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Article Excerpt
Abstract
This article identifies five waves of Canadian immigration over four centuries and connects them with their dominant political outlooks and partisan expressions. Taking a panoramic historical perspective, it locates immigrant groups in their regionally concentrated settings and connects Old and New World ideological currents. Immigrants proved to Se formative and continuing influences in Canadian party politics by establishing and sustaining parties identifiable today. Ripples within the immigrant waves meant that their ideological orientations were neither monolithic nor static. Some of the immigrant groups in the first four waves were charter ones; they determined what other groups would be admitted and they established political parties that are identifiable today. The fifth wave, coming since the Second World War, has not ideologically reoriented party politics nor created new parties, but it has compelled the established parties to reorient themselves to and accommodate its presence. Political personalities and newspapers are presented as reflectors of their wave's ideological bias. Differentials in the political participation in the fifth, or global, wave are noted.
Resume
Dans cet article nous identifions cinq vagues d'immigration au Canada en quatre siecles et faisons le lien avec les points de vue ideologiques et expressions partisanes de chacune d'entre elles. Une perspective panoramique et historique permet de localiser les groupes d'immigrants dans les regions ou ils se sont concentres et de voir le lien entre les courants ideologiques de l'ancien et du nouveau monde. Ces groupes ont effectivement eu une influence formative continue sur les politiques des partis au Canada en creant en soutenant des partis qui existent encore aujourd'hui. Plusieurs cascades d'immigration indiquent que leurs orientations ideologiques n'etaient ni monolithiques, ni statiques. Certains immigrants au sein des quatre premieres vagues furent des fondateurs qui determinerent quels autres groupes seraient admis et qui mirent sur pied des partis politiques encore identifiables aujourd'hui. La cinquieme vague, arrivee depuis la seconde guerre mondiale, n'a pas reoriente ideologiquement la politique des partis ni n'en a cree de nouveaux, mais elle a amene ceux qui etaient etablis a s'ajuster et a s'accommoder a sa presence. Des personnalites politiques et des journaux refleteront les biais ideologiques de chacune de ces vagues. On remarquera des differences dans la participation politique de la cinquieme vague, et son caractere international.
INTRODUCTION
This article identifies five waves of Canadian immigration over four centuries and connects them with their dominant political outlooks and partisan expressions. It identifies ideological-cultural clefts in Canadian politics and traces them to the country's immigrant settlement patterns. It is a broad conceptual piece that uses historical findings to draw out points of similarity and difference across historical eras. This panoramic treatment links Old and New World politics, locating specific immigrant groups in their regionally concentrated settings. The five waves, respectively, are: New France's canadiens in the seventeenth century; the Loyalist decampment following the American Revolution in the eighteenth century; an early modern, largely British, flood into Upper Canada in the first half of the nineteenth century; the mix of Britons, Americans, and continental European prairie pioneers at the turn of the twentieth century; and that motley polyphonic wave from around the globe settling in Metro Canada in the past half-century. The ideological orientations of these waves were neither monolithic nor static. This article points to their formative and continuing influences on Canadian party politics. Some of the immigrant groups in the first four waves were charter ones; they determined what other groups would be admitted and what they would do (Porter 1965, 60, 63). They established political parties that are identifiable today. The fifth wave is a Charter one in that its diversity helped to impel the equality and multicultural provisions of the Charter of Rights. This wave influenced public policy and changed the face of public administration. It transformed English Canada's older perception of itself as a British nation. Political parties had to accommodate this wave and reorient themselves to its presence.
To be sure, one may identify an even earlier immigrant group, Canada's First Nations. They came to the land in the distant past. Diverse tribes speaking different languages, steeped in different cultural traditions, were spread across the continent. Indigenous peoples' political orientations stand apart from those of other immigrant groups as they exhibit a predilection for political decision-making by consensus, respect for authorities and elders, disapprove of intense egoism, and are intensely spiritual. Collectively, aboriginals generally pursue harmony, non-interference, persuasion, and unanimity (Brock 1994).
THE FRENCH WAVE
New France received no more than 10,000 settlers between its foundation in 1608 and Conquest in 1759. After 1681, only a trickle arrived, although the importation of young girls, incentives for procreation and disincentives for bachelorhood, boosted the colony's numbers to 55,000 by 1754 (McRae 1964, 225-7; Lower 1958, 34). By 2001, there were nearly seven million or 23 percent of Canadians reporting French as their mother tongue (Statistics Canada 2001). French Canadians have more than survived; they have thrived. The genesis of their enduring cultural welfare and constitutional status is traceable to Britain's Quebec Act of 1774. Their civil law was recognized and, although they were Catholic, they were permitted to participate in public affairs unlike the case in Britain at the time. In recent decades, federal and provincial policies have promoted the French language and parliament has recognized the quebecois--those living in the only North American jurisdiction where the French language prevails--as a "nation" (Canada 2006, 5412). An ironic upshot is that, outside Quebec, the use of French shrank after governments became active in its cause. In contrast, French usage grew when the language was suppressed in provincial educational systems (McRoberts 1997, 103-6; Wiseman 1992). More harmful to the cultures of French Canadians and their language have been urbanization, intermarriage, a lower birth rate, the eclipse of the extended family, mass communications, advances in transportation, increased mobility, and the declericalization of their society.
New France was a consciously modeled cultural fragment of its European parent. Religious orthodoxy was a condition of migration to Canada in the context of a semi-feudal and moderately absolutist state. The landowning seigneurs monopolized political and economic power before the Conquest. After it and the return of most of the seigniorial class to France, the clergy rose to the fore, controlling the educational and spiritual spheres. No printing press existed throughout the French colonial period. In this, the colony contrasted with pre-revolutionary British North America, which served as a place of refuge for religious and political dissenters.
To be a French Canadian until the 1960's Quiet Revolution was to be a pre-Enlightenment, pre-liberal, Catholic in a collectivist society that defined itself as hierarchical, organic, cooperative, and authoritatively ordered. There is dispute regarding the economic retardation of Quebec after the Conquest (Rudin 1997; Ouelette 1980), but there is little disagreement regarding its mentalite collective. The New World's challenging frontier environment helped level the conditions of seigneur and habitant so that the former could not access all the perks of his European counterpart and the latter's status was not as low as the French peasant's. Catholic-centred collectivism fed an ideological orientation where obligations-tithing, praying, obeying--preceded rights and where duty (exemplified in the press title Le Devoir) had primacy over freedom. Long after the Conquest of 1760, New France's idealized past--the moral goodness and superiority of its faith and rural lifestyle--continued to be promulgated. Lionel Groulx, the priest and long the province's foremost historian and nationalist, was fond of citing reactionary dicta, assuming the Christian resignation of a de Maistre rather than the rationalist liberal bent of a Rousseau or Voltaire. There were liberal streaks in quebecois political culture--the 1837 rebellion and the young intellectuals in the Institut canadien--but they were pallid. The rebellion's patriote leader, Louis-Joseph Papineau, was at all times a temperamental conservative and a loyal son of the Church. He tried, but failed, to reconcile modern liberal thought with Catholicism's insistence on the supremacy of religious over civil society (Moniere 1981, 183). Church opposition crushed the Institut. The residual rights of the seigneurs, established by Bourbon France, were only terminated in the 1930s. It was a time when the clergy, as the society's dominant ideological force, stressed theories of class and social harmony and nodded approvingly to the fascist models of Iberia and Italy.
Edward McWhinney expresses the common misconception that Anglo bias against the French and the French language discouraged this wave's spread across Canada (1982, 28). It was actually retarded by French Canadians' attitudes. They were not magnetized by the western frontier and did not share the optimistic, expansive, and independent mentality of others who headed there. They disbelieved in the value of prairie land, and their leaders feared that out-migration from Quebec would weaken the French fact in an expanding country. In brief, the French exhibited "pessimism, defeatism, or demoralization," and a fortress Quebec mentality took hold (Silver 1969, 27). In 1958, Pierre Trudeau bemoaned the fact that French Canada's conservative ideology, its lack of liberal thought, meant that it was neither "psychologically nor politically prepared" for democratic representative government in the nineteenth century. Quebec's women were only enfranchised in 1940, more than two decades after other provinces. As evidence of the continuing power of the Old World's pre-liberal ancien outlook, Trudeau cited the intermeshing of Church and public broadcasting in a prayer aired by Radio-Canada on Quebec's 1956 election day:
Sovereign authority, by whatever government it is exercised, is derived solely from God, the supreme and eternal principle of all power.... It is therefore an absolute error to believe that authority comes from the multitudes, from the masses, from the people, to pretend that authority does not properly belong to those who exercise it, but that they have only a simple mandate revocable at any rime by the people. This error, which dates from the Reformation, rests on the false principle that man has no other toaster than his own reason.... All this explanation about the origin, the basis, and the composition of this alleged sovereignty of the people is purely arbitrary. Moreover, if it is admitted, it will have as a consequence the weakening of authority, making it a myth, giving it an unstable and changeable basis, stimulating popular passions and encouraging sedition (Trudeau 1977, quoted on 110-1).
The political expression of this first wave's long enduring ideology was its support for conservative parties: the parti bleu--associated with English-speaking Tories--in the nineteenth century and the Union Nationale in the twentieth. Parishioners, according to legend, were exhorted from the pulpit to remember that "Heaven is Blue and Hell is Red"--the colour of the anti-clerical parti rouge (Lemieux 1978, 248). Another distinctively quebecois party that this wave produced was the Bloc populaire canadien which arose during the Second World War in opposition to conscription and in favour of provincial autonomy. It came to hold five seats in parliament. Generally,...
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