Prime Boneheads

I mean, Prime Ministers. Oh, whatever. Looking ahead to 2011 and a potential federal election, here are four book reviews originally published in Quill & Quire that look backward as we look forward.

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Prime Ministers: Ranking Canada’s Leaders
by J.L. Granatstein and Norman Hillmer
Bastards & Boneheads: Our Glorious Leaders, Past and Present
by Will Ferguson
(from the November 1999 issue)

Egotists and Autocrats: The Prime Ministers of Canada
by George Bowering
(from the September 1999 issue)

Memos to the Prime Minister: What Canada Could Be in the 21st Century
by Harvey Schachter, ed.
(from the September 2001 issue)

Repeat after me. Canadian history isn’t boring; Canadian historians are boring. Most of them, anyway. As Will Ferguson amply illustrates in his survey of Canada’s glorious leaders past and present, Bastards & Boneheads, the history of the European invasion of the northern half of this continent has just as much drama, conflict, and intrigue as the self-narrative of those deluded followers of manifest destiny to the south of us. Canada has long been a country in need of a storyteller. And Ferguson is an apt one.

First, however, let’s size up the opposition, represented here by J.L. Granatstein and Norman Hillmer’s expanded top 20 list titled Prime Ministers: Ranking Canada’s Leaders. Granatstein has been making the rounds lately decrying how little Canadian high schoolers know about their nation’s history. He does his cause little service here, however, despite using the Chatelaine-like technique of listing the PMs in order of greatness. If only he had called Chatelaine and asked their advice! Surely a survey of the sex lives of our PMs would have done more to focus the minds of teenagers on the significance of leadership in national affairs (no pun intended).

Whereas the nature of Granatstein’s and Hillmer’s exercise limits them to the country’s leaders from Confederation to the present, Ferguson casts a wider net. His narrative begins with the arrival of the first French colonialists (1604) and includes chapters on glorious leaders like Chief Tecumseh, Lord Durham, Louis Riel, and the suffragettes. Ferguson scores here, since his survey of winners and losers includes not only those sanctioned powerful by Parliament, but those who exercised influence in other jurisdictions.

The decision by Granatstein and Hillmer to focus on parliamentary leadership leads them to interpret Canadian history through the challenges faced by our PMs; mainly, how to govern a large, underpopulated country prone to regional conflicts and struggling to wean itself from one empire (British) while avoiding being sucked up into another (American). This is narrative with interesting but familiar features. For example, it raises the eternal spectre of Canada’s collapse, either from inside or from without. On the one hand, we have the War of 1812 and Free Trade. On the other, Canada’s PMs have done battle with openly separatist movements in Quebec and Nova Scotia and sought means to pacify Western idealists from before Riel to the present day.

Ferguson adopts a less conventional view: “If we are good, if we are very, very good, we [Canadians] may one day become Acadians.” The Acadians (remember them?) were French settlers in Nova Scotia for 100-odd years until most of them were forcibly expelled by British military thugs in 1755. A few remained; many were deported to the then-French colony of Louisiana; some managed to return to the Bay of Fundy area and settle in what is now Canada’s only officially bilingual province, New Brunswick. Ferguson presents the Acadians as victims of history who nonetheless overcame the odds and remained big-hearted and prosperous. They are a model for the rest of us. In Ferguson’s view, if Quebec faced facts it would see it has nurtured a victim narrative out of proportion to the details of the past. If English Canada faced facts, it would see the plan to assimilate the First Nations was a disaster; it took too long for women to get the vote; Canada’s failure to accept Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany was one of the nation’s darkest hours. None of these events figure prominently in the book by Granatstein and Hillmer. They were not priorities of Canada’s PMs, and they are not the priorities of Canada’s leading historians. How boring – and unfortunate.

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Egotists and Autocrats: The Prime Ministers of Canada
by George Bowering
(from the September 1999 issue)

Not so many years ago, when Brian Mulroney led this country into yet another of his misbegotten constitutional adventures, The Globe and Mail ran an editorial reminding readers that Canada was a country-in-progress. We all know that Canada was “born” on July 1, 1867, but was it really? Perhaps it started a few years earlier with the merger of Upper and Lower Canada. Perhaps it began on the Plains of Abraham. Perhaps things didn’t really get started until Trudeau brought home the constitution in 1982.

For over 100 years Canada has been asserting its independence, George Bowering tells us in his thorough and amusing survey of our usually illustrious prime ministers. And similar issues come up again and again. Will Canada send troops to fight Imperial wars? Will Canada get its own navy? What about its own flag? Will Canada embrace Free Trade or a home-grown economic policy? Can Ottawa expropriate provincial land so the Americans can test their latest super-duper torpedoes? The questions never cease.

In Bowering’s view, Canada has never been led so much as watched over. Our prime ministers have suffered the thankless task of overseeing a vast underpopulated land ready to be torn apart by regional lunatics or swallowed up by Imperial so-called friends: mainly, Britain and/or the U.S. You can almost see Bowering’s wry smile as he recounts the struggle of various PMs to balance the country’s competing interests. Mulroney didn’t invent East/West conflict, he only perfected it, and he left the country, as Bowering says, with “Laurier’s nightmare.”

It’s a pity that Mulroney will likely never share Bowering’s view of history, wherein the patterns repeat and those who try to “fix” the intersecting gears are quickly ground to dust. With the country now full of me-firsters and other assorted Mulroney-spawn, it’s left for us to hope that Bowering’s book will prove a useful antidote to the poisonous spores that still drift about the land.

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Memos to the Prime Minister: What Canada Could Be in the 21st Century
by Harvey Schachter, ed.
(from the September 2001 issue)

Canadians dissatisfied with the lack of discussion of clear public policy alternatives during last fall’s federal election campaign can rejoice at the arrival of this new resource. In Memos to the Prime Minister, Harvey Schachter has compiled over two dozen messages for our leader from some of Canada’s top businesspeople and thinkers.

The writers fire advice at Mr. Chretien from the left, the right, and numerous points in between, leaving readers to wonder what direction the PM will move in. Perhaps he’ll prefer to sit in the middle weighing his options. Bob Rae begins his memo claiming this quiet approach “would be a great mistake. There is much to be done.”

Schachter asked the contributors to be prescriptive, so it is not surprising that the writers follow Rae in urging the Prime Minister to do more, more, more. Cut more taxes. Increase program spending. Innovate health care by providing individuals with their own “health care dollars” accounts. Innovate health care by focusing on quality management systems. Save the environment through tougher regulations. Save the environment by letting the free market rule.

After reading Memos, readers will no longer wonder where the public policy debate has gone in the country. They are more likely to question why the biggest issue the opposition parties can think to raise in Parliament is the PM’s financial relationship to a hotel beside a golf course.

What’s missing from this collection? Artists and church folk. Groups like the Canadian Council of Bishops and the Mennonite Central Committee make policy recommendations to the government all the time. It is strange that their voices are not heard here. Artists also have points to make. It is sad that their ideas to remain unacknowledged.