Johnson’s integration: A reply

For the same reason, I find Macdonald's unqualified rejection of interventions by the central government in the New Brunswick schools case surprising. If he was indeed a believer in strong central government, including the use of disallowance and remedial action, he might reasonably have been expected to intervene in that case, the more so in view of the embarassment his reaction caused his colleague, Cartier. I do not know why he refrained, or how he really viewed that. dubiously conceived part of the B.N.A. Act, Section 93. I recognize the force of what Professor Clark says with respect to the views of Mills and of Tupper's acceptance of them, on the obligation on the Federal Government to intervene by remedial action in the Manitoba Schools Case in 1896. (The real argument, after all, was not Dialogue: JOHNSON'S INTEGRATION: A REPLY J. H. DALES In his article on Canadian-American economic integration in the August number of this Journal, Harry Johnson has quoted me correctly but misinterpreted me egregiously. In a section of the article designed to bolster his opinion that "the tariff, at the most, makes a minor difference to the overall size of the Canadian industrial sector" (p.34), he quotes me correctly to the effect that the national policy seems to have been a dismal failure. But by national policy, as I stated on p. 298 of my article, I meant "the famous trinity of Canadian nation-building policies", and used the upper-case National Policy to refer to the policy of protective tariffs. I gave my opinion on the Journal of Canadian Studies about the obligation to intervene, but, a world of differences, about how intervention should be carried out.) A reading and rereading of the debates leaves me with the fixed impression that Mills, however courageously, was merely being compulsively pedantic and Tupper, who seeking like Mills to reduce the obligation to its slenderest proportions, was welcoming aid in a position I can only view with disappointment. Neither man, more than Macdonald in the 1870's, was boldly asserting an over-riding national power; each was bowing to the savage provincial democracy of the time. I grant that these views raised the question whether there ever was, or could be, a "Macdonaldian " constitution. Macdonald was often privately a fey romantic, never publicly. We should not be deceived by his personal obiter dicta. National Policy on p. 310 of the article when I wrote that "it seems very likely that the National Policy has been effective, and probably strongly so, during most of the past eighty-five years". By "effective" I meant effective in leading to uneconomic manufacturing activity in Canada. In my opinion, therefore, a removal of tariffs would lead to the removal of uneconomic manufacturing from the Canadian economy, and I suspect that this would make more than "a minor difference " to the overall size of manufacturing in Canada. (Johnson and I agree, of course, that tariff removal would increase the standard of living in Canada; this is not an "opinion" but is as close to being a certainty as any statement in social science can be. ) Johnson's slip into the typographical boobytrap that I inadvertently prepared is of no significance . But I cannot allow the rest of the article to pass without comment, for it is so tendentious, and so badly argued, that were it not for a few familiar Johnson trademarks (for example, his 53 54 EDGE An Independent Journal of Art, Poetry and Politics now publishes issue No. 5: Fall 1966 with UTOPIA IN THE ARCTIC by P. S. Barry APARTHEID HAS FEET OF GOLD by H. Bernstein an.d POEMS by G. Bowering, P. Brennan, F. Cogswell , R. Gustafson, Ch. Johnson, B. Lord, A. Nowlan, P. O'Broin, H. Rosenthal a.o. ARTWORK by J. L. Shadbolt, C. A. Siqueiros, H. Town, N. Yates a.o. plus SATIRES, SHORT STORIES AND BOOKREVIEW ARTICLES Subscription: $2.50 per year; Single copies: $1.50 EDGE ti BOX 4067 ti EDMONTON, ALBERTA Send Manuscripts to EDGE, Box 36, Station H, Montreal theory of Canadian history, which runs in terms of the American Revolution and the American Civil War...