Scott W. See. The History of Canada. Second Edition

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Smallwood’s Argument for

Confederation

Joey Smallwood was one of the most colorful and eccentric political

figures of twentieth-century Canada. His rationale for supporting

Newfoundland’s confederation with Canada was repeatedly made

during two grueling referendums on the future of the province in

1948. The following document comes from Smallwood’s autobio-

graphy, which he fittingly titled I Chose Canada. His self-assurance,

never in short supply during his political career, comes through

clearly in the pages of his autobiography. Note also his appeal to

Newfoundlanders to see the benefits of becoming a part of Canada’s

growing number of social programs in the postwar era.

I was going to bring Newfoundland and Canada together as one

country. I was going to get the National Convention to ask Canada to

state the terms and conditions of Newfoundland’s entry in the

Confederation. . . .

Our people had no notion at all of what Confederation was or what

it meant. They had no conception of a federal system of government.

Their only experience of government was what they had had before

the coming of the Commission system. In Newfoundland up to this

time, one Government alone . . .had performed all the functions of

government that in most other countries were performed by federal,

provincial or state, municipal, county or other forms of local

administration. . . .

Joseph R. Smallwood, I Chose Canada (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1973),

226–228.

Smallwood’s Argument for Confederation 357

It was to people whose knowledge and experience of government

was so simply defined that I undertook to explain the complexities of

Confederation; and not merely to explain, but to convince them of its

rightness for them—a mammoth task!

[Our arguments] enabled them to understand how it could be that,

under Confederation, a province would have its own elected

Provincial Government, to handle purely local matters, while at the

same time there would be a great Central Government at Ottawa that

would coordinate national affairs for all the provinces. This Central

or Federal Government would be answerable to the Parliament of

Canada, just as the local Provincial Government would be answer-

able to the Provincial House of Assembly. Each Legislature and each

Government would have its duties and rights clearly spelled out. And,

I used to say triumphantly, Newfoundlanders, like the people in the

other nine provinces, would have the right to elect that Parliament of

all Canada and would be represented in it by their own Members of

Parliament and their own Senators. In addition—a fact that appealed

to so many people then—Newfoundlanders, besides paying Cana-

dian federal taxes to the Federal Government of Canada, would share

in the huge amounts that this Government paid out to individual

provinces! I drove home, repeatedly and endlessly, the fact that there

were “have” and “have-not” provinces, that Newfoundland would

be one of the have-nots, and that therefore we would receive from

Ottawa far, far more than we contributed.

358 Smallwood’s Argument for Confederation

Diefenbaker and Nuclear

Weapons

Prime Minister Diefenbaker’s attempts to define a Canadian role in

the Cold War led to significant problems for his administration; they

also illustrated the delicate balance the country faced as it tried to

support its superpower ally and still maintain enough distance from

the United States’ more unpopular policies. The question of nuclear

weapons on Canadian soil represented an especially thorny dilemma

for Canadians in the early 1960s. The following passages, which

come from the House of Commons Debates in late January 1963,

clarify Diefenbaker’s defense of his decision to alter Canada’s original

agreement with the United States to arm Bomarc anti-aircraft missiles

with nuclear warheads.

During 1958 the Canadian government studied intensively the arms

required by Canadian forces in modern circumstances, and we

reached the decision we would provide aircraft for the purposes of

NATO. At that time I made it perfectly clear . . .that those forces

would have to be equipped, in order to be fully effective, with

defensive nuclear weapons if and when the need arose. That was

recognized in taking the decision that was announced in September,

1958, to install Bomarc anti-aircraft missiles in Canada. . . .

Every now and then some new white hope of rocketry goes into the

scrap pile. We established the Bomarc, the two units. They are

effective over an area of only a few hundred miles. People talk about

J.L. Granatstein, ed., Canadian Foreign Policy Since 1945: Middle Power or

Satellite? (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1970), 119, 120, 123, 125.

Diefenbaker and Nuclear Weapons 359

change. Who would have thought three years ago that today the fear

would be an attack with intercontinental ballistic missiles? This

program cost Canada some $14 million. The United States put up the

major portion of the total cost. I do not want to repeat, but it is

necessary to do so, that with the advent more and more into

intercontinental ballistic missiles the bomber carrier is less and less

the threat that it was.

So what should we do? Should we carry on with what we have done in

the past, merely for the purpose of saying, “Well, we stated, and having

started and having proceeded, we will continue”? Should we do this in an

area where mistakes are made? . . . More and more the nuclear deterrent

is becoming of such a nature that more nuclear arms will add nothing

materially to our defences. Greater and greater emphasis must be placed

on conventional arms and conventional forces. We in Canada took the

lead in that connection. . . .

What course should we take at this time? I emphasize what I have

already stated, that we shall at all times carry out whatever our

responsibilities are. I have said that strategic changes are taking place

in the thinking of the western world, and there is a general

recognition that the nuclear deterrent will not be strengthened by

the expansion of the nuclear family. With these improvements in the

international situation, this is no time for hardened decisions that

cannot be altered. We must be flexible and fluid, for no one can

anticipate what Khrushchev will do. . . .[W]e are living in a new and

changing world of defence realism. . . .

Canada has a proud record. . . .All of us should be true Canadians

when facing a problem that touches the heartstrings of each and every

one of us. My prayer is that we will be directed in this matter. Some

may ridicule that belief on my part. I believe that the western world has

been directed by God in the last few years, or there would have been no

survival. I believe that will continue. My prayer is that we shall so live

as to maintain not only the integrity of Canada and its high reputation

by carrying out our responsibilities, but at the same time that we will be

right, that the Canadian people will be able to say that, whatever

decision is made, it was made with every consideration being given to

all those moral and psychological things that form one’smake-up.

360 Diefenbaker and Nuclear Weapons

Recommendations of the

Massey Re port

In the late 1940s the federal government created a commission to

explore the current state of Canadian culture and to make

recommendations for its future development. Chaired by the well-

known diplomat, Vincent Massey, the Royal Commission on

National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences issued a

detailed report of its findings in 1951. The report was responsible for

laying the groundwork either to improve or to create a wide range of

government-sponsored agencies in the following decades. These

included federal aid for students, the Canada Council for the

encouragement of arts, letters, humanities, and social sciences, the

National Gallery, the National Library, archives, the National Film

Board, and numerous museums. Excerpts of that report, which

attempted to define Canadian culture and suggested ways to ensure

its survival in the modern world, are presented below.

Our task has been neither modest in scope nor simple in character.

The subjects with which we have dealt cover the entire field of letters,

the arts and sciences within the jurisdiction of the federal state. But

although numerous and varied they are all parts of one whole. Our

concern throughout was with the needs and desires of the citizen in

relation to science, literature, art, music, the drama, films, broad-

casting. In accordance with our instructions we examined also

R. Douglas Francis and Donald B. Smith, eds., Readings in Canadian History:

Post-Confederation (Toronto: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston of Canada, 1982),

526, 533, 544, 545.

Recommendations of the Massey Report 361

research as related to the national welfare, and considered what the

Federal Government might do in the development of the individual

through scholarships and bursaries. Such an inquiry as we have been

asked to make is probably unique; it is certainly unprecedented in

Canada. . . .

Canadians, with their customary optimism, may think that the fate

of their civilization is in their own hands. So it is. But this young

nation, struggling to be itself, must shape its course with an eye to

three conditions so familiar that their significance can too easily be

ignored. Canada has a small and scattered population in a vast area;

this population is clustered along the rim of another country many

times more populous and of far greater economic strength; a majority

of Canadians share their mother tongue with that neighbour, which

leads to peculiarly close and intimate relations. One or two of these

conditions will be found in many modern countries. But Canada

alone possesses all three. What is their effect, good or bad, on what

we call Canadianism? ....

But the institutions, the movements, the activities we have examined

share something more than a purpose; they suffer in common from

lack of nourishment. No appraisal of our intellectual or cultural life

can leave one complacent or even content. If modern nations were

marshaled in the order of the importance which they assign to those

things with which this inquiry is concerned, Canada would be found

far from the vanguard; she would even be near the end of the

procession. . . .

It seems to us that two things are essential to restore in Canada the

balance between the attention we pay to material achievements and

to the other less tangible but more enduring parts of our civilization.

The first must be of course the will of our people to enrich and to

quicken their cultural and intellectual life; our inquiry has made clear

that this will is earnest and widespread among our fellow-citizens.

The second essential is money. If we in Canada are to have a more

plentiful and better cultural fare, we must pay for it. Good will alone

can do little for a starving plant; if the cultural life of Canada is

anaemic, it must be nourished, and this will cost money. This is a task

for shared effort in all fields of government, federal, provincial and

local.

362 Recommendations of the Massey Report

A Voice of the New Quebec

The Quiet Revolution affected virtually every aspect of life in Quebec.

In addition to the social, religious, and educational changes that

became synonymous with its transformative impact, it reinvigorated

the old question of the nature of the province’s relationship with

Canada. A number of politicians, including René Lévesque, put their

efforts into building an argument for fundamentally changing

Quebec’s ties to Canada. The following selection, published in 1968,

comes from Lévesque’s exposition of a plan that would quickly evolve

into the sovereignty-association movement.

Now, in the last few years we have indeed made some progress along

this difficult road of “catching up,” the road which leads to the

greater promise of our age.

At least enough progress to know that what comes next depends

only on ourselves and on the choices that only we can make. . . .

On this road where there can be no more stopping are a number of

necessary tasks which must be attended to without delay. Neglecting

them would endanger the impetus we have acquired, perhaps it

would slow it down irreparably.

And here we encounter a basic difficulty which has become more

and more acute in recent years. It is created by the political regime

under which we have lived for over a century.

We are a nation within a country where there are two nations. For

all the things we mentioned earlier, using words like “individuality,”

“history,”“society,” and ”people,” are also the things one includes

René Lévesque, An Option for Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968),

18, 20–21.

A Voice of the New Quebec 363

under the word “nation.” It means nothing more than the collective

will to live that belongs to any national entity likely to survive.

Two nations in a single country: this means, as well, that in fact

there are two majorities, two “complete societies” quite distinct from

each other trying to get along within a common framework. That this

number puts us in a minority position makes no difference; just as a

civilized society will never condemn a little man to feel inferior beside

a bigger man, civilized relations among nations demand that they

treat each other as equals in law and in fact.

Now we believe it to be evident that the hundred-year-old

framework of Canada can hardly have any effect other than to

create increasing difficulties between the two parties insofar as their

mutual respect and understanding are concerned, as well as impeding

the changes and progress so essential to both.

It is useless to go back over the balance sheet of the century just

past, listing the advantages it undoubtedly has brought us and the

obstacles and injustices it even more unquestionably has set in our

way.

The important thing for today and for tomorrow is that both sides

realize that this regime has had its day, and that it is a matter of

urgency either to modify it profoundly or to build a new one.

As we are the ones who have put up with its main disadvantages, it

is natural that we also should be in the greatest hurry to be rid of it;

the more so because it is we who are menaced most dangerously by its

current paralysis.

364 A Voice of the New Quebec

The Underside of

Canadian Society

At the same time that Canadians were celebrating their stature as a

leading industrialized nation with progressive ideals, critics were

uncovering evidence that pointed to the country’s profound social

and economic inequities. One landmark scholarly study of the 1960s,

John Porter’s Vertical Mosaic, tackled one of the most tenacious

Canadian myths: that the country was classless and thus essentially

egalitarian. Through the lens of sociological methodology, Porter

discovered persistent inequities based on ethnic identification; he

suggested that class might indeed exist in Canada. Porter’s

provocative work triggered a generation of debate among scholars.

Excerpts from the introduction and conclusion to his work should

suffice to give the reader a sense of the context of his work and of his

major conclusions.

One of the most persistent images that Canadians have of their

society is that is has no classes. This image becomes translated into

the assertion that Canadians are all relatively equal in their

possessions, in the amount of money they earn, and in the

opportunities which they and their children have to get on in the

world. An important element in this image of classlessness is that,

with the absence of formal aristocracy and aristocratic institutions,

Canada is a society in which equalitarian values have asserted

John Porter, The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in

Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 3, 4, 6, 557, 558. Reprinted

with permission of the publisher.

The Underside of Canadian Society 365

themselves over authoritarian values. Canada, it is thought, shares

not only a continent with the United States, but also a democratic

ideology which rejects the historical class and power structures of

Europe. . . .

The historical source of the image of a classless Canada is the

equality among pioneers in the frontier environment of the last

century. In the early part of the present century there was a similar

equality of status among those who were settlers in the west,

although, as we shall see, these settlers were by no means treated

equally. . . .

Although the historical image of rural equality lingers it has

gradually given way in the urban industrial setting to an image of a

middle level classlessness in which there is a general uniformity of

possessions. . . .Modern advertising has done much to standardize the

image of middle class consumption levels and middle class behavior.

Consumers’ magazines are devoted to the task of constructing the

ideal way of life through articles on childrearing, homemaking,

sexual behaviour, health, sports, and hobbies.

That there is neither very rich nor very poor in Canada is an

important part of the image. There are no barriers to opportunity.

Education is free. Therefore, making use of it is largely a question of

personal ambition.

Images which conflict with the one of middle class equality rarely

find expression, partly because the literate middle class is both the

producer and the consumer of the image. Even at times in what

purports to be serious social analysis, middle class intellectuals

project the image of their own class onto the social classes above and

below them. There is scarcely any critical analysis of Canadian social

life upon which a conflicting image could be based. The idea of class

differences has scarcely entered the stream of Canadian academic

writing despite the fact that class differences stand in the way of

implementing one of the most important values of western society,

that is equality. . . .

Canada, it may be concluded from the evidence . . .has a long way to

go to become in any sense a thorough-going democracy. . . .Even into

the 1960’s Canadian educational systems have yet to become

democratized through to the university level. The possibilities for

upward social mobility are reduced, and, at the same time, shortages

of highly trained people for the new occupational structure continue.

366 The Underside of Canadian Society