“I’m an unrevised, unrepented Sir John A. Macdonald
conservative… There aren’t many of
us left… Just Creighton and me… That is… if Donald will admit me to the
sacred precincts… I’m sick of pygmies trying to destroy what giants created.”
—Eugene Forsey
When Brian Mulroney became Prime Minister of Canada in the
early 1980s, most assumed Canada might return to a traditional form of Tory
government. When Brian Mulroney went to Washington after his electoral victory,
and assured President Ronald Reagan that Canada was open for business once
again, a clear signal was sent across the land. The Progressive Conservative
government of Mulroney was going to take Canada much closer to the USA than any
other leader of the Conservative party in Canada had ever done.
Mulroney was, most
came to see, cut from the same republican cloth as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald
Reagan, and this type of republican conservatism had little in common with
Canadian High Tory conservatism. Since Mulroney, the language of Canadian
conservatism has come to ape, echo and reflect the American version of
conservatism. Stephen Harper walks, for the most part, in the same footsteps as
Mulroney, Reagan and Thatcher. This is why he was so supportive of the American
invasion of Iraq, and most of the policies of the USA. He is a colonial of the
most worrisome and activist type. He serves the interests of the American
empire, and he has walked the extra mile to make sure Canadians do the same
thing. All must bow and genuflect to Caesar to the south of us.
It was this disturbing shift in the meaning and
understanding of Canadian conservatism in the early 1980s that created many a
concern and worry amongst Canadian High Tory conservatives. It would just be a
matter of time before some sort of response emerged. The first book that
attempted, in a more popular way, to correct the image of conservatism that
Mulroney was parading about was Charles Taylor’s, Radical Tories: The Conservative Tradition in Canada (1982).
Taylor, in Radical Tories, pointed
out in a clear headed and historical manner, that there was a Tory tradition in
Canada that could not be equated with Mulroney’s brand of blue tory
conservatism. Taylor listed the family tree and lineage in his missive and
tract for the times in a series of short essays on important Canadian Tories
that could not be squared with the Mulroney clan. The book came as a solid
rebuke and firm footed turning of the back on the blue tory way. Taylor, in his
short profiles, showcased such worthies as Lea*censored*, Sandwell, Deacon, Morton,
Purdy, Grant, Stanfield, Crombie, and Donald Creighton and Eugene Forsey.
Taylor’s chapter on Creighton (I) was called, ‘The Northern Empire’, and his
chapter on Forsey (V) was called, ‘Red Tories and Social Justice’. What did
Creighton, the finest and noblest Canadian High Tory historian, have in common
with Eugene Forsey, a noble and fine leftist intellectual and activist?
Donald Creighton was, without much doubt, an eloquent and
controversial Canadian historian. He argued, in book after book, that Canada
was created and built, consciously so, in an East-West manner, and the most
visionary of political leaders of Canada (which were Tories) waged many a
battle to keep Canada from becoming a satellite and colony of the USA.
Creighton’s biography of Sir.John A. Macdonald is a spirited and animated
defence of Macdonald, and the way he gave his life to preserve and keep Canada
firm and intact. Creighton wrote many other books on Canadian history, and in
each of these books, he probes and examines the struggles within the Canadian
soul to preserve its own way or annex and integrate with the USA.
Creighton’s book on Innis, Harold Adam Innis: Portrait of a Scholar (1957), highlighted and
reinforced Creighton’s deeper passion. Innis had argued that societies shape
and form themselves around two important ideas and concepts (space or time).
Much hinges on whether the spacial or chronological idea dominates. A spacial
society tends to be concerned and preoccupied with movement, mobility, change,
a lack of history and tradition and a weak notion of boundaries. The sky above
is a fit symbol for the metaphor of space. A time bound and chronological
society is more concerned about the past, the relationship between generations,
the connections across time, what binds things together in and through time. A
spacial culture tends to be more liberal, a time conscious society tends to be
more conservative. Innis argued that, in an age of rapid change (as we are in
now), we need to be more rooted and grounded in a more time bound and
chronological way.
Creighton drew together many of the insights of Innis and
gave them a solid historical and political grounding. It was Innis’s argument
that Canadians, to be Canadians, need to think more in an East-West manner
rather than a North-South way. The more Canadians think North-South, the more
they will become Americans. Innis also argued Canadians need to think more in a
time bound and chronological way. When we think, mostly, in a spacial manner,
we think more like the liberal Americans to the south of us.
Creighton had a great deal of fondness for the arguments of
Innis, but he extolled the fine work of Eugene Forsey. Forsey was highlighted
in Creighton’s final book, The Passionate
Observer: Selected Writings (1980). ‘Eugene Forsey: Political
Traditionalist, Social Radical’ holds high and offers many a kudo to the life
and meticulous writings of Forsey. Forsey had been a student of Lea*censored* at
McGill in the 1920s, and he taught in the political economy department at
McGill in the 1930s. Forsey was a founding member of the League for Social
Reconstruction and the CCF. But, and this was a vital point for Creighton.
Forsey, unlike many in the New Left, was grounded in the best of the English
conservative way, and it was by mining the depths of this older conservatism
that the gold of Forsey’s social radicalism emerged. Creighton concluded his
article on Forsey was saying, ‘The truth is that he is indecipherable by
Canadian criticism. If only there were many Canadians like him’. Even though
Creighton had his questions about Forsey, he saw in Forsey that unique Canadian
ability to blend both conservatism and radicalism. It was in the living of this tension that the best of the
Canadian vision is expressed and embodied.
When Charles Taylor was doing his interviews for Radical Tories, he asked Forsey if he would be interested in being interviewed with other Tories
of an older tradition. Forsey’s reply letter says much about the man:
I need hardly say I should be
highly honoured to figure in such a distinguished company in your new book,
though I fear George Grant looks upon me with a very jaundiced eye, and might jib
at finding himself in such bad company. I am, however, very doubtful about
whether you ought to bother with me, at any rate in anything more than perhaps a few
footnotes. Lea*censored*, Creighton and Grant are towering figures; I am simply
not in the same class.
Eugene Forsey had his autobiography, A Life on the Fringe: The Memoirs of Eugene Forsey, published in
1990. His days were near an end, but he still had much to say. The tale told in
A Life on the Fringe highlights just
how Forsey managed to combine and integrate the deeper and fuller aspects of
the Anglo-Canadian way with a searching and probing passion for justice and
peace at a legal, economic and political level. The drama that Forsey recounts
takes the curious Canadian into an intellectual world in which distinctions
such as left, right and sensible centre make little or no sense. Forsey was too
big a man to be captured by such a small ideological net. It is most
interesting to note that in the last few years of his life Forsey gave a talk
to the Anglican Prayer Book Society. The Prayer Book Society tends to be seen
by many as the last bastion of a reactionary and out of touch English
traditionalism. What was Forsey, the social radical, doing giving a
presentation to the Prayer Book Society? For Forsey, grounded as he was in the
best of the Anglo-Canadian religious and political tradition, such simple and
brittle distinctions lacked depth and substance. Forsey saw in the Prayer Book
the very religious and political resources for building a just society and the
True North. The Prayer Book Magazine, The
Machary Review (
Number 6: December 1997) published Forsey’s lecture. It
was called, ‘What Have These Reformers Wrought?’ The article is vintage
Forsey. Traditionalism and Radicalism are like the left and
right hand. When either is lopped off, much hurt and harm comes to the
body
politic.
Donald Creighton was the finest High Tory historian Canada
has produced. He often lamented the way liberals distorted and misinterpreted
Canadian history to serve their agenda. He called the liberal read of Canadian
history, playing on the old and new translations of the Bible, the authorized
reading of Canadian history. Liberal Canadian historians tended to idealize the
liberal interpretation of Canadian history and thereby offer gullible and naïve
Canadians a distorted view of both Toryism and the Canadian
intellectual and political journey. Creighton realized that
genuine Canadian Toryism was not averse or opposed to a concern for the common
good and the protection of the Canadian way over and against the American.
Creighton knew his Tory tradition well enough to turn to Forsey as an ally and
friend on the journey. Forsey, on the other hand, was so well rooted in the
High Tory way that he knew that such rooting could hold up the trunk and
branches of a radical social agenda. In short, for Forsey, the fruit of
political radicalism could only be sustained and nourished by being rooted in
the soil of the ancient conservative way. Sadly so, conservatism and radicalism
have diverged and both have suffered for it.
We are in a desperate for historians and intellectuals like
Creighton and Forsey to rebuild and rebind what has been broken and injured.
Until this is done, we will never recover the genius and visionary quality of what
it means to be a Canadian.
rsd