Our Son's Heritage

MR. INWOOD: It is always a pleasure to welcome a son of the Province of Quebec, but we are indeed honoured today to have as our speaker the official representative of the Crown for the Province of Quebec, the Lieutenant-Governor, the Honourable Gaspard Fauteux.

Mr. Fauteux was born in St. Hyacinthe, Quebec. It is interesting to note that his grandfather--the Honourable H. Mercier--and his uncle--Sir Lomer Gouin--were former Prime Ministers of the Province of Quebec.

He was educated in a Quebec seminary: College Ste. Marie and the University of Montreal. He is a former Governor of the College of Dental Surgeons of Quebec, a Knight of Grace-St. John of Jerusalem and a Commander of the National Order of the Legion of Honour.

Mr. Fauteux's public life has not been without its successes and setbacks as he was elected to the Quebec Legislature in 1931, but was defeated in the General Election of 1935. However, in a subsequent by-election he was elected to the house of commons in 1942 and again in 1945 and 1949. He was chosen speaker of the House of Commons in 1945 and has had his public life and public service most aptly recognized by his appointment as Lieutenant-Governor of the Province of Quebec.

It is my pleasure to present to you the Honourable Gaspard Fauteux, P.C., LL.D., D.C.L., D.D.S., L.D.S., who will speak to us of "Our Son's Heritage".

MR. FAUTEUX: To The Empire Club of Canada, guardian of our British Commonwealth of Nation's way of life and traditions, I owe, today, the great honour of being permitted to express my views as to what I would like our Canada of Tomorrow to be. Through you, Mr. Chairman, I extend to all your members my most sincere thanks.

May I be permitted first to call your attention to the fact that I would like to speak to you here, not as much as the Queen's representative in French Quebec but as a citizen of our great Kingdom of Canada and a humble member of the British Commonwealth of Nations.

Almost fifty years ago, a great Canadian, the late Sir Wilfrid Laurier, described the Twentieth Century as that of Canada, and more recently, other great Canadian called the second half of that century that of our Northland.

Proud of our Past, confident in our Present and with faith in our future, we are, Gentlemen, the custodians of our sons' inheritance.

Canada today is a nation built through sacrifices and toil. It is a nation which managed through faith in itself and in her sons to remain no longer the colony it was, living under the ruling of a tutor. We have acquired faith in ourselves and the faith we have passed down to our brothers and sons by adoption.

We are proud of our Past because without those French pioneers and adventurous ideologists and without their English counterpart, there would have been no race among the British, the French, and the others to have built the country we are proud of today.

Had it not been for the discoveries of our vast natural resources, would have the British under George the Second fought with the help of such Generals as Wolfe and his colleagues to win this land from the French by defeating in fair battle Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham in 1759?

Was it not due to the broadmindedness of such British Governors as Ramsey, Grey and the others that Quebec, or French Canada, retained its freedom of language and religion towards the end of the eighteenth century?

It was also shortly after that, that French and English Canadians started to pool their efforts to build what became in 1867 the Dominion of Canada despite the isolated incidents of the Riel Rebellion and the 1837-38 Quebec Patriotic Insurrection.

We should remember those days because from them we can learn great lessons. It was from these first frictions between our two great races and cultures that we learned to become a united nation, a nation which started with four provinces of Eastern Canada to become the largest 10-province land of desire to millions.

We learned in those days of our Past to become so united that when the young United States decided to rebel against the British Realm and tried to have French Canada join, Quebec as well as Ontario and the Maritimes joined forces to fight side by side and successfully protected the Canadian soil against invasion from the South.

The battle of Chateauguay as well as the defeat of General Arnold at the foot of the King's bastion at Quebec City are just as many incidents in our National annals which prove that once French and British became Canadians, they learned to meet and know each other and become partners in the great task of making Canada what it has become today.

Yes, my friends, we, all of us, whether we come from Quebec, Newfoundland, the Maritimes, Ontario, Western Canada or the remote Western coasts of British Columbia, we are proud of being the legitimate heirs of two great cultures who have been brought up in the fear of God and respect for authority.

We are proud of our Past, but we are also confident in our Present because we believe that each and everyone of us has learned freely and willingly to drop our racial crests and slogans to become real brothers.

We are proud of our Past. Yes. But we must also remember that not only French and British settlers built this great Nation of ours. There were also the Irish, Scots, Italians, Slavs, Germans and many millions of others who fought not so many years ago to safeguard what we want to leave our sons and daughters.

We are all proud of our racial origins and like the son who leaves the paternal home, we keep deep in our heart the memory and souvenir of that past, but face the challenge of today because we are but the intermediary between the past and the future of our children and theirs.

I ask you if the appointed time has not come, Gentlemen, for all of us to forget, except in our hearts, where we came from, so that we may realize that we are all Canadians, working for Canada and those who will be the Canadians of tomorrow.

We must have confidence in the present, and we have, from the people who know, the greatest tools in our hands to make of our Nation what our grandsons should expect us to do.

A great soldier, who fought and toiled for the survival of our democratic way of life, Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, in a speech in the City of Quebec, said, and I quote: "There stands Canada, a hinge between the Old World and the new; a hinge of purest gold".

This was perhaps what made a well known Canadian writer, Leslie Roberts, say that "in the opening years of the second half of the twentieth century, Canada possesses a treasure of wealth which cannot be matched in the Western world."

"That wealth lies in the seas off Nova Scotia, in the forests of the North, in the giant timber of the Pacific Coast and its offshore."

Roberts also said that this great wealth again resided in our mines, our oil wells, in the soil of our plains, in the orchards of Niagara, our rivers and lakes, in our humming factories, our hydro-electric power plants; but mostly "in the Canadian people and the qualities they possess."

W. J. Borrie, of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, sees as the major task of our present, the consolidation of our past gains.

After a review of our past, in an article published in the "Monetary Times Annual Review" for 1954, Mr. Borrie said

" . . . it may well be that the major task for 1954 will be the consolidation of real gains made during the postwar period, prior to a further upward climb from this plateau."

The President of the Canadian Manufacturers' Association, Mr. J. D. Ferguson, in the same "Monetary Time Report", added this advice:

"In the sense that Columbus discovered America, Canadians seem to be eternally engaged in the discovery of Canada."

When Britain's Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, came here in 1952, he said at Ottawa, January 14 of that year, that Canada had become "an indispensible ally".

"Upon the whole surface of the globe, there is no more spacious and splendid domain than Canada open to the activity and genius of free man", said Mr. Churchill.

Even in Europe we are being acknowledged as a power which is strictly Canadian and recognized as such. "Despite the fact that the population of Canada has been stamped by the fusion of various cultures: French, British and North-American, this fusion of such dissimilar elements has created a distinct nationality and favoured the creation of a way of life entirely Canadian." Those were the words used by Leon Robert, Director of the Compagnie Generale de Telegraphie of France in the Magazine "France-Amerique.

If the world has confidence in our future, I believe we should have confidence in our present and faith in our tomorrow.

We must plan today the Canada in which our sons and grandsons will live.

We have a rich inheritance but we must make it profit for those who will take over when our time to leave this world has come.

When a man or a woman becomes a father or mother, selfish life has ended and life becomes a duty to the children.

We have rich lands, a richer undersoil, unharnessed power in our rivers, falls and forests; our lakes and rivers are also rich in natural resources of all kind.

Years ago, the slogan in the United States as well as here was: "Go West young man".

A few months ago, a Canadian born American industrialist, Mr. Cyrus S. Eaton, of Cleveland, Ohio, changed that slogan while celebrating his 70th birthday at one of our many Winter Sport Resorts, at Manoir Castin, 15 miles North of Quebec City.

Eaton, returning from a skiing expedition, and with his personal experience in Ungava and the Canadian North, said: "Today my advice to your youth is 'Go North young man'".

The age of airplanes, helicopters, radar, radio and television, to mention but a few of the discoveries of our times, have changed the map of the world to such a point that what was West in the days of the ponies, the railroads, the caravans, now has become the North.

Agriculture, which used to be our number one source of revenue, has maintained its place, but such new industries as mining, engineering, chemical research and atomic energy exploitation have joined the ranks of our various fields of activities and supplement our trades of the past decades.

Today we have found oil in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Gaspe and other distant parts of our country; iron ore in Ontario, Quebec and Ungava; copper and silver in Ontario, Quebec and even the Gaspe peninsula and we have maintained our privileged place in the fields of pulp and paper, newsprint, asbestos, and many others.

Since the last war, we have more than doubled our hydro-electric power assets and we have barely harnessed half of our potential and with the canalization of the St. Lawrence Seaway, we are opening the door to greater activities as well as opening the door to greater development.

As E. C. Gould, a prominent Canadian writer said: "As a logical result the northern pioneers have pointed out that unless a nation had new land to develop, it must lose much of its virility."

But, gentlemen, we have but scratched the surface of what we know and there are in our Northern Territories hundreds of thousands of square miles of virgin land.

Yes. We may be proud of our past, confident of our present, but we must look forward with faith to our future and work relentlessly to make it what our sons deserve it to be.

We are all doing a great job and we could do a greater job, had we the population awaken to the advantages of the future.

We could do that job alone, but it would take so many years to do it alone that it would take three generations, if not more, to achieve our ambitions of today.

We need newcomers, new Canadians, whom we may call our real brothers in a few years. We need the science and skill of older countries. We need sons by adoption.

Since several years now, close to a million of them have come and most of them have taken their place among us, worked side by side with us and some have even taught us.

Before ten years have passed, Canada will have in the Province of Quebec a steel production which will make the Ruhr, so contested by Germany and France, a dwarf as compared to that giant of ours.

At Sorel, at Sept-Iles, at Havre-Saint-Pierre, along the shores of Ungava Bay and in other parts of industrialized Quebec, iron ore, copper, zinc, silver, and other minerals will be processed, milled and shipped in ingot form to the specialized refineries and mills of the world.

But we cannot rely only on exports and on our present population to continue our growth as a nation.

On the home front, price adjustments are necessary and the only way we can achieve economic independence, isolated unto ourselves, as Mr. James Muir, President of the Royal Bank of Canada, said recently, is by a reduction of our standard of living, by increasing our domestic market to absorb what cannot be sold through our exports.

At present, the importer's position is difficult because of our high tariffs, while our exports suffer from our high cost of production.

I am not a financier, but, to me, if we would increase our domestic market through a larger population and purchasing power, we could balance our production with our market needs and consequently be able to spread a continued prosperity at all levels to our people whether they live in Newfoundland, the Maritimes, Quebec, Ontario, the Prairies or the west Coast.

Mr. Muir also believes that the time has come for the dollar area to show evidence of good faith by reducing trade barriers both in the form of tariff duties and in the form of customs, formalities and red tape.

I take his word and agree with him because I also feel that we must do something to maintain our national prosperity, a firm economy and assure the men and women who work either in an office, a mill or a mine or on a farm, a reasonable security.

I know but little of the complicated financial and commercial machineries which will achieve this purpose, but I believe that with a larger population we can help solve the problems of our growth as a nation.

When the President of the Royal Bank of Canada says that "the most important of those barriers to our economic growth is the smallness of our population with a consequent narrowness of our national market", I share his opinion.

So far, through natural increase and immigration, our population has grown from 11,152,000 in 1938 to 15, 000,000 in 1953, but if we are to meet the challenge which faces us today, we need more and more people who will become good, honest and sincere Canadians.

For a time, while they become acquainted to our ways of life and to our ways of thinking, they may feel like sons by adoption, but if we, all of us, cooperate and help them into the Canadian fold, they will be soon as Canadian as we are.

Our first job towards the future of our nation is to protect our territory, our way of life and our various freedoms, particularly those of language and religion. More particularly we should continue to be an example to the world in our respect and protection of these same freedoms in our cities and towns where certain elements, which contribute to make our nation what it is, are in a minority.

We must forget our French, English, Irish, Scottish, Jewish or other racial or familial stock to remember that we are above all Canadians.

Mind you, I do not mean that in our homes, our churches and among our family groups, we must throw away or set aside those wonderful traditions left down to us by our forefathers and our parents. I mean that a Canadian may cherish the souvenir and love of his ancestry and be proud of it, but look forward to make his son a Canadian just like the New Englanders, the Pennsylvanians and the others who made their sons proud to call themselves Americans to mention the United States in example.

In the development of our natural resources we have accepted and made use of foreign capital, either British, American, Swiss, French or other. But just because we did so in our national youth, does it mean we have become the economic slaves of our financiers?

Did not the wealth of the United States of America come from British and French capital and bullion from Spain?

Some people will say that by opening the immigration doors of our country to many, we are inviting into our midst Communist agents.

I would answer that objection of a greater immigration programme by saying that the best argument against Communism is to give the commie a piece of land, a home of his own, a job and a bank account which he will earn, and we shall be making more capitalists out of them than any propaganda will.

By that, I do not mean we should tell our Immigration Officials just to let any Tom, Dick or Harry enter Canada. I mean that under a programme of selective and well balanced immigration, we can increase our population with people who want to become Canadians, who want to share the toil with us before they share the wealth they and we want to guarantee to our children.

Now there is another matter which is dear to my heart and which I wish to make you acquainted with. That is the question of a National flag we should be as proud of as the Americans are of theirs.

If we are to become a united nation, we must develop an esprit-de-corps among Canadians, old and young, French and English or whatever their origins are.

We must learn to drop the racial origin tag on our official documents. In other words, when a man or woman is a Canadian citizen, he or she is a Canadian--period.

We may continue to be proud of our ancestry. Our wives should continue to teach our children the history of our forefathers, but they should also teach our sons to be proud of being Canadians.

We have much to learn from the British School tie and from the pride a young American feels when he salutes the Stars and Stripes.

Some may call this sentimentality. I believe Canada, like any other nation, should have her own Banner. Naturally, we cannot design a flag of our own and keep all the crests of our individual racial origins. Some of us would have to put water in our wine, as the French say, and sacrifice part of a legitimate desire to see either the Union Jack, the Irish harp, the Scottish lion, or the French fleur de lys.

I believe that we could design a flag which would be accepted by all true Canadians and recognized by any nation where our ships, our planes or our troops fighting under the United Nations and North Atlantic Treaty Organization, peaceful police forces, travel or work,

To us, who are gradually on the way to join our fathers and forefathers, it is all well and good to talk at the club or at home about what happened before our days, but we owe to our sons, as they will owe to their sons, to build for them a country in which they will be happy and remember us with pride.

When you and I left the paternal home, it was not because we had stopped to love our parents, but because we were starting a new life, building a new home.

We probably took along with us many old souvenirs, silver with the family crest, crystal with the initials of our father or mother and even linen with embroidered initials.

Tomorrow, our sons and daughters will leave us and take away with them a few mementos of our days. They will build more modern homes to suit their needs and their era. Should we be vexed?

By adapting ourselves to the era of our days and by adapting ourselves to smooth the path for our children, we are not dropping traditions, because traditions are passed down the line in the home, in the church and at school but from one heart to another, not from the counter of a wholesaler to that of a retailer and then sold at a set price.

May I be permitted to bring up at this time an example that will show you that in Quebec, despite modern ways of living, traditions have not died.

When I was a boy, many paternal homes had no central heating then, and the Quebec children used to kneel on New Year's Day morning before their father who stood, his back to the fireplace.

Today, we have central heating and few homes have the old fireplace, but just the same, on New Year's Day morning, many of our children still gather in the living room and ask for the traditional New Year paternal benediction or blessing.

We are all proud of our traditions and they should be respected and passed down from one generation to the other, especially when they teach the love of God and the respect of His commandments.

On the other hand, we must continue to carry the banner and pave the way to better living, if possible, for those we love and for whom so many of us have sacrificed their lives on many fronts, from the muddy trenches of France in 1914-18, to the mountains of Korea since 1950.

My friends, I am proud of those traditions of Quebec, which the people of my Province have carved in the stone--"Je me souviens". But I am also proud to be a Canadian and also honoured to have been chosen as the representative of the Queen, Our Queen, among my people.

My hope, before I retire, is to have the opportunity to see more of Canada and meet more of the people who make our Nation what it is. I hope to travel across the nation and meet as many Canadians as I may be permitted to and, in this way, learn more about people so that we may do more for one and all.

I am extremely honoured at having been asked to meet you, and speak to you today, not as much as Lieutenant-Governor of the Province of Quebec, but as a Canadian who loves his country.

May T be permitted before parting with you to quote a citation of Walt Whitman, that great American poet, which was used by the late Doctor Lloyd C. Douglas, a Minister and writer known the world over.

"Have you learned lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you?" asked Whitman.

"Have you not learned greater lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed the passage with you?" the citation continued.

This lesson I took from the front page of Lloyd C. Douglas's novel "Disputed Passage".

It was a great lesson to me and I believe that a closer study of what Whitman and Douglas tried to pass down will probably open the door to more and deeper meditation.

I believe that we, Canadians, are going through a disputed passage and that the sooner we learn the great lesson from those who brace themselves against us and who dispute the passage with us, the sooner we shall give our sons their rightful inheritance.

This lesson we can learn from building a culture of our own, a literature of our own, arts of our own and music of our own.

I agree with you that we are a nation less than 400 years old and that some countries of Europe have a culture and existence which go back to two thousand years.

Nevertheless, I still believe we can do it and the only way to do so is to get together, we the pioneers, and build a Canada of Tomorrow which will make our sons and grandsons proud of us, as we are today in reading the inscription on the Quebec monument dedicated to Generals Wolfe and Montcalm:

"Valor gave them a common death" "History, a common fame" "Posterity, a common monument."

THANKS OF THE MEETING were expressed by Mr. H. R. Jackman.