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.