Eugene Forsey: Canada’s Maverick Sage by Helen Forsey (review)

Among his other qualities, Eugene Alfred Forsey (1904–91) had two that earned him admiration and occasional hostility. He often saw things more clearly than others did, and he rarely lost an opportunity to point out to others what they had overlooked.

Both qualities are in ample evidence in Helen Forsey’s splendid tribute to her father, an account of his perceptions and ideas and her engagement with them, and an assessment of their continuing relevance. (Full disclosure: when she was writing the book she spoke with me about her father, whom I had consulted in the 1960s and 1970s when I was preparing my dissertation and book on the League for Social Reconstruction.) Rather than write a traditional biography, she organized her book by subject, fifteen in all, each dealing with an aspect of his personality and thought. This leads to some repetitiveness, but it enables us to trace his views over time, to observe changes in them but also to note their consistency, especially in their ethical and religious basis.

Among the various aspects of his thought, three stand out. The first was a commitment to economic equality and fairness that owed much to the Great Depression. It led him to abandon the conservatism of his youth and join the ccf, whose 1933 founding convention in Regina he attended. In his economic writings he showed a keen sense of history as well as an awareness of the power of large corporations to shape a playing field that was anything but level. In 1937 the League for Social Reconstruction published a booklet he wrote, Recovery: For Whom?, which showed that unemployment remained high, even as corporate profitability had recovered, a phenomenon with which we have once again become familiar.

A second commitment was to the maintenance of a strong Canada. Although aware of the strength of provincial sentiment – he himself was proud of his Newfoundland roots – he believed that Ottawa was better able than the individual provinces to control the corporations. Linked to this was his belief that Canada was a nation-state well worth preserving. Fluently bilingual, he loved Quebec but not everything Québécois: for example, he was a staunch opponent of the illiberal Padlock Act (1937). In 1961 he abandoned the New Democratic Party over what he held to be the new party’s ill-considered adoption of the “two nations” view of Canada favoured by Quebec nationalists. Sharing Pierre Trudeau’s skepticism about ethnically based nationalism, Forsey accepted a seat in the Senate in 1971 and sat as a Liberal until his retirement in 1979.

A third commitment was to constitutional and parliamentary government. This found expression in his support of Lord Byng in the 1926 constitutional crisis, his hostility to the Liberal government’s peremptory handling of the Trans Canada Pipeline issue in 1956, and his opposition to the 1987 Meech Lake Accord, to name just three examples.

Forsey’s magnum opus was The Royal Power of Dissolution in the British Commonwealth (1943). It argued, inter alia, that Lord Byng had been right to refuse a dissolution to Prime Minister Mackenzie King, whose government faced a vote of censure, and to offer Conservative leader Arthur Meighen, head of the largest party in the House, a chance to govern. Rooted in Forsey’s respect for the rights of Parliament, though possibly influenced also by his admiration of Meighen, this opinion was contested in 1943 and has been so ever since.

During the 2008 constitutional crisis we once more heard the argument that the 1926 general election, which returned the Liberals to office, had effectively settled the matter in King’s, and, by extension, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s favour: the governor-general may not withhold what the prime minister desires. Helen Forsey seems to accept this assessment, though with regret, writing that King was able to “bamboozle a disconcerted electorate” (313). She is mistaken, but her mistake is understandable, given the way the King-Byng affair is generally understood. In fact, the constitutional...