Jaeger from Trudeaupia offers an interesting perspective on the dramatic change Canadian political culture underwent in the last decades. He says that Canada abandoned its British-inspired institutions for French-inspired ones:
The difference is that French governance has always been very centralized, top down and statist, while the British tradition is the opposite: decentralized and bottom up. And prior to 1968 federal politicians from Quebec found the Anglo heritage of traditional liberalism and limited government rather attractive.While I think Jaeger is on the right track, I think painting this as a "French vs. Anglo" issue is somewhat inaccurate. To start, it fails to explain how French Canadians used to be even more antistatist than the English Canadians. It is now largely forgotten, but the Laurier government held a plebiscite in 1898 - the first in the Dominion's history - on federal alcohol Prohibition. Every single province voted for Prohibition - except Quebec which voted overwhelmingly against. Even though the Yes side won by 51% in all of Canada, the Laurier government refused to implement Prohibition, citing among other things steadfast opposition from Quebec. So we have a case of French Canadians not only being less statist than their English Canadiens fellow citizens but also trumping the latter. Quebec was also the last province to implement a provincial Prohibition in 1919 - and this was Prohibition-lite where beer, wine and cider were still legal - and the first one to ditch it in 1921. Quebec was then the only jurisdiction in all North America where alcohol was legal. Ontario started nationalizing hydro-electric utilities almost 40 years before Quebec did. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Duplessis government in Quebec trumpeted its pro-busienss credentials while alleging the other provinces were pursuing "socialism". Even the two conscription crisis fit the pattern of French Canadian antistatism. Laurier himself led the Liberal Party in the 1917 elections on an anti-conscription platform. He felt that it could not be just to coerce a man to fight in the name of liberty. But then, in the 1960s, it all changed in the wake of what came to be known as the Quiet Revolution. Suddenly, Quebecers switched from being the biggest skeptics of government intervention and expansion to being their biggest fans. Such a huge change can seem astounding, but a closer analysis reveals that it is not a change as huge as it seems. I think the key to understanding the last decades of change in Canadian politics is not French vs. Anglo but Catholic vs. Protestant. Quebec and Canada may now be quite secular, but the cultural habits of thought and action shaped by centuries of religious belief and practices simply don't go away overnight. Being a Catholic means believing that a single source of authority, namely the Catholic Church led by the Pope, holds the key to the correct interpretation to God's word. In contrast, Protestantism usually believes that there should be no middleman between the believer and God's word. While Catholicism uses a transcendant moral order to legitimize centralized authority, Protestantism uses it to legitimize individual defiance of authority. There is a good deal of historical evidence to prove that, while some French Canadians like Laurier really cherished individual liberty, the antistatism of most French Canadians stemmed from their wanting to preserve the authority and prestige of the Church from state interference. Their antistatism was still increased by the fact that, as opposed to the Church, the State did not hold in their eyes any particular moral legitimacy. The Church ran most of Quebec's social services up until the 1960s, including health care, education and welfare. The best way to summarize what happened in the 1960s is to say Quebecers massively transferred their strong loyalties from the Church to the State. They suddenly became big believers in Big Government and the growth of governments in Quebec City and Ottawa is here to prove it. Quebecers still believed in centralized authority, they only switched which authority they believed in. Since Canada is a federation, this posed a further problem: which State, the one in Quebec City or in Ottawa? Catholicism did not legitimize just any authority: one and exactly one institution held the key to God's word. Quebecers often seem to have problems conceiving of divided loyalites and divided authority (the same pattern can be seen in France). It is interesting that a major separatist argument is that there are too many levels of government in Canada and it is argued that separation would have the advantage of coalescing the powers of the federal and provincial government into an allegedly more efficient and legitimate unitary government. Federalists are better at understanding divided power but not by much. They usually do not defend federalism in terms of checks and balances between governments but simply try to point out how the federal government does such a fine job for Quebec and that we should not be so fearful of growing federal power. (Unless they argue for some kind of asymetric federalism in which most federal powers in Quebec are delegated to the Quebec government) It is also interesting to note that Charest's (mild) plans for scaling back the Quebec government are provoking a lot of emotive responses about Charest "destroying Quebec", as if there were no differences between Quebec and its government. Although it's inefficient, although it's costly, the bloated size of government is defended as a source of national identity and almost of spiritual fulfillment. The rest of Canada also adopted a similar toned down version of this mindset. Talk of scaling back the Canadian welfare state or especially of allowing some private health care, and you will be sure to hear English Canadians talking about the "destruction of Canada". Many English Canadians have great emotional investments in Big Government as a source of an identity distinct from the United States. Different policies pursued by provinces is seen not as diversity but as a source of inequality that would stem from failure to comply with "national norms" and demands federal harmonization and equalization. In my opinion, Canada has not undergone Francization; it has undergone Catholicization. This is true in an extremely basic way: Catholics now make up 43% of the population compared with 29% for Protestants. Catholics also outnumbered Protestants for the first time in the 1971 census -- which oddly coincides with Trudeau's rise to power. But there is also the fact that English Canadian Protestants were mostly Protestant-lite, followers of the Anglican Church which was closer in spirit to the Catholic Church than were American Protestant sects. Finally, it should be noted the Catholic Church modernized itself in the 1960s during the Vatican II Council and somewhat downplayed the need for centralized authority. The biggest symbolic change was to let the Mass be celebrated in the local language instead of requiring the use of Latin: the solid unitarianism of the Church was broken down to allow some local liturgical autonomy. The Church thereafter left behind its earlier support of authoritarian government and embraced both democracy and capitalism, playing a large role in the struggle against Communism in Central and Eastern Europe. However, the legacy of centralized Church authority still haunts us. Granting the Church the temporal powers of the State was rightly thought to be unwise. Granting the State the spiritual devotion formerly reserved to the Church is no wiser. | Jaeger de Trudeaupia offre une perspective intéressante sur les bouleversements de la culture politique canadienne dans les dernières décennies. Il dit que le Canada a abandonné ses institutions d'inspiration britannique pour en adopter d'autres d'inspiration française:
La différence est que la gouvernace française a toujours été très centralisée, top down et étatiste tandis que la tradition britannique est au contraire décentralisée et bottom up. Et avant 1968, les politiciens fédéraux du Québec trouvaient plutôt séduisant l'héritage anglo-saxon de libéralisme traditionnel et de gouvernement limité.Bien que je pense que Jaeger est sur la bonne voie, je pense que de présenter ça comme un problème "Français vs. Anglais" ne donne pas l'heure juste. D'abord, ça ne peut pas expliquer pourquoi les Canadiens Français étaient encore plus antiétatistes que les Canadiens Anglais. Ça fait maintenant longtemps qu'on l'a oublié, mais le gouvernement Laurier a tenu un plébiscite en 1898 - le premier dans l'histoire du Dominion - sur la Prohibition fédérale de l'alcool. Toutes les provinces ont voté pour la Prohibition - sauf le Québec qui a voté de manière écrasante contre. Même si le Oui a gagné par 51% à l'échelle du Canada, le gouvernement Laurier a refusé d'instaurer la Prohibition, citant entre autres l'opposition farouche du Québec. Donc on a un exemple où les Canadiens Français sont non seulement moins étatistes que leurs concitoyens Canadiens Anglais mais réussissent aussi à imposer leur volonté à ces derniers. Le Québec a aussi été la dernière province à instaurer une Prohibition au niveau provincial en 1919 - et c'était une Prohibition-lite où la bière, le vin et le cidre étaient encore légaux - et a été la première province à l'abandonner en 1921. Le Québec était alors la seule juridiction en Amérique du Nord où l'alcool était légal. L'Ontario a commencé à nationaliser les compagnies hydro-électriques 40 ans avant que le Québec ne le fasse. Dans les années 1940 et 1950, le gouvernement québécois de Duplessis se vantait de ses affinités pro-entreprises tout en accusant les autres provinces de se diriger vers le "socialisme". Même les deux crises de la conscription entrent dans le moule de l'antiétatisme canadien français. Laurier lui-même a dirigé le Parti Libéral sur une plateform anti-conscription lors des élections de 1917. Il croyait qu'il ne pouvait pas être juste de forcer un homme à se battre au nom de la liberté. Mais ensuite, dans les années 1960, tout a changé dans la foulée de ce qui est maintenant appelé la Révolution Tranquille. Soudainement, les Québecois ont cessé d'être les plus grands sceptiques de l'expansion et intervention gouvernementale pour en devenir les plus grands fans. Un tel changement gigantesque peut sembler déroutant, mais une analyse plus détailée révèle que ce changement n'est pas aussi gigantesque qu'il le semble. Je pense que la clé pour comprendre les dernières décennies de changement dans la politique canadienne n'est pas Français vs. Anglais, mais Catholique vs. Protestant. Le Québec et le Canada sont peut-être aujourd'hui très laïques, mais les habitudes culturelles forgées par des siècles de croyances et pratiques religieuses ne disparaissent tout simplement pas du jour au lendemain. Être un Catholique signifie de croire qu'une seule source d'autorité, notamment l'Église catholique menée par le Pape, détient la clé de l'interprétation correcte de la parole de Dieu. Au contraire, le Protestantisme croit généralement qu'il ne devrait pas y avoir d'intermédiaire entre le fidèle et la parole de Dieu. Alors que le Catholicisme se sert d'un ordre moral transcendant pour légitimer une autorité centralisée, le Protestantisme s'en sert pour légitimer la défiance individuelle face à l'autorité. Il y a assez d'éléments historiques pour prouver que, bien que quelques Canadiens français comme Laurier chérissaient vraiment la liberté individuelle, l'antiétatisme de la plupart d'entre eux venait de leur désir de préserver l'autorité et le prestige de l'Église contre l'interférence gouvernementale. Leur antiétatisme était encore amplifié par le fait que, contrairement à l'Église, l'État n'avait pas en leurs yeux une légitimité morale particulière. L'Église gérait la plupart des services sociaux du Québec jusqu'aux années 1960, incluant les soins de santé, l'éducation et l'aide sociale. La meilleure façon de résumer ce qui s'est passé dans les années 1960 est de dire que les Québécois ont massivement transféré leurs fortes loyautés de l'Église vers l'État. Ils sont soudainement devenus de grands croyants en un gros gouvernement et la croissance des gouvernements à Québec et Ottawa est là pour le prouver. Les Québécois croyaient toujours à l'autorité centralisée, ils ont seulement changé l'autorité dans laquelle ils croient. Comme le Canada est une fédération, cela posait un autre problème: quel État, celui à Québec ou à Ottawa? Le Catholicisme ne légitimait pas n'importe quelle autorité: une et une seule institution détenait la vérité sur la parole de Dieu. Les Québécois semblent souvent avoir des problèmes à saisir le concept de loyautés divisées et d'autorité divisée (la même chose peut être constatée en France). C'est intéressant qu'un argument majeure pour la séparation est qu'il y a trop de niveaux de gouvernements au Canada et on affirme que la séparation aurait l'avantage de fusionner les pouvoirs des gouvernements fédéral et provincial en un gouvernement unitaire supposé plus efficace et légitime. Les fédéralistes comprennent mieux le concept de pouvoir divisé, mais pas tellement mieux. Généralement, ils ne défendent pas le fédéralisme en termes de contrepoids entre les gouvernements mais essaient simplement de montrer comment le gouvernement fédéral fait un si bon travail pour le Québec et que nous ne devrions pas avoir si peur des pouvoirs fédéraux grandissants. (À moins qu'ils ne défendent une sorte de fédéralisme asymétrique où la plupart des pouvoirs fédéraux au Québec sont délégués au gouvernement du Québec) Il est aussi intéressant de noter que les plans (modérés) de Charest pour réduire la taille du gouvernement du Québec provoquent beaucoup de réactions émotives selon lesquelles Charest est en train de "détruire le Québec", comme si il n'y avait pas de différences entre le Québec et son gouvernement. Même si il est inefficace, même si il coûte cher, la taille opulente du gouvernement est défendue comme une source d'identité nationale et presque d'épanouissement spirituel. Le reste du Canada a aussi adopté une version diluée de cette mentalité. Parlez de réduire l'État-Providence canadien ou spécialement de permettre un peu de privé dans les soins de santé et vous pouvez être sûr d'entendre des Canadiens Anglais parler de la "destruction du Canada". Plusieurs Canadiens Anglais ont de grands investissements émotifs dans un gros gouvernement comme source d'une identité distincte des États-Unis. Des politiques différentes mises en oeuvre par les provinces ne sont pas vues comme de la diversité mais comme une source d'inégalité qui viendrait du fait de ne pas suivre des "normes nationales" et qui nécessite une harmonisation et égalisation fédérale. Selon moi, le Canada n'a pas subi une Francisation; il a subi une Catholicisation. C'est vrai d'une manière très terre à terre: les Catholiques représentent maintenant 43% de la population contre 29% pour les Protestants. Les Catholiques ont dépassé en nombre les Protestants pour la première fois lors du recensement de 1971 -- ce qui coincide étrangement avec l'arrivée au pouvoir de Trudeau. Mais il y a aussi le fait que les Protestants canadiens anglais étaient surtout protestant-lite, des fidèles de l'Église anglicane qui était plus près en esprit de l'Église catholique que ne l'étaient les sectes protestantes américaines. Finalement, il faut rappeler que l'Église catholique s'est modernisée dans les années 1960 lors d'un concile Vatican II et a diminué l'emphase sur l'autorité centralisée. Le plus grand changement symbolique a été de laisser la Messe être célébrée dans la langue locale aulieu d'exiger l'usage du latin: l'unitarisme solide de l'Église a été fissuré pour permettre une certaine autonomie liturgique locale. L'Église a par la suite laissé derrière elle son ancien soutien aux modes de gouvernement autoritaire et a souscrit aux principes de la démocratie ainsi que du capitalisme, jouant un grand rôle dans la lutte contre le communisme en Europe centrale et en Europe de l'Est. Cependant, l'héritage de l'autorité centralisée de l'Église nous hante toujours. De donner à l'Église les pouvoirs temporels de l'État était perçu avec raison comme étant une mauvaise idée. De donner à l'État la dévotion spirituelle précédemment réservée à l'Église n'est pas une meilleure idée. |
Outstanding!
Simply one of the best explainations for the shift in Canadian politics I have read in years.
The interesting challenge posed by the Reform Party and it's failure to capture seats East of the Lakehead makes great sense if you think about it in the terms you suggest. Indeed, the very name of the party was redolent of a challenge to the one and only legitimate church.
Merci.
Écrit par: Jay Currie à février 24, 2004 01:25 AMThank you very much for the praise and for the link! The name of the Reform Party is indeed revealing now that I think of it.
Écrit par: Laurent à février 24, 2004 01:00 PMIf you accept André Laurendeau's Negro-King theory about Duplessis then it shifts the argument back to the French/English divide. On the whole, he argued, Duplessis behaved like one of these Negro-kings that one finds scattered throughout the British Empire. “The British, always pragmatic, did not necessarily destroy and replace the existing political power in the colonies”, he said. “In fact, they frequently accommodated themselves with local customs and rulers, as long as these petty rulers recognised the superior authority of the imperial power and protected its economic interests.” We can argue that the British tradition of liberalism and limited government, according to Laurendeau, also an elitist tradition, manipulated Duplessis to create the pro-business environment in Quebec and it did not derive from a native anti-statist philosphy.
The writings of Abbe Groulx however and the Catholic Church in Quebec reveal a decided bent towards authoritarianism. Certainly, elements of this intellectual elite were sympathetic to Italian fascism and Vichy France. The nationalism of la survivance displayed statist elements. Quebec historian, Esther Delisle, writes that the anti-statist interpretation of the conscription crisis of WWII is a myth. She portends that at least among the intellectual elite, represented by Groulx and Le Devoir, opposition to conscription came from fascist sympathies and virulent anti-Semitism. The corporatist or statist elements of the Quiet revolution, according to Delisle, did not suddenly appear but were long nurtured in Quebec’s nationalism.
Hmmm...your argument has the hint of something structured to support what seems to be a dislike of what you characterize as the "Canadian welfare state". You seem to be suggesting that Quebecers being largely Catholic believe in authoritarianism, and only those subscribing to authoritarianism could believe in the "welfare state". You suggest this desire for authoritarianism has leaked into the rest of Canada.
You ignore the Quebec nationalist tendencies engendered by culture and language differences. You also ignore the possibility that ideas of public good and social justice may very well be at the heart of the Canadian desire for strong social institutions (like universal health care), instead you simply dismiss it as a vehicle Canadians use to differentiate themselves from Americans, which seems very farfetched. Instead of constructing your own mythology to support your political beliefs, perhaps try arguing your beliefs directly.
Desmond Jones:
I'd just like to clarify that what I presented as the typical antistatism of French Canadians is not the antistatism, say, of the British liberal political philosophers or the American Founding Fathers who self-consciously hammered out in great details the evils of oppressive government and the need to limit the power of government. (Though there surely was a good deal of Laurier Liberals and Gouin-Taschereau Liberals who held that view.) Instead, what I presented as the typical antistatism of French Canadians is a byproduct, an unintended consequence of clericalism. The belief was that the Church was doing a good job of handling health care, education and welfare, so why should the State intervene there? For example, all of Quebec French-speaking universities were run by the Church until the 1960s. The State was seen as an impure institution, shaped and moved by the then-despised process of politics (which was the exact argument used by the Legislative Council to quash a late 19th century Bill creating a provincial Ministry of Education), while the Church was seen as not having this failing. The first pillar of French Canadian nationalism was of course the French language. But the second one was then the Catholic Church, not the government of Quebec (as was the case with the later Quebec nationalism).
About the crisis of conscription, I think we can agree the WWI conscription crisis was shaped among others by the Laurier Liberals' concerns about the injustice of coercion in the name of liberty, by a traditional French Canadian anti-militarism and isolationism (which also expressed itself during the Boer War and before WWI when the Bourassa Nationalistes opposed Laurier's creation of a Canadian Navy because they thought it would drag Canada into Europe's wars) and by just plain ethnic resentment at what they saw as an Anglo majority sending the French as cannon fodder. There would be no need to invoke a sympathy for the Kaiser to explain what happened.
While Esther Delisle has done a good job of documenting the fascist sympathies that existed in some quarters of the late 1930s Quebec, I don't think she has claimed that these or anti-Semitism explained why French Canadians (inside and outside Quebec) voted overwhelmingly against conscription. She has shown that the Bloc Populaire founded in the wake of the anti-conscription movement had strong streaks of anti-Semitism, but since it got only 4 seats in 1944 provincial elections and 2 seats in the 1945 federal elections, I'd say the anti-Semites were more obnoxious loudmouths than anything else. Anyway, I think the factors cited above for the WWI conscription crisis explain well enough the opposition of the larger population to conscription in WWII.
Écrit par: Laurent à février 24, 2004 11:10 PMJame Burns:
Of course I dislike the welfare state. I posted this as a follow-up to Trudeaupia who posted his as a follow-up to Mark Steyn about how and why Canada came to grow such a welfare state and I think it is fair to say that none of us three sees this development in a positive light.
I'm sorry if you construed my piece as arguing that only those who believe in authoritarianism can support a welfare state, but that was not my point. My point was to give an explanation to why Quebec suddenly switched from supporting smaller governments than were supported by the rest of Canada to supporting bigger governments; and why this sudden switch happened at the same time as the precipitous decline of the Church in Quebec. (The same question can be asked with respect to English Canada and the United States; prior to the 1960s, Canada's social programs and government interventions were mostly lifted from our southern neighbor. Then in a relatively short time frame, Canada took the lead in establishing social programs and has kept it since.)
I don't think I ignored any cultural and language differencies of the Quebecers. These existed well before the 1960s yet Quebecers didn't came to embrace sizeable governments until that decade. Nationalist tendencies before 1960s tended to center, second to the French language, on the institution of the Catholic Church, not of the government of Quebec (unlike the post-Quiet Revolution nationalism). As for people adopting a strong State for the sake of it, well that's not my invention. This phrase: "Although it's inefficient, although it's costly, the bloated size of government is defended as a source of national identity" is not something I cooked up but pretty much the core of and is lifted from an op-ed recently published in La Presse whose author used this argument to defend the current big size of the government of Quebec.
I pretty much remember that the Canadian Left likes to slander any free-market ideas as being imported from the USA and that their American-ness makes them unfit for Canada. The political discourse of the recent past and present tells me that sometimes (though not always) interventionism and welfarism are defended for the sake of distintictiveness (though it is often defended on sounder grounds), but anyway this is not the gist of my piece so I won't try to defend this minor point on this thread.
Écrit par: Laurent à février 24, 2004 11:48 PMTrudeau's treatise written on the eve of the Asbestos strike in 1949, reflects a different sentiment. Even though Quebecers had suffered higher unemployement during the depression the Church narrowly interpreted the papal decree denouncing atheistic socialism and decried the reforms of the CCF. The consequence was not unintended but deliberate.
Historian Alexander Brady argues that nationalists like Bourassa were sympathetic to the Transvaal Boers and not unsympathetic to German militarism. He writes, "The views of Bourassa, the brilliant and fiery director of Le Devoir, now wielded influence, and in his extreme moments he was emphatic that "the peril which threatens all French culture on this continent is not German militarism; it is Anglo-Saxon commercialism. The insidious influence which undermines in America Catholic thought and action is not the philosophy of Nietzsche, but Anglo-Protestant agnosticism."
Further he writes, "The Church had not encouraged love of France. Naturally it could have little sympathy with a State that in the name of Liberalism had driven from their sanctuaries devout monks and nuns. La Croix, a paper that circulates widely among clericals, reflected the popular sentiment in its claim that the Great War was brought upon France as punishment for sins against the Church." The cannon fodder sentiment is weak because there is no precedent for it. It appears the Church had no sympathy for France and the Nationalists had no intention of furthering "insidious Anglo-Saxon commercialism" or its agnostic component.
It is hard to accept the notion of anti-Semitism, during WWII being relegated to a few loud mouths when the well documented None Is Too Many asserts in regard to Jewish refugees that, "Almost every French-language newspaper had warned the government against opening Canada's doors to European Jews. Le Devoir asked "Why let in Jews?" This was a mild reaction compared to other vicious Anti-Semitic utterances that appeared in La Nation L'Action Catholique and L'Action Nationale. Three Quebec M.P.'s spoke out against the Jews. Wilfrid LaCroix, C.H. Leclerc and H.E. Brunelle led the anti-refugee onslaught. In the House of Commons Brunelle said "Jews have caused great difficulties wherever they have lived." And further that, "128,000 members of the St.Jean Baptiste society signed a petition opposing all immigration and especially Jewish immigration, which Lacroix delivered to the Commons." The threat of immigration and anglo commercialism on ethic nationalism and its goals for Quebec is a theme that continued from WW1.
A case can be made that the tiumph of statism in the 1960s in Quebec was the triumph of the nationalist clerical doctrine over insiduous Anglo commercialism and coincided more with the passing of Dupessis, the Negro-king, than the decline of the Church.