A Canadian Dilemma

Abstract

Whether to think of Canada primarily in its relationship with the United States or as open to the whole world is a dilemma for Canadians and for Canadian society as a whole. Canadian governments' actions at any time are likely to be determined by conflicting interests and pressures of the moment on specific issues.1 The perspective attributable to Canadian society is broader and deeper and may be expected to develop and change slowly over time. So I shall attempt to address the question in a long-term historical perspective.TWO ORIENTATIONSHistorical scholarship shows two conflicting orientations of Canada to the world. They can be represented in geographic terms as an east-west perspective and a north-south perspective. Donald Creightoris work gave a firm basis to the east-west conception of Canada's place in the world. The commercial empire of the St. Lawrence that he wrote about was its first manifestation-the linkage between the production of the great plains of the west, the financial and commercial interests of Montreal, and the transatlantic markets of Britain and Europe, tied in also with the commerce of the Caribbean.2 This perspective, though expressed in economic terms, was not a product of economic determinism. It was as much political and cultural. It reflected the option that created Canada with a strong central government designed to bind the broad extent of the country together and to defend it against incursion from the rising world power to the south. The war of 1812 was as vivid in the minds of Canadians in the years of Confederation as the beginnings of the Cold War are in ours, and at the very time of Confederation the Fenian raids into Canada reinforced that image. The British connection sustained defence of the new country. Transatlantic political and cultural ties as well as economic relations were vital to postConfederation Canada. This was Sir John A. Macdonald's vision of Canada.The north-south perspective was at first primarily a matter of economics but it has also had a significant political and cultural component. It emerged violently and abortively in 1849 in a short-lived annexationist movement led by the English-speaking merchants of Montreal who were the fulcrum in the grain trade between Canada and Britain. They were reacting in anger to Peel's repeal of the Corn Laws in Britain, which had given Canada a protected market for wheat. Adding insult to injury, these merchants and their supporters were enraged by the British crown's endorsement of responsible government, which threatened their local political dominance by giving due representation to the Francophone population. An Anglo mob in Montreal tossed refuse at the representative of the British monarchy and burned down the parliament buildings. Four of the principal English-language newspapers of Montreal supported annexation to the United States. Nothing much survived of this petulance.It was, however, in the 1890s that union with the United States gained a more sophisticated intellectual status thanks in part to the efforts of an Englishman, Goldwin Smith, who had settled in Toronto. Smith had been Regius Professor of modern history at Oxford where he expounded the liberal economic views of Cobden and Bright and contested ecclesiastical dominance in the university. A family tragedy, the suicide of his ailing father, interrupted his life in England and he resurrected his career across the Atlantic as one of the leading lights at the newly founded and secular Cornell University in upstate New York. From there he moved to Toronto where he married a wealthy widow, settled in the Grange, which after his death became the Art Gallery of Ontario, and animated an influential political and literary circle. He may have been the first to play the role of the public intellectual in English Canada.In the British liberal tradition he was anti-imperialist, mainly because of his profound belief in the Manchester school of economic liberalism. …