The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (27 page)

In Howland's tract, we can see the emerging themes of Britannic nationalism in its Canadian version. As elsewhere in the settler colonies, this was a complex political emotion. Its appeal ranged far beyond the small minority who looked forward to an imperial federation or called themselves ‘imperialists’. In Canada, it was a cross-party sentiment that was strongest between 1890 and 1920, but continued to shape the English-Canadian outlook until c.1960. It was an echo of Macdonald's old war cry: ‘A British subject I was born, a British subject I will die.’
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It affirmed that Canada was a ‘British’ country in allegiance, institutions and values. But it was not to be mistaken for the Macdonaldite Toryism which Britannic nationalism rejected as a shabby, inadequate compromise bringing internal disunity and external impotence. Indeed, just because it was based on the endless ‘squaring’ of rapacious interests, chief among them the clerical conservatives of Quebec, Macdonald's ‘system’ – so its critics maintained – would bar, not open, the way to a Britannic future.

In the early 1890s, a variety of political fears coalesced into the informal programme at whose heart lay the ‘Britannicising’ of Canada. The election of 1891 and the wide appeal of commercial integration with the United States showed that Smith's attack on the idea of Canada could not be taken lightly. If Canada was to survive as a ‘separate nationality’, patriotic sentiment would have to be founded on something more durable than Macdonald's fixes, fudges and fiddles. Politics must be cleaned up and modernised. Political leadership should be based on a covenant with the people and be seen to respond to their needs. This was the Gladstonian model whose influence in and beyond the English-speaking world has been insufficiently recognised.
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Its realisation was made all the more urgent by recognition that urbanisation, industrialisation and (after 1900) the flood of immigration had created new social problems and demanded new moral and social action, including factory laws, education and temperance. A populist gospel of social duty, moral uplift and physical improvement laid stress, as elsewhere across the ‘British’ world, upon ethnic solidarity: ‘Britishness’ was to be the building block of a more efficient, better-disciplined as well as more mobile society.

To the champions of reform, it seemed obvious that a new-style dominion must be built up as a protestant, secular state, guided by a progressive liberalism and governed (through its parliamentary institutions) by an enlightened public opinion. Equally, that, while Canada's ‘separate nationality’ could only be guaranteed as a ‘British’ nation, national dignity and self-esteem demanded an equality of status with Britain in what Howland had provocatively called a ‘federal Republic…united under a hereditary president’.
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But equality of status meant not indifference to the wider concerns of Empire, but much fuller participation in them. Only in that way could Canadians guard their national interests against the danger of Anglo-American agreement at their expense. ‘Britannic nationalism’ in short meant neither subservience to Britain nor a repudiation of Canadian nationhood. It was a programme to achieve a Canadian nation by drawing more deeply (if selectively) on recent British political practice, and by asserting Canada's claims (as Britannic nation not colonial dependency) on the imperial centre in London.

Much of the bitterness in Canadian politics after 1890 sprang from the fear that the pursuit of Britannic nationhood for Canada would be frustrated by French Canadian opposition. Until the 1890s, the willingness of English Canadians to ‘tolerate’ the ‘peculiar institutions’ of French Canada – especially the entrenched power of the Catholic church – rested on the assumption that Quebec was (largely) an inward-looking ‘reserve’ whose population (a minority in the dominion) would not obstruct the ‘progress’ of the British majority. That was the English-Canadian version of the ‘compact’ of 1867. The Riel affair, the fillip it gave to French Canadian feeling, and the emergence of the ‘
parti national
’ under Honore Mercier first belied this hope. The Jesuit Estates Act (1886) that Macdonald refused to veto seemed to show that in Quebec the clerical influence so hateful to Ontario Liberals and protestants was growing more assertive. It led to the virulently protestant Equal Rights Association in Ontario.
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Then, in the 1890s, as settlers moved into Manitoba from Ontario, a furious row broke out over the right of the province's Catholic, French-speaking minority to maintain separate schools against the will of the provincial government. In Ontario especially, the dithering of the Macdonald government was ample proof that it was willing to sacrifice the vital ingredients of nationhood – secular education and popular democracy – to the corrupt dictates of its coalition with the Quebec
Bleus
. Indeed, the ‘schools question’ seemed the crux of Canada's future. Settlement of Western Canada, long delayed by depression, was expected to break the deadlock between English and French Canada. Vast, new, and English-speaking, provinces in the West would form, politically, a ‘Greater Ontario’. But not if their politics were fractured and corrupted by the entrenchment of clerical and French-Canadian influence.

Indeed, Ontario was the heartland of Britannic nationalism which was rooted in the province's Liberal and protestant ethos. It was the creed of the Orange Order, the most powerful association in the province.
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In Ontario, the shift from agrarian society towards urbanisation and industrialisation had gone furthest and fastest, and the need for new kinds of political solidarity was felt most deeply. Ontario politicians and publicists like Clifford Sifton (soon to be Laurier's main Liberal henchman in English Canada), Newton Rowell and John Willison, editor of the great Liberal organ, the
Toronto Globe
,
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were adamant that British values must prevail in Ontario, and Ontario values in Canada. ‘Upon the English and Protestant people’, declared Sifton in 1895, ‘most largely rests the duty of developing that province [Manitoba] in a manner consonant with British institutions – to take all this heterogeneous mass and make [it] into one.’
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And nowhere did the Britannic programme strike a louder chord than in Toronto, the provincial capital. Toronto aspired to be the true capital of a modern, progressive (and therefore British) Canada.
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By the 1890s, industry and the mining boom in Northern Ontario were boosting its wealth and self-confidence. It was no coincidence that its social elite combined an intense civic consciousness with political views resembling those in Howland's manifesto. The new class of bankers (like G. A. Cox and Byron Walker), financiers like Pellatt
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and general merchants like Flavelle
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were eager to give Toronto the institutions of a dynamic, cohesive urban community. A university, to be a national university for Canada,
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a modern hospital, a museum and an art gallery were key elements in the grand design. So too were a new railway to the West to rival Montreal's Canadian Pacific;
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the westward expansion of Walker's Canadian Bank of Commerce – by 1915 nearly half the bank's branches were west of the Great Lakes;
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and the takeover of Manitoba by Ontario men. When Lord Milner was invited to Canada to preach the doctrine of closer imperial union, his old friend Glazebrook, now a Toronto banker, pressed the claims of the city in revealing terms:

The vital and most important part of Canada is the West…[I]t is there…that the new type of Canadian is being developed. Toronto is really…the eastern extremity of the North-West; the new enterprises of the West are being financed in Toronto, and the type of man in the West shades off as you go East into the Ontario type.
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The outbreak of the South African War in October 1899 was the occasion for an outburst of this Britannic sentiment. Laurier's Liberal government, resting on electoral support in both Ontario and Quebec, tried to steer a middle course. It expressed sympathy with the Uitlander grievances in Johannesburg. But Laurier was also determined to avoid direct involvement in the war and not to send a military contingent.
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This stance infuriated much Ontario opinion. Laurier's Liberal allies in the province begged him to take the lead. ‘We must not let this patriotic feeling be headed by the Tories’, one warned him. ‘You must head it and guide it yourself.’
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Under intense pressure from Ontario Liberals, Laurier caved in – to the outrage of his most ardent supporters in Quebec. Was Canada returning to ‘l’état primitif du colonie de la Couronne’, demanded his erstwhile protégé, Henri Bourassa.
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‘The English Canadians have two countries’, complained the Montreal paper
La Presse
, ‘one here and one across the sea.’
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But the weight of opinion bore down inexorably on Laurier. ‘You will not, you cannot deny’, a fellow Quebecois told Bourassa,

that the will of an overwhelming majority of the Canadian people expressed through its press, the mouthpiece of a free people…not only justified but practically compelled the action of the Executive…Canada cannot be indifferent to anything which may affect the honour and prestige of the British flag.
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The choice for French Canada, Laurier himself told Bourassa, was whether to march at the head of the Confederation or to retreat into isolation.
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French Canadians had to choose between English and American imperialism. The contingent was sent.
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For Laurier's ‘system’ and for the leadership of both main parties, Liberal and Conservative, in French Canada, the rise of Britannic sentiment was a dangerous challenge. As prosperity and immigration increased from 1896, the simultaneous rise of the West and of ‘industrial Canada’ threatened to dominate Quebec and unravel the compromise of 1867.
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Laurier had always parried the claim that Canada was a ‘British’ country, preferring to argue that while Canada ‘must be British’ that meant ‘British in allegiance and Canadian in sentiment’.
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Laurier's popularity in Ontario rested partly on his reputation as an anti-clerical in Quebec, partly on his regard for ‘provincial rights’ and partly on the belief that he was best qualified to reconcile French Canadians to a progressive ‘Britannic’ future. He was a French Canadian ‘moderniser’ whose constant professions of imperial loyalty reassured Britannic sentiment in English Canada. That and the same laborious attention to federal patronage that had kept Macdonald in power for so long were enough to win a Liberal majority in the elections of 1900, 1904 and 1908. But behind these electoral successes an earthquake was under way in Ontario. There, much Liberal opinion had been incensed by Laurier's apparent willingness to entrench separate catholic schools in the two new prairie provinces set up in 1905.
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Then, in 1910, the navy question and reciprocity blew apart the alliance of Quebec and Ontario Liberalism, and signalled the partial and uneasy triumph of ‘Britannic’ politics in Canada.

Since 1902, Laurier had tenaciously opposed the call by the Australian and New Zealand governments for closer participation in the making of British defence and foreign policy – fearing that any deeper imperial commitment would revive the damaging controversy with Bourassa in 1899. But, in 1909, with the rising alarm over German naval rivalry, Laurier found that more was required than professions of imperial loyalty. As the ‘naval scare’ spread like a virus along the telegraph lines and through the news agencies, the newspapers of English Canada took up the call for a Canadian contribution to imperial defence.
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Canada should give two dreadnoughts to the Royal Navy, declared the
Manitoba Free Press
, the voice of prairie Liberalism.
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Laurier's Conservative opponents took up the cry, urging immediate help in Britain's naval ‘emergency’. Laurier's response was canny. His naval service bill in January 1910 proposed a small Canadian navy, under Canadian control. As Laurier conceded, Canada's constitutional status meant that, if Britain was at war, Canada would follow automatically. But the extent of Canada's contribution would be for ministers in Ottawa to decide.

Laurier's formula was shrewdly calculated to appease Britannic sentiment among Liberal supporters. He also knew that Conservative demands for direct subvention to the Royal Navy would divide their supporters, especially in Quebec. Instead, by conceding his ‘tin pot navy’, Laurier intended to consolidate his unwieldy coalition across Quebec, Ontario and the West. It was a drastic miscalculation. In Quebec, the navy bill became the hated emblem of English-Canadian hegemony in Canada and of the growing dominance of ‘English’ capitalism in the province where urbanisation and industrialism threatened to deracinate the
Canadiens
crowding into the anglicised cities.
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To Bourassa, whose nationalism was rooted in religious and social conservatism, and to the Quebec Conservatives with their clerical connections, the enemy became ‘imperialism’; the collaborator Laurier; the stake the survival (‘
survivance
’) of French Canada as a distinct, Catholic society.
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