Regionalism? Or Irrationalism?

Review Article Regionalism ? or Irrationalism? LOVELL CLARK David Jay Bercuson (editor), Canada and the Burden of Unity. Toronto: The Macmillan Co. of Canada. 1977. 192pp. No doubt it was to be expected, when Canada is facing the threat of separatism in Quebec, that a group of professors from other parts of the country would choose this moment to add to the forces of disunity by jumping on the bandwagon of regionalism. The opportunity to rehash a litany of regional grievances and to play at rewriting the Constitution was too good to be missed . After all, regional griping has long been the national pastime, not hockey as is mistakenly assumed, and the penchant in some professorial quarters for correcting the lamentable shortcomings of the Fathers of Confederation runs it a close second. The authors of the present volume find the results of the Fathers' work badly flawed. Their complaint is a familiar one. The national policies have always been framed for the benefit of central Canada alone, while the burdens of unity have always fallen on the unwilling shoulders of the Maritimes and the West. It is time, they say, to lay these burdens down. It is Professor Bercuson who, in his Introduction , sounds the most stridently anti-national note. In this he is not fully supported by the essayists who follow him, most of whom implicitly or explicitly contradict his position. Even the achievement of Confederation earns a sour appraisal from Professor Bercuson. The separate colonies were too often "cajoled into union by wily and ambitious politicians,'' or ''bludgeoned by the Colonial Office,'' or else bribed by the Canadian treasury. A union so sinfully conceived could s~arcely be productive of much good; certainly Prof~ssor Bercuson doesn't find any. He rings the changes on all the grievances to which the essayists have drawn attention, plus a few pet Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 13, No. 2 (Ete 1978 Summer) peeves of his own, some of which are highly subjective. "Finally, there is the less materialistic, but no less real, burden of being ignored, misunderstood , stereotyped, and patronized by Central Canadians." In the course of his fulminations Professor Bercuson questions whether Sir John A. Macdonald 's concept of a strong federal union was the best one. "Mercier, Mowatt [sic], et al., may have been far wiser in their assessment of what Canada really needed than Macdonald." Perhaps space limitations prevented him from explaining or justifying this statement, but Professor Bercuson might have asked himself why, if Macdonald's policies were solely for the benefit of Ontario and Quebec, it was the premiers of these very provinces who so bitterly opposed him. It should be noted, also, that if Macdonald's last electoral defence of his national policies in 1891 had hinged on central Canada alone he would have been defeated. He was saved by the votes of the Maritimes and the West, the "shreds and patches of the Dominion,'' as Sir Richard Cartwright so rudely and foolishly labelled them. Other statements by Professor Bercuson require similar explanation and support if they are to be taken as more than mere rhetoric. He complains (if that is the right word) that "Ottawa has never been slow to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into welfare programs and equalization payments" into the eastern provinces, but it "has not been willing to go to the root of the problem by changing cultural and economic policies which would bring the Atlantic region into ~he mainstream of Canadian society.'' What does this mean? Is it anything more than empty rhetoric? Certainly the implications are not very complimentary ·to the people of the Atlantic provinces. Professor Bercuson also insists: ''That federalism in Canada must be built upon the recognition of regional equality,'' a statement which at first glance will command the assent of many. But again, what does it mean? Equality of living standards regardless of the facts of economic geography? Equality of representation in the political councils of the nation regardless of size of population? Professor Bercuson could mean these or several other kinds of equality but until he specifies them he has said nothing. 119 Professor Bercuson says that the provinces "should not be allowed...