Louis Riel and English-Canadian Political Thought

I

Consideration of the common origin of Canada and the United States in the English political tradition, combined with the difference in the manner in which each achieved a break with the British Empire, is significant for a contemporary critique of empire. The significance of the American revolutionary break, under the influence of eighteenth-century political ideas of natural right – and the consequent influence that this revolution has had on all New World nations – has meant that Canadian political culture has often been articulated in contrast to the pervasive Enlightenment individualism and ahistoricism of the United States. In particular, it has been commonplace to describe the different character of Canadian identity from that of the United States with reference to the greater communitarian component of Canadian political culture. Whether this communitarianism is attributed to the influence of a non-revolutionary political tradition, Loyalism, a harsh winter climate, or French-English accommodation, it is widely accepted that, as Seymour Lipset observes, 'America reflects the influence of its classically liberal, Whig, individualistic, antistatist, populist, ideological origins. Canada ... can still be seen as Tory-mercantilist, group-oriented, statist, deferential to authority – a "socialist monarchy," to use Robertson Davies' phrase' (212). The emphasis on communitarianism as a way of understanding Canada has been matched by an emphasis on a particular manner of dealing with cultural diversity. Canadian philosophy has been characterized by what Leslie Armour has called a 'rationalist pluralism' in which 'either a plurality of views can be justified or a new synthesis of apparently conflicting views can be found' ('Canadian Ways of Thinking,' 5). This pluralism has also been further described by Armour and his collaborator Elizabeth Trott as a 'philosophical federalism' – 'a natural inclination to find out why one's neighbour thinks differently rather than to find out how to show him up as an idiot' (4).¹

Probably because of a weak national identity, Canadian culture has tended to assume that there is no one overarching identity or community that effectively could subsume the plurality of communities. Thus, multicultural policy, everyday practices, and philosophical articulations tend not only to have a communitarian bias but also to assume a plurality of relevant communities. Armour has concluded that 'what we have in common cannot be expressed through a single community ... this pluralism is related to our communitarianism' (The Idea of Canada, 109). The Hegelianism of classic Canadian philosopher John Watson (1847–1939) led him to assert that totality is a product of moral reason, which requires a plurality of communities for its expression. This particular mixture of identity and diversity is, from a comparative viewpoint, the core feature of Canadian political culture that has demanded articulation in Canadian philosophy.

A recent analysis by Michael Dorland and Maurice Charland revisits this established topos in order to argue that Canadian communitarian and diverse political culture is rooted in the role and nature of law. But because this argument ignores or downplays the process whereby the limits of Canadian civility have been established in historical events, it characterizes Canada's history too benignly. In consequence, it unnecessarily constrains what currently seems possible and unwarrantedly universalizes the result of the history. It misinterprets the specificity of Canadian culture by failing to address the motive, or origin, of its dynamism in representing difference.

The persisting disorder of Canadian history was perhaps most apparent during the Riel Rebellions, which show 'the difficulties of the dominant legal regime's acceptance of pluralistic legal subjectivities, which its very logic paradoxically keeps bringing to the fore' (Dorland and Charland 154). The Métis differentiated themselves from both Indians and whites. The Manitoba Act (1870) recognized a new civil status of 'half-breeds' and their land title – though in the form of alienable private property that extinguished the French river-lot system while at the same time affirming federal sovereignty. The close of the later 1885 Rebellion and the hanging of Riel confirmed this result.

Riel tested...