a welfare state as a “something-for-nothing” attitude. What was needed was sound finance, it was honesty, industry, and thrift, it was “the old tonic, the old discipline of self-reliance and self-help.” Meighen evoked a crisis of masculine virility: “Are we going to build on the sterner virtues on which civilization has been made, or are we going to relapse into the soft and easy habits and hypnosis on which from the earlier times civilization has decayed?”40 Meighen’s views were out of place because many economic elites increasingly felt that, to have any political impact, nostrums needed to be replaced with dynamism. And it was middle-class experts, rather than politicians, who supplied the direction. In this respect, Murray must be understood alongside his direct peer, economist Gilbert E. Jackson. The late careers of both men demonstrated the key role big business played in sponsoring free market intellectual activity during the reconstruction period. Historian Don Nerbas argues that a new type of business elite political mobilization emerged, less focused on party politics and more reliant on the credibility of expert opinion. In mid-1943, Montreal executives tied to the James Committee decided to consider the postwar issues facing manufacturing industries. They formed the Canadian Committee on Industrial Reconstruction (ccir ), chaired by Charles Dunning, a past federal Liberal finance minister deeply immersed in the interlocking directorships of the Montreal big bourgeoisie. Akin to a think tank for the wealthy, the new committee favoured private discussion and sponsored research conducted by Gilbert Jackson and Associates. Jackson had been a consultant for big business from 1934, when

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he left a professorship at the University of Toronto.41 Come the war, Jackson dissented from his profession’s growing acceptance of Keynesianism and economic planning. He argued that postwar prosperity lay in increasing exports, not in planning for social security. Since Jackson distrusted the political decisions of ordinary people, he cribbed American libertarian journalist Walter Lippmann to insist that democracy required elite guidance and intellectual leadership. Far from advocating laissez faire, Jackson stood within emerging neoliberal thought by suggesting that liberal society could not be sustained without active political management. He preferred to keep the ccir activities secretive and to influence policy by presenting his research findings directly to the Department of Reconstruction. However, Jackson also believed that the ccir might shape public opinion by disseminating materials about economic freedom to newspapers and magazines. Influencing the public was precisely where Gladstone Murray’s expertise was useful.42

t he c a m pa ig n f o r “ r e s p onsi ble enterpri s e” Murray detected that reconstruction debates posed a political dilemma for which he had saleable skills. He determined: “My job is to help re-invigorate, regenerate, re-orient, and stream-line the Enterprise System, in order that the present world-wide advance of Collectivism may be checked and ultimately overcome, to the decisive advantage of human progress, freedom, prosperity, and enlightenment.”43 Having come to much the same realization as Murray, corporate executives committed themselves to a wider North American campaign to “sell free enterprise.” In some measure, the initiative was coordinated from Montreal. In early 1943, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce (ccc ) struck the Committee on Free Enterprise.44 (The name was changed to the Committee on Economic Development, a moniker lifted from a lobby group formed by leading American executives in 1942.) The committee sent a delegation to Washington to learn about the Chamber of Commerce of the United States’ (ccus ) own propaganda push. Subsequently, William J. Sheridan directed the efforts of the ccc ’s Department of Economic Development. Tens of thousands of booklets were distributed to local chambers of commerce and to employers.45 Seven leading advertising firms agreed to support the ccc ’s program and to charge only for out-of-pocket expenses. Get Out the Vote initiatives were mounted to counter

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supposed voter apathy. Still, underscoring that big business was acting defensively, ccc activities were marked by a hint of secrecy and a strong wariness of public criticism. At one point, committee members debated whether the campaign should appear to originate at the Brandon Board of Trade, lest the “stigma” of its St James Street origins be too strong.46 The ccc also avoided mentioning the ccf and eschewed any direct association with known anti-ccf propagandists.47 In fact, much of the free enterprise campaign was left to the private discretion of corporate executives. The campaign reached the public through daily and weekly newspapers, public speakers, pamphlets, and advertisements.48 It was also waged in the workplace, through welfare capitalism, company unions, and other union avoidance strategies.49 A Royal Bank of Canada ad captured part of the tone: “What is private enterprise? It is the natural desire to make your own way as far as your ability will take you; an instinct that has bought to this continent the highest standard of life enjoyed by any people on earth. It is democracy on the march.”50 Anti-socialist enthusiasm had wider scope. With their publications variously financed, self-anointed anti-ccf propagandists were alternatively earnest, satirical, and inflammatory.51 In the latter vein, Burdick Trestrail was most striking. With considerable backing from Bay Street capitalists, Trestrail argued that the ccf was a socialist conspiracy invented by League for Social Reconstruction intellectuals. He added an anti-Semitic, xenophobic, and anti-Bolshevik note by conspicuously describing ccf national secretary David Lewis as both Jewish and Russian-born. In the 1945 federal election campaign, as many as three million copies of Social Suicide!, a Trestrail booklet, were mailed to voters. Copies were reportedly massed at the warehouses of the Simpson’s department store chain.52 Historians have argued that the campaign against the ccf contributed to the collapse in political support for the party in 1945 and in the years after.53 At the time, ccf leaders repeatedly identified a business-financed anti-socialist initiative to undercut the party’s electoral appeal. During the war, labour and the left frequently charged that their political or managerial opponents were guilty of fascist or Nazi practices, and David Lewis fingered Gladstone Murray – “an imaginative and resourceful smoothie, with a wide experience in the art of packaging ideas in words to suit any occasion” – as one of the “Goebbels” in the anti-ccf operation.54

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ccf figures were equally frustrated as Progressive Conservative Party politicians joined the attacks. Ontario premier George Drew insisted that the ccf was an “anti-British, revolutionary, national socialist party.”55 Outrage at this culminated during the 1945 Ontario election campaign, when provincial leader Edward Jolliffe accused Drew of operating a “Government Gestapo” to discredit his political opponents.56 Dubiously clearing Drew of wrongdoing, a royal commission found that (often erroneous) information from William J. Osborne-Dempster, a provincial secret policeman, was passed to Gladstone Murray and M.A. Sanderson, an exterminator who revelled in placing alarmist anti-socialist newspaper ads. And though Murray and Drew testified otherwise, they corresponded about Osborne-Dempster’s reports as well as anti-ccf tactics.57 Murray’s anti-ccf work was not incidental. He described the ccf and the British Labour Party, each led by “state-worshippers,” as threats to democracy itself.58 He publicly echoed Drew’s loaded reminder that Nazi stood for “national socialism.”59 In one speech naming the ccf , Murray declared that “collectivism [was] inherently a form of escapism” and that the “doctrine of Karl Marx” was simply “a creed of pessimism and cynicism.”60 Responsible Enterprise, the “policy counsel” company founded by Gladstone Murray, was backed by some of the wealthiest capitalists in Canada. In 1943, Murray’s letters of introduction listed twenty-one references from “leading corporations in industry, finance, mining, and public utilities.”61 By a ccf count, these executives held at least fifty-one company presidencies (including Noranda, Imperial Oil, Inco, and Massey-Harris), seventeen vice-presidencies, and 106 directorships. Murray’s closest proponents included J.P. Bickell, a wealthy mining executive and chairman of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and J.S. Vanderploeg, a brass-manufacturing executive active in the Canadian Exporters’ Association. Arthur Meighen and Charles Dunning were also listed. Gerald Caplan suggests that Murray’s supporters were largely Toronto business elites who, as donors, wielded marked influence in the federal and Ontario Progressive Conservative Parties.62 But, as Dunning’s involvement hinted, Murray envisioned a nonpartisan “roving commission for common sense.”63 “Private enterprise must take steps to protect itself” and could not wait for the “old-line parties” to coalesce.64 Using a military metaphor, Murray described his project as “an advance mobile column for Free Enterprise.”65 He also jokingly used

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the language of opponents to refer to his operation as the “paid minions of Capitalism.”66 Responsible Enterprise was the most wellfunded anti-socialist agency in Canada during the 1940s. Murray’s activities accorded with quantitative and qualitative changes in how mass democracy was perceived. The war accentuated the importance of the public relations and advertising industries. Government agencies like the Wartime Information Board flooded the public with propaganda aimed at securing support for economic controls. Private companies, too, urged Canadians to buy Victory Bonds and, thereby, become materially invested in a kind of bondholders’ democracy.67 The concurrent emergence of opinion polling ensured that propaganda was understood as a close interplay between propagandist and audience, between technocrat and citizen. In 1941, a consortium of newspaper publishers hoping to boost circulation commissioned the first national opinion poll.68 When a September 1943 Gallup poll showed that the ccf had the greatest support among prospective voters, the revelation was all the more novel for the way voter preferences could be known and quantified by means other than the ballot box.69 Canadians saw what they themselves were thinking. Still, polling could equally be used for private commercial or political advantage. Political parties quickly made use of polling, and market research firm Elliott-Haynes Limited began to “measure the trend of Canadian public opinion on the general question of socialism versus private enterprise.”70 In fall 1944, for example, the firm’s big business subscribers learned that public support for government ownership of utility, resource, and financial industries had grown to 37 per cent.71 The views of the public, newly quantifiable and shiftable, were of pressing importance. Public relations might make democracy safe for capitalism.72 Murray suggested that democracy, freedom, and individualism were indeed threatened by the “contemporary domination of politics by economics.” He worried that industrial capitalism had prompted “a reversion to the herd-mind.” Workers, “conscious of their collective power, have become a new vested interest, wielding the weapon of the strike, and swinging elections by their numbers and discipline.” Moreover, the “cult of the ‘common man’ has induced the ordinary citizen to seek again organization in masses, to use his collective power to force the State to become more meddlesome and mighty than ever before.”73 But Murray argued that no citizen was common because, “endowed with unequal and different potential capacities,”

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they exercised “an inalienable sovereignty as an individual.” Far from a venue of class opposition, democracy was rightly “an insurance policy. It is the right to vote, to hold office, to form political parties, to praise or criticize the government or any political party, often unintelligently, sometimes mendaciously. The people by voting record their preferences in regard to general policies and values.”74 Elite democracy was thus as relevant to the public sphere at large as it was to Murray’s cbc . His policy counsel firm would inform and persuade individuals motivated by a mix of emotion and reason. Murray warned that “root-and-branch” reformers were making inroads against the profit motive through “a psychological initiative.”75 Not stopping at lobbying government or at anti-socialist fear mongering, business needed to take the same psychological approach to compete with promises of “glowing horizons, pink or red.”76 Murray insisted: “We cannot be safe until we reach the position in which the citizen is convinced that his own well-being is bound up with the continuance of the Enterprise System. It is necessary, therefore, to do more than disillusion the citizen about the ideas of the Revolutionaries; he must be given a reason for faith in Enterprise to support his emotional good-will.”77 Murray declared that, in what was a “war of ideas, to act rightly is not enough: it is necessary also that citizens be told of the right action, the reasons, and the policy behind it.”78 This was “public education” work, and it might lead to a more “self-disciplined democracy.”79 Audience mattered. Class shaped Murray’s thinking, though he ostensibly averred naming the middle class. He wrote: “Truth must be marshalled and brought home simply and attractively to most of the individuals constituting that decisive part of our population, its middle elements – by this I mean – farmers, doctors, lawyers, storekeepers, accountants, shop assistants, clergy and ministers of religion, business agents and salesmen, barbers, insurance workers, foremen, civil servants, pensioners, war veterans, teachers, university staff, and other ‘white collar’ workers.”80 Murray clearly understood that democracy was about power. Given his disdain of conspicuous working-class activism, he eyed another constituency that would serve as a counterweight and resist bottom-up demands for redistribution. It was a prescient strategy. In the postwar decade, unions and the democratic left lessened the language of class opposition. And, through a mix of affluence and aspiration, more Canadians identified with the middle elements of society.

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Message mattered. Murray admonished executives and argued that they needed a fundamental change in attitude. Suggesting that laissez faire capitalism was dead, he insisted: “The negative, obstructionist, reluctant attitude of some elements of business towards social security proposals is a powerful aid to the collectivists. To argue that the Beveridge Plan or the Marsh Plan or President Roosevelt’s Plan cannot be afforded, plays directly into the hands of the other side.” Business had to realize that social security was “inevitable.” The key was arguing that social security could only be attained “on the basis of vigorous and prosperous free enterprise.”81 Believing “the less government the better,” Murray was willing by 1945 to accept an expanded role for the state. Though he could not bring himself to use the term “planning,” he insisted: “There should be design for the enterprise system. Design is compatible with minimum wage standards, with health standards, with education standards, and with a reasonable amount of compulsory social insurance. Design for enterprise is compatible with certain types of government ownership, management, and investment. But the point is that the individual must know in advance just how the rules will work.”82 In the field of labour relations, Murray issued the “Code of Responsible Enterprise.” It called for the recognition of unions and for collective bargaining on wages, and it argued that general welfare depended on labour-management cooperation. The code offered support for public social welfare measures “that [could] be financed without jeopardizing business.” These concessions were proffered so long as private property rights and management prerogatives were preserved “under a system of competitive Capitalism.”83 Murray’s comments accompanying the code showed that he drew substantially on American “corporate moderates,” to borrow a term from historian Andrew Workman. Murray compared his own statement to the Management-Labour Charter agreed upon by the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the American Federation of Labour, and ccus . From 1942, ccus president Eric Johnston worked to overturn the chamber’s opposition to unions and the New Deal. Despite the objections of many members, Johnston envisioned a postwar order premised on collective bargaining, high wages, and rising production.84 The National Association of Manufacturers (nam ) remained a more intransigent employers’ organization. But, by 1945, nam staff attempted to cast

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management as reasonable and open to “fair” labour relations as well economic security.85 Murray, his backers, and the Canadian Chamber of Commerce joined American big business counterparts in gesturing towards a postwar industrial relations settlement. Murray gave the impression that he was seizing a middle ground. On one side were the advocates of a “slave state solution.” On the other, “free enterprise fanatics” wanted “to lift all restrictions and controls, let government return into mid-Victorian aloofness and inactivity, and trust to individual initiative.”86 “Responsible Enterprise” stood between the extremes as a positive philosophy “embodying the social conscience of enlightened enterprise.”87 Murray’s formulation served to imply that there was but one course. He disproportionately concentrated his attacks on government intervention, claiming that the perpetuation of the state’s wartime role meant paternalism and an inevitable path to “an authoritarian bureaucratic and inefficient society.”88 For Murray and corporate critics of socialism, this line of argument was buoyed by the vocabulary of economist Friedrich Hayek. Conflating socialism and fascism, The Road to Serfdom (1944) argues that all planning suppressed freedom and led to dictatorship. Hayek insisted that it was through economic freedom, not politics, that individual liberty and revolutionary change would be achieved.89 The “impersonal bigness” of society, Murray cribbed, could be “revolved either in terms of emancipated freedom or of regimented serfdom. In Canada, we prefer the road to emancipated freedom.”90 Whereas scholar C.B. Macpherson, as Ian McKay (chapter 10, this volume) details, detected an inherent tension between “rule by the people” and liberal social relations, Murray sided with those who viewed democracy, properly construed, as a guardian of economic liberty against totalitarianism. “Liberal democracy,” which Denis Pilon (chapter 1, this volume) identifies as a postwar ideological project, meant democracy delimited in service of liberalism. In this and other respects, Murray was firmly within a transnational neoliberal intellectual current. Anxious at the prospect of socialism, the fairly plural movement emerged from 1937 out of debates among liberals over political economy transformations, especially the growth of government. Neoliberals sought a positive, dynamic capitalist order rescued from the contradictions continually eroding its premises. They envisioned a society in which individual freedom was preserved through self-interested economic activity in

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competitive, more decentralized markets. They also insisted that, since free markets required a proper legal and institutional framework, a limited government should actively make needed modifications. Neoliberals adopted varied opinions on government regulations and a social minimum, while they treated monopolies and unions, laissez faire, and the welfare state with different measures of scepticism. Yet looking beyond the market, early neoliberals tended to insist that a free society required collective moral values.91 Murray was much concerned with shared values. Beyond a general line and the slogan “Responsible Enterprise,” Murray did not concern himself with policy. His involvement in public debates was rhetorical. He addressed gatherings of various organizations. If he hardly travelled beyond southern Ontario and the greater Montreal area, Murray’s speeches were sent to newspapers across anglophone Canada, published as booklets, and printed in Murray’s own newsletter, the Outlook. Murray framed his defence of capitalism within a self-evident historical epic. The advance of Western civilization was central to Murray’s whiggish account, as it had been for liberal spokesmen since the nineteenth century.92 At root was a loose idea of natural law. Murray insisted: “Our basic hope lies in the fact that the free society has ultimate and external truth on its side. The order of the universe is fundamentally an order with a purpose – the only intelligent alternative to the irrationality of the Marxist dialectic.” Murray suggested that history demonstrated the unfolding of that natural order. The profit motive arose when humans were “still in a tribal state.”93 But civilization, borne exclusively by the West, had seen people rise “from mere masses into individuality, from sameness to difference.” The “Christian idea of divine dispensation” had driven forward the “process of individualization” and the cause of freedom. The lesson from the past was: “Man achieves civilization not chiefly as a result of superior biological endowment or geographical environment but as a response to challenge in a situation which rouses him to make a hitherto unprecedented effort.” This historical framing enabled a story of progress and great optimism rather than reaction. Zooming out also served to minimize the importance of immediate demands for social security and economic betterment. “All history warns against shortcuts to progress,” was the conclusion Murray drew.94 Christianity was essential to Murray’s consistent desire to transcend the material. Murray warned: “There is a serious danger in

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trusting solely or unduly to materialist solutions to our problems. Without a continuing spiritual bond, all our efforts, plans, blueprints, political and social theories will yield no substantial progress or satisfaction.”95 Worryingly, the years since 1930 had seen “a deliberate reversal of the trend of centuries.”96 To Murray, this was primarily a moral failing. Keeping political process out of sight, he argued that the solution lay in a “new citizenship” inspired by spiritual renewal – for Christianity provided the basis for community as well as individualism. Murray imagined that “Spiritual power flows automatically from the practice by the individual citizen of the elementary virtues: the Golden Rule, humility, kindness, charity, tolerance, and submission in prayer. As awareness spreads, spiritual radiation transforms the individual, the family, the group, the community, and the nation. Without spiritual orientation, democracy itself is drab and futile.”97 Here was a High Anglican version of communal deference, in which Christianity served largely to salve and to inform ethical relationships. The new citizenship, “by restoring morality, will make possible the resumption of progress.”98 Murray hoped to inspire more than he wished to caution. Progress would result from individuals enacting a muscular Christianity, that is, “a spirit of adventure, of unquenchable ambition, of intellectual honesty, and above all, of dynamic spiritual well-being.” Murray dreamed of a new Renaissance, seemingly to mask the austere and the banal: “Romance revives, and extending her welcome to the strange, discovers in it something that has always been latent in man’s mind although starved by convention.”99 Like some later libertarians, Murray had a futurist streak. Space exploration, nuclear-powered airplanes, and computers would “provide man with a permanent outlet for his aggressive and pioneering instincts.”100 Indeed: “Once the idea of war either between nations or classes is consigned to the limbo of the paraphernalia of barbarism where it belongs, we shall be on the threshold of the greatest age of exploration and adventure.”101 The frontier also informed Murray’s appraisal of the Dominion. Concealing the violence of settler colonialism, the frontier myth establishes continuity between past and present through a simple, value-laden historical arc centred on the self-reliant male individual.102 Directly in this vein, Murray felt that the history of Canada “reveals that we have relied mostly upon the qualities of initiative, self-reliance, enterprise and energy that made it possible for the

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explorers, missionaries, trappers, fur-traders, and settlers to transform the wilderness that was this half of the Continent into what is now the third trading nation in the world.”103 Murray underscored his settler colonial triumphalism, proclaiming that, “without private enterprise, Canada today would not be far ahead of the primitive civilization of the Indians prior to European settlement.”104 A Canada-as-young-nation trope left the future open ended and suggested a need for patience and endeavour rather than an alternative to free enterprise. In that light: “the soundest hope of improvement is in building upon the best of past experience” and in a “continuous and practical effort to repair the deficiencies and shortcomings of the present state of society without undermining our birthright of freedom. There is to be a humane floor under adversity, improving provision for health and education, and a steady widening of the entrance to opportunities for all citizens. This being still a new country, the resources of which have been barely scratched, the evolutionist looks forward to a period of tremendous expansion and development.”105 International, as well as industrial, peace was a key consideration in reconstruction debates. Undaunted by anti-colonial movements, Murray sided with those who believed that the British Commonwealth ought to retain its stewardship. He was an enthusiastic proponent of a liberal narrative of the British Empire, an account normalizing imperial power and ignoring the racism that justified it. If neoliberals believed that economic freedom required certain preconditions, Murray included the civilizing mission. It was a belief that suited the British Canadian identity of much of his audience. A convinced imperialist, Murray described the Victorian Empire “as the nearest approach to the ideal Golden Age that man has so far attained,” and he lamented the loss of “Pax Britannica” on a global scale.106 The Russian Revolution had been the onset of trouble. Yet it worried him greatly that the welfare state was making inroads under Labour governments in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand.107 If international peace and trade were to be advanced, the Commonwealth – within which the Dominion of Canada would assume a growing burden – needed to join with the United States as “clear-eyed” leaders of “a new and universal world order of free peoples.”108 With the language of anti-conquest, Murray argued that this partnership was “not for aggression or aggrandisement but for the eviction of misery and despair: for the establishment of the dignity and happiness of men and women everywhere.”109

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“robus t in d iv idua l is m ” in the pos twar peri od The arrival of the postwar period was accompanied by a thinning of the political and social ferment that had fired reconstruction debates. In the late 1940s, many Canadians desired conformity and domestic stability during an intensive period of family formation and much change.110 Equally, the onset of the Cold War decisively mobilized Canadians against communism abroad and secret communists within. Placing the political left under suspicion, Cold War conditions placed a chill on social democratic politics and the labour movement.111 Anti-communist ideas and literature proliferated in Canada by 1947.112 If liberal democracy was much venerated, its accepted bounds were narrowed. In this altered political context, Murray lessened his reformist rhetoric. First, he worked to drive the language of Cold War vigilance into the mainstream of political common sense. This represented little transformation in his views as his anti-communism and antisocialism dated to the 1920s. Murray lectured that: “Communism, as a political doctrine and as applied behind the Iron Curtain, is a barbarous tyranny repellant to all sane Canadians. So-called ‘democratic Socialism,’ as advanced by the ccf , professes to be ‘the wave of the future.’ When stripped of its embellishments and fine phrases, Socialism means Statism, means the absorption by Government of the bulk of the affairs of citizens.”113 This being the case, “by sapping the foundations of freedom, Socialism eases the advance of Communism.”114 He described the peace movement both as spurious and as controlled by Moscow.115 And, with the international context in mind, Murray was in touch with American diplomat John Foster Dulles over the idea of forming a Freedom International.116 Marjorie Lamb, who began as Murray’s secretary, became an anti-communist propagandist in her own right. The “redhead out to beat the reds” supplied the materials informing the anti-communist activities of the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire.117 Second, Murray adopted a sharply anti-union position. If “Big Corporations,” which resulted merely from “the application of genius” and efficiency, had accepted their responsibilities, responsible unionism was wholly lacking. In fact, unions and strikes were part of a Moscow-planned pattern of class antagonism that threatened democracy and led to revolution.118 This was a preamble to attacking union security provisions within postwar labour legislation.

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Murray joined the ccc and some employers in a bid to follow the gains American big business had secured through the Taft-Harley Act (which restricted union activities) and the Right-to-Work movement (which promoted legislation outlawing the closed shop rule that membership in the established union in a workplace was a condition of employment).119 Murray argued that the closed shop and the check off were each “a serious invasion of the elementary rights of the individual worker.” He advocated their elimination.120 He also repeated a number of employer platitudes: labour conflict could not be legislated out of existence; increased production was needed for increased wages; and union demands harmed “the boss of all, the consumer, the average citizen.”121 When Murray expressed his preference for voluntary labour-management cooperation, it figured in a postwar business offensive aimed at hampering union growth and limiting labour’s power. In the early 1950s, Murray spoke to fewer organizations and he notably shifted the character of his newsletter. The Outlook became less a vehicle for printing Murray’s own scripts and more a digest of militant individualist thought. Without becoming a mass movement, dozens of new American and British organizations extolling free enterprise as well attacking unions and the welfare state emerged in the 1940s and early 1950s.122 Murray reproduced materials issued by British and American free market think tanks, propagandists, intellectuals, and businesspeople. Adding his own editorials and mixing in the public pronouncements of Canadian executives, Murray presented readers with a synthesis of the latest in big business-funded free enterprise ideology. In the course of his transnational immersion, Murray abandoned the ostensible reformism that had defined his interventions in reconstruction debates. By 1954, under increasing American influence, Murray’s views hardened into a conservative libertarianism. Murray was interested in those who appeared to share his affinity for spiritual renewal. He described Moral Re-Armament as seeking “a hate-free, greed-free world on a basis of individual honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love.”123 During the 1930s, this British North American movement shifted from sexual puritanism and self-help evangelism among male university students to near-fascist idolization of theocracy as a means of securing harmonious society on an international scale. After the war, well-travelled leader Frank Buchman engaged in a self-aggrandizing anti-communist mission to save the world.124 Murray also reproduced work by Spiritual Mobilization and

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Christian Freedom Foundation, two organizations underwritten by Sun Oil executive J. Howard Pew. Devoutly Presbyterian and ardently opposed to the New Deal, Pew believed that it was politically paramount to show that capitalist principles did not contradict Christian ethics. For its part, Spiritual Mobilization sent ministers literature mixing Christianity and economic libertarianism. James Ingebretsen, the organization’s president during the 1950s as well as the polemicist Murray quoted, privately believed that religion was “balderdash.” But the hope was to convince ministers to defend unrestrained capitalism from the pulpit.125 Similarly, Howard Kershner edited Christian Economics to reach Christian Freedom Foundation’s evangelical audience.126 Murray himself stopped short of these peers, keeping his religious sentiments in a moral register. “Christianity gives us no economic programme; it gives a standard of values,” he noted, adding that avarice, “selfish luxury,” and discontent were among the things Christianity condemned. Quoting English Anglican professor-priest William Inge, he suggested that accepting Christian ethics made for a happier, more ordered society.127 Murray’s embrace of free market contemporaries had greater sweep, and economists supplied much of the intellectual authority. Murray approvingly quoted Hayek and fellow Austrian classical liberal economist Ludwig von Mises, and he cheered the Mont Pèlerin Society (1947) as “unrepentant whigs.”128 Hayek was instrumental to the society, conceived as providing international intellectual leadership for a renewed, uncompromising defence of the market. Murray also reproduced excerpts from the work of Henry Simons and Milton Friedman, both central figures in the Chicago School of Economics. In the early 1960s, Friedman emerged as the leading public intellectual of neoclassical economic thought.129 Murray had a sense of his British and American peers. He was friendly with British libertarian politician Ernest Benn, founder of the Society of Individualists. Surely inspired by the British movement, a few different individualist associations appeared in Canada in the mid-1940s.130 Murray, too, reproduced the work of Deryck Abel, a journalist and Benn associate. Abel played a role in several free trade and libertarian organizations, including the People’s League for Defence of Freedom. When the league was founded in 1956, Murray printed its anti-union objectives.131 From the United States, Murray notably used materials disseminated by the Foundation for Economic Education, a corporate-financed libertarian think tank established in 1946. Led

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by Leonard Read, former manager of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, the foundation extolled unrestrained market liberty.132 Therefore, in the mid-1950s, Murray placed himself within the “revolutionary movement of robust individualism.”133 “Experiments in Socialism leave no doubt that citizens are better off when they keep most of their affairs in their own hands,” he declared. A few rhetorical gestures aside, Murray offered no concrete place for government regulation of the economy.134 He wrote: “The market-economy is an integrated system of forces and factors that produce a composite result. When Government interferes with measures of restraint, compulsion, and direction it does not follow that the prophesied or desired results are attained … Not only are conditions made more unsatisfactory for the intervening Government authority; but also the market system is wrecked and chaos ensues.”135 As did libertarians, Murray described government as an agency of coercion. The use of coercion resulted “in the moral and intellectual decline of both government and citizens” and in an accelerated “spiral towards totalitarianism and war.”136 The overall impression Murray left was that any government intervention in the economy was exceedingly dangerous. When it came to welfare, Murray feigned support for minimalist social provision while cautioning against it. He explained: “To make provision for the old, the sick, the infirm, and the unemployed, is certainly a worthy objective as long as our economic structure is not wrecked or seriously impaired.” However, Murray wanted it known that in “human affairs there is no such thing as absolute security. To aim at absolute security is to accept paralysis and invite disaster.” Murray was certain that, “in the process of relieving insecurity the State [would] destroy the characteristic liberties of our time.” “Some element of risk is indispensable both to well-being and to progress,” he wrote, “Ours is a world of adventure. Adversity is our teacher, success our inspiration.”137 Risk and achievement, responsibility and freedom were all properly the domain of the enlightened, manly individual. “The maintenance of individual freedom rests upon the conscious acceptance of the responsibilities of Christian fellowship,” Murray insisted. “There need be no limit to human achievement if spiritual dedication is dominant.”138 For the ideological benefit of his readers, then, Murray described a conservative libertarian society in which private property and the market were unrestrained, and the state played next to no role in the distribution of well-being. Inequality was an untroubling result

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of individual excellence or temporary failure necessitating renewed daring. Democracy need only guard economic liberty. But – and here was Murray’s conservatism– the larger task was to transcend material concerns and ensure the forward progress of an empire-derived civilization. Social cohesion, and individual freedom itself, was protected by the moralism of the Golden Rule.

“ s e l f - d is c ip l in e d democracy” Under the banner of “Responsible Enterprise,” Gladstone Murray was among the most prominent public defenders of a revived free market liberalism during the late war and into the immediate postwar period. Murray inverted the general thrust of reconstruction debates. Rather than the welfare state responding to popular democratic pressure for social citizenship and planned economic security, the discerning citizen would protect individual freedom by rejecting totalitarian interventionism, deferring to market-mediated well-being, and embracing Christian responsibility. Murray joined a rich people’s movement to sell free enterprise in North America. It went far beyond his own contributions, though his own wealthy backers funded the wider campaign. As a public relations professional, Murray’s task was to reassert faded big business priorities by crafting a positive program and securing an enlarged constituency. Given the liberal values and moralism Murray shared with someone like Arthur Meighen, it is fair to wonder if Murray’s efforts differed much from prior liberal conservatism. Certainly, the shared ground included aversion to labour radicalism and, as well as appeals to manly individualism, personal responsibility, and empire. Yet Murray was part of a transition, one in which neoliberal ideas became relevant. Amid political economy changes, the threat posed by an all-powerful state became a pronounced concern of right-wing politics. And given a more vigorous and immediate mass democracy, purely partisan electoral politics began to matter less to big business mobilization. Experts, rather than politicians, were called on to mediate the relationship between the powerful and ordinary people. The reconstruction period was important in precipitating the new direction. Drawing on transnational neoliberalism, Murray insisted that democracy and capitalism did in fact require reconstruction. For democracy to function intelligibly and for citizenship to assume its proper moral scope, public opinion needed expert management.

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Public relations work would educate the middle elements of society and persuade them their well-being depended on capitalist priorities. Murray thus articulated a vision of elite liberal democracy. As for the economic elite, never mind obstructionism. Murray counselled big business to accommodate popular wishes or face political irrelevance. Social security was inevitable, labour-capital accommodation was necessary, and government had its purpose in ensuring minimum standards or in strategic involvement in the economy. And yet. The arguments Murray made, as well as the concessions he appeared to offer to workers and to citizens, were conditioned by restraint. State social provision or collective bargaining were acceptable, and yet they should not lead to undue spending, government growth, or tax burden; and yet they should not constitute a socialist path to communism; and yet they must not confer power to unions that would destroy individual liberty; and yet private property rights and “our economic structure” were sacrosanct. Murray offered a decidedly conservative liberal bargain. He carried it along with a heroic, masculine historical narrative of the advance of Western civilization. Individual effort achieved progress, conquering the Canadian frontier and driving forward the British Empire. Where risk and romance inspired idealism, shared spiritual values transcended material concerns and guarded individual freedom as well as social harmony. Murray’s lesson was self-evident: what the past supposedly had been should guide future endeavour. He used this rhetorical framework to deflect unwanted reform. Rather optimistically, Murray strove to meet the perceived dangers of democracy by appealing to individualistic ideals, viewing suasion as essential to constraining popular political and policy preferences. As the reconstruction context dissolved, socio-economic demands on government ebbed in favour of communitarian and household priorities. Moreover, the advent of Cold War anti-communist vigilance did much to bring about the “self-disciplined democracy” Murray envisioned. The ideas influencing his own views moved from neoliberalism to libertarianism. Drawing upon the like-minded in the United States and Britain, he remained an important vector for the latest in transnational free market thought. Murray’s activism exemplified a possible course for a new right in Canada and beyond, one dependent on extolling militant individualism and arguing that the survival of individual freedom hinged on realizing a more dynamic capitalist society.

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no t e s 1 Gladstone Murray, “Will Freedom Survive?,” text of address, Canadian Association of Contracting Painters and Decorators, Toronto, 15 March 1946, 6, 11, Library and Archives Canada (hereafter lac ), William Ewart Gladstone Murray Fonds, mg 30 e 186, vol. 7, Can. Assoc. Contracting Painter, 15 March 1946. 2 Terry Cook, “Canadian Conservative Tradition,” observes that seeing Canadian conservatism in terms of the acts and policies of a single party does a disservice, especially as Liberal and Conservative governments paralleled one another. 3 Referring to tax protests, Isaac Martin, Rich People’s Movements, 1, describes rich people’s movements as nonviolent social movements engaging in civil disobedience to demand that government redistribute resources to the rich. I see no reason why civil disobedience must be a necessary part of the definition. 4 Roy, Progrès, 55–6. 5 Gladstone Murray, “A Mobile Advance Guard for Enterprise,” Summary of Statement, Saddle of Mutton Dining Club, Toronto, 15 April 1946, 7, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 7. 6 Caplan, Dilemma; and Boyko, Into the Hurricane. 7 McInnis, Harnessing Labour Confrontation, 60–85; Nerbas, “Managing Democracy”; and Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise. 8 Gladstone Murray, text of address, British American Oil Company Limited Staff Meeting, Toronto, 26 February 1947, 7, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 8, ba Oil Co. Ltd. Staff Meeting, 26 February 1946. 9 “Major Gladstone Murray Here to Assume Duties,” Ottawa Journal, 10 October 1936, 8; and Briggs, History of Broadcasting, 270. 10 Gladstone Murray, “Good-Bye bbc ,” News Chronicle, 28 September 1936, 10, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 1, cbc , 1936 Appointment. 11 See Prang, “Origins.” 12 “Broadcasting in Canada; Major Murray’s Report,” Times, 23 August 1933, n.p., lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 1, cbc , Report on Canadian Broadcasting. 13 Quoted in Kuffert, Canada before Radio, 8. 14 Ibid., 28, 30–1, 37–9, 45, 47, 206. 15 The expense account of his successor was strictly capped. “Gladstone Murray Resigns cbc Post to Enter Business,” Victoria Times, 10 February 1943, n.p.; and The Legionary, “Murray Must Stay,” Ottawa Journal, 19 August 1942, n.p.

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Struthers, Limits of Affluence, 117–18. Campbell, Respectable Citizens; and Endicott, Raising the Workers’ Flag. Tillotson, Public at Play, 11. Phillips and Watson, “Mobilization to Continentalism,” 23–30. Nerbas, Dominion of Capital, 163. See also McDowall, Sum of the Satisfactions; and Granatstein, Ottawa Men. Tillotson, Give and Take, 174–209; Mosby, Food Will Win; and Liverant, Buying Happiness, 131–56. Bjorge, “Workers’ War”; and Naylor, Fate of Labour, 297. Cuthbertson, Labour Goes to War, 6, 102; and Finkel, “Paradise Postponed,” 131. McKay, Reds, Rebels, 173–81. In 1942, partisan reformers from Toronto and the Prairies sought to revitalize the newly renamed Progressive Conservative Party with a platform calling for social reforms so long as capitalism was preserved. In 1944, the Liberal federal government followed suit by promising postwar social security and welfare measures. Having lost the middle ground, Toronto executives diluted Conservative commitment to social security and reverted to an emphasis on conscription and free enterprise. See Granatstein, Politics of Survival, 126–34, 176; and Whitaker, Government Party, 167. Struthers, Limits of Affluence, 118. Young, “People Will Sink”; and Brushett, “People and Government.” Horn, League for Social Reconstruction. Nerbas, Dominion of Capital, 203. Campbell, Grand Illusions. Christie, Engendering the State, 280. Oliver, “When the Battle’s Won.” Finkel, “Paradise Postponed,” 120–42. Walter P. Zeller, the department store owner, declared that “nobody pretends that we can hope to step from the war into a utopian world.” He asserted that “economic and social direction” would abrogate democracy, and he urged corporate actors to squelch the threat of unions and socialism. See McInnis, Harnessing Labour Confrontation, 65. Philip S. Fisher, a Southam publishing executive, believed that business should support “all those moves for the enlargement of the social security of the individual, at the same time trying to ensure that such social security plans are based and administered on sound psychological and physiological and economic principles. If business does this, I think it will

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remove one of the main sources of criticism against it.” Fisher insisted that “private enterprise could modify its practices and support social security measures without cost to itself.” See Minutes of the meeting of the National Board of Directors of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, 8 June 1942, app. 2, “Philip S. Fisher, Montreal to R.P. Jellett, 2 June 1942,” 2, lac , Canadian Chamber of Commerce Fonds, mg 28-III62, vol. 6, Board of Directors, minutes, 3 1940–43. Finkel, Business and Social Reform; and McAndrew, “Canada, Roosevelt,” 91. Nerbas, Dominion of Capital, 6, 31. Tillotson, Give and Take, 111; and Young, “George McCullagh.” Heaman, Tax, 332–74. “Socialism,” Address of Right Hon. Arthur Meighen, pc , kc , before the Kiwanis Club, Vancouver, bc , 21 October 1943, 11–12, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 3, Meighen, Arthur, 1943–60. In 1935, Jackson suggested that the ongoing “man-made depression” resulted from morally deplorable nationalism (tariffs) and selfishness (speculation). Personal responsibly, cooperation, and harmony – not “economic adjustment” – offered the way out of the crisis. See Jackson, Economist’s Confession, 26–31. Nerbas, “Managing Democracy,” 173–204. Transradio v. Time Inc., County Court of New York, 24 April 1946, 1, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 7, Transradio – Reply to the Inquiry as to What Mr. Gladstone Murray “Did,” 24 April 1946. Robert Jellett, president of ccc and of Royal Trust Company, explained: “I think we can enlist the active support of all sorts of sane people throughout the country whether in business, or the professions, or engaged in any other class of activity. Many are anxious that the promiscuous doctrines now circulating so widely should be refuted fully and promptly.” See Minutes of the meeting of the National Board of Directors of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, 8 June 1942, app. 2, “Further Memorandum Re: Educational Efforts for the Encouragement of Free Enterprise as Against Socialism,” 15 June 1942, 1, lac , mg 28-III62, vol. 6, Board of Directors minutes, 3, 1940–43. Canadian Chamber of Commerce, “1946 Annual Report,” Seventeenth Annual Meeting, Winnipeg, 8–10 October 1946, 13, lac , mg 28-III62, vol. 5, Annual Reports, 1941–48. Minutes of the meeting of the Executive Sub-Committee on Private Enterprise, 10 May 1944, 1–2 and 14 June 1944, 1, lac , mg 28-III62, vol. 9, committee minutes, economic development, 1943–61.

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47 Minutes of the meeting of the Executive Sub-Committee on Private Enterprise, 3 November 1944, 1, lac , mg 28-III62, vol. 9, committee minutes, economic development, 1943–61; and Minutes of the meeting of the Executive Sub-Committee on Economic Development, 23 February 1948, 3, lac , mg 28-III62, vol. 9, committee minutes, economic development, 1943–61. 48 Major Toronto publications were involved, including the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Telegram, Maclean’s, and Saturday Night. But so, too, were newspapers such as the Regina Leader Post, the Kelowna Courier, and so on. 49 Patrias, “Employers’ Anti-Unionism.” 50 The September 1943 Royal Bank of Canada ad is quoted in Caplan, Dilemma, 127. 51 The ccf collected myriad items of anti-socialist literature, filing it all away as “Anti-ccf Propaganda.” See lac , Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and New Democratic Party Fonds, mg 28-IV1, vol. 361, anticcf propaganda – pamphlets, 1934–56. 52 Trestrail, Social Suicide!; Boyko, Into the Hurricane, 70–85; Caplan, Dilemma, 159–63; and Horn, League for Social Reconstruction, 208–9. 53 Young, Anatomy of a Party, 117. 54 “Lewis Charges ‘Big Interests’ Back Murray,” Globe and Mail, 28 November 1943, n.p.; and Lewis, Good Fight, 271. 55 “ccf Party Is Criticized by Drew,” Halifax Herald, 13 November 1943, n.p. 56 “Extracts from the Toronto Daily Star, May 25/45,” 1, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 3, Royal Commission – Ontario Secret Political Police, 1945. 57 Lewis, Good Fight, 266–87; Caplan, Dilemma, 168–87. 58 Gladstone Murray, “Common Sense about the Future of Canada,” Text of Address, Kiwanis Club, London, Ontario, 4 February 1944, 3, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 6, London Kiwanis Club, 4 February 1944. 59 Eugene Forsey, “Right-Wing Agitators,” Manitoba Common Wealth, 10 December 1943, n.p. 60 Gladstone Murray, “Escapism,” text of address, Property Owners’ Association, Toronto, 7 June 1944, 3–4, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 6, Property Owners’ Association, 7 June 1944. 61 Murray operated Responsible Enterprise until his retirement in 1962. See Gladstone Murray to Mr Bongard, 4 August 1943, 2, lac , mg 28-IV1, vol. 361, anti-ccf propaganda, correspondence, 1945. 62 Caplan, Dilemma, 120–4. 63 Gladstone Murray to Mr Bongard, 4 August 1943, 2, lac , mg 28-IV1, vol. 361, anti-ccf propaganda, correspondence, 1945.

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64 Gladstone Murray, “The Real Issue,” Report Memorandum, August 1943, 2, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 3, Responsible Enterprise, reports, 1943–45. 65 Murray, “Mobile Advance Guard,” 8. 66 Gladstone Murray to J.G. Diefenbaker, 27 February 1946, 1, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 1, Diefenbaker, J.G., 1944–60. 67 Whitaker, Government Party, 216. 68 Robinson, Measure of Democracy, 37, 66. 69 Caplan, Dilemma, 110. 70 Walter E. Elliott, President, Elliott-Haynes Limited, “A Continuing Study of Public Attitudes towards Canadian Business and Industry,” Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Chamber of Commerce, Vancouver, 26 October 1948, 1, lac, mg 28-III62, vol. 1, Annual Meeting (19th), addresses, 1948. 71 Robinson, Measure of Democracy, 139. 72 Whitaker, Government Party, 217. 73 Gladstone Murray, “Freedom Threatened by Materialism, Technology and Collectivism,” Orillia Packet and Times, 5 May 1949, n.p., lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 4, clippings, W.E.G. Murray, 1932–54. 74 Murray, text of address, British American Oil Company, 6. 75 Gladstone Murray, “The Psychological Initiative,” memorandum no. B-2, June 1943, 1, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 3, Responsible Enterprise, reports, 1943–45. 76 “Extract from an article entitled ‘Radio Riddles’ by Gladstone Murray published in Saturday Night of Toronto for May 15th, 1943,” 2, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 3, Public Speaking Lessons, 1943. 77 Murray, “Mobile Advance Guard,” 7; “Gladstone Murray as a Point of Reference,” Canadian Forum (March 1944), 270. 78 Murray, Testing Time, 8. 79 Gladstone Murray, “Where Do We Go from Here?,” text of address, Annual Dinner of the Comptometors’ Society, c. 1945, 13, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 7. 80 Gladstone Murray, “Private Enterprise and Its Survival,” text of address, Chartered Institute of Secretaries, Toronto, 10 March 1955, 6, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 10, Chartered Institute of Secretaries, 10 March 1955. 81 Murray, “Psychological Initiative,” 1. 82 Gladstone Murray, “The Home in Post-War Canada,” text of address, Association of Furniture Dealers Annual Dinner, Toronto, 10 January 1945, 8, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 7, Furniture Dealers Association, 10 January 1945; “Reprint of First Editorial in the Ottawa Journal, Saturday, January 2, 1943,” 1, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 3, Responsible Enterprise, reports, 1943–45.

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83 Gladstone Murray, “The Code of Responsible Enterprise,” report memorandum, May 1945, 1, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 3, Responsible Enterprise, reports, 1943–45. 84 This project was a notably anti-communist one. In 1947, Johnston instituted the Hollywood Blacklist as president of the Motion Picture Association of America. 85 Workman, “Manufacturing Power.” 86 Gladstone Murray, “Canada in the World of Tomorrow,” text of address, Canadian Club of Bowmanville, 29 November 1945, 5, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 7, Bowmanville, 29 November 1945. 87 Murray, Testing Time, 7. 88 “Reprint of First Editorial,” 1. 89 Hayek, Road to Serfdom; Nash, Conservative Intellectual Movement, 5–9; Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 39, 46. 90 In 1945, Readers’ Digest condensed Hayek’s book and thereby helped popularize it. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce’s Committee on Economic Development ordered ten thousand copies to distribute to teachers, clergy, and politicians. See minutes of the Special Meeting of the Executive Sub-Committee on Economic Development, 4 April 1945, 1, lac , mg 28-III62, vol. 9, committee minutes, economic development, 1943–61. Gladstone Murray, “Canada a Century Hence,” text of address, Canadian Unity Alliance, Montreal, 12 December 1946, 6, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 8. 91 Stedman-Jones, Masters of the Universe, 2–3; Plehwe, “Introduction,” 22–4; Burgin, Great Persuasion, 9, 59; and Jackson, “Origins of NeoLiberalism,” 132, 137, 143–5, 150. 92 Ubiquitously, Murray’s free enterprise contemporaries lauded capitalism as one of the great achievements of Western Civilization. See Roy, Progrès, 116. 93 Gladstone Murray, “Is the Profit Motive Anti-Social?” Vital Speeches of the Day, vol. 11, no. 5, 15 December 1944, 147, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 5, articles, W.E.G. Murray. 94 Murray, “Freedom Threatened by Materialism,” 1. 95 Murray, “Where Do We Go from Here?,” 13–14. 96 Murray, “Freedom Threatened by Materialism,” 1. 97 Gladstone Murray, “A Bulwark of Freedom,” text of address, Life Insurance Institute of Canada, Waterloo, 26 February 1953, 8, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 10, Life Insurance Institute of Canada, 26 February 1953. 98 Murray, “Freedom Threatened by Materialism,” 1. 99 Gladstone Murray, “The American Renaissance,” Text of Commencement Day Address, Florida Southern College, Lakeland, Florida, 2 June 1948, 7–8, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 1, Florida Southern College, 1948–50.

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100 Gladstone Murray, “The Vital Issue,” text of address, Rotary Club of Niagara Falls, Niagara Falls, 19 August 1952, 8, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 10. 101 Murray, “American Renaissance,” 7. 102 Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 5; Furniss, Burden of History, 83–4, 102. 103 Gladstone Murray, “Straight Thinking,” text of address, Yorkton Board of Trade, 10 May 1944, 1, lac, mg 30 e 186, vol. 6. 104 Gladstone Murray, “What Governs Progress,” Outlook, vol. 9, no. 12, March 1957, 1, lac, mg 30 e 186, vol. 13, 1957. 105 Murray, “Where Do We Go from Here?,” 9. 106 Gladstone Murray, “Canada and the Twenty-First Century,” text of address, St Andrew’s Society of Toronto, Toronto, 14 February 1946, 4, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 7. 107 Gladstone Murray, “The Situation in Canada,” New English Review, vol. 11, no. 6 (October 1945), 493, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 4, periodicals. 108 Murray, Place of the British Commonwealth, 18. 109 Murray, “American Renaissance,” 6. On anti-conquest, see Pratt, Imperial Eyes. 110 Adams, Trouble with Normal, 3, 8; and Fahrni, Household Politics. 111 Whitaker and Marcuse, Cold War Canada; and Teigrob, Warming up; Struthers, Limits of Affluence, 139–41. 112 For example, Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Communist Threat. 113 Gladstone Murray, [Untitled], Outlook, vol. 1, no. 11, February 1949, 1, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 12, 1949. 114 Gladstone Murray, “An Analysis of the ccf ,” Outlook, vol. 2, no. 2, May 1949, 3, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 12, 1949. 115 Gladstone Murray, “Outline of Report,” University Club, Montreal, 19 October 1950, 1, lac, mg 30 e 186, vol. 9, luncheon address, Montreal, 19 October 1950. 116 Gladstone Murray to J.G. Diefenbaker, 28 August 1948, 1, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 1, Diefenbaker, J.G., 1944–60. 117 Pickles, Female Imperialism, 122–44; and Whitaker and Marcuse, Cold War Canada, 276. 118 Murray, Testing Time, 4. 119 Smith, “Fairness and Balance”; Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise, 43–4; and Dixon, “Limiting Labor.” 120 Gladstone Murray, “Management and Labour,” text of address, Junior League of Toronto, Toronto, 17 October 1951, 8, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 10. 121 Gladstone Murray, “What Is Wrong between Management and Labour,” text of address, Christ Church, New York City, 2 October 1946, 1, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 7.

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122 Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 56. 123 Gladstone Murray, “An Experiment in Faith,” Outlook, vol. 7, no. 3, June 1954, 2, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 12, 1954. 124 Sack, Moral Re-Armament, 7, 9, 42–3, 72–83, 92–4, 152–7. 125 Pew spearheaded a conservative countermovement within the National Council of Churches, joined the Mont Pèlerin Society, and quietly financed a range of free market initiatives. Having overseen his company’s expansion into northern Alberta oilfields in the late 1940s, he struck up a friendship with radio evangelist and Social Credit premier Ernest Manning. See Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 48, 70; Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise, 232–43; and Grem, Blessings of Business, 70–81. 126 Diamond, Roads to Dominion, 99. 127 Gladstone Murray, “A Christian Standard,” Outlook, vol. 7, no. 2, May 1954, 2, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 12, 1954. 128 Gladstone Murray, “Unrepentant Whigs,” Outlook, vol. 10, no. 8, November 1957, 1, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 13, 1957. 129 Nash, Conservative Intellectual Movement, 284–91; and Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 136. 130 The Canadian branch of the Society of Individualists was operated by E. James Bennett, a Toronto accountant. The Association of Canadian Individualists was based in Vancouver. B.A. Trestrail named his anti-ccf front organization the Society for Individual Freedom (Opposing State Socialism). 131 Gladstone Murray, “Taming Trade Unions,” Outlook, vol. 9, no. 5, August 1956, 1, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 13, 1956; Pritchford, Conservative Party, 97–9; and Abel, Ernest Benn, 134. 132 Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 27. 133 Gladstone Murray, “Individualism the Real Revolutionary Force,” Montreal Daily Star, 4 January 1951, n.p. 134 Gladstone Murray, “The Future of Canada,” text of address, Rotary Club of Chatham, Ontario, 18 April 1956, 6–7, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 11. 135 Gladstone Murray, “Dangers of Intervention,” Outlook, vol. 6, no. 12, March 1954, 4, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 12, 1954. 136 Gladstone Murray, “Bureaucracy at Work,” Outlook, vol. 7, no. 3, June 1954, 2, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol.12, 1954. 137 Murray, “Bulwark of Freedom,” 4; and Murray, “Management and Labour,” 4. 138 Gladstone Murray, “Looking Ahead,” Canadian Banker, vol. 60, no. 3 (1953), 8, lac , mg 30 e 186, vol. 4, clippings, W.E.G. Murray, 1932–54.

10 The Real World of Democracy? C.B. Macpherson’s Critique of the Cold War Reification of “Liberal Democracy,” 1965 Ian McKay

“There is a good deal of muddle about democracy,” declared a man with a soft and slightly drawling voice on 22 January 1965. So began a six-part lecture series on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation delivered by a world-renowned scholar named Crawford Brough Macpherson (1911–87).1 Macpherson was speaking in a Cold War context, one in which, as Denis Pilon (chapter 1, this volume) remarks, “the conceptually sloppy amalgam” that is “liberal democracy” became the centrepiece of a sustained ideological struggle against the left. Although Macpherson himself fell into this pattern to some extent – as suggested by his hyphenated term “liberal-democracy” – the very problematization of “democracy” he proposes in Real World went some good distance to initiating the awareness that liberal order and a democratic society need not, and in the nineteenth century generally did not, coincide. That any “muddle” existed was, of course, hardly self-evident to the many Cold Warriors for whom “liberal democracy” – or “liberal-democracy” – was that coherent set of moral principles and practices distinguishing our freedom from their totalitarianism. By de-reifying and historicizing liberal democracy, relativizing it both spatially and temporally, Macpherson’s lectures and short book sought to destabilize Cold War polarities. In this context, he was both a sympathetic interpreter and iconoclastic critic of that muddled amalgam, “liberal democracy” – whose hegemonic status in the twenty-first century is still relatively unscathed in much of

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the world, as an emergent Cold War with China demonstrates only too well. The iconoclast in question seemed ill-suited to his role. He came from a leading elite university not renowned as a centre of radicalism. He had been a distinguished leader in Canadian academic affairs for decades.2 Yet now he was addressing a far wider audience in a lecture series bearing the name of Vincent Massey, a revered Canadian governor general, delivered on the state-owned broadcasting service. Macpherson was born into a middle-class Presbyterian family and spent the greater part of his life in Toronto. After a stellar undergraduate career at the University of Toronto, he studied at the London School of Economics under such left intellectuals as Harold Laski (his supervisor) and R.H. Tawney (who was arguably the stronger influence on him). He returned to the University of Toronto (U of T) in 1935 and joined its Department of Political Economy, where he spent most of his academic career from 1935 to 1982. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (1962) was the book that won him an international reputation and that endures to this day: some commentators regarded it as original and insightful, others as eccentric and inappropriately abstract. It was widely regarded as a Marxist text in so far as it emphasized the powerful influence on Hobbes and Locke of an emerging capitalist order. Possessive Individualism inaugurated a phrase still in common currency, and it undoubtedly constituted a high point in Macpherson’s career. It is the one book of his that the world outside Canada is apt to remember. Yet in many respects it can be viewed as having inaugurated a much more general “Moment of Macpherson,” extending roughly from 1962 to 1973 – one that encompassed not just his famous volume but also a slew of articles and book reviews and a controversial report in 1967 to U of T recommending the overhaul of its arts and science curriculum. In these years the scholar was in his heyday. Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (1973) is arguably as formidable as its more famous predecessor and lays out his case in a more systematically theorized form. 3 He had (and has) many critics and even enemies. Why? Because, in a context in which “liberal democracies” were the sanctified antitheses of the “totalitarian tyrannies” of the Socialist Bloc and Third World, Macpherson argued that this revered reified dichotomy was simplistic. He thought that the liberal values he cherished – the human rights

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for which he fought in the 1940s and 1950s (alongside some of the activists analyzed by Frager and Patrias [chapter 8, this volume]), a peaceful world order, the rule of law, ordered civility, almost all the classical liberties – were put at risk by the capitalist social relations that had been pervasive in the West since the seventeenth century. Honest liberals needed to retrieve democracy, the rule of the many, not the few, from capitalism – and from many Cold War liberals. But – could one really be an anti-capitalist liberal? And, further, could this mission of retrieval really be accomplished by means of selective but extensive borrowings from a Marxist tradition conventionally construed as the liberals’ arch-enemy? At what point did such borrowings constitute a betrayal of liberalism itself? Many liberals detested Macpherson because he asked questions about the tradition they shared with him that went to the very heart of their faith. Often accused by them of elusiveness and stealth, Macpherson himself thought he was being quite candid: “What I have been trying to do all along (and am still trying to do) … is work out a revision of liberal-democratic theory, a revision which clearly owes a good deal to Marx, in the hope of making that theory more democratic while rescuing that valuable part of the liberal tradition which is submerged when liberalism is identified with capitalist market relations.”4 His critics thought otherwise. Because his immanent critique focused most intently on his own liberal tradition, liberals in particular never accepted either the plausibility or the probity of their compatriot’s life work. 5 By common consent among the best Macpherson scholars, the “Marxist or Liberal?” debate on these questions reached its best-before date, if indeed it had one, sometime in the 1970s.6 Yet for the scholar interested in the history of thinking about democracy in the 1960s and 1970s, the polemics themselves are still interesting, in part because they suggest how slippery the term “Marxist” had become, especially as a term of liberal reproach. It never comfortably fit Macpherson and, so far as I can see, he never applied it to himself. Questioning liberalism’s reified status as “that which must not be questioned” seemed to provoke almost automatic charges of Marxist authoritarianism – and since Macpherson was unabashedly making use of some Marxist concepts, above all the concept of capitalism as a vast economic and cultural system, one can understand why such a reaction seemed plausible. What did it mean to be a liberal democrat critical of capitalism in the Cold War and the radicalizing 1960s? As a man who, in Jules

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Townshend’s words, “spoke the liberal language, albeit with a heavy Marxist inflection, and took liberalism seriously enough to embrace some of its core values,” one who built his argument “on a close reading, particularly of Hobbes and Locke,”7 Macpherson appealed to those impatient with both liberal and Marxist doctrinaires and anxious to rethink what democracy might mean and how it might still be defended. The Real World of Democracy merits close attention as a significant element in the “Moment of Macpherson.” It offers us a good example of the promise and peril of that mid-century development. Only sixty-seven pages long in its first edition, the pamphlet-length text, likely hurriedly written in the closing months of 1964, hardly has the scholarly heft of Possessive Individualism or Democratic Theory. Real World offers contemporary critics of Macpherson what they take to be good evidence of an irretrievably dated figure from another time. As philosopher Frank Cunningham noted in 1993, rather than the future imagined in the book – in which liberal democracies, the Communist Bloc, and the Third World would all converge in a more harmonious order that had wisely learned to move beyond capitalism – we find one in which “possessive individualism, inequality, and a market economy not only remain dominant features of the capitalist world, but it, and not socialist equality has provided the model for peoples of both second and third world countries, who, given an opportunity, have voted against socialism and for an extreme version of market capitalism.”8 And Cunningham was writing before the full consolidation of a neoliberal world order.9 Granting all these limitations, Real World offers an unrivalled glimpse into a formidably intelligent and critical Western liberal trying to resituate himself and his tradition historically and spatially – within a longue durée extending from the sixteenth century to the present and within a world characterized by ideologies and political formations operating both within and far beyond national borders. It was comprised of six chapters, each of them based on a cbc lecture summarizing a complex theme in fewer than twenty pages. The first lecture lays out many of Macpherson’s core definitions and claims, all of which attempt to historicize and de-reify liberal democracy and undermine its claims to (temporal and spatial) universality. Liberalism and democracy are, conceptually and historically, distinct from each other. For Macpherson, liberalism could be defined as

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the politics of choice. It was something much more than a limited political tradition: it meant that “both the society as a whole and the system of government were organized on a principle of freedom of choice.” It meant individuals were free to choose their religion, their pattern of life, their marriage partners, their occupations; indeed, they were at liberty to make the best arrangements, the best bargain they could, in everything that affected their lives. In an ideal liberal order, people offered their services, their products, their savings, or their labour on the market and got the market price for them, which was itself determined by all their independent decisions. And “with the income they got they made more choices – how much to spend, how much to save, what to spend on, and what to invest in.” Instead of a society based “on custom, on status, and on an authoritarian allocation of work and rewards,” one found “a society based on individual mobility, on contract, and on impersonal market allocation of work and rewards in response to individual choices.” People once accustomed to lives conditioned by their position in “ranks or orders or communities” now found themselves living, “with delight or with fear,” in a society that required them to “think of themselves as individuals free to choose.” Even governments themselves, treated as suppliers of “certain political goods,” were “put in a sort of market situation.” They furnished not just the general political good of law and order but also the specific political goods “demanded by those who had the upper hand in running that particular kind of society.” The “job” of the competitive party system was “to uphold the competitive market society, by keeping the government responsive to the shifting majority interests of those who were running the market society.” Market criteria spread far beyond the economy in such a society, in which “everything is up for choice, or may be up for choice at any time – everything, that is to say, except the liberal society and the democratic franchise themselves. The ideal of liberal-democracy is consumers’ sovereignty – we buy what we want with our votes.”10 Democracy, on the other hand – and here Macpherson was thinking of its meaning in such authors as Aristotle, an abiding influence on him – meant “rule by the people” or “government in accordance with the will of the bulk of the people,” “a system of government … in which the majority actually controls the rulers, … those who make and enforce political decisions.” The “majority must be able to say what they want and make it stick.” It entailed, more generally,

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“rule by the common people, the plebeians … the sway of the lowest and largest class … government by and for the common people, by and for the hitherto oppressed classes.” In other words, the “original notion of democracy” was “rule by and for the poor and oppressed,” or “rule by and for the poor.” 11 Thus, on his reading, “liberal democracy” was a term that concealed an underlying tension between two divergent and potentially conflicting political and social trajectories. Contrary to much Cold War opinion, there might be “nothing democratic” about a liberal society, especially one divided between the rich and the poor. Driven by imperatives that were both political and economic, liberals swallowed their initial reservations and accepted some elements of democracy “on competitive liberal grounds.” Over time democracy had come to be regarded not as a threat to the liberal state but, rather, as “a fulfillment” of it; not as a term for a disparaged plebeian tradition but as one designating the entire order’s highest principles. In its narrow sense, “a system of government … in which the majority actually controls the rulers … those who make and enforce political decisions,” democracy had at least been partially achieved. “We in the West,” he proclaimed, “have built up a system which we value very highly. It combines a large measure of individual liberty with a fair approximation to majority rule. None of the other systems have managed it, and we don’t intend to be talked out of our achievement no matter how necessary a policy of co-existence with the other systems may be.” Yet, as much as one valued the achievements of “the West” that “we” inhabited – and this book is densely populated indeed with such consensual “we’s” – such freedoms had not fundamentally altered the market society. Democracy was applied “as a top dressing” to soil “already prepared by the operation of the competitive, individualist market society.”12 Topdressing – sand or prepared soil mix applied to a lawn – can be used to smooth its surface and to help avoid desiccation; over the years, multiple applications may gradually modify the profile of the soil. 13 Somewhat acceded to in the liberal West since the 1840s, egalitarian democratic demands had returned in a radical way by the mid-twentieth century, this time on a world scale. Macpherson argues that twentieth-century liberals in the West could no longer claim to be democracy’s sole guardians. There were now the “somewhat different non-liberal systems of most of the underdeveloped

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countries of Asia and Africa.” All of these non-Western models had “historical claim to the title democracy” because they echoed the original ideal – that is, “rule by or in the interests of the hitherto oppressed class.” They all justified themselves with reference to “the classic notion of democracy as an equal human society.”14 The second lecture explores the claim of communist states to the term. Macpherson wanted to historicize the Communist Bloc by relating its experience of dictatorship with those of such revolutions as the English in the seventeenth century and the French in the eighteenth century. In all such epochal moments for liberalism, a minority had believed it needed to take command. And so it had been in Russia in 1917. Lenin inherited the insights of Marx, who had made the ancient concept of democracy “more precise” by “relating it to the historical development of systems of production, and particularly of the capitalist system of production.” On Macpherson’s very conventional interpretation,15 Lenin had conceptualized the vanguard party as a means of modernizing “a nation mainly of backward peasants,” which necessitated, among other things, an economic strategy prioritizing “capital equipment” over “the production of things for people to eat and use.” It was a problem “we in the West” could not recall ever confronting, Macpherson argued. Yet, in so far as communists were genuinely trying to move “towards a firmly held goal of an equal society in which everybody can be fully human,” they were simply using the word in its “original and normal sense.” In fact, vanguard parties might also be construed as democratic in a narrower sense as well, if there was full intraparty democracy, membership was open, and they did not demand abnormal levels of commitment. 16 Macpherson was really only summarizing much conventional scholarship on the Soviet Communism epitomized by historian E.H. Carr and more recently extended by such as Alfred G. Meyer, Herbert Marcuse, and Adam B. Ulam, all of whom Macpherson had earlier assessed, sometimes in ways closely anticipating Real World’s discussion.17 In no case did his reviews, or his book, signify his approval of dictatorships. Macpherson thought that vanguardism, perhaps a tragic necessity in some situations, such as the revolutions in England, France, and Russia, nonetheless constituted “an exceedingly dangerous path,” one providing no guarantee that such a vanguard would “in fact use their power for the ends for which it was supposed to be used.” A vanguard state “may be a government for the people but it is not

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government by the people, or even by the choice of the people,” he remarked. As for the potentially democratic one-party states, Macpherson noted that none had yet appeared on earth.18 Yet, taken out of context, his attempt at a reconnaissance of the ideological assumptions defended by Soviet-style regimes could be, and were, mistaken as a defence of those regimes. Almost as controversial is Macpherson’s third and rather underresearched chapter, which dwells upon democracy in the “newly independent underdeveloped countries” or “the third world, as it is sometimes called.” Here was a “new world,” neither communist nor capitalist. Macpherson draws a picture of countries in which there is generally little in the way of “internal class divisions of an exploitive kind.” This made it very difficult for communists to make headway, for “communist doctrine and communist movements” could flourish only “where there is something for them to take hold of.” In such settings of “relative classlessness,” one party-states in the Third World could register a claim to be democratic in so far as the parties, unlike those in communist states, did often entail grassroots control, open membership, and realistic expectations of members. 19 As Macpherson explains in a piece published in 1966, but written at the same time he was preparing Real World, the “revolutions and ideologies likely to be most important in the second half of the twentieth century are those of the underdeveloped countries.” They were “not formed entirely from either Marxist or liberal-democratic ideologies” and were already having an effect on both the “Communist and Western structure of power and of ideas.” He clarifies that he does not use “ideology” in a pejorative sense but, rather, to denote “any more or less systematic set of ideas about man’s place in nature, in society, and in history,” and by “revolution” he means a “transfer of state power by means involving the use or threat of organized unauthorized force, and the subsequent consolidation of that transferred over, with a view to bringing about a fundamental change in social, economic, and political institutions.”20 If the first three lectures set out models of democracy that corresponded to widely debated questions of the 1960s, the next two, focused specifically on the ills of liberal democracy as a “system of power,” explore more recondite territory, specifically Macpherson’s idea of the “transfer of powers” and the “myth of maximization.” Both discussions recapitulate themes developed earlier in Possessive Individualism but, at least in the first case, introduce new elements.

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Macpherson argues that a “curiously limited” vision of “human excellence” – or more strongly, “a travesty of the human condition” – had been built into market society and hence into liberal democracies, which took every expenditure of human energy to be painful, maintained that no one worked except in expectation of material reward, and assumed that one should prefer to obtain satisfactions with the least expenditure of effort. This “hollow vision” of humanity influenced liberal democracy as a whole, which was, “like any other state,” “a system of power.”21 Government – enjoying a monopoly on “the power to compel by physical force or constraint” and entailing the power of governors “to compel the governed” – obviously meant such a system in the narrow sense, but, Macpherson insists, it should also be seen as a force working “to maintain a set of relations between individuals and groups within the society which are power relations.” Macpherson concedes that when a person sold “the use of that strength to another at its market price,” there was “no net transfer of his powers to another. He is selling something he owns for what it is worth: he gets no less than he gives.” Yet, without “free access” to the “means of labour,” a person’s powers were diminished, and with no access, that person “ceases to live.” The liberal democratic state was both the government in a narrow sense – that is, a necessary institution whose legitimacy rested on “the governed having some effective control over the governors by way of choice of governors” – and an institution with a much broader mandate, vested with “the job” of maintaining the relations whereby some people’s powers was transferred to others. Such injurious power relations had been obscured by capitalism’s enormous productivity. It was now possible to imagine a modern productive society that did not require “the transfer of powers from non-owners” – Macpherson in 1973 would call this the owners’ “extractive power”22 – and indeed, such societies were not only possible but had already emerged in the Socialist Bloc.23 The transfer of powers thesis is developed briefly in Possessive Individualism, but Real World is the first time it receives such a detailed exposition. Drawing on Hobbes as much as Marx,24 Real World clarifies what was inherently undemocratic about capitalism as Macpherson understood it. Under capitalism, one’s powers were not only diminished by lack of access to the means of life but also by virtue of the fact that one was no longer exercising powers for one’s own purposes. Powers must be exercised in order fully to exist,

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and they should thereby entail the freedom and rationality intrinsic to being human. It was obvious that “the natural development of the capitalist market” had distanced the real world of democracy from the theory’s hypothesized “perfect competition.” When such competition was removed, “the firms go on maximizing their profits, but this no longer maximizes social utility.” The notion that the market maximized utilities or satisfactions was a myth, Macpherson argues, first because it was difficult to think of a standard system of measurement that would empirically sustain the claim and, second, because the market could not “reward people in proportion to the energy and skill they expend,” because “it had to reward ownership as well. It has to look after the transfer of powers.”25 In his conclusion, Macpherson, citing Keynes, foresees a time when the “accumulation of wealth” would no longer be of “high social importance.” Then “we” might aspire to retrieve “the democratic values of equal freedom and equal access to a rational purposive life.”26 So argues The Real World of Democracy, a tract for the Cold War times. The response to it was puzzling, and in two ways. First, it is odd that it did not arouse a storm of public controversy as a radio lecture, given what we think we know about Cold War Canada. (If the radio lectures prompted calls for Macpherson to be hounded as a disloyal “Red on the Radio,” I have not, to my surprise, found them.) Second, it is equally odd that it did rouse such a virulent anti-communist response among some critics, sometimes writing years after the book’s publication. We have already hinted at one reason the lectures were received so placidly: given their unremittingly academic tone, intricate arguments, and arcane references, they probably caused many listeners to zone out. 27 The last two lectures, oriented to the “transfer of powers,” emphasize a concept Macpherson himself notes had stumped many of his critics.28 And the mythical maximization of utilities was an implausibly abstract topic for a radio talk clocking in at twenty-nine minutes and thirty-six seconds.29 A second, more contentious explanation for the apathetic response to his lectures is that many liberals in his cbc audience might not have heard much with which they strenuously disagreed. The lectures were written in late 1964, a scant two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, widely seen as an ominous sign that the world was on the brink of destruction. Placed in its 1964–65 context, Real World makes much more sense than it does as a supposed treatise on democracy

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in the abstract. From mid-1963 to the end of 1964, Macpherson was a director of the Canadian Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (ccnd ) and headed its Policy Committee. He controversially propelled the organization from a strictly defined anti-nuclear stance towards a more generally anti-war and pro-neutrality position.30 The arguments of one ccnd paper from a policy committee he chaired, A Canadian Policy for Peace, flows almost directly into Real World: The world is no longer divided into Communist and antiCommunist nations. There is a large new sector, comprising most of Africa and south-east Asia, which is now independent, uncommitted to either East or West, and intends to remain so. East and West can no longer hope to make their way of life prevail in the world, or even save their way of life from extinction, by cold war. Only by policies which recognize the just claims of the newly-freed third of the world, can the West hope to save and extend the values of freedom and humanity enshrined in the un Charter. At the same time, the emergence of these new nations has made another difference in the Cold War. The very existence of the uncommitted nations, and their powerful voice in the un General Assembly, have taken some of the strain out of the cold war. And if the new nations are allowed and helped to develop, they will be able to take more of the strain out of it. Yet the major powers, so deeply enmeshed in Cold War patterns of thought and action, cannot help the new nations, except in order to advance their own cold war strength. Canada, being a middle power, can take an imaginative lead here which the bigger nations seem unable to take.31 In January 1964, as an activist with the ccnd , Macpherson slammed the Liberal government’s decision to acquire nuclear warheads, a “miserable contrast” with its “messages of peace and goodwill for the New Year.”32 In March, he criticized the “self-defeating” argument that Canadians should not get too far out of step with the United States: “If you’re afraid to get out of step, you can’t expect to change the policy or have any influence at all.”33 In November 1964 he visited External Affairs Minister Paul Martin to urge him to support the admission of Communist China to the United Nations. 34

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In September 1965, Macpherson followed up the broadcasts with a lecture in Regina on the “Strange World of Modern Ideologies.” In it, he declared that “the Western nations must give more financial and technical aid to newly-independent underdeveloped countries of the world, or the chances of human and democratic development in these countries could be irretrievably lost.” This audience received a deftly trimmed-down version of Real World, as the following story from the Regina Leader-Post reveals: “We now have in sight a society of abundance … but our whole society is organized on the basis of scarcity,” he said. … The West, he said, must try to make the “tremendous intellectual effort” necessary to switch from an ideology based on scarcity, to one based on abundance, and it must impress upon its political and financial leaders, the reality of the revolutionary world in which two other ideologies based on abundance exist. He said the first step would be the positive decolonization of underdeveloped countries, with technical and capital aid to enable them to make their own take-off. These countries, as the Communist countries, reject the competitive capital and multi-party principles of the Western ideology, and have the same humanist views Karl Marx had. But they reject the Communist idea of class analysis – claiming once foreign powers leave, they have a classless society. “Some speak of Communist imperialism alongside of Western imperialism,” he said … “If we care about the quality of democracy, the quality of human society, we have a choice. We can help them maintain and improve the levels or make them do it all on their own and this would probably mean slipping backwards in the democratic scale.”35 This speech calls sharply into question the popular liberal myth of Macpherson as the “Stealth Marxist,” ensnaring the innocent in his cunning web of sophistries and abstractions. There are no indications the members of his liberal audience in Regina were outraged by anything they heard. After all, a fellow student of Laski, Pierre Trudeau, riding a wave of revulsion against nuclear weapons and equally reviled by some as soft on communism, would four years later come to power with what seemed a somewhat “Macphersonian” program

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of participatory democracy and, perhaps, the extraction of Canada from Cold War polarities.36 It is telling that the book, rather than the lectures themselves, stirred up controversy. It passed through nine further impressions from 1966 to 1974 as a publication of the cbc (and incidentally generating an unexpected windfall for the Macpherson family).37 Some reviewers were appreciative. Geoffrey Barraclough, the renowned European historian and recent author of An Introduction to Contemporary History, considered Macpherson’s book a refreshingly “clear-headed” re-evaluation of the simplistic notion that liberalism and democracy were inseparably linked, and agreed that “we are … are the laggards in the race to the 21st century.”38 For Alexander Brady, eminent political scientist at U of T, the book was “brilliantly argued, forcible and highly provocative.”39 A.H. Hanson, professor of politics at the University of Leeds, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, considered Macpherson to be not only a “very learned Marxist” but also an “exceptionally civilized and persuasive one.”40 Yet Hanson was mixing his praise with the delicately phrased insinuation that Macpherson was coming from a very problematic ideological location. Many reviewers followed this path. In the Tribune, the flagship of the Labour Party left in Britain, journalist Anthony Arblaster, later to write his own big book about liberalism, judged Real World to be “a very disappointing book on a very important subject,” in part because of its “intolerably abstract and schematic manner.”41 As Brady pithily put it, “It is unfortunate that politics is not such a tidy subject as geometry.”42 “Macpherson begins brilliantly, but then tails off into some very thin Marxist metaphysics,” political theorist Bernard Crick complained.43 At a time when a reified “liberal-democracy-versus-communism” dichotomy seems to have entranced so much of the academic and non-academic world, many reviewers rejected Macpherson’s attempt to rethink both of this dichotomy’s poles. Rather than clearing up the “muddle” on democracy, Macpherson’s use of the term risked making it “so compendious as to deprive it of meaning,” Hanson complained.44 Writing in Canadian Dimension, philosopher Anthony Mardiros agreed: Macpherson was “much too ready to accept as democracy that which claims to be democracy.”45 Brady thought Macpherson had oversimplified liberalism’s complicated history by intertwining it with that of capitalism.46

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A red flag to many critical bulls was Macpherson’s handling of the Soviet Union. Arblaster faulted Macpherson’s treatment of the regime: his account seemed “to take it for granted that the Soviet system is aimed at the achievement of equality, and, incredibly, makes no mention of Stalin or Stalinism.” 47 Trotskyist Leslie Tolmin scored Macpherson’s “inclination to rationalize the power of existing authority.” In effect, he was offering “a rationalization of Stalinism” and defending “‘the permanent authoritarian rule’ of the Soviet bureaucracy.”48 Such a severely critical tone anticipated much of the academic treatment of Real World in the 1970s and 1980s. Kenneth Minogue of the London School of Economics (the editor of an edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan competitive with that of Macpherson and soon to be a star of the Mont Pèlerin Society) delivered a blistering critique of Macpherson in the mid-1970s that used Real World extensively as a primary source and can be taken as a model of an emergent genre of neoliberal Macpherson-bashing.49 For Minogue, Macpherson’s supposed proclivity towards totalitarianism was the seemingly ineluctable consequence of his rationalist propensity for constructing social blueprints. Here was a man, like the educated hedgehog of Archilochus, who knew just one big thing. (Minogue was blatantly drawing on, but curiously not citing, a text from Isaiah Berlin).50 Macpherson’s proto-totalitarianism supposedly arose in part from his method of analysis: he was intent on stretching “abstractions in order to grind down all distinctions which stand in the way of the one fundamental criterion: a fully human life.” Minogue nonetheless detected in him a dire agenda for a completely collectivized order, perhaps “a kind of kibbutz life with ping pong and hi fi after work in the communal hall,” in which there would be no private property (excepting, perhaps, underwear and toothbrushes), no privacy, and no money. In it, “everything will depend upon political decisions.” Only in a society “entirely homogeneous in desires, tastes, levels of energy, and intensity of adherence to roughly the same set of beliefs” would such a future be possible. Breaking down all the barriers existing between people, envisaging “free-floating human beings tied to nothing at all,” Macpherson might seem to be offering “a vision of liberation.” But what would the outcome of his agenda be if not “the most profound enslavement, indeed the most elaborate thwarting of human development, that could be imagined”?51

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Macpherson responded to Minogue’s caustic critique with his customary restraint. Besides pointing out his critic’s mistakes in logic, he observed that the utopian future imputed to him by Minogue offered a prospect “which revolts me as much as it revolts him.” The attempts to reach a “non-contentious and non-totalitarian society,” as evidenced in nineteenth-century utopian communities or in the “Soviet system in this century,” had “all failed.” Whether they had done so because of the “impossibility of isolating a non-market community from an engulfing market society” in the first case or the “monstrous real scarcity with which it began” in the second, “no one can say for certain.”52 It was a very patient reply from someone who, for more than a decade, had marked his distance from Soviet-style regimes and had taken an enthusiastic part in many of the campaigns for human rights in the 1940s and 1950s. Some critical reviewers faulted Macpherson for failing to provide solutions for what he had diagnosed as the challenges confronting democracy in the world. J. Roland Pennock, a political scientist at Swarthmore College and future author of Democratic Political Theory (1979), thought the argument leading up to Macpherson’s most prominent practical suggestion – that Western governments offer massive economic aid to Third World countries as the best way to save liberal democracy – involved a “massive non sequitur.” One might accept as valuable Macpherson’s proposition that “we must substitute spiritual for material values,” and it was also possible to argue “that unless we do so our polities will cease to command the support of citizens.” But the conclusion that we must therefore “increase our material aid to underdeveloped nations” did not follow from these premises. 53 From a Trotskyist perspective, Tolmin deemed Macpherson’s recommendations for greatly enhanced foreign aid “to be ‘singularly pathetic.’”54 That critique did capture what was distinctly middle-of-the-road about Macpherson on the Third World, palpably out of step with a radical left ever more taken with the Global South’s insurgencies against imperialism. He was offering, not revolutionary solidarity with its insurgent masses, but a charity model to safeguard the reputation and well-being of Western capitalist societies. Perhaps with such criticisms in mind, Macpherson himself later remarked that, if he were to rewrite Real World after fifteen years, he would subject it to a substantial revision. Yet he also noted that “our students” needed to be “jerked out of their unthinking acceptance of liberal

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democracy as the only model of democracy.” He declined to withdraw it because “I think our students still need that jerk.”55 Minogue suggests one of the reasons Real World came to be the object of such hostile criticism: many up-and-coming political theorists were awakening to the emergent hegemony of neoliberalism, which in almost every respect is the polar opposite of everything Macpherson stood for. A host of fledgling neoliberals in the 1970s and 1980s discovered the considerable polemical mileage offered by misleadingly tying Macpherson as closely as they could to the Soviet model. As we have seen, there is reason for taking Real World seriously as a major contribution to Macpherson’s political writings. Doing so means respecting its context, rhetorical strategies, and implied subject-position – not highlighting decontextualized quotations with the polemical aim of slaying an ideological foe. To some extent, Macpherson brought Real World’s fate upon himself since, in places, his presentation of the ideological assumptions underlying his three models, each of them presented in highly condensed and abstract form, created the impression that he was treating as empirical realities what were in his mind, for the most part, ideological postulates. Moreover, there was undoubtedly a good-natured Enlightenment optimism present in the appraisal of all of Macpherson’s three worlds, each of which was inhabited by thoughtful people in quest of a peaceful and rational planet and willing to understand, and even trust, their counterparts in the other two spheres. Someone in quest of the darker side of each world – the transatlantic slave trade and predatory imperialism in the first, Stalinist repression and murder in the second, and class exploitation and militarism in the third, for instance – will come away empty-handed. Both liberals and Marxists, unyielding in their own established conventions of assessing what was and was not democratic, thus projected on to Macpherson identities and positions that were not really his. In their drive to reduce Macpherson to a simple essence, often flouting as they did their own professed theoretical and political precepts, they missed the most obvious message of Real World: in a world menaced by nuclear war, it was wise to acknowledge the ideological claims registered by the central players (which in his mind included the countries emerging from colonization).56 The paradox here for liberals was that Macpherson not only plainly knew their own tradition intimately but also, in relativizing it, was merely

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reporting on their doctrine’s actual position in the real world. There was, one might say, a certain fact-resistant illiberalism to their Cold War liberalism. As Jules Townshend puts it with respect to them, “No constructive engagement with his work was attempted.”57 Macpherson’s liminal ideological identity, liberal and (seemingly) Marxist at one and the same time, was of a piece with an equally liminal Canada, an indistinctly imagined community that might (in the dreams of Macpherson and his peacenik compatriots) pursue its own independent and neutral foreign policy. Critical ideas broadly accepted by many liberal intellectuals from the 1930s to the 1960s came to be perceived far more negatively in the 1970s and 1980s. In the milieu in which Macpherson came to intellectual maturity, his brand of radical democracy was fairly commonplace. Tawney provided him with the inspiration for the very concept and phrase of “possessive individualism,” and Laski provided him with direct anticipations of his argument about the problematic relation of capitalism with freedom.58 As can be seen in the subsequent efflorescence of the Canadian political economy school, which claimed Macpherson as an ancestor, he played a bridging role between that generation and a new one: but in the increasingly pro-market world of liberal political theory, any such trajectory was a strenuously contested one.59 One of his most prominent graduate students, Ed Broadbent, at work in 1965 on his doctoral dissertation about John Stuart Mill,60 would become federal leader of the New Democratic Party, which itself came to sound very “Macphersonian” in its combative democratic leftism in the 1970s and 1980s.61 David Held, who developed his own highly influential interpretation of seven models of democracy, acknowledged his indebtedness to Macpherson and Real World, to whom he directly owed his concepts of “protective” and “developmental” democracy.62 It was in the third quarter of the twentieth century that a somewhat egalitarian version of “democracy” became a general (but never universal) article of faith among Canadians.63 And Macpherson can stand as one of its most significant intellectuals. If ever there is a reinvigoration of interest in his vision of democracy, as a whole way of life rather than just as a system of political representation, it will likely involve a more appreciative, holistic, and balanced appraisal of “the Moment of Macpherson” as that in which “Canada’s Democracy” received one of its most persuasive and interesting theorizations.

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I should like to acknowledge the research assistance of David Thompson and the wise counsel of Frank Cunningham. The lectures were broadcast from 22 January to 26 February and rebroadcast from 10 March to 14 April. They were also picked up by National Public Radio in the United States. Five of them may be (and should be) listened to online: see https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1964-cbc-masseylectures-the-real-world-of-democracy-1.2946802. By and large the printed version – Macpherson, Real World of Democracy – aligns with the oral, with the exception of chapter 3 on democracy’s “underdeveloped variant.” Macpherson was head of the Canadian Political Science Association, a leader of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, and was soon to be entrusted with the overhaul of the undergraduate curriculum in the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto, commonly regarded as the country’s most prestigious university. A partial list of milestones from the “Moment of Macpherson” should include the numerous essays from the 1960s, many of which, plus five original ones, can be found in Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval, which is now generally accessible in a new edition introduced by Frank Cunningham. For other milestones in addition to Real World, see Macpherson, Possessive Individualism; and Presidential Advisory Committee, Undergraduate Instruction. Macpherson, “Humanist Democracy,” 423. All of his major titles are now back in print, many of them in new Oxford University Press “Wynford Editions” edited by Frank Cunningham. The one major exception is The Real World of Democracy, available from the House of Anansi. As Peter Lindsay puts it: “I personally see little point in such exercises. This type of categorization would seem to lend itself to reductionist error more than it would to genuine thought.” See Lindsay, Creative Individualism, 42n78. For a judicious assessment, see Cunningham, Political Thought of Macpherson, 52–4. Townshend, Macpherson, 2. Cunningham, Real World of Democracy, 3. For more present-day reflections, see McKay, “Common Sense of Neoliberalism.” Macpherson, Real World of Democracy, 8–13, 48. Ibid., 2, 7–8, 26, 68. Ibid., 4, 11, 14, 16.

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13 As a non-landscaper, I rely here on the expert advice of “The Lawn Institute,” https://www.thelawninstitute.org/pages/education/lawnmaintenance/topdressing/. 14 Macpherson, Real World of Democracy, 17, 48. 15 For a much more satisfying contemporary analysis of Lenin’s thought about the party and its purpose, see Lih, Lenin Rediscovered. Macpherson was merely reproducing what Lih calls the “textbook Lenin” of mainstream scholarship on the Russian Revolution. 16 Macpherson, Real World of Democracy, 21–2, 24, 25, 28, 47. 17 Macpherson, reviews of Meyer, Leninism, 129–30; Ulam, Unfinished Revolution, in Political Science Quarterly (September 1962), 451–3; and Marcuse, Soviet Marxism, in Political Science Quarterly 74 (March 1959), 152–3. In his review of Marcuse, Macpherson was struck by his finding that the communists confronted “‘a historical dynamic’ by which the theory, ‘once incorporated into the foundational institutions and objectives of the new society … surpasses the intentions of the leadership’: to this dynamic ‘the leadership itself is subjected – no matter how autonomous and totalitarian it may be,’” a foreshadowing of his Real World of Democracy six years later. 18 Macpherson, Real World of Democracy, 26, 28, 32. 19 Ibid., 15, 33, 45, 47, 49. 20 Macpherson, “Revolution and Ideology,” 139–40. 21 Macpherson, Real World of Democracy, 56. 22 Cunningham, Democratic Theory, 42. 23 Macpherson, Real World of Democracy, 57, 61–4. 24 Leo Panitch writes that the theory was “entirely founded on the theory of surplus value, only extended to point out that, in addition to the material value transferred by the labourer to the capitalist in the process of production in the form of value over and above that of what it takes to reproduce the wage of the exchange contract in material terms, there is an additional loss to the labourer.” See Panitch, “Liberal Democracy,” 147 (emphasis added). Svacek, “Elusive Marxism,” calls this Macpherson’s “terminological codpiece.” The Hobbesian genealogy seems far clearer to me: see Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, 56; Hobbes, Leviathan (Macpherson), 1: 11, 160–8; Hansen, Reconsidering C.B. Macpherson, 70; and Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, 56. 25 Macpherson, Real World of Democracy, 69, 72, 73, 76, 78. 26 Ibid., 90, 94–5. 27 Minogue, not exactly an impartial critic, did memorably capture this stylistic quality of Macpherson: “The problems of the argument might

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well diminish if Macpherson were to equip the tortuous defiles of his argument with a few examples to supply foot and handhold.” See Minogue, “Humanist Democracy,” 382. Macpherson, “Humanist Democracy,” 424. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1964-cbc-massey-lectures-the-realworld-of-democracy-1.2946802. On this site, the lecture is wrongly dated to 1964. “Proposal – C.B. Macpherson, Summary, (3) i-vi, viii-x,” n.d., meetings – minutes and reports, vol. 1, Canadian Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (ccnd ), Library and Archives Canada (hereafter lac ), mg 28 I389. “Draft Statement of Policy – ‘A Canadian Policy for Peace,’” Summer 1963, meetings – minutes and reports, vol. 1, ccnd , lac , mg 28 I389. “Anti-Bomb Organizations Deplore A-Heads Here,” Ottawa Citizen, 3 January 1964. “ccnd Chief Predicts nato Force Boycott,” Edmonton Journal, 21 March 1964. He had earlier voted against this very policy: “Handwritten Minutes of Board of Directors of ccnd , Montreal,” afternoon, 26 October 1963, meetings – minutes and reports, vol. 1, ccnd , lac , mg 28 I389. “Six Speakers Arranged for Plain Talk Series,” Regina Leader-Post,” 18 September 1965; and “Poor Nations Need Support,” Reginer LeaderPost, 28 September 1965. In contrast with the vast majority of leftists in Canada, Macpherson later offered Pierre Trudeau, his fellow lse alumnus, critical support for military aid to the civil power under the aegis of the War Measures Act in 1970. He thought the government, having made the case for the abrogation of civil liberties in an emergency, should give itself a clear deadline for restoring them: “I note that, however strong the case was at the time, it has now lost much of its strength. The search and detention powers that you were persuaded were so urgently needed have now been used, in the widespread way the police thought necessary. Advantage has now been taken of the element of surprise; it cannot have the same effect again.” See Macpherson to Trudeau, 18 October 1970, University of Toronto Archives, C.B Macpherson Fonds, 887-0069/005, fol. “Letter to pm ., etc.” His daughter Sheila recalls that, on the basis of royalties from the Massey book, her family was able to purchase a dishwasher with the proceeds, which ever after bore the name “the Massey dishwasher.” Interview with Sheila Macpherson, Toronto, 4 April 2017.

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38 Barraclough, “Canadian Iconoclasm,” New Statesman, 25 March 1965, 472. 39 Brady, “Social Studies,” 469. 40 A.H. Hanson, “Marxist Democracy,” Times Literary Supplement, 9 June 1966, 510. 41 Anthony Arblaster, “History Made Tidy,” Tribune (London), 6 May 1966, 13. 42 Brady, “Social Studies” (review essay on recent publications in social science). 43 Bernard Crick, “All for Democracy,” Observer, 10 April 1966, 21. 44 Ibid. 45 Mardiros, “Ideological World of Macpherson,” 21. 46 Brady, “Social Studies.” 47 Arblaster, “History Made Tidy.” 48 Tolmin, Socialism and the Professor, 4–10. 49 A regulator contributor to Encounter, a cia -linked cultural publication in the Cold War, Minogue was the author of The Liberal Mind (1962), Nationalism (1967), and The Concept of the University (1973). As he explains in a revealing reminiscence in Abse, My lse , “People like Laski and Morris Ginsberg … worked both to enlighten and improve the world” (176), whereas, “in many ways, the best place for universities is in quiet backwaters where the distraction of practical commitment interferes less with the pursuit of objectivity” (178). He found in Michael Oakeshott, Laski’s successor, a welcome antidote to such a Laski-like posture, and he may well have identified Macpherson as someone intent on pursuing an lse activist tradition he devoutly hoped had been transcended. 50 See Berlin, Hedgehog and the Fox. 51 Minogue, “Humanist Democracy,” 377, 380, 384, 391, 394 (emphasis in original). Some of Minogue’s polemic targeted Democratic Theory in general, but he also cited Real World extensively. 52 Macpherson, “Humanist Democracy,” 429. 53 Pennock, “Macpherson, Real World of Democracy.” 54 Tolmin, Socialism and Professor, 20. 55 The context was a rebuke by Steven Lukes that Macpherson had somehow overlooked neocolonialism in the Third World. See Macpherson to Steven Lukes, 8 January 1980, University of Toronto Archives, Macpherson Fonds, 887-0069/004, fol., “Letters re Festschrift.” 56 A point made by Townshend, Macpherson, 5. 57 Ibid., 100.

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58 As Jules Townshend (Macperhson, 9) notes, Laski in 1940 argued that “liberalism could survive through ‘a reinvigoration of [its] doctrinal content’ based upon a ‘new conception of property in which social ownership and control replace individual ownership and control.” 59 Whitaker, “Confused Alarms,” 17. 60 See Broadbent, “Importance of Class.” 61 As is well explored in Aivalis, “Legacy of Democratic Socialism.” 62 Held, Models of Democracy, 6. Held did depart from Macpherson in substantive respects and drew heavily on Macpherson’s later Democratic Theory. 63 For an exposition of this revisionist approach, see Langford, “Helping People Help Themselves.”

11 Recognition as Regulation: Liberal Democracy and Sexual Citizenship in Canada Leonard Halladay

As an outpouring of social activism in the 1960s and 1970s, Canada’s “rights revolution” included the claims of Indigenous peoples, racialized ethnocultural minorities, feminist and lgbtq + activists, and the resurgent nationalism of Quebec. Though diverse in composition and concern, the collective demands of these groups challenged prevailing public orthodoxy, as each resisted the terms of its exclusion by troubling the long-held belief that identity is a strictly private matter. In keeping with calls for justice, equality, freedom, and liberation, and in the wake of the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the demand for marriage equality emerged gradually among lgbtq + communities. On an institutional level, the formal recognition bestowed by the Charter’s section 15 proved particularly advantageous to lesbians and gay men, suggesting to the courts that they were equal to their heterosexual counterparts and opening new avenues for activists to push for reform.1 Normalized in part in 2005 by the passage of the Civil Marriage Act – a historic first in the Western hemisphere – lgbtq + communities have since assumed a central place in Canada’s national imaginary.2 Indeed, the formal recognition of legal rights for gender and sexual minorities grew rapidly in the 1990s, extending throughout the 2000s across parts of Western Europe to Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and, more recently, the United States, with white, coupled, “middle-class” queers at the helm.3 At the same time, the recognition of lgbtq + people as deserving of human rights emerged internationally. With the establishment of the Yogyakarta Principles in 2006 and following several un resolutions on sexual orientation and gender identity

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from 2008 onward, Canadian officials increasingly took up the promotion of these rights both at home and abroad.4 “Gay rights” have since become an international touchstone of Canada’s commitment to diversity, tolerance, and an institutionalized liberal multiculturalism, the subject of celebration for both the Government of Canada and organizations ranging from Historica Canada to the Royal Canadian Mint. At the same time, the swiftness of these developments have prompted concern over “pinkwashing” and “homonationalism” from critical scholars in a number of fields.5 For many poor, racialized, and non-normative lgbtq + people, a relatively prodigious willingness to over-emphasize these developments risks obscuring the struggles of those on the margins, for whom the specific right to marry has made little substantive difference. Yet, with the emergence of this new sexual politics, breaking from liberationist discourses through its emphasis on rights, recognition, and citizenship, it seems that much has been done to unsettle the normative hegemony of “compulsory heterosexuality” in Canada and elsewhere.6 Despite being marked by growing material inequality, certified by the proliferation of financialized global capitalism, the emergent acceptance of queer ways of being and knowing is arguably indicative of a movement towards a new sort of political community: a Canada that is fairer, more humane, and less exclusionary than in decades past. “In effect,” writes Leticia Sabsay, “guided by the demands of feminist and Lesbian, Gay, Trans*, Bisexuals, Queer, and Intersex (lgbtq+i ) social movements as well as by human rights international agendas, different governmental initiatives have been implementing (or are being pressured to implement) new legal frameworks led by anti-discriminatory ideals and democratic models of inclusion.”7 Reflecting on this trend and how it is depicted in Canada and elsewhere, I cannot help but wonder, does offering rights to lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and other non-normative groups somehow make Canada more democratic? Though democracy’s etymological heritage returns a range of interpretations, there is general agreement on the meaning of its roots. Few balk at the claim that democracy means “rule by the people” and that the people must be the very source of ruling authority if that authority is to claim a democratic mantle.8 But, what exactly is meant by “the people”? Who gets an invitation to join this seemingly exclusive group? For, as Bruno Bosteels reminds us, “to raise the question ‘what is a people?’ always means at the same time to

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make some statement, even if only implicitly, about who or what is not a people.”9 Any history of democracy, then, is bound to be a history of struggle, with those on the outside seeking redress for their exclusion and trying to find a way in. In keeping with this logic, Jacques Rancière argues that the demos at the root of our shared sense of democracy is neither the people, nor the propertied, nor the poor but simply “the part that has no part.”10 At its simplest, therefore, and given the relationship between democracy, equality, and freedom, it seems that including the previously excluded, or recognizing the hitherto unrecognized, is a move to expand the demos. By bringing the struggles of queer and trans activists to the fore, a unique admixture of activism and institutional change has certainly contributed to what Sabsay and others characterize as a process of “sexual democratization.”11 Yet, the headway made in recognizing both the identities and demands of lgbtq + people has come primarily in the form of individual rights, gains framed by discussions of “sexual citizenship” and the “politics of recognition” among social and political theorists.12 Beginning with a series of legal victories in the 1990s, these rights emerged in an era structured by the seemingly banal everydayness of neoliberalism, an economic-turnedpolitical logic premised on the notion that our collective freedom is best secured by freer markets, freer trade, strengthened regimes of private property, and by subjecting nearly all human action to mediation by market forces.13 As a set of discursive practices encouraging individual self-sufficiency, that is, neoliberal logics are a form of governmentality – techniques, rationalities, or arts of government, in Foucault’s terms, which are concerned with the shaping, moulding, and conditioning of human conduct.14 Taken together, the mechanisms implicated in neoliberal governmentality include an overlapping network of governing authorities and a plurality of norms, purposes, and outcomes that are simultaneously invoked and sought.15 Going, then, to the heart of the “muddle,” to borrow jargon from C.B. Macpherson, this chapter explores some of the tensions at play in the popular notion that rights bear a causal relationship to democracy and considers the extent to which liberal means can and should be understood as made to fit democratic ends.16 For as Dennis Pilon (chapter 1, this volume) remarks, it is time we reckoned with the limits imposed on our understanding of the past by the “conceptually sloppy amalgam” of “liberal democracy.” I cannot help but agree.

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My attempt at such a reckoning extends from two observations about democracy in Canada. First, that Canadian democracy takes liberal democracy as its primary form, in so far as Canada is a polity dually committed – at least in theory – to both popular sovereignty and to protecting the basic dignity of its citizens.17 This makes separating democracy from liberalism – at least in practice – admittedly rather difficult. Nevertheless, I argue that this should not deter us from thinking through, and aspiring towards, a democratic vision of freedom and equality beyond the orthodox hedging of liberal constraint. The here and now is indeed “a prison house” in the words of José Esteban Muñoz, and “We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel the then and there.”18 Second, I note that popular understandings of democracy in Canada extend, more often than not, from liberal pluralist notions of freedom and tolerance. According to such notions, Canada is all too frequently conceived as having almost always been a benevolent defender of minority rights, with a history that follows the steady march of progress. And though extending rights to lgbtq+ people has come to be understood as an inevitable phase in the unfolding of modern freedom, that freedom tends to be couched in liberal terms while relying on the unsettled conviction that history is linear, progressive, and endowed with reason.19 These observations suggest that popular conceptions of Canadian democracy make for a particular kind of muddle, one that seems to equate the expansion of political and economic liberalism with democracy’s arrival. But it is incredibly misleading, I argue, to think of democracy this way. While the collapse of so-called “real socialism” did much to invigorate neoliberal enthusiasm respecting the “end of history” into the 1990s, the universalization of Western liberal democracy has not only not come to pass but is retrenching in capitalist states across the globe.20 Meanwhile, as persistent socioeconomic inequalities work to stifle democracy in Canada and elsewhere, the uniformity of history, along with its dominant narratives, are being challenged, contested, and rethought by an assemblage of “subjects and settings that are rarely named historical.”21 At the same time, mapping rather than archiving has assumed a central role in the recording of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (bipoc ) queer and trans histories.22 These have long been decentred, obscured, and erased by narratives of white gay heroism, which have, in more orthodox

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cases, been far too content to reduce the particularities of queer and trans activism to a uniform history of “gay rights.”23 While there is little doubt that the combined discourses of rights, recognition, and citizenship have made some positive contributions to human freedom, they have also made space for new regimes of exclusion, discrimination, and regulation, regimes that are difficult to square with the principles of freedom and equality on which democracy claims to rest. For this reason, this chapter proceeds by revisiting the politics of recognition, examining its relationship to “gay rights” in the context of neoliberal citizenship. In doing so, it argues that the giving of rights to Canada’s gender and sexual minorities is not only not especially democratic, but that this historical turn of events might be better understood as serving the expansion of a liberal order framework.24 To make this argument, I selectively reconstruct a history of queer and trans activism, paying particular attention to the struggle for same-sex marriage throughout the 1990s. Indeed, despite the centrality of rights, recognition, and citizenship to the story of Canada, this chapter shows that their relationship to Canadian democracy is a fraught one at best.

t h e p r im acy o f recogni ti on Arising as a means of understanding the claims of “new social movements” and against what Iris Marion Young labels a “difference-blind” liberalism, the politics of recognition was central to the emergence of a new liberal pluralism that grew sensitive to questions of identity and difference, beginning in the 1960s.25 In Canada, though the bulk of this change took the form of official multiculturalism (1971), it included a broad range of state responses designed to recognize group-based claims, including those of a sovereigntist Quebec.26 Breaking from more orthodox approaches to questions of justice attached to the perceived neutrality of “public reason,” the emergent emphasis on recognition also underscored that lgbtq + rights, as group-based minority rights not unlike the others, were not just matters of access or distribution but also matters of standing.27 Viewed in the terms of the politics of recognition, though some of the rights sought by lgbtq + people were different in kind from those of, for instance, women or racialized ethnocultural minorities, being recognized as deserving them was arguably as important as actually having them.28 Through recognition, that is, rights came to be understood not just as good in their quantity

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or by virtue of the liberties secured but because they included those on the margins in a citizenship regime anchored by the concepts of dignity and respect. In the everyday sense, the term “recognition” typically denotes something worth acknowledging, something true, valid, legal, worthy of consideration, or of “formal sanction or approval.”29 Similarly, when we deploy the verb “recognize,” in relation to both animates and inanimates, we acknowledge, identify, consider, or accept them as or to be something, as known “by some distinctive feature,” as valid in existence or character.30 Recognition, therefore, is always both descriptive and prescriptive: it affirms both the presence of a thing and sets the scope of its thingness, presupposing a specific relationship embedded in the very process of recognizing. But the prescriptive dimension of recognition includes yet another distinction between its normative and psychosocial elements. When you recognize a woman on your walk to work, you recognize her first not just as having the characteristics you associate with women but as different in kind from, say, a mailbox or a coffee cup. That is, though you may not know said woman personally, you recognize her first as another person, with agency, autonomy, and presumably a whole host of other human characteristics. Recognizing her in this way implies not only that she has distinctive features but also that she has a particular kind of standing in relationship to you. That is, because she is a person, rather than a mailbox or a coffee cup, she commands your respect in a way that these other things do not. Not only are you able to determine certain basic things about her based on how she appears, but you could likely determine still other things, such as her religion, ethnicity, or gender identity, if you encountered her several times, heard her speak, or sat down for a conversation with her. It is on this basis that recognition assumes a psychosocial importance as it is no longer enough that you recognize the woman simply as a person, you must now also recognize her as a person with a specific identity. Indeed, if you were to deny her this form of recognition or, worse yet, assign her an identity that she did not wish to have, you would be misrecognizing her in a potentially offensive and damaging way. Examples like this one are useful because they help illustrate how different aspects of recognition are common to our everyday lives. Indeed, we can likely already see how the struggle for democracy – for inclusion among the demos – is a struggle to be recognized in a

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particular sort of way. Elevating the misrecognition of our imaginary subject to the level of a slur makes this claim even sharper. And, indeed, we can imagine countless other variations of this example, where recognition is exchanged between groups and institutions rather than people on the street. Consider the related example of intervening in a legal proceeding. In legal terms, acting in this fashion typically requires “leave.” That is to say, to be granted “intervenor status” requires that the court recognize the standing of non-parties in relation to the matter before it and extend to them (through the granting of “leave”) an opportunity to be heard. Such a circumstance, on the other hand, also requires that prospective intervenors recognize the court’s authority, comporting themselves in a way such that they appear both legible and legitimate when presenting themselves before it.31 Accordingly, though acting as a litigant requires no such competition for standing, it still requires that those party to a given dispute make a coherent and compelling case if they expect a favourable outcome. Part of seeking recognition, therefore, from courts or other state institutions, demands that a considerable amount of coherence and stability be presented by the groups for whom recognition is sought.32 As these examples illustrate, our intersubjective relations matter a great deal and are formative to establishing who we are. Accordingly, the notion that recognition is significant to identity is precisely why scholars like Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth converge on the claim that identity emerges dialogically.33 For Taylor in particular, identity and agency evolve out of what he calls “webs of interlocution” in which subjects negotiate both who they are and the extent to which they are free by engaging in “the politics of recognition.”34 For Taylor and Honneth alike, then, recognition provides the conditions that make our freedom possible because it is through our being recognized by one another, each as independent and conscious of the world, that we come to understand each other as both free and worthy of respect.35 As Taylor describes: The thesis is that our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a

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form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being … misrecognition shows not just a lack of due respect. It can inflict a grievous wound, saddling its victims with a crippling self-hatred. Due recognition is not just a courtesy we owe to people, it is a vital human need.36 Similarly, Honneth asserts that “the reproduction of social life is governed by the imperative of mutual recognition, because one can develop a practical relation-to-self only when one has learned to view oneself, from the normative perspective of one’s partners in interaction, as their social addressee.”37 Hence, if we follow Taylor and Honneth in granting recognition significance, understanding the fight for rights as a struggle for dignity and standing becomes all the more intuitive. This is particularly so in the case of same-sex marriage, where the moral imperative driving the call for marriage equality was a demand not simply to participate in the act of marriage or to receive spousal benefits but to be granted the social privileges, dignity, and respect that the ability to marry confers. Yet, when the dignity that emerges by way of recognition is met by the notion of “authenticity,” with determining another’s identity bound up in uncovering their “natural” or “true self,” recognition’s relationship to democracy is almost immediately in doubt.38 That is, to the extent that recognition requires a stable or authentic subject to recognize, the supposed “dialogic” character of identity devolves rather quickly into a thoroughly essentialist and one-sided “conversation.”39 For if the terms with which a subject is recognized are always set in advance by the “master,” by the state, or by prevailing public orthodoxy, rather than by being subject to revision, contestation, and debate, they simply cannot be the stuff of reciprocal dialogue. By asserting the need for a “True,” fixed, or essential identity, therefore, the politics of recognition seems oddly content to do its recognizing on only its own asymmetrical terms.40 This makes the politics of recognition especially difficult to square with queer understandings of identity and agency, as well as the basic idea that democracy means rule by the people. For if the terms on which one gains standing are not themselves democratic, then how can one expect them to produce democratic results? This problem raises the additional question as to whether there can even be a queer politics of recognition.41 Indeed, for communities where scepticism respecting the so-called “natural” division of the sexes is met by the

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Foucauldian insight that identity is discursively constructed or, in Judith Butler’s terms, “performed,” the notion that identity could or should be something essential, fixed, or “True” is a particularly tough pill to swallow.42 And while a certain amount of strategic essentialism is often acknowledged as a necessary evil when queer and trans people seek recognition in the form of rights, said rights, along with the recognition they entail, are only democratic if they connect those people with political power.43 In Hannah Arendt’s terms, this means they are democratic if and only if they secure the opportunity for people to disclose themselves politically by speaking and acting freely together.44 For without the ability to “be political,” to engage, as it were, agonistically in mutual exchanges of disclosure and acknowledgment, there may be little more to do than struggle for “equal” rights against liberalism’s closed horizon.45 So while misrecognition is certainly a harm, an injustice that ought to be fought, by assuming a fixed identity as its necessary end goal and final point of discovery, the politics of recognition does little more than secure an orthodox, reified, individual liberty for lgbtq + people. This is a freedom advanced by the securing of rights for individual liberal-turned-neoliberal subjects, rather than a democratic freedom that enables those subjects to both exercise and share in real political power.

a w in d ow o f o pportuni ty A complementary understanding of the emergence of “gay rights” is found by positioning the idea of sexual citizenship in relation to the social and institutional changes that enabled their attainment. In Canada, this relationship is captured in the split between the liberationist tactics common to lesbian and gay activism in the early 1970s and the later focus on Charter litigation beginning in the early 1990s. In a sense, the rights of citizenship that emerged in the latter period are a form of recognition for the sexual citizen, which, as we have seen, rest on notions of dignity, standing, and “mutual” respect. Drawing on T.H. Marshall’s conception of social rights, the idea of sexual citizenship traverses the divide between public and private by demanding that orthodox notions of belonging be broadened to include sex (understood as including gender and sexuality) as a unit of analysis.46 Differently put, sexual citizenship is a citizenship that “is increasingly sexed up” by its incorporation of “once abject

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sexualities and once deviant sexual practices.”47 At the same time, the citizenship of political theory has come to be defined not just as a legal status comprised of civil, political, and social rights but also as including various forms of agency and a sense of group identity, where the idea of recognition continues to loom large.48 Though today’s sexual citizenship is a multi-scalar concept, many see it as being primarily about rights, recognition, and participation in consumer capitalism through the consumption of good and services.49 Yet the emergence of the sexual citizen as a bearer of individual rights is best explained by situating social activism in relation to the institutional contours and political opportunities specific to a given context.50 In Canada, this mode of analysis is mainly concerned with three sets of actors: interest groups and activists, Parliament, and the courts. Getting a handle on patterns of social activism, moreover, means paying attention to the macro-historical factors proximate to the distribution of social, economic, and political power.51 In considering such factors, context is broadly understood to include consistent, though not exclusively formal or institutional aspects of a political environment, including the resources available to a given group.52 Broadly conceived, this context forms what Sidney Tarrow calls a “political opportunity structure,” combining the degree to which a particular polity is open to change, the relative (in)stability of its political alignments, the presence or absence of allies, and the divisions between elites.53 Popular political rationalities – such as the decline of social liberalism in favour of neoliberalism – also show their influence here, as they too have the capacity to differentially enhance or limit opportunities for interest articulation and claims-making on the state.54 Indeed as sexual citizenship is, for many, primarily about the extent to which rights enable individual participation in capitalist regimes of consumption, it bears a direct relationship to the marketization of social life.55 More specifically, as Diane Richardson points out, sexual citizenship is largely a discourse of individual entitlement, mobilizing the self as an atomistic neoliberal subject, “where there is a predominant emphasis on the right to choose – your partner; whether to marry or not; to have a child or not; your sexual activities.”56 With this in mind, what follows is a survey of some of the social and political factors proximate to having those choices. Responding to the various demands of Canada’s sexual citizens, these factors opened different points of access at different times, providing different avenues for political change to varying degrees of success.

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Again, beginning in the 1960s, and stimulated by grassroots democratic movements along with socialist calls for liberation in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, marginalized peoples in the United States, Canada, and across Western Europe began to challenge the norms and institutions formative to their oppression. Anti-war demonstrations against US involvement in Vietnam were central to this wave of radical protest, as were demands for civil rights by Black Americans, and, in Canada, separatist calls for a free and independent Quebec. In August 1966, during this period of social upheaval, the assault of a drag queen by police at an eatery called Compton’s Cafeteria, in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, provoked a riot.57 Though in a visibly gay and working-class part of town, Compton’s was a routine hang out for trans women in particular, who were often unwelcome in the district’s adjacent bars due to persistent transphobia among other regulars. On this particular evening, the restaurant’s management was annoyed by a loud group of queens who had gathered to chat without spending much money and summoned the police to encourage them to move along. When the encounter got physical, one of the queens responded by throwing coffee at the officers, provoking other patrons – many of whom were gender-variant, bipoc , queer, sex workers, and trans people – to take the fight out to the street. While the police called for backup, rioters smashed windows and vandalized a police cruiser as a crowd of drag queens beat the police with their handbags and the heels of their stilettos. Not unlike the well-known Stonewall riots, which occurred in New York City only three years later (in June 1969), the riot at Compton’s Cafeteria was an act of resistance by queer and trans people, with racialized and working-class people at the forefront.58 Led by drag queens, sex workers, and street kids, these events marked the beginning of a fight for liberation from the normative strictures of cis-heteropatriarchy, a battle for the right to live absent the fear of discrimination and violence that would eventually make its way north of the Canada-US border. Though the radical flavour of the 1960s came somewhat later to lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer politics in Canada, it too was liberationist in origin. In the wake of Stonewall, for instance, members of New York’s Mattachine Society formed a new group called the Gay Liberation Front in 1969.59 As Canada’s lgbtq + communities gradually caught wind of American radicalism, they also formed similar groups. Montreal’s Front de libération homosexuel, formed in November 1970 and was soon followed by the Vancouver Gay

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Liberation Front, the Gay Alliance Toward Equality (gate ) and the Community Homophile Association of Toronto (chat ) in the early months of 1971. The University of Toronto Homophile Association, formed in 1969 and radical despite its name, was also influenced by queer militancy in the United States, producing ephemera bearing the slogan “Gay Is Good!” that encouraged gay men to fight back against oppression by asserting their sexuality as natural and taking to the streets.60 Indeed, almost as quickly as the groups themselves, a list of demands emerged from this nascent mixture of collective action, which were presented to Canadian Parliament in a thirteen-page document following the first lgbtq + demonstration on Parliament Hill, in August 1971.61 While “gay liberation” was certainly male dominated throughout this period, lesbian feminist organizations, such as the Lesbian Organization of Toronto (loot ), became active by the mid1970s.62 It is also important to remember that non-normative perspectives, practices, and ideas about gender and sexuality were almost entirely excluded from even the back pages of the popular press in this period. When lgbtq + people did see coverage, they were often pathologized, mocked, or simply labelled criminal. This made the formation of liberationist periodicals, such as The Body Politic in Toronto in 1971, instrumental to early social and political organizing.63 Yet, throughout the 1970s, the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer people across Canada remained those of relative obscurity, as relationships between queer and trans people were widely considered deviant, immoral, and indicative of mental illness. Harassment by law enforcement was routine throughout this period, with police raids of queer spaces continuing into the 1980s.64 During the early days of “gay liberation,” this social climate meant that most lived a double life. Though Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s government pursued the limited decriminalization of two specific Criminal Code offences aimed at “homosexual sex” in 1969, lgbtq + people continued to find themselves reviled as criminals throughout the 1970s, particularly in public spaces.65 Still, as a broadly queer politics developed and diversified throughout the 1970s – thanks to the work of other advocacy organizations such as the Gay Alliance Toward Equality in Toronto and Vancouver, the Association des gai(e)s du Québec in Montreal, and the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights in Ontario – activists pursued a wide range of targets and tactics,

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remaining “intellectually promiscuous” despite their being loosely united behind a common liberationist project.66 As in other jurisdictions, the onset of the global aids crisis also had an important impact on queer politics in Canada. aids reinforced stigma around the lgbtq + community, and gay men in particular, whose feelings of rage, loss, and shame were exacerbated by the socially conservative and heterosexist notion that lgbtq + people were responsible for the virus. During the 1980s, as thousands of gay men, sex workers, and others in the community died of aids , differing strands of queer social activism found common purpose in fighting the epidemic while governments across the country ran from the crisis in fear that a strong response would be taken as a show of support for the “gay lifestyle.” In the United States, the formation of act up (aids Coalition to Unleash Power) in 1987 led to a series of public demonstrations, including “die-ins” targeting pharmaceutical companies, the US Food and Drug Administration, and the Roman Catholic Church, which exhorted their government to act.67 The advocacy work of act up also inspired the creation of Canadian organizations, including Toronto’s aids Action Now!, whose direct action tactics were successful in attracting government funding for aids-related drugs and strengthened treatment programs at clinics and hospitals.68 As federal inactivity in the face of aids was the norm in these years, community organizations formed in the early days of liberation politics played a central role in establishing some of the first aids community groups in Canada’s major cities.69 Responding to the highest per-capita incidence of the virus, aids Vancouver was the first of these in 1983 and was quickly followed by the aids Committee of Toronto (1983) and the aids Committee of Ottawa (1985), all of which would eventually become full-fledged aids service organizations that are still in operation today. In a host of difficult and unexpected ways, 1982 marked perhaps the most significant year for queer and trans politics in Canada to date. Reporting its first case of aids in March of that year, the country joined a global struggle against the virus that would claim countless lives, provoking regulatory regimes of criminality and indignity that largely remain in place.70 Just a month later, the country saw constitutional change as never before, with the patriation of the Constitution and the enacting of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.71 Though the extent of this change and its effect on the lives of lgbtq + people were hard to envision at the

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time, the Charter fundamentally altered the protection of rights and freedoms. Prior to the Charter, Canada’s Constitution Act, 1867, had entrenched the British legal tradition of parliamentary supremacy, meaning, “it was a foundational principle of the Canadian state that rights were best protected through Parliament rather than the courts.” Yet, as Dominique Clément writes, “almost 150 years later, Canadians embraced the notion of using the courts to enforce a written bill of rights, even if this meant frustrating the will of Parliament.”72 As Clément rightly suggests, Canada’s courts took on new powers as a result of the Charter, acting as a backstop to the popular will of Parliament in previously unknown ways. Having assumed the power of legislative judicial review, for instance, the Supreme Court drew criticism from the academic right, who later argued that the judicialization of politics meant undue consideration of minority “special interests” and that this was undemocratic.73 By the mid-1980s, section 15 of the Charter was providing clear inroads to lesbians and gay men, who began to concentrate on recognition as formal and legal equality while moving further away from both more substantive forms of social equality and liberation and the aspirations of their queer and trans counterparts.74 Though “rights talk” was already dotting liberationist discourse by the mid1970s, pre-Charter rights claims were much less focused on equality as sameness, maintaining, in some cases, a distinct liberationist flavour even after the Charter’s arrival. Early rights discourses, that is, understood rights more as a means by which to address the impacts of discrimination and criminality than as mechanisms for securing formal equality in the form of mainstream social membership. Indeed, as Tom Warner observes, “the advocacy focus shifted overwhelmingly toward the pursuit of legislated equality rights” in the wake of the Charter as lgbtq + activism began to move along “two parallel tracks.”75 Though the liberationist bent of lesbian, gay, and subsequently queer collective action had already begun to part company from its rights-seeking variant, the Charter effectively widened this gap. In many ways, lgbtq + rights-seeking had already dispensed with the t and the q as the recognition now sought through rights attainment was almost exclusively the domain of white, “middle-class” lesbians and gay men, for whom rights-seeking had become an end in itself. In the decades that followed, Canada’s courts led its legislatures in shaping policies related to lgbtq+ communities, provoking

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political institutions and the actors populating them to acknowledge the need for change. Although section 15 became the basis for calls for equality and freedom from discrimination based on gender or sexuality, these terms were not explicitly listed in the section, nor did they appear anywhere else in the text of the Charter.76 Nevertheless, given the section’s general prohibition against discrimination, it seemed that it was only a matter of time before it would be applied to at least the most normative of lgbtq + people. In anticipation of this, a subcommittee of the Standing Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs released Equality for All in October 1985, a report recommending changes to the Criminal Code, the Canadian Human Rights Act (chra ), and federal security clearance guidelines to recognize sexuality in compliance with section 15.77 The report also advised ending the ban on military service for lesbians and gay men, but bringing the military and the governing Tory caucus on side with its recommendations proved tricky. Despite public pressure to implement the committee’s advice change was slow to come. When the government did finally act on the proposed changes to the Criminal Code, the chra was left untouched and the ban on gays in the military remained in place.78 Hence, with their representatives in Parliament dragging their feet on both human rights issues and (later) marriage, lgbtq + activists were left with few alternatives but to appeal to section 15 and bring their concerns before the courts.79 Heard by the Supreme Court in 1995, Egan v. Canada was a landmark rights case for the application of section 15. In it, plaintiffs James Egan and John Norris Nesbitt challenged the definition of “spouse” contained in the Old Age Security Act, a term that did not apply to same-sex couples.80 Egan and Nesbitt were being denied a spousal allowance available to heterosexual couples with a combined income below a certain threshold at age sixty-five. The couple argued that limiting the term “spouse” to relationships between heterosexuals was a violation of their equality rights under section 15 of the Charter.81 While a split decision meant the couple’s claim was rejected, the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously held that sexual orientation was analogous to the other grounds set out in section 15.82 Three years later, in 1998, the Court heard the case of Vriend v. Alberta. Here the plaintiff, Delwin Vriend, had been removed from his post as a science laboratory coordinator at Kings College in Edmonton because he was gay.83 Challenging his dismissal, Vriend argued that the failure to include sexuality as a prohibited ground

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of discrimination under Alberta’s Individual Rights Protection Act (irpa ) was a violation of his rights under section 15 of the Charter. This time, due in part to its decision in Egan, the Supreme Court sided with Vriend and affirmed his argument by finding in his favour and by reading sexual orientation into Alberta’s irpa .84 The Court’s decision in Vriend v. Alberta was incredibly significant for two reasons. First, it was the first time that a majority of the Court would find a denial of formal equality on the basis of sexuality to be not just a violation of section 15 but also an unreasonable violation.85 That is, as dictated by section 1 of the Charter, a violation that failed to meet the threshold of being “subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”86 Second, the Court did not stop at striking down the provisions of the irpa it found in violation of section 15 but read sexual orientation into the act, setting a crucial precedent for future litigation on similar grounds.87 Deciding as it did, the Court’s reasoning in Vriend relied on the notion that a denial of this nature, a denial of recognition as formal equality, was an affront to democracy to be remedied through rights. Finally, in 1999, the Supreme Court ruled on M. v. H., the last major case it would hear on section 15 prior to the enactment of the Civil Marriage Act. In this case, two lesbian women, who were partners in both life and business while sharing a home for ten years, decided to end their relationship. After separating, M. sought the partition and sale of their home, and spousal support from H. under Ontario’s Family Law Act (fla ).88 In a similar fashion to Egan and Nesbitt, M. also challenged the constitutionality of the term “spouse,” defined in the fla as applying to married couples or unmarried couples of the opposite sex, who had lived continuously together for no less than three years. Accordingly, the majority of the Court found that this entailed discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, contravening section 15 of the Charter, and that it was not a reasonable limit under section 1.89 Having successfully established the discriminatory nature of the term “spouse,” which applied in the fla only to heterosexual relationships, M. v. H. set the stage for the Civil Marriage Act. Though a host of other battles remained to be fought in the superior courts of the provinces, the progress made at the Supreme Court meant that it was only a matter of time before the Government of Canada would act on same-sex marriage. Following positive

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decisions by the Superior Courts of Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia from July 2002 to May 2003, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien soon revealed that the government would do just that.90 With a final nod from the Supreme Court in the Reference re SameSex Marriage, the Martin Government’s Bill C-38 was given first reading on 1 February 2005, and, following heated debate in both the House and the Senate, received royal ascent as the Civil Marriage Act that July.91 As this short history indicates, much of the success of the rights-seeking variant of queer social activism stemmed primarily from a focus on strategic litigation beginning in the early 1990s. With section 15 of the Charter providing a new point of access for lgbtq + claims-making on the state, a significant number of lesbians and gay men moved from being morally suspect subjects of deviance and criminality to full sexual citizenship in just three decades. Though these developments speak, on the one hand, to the centralizing force of the Charter, they also provide insight into the relationship between the Charter and federalism, as change came in different ways and at different times in different regions of the country.92 For as Miriam Smith points out, on key issues such as decriminalization, discrimination protections in federal and provincial human rights law, same-sex marriage, parenting, and trans rights, the division of powers can mean policy diffusion, policy stagnation, and policy divergence almost simultaneously.93 Accordingly, while the Charter and its attendant emphasis on strategic litigation was central to the emergence of both lgbtq + human rights protections and same-sex marriage, activism continued to play a central role in this struggle, even as disagreement persisted between marriage advocates and other activists. David Rayside, in particular, cautions against reducing particular advances to the Charter alone, as activist work remained significant to policy outcomes, particularly at the provincial level.94 Part and parcel of the swift ascendance of same-sex marriage, however, the Charter’s section 15 meant fundamental changes to the country’s political opportunity structure and the policy avenues open to queer and trans politics.95 As Tim McCaskell, a founding member of aids Action Now!, recalls, “this turn to the courts reflected impatience with the slow rate of political change, and the perception that the Charter opened a window of opportunity.”96 Finally, though “marriage equality,” or same-sex marriage, was a new moment for sexual citizenship in Canada,

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thanks in no small part to institutional change, it was also part of a wider trend among liberal democracies throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s.97 Indeed, the emergence of Canada’s Civil Marriage Act was also informed by shifts in social attitude among key political figures in addition to activist pressure and the institutional changes outlined here. Section 15 of the Charter was nothing short of a watershed moment for lgbtq + politics in Canada. In conjunction with the efforts of activists nationwide, the Charter ushered in a period of social and political change that saw formal recognition extended to lgbtq + people in new and unprecedented ways. Yet the proliferation of a more policy-directed equality rights discourse also meant fundamental changes to the meaning of queer and trans activism as the notion that changing the law ought to be the primary goal of political organizing became the dominant assumption of a gay and lesbian politics that grew increasingly mainstream.98 And while the Charter quickly became a vehicle for those content to pursue formal recognition as rights-based equality, it was hardly a uniform victory for the t and the q of the lgbtq + umbrella. It proved far less useful to those queer and trans people looking, for instance, to challenge cis-heterosexist assumptions about the naturalness of the nuclear family, the presumed proclivity among men and women for “choosing” blue versus pink jobs, the persistence of poverty resulting from social, economic, and political exclusion, and a range of other historically specific social forms and relations presumed universal by prevailing public orthodoxy.99 For included in the myriad of Charter effects is the partial social absorption and normalization of particular lgbtq + identities to the exclusion and marginalization of others. Indeed, by formalizing recognition as equality through rights, Charter-based activism effectively reified racialized and cis-heteropatriarchal conceptions of spouse, family, and nation through the production and proliferation of “the respectable same-sex couple.”100 In much the same fashion as the politics of recognition, therefore, the political processes attached to the Charter’s emergence were often indifferent to the notion that lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer demands ought to be met on their own terms, rather than the terms of the liberal state. Differently put, Charter rights functioned to reduce these demands to a simple matter of inclusion within “existing and heterosexual-dominated, gendered, racialized, and classed social forms.”101

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r ig h t s , r e c o g n it io n , and neoli beral g ov e r n m e n tali ty Although the advent of the Charter can be fruitfully understood as being informed by social activism, its emergence alongside the shrinking of Canada’s welfare state is also especially noteworthy. As feminist political economists have documented, the practice of supplying public funds to interest groups was common among Canada’s federal departments and agencies throughout the 1970s, following the rapid expansion of social programs only a decade before.102 Quebec’s Quiet Revolution presents yet another example of the identity-based claims-making common throughout this period, which prompted the Government of Canada to enact the Official Languages Act in 1969, followed by an official Multiculturalism Policy in 1971. Similarly, in response to the demands made by the National Action Coalition (nac ) and the wider women’s movement, the Government of Canada established Status of Women Canada, an interdepartmental coordinating agency to be represented in cabinet by a newly created minister responsible for the status of women in 1976.103 In each of these instances, the equity claims brought before the state were met by policy change and the dispensation of public resources appropriate to the social liberalism of Canada’s postwar citizenship regime. While lgbtq + people were mostly unaddressed by such changes, “that regime’s discourse linked the solidification of Canada’s national identity to the realization of equitable treatment of the disadvantaged,” as Jane Jensen and Susan Phillips rightly point out.104 Hence, the Charter’s emergence only a few years later proved prescient, formalizing recognition as constitutional rights just as Canada’s penchant for welfare spending began to wane. The version of political liberalism affirmed through Charter rights was thus a warning, the culmination of a newly institutionalized political individualism and a sign of the deepening economic liberalism to come. Indeed, by granting formal recognition to individuals on the basis of their group identities (under section 15), the state began to elevate liberal individualism in a manner the likes of which Canada had never previously seen. With the Charter in place, older forms of group recognition through targeted spending were gradually eliminated. Simply put, the Charter marked both the demise and the culmination of welfare liberalism, which had reached its limits by the early 1980s.105

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It is therefore no coincidence that the beginnings of individual rights for lgbtq + people developed alongside the emergence of neoliberal logics and models of governance in Canada. This included the gradual withdrawal of state support for groups in civil society, the introduction of partnership models for state service delivery, an increase in privatization, and the normalization of the individually competitive market actor as the sole object of concern, and measure of success, for the Canadian state. While the political liberalism of the Charter ought not be confused with the economic liberalism and deepening neoliberalism that flourished at the perishing of the welfare state, the Charter nonetheless presented an ideologically compatible framework, a useful haven structured by allusions tolerance and justice from within which neoliberalism could advance unchecked. Contrasting with earlier forms of economic liberalism, neoliberalism does not assume a self-regulating market, nor does it confine its emphasis on marketization to the market itself. Instead, neoliberalism reimagines the political and social spheres as markets themselves, seeking the development of social policy and the establishment of a political culture that reconstructs citizenship along the lines of rational choice.106 All aspects of human life are thereby reimagined and measured based on economic conceptions of profitability and productivity; in the eyes of neoliberalism, the idea of the “citizen” captures only the individually competitive and self-sufficient market actor, who acts in accordance with market principles not just in the market but in every aspect of daily life. Moreover, “part of what makes neoliberalism ‘neo,’” as Wendy Brown explains, “is that it depicts free markets, free trade, and entrepreneurial rationality as achieved and normative, as promulgated through law and through social and economic policy – not simply as occurring by dint of nature.”107 This is precisely why processes of privatization and deregulation are routinely couched in neoliberal terms. By recasting those subject to these measures as rational, autonomous consumers who are ostensibly “freer” than ever before, such processes succeed in reducing freedom to nothing more than a capacity choose what to buy and consume. Politically, then, one of the consequences of neoliberalism is the reproduction of mechanisms, methods, and criteria for governing human conduct along the very same lines, where the norms of market capitalism are seen as a perfectly reasonable replacement for moral and juridical principles like justice, freedom, and equality.108

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Underscoring the subtlety with which neoliberalism pursues a program of governmentality, Cressida Heyes provides the example of commercial weight loss programs. In this instance, a diet program is sold to the consumer as an enlightening, flexible, and self-directed solution to the problem of achieving a so-called “desirable body,” absent the paternalism of personal trainers and dieticians, whereby the consumer gets to choose even what to eat.109 While arguably providing greater choice to consumers in helping them to realize their goals, Foucault’s “care of the self,” – “those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves” – is transmuted by commercial weight loss programs into a discourse of “self-care.”110 This means co-opting the broadly Kantian notion of “self-legislation” and reproducing it as a form of disciplinary power designed to prompt both the acceptance of near total responsibility for one’s own “choices” and the very terms in which those choices become meaningful “solutions.” Neoliberal governmentality is therefore the technique of governing through freedom, with freedom understood as marketized individual liberty, being able to choose between Coke and Pepsi. As in the case of commercial weight loss, this is a mode of governance that achieves its aims through the reinscription of specific norms. Such norms enforce and structure a network of obligations through which the state responds to the problem of the falling rate of profit by reducing its capacity to address costly macro-level social issues (like poverty, illness, and childcare). These are, in turn, recast instead as private problems that can only be addressed through individual choices and individual financial means.111 With this understanding in place, it bears repeating that neoliberal governmentality is a specific economic-turned-political rationality, an “art of government” through which the individual subject is conditioned or taught to perform their subjectivity in particular ways.112 The only role for government then – according to neoliberal thought – is to provide a skeletal framework to citizens, who are conceived as being self-governing managers of their own risks, needs, and interests, in alignment with those of the state. Indeed, it is this very “teaching” that makes the institution of marriage, understood as a right, so desirable for lesbians and gay men in the first place. Here, again, the state is understood as a guarantor of rights for private egoistic pursuits as well as the enforcer of individual contracts, understood as rights to private property. Indeed, it is in part

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this conception, this way of understanding the state’s relationship to marriage, that prompts Lisa Duggan to label neoliberal governmentality “homonormative.”113 Here, rather than prohibiting the non-normative, concern for who comprises “the family” is jettisoned in favour of an understanding of social life that stresses productivity and choice in virtually every aspect of what the family does. Instead of attempting to exclude lgbtq + people from the institution of marriage – that is, from forming “productive” families – this form of sexual politics privileges liberal inclusion, white respectability, and neoliberal economic interests by “promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.”114 Hence, by privileging a discourse of individual rights, institutions like the Charter radically reconfigure the idea of democratic equality without fully appreciating the extent to which political liberalism is susceptible to co-optation by its economic variant. For on the one hand, to realize complete equality would ostensibly mean endangering individual liberty, while on the other, allowing for individual liberty to proceed unfettered would amount to abandoning equality tout court. The solution to this problem comes by way of rights, where equality is understood only as “equality in the right to liberty – which is not only compatible with liberalism but actually demanded by its view of freedom.”115 So while rights do inform liberal democratic notions of equality, they do so in a very specific sense, one that does almost nothing to secure the equitable distribution of political power in neoliberal contexts. This is because democratic freedom, cultivated through agonistic action and by connecting the demos to political power, has been supplanted by liberal-cum-neoliberal freedom, which is entirely divorced from the idea of obligation that democratic freedom requires as its opposite. We need only return briefly to the case law previously surveyed to see examples of the politics of recognition feeding the logic of liberal rights and, in turn, the dispensation of those rights in alignment with neoliberal logics. In the case of M. v. H. for instance, where the Supreme Court held the definition of “spouse” in Ontario’s fla to be in violation of section 15 of the Charter, the reasons given included concern for that fact that the exclusion of same-sex partners “promotes the view that M., and individuals in same-sex relationships generally, are less worthy of recognition and protection” than heterosexuals.116 The Court went on to claim that a primary

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implication of this exclusion included the wrongful assumption that same-sex couples are “incapable of forming intimate relationships of economic interdependence” as compared to their straight counterparts.117 Indeed, though misrecognition and exclusion were a problem for the Court, in so far they were seen as contributing to the social and political erasure of select queer people, the key issue here was one of capital.118 More specifically, it was not just the issue of recognition, inclusion, or even spousal support, that proved decisive, as the logic underpinning the dispensation of this need included concern for “decreasing government expenditure since fewer people would have to look to social assistance upon the breakdown of their relationship.”119 Hence, in much the same way as in Egan v. Canada, where pension access was central, the dispensation of recognition sought through rights in M. v. H. received its justification from neoliberal logics. That is, the Court justified its decision by reasoning that privatized relations of care would absolve the state of the financial burden of caring for its citizens, making moral recognition and legal rights both economically appropriate and politically justifiable.

c o n c l u s i ons The politics of both recognition and political opportunity provide similar explanations for the emergence of sexual citizenship, albeit from different perspectives and with different points of emphasis. When examined together, however, they advance a relatively uniform understanding of social and political change, two complementary ways of accounting for the emergence of a seemingly democratic identity politics in the latter half of the twentieth century. The common narrative is a succinct one: in the Canada of sixty or so years ago, lesbians and gay men (because queer and trans people were illegible to heterosexuals) were the subjects of sin, sickness, and crime. Beginning in the United States, the “summer of love” was punctuated by key moments of resistance against the normative strictures of white supremacy, capitalist economics, the nuclear family, and naturalist assumptions concerned with what was “proper” to men to women. The forward-looking tenor of this period soon awakened the latent activism of “gay” Canadians, which came alive in the early 1970s. As a new decade began, scores of gay men – campy, over-the-top characters with affectation akin to The Village People – began to be recognized as their seemingly authentic sexual

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selves. But in so far as their “new-found authenticity” entailed considerable promiscuity, the onset of the global aids crisis dealt a heavy blow to communities structured around the so-called “gay lifestyle.” Shortly thereafter, with the help of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, those who survived aids came around to the importance of stable, long-term, monogamous partnerships and began to push for the right to marry as the more radical variants of lgbtq + activism quickly vanished. Soon the benevolent courts convinced the stubborn legislatures that “the gays” were actually not so bad. If only their freedom were secured by rights, they reasoned, lgbtq + people could be productive contributors to society. Granting them access to same-sex marriage would ostensibly enable them to make meaningful choices, affording the previously excluded an opportunity to organize their lives in the same way as straight people and thereby avail themselves of the social, political, and economic advantages of “democratic” (sexual) citizenship.120 At the heart of the push for marriage equality, and formal recognition more generally, then, was the idea that there is nothing particularly “queer” about lgbtq + people. Indeed, the fight for same-sex marriage relied largely on the notion that queerness is reducible to the presumed immutability of lesbian and gay identities, and that queers in Canada are “just like other white, middle-classed people.”121 While the foregoing “story” is an admittedly reductive and arguably sensational rehearsal of the ideas outlined in preceding sections, it nonetheless captures the tendency of such narratives to paper over a rich and nuanced history with their onward-and-upward style. Indeed, with the history around same-sex marriage now the stuff of national celebration, most have lost sight of the fact that earlier social activism was grounded in liberationist principles, a lesbian feminism critical of marriage, various critiques of capitalism, the gender binary, and a whole host of other institutions, in addition to being radically democratic. With much of the same boldness as the end-of-history thesis, the triumphalism of Canada’s history of lgbtq+ rights – imagined in retrospect as an accumulative struggle for (marriage) rights, recognition, and citizenship in alignment with the logics of liberalism – can trick us into believing not only that we are all equal now but also that the democratic vision of equality and freedom advanced by activist struggles vanished in the face of a liberal one. Yet, the rights dispensed as formal recognition by section 15 of the Charter are the stewards of individual liberty, securing neither

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an enhanced ability to share in the exercise of democratic power nor a substantive recognition capable of meeting the terms of the people by whom that power is sought. And while the democratic vision of freedom and equality advanced here may seem an ambitious goal, it is nothing short of what the concept of democracy demands. For it is not participation and power, but property and individual choice that (marriage) rights, recognition, and (sexual) citizenship secure. With neoliberalism largely supplanting its political cousin, the democratic version of equality and freedom seems all the more elusive. At the same time, the practice of liberal democracy grows more formalistic and technocratic than ever. Indeed, even the best liberal intentions have been radically reconfigured by a regime of neoliberal governmentality bent on depoliticizing the political, where equality is now the right to freedom and freedom the right to private, egoistic choice. Part of the cleverness of liberalism, and subsequently neoliberalism, then, is not just the fiction of progressivist history but the equally suspect conviction that that history has somehow produced democratic ends by way of liberal means. Rather than the collective exercise of political power and an equality secured through the freedom to act politically, democracy is thereby reduced, first, to the attainment of formal rights and, second, to the “right” to choose from among the party “brands” at election time – in the very same way that one has the choice between Coke and Pepsi. While the fuller inclusion of lgbtq + people in the combined discourses of rights, recognition, and citizenship may look and feel like a move to expand the demos, there is little to suggest that such inclusion means greater democratic autonomy for those whom it includes. Without doubt, many of the mechanisms of that inclusion cannot even pretend to live up to some of democracy’s basic demands. Rather, in and through its elevation of a marketized individual liberty – now presumed to be the only kind of freedom “on the market” – neoliberalism has almost entirely dispensed with the basic democratic ideal of sharing power in public, as there is no freedom to act politically if there are neither public concerns nor a public around to share them. Hence, as I have argued here, the freedom gained by “queer” ventures down the path towards sexual citizenship is simply not a freedom that has brought the people closer to a democratic political power. By normalizing and proliferating market capitalism, and the marketization of the everyday under the guise of political liberalism, neoliberalism’s crowning achievement has been to convince those

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under its thumb that there is, indeed, no alternative to its view of freedom and that democracy is a long-achieved reality, requiring little defence or maintenance. Certainly, given the relative hegemony of political liberalism and its attendant emphasis on freedom as individual liberty, rights are indeed still those things that, in Wendy Brown’s estimation, “we cannot not want.”122 For part of the disciplinary power of liberalism, and the seemingly banal everydayness of neoliberal governmentality, includes living in an age in which we struggle to articulate desires for a truly democratic freedom, equality, and justice in terms that capture their significance beyond the prevalent (neo)liberal hedging of prevailing public orthodoxy. Still, despite the oppressions encountered in the struggle against (neo)liberalism’s seemingly closed horizon, we should not be tricked into believing that the vision of freedom and equality it provides is the fullest one available. Indeed, I hope to have shown that equating rights attainment with democracy’s arrival bears neither historical nor philosophical scrutiny. At the same time, I have pursued this line of argument so as to urge us to resist the notion that there is no alternative. My hope is that we may instead revisit our praxis and imagine a different future. no t e s 1 See Smith, Lesbian and Gay Rights; and Warner, Never Going Back. 2 See Fitzgerald and Rayter, Queerly Canadian; and Dryden and Lenon, Disrupting Queer Inclusion. 3 My use of the term “queer” differs somewhat depending on the context. Often, I use it as an umbrella term for a range of non-normative genders and sexualities but also, following Kinsmen and Gentile, to “reclaim a term of abuse and stigmatization” that was historically an epithet directed at lgbtq + people. For me, the term signals a set of political commitments to both inter- and intra-group solidarity – it is not merely a term for a particular kind of non-normative affective individualism. Used in this way, “queer” is not the so-called “new gay,” nor it is reducible to a semantic strategy that simply seeks to avoid becoming entangled in “alphabet soup.” Instead, “queer” refers those who disrupt, contest, or challenge the gender binary by “defy[ing] heterosexual hegemony and the restrictions of the male-dominated two-gender system.” At the same time, I continue to use other specific terms, such as “lesbian,” “gay,” “bi,” and “trans,” when a given social or historical context renders them more appropriate. Finally, I

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also employ the phrasing “queer and trans” for reasons of inclusion and historical accuracy. Indeed, though not always named as such, trans people have historically been at the forefront of queer liberationist activism. At the same time, such usage is a deliberate attempt to indicate that trans issues and experiences often differ significantly from those of other queer people, meriting both study and attention in their own right. For more on this terminology and its significance, see Kinsman and Gentile, War on Queers, 5; Jagose, Queer Theory, 72–100; and Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1–32. On lgbtq + marriage rights by country, see Mendos, StateSponsored Homophobia, 139. See United Nations, “Resolutions – Sexual Orientation”; and Government of Canada, “The Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, 2-Spirit and Intersex Persons,” https://www.international.gc.ca/ world-monde/issues_development-enjeux_developpement/human_rightsdroits_homme/rights_lgbti-droits_lgbti.aspx?lang=eng. For examples, see Historica Canada, “Heritage Minutes: Jim Egan,” https:// www.historicacanada.ca/content/heritage-minutes/jim-egan; Royal Canadian Mint, “Equality – Royal Canadian Mint,” April 2019, https://www.mint.ca/ store/microsite/?site=equality&lang=en_CA&rcmeid=van_equality; and Citizenship and Immigration Canada, “Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Canadian Citizenship.” https://www.canada.ca/content/ dam/ircc/migration/ircc/english/pdf/pub/discover.pdf. On discussions of pinkwashing and homonationalism, see, Puar, Terrorist Assemblages; Morgensen, “Theorising Gender”; and Morgensen, “Queer Settler Colonialism.” See Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality.” Sabsay, Political Imaginary, 86. See Held, Models of Democracy, 1–3. Bosteels, “Introduction,” 1. Rancière, Dissensus, 70. Fassin, “Sexual Democracy and Civilizations”; and Fassin, “Sexual Democracy and Racialization.” See Weeks, “Sexual Citizen”; Richardson, Sexuality and Citizenship; and Taylor, “Politics of Recognition.” See Harvey, Brief History, 1–4; and Larner, “Neo-Liberalism,” 5–25. Quoted in Walters, Governmentality, 11. See also Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics; Foucault “The Subject and Power”; and Foucault “The Ethics and Concern for Self as Practice of Freedom.” Dean, Governmentality, 11. While this is suggested in a number of ways and contexts, the Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual Democracy Index, in particular, measures civil

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liberties alongside the categories of political culture, political participation, functioning of government, electoral process, and pluralism as its five indicators of democracy among 165 independent states across the globe. In its most recent 2019 report, Canada scored a 9.71/10 in the civil liberties category and was one of only four countries to receive a perfect 10/10 score in two preceding years (2017, 2018). See The Economist, Intelligence Unit, “A Year of Democratic Setbacks and Popular Protest,” 10. https://www.eiu.com/n/. This is to understand popular conceptions of liberal justice as central to Canadian democracy. The primary exemplar of this is John Rawls, whose 1971 publication of A Theory of Justice underscores the need for a normative justification of democracy that accounts for differing conceptions of “the good life.” These “differing conceptions” form what Rawls later comes to call the “fact of pluralism” in his 1993 publication Political Liberalism (64). Rather than reduce democracy to an instrumental liberalism, Rawls looks to reaffirm a rich moral account of the political premised on the Kantian conception of universal rationality. In the opening pages of a Theory of Justice, Rawls notes that “justice is the first virtue of social institutions” and the laws that frame them (3). That is, Rawlsian justice is that which recognizes the inviolability of each person, which is then secured in and through the ascription of rights. These rights are premised on the recognition of “equal citizenship” and are not subject to a “calculus of social interests” or ideological constraints (4). Rawls’s well-ordered society is, then, one in which human beings understand themselves as possessing an innate sense of justice and one that deploys a moral language of rights in relationship to the ideas of freedom and equality. See Rawls, Theory of Justice; and Rawls, Political Liberalism. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1 (emphasis in original). As Wendy Brown argues, for example, these ideas have been particularly helpful to the naturalization of liberalism, the dominant ideology of the modern West. See Brown, Politics Out of History. That is, despite Francis Fukuyama’s suggestion that the immanent collapse of the Soviet Union marked “not just … the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government,” a lot has changed since 1989. Today, with the rise of far-right populism in the wake of 2008 (the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression), the notion that liberal democratic ideals have triumphed once and for all is not only exaggerated, it seems altogether ridiculous. See Fukyama, “End of History.”

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21 Haritaworn, Moussa, and Ware, Marvellous Grounds, 7. 22 Ibid., 9. 23 Through an emphasis on formal equality and the assumed immutability of sexuality, established justifications of “gay rights” tend to rest on racialized notions of the “deserving subject” absent any substantive acknowledgment of the racism entailed thereby. For a book-length exploration of the tensions between queerness, Islamophobia, and the problems of homonationalism, see Haritaworn, Queer Lovers. 24 Following Ian McKay, this is to define Canada as a historically specific project of rule that is intimately linked to the reproduction of liberalism. That is, “rather than either an essence we must defend or an empty homogenous space we must possess … Canada-as-project can be analyzed through the study of a certain politico-economic logic – to wit, liberalism.” See McKay, “Liberal Order Framework,” 620–1. 25 See Young, “Structural Injustice,” 273–98; and Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” 25–73. 26 See Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship; Kymlicka, Finding Our Way; and Brosseau and Dewing, “Canadian Multiculturalism,” 1–32. 27 See Rawls, Political Liberalism, 212–55; and Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 1–63 28 While this characterization displays obvious ignorance for the lived experiences of lgbtq + people who are bipoc , it is motivated by a desire to accurately describe the politics of recognition – that is, on its own terms, and therefore subject to the constraints imposed by liberal categories. 29 Canadian Oxford Dictionary, s.v. “Recognition.” 30 Ibid., s.v. “Recognize.” 31 That is, legible in the sense of being intelligible to the state, and legitimate in the sense of being seen as worthy of standing in a particular context. On legibility particularly, See Scott, Seeing Like a State. 32 As we shall see, this was particularly important in the fight for same-sex marriage, where, in addition to the obvious fluidity and heterogeneity of lgbtq+ identities, a multiplicity of perspectives among social actors meant that not all agreed on the importance of marriage or the tactics employed to realize this goal. Indeed, as Miriam Smith explains, appealing to the state as a particular social group means presenting a clear and coherent picture of what is standing before it: “When, for example, litigants want same-sex marriage while others in the lgbtq+ communities critique and question this same objective, politicians and state actors are left with a conundrum. Even if they wish to recognize and include lgbtq+

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people, it can be unclear how to do this when the lgbtq+ communities do not form one coherent group, do not speak with one clear voice, and do not seem to want the same things.” See Smith, “lgbtq Rights,” 110. On this point, see Honneth, Struggle for Recognition; Taylor, Sources of the Self. In each case, the claim that identity derives from a process of intersubjective exchange is grounded by Hegel’s claim that: “Selfconsciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.” See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 111; and Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” 36–7. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 36. On the relation between identity and agency as products of recognition, see Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition, 11; and Pippin, “What Is the Question,” 156. Here Hegel can be read via Taylor as extending the Kantian project pertaining to rational self-determination. This amounts to freedom being understood as the product of rationally devised and self-enacted moral law. Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” 24–5. Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, 92–3. See Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” 28. See also Taylor, Sources of the Self; and Taylor, “Malaise of Modernity.” See Dhamoon, Identity/Difference, 1–18. Drawing on Fanon and working from an Indigenous perspective, Glen Coulthard develops this point at considerable length, linking the politics of recognition with settler colonialism. See Coulthard, “Subjects of Empire,” 437–60; and Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks. See Heyes, “Queer Politics of Recognition,” 53–66. Ibid. See also Foucault, History of Sexuality; Butler, Gender Trouble; and Wittig, Straight Mind. Indeed, as Dennis Pilon highlights in his discussion of the electoral franchise, questions surrounding the capacity to vote only get to the heart of democracy if it can be shown that, by voting, one actually has a say in public decision making and wields real political power. See chapter 1, this volume, for Pilon’s discussion of the relationship between political power and the right to vote. See Arendt, “What Is Freedom?” See Tully, “Agonistic Freedom.” See Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class; Weeks, “Sexual Citizen”; and Richardson, Sexuality and Citizenship. Cossman, Sexual Citizens, 195. Cohen, “Changing Paradigms”; Kymlicka and Norman, Citizenship in Diverse Societies; and Carens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community.

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49 On multi-scalar citizenship, see Yuvall-Davis, “Multi-layered Citizen”; and Grundy and Smith, “Multi-Scalar Citizenship.” 50 Smith, Civil Society, 23–9. 51 Ibid., 58. 52 Ibid. 53 Tarrow, Power in Movement, 18. 54 Brodie, “Equal Now,” 149. 55 See Evans, Sexual Citizenship; and Bell and Binnie, Sexual Citizen. 56 Richardson, Sexuality and Citizenship, 50 (emphasis in original). 57 For a fuller account of the Compton Cafeteria Riot, see Stryker, Transgender History, 148–69. 58 For a reflection on the historical significance of the Stonewall riot in relationship to the riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, see Segal, “Then I Danced.” 59 As Tom Warner observes, glf ’s use of the term “front” borrowed deliberately from the name of the National Liberation Front, a Vietcong group inside Vietnam, which was at war with the United States. With ties to the Black Panther Party and Students for a Democratic Society, members of glf saw themselves as revolutionaries seeking to liberate lesbians and gay men along with a range of other oppressed peoples. See Warner, Never Going Back, 62–3. 60 Ibid., 66–75. 61 For a list of these demands, see Smith, “Identity and Opportunity,” 184. 62 See Ross, “House That Jill Built.” 63 See De Groot, “Transnational History of Gay Liberation.” 64 It was largely on this basis that the Government of Canada worked to perpetuate the notion that lgbtq + people were morally suspect communist perverts, deploying this image to legitimate the harassment, intimidation, and eventual firing of thousands of Canadian public servants, the widespread surveillance of gay and lesbian activists, and the development of a pseudo-scientific machine that sought to “detect homosexuals” thought to be lurking among the heterosexual main. On this point see Kinsman and Gentile, War on Queers. See also Kinsman, Regulation of Desire; and Warner, Never Going Back. 65 Indeed, despite repealing aspects of “buggery” and “gross indecency” laws, which no longer applied in limited private settings between two people age twenty-one or older, the “bawdy house law” and other offences used to criminalize sex between men remained in place. In addition, anything resembling buggery or gross indecency that occurred in public, between more than two people, or between anyone below age twenty-one,

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remained a criminal act. Hence, as Tom Hooper suggests, these reforms – made in the name of Trudeau’s “Just Society” – meant, at best, the creation of limited exceptions for just these two offences. See Kinsman, Regulation of Desire; and Hooper, “Queering ’69.” See also Hooper, “State’s Key.” See De Groot, “Transnational History of Gay Liberation.” Ibid., 187–90. Rayside and Lindquist, “aids Activism,” 37–76. Smith, Lesbian and Gay Rights, 96; and Warner, Never Going Back, 161–4. House of Commons of Canada, “The Criminalization of hiv NonDisclosure in Canada. Report of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights,” June 2019, https://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/201/301/ weekly_acquisitions_list-ef/2019/19-26/publications.gc.ca/collections/ collection_2019/parl/xc66-1/XC66-1-1-421-28-eng.pdf. Russell, Constitutional Odyssey. Clément, Human Rights, 126. See Morton, “Charter Revolution.” Kinsman and Gentile, War on Queers, 391–428. Warner, Never Going Back, 192. Under the heading “Equality Rights,” section 15 (1) reads: “Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.” Section 15 did not come into force until 17 April 1985, allowing the federal and provincial governments time to amend existing statutes to ensure compliance. For the full text of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, see Canada, Justice Canada, 26 March 2019, “Constitution Acts 1867–1982,” https://lawslois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/page-15.html. Warner, Never Going Back, 194–5 Ibid. Ibid., 191–246. Supreme Court of Canada, 5 May 1995, Egan v. Canada [1995] 2 scr 513, https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/1265/1/document.do. Ibid. Ibid. Supreme Court of Canada, 2 April 1998, Vriend v. Alberta [1998] 1 scr 493, https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/1607/1/ document.do. Ibid.

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85 See Cossman, “Lesbians, Gay Men.” 86 Section 1, Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Part I of the Constitution Act, 1982, being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (uk ), 1982, c 11. https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/check/ art1.html, my emphasis. 87 Cossman, “Lesbians, Gay Men,” 232. 88 Supreme Court of Canada, 20 May 1999, M. v. H. [1999] 2 scr 3, https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1702/index.do. 89 Ibid. 90 Clifford Krauss, “Canadian Leaders Agree to Propose Gay Marriage Law,” New York Times, 18 June 2003. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/18/ world/canadian-leaders-agree-to-propose-gay-marriage-law.html. 91 Mary Hurley, “Legislative Summary: Bill C-38: The Civil Marriage Act,” 14 September 2005, Library of Parliament. https://lop.parl.ca/staticfiles/ PublicWebsite/Home/ResearchPublications/LegislativeSummaries/ PDF/38-1/c38-e.pdf. 92 On the centralizing effect of the Charter in relationship to Canadian federalism, see Cairns, “The Charter,” 619; and Cairns, Charter versus Federalism. 93 Smith, “Federalism, Courts.” 94 Rayside, Queer Inclusions, 92–125. 95 Smith, Lesbian and Gay Rights. See also Smith, “Identity and Opportunity.” 96 McKaskell, Queer Progress, 253. 97 In Britain, for instance, the coming to power of New Labour in May 2000, under Prime Minister Tony Blair, meant dramatic changes to the political opportunity structure available to queer activists. Marriage rights came less swiftly to the uk than to Canada, but legislative changes to include protection(s) from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and the introduction of the Civil Partnership Act, 2004, formed part of an increased emphasis on recognizing gender and sexual diversity that was common at the time. For an analysis of the uk’s political opportunity structure as it relates to rights expansion for queer people in Britain, see Kollman and Waites, “Political Opportunity Structures.” 98 See Smith, Lesbian and Gay Rights, 157–64. 99 Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” 24. 100 On respectability, see Valverde, “New Entity.” On the racializing nature of “deservedness and respectability,” see Haritaworn, Queer Lovers. On the change and its heterosexist implications for law and policy more generally, see Cossman, “Lesbians, Gay Men.”

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101 Kinsman and Gentile, “National Security and Homonationalism,” 135. 102 Phillips, “How Ottawa Blends,”183–227; Dobrowolsky, “Charter Champions?,” 205–25; and Dobrowolsky, “Women’s Movement,” 152–97. 103 Brodie, “Equal Now,” 145–64; and Collier, “Not Quite the Death,” 17–33. 104 Jensen and Phillips, “Regime Shift,” 119. 105 Ibid. 106 Brown, “American Nightmare,” 694. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid. 109 Heyes, “Foucault Goes to Weight Watchers.” 110 Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 10. 111 See Walters, Governmentality, 9–13; and Dean, Governing Societies, 101–2. 112 Lorenzini, “Governmentality, Subjectivity,” 154–66. 113 Duggan, “New Homonormativity,” 179. 114 Ibid. See also Eng, Feeling of Kinship. 115 Bobbio, Liberalism and Democracy, 32. 116 Supreme Court of Canada, 20 May 1999, M. v. H. [1999] 2 scr 3 (page 7, emphasis mine), https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1702/ index.do. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid. 119 Quoted in Lenon, “Governmentality,” 67. See also Supreme Court of Canada, 20 May 1999, M. v. H. [1999] 2 scr 3. 120 For the American version of this tongue-in-cheek history, see Nair, “Against Equality.” 121 Kinsman and Gentile, “National Security and Homonationalism,” 135. 122 Brown, “Suffering Rights as Paradoxes,” 230. See also Spivak, Outside the Teaching Machine, 44.

pa r t f ou r

History and Beyond

12 Community and Expertise in Canadian Democracy since 1920 Shirley Tillotson

By the 1920s the nineteenth-century struggles over voting rights had yielded a mass electorate in the Anglo-American democracies, albeit one that in Canada still excluded by law specified racialized groups. In the course of those transnational struggles, people fighting to end class, sex, and race exclusions had not challenged the notion that autonomous rationality, common interest in good government, and contribution to the state were necessary for citizenship. They had just disputed the traits that were supposed to guarantee those qualifications. These arguments about capacity, interests, and contribution left residues that have shaped to this day what counts as legitimate political authority. After the women’s suffrage victory, struggles about what newly enlarged formal democracy would mean in substance continued to simmer. For, as Dennis Pilon (chapter 1, this volume) notes, the day after something even resembling real engagement in government by the great mass of people was achieved, a powerful minority continued to oppose it, contesting its “scale, depth, and scope.” Those who resisted the implications of a mass electorate sought to reassert the privileges of the propertied or, in some other way, to reinvent a hierarchy with male, mainly white, property owners’ authority at the top. Equally, the minorities that were still excluded from the vote struggled to gain it or to secure in its place other rights that they deemed more meaningful. Many of those who newly enjoyed enfranchisement as “the people” sought to use electoral power for policy ends, inspired by a sense of common interests that went beyond service to capital. In this chapter, I explore some

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of the societal fora in which economically and culturally powerful groups attempted to reassert privileged political authority after their votes were swamped by those of women and the masses. I argue that the cultural materials they used were often reinventions of the old property qualification, redescribing capacity, shared interests, or contribution in ways that might command consent while implicitly demoting the authority of all but an exclusive elite. But, occasionally, vulnerable minorities, organized women, or working-class advocates turned those old justifications of authority to their own political uses to challenge economic or social privilege. In making this argument, I am distilling something I have only gradually understood in my thirty years of research into the cultural processes that link social power to the particular forms taken by the state. This research has taken me from human rights law, to social unionism, to community organization for recreation, to fundraising, and, finally, to the cultural work of tax policy. In all of these areas, I have seen two terms being used to produce public authority: “community” and “expertise.” “Community” and “expertise” did in the twentieth century the same work as “capacity,” “shared interests,” and “contribution” did in the nineteenth-century struggles over the franchise. Indeed, I suggest that the two terms drew on the old suffrage logic in ways that changed over time. For example, bundled in “community” was sometimes a blend of ideas of shared interest and contribution. “Expertise” has always been about capacity, but sometimes it also refers to a claim from common interests or contribution. Like those older rationales for political rights, and sometimes borrowing from their power, invocations of community and expertise have shown up in attempts to generate legitimacy for public policy. Our present problem may be that, for historical reasons, a melodramatic confrontation between a majority and a minority, named as “the people” and “elites,” has emerged in which community authority and expert authority are seen to be at odds. The narrative arc of this chapter sketches how this opposition emerged in its current form, as I have seen that story develop from the vantage points of my past research.1 In what follows, I draw on my research to show four roughly successive moments when either community or expertise was advanced as a means of democratic problem-solving. And in each I describe the failings in democracy that arose out of those moments. In the following years, these failings pushed political actors towards changed conceptions and uses

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of community and expertise. I conclude with a consideration of what community and expertise mean in a fifth moment – our own – and what historians can do to help open possibilities for a more just, democratic future.

t he f irs t m o m e n t : d e p l oyi ng “communi ty” The first moment is one in which a united community, sometimes national and sometimes smaller, seems to offer hope for a new democracy, one better able to deliver support for the needy and fiscal stability for the nation, even in the face of fracturing tensions. In his landmark 1920 budget speech, Finance Minister Sir Henry Drayton called on Canadians “to again become as united and earnest” as they had been during the war.2 The fiscal problems of the nation were such that contributions from women and working-class men of the new mass electorate were going to be needed, and the free-riders among propertied men would have to be pressured and persuaded to do their part. Invocations of community addressed a mass electorate that was far from unified, however. After 1919, no one could doubt there were class divisions, in Canada and the world, that were sharpening in the 1930s. From the point of view of the propertied men and women who led charitable fundraising and made policy in public finance, however, there seemed to be a good case for evoking a united national community. The methods that they adopted oddly ended up reinforcing the cultural authority of the propertied minority. In the early 1920s, expectations of charitable giving and requirements of income tax paying seemed unappealingly pressing for the most prosperous Canadians.3 They began to think that free-riders on others’ generosity or taxes needed to be brought into the ranks of the contributing citizens. To this end, public officials and private leaders gushed communitarian rhetoric. They urged unity in support of services that would fulfill the promise of a better, more democratic postwar world. Among fundraisers, A.H. Whitman of Halifax summoned up the idea of the city united as he claimed it had been in war: the community chest was “a community effort, for community good – the first community effort since the first [November 1917] Victory Loan campaign.”4 A similar evocation of collective contribution as expressing community feeling featured in a 1931 campaign to sell government bonds – the National Service Loan. A great common enterprise! Sharing the burden of the noble few! Drawing

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on the wisdom of the willing so as to avoid the curse of compulsion! The honour of the community! The minimum necessary for the public good! And anticipating the “Everyone Gives, Everyone Benefits” slogan of the late 1940s, “A national unit of mutual interest.”5 In both fundraising and bond sales, the communitarian rhetoric was no simple reflection of the culture but, rather, a conscious strategy to incite contribution from those previously excluded or delinquent. The emotional calls to united effort that were made in the Victory bond campaign materials of 1917–19 were a marked contrast to the pallid pitches to self-interest made in 1915–16 to the usual wealthy investors and financial institutions. To attract the savings of people with smaller incomes called for the “selling” of community. As a government public relations expert pointed out in 1943, “The sense of togetherness, in a country like this, must dwell largely in the imagination; let us use our own imaginations in cultivating it.”6 Community solidarity was not a fact of nature, but it could be produced by public discourse, they hoped, and with real material results. This was as evident in public finance as in fundraising. Although the federal tax authority’s rhetoric remained sober and rational until the Second World War, the marketing of government bonds both anticipated (during the war years) and echoed in the 1931 National Service Loan the rhetorical assertion of community responsibility that was used by the modernizing fundraisers of Canada’s cities. State projects were backed by law and ultimately by force, but administrative and enforcement capacity was so limited that persuading citizens to agree and participate was essential. As I argue in Contributing Citizens, the fundraisers were trying to fashion a culture of contribution. In Give and Take, I connect that same culture-making project to bond marketing and develop the connections to progressive income taxation that I sketch in the charities book. These invocations of community obligation may have been devised as a practical means of generating tax compliance, selling bonds, and raising donations, but they also summoned up a democratic ideal of collective responsibility in pursuit of a just social order. But it is also possible to see the practices of community-building deployed in this way as reproducing in the world of a mass electorate some new ways of justifying the authority of property – authority that had apparently been diluted in the modern national franchise. Intentionally or not, the very efforts to engage

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mass participation had the effect of putting the civic-mindedness of the new voters in question. Consider the Halifax community chest of 1925. Launching a canvass of the city’s industrial workers was a new strategy for these fundraisers, who hoped to supplement the yield from the normal ranks of charitable donors with contributions from these workers. But the goal that they set for their industrial section was utterly unrealistic. There were only about fourteen hundred families in the “industrial employees” sector from which the community chest hoped to raise $25,000. Each would have had to contribute $17.86 over the year. Workingclass donors actually did support the campaign, as a sample of identifiable donors from the published list in the 1925 campaign shows. But their usual contribution was a dollar. Looking at all the donations, from rich, middle, and poor together, 71 per cent of gifts were five dollars or less. Self-delusion probably explained the absurd target, but the implicit “failure” of industrial workers’ generosity would have helped reassure the middle class and big givers among the wealthy of their moral right to rule.7 Similarly, in the 1930s, faced with resentment over the tax burden that all citizens carried because of the war debt, a burden on which some citizens (bondholders) earned interest payments, the federal government certainly attempted to tax that bond interest. But some of it was tax-exempt, a feature written into the terms of the 1917 and 1918 bond contracts. That festering wound in income tax politics partly explains why the enforcement of income tax relied substantially on a rhetoric of community. The income tax payer (understood commonsensically to be a well-off man, usually urban) was said by the commissioner of income tax to be honourable and patriotic. That figure’s virtuous respect of the law, he asserted, helped to keep down the cost of collecting the tax and so contributed significantly to the public revenue.8 In tax as in charity, the work of celebrating the well-to-do as generous and honourable was a way of justifying their moral authority in public life. These discourses of honourable contribution by the well-to-do (against whom the urban workers did not quite measure up) still assigned to contribution or supposed lack of contribution the power to differentiate between those with a voice and those whose voice could properly be disregarded. In this way, these discourses repeated the old justification for limiting votes to taxpaying property owners, the contributors who “paid the piper” of government and, thus, “called the tune.”

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Increasing the number of working-class income tax payers, like broadening the donor base, could make contributor mentality a tool for property-owner priorities. In British Columbia, an income tax that was imposed on very small incomes in 1931 was explicitly celebrated as making beneficiaries of government services pay for those benefits. The provincial government imposed a wages tax that drew mere cents from paycheques. Following major protests, the government that introduced that tax was trounced in the next election. But the finance minister was proud that he had increased by some 110,000 the number of income tax payers and that, on the basis of that achievement, sales of provincial bonds had improved. The actual dollar amount of the tax revenue, wrenched from small household budgets, was trivial, as had been Halifax’s small charitable donations and the small wartime bond purchases. But the cultural effect of the wages tax was important. To satisfy the usual income tax payers, the beneficiaries of public spending had to be made to feel a sharper tax pinch, had to join in with donors and bond purchasers in the common “community” effort. That they found it a hardship to do so was a desired result, not an accident, inciting resentment of collective expenditure along with pride in contribution.9 In this sort of community appeal, the old model of a property franchise was reinvented in a new form. With a more diverse electorate, a more active state and popular control of the state now appeared as both promise and threat. Class looked different when both the propertied and the propertyless were together as voters, instead of the mass of the unpropertied standing outside the pale with petitions, journalism, and strikes as their means of political participation. In this context, including the propertyless as contributors might make them into allies whose pocketbook interests could be said to be threatened by “excessive” charity and “wasteful” government. A community not of mutual aid, but of mutual defence against the demands of the state was a strategy of solidarity that Christian socialists may well not have anticipated. But it was present in the interwar years. Both tax and charity policy makers aimed not only to raise money but also to recruit the new publics to be cheerleaders of retrenchment, enemies of government “waste.”10 In this way, their invocations of community attempted to mobilize private resources for public purposes on a mass scale and, at the same time, smuggled back into these community exercises the idea that the big contributors were wise guardians against extravagance.

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The history of the interwar years is full of other, more innocent exercises in community building, often centred on organized recreation. Whether in the playgrounds movement spearheaded by Local Councils of Women or in the Big Picnic that brought together people of African descent, or many other counter-hegemonic movements, contributing volunteer labour and money for community events reflected an ancient wisdom – that mutual aid builds solidarity. In some cases, groups were organized with the hope of policy influence and political impact. “Community” did more than one kind of political work. It could empower minorities and the economically vulnerable rather than just serving to hide the class interests of big property. But, in all of its contexts, community evoked and induced social control – “a social mind to give to society an orderly arrangement” and the ability to do things together for the group (variously defined) and not merely from fear of policing.11 In the move from funding roads and bridges (McNairn, chapter 5, this volume) to funding mother’s allowances, war debt, charities for ex-convicts, and unemployment relief, a new level of complexity and conflict had to be addressed by those who claimed that contributions served the common interests of the group. There were competing visions of proper community responsibility. To unite the formerly privileged and the mass electorate in consent to common policies was not simple. Something more than fellow-feeling would be required. By the 1920s, social science expertise was promising policy that could win majority support as the voices and interests of property were joined and challenged by others.

t h e s e c o n d m oment: s o c ia l s c ie n c e e x p e rti se as capaci ty Property had based its political authority not just on contribution and shared interests but also on the claim of its competence to manage the community’s common affairs. That capacity argument came under assault in the 1930s, in the face of changing economic conditions and a new generation of social scientists. In The Government Generation: Canadian Intellectuals and the State, 1900–1945, Doug Owram shows how the authority of businessmen’s common-sense expertise had been shaken by the Great War and was largely shattered by the Great Depression.12 A variety of new experts, trained in the social sciences, eagerly offered alternative sorts of knowledge.

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Owram was particularly interested in the rise of university-trained, specialized economists and their impact on labour and banking questions. But social science experts appeared increasingly credible on other subjects, too, such as how to ensure that children were fed, clothed, and schooled; how to protect against the threat of Bolshevism (if such a threat there was); and how to integrate the new voters into democracy. Along with economists came social workers, psychologists, and public relations experts.13 These new sciences of social control would proliferate during the interwar years and acquire real policy authority in the 1950s. Their promise? That a world shaken, perhaps broken, by crisis could be repaired by new methods of public administration, methods informed by specialized expertise. The analogy to public health medicine and its triumphs over contagious diseases gave them credibility. There was real hope that social research would similarly provide effective solutions of general benefit and, consequently, win mass electoral support for whichever party chose wisely from the wares of social science. The social scientists’ claim to democratic authority in public policy debate thus bundled an appeal to common interests with a kind of autonomous reason that mimicked the special intellectual capacity once thought to be indicated by substantial property-ownership. The importance of social science in public policy was echoed and instantiated in both fundraising and tax policy. In both areas, there were empirical questions in the 1930s about how much money was available to support collective projects. Where was the money and what method of extraction would be the least expensive and the most consistently fruitful? In the interwar years, both fundraisers and tax collectors had a sense that, if they answered these questions incorrectly, their sources of money would shrivel and shrink. By the 1950s, there were quasi-technical terms and measurement strategies for the perverse effects that they feared: “donor fatigue” and “elasticity of work effort.” These new terms represented familiar concepts from the 1920s. The very origins of the community chest movement lay in the idea that improved fundraising methods would overcome resistance from frequently dunned donors, especially the wealthiest. And, in taxation, the early 1920s already saw in circulation the notion that taxation might increase to the point of diminishing returns (either because of evasion or because higher collection costs reduced the net revenue). No one knew whether this folk wisdom

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was reliable or what might be the magnitude of the effects of getting collection methods and tax rates wrong or right. There were strong disagreements around these and related questions of public finance. Was the borrowing ability of particular governments (municipal, provincial, national) sound or weak? Were soldiers’ pensions at the right level or utterly inadequate for either justice or peace? Was the country nearly bankrupt or riding out a temporary turbulence? The advocates of carefully balanced budgets pointed to the monetary chaos of inflation-ridden France and Germany in the early 1920s and warned sternly that Canada was staggering near the brink of something similar. In all of these questions of public finance and social need, theory and ideology vastly outpaced data and explanatory rigour.14 Actuaries and bankers probably had the best sources of data. By contrast, public accounts in many Canadian cities were rudimentary. In 1920, the mere beginning of national accounts of the sort that economists now use was still fifteen years in the future. Even actuaries and bankers worked with somewhat patchy data.15 Similar questions arose around charitable fundraising. How much “real need” existed in particular cities? Were needy people gaming the uncoordinated charities? Were sentimental donors supporting ineffective social work? The advocates of social spending regularly trotted out the argument that, if we do not spend on playgrounds now, then we will have to spend on prisons later. But whether organized recreation programs made the slightest different in rates of criminality was impossible to know based on any evidence at hand. As late as the 1940s, the research offered in support of proposals to supply public recreation services to particular neighbourhoods relied on the most obviously conjectural correlation between neighbourhoods with high rates of juvenile delinquency charges and no playgrounds, ignoring other, more complex causes (poverty in crowded, low-rent districts and associated social exclusion and stresses).16 Assessments of social need, like tax policy and fundraising strategies, were shaped to a remarkable degree by folk psychology, common-sense traditions, and bandwagon thinking.17 The experts who were recruited to develop policy in these areas helped dislodge the authority of property interests, or at least to supplement those interests with information that spoke to a plurality of views of the common good. In this sense, their work was a wise and democratic response to the reality of a larger and more complex

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electorate. At the same time, however, experts were not unambiguously a democratizing force. Expertise comes in a variety of types, with a variety of implications for democracy. Looking back over the twentieth century, philosopher of science Stephen P. Turner has sketched five types of experts, each with different roles in democratic life. In the interwar years and through the 1950s, several of these types emerged or flourished and their various impacts on democracy became a point of debate.18 Two of Turner’s five types – the social worker and the bureaucrat – matter especially in the democratization processes I have studied. Neither produces knowledge that is absolutely credible regardless of audience or always valuable because of its constant, demonstrated effectiveness. But both at first promised to be the kind of expert to whom political philosopher John Rawls gave an important role in his theory of justice: the trustworthy producers of “non-controversial social science.”19 Both quickly became somewhat controversial. Social workers struggled to establish a credible claim to expertise, even though they aimed to address and convince a broad public. In fact, they were funded by groups that represented themselves as serving the public but that also pursued particular interests. Their employers – the charities and private funding bodies that emerged in the late nineteenth century – deployed them not only to supply care and service but also to shape the broader public’s knowledge and understanding of the world, often in ways that confirmed hegemonic social hierarchies. Canada’s most famous example, Charlotte Whitton, studied poverty during the 1930s. By distinguishing poverty caused by unemployment from other sorts of poverty, she demonstrated the worth of her investigative skills to a government that wanted to spend less on unemployment relief. Funding affects the uptake of such expertise.20 Recreation experts’ claims that their programs prevented delinquency and generated social cohesion came under attack in the early 1950s when municipal budgets creaked under the weight of growing demands.21 Federated fundraising’s claim that coordination produced more money for less effort was disputed in the 1950s when “need” turned out to be a matter of perception, and the proliferation of new agencies generated a new wave of donor fatigue.22 In both cases, gender hierarchy shaped the resulting retrenchment.23 The other kind of controversial expert was the public administration insider: put crudely, the bureaucrat, though not necessarily a man or woman of the state. The civil servants’ interlocutors in

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various organized interest groups also belonged to this type. This expert’s audience is largely other insiders, and their knowledge is deemed to be technical and specialized, with efficacy hard for outsiders to judge and therefore open to some risk of unconscious bias. When they address the public, the implication of their message is often that the public’s perceptions are mistaken. As the federal government’s policy scope enlarged (e.g., after the creation of the national Department of Health in 1919) federal authorities sought out or encouraged the formation of national organizations whose own experts could help gather information and formulate policy (e.g., the Canadian Council for Child and Family Welfare or the Federation of Agriculture).24 Connecting state and society, such organizations employed experts whose lifetime career trajectory often took them back and forth across the divide between government and private sector, travelling within a network of experts.25 Tax policy experts were of this kind. With their background in economics, law, or accountancy, they become increasingly oriented to an insider perspective. Their audience in the 1920s and 1930s was broader than it became by the 1950s. This was in part because the corpus of law and research on which tax policy drew by the late 1950s had grown and become more complex. For example, a business-facing organization founded in 1919, the Citizens Research Institute of Canada (cric ), promulgated tax data and analysis to public officials and business groups throughout the interwar years, using four-page flyers and simple mathematics. By the 1940s, the federal Department of Finance employed several economists with graduate-level training, and they dismissed the cric as irrelevant.26 Both of these types of contested experts – the social work type and the bureaucratic type – positioned themselves against “politics” while employed in public service, often by the state. As they saw it, their expertise enabled them to speak truth to power (even though, to their clients and the public, they presented a face of power). The authority conferred on politicians by election has sometimes been described by these experts as lacking a rational basis.27 Elections could be bought. Votes could be won by specious promises. The sweetness of public office might entice people of poor character, or corrupt the character of the initially innocent, replacing their commitment to the public interest with the desire simply to stay in office. The abundant evidence of political corruption in the interwar years was sufficient to justify

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for the men and women of recreation, fundraising, and tax administration a certain self-righteous doubt about the authority conferred by mass democracy.28 Like the nineteenth-century property owner, they saw the risk of mobocracy in democracy. And yet, their own claims to authority based on a unifying scientific truth that spoke only to common interests appeared suspect to some critics. In the 1960s, such critics would speak from New Left and feminist positions. But during the interwar years, mistrust of experts was a conservative position. It was expressed in Lord Hewart’s The New Despotism, in which he takes aim at experts within the British civil service who exercised unappealable discretionary authority in the name of their minister, violating the due process rights that litigation would have provided to unhappy citizens. Moreover, in writing legislation, Hewart argues, civil service experts were deliberately obscure and technical in ways that impeded parliamentarians’ ability to properly understand the bills they were meant to debate. Believing that “the only persons fit to govern are experts,” civil servants, according to Hewart, had found ways around Parliament and the law courts.29 From another direction, Roman Catholic criticism of eugenicist social reform described experts as power-mad. Emphasizing personal responsibility and humble acceptance of God’s will, Catholics saw reformers’ scientifically informed efforts to prevent suffering and spare society unnecessary burdens as arrogance. Solutions to human misery would not come from seeing misery as a technical problem in resource allocation to be solved by economists or as a health problem to be prevented by birth control. Misery was sin or moral failure or both, and to think otherwise was technocratic.30 Finally, the idea that national interest groups and national social policy might regulate the problems of poverty and economic development looked to some provincial governments, especially Quebec’s, like European-style bureaucracy, expanding the powers of centralized government in ways that undermined freedom and contradicted the spirit and letter of federalism.31 In these critiques, experts were thought to have acquired interests that were particular either to their own professional group or to a larger social project, possibly a socialist one, which roughly overrode, rather than balancing, society’s various interests. At this point, critics of experts rarely championed the wisdom of the people. Indeed, beginning in the 1920s and broadening in the

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1930s, some elements in Canadian public life organized around deep scepticism about electoral democracy. The National Government movement and the Leadership League, on one hand, and Catholic corporatists, on the other, were convinced that parliamentary politics was, at best, a costly luxury and, at worst, a way of subjecting the public interest to management by the ignorant and the corrupt. In neither of these views was the mass electorate seen as a wise and cleansing force in public decision making. Authority belonged neither with the people as the community nor with experts but with an elite of the best people, leaders with business success or church oversight to ensure their competence and moral soundness. An exclusive community was the properly public authority.32 The influence of the old nineteenth-century franchise logic endured. The advocates of elite-led democracy shared with some of their contemporary social scientists a doubt about whether the mass electorate and the parliaments that they elected could be relied upon to manage collective life competently. How were voters to decide difficult matters such as how much charitable giving could accomplish or how the tax burden should be most effectively and fairly shared? Still, at a time when most answers to such questions were merely ideological speculation, mid-century social scientists’ efforts to collect and analyze social and economic data were surely heading in a more democratic direction, one where rigorous scientific accountability might ensure good material for effective policy in service of the broadest common interests. In the interwar years, the experts of fundraising and tax policy had begun to try new research methods, but the results of their experiments (much unsettled by the disruptions of the Depression) were not yet in when Canada signed up to fight in the Second World War. That crisis would change the scope of contribution and, with it, the voices that would carry authority as a democratic public.

t he t h ir d m o m e n t : n e goti ati ng consent du r in g c r is is – t h e s econd world war a n d p o s t wa r r e cons tructi on The Great Depression had reduced to rubble many of the methods by which people had provided for their security in the face of life’s risks.33 Remedies to the problems of public finance and voluntary assistance were cobbled together but left deep dissatisfaction. More

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fundamental remedies were contemplated in the form of new political and economic ideas and institutions. Change was afoot in public finance, marked by the new Bank of Canada, the national accounts section of the Dominion Bureau of Statistics, and a budget animated by Keynesian ideas.34 But it would not be until the Atlantic Charter of 1941 that Canada joined its allies in committing, at least formally, to a policy of tax-supported, publicly organized guarantees for personal security – “social security.”35 Rather than simply a rational response to the crisis of the 1930s, these commitments were designed to justify the heavy demands that the Allied wartime governments would be making on their citizens. In Canada, the vocabulary of social security set a framework for bargaining new terms in the relationship between state and citizen. As in the 1914–18 war, the wartime rhetoric of community was disputed by those who saw inequality in the sacrifices required for the common good. But in the crisis of the Second World War, the federal government faced a broadly enfranchised electorate. Farmer and labour groups, chafing against laws that favoured banks and employers, were equipped with new tools – the industrial union movement and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. In this context, the nature of contribution and its link to political voice entered a new phase, and the broad-based labour movement would turn the exclusive logic of the nineteenth-century franchise on its head. In both charity and taxation, authorities encountered a militant labour movement and a working-class public who felt heavily burdened by the many demands to contribute. In response, governments and fundraisers sought ways to listen for and respond to voices of protest. Organizations of Indigenous people, of workers in particular industries, and of labour in general met with the tax authorities. Community chest fundraisers recruited union men to participate in fundraising at work and responded to various protests about unfair pressures to contribute. Many working-class or lower-income Canadians wrote to the minister of finance to explain the impact of national tax measures on their household budgets. In various ways, and with varying degrees of impact, the new ways of including these representatives of “the masses” in policy deliberations was a condition of getting cooperation with essential war measures.36 In this way, the political culture of the war years was pathdetermining for postwar democracy. A model of consultation (however incomplete) as a means to consent was established because

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of the role of quasi-voluntary contribution in the design of war finance.37 From 1914 to 1918, the ability to borrow internationally meant war finance depended scarcely at all on tax compliance. By contrast, the pay-as-you-go model from 1939 to 1945 required active compliance behaviour. Enforcement staffing at National Revenue remained modest, as in the 1930s. Managing morale was cheaper than active policing, and less likely to feed anti-government feeling, an especially important consideration during wartime. Consent was also required to make effective the more ambitious price-stabilizing measures between 1939 and 1945. In this context, the social security promise was a tactic for building consent to contribution.38 As a result, there emerged a mass public newly alert to the tax details of budgets and possessed of a promise that the nation’s fiscal capacity would be deployed for welfare once it was no longer needed for warfare. During the 1950s, working-class organizations pushed for delivery on that promise. Others took an increasing part in administering the new regime.39 The effectiveness of this mass public in claiming a postwar welfare state would be limited, however, by powerful opponents (among them Gladstone Murray, as Langford shows in chapter 9, this volume). During the wartime discussions of reconstruction, conservative objections had been heard, in relatively muted terms. But, as Don Nerbas shows, a more fundamentally critical, anti-statist business lobby was quietly organizing during the war. It was initially called the Canadian Committee on Industrial Reconstruction (ccir ). After the war, its supporters would urge that the welfare state was a threat to democracy. For example, Wellington Jeffers, the Globe and Mail’s finance columnist, was involved with the ccir . He liked to quote from British economist Colin Clark, who seemingly gave econometric heft to the notion that taxes must not exceed 25 per cent of personal income. But Jeffers and the Globe editors particularly emphasized Clark’s political analysis: that the expanding role of the state in “pensions, health, education and everything else” creates “a State which will not merely tax us to excess (it does that already) but eventually enslave us completely … [T]he concentration of political and economic power at present being built up at one centre will, before long, prove an irresistible temptation to some totalitarian group of men, whether they be civil servants or politicians. And the ordinary citizen will be powerless to resist such a group.”40

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From a perspective like this, social provision and new measures of democratic social control were worrisome. If health insurance were to be introduced, then engaging the masses in healthy recreation would reduce costs, but the prospect of, for example, government-run youth sport leagues too much resembled the Hitler Youth. Reassurances were earnestly offered, however. The collective cooperative spirit of public recreation was thoroughly blended with assertions of respect for voluntarism and choice.41 The other worry was that the expansion of public provision into new areas, such as recreation, would lead to an increased burden of federal taxation. The national Physical Fitness Division that was created in 1943 was wound down after 1950.42 But big-ticket programs like the family allowance program, unemployment insurance, and non-contributory pensions continued to incite worry among those who paid large income tax bills and who thought they got no benefit from such programs. To them, social security looked like the tyranny of the poor majority over the wealthy minority, a worry that, as Grittner (chapter 7, this volume) shows, shaped the nineteenth-century franchise debates and, indeed, Confederation. From this perspective, social security funded by a progressive-rate income tax conflicted with a view of democracy in which the interests of a minority (even a wealthy and otherwise powerful one) should not be overwhelmed by the majority.43 At the Canadian Tax Foundation’s third conference in 1949, a senior insurance executive, actuary W.M. Anderson, made this case. He argued that the “democratic principle of taxation” required that the majority of voters be those whose tax contributions were greater than the dollar value of the benefits they got from the state. If the reverse were true, if the voting majority consisted of people who got more than they gave, then the votes of the minority who were net contributors would be swamped by those of the net beneficiaries.44 A later finance minister, Mitchell Sharp, admired Anderson’s intelligence but felt that the consumption-tax-plus-flat-tax system that Anderson had in mind would be too “revolutionary” for Canadians. Nonetheless, it reappeared briefly in the 1985 report of the Macdonald Royal Commission.45 Old tax ideas never die. In the postwar arguments about income taxation, the insistence that smaller incomes must carry an income tax obligation was about quelling the appetite for redistributive social spending. In 1949, as in the 1930s, the point was that those who want services must

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pay for them. Opponents of progressive income tax saw this as a moral cause – against the corrupting temptation of “something for nothing” among voters and against the self-interested extravagance of politicians and civil servants.46 Publicly politic, they did not often emphasize the supposed moral weaknesses of those who used social services. Still, in 1948, Wellington Jeffers compared social security to feeding bears in Banff – in both cases, those who were fed by others would likely turn violent if denied.47 In Jeffers’s circles, respect for the wisdom of the majority was in short supply. In charitable fundraising, the postwar language expressed a more inclusive idea of contribution and benefit in a nutshell: “Everybody gives, everybody benefits.” In recreation, too, the emphasis was on providing service to “all the people.” Part of the welfare state perspective, these discursive strategies nonetheless addressed worries about mounting taxation. In a mass income tax, the many small payments of the poor reassured the rich that they were not the sole target of income taxation. Similarly, the universality language in charity was also meant to persuade the better-off that they weren’t carrying the burden alone. The “everybody benefits” element also signalled that there might be benefits to them from collectively funded services, as there could be in the new universal social programs.48 An argument for common interest supplemented the contribution logic. Public recreation programs especially emphasized cross-class benefit. Bridging social divisions such as religion, ethnicity, and class was the core rationale for publicly funded sports and craft classes and choirs. In fundraising, the progressive federated appeals brought union men and women onto boards and committees in the name of democracy. It really was a remarkable victory for the fundraisers’ effort in cross-class cooperation when, in 1955, a business-led community chest initiative pushed the federal and provincial governments to enlarge tax-funded social spending. By contrast, the public recreation movement’s enthusiasm for inclusive community governance had fairly limited results. Shared decision making in socially mixed citizen committees was less a basis of common interests than was getting public facilities for children’s and youth (especially boys’) recreation.49 After the war, attempts to keep alive this view of an inclusive deliberative community of contributors as the foundation of democracy took many forms. Citizen participation through local recreation

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organizing was just one expression of those efforts. Union organizing efforts saw increasing success and union participation in public affairs expanded, too, in part through the ccf and later the ndp . On the cbc , programs like Citizens Forum and Farm Forum, and in civil society, organizations like the Canadian Association for Adult Education formed a common cause: fostering an engaged citizenry whose understanding of public affairs would build unity and put an end to sterile and potentially violent ideological conflict. At the same time, Cold War anti-communism aggressively ruled out of bounds some kinds of social and political tendencies.50 Memories of the world before the war, blended with Cold War geopolitics, validated citizen participation only if it avoided the ideologies that had mobilized revolution or fascism. In the wartime ideal of democracy, emphasis on a great common project in the face of crisis had again prompted sacrifice. In this ideal, the state served all in return for sacrifice and contribution from all. Interests and contribution were universalized, and franchise reform would follow this logic in the postwar period, with the vote finally becoming a citizen right, rather than a privilege, with the Charter in 1982. But there was powerful pushback to government-directed social provision, and, compounded by geopolitics, conservatives’ Cold War fears limited what was thinkable in mainstream political life. Sometimes, expertise seemed to promise a common ground for politics, safe from ideological conflict. Scientific economics, along with science-driven technologies, defined that common ground. During the long 1950s, experts such as these would have a higher standing as agents of democracy than perhaps before or since. It might have seemed as though the nineteenth-century model of the rightly enfranchised citizen had been decisively remade: mass education built capacity, social science expertise was beginning to form an objective conception of common interest, and broadbased taxation and fundraising made contributors of all. However, community-building and respect for expertise, both valuable for democracy, having been brought together during crisis, would produce an unstable mix in peacetime. Expertise usefully establishes a common factual reality, but differences in values and interests among Canada’s various communities remained. To deal with this tension, Canadians drew on transnational innovations in law and politics that shifted the meanings of community and expertise.

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t he f o u rt h m o m e n t : r ights , experti s e, and k n ow l e d g e as t h e new pri vi lege Beginning in the late 1940s, a social movement for human rights began (along with other forces) to redefine whose voices would represent expertise and community. In the process, the political meaning of “minority” in “minority rights” was radically altered, and the sense of who were “contributors” continued to change. At the beginning of the period, the very notion of universal (“human”) rights was specialized knowledge. For example, a key human rights term, “anti-discrimination,” seemed strange to Prime Minister King, when, in 1947, he made a key policy statement on immigration. He tried to distinguish between proper discrimination in the selection of immigrants and “objectionable discrimination.” 51 The statutes and administrative practice that would define those terms lay in the future. Work by lawyers, scholars, plaintiffs, and movement activists would together provide the tools King lacked. Before those tools were made, however, it was not self-evident in what ways we are truly all alike, entitled to the same treatment, and what kinds of differences justify inclusion or exclusion – whether from a national community, from particular kinds of employment, or from certain neighbourhoods or businesses. Certainly, in the 1950s, women workers were widely seen by both employers and labour unions as so different from men workers as to require different treatment.52 As Frager and Patrias show (chapter 8, this volume, and elsewhere), the philosophical basis of “likeness” was contested, as was the scope of equal treatment and the limits of individual rights in relation to property rights or collective rights.53 But like the nineteenth-century suffrage struggles at their best, the human rights movement aimed to unseat privilege. Instead of challenging a privileged minority, however, human rights activism pointed to the privileges of the majority and seemingly reversed the project of the nineteenth-century’s franchise reformers. In the twentieth century, legislatures elected by the people (a majority) and not just those who owned property (a minority) had generated new conceptions of rights, including, in various Canadian provinces, the early human rights statutes that affirmed protection of members of minorities against violations of some general rights. This body of law expressed something of the “social rights” that

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were posited in 1951 by British sociologist T.H. Marshall. Social rights included rights to housing, health, education, and, generally, the right to share in a roughly common level of security and participation.54 In their fullest sense, these rights were and are still sometimes resisted as socialist. But the human rights laws passed in the 1950s through to the 1970s were not socialist. They embodied a liberal conception of rights. Particular kinds of human difference were not to be allowed to count as significant in the state’s equal treatment of individuals or in state-backed public life. Over the next half century, continuing political struggle enlarged the list of differences that were deemed not to matter in judging equality of treatment. What was being remade in this process was a vision of community, a newly inclusive majority, a “we” who are all “alike.”55 This universalizing move in rights talk required for its implementation cultural and administrative work to show how minority interests were in an important way also common interests. In this respect, human rights work was part of a larger pattern in the 1950s – namely, renewed efforts to find community among complexity. A mass electorate of equal individuals contained multiple, sometimes conflicting group interests. Elections on their own were inadequate to coordinate this complexity. Not just in rights politics, but in many policy areas, public opinion was increasingly formed by proliferating groups. Elections still mattered, and rates of voter participation mostly inched upward during the 1950s, with historically high 79 per cent participation during the populist electioneering of Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservative campaigns of 1958, 1962, and 1963. But, in parallel to the active use of the vote by individuals, public policy groups expressed viewpoints of industries, occupations, people with certain diseases and their allies, and a host of other categories of Canadians for whom coordinated engagement with government had come to seem necessary. In the 1980s, in Group Politics and Public Policy, Paul Pross anatomized this development in Canada, but group politics (pressure groups, interest groups, lobby groups) had already been the subject of obsessive interest internationally during the 1950s and 1960s.56 The expanded role of group politics empowered various kinds of groups. Some continued the anti-statist current that had resisted social security in the name of democracy. Internationally, opponents of the welfare state – they would have said defenders of freedom, following F.A. Hayek – organized in the long 1950s as the Mont

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Pèlerin Society (mps ) and attracted much funding for their education, research, and policy intervention project from anti-tax business interests.57 Whether that particular network had significant representation in Canadian academia or politics in the 1960s and 1970s is only now attracting historians’ attention (e.g., see Langford, chapter 9, this volume).58 My own research revealed small traces of mps -like influence but little evidence of its project’s flourishing in 1960s Canada. For example, when the Canadian Chamber of Commerce tried to mount an Operation Freedom educational campaign (about the dangers of the welfare state and evils of rising taxes) on the eve of the 1962 election, drawing loosely on a Hayekian vocabulary, big business and economists in Toronto found their materials politically embarrassing and “naïve,” and squelched the chamber’s smaller-city-based campaign. Maurice Duplessis ran an anti-centralist, freedom-loving, capital-protecting government during the 1950s in Quebec, but in 1962 he was replaced by the more statist Liberals. It is likely that the founder in 1970 of the National Citizens Coalition, Colin Brown, an insurance executive, would have encountered through his industry the international networks in which mps ideas circulated. But the intellectual sophistication among these Canadian Hayekians was slight. As Langford points out, it was the Reader’s Digest version of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom that the Chamber of Commerce helped to circulate in Canada.59 Against group politics of a narrow sort, some politicians encouraged participatory democracy. In the tax debates of the 1960s, well-organized interests such as mining and finance brought big resources to bear in public policy debates.60 They had kinds of clout that the general public or lower-income taxpayers could not wield, even by means of the then-still-growing union movement. Among other things, they could pay for major public relations campaigns, sometimes openly, sometimes not. In response, Finance Minister Benson and Prime Minister Trudeau used participatory democracy methods to bolster their policy agenda against well-heeled critics. These methods were legitimating in that they promised that all views had a chance to be heard, and electorally helpful, in so far as they gave the government one more way of weighing how proposed policies might affect election results. In an odd way, the United Way’s new methods of fundraising in the 1950s and 1960s – fashion shows and football games and other kinds of fun – were devised for the same purpose: to increase active involvement, even if the dollar

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value of donations was not in the short run increased. Orchestrated mass participation in public life helped to legitimate government as an expression of the people’s will. Trying to make political parties and policy development operate a bit like social movements was the mode of the day – partly in response to demography, to attract the baby boomer youth.61 “Contribution” in this political practice consisted in showing up, helping to make a show. Public recreation activism also aimed to broaden contribution and participation in democratic processes, aiming to integrate minorities and to fashion a new more diverse majority in the process. The Ontario expression of this movement was the Community Programs Branch, launched in 1946. Even without facing serious resistance from business interests, the recreationists still confronted a basic problem of mass democracy. How does a democratic state serve both the majority and minorities? They took two sorts of approach. In one, emphasizing the wisdom of the majority, the market was their model. As state actors, they simply worked to facilitate whatever goals were indicated by the greatest number of “purchasers” – the people who showed up, both as organizers and consumers of a recreation service. The other approach was improvement, aiming to include marginalized minorities or to increase the number of the consumers of “better” recreations. They saw popular tastes as a lure to engage participation in more challenging kinds of leisure. And they wanted to draw into their programs citizens who might not normally feel able to participate, who lacked social capital or actual income to purchase participation. For both approaches, the ideal participants would not merely show up as consumers of state services. They would also be decision-makers, active citizens who understood their community in all its complexity, possessed therefore of the capacity to exercise political influence in a democratic way. Within the public recreation movement, it was not easy to blend these views of what it meant for citizen-consumers to have a voice and to be well served. The professional recreation directors – mostly at first social workers from the group work tradition – found in that tension a role for themselves as experts who could interpret to city councillors and community members why and how both aspects of democracy (i.e., majority preferences and inclusive service to minorities) could be expressed in program content and leadership. The results of their work were mixed: in some towns their ideal of citizenship through play was embraced, in others not.

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By the end of the 1950s, the citizen participation project in recreation was much diminished. Its efforts illustrate one paradox of inclusive participation: where there are structural differences in resources for participation (leisure time being an important one), then participatory democracy privileges the better-resourced, even if they are a minority.62 The mode of democratic life that emerged between 1945 and 1975 deployed various visions of community, expertise, and citizenship that had developed in response to the “problem” of the mass electorate. Tensions among visions of expert authority and engaged citizenship became apparent as they were put into practice. In the charities, public relations campaign experts who treated need and giving as general, abstract things undoubtedly made fundraising more efficient. But people who were accustomed to older styles of appeal, who saw giving as an expression of fellow-feeling, found giving “once and for all” cold and distant. Charitable giving came to seem like paying a tax, one critic said. Tax itself during the 1950s was a fairly messy exercise in multidimensional problem-solving that turned 1949’s income tax statute into something quite tortuous by decade’s end. But mathematized economics was slowly developing a knowledge base that might drive a rational fiscal policy. In the work of the Royal Commission on Taxation between 1963 and 1967, a model built from principles and research pointed the way to that kind of future. And yet, tax reform turned out not to be simply an exercise in scientific planning. By the time the Carter reforms made it through the democratic process, group politics had compromised the experts’ coherent vision. The organization, communication, or deployment of modern expertise often ran afoul of important elements in popular opinion. Modern economic development and relocation plans left some rural people in eastern Canada and Quebec unsettled and sceptical. Making rights universal or transforming the tax system disrupted complex systemic relations. A labour movement stabilized by industrial relations law acquired a cadre of expert leaders – bureaucrats – and struggled to maintain members’ engagement. Social workers became welfare administrators whose efforts to help came bundled with strange Freudian rationales and budgetary constraints. People disadvantaged by economic and social structural change did not always want the remedies that were offered by experts. Consultation in an individualist liberal mode failed to capture the meaning of community, a

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kind of loss that individual compensation could not repair.63 There was a gap between the experiences and objectives of Canadians who were supposed to benefit from new social programs and those who devised and administered those programs.64 Some political actors knew this was so. Community development and social animation through projects like the Company of Young Canadians and the Fogo process were conceived as a ways of bridging that gap.65 More generally, policy education bodies like the Canadian Council on Social Development or the Economic Council of Canada attempted to work with and through the labour movement, business groups, political parties, and other organizations to share research with the voting public. Various social professions – teaching, social work, medicine – began to reflect on more democratic ways to wield expert authority.66 One way to see the expansion of funding for university education in the 1960s is as an attempt to democratize expertise.67 And yet, a critique of bureaucracy grew and found a foothold in both left and right. Planning was not a panacea. “Community” and “experts” were sometimes at loggerheads, in spite of efforts to bring the people into the state and to bring expertise to the problems of the people.68 The capacity of the people, and especially the organized people in community, to know their own interests was beginning to overshadow being a contributor as the basis for democratic authority. Everyone was now a contributor, if only as a consumer providing “demand” and paying consumption taxes. The privileged voice of the propertied minority as sole contributors had been dethroned, but from the perspectives of various new social movements, experts sometimes sounded like that old voice – a powerful minority protecting political privilege in new terms.

t h e f if t h m o m e nt: our own In some ways, the logic of the nineteenth-century’s racialized and gendered property-owners’ franchise now seems remote, thoroughly undermined by the universalism of mass electoral democracy and human rights discourse. Why should not everyone affected by decisions have a say in those decisions? Why should there not be rights more general and more fundamental than the right to individually own and control property? But the revolutions (most, but not all of them, slow) that overturned property owners’ elite privilege in the franchise and empowered electoral majorities did not erase worries

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about unaccountable minorities or tyrannical majorities. These remain, reconstituted by changing circumstances. The struggles for universal suffrage achieved, we have had repeatedly to confront the vulnerabilities of our current political institutions and of the cultural underpinnings of democracy in daily life. Today’s litany of fears and issues is familiar, and far from solely Canadian. Some of its elements date back to the 1960s and 1970s, and others are more recent. To rehearse just a few of the main points: the influence of money in politics is a perennial worry, and Canadian legislation in 1974 and 2007 attempted to constrain it. But elimination in 2015 of the per vote subsidy from the public treasury has put fundraising at the centre of our national politics, and it is not clear how effectively the legal constraints on “pay-to-play” can prevent corruption.69 Closely related is the question of how to hold state actors to a high standard of ethics, competence, compassion, and justice. Every institutional mechanism of accountability has its vulnerabilities.70 Members of Parliament are hobbled by party discipline, and cabinets may be little more than focus groups for the prime minister. The electoral mechanisms by which governments are constituted seem inadequate to reflect and properly empower our complex publics. Beyond politics, other state institutions have their own troubles. Senior courts, as Donald Savoie points out, “have become political actors but without having to deal with the constraints politicians have to contend with, including transparency requirements and seeking re-election.”71 Conversely, government departments labour on networked problems within complex constraints of oversight and reporting requirements. It can seem as though the levers are not connected to the machinery.72 In civil society, democratic culture has its own problems. Academic experts once “promised to overcome the ills of the political marketplace.” But Turner argues that academic over-reach and unacknowledged biases have helped to generate a protest politics whose participants (often rightly, but sometimes wrongly) refuse to accept policy based on inaccessible research results.73 As Skocpol shows, citizen organization lacks the thick connections that characterized associational life before the 1990s and may be less effective as a result.74 Journalists have tried to hold state institutions and civil society organizations to account. But journalism, a trade that became a profession during the postwar period, now fights for survival. Newspapers and other major employers of professional journalists

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search for a viable business model in order to pay adequate salaries and fund the best investigative work. Competition from (and sometimes complicity with) other, less ethical information providers produces a polarized audience of the deeply ill-informed.75 Whatever education systems can do (and they struggle under their own burdens), the adult public has come to seem extraordinarily gullible and given to groupthink. The majority vote has generated some frightening results in recent years. There are expectations of nation-states that they cannot possibly meet. Even supposing that a national electorate can hold its own government to a high standard, the transnational coordination problems and international conflicts of interest make essential matters such as a just and effective tax regime only partly in a national government’s power to determine.76 How can the history I sketch here speak to such democratic difficulties in our present moment? There is always some encouragement to be had from recalling the interplay over time of hopeful projects, partial failures, the impact of unpredictable crises, and the constitution of new social actors. Old sources of legitimacy get repurposed in new ways, and not always in conservative ones. Yes, the powerful minority fought well into the 1950s to resist the impact of mass enfranchisement. But their very tools – claims to superior capacity, a persuasive vision of shared interests, and the power of contribution to impart legitimacy to political voice – could be and were used for others’ projects. In the process, our political culture gained a broadened view of contribution, a more varied notion of interests, and new assertions of expertise. In each of the moments discussed here, as much as in our own, there was suffering, disaster, corruption, incompetence, and misinformation. In each, people with ideas about a desirable future or at least an immediate remedy for distress made efforts to assert a better idea of community and a sounder form of expertise, many of them framing these as ideas about democracy. History reminds us that people who have both an idea and a strategic mindset can make change, working sometimes with and sometimes against the forces of continuity. Today, expertise remains an arena of struggle, and evocations of national community are difficult to reconcile with our many divisions. Turning over hard problems to expert commissions or to public inquiries, though both are still important democratic tools, won’t guarantee that results are accepted or even understood by the public. This remains the work of democratic politics. Tax history has given me

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an especially vivid sense of what that politics contributes to building a connection between experts and voters. That connection generates consent, without which tax compliance erodes. The determinants of that consent are complex. There are elements of exchange, gift, policing, status group closure, and the quasi-military features of political alliance building (whether party politics or geo-politics). The stakes in tax arrangements range from life-threatening deprivation to productive accumulation to state-shaking economic power. We need all the institutional complexity of modern states – administrative law, technical experts in the civil service, public inquiries, electoral campaigns, organized pressure groups, and more – to do the work of organizing consent in tax, and not only in tax.77 I want to emphasize here that, in organizing consent, elected leaders, often disparaged as “politicians,” play an essential part. As I conclude in Give and Take, politicians are “social” workers. Along with people in other professions, such as educators, journalists, clergy, and the actual social workers, they represent us to each other and so play an important part in connecting the varied capacities and interests among the electorate.78 We need them to show us (and we need to show them) how to fight in community-building ways, to do conflict cooperatively.79 The moment just preceding our own offered some hopeful examples of that style of politics. A regime of industrial relations law and the proliferation of organized interests empowered, to various extents, plural political actors. In the 1960s, innovation in protest tactics, often following the always strategic Saul Alinsky’s lead, left behind the practices of the spontaneous crowd. As a step forward in democratization, demonstrations and other “powers of the weak,” such as the alternative press, joined parliaments and law courts as ordinary means of fairly peaceably negotiating our way through conflict. But in pointing to the virtues of these developments, I am not suggesting the nostalgic redeployment of old tools. Our political life is no longer that of the railway and telephone. Its scale has changed. A social media pile-on is not the same as a march on Ottawa. If our means of negotiating conflict cannot find effective handles for transnational politics, then they will not produce democratic engagement or just results. Whatever those handles might be, they need to be understood within a fresh story of how to contribute and how to speak publicly, as democratic citizens, in ways that enable cooperative conflict around social questions in our present world – local, national, and transnational. To those who would make that story, I suggest that we jettison

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melodramatic political narratives. Our twentieth-century past suggests that “the people” cannot any longer be the innocent hero that the suffrage struggles imagined. In our world, enfranchised majorities may enjoy unearned privilege and can use it abusively, whether in electoral politics or the politics of daily life. And the expert’s role as an unblemished opponent of corrupt politics is substantially compromised. Given the risks of incompetence or partiality (not such different problems), experts can no longer promise utopia, only substantial contribution. As with heroes, so with villains. We can surely see the dangers in summoning up some shadowy minority to replace propertied interests in the social democratic melodrama role of the vile aristocrat who threatens to despoil community welfare (the maiden epitome of perfection). However important it remains to be alert to exclusive networks of people who control strategic resources, we have seen where that sort of conspiratorial thinking can go, from anti-Semitism to qanon. Global distance and unaccountable mechanisms of power heighten the risk of delusional conspiratorial mobilizations. Historians can surely help moderate the taste for melodrama’s dubious moral pleasures. Historical consciousness inclines to understanding complexity rather than crafting rattling good yarns in which good and evil clash cataclysmically. Is complexity too dull for use in democratic politics? Maybe, but not necessarily. There are big stakes and real drama in stories where the problems of communities, on many scales, are solved, or partly solved, with ordinary care and exceptional creativity, special expertise and the wisdom of hard-won experience, even though solutions hold only for a time, contingently. In that kind of story, the heroes will be people who can engage in conflict without creating enemies, people who combine moral clarity with an ability to find ways to work together. This is not one class of people, defined in social, economic, or, god forbid, biological terms. And the battles they engage will be everyday ones as well as those of high politics. Stories of such struggles can be told by historians who gain credibility by their empirical methods and gain influence by plain and powerful language. Equally, though, imaginative fictions can transcend melodrama, maybe even in the world of game design. Whatever their source, stories that hinge on cooperative conflict can be the material for a democratic public culture. In that culture, an inclusive community would bring together many kinds of humans, including experts, to collectively make and share the means of decent existence.

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no t e s 1 The origin of this chapter lies in my having had, since 2017, an inchoate sense that there was a through-line that linked my three books and other smaller research projects. I wanted to try to trace that through-line, and so I offered the editors of this volume a choice between either a chapter that would allow me to do that work or a different, empirical study on a new topic. They generously asked me to do this exploration. I hope that (while it might seem self-indulgent) it may have some general interest. I appreciate the faith that Tunnicliffe and Mauduit showed, and I take responsibility for whatever failings the piece has. The works on which I draw are as follows: Public at Play; Contributing Citizens; Give and Take. I also draw in this chapter on my research on the postwar developments that anticipated the social unionism of the 1970s and later. This research was published in two articles: “When Our Membership Awakens” and “Class and Community.” This chapter also draws on one of my graduate school essays, published as “Human Rights Law as Prism.” Where I draw on the above works, I cite page references from these works rather than the source material on which these works are based. Writing this chapter has also prompted me to supplement references to my published work with some material that I collected for, but did not use in, these publications as well as some small amounts of new research. I have not attempted to cite the full historiography for all the topics I cover in this chapter, but at some points, where I judge that for cohesion the narrative requires it, I add others’ historical work. In one case, I cite Doug Owram’s The Government Generation to acknowledge that work’s pivotal and unique impact on my research program. 2 Tillotson, Give and Take, 52. 3 Tillotson, Contributing Citizens, 28, referring to Board of Trade officer P.G. Shallcross in Vancouver. 4 “Enthusiastic Meeting Opens Community Chest Campaign,” clipping from unspecified Halifax newspaper, dated May 1925, Nova Scotia Archives (nsa) , mg 20, vol. 1,717. On the fundraisers’ communitarian rhetoric generally in the interwar period, see Tillotson, Contributing Citizens, 36, 53–4. 5 Tillotson, Give and Take, 36–45, 49–50, 157–9. 6 Wartime Information Board Reports, Branch Information Briefs, “Low Morale,” 19 April 1943, Library and Archives Canada (lac) , Department of Finance Fonds, rg 19, vol. 4,030, file 129-W3. 7 Tillotson, Contributing Citizens, 51–2.

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8 Ibid., Give and Take, 63–4, 140–1. 9 Ibid., 94–103. 10 Ibid., 99, 196–7, 257–8. Tillotson, Contributing Citizens, 127–8, 144–5, 193–200. 11 Blackmar and Gillin, Outlines, 380 and passim. Blackmar and Gillin refer to Herbert Spencer and E.A. Ross as the foundational theorists of social control. The chapter on “Social Control” features E.A. Ross, and the chapter on “Social Organization” features Herbert Spencer. The authors link the two chapters by reference to Spencer’s notion of “the regulating and protecting system” as one of five constituent parts of society, in which are included mutual aid organizations (104–5). My copy is a deaccessioned one, worn from heavy use, from the library of University of King’s College in Halifax. For a broader discussion of the uses of Spencerian ideas in the Canadian left, see McKay, Reasoning Otherwise. 12 Owram, Government Generation. 13 There are several large and international literatures referenced here. A selection that represents older and newer, American and Canadian, works: Burke, Seeking the Highest Good; Morton, Wisdom, Justice, and Charity; O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge; Gleason, Normalizing the Ideal; Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance; Ewen, pr ! ; Robinson, Measure of Democracy; and Belisle, Retail Nation. 14 Bronfenbrenner, “Diminishing Returns.” 15 Tillotson, “New Taxpayer,” 159–60; and Tillotson, Give and Take, 29–30, 64, 167–8. 16 Tillotson, Contributing Citizens, 142–3. 17 The literature on juvenile delinquency, for example, is rich with examples, even in a small selection: Valverde, “Building Anti-Delinquent Communities”; Iacovetta, “Gossip, Contest, and Power”; Myers, “Voluntary Delinquent”; Adams, Trouble with Normal; Keshen, “Wartime Jitters over Juveniles”; and Sangster, Girl Trouble. 18 Turner, Politics of Expertise, 24–35. 19 Rawls, Justice as Fairness, quoted in Tillotson, Give and Take, 277. 20 Struthers, “Profession in Crisis.” For a complex account of the intersecting determinants of social work practice, blending ideas, personality, place, and funding into the account of the career of an expert social worker, see Morton, Wisdom, Justice, and Charity. 21 Tillotson, Public at Play, 63–5. 22 Tillotson, Contributing Citizens, 193–200. 23 Ibid., 171–2; and Tillotson, Public at Play, 63–7, 72–7. 24 Pross, Group Politics, 40–7.

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Tillotson, Contributing Citizens, 117–18, 140, 162–6, 171–2, 297–8n35. Tillotson, Give and Take, 64–6, 75, 190. Ibid., 167–8; and Tillotson, Contributing Citizens, 123–5. Tillotson, Contributing Citizens, 43, 103, 277n2, 277n3; Tillotson, Give and Take, 112, 167–8. Major scandals at the national level during the interwar years included the collapse of the Home Bank, corruption in the customs and excise administration, and the pay-offs by a major hydroelectric power company to the federal Liberal Party. Hewart of Bury, New Despotism, 20–1. McLaren, Master Race. Tillotson, Give and Take, 265–8. Ibid., 111–13, 362n130. In addition to Don Nerbas’s treatment of the National Government movement, referenced in Give and Take, sources for the Leadership League and for Catholic corporatism are Young, “McCullagh”; and Nemni and Nemni, Young Trudeau, 131–51. In support of the Leadership League, McCullagh’s newspaper ran an almost year-long weekly series of columns on tax questions: “How Far Can Taxation Go?,” Globe and Mail, front page from 7 May 1938 to 11 March 1939. The many strains on means of security (personal or social) are generally well known. Among the pressures that should be more commonly noted is the role of municipalities in paying for the hospital care of the indigent sick – a role that grew as families’ means were depleted by unemployment. This was significant in leaving both families and municipalities in dire straits. See Gagan and Gagan, Patients of Moderate Means, 84. McDowall, Sum of the Satisfactions. Blake, From Rights to Needs, 34–6. Tillotson, “Class and Community,” 76–9; Tillotson, Contributing Citizens, 139–41, 148–53; and Tillotson, Give and Take, 123–5, 179–88, 195–209. This point touches tangentially on a thesis about taxation advanced by Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage, Taxing the Rich, 5. (In spite of their title, they discuss Canada, too.) They argue that, when war mobilization requires governments to “take an unequal action that somehow favours the rich,” arguments for taxes that differentially target the rich (like progressive-rate income taxation) gain momentum. They call these “compensatory arguments.” I argue that, for the same reason, not only policy substance but also policy process shifts towards a different sort of fairness: greater policy influence follows from the increased demands of contribution, demands that impose hardship most heavily on people of lower incomes.

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38 Tillotson, Give and Take, 190–8, 222–4. 39 Tillotson, “When Our Membership Awakens”; and Tillotson, “Class and Community.” These articles are on the involvement of unionists in private charity. Others have written about labour activism on social security policy in the 1950s and 1960s. See, for example, Porter, Gendered States; and Struthers, Limits of Affluence. 40 Clark, Welfare and Taxation, 62. Reproduced as “Thought for Today,” Globe and Mail, 3 January 1955, 6. 41 Tillotson, Public at Play, 26–30; 78–87. 42 McFarland, Public Recreation, 51–4. 43 As Nancy McLean points out in Democracy in Chains, the notion that the wealthy were a minority who deserved protection from discriminatory coercion by a politically empowered majority was both old (the opponents of democracy in the nineteenth century) and current in conservative circles in the United States in the 1950s. I first encountered the clever deployment of anti-discrimination language as a standard of fairness to the wealthy in a 1997 article by Buchanan, “Can Democracy Promote the General Welfare?” Reading this piece by Buchanan enabled me to recognize the faint traces of this view in Canadian primary sources on fundraising and taxation in the 1950s. 44 W.M. Anderson, Some reflections on personal taxation in relation to social security benefits and contributions; an address given … in Montreal, Tuesday, December, 6, 1949, at the Third Tax Conference of the Canadian Tax Foundation, 6. 45 Sharp, Which Reminds Me, 46. 46 Tillotson, Give and Take, 196–7, 210, 214, 257–8 282–3, 392n1. See also Chester A. Bloom, “Growing Expense Accounts,” Halifax ChronicleHerald, 14 April 1954, 6. 47 Wellington Jeffers, “Finance at Large,” Globe and Mail, 26 August 1948, 32. 48 Tillotson, Public at Play, 33, 47–9, 65–7, 81–7; Tillotson, Contributing Citizens, 57, 214–16, 189–91, 226; and Tillotson, Give and Take, 196–7. 49 Tillotson, Public at Play, 104–56; and Tillotson, Contributing Citizens, 172–88. 50 Irving Abella describes the purging of communists from several international unions in Canada during and after the Second World War in Nationalism, Communism, and Canadian Labour. An example of the impact of anti-communism in constraining social movement activism is provided in Lambertson, “Black, Brown, White, and Red.” Discussions of reconstruction, of science, and of religion in the 1940s and 1950s were

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suffused with worries about communist tendencies, as L.B. Kuffert shows in A Great Duty. Canada, House of Commons, Debates, 1 May 1947, 2,646. Tillotson, “Human Rights,” 534–5, 538–40, 549–50, 553–4; and Frager and Patrias, “Human Rights Activists,” 591. Patrias and Frager, “These Are Our Rights”; and Patrias and Frager, “Human Rights Activists.” These articles were foundational contributions to a literature that continues to grow. For a summary treatment, see Clément, Human Rights. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class. Although the liberal standard of formal equality – treat likes alike – has ancient roots in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, my own appreciation of how historically contingent the notion of likeness is comes from Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. For Rorty, the work of justice entails deliberately enlarging those whom we recognize as like “us,” especially in terms of like us in deserving to be spared pain and humiliation. Though published in 1989, long after the movement began, Contingency provides a philosophical framework for human rights. Pross, Group Politics, 48–81. Among the foundational works from the 1950s and 1960s are John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism; and Mancur Olson, Logic of Collective Action. Maclean, Democracy in Chains; and Mirowski and Plehwe, Road from Mont Pèlerin. Langford, Global Politics of Poverty. Langford (chapter 9, this volume). MacDonald, “Carter Commission.” Litt, Trudeaumania, 25–69. Iris Marion Young summarizes this paradox in her Justice and the Politics of Difference, 92–5. Loo, “Africville.” Richard Wright, “Urban Renewal Revisited,” finds that urban renewal was less destructive than some myth-making accounts of the 1970s asserted, but he concludes that lack of respect for the strategies and community connections of poor neighbourhoods was a marker of urban renewal planning. Raymond B. Blake, “Resettlement of Pushthrough,” provides a nuanced account of the process of resettlement in one outport community, acknowledging disruption of community culture as one loss while acknowledging the gains and reasoned decision making of those who moved in. Even while the material benefits of the many programs of tax-funded social services and income assistance since the 1940s are indisputable,

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those programs have also inflicted harms, many of them cultural. One powerful resource for understanding working-class men’s cultural disconnection from the programs of the modern welfare state is the classic by Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, Hidden Injuries. Women clients of the welfare state have experienced the toxic mix of inadequate help and patriarchal control described in works such as Margaret Jane Hillyard Little, Moral Regulation of Single Mothers. Welfare services as a mechanism of oppressive racialization persisted into the post-eugenics era in various ways. Histories and processes have varied among racialized groups. An excellent historical study that presents the racialization inflicted on Indigenous people by postwar social science is found in Hugh Shewell, Enough to Keep Them Alive. Brushett, “Combler le fossé”; Newhook, “Fogo Island Film”; and Langford, “Jean Lagassé.” As I finish the last draft of this chapter, I am reading a new book by Tina Loo in which she brings together five stories of welfare state intervention and community development to masterfully show the 1950s and 1960s as a distinct period in Canadian democracy. Having heard her speak from this research and having read her Africville article, I see her influence on my thinking about the fourth moment in the history of democracy. See Loo, Moved by the State. Re: teaching, see Postman and Weingartner, Subversive Activity. Re: social work, see Jennison and Lundy, One Hundred Years, 249, 27–72. Re: medicine, see McWhinney, “Major Transformation.” Axelrod, Scholars and Dollars, 152–3. Several rich case studies of such conflictual negotiations are provided in Loo, Moved by the State. Elections Canada, “Political Financing,” Resource Centre, elections.ca/ content.aspx?section=res&dir=ces&document=part6&lang=e; and Democracy Watch, “Money in Politics campaign,” democracywatch.ca/ campaigns/money-in-politics-campaign/. I draw for examples here on Savoie’s Power. Ibid.,74 Ibid., chap. 7 Turner, Politics of Expertise, 111. Skocpol, Diminished Democracy. Silverman, Lies, Damn Lies and Viral Content. Fossum, Kastoryano, and Siim, “Negotiating Territoriality,” 6–7. For a particular example, see Richard M. Bird, “Global Taxes and International Taxation: Myth and Reality,” ictd Working Paper 28, January 2015, opendocs.ids.ac.uk.

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77 While urging here that all of these elements are necessary, I acknowledge that sorting out their most effective contributions remains a serious problem. An example of an important effort to do so is the work of politics scholar Frank Vibert, Rise of the Unelected. Although Vibert’s analysis rests more heavily on a fact/value distinction than historians of science would deem wise, he usefully sketches an institutional framework that is congenial to the anti-melodrama conclusions of this chapter. 78 I see community as potentially conducive to human welfare, but I also see community as requiring constant and deliberate efforts of construction – efforts which can be perverse in their effects. These tensions are well described in Banting and Kymlicka, Strains of Commitment. In that volume, the chapter by Jacob T. Levy (“Against Fraternity”) strikingly, and I think convincingly, argues that institutionally regulated partisan political conflict, rather than some general sense of solidarity, provides the best chance for managing disagreement in a cooperative way without unrealistically hoping to erase disagreement by means of constituting a meaningfully homogenous community. 79 For years, my conception of cooperative conflict has been influenced by Calhoun, “Standing for Something.” Management theory of various kinds works on this question. Two widely influential books that make a constructive contribution are Patterson et al. Crucial Conversations; and Fraser and Ury, Getting to Yes. Complementing these conventional works is the tactical insight of social movement activist Randy Shaw, Activist’s Handbook. Though Shaw’s emphasis is on protest, the book is about building power for use in politics. Being cooperative does not entail being weak. Methods for improving institutions and citizen capacity together in a reform project that I see as likely to produce cooperative conflict are described in Moscrop, Too Dumb for Democracy?

13 Reckoning with the Realities of History: The Politics of White Supremacy and the Expansion of Settler Democracy in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Henry Yu

As an afterthought to this insightful and provocative collection of chapters, I am inspired to think about what it means at this present moment, a little over 150 years after the creation of Canada as a nation, to reckon with the realities of its history as a democracy. I use the word “reckon” both in the sense of its Old English and Germanic meanings to calculate or recount for a payment or debt and in the prophetic sense of its use to describe a summative eschatological judgment, a divine “day of reckoning” at the end of days.1 This thought-piece might also be considered an attempt at a “dead reckoning” in the sense of how oceanic navigators used to calculate a present and future position by extrapolating from a previous position, combining this with information about course direction in the time since.2 By the end of this chapter, I hope that by framing the history of Canada as one in which the growth of democratic representation was inextricable from the expansion and contraction of the political deployment of white supremacy, the reader will be left to assess where, when, and who we are at this moment. As part of this chapter’s framing, I consider what happened in what is now Canada over the last three centuries within the context of the colonies of the British Empire, each of which became settler colonial nations: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. All four countries were produced from processes that displaced Indigenous peoples through mass migration and colonial settlement

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from other parts of the globe, and built new national imaginaries, legal structures, and state bureaucracies by shifting from imperial governance to localized governance. In all four settler colonial nations, organizing around political white supremacy was a core element of the transformation of governance.3 By depriving Indigenous peoples of their pre-existing forms of governance through colonizing their territories, at first by imposing imperial rule from afar and then through the creation of new settler nations that were seemingly self-governed, these four nations shared a parallel process. Those people considered worthy of political representation were limited, initially through the empowering primarily of white male landowning settlers, later by expanding political representation to other male migrants (and their descendants) legally considered white, and finally by including white women in the early twentieth century. In all four, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the political power of white supremacy was built through excluding those considered non-white from political representation and by the inequitable allocation of resources and opportunities that such representation created. All four settler societies were shaped by the use, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of the rhetoric of white supremacy to expand democratic representation from primarily white male landowners to non-landowning white male labourers. Consequently, until the late twentieth century (the late 1960s in the United States and Canada, the 1980s in Australia and New Zealand) the demographic growth in all four was shaped by racial preferences for the immigration of white migrants and the limitation and exclusion of non-whites. In other words, the valorization and expansion of democracy in all four settler nations was inextricable from the dynamic changes in the politics of white supremacy. The process of broadening political representation through an expansion of democratic participation was predicated for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the inclusion of new members in the body politic (e.g., increasing the participation and political power of white male workers through labour organizing) simultaneously with the active exclusion, and often the increasing deprivation of resources and opportunities for, others (e.g., the exclusion of non-white men and women from unions and professions or from receiving or owning pre-empted land taken from Indigenous peoples). The expansion of the franchise – to lower-class white men, to propertied then all white women, and then only much later to non-white

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men and women – can be and has often been narrated as a progressive growth of democratic rights. The struggle for suffrage can seem in hindsight to have been an inexorable trend of expansion to more and more people. Universal suffrage as a progressive story, a teleological historical process with an idealized end, shaped political storytelling in the twentieth century as a rallying narrative for what historian David Hollinger describes as the “widening” of the “circle of we.”4 In the early twenty-first century, have we reached the apex of democracy as a form of government and of expansive belonging? The question arises of whether the franchise equals democracy, but the expansion of voting has been powerfully equated with historical narratives of democratic progress. By the end of this chapter, I hope a schematic overview of how national narratives of democratic belonging were built upon political processes of racial exclusion and white supremacy allow this volume to be understood as a particularly Canadian political history, detailed in its regional realities and yet neither exceptional nor typical within the broader processes described. This specific moment is fraught both temporally and spatially – “when” we think we are in the longer story of “Canada” as a nation, and how that accords with the narratives of time that other white settler nations declare, as well as “where” we think we are as a geographically delimited territory shaped historically by multiple and distinctively regional processes of colonization. What does it mean to reckon with this history, and was the increasing repudiation of white supremacy in the last half of the twentieth century a reversal, a change in direction, or a staying of the course? As I argue, it has been all three. Depending upon how you define the meaning of the past in shaping the direction of the future, this present moment of reckoning matters. In a sense, this volume has its own moment in time and space – a reckoning with the realities of democracy as popular nationalist movements across Europe, the United States, Australia, and Canada promote a xenophobic fear of outsiders, movements that often do not bother hiding their reliance on appeals to racial purity and the threat of non-whites. The growth over the last half century of political movements that have been built around the grievances of “white nationalism” (to use one of the more recent terms to appear in popular discourses to describe various movements around the Atlantic) have been shaped by narratives of loss that cannot be understood without the broader historical

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framing of the expansion of the privileges of white supremacy. The affective appeal of such political discourses of nostalgic loss and incipient doom comes with its own form of reckoning. And though this appeal is arguably more limited in Canada than in other places, one must ask whether this limit is just a matter of time. In the end, I argue that, whether considering progressive political narratives (the expansion of democracy) or regressive narratives (the loss of status and privilege through the “replacement” of whites by non-whites), we stand at a time and place defined by how we understand the past and the directions in which we can move forward collectively.

d e m o c r at ic e xpansi on i n f o u r w h it e s e t t l er coloni es How should we understand the Confederation of the Dominion of Canada in 1867 as a process within the broader historical process of British imperial white settler colonies becoming independent nations? The first useful point is to see it as part of the territorial expansion of European colonialism and the extension of transatlantic migration into the Pacific region. Although the thirteen British colonies on the Atlantic that became the United States had separated from British rule in the late eighteenth century, the incorporation of new territories in the Pacific region (California, Oregon, Alaska, and Pacific Islands such as Hawai’i, Guam, Samoa, and the Philippines) took place in the nineteenth century, coinciding with the transformation of colonial territories in the Pacific (such as British Columbia, and Australian colonies such as Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania) into components of the new white settler nations of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The transformation from colonial settlements to settler nations cannot be understood without analyzing how the political tools of white supremacy justified the displacement of Indigenous peoples and the restriction of non-white migrants.5 All four nations grew demographically with the territorial and numerical expansion of white settlement through mass migration in the nineteenth century, and each of these settler nations used the power of the new states’ sovereignty over border crossing to ensure the dominance of white European settlement in territories taken from Indigenous peoples by creating and enforcing policies that constrained or curtailed Asian migrants between the 1880s and 1920s.6 By the end of the

Table 13.1 | Anti-Chinese legislation, 1880s 1881

Chinese Immigrants Act (restriction of numbers and poll tax), New Zealand

1882

Chinese Exclusion Act (no new Chinese labourers), United States

1885

Chinese Head Tax (tax on Chinese migrants), Canada

1880s

Various Australian colonies enact anti-Chinese legislation

Table 13.2 | Broad extension of anti-Chinese to anti-Asian legislation, 1900–20s

1899

Immigration Act (immigrant application in English), New Zealand

1901

Immigration Restriction Act (dictation test), Australia

1907

Chinese Immigrants Amendment Act (English language reading test and poll tax), New Zealand

1908

Gentleman’s Agreement restricts Japanese migration, United States

1908

Hayashi-Lemieux (Gentleman’s) Agreement restricts Japanese migration, Canada

1908

Continuous Passage regulation restricts South Asian migration, Canada

1924

National Origins Act blocks new Asian migration except from the Philippines, United States

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nineteenth century, for example, all four had enacted limitations on Chinese migration and, in the first decades of the twentieth century, had extended limitations to other Asian migrants. The above tables are a relatively value-neutral reckoning of legislative trends and patterns: that the laws were adopted is undeniable, with no argument as to their significance or to whether they were welcome or unwelcome as political acts.7 Indeed, this chapter assumes as its starting point the simple statement of historical reality that this occurred. The question to be answered is how our understanding of Canada’s history, present, and future should be shaped by the knowledge that the rise and spread of democracy, simply defined as an expansion of the “we” that was at any moment considered the body politic represented through the political process, was essentially predicated upon white supremacy. In Canada, the province of British Columbia drove much of the anti-Asian legislation, but the political tool of anti-Asian white supremacy supported a continent-wide historical process involving the clearance of Indigenous peoples onto reserves and the removal of their access to traditional lands and resources. This colonizing process had begun earlier along the Atlantic coast, but the new Canadian Parliament’s Indian Act, 1876, created a national system that codified and created a structure of legal regulations and state tools for the ongoing dispossession and deprivation of Indigenous peoples – a system that continues in Canada today. In much of what is now Canada, and particularly west of Manitoba, the Indian Act allowed for unilateral usurpation. For example, because much of the territory that was incorporated into Canada as British Columbia in 1871 was still in practice governed by Indigenous societies who had not, and would not, cede their land or resources in any manner to Canadian authority (or, before that, to the British Crown), the ongoing consequence has been that British Columbia remains unceded territory. Only a small amount of territory on Vancouver Island, negotiated by colonial governor James Douglas with local First Nations in the 1850s, had been covered by treaty agreements pertaining to use. The declaration by Canada’s Parliament in 1876 that Indigenous peoples in what is now British Columbia were to be registered and that the land they lived upon and the resources that they had used for thousands of years were no longer theirs was both unwarranted and unjustified by conquest or agreement.

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The history of the United States as a westward expanding empire in the nineteenth century, although complex in the details of local processes and constantly fraught with the expansion of slavery, was also characterized by treaties and promises serially made with Indigenous societies but broken by “democratically” elected governments in the interests of white settlers. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, Americans expanded westward across the Royal Proclamation Line, which had been set in 1763 in negotiations between the British Crown and Indigenous allies as the westward boundary for British colonial settlement. Stretching north-south along the ridge of the Adirondacks and Appalachian mountain ranges, this frontier border had perennially been tested by westering white migrants who ignored the authority not only of the British and the Americans but also, and especially, of the Indigenous peoples who continued to live in those lands. This was a squatter expansion, driven at first by illegal settlements crossing boundaries that the new United States had set in order to avoid conflict with Indigenous peoples west of them.8 In the Australian colonies, a declaration by British colonial authorities of Aboriginal territory as “terra nullius” (empty land) unilaterally justified the dispossession and displacement of Indigenous peoples.9 Although in 1840 the Treaty of Waitangi would shape the creation of New Zealand and the ongoing relations between Maori and pakeha (non-Maori Europeans), conflicts over the Maori and English texts and understandings of the treaty’s terms continued into the late twentieth century. The British interpretation of the treaty, embodied in the English text, was used by colonial authorities to justify colonization and produced effects similar to those produced by the unilateral imposition of white supremacy in Canada and Australia.10 The commonalities across all four of these settler nations reveal shared techniques and bureaucratic regimes of ethnic cleansing – the reserve system to clear Indigenous peoples from lands wanted for settlement, the restriction of Indigenous peoples’ mobility, the appropriation of Indigenous resources for the use of settlers, the deliberate destruction of the ability of Indigenous societies to maintain their way of life, and the implementation of residential schooling as a means of breaking the intergenerational transfer of Indigenous languages and cultures. These processes were locally implemented at different moments in different places, and many were revised, terminated, and replaced with other techniques

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and bureaucratic technologies, but the process of colonization that they served is ongoing. Most perversely, the violence and viciousness of these processes has been both justified and hidden through ongoing cultural misrepresentations of Indigenous peoples.11 The historiographic separation that settler national histories make between a “colonial period” and a subsequent “national period” has generally served to shunt the processes of colonization into a distant past, as if it was during the pre-national period that acts of dispossession and deprivation occurred, the implication being that the newborn nations began without the stain of colonialism, innocently inheriting the material benefits of what had been taken under previous policies.12 In Canada, this has been particularly apparent with the continuing designation of Crown lands, those territories and resources ostensibly acquired by the British and passed the new nation of Canada. To use an analogy, the legal act of endowing the new Dominion of Canada with authority over colonized Indigenous peoples, lands, and resources is akin to being given stolen goods and believing that the original act of theft by which they were acquired lost its significance when they were passed on to you. In the parlance of petty thievery, we are using fenced goods. This is not to say that there have not been important moments regarding the recognition of the limits of colonial dispossession and deprivation as Indigenous peoples have used the courts to undermine legal justifications of colonization. Some examples in Canada include Supreme Court cases such as Calder v. British Columbia (1975), Regina (the “Queen”) v. Sparrow (1990), Delgamuukw v. Regina (1997), and Tsilhqot’in Nation v. Regina (2014) – a series of decisions that built on each other to recognize that “Aboriginal title” and Indigenous rights to resources existed prior to colonization and that Indigenous struggles in multiple fields, including the legal arena, would continue to be salient. In 1975 in New Zealand, the Waitangi Tribunal was a high-profile moment in a long and continuing struggle to recognize Maori sovereignty and the limits of colonial claims, including, for example, the recognition that Maori interpretations of the Treaty of Waitangi, including those passed on in community oral traditions, could be more historically accurate than versions written down in English by British negotiators.13 The point is that colonization has been an ongoing structure and continual process rather than a single moment or event.14 Singular examples such as court cases or tribunals and commissions might best be

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considered as those moments when struggles against this ongoing structure erupt. When considering Canada’s national history within this broader context, we see that one of its enduring characteristic is denial, a narrative assumption about who or what Canada is that ignores the salience and significance of the continuity of the struggle for Indigenous rights. Comparing Canada and New Zealand over the last half century, it is interesting to note the very different trajectories that the formal recognition of bicultural Maori-Pakeha forms of governance have generated. New Zealand/Aotearoa has undertaken a reckoning with its past that has changed the direction of its future. Although still a recent shift in direction, continuing experiments in shared governance in New Zealand highlight the enduring continuity of the assumptions of unilateral sovereignty over Indigenous territory and resources that continue to mark the other three settler nations. Before the 1970s, however, all four settler nations used the politics of white supremacy to build similar ongoing colonial structures. In relation to the question of democracy, then, how did migration, settlement, and discourses of white supremacy and racial exclusion work through “democratic” processes to accomplish this?

race a n d t h e d e p r ivat ions of democracy What is a “democracy”? And was Canada democratic when it was formed? Did it become democratic at some moment in its history? Has it become more democratic in the last century? How has this democracy been understood, and promoted, by different actors at different times? In abstract, these are questions that this volume attempts to provoke and upon which its chapters provide various perspectives. I would argue that one of the most useful ways to think about democracy in Canada involves recognizing that it was advanced primarily through deprivation. In all four settler nations, the history of democratic expansion was one in which white supremacy was both a means and an end. White supremacy justified the appropriation of Indigenous territory and resources for white settlers; white supremacy was a tool for organizing new migrants into labour unions and political parties; white supremacy was a tool for defining who belonged, and who did not, in these new nations; white supremacy helped determine who would receive government resources – indeed, it helped determine who government was

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designed to serve and who should be legally excluded or become the target of legalized racial discrimination. In all four settler nations, the great engines of nineteenth-century democratization, from Jacksonian democracy in the 1830s in the United States through to the expansion of political power through labour organizing in the late 1800s and early 1900s, were fuelled by the gasoline of white supremacy. If it is difficult at the present moment to grapple with this, the fault lies not in the historical reality but in how what happened has been either conveniently forgotten or euphemistically explained as mistakes, aberrations, or the result of a different morality that existed in the past. The difficulty in the story is in the telling. By the 1830s, the power of the federal government of the United States, which had generally been used to control westering settlements, had been captured by an expansive new set of voters. The rise of Jacksonian democracy, named for General Andrew Jackson, the military veteran who rode the wave of these new voters first to Congress and then to the presidency in 1830, illustrates most clearly the political formula that intimately connected the expansion of democracy and the expansion of white supremacy. Historian David Roediger famously describes Jacksonian democracy as a “herrenvolk republic,” using the term for “master race” that justified nineteenth-century Europe’s colonialism and twentieth-century Nazi Germany’s racial politics. The expansion of democratic power from landowning white men to include the interests of small farmers, frontier settlers, urban artisans, and an ever-growing population of male European migrants was predicated on organizing their political interests around white supremacy. As a number of historians of the nineteenth-century United States have described, mass popular culture representations of non-whites that reinforced their racial inferiority were an essential political tool for the organizing of new voters around self-interests defined by race. “Blackface minstrelsy,” a popular practice involving white performers using face paint to act black, is an iconic example of how entertainment that created laughter and joy in audiences helped cement emotional attachments to feeling “white.” Laughing at the expense of others is an effective, arguably even a crucial, tool in helping create a sense of racial solidarity. Although the focus in Roediger’s iconic study is the metaphoric “wages of whiteness” – the perceived economic benefits of white supremacy – perhaps more powerful in analyses of the use

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of popular cultural representations of race as a political organizing tool are the affective appeals to desire, loathing, and loss.15 By denigrating and dehumanizing another set of people as derisively undeserving, laughter served as a form of medicine for mendacity. An ambition to have more, even at the expense of others, or a fear of losing ground, became enduring weapons of white supremacy in the tool kit of democratic expansion. Scholars and intellectuals who have admired the spirit of egalitarian democratic representation that the Age of Jackson empowered have long struggled to reckon with the efficacy of the widespread use of white supremacy as one of its primary political tools. Alexander Saxton, the great historian of the anti-Chinese movement in California and its use of white supremacy in organizing labour, captured this paradoxical appeal of the inequity of race in the egalitarian expansion of democracy. In his iconic study, The Indispensable Enemy, Saxton details the role of popular newspapers in fomenting race hatred towards the Chinese in California during the 1870s and 1880s. The political rise of Denis Kearney, the recently arrived Irish migrant in San Francisco whose sandlot agitation exhorted Irish and Italian migrants to organize with other recent European migrants into the white Workingmen’s Party, provided the blueprint for how young labourers could join together politically to capture the powers of the state. As with the expansion of democracy during the 1830s in the expanding eastern United States, the growing political power of the labour movement on the west coast was built with white supremacy.16 In his summative work The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, Saxton describes the role of racial representations in creating a sense of political solidarity and belonging among white labourers. Cartoons in Californian newspapers making fun of pigtailed Chinese men, dime store caricatures of Indians in feather headdresses, blackface entertainers pretending to be happy singing slaves – all of these amusing entertainments served to help advance herrenvolk democracy by providing the common-sense feeling that those who were to be deprived deserved their deprivation.17 And if the process of deprivation came about through a democratic process of voting and representation, then the moral authority of the democratic majority would provide its political legitimacy. Did the political process that Saxton describes also occur in Canada? Was the seeming paradox between the politics of white supremacy and the expansion of democracy also a feature of the

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other three settler nations? British Columbia serves as a useful heuristic example. The disenfranchisement of non-whites, in particular Chinese migrants and Indigenous peoples who already made up a significant proportion of the population immediately after British Columbia joined Confederation in 1871, was one of the first acts of deprivation on the part of the new provincial legislature. But it was one among many. Disenfranchisement meant that, for over half of Canada’s history, neither those registered as “Indians” under the federal Indian Act, nor those categorized as Chinese, would be allowed to vote or stand for political office. Chinese did not reacquire the right to vote in federal elections until 1947, and those registered with Indian “status” could not vote until 1960. Although the deprivation resulting from the act of choosing political representation was significant, it was the myriad consequences of being the target of a legalized white supremacy that was particularly innovative. As in California during the same period, those who could vote had the potential ability to capture political control of state mechanisms and use them to further deprive or curtail the opportunities of non-voting non-whites. A plethora of racially discriminatory laws from the 1870s through the 1940s were enacted by organizing voters through the political tool of white supremacy.18 It may be useful to share an instance of how organizing around white supremacy could help whites gain control of the legal power of the state for ends that were seemingly mundane and that yet could have a profound impact on the lives of non-whites. Extensive and successful local systems of vertically integrated Chinese-run farms, produce distributors, grocery stores, and door-to-door vegetable peddlers were a feature of Cantonese migrant networks all around the Pacific. Whether in Dunedin on the South Island in New Zealand, Sydney in New South Wales, Stockton and San Francisco in California, Seattle in Washington, Honolulu in Hawai’i, or Victoria and Vancouver in British Columbia, Chinese migrants from Guangdong in south China dominated local produce industries. This economic success attracted the attention of migrants from Britain and Europe who could use the legal powers of the state to help eliminate or harass Chinese people. In the first half of the twentieth century, for instance, municipal and provincial authority over licensing and trade in British Columbia was often used to target Chinese-owned businesses. This could be done without mentioning explicit intent, even though the goals were clear to all concerned.

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In 1928, the bc provincial legislature passed an act that gave authority to the members of the Trade Licence Board to “refuse to issue, continue, transfer, or renew license to do business to any person, firm or corporation if in the opinion of the Board it be not advisable in the public interests of the municipality for which it functions to do so.” Immediately after the passage of this regulation, the Trade Licence Board began targeting Chinese businesses, such as vegetable peddlers, by refusing to renew their licences. Within a year, the door-to-door on-foot delivery of vegetables by Chinese peddlers was eliminated. In British Columbia, marketing boards also targeted individual Chinese-run farms through seemingly neutral bylaws forbidding the sale of produce transported across municipal lines or through severely limiting the acreage on which Chinese farmers were allowed to grow popular vegetables for market. With little political recourse to fight the legislation, Chinese Canadians turned to other forms of resistance and subversion, including clever use of the courts. One of the best examples of this is the so-called “Potato War” that took place in Vancouver and other Lower Mainland municipalities in the 1930s. In the Lower Mainland, Chinese Canadian farmers came up with an innovative challenge to a bylaw forbidding sales of produce transported from their rural farms across municipal boundaries into Vancouver. Under the cover of night, potatoes grown all across the region were brought into the city of Vancouver and mixed together into a single pile. When the Chinese distributors were fined for breaking the law, their lawyers challenged the province’s lawyers to prove that a particular potato sold in Vancouver had indeed been transported from another municipality. The discriminatory bylaw had been specifically aimed at the well-organized distribution systems created by Chinese Canadians, targeting their ability to bring produce to urban markets from farms all around British Columbia. Those targeted by the legislation identified a potential weak point in the law, however, in its separation of the act of transportation and the act of sale. Collectively, they innovated, organized, and shifted their distribution practices to exploit that weakness and creatively defeated the legal power of the state arrayed against them. Their victory in court, however, was just one skirmish in the ongoing iterative cycle of battles that lasted for generations, not all of which they would or could win. Because of the capture of state legislatures by those organizing around white supremacy, racial exclusion and racial discrimination could become both a tool and a

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political end in itself. Courts were a limited means of recourse for the targets of white supremacy when the law itself was a tool in the hands of democratic politics built around white supremacy. In an oral history conducted by researcher Denise Fong in 2019, Colonel Howe Lee of Burnaby, British Columbia, shared a story of how non-whites tried to mitigate the effects of white supremacy.19 In the 1940s, Chinese Canadian farmers in Armstrong (in the bc interior) were forbidden by their regional marketing board to grow “Western” vegetables such as carrots or lettuce that they had been profitably transporting and selling to non-Chinese customers in Vancouver. Rather than leaving their farmland and warehouses empty and their regional distribution system idle, the Chinese farmers in Armstrong began growing “Chinese vegetables” such as sui choy for market for the first time. Chinese restaurants, which had almost universally used “Western” vegetables on their menus until this point, supported the targeted farmers and distributors by changing their menus and beginning to use Chinese vegetables, thus introducing and marketing these ingredients to their customers in more “authentic” Chinese dishes. The fact that farmers and restaurateurs were often cousins and village relatives from the same Cantonese migrant networks around the Pacific was undoubtedly a factor in their ability to collectively organize and act in concert in response to anti-Chinese discrimination. It provided the means for creating participatory democratic communities that grew out of the struggle against the formal polities arrayed against them, a point to which I return at the end of this chapter. This seemingly minor anecdote about Chinese Canadian farmers switching from “non-Chinese” to “Chinese” vegetables in the 1940s due to racially discriminatory agricultural bylaws reveals how the long history of iterative battles against white supremacy were often expressed through every-day struggles for life. With the legal power of the state in the hands of whites, white supremacy as a dynamic ever-changing process could be implemented in seemingly trivial and innocuous ways, continually assailing the dignity and economic livelihoods of those targeted. The strength and resilience of those targeted, and their ability to collectively organize and fight back, cannot be analyzed without understanding the manner in which targeted communities themselves built bonds of trust and obligation and shared risk.

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f r a n c h is in g w h it e supremacy: vo t in g a n d r it ua l s of democracy It is tempting to focus on the act of voting as the primary indicator of political participation and belonging – as the essential element of formal representation in defining a democracy. Indeed, in the four settler nations I am discussing, the symbolic act of voting became historically important as a civic ritual affirming the legitimacy of governments to pass laws and to rule on the behalf of voters. Setting aside philosophical questions of whether voting is actually important in deriving democratic legitimacy for a government (a question posed by many of the contributors to this volume), it might be useful to ask: If the egalitarian expansion of democracy and the politics of white supremacy developed in concert in the four settler nations being discussed here, how and why did the ideal of voting by white settlers, in the interests of white settlement, end? Or, perhaps more accurately, how was it that, by the late twentieth century, we began to understand the growth of democracy as the repudiation of racial discrimination? The Cold War period has often been analyzed by historians, especially in the United States, as a moment when rhetorical justifications for the difference between “Western democracies” aligned with the United States and “communist” governments aligned with the Soviet Union became increasingly important.20 Political propaganda generated by the United States and the Soviet Union, aimed at both international and domestic audiences, was of course varied in the decades after the Second World War, but American propaganda in particular used “freedom” and “democracy” as banner words to differentiate the United States from the Soviet Union and from “communism.” The diplomatic and political alignment of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as Cold War allies with the United States generally held firm between the 1950s and the 1980s, especially in comparison to others during the same period. All four nations emerged from the Cold War period having been shaped, to various degrees, by their respective rhetorical battles. The idea that a government should derive its legitimacy from voters, and that representatives chosen periodically by voters embodied that legitimacy to rule, became powerfully associated with political alignment with the United States, and the Civil Rights movement took on global significance as a litmus test for hypocrisy. From a

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political science perspective, the abstract concept of a democratic republic could be derived from ideal principles; from a historical perspective, during the Cold War, the United States’ ability to shape understandings of what constituted an ideal “democracy” lay in the successful propagation of idealized American examples. For instance, phrases used by Abraham Lincoln in his 1863 Gettysburg Address describing a government “of the People, by the People, for the People” became common examples used in stories telling of how, in 1776, the American Declaration of Independence created a “new birth of freedom” that endured as an ideal through the trials of war.21 American propaganda used the most effective techniques from consumer advertising and popular culture to spread the idea that American freedom and democracy were ideals by which the world could be inspired and could emulate.22 The powerful political narrative of nationhood that was propagated, that the story of the United States was of a nation built around a set of universal ideals maintained through the exigencies and corruption of time, became not only a powerful domestic rallying point amidst the vicious politics of McCarthyism and anti-communism but also an international rallying point through the propaganda machinery of the US State Department. A set of Harvard historians created the research underpinnings of this national history: Arthur Schlesinger Jr contributed the idea that a consensus around core ideals provided a central political thread through US history, helping prevent the dangers of ideological fanaticism from both the political right and the political left, which had characterized French Revolutionary politics and authoritarian regimes all around the globe. American democracy was steadfast in its endurance as an idealistic beacon for the world from the first moments of its presentation as a shining “city upon the hill,” which historian Perry Miller argues was the essence of what the Puritan founders of New England had created for the rest of the world to see. What Miller analyzes as a uniquely odd and lost worldview contained in the puritanical writings of three generations of Protestant ministers in the seventeenth century became, in the Cold War, propaganda machinery for the political narrative of an unbroken American ideal stretching from Puritan Pilgrims to patriotic anti-communism. Arguably, the idea that a nation must have some kind of ideal at the heart of its national history was not a feature of the nation-building processes of Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. Indeed, for most

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of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the need for a national history that was somehow distinctive, unique, and exceptional, akin to the national narratives being advertised for the United States during the Cold War, did not have the same kind of appeal in the other settler nations. Later twentieth-century inventions, such as Australian nationhood birthed by its history as a penal colony, or the story of Canada as a nice and polite hockey-loving country, have sparked some superficial sense of patriotic pride in a manner vaguely reminiscent of American nationalism. Their weakness in comparison to the American invention, however, says as much about their ability to provide an affectively appealing but empty consensus as it does the relatively weak desire for a central core to nationhood. Even if the substantive historical basis of any imagining of Canada as a democracy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries century was at best delusional, as this volume demonstrates, by the late twentieth century Canada seemed definitively to be a Western democracy. How did this happen? The anti-apartheid movement that became so popular in Canada during the 1980s is a telling example of how the self-definition of Canada as a democracy became popular through its differentiation from those nations that were not. South Africa’s apartheid regime, created in 1948, borrowed a number of white supremacist policies from the four settler nations discussed in this chapter. The disenfranchisement of non-whites, separate “reserves” for non-whites, racial segregation of public services and facilities, racial segregation of residential areas, racial discrimination in employment and professional status – all of these had been implemented with direct knowledge of how effective these techniques had been not only in the American South but also in British Columbia and Australia. South Africa, in a sense, was a herrenvolk white-minority settler nation tacking against the trend that had taken hold in the four white-majority settler nations. After the Second World War, the genocidal racism of the Nazi enemy had given white supremacy a bad reputation. All four settler nations seemed to be engaged in dismantling racial apartheid in the last half of the twentieth century, even as South Africa was entrenching it. By the 1980s, South Africa had become the symbol of racial apartheid and its undemocratic political underpinnings. In order to understand how ironic this was historically, the fervour of anti-apartheid movements in Canada need to be understood within the broader framework of race and democracy sketched above.23

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A retroactive act of imagination, which held that all four settler nations were somehow representative democracies in kinship and alliance with the United States, and different from the Soviet Union, developed during the Cold War as a by-product of anti-communism. The ideal of freedom and democracy as the unifying element among nations aligned with the United States during the Cold War had been rhetorically useful in differentiating the “West” (including postwar US allies such as Japan, South Korea, South Vietnam, Taiwan, and West Germany) from the Communist Bloc countries of the “East” (including those behind the “Iron Curtain” in Europe, such as East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia) as well as from anti-colonial communist movements in Asia that had created postcolonial governments in China, North Korea, and North Vietnam. Freedom as an abstract ideal worked well in valorizing individuals daring to speak against government authority and those suffering from government persecution, but it could also be used to undermine the authority and power of governments in the West, particularly in settler nations that had been built around white supremacy, where access to resources and representation in government had purposefully excluded nonwhites and used the power of the state to persecute racial minorities. Could non-whites excluded and suppressed by legalized racism not appeal to the same abstract ideals of freedom, equal rights, and democratic representation proffered by Cold War propaganda? That non-whites did effectively use these rhetorical openings to help break down the legal structures of white supremacy is clear. This was despite the viciousness of legalized white supremacy in Canada at the same moment that South Africa legalized apartheid. For instance, those racially categorized as “Japanese” in Canada had a much more difficult time than did their counterparts in the United States during the Second World War. Japanese Canadian removal, incarceration, and exile was much harsher than the internment and removal process endured by Japanese Americans. Japanese Americans were allowed to leave internment camps before the war ended and many returned to the west coast after 1945; Japanese Canadians, in contrast, were barred from returning to the west coast and from inclusion in Canada’s newly enacted citizenship until 1949, spending longer in legal exile from their homes on the west coast after the war than they did during the war. However, the greatest difference between the treatment of residents racially categorized as Japanese in Canada as opposed to in the United States was that the Canadian

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federal government, in cooperation with British Columbia’s provincial government, empowered its Security Commission to sell off the property and belongings of Japanese Canadians to finance their removal and to ensure that they had nothing to return to. As argued by Laura Ishiguro, Nicole Yakashiro, and Will Archibald, the permanent ethnic cleansing of Japanese Canadians from the west coast stands with Canada’s reserve system and its removal of Indigenous First Nations from their territories as iconic elements in the political success of the magical alchemy of white supremacy.24 As Patricia Roy argues in The Triumph of Citizenship, after the Second World War, the appeal to citizenship for politically excluded Asian Canadians worked relatively well for Chinese Canadians and some other non-white minorities mere decades after vicious antiAsian politics had justified the very laws being dismantled. Appeals by Chinese Canadians and other Asian Canadians for political inclusion, as noted by historians Tim Stanley, John Price, Laura Madokoro, and Lisa Mar, had only had limited success in the early twentieth century in struggles against anti-Asian legislation. And yet Chinese Canadian military veterans and their political allies were able to successfully lobby for Chinese Canadians to be included in the 1947 legal definition of national citizenship.25 Even as racial discrimination was expunged from the laws governing the franchise, a century of exclusionary immigration policies had created a polity whose majority was European in origin, and so white supremacy continued to be viable as a political principle in electoral politics. The first Chinese Canadian member of Parliament, military veteran Douglas Jung, was elected in 1957, even as nonwhites remained a minority of voters both in his riding in Vancouver and throughout other ridings across Canada. Political calculations that even small numbers of voters could affect the electoral result in “first-past-the-post” elections did empower those considered to be members of racial minorities and led to the adoption of Canada’s first anti-discrimination laws. In British Columbia, provincial legislation prohibiting racial discrimination in employment and housing was passed for the first time in the 1960s. We might pause for a second to ponder this development within the historical framework we have outlined. For a century of Canada’s existence as a nation, racial discrimination was legally sanctioned and promoted by all three levels of government. In other words, two-thirds of Canada’s history has been characterized by the formal coupling of the nation’s

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laws and white supremacy in determining such measures as what jobs were available to non-whites and where non-whites could live. Across the four white settler nations, white supremacy in immigration policy was also slowly ending. In 1965, the United States became the first of the four white settler nations to replace its preferential immigration policy for migrants from northern and western Europe, laws initially implemented in the National Origins Act, 1924. In Canada, preference for white migration was not removed from immigration policy until 1967. In Australia, the formal “White Australia” policy for immigration that excluded Asians was not ended until 1973. New Zealand enacted immigration reforms to end racial preferences in 1987. This reveals that, from a historical point of view, the expansion of who was imagined as belonging to the nation has been organized around white supremacy for the majority of the time that all four of these settler nations have existed. That is their shared reality.

f ro m o u r a pa rt h e id to thei r aparthei d: 1 9 4 8 to 1984 By the 1950s, only a few years after Canada’s Citizenship Act, 1947, had created an abstract universal category of citizenship that could include non-whites, arguments against apartheid in South Africa were being made in Canada – even as successive Canadian governments did little to challenge South Africa’s apartheid regime. It was only in the 1980s, when the anti-apartheid movement had achieved a high level of popular support in Canada, that the federal government joined other nations in sanctioning South Africa’s apartheid government. How is it then possible for so many Canadians to believe that we have been on the progressive side of history in terms of broader struggles for democracy?26 The narrative magic of retroactive delusion is one of the astounding properties of historical imagination. As an example, we might consider a newspaper article written in 2013 in the Globe and Mail entitled “Canada’s Political Fight against Apartheid.” The article explains that, “Canada, a strong foe of apartheid,” was one of the first nations visited by anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela in 1990 after his recently being released from decades of imprisonment by the South African government. Mandela was invited by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney to speak to a special joint session of Parliament. According to the article:

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That speech, which Mr. Mulroney later called one of the more cherished memories of his political life, marked the public recognition of the role that Canada had played in the political fight against apartheid. The campaign stretched over 30 years and several political leaders, from John Diefenbaker in the 1960s to Mr. Mulroney, Joe Clark and a very young Alison Redford in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Less than a year after his Canadian Bill of Rights passed in the House of Commons, Mr. Diefenbaker turned his sights on racism elsewhere in the world. At the Commonwealth Conference held in London in March, 1961, he took a stand against apartheid, South Africa’s institutionalized subjugation of blacks. Six months earlier, in a whites-only referendum, South Africa had voted to reject parliamentary democracy and become a republic – yet it still wanted to be part of the Commonwealth. Other members were divided, so Mr. Diefenbaker proposed a clever feint: that, instead of rejecting South Africa, they declare racial equality an essential principle of the Commonwealth. Rather than renounce apartheid, South Africa withdrew its application, making Mr. Diefenbaker the “hero” of the hour, according to journalist Peter Newman’s book, Renegade in Power. Quoting the London Observer, he writes: “Not only did he provide a bridge between the old white dominions and the new non-white members; he also demonstrated the importance of somebody giving a lead.” Young politicos at the time, Mr. Mulroney and Mr. Clark were strongly influenced by Mr. Diefenbaker’s example. When they were in power, they “insisted on bringing the South African issue to the forefront of foreign policy,” Mr. Clark, who was prime minister (1979-1980) and then secretary of state for external affairs in the Mulroney cabinet, recalled in a 2012 interview with the Globe and Mail. “We quite rightly thought of this as part of our heritage and obligation.” Mr. Mulroney took up the challenge after coming to power in September, 1984. He writes in his Memoirs that apartheid was “anathema to me,” equating it with “the same degree of disgust that I attached to the Nazis – the authors of the most odious offence in modern history.”27

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I quote this article extensively to allow it to tell its story of Canada’s role in anti-apartheid struggles in its own words. My point is not to question the sincerity of the four individuals, or of the article’s author, with regard to their recollections of their motivations or their actions pertaining to apartheid. Rather, it is to highlight to readers the implausibility of the story’s portrayal of Canada’s history of fighting South African apartheid.28 In the postwar years, the newly organized Commonwealth would welcome new “non-white members” by means of a clever diplomatic trick. The former colonies of the British Empire would be an inclusive club, and they would welcome the newly decolonized states that had ended British rule, some through violent overthrow and others through negotiation spurred by the threat of violence. The “old white dominions,” such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the products of over a century of herrenvolk democracy, magically elided their own histories of white supremacy by adopting racial equality as an essential principle of, and requirement for admission to, the new Commonwealth. A clever “feint” indeed: the white supremacist apartheid regime of South Africa was now the one excluded from the club, and, to everyone’s relief, that state chose to withdraw its application for membership. Given the reality that non-whites in Canada had legally acquired voting rights in 1947, literally one year before the establishment of apartheid in South Africa in 1948, and that “Status Indians” under the Indian Act acquired voting rights in 1960, less than a year before Prime Minister Diefenbaker’s stand for racial equality, just what is this story of the history of Canada’s political ideals supposed to teach us? I want to be clear that I am not impugning the personal principles of any of the political leaders named in the Globe and Mail article. It is no coincidence that John Diefenbaker was the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada that welcomed Douglas Jung as a candidate in 1957 or that he was the prime minister who appointed Jung as the representative for Canada at the United Nations after becoming Canada’s first Chinese Canadian mp . It is also no coincidence that Brian Mulroney was the prime minister who apologized in Parliament on behalf of all Canadians in 1988 for the removal of Japanese Canadians from British Columbia in 1942. I have no doubt that moral principles motivated all four in their political careers and that they are all good people.

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The point I want to make is that one of the key features of the ongoing colonial structure of Canada’s political system is a belief in the benevolence of those who rule in the name of the public good. However, well-intended decision makers and administrators may come up with policies that lead, to consequences both honourable and horrific, and one of the enduring features of the colonial systems of authority and governance inherited by Canada is the unilateral imposition of policy upon those who have had limited or no means of disagreeing with it. Indian residential schools were arguably implemented out of the good intentions of those who thought they were a good idea – this did little to mitigate their genocidal effects upon those who had no say in their implementation and who suffered as a consequence of someone else’s decisions. One of the tragic traits of the relative absence of the voices of “the people” in Canada’s political practices has been the tendency of benevolent rulers, no matter how well intentioned, to fail to adequately understand the lives of those they rule. As a number of chapters in this volume detail, the expansion of democracy in Canada has often been driven by those who have been left out of decision making, and the capture of state power by those formerly excluded has generally been at the expense of the authority of those who rule. But has this been a common understanding of Canada’s political history? The 2013 Globe and Mail article about Canada’s “fight against apartheid” ends on a telling note. Alison Redford, the article explains, had been asked by those creating the new post-apartheid South Africa for advice on nation-building: “They would often turn to Canada in a critical way and say, ‘This is what you did: Explain it to me. Why did you do that? How does it work? What are the problems?’” Ms. Redford recalled. These questions have had long-term ramifications. They forced Ms. Redford to examine Canada’s system and make sure she understood it so she could participate in the conversation. That process of looking at her country from halfway around the world helped to shape her thinking when she entered politics in Alberta a decade ago. Like a boomerang, Canada’s stand against apartheid had come full circle as a political influence.29 What historical lessons did Premier Redford learn when she examined “Canada’s system” and made “sure she understood it”? Did she

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think about the long history of racial apartheid that Canada had quietly begun repudiating at the very moment South Africa began to borrow and implement it?

r e p u d iat in g w h it e supremacy: doe s r e c o n c il iat io n r e qui re a reckoni ng? Democracy is a form of reckoning, a counting of votes, but it is also a counting of souls deemed human, worthy of having a say in how their lives are ruled. Counting votes, determining who should vote, and how to represent those votes – through proportional representation, “one man one vote,” first past the post, wards versus at large representatives, and on and on – the science of politics as a form of knowledge has examined and analyzed systems of governance and their comparative effects and consequences over the same centuries that saw the development of the settler democracies discussed here. The calculus of democratic representation can be stunningly inhumane in its mathematical precision: one of the best/worst examples being the US Constitutional Convention’s debate in 1787 over how enslaved African Americans should be counted towards the proportional distribution of Congressional seats in the House of Representatives, leading to the infamous 3/5 compromise for counting enslaved people as residents for the purposes of political representation. Slaves being considered three-fifths human is an extreme example, but the democratic systems developed in the four settler nations continually calculated the relative democratic value of men versus women, rich versus poor, adults versus children, citizens versus foreigners, and white versus non-white. Whose voices are worthy of being heard, whose souls are worth counting? This is an interesting moment in time for the four white settler nations under discussion. For well over half of the histories of each, overt legal white supremacy was the law of the land. For the last half century, all four have been repudiating the politics of white supremacy upon which they were built. Those who were excluded must now be reconciled with those who did the excluding. Is it any wonder that it has been a struggle to reckon with these pasts? Who we are now has been the product of this shared history; similarly, who we will become will be the product of this shared history. Historian David Hollinger uses the question “how wide the circle of we?” to describe the progressive expansion among American thinkers

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regarding who could and should be considered worthy citizens: from white Anglo Saxon Protestants; to “ethnic” white Europeans, including Catholics, Jews, Slavs, and Armenians; and, eventually, in the recent past, to non-whites. Hollinger’s phrase captures powerfully the role of those who were left out of the “we” when forcing everyone to rethink the bounds of their belonging.30 The expansion of the “we” in this telling has been predicated upon the challenge brought by those who were excluded, struggling against the consequences of being left out, in alliance with those who believed that the privileges of belonging were a universal right that should not be restricted to themselves. The idea and the ideal of universal democratic agency, that we should each of us have a say in how we are governed, has been a powerful political principle for organizing those who believe in the ideal precisely because they have been excluded and those who believe in it on principle alone. The hope for a broader, more fair and just democracy, a wider circle of “we” that would embrace the needs of everyone, is alluring and persuasive and augurs a better future for all. Such hopes provide motivation for our young and a call to action to broaden the benefits of belonging. But what if many of the “democratic movements that fought” for the franchise in Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand in the nineteenth century were not particularly interested in raising “the quality of life for everyone”? What if they succeeded in expanding the bounds of democratic agency by increasing the rewards for themselves at the expense of others? A telling example only vaguely thought about in Canada is how political movements for women’s suffrage across all four nations universally claimed an advance for women but in practice almost invariably meant only for “white women.” As the formerly enslaved Sojourner Truth asked so trenchantly in 1851 of her fellow American suffragettes, “Ain’t I a woman?” The implicit answer (no) continues to plague women of colour – particularly in Canada – as advances in gender equity and inclusion often exacerbate rather than mitigate racial gaps.31 As this chapter sketches, the capture of the state’s power in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries supplied both the means and the ends of implementing white supremacy for the benefit of increasing majorities of European migrant settlers, both men and women. Is it enough to sincerely say that “we don’t believe in that anymore”? The deprivations of democracy in our past require not just the recognition of their reality, including the effective expansion of democracy using the political tools of white supremacy, but also a

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reckoning of the costs and consequences of that process. The legitimacy of democracy, not as an ideal but as a communal social practice moving forward, requires a reckoning with those deprived in the past. This is not a backward-looking exercise but a forward-looking process, without which we cannot hope for a moral legitimacy moving ahead. It is precisely because the democratic past created inequity and deprivation that its consequences cannot be merely wished away by repudiating the goals that were pursued. This is the outcome of the dead reckoning of our past mapped in this chapter. This is where we have come from, this is where we are. Without arguing the realities of democracy in other places and other times (Ancient Greece, present-day Europe, etc.), but building out of the realities charted in this collection, I argue that understanding what happened “here” in Canada was historically a regional manifestation of what was also happening in the other settler nations politically organized around white supremacy. At first, democracy was an ideal used in specific ways to expand the economic and affective benefits of white supremacy. Material benefits such as property ownership and the legal protection of the courts were tangible; however, less measurable, yet perhaps even more important, were those benefits that arose due to their being denied to others: opportunity and possibility, being considered human, emotional resources such as hope, intangible possessions such as the inheritance of identity bequeathed through language and culture, even the mundane benefits of a sense of normalcy and belonging at the expense of those denigrated and excluded for being abnormal. It is the tragic paradox of our democratic origins that so much of what “we” claim as a national inheritance was achieved by depriving resources, both material and affective, from those outside a circle of belonging defined by white supremacy.32 In the present moment, for all those who enjoy the benefits of being Canadian, and for those who will become new Canadians by engaging in a sense of belonging through adopting the term “we” – where do we go from here?

re al i t y, r e c o g n it io n , a n d relearni ng the past In Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which describes Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, there is an oft-quoted description of the “Angel of History” looking backward: “Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe,

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which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet … a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.”33 At the time of writing, Benjamin had witnessed the vicious rise of Hitler and Nazism through the use of the new mass communication technologies of the radio and cinema, the deadly violence and bureaucratic rationality and efficiency of state-controlled anti-Semitism, and the ruthless military power of goose-stepping stormtroopers marching in perfect unison. It might be understandable in that context why there seemed to be no possibility of being able to look forward with hope. How could historical progress not seem an unfolding disaster? It is not my goal to describe the nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury expansion of democracy in Canada and other settler nations as a catastrophic pile of white supremacist rubble. If there is an analogy to be drawn in imagining what the Angel of History would see in looking back at the reality of the racially exclusionary democracy built in Canada, it would be that the angel would be turned the other way, looking only forward and unable to see the rubble of destruction wrought by the progress of history. The winds might be blowing just as hard, but the wings would soar as if of their own accord, an angel of goodness and reason ever rising with barely any comprehension of what has been left in its wake. It strikes me that the narratives of progress and future potential promised by the white settler nationalisms that created Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States were wondrous in their alchemy, magically transforming the thefts of the past into the gilded gifts of the future. If we turn around, will we be able to bear witness to what we see? In Canada, from 2008 to 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which examined the devastating effects of the Indian residential school system, galvanized many Canadians across the continent. That it was forced upon the Canadian government as a court-ordered action resulting from a class action lawsuit brought on behalf of survivors tells us perhaps how hard it is to make our Angel of Progress turn to look back over its shoulder. So where are we, and when are we, and which way are we heading? We live in a time of reckoning. This is the moment of history in which we find ourselves. If the question of “where” we are is answered by

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the word “Canada,” then our reality is that of a nation built through an ongoing process of colonial theft, a possessive belonging stolen from the territories and resources of Indigenous peoples who were here for tens of thousands of years before migrants came from other parts of the world. The question of “when” we are, I would argue, is at a precarious moment. For two-thirds of our history as a nation we have efficiently and effectively implemented white supremacy; the next one-third was characterized by a quiet change of course with the magical illusion that we have somehow always been on this path. But, in blindly moving forward and not truly understanding the reality of the pile of rubble that we have left behind, we risk losing our way. Through formal apologies and the political acknowledgment of what we have done in our past, we have been trying to recognize the reality of who we have been. But in order to reconcile with that past, it is not enough to acknowledge the rubble and move on. Reconciliation is not a single moment but an ongoing, forward-moving path, one that requires a continuous reckoning of that path’s past and of where we are heading at any given moment. It will be a difficult process, uneven and tiring and contingent upon a collective democracy born as much out of hope for the future as it is out of a reckoning of our past. We are heading down a path fraught with choices and possibilities looking both backwards and forwards. It will be hard. Some of those who fear the loss of benefits, both material and affective, of the history we have lived, will surely balk. There is great appeal within an affective politics of fear and nostalgia. One of the tools that has always been in the toolkit of white supremacy is the persuasive power of what will be potentially gained. What the prophets of doom will use moving forward will instead be the fear of what might be lost if those gains are not protected. Where will we go from here? Will recognizing the rubble of the past lead to a loss of hope? Will the affective politics of fear enlist majorities to use the power of the state to protect the advantages gained in the first two-thirds of our history? Will we be able to maintain democratic majorities more easily if we maintain the delusions of looking only forward? I hope not. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Barack Obama powerfully referenced this William Faulkner quote in 2008 during his presidential campaign in speaking to the long fraught history of racial relations in the United States.34 Faulkner, a writer shaped by

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his upbringing in the American South, knew the dangers of delusions about the past and the Old South plantation mythology that led to the racial consequences of slavery. Obama brought to his speech the academic precision of a highly educated and intelligent presidential aspirant suffused with the charismatic sensibility of the African American church. In Canada, we have perhaps forgotten the fire and brimstone quality of Obama, but we face the same choice: either reconcile with our past or face the consequences of blindly ignoring the rubble around us. The choice is between two very different senses of reckoning with the past. One is an accountant’s reckoning, calculating the damage wrought like an insurance adjuster determining compensation for a disaster. What do we owe to those who were left bereft for our benefit? How do we move forward amidst the ongoing colonial dispossession that is our inheritance? The other sense is of an eschatological reckoning, drawn from the same biblical roots as the reconciliation movements that were sparked by the coming of the Second Millennium in the 1990s. This reckoning is less kind, a sword of judgment hanging over all whose sins are yet to be tallied. Most Canadians stopped attending church in the 1960s and 1970s, at the very same moment, two-thirds into its history, that our nation slipped into a different future, and so this passage might not be familiar (it is also a particularly American translation, likely unfamiliar to those raised on the King James Bible): For the Lord of hosts will have a day of reckoning Against everyone who is proud and lofty And against everyone who is lifted up, That he may be abased. Isaiah 2:12 (New American Standard Bible) We have no say in this reckoning at the end of days, and those who do not believe in a vengeful or merciful God who stands in judgment may not feel the same worry or relief as those who do. But this sense, of a time of reckoning to come, is nonetheless upon us. We have no choice except to unlearn narratives of Canada that place racism at the margins of the story. The first step of many is to choose to re-narrate our past through recognizing the costs of white supremacy that we still bear. We cannot enjoy the bounties of a common future until we pay our bills.

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Democracy is about agency and choice in the representation of our will. The free will that we exert collectively can be rallied for myriad ends. Included in those possibilities are “white nationalist” appeals to nostalgia and loss of the benefits of an earlier time we now repudiate. It is not as deep below the surface as we may wish to believe. Indeed, it is part of the wreckage below our feet bequeathed to us by the generations who came before. We have seen in the recent past how appeals around the globe to resentment and the fear of “replacement” by non-whites has reanimated the politics of white supremacy. If we wish to avoid the rise of white nationalism that ever lurks in the rubble below us, we cannot avoid a reckoning with our past. Indeed, it is the only thing that will save us now and moving forward. not e s 1 As used, for instance, in the New American Standard Bible’s translation of Isaiah 2:12, of the phrase “day of reckoning.” This is not the translation of Isaiah 2:12 found in the original King James Bible, but it is now commonly used in American evangelical translations of the Old Testament to evoke the accounting of sins at the end of time. 2 The navigational use of the term refers to the counting both of time elapsed and of speed, combined with direction since the last known position, in order to calculate current position. 3 Dubinsky, Perry, and Yu, Within and Without. 4 Hollinger, “Circle of the ‘We.’” 5 Wolfe, “History and Imperialism.” 6 McKeown, Melancholy Order. 7 Price, Great White Walls; and Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race. 8 White, Middle Ground. 9 Moreton-Robinson, White Possessive. 10 Orange, Treaty of Waitangi. 11 King, Inconvenient Indian; and Deloria, Playing Indian. 12 White, It’s Your Misfortune. 13 Orange, Treaty of Waitangi; and Harris, Hikoi. 14 This point has been made innumerable times by a myriad of analysts and critiques, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. 15 Roediger, Wages of Whiteness; Saxton, Indispensable Enemy; Saxton, White Republic; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; and Foley, White Scourge.

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16 Saxton, Indispensable Enemy. 17 Saxton, White Republic. 18 Roy, White Man’s Province; Ward, White Canada; Perry, Edge of Empire; and Ishiguro and Madokoro, “White Supremacy.” 19 Denise Fong, interview with Colonel Howe Lee for the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of British Columbia Annual Banquet and for Burnaby Village Museum, 2019. 20 Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights. 21 Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg. 22 Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights. 23 See also Madokoro, MacKenzie, and Meren, Dominion of Race. 24 Although there are many more studies of Japanese American internment than of Japanese Canadian internment, for the latter, see: books by Ken Adachi and scholars such as Ann Sunahara; work done as part of the redress movement leading to Canada’s apology in 1988; recent studies under the Landscapes of Injustice project, for instance Laura Ishiguro, Nicole Yakashiro, and Will Archibald, “Settler Colonialism and Japanese Canadian History,” http://www.landscapesofinjustice.com/wp-content/ uploads/2018/01/Ishiguro-Yakashiro-and-Archibald-Settler-Colonialismand-Japanese-Canadian-history-2.pdf; as well as that of John Price and others in British Columbia who argue for provincial redress for Japanese Canadians. See also John Price’s six part series, beginning 3 November 2019, “Our History: Righting a Historical Wrong for Japanese Canadians, Association asks bc Government to Acknowledge Responsibility in 1940s Dispossession of Japanese Canadians,” in the Victoria Times Colonist, https://www.timescolonist.com/islander/our-history-righting-a-historicalwrong-for-japanese-canadians-1.23996497. And see Adachi, Enemy That Never Was; and Sunahara, Politics of Racism. 25 Roy, Triumph of Citizenship; Mar, Brokering Belonging; Stanley, Contesting White Supremacy; Price, Orienting Canada; and Madokoro, Elusive Refuge. 26 Freeman, Ambiguous Champion. 27 Sandra Martin, “Canada’s Political Fight against Apartheid,” Globe and Mail, 6 December 2013. Online text updated 11 May 2018. https://www. theglobeandmail.com/news/world/nelson-mandela/canadas-politicalfight-against-apartheid/article15812626/. 28 Manulak, “African Representative.” 29 Martin, “Canada’s Political Fight against Apartheid.” 30 Hollinger, “Circle of the ‘We.’”

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31 Painter, Sojourner Truth; Williams, Alchemy of Race; and Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing.” For Canada, see Backhouse, Colour Coded; and Campbell, Great Revolutionary Wave. 32 Perhaps more effectively than any other historian in Canada, Tim Stanley has written persuasively and consistently about the need to confront how historical narratives of belonging in Canada erase and efface white supremacy. See Stanley, “Why I Killed Canadian History”; “Whose Public? Whose Memory?”; “Banality of Colonialism”; “Playing with ‘Nitro’”; and “Commemorating John A. Macdonald.” 33 Benjamin, Philosophy of History. 34 Scott Horton, “The Past Is Not Past. Or Is It?,” Harpers Magazine, 24 March 2008. https://harpers.org/blog/2008/03/the-past-is-not-pastor-is-it/.

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Index

Abel, Deryck, 285 Abella, Irving, 386n50 Aberhart, William, 271 Acton, John, 114n82 African Canadians. See Black Canadians Age of Revolution, 15, 151 Ajzenstat, Janet, 15, 54, 172 Alberta, 73, 78 Alinsky, Saul, 381 Allan, William, 127, 128, 131, 132 Anderson, W.M., 370 anti-Asian legislation, 393–5, 401–3, 407–8. See also Chinese Canadians; Japanese Canadians; white supremacy anti-discrimination legislation, 237, 240, 241, 243, 246–7, 252, 259, 350, 373, 408. See also fair practices laws anti-Semitism, 235, 241, 244, 255, 256, 274, 382, 416; economic roots of, 243, 245–6, 249 apartheid, 406, 407, 409–13; anti-apartheid movement, 406, 409. See also South Africa Arblaster, Anthony, 309, 310

Archibald, Will, 507 Arendt, Hannah, 11, 327 Aristotle, 52, 203, 204, 205, 215, 221, 301–2, 387n55 Atlantic Charter, 368 Australia, 393; Cold War alliances, 404; colonial, 90, 92, 97, 131, 145n68; and democracy, 391, 411, 414; immigration policy, 394; Labour governments, 282; nationalist movements, 392, 396; nation building, 405–6, 416; “White Australia” policy, 409. See also Indigenous peoples; settler colonialism; white supremacy Baldwin, Robert, 16–17, 54, 208, 210–11 Bank of Canada, 368 Bank of Upper Canada, 116, 117, 123, 124, 127, 128, 129–31, 132, 136, 140, 144n59, 149, 165 Bannister, Jerry, 16 Barraclough, Geoffrey, 309 Battiste, Marie, 106–7 Belich, James, 109n2

484

Index

Bell, Duncan, 102 Benjamin, Walter, 415–16 Benn, Ernest, 286 Bennett, Richard B., 271 Bentham, Jeremy, and Benthamites, 126, 145n68 Berlin, Isaiah, 310 Beyme, Klaus von, 38, 45 Bhandar, Brenna, 88 Bickell, John Paris, 275 Bittermann, Rusty, 16 Black Canadians 102–3, 105, 106, 190, 210, 238, 245, 253, 322, 361 Blackstone, William, 157–8 Blanchet, Joseph, 172 Blum, Sid, 245 Bodin, Jean, 63 Bolshevism, 244, 362 Bonenfant, Jean-Charles, 172 Borden, Robert, 19 Bosteels, Bruno, 320–1 Boulton, Henry John, 129–30, 215, 216, 217 Bourassa, Henri, 184 Britain: Beveridge Plan, 270, 272, 278; British Broadcasting Company (bbc ), 267; and Canadian identity, 24, 282; Chartism, 188, 208, 225n25; Civil War, 53–4; enfranchisement, 36–7, 38, 45, 123; Glorious Revolution, 15, 37, 54, 123, 204; Great Reforms Acts, 36, 103; Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, 383; labour movement, 39, 121, 267; Labour Party, 275, 309; legal tradition, 332; libertarianism, 285; migration to Canada, 90,

133, 390, 391, 393; militaryfiscal state, 123–4; and North American economy, 125, 128; opposed to democracy, 15, 17–18, 161, 204; responsible government, 37, 38; Tories, 53–4; treaties with Indigenous peoples, 71, 78, 105, 395, 396. See also constitution; monarchy; parliament; settler colonialism British Columbia, 79, 393, 401; and Chinese Canadians, 401–3; incorporation into Canada, 395, 401; and Japanese Canadians, 408, 411; and land treaties, 73; and same-sex marriage, 335; and taxation, 360; and white supremacy, 406, 408. See also anti-Asian legislation; Chinese Canadians; enfranchisement; Japanese Canadians; Indigenous peoples British Empire. See Britain Broadbent, Ed, 313 Bronfman, Samuel, 238, 245 Brooke, John, 154 Brown, Colin, 375 Brown, George, 176–8, 179, 194, 208, 210, 211, 216, 222 Brown, Wendy, 338, 344, 346n19 Buchman, Frank, 284 Buller, Charles, 187 Burke, Edmund, 208 Burrill, Fred, 89 Butler, Judith, 327 Canada Company, 131–2, 133, 149, 152, 165, 168n10 Canada East. See Lower Canada Canada West. See Upper Canada

Index Canadian Association for Adult Education, 239, 251, 372 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (cbc ), 372; and Gladstone Murray, 21, 262, 267, 268, 277, 297; lecture series, 300, 306, 309 Canadian Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (ccnd ), 307 Canadian Chamber of Commerce (ccc ), 273, 279; and the ccf , 274–5; Committee on Free Enterprise, 273; and labour, 278, 284; and welfare state, 375 Canadian Committee on Industrial Reconstruction (ccir ), 272, 369 Canadian Rebellion. See Rebellion, Canadian capitalism, 271, 298, 304, 320, 341, 375; in Britain, 43–4; and Christianity, 271, 285; critiques of, 10, 19–20, 87, 88, 106, 274–5, 299, 300, 342; defense of, 280; definition of, 88; and democracy, 9–11, 12, 15, 19, 38, 43–4, 48, 87–8, 106, 118, 120, 136, 266, 276, 287–8, 299, 305–6, 313, 322, 355; free enterprise campaign, 265, 273, 274, 275, 278, 279, 282, 284, 287; “Gentlemanly Capitalism,” 120, 123–4, 131, 132, 133; Great Depression, 53, 268, 271, 272, 361, 367; and imperialism, 17, 72, 73, 74, 87, 88, 89–90, 91–102, 117, 120, 122, 132–3, 145n68, 146n78, 311; and Lenin, 303; market revolution, 117, 118, 125–6, 142n8; and Marxism, 280; and partisan

485

politics, 271–2; and post-war reconstruction, 270; and racial inequality, 87, 110n8, 238, 243, 246, 247, 258, 297, 301; welfare capitalism, 274. See also democracy; liberalism; neoliberalism Caplan, Gerald, 275 Cardinal, Harold, 78 Carr, Edward Hallett, 303 Cartier, Georges-Étienne, 184 Champlain, Samuel de, 60 Chandler, Alfred, 119, 126, 141 Charlevoix, Father, 64–5, 67, 69–70 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 22–3, 24, 237, 331, 337; and individual rights, 340; and lgbtq+ activism, 327, 332, 335, 336, 342; and marriage equality, 319, 342; and neoliberalism, 338; and power of the courts, 331–2; Section 15, 319, 350n76, 332, 333, 334, 335–6, 340, 342; and the vote, 372; and welfare liberalism, 337. See also human rights charity, 359, 360, 368, 371, 375 Chevrier, Marc, 28n45 China, 42 Chinese Canadians: activism, 402, 403, 408; anti-Chinese movements, 400, 402; disenfranchisement, 221, 401; first member of parliament, 411; migration, 395, 401; Potato War, 402. See also anti-Asian legislation; British Columbia Chrétien, Jean, 335 Christianity, 287; and Canada, 173–4; Canadian Council of

486

Index

Christians and Jews, 252; Christian Freedom Foundation, 285; Christian socialists, 360; Clergies, 195–6, 238; and democracy, 17, 19, 236, 247, 252, 257, 259, 281; and economy, 271, 285; Federal Council of Churches, 253; and human rights, 251, 253, 254; and imperialism, 61–2, 64–5, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 75, 77, 97, 98, 100, 132, 183, 266; and Jews, 254–6; New American Standard Bible, 418, 419n1; protestant superiority, 175, 178–9, 181, 186; Social Gospel, 19, 247; ultramontanism, 174; values, 73, 254, 257, 285; voluntary organizations, 251, 253. See also democracy Ciepley, David, 119 citizens/citizenship, 240, 268, 270, 282, 284, 311, 355, 359; active citizenship, 250, 251; and capitalism, 266; and Christianity, 281; Citizens Research Institute of Canada (cric ), 365; Citizenship Act, 1947, 24, 250, 337, 408, 409; Citizenship Training, 250–1; and democracy, 10, 20, 21, 108, 250, 266, 277, 287, 357, 358, 371, 377, 381, 413; exclusion from, 407, 414; and human rights, 323, 372; and Indigenous peoples, 75, 76, 78, 80, 108; and neoliberalism, 323, 338, 339; opinion polling of, 270, 276; and property-rights, 50, 126, 133–4, 135, 137; role of, 54, 192, 355, 357, 358, 359, 368, 372, 376; “sexual citizen,”

319, 321, 327–8, 335, 341, 342, 343; social citizenship, 287; and socialism, 283, 286. See also democracy; enfranchisement civil liberties. See human rights Clark, Colin, 369 Clark, Joe, 410 Clément, Dominique, 260n10, 332 Colclough, W.H., 256–7 Cold War, 22, 238, 306, 406; anti-communism, 283, 288, 372, 405, 407; and democracy, 7, 13, 50, 53, 236, 257, 297–8, 302, 309, 405; geopolitics of, 404; and human rights, 257, 259; and liberalism, 299, 313; and the United Nations, 307. See also democracy; liberalism; Macpherson, C.B.; Murray, Gladstone Coldwell, M.J., 247 Collier, Ruth Berins, 45, 48 Colpitts, George, 197 communism, 237, 242, 304, 308, 309; anti-communism, 188, 237, 245, 267, 283, 284, 288, 306, 307, 372, 386n50, 405; Communist or Soviet Bloc, 13, 42, 300, 303, 404, 407, 375, 378, 505 Community Chest, 357, 359, 362, 368, 371 Community Programs Branch, Government of Ontario, 376 Company of Young Canadians, 378 Confederation (Canadian), 6, 24, 370, 401; anti-democratic, 11–12, 14, 17–18, 88–9, 175, 205, 218–23; as democratic, 14; and Indigenous peoples, 72–3,

Index 77, 80, 101, 184, 197; and public debt, 92. See also constitution; Taché, Joseph-Charles conservatism, 264, 366; antidemocratic, 14, 37–8, 45, 52; British American League, 214–15; conservative libertarianism, 284, 286; Conservative Party (Progressive Conservative Party), 19, 265, 269, 271, 275, 290n25; as democratic, 6, 17, 45, 173, 186–7, 287; and liberalism, 173, 287–8; “new right,” 10, 264, 265, 267, 288; in politics, 158–9, 166, 187, 208, 213–15, 217, 218–19, 221, 264, 265, 271, 272, 287, 296n125; in Québec, 271; social conservatism, 331; in the United States, 271. See also reconstruction; right-wing movements; Taché, Joseph-Charles constitution (Canada), 5, 337; colonial, 205; Constitutional Act, 1791, 15, 16, 38, 100, 151, 159; constitutionality, 252, 334; British North America Act, 1867, 17, 92, 101, 111n25, 175, 192, 221, 332; and Indigenous peoples, 79; repatriation (1982), 6, 24, 331; Statute of Westminster, 24. See also Charter of Rights and Freedoms; Confederation; executive power; parliament; responsible government cooperation, 11, 14, 19, 70, 137–8, 156, 163, 167, 271, 278, 284, 371; and democracy, 10, 138 Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ccf ), 235, 237, 244,

487

372; coming to power/voter support for 20, 269, 276; critiques of 236, 266, 274–5, 283; and human rights, 240, 243; and Jewish activists, 245, 247; and labour, 236, 247, 368; program of, 19–20; Regina Manifesto, 247. See also New Democratic Party; social democracy; welfare state corporations: as anti-democratic, 4, 19, 21, 93, 116, 117, 118, 127, 128, 135, 142, 149, 264; as anti-socialist, 279, 274; big business, 264, 265, 271, 272, 287, 369; colonial, 93–4, 116, 131, 134; Crown corporations, 269, 270; and democracy, 4, 6, 7, 11, 16, 93, 116, 117–18, 130, 135–8, 142, 149–50, 156, 158–62, 165–7, 235, 265, 266, 271, 276, 376; as “franchise state,” 117, 119, 119–20, 123, 124, 126–7, 131, 141; “Free enterprise” campaign, 273, 274, 275, 278; and government intervention, 91, 93, 94–5, 242, 271, 375; and imperialism, 91–4, 117, 118, 120, 134, 142n7, 165; incorporation, 117–18, 119, 122, 124, 126, 127, 131, 134, 140–1, 148, 157–9, 164–5; and Indigenous peoples, 164, 165; municipal, 16, 117, 123, 148, 157, 158–9, 161, 162–3, 171n43, 218; and organized labour, 267, 283, 284; and postwar reconstruction debates, 270, 275–9; for public good, 16, 149–50, 158, 160–2, 163, 165, 166, 371; and women, 141, 163.

488

Index

See also Bank of Upper Canada; Canada Company; Hudson’s Bay Company; state; Welland Canal Coulthard, Glenn, 99, 348n40 Craig, Bronwyn, 181 Creighton, Donald, 117, 149 Crick, Bernard, 309 Criminal Code of Canada, 330, 333 Cross, Michael S., 208 Cunningham, Frank, 300 Curthoys, Ann, 97 Curtis, Bruce, 173, 174, 175, 177, 192 Dahl, Adam, 12 Dagenais, Maxime, 204 debt: as currency, 128–9; and democracy, 91, 107; Indigenous peoples’ view of, 66–7, 69; and power relations, 89, 106–7, 130, 133–4, 139–40, 141–2; public, 17, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 91–6, 97, 101, 106, 109, 123, 124; war, 359, 361 Delâge, Denys, 11, 13 democracy: adversaries of, 11–12, 17, 18, 28n59, 36–9, 49–50, 52, 53, 142, 173, 203–5, 206, 210– 18, 221–2, 367; ancient Greek, 8–9, 34, 36, 39, 415; “Christian democracy,” 236, 247, 252–7; and community, 356, 357, 358–61, 371, 372, 374, 376, 377, 380; “contributory democracy,” 16, 148–9, 150, 158, 159, 161, 165, 167, 168n1; and covid -19, 4; “cultural democracy,” 247–8, 258, 262n55; in danger, 3–4, 54;

definition of, 3, 4, 5, 8–14, 22, 25, 33–40; 46; 48–54, 87–8, 91, 106, 108, 116, 150, 172, 203–4, 236, 279–80, 301–2; 320–1, 322, 355, 395, 404; “deliberative democracy,” 16, 38, 136–7, 158; and discrimination, 78, 235–50; 252; 254–5, 257–8, 323, 332, 373–4, 398–9, 404, 406; and education, 10, 41, 42, 54, 75, 239, 240, 241 247, 250, 251, 255, 277, 372, 375; elitist, 12, 21, 219, 222, 266, 267, 273, 277, 288, 356, 367; and equality, 10, 10–11, 13, 20, 22, 23, 49, 58, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 135, 236, 239, 245, 321, 333, 340; and eurocentrism, 6, 9, 13, 17, 23, 399, 414; and gender relations, 16, 18, 23, 54, 76, 122, 258, 268, 269, 319, 323, 327, 330, 333, 364, 378, 414; “herrenvolk democracy,” 399, 400, 406, 411; and imperialism, 13, 23, 87; “joint-stock democracy,” 15, 36, 118, 134–40; and liberty/ freedom, 4, 11, 23, 58, 73 , 137, 242, 253, 279, 286, 287, 288, 302, 327, 339, 340, 342–3, 343, 344; limits of, 18–19, 20, 22, 23, 58, 74–5, 77, 80, 87–8, 89–90, 91, 106–9, 133, 137, 142, 203, 222, 237, 259, 299, 302, 304–5, 342–3, 367, 398, 414–15; as mobocracy, 12, 210, 213; participatory, 22, 308–9, 375, 377, 403; and power relations, 8, 9, 11, 14, 24–5, 33, 37, 39, 42, 49, 53–4, 67–8, 71, 88, 162, 191, 205, 265, 276–7, 277, 287, 305,

Index 340, 343, 356, 369, 391, 399, 412; and property, 38, 242, 355, 356, 358, 359, 360, 360, 361, 363, 366, 373, 378; and racial relations, 13, 19, 21, 29n71, 54, 76–7, 78, 87–8, 90, 102–3, 105–6, 188, 236, 238–9, 240, 246, 249–50, 258, 406, 407, 410; and science/expertise, 10, 12, 21, 41, 192, 193, 356–7, 361–2, 364, 372–3, 377, 378, 380; “self-disciplined democracy,” 21, 266, 277, 287–8; and social classes, 8, 11, 12, 21, 41–6, 47–8, 54, 116, 122, 135, 219, 222; and violence, 13, 21, 23, 52, 74, 106, 204, 214, 281, 329, 411 democratization: in Canada, 5–7, 11, 13, 14–25, 36, 47, 51, 54, 58, 79–80, 88–9, 117, 133, 136–7, 142, 149–50, 158, 159, 167, 187, 191–2, 207, 211, 221–3, 266–7, 271, 287–8, 313, 381, 398–9; as global phenomenon, 3–4, 5, 6–7, 12, 33–5, 37–8, 40–2, 44–7, 50, 52–3, 165; methodology, 5, 6–7, 9, 14, 17, 33–55, 134–5, 141–2, 150–1, 167, 172; role of experts in, 193, 363–4, 378; scientific literature on, 4–6, 7–8, 14–15, 16, 18, 20, 23, 33–4, 39–47, 88–9, 116, 136, 142, 193, 204, 364; “sexual democratization,” 321; as a struggle, 6, 10, 19, 24–5, 33, 37, 38, 42, 45, 47–8, 49, 51, 52–3, 118, 136, 150, 151, 166, 177, 204–5, 209, 216, 217, 221–2, 236, 237–8, 246, 259, 297, 320, 321, 324,

489

326, 327, 335, 344, 355, 356, 373, 374, 379, 381, 382, 392, 397–8, 403, 409 demos. See “the people” Derrida, Jacques, 9 Dewey, John, 10 Diefenbaker, John, 374, 410–11 Doré, Gustave, 195 Douglas, James, 395 Doyle, Lawrence O’Connor, 210 Draper, William Henry, 166 Drew, George, 275 Ducharme, Michel, 27n33, 173 Dulles, John Foster, 283 Duncombe, Charles, 136, 143n11 Dunn, John Henry, 96 Dunning, Charles, 272, 275–6 Duplessis, Maurice, 375, 271 Dupuis-Déri, Francis, 18, 49 Durham, Lord (John George Lambton), 188; and democracy, 172, 207; on Family Compact, 145n71; and public debt, 91, 93, 98; and racial relations, 103, 104, 178, 179; Report, 97, 98, 100, 207, 218; and responsible government, 97; and settler colonialism, 87, 89–90, 97, 100–1 Egan, James, 333–4; Egan v. Canada, 333, 341. Eisendrath, Rabbi Maurice, 257 election. See vote Eley, Geoff, 45–6 Elgin, lord, 213–14 Ellice, Edward, 133, 145n68 enemy alien, 19, 265 enfranchisement: and citizenship, 372; and democracy, 14, 35, 38, 40, 45, 301, 355, 356, 368, 382,

490

Index

391–2, 414; disenfranchisement, 19, 209, 212, 221, 401, 406; and ethnicity/race, 19, 23, 40, 172, 177–8, 185–6, 187, 204, 209, 210, 212, 220, 265, 408; Franchise Acts, 18, 19, 36, 185, 204, 212, 220, 221, 222, 223; limits of, 11, 18, 19, 23, 36–7, 38, 40, 177–8, 205; mass electorate, 37, 38, 40, 172, 265, 355, 357, 361, 362, 367, 374, 377, 378, 380; pre-Confederation, 15, 17, 208–13; and property, 15, 36, 38, 172, 185, 205, 208–9, 211, 212, 220, 221, 360, 378; universal suffrage, 17, 19, 172, 177–8, 186–7, 190–1, 192, 198, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215–16, 220, 222, 225n25, 379, 392. See also Chinese Canadians; Indigenous peoples; Japanese Canadians; vote; white supremacy; women Englebert, Robert, 181 Enlightenment, 51, 177, 312; and Indigenous peoples, 13, 69–71, 79; opposed to democracy, 11; “radical enlightenment,” 26n20 executive power: and democratization, 38, 39, 40, 49, 78, 150, 207; and division of power, 24, 37, 38, 40, 54, 172, 175, 192, 219, 335; opposed to democracy, 18, 206, 212, 222; in pre-Confederation Canada, 16, 152, 206, 207; prime minister (Canada), 18, 24, 49, 251, 379, 411 fair practices laws, 241, 244. See also anti-discrimination legislation

fascism, 42, 53, 235, 236, 238, 244, 271, 274, 279, 372 Faulkner, William, 417–9 federalism, 18, 24, 173, 175, 191–4, 197, 205, 218–22, 335, 366 Feinberg, Rabbi Abraham, 256 feudality, 43, 44, 62–3, 79, 176, 195 Frager, Ruth, 10, 22, 102, 265, 299, 373 franchise. See enfranchisement Franklin, Benjamin, 178, 179, 199n20 Fraser, Nancy, 246, 262n50 Fraser Institute, 259 France: Ancien Régime, 59, 61, 62–3, 64, 70–1, 188; Coutume de Paris, 16; influence of, 173, 186, 188, 193, 194; revolutions in, 182, 191, 405; thinkers, 70, 180. See also monarchy, New France; settler colonialism Freeden, Michael, 10 French Canadians, 105, 174, 187, 196, 265; and Anglo-Protestants, 175–7, 178, 181, 182, 185, 188, 190, 194; and Confederation, 17, 194; on the continent, 180–1, 183–4; coureurs de bois (and fur traders), 23, 60, 176, 185; Durham and, 100, 104, 178, 179, 190; and Indigenous peoples, 23, 59, 59–62, 63, 68, 69, 80n2, 181; and labour, 247; women, 16–17. See also Lower Canada; nationalism; Quebec; Taché, Joseph-Charles Friedman, Milton, 285 Foran, Timothy, 183

Index Foucault, Michel, 75, 321, 339 Fukuyama, Francis, 346n20 Gagan, David, 131 gay rights, 320, 323, 327, 347n23; dominant narratives, 322–3. See also lgbtq +; same-sex marriage Gérin-Lajoie, Antoine, 175 Germany, 18, 37, 38, 42 Gettler, Brian, 77, 100 Goeman, Mishuana, 108–9 government. See executive power Greer, Allan, 6, 16, 116, 142 Grittner, Colin, 12, 17, 18, 52, 173, 370 Gwyn, Richard, 175 Halladay, Leonard, 10, 11, 22–3, 237 Halldorson, Salome, 241–2 Hamon, Max, 198 Hanson, A.H., 309 Haugan, W.M., 248, 262n55 Hayek, Friedrich, 279, 285, 374, 375 Head, Edmund, 175 Heaman, E.A., 10, 17, 28n59, 89, 154, 211, 215 Held, David, 3, 313 Hewart, Gordon, 366 Hitler, Adolf, 255, 257, 416; Hitler Youth, 370 Hobbes, Thomas, 11, 122, 298, 300, 305; Leviathan, 310 Hogan, John Sheridan, 175–6, 181, 187 Hollinger, David, 392, 413 Holocaust, 257 Honneth, Axel, 325–6 Horkheimer, Max, 249

491

Horton, Wilmot, 133 Howe, Joseph, 16, 208, 210, 211–13, 216, 227n47, 230n89 Howick, lord, 92 Hryhorczuk, Michael, 242 Hudson’s Bay Company, 77, 117, 120, 133, 183, 184 Hughes, Samuel, 138 human rights: campaigns for, 236, 238, 240, 243–4, 249–51, 257, 258; Canadian Bill of Rights, 410; Canadian Human Rights Act (chra ), 333; and democracy, 8, 10, 21–2, 235, 236, 245, 252–3, 257, 298, 373, 378; defining, 236–8, 258; and immigration, 243, 245; international, 319; and labour, 243–4, 245, 247, 258; and liberal democracy, 238–43; and liberalism, 10, 50, 137, 191, 242, 243, 374; minority rights, 203, 239, 373; “rights revolution,” 320; role of the state, 240; Saskatchewan Bill of Rights, 240; Special Committee of the Senate on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, 254; Toronto Civil Liberties Association, 251; as universal, 374. See also antidiscrimination legislation; anti-Semitism; Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; fair practices laws; gay rights; lgbtq+; women Hume, David, 122, 156, 179–80, 187 Huntington, Samuel, 12 Ignatieff, Michael, 198–9

492

Index

Indigenous peoples, 179, 183, 196–7; activism, 78, 96, 319, 368; Anishinaabe, 95; democratic practices of, 7, 13, 23, 58, 59, 61–2, 64–8, 69–70, 79, 185; Gradual Civilization Act, 185; Haudenosaunee/Iroquois/Six Nations, 13, 23, 68, 71, 72, 76, 80, 95, 96, 108, 142n7, 155, 164, 165, 183; Indian Act, 23, 77, 78, 395, 401, 411; Innu/ Montagnais, 81n6, 184–5; Inuit, 23, 78; Iroquoians, 23, 60, 63, 64; land dispossession, 17, 23, 72–3, 76, 80, 89, 91–2, 94, 95, 97–101, 109, 131, 164, 205, 390–1, 395, 396, 397, 418; land rematriation, 88, 91, 108–9; land rights, 79, 103, 105, 108, 109, 397; Métis, 17, 23, 60, 78, 177, 179, 180, 181, 183–4, 185, 196–7, 198; Mi’kmaq, 63, 184–5; Mississauga, 164; Ojibwa, 63, 197; Red Book, 78; reserve system, 72, 76, 98, 395, 396, 408; residential schools, 75, 80, 396, 412, 416; and the Royal Proclamation of 1763, 72, 94, 100, 396; as seignors, 62; as sovereign, 17, 29n75, 63–4, 71, 78, 80, 89, 99, 107–8, 113n60, 186, 397, 398; Supreme Court of Canada decisions, 79, 397; treaties, 72, 73, 78, 79, 95, 186, 197; Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Canada, 13, 416; and vote, 18, 23, 76, 77, 108, 185–6, 197, 209, 210, 221, 391, 401; Wendat/Huron, 23; and Western democracy, 6, 11, 12,

13, 23, 29n75, 58, 59, 60, 73–80, 106–8, 174, 175, 177, 180, 182, 185–6, 189–90, 198, 405, 406, 407, 415; White Paper, 78. See also Australia, New Zealand, settler colonialism, United States Innes, Joanna, 193, 204 Ishiguro, Laura, 408 Israel, Jonathan, 26n20 Jackson, Andrew, and Jacksonians, 104–5, 176, 208, 399–400 Jackson, Gilbert E., 272–3, 291n41 Jacobson, Muriel, 239 Jamaica, 105 James, Cyril, 270 Japanese Canadians: apology and redress, 420n24; Co–operative Committee on Japanese Canadians (ccjc ), 251, 253; discrimination against, 235–6, 238; dispossession, 408; franchise, 251; internment, 407, 420n24; migration, 394; relocation and deportation, 236, 251, 253, 407–8, 411. See also antiAsian legislation; British Columbia Jeffers, Wellington, 369, 371 Jefferson, Thomas, and Jeffersonians, 83n62, 208 Jensen, Jane, 337 Jewish Canadians: Bund, the, 245, 261n42; Canadian Council of Christians and Jews, 252; Canadian Jewish Congress, 238, 240, 243; and Christian Canadians, 252, 256–7; and discrimination, 243–7, 253; Jewish Labour Committee (jlc ), 237,

Index 243, 244, 258; and socialist organizations, 243, 245. See also anti-discrimination legislation; anti-Semitism; human rights Johnston, Eric, 278 Johnston, James William, 215, 216, 217 Jung, Douglas, 408, 411 Kaplansky, Kalmen, 237, 244, 245–6 Keynes, John Maynard, and Keynesianism, 20, 269, 270, 273, 306, 368 Keyssar, Alexander, 36 King, Thomas, 109 King, William Lyon Mackenzie, 252, 373 Klee, Paul, 415; Angelus Novus, 415–6 Kloppenberg, James, 5 Kuffert, Len, 268 labour: activism, 19, 243–5, 269, 283–4, 373, 398–9; American Federation of Labour, 278; and capitalism, 43–4, 131, 278; Congress of Industrial Organizations, 269, 278; and democracy, 19, 43–6, 54; and enfranchisement, 36, 210; and land access, 90, 92, 131, 132–4; National Association of Manufacturers (nam ), 278; Negro Labor Committee, 244; pauperisation, 133–4; Right-toWork Movement, 284; and settler colonialism, 90, 132–4; unions, 121, 138, 284, 368, 372, 373, 398; United

493

Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, 245 Lafitau, Father, 68 La Fontaine, Louis-Hippolyte, 16–17, 54, 174, 208, 210–11, 229n76 Lahontan, 65, 70 Lamb, Marjorie, 283 Lambertson, Ross, 243 Lambton, John George. See Durham, Lord Lamennais, Félicité de, 195 Langford, Will, 10, 12, 21, 102, 236, 369, 375 Laski, Harold, 298, 308, 313, 317n49, 318n58 Laurier, Wilfrid, 59, 223, 271 Leadership League, 367 League for Social Reconstruction, 270, 274 Lee, Colonel Howe, 403 Lefort, Claude, 11 Left: leftism, 45, 50, 238, 240, 244, 256, 297, 298; and labour, 274, 277; New Left, 366; radical left, 311 legislative power. See parliament Le Jeune, Father, 61–2, 68, 71 Lenin, Vladimir, 303, 315n15 Lewis, David, 274 Lewis, Moishe, 244 lgbtq+: activism, 319, 327, 342; activist groups, 300, 329–330; and aids crisis, 331, 335, 342; Body Politic, The (tbp ), 330; Compton’s Cafeteria Riots, 329; “compulsory heterosexuality,” 320; “decriminalization” of homosexuality, 330, 335; and democracy, 11, 22–3, 334; and

494

Index

homonationalism, 320; and liberalism, 337–9; and marriage equality, 319, 326, 335, 342; and pinkwashing, 320; queer (definition), 344n3; queer and trans activism, 320, 321, 322, 323, 327, 329–33, 335, 336, 344n3; Stonewall Riots, 329; Yogyakarta Principles, 319. See also citizenship; gay rights; human rights; recognition; samesex marriage liberal democracy, 3–4, 49, 279, 283, 288, 322; as antidemocratic, 9–10, 12, 22, 49–50, 118, 141–2, 304, 305, 322, 343; and Cold War reification, 300, 304, 309; and corporations, 118, 136; definition, 116, 297, 301–2, 321, 322; disaffection with, 271; and Indigenous peoples, 13, 23, 60, 107; and lgbtq + peoples, 23, 319, 322; origins, 15, 50; and political representation, 12; postmodern, 4. See also democracy; human rights; liberalism; “liberal order” liberalism: and capitalism, 38, 89–90, 118, 121, 141, 299, 300, 309, 337, 338; and Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 337; and citizenship, 133–4, 142, 266; classical liberalism, 243, 264, 272; and Confederation, 14; and conservatism, 179, 188, 265; and corporations, 116, 135; and democracy, 9–10, 22, 37–8, 49–51, 116, 122, 133, 136–7, 172, 299, 300, 309, 311–12, 321, 322; diversity of, 10; and

equality, 59, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80, 327, 340; and Indigenous peoples, 59, 73, 74, 79, 80, 89–90, 103, 104, 141, 177; and individualism, 10, 73, 337, 377; and laissez-faire/free trade, 118, 119, 120, 122–3, 125–6, 127, 134, 136, 140, 278; “liberal dilemma,” 26n27; and market, 7, 126, 143n28, 287, 300; and marriage equality, 336; and Marxism, 299–300, 312–13; and multiculturalism, 320; and narratives of the British Empire, 282; and pluralism, 51, 102–5, 322, 323; and power, 265; and property rights, 14, 51, 141, 241; and revolution, 180, 303; social liberalism, 328, 337; and “the people,” 50–1, 279; and the welfare state, 337. See also capitalism; human rights; liberal democracy; “liberal order”; neoliberalism “liberal order,” 89, 240, 301; and democratization 47, 48, 51, 54; “liberal-corporate order,” 15, 117, 119, 124, 140–2; opposed to democracy, 10, 21, 38, 49, 140, 297, 323 Liberal Party, 19, 212, 216, 242, 269, 271, 272, 290n25, 307 libertarianism, 150, 163, 266, 273, 281, 284, 285, 286, 288; Foundation for Economic Education, 285–6; People’s League for Defence of Freedom, 285 Lippmann, Walter, 12 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 40–1, 43, 47

Index Locke, John, 15, 51, 52, 73, 167, 298, 300 Loo, Tina, 388n65 Lower Canada, 15, 16, 72, 98, 100, 116, 145n68, 159, 164, 178, 184, 188, 206, 208, 209. See also United Canada loyalism/loyalists, 17, 72, 131, 134, 182, 204 Lummis, Douglas, 3 Macaulay, Thomas B., 195 Macdonald, John A., 27n33, 174; and the bna Act, 17–18, 175, 219–20; and enfranchisement, 185, 211, 216, 220, 221; and French Canadians, 185; and Indigenous peoples, 77, 185; and western expansion, 184, 197 Mackenzie, William Lyon: and corporations, 116, 118, 123, 127, 129, 130, 149, 165; and democracy, 116; network, 137–9; newspaper, 138; and taxation, 151, 153 Macpherson, C.B., 10, 279, 297–8; Canadian Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (ccnd ), 307; and capitalism, 10, 298, 299, 300, 303, 305, 308, 313; and China, 298, 307; and communism, 303, 308, 309; and democracy, 10, 22, 49, 297, 300, 301–5, 309, 313; and Hobbes, 310; and Keynes, 306; and “liberal-democracyversus-communism” dichotomy, 298, 309; and Marxism, 299–300, 303, 304, 305, 308, 309, 313; “Moment of Macpherson,” 298, 300, 313,

495

314n3; Possessive Individualism, 298, 300, 304, 305, 313; Real World of Democracy, 300–1, 303, 304–6, 307, 308, 309, 310, 312; response to, 309–12; and Soviet Union, 303, 304, 310, 311, 312; and Third World, 298, 300, 304, 311. See also liberal democracy Madokoro, Laura, 408 Mandela, Nelson, 409 Manin, Bernard, 27n36 Manitoba, 73, 184, 196–7, 255, 395 Maori, 97, 98, 396, 397, 398. See also New Zealand Mar, Lisa, 408 Marsh, Leonard, 20, 270, 278 Marshall, Thomas Humphrey, 327, 374 Martin, Paul, Jr, 335 Martin, Paul, Sr, 307 Marx, Karl, 37, 90, 132, 179, 187, 275, 299, 303, 305; Marxism, 43, 280, 300, 304, 308, 309, 312, 313 Massey, Vincent, 298 McAree, J.D., 242 McCarthyism, 405 McDougall, William, 176, 184 McKay, Ian, 7, 10, 20–1, 22, 38, 51, 54, 89, 141, 279 McKittrick, Katherine, 106 McLean, Nancy, 386n43 McMaster University, 5 McNairn, Jeffrey L., 11, 16, 38–9, 93, 117, 119, 136, 271, 361 media, 4, 39; and democracy, 38–9, 50, 108, 158, 381; and exclusion, 330; opinion polling, 276; print

496

Index

media/newspapers, 16, 76, 158, 242, 251, 252, 256, 267, 273, 274, 275, 280, 379; public broadcasting, 22, 268; and racial representations, 400, 416; radio, 267, 268, 306. See also Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Meighen, Arthur, 272, 275, 287 Mill, John Stuart, 52, 87, 89–90, 91, 92, 101–2, 103–5, 313 Miller, Perry, 405 Mineweweh, 63 Minogue, Kenneth, 310–11, 312, 315–16n27 Mishra, Pankaj, 199 modernity, 13, 19, 35, 39, 41, 43, 45, 60, 65, 69, 74, 75, 87, 106, 176, 186, 188–9, 199, 272 modernization theory, 41–3, 47 monarchy, 17, 203; British, 37, 54; and Canada, 14, 17, 24, 59; and democracy, 11, 15; French, 59–63, 64, 69; relations to Indigenous peoples, 59–60, 100, 108, 109, 395, 397, 398 Monkman, Kent, 77 Montesquieu, 11, 180 Mont Pèlerin Society, 285, 296n125, 310, 375 Moore, Barrington, 42–3 Mowat, Oliver, 197 Moyn, Samuel, 243, 246 Mulroney, Brian, 409–10, 411 multiculturalism. See pluralism Muñoz, Jose Esteban, 322 Murray, Gladstone, 267; and Christianity, 266, 271, 280–1, 285, 286, 287; criticisms of the ccf, 266, 274–5; defence of capitalism, 280, 282, 288; and

democracy, 21, 264, 266, 267, 276, 277, 287–8; and Gilbert E. Jackson, 272–3; and labour relations, 283–4; and libertarianism, 266, 273, 281, 284–6, 288; and neoliberalism, 266, 273, 279, 280, 282, 287, 288; Outlook, The, 280, 284; “Responsible Enterprise,” 21, 266–7, 273, 275–9, 280, 287; role at cbc , 264, 267–8; on state intervention, 278; support for British Empire, 282, 288; view on public broadcasting, 267–8; and welfare state, 277, 278, 286. See also public debate; reconstruction Napoleon III, 186, 195 nationalism, 173; American, 406; Indigenous peoples, 78, 80; French Canadian/Quebec, 174, 175, 271, 319; homonationalism, 320; white nationalism, 392, 416, 419. See also nationality; pluralism; Taché, Joseph-Charles nationality, 103–5, 82n114, 190, 192, 195. See also nationalism, pluralism Nazism/Nazi Germany, 53, 235, 236, 238, 244, 249, 256, 257, 274, 275, 399, 406, 410, 416 neoliberalism, 7, 243, 259, 321; and citizenship, 323, 328; critiques of C.B. Macpherson, 310; and democracy, 273, 282, 287, 300, 322, 338, 343; historiography on, 266; and homonormativity, 340; and individual rights, 23, 327, 337, 338, 339, 340; and

Index reconstruction, 287; rise of, 279–80, 312, 328, 338 Nerbas, Don, 266, 272, 369 Nesbitt, John Norris, 333, 334 New Brunswick, 18, 207, 209, 215, 216, 220, 225n20, 230n96 New Democratic Party (ndp ), 20, 21, 105, 313, 372. See also Co-operative Commonwealth Federation; social democracy; welfare state Newfoundland, 16, 18 New France, 28n45, 59–62, 64, 178, 180, 181. See also French Canadians New Zealand: anti-Asian legislation, 394; Chinese migrants, 401; Cold War alliances, 404; governance, 398; and human rights, 319; immigration policy, 391, 409; and settler colonialism, 97–8, 390, 393, 405, 411, 414, 416; Treaty of Waitangi, 98, 396, 397; welfare state, 282. See also settler colonialism Nova Scotia, 188, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211–13, 215, 216, 220, 221 Nunavut, 79 Obama, Barack, 417–18 Ober, Josiah, 9 Official Languages Act, 337 Ogden, Samuel, 161–2, 163 Ontario, 72, 73, 184, 196, 197, 221, 242, 245, 250, 253, 266, 275, 280, 330, 334, 340, 376. See also Upper Canada Osborne-Dempster, William J., 275 Owram, Doug, 176, 361, 362

497

Paine, Thomas, 10, 26n20 Papineau, Louis-Joseph, 209 Parent, Étienne, 175 parliament, 328, 332, 409, 411; colonial legislatures, 15, 16, 54, 92, 94, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 131, 151, 152, 205–7, 214, 217; and democracy, 14, 15, 18, 24, 37–8, 39, 40, 45, 54, 116, 150, 219, 220, 222, 367; extraparliamentary pressure, 328, 330; legislative power, 37–8, 54, 117, 128, 131, 165, 204, 215, 220, 332, 366, 381, 395; mechanisms of, 18, 215, 216–17, 219, 333, 379; parliamentary supremacy, 48, 332; upper house, 190, 205, 206–7, 214–17, 219 Patrias, Carmela, 10, 22, 102, 265, 299, 373 Pennock, J. Roland, 311 “the people,” 5, 19, 382, 412; definition of, 8, 13–14, 18, 51, 59, 88, 99, 320, 321, 356; inclusion in, 324, 343, 355; limits of, 8, 12, 17–18, 38, 77, 340; popular sovereignty, 12, 24, 38, 88, 186, 204, 322; power of, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 15–16, 22, 38; 49, 59, 88, 108, 165, 205, 218 Perrot, Nicolas, 64, 67 Pew, J. Howard, 285, 296n125 Philp, Mark, 204 Pilon, Dennis, 9, 10, 18, 134–5, 141–2, 172, 235, 279, 297, 321, 348n43, 355 Piva, Michael, 98 Plato, 11, 52 pluralism, 19, 165, 248, 268; Canada as plurinational polity, 7,

498

Index

17, 105, 173, 175, 181–2, 187, 188, 190, 192, 194, 197, 198, 323; “cultural pluralism,” 173; and democracy, 345–6n16; legal pluralism, 61; multiculturalism, 107, 108, 248, 320, 323, 337. See also Black Canadians; Chinese Canadians; French Canadians; Indigenous peoples; Japanese Canadians; Jewish Canadians; Quebec; settler colonialism Polanyi, Karl, 125–6, 129, 131, 132 Popper, Karl, 10 populism, 19, 50, 208, 215, 346n20 Price, John, 408 Prince Edward Island, 16, 188, 206, 207, 209, 210, 215, 217 public debate: and democracy, 35, 38–9, 104, 116, 136–7, 180, 251, 287; management of, 287–8; measuring, 276; power of, 16, 38–9, 179–80, 198, 273, 374, 252, 333; and welfare state, 268 public opinion. See public debate public sphere, 16, 21, 34, 116, 277; voluntary associations, 16, 19, 136–8, 154–5, 158, 250, 251, 259, 319, 328, 338, 374, 381. See also media Quebec, 24, 71, 77, 221, 319, 323, 329, 335, 337, 366, 375, 377. See also French Canadians; Lower Canada; nationalism; New France; pluralism Rancière, Jacques, 9, 321 Ranke, Leopold, 195 Rawls, John, 26n27, 346n17, 364

Rebellion, Canadian, 15, 99, 117, 120, 135, 136, 140, 207; Rebellion Losses crisis, 174, 213–14, 215 recognition, 323–7; and Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 319, 332, 336, 337; and citizenship, 320, 323, 342–3; and democracy, 327; of lgbtq + people, 22–3, 237, 319, 323, 336; politics of, 321, 323–4, 341; of the “sexual citizen,” 327–8; and Supreme Court of Canada, 334–5, 340–1 reconstruction: Advisory Committee on Reconstruction, 270; League for Social Reconstruction, 270; post-World War II, 264, 265, 268–70, 287, 367, 369, 272, 273, 274, 283, 284, 287, 288; Reconstruction Party, 271. See also capitalism; Murray, Gladstone Redford, Alison, 410, 412 Red River, 184, 197 reformers: in British North America, 6, 11, 15, 16–17, 48, 49, 117, 137, 138, 149, 152, 158–9, 165, 206, 208–12, 216, 222; Canadian Reform Party, 211; Clear Grits, 211; colonial reform movement, 89–90, 96–7, 98–9, 101–2 representation, 177–8; as anti-democratic, 12, 221–2, 413; as central to democracy, 12, 14, 27n36, 34, 116, 313, 390, 391, 400, 404, 419; and white supremacy, 91, 104, 390–1, 399, 401, 407

Index republicanism/republicans: Ancient Rome, 68, 71, 187, 203; in Canada, 15, 116, 117, 120, 136, 137–8, 206–7, 209; and democracy, 10, 15, 28n45, 70–1, 79, 116, 118, 120, 122, 135, 136–7, 204, 209, 391, 399; and economy, 116, 117, 118, 121–2, 123, 130, 134–40, 149, 165; and settler colonialism, 120. See also United States responsible government, 166; and democracy, 16–17, 35, 37–8, 47, 54, 204, 208–9, 213; limits of, 37; and settler colonialism, 17, 90, 103; struggle for, 47, 206–7 Ricardo, David, 121, 143n28 Riel, Louis, 184, 196, 198 right-wing movements, 4, 235, 259, 264, 265, 287 Roberts, Julia, 16 Robinson, John Beverley, 123, 125, 127, 156 Roediger, David, 399 Rokkan, Stein, 41 Rolph, George, 157, 163 Rosanvallon, Pierre, 9 Rosenfeld, Sandra, 193 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 70 Roy, Fernande, 265 Roy, Patricia, 408 Russia, 19, 42, 257, 304, 310, 311, 312, 346n20, 404, 407 Saalheimer, Manfred, 240, 241, 249 Sabsay, Leticia, 320, 321 same-sex marriage, 326, 347n32; Civil Marriage Act, 319, 334, 336; struggle for, 323, 335, 342; and Supreme Court of Canada,

499

334–40, 340–1. See also gay rights; lgbtq +; recognition Sangster, Joan, 23 Sartori, Giovanni, 35 Saskatchewan, 20, 73, 197, 240, 253 Saul, John Ralston, 16, 54 Savoie, Donald, 379 Saxton, Alexander, 400 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr, 405 Schrauwers, Albert, 10, 11, 15, 93, 149, 165, 271 Schumpeter, Joseph, 12 Seeley, R.S.K., 254 settler colonialism, 109n2, 390; British, 71–4, 75–6, 87, 89–90; 91, 93, 95–102, 103, 104–5, 120, 133, 164, 182, 205–6, 281, 393; Canadian, 76–7, 80, 107–8, 176, 179, 181, 183, 185–6, 196–7, 198, 392, 415, 416; commissions, 75–6; and democracy, 7, 12–13, 17, 19, 23, 24–5, 54, 58, 60, 73, 76, 87–8, 107–9, 404, 407, 413; French, 61–4, 69, 71, 73; and frontier myth, 281; historiography, 397; “terra nullius,” 396; and white supremacy, 17, 87, 88, 90, 102–5, 391, 393, 398, 399, 407, 409. See also capitalism; Indigenous peoples; New Zealand; United States Silcoff, Maurice, 244 Simcoe, John Graves, 15 Simpson, Audra, 100, 107, 108 Singh, Jagmeet, 105 Sioui, Georges, 79 Smith, Adam, 52, 63, 74, 77, 122, 179

500

Index

Smith, Goldwin, 148, 150 Smith, Miriam, 335, 347n32 Social Credit Party, 241, 271. See also Aberhart, William social democracy. See charity; Co-operative Commonwealth Federation; human rights; New Democratic Party; state; taxation; welfare state socialism: Christian socialists, 360; collapse of, 322; and decolonization, 329; and Jewish Canadians, 243–6, 258, 261n42; opposition to, 19, 188, 191, 267, 274–5, 276, 277, 279, 283, 300, 374; public opinion on, 276. See also Co-operative Commonwealth Federation; human rights South Africa, 406, 407, 409–12. See also Apartheid Soviet Union (ussr ). See Russia Spencer, Herbert, 384n11 Stalin and Stalinism, 310, 312 Stanley, Timothy, 408, 421n32 state: and capitalism, 10, 39, 43–4, 87, 88, 106, 117, 118, 119, 126, 322; “colonial leviathan,” 150, 166; and contribution, 154–6, 159, 355, 356, 357–8, 359, 361, 368, 371, 372, 376, 380; control of the, 330; and corporations, 118, 119, 128, 131, 139, 157–8, 163–4; and democracy, 10, 14, 16, 20, 25, 376; foundations, 87, 91; and fundraising policy, 357, 358, 362, 363, 367, 371, 377, 379; and Indigenous peoples, 78, 79, 101; intervention, 93, 95, 120–1, 148–9, 241, 258, 276, 368; liberal state, 21, 38, 89,

117, 302, 336; and non-state actors, 14, 154; one-party states, 304; opposition to, 38; and power, 39, 119, 287, 356, 400, 401, 402, 403, 407, 412, 414, 417; and property rights, 241, 286; role of the, 78, 160, 161, 166, 175, 192–5, 240–1, 269, 279, 326, 328, 335, 337, 369; settler, 87, 88, 89, 91, 101, 106–8, 326; and social programs, 20, 371–2; 376–7; sovereignty, 117, 393. See also liberalism; welfare state Stedman Jones, Gareth, 186–7 Stewart, Gordon, 17 Strachan, John, 121, 125, 128, 130, 132 Strong-Boag, Veronica, 18 Svonkin, Stuart, 247, 249 Sydenham, Lord (Charles Poulett Thompson), 92, 166–7, 218 Taché, Alexandre, 183–4, 196, 198 Taché, Joseph-Charles, 215; biography, 174, 186; and British settlers, 154, 188–9; and Confederation, 17, 172, 173, 175, 177, 181–4, 185, 189, 190–6; conservatism, 187–8; Courrier du Canada, 174; and democracy, 17, 172–5, 177, 178, 185–7, 190–2, 194, 198, 199; historiography on, 173, 174; and Indigenous peoples, 177, 180, 182, 184–6, 189, 197, 198; and liberalism, 10, 191, 193, 195; and materialism, 188–9, 194; and Métis civilization, 183–4, 196; and nationalism, 173, 174,

Index 175, 176, 177–8, 179, 186, 195; and religion, 174, 187, 188, 190, 195–6, 198; and science, 174, 175, 192; and self-interest, 155, 191; and Tocqueville, 198; and transnational relations, 173, 174, 175, 177, 181–2, 185, 186, 190, 198 Taine, Hyppolite, 61 Tarrow, Sidney, 328 Taschereau, Elzéar-Alexandre, 196 Tawney, Richard Henry, 298, 313 taxation, 356, 380; Canadian Tax Foundation, 370; and corporations, 117, 120, 127, 152, 153; and democracy, 20, 151, 152–3, 154–5, 157, 158, 162–3, 166, 269, 357, 370, 381; income tax, 20, 357–60, 370, 371, 375; National Citizens Coalition, 375; National Service Loan, 357; postwar debates, 271, 288, 370, 375, 377; progressive, 20, 370, 371; resentment over, 218, 359, 371 375; rhetoric on, 21, 358; right to, 15, 131, 151; Royal Commission on Taxation, 377; as policy, 359–60, 362, 363, 365, 367, 368, 369; as voluntary contribution, 16, 148–9, 151, 153–7, 160, 163, 166; and welfare state, 20, 370 Taylor, Astra, 4 Taylor, Charles, 325–6 Taylor, James, 119 Therborn, Goran, 43–4, 45, 47 Third World, 298, 300, 304, 311 Thompson, Charles Poulett. See Sydenham, Lord Thompson, E.P., 39

501

Thomson, Watson, 255 Thorson, Joseph, 239, 241 Thucydides, 8, 179 Tillotson, Shirley, 12, 20, 21, 149, 150, 272 Tobias, John, 174 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 172, 198; and democracy, 3, 58, 165, 179, 189; on Indigenous peoples, 73–4, 180; on nationalities and races, 178, 179, 180, 188, 195, 198; on the United States, 180, 188–9 Tolmin, Leslie, 310, 311 Tough, David, 20 Townshend, Jules, 300, 313 Tozer, Angela, 11, 17, 73, 120, 124, 125, 131, 132, 164, 205 “transitology,” 44–5, 47 Trestrail, Burdick, 274, 296n130 Trotskyism, 310, 311 Trudeau, Pierre Elliot, 22, 79, 316n36, 330, 375 Truth, Sojourner, 414 Tuck, Eve, 108 Turner, Stephen P., 364, 379 United Canada, 54, 92, 207, 209, 210–11, 215, 216, 217, 220. See also Lower Canada; Upper Canada United Nations, 255, 307, 411 United States, 93, 120, 188; African Americans, 192–3, 413, 418; American Revolution, 6, 11, 13, 71, 83n62, 182, 396; Chamber of Commerce of the United States (ccus ), 273, 286; Civil Rights movement, 404; Civil War, 17, 212, 218; Constitution,

502

Index

79–80, 182–3; and democracy, 12, 40, 50, 176, 203, 209, 210; electoral system, 49; and enfranchisement, 36, 40, 45, 209; Gettysburg Address, 405; influence on Canada, 7, 15, 17, 90, 153, 158, 173, 188, 189, 192–3, 199, 204; Japanese Americans, 407; and Jewish human rights organizations, 244; National Origins Act, 409; New Deal, 271, 278, 285; and racism, 399–400, 417; representation in, 413; and settler colonialism, 12, 13, 74, 83n62, 104–5, 108, 109n2, 180, 185, 186, 393, 396, 399, 400, 409, 414, 416; TaftHarley Act, 284; War of 1812, 71–2, 204 Upper Canada: corporations in, 117, 118, 126, 129–31, 149, 158–9, 167; and democracy, 15, 16, 153; demography, 72; economic development, 91, 92–7, 100, 119–22, 124–8, 132–3, 135–6; Family Compact/Tories, 117, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124–5, 126–8, 130–2, 136, 140, 206, 208; political life, 38, 116, 118, 125, 137–8, 158–9, 187, 208; taxation in, 151–2, 156, 159–62, 167 Utilitarians, 50 Vibert, Frank, 389n77 vote, 17, 355; and Confederation, 17–18; and corruption, 18; electoral system/elections, 19, 34, 35, 40, 45–6, 48, 51, 116, 365, 374, 379, 381, 408; meaning of, 12,

18, 35–7, 39, 46, 48, 53, 108, 172, 215–16, 277, 348n43, 372; in the Middle Ages, 35–6; in municipalities, 171n43; secret ballot, 18, 37, 190; and violence 18, 37, 190. See also enfranchisement Vowel, Chelsea, 107 Vriend, Delwin, 333–4 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, 89–90, 92, 97, 99, 100, 103, 104, 110n2, 120, 125, 132, 148n78 Walcott, Rinaldo, 102, 110n8 Warner, Tom, 332, 349n59 Warren, Jean-Philippe, 11, 13 Way, Peter, 214 welfare state, 20, 241, 270, 287; Canadian Council on Social Development, 378; and democratization, 6, 12, 20–1, 371; opposition to, 265, 272, 280, 282, 284, 369, 374, 375; shrinking of, 337, 338; social security, 264, 268, 270, 273, 278, 280, 288, 368, 369, 370, 371, 374; support for, 258, 269, 270. See also Marsh, Leonard; state Welland Canal, 91, 93–6, 117, 122, 124, 125, 127, 130, 149, 152, 165 Whigs, 37, 50, 54–5; Whiggism, 13, 51, 58, 60, 179–80, 208 Whitehead, Lawrence, 49 white supremacy, 341; and democracy, 7, 13, 21, 28n59, 60, 91, 103, 105–6, 210, 212, 391, 398–401, 403, 404, 407, 409, 413–15, 417, 418, 419; deployment of, 102–3, 390, 393, 395;

Index and disenfranchisement, 395, 401, 406, 408; and Jacksonian democracy, 399–400; legal regime of, 401–3, 408–9; Nazism and, 406; in political thought, 87, 391; repudiation of, 392, 404, 413–15, 419. See also antiAsian legislation; settler colonialism Whitton, Charlotte, 364 Wilson, Edward Francis, 75 Wilson, Woodrow, 13 Wilson Institute, L.R., 5 Wise, Sydney F., 175, 204 Wolfe, Patrick, 88 Wolin, Sheldon, 9, 26n27, 179 women: activism, 19, 337, 356, 357; democratic value of, 413; franchise, 16–17, 18, 19, 28n61, 36, 163, 172, 204, 209–10, 212, 220, 221, 223, 355–6, 355, 357, 391–2, 414; National Action Coalition, 337; women’s rights, 78, 141, 172, 237, 258, 259; working class, 357, 371, 373; Young Women’s Christian Association (ywca ), 253. See also democracy

503

working class. See labour Workman, Andrew, 278 world wars, 7; First World War, 18–19, 37, 38, 46, 49, 268, 361; Second World War, 10, 21, 235, 238, 241, 265, 367, 368, 404, 406, 408; War Measures Act, 252, 316n36; Wartime Information Board, 276 xenophobia, 274, 392 Yang, K. Wayne, 108 Young, Iris Marion, 323 Young, William, 216 Yu, Henry, 11, 13, 19, 29n71, 91 Zeller, Walter P., 290n34