Putting the Empire Back into Canada

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.)

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.

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).