The Changing Political Face of Canada

Doug Morris, President, Morris Glass and Windows/Humidity Solutions, and Director, The Empire Club of Canada; Jura Augustinavicius, Senior Student, North Toronto Collegiate Institute; Rev. Canon Philip Hobson, Incumbent, St. Martin-in-the-Fields Anglican Church; Andrew Coyne, National Affairs Columnist, National Post; Peter G. White, President and CEO, Peter G. White Management Ltd., Banff, Alberta; Rudyard Griffiths, Executive Director, Dominion Institute; Dr. Ken Jones, Dean, The Faculty of Business, Ryerson University; Don McCutchan, Partner and International Policy Advisor, Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP, and Second Vice-President, The Empire Club of Canada; Patrick Luciani, Senior Fellow in Public Policy, Atlantic Institute for Market Studies; Gareth S. Seltzer, President, TWS Canada Group, and Past President, The Empire Club of Canada; Helen Walsh, President, Couchiching Institute on Public Affairs; and Duncan N.R. Jackman, President, The Fulcrum Investment Company Limited, and Director, The Empire Club of Canada.

Introduction by John Niles

Lord Black, Past Presidents, Directors, members and guests of the Empire Club of Canada:

In the fall of 1997 the Rev. Bill Phipps, then Moderator of the United Church of Canada, questioned the Divinity of Jesus Christ, hinting that He might not be God--reminiscent of the wrong-headed "God is dead" theology of the '60s.

The CTV Double Exposure comedy team of Linda Cullen and Bob Robertson must have responded by saying, "Great news. Conrad's back in the running."

Now Rick Mercer must have thought Lord Black won because last week he said that once he heard that Lord Black wanted back into Canada as a Canadian citizen he said, "I thought I heard the angels sing."

Now, being as I am a United Church minister, I have to admit none of us ever believed anything Bill Phipps said anyway.

However, like God, Lord Conrad Black not only has the title but his presence reverberates through both corporations and countries, whether he is actually present or not. And just as those who declared definitively in the '60s that God was dead soon found that they were most definitely wrong.

So too, I think today, they will discover that Lord Black is far from dead and nowhere near buried.

It was the seventeenth century French satirist Jean de La Bruyere, who wrote, "Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think."

As I listened earlier today to Lord Black's astonishing command of the English language, I noticed that he was indeed not just a Lord, but as he once said of another, "The Lord of all larrikins with a wicked wit and a tongue that could clip a hedge." And perhaps his view of life was far more comedy than tragedy due to his vast intellect.

Lord Black studied his way to a history degree at Carleton University, a law degree from Laval and an MA from McGill.

In his 20s, Lord Black began buying small Canadian newspapers and, in 1971, he co-founded the Sterling Newspapers Group. In 1978, he became Chair of the Argus Corporation--a position he used as a launch-pad to start the Hollinger group. By the 1990s Hollinger controlled 60 per cent of Canadian newspaper titles, as well as hundreds of dailies in the U.S., England, Australia and Israel.

Lord Black became known for taking over newspapers and chopping away the fat causing these newspapers to often turn a profit within a year. So large was his appetite for newspapers that at one point he was the third-largest newspaper publisher in the world. At its peak in 1999, Hollinger had revenues of over $3 billion.

Lord Black has written several books, including an autobiography, a book about Maurice Duplessis and one about Franklin Roosevelt.

Conrad Black

Thank you very much Dr. Niles, John.

I think I owe you all a word of preliminary explanation. In what seemed like a good idea at the time, I followed up on an occasion where a number of us at this table were present last night at the home of someone at this table (I won't mention the name) and the evening continued to a prodigious hour. When I got in at three o'clock I sat down to write what I have in front of me here. My wife who does not normally go to bed early duly appeared in night attire (a very agreeable prospect I must say) and said, "What are you doing?" and I told her. She said, "Have you taken complete leave of your senses? Fortunately I won't be there but good luck to the people who are." She had another engagement.

I am particularly grateful that so many people have come out today for an address that is titled in what I can only describe in an unimaginative way. We have all had inflicted upon us countless opinionated statements on the general theme of the changing political face of Canada and that any of you have actually consented to hear another one is flattering. I put it to you that in fact for once the title is not misapplied. There are some very important changes in this country politically. I remember that Bruce Hutchinson for example every few years would devise some new way of saying that everything had changed and things were happening that never happened in Canada before and so on. That was, I guess, his job up to a point and he made a pretty convincing case for it, but really nothing much changed. But I think it is different now and if you allow me I will tell you why.

I may have to do something that is unutterably irritating and put on these glasses which out of sheer vanity I have to tell you are not prescription glasses and cost I think $8.

I'm going to make a couple of predictions.

First, I think we are going to have a steady return toward a two-party federal system for the first time in nearly a century since Henri Bourassa founded his Nationalist Party before the First World War.

And second, I think for the first time in nearly 50 years the principal political opposition to the federal government is going to come from the leader of the opposition and not from the premiers of the major provinces.

And finally there is a change in the status of this country in the world which will affect our politicians and affect I think the expectations of the public of those politicians.

If you will indulge me in a bit of sketchy history, I think almost all Canadians are at least generally aware that the country was strung together as a ribbon of settlements along the U.S. border following the failure of Lord Durham's united province of Canada which was a mechanism for assimilating the French Canadians. Most French Quebeckers I think at the time of Confederation, influential French Quebeckers, approved of Confederation not because they had any great enthusiasm for Canada but because they wished to be rid of this systematic attempt to assimilate them and they looked upon Canada, English Canada, as essentially a buffer zone between themselves and this huge English-speaking country of the United States, a "cordon sanitaire" if you will.

The Quebeckers and the Acadians had been abandoned by the French following military reverses and the original Ontarians were of course fugitives from revolutionary America. Nova Scotia was severed from New England and when Newfoundland eventually joined Canada it was after it had gone bankrupt as an autonomous dominion. So it was never going to be easy to produce a single political voice for such a disparate group of regions.

Now Sir John Macdonald managed of course extremely well and was a great statesman with a tariff policy and a railway policy linking these units together all within the imperial framework that is in some respects, as our president of the club said, continued in this organization.

I commend to those of you who haven't read them the comments at the time of Confederation when relevant legislation was put in the British Parliament by the then leader of the House of Commons Benjamin Disraeli who could never I think resist being fairly cynical about almost anything. Some of his comments on the future of Canada proved to be rather prescient although I don't imagine he spent a great deal of time thinking about them.

From the first election after Sir John Macdonald died in 1891, the federal Liberal Party effectively seized the federal government with a formula that kept it in office for 80 of the last 110 years from the first election of Sir Wilfrid Laurier in 1896 to the election of Stephen Harper earlier this year. And it was a similar formula to that employed by the Democratic Party in the United States under Jefferson and Jackson, which won 13 of the 15 presidential elections between 1800 and 1856. In the one case and the other what it consisted of essentially was that secession would not be tolerated in the case of the Americans by the South and in this country in Quebec. While it would not be permitted to secede it would be well served and the governing party would be their champion compared to the alternatives. It is preposterous for me to tell you all this, you know it, but I'm just setting the stage because if I'm going to say why I think the face of Canada is changing, I have to say what it was before. The Liberal Party did deliver well for Quebec and it did effectively fight the secessionist spirit in Quebec. I've stopped the comparison with the United States because obviously they took a different road and ended in a horrible war albeit one that resolved the secessionist question.

There is an acoustic problem. I've been invited to speak louder. That is a first for me.

The Liberal concentration on Quebec did help create western regional parties that felt that Quebec was over-indulged and it contributed to the fragmentation of the opposition as well as some Quebec parties that wanted more than Quebec was already receiving. There were ideological parties both to the right and to the left of the federal Liberals and in general all of this tendency to fragmentation was to the Liberal's advantage. They held office for more than 75 per cent of the time that elapsed from the rise of Sir Wilfrid to the retirement of Pierre Trudeau and the Liberal Party of Canada was the most successful national political party in the democratic world. It was a tremendous success story based chiefly on the formula that we are all familiar with that I have just referred to and Canada was in effect a one-and-a-half-party system.

The Conservatives and there are some very distinguished members of that party here today, former MPs and former candidates, will not I trust be offended when I say that the federal Conservative Party was generally a group of malcontents who were united only as far as I could ever discern by the fact that for some reason or another they weren't Liberals.

I put it to you that these conditions have ended because the status of Quebec no longer preoccupies this country as it did. This year is the first time in 38 years that we have gone more than a few months without a federal Quebec prime minister.

Most Canadians I think would agree that 60 years ago French Canadians did have some substantial grievances and I think, perhaps I'm being na•ve, most French Canadians would agree that over that time English-speaking Canada in general has made a reasonable effort to accommodate those grievances. In the 1930s one of Quebec's leading nationalists, Dr. Philippe Hamel, said, "Conquer us with goodwill my English-speaking compatriots. You will be astounded at the easy victory that awaits you." Well it was not an easy victory in fact and some of us, and there are a number in this category here today, who took the trouble to learn French and learn something about the history of Quebec, were not welcomed in our interest as we were assured by Le Devoir and other authoritative nationalist Quebec sources of opinion that we would be. It was widely suggested that bi-culturalism, once it was officially embraced in English Canada, was in fact an effort at assimilation and of course that was an unjust charge.

Maurice Duplessis, despite the obloquy that has been heaped upon him by largely Liberal Party mythology, was without question the most talented as well as the longest-serving premier in Quebec and said that the Quebec nationalists were like a 10-pound fish on a five-pound line and they had to be reeled in and let out very carefully and very slowly. And he said that he would quiet the nationalists for 10 years by giving Quebec a flag and for 10 years after that by opening a delegation in Paris and for 10 years after that with the World's Fair in Montreal and that is more or less what happened.

Duplessis and Jean Lesage and Daniel Johnson senior, René Lévesque, Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard were plausible Quebec leaders who in certain circumstances could have been imaginable as leaders of an emerging independent Quebec. But that is not the case with their successors. The present political leadership in Quebec is not believable in that role and in fact I don't think that Quebec has any serious grievances and I don't think most Quebeckers think that they have any serious grievances with Canada.

The new federal government largely led from Alberta is prepared to decentralize powers to some degree but not under threat and the jurisdictional ambitions of the main provinces it seems to me are now relatively similar and pursued with approximately equivalent determination. I'm happy to say that I think the chances are small that we will again be subjected to the regular spectacle we all recall of the heads of the provincial and federal governments celebrating more concessions to Quebec in the old railway station in Ottawa and then singing "O Canada" to us and then waiting for the proverbial decent interval before all the other provinces demanded in the interests of equal treatment exactly what they grudgingly supposedly conceded to Quebec. I don't think we are going to have to go around that track again.

In days when my relations with Jean Chretien were more cordial and less monosyllabic than they are now, I urged that the Clarity Act as it was being brought forward include the provision that in the event of a "yes" vote on a secession issue in any province, any county of that province that voted "no" be deemed to have seceded from the province and remain in the country. He was not prepared to go that far but I think that the Clarity Act as passed has made a tremendously important contribution to resolving this problem.

Quebec separatists could never get close to 50 per cent in a referendum or any poll without what amounted to a trick question where they would retain most of the benefits of Confederation while exchanging embassies with all the countries of the world. It was the constitutional equivalent of eating the cake and still having it in front of you. It was essentially a fraud and they can't do it again. There's a demographic component to this as well. When the first overtly separatist votes were cast in a Quebec election in 1962, the French-Canadians comprised 31 per cent of federal MPs and approximately the same share of the population of the whole country. The combination of the reduced birthrate in French Quebec and immigration patterns has reduced that figure to about 23 per cent.

Because 95 per cent of Canadians live within 100 miles of the U.S. border and it is in fact very difficult even for any of us to distinguish a Canadian from an American from a northern state, Canada's identity crisis has been a lengthy one and the ambivalence of Quebec aggravated it. To most Canadians the British connection distinguished Canada from the United States until after the Second World War. Our chairman of the club referred to this club being founded in 1903 and it was representative of that strong sentiment.

There was the brief moment around the centenary of Confederation of the rise of Trudeau when it was proposed that bi-culturalism was a key to Canada's distinctiveness compared to the U.S. This proved not to be as popular in either English or French Canada as its espousers had hoped, and it swiftly gave way to the related view informally propagated by Trudeau himself that Canada was a kinder and gentler society than the United States, which in practice meant more socialistic. It started relatively innocuously with universal medical care and rather rigorous notions of gun control, but it extended well beyond that quite quickly. This was an easier idea to sell at that time when the United States was enmeshed in the Vietnam War and had severe racial disturbances in many of its cities. But it masked the principal anti-separatist activity of the federal government, which was the transfer of money from the wealthiest to less wealthy parts of the country and specifically to Quebec. Once Trudeau confused the Quebec nationalists which he did very artfully by saying that there should be an end to this, as he described it, squalid debate between politicians about the rights of different jurisdictions and the focus should be on the rights of individual citizens which dumbfounded the Quebec nationalists for a time.

It was only a short step after that to regional economic equality and equality of public services throughout the country, which accorded all the cover that was necessary for vast transfers of money around the country. At a practical level it raised but did not admit the impossibility of bringing resources to people because obviously people have to go to resources but separatists aren't always outwitted by practicality. Quebec's adherence to the federal state was in some considerable measure acquired but it was never officially costed by Trudeau or by Brian Mulroney and was masked by the national raison d'tre of institutionalized generosity that supposedly helped to distinguish us from the United States.

This official practice of collecting large amounts of money from people in provinces where they were generated and redistributing them to other people was intellectually justified as part of a charitable national aptitude and practically justified as necessary to national unity. The policy tended to legitimize and reinforce the long-held view that political trends were steadily to the left. The precursor of the NDP, the CCF, some of you will recall used to call themselves Liberals in a hurry. It was assumed that all movement was gradually and inexorably to the left. Yet whenever Mackenzie King was in need of a boost in a tight election, he would produce some new social measure such as the baby bonus in the middle of the 1945 election campaign which helped him come back with a majority.

But the drift in western public policy has not been to the left for the last 25 years. It was prolonged in that direction in this country because of the perceived need, let us be frank about it, to buy the adherence of a large region of the country.

It is not clear to me that the federal Liberal Party is still moving left and if it is it is not clear that the country is moving with it. And the NDP no longer has any claim to being a bell weather much less a wave of the future.

I predict that before the New Democrats cease to call themselves "New" nearly half a century after they were founded, it will become steadily more difficult to explain the purpose of the NDP as a distinct party. I personally doubt if Bob Rae was the highest NDP office holder in Canada's history as premier of Ontario. I personally doubt that he will be the next Liberal leader although I wish him well personally (I like him as a man) but I think he will be a representative leader in bringing in a large number of his former fellow New Democrats to an important and influential niche within the Liberal Party.

The Bloc Québécois is a levitation. It was always nonsense to have an official opposition dedicated to secession from the Parliament where it sat. It was one of the ludicrous anomalies of the era of crisis of federal institutions in this country. In the last general election all three national party leaders spoke French perfectly passably. No sane Quebecker in my opinion believes that Quebec really would be better off without Canada or that Canada oppresses Quebec or that the current provincial leadership of Quebec will be taken seriously by anyone if it purported to secede. The fact that the Conservative Party with no Quebec organization rose so quickly during the last campaign I think shows us the way forward.

For the first time in Canadian history the Liberal Party ran third in Quebec. Plainly the transitory irritation of Adscam, the final manifestation I put it to you of the policy of buying Quebec's affections for Canada, maintained the Bloc vote. Quebec does not wish to be without influence in the federal government and is certainly not accustomed to such a deprived status. The Bloc is a complete anachronism.

I referred earlier to Maurice Duplessis. He said to Paul-ƒmile Cardinal Léger, "If you squeeze a fish hard enough it will get away." He was referring to church matters. Something like that happened to the church in Quebec and something similar I think may happen to the Quebec Liberal Party. The Quebec Liberal Party squeezed that fish too hard. There is no doubt that Quebec was a priest-ridden society in 1960 but the cold revolution of the Liberals resulted primarily in the same people operating the same schools and hospitals for the benefit of the same population at 10 times the cost to the taxpayers because they ceased to be clerical personnel. Secularism had its rewards of course but the Quebec Liberal Party has oversold itself for too long. At least it represents a valid series of policy options and is capable of governing Quebec and Canada.

The Bloc Québécois, as I said, I think will not last as long nor is it as distinguishably led as was the Bloc populaire of the 1940s. Because the Liberal Party had such a reliable formula for winning elections, it generated regional resentments against this Toronto Ottawa Quebec basis of the federal government. And because Quebec rarely liked to put all its political eggs in the same basket it generally sought a strong provincial government.

From the last election of Sir John Macdonald to the election as party leader of Brian Mulroney, the federal Conservatives had 17 leaders compared to five for the federal Liberals all of whom were prime minister at one point or another, in fact for most of their careers as leaders.

The Liberals governed in Ottawa for 71 of the 88 years prior to Brian Mulroney's election as prime minister and the real leaders of the opposition most of that time were usually the premiers of Quebec and Ontario and Alberta--Taschereau, Duplessis, Mitchell Hepburn, Frost, Aberhart, Manning, Lesage, Daniel Johnson senior, John Robarts, and others. The whole concept of equalization payments was devised by Mr. St. Laurent in 1955. When Duplessis told him that Quebec was going to assert its concurrent right to direct taxes and impose a provincial income tax and if the federal government did not credit that on federal tax returns for the Quebec citizens, then double taxation would be the issue in the coming federal and provincial elections in Quebec. At that point the federal Liberal Party discovered the virtues of equalization payments.

Regional identification has been strong in various parts of this country for a long time and the official opposition as I've mentioned and as we all know was at times severely fragmented as a result of it and in those periods the give and take in a democracy is apt to be between jurisdictions rather than in the federal legislature.

For the reasons that I've mentioned, I think the conditions that gave rise to very powerful provincial governments no longer attain. I believe that Canada's system, and I do want to emphasize this, served it well through very difficult times. It was not easy to govern Canada. The historian W.L. Morton referred to Canada many years ago as a country strong only in moderation and governable only by compromise. Rarely even in world wars did English and French Canada and the East and West see great public issues the same way. Our system was often boring and was often infested with self-important and mediocre people, but the negotiations were always in good faith and it got us through a terribly difficult time and is nothing to be ashamed of.

This brings me to what you will be relieved to be reassured is my last point. Most Canadians my age were brought up to believe that Canada was as Mr. Diefenbaker used to repeat at every opportunity a middle power. We were conditioned to believe that it was our lot in the international community to tug the trouser leg of the United States or the British or even the French. That's when General De Gaulle repaid our contribution of an entire Canadian army to the liberation of France in 1944 by coming to this country and urging Quebec to secede from Canada in 1967.

Sophisticated economies like ours were deemed to be those that manufactured successfully. Resource-driven economies were hewers of wood and drawers of water. All this has changed. As the threat to Canada's unity has evaporated, the strength of its economy has greatly increased and there are many people in the room who know more about it than I do. All but the most technically advanced manufacturing is now generally outsourced to low-cost countries and with six to 10-per-cent economic growth rates in China and India covering more than a third of the people of the world all of our natural resources are in relentlessly increasing demand.

As currently priced we have among the greatest oil reserves of any country in the world but the entire country is a treasure-house--base metals, precious metals, forest products, energy, agriculture. It is an enviable situation and the impact of it is becoming clearer all the time.

There are now 191 member states in the United Nations and Canada is geopolitically among the 10 most important of them. We don't think of ourselves that way but it is true. Canada today is more important to the world and I say this with great deference to my friend at this table, more important to the world than Italy.

Canada has the resources to be a serious influence in the world and the political stability to ensure that that influence is positive and effective. Canada can now afford to be as socially generous as it has been and reduce taxes to a level that is competitive with the United States. It doesn't any more have to make that choice. This is a tremendous breakthrough, a tremendous step forward for this country. And the correlation of forces with the traditional great powers has also changed.

Most of Europe is effectively politically dyspeptic; it has collapsed birthrates and largely stagnate economies. The Soviet Union of course has crumbled and the United States is of course still the greatest economic and military and popular cultural power in the world but it has all its ground forces military capacity now engaged in an apparently somewhat intractable situation in Iraq and it is running a steady $800-billion annual current account deficit. It can't go on like this and as long as it does, as long as both those factors continue, the United States has very little disposable political influence in the world compared to what it could have and has and doubtless will have again.

Stephen Harper and the leading Liberal contenders are I think all relatively thoughtful and imaginative politicians. The United Nations is a shambles. NATO is in complete disarray. The Coalition of the Willing is an absolute fraud and everybody knows it's a fraud. There's much to be done and Canada without exaggerating our potential could be an influence in the world. It could exercise an influence that Canada sought but did not achieve in our days as a professional peace-keeper and middle power. We must not let it go to our heads but Canada is by many measurements and by imminent potential one of the world's great powers and I think we should get used to it and I think the prospect is very agreeable.

Thank you very much.

The appreciation of the meeting was expressed by Don McCutchan, Partner and International Policy Advisor, Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP, and Second Vice-President, The Empire Club of Canada.