Alumni Oration

"Real Strength of Dominion Lies in Human Ingredients" Daily Gleaner (17 May 1934). (UA Case 67a, Box 2)

"The Challenge of Confederation to this Generation"

False modesty in Canada is not usually regarded as one of our besetting sins. We have been accustomed to speak boastfully of our vast area, our great mountain ranges and our magnificent distances. These in themselves surely are not assets but liabilities and will never cease to be so in our time. If we had the same resources in a quarter of the area with three or four times the population we should be a much happier, a much more prosperous, and a much more united people. After nearly seventy years of Confederation our whole population would go into he states of New York. There were five distinct political climates across Canada, and the best efforts of two whole generations had gone not to the real building of a nation but to the removal of physical disabilities which would otherwise have made the building of a transcontinental British Dominion on this continent impossible. In that sense the real strength of Canada lay not in our physical geography at all but in the human ingredients of Confederation, the spirit of the Canadian people.

Barriers of Geography

It is almost impossible for this generation to reconstruct even the imagination, the task of seventy years ago. In the east our own Maritime Provinces looked towards the Atlantic. Trade was altogether maritimes, to the West Indies, to Great Britain and the American sea-board. Cut off from the Maritime Provinces by a wilderness of forest and in winter by the frozen St. Lawrence was Canada East, as it was then known, a French community, with imponderable barriers of race, language and tradition. Then above the Ottawa lay Canada West, united to Canada East by political bonds that were fast becoming intolerable, but moving as many thought, upon an include plane towards the United States. Then separated from Canada West by another wilderness of forest and granite was one of he most curious little pockets of settlement on the continent. Red River could be reached at that time only by way of the United States, and more than two million of people in ten years poured around the south of the Great Lakes towards the western prairies. Another thousand miles of wilderness and mountains separated Red River from the little province of British Columbia which was to be reached at the time only by half circumnavigating the world. In the history of modern nations has there even been a fight like this against the barriers of physical geography?

The B.N.A. Act

Three great prerequisites were necessary before these scattered communities could every hope to function as a nation. The first of these was political and the answer to that problem, as we all know, was the British North America Act of 1867. It is curious how many of the chief excellencies of that great measure are directly traceable to this very challenge of danger and disintegration. Canada is perhaps the strongest federation in the modern world; that is to say the federal powers by comparison with the provincial powers are much stronger than in the United States or [Brazil] or Australia. This was the deliberate purpose of Macdonald and many of the Fathers of Confederation, and nothing but the desperate emergency of that day reconciled these scattered provinces to the surrender of cherished rights to a distant national government. It may not be generally known that the first detailed project of federation based squarely upon the principle of self-governing nationhood was drawn up secretly for Lord Grey in 1851 by Sir Edmund Head, the grandson of a loyalist and governor at the time of New Brunswick. It was Sir Edmund who launched the project with A.T. Galt into Canadian politics in 1858.

Northwestern Transfer

The second prerequisite was the problem of westward expansion to the Pacific. In 1857 the Hudson’s Bay Company controlled more than one-quarter of the continent, and even the original Confederation of 1867 was less than one-fifth the size of the present Dominion. Here again the need was desperate. The Union Pacific had been character in 1862 and the free homestead system in the United States was pouring hundreds of thousands of settlers westward and northward towards Rupert’s Land. Already the Northern Pacific was under way, designed as Macdonald believed, to forestall Canada in the race for the northern prairies. The transfer of the Hudson’s Bay Territories changed not only the side but the very nature of the Canadian federation. In 1867 the Dominion was a federation of equal provinces each in control of its own public domain. In 1870 Canada became a veritable Empire in its own right with the widest range of unalienated crown lands under federal control to be found at that time in the British Empire.

The Railway

The third prerequisite was of course a trans-continental railway on Canadian soil, and this was perhaps the chief reason for retaining that whole vast area under federal control. "The railway," said Sir John A. Macdonald, "must be built by means of the land through which it has to pass." It took 25,000,000 acres of land and nearly $100,000,000 of government money to complete the C.P.R. in 1885. But who shall say that it was not worth the price? The C.P.R. has been the only transcontinental railway in American that has never gone into the hands of a receiver, and its contributions to Canadian nationhood not only in binding the provinces together but in the use it has made of the vast land grants in the interests of prosperous and permanent settlement has been almost beyond calculation.

Means to An End

But neither the B.N.A. Act of 1867 nor the expansion westward to the Pacific and the C.P.R. could create a nation. These were not ends in themselves but merely means to an end: means of enabling these scattered communities to co-operate for political purposes if they chose – means of bringing them together, of exchanging their commodities, of knowing each other in order that the real work of nation-building might begin. In that sense the real task of Confederation belongs not to that generation but to this. What if having been brought together we discover that we do not like each other? What is we discover not mutual sympathies but mutual antipathies? What if these varied interests tend not towards unification but towards conflict and disintegration?

Problems of Today

Let me illustrate. The Canadian West in the middle of a continent grows in normal times some 850,000,000 bushels of grain, which must be sold in world markets at world prices. The western farmer believes that two things are indispensable – low cost of production which he thinks means low tariffs, and the lowest possibly costs of transportation: We in eastern Canada, living beside a highly industrialized neighbor, fell that we can’t meet world condition. We need protection and more protection. Or consider the problem of building up a consciousness of vital and fundamental interests in common – of thinking about the same things in the same way at the same time. Public opinion in Great Britain or in the Netherlands is very alert and easily massed. I am included top think it is alert because it is so easily massed. The London Times is read in Devon, the Scotsman in the Midlands and the Manchester Guardian in the Highlands. I wonder how many of us read [ ] any newspaper printed outside our own province. How many of us every read a newspaper in the French language? It was only in 1917, I believe, that we had a twenty-four-hour-a-day Teased wire across Canada for western newspapers.

The truth is that we have a country which is hard to traverse, hard to develop hard to populate and desperately hard to govern. For nearly seventy years we have been building giants’ causeways across the continent and now some of the most critical problems of nationhood have just begun.

Need of Generous Spirit

Must we not admit that many of these conflicting interests are never likely in our day to be harmonized – interests of East and West, of agriculture and industry, of credit centres and the frontier? But surely they can be approached in a more generous spirit and our public life may be all the richer for them. That is one of the most amazing paradoxes, it seems to me, in Canadian history. I shall never forget the reply of a New Zealander when a Canadian congratulated him upon the simplicity and the homogeneity of life in that happy Dominion. How is it, he replied, that almost all the great political problems in the British Commonwealth overseas have been solved first of all in Canada – the problem of race, of responsible government, of confederation? Magnanimity in politics, says old Burke, is not seldom the truest wisdom. Must we not all admit there is room for more magnanimity in Canadian public life? The thirsty earth, as Burke once said, is gasping and gaping and crying out that healing shower from heaven.

Resources of Spirit

Judging the present temper of the Canadian people with a measure of detachment, and with a measure of experience also, I venture to think that there are resources of public spirit in this country that have never been truly stirred. We all know the Duncan Report. But I do venture to say that the spirit in which the rest of Canada implemented the terms of that report was worthy of the traditions of a great nation. Or take the Natural Resources Question of the Prairie Provinces, now happily being brought to a successful conclusion. The Dominion kept the lands in 1870 and in 1905 not because the prairie provinces had no constitutional right to them but because they were necessary for the nation. The West has never been disposed to question that necessity and they are proud, as the Prime Minister of Manitoba stated in 1920, "in having been able to lend, so to speak, to the Dominion, the immediate resources without which these great national enterprises could never have been effected." That, I think you will agree, is public policy on a very high level. After all what constitutes a nation? Joseph Howe asked [that] [question] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] extent of territory make a nation? Never. Numbers of people? No. What then? The spirit which animates, the discipline which renders them invincible."