The relevance of “Canada First”

The relevance of "Canada First" DAVID P. GAGAN Disconcerted by the aggressive ethnocentrism displayed by the "Twelve Apostles" during the Red River uprising of 1869-70, Canadian historians invariably give short shrift to this earlier, secretive phase of the Canada First movement and preoccupy themselves with the "really significant part of Canada First," 1 the rise and decline of the Canada First Party. As a result, "Canada First" has become synonymous with the first unsuccessful incursion of the intellectuals into the political life of the new Dominion , and with the awakening of liberal nationalism in modern Canadian history. Described as a relic of the age of romantic nationalism out of place in the age of political realism, Canada First has been both praised and criticized for its pre-occupation with the visionary, rather than the practical aspects of Canada's "new nationality." But in either case, the weight of historical judgment has tended toward the view that Canada First left a legacy of farsighted policies which were eventually "plundered" by less omniscient politicians, and that it served a useful purpose in demonstrating the potential of a non-partisan third force to elevate the normally low tenor of Canadian political discourse .2 This has been the relevance of Canada First for Canadian historiography. But Canada First did not come into being as the harbinger of a new era of liberal nationalism, or as the purveyor of constitutional theory and pristine political morality. "Canada First" was conceived as a militantly patriotic expression of faith in the historical objectives of Confederation on the part of five young men who hoped to evoke an outpouring of "national sentiment" consistent with the immensity of the task of creating a transcontinental state. Quite capable of composing romanticized paeans to the visionary promises of a "new nationality," they were equally versed in the meaning of aggressive nationalism . Intolerant and anti-liberal toward dissenting opinion, their Procrustean bed of patriotism often resembled nothing more nor less than the aggressive exclusivism of English -Canadian nationalism. But they had an 36 affinity with the problems of nationality which the ill-starred Canada First Party could never hope to emulate, because they understood realpolitik, and therein, perhaps, lies the historical relevance of Canada First. The story of the origins of the Canada First movement is well known; of how Charles Mair, W. A. Foster, George Taylor Denison (3rd), Henry J. Morgan and Robert Grant Haliburton, "the old five of the corner room" as they liked to remember themselves, used to gather for a "smoke and a chat" in Morgan's rooms at Salmon's Hotel, Ottawa, in April of 1868; and of their mutual pledge to work individually or in concert, without regard for party affiliation, to place "Canada First" out of respect for the memory of D'Arcy McGee, the martyred prophet of the "new nationality."3 The young men shared with each other, and with McGee whose grasp of the economic basis of the "new nationality" has been the subject of a recent revisionist study, something more than a rhetorical vision of national greatness. Haliburton , for example, was the author of two pamphlets, The Coal Trade of the New Dominion and lntercolonial Trade: Our Only Safeguard Against Disunion, in which he anticipated and defended transcontinental economic consolidation premised on western agricultural development, eastern industrial growth and maritime commerce as the essential precondition of national unity and survival. Haliburton was in Ottawa, in fact, as a representative of the Nova Scotia Coal Owner's Association, and in his capacity as an ardent opponent of his province's anti-Confederates. He had dined with McGee, on the night of the assassination, to discuss these and related matters, and in the Commons that same evening McGee had made use of some of Haliburton's arguments.4 Similarly W. A. Foster, who was a Toronto lawyer and eventually editor of the Monetary Times, had written extensively for the Westminster Review on the historical basis of, and the future prospects for the new nation whose fundamental unity and prosperity would continue to be derived from the political and economic cohesion imposed by the St. Lawrence. Foster's articles, which are reprinted in Canada First...