Discovering Confederation: A Canadian’s Story by Janet Ajzenstat (review)

Janet Ajzenstat’s autobiography chronicles what she herself calls a “non-standard” career – a late-starting faculty wife, she won a tenure-track post at the age of 57 (8). Her idiosyncratic account reviews an intellectual journey from the socialist idealism of the 1960s toward a more traditional interpretation of Canada’s origins. Scholarly viewpoints are too often casually tagged. The book reminds us that academics revise their ideas in response to new horizons and controversies and that challenging books and niggling questions are encountered during what may seem haphazard personal chronologies. One bedrock element shining through the memoir is the author’s half-century partnership of enquiring discourse with the late Sam Ajzenstat of McMaster University’s Department of Philosophy.

“I am not a historian,” Ajzenstat proclaims (10). Rather, she has aimed to understand great texts, patriotically insisting that the United States is not the only North American country to have generated transcendent principles. If a great text seems shocking or contradictory, you must reread and ponder until its latent synthesis emerges. Hence, she came to argue that Lord Durham’s determination to deprive French Canadians of their culture did not in fact clash with his liberalism but, rather, formed an inherent part of it. We crossed pens over this idea. As a historian, I locate the Durham report in a historical context, emphasizing the struggle for the future of Britain’s elite Whig party, whereas, for Ajzenstat, Canada’s founding documents are sources for “ideas of universal interest” (10).

Historian or not, Ajzenstat makes large statements about the past, notably in her claim that responsible government happened across British North America in 1848. In fact, Newfoundland was not granted responsible government until 1855, while New Brunswick edged into accepting a parliamentary executive and party rule through a transitional decade. More controversially, Ajzenstat equates responsible government with untrammelled independence, citing opponents of Confederation who insisted that their colonial constitutions were immutable charters. Two of those quoted on the freedom of colonial institutions were actually supporters of the Quebec scheme of 1864: J.M. Johnson of New Brunswick was a Father of Confederation, while the Canadian David Christie explicitly accepted that the imperial parliament would have the final say over the new constitution.

“I do not read Canada’s historical texts in order to understand Canada or Canadian history,” Ajzenstat announces (10). Confusingly, she has also come “to regard Canada’s national history as a long avenue of ‘texts,’ – primary documents – informing and rewarding the persevering student: raising questions and challenging received wisdom” (28). George Grant, Gad Horowitz, and C.B. Macpherson are all dismissed. Canadian society was never wholly Tory, nor is it benignly collectivist. It is liberal and Lockean, and the product is a “uniquely loveable” country (32). Deploring breaks with the past, such as the 1982 renaming of the British North America Act, she contends for the centrality of parliamentary government. Parliaments get things wrong, but their decisions are not final. Hence, the legislative process, not the courts, provides the best guarantee of minority rights. It is indeed true that parliament provides a voice for “dissenting opinion” and that unpopular opinions are “never dismissed permanently” (94). However, noting that Canada’s parliaments were slow to recognize sexual or racial minorities, some will prefer judicial activism based on the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, whose existence is never openly confronted. In effect, Ajzenstat believes that your fervent belief that Medicare represents the essence of being Canadian does not entitle you to write health care into the constitution.

Like this autobiography, the Ajzenstat family lifestyle was quirky. They gave up running a car and generally managed without a television set. She is honest about her intellectual insecurities and tough on herself about questions that she never dared ask or failed to answer in endlessly discouraging job interviews. Strong opinions are mingled with such arch humour that I felt aggrieved, but only mildly, to be rebuked...