The Old Order

Abstract

In 1995, Alan Cairns wrote an essay describing Canada’s half-century political transformation.1 His transitional retrospective begins in the 1950s, a time when Canadians had envisioned their polity on a journey of political maturation. Dependent upon ‘Mother Britain’ for money, security and guidance, the country was ascending ‘from colony to a nation’, that is, from a political childhood towards independence.2 Mirroring its subordination to Britain, Canada’s domestic politics were similarly hierarchical. John Porter’s 1960’s snapshot of Canada’s ‘Vertical Mosaic’ describes a world in which ethnically British upper class males sat atop a set of interlocking hierarchies of class, ethnicity and gender.3 Canada contained two ‘Founding Races’. The federal government represented the senior Anglo Saxons while the junior French made do with a provincial premier. Excluded from the foundation myth, those who were neither British nor French suffered legal disabilities up to and including disenfranchisement. The economic and political realms were male preserves (women had only become legal persons in 1929), while the prevailing constitutional theory located sovereignty in the Queen and her Parliament, not the people.