Of Patrons and Patronage

Of Patrons and Patronage For three years the press and media have been awash with stories and allegations about the practice of political patronage in Canada. Yet, for all this, Canadians remain by and large poorly informed about the matter and with little perspective from which to make helpful judgements - surprisingly so in the light of their own past. This special issue aims to help provide such perspective, and contribute to a more satisfying public discussion. It has long been commonplace to observe that patronage has been little studied in Canada. While it turned up not infrequently in narrative or analysis of Canadian political life, the references were scattered, or confined to occasional scholarly articles. There were no overviews or book-length studies. In recent years, however, this lack has begun to be corrected. Vincent Lemieux and Raymond Hudon have published a major study of patronage in Quebec from 1944 to 1972, and Lemieux himself has produced an important theoretical and comparative work. Unfortunately Lemieux's welcome comparative approach omitted the one case likely to yield the most fruitful comparisons with Quebec : the other provinces of Canada! But given the relatively sparse nature of the secondary material then available, this omission was perhaps understandable , if regrettable. In English-speaking Canada less has been done. However, within the past year a new work has appeared which begins, refreshingly , to correct this state of affairs. In The Origins ofCanadian Politics: A Comparative Approach, the American scholar Gordon Stewart offers a thesis about the role of patronage in Canadian politics up to 1914. His spare but elegant and suggestive essay - for that is what it is - argues that the emerging Canadian political culture was fashioned by a distinctive blend of British institutional inheritance, American example, and local needs. While Canada (especially the "province" of Canada, from 1841 to 1867) inherited the "court" rather than the "country" outlook of seventeenth century British politics, it expressed this centralizing and statist impulse through the unbridled exploitation of political patronage that was more typical of the North American environment. Yet whereas patronage in the United States was originally employed to enhance localism, to circumscribe the state and resist central power - impulses typical of the "country" tendency in earlier British politics - in Canada patronage was used to promote unification , state activism, and central control. Stewart thus joins the ranks of scholars like Louis Hartz, Kenneth McRae and Gad Horowitz in arguing that there is in Canadian political life a distinctive strain - fl "Tory touch" - that sets it off from the politics of the United States. But he does so not so much on the ground of ideology as on that of institutional inheritance, political economy and political culture. Patronage undoubtedly played a role in British and American politics, but nineteenth-century Canadian politics were distinctive, Stewart argues, because they were "much more explicitly about patronage." Journal of Canadian Studies 3 If so - and there is much in Stewart's essay that invites debate or amplification - it should come as less of a surprise that Canadians are busily engaged in examining the meaning of that legacy today. (Stewart's own tentative efforts in conclusion to draw out the implications for twentieth-century Canadian politics are the least satisfying portion of his essay, though he does enrich previous theories concerning the unusual prominence of federal-provincial relations in Canadian political life.) The contributions to this special issue can perhaps be grouped rather loosely , and with overlap, in five categories. The first two papers, by Vincent Lemieux and Albert Breton, examine patronage primarily from a theoretical and structural point of view. Lemieux reviews the relationships and processes underlying any patronage transaction, emphasizing more than some previous authors the competition between patrons for resources and loyalties. Albert Breton approaches patronage as a universal and necessary feature of human organizations, both public and private, arguing that it can only be accurately described as "corruption" when it is unconstrained by the kind of competition noted by Lemieux, and hence accumulates excessively at one level or location. The following three papers approach patronage in Canada from an historical perspective, though they all have something important to say about the contemporary situation. David Smith compares the...