Confederation: The Use and Abuse of History

Confederation: The Use and Abuse of History D. G. CREIGHTON In his speech at the laying of the cornerstone of Champlain College, Premier Jean Lesage made a remark which provides an appropriate introduction for this discussion. "To those who keep repeating 'What exactly does Quebec want?' " Mr. Lesage said, "I ask, 'What exactly do you want Quebec not to want?' " Well, I have no intention of picking up Mr. Lesage's challenge in the form in which he so dramatically flung it down. I suspect that a Canadian from any one of the other nine provinces would have as little relish for specifying what he does not want Quebec to want as Mr. Lesage evidently has for specifying what Quebec does want. But the embarrassment of being specific, which everybody feels, is not my main reason for declining to submit an itemized list of refusals to Mr. Lesage. My main reason is that his challenge appears to rest on an assumption which I do not find acceptable. His words seem to imply that Canadians are divided into two great classes: those in Quebec who have wants and those outside Quebec who want to deny those wants. This is surely, at the very least, a very large over-simplification of the present confused and agitated state of public opinion in Canada. Obviously the "wants" of which Mr. Lesage speaks are concerned with the position of Quebec Province, and of French Canada as a whole, in Canadian Confederation; but these are not the only "wants" that are being felt in Canada today, and, equally important, they are not the only wants that imply changes in the Canadian constitution. All over the country Canadians are advocating changes, or discussing the advisability of changes, or-and this is perhaps most important of all - making demands, reaching decisions, drawing up plans which, though they realize it only partly if at all, may mean still more drastic, though indirect, changes in the Journal of Canadian Studies future. It is not enough to examine the wants of Quebec or of French Canada in isolation; it is necessary to review the whole range of recent developments which either directly or indirectly alter the form or upset the balance of the Canadian constitution. If a "quiet revolution" has been going on in Quebec, another revolution, quieter still but just as significant, has been going on in Canada as a whole. Revolution means the complete overthrow of an established form of government, or, more generally, of an established political and social regime; and it is obvious at once that changes on such a grand scale are not in many Canadians' minds at the present time. A considerable part of our constitution, like most of the British, is unwritten; and with these venerable conventions , by which free men are ruled in a constitutional monarchy, nobody wants to tamper seriously. When we talk about constitutional change what we almost invariably mean is change in the purely federal part of our constitution , which, is of course, set out in the British North America Act of 1867. This Act has been amended in the past; but the amendments have not been frequent and few of them are really substantial in character. In its written form, our federal constitution is thus fairly close to what it was a hundred years ago; and that brings us back to the intentions of the Fathers of Confederation, which is the subject of this paper. What I should like to do is to re-examine the intentions of the Fathers in the light of the new demands and changed circumstances of the present day. What were those intentions and why are they now regarded by some as inadequate ? What arguments are advanced to justify constitutional change and how valid are they? All revolutionaries - including "quiet" revolutionaries - have got to make up their minds about history. The past inexorably confronts all those who advocate sudden and major changes. The question of how history is to be regarded, of how it is to be interpreted so as to justify drastic reforms, is inevitably a crucially important problem for revolutionaries. They have, of course, found extremely varied solutions to it 3 over...