The reigning political consensus that characterized this country right up to the birth of the New Canada in 1960 took a quite different view of the role of the individual, of government and of the effects of government intervention on people’s character than the one that prevails today. The view that predominates today on both sides of the border is of Canadians as kinder and gentler than their American neighbours, more willing to use the power of the state in pursuit of public goods, more welfare-minded, more socially left wing. It is also a view that could establish itself only by defeating and then consigning to a trunk in the never visited attic of our collective memory the older view that had defined Canada for almost the first century of its existence and for many decades prior to 1867.
This revolution in Canadians’ intellectual and moral self-understanding was fed by many tributaries. We were certainly well plugged into the broad intellectual currents washing over Western civilization. For instance, the influence of Marxism, some branches of feminism, post-structuralism, and other “radical” philosophies in the universities and elsewhere helped to create fertile soil for new ideas across the West, while simultaneously demonizing the bourgeois virtues. Vietnam and the counter-culture produced a vibrant movement of protest and questioning of authority throughout the Western world, including the authority of traditional values and behaviours.
Not to be neglected in the list of ways in which Canadians’ old values began to fall into desuetude was the extent to which Canada copied American innovations. As is so often the case in Canada–U.S. intellectual history, America led the way with bold social experiments that didn’t really pan out. America drew back, but Canada rushed in and embraced the American innovations as the latest thing. Yet once the Americans had abandoned them, Canadians then deluded themselves that their now “distinct” approach demonstrated how different they were from the people they had originally copied, whereas in reality it proved the less flattering proposition that we are slower to learn from our mistakes.
The “War on Poverty” of Lyndon Johnson was one such innovation, an innovation whose failure was later documented in exquisite detail in Charles Murray’s path-breaking 1984 book, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980.
Here at home, the Canadian left, far from being reflexively anti-American as it is today, drew much inspiration from such U.S. social policy, and the CCF and its successor, the NDP, were at least as inspired by American Progressivism and the Social Gospel movement as by British Labourism and Fabianism. In the period that interests us, Cy Gonick, influential editor of the iconic (on the left) Canadian Dimension, wrote admiringly of American social policy and lamented Canada’s status as laggard. “The United States has discovered poverty,” Gonick wrote in May 1964; “it is curious that this subject is being ignored by Canadian counterparts.” Welfarism was part of the new spirit of the age and Canada had a lot of catching up to do.
We caught up with a vengeance, rapidly surpassing the United States, and were soon breathing down the necks of some of Europe’s welfare states with regard to the size of our social welfare apparatus. In one of those intellectual inversions with which history is replete, we began to associate the values of Canada’s first century with foreign values, American values, values that had nothing to do with us. We literally suppressed or at the very least forgot our history because it suddenly became inconvenient when faced with the need to rationalize the rapid spurt of growth in the welfare state.
So no change in the general zeitgeist of the post-war industrial world can prove a sufficient explanation for Canada’s sudden embrace of the welfare state, an innovation to which Canada had so far proved remarkably resistant. Others will find the popularity of left-wing ideas, the counter-culture, feminism, effective contraception, cities and city life, the attractions of Keynesian-style demand management, rejection of tradition and the rise of relativism and hostility to authority and other ideas abroad in the West at this time to be sufficient explanation of the direction Canada took in these years.
But the very ubiquity of those ideas makes them unsatisfying as an explanation as to why Canada suddenly fell in line with them so comprehensively after having resisted their rise so energetically over previous decades.
The state had been expanding on both sides of the border for years. When Stephen Leacock warned of the impending arrival of socialism in Canada in 1924, the state in Canada was spending 11% of GDP. By 1960, we were spending over 28%. Again, however, there was nothing in that that distinguished Canada; government was carving out a bigger role for itself everywhere. No one denies that the zeitgeist was there, no one denies that government in general and the social service state in particular were growing. What has to be explained is not the direction of change, but rather its speed and scope and timing.
And here the parallel social and economic developments of Canada and the United States over the previous century must be given their due weight. We were two societies with a similar intellectual, philosophical and institutional endowment. We Canadians thought of ourselves as the truer guardians of the British traditions of liberty and limited government, but the Americans fought a revolution in order to vindicate what they thought of as the rights and liberties of Englishmen. The spirit of the great liberal individualist John Locke presided over America’s founding debates in the eighteenth century, just as he did over the Confederation debates of the nineteenth.
In most ways that matter, by 1960 we had comparable achievements and believed those achievements to be rooted in our shared heritage of limited government, individual freedom, personal responsibility and the rule of law. Canada was not a European welfare state, we were not Sweden or France or Germany; indeed those were the ideas that were foreign to our history and traditional practices. We were resolutely North American, men and women, French-speakers and English-speakers, Westerners, Central Canadians and Easterners together. Indeed, we often thought that what distinguished us from Americans was their less fervent attachment to those values that set us both apart from other peoples who had not yet understood the secrets of development, both personal and economic. We didn’t think we were Americans. We thought we were the superior brand of North American.
To explain our divergence from the United States in the decades following 1960 as somehow simply the result of a more “European” character, of profoundly different cultures and values, confuses what must be explained with the explanation. It is no good to argue that we are only middle of the pack among Western democracies in social welfare provision today when it is the movement to there from our very different starting point that we are trying to understand. We in effect changed teams. What must be explained is why we stopped being resolutely North American and moved so fast toward a European-style welfare state.
When I began writing this book, I was drawn to the argument that the most important change in the post-war period, and what made Canada particularly vulnerable to this new ideology of social welfare, was our rapidly faltering confidence in the ability of the economy to absorb all our children. But the more I dug into it, the more I realized that this was not enough of an explanation either. Not only had we faced similar waves of job-seekers before (as in the postwar period) but we had also met and mastered depressions and bouts of high unemployment without abandoning our principles. While our Boomer generation was the largest among the industrialized countries, America was not far behind, and it too had to expand universities and schools and other new infrastructure and institutions to manage the wave of youngsters. It was their president who said “We are all Keynesians now” and that same president (a Republican to boot) introduced price and wage controls well before Ottawa did.
European countries that did not experience anything like North America’s postwar baby boom did, however, expand the size of their governments and welfare states significantly. Clearly you could have the boom without the massive expansion of government and particularly the welfare state (Australia and the United States), and you could have the expansion of the welfare state without any real boom at all (much of Western Europe).
In any case, the rapid unfolding of the expansion of the welfare state and the dependence it brought in its train from about 1968 or so didn’t match closely enough the rise of the Boomers in the workforce. It didn’t match the economic cycles that might have been the giveaway of a Keynesian-inspired coup d’état. There had to be something else that suddenly supercharged what otherwise had been a rather lazy drift to expanded government in Canada. That something else was the destructive dynamic created by Quebec nationalism that unleashed a bidding war between Ottawa and Quebec City for the loyalty of Quebecers
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From Fearful Symmetry: The Fall and Rise of Canada’s Founding Values by Brian Lee Crowley. Copyright © 2009 by Brian Lee Crowley. Published by arrangement with Key Porter Books.