An enduring Canadian myth: Responsible Government and the Family Compact

An enduring Canadian myth: Responsible Government and the Family Compact GRAEME PATTERSON For the past fifty years, observes Mircea Eliade, ''Western scholars have approached the study of myth from a viewpoint markedly different from...that of the nineteenth century. Unlike their predecessors, who treated myth in the usual meaning of the word, that is as 'fable', 'invention ', 'fiction', they have accepted it as it was understood in the archaic societies, where, on the contrary, 'myth' means 'a true story' and, beyond that, 'a story that is a most precious possession because it is sacred, exemplary, significant.' ''1 Indeed, myth has come to be understood as at once illusory and significant as simple fiction is not. In this sense of the word, this paper is concerned with the development, permutations, and fragmentation of the story of the overthrow of "the family compact" and the triumph of "responsible government.'' As imbedded in Canadian history, this story, it is argued, partakes of the nature of myth. Historians, and before them politicians, have disagreed for generations as to what ''the family compact" of Upper Canada actually was. W.S. Wallace wrote of it in 1915 as "a local oligarchy composed of men, some well-born, some ill-born, some brilliant, some stupid, whom the caprices of a small provincial society...had pitchforked into power."2 And in 1926 this oligarchy was identified by Alison Ewart and Julia Jarvis with the personnel of the Upper Canadian executive and legislative assemblies which sat between 1791 and 1841.3 A year later, however, Aileen Dunham contended it was "a tendency in society rather than a definite social organization.''4 In the next decade Donald Creighton conceived of it as not having been confined to Upper Canada; "the 'Family Compact' in both Upper Journal ofCanadian Studies and Lower Canada," he wrote, "was less a company of blood relatives than it was a fraternal union of merchants, professional men and bureaucrats ; and the names of a few dozen persons tum up again and again, with almost equal regularity in the affairs of business and government, until the extent of their monopoly control suggests the practical identification of the political and commercial state."5 In 1952, however, Hugh Aitken, while viewing business interests as interwoven with the ''compact,'' nonetheless regarded it as distinct from them.6 Then in 1957 R.E. Saunders treated "the family compact" as a sort of ''power elite'';7 and sociological concepts of elite groups have since then influenced the thought of S.F. Wise.s Of recent studies,9 the most significant are those of Wise and G.M. Craig. The epithet ''Family Compact,'' wrote the latter in 1963, "had only a limited accuracy since, as Lord Durham pointed out, its members were not all tied together by family connection, nor were they the ingrown, selfish and reactionary group the phrase was meant by their opponents to suggest.''10 Yet, following Durham, he thought that the term "continues to be useful to describe the relatively small, tightly knit group of men who dominated the government in the 1820's and to a somewhat lesser extent in the following decade.'' He sharply departed from Durham, however, in limiting the group's membership to "simply the leading members of the executive: executive councillors, senior officials and certain members of the judiciary''; and he did not explain why the term continued to be useful. In the former regard, Wise had followed Durham more closely in the previous year when he equated the "compact" less with a small group of administrators than with a whole social class. "It was virtually identical (with some minor exceptions)," he wrote, "with the small professional and mercantile middle and upper middle class...and could claim with a good deal of justification a virtual monopoly of what education and general culture there existed in the colony.''11 In 1967 Wise had a new idea. "Our reform tradition," he then wrote, "has telescoped the complexities of early conservatism into High Toryism, and turned the phrase 'Family Compact' 3 into a term of political science when it was nothing but a political epithet.''12 Wise was on the right track; but "family compact" was, and is...