Chapter 19 Canada. Hauss/Haussman, Chapter 19: Canada-1 Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.

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1 Chapter 19 Canada Chapter Outline Becoming Canada Thinking about Canada The Evolution of the Canadian State Political Culture Political Participation The Canadian State Public Policy: Moving to the Right? The Media Hauss/Haussman, Chapter 19: Canada-1

2 If we don t conceive of our story of Canada accurately, we as politicians can t do what we need to do, and we as citizens can t live the life that is in us to live. Ken Dryden The Basics Canada Size Population Ethnic composition Religion 9,984,670 sq. km (slightly larger than the United States) 34.3 million GDP per capita $40,300 Currency $0.98 CAD = $1 Capital British Isles 28%; France 23%; Other European 15%; Native Canadian 2%; Other 6%; Mixed 26% Roman Catholic 43%; Protestant 27%; Muslim 2%; Other and None 28% Ottawa Head of Government Stephen Harper (2006 ) Head of State David Johnston (2010 ) BECOMING CANADA Almost every other chapter begins with a statement by a famous politician or political scientist. Chapter 19 starts with one by a professional athlete turned politician. Ken Dryden was arguably the greatest goalie to ever play hockey. At 6 4 he seemed to fill the net when he starred for Cornell University and the Montreal Canadiens. Dryden was also an unusual hockey player. While with Montreal, he earned a law degree from McGill University before a long career as an NHL administrator which, in turn, led him to a seven-year stint as a Liberal member of Parliament and cabinet minister from Toronto. His book includes everything from being an athlete to the responsibility each of us shares for global warming. In many ways, however, it is the title, Becoming Canada, that draws our attention to it. It is hard to imagine a book entitled Becoming America or Becoming Britain. Immigrants have speculated about what becoming American or British is all about, but that wasn t his title. He lives in an old country. Depending on how you count, Canada has been around for a long time, at least since the British North America Act was signed in 1867 or the British occupation of all of what would become Canada a century earlier. Hauss/Haussman, Chapter 19: Canada-2

3 But unlike the United States or Great Britain, Canada is still seeking to define and become itself. As we will see time and again in the pages that follow, Canada lives very much in the shadow of those other two English-speaking democracies. The United Kingdom gave it most of its political institutions. The United States has been a lurking presence throughout modern Canada s history, at times seeming to want to take it over, at times simply seeming to dominate its economy and popular culture. Dryden is right. Whatever it shares with these two or any other countries, Canada is unique. Despite many bumps along the way that we will consider, it is arguably the most successful federal, multilingual, multiethnic democracy in the world. To cite but one statistic, there were 16,929 murders in the United States, but only 594 in Canada. Similarly, the United States is still struggling to provide health care for all of its citizens. The Canadian system is far from perfect, but it has offered more than basic health care for everyone for decades. How can two countries that are so similar in so many ways be so different at the same time? That uniqueness extends to its hybrid political system. Canada s institutions are mostly British in origin but its political culture has a lot in common with its giant neighbor to the south. Today, Canada is not really much like either of them. To cite but one example, John Ibbitson wrote a book on Canadian and American politics in 2009 shortly after he was named Washington correspondent for Toronto s Globe and Mail. Open and Shut contrasts what Ibbitson saw as the innovative openness of American politics of the then new Obama presidency with the hidebound and risk-averse politics in an Ottawa led by the anything but charismatic Stephen Harper (1959-). As we write, the United States is in the middle of one of the most vicious and least productive periods in recent political history, while Harper presides over a rare Conservative majority that could become the latest in a long list of electoral dynasties that have been a key feature over the nearly century and a half since confederation. Last but by no means least, Canada is one of the few countries that has built itself around three distinct populations (indigenous, English, and French) and is, arguably, the industrialized democracy that is most welcoming of immigrants today. Taken together, these features make Canada a country that deserves our attention in any basic course in comparative politics. In this chapter, we will stress what makes Canada different, which will include its complicated history, its regional and ethnic divisions, and its frequent lack of collective self-confidence vis-à-vis its better known, English-speaking fellow democracies. American: A Misleading Term As discussed in Chapter 16 on Mexico, the word American is often incorrectly used to describe a citizen of the United States. Canadians, Mexicans, and many others are Americans, too. Many Canadians resent the fact that people from the United States think that the term applies to themselves alone, and as such, many Canadiens view it as a sign of what they think of as American arrogance. But because we lack a better term for use in academic prose, let alone everyday conversation, American will refer to residents of the United States in the rest of this chapter. Hauss/Haussman, Chapter 19: Canada-3

4 THINKING ABOUT CANADA Big Brothers Are Watching In Chapter 16, we used the phrase big brother is watching to describe the relationship between the United States and Mexico. Big brothers matter here, too, but in this case the use of the plural is not a typo. Canada has had two big brothers. Today s Canada began as British and French colonies until France lost Québec in what Americans call the French and Indian war. Canadian political institutions were explicitly patterned after those in London. They have evolved some since the British North America Act was approved in London but the procedural differences are largely in the details. In fact, although Canada gained all but total control of its internal and external affairs more than a century ago, London was still the ultimate source of authority until Canada patriated its constitution in Even today, the lower house of Parliament is still known as the House of Commons, whose sessions officially begin with a speech from the throne, albeit one not read by the reigning monarch. The United States has the greatest sway over Canada today. It is not as overwhelming or as one-sided as the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. Nonetheless, it is inescapable, as the few visitors who venture north of the border soon discover. Canadians watch the same television shows and buy the same products at many of the same stores as Americans. And perhaps more telling for our purposes, the specter of an American annexation of Canada was openly discussed as recently as the 1980s. The two countries have been at peace with each other for more than a century, the longest such period between two large powers in recorded history. The last hint of hostilities between Canada and the United States occurred thirty years before Canada was formally created in a series of skirmishes exaggeratedly known as the Aroostook War, over what is still the leastpopulated and least-developed county in the state of Maine. They also share one of the most peaceful borders in the world. It used to be the longest unguarded border in the world, an honor that now goes to the Schengen group of the European Union which has abolished all internal border controls. Americans and Canadians always needed some form of identification to cross the border. However, it was only in 2007, in the aftermath of 9/11, that each began requiring visitors from the other country to carry a valid passport. For political scientists, the most puzzling aspect of the relationship lies in how one-sided the relationship is. Canadians have no choice but to pay attention to the U.S. It can safely be said that most Americans blithely ignore their neighbors to the north. About three-quarters of all Canadians live within one hundred miles of the border with the United States. Virtually everyone watches U.S. television. Rogers, the leading cable company, provides all of the major channels one finds on cable services in the United States, along with Canadian and a handful of European networks. News about the United States is a fixture in all Canadian mass media except for a handful of Internet sites that only feature Canadian content. Many Canadians travel frequently to the United States, if nothing else to shop for consumer goods because prices have historically been much cheaper south of the border until both dollars reached parity in early Hockey is Canada s national sport, but all but seven of the thirty National Hockey League teams play in the United States. Hauss/Haussman, Chapter 19: Canada-4

5 But very few Americans know much or care much about Canada. Few of us travel there. Almost none of us have access to Canadian media. When Chip moved to Waterville, Maine, in 1975, he was delighted to learn that the local cable company carried a French language station that showed La soirée du hockey au Canada each Saturday. But by the time Melissa moved there a few years later, the French-speaking population in central Maine had declined precipitously, and that station was long gone. He now has several hundred channels on his cable system; none are Canadian. The local NPR station carries As It Happens, the CBC newsmagazine that was the inspiration for All Things Considered. The program was not available in thirty states, including seven that border Canada. During the time it took to write this chapter, nothing on Canada appeared in either the New York Times or Washington Post other than baseball, basketball, and hockey scores. The Basics In other words, background information on Canada is at least as important a topic as it would be for any country covered in a comparative politics course for U.S. students for one simple reason: They know very little about it. Geography First, Canada is huge. It is about 5 percent larger than the United States. Only Indonesia and Russia are bigger. But with only 34 million residents, Canada is sparsely populated. There is a simple reason why so many Canadians live near the border. Its northern climate is too cold for most people. Think about the territory of Nunavut, which was created in 1999 as a homeland for many of Canada s aboriginal peoples. It is a vast territory, taking up one-fifth of Canada, but it has only about 29,000 residents. The largest town, Iqaluit, has a population of 6,000. Language Again Almost all countries in the Americas face another, common linguistic dilemma. What should they call descendants of people who lived there before the Europeans arrived. Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, and the other early explorers settled on the term Indians because they thought they had found the westward passage to the Indies. They, of course, were wrong both about where they were and about the identity of the people they met. Indian and Eskimo are rarely used in Canada because both are seen as pejorative. Most scholars prefer aboriginal to describe this group of more than a million people who make up about four percent of the population. Even that can be confusing. The BNA used Indian, thus giving the term some legal standing. Many of those once called Eskimos are today Inuits, but not all. Some reject that name, too. Non-Inuit aboriginals are often referred to as first nations and are ethnically closest to what American mean by Indians (in fact, many groups live in both countries). That does not end the confusion. About four hundred thousand people are known as métis, which describes people with both white and first nation ancestry. Hauss/Haussman, Chapter 19: Canada-5

6 Canada s history of dealing with its aboriginal peoples is now all but universally seen as appalling. However, more than Australia or the United States, it has made major strides in recent years in giving their sparsely populated regions much needed social services and a large degree of self-government. Much of Canada lies above the Arctic Circle. In June 2005, the town of Cambridge Bay in Nunavut only broke 50 degrees Fahrenheit one day per week. Canada s equivalent of the Super Bowl, the Gray Cup, is played in November. Outdoor football games after that date are unimaginable. Many Canadians enjoy ice skating on the Rideau Canal separating the national capital, Ottawa, from its sibling city, Hull. In all of Chip s years of living in Washington, D.C., no one has been able to skate on the Potomac. Diversity Canadian politics is defined by the country s diversity. Modern Canadian history begins with the amalgamation of two sets of colonies: one English, the other French. Even more than the effect of race in the United States, language is at the heart of politics in Canada to this day. People in the United States and Canada have reached different conclusions about what to call the peoples who lived there before the European colonists arrived. About one-fourth of all Canadians speak French as their native tongue. Most francophones also speak English, although many do not do so well. Almost all of them live in Québec, which was the heart of New France, as the French colony was known. Some French speakers live in the Maritime provinces (home of the Acadians, most of whom were forced to move to Louisiana), and a few others live in the West. A generation ago, conflict over language came close to tearing Canada apart. In the 1960s, many Québecois started to agitate for sovereignty if not outright independence. Referenda that could have led to an independent Quebec were defeated in 1980 and 1995, the second time by less than one percent of the vote. The referenda did not tell the entire story nor did their defeat remove the language issue from politics. In 1977, the Province of Québec passed Bill 101, which made French the official language of Québec and paved the way for national legislation on bilingualism. 1 Bill 104, enacted thirty years later, required new immigrants who were not native English speakers to attend French language schools. In October 2009, parts of the law were overturned by the Québec Court of Appeals, which could give new life to the language issue. Appeals of that decision are still pending even though only about 4,000 children have been affected by the provisions of Bill Bilingualism is no small matter in Canada. All senior civil servants must speak both. All courses at the Royal Military College are conducted in both languages, and upon graduation, all cadets must be bilingual. Debates among candidates for the prime ministry are held in both languages, usually on successive nights. Not all Anglophone candidates speak French well, but it is all but impossible to get elected these days without a reasonable command of it. Hauss/Haussman, Chapter 19: Canada-6

7 Unlike many European countries, the Canadian state never tried to impose a common identity. As a result, many Canadians blend several different definitions of who they are. Many French-speaking Canadians in Québec define themselves as both Québecois and Canadians. Many people from first nations often focus on their ethnic heritage. Many English-speaking Canadians, although they may define themselves simply as Canadian, have strong loyalties to their regions and to the countries their families emigrated from. The easing of tensions over Québec has not brought ethnic politics to an end. Over the last few decades, Canada--like most industrial democracies--has become home to many nonwhite immigrants. They come from three main regions the Caribbean, China, and South Asia. Altogether, the visible minorities (a term used in the Canadian census since 1998) make up about 6 percent of the population. Toronto and Vancouver have had majority minority populations at least since the beginning of this century. So far, the new face of Canada has not become a political issue. However, since most new immigrants outside of Montréal have chosen to be English speakers, the shift in the balance of the population might further alienate francophone Canadians. Little Mosque on the Prairie Like people south of the border, Canadians are struggling to deal with their newfound cultural diversity. One of the most innovative attempts to do so is the wonderfully funny sitcom, Little Mosque on the Prairie, which premiered on the state-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in 2007 and will have its sixth and final season in The show is set in a small town that somehow has a small, multiracial community of Muslims and a significant number of long-term residents who oppose further immigration. The series begins with the arrival of a new imam from Toronto who has been asked to help the Muslim community grow. As befits all sitcoms, the very handsome lawyer-turned-imam falls in love with the beautiful daughter of the leader of the community. They were married in the third season. The series pokes fun not only at Canadian political culture, but at the Muslim community as well. Some scholars think that the show masks considerable racism despite the fact that its creators and most of its writers are Muslims. Perhaps that criticism simply reflects the academic s propensity to take him/herself and all of life too seriously. Its first episode had more viewers than the debut of any other Canadian series. Fox bought the rights to create an American version, but it has not produced it yet. A few episodes are available at the normal online video sites. Given the diversity of present-day Canada and its history, which we are about to discuss, it should come as no surprise that it is a federation and not a unitary state. It is not the only one covered in this book (the United States, Germany), but the Canadians have probably gone to greater lengths to define the power of the national or federal government vis-à-vis those of the ten provinces and three territories. But given what we have already seen about Canada, let alone Hauss/Haussman, Chapter 19: Canada-7

8 the material on its history that follows, it is also not surprising that the distribution of powers and the very nature of federalism are questioned far more than in either the United States or Germany. Key Questions In a few paragraphs, we will pose the types of questions we have included in the comparable section of every chapter in Comparative Politics. Before we do so, we should highlight three broader themes that have to structure any discussion of Canadian politics. When authors do not raise them explicitly, they run the risk of unnecessarily confusing their readers because readers may find it hard to see a central paradox that leaves Canada with more open questions than the other advanced industrialized democracies covered in Part 2. On the one hand, the basic parameters of its politics and democracy have been set for a long time, perhaps since confederation a century and a half ago. On the other, these three basic questions are left hanging in ways that leave the specific nature of Canadian politics more up for grabs than anything we saw elsewhere in Part 2 of this book. Federal-Provincial Relations. Canada does not have the kind of vexing problems with federalism that we saw in Russia or India. Still, patterns of power and responsibility between the federal and provincial government remain ambiguous and periodically pose problems for both levels of government. Language and Identity Politics. We have encountered multiple examples of intractable identity-based conflict in Comparative Politics. Despite a flurry of violence in the late 1960s and a history of discrimination against Québecois, there are no signs that ethnic tensions are likely to tear Canada apart at least for the next few decades. However, ethnic tensions have helped shape Canadian politics in unusual ways, including making regional issues and alignments more important than they are in just about any other established democracy. Foreign Impact. No one would confuse Canada and Mexico. Both, however, have to live with the world s one remaining superpower situated between them. As we will see shortly, the British gave to Canada most of its political institutions and to the United States many of its cultural values. As Ken Dryden suggests in the statement that begins this chapter, that foreign influence is powerful enough that it begs the question of what being or becoming Canadian means. In Canada today, those three trends manifest themselves in six specific issues that echo those covered in other chapters. Why has Canada had a harder time building and/or sustaining national unity than most established democracies? How do Canada s history and political culture lead to its peculiar mix of regionalism and nationalism? Why does Canada have one of the most volatile and changing party systems in the democratic world, despite having inherited its electoral procedures lock, stock, and barrel from the United Kingdom? Hauss/Haussman, Chapter 19: Canada-8

9 But at the same time, why are Canadians reluctant to engage in major constitutional change? Why does Canada have a more active and most would say more effective set of social service policies than the United States, most notably a health care system that covers everyone? Despite all the apparent upheaval, why do almost all Canadians seem content with its role as a middle level power in international relations? THE EVOLUTION OF THE CANADIAN STATE The history of most countries and regions is filled with myths. Canada is no exception. The first one we need to dispel is one that Dryden raises and quickly dismisses. Many casual observers think that Canadians are too polite to be interesting. Rather, their history is filled with the kind of turmoil we see in most other countries. As a result, Canadians had to make choices that, in turn, went a long way toward shaping what politics there is like today. As the historian Desmond Morton put it early in his history of the country: Canadians believe that their history is short, boring, and irrelevant. They are wrong on all counts. 2 In countering that misconception, American readers will encounter yet another paradox. The United States needed a revolution to free itself from colonial rule and then had to fight a civil war to keep it together. Canada gained its independence peacefully and never went through a civil war. Nonetheless, in its history since independence, Canada has faced more big questions about the regime than has the United States. The United States also broke cleanly and all but completely with Britain. Canada did not. Even today, the Queen of England is officially the head of state in Canada. To be sure, London has no impact on day-to-day politics in Ottawa. Nonetheless, the queen s portrait is still on Canadian stamps and currency. The second myth is that Columbus discovered America. That misconception has had less to do with how historians interpret Canada s past or how it was settled. However, if we start our analysis of its history with formal colonization, we will blind ourselves to a number of historical trends that Canadians themselves have paid too little attention to. Colonialism and its Antecedents Columbus and his crew were not the first Europeans to put their feet on American soil. There is no longer any doubt that Vikings had settlements in today s Atlantic provinces no later than Leif Ericson s first voyage in We do not know what happened to them, but those colonies were abandoned along with the Norse colony in Greenland in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. 2 Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada. 6 th ed. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2006). Preface. Note this was read on a Kindle without page numbers. This citation is from the first page of the preface. Hauss/Haussman, Chapter 19: Canada-9

10 The permanent history of Europeans in Canada began with the arrival of the English and the French, although neither got there initially because their own explorers found it. The English got there first when the Italian, John Cabot (really Giovanni Caboto), landed in Newfoundland in (See Table 19.1.) Less than thirty years later, the French began to lay claim to what became Canada when another Italian in their employ, Giovanni de Verazzano (for whom New York City s bridge is named), mapped much of the eastern coastline of North America and audaciously claimed it all for France ( The explorers and the first settlers encountered lands inhabited by as many as two million people. Unlike the rest of the Americas, the First Nations of Canada had arrived in two waves whose descendants maintained separate identities the Algonquin speakers in the south and the Athapaskan groups in the north. The word Canada was apparently first used early in the sixteenth century and is derived from the Iroquois word for settlement or land. Again, unlike other aboriginals to their south, they welcomed the first Europeans to their peril as it later turned out. The French created their first settlements in what is now New Brunswick, moving on to Québec following Jean Cartier s expeditions up the St. Lawrence River. Samuel de Champlain officially gave New France its name in 1608 with the establishment of what became Québec City and Montréal. The French colony had two economic mainstays. In the east, most settlers became farmers and were informally led by the Catholic Church and what amounted to feudal lords known as seigneurs. Meanwhile, trappers headed west and set up the lucrative fur trade along the St. Lawrence and the banks of the Great Lakes. Eventually, France would claim the entire Mississippi River and all the land whose waters drained into it, which, of course, included most of the western half of the continent. The British followed shortly thereafter. Their first permanent settlement was established in 1610 in Cuper s Bay (today s Cupids) in Newfoundland. They laid claim to most of Canada from what is now Ontario eastward. The Iroquois, Hurons, and other tribes who lived near the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes bore the brunt of colonization. The French took the lead, but once again, the English weren t far behind. As in the thirteen colonies to the south, the British and French decided they had to destroy the culture of the people they discovered upon their arrival. They did so, in part, to support the fur trade. Just as important for the French was Champlain s devotion to the Catholic Church (he was a convert from Protestantism), which made turning the heathens into Christians an important goal. The fact that both countries claimed the same territory meant that they almost certainly would have become rivals in Canada on the basis of local disputes. For good or ill, the competition between them was first touched off by their rivalry in Europe. In the early eighteenth century, the two fought each other in the War of Spanish Succession for reasons that had little or nothing to do North America. That war ended with the Treaty of Utrecht in which France ceded Nova Scotia and Newfoundland to the British. Next came the French and Indian War, which started in North America and eventually spread to Europe, where it became known as the Seven Years War. By then, the British had realized that a strong French presence in North America would jeopardize their more valuable Hauss/Haussman, Chapter 19: Canada-10

11 thirteen colonies in the South. The deciding part of the war took place on Canadian soil, culminating in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in Québec City in The commanding generals the French Louis Montcalm and the British James Wolfe were killed in the British victory. France s more important loss came at the negotiating table, not on the battlefield. The Treaty of Paris turned Québec over to the English, although France maintained nominal ownership of some of its western claims until the United States secured the Louisiana Purchase forty years later. To give a sense of how little Québec mattered to the French, the eminent philosopher Voltaire called it a few acres of snow. Table 19.1 The Early History of Canada Year Event 1497 John Cabot discovers Newfoundland 1534 Jean Cartier begins exploration of St. Lawrence River and its region 1598 Creation of New France 1670 Formation of the Hudson s Bay Company 1759 Battle of the Plains of Abraham 1867 British North America Act In 1774, the British passed the Quebec Act. Rather than brutally deporting the residents of their new possession as they had done with the Acadians twenty years earlier, the British granted a degree of local autonomy to the new residents of its empire by recognizing Québec s civil laws, the seigneurial or feudal system, and the privileged position of the Roman Catholic Church. The British also assumed that there would be massive immigration to Québec and that English speakers would overwhelm the French. That did not happen. Although they could not have realized it at the time, by passing the Quebec Act, the British laid the foundation for the creation of two Canadian cultures and most subsequent demands for the independence or sovereignty of Québec. Toward Confederation Independence The American Revolution deepened the hostility between the English and the French in part because of the substantial influx of Loyalists, who fled north and settled in Nova Scotia, Québec, and Ontario. These new immigrants soon demanded that Canada should have a stronger local assembly like those the British authorized in the southern colonies they had fled from. Hauss/Haussman, Chapter 19: Canada-11

12 In 1791, the British divided the single colony into Upper and Lower Canada and granted each an assembly, while the sparsely Maritimes remained under more direct English rule. None were democratic. The governor of each colony dominated the assembly, a situation that was complicated in Lower Canada by conflict between French and English and in Upper Canada by the arrival of new immigrants who were reluctant to accept being led by the established elites. Somewhat surprisingly, the next conflict to pit the French against the English in Europe did not have much of an impact on Canada. French Canadians did not flock to Napoleon s side. As most historians see it, they were too traditional and benefited too much from the demand for their timber and agricultural products. The calm during the early part of the century no doubt made unification easier in the middle of it. That did not mean that Canada was secure. Many people in the United States assumed that their revolution would spread to the north. When that happened, they assumed they would annex Canada as part of their new union. No time was more dangerous for Canada than the War of 1812, which was itself part of the final phase of the global Napoleonic wars. The years after Napoleon was finally and definitively defeated in 1815 were troubled ones for all Canadians. Québec lost access to most of its overseas markets, touching off a deep and lasting recession. The English-speaking regions quickly became overpopulated because they had to assimilate not only more Tory Loyalists from the United States but residents of the British Isles who were trying to escape poverty there. The elected assemblies pushed for more political control usually in opposition to the British-appointed governors and the elite-dominated executive councils, which did not consider themselves to be responsible to the voters even at a time when only property-owning men could vote. These conflicts culminated in the failed rebellions of in Upper and Lower Canada. The British sent Lord Durham to investigate the rebellions which led to passage of the Act of Union in This law combined Upper and Lower Canada into a single colony that presumably would assimilate French Canadians by immersing them in a larger political unit dominated by British settlers. To better integrate the French Canadians in the new colony, the new Canadian assembly had an equal number of representatives for the new Canada East and Canada West, an arrangement that underrepresented Canada East s population in the assembly. Democratization In Canada Democratization in Canada occurred in many of the same ways that it did in Great Britain and the United States. It happened gradually, both in terms of incorporating more and more of the electorate and handing more and more power to institutions directly elected by the people. As in the United States, Canada s democracy grew as the country expanded westward, adding new provinces. Unlike the United States, the country s divisions never came close to producing a bloody conflict like the Civil War. But even at this point in the narrative, it should be clear that the British and the French experienced their joint history in two very different ways. As is common in cases of intractable conflict, those different historical images can get in the way of creating any kind of lasting or peaceful solution to a conflict such as the one between the French and English in Canada. Hauss/Haussman, Chapter 19: Canada-12

13 Lord Durham s hopes for a unified colony under English domination did not come to pass. Politicians put together a power-sharing regime, which was an important stepping stone toward the establishment of federalism because each of the old provinces maintained its own administration. Cabinets routinely had ministers from the East and the West, sometimes as de facto co-prime ministers. However, by the 1850s, many in Canada West had become frustrated with this arrangement. The population there was growing so fast that the equal division of legislative seats left Canada West underrepresented in the assembly. The Reform Party of Canada West, led by George Brown, called for an end to the power-sharing arrangement so that it could escape sharing power with the French (which they felt was tantamount to domination by the French). The Canadian legislature was frequently deadlocked, which made either the passage of laws or the formation of a stable government difficult. It was also in the United Kingdom s interest to keep Canada strong and unified so it could defend itself against a feared American invasion. They had some reason to do so, because a large number of Canadian politicians were in favor of unification with the United States at the time. By the 1840s at the latest, some roughly common patterns appeared in Canadian public opinion at least among the propertied men who could vote. First were reformers known as rouges in Québec and Whigs or True Grits elsewhere. Second were conservatives who called themselves bleus among the francophones and Tories in the rest of the provinces. Leaders from both camps other than the rouges (who feared Anglophone domination of a united Canada), began to meet in an attempt to define Canada s future. There were other incentives for them to cooperate. The prospect of a transcontinental railroad helped open the West to settlement and commerce. The American Civil War drove Canadians and the British closer together. All these pressures led politicians from the United Provinces of Canada and three other British colonies Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick to begin negotiating confederation at the 1864 Charlottetown Conference. Three years later, most of them and the British Parliament agreed to the BNA Act. In those negotiations which took years to complete, the factional leaders had to overcome two obstacles: Should Canada be a mostly unitary or mainly federal state? Eventually, the Ontario-based Conservatives, led by Sir John A. Macdonald ( ) who would be Canada s first prime minister, agreed to a federal system as demanded by the bleus, led by George-Étienne Cartier, and the Reform Party, led by George Brown, who spoke on behalf of the small farmers of Canada West. The negotiators were also stymied by a feature of the Act of Union that gave Canada East and West the same number of representatives and that assured joint, gridlocked government. In this case, adding the Maritimes broke the deadlock because now neither Ontario nor Québec could hope to dominate on its own. Resolving these concerns allowed Canada West to escape what Brown s Reform Party feared could be French domination by creating a larger decision-making body in which power was more dispersed. Prince Edward Island initially declined to join, but entered it six years later. By that time, Manitoba (1870) and British Columbia (1871) had become members. Alberta and Saskatchewan Hauss/Haussman, Chapter 19: Canada-13

14 were separated from the Northwest Territory to form provinces in The last original colony to join the confederation was Newfoundland in The British North America Act Canada has had two constitutions. As we will see toward the end of this chapter, the British North America Act had more than its share of ambiguous provisions, and it took the patriation of the constitution in 1982 to settle most but not all of them. Still, the BNA Act created the basic institutions that have been at the heart of Canadian politics ever since. Since 1982, the BNA has been officially known as the Constitution Act of 1867 even though its provisions and language did not change. Five of its provisions are important because each remains in some ways contentious today. First, the Act initially placed the main levers of economic and political power in the hands of the federal government. It had the authority to tax and spend, except in limited and clearly defined ways left to the provinces. The federal government also kept control of trade and commerce, banking, and the currency. Only education, culture, and local matters were given to the provinces. Second, it also retained some features from British colonial practice that reinforced the federal government s upper hand over the provinces. For example, the prime minister appointed the lieutenant governors, who served as each province s chief executives, just as the colonial governors had been appointed by London. The federal government also retained the power to reserve or delay implementation of provincial legislation for up to a year, during which time parliament could disallow or reject it. That power is still on the books, although disallowance and reservation have not been used since 1943 and Third, the BNA Act contained important guarantees for the English minority in Québec and for the French minority in Ontario. Each was guaranteed the right to education in its own language in schools run by its own religion s clergy; as in the U.K., almost all schools were run by the churches. In the nineteenth century, guaranteeing the right to religious education carried with it the protection of linguistic and cultural privileges as well. In Québec, in particular, the Catholic Church both controlled the schools and ensured the survival of the French language and culture. The religious guarantees varied from province to province because they joined the confederation at different times. Nonetheless, they shared an important common purpose: protecting minority rights. Fourth, in retrospect, the BNA was conspicuously silent on how it could be amended. In some ways that makes sense because it was actually enacted by the British Parliament which retained legal sovereignty over Canada. In practice, London rarely exerted any such influence. Nonetheless, this anomaly kept Canadians from trying very hard or very often to amend their constitution until the 1982 Act, which we will discuss shortly. Fifth, the BNA Act also did not provide many details about the institutions of parliamentary government. It simply stated that Canada was to have a system of government similar in principle to that of the United Kingdom. Hauss/Haussman, Chapter 19: Canada-14

15 It was assumed that the House of Commons would dominate, much like its equivalent in the United Kingdom. At first, the provinces determined who could vote until the federal government took that power over the course of the next few decades. Until then, only men who owned property worth a certain amount or earned a decent salary could vote. The House of Commons had the sole right to determine who would become prime minister and to remove a government if it lost a vote of confidence. Officially, the governor general named the prime minister and dissolved the Parliament, but he (they were all men until the beginning of this century) only used those powers on the rare occasions when the parliamentary arithmetic did not yield an obvious winner. The upper house of Parliament, the Senate, was appointed by the federal government to ensure representation from each province. By requiring senators to hold $4,000 of real property in the province from which they were appointed, the fathers of the confederation also wanted to ensure that it would act as a check on the democratic impulses of the popularly elected House of Commons. Senate seats were not apportioned equally. As new provinces were added, representation became ever more unequal. Ontario and Québec had the same number of Senate seats. However, Newfoundland, which joined the confederation much later, had six Senate seats, giving the Maritimes a total of thirty while Western Canada had only twenty-four, split between its four provinces. There were also holes in the BNA Act. In this case, only two are worth mentioning here. First, it has no equivalent of the We the People language of the U.S. Constitution. Even more telling, it was only with the 1982 Constitution Act that Canada bestowed itself with an explicit Charter of Rights. More important on a day to day basis was the absence of any provision for the various aboriginal peoples or the métis. Many early leaders spoke eloquently of the new country they were creating. None ever mentioned Canada s aboriginal people who were not consulted about the creation of this new country on their traditional territory. That blindness to diversity other than that between French and English speakers led to horrific discrimination against First Peoples and, more generally, made it difficult for Canadians to even begin creating a truly multicultural society until the last two decades or so. Consolidating the Federal System The first century or so of the history of the new and only de facto independent country can be confusing if we focus on chronology as we have so far in this section. Rather, it makes more sense to concentrate on two key themes that stress the most important elements of continuity and uncertainty in the years before patriation and the most recent step in its constitutional evolution (see Table 19.2). Hauss/Haussman, Chapter 19: Canada-15

16 Table 19.2 Events and Trends in Canada since Confederation Year Event Expansion to present-day boundaries 1930s 1960s Federal responsibility for social policy Quiet Revolution in Québec 1968 Pierre Trudeau becomes prime minister 1969 Official Languages Act Passed 1976 PQ wins first election 1980 Referendum in Québec fails 1982 Patriation of the constitution Negotiation and collapse of Meech Lake Accord 1992 Failure of Charlottetown Accord Failure of second Québec referendum 1994 PQ wins provincial election 2005 Steven Harper becomes Prime Minister 2011 Harper and Conservatives win a majority in parliament Dynasties and Interludes Dynasties and Interludes is the main title of the best recent book on elections in Canada. 3 Other countries have had long periods in which a single party, and often a single ruler, was in control, such as the one led by Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain or Charles de Gaulle in Fifth Republic France. 3 Lawrence LeDuc, John Pammett, Judith McKenzie, and André Turcotte. Dynasties and Interludes: Past and Present in Canadian Electoral Politics. (Toronto: Dundurn Press,, 2010). Hauss/Haussman, Chapter 19: Canada-16

17 No country, however, had five of them as Canada did between Confederation and the election of It could well be that the three elections won since then by Steven Harper and the new Conservative Party will become a sixth, but it is too early to tell. Besides, it makes more sense to defer discussion of Harper and the uncertainties his government and party face until we get to Canadian politics today in a few pages. As Table 19.3 shows, the dynasties are periods of between four and nine elections in which a single party, and often a single leader, kept winning. These victories were not always consecutive Macdonald, Laurier, and Trudeau all lost at least once and then were returned to office. These interludes did little to alter the long term balance of power between the two main parties. Before we consider them, keep four things in mind. First, the Liberals led four of the five dynasties, which led some observers to think of them as the natural party of government. That may or may not be the case, and their preponderance may simply be an historical coincidence, as their chaos today might seem to suggest. What seems beyond doubt is that the first critical election in the string produced a lasting realignment in voter preferences that, in turn, led to new departures in public policy that lasted for a generation or more. Second, although only the major parties ever ran a dynasty, Canada has never had a twoparty system. Formal coalition governments were only formed in the 1870s and in wartime, but minority governments have been part and parcel of each dynasty. Most dynasties included minority governments in which the leader could only stay in power because of the de facto support of one or more of the smaller parties. Along those same lines, smaller parties have always been strong enough to keep either major party from gaining a majority of the vote even when it won a landslide victory in the House of Commons, something we will see in more detail in the section on the electoral system later on. There are usually several of these parties, so it is misleading to use the common American term, third parties to describe them. And, unlike American third parties, many of them have proven to be lasting fixtures in Canadian politics, such as today s New Democratic Party and one of the two groups that merged to form the new Conservative party a decade ago. Table 19.3 Political Dynasties Years Prime Minister Party Number of Elections Won John A. Macdonald Conservative Wilfred Laurier Liberal Mackenzie King and Louis St. Laurent Liberal Pierre Elliot Trudeau Liberal Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin Liberal 4 Hauss/Haussman, Chapter 19: Canada-17

18 Source: Adapted from LeDuc, et al., Dynasties and Elections: Past and Present in Canadian Electoral Politics. (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2011), p. 27. This history of alternating dynasties and interludes went a long way toward shaping the way Canadian politics is conducted today. Third, Canadian governments gradually expanded suffrage in the sixty years after confederation. At the time, no women or First Peoples were eligible to vote. Also excluded were men who either made less than a certain amount of money or owned less than a certain amount of property. That number varied because the provinces determined requirements for voting before 1885 and early in the twentieth century. In some cases, even provincial officials were barred from the polls. In the first few elections, voting did not take place on the same day nationwide. The secret ballot was only introduced during a brief Liberal interlude after the 1874 election. Property restrictions on men were later lifted. During World War I, two unusual policies were enacted which led to the removal of all restrictions in the aftermath of the armistice. Wives and other female relatives of soldiers serving at the front were allowed to vote. Meanwhile, the votes of deployed soldiers were counted separately and the government could apply the results in any district it saw fit. Needless to say, most of the later limits on the right to vote were used to enhance the likelihood that whoever wrote the law would win! Perhaps as a result, all of them quickly disappeared after the war. In 1920, the Chief Election Officer was created to ensure the honest conduct of elections. That same year, the first woman MP was elected. The only other major change was the lowering of the voting age from 21 to 18 in Fourth, the Liberals and Conservatives had to become brokerage parties in order to be successful. In other chapters, we used the term catch all party to describe organizations that sought support in all parts of the electorate. Canadian brokerage parties were a little bit different. They developed earlier; the catch all parties discussed in other chapters were largely a product of the media age. They also had origins that were specific to Canada. Given its linguistic and regional differences, parties seeking a majority had to directly appeal to a number of the groups they spawned. Quite early, then, the major parties abandoned or at least watered down their enduring ideological commitments, instead placing positions on issues of the day, regional interests, and the appeal of their candidates for prime minister at the heart of their campaigns. It was only natural that the most important architect of confederation became Canada s first prime minister. It could be argued, however, that the Macdonald dynasty was not confirmed until he returned to power after his 1874 defeat by the Liberals. A number of issues dominated politics for the thirty years in which he was in office, all of which served to bolster Conservative rule. Like the United States, Canadian political and business elites saw the need to build a transcontinental railroad. Macdonald also helped enact a series of restrictive tariffs and other programs known as the National Policy that were designed to protect Canadian firms from competition from imports and ease export sales for the goods their farms and factories produced. The only issue where Conservatives lagged behind the Liberals was honesty, because Macdonald seemed more than willing to enact policies that worked to his colleagues political and financial benefit. Macdonald died in As is often the case following the death of a long-established ruler, the Conservatives lacked both new ideas and a strong candidate to take his place. That was one of the reasons Canadian voters opted for their first Liberal and Francophone prime minister, Hauss/Haussman, Chapter 19: Canada-18