The grant of responsible government to the Province of Canada by the British government in 1848, depicted as a hard-won achievement by Canadian reformers, is a pillar of Liberal history. Donald Creighton, Grit whiggery’s most caustic critic, described the preoccupation with 1848 as an “obsession” based on an imaginary “emancipation from British control.” The further left the observer, the more likely to give credit to the rebel leaders of 1837, Louis-Joseph Papineau (who in fact sought an American-style republic) and William Lyon Mackenzie, also an Amercanizer but, according to Bob Rae, the “great Canadian radical.”1 A.R.M. Lower in Colony to Nation, a catechism of the once-mighty Liberal faith, called the rebellions “blessings in disguise, the corner stones of Canadian nationhood.”

In the heroic version, the mid-century Canadas were divided between the forces of darkness and light. Fighting for the good were radicals and moderate reformers (Papineau-Mackenzie, Baldwin-La Fontaine), held to be selfless and heroic freedom-lovers, even as heralds of Marxist revolution. On the dark side were the British-appointed governors and the mostly English-speaking elites of Montreal and Toronto. Branded as the “château clique” and “family compact” by their political enemies, they were said to be reactionary and venal — “turkeys, or rather, Tories” in Rick Salutin’s 1973 play, “The Farmers’ Revolt,” which is meant to be anti-American even though Mackenzie was the most pro-American figure in Canadian history. According to this class-war model, the British and their colonial clients cared for nothing but their own wealth and power while the rural proletariat (few of whom actually supported rebellion) were the embodiment of virtue. Yet whatever their faults, a side-by-side comparison of “compact” giants such as John Molson, George Moffatt, John Beverley Robinson, or John Strachan with the playwright would leave little doubt as to which more closely resembled the bird in question.

Younger historians continue to undermine these old approaches. Michel Ducharme’s new study, Le concept de liberté au Canada à l’époque des Révolutions atlantiques, 1776-1838, finds that all factions were led by intelligent, active proponents of liberty — including arch-Tories like Robinson, Hagerman, and Boulton. Ironically it was establishment Tories who embraced the kind of property-centred freedom we think of as modern today. Another youngish revisionist, Jerry Bannister, rehabilitates the colonial leaders as genuine liberals: Robinson, he implies, could be described as a Lockean Loyalist. Such men, with an eye to stability, prosperity, and public works, were well within their rights to reject the spin of the self-righteous professional politicians and journalists who portrayed themselves as freedom’s champions. After all, like all politicians, the reformers wanted to get their hands on patronage plums for their friends. The reformers were “place beggars,” as D’Arcy McGee sharply remarked.2 Indeed they were opportunists in more ways than one.

Oddly the rebel myth was once so important to Canadian leftists that volunteers in Spain in 1937 called themselves the Mackenzie-Papineau battalion, the Mac-Paps. It’s obvious that the radical legacy is overrated. Without saying so, John Ralston Saul seems to agree in his book, Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine & Robert Baldwin,3 his entry in the “Extraordinary Canadians” series of which he is editor. If Saul is to be thanked for one thing in this book, it is for displacing Mackenzie and Papineau as the sainted heroes of democracy with his own secular saints: the partnership of La Fontaine and Baldwin. Based on the commonplace La Fontaine was named attorney-general (the senior minister of the day) in 1849, the first to be technically accountable to the elected assembly rather than to the governor, Saul makes bold to call La Fontaine “Canada’s first prime minister.” This is cute, part of Saul’s valiant attempt to dramatize the infamously dull episode of “Robert Responsible Government.” But there is no need to pretend because there was a real prime minister in 1849. His name was Lord John Russell, chief executive of Her Britannic Majesty’s government, and it was he who granted responsible government to the Canadas.

Saul’s artful misnomer is a symptom of his failure at any time to elucidate the motives and complexities behind London’s reluctance to confer earlier on Canada a replica of the cabinet system that prevailed in England. Responsible government should have been “self-evident,” Saul states. But he gives no indication as to why it was not. He says, “imperial politicians … believed in democracy and citizenship at home but not in the colonies,” implying it was a simple case of hypocrisy. Saul offers no discussion of the sophisticated literature left by defenders of the constitutional order. He does not even mention the system of “harmony” in which, under instructions from London, the governors made decisions as far as possible in congruence with the assembly, cabinet, and local advisors. One difficulty from London’s perspective was how to reconcile the existence of two responsible ministries under one crown, a ministry in the colonies and another in the metropole: in the event of contradictory advice to Her Majesty which would prevail? Saul could at least have stated the anti-responsibility quandary just once in his book, even if it made no sense to him. The kicker, though, is that in practice, the Province of Canada already had responsible government by 1841. As Phillip Buckner wrote of the governor, Lord Sydenham: “nothing in his actions … was illegal, unconstitutional, or inconsistent with the basic principle of responsible government.”4

I can’t speak to Saul qua philosopher, but as historian he is painfully frustrating. First there are a few howlers: Upper Canada’s governor in 1836, he says, was “Edmund Bond Head.” But Sir Edmund Walker Head became governor in 1854. In 1836 the colony welcomed his cousin, Sir Francis Bond Head, one of Wellington’s former officers whom Saul is pleased to dismiss as an “idiot.” (Thus endorsing the Salutin/turkey class-loathing interpretation.) Saul also says 1848 saw Canada’s “first steps as a democracy,” which must be news to Nova Scotians, who elected their first representative assembly in 1758, and Upper and Lower Canadians, who elected their first assemblies in 1791.

Saul’s real problem is writing as if the attainment of autonomous cabinet government was anti-British, somehow a “way out” of empire. Apparently the British empire ceased to exist after 1848 as far as Canada was concerned because La Fontaine and Baldwin “talked their way out of an empire.” Theirs was a great “emancipation,” as Creighton said of the old Liberal myth. Ahead of Australia, New Zealand, and later India and other colonies, Canada was the first “to extricate itself without a fight,” Saul says. But Canada did not extricate itself from anything in 1848 and had no desire to do so; on the contrary.

Saul replaces the radical myth with an independence myth of his own. His anti-imperialist rhetoric echoes that of the Patriots and reformers whose speeches and fulminations he tends to take at face value. Saul forgets that his heroes were politiciansout to get votes. His style, like theirs, demonizes the British and the most accomplished colonials alike. What was it that prevented Canadian democracy and independence in Saul’s mid-century Canada? Apparently it was the threat of being indiscriminately shot or bayonetted by British soldiers in the streets! “There were more than enough British regulars to do a professional job,” Saul writes. “Properly lined up, opening fire in raking blasts, they could disperse mobs many times their own size. That, after all, is how empires are held.”

That simple, was it? “Firing on the mob … is what they were trained to do.” This is the picture of “British” administration in Canada that Saul conjures up. It accords with nationalist assumptions. We were a colony; we became a proud country; therefore we must have struggled for freedom: so runs the accepted colony to nation syllogism. It is no wonder that naive reviewers have reflexively adopted Saul’s anti-colonial tone. “Tough nation-builders fought powerful empire,” wrote theWinnipeg Free Press. The reformers were “unsung heroes,” wrote the The Sun, swallowing the bait. Maclean’s praised Saul’s “lavish detail.” Even Janet Ajzenstat, who should know better, indulged the anti-empire motif in an admiring blog post entitled, “John Ralston Saul: ‘Out of Empire’s Control.’”

It is true that shots were fired by soldiers in the Place d’Armes during the 1832 election. But they were fired to uphold, not suppress, democracy. As rioters menaced and rival mobs began chasing the candidates, troops were called in at the request of Canadian magistrates. The Riot Act was read in accordance with law. When soldiers opened fire there were no “raking blasts,” as Saul imagines, but one shot at a time under officers’ orders. Three rioters were killed. Still, once the votes were counted, it was the Patriot candidate endorsed by Papineau, an Irish immigrant named Daniel Tracey, who was declared the winner (though he would die of cholera before taking his seat). The episode is distorted in, among other places, the CBC’s “A People’s History,” in which the viewer hears mass firing in the background but is not shown or told what actually happened. Oddly The Dictionary of Canadian Biography, which aspires to be definitive, is little better, citing “the intervention by the armed forces against Canadians,” a phrase that suggests “Canadians” was synonymous to “rioters.” But the Riot Act in 1832 was invoked by Canadianjudges on behalf of the electors to ensure the votes were properly counted.5

French-speaking reformers did not uniformly back Papineau. In reality several Patriots broke ranks with him before 1837 as his rhetoric became more violent. Louis Guy, for example, was Papineau’s ally in opposing union of the Canadas in 1822-23, persuading London to cancel the plan. But unlike Papineau, Guy was level-headed, a soldier and veteran of Salaberry’s defence of Montreal in 1813. Having served as a judge, as commissioner for roads and bridges, and on the legislative council advising the governor, Guy saw the folly of Papineau’s course. (Oddly, Papineau regarded Louisiana as the model for French Canada, not realizing that people in Louisiana spoke English.) Alfred-Xavier Rambau, a journalist who had lived in New York, supported the government in 1837. Étienne Parent, a fervent Patriot and publisher of Le Canadien, also broke ranks; when violence broke out, he blamed the Patriots: “We impute to them the blame for all the blood that will be shed.” In the hunter uprising of 1838, Parent switched back to the rebel side and denounced Sir John Colborne’s excessive repression. Parent was arrested for sedition but his faith in British justice was vindicated when he was released under habeas corpus. Although few francophones fought for the government in 1837, some did. One ex-Patriot, Austin Cuvillier, took up arms in 1837 as a major and commander of Montreal’s 5th militia battalion.6 Pierre-Édouard Leclère, superintendent of the Montreal police and founder of the Ami du peuple newspaper, in 1837 denounced the rebels, who “will become our tyrants as soon as they become our masters” — the outcome of most revolutions.

And yet rebel defeat continues to be conflated with “British” oppression. Joseph Graham in a recent issue of Canada’s History writes that “British forces suppressed the uprising.” But local volunteers, mostly from Montreal’s English population (then in the majority), put down the rebels alongside British regulars. Far from an attempt to “throw off the colonial yoke,” as Graham states, 1837 in the eyes of contemporaries had more to do with preventing annexation to the United States. Mackenzie and Papineau were unsuccessful in part because they wrapped themselves in stars and stripes.

Here again reality is discordant with dogma. For nationalists and leftists, Canadian history must have been a struggle against imperialists. In reality, the British government in the 1830s and 1840s was looking for ways to divest itself of colonial administration, to reduce expenditure by devolving power. The uprisings had to be put down, of course, because a rabble victory “would be an open invitation to enemies to trample on British interests,” as Ged Martin put it.7 With peace restored, some were prepared to “fling Lower Canada overboard altogether.” British leaders expected the colonies to become independent as long as British interests were upheld — the question was how and when. England’s introduction of free trade with the repeal of the corn laws in 1846, which Canadian elites opposed because they lost imperial protection and went bankrupt, was a step towards autonomy. Toronto reformer Francis Hincks lamented that British acquaintances thought Canada’s departure “would be no loss.” There were anti-imperialists in the 1840s, but contrary to Saul et al., they lived in England, not Canada.

Even the anti-free trade riots that led to the burning of parliament are distorted by the nationalist lens. Again, an article in Canada’s History labels the Tory incendiaries “pro-British” — an absurdity because they were protesting againstBritish policy and the elected government’s restitution of the rebels. Believing London wanted to wash its hands of the Canadas anyway, the Tories (among others including Papineau, who had by then peacefully resettled on his landed estate) signed the annexation manifesto to join the United States.

Saul gets off on the wrong foot on page one, where in 1849 the “troop of professional infantry was holding the mob back.” In another romanticized passage, Saul depicts Baldwin and La Fontaine as impregnable fortresses of democratic stability, observing a mob run wild. But it is only thanks to British regulars that the duo could strike such a posture: it was the troops whom Saul describes elsewhere as terrifying instruments of imperialism who were protecting Baldwin and La Fontaine from the crowd. Again when La Fontaine’s life was threatened by rioters in 1849 how did he get away? Whoops! He escaped, Saul writes, “in a protective bubble created by soldiers of the Seventy-first Highlanders, with bayonets fixed.” Saul says La Fontaine was “imperturbable” despite the danger around him. Perhaps, but the reason he was unperturbed was that he stood within the empire’s “protective bubble,” two hundred men with “bayonets fixed, holding off the mob outside.”

Saul writes as if mob violence was something uniquely appalling in the context of reactionary Tories. But riots were a routine, if unpleasant, feature of eighteenth and nineteenth century societies everywhere with the advent of industrialization and market liberalization. In England, the Luddites smashed machinery to protest against industrial change, culminating in the Swing Riots of 1830. The prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, had his train pelted by a mob in 1829 and the windows of Apsley House smashed. In 1839 twenty members of the mob were killed when police opened fire in the Chartist Riots in Birmingham. We should not be especially horrified, then, to find that, in 1849, La Fontaine’s house was ransacked or the governor’s carriage bombarded with rocks and offal.

The problem at Terrebonne during the 1841 election — though Saul neglects to point this out — was that troops were lacking. In the face of mob activity on polling day, La Fontaine withdrew from the campaign, an incident that is glorified in a Historica Minute as the prelude to responsible government in 1848. The nationalist version, which overlooks the possibility of self-serving theatrical motives on La Fontaine’s part, blames the English gangs only, facilely demonizing the establishment and the governor. There were even stories in the British press that Sydenham personally used £20,000 from the Jesuit Estates to pay mobs to disrupt polling. In fact, the governor did not have access to such funds; the smear was typical of the hearsay that lazy reporters picked up from “steam-boats and bar-rooms.”

It is true that Sydenham did not believe he should be obliged to accept majority rule on every question. (Nor do modern leftists, who are often selective democrats.) Moreover he believed the government party had a right to try to win elections. In his view, if the mobs raged unchecked it is because Canadian authorities, whom he urged to uphold the peace, did not call out the troops. As Sydenham observed, “Lafontaine admitted that the great bulk of his followers” were armed with cudgels; they were “at least as much prepared for a conflict as the English.” These facts do not fit into Saul’s tale of uniquely English “thuggery.” But unfortunately for him, it is this kind of detail that makes the simplistic anti-imperialist caricature untenable.

 

Ultimately Saul is confused about the British empire because he shares Salutin’s doctrine. On page 69 he says the “British/European nation states were increasingly being built on the domination of one race, language, religion over all the others.” But on page 93 Saul writes, “The British Empire was built on commerce.” Saul is mistaken to polarize colonial society between what he calls inelegantly a “european monolithic/colonial model” as against a “democratic movement.” This is too black and white, too radical chic. He needs a dose of Ducharme and Bannister. A more balanced account would say that with London’s benediction British governors for the most part worked with various factions, including reformers, to devolve political power to locally elected officials when it was politically feasible and while maintaining ordered liberty, protecting private property, and checking the reformers’ political chicanery.

Saul is too preoccupied with building up his heroes to unravel the intricacies of colonial politics in the 1840s — the interplay of successive governors, councillors, and assemblymen which Saul reduces to a tale of heroes vs. idiots. He gives little credit even to Lord Elgin, who both implemented responsible government and secured free trade in Washington. (Yet he compares La Fontaine to Tolstoy and Gandhi!) It is therefore beyond Saul’s grasp that the ultimate cause of responsible government was not colonial heroics but British policy. One would never glean from Saul’s book that mid-Victorian Canada was not a case of the mother country clinging to the colonies but of Canadians clinging to the mother country. The reformers who demonized the “compact” were in the right place at the right time to benefit from the changing political climate.

We will be closer to an accurate picture of 1848 when we accept that La Fontaine and Baldwin were not heroes but ordinary, sly and slightly ridiculous opportunists seeking power and patronage. (La Fontaine was particularly ludicrous in his attempts to coiff his hair in such a way as to make the most of a physiognomic resemblance to Napoleon.) We will more accurately understand the period when we restore agency to the British government, to the governors and particularly to Elgin, who implemented internal self-government. And when we cease to demonize the empire and the talented Toronto and Montreal elites who, for all their faults, took quite explicable positions if we care to find out what they were. We will cease inflating the achievement of reformist politicians when we acknowledge they were not charging at imperial dragons, but pushing at an open door.

C.P. Champion studied history and international relations at UBC and Cambridge University. He worked on Ted Byfield’s history of Alberta and as a reporter and proofreader at Alberta Report. Later he was a policy researcher for the Reform Party and Canadian Alliance, obtained his Ph.D. from McGill, and works as a policy advisor in Ottawa. He has written for the National Post, Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette and Globe and Mail, and is the author of The Strange Demise of British  Canada (MQUP, 2010). He is a contributing editor to The Dorchester Review.

The Scots rank among history’s great self-mythologizers, mostly at the expense of the English. Much of the bluster is quite tolerable. The vainglorious “here’s tae us” refrain, to which the rest of us are subjected, is almost endearing. Yet the mighty Scot is now credited not only with devising golf, bagpipes, whisky, curling, and haggis but with “inventing the modern world” and “creating” or “inventing” Canada. Ken McGoogan’s How the Scots Invented Canada is not the first iteration. In 2003, Matthew Shaw wrote Great Scots: How the Scots Created Canada. This was followed by an academic collection under the more temporizing title, Kingdom of the Mind: How the Scots Helped Make Canada in 2006, the same year as Paul Cowan’s How the Scots Created Canada.

The obvious, belaboured role played by Scots in shaping Canada is really a facet of their wider role as empire-builders. They not only scaled the Heights of Abraham for General Wolfe, but laid siege to Bangalore, Saringapatam, and Pondicherry before charging the gates. Despite McGoogan’s ten pages devoted to William Lyon Mackenzie as an ostensible “maker of 1867” (a curious anachronism), Mackenzie was not the only Scot in the 1837 rebellions. Scots did their part to suppress the rebels too: at least one Montreal volunteer regiment wore tartan stripes on their trousers. According to a fellow Scot, Robert Sellar of the Huntingdon Gleaner (overlooked by McGoogan), “It is safe to say that had Lyon McKenzie been a resident of Montreal instead of Toronto, he would have shouldered a musket to put down rebellion instead of leading one.”*

Few would dare deny that Scots invented their share of machines and techniques, that they braved oceans, rivers, and wastelands, and turned vast colonies into loyal and prosperous federations. What these authors are less keen to say, presumably because it would sell fewer books, is that Scots did all these things in ardent (and self-enriching) service of the larger British project; hence the title of Tom Devine’s Scotland’s Empire 1600-1815, published in 2003. When, as Herman notes, Scots produced an ambitious English-language encyclopedia they did not call it “Caledonica” but Britannica, a detail Herman omits.

Even so, the ingenious Scot manages to shift any blame for the sins of conquest and empire onto the shoulders of Englishmen, all the while assuming the air of victim of primordial highland spoliation. Wha’ll gave the much-abused Anglish his due? After all, for every Scottish inventor,  there was at least one English pioneer: James Watt’s path was blazed by English steam-engine inventor Thomas Newcomen (or by another Englishman, Thomas Savery, as McGoogan observes), and so on.

The intertwined history of Scots and English suggests that if misery can make for strange bedfellows, so too can shared interests. This dates back at least as far as the middle ages, brought to the masses by the “great big steaming haggis of lies” that was Mel Gibson’s “Braveheart,” as a Guardian reviewer described the film in 2008. When Scottish armies defeated Charles I in 1640 in what turned out to be a prelude to the English Civil War (the one that ended with the king losing his head in 1649), the king’s enemies — both English and Scots — joined in celebration: “We must now stand or fall together,” declared the Treaty of Ripon, for “We are Brethren.” Once the civil war had played out, however, Cromwell’s English republic proved to be no friend to Scots.

The formal Union in 1707 (whence the United Kingdom) under Queen Anne, a Stuart and a niece of Charles II, imposed a practical modus vivendi. Lowland Scots had long since transformed themselves into collaborators, Samuel Johnson’s “crafty, designing people, eagerly attentive to their own interests.” But whatever the benefits, many Scots mourned the loss of independence: “As for the embodying of Scotland by England,” lamented one, “it will be as when a poor bird is embodied in the hawk that hath eaten it up.”

But while the Union ended independence, and doomed the ancient highland culture and the Jacobite cause, it did not destroy Scottish identity. It might not even be too much to suggest that for all its subordination and subornation, the impact of English rule in fact generated much of the Scottish identity that we know today. Herman admits as much on page 119: “Far from leading educated Scots to abandon or forget their Scottish identity, Anglicization seems to have encouraged them to keep it alive and intact.”

Since Britain’s empire was also Canada’s, it is no surprise that confederation in 1867 was a high-water mark of Scots influence, with Scots predominating among the founding fathers in Canada’s transcontinental enterprise, supported and financed by London. What’s odd — and typical of missing the British forest for the Scottish trees — is that McGoogan has written a 400-page book without much to say about this collaborative reality. The “How the Scots did such and such” genre is lucrative because readers seem to crave being told they did it all on their own. But if the Scots invented Canada, they did so in a kind of junior partnership with the English. And we should not lose sight of the prerequisite: that the English had invented the Scots.

As with the parade of inventors, for every Scottish trader, soldier, and settler who followed the path to America there had already been a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century English adventurer blazing the trail — a Raleigh, Guy, or Gilbert; a Falkland or Calvert. Even the Cabots were English by adoption, men of Bristol hired by local merchants. English trailblazing shines through the Scotch mist in Andrew D. Nicholls’s A Fleeting Empire: Early Stuart Britain and the Merchant Adventurers to Canada.

Nicholls charts Anglo-Scottish cooperation under King James VI and I, the first to rule both kingdoms as King of Great Britain, and under his son Charles I. The collective security of the British Isles and the subjugation of Ireland by Anglo-Scots Protestants provided two sources of unity under royal patronage. “Opening up English overseas ventures to Scottish investors and participants marked a third way of encouraging greater co-operation,” Nicholls writes. Sir William Alexander, planter of New Scotland in 1621 as a complement to New England, sought to “forestall further French ambitions” in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In turn Lewis, David, and Thomas Kirke’s quasi-piratical English syndicate was chartered by Charles I in 1627 as the Merchant Adventurers to Canada; they achieved the first (temporary) conquest of Quebec in 1629.

Nicholls criticizes the whiggish tendency of historians to narrate events in light of how they ultimately turned out, portraying seventeenth-century conflicts as merely “foreshadowing” the emergence of today’s nation states. This teleology reduces the Kirke brothers and their adventurous contemporaries to the role of forerunners. Nicholls concludes that British ascendancy over the French in America might have come a century earlier had Charles I seen fit to hold and build on the gains made during his father’s reign. He does not mention the obvious what-if scenario, namely: had English control of Quebec been secured by the 1640s, before most French settlement took place, it is hard to imagine there would be a French-speaking province in Canada today.

Later, as Scots lowlanders prosper in the emerging British isles, the north presents a tragic foil: rebellion in the highlands between 1715 and 1745 threatened the integrity of the Union. The “barbarous” old society would be uprooted, the clans dispersed, hereditary lines broken or coopted. The Gaelic tongue was suppressed, the tartan and the philibeg banned for civilian use by the 1746 Dress Act until 1782.

Yet what was this tartan philibeg? Even in the midst of destruction, England’s impact was inventive. It is now better understood that what highland Scots typically wore previously was not the characteristic outfit that so many Canadian regiments wear today. More likely it was similar to what one Scottish minister described seeing on Jacobite soldiers in 1715, a long homespun tunic of one colour, draped over one shoulder, enrobing the wearer below the knee, and belted at the waist. Other sources depict more than one colour.

It has been forty years since an iconoclastic English historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, revealed the fraud of “the ancient traditions of Scotland” in a chapter in a 1983 collection edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition. The short kilt worn round the waist, Trevor-Roper concluded, the epitome of Scottish habiliment, was invented by an English Quaker. When industrialist Thomas Rawlinson set up his iron works in Scotland in the 1720s, he found his highland labourers encumbered by their traditional “plaid,” the toga-like “great kilt.” Rawlinson proposed separating the lower part to give his labourers greater freedom of movement — and thus the kilt was born.

Whether Trevor-Roper was correct in every detail or not, England’s tartan ban did not apply to soldiers. About the same time kilts made their first appearance, in 1725 the British army began recruiting men from the highlands, forming the first highland regiment in 1740, the Black Watch. Unlike civilians these embryonic regiments were permitted to wear highland dress. This meant, at first, the full-body cloak or belted plaid, which in time gave way to the more practical kilt. Whoever invented the short kilt, it is the (English) army’s innovation of highland regiments that perpetuated and popularized it.

Many of the tartan patterns and colours that we know today, as Trevor-Roper documented, were the ad hoc creation of a Bannockburn-based company, William Wilson & Son, which assigned “certified” patterns to various clan chiefs in preparation for the Royal Visit of 1822. That event seems to have played a larger role in the fabrication of “traditional highland dress” than any other. Descending upon Edinburgh the King himself, George IV, was got up in sash, kilt and sporran, large plumed Tam-o’-shanter, and tartan hose (argyle socks). It was for this occasion that Sir Walter Scott was enlisted to recruit highland chiefs and to “bring half-a-dozen or half-a-score of clansmen.” He urged them to dress the part, to make a colourful impression, for “Highlanders are what [the King] will best like to see,” as Trevor-Roper recounts in The Invention of Scotland, an expanded version of his earlier work, published in 2003 after his death.

Apart from the few people who actively dislike them, most would agree that the pipes, drums, and other paraphernalia are a brilliant and enduring creation. As Trevor-Roper noted, while some twentieth-century folk revivals manifested themselves as murderous ideologies (such as the German Herrenvolk), by contrast Britain’s Irish, Scots, and Welsh folk legends were domesticated into innocent ritual. Thus the invention of the Scot is a largely benevolent English achievement.

More to the point is the integral role played by Scots in promoting the larger British civilization to the detriment of its rivals. As Niall Ferguson, an Atlantic-leaping Scot, put it in his 2003 apologia, Empire: in an imperial context “Scotland’s surplus entrepreneurs and engineers, medics and musketeers could deploy their skills and energies ever further afield in the service of English capital and under the protection of England’s navy.” By the 1750s only one-tenth of the British population lived in Scotland, but Scots accounted for half the agents of the East India company; nearly half the directors’ clerks in Bengal; half the free merchants, half the surgeon recruits. Warren Hastings, England’s proconsul, called the staff his “Scotch Guardians.”

Ferguson cites Scots’ greater willingness to try their luck abroad. McGoogan goes further, claiming Scots were “more egalitarian, flexible and pragmatic than the English” towards Indians and French Canadians – a claim embellished by John Ivison in the National Post as “a cultural intermingling that laid the foundation for Canadian diversity. That mindset resulted from the liberal ideals of the Scottish Enlightenment.” And yet something else was in play: an English genius for deploying others’ individual and collective self-interest and professional pride in Her Majesty’s greater service.

A popularizer like Simon Schama could refer to the Union as a “hostile merger.” But what began as a takeover “would end in a full partnership in the most powerful going concern in the world.” If the Scots invented the modern world, they did so within the political, military, economic, and intellectual structure of England’s empire. What is at issue is not so much Scots “beat[ing] the English at their own game,” as Herman puts it. If Scots were able to transcend their remote parochialism and go on to re-found Canada and much else, it was because, ironically perhaps, they were given a platform and a raison d’être by the English. In short, if the Scots invented the modern world, it was because the English had already invented the Scots. ~

* Robert Sellar, The History of Huntingdon, Chateauguay and Beauharnois from TheirFirst Settlement to the Year 1838 (1888), p. 502. Thanks to Phyllis Reeve for the quotation.

C.P. Champion on a Toronto historian’s memoirs

© The Dorchester Review Vol. 2 No. 1 Spring/Summer 2012

“The lives of historians are generally a bore,” Niall Ferguson has said, “just scribble, scribble scribbling.” That is probably true for most readers whose first choice would not be a historian’s memoirs. But at their best, such apologias can be a stirring encounter between the scribe and his own life and times. John Lukacs’ Confessions of an Original Sinner takes one from pre-war Hungary through the events in The Last European War, A History of the Cold War, and his other books, to the pretentiousness of much of American elite academe today. Lukacs calls himself a “reactionary” rather than a conservative: half-Jewish, half-Catholic, nostalgic for the bourgeois civilization of interwar Budapest, he is more humanly-grounded than Eric Hobsbawm, the soft-spoken communist who, discussing his memoirInteresting Times on BBC Radio, said of Stalin’s victims: “dead is dead.” Quebec historian Marcel Trudel’sMemoirs of a Less Travelled Road reveal a liberal who adopted French Enlightenment hubris and the predictable attitudes of his time: the “rebellious” anti-clericalism, bohemianism, and secularism of the ascendant quiet revolution.

Michael Bliss’ Writing Historyis more smug and less rewarding. Regarded as one of (English) Canada’s top historians, he retired from the University of Toronto in 2006 “satisfied” at having “gone the distance in a good profession.” He is appropriately scathing of the “academic mouse race,” a world of “unspeakable dreariness,” his department a “soul destroying” nest of ignorant, idle posturing and waste. The “fashionable post-modern relativism” of the 1980s and 1990s was sophomoric, he says, “based on fallacies we had covered in week two of second year ethics,” and “most social theorizing” is “bunkum.”

Bliss was reputed by some to be a conservative. This is a mistake. As a student he fell under the spell of socialists Stanley Knowles and Kenneth McNaught, but distanced himself from the NDP and Marxism, which he came to see as a “surrogate religion” (111). He refers to Stanley Ryerson’s communist history as “almost cartoonish” and McNaught, the Marxist professor, as “the Cadillac-driving Rosedale Red.” In the 1970s he defended Conrad Black’s Duplessis from an attack by Ramsay Cook, his own mentor who as an ideological Trudeauite propounded the incontrovertibility of the Leftist doctrine of the pre-1960 grande noirceur. Last year Bliss pronounced the era of Tommy Douglas and socialized health care over, and published in the Globe an admirable indictment of the contemptible Norman Bethune. He is conservative in the traditionalist sense that he believes that modern society is afflicted by “appalling selfishness and communal disintegration,” citing public sympathy with Robert Latimer, who in 1993 gassed his crippled twelve-year-old daughter, Tracy, to death by shutting her inside his pick-up truck and directing the exhaust fumes into the cab through a hose.

Like his contemporaries J.L. Granatstein and Desmond Morton, Bliss believed that promoting national history was a public duty, the tenured historian’s patriotic contribution to nation-building. Such men adopted nationalism as a surrogate gospel exercised through Toronto noblesse oblige, academic bonhomie, and TV appearances. They took a dim view of younger historians who abandoned national history and “turned inward” towards regionalism, women’s history, and other particularisms, “personalized, privatized, and solipsistic.” Bliss condemns parochialism but refers to his own Toronto institution as “Canada’s University.”

He claims as his models A.J.P. Taylor for short sentences and Gibbon for elegance. For relaxation he likes Joseph Conrad, P.G. Wodehouse, Anthony Powell, Penelope Lively, and Joyce Carol Oates. He approves of Pierre Berton’s wide-ranging, “professional” popular books but loathes Peter Newman as “unreadable, inaccurate, smarmy,” and “sniggering.” But do Bliss’ worthy biographies of tycoons and medical giants imply a liking for Carlyle and a rejection of Tolstoy? The memoir is silent. He offers few thoughts on the interplay of history with memory, identity, or culture. Describing the loss of his thin Methodist christianity during a “long shower” in 1961 when a callow “flash of insight” revealed to him that “God was a superstitious invention” and “life after death … probably logically untenable,” he echoes the second-year “philosophy” that he himself disdains. Bliss had been considering ministry in the United church after initially poor academic results. South Ontario Methodists, whom Loring Christie called “a vicious breed,” were blockheadedly anti-papist and we later get a glimpse of casual anti-Catholicism: a “relic” of the medical giant Sir William Osler, kept in an old whisky tin, which Bliss calls “better than anything the Vatican had.”

But is this all that the great historian has to say about two thousand years of culture, of the predicament of modern man, apart from “radical Cartesian doubt” adopted at U. of T.? Bliss has sought in the heroes of scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs — in biographies of Osler, Banting, Cushing — a temporal salvation to replace the weak puritanism he lost at age twenty. He was not a man to stand against the trends of the times: he admired the Kennedys and deplored Vietnam, where he believed America was “destroying an Asian civilization.” Trudeau was “an amazing cross between John F. Kennedy and the young Laurier” and, “I told our children that Trudeau would be a pretty good role model for them to follow.”

Bliss’ fight for Canada was really a fight to preserve Trudeau’s legacy. Teaching history, he says, drove him into public affairs. He was “frustrat[ed] with the parochialism of the Canadian history beat.” Canada was a “Mickey Mouse sort of a country in some respects” compared to the United States. Bliss embraced Trudeaumania, became disillusioned in the mid-1970s, and redoubled his devotion in the 1980s. In between he liked Bob Stanfield and Joe Clark. “I think we were both attracted,” a colleague wrote, “by Clark’s … attempt to formulate a conservatism that transcended rather than repudiated Trudeau’s statism” – in other words, something that was not conservative and would be unlikely to win office.

Bliss’ Trudeauism is sufficiently ideological that he believes, with all his heart, that Trudeau wrought a “constitutional revolution” and “led Canada in the direction of a new democracy, emphasizing true popular sovereignty” (319). This is a spectacular delusion when one considers that the 1982 constitution removed supreme authority from Parliament and transferred power to judges, lawyers, and radical interest groups not answerable to the electorate.

Bliss and his chums went berzerk over the Meech Lake Accord and he persists in describing it as a reversion to “nineteenth-century contempt of democracy.” Mulroney failed to consult “the people.” But whom does Bliss think Trudeau consulted in his revolution from above? Meech was the product of “eleven, white male politicians,” he says; but Trudeau’s deal was the product of ten – a significant number, of course, because it was signed by Trudeau and nine premiers, without Quebec.

It is on Quebec that Bliss reveals the depth of the illusion he shares with other protégés of Ramsay Cook. Outraged by Parliament’s recognition (on the Harper government’s initiative) of the Québécois as “a nation,” they cannot see that this might not have been necessary in 2009 had Mulroney’s amendments been ratified in 1990. Instead Bliss is raring to include a critical chapter on Harper in the next edition of Right Honourable Men, his best-selling whiggish survey of prime ministers from Macdonald to Chrétien. The book argues illogically that power over time descended “from the grip of autocratic prime ministers … to the will of voters in an age of mass democracy, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and referenda on constitutional change” (under Mulroney).

Bliss says dismissively that Quebec’s assent was “not urgent” in the 1980s; no province’s “signature” was required; anyway the Parti Québécois was at a “low ebb” (277). In each case Bliss seems to have the wrong end of the stick. Perhaps the PQ was at a low ebb precisely because Trudeau was out of power; perhaps it was Trudeau who since 1968 had inflamed separatism and aggravated the unity crisis. A genuine federalism required flexibility. The significance of Mulroney in history may well be that Meech would have slain with one blow both separatism and the top-down federalism that provoked it.

Trudeau’s constitution survived but the result was farce: no sooner had his party returned to power in 1993 than the PQ was back with another referendum! Yet the steely helmet of the anglophone Trudeauites remains ever impervious to the damage done by the liberalizing, homogenizing federalism that Guy LaForest in his brilliant Trudeau and the End of a Canadian Dreamcalled the “constitutional dialogue of the deaf.” After meeting a BC minister who supported Meech, Bliss wrote in his diary: “I thought how sad to meet such a parochial politician” (292).

Parochial is one of his favourite words. To his credit Bliss is self-conscious about his inability to speak French, a “sometimes embarrassing shortcoming” (294). Like many liberals he believes himself to be non-ideological. This is consistent with the small-town Ontario missionary presumption according to which the true Canadian spirit subsists in the secular liberal Toronto elite and its state-supported tentacles. His most recent public forays, given to monarchy-bashing, stem from that same Roundhead pietism of which his rôle as “national” historian is an expression.

Maple Leaf Empire: Canada, Britain, and Two World Wars. Jonathan F. Vance. Oxford, 2012.

Mohawks on the Nile: Natives Among the Canadian Voyageurs in Egypt 1884-1885. Carl Benn. Dundurn, 2010.

THE STONE ARCH AT the Royal Military College in Kingston, erected in 1923, memorializes former cadets who gave their lives for the Empire. When a rumour circulated in the mid-1990s that the administration was planning to sandblast the words for the Empire and replace them with “for Canada,” it sounded like a brash attempt to rewrite history, purging the memory of those who had the temerity  die for something other than the modern Canadian state. How, alumni thundered, could such an act of vandalism be contemplated at one of the country’s most prestigious institutions? But it turned out that the sandblasting plan was apocryphal; campus gossip prompted, it seems, by the appearance of new bilingual signs and other changes.

Even if the sandblasting rumour was false, it rang true for some because colonial heritage had been targeted for change before. In the 1960s and ’70s nearly every long-established agency from the Post Office (Royal Mail) to the Public Archives (headed by the Dominion Archivist) was tinkered with and given a banal name like Canada Post or Archives Canada. The Canadian Army became “Mobile Command” (and later, “Land Force”). In 1982 a handful of Members of Parliament on a quiet Friday afternoon rebaptized the national holiday, Dominion Day, to “Canada Day” in a snap vote without quorum. It seemed that every effort to Canadianize the present involved repudiating and dumbing down the colonial past.

Repetition is habit-forming. Today an almost comical reflex to replace traditional names can be found among nationalistic journalists and historians. Andrew Cohen, former president of the Historica Foundation, a Carleton professor and Citizen columnist, wrote that it would be “a natural step” to change the name of one of Ottawa’s oldest thoroughfares, Wellington Street, chosen by the city’s putative founder, Colonel John By. In Cohen’s mind, Parliament’s association with the Iron Duke reveals “the insecurity of an adolescent nation trapped in its neo-colonialism.” Amen, said some historians including Richard Gwyn, the Macdonald biographer, and J.L. Granatstein, who has been gallantly charging at “colonial” windmills since 1968, when he endorsed the Pearson Liberals’ highly controversial suppression of the “Royal” titles of the navy and air force. (They were restored in 2011.)

Despite the significance of pre-1867 events in shaping our country, there continues to be a certain disdain for the colonial period. Some of this can be explained by a proclivity for politically-correct history; in other cases by ignorance. Cohen wrote that Canadians “have never fought for conquest or colonies.” Another columnist, John Ibbitson of the Globe, told the Couchiching conference in 2006, “we have no imperial past.” Echoing this belief were Stéphane Dion, former Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, in 1997; Toronto Star columnist Haroon Siddiqui, in 2001; the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Beverley McLachlin, in 2004; and Ann Livingstone of the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre, in 2010. All have insisted that Canada has “no colonial past to regret.”

Hadn’t the prophet of Liberalism, F.H. Underhill, declared Canada “innocent” of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, socialism “and all the other twentieth century sins”? This selective nationalism, historically linked to the Liberal party, is based on two dogmas: first, that Canada did not have colonies or behave like a colonial power; and second, that Canada owes its independence to a noble and pure-hearted struggle to free itself from the British Empire.

Both false beliefs have been propagated for nearly 100 years by historians, politicians, and bureaucrats about whom, at it happens, Granatstein has written. His book, The Ottawa Men: Civil Service Mandarins (1982), celebrated O.D. Skelton and his recruits in the early External Affairs service of the 1920s. Among them was Lester B. Pearson, the small-town Ontario son of the manse who followed in Mackenzie King’s footsteps as a bureaucrat who entered politics and became prime minister. The idea of a struggle for independence was conjured by Liberal nationalists such as journalist J.W. Dafoe and historian A.R.M. Lower, later an advisor to Pearson. Lower’s 1946 Colony to Nation portrayed a valiant struggle by true Canadians to shed the British connection.

In 1964 when tabling the resolution to replace the traditional Canadian flag with a new one, Pearson said a maple leaf design would symbolize the rise “from colony to self-governing dominion to independent nation.” Pierre Trudeau invoked the image again in 1982, asserting that the constitution’s patriation achieved “Canada’s full independence” even though in practical terms patriation was a meaningless enactment based on the chimæra that Westminster would ever interfere with the BNA Act. As an indication of the myth’s continuing political import today, columnist Lawrence Martin wrote on iPolitics (10 January) that, “In Canadian history, the cycle of independence has been authored chiefly by the Liberal Party.”

The belief that Canada’s history is anti-imperial is quite easily discredited by the well-documented enthusiasm of Canadians for the British project, particularly in English-speaking Canada but also, up to a point, in French-speaking Quebec. The fact is that the British were, at almost any point after 1815, ready to wash their hands of the Canadian colonies. There were differences over how it should be done; Britain sent 14,000 troops to defend Canada during the US civil war but the goal was to disengage as soon as possible. Confederation became Britain’s means of strategic escape, as Ged Martin has documented in Britain and the Origins of Canadian Confederation (1995) and Andrew Smith in his British Businessmen and Canadian Confederation (2008).

AS A SUBJECT OF INQUIRY among historians the Empire went out of fashion in the expanding universities of the 1960s. The focus became more nationalistic, and later anti-nationalistic and preoccupied with ethnic, regional, and, more recently, sexual identities — as in Australia and New Zealand. So inward-looking was the atmosphere from the 1970s to the early 2000s that, as Niall Ferguson told the New Zealand Herald last year, “It varies from place to place but Canada is the most politically correct, with everybody cringing about their Imperial past.”

A few scholars dissented. Phillip Buckner gave a 1984 presidential address to the Canadian Historical Association entitled, “Whatever Happened to the British Empire?” He chided his colleagues for whitewashing the past. In the UK, Ged Martin, one of the few British scholars of his generation to specialize in Canada, established a Centre for Canadian Studies at the University of Edinburgh, which published an academic journal, The British Journal of Canadian Studies. Martin became a prolific scholar of wide and entertaining erudition ranging also to Australia, New Zealand, India, and Ireland. Buckner, for his part, rallied various scholars from the USA and across the Commonwealth to “rediscover the British World” in a series of conferences and a half-dozen books. He reminded Canadians that they are “co-owners of the British Empire and its history.”

Professor Vance’s Maple Leaf Empire, published in 2011, represents a kind of “mainstreaming” of Buckner and the British world, hitherto ignored by the nationalistic Canadian historical establishment. It is the first book in the field by a Canadian historian whose writings are noticed outside academic circles and praised by popular historians. Jack Granatstein in a jacket blurb called Maple Leaf Empire “first rate – living history.” Unlike most professors’ books, it has been reviewed in the newspapers and in Maclean’s.

Vance believes academic opinion has been shifting, that historians are recognizing once again that the Empire shaped Canadian identity, and that “Britishness as it evolved in Canada was something uniquely Canadian.” In one of his chapters, “Canada: A British Nation,” Vance probes the extent to which Britishness was a central part of the Canadian experience. The illustrations, including twenty-two plates mostly in colour, bring alive this sometimes tacky homegrown Britishness.

“Besides being Canadian,” Vance quotes one Toronto soldier in 1919, “we are all Britishers.” Upon reading it, much of this argument seems obvious. How could anyone have denied that Canada was steeped in miniature mutually-reinforcing British and pseudo-British ways? Vance suggests that Granatstein and Desmond Morton, among others, have exaggerated the extent to which the 1914-18 war was “the crucible of Canadian nationhood.” Contrary to nationalist thinking, links between Britain and Canada in fact grew stronger after the war.

Perhaps all this Britishness seems rather commonplace. It is so much part of the shared English Canadian experience that it has simply faded blandly into the background. As is also forgotten or taken for granted, almost all of the hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and their millions of descendants who built Canada as we know it, came either directly from the British isles or via the USA and became dull ordinary wasps. It is rubbish to speak of “Canadian diversity” in historical terms except insofar as these foundational immigrants were English, Scots, Irish, and Welsh. The French enclave of Quebec was a nation in its own sphere, developing on a separate track under, it must be said, a British mantle (of which Vance has little to say.)

Vance’s point is that this shared Britishness on both sides of the Atlantic was spontaneous and largely unaffected. That affluent Canadians such as Garfield Weston integrated easily into British life between the wars was not contradictory, Vance says, but “entirely natural” because, “It was not so much leaving Canada as going to a different part of the British world.” This transfer of talent back to the mother country – a kind of reverse colonization, Vance implies – put on the British stage various men who were at home in Britain such as Law, Gault, and Beaverbrook, and, with greater effort at contrivance, Massey.

What has attracted more comment from reviewers is Vance’s idea that the presence of Canadian troops in Britain amounted to “a kind of reverse colonialism.” The presence of “modest outposts” in England began in the first world war and grew to include banks, companies, and government agencies – but above all Canadian veterans who put down roots in the old country. “Canada’s new empire in Britain,” Vance says, was centred on Canadian military headquarters (CMHQ) on Cockspur Street. It is hard to resist the conclusion that Vance’s notion that Canadians, like Caesar, “came, saw, and conquered” a “Canadian empire in Britain” is a gimmick or news hook to attract media notice.

It would be more accurate were Vance to say these outposts were Canadian ghettos, places where colonials who found England claustrophobic or whose egos had been bruised by English brusqueness (easily misunderstood) could congregate. Such was the function of the “Halfway House” pub in Heath End, where Boer war veteran Frank Cullinan, a Canadian, “became a father figure to Canadian soldiers,” and such were the Weston estate in Buckinghamshire, various Massey properties and initiatives, and so on. Massey himself described Cockspur St. as “Little Canada” (reinforcing the idea of a ghetto, though Vance apparently misses the point). There, Vance says, “Canadianized” food was served by Canadian cooks at the Salvation Army hotel. Enclaves can be part of a country’s influence overseas, but Canadians keeping each other company in England had less to do with reverse-imperialism than with insecurity and the human desire for familiar surroundings. Vance does not consider it but when Canadians like Pearson played hockey for Oxford University in the 1920s, or the historian C.P. Stacey put up a Red Ensign in his college rooms, they were joining a Canadian ghetto formed in reaction to British surroundings. But this would be less congenial to proud nationalists.

Behind the period 1914 to 1945 stands a longstanding co-imperialism reaching back into the eighteenth century. Both a Salaberry from Beauport and a Simcoe from York took part in the Peninsular War under Wellington’s command in Spain in 1812 (as did Ottawa’s Col. By). A Canadian received the Victoria Cross for his part in the Charge of the Light Brigade (Crimea, 1854), and a Nova Scotian for having manned the guns in the Siege of Lucknow (India, 1857), a decade before confederation.

In Mohawks on the Nile, Carl Benn tells the story of the Canadians in the Wolseley expedition of 1884-85, the failed attempt to rescue General Gordon, the governor general of the Sudan then besieged at Khartoum. The expedition’s commander, Garnet Wolseley, had been impressed by French Canadian and Mohawk rivermen in the march on Fort Garry in 1870. In Egypt Wolseley’s staff saw to it that the force included 385 Canadian voyageurs, including sixty Indians – all volunteers: Mohawks from Kahnawake, Kanesatake, and Akwesasne, and several Ojibway from the West.

It is not that Benn goes out of his way to put the Empire back into Canadian history; it probably does not occur to him that it could be taken out. By simply recounting the native and Canadian experience in Egypt, Mohawks on the Nile undermines the pure-Canada narrative whose premise is a struggle for independence from Britain. Benn has written previously about the Iroquois who rallied to the Crown in 1812, some of whom were still alive in the 1880s. If the Iroquois were disappointed in Upper Canada after 1814, “the even grimmer situation of the Iroquois south of the border seems to have affirmed the validity of their decision to fight against the United States.” In 1837 various Indian tribes mustered as “separate aboriginal forces” to support the Crown in suppressing the rebels. In a revealing sidelight, Benn quotes one 1837 rebel whose goal was to fight “Indians, Negroes, and Orangemen.”

Contrary to what might be assumed, English-language media did not “discriminate” between whites and Indians, who were allies rather than subjects. Louis Jackson, a Mohawk chief, was described by Toronto’s Globe as “chief foreman of the Canadians” without reference to his race. In the military games held in Wadi Halfa, the program for which is included in Benn’s appendices, the athletes taking part in the sack race, tug-of-war, three-legged race, etc., were grouped as “Europeans and Canadians” (including Indians) as distinct from “Egyptian soldiers” or “Natives [Sudanese and Egyptians].” Benn says British authorities denounced “several deadbeats” among their English Canadian recruits and recent immigrants but declared the Iroquois and French “nearly all first-class men.”

The presence of experienced Mohawks in British uniforms in Egypt in 1884 reveals more than a readiness to take up opportunities for challenging work. It reflects a continuing integration in the Imperial system but, more important to Benn, the continued assertion of the Mohawk identity as dutiful warrior and reliable ally.

If native volunteers who regarded the King as their protector sit awkwardly with nationalistic Canadian history, how much more counterintuitive is the roster of Royal Military College alumni, born in Canada, who served as colonial administrators in Africa. They merit little mention in nationalist publications. Sir Gordon Guggisberg, born in Ontario to a family of Swiss origin, served as director of surveys in Gold Coast (the future Ghana), Ashanti, and Northern and Southern Nigeria, and as Governor of the Gold Coast from 1919-27. “My heart is in Africa,” he wrote. Ghana in 1974 erected a statue to this extraordinary Canadian in Accra — but there is no statue in his native Galt, and he merits only a few paltry lines in The Canadian Encyclopedia.

Sir Percy Girouard was born in Montreal in 1867, his father a Quebec Conservative MP and his mother Irish. After RMC he apprenticed with the CPR, laid the tracks in Egypt and the Sudan that made possible the later ascent of the Nile by Kitchener’s punitive expedition of 1896-98, served as Britain’s director of railways in the Boer war, and in 1907 was appointed Governor of Northern Nigeria, “the country which a Canadian will rule,” Toronto’s Globe reported. From 1909 to 1912 Girouard was governor of British East Africa, the future Kenya. Through all this he remained a Canadian (his father having become a prominent judge) and honorary lieutenant colonel of the 18th (Saguenay) regiment based in Chicoutimi. Anthony Kirk-Greene, the Oxford historian, called Girouard “Canada’s most distinguished yet least-known colonial governor.” He too merits only eleven lines in The Canadian Encyclopedia.

RMC empire-builders in Africa included engineers Huntley Mackay, William G. Stairs, William H. Robinson, and Kenneth J.R. Campbell. Born in Kingston, Mackay served in tribal wars in Sierra Leone and became acting administrator of the British East Africa Company. Robinson served as a deputy commissioner and sub-consul in Nigeria and died trying to blow up the gate of a rebel stockade in Sierra Leone. Harry Freer served in the British occupation of Egypt in 1882 and the North-West campaign against Riel in 1885. Henry Wise served in the North-West, was wounded at Fish Creek, and later became aide-de-camp to the viceroy of India, Lord Lansdowne (1888-94), who had previously been governor-general of Canada (1883-8). Campbell served in the Niger Coast protectorate. Another RMC graduate, Herbert Nanton, fought on the North-West Frontier of India and in the Boer war. Most of these men are not even mentioned in The Canadian Encyclopedia and Stairs merits only seven lines even as a co-discoverer of the sources of the Nile. Given these omissions the Encyclopedia’s editor, James Marsh, takes liberties describing it as “the closest thing we [have] ever had to an expression of the Canadian identity.” A better guide to these Canadian empire-builders is an online essay by Andrew B. Godefroy, “Canadian Soldiers in West African Conflicts, 1885-1905.” As Godefroy writes, “the history of Canada’s Victorian and Edwardian Army remains largely untold and little understood.”

Perhaps the selective Canadianism of the Encylcopedia can be partly explained by the tendency on the Left to adopt a posture of moral superiority to some unfashionable entity or other. In the case of Canadian nationalists, it is the British empire that is demonized. In Africa, wrote Margaret Laurence, “I still wore my militant liberalism like a heart on my sleeve.” Her experiences between 1950 and 1957 in British Somaliland and the Gold Coast (where her husband worked for the British Overseas Development Service) inspired her first novel, This Side Jordan (1960) and other works. Like E.M. Forster, who spent only a few weeks in India before writing his influential anti-imperial classic, A Passage to India, Laurence wrote critically of “the real India” without having set foot there. True to her nationalistic muse, Laurence wanted her art to assist Canadians in being distinctive, better than those wicked imperialists.

But Laurence, born in Manitoba, became disillusioned on her return to Canada. Confronting with new eyes the fate of the Métis (she might have included aboriginals too), Laurence was forced to concede that Canadians are colonizers in their own back yard. What is impressive is how difficult her liberal doctrine makes it for her to see and accept this reality.

If Canadians, as Buckner has been saying for nearly thirty years, were co-imperialists, this was never more so than when they acquired their own empire. Ottawa was no mere subordinate in a conveniently scape-goated “British” empire but the capital of a colonial power in its own right. The relationship to the frontier, former Hudson’s Bay Company territories, the Red River colony, the treaty Indians of the West, the Pacific colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia, the nascent prairie provinces, the Maritimes, and to northern Ontario and northern Quebec, was decidedly colonial; it was from Canadian expansionist pretensions that Newfoundland stood aloof. When Joseph Howe, the former anti-confederate from Nova Scotia, accepted a federal post in 1869, he was called Secretary of State for the Provinces and Superintendent-General of Indian Affairs — in other words Ottawa’s secretary to the colonies.

The modern opinion poll did not exist in 1885 but large crowds turned out to cheer the men who mustered to punish Riel, the Métis, and the Indians. Halifax, Kingston, Belleville, Ottawa, Toronto, Winnipeg, Regina, Edmonton – they expressed “the martial spirit of the Old Dominion,” one Canadian wrote, and included two French-speaking battalions, the 9th Voltigeurs from Quebec under the command of Guillaume Amyot, and the 65th Mounted Rifles of Montreal, Joseph-Aldric Ouimet commanding. There was, it should be remembered, a kind of bipartisan consensus about Riel, to the extent that in 1885 the Quebec newspaper La Minerve, various Conservatives, and senior Ontario Liberals like David Mills MP, called Riel “le Mahdi de l’Ouest,” equating him with the fanatical Mahdi of Sudan whose forces had killed Gordon on the Nile that January.

Sending the proverbial gunboat against the Métis, the Library and Archives Canada website “From Colony to Country” is pleased to relate, was Canada’s first such endeavour “without British involvement.” More to the point is that it was a classic imperial punitive expedition carried out by Canadians in their own colonial interest — and complete with their own Canadian-made blimpish blunders such as Col. Otter getting himself surrounded at Cut Knife Creek. As a perplexed Margaret Laurence put it: “It has always seemed ironic to me that this war so much resembled the colonialist-imperialist wars of Britain, from whom Canada had recently become independent. Perhaps I am making too much of this parallel, although I think it truly exists.”

Canada’s colonial system was outlined in the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, released in 1996: the Province of Canada in 1857 passed legislation to “Encourage the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes.” The federal Indian Act of 1927 enacted “stronger measures” to “control the affairs of Aboriginal societies.” In various rulings on aboriginal title such as Delgamuukw (1997), Supreme Court judges have noted the continuity between British and Canadian rule, from the “assertion of British sovereignty” to the assertion of “Crown sovereignty” in BC after confederation. Macdonald hoped to “do away with the tribal system, and assimilate the Indian people in all respects with the inhabitants of the Dominion.” “All colonial and Canadian law and policy” have shared the same “cultural chauvinism,” said a Kwakiutl report in 1992. According to Vera J. Roy, Canada after 1867 had “one of the most effective and insidious tools in its colonial arsenal” in s. 91 of the BNA Act, which led to “severe social and cultural dislocation” including residential schools, “an even more pernicious expression of the colonialist drive.” The 1996 report cited the “complex, destabilizing and demoralizing legacy of colonialism” created by “colonial and Canadian governments.”

There appears to have been a transition in the white-Indian relationship between its British and Canadian phases: perhaps, as colonialists, Canadians were “worse”? Benn’s Mohawks on the Nile includes as appendices two first-hand accounts by Mohawk voyageurs Louis Jackson and James Deer, which convey their enthusiasm for the adventure. Why? Deer and Jackson have little to say of larger questions, being concerned with relating the immediate events, but Benn suggests that, as in previous conflicts, the Iroquois saw in the British alliance a safeguard and bulwark for their interests. In 1812 (and in a sense also in 1837) they hedged the Crown’s protection against American conquest.

The Mohawks had a low opinion of the Egyptians and Sudanese as feckless workers, but were at ease with Imperial service. Jackson was proud of having “shown the world that the dwellers on the banks of the Nile, after navigating it for centuries, could still learn something of the craft from the Iroquois Indians … and the Canadian voyageurs of many races.” Jackson says his British officer, Brev. Lt.-Col. James Alleyne (also a veteran of the Red River expedition), “was so well pleased with our progress” upriver “that he never interfered but left it all to us.” And Jackson praised “the handsome treatment accorded us by the British government,” with double the contracted clothing allotment including a new overcoat at Malta on the return journey (157), vowing to enlist again if called upon. Jackson’s “most experienced boatman” was one Peter Canoe, who spoke no English but served very well as a foreman with James Deer interpreting.

Paid service overseas, with the Pyramids and Abu Simbel thrown in, was no doubt a liberating experience for such men. By the 1880s, Her Majesty’s Indian allies found themselves caught inside a self-asserting Canadian dominion in which their status was reduced to that of wards. Benn does not pursue the logical implication that the Iroquois, formerly dignified allies, were now at the mercy of Ottawa’s own colonial government which proved, if anything, harsher in its assimilationist approach than its British predecessors. The worst of the residential schools neglect occurred under Canadian direction, not British. Perhaps there is even a parallel to the sad experience of harmless Ukrainian settlers rounded up by blimpish Canadian nationalists (Hughes, Otter, et al.) during the first world war, against British advice. This was an Imperial arrogance based in small-town Ontario, and deserves further study.

By the time of the great war, Indians were obliged to enlist as individuals, not as tribal allies, Benn recounts. Their group identity and particular traditions meant little to military bureaucrats like Hughes, an Ontario imperialist not a British one. Still, one-in-three able-bodied Indian males volunteered to fight, around 4,000 warriors — and some Iroquois did manage to serve with their brethren by enlisting in the 114th (Brantford) Battalion of Haldimand County. Fascinatingly, the Six Nations of the Grand River declared war on Kaiser Wilhelm II independently of Canada and the Empire, reaffirming their identity as allies rather than objects of Ottawa’s whimsy. “We came over with the United Empire Loyalists,” one Mohawk from Quinte said; “Our treaties are with the Crown, so when the Crown calls, you go.” Lt. Cameron Brant, great-great grandson of the eighteenth-century chief, was killed at Ypres in 1915. It is regrettable that unique first nations regiments, with their own proud identity intact, were not held together in 1914-16 as, for example, were Sikh regiments in India. The Six Nations Women’s Patriotic League created a battle flag for the 114th bearing Iroquois symbols, but Ottawa ignored them.

Canada’s colonial policy can also be seen in the subvention of the Western provinces. In 1905 Sir Wilfrid Laurier adopted traditional divide et impera tactics toward the settlements on the western Prairie to which Ottawa looked for the expansion and enrichment of its Dominion. Sir Frederick Haultain, premier of the north-west territories since 1897, made the case that Canada was “admitting an independent and consenting colony into the union.” He asked Laurier to create “one big province,” a counterweight in the top-heavy Dominion. To some extent for partisan reasons (Haultain was a Conservative) Laurier instead split the territory into two smaller provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, alongside a rump NWT, thus perpetuating the West’s status as “a colony within a colony.” It is amusing, again, that when The Canadian Encyclopedia was published by Mel Hurtig, the prominent “Canadian nationialist,” in 1985, in Edmonton no less, it left out Haultain!

Canada’s nationalist historians and journalists have perpetuated certain omissions about Canada’s empire amounting to a kind of Freudian denial of denial. But some historians are resisting the tendency to expunge the past in the name of nation-building. As Sir Charles G.D. Roberts paraphrased Kipling, “what do they know of Canada who only Canada know?” From Buckner’s British World conferences and Godefroy’s RMC alumni abroad, to Benn’s Mohawks on the Nile and Vance’s maple leaf ghettos, historians are beginning to put the Empire back into Canada.

C.P. Champion has an M.Phil. from Cambridge and a Ph.D. from McGill. He worked for three years at Ted Byfield’s Alberta Report and later for the Reform party and its successors in Ottawa, and is the author of  The Strange Demise of British Canada (MQUP, 2010).

When war broke out in 1812, seventeen-year-old Étienne Taché quit school in Quebec City to enroll in the 5th battalion, Lower Canadian Militia. After serving in the reserve at Chateauguay in 1813, Taché’s battalion became the elite Chasseurs Canadiens. In 1814, Lieutenant Taché marched south in the Plattsburgh campaign and witnessed the battle of Lake Champlain. Later, after a postwar career as a doctor, he was elected in 1848 to the Provincial Assembly. By 1864, still a member of the Militia and now Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Étienne Taché, with knighthoods from the Pope and the Queen, he was co-premier with John A. Macdonald in the coalition that brought about Confederation. He was unanimously elected chairman of the Quebec Conference, where delegates wrote the resolutions for a federal union. More than any other figure, Taché’s life and career connect the War of 1812 with Confederation.

Taché was the titular “Premier of the Canadian Government” though in practice its co-leader with Macdonald was George-Étienne Cartier of Montreal. But Cartier, best-known for taking Quebec into Confederation, also had a close connection to the War of 1812: his father, Jacques (1774-1841), had served as a Lieutenant and paymaster in the Verchères Militia during the War. And Cartier’s right-hand man, Hector-Louis Langevin, later a cabinet minister, was married to Sophie LaForce, whose father, Major Pierre LaForce, was one of Salaberry’s Voltigeur officers in the battle of Chateauguay.

Several of the Fathers of Confederation had a connection to the War of 1812. It was part of living memory and family lore. There were only two generations — fifty years — between 1814, when the peace was signed, and 1864, when the British-American union was launched. To use a more recent comparison, fifty years was the time between 1945 and 1995, when “Victory in Europe” brought together veterans and their children and grandchildren for commemorations in Canada and abroad. Considering this proximity, the generational link between 1812 and Confederation has received remarkably little attention from historians. And in view of that link it is all the more surprising to recall that a number of professors, journalists, and bloggers — mostly on the political Left — angrily denounced the Harper government’s emphasis on the Bicentennial last year in preparation for Canada’s 150th anniversary in 2017, and continue to reproach the government almost as if it had scourged and crucified Clio, the muse of history.

Time was when the Canadian Left was quite enamoured of the War of 1812. For academics like James Laxer, an NDP activist so extreme that he was purged in 1972 after a failed takeover bid by the faction known as the Waffle, the War of 1812 played into a broader anti-Americanism that throve on drugs, race riots, “Vietnam,” Nixon-hatred, draft-dodgers, the “branch plant economy,” the Chilean coup, cruise-missile testing, and free trade. For them the War of 1812 was part of the case for an Independent Socialist Canada. In The Border: Canada, the US and Dispatches from the 29th Parallel, published in 2003, Laxer wrote of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, “On September 11, 2001, terrorists did what no foreign power had ever been able to do to the United States in the nearly two centuries since the War of 1812.” Apparently by taking the proletarian struggle to the capitalist homeland, Canadians “were the first people successfully to resist American expansionism” — that is, until the attacks on New York and Washington 187 years later. (One had little suspected this implied affinity between Tecumseh and Brock, the subjects of Laxer’s most recent book, and al-Qaeda.)

Some critics have gone to the opposite extreme, deciding that the War of 1812 did not really happen — at least not to Canadians. “Serious historians debunk the idea that the three-year War of 1812 … had much to do with the future Canada,” declared blogger Roger Annis. “The country was not even founded until fifty-two years after the War’s end.” Annis dismissed the notion that the war “was a ‘founding event’ of great heroism and historical significance for Canada” (blog, “A Socialist in Canada,” July 3, 2012). Comment boards carried rants such as this from Postzilla: “The war of 1812 was before Canada was a country, he [the demon Harper — eds.] is celebrating Colonial History, England basically.” “ProgressiveBloggers” denounced “Harper’s bizarre obsession with the War of 1812.”

Jamie Swift, co-author of the book Warrior Nation, belittled the War as a “handful of inconclusive skirmishes.” He accused the prime minister of trying “to turn the brutal little war into a noble, nation-building enterprise,” a notion “widely rubbished by historians.” All of this is a far cry from the old Waffle position that the War of 1812 was a milestone of Canadian independence.

Inevitably the reductio ad Hitlerum was quick to appear. One blogger compared “the propagandistic opportunism of the Harper Regime” to “the ‘Triumph of the Will’ with Hitler symbolically descending from the clouds” (“AppalledBC,” online, Oct. 7, 2011). Ian McKay, a leading light in Queen’s University’s history department, wrote in Canada’s History magazine that, “Ottawa, its streets bedecked with War of 1812 banners, has the martial air of … 1930s Berlin.” (Feb.-Mar. 2013, p. 50). Has McKay taken leave of his senses? Surely Mark Reid, the editor of Canada’s History, made a questionable decision in publishing this tripe. Serious historians at Queen’s must be shaking their heads at McKay’s equation of a few Laura Secord banners in Ottawa with swastikas in Berlin.

Unfortunately these ideas have been wrongheadedly adopted by mainstream commentators. Jeffrey Simpson of the Globe and Mail has accused the government of “rewriting the past.” In a debate at the War Museum in Ottawa last year, he and Jack Granatstein belittled the Canadian role in the war. “To suggest, as [Harper] did recently, that the Canadian military’s roots lay in this war was a complete rewriting of history, such as we might expect but do not deserve,” Simpson claimed. In reply Granatstein (billed as Simpson’s opponent) agreed with him: “Most of the fighting by our side was done by British regulars, and the Canadian militia … did almost nothing and sustained very light casualties.” In fact, the belief that Canadian participation is a “myth” has been greatly exaggerated. (See “The Myth of the ‘Militia Myth’” by Robert Henderson on page 12 of this issue.)

For the record, Ottawa’s case for the Bicentennial is that the War of 1812 “established the cornerstones of our political institutions and laid the foundation for Confederation,” as heritage minister James Moore put it. The prime minister was slightly more nuanced: “The War helped establish our path toward becoming an independent and free country” and “define who we are today, what side of the border we live on, and which flag we salute.” At an event in Quebec to announce new battle honours for Canadian regiments which in point of fact trace their origins to the War of 1812, Harper added: “These bonds created by our ancestors are at the origin of a truly pan-Canadian identity that made possible our Confederation, and led to a country of great diversity with two official languages.” As Moore told Maclean’s, with a touch of historical panache, “This war leads directly to Confederation in 1867.”

Not everyone would agree with Moore’s “direct” linkage of 1812 and 1867. Still, many of the delegates at Charlottetown and Quebec in 1864 did have family, friends, or neighbours who were participants in the War or victims of American pillage. Their family experiences comprise at least part of the Canadian and Maritime establishments’ collective memory of 1812 and its antecedents, the Revolutionary War and the flight of the Loyalists. Some of the delegates were descendants of officers deprived of their property and livelihood in the American War. But even those immigrant delegates such as Macdonald,  George Brown and others who settled in Canada after 1814 had also been exposed to memories of the War of 1812 in their youth, at school, in church, in the periodicals they read, and on the political hustings.

Mainstream historians with real expertise such as John R. Grodzinski and Donald E. Graves, have broadly sympathized with the Bicentennial. Even Christopher Moore, whose blog has of late carried surprisingly bigoted leftist views,* wrote in guarded defence of the Bicentennial: “Though I approve of historical controversy in general, I’m not very sympathetic to the argument … that all this War of 1812 commemoration is a vast state conspiracy to turn us into tory warmongers. But after just a couple of months, I do sense a touch of 1812 fatigue …” (“How’s the War going, 200 years ago?” Aug. 16, 2012). Moore cited no evidence of fatigue, a feeling that was presumably not shared by the thousands who gathered for re-enactments last summer.

Historians closer to the events had no such doubts: Lt.-Col. W.F. Coffin wrote in 1812: The War and Its Moral, A Canadian Chronicle, published in 1864, that even the numerals “1812” were “a sign of solemn import to the people of Canada” which “carries with it the virtue of an incantation … an episode in the story of a young people, glorious in itself and full of promise.” A.H.U. Colquhoun wrote in The Fathers of Confederation, published in 1916, “The War of 1812 furnished another startling proof of the isolated and defenceless position of the provinces.” As Colquhoun noted, the first plans for federation were proposed in 1814 by, among others, Chief Justice Jonathan Sewell, a first-generation Loyalist.

To this day, most historians are quite prepared to agree with A.R.M. Lower, a Liberal and the author of the influential 1946 Colony to Nation, who wrote that the war was semi-mythical but formative all the same. “The sense of Canadian nationality dates from the war of 1812. … The essence of the war … is that it built the first story of the Canadian national edifice.” Like other wars in history, 1812 contributed to the development of a cohesive society and a national spirit. There is nothing unusual in a fledgling frontier society cultivating a patriotic myth to build social cohesion. After 1815 thousands of immigrants poured into Upper Canada from England, Scotland, and Ireland, tripling the size of Toronto. Their assimilation into the myth of 1812 was part of what Jane Errington of the Royal Military College in her 1995 book, The Lion, the Eagle, and Upper Canada, called “the process of integration and assimilation which the war had sparked among the colonists” (p. 91). By the late 1860s “historians of the period had immortalized the myth.” It was this image of 1812 that was infused into the next two generations of colonists and immigrants, including a number of Fathers of Confederation.

The Canadian founder with the closest connection to 1812 was Colonel Taché. Born in 1795, he was a product of the pragmatically nationalist French Canada that upheld the nineteenth-century Tory entente between English Imperialism and ultramontane Catholicism. He became an archetype of the Victorian Canadien, serving in the Army, taking a profession, representing his home constituency of Kamouraska, marrying well, siring fifteen children; living, loving, and dying on his native soil in communion with the Catholic Church. Like many prudent contemporaries, he had rejected both Patriote demagoguery (knowing where such behaviour invariably leads) and the chest-thumping commercialism of Anglo-Montreal.

“Our Loyalty is not one of speculation, of pounds, shillings, and pence,” Taché told the Legislature in Montreal in 1846. “We do not carry it on our lips, we do not make a traffic of it. But we are in our habits, by our laws, and by our religion … monarchists and conservatives.” This was the famous speech in which, recalling his experiences in 1813, he predicted, gesturing toward the portrait of Queen Victoria in the chamber (the same painting that now hangs in the Senate foyer in Ottawa), that the “last cannon shot” in defence of Britain would be fired by a French Canadian.

Taché’s experience was unique — almost. His oldest brother had served as a Captain in the Voltigeurs under Salaberry. A nephew, Joseph-Charles Taché, was an early advocate of federation in a series of articles in the Courrier du Canada of Quebec City in 1857. Meanwhile in Upper Canada Sir Allan Napier MacNab, born in Niagara in 1798, volunteered at the age of 14 and served in the Militia at Sackets Harbor, Plattsburgh, Black Rock, and Fort Niagara. He went on to be a senior politician in Upper Canada, a link between the old aristocratic Toryism of John Graves Simcoe’s successors and the pragmatic Conservatism of William Henry Draper and John A. Macdonald. MacNab said, “All my politics are railroads,” a motto later embodied in the transcontinental Dominion and its first prime minister.

MacNab was conscious of the memory of Sir Isaac Brock, known to generations of Canadians as “the Saviour of Canada,” and it impinged on him at various times throughout his life. In 1841 Baron Seaton (Sir John Colborne, former commander-in-chief of North America) wrote to MacNab asking him to arrange for a certain Lieutenant Brock, one of the hero’s relatives in England, to be appointed to “a company in the Canadian Corps.”1 In the 1850s MacNab served as chairman of the Brock Monument Committee, which constructed the pillar that is extant today at Queenston. It was completed in 1856 and inaugurated in 1859 with funds approved by the Canadian Legislature, including future Fathers of Confederation such as Cartier, Macdonald, Galt, and Brown. In 1860 MacNab received a written tribute on “The Invasion of Canada” by one John Clark, which MacNab called “Clark’s effusion in memory of General Brock’s command in 1812.”2 Invocations of 1812 were common enough in the 1860s.

Like Taché’s, MacNab’s life bridged the War of 1812 and Confederation — even though, MacNab dying in 1862 and Taché in 1865, neither lived to see the new federal arrangements brought to fruition. After Taché’s death, McGee said his “sense of duty was that of a soldier of the Spartan stamp.”3 He had stood with the few against the many at Chateauguay. For Taché and MacNab’s generation, as for Macdonald and Cartier’s, the United States never ceased to be a menacing presence, any less in the 1860s than in 1812. Taking a closer look at the Fathers, what do we find? Why have historians made so little effort to draw out the connections between 1812 and Confederation?

Lt.-Col. Jacques Cartier: the 1812 veteran who was the father of Sir George-Etienne Cartier, the Father of Confederation who brought Quebec into Confederation.

Sir Charles Tupper, who attended all three conferences leading to Confederation (Charlottetown, Quebec, and London), was born at Amherst, NS in 1812. His father had trained in the local Militia in anticipation of an invasion. The Tuppers, a clerical family, could hardly have been unaware of the “ecstatic rejoicing” when HMS Shannon sailed into Halifax harbour in 1813 with the captured USS Chesapeake as a prize, or of the celebrations including the bonfire in Halifax upon Napoleon’s defeat in 1814. Years later, Charles Tupper got his start in politics in the 1850s under the influence of an 1812 veteran, James W. Johnson, the Conservative leader and pre-Confederation Premier of Nova Scotia whose portrait hangs in the Nova Scotia legislative chamber today.

Joseph Howe, the father of responsible government in Nova Scotia who was a federation sceptic in 1864 but later joined Macdonald’s cabinet, was eight years old in 1812: “The moment [war] came we prepared for combat without a murmur. I am just old enough to remember that war,” he said in 1862, the fiftieth anniversary. His father, an ardent Loyalist from New York, was a publisher, postmaster and from 1807-9 a spy in Washington on behalf of the Nova Scotia governor; his father-in-law had served in the Nova Scotia Fencibles. In later life, Howe often referred to 1812 in letters and speeches: “The United States joined the French in 1812 because they were at war with England,” he wrote to W.E. Gladstone in 1855. “Republican America fell upon the flank of England, while her fleets and armies were engaged in the great struggle with Bonaparte.” Our “great instincts” in Nova Scotia, Howe boasted, “prompted us to oppose Bonaparte in 1812” because “we apprehended danger to freedom and civilization.”

John Sandfield Macdonald, who became Ontario’s first premier in 1867, was not technically a Father of Confederation because he did not attend the conferences. But he was almost present at the creation, and like some of his contemporaries he had been recruited into politics by a War of 1812 veteran, Colonel Alexander Fraser, in the 1840s.

John Mowat: the 1812 veteran whose son, Oliver, became a Father of Confederation & Ontario’s third premier and eighth lieutenant governor.

Sir Oliver Mowat was a delegate from Upper Canada at Quebec in 1864 and went on to become Ontario’s third premier and its eighth Lieutenant Governor. His Scottish father, John Mowat, was a Peninsular War veteran who was among the 6,000 troops sent from Britain to Canada to fight in the War of 1812, and served at Plattsburgh in 1814. Thus a fair number of the Fathers were only one generation removed from an 1812 veteran.

John Galt, the father of Alexander Tilloch Galt, the Father of Confederation from Sherbrooke, made part of his living with the Canada Company, which in the 1820s sought compensation for Loyalist settlers whose property had been destroyed by American troops in the War of 1812. Also among the Montrealers was Thomas D’Arcy McGee, who in 1858 published the ballad “Along the Line!” in the collection Canadian Ballads. It is subtitled “A.D. 1812” and exhorts: “Steady be your beacon’s blaze / Along the line! along the line! / Freely sing dear Freedom’s praise / Along the line! along the line!” The second stanza, “Let them rail against the North, … / When it sends its heroes forth” refers to Canada in 1812. As McGee’s fine biographer, David Wilson, interprets this poem, “anti-slavery sentiment could function as a cohesive force, through which Canadians could assume the moral high ground and define themselves against Americans” (vol. ii, p. 119).

But this is a rather timid and negative reading! One could also conclude that English-speaking patriotic sentiment in the 1850s, rooted in a semi-mythical defence of Canada which inspired McGee, could be understood and assimilated by recent immigrants. The poem reconstructed “the thoughts of Canadian volunteers as they prepared for the impending American invasion,” Wilson writes, presumably one reason why Canadian Ballads is today seen as “a landmark of Canadian cultural nationalism.” (The poem is reproduced at the bottom of this article.)

And what of Sir John A. Macdonald, who immigrated to Upper Canada with his family in 1820 at the age of five? What are we to suppose young Johnny gleaned of the recent war at the local school in Adolphustown or at the Loyalist church, or the Midland District Grammar School, a bastion of Loyalist education? While attending Midland Grammar, which was a day school, Johnny lived with his cousins, the Macphersons, his “second home,” writes Donald Creighton (vol. I, p. 15).

His uncle, the patriarch, Lt. Col. Donald Macpherson, had landed at Quebec 1807 with the 10th Royal Veteran battalion and served with the 71st Highlanders. In the War of 1812 he saw action in Chauncey’s attack on Kingston harbour, where his daughter (one of six) could remember bullets penetrating “the wooden walls of the pretty white cottage that then did duty as the commandant’s residence.” Afterwards Macpherson became a leading figure in Kingston.

Lt.-Col. Donald Macpherson: the 1812 veteran who was the uncle of Sir John A. Macdonald, who lived at the Macpherson’s house during his school day & “devoured” his uncle’s library.

Young Johnny Macdonald, devouring “his uncle’s library and the ‘slices of pudding’ set aside by Macpherson’s youngest daughter,” grew up in the shadow of the War of 1812. He was fourteen years old when his uncle died in 1829, buried in Kingston with full military honours, “the minute guns from the city battery being answered by those from the fort,” fired by the 71st Highlanders. The funeral undoubtedly made an impression on the bright young man who had read his uncle’s books.

Later, everywhere Macdonald campaigned in 1860, Creighton relates, he met “lawyers, merchants, farmers young men … and old men who had fought in a dozen political battles and bore the medals of the War of 1812 upon their chests.”

Sir Alexander Campbell, a Father of Confederation and Macdonald’s sometime law partner, moved from England to Canada with his family in 1823 as a child, and like Macdonald, he was classically educated at Midland Grammar in the spirit of Bishop Strachan. Other Fathers of Confederation with military connections included R.B. Dickey of Nova Scotia, whose father had served as Lieutenant Colonel of the Cumberland County Militia in 1812. J.W. Ritchie’s father, Thomas had been a Militia officer and member of the Assembly who helped organize Nova Scotia’s wartime finances during the War of 1812. Edward Barron Chandler was from a Loyalist family, his father-in-law, Joshua Upham, having served in the Revolutionary War. Hewitt Bernard, born in Jamaica and the recording secretary at the Charlottetown Conference in 1864, and whose sister married Sir John A., later became a Militia Colonel. William Henry Pope, one of the more picturesque Fathers of Confederation with his Lord Salisbury-style beard, was the son of a postwar immigrant to Prince Edward Island from Devon who was a major in the Prince County Militia.

Colonel John Hamilton Gray, the Premier of Prince Edward Island who hosted the conference in 1864, was born at Charlottetown in 1811 and had a career in the British Army in India and South Africa before returning to PEI. His father, Robert Gray (born in Scotland, 1747), served in the Revolutionary War as a captain in the King’s American Regiment under Col. Edmund Fanning. Of the New Brunswickers, Samuel Leonard Tilley came from a Loyalist family. The other John Hamilton Gray, born in Bermuda in 1814, later became a Captain in the New Brunswick Regiment and Lieutenant Colonel of the New Brunswick Rangers. Such men had not served in the War of 1812 but the Militia ambience of the time was coloured by the War’s memory.

Nor was it untypical for Macdonald’s caucus members, including the Quebecers, to have a connection to the War of 1812, albeit sometimes more remote. Theodore Robitaille, the MP for Bonaventure after Confederation, was a longtime Tory loyalist who remained a backbencher for much of his career except for a stint as Receiver General, until Macdonald made him the fourth Lieutenant Governor of Quebec in 1879, and afterwards a Senator. Even here we find a link to the past, as Robitaille’s great uncle served as chaplain of the Lower Canadian Militia during the War of 1812.

In 1882 Macdonald received an appeal from Major J.R. Wilkinson for help in getting the Essex Battalion gazetted, properly manned, and better equipped. Essex County deserved a “good strong battalion,” Wilkinson wrote, as an “exposed frontier county.”5 They did not have much longer to wait, as the North-West Rebellion of 1885 provided the occasion for standing up the 21st Essex Battalion of Infantry under Lt. Col. Wilkinson’s command. It is notable that the Essex Battalion perpetuated the 1st and 2nd Regiments of the Essex Militia, which fought in the War of 1812. (Mr. Harper last year ensured that proper battle honours went to  such regiments, the modern perpetuators of 1812 fighting units; left to its own devices, DND was planning to issue a cheap lapel pin.)

Biographers have paid less attention than they might to the War of 1812-14 in the collective memory of the Confederation era. The life of Sir George Cartier by John Boyd, Sir George Etienne Cartier, Bart., his life and times: a political history of Canada from 1814 until 1873, published in 1914, omits any mention even of Cartier’s father’s having fought in the war. Newer biographies by Brian Young and Alastair Sweeny mention the fact but only in passing. Recent biographies of Taché and Langevin refer to a family connection to the War but do not develop the significance of British military service by French Canadians. Murray Beck’s biography of Joseph Howe has little to say about the War of 1812, despite the frequency with which Howe himself referred to it. The two volumes of Creighton’s life of Macdonald, despite their Tory nation-building inspiration, merely allude to the war. Richard Gwyn’s more recent  (and more Liberal) John A.: The Man Who Made Us, is more explicit: “Memories of the 1812 War had a powerful effect on Canadians’ consciousness,” having “occurred within living memory.” (p. 254-5). But little is said of Sir John’s uncle, an 1812 veteran.

In 1887, the House of Commons dealt briefly with the question of pensions for 1812 veterans. Sir Richard Cartwright was a Liberal MP and the grandson of a Loyalist officer from the Revolutionary War who, retired and in his sixties during the War of 1812, wrote articles for the Kingston Gazette explaining why Upper Canada’s “traditions” should be preserved from US aggression. Sir Richard, the grandson, asked the House in 1887 how many 1812 veterans remained living, seventy-three years after the Treaty of Ghent.

The answer came from Sir Adolphe-Philippe Caron, the Minister of Militia and Defence, whose grandfather had served in the Militia at Beauport in the 1790s, and it is a remarkable fact: there were in 1887 as many as 271 living veterans of the War of 1812, of whom 221 were receiving a pension of $30 each; 49 were getting $80 each, and one pensioner in Quebec was receiving $60, the total allocation being $6,630.

It is clear, then, that for the Fathers of Confederation and the generation of politicians who occupied ministries in Ottawa down to the 1880s, the War of 1812 was a constitutive element of British North Americans’ collective memory. There are therefore quite respectable grounds for linking the two events for the purposes of the Bicentennial. It is perverse for critics, motivated more likely by personal hatred for the prime minister than by zeal for accuracy or truth, to deny the historical connections between the war and Canada’s founding as a way to set the stage for the sesquicentennial of 2017. Any date could have been chosen, but the federal government’s emphasis on the War of 1812 as part of a five-year ramp-up from 2012 to the 150th anniversary of the Dominion is an inspired approach worthily commended to the country.

Notes
1. Sir Allan N. MacNab Papers, Bundle 5, Reel A-22, April 1841, Library and Archives Canada.
2. MacNab Papers, Reel A-22, Stamped “St. Catherines, Upper Canada, May 1860.
3. House of Commons Debates, Nov. 14, 1867, p. 70 (McGee’s maiden speech in the Dominion Parliament).
4. The Life of Sir John A. Macdonald, by his nephew Lt. Col. J. Pennington Macpherson, ADC, St. John, N.B., Earle Publishing, 1891, vol. 1, p. 80; “Donald Macpherson,” by Laurie (Stanley) Blackwell, Dictionary of Canadian Biography.
5. Sir John A. Macdonald Papers, Vol. 313 (1882), Reel C-1968/9, Library and Archives Canada.
* In one egregious example, Mr. Moore blogged on Oct. 22, 2012 that Saint Kateri Tekakwitha is “a tragic figure rather than a role model, and copping [sic] a sainthood from Pope Benedict seems like, I dunno, accepting an honorary degree from a shady online college” — a vulgar throwback to 19th century anti-Catholicism. By contrast, local First Nations, who have been Catholic for centuries, were uplifted by the canonization and gathered at the Kahnewake shrine in high numbers. One said, “it shows we can be respected too.” In Catholic terms, of course, a saint in Heaven is far more powerful than the mere human respect eschewed by Mr. Moore…

How often in the past year and a half have we heard the pedantic refrain that Canada “did not exist” in 1812.

“There was no such thing as Canada at the time,” wrote Ian McKay of Queen’s University. “‘Canada’ did not exist,” said John Bell on the Socialist Worker website. The government should not have devoted any resources to commemorating the War of 1812, they all said, because it had “nothing to do with Canada.” Because, you see, Canada did not exist. This dolorous mantra can been found all over comment boards, as in this example from the Huffington Post: “The fact [sic] that Canada did not exist until the signing of Confederation in 1867…” and so on.

Regrettably it has also been adopted in mainstream media chatter: “Canadians weren’t yet Canadians,” said the Globe and Mail’s John Allemang. “There was no sense of being ‘Canadian’ at the time,” said Jeffrey Simpson, apparently invincibly ignorant, to use the precise term for his condition. Barbara Yaffe said the war took place “55 years before Canada became Canada.” For Andrew Cohen, Canada “did not yet exist.” A typical post on Milnet.ca, a comment board frequented by members of the military, D.A. Paterson stated flatly: “Canada did not exist” in a post that had been “read 44,851 times” by January of this year. And Jack Granatstein told a Canadian War Museum audience in Ottawa last November that Upper and Lower Canadians fighting in the war had “no sense of being Canadian.”

In fact not only did Canada exist in 1812 but there were two — two legal jurisdictions, Upper Canada and Lower Canada, established by the Constitutional Act, also called the Canada Act, of 1791.

A strong sense of being “Canadian” in New France was well-established before 1700, by which time settlers had been fighting off Indian attacks for three generations. There is a book by Quebec historian Gervais Carpin on the use of the term “Canadien” between 1535 and 1691, Histoire d’un mot (“The History of a Word”), published in 1995. The map above shows “Vray Canada” (“Canada Proper,” the heartland around Quebec City) and is dated 1719. The Canadiens, in historical terms, represent much more than an illustrious hockey team.

All of this is a reminder that what happened in 1867 was really a “re-founding” that appropriated the name and gravitas of an already-old French-speaking Catholic civilization, imported 200 years earlier to the banks of the St. Lawrence.

As for Upper Canadians, they were citizens of a younger society distinct from Lower Canada in their language (English), culture (British-American), experience (as refugees and émigrés), and heritage (in many cases as members of American families displaced by the Revolutionary War and not inclined to forget it). By the mid-1790s Upper Canada had elected a legislature, begun to abolish slavery, established a judiciary, laid the road-grid that is still used, and formed distinctive county Militia units (some of which remain in today’s the Canadian Army). They were uniquely British-Canadian, as opposed to French, British, American, or anything else. Their Upper Canadianism may not have been fully-formed, but it is a great exaggeration for Alan Taylor, the author of The Civil War of 1812, and his readers (who include Mr. Simpson), to declare that it “didn’t exist.”

Before 1812, several distinctly Canadian characteristics of today’s Parliament were already in existence. Among these, according to Gary O’Brien, the Clerk of the Senate, writing in the Autumn 2012 issue of the Canadian Parliamentary Review, we can enumerate the following: that the elected members have desks, not benches as at Westminster; that they vote by roll-call, not by entering “aye” or “nay” lobbies; that the speaker wears a periwig or no wig (the Americans may have pinched the speaker’s wig as a “scalp” when they sacked the Legislature in York in 1813); that decisions are made more quickly and with less ceremony; that members enjoy “privilege” inside the House; that the administration is non-partisan; that both English and French are used (at Quebec, starting in 1792). All told, this is a “substantial” pre-1812 legacy “deserving of recognition,” O’Brien writes (p. 12-13). Parts of the mace used by the Canadian Senate today, an “emblem of sovereignty and authority,” date from the Legislative Council in 1793. The mace of Upper Canada was pillaged by the Americans in 1813 and returned to Ontario only in 1934. (Pike & McCreery, Canadian Symbols of Authority, p. 109, 133).

And after all, what were the Americans attacking if not an entity called “Canada”? General Hull warned in his “Proclamation to the Inhabitants of Canada, July 12, 1812: Urging Them Not to Take Part in the War Between the United States and Great Britain,” that “the Standard of the UNION now waves over the Territory of CANADA. … I come to protect, not to injure you.” It is reproduced on the Parks Canada website’s Teacher Resource Centre. Hull’s missive suggests that the oft-repeated Cohen-Granatstein-Simpson mantra, that Canadians played no part in the war — see “The Myth of the Militia Myth” on this website — originated simply as American war propaganda. It is indeed a pity that Canada’s best-known public commentators derive their talking points from none other than the American war hawks.

from “Notes & Topics”

The Dorchester Review Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2012)

Holocaust-denial in Muslim lands is spoon-fed to children, the murder of six million depicted from school age as a mere contrivance to justify Israel’s existence. The best-known denier is Iran’s then-president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who told a Teheran audience in 2009 (one of many occasions), “It is a lie based on an unprovable and mythical claim.” In Egypt the former head of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohammed Mahdi Akef, referred to “the myth of the Holocaust” (BBC, 23 Dec. 2005). Palestinian school curricula, according to David Bedein of the Center for Near East Policy Research, are built around the doctorate that president and PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas defended in 1982 at the USSR’s Institute of Oriental Studies on the alleged “links” between Nazism and Zionism. It claims that Hitler’s Jewish victims numbered “possibly” six million or “below one million” and that no gas chambers were used. Similar pseudo-scholarship is documented in Syria, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab lands.

The word “Shoah” cannot be found on the Al Jazeera-English website and “Holocaust” links to Norman Finkelstein on “exploiting” the tragedy. Mehdi Hasan, senior editor at The New Statesman, wrote: “British Muslim attitudes are defined not just by denial but by indifference” (“I am shamed by Muslim attitudes to the Holocaust,” The Times, Jan. 27). The British Muslim Council boycotted Holocaust Memorial Day from 2001-07 and 2009-10. “Palestinian suffering,” Hasan said, “is not reduced by belittling the mass murder of Europe’s Jews.”

There are glimmers of light. Though Al Jazeera ignored it, a Moroccan student, Elmehdi Boudra, organized a Holocaust conference, the first ever in a Muslim country, on Sept. 21 at Al-Akhawayn University. It “attracted virtually no media attention of any kind” (New York Times, 23 Sept. 2011). Morocco’s king, Mohammed VI, in 2009 called for “an exhaustive and faithful reading of the history.” His grandfather, Mohammed V, notably refused to transfer Jews to the death camps. Boudra, who had heard of the Moroccan Jews (most of whom now live in Israel or France) from his grandmother, studied with Simon Levy at the Museum of Moroccan Judaism in Casablanca.

In Turkey this year the state broadcaster, TRT, showed some of French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour documentary, “Shoah,” first produced in 1985 – “the first time the film has been aired on public television in a majority-Muslim country” (AP, Jan. 27, Gulf Times, Jan. 28, 2012). “Over the past 60 years, the Muslim world [has] been excluded from history learning,” says director Abraham Radkin of the Aladdin Project, based in Paris, which subtitled the film in Turkish, Arabic, and Farsi. “Shoah” was also broadcast in Iran in 2011 by a Farsi satellite channel based in Los Angeles. Prof. Cengiz Aktar of Bahcesehir University said: “There [are] a lot of misjudgments about Judaism, [a] lack of knowledge about European Jews, what happened to them. … The Turks are engaged in a pioneering work and I am sure it will be followed by other Muslim countries.”

Turks had already seen a film, “The Turkish Passport,” about diplomats who rescued Jews during the war. In a similar vein a photographic exhibition, “Besa: A Code of Honor: Muslim Albanians who Rescued Jews During the Holocaust,” by Norman H. Gershman, sponsored by the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem, opened in Calgary this winter. The seventeen Albanian Muslims profiled are among sixty-three of the Righteous Among the Nations. Also among the latter, Eva Weisel believes, should be her little-known rescuer in wartime Tunisia, an Arab man named Khaled Abdul-Wahab (Jerusalem Post, Jan. 28, 2012).

At Auschwitz on 1 Feb. 2012 Bosnia’s Grand Mufti, Mustafa Cerić, said: “We must teach our young people in mosques, churches and synagogues about what happened here. This awful place should stand as a reminder to all people that intolerance and lack of understanding between people can result in … such places as Auschwitz” (Reuters). The news, then, from Turkey, Morocco, Bosnia, even Iran is encouraging. As Mehdi Hasan urged fellow Muslims: “let us stand side by side with our Jewish brethren and together mourn the deaths of six million innocent souls.” — CPC