Canadian Intellectuals, the Tory Tradition, and the Challenge of Modernity, 1939–1970 by Philip Massolin (review)

492 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 pro-fascist French Canadian nationalist community leaders was rather high, and even perhaps included the young Pierre Trudeau (who appears to have supported the Vichy regime). Yet the number of internments of French Canadians was remarkably low. Ethnicity alone, as this volume demonstrates, cannot explain internment, but it was a factor. The editors of this collection are to be congratulated for their willingness, indeed their bravery, to interrogate a comfortable community consensus in defence of the search for historical truth. (ALVIN FINKEL) Philip Massolin. Canadian Intellectuals, the Tory Tradition, and the Challenge of Modernity, 1939B1970 University of Toronto Press. x, 358. $60.00 Long ago, when George Grant drew hundreds to university lecture halls to hear his laments for a nation, I was doing archival research on the Conservative party of Canada in the first two decades of the twentieth century. I watched fascinated as Grant, a superb performer who let his cigarette ash linger in Clarence Darrow fashion, performed the last rites on the nation. What puzzled me is how the tradition he describes did not fit the past that I was encountering in the archives. Take, for example, Robert Borden, who promised >neither truck nor trade= with the Yankees in the 1911 election. Like John A. Macdonald, he had flirted with reciprocity only a few years before mounting the barricades to hold off the dreaded Americans. Most aspects of modernity frightened Borden not an iota. He bought a motor car, admired industrial leaders, was formal in religious observance, and took an interest in modern science. Wilfrid Laurier, however, was different. He told Mackenzie King in November 1917 that he did not like the modern age and deplored >its mechanical aspect, photos for paintings, no originality, he disliked the motor, the telegraph, telephone, the real charm of the world had gone. He would rather have the eighteenth century.= Those who know King best tell us that he preferred the nineteenth. Philip Massolin=s thoughtful and well-written study identifies a specific group as the Tory critics of modernity. Among them are Donald Creighton, Harold Innis, George Grant, W.L. Morton, and Hilda Neatby. For these critics, King and Laurier were agents of destruction, the political incarnation of those forces that subverted Canadian traditions. Yet those traditions that Massolin identifies as part of the Tory tradition, particularly the agrarian myth, were scarcely as valid for Canada as they were in Britain. In Canada, the Conservative party, especially under Macdonald, was the party of the city, of the industrial workers and the owners. Those who cherished the rural myth were Liberals or, when the Liberal government became too close to industrial capitalists, the Progressives. The Conservatives under humanities 493 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Macdonald, Borden, and especially Meighen were the party of industrial capitalism and the tariff that protected capitalism and urbanism in Canada. Vincent Massey, a Liberal, is deemed by Massolin to be one of the critics of modernity. Yet he was an industrial capitalist and very much an urban Canadian. King despised Massey because he thought he was an elitist and hopelessly influenced by >Thames fever,= an affliction that befell those who came too close to the lure of British upper-class society. Maryon Pearson learned quickly that her husband=s superior in London in the late 1930s believed that private school education was essential for her children. Her husband, Lester Pearson, who had spent as much of his adult life in Britain as in Canada, became troubled that Massey trusted more his British friends than the prime minister that he served. Massolin is correct to identify a group of English Canadians who became critics of Canada=s political and cultural direction in the 1950s. Donald Creighton=s magnificent prose made John A. Macdonald the embodiment of an intellectual tradition that he termed Conservative, or Tory. Much evidence suggests, however, that this tradition was not so much a foe of modernity as representative of the British Canadian tradition in Canada. If the group had wanted allies in their opposition to modernity, they would have found many...