Fairness doctrine

John Ralston Saul reboots the history
of Montreal and Canada with A Fair Country:
Telling Truths About Canada

by JULIET WATERS

Not long into the conversation I was having with John Ralston Saul last week, he got a call from his agent. Saul’s publisher is set to re-release The Collapse of Globalism, the book in which, three years ago, Saul predicted the kind of economic crisis we’re now seeing. Even if Saul weren’t so demonstrably prescient, his new book A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada is essential reading, especially for Montrealers.

In it Saul argues that Canada is more than a country. It’s a civilization with a history and culture that goes back far longer than we’ve always believed.

“We are a Métis civilization,” he writes. “What we are today has been inspired as much by four centuries of life with the indigenous civilizations as by four centuries of immigration. Perhaps more. Today we are the outcome of that experience. As have Métis people, Canadians in general have been heavily influenced and shaped by the First Nations. We still are. We increasingly are. This influencing, this shaping is deep within us.”

When French and English Europeans first began settling Canada, Saul argues, intermarriage was not only common but also encouraged. Especially in New France, settlers were deeply dependent on their relationships with native tribes.

As the fur trade grew, indigenous and settler governments became increasingly interdependent. In 1701 The Great Peace brought 39 native tribes to Montreal to sign a treaty with each other and New France. This, and a similar treaty, the Niagara Peace of 1764, Saul calls the “creative beginnings of the Canadian ideal.” The Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the Quebec Act of 1774 drew from these models in negotiating a more balanced sense of sovereignty than has been seen in other colonized nations. It’s what has largely spared us a history of civil war.

For much of the 18th century Montreal was a powerful and interesting mix of native and European civilization. “That mixture was used to create structures everywhere west of Montreal,” with the of exception of Toronto and Southwestern Ontario, which Saul argues were “a provincial ‘down there, over there,’ not really relevant nationally…. That’s what’s fascinating about Montreal. It’s not a regional city it’s the National city.”

Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes Canada ever made, Saul said over coffee, was to change the capital from Montreal to Ottawa. “Montreal should have stayed the capital of Canada. I mean, Ottawa, given where we were at that time was a very logical place to put it for a bunch of reasons.” (An important one being that Montrealers burned down the parliament buildings in 1839.) “Montreal lost it by its division. In a way Ottawa was an attempt to keep that two culture thing without the violence.” But had we kept the capital here it’s less likely we would have seen the kind of divisions between Quebec’s provincial government and our federal one that we’ve seen in the last 150 years.

“If it had been the capital, the presence of an enormous bilingual government would have protected the city from being so cut. The fact that it wasn’t the federal or provincial capital gave undue influence to people with money. Had the politics been here it would have been a different situation.”

Here’s what happened instead: “In the middle of the 19th century, you start to get these shifts of power and Montreal starts to lose its sense of place, and starts to talk more and more about Britain and the Queen and Scotland and France.”

Along with the waves of Irish Protestants and other anglophones, Montreal started to see a different kind of French settler, “right wing priests from France who started dreaming of a more perfect France.” History started being rewritten, and cultural values started shifting. Montrealers, and Canadians with them, lost their sense of place.

Reading A Fair Country may be the first step to getting it back.

A FAIR COUNTRY: TELLING TRUTHS
ABOUT CANADA BY JOHN RALSTON
SAUL, VIKING CANADA, HC, 338 PP. $34