From the Rule of Law to Responsible Government: Ontario Political Culture and the Origins of Canadian Statism

Abstract

It is a commonplace that the Canadian political culture is more “conservative” or “statist” than the American. This trail is usually explained in terms of cultural continuity, the underlying idea being thai Canada was formed from a congeries of cultural fragments which esteemed paternalistic collectivism and deplored American “liberalism” and “individualism,” and that this initial bias, reinforced as it was by fear of the United States, affected even liberal thought. This paper approaches the Canadian political culture from the opposite direction. Focussing on Ontario, it traces Canadian statism to the transformation of Upper Canadian Reform ideology by the contingencies of domestic history. A fundamental inconsistency within Whig constitutionalism — the hegemonic ideology of the English stale and as such the ideological foundation of British rule in Upper Canada — was crucial to that transformation. In proclaiming the existence of indefeasible constitutional principles, but setting no limit to Parliament's power to legislate in derogation of those principles. Whig constitutionalism permitted contradictions between “the constitution” and “the law.” Upper Canadian Reformers were especially sensitive to this inconsistency because of the apparent failure of legally established institutions to function according to constitutional precept. The imperial failure to remedy these functional defects impelled leading Reformers to forsake Whig constitutionalism for the ideology of responsible government. The circumstances of the struggle for responsible government fostered the apotheosis of the community and imparted a special authority to the common will as expressed in legislation. This development promoted a drift from constitutionalism towards legalism in relations between the state and the individual, but because it was the provincial, not the “national” community that was thus exalted, constitutionalism remained predominant in federal- provincial relations. The persistence of this cultural dualism is evident from a comparison of the decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada in Morgentaler's cases with its decision in the Patriation Reference.