Reflection on Penguin History of Canada by Robert Bothwell for Penguin Canada

               This is not a book about penguins. It was published by “Penguin,” and probably would have been pretty good if it was about penguins. However, penguins have never lived in North America, unlike mammoths, camels, mastodons, giant sloths, and horses, which were all hunted to extinction along with the giant beaver. Indigenous people would continue to hunt deer, moose, bear, and beaver until modern day. The history of Canada is about the rise of powerful First Nations tribes, European contact and conflict among Iroquois, Huron, Algonquin, and other tribes with the French and English, the victory of the English, and the slow separation of Canada from the United Kingdom.

               Canada was always more lightly populated than other parts of the Americas like the Andes, Mesoamerica, and the Mississippi basin. However, the Pacific coast was very socially complex and hierarchical due to abundant supplies of salmon. Two thousand years ago, they had a semi-nomadic society with permanent winter villages and hereditary slaves. However these people would contact European diseases long before they would meet Europeans. The first contact in Canada came from French sailing down the St. Lawrence River, searching for the fabled Northwest Passage to Asia. They initially traded with the French, and the French had some success in converting a few to Catholicism. After all, the old tribal religions had lost their potency in the face of European diseases that the old shamans and medicine men couldn’t cure. The Jesuits couldn’t cure them either, but regardless there was an erosion of traditional faith.

               The Huron clashed with the Iroquois, who had their population cut  in half by disease. To replenish, they sought to take slaves from the Huron. Between 1648 and 1650 the Iroquois systematically wiped out the Huron people. Why did this happen? It was a dispute over the newly lucrative fur-trading business, as European elites would pay top dollar for North American furs, especially beaver. The French, for their part, stoked hostilities, allying with the Huron as a buffer state between them and the Iroquois in what would become upstate New York. The French made the split, and with the Indians fighting against each other, the relative position of the French improved.

               The French established a small, settled society based on fur trading, small-scale agriculture, and the Catholic Church. The French Church, however, was not totally subservient to the Vatican. They appointed their own Cardinals, bishops, priests, monks, and nuns by royal decree, not papal decree. By 1660, the French had just 3,000 inhabitants, a tiny colony compared to the 50,000 English in New England and their additional 30,000 in Virginia, not to mention the 10,000 Dutch in New Netherlands. Canada always was the smaller cousin to the English colonies that would become the USA. That said, its isolation kept it independent. Quebec may have been taken by the English (through a siege) in the French and Indian War, but it withstood American attacks in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. It did so based on a rugged climate, tall cliffs on three sides, and a river that acted as a natural moat.

               The French used three men to govern New France: a provincial governor, chosen from the nobility, but with little real power, a lieutenant governor, who was the true manager of provincial power, and the bishop, who help authority over morals and education. This led to much confusion and made government largely ineffective, which was how the French king wanted it. An ineffectual government couldn’t rebel. The King of France had more direct authority and despite its low population, New France was able to move south, settling the Ohio territory while the disunited British colonies struggled to stop them. The first British settlements in modern Canada were in Newfoundland. Originally, the French had settled there as their fishing habits required a stable presence on land for the drying of the fish before export, while English techniques allowed them to dry the fish at sea. The English would be back though, and they would deport the Acadians (French settlers) from the region in the mid-18^th century shortly before the Seven Years’ War (French and Indian War).

               As the 18^th century turned into the 19^th, timber and agriculture replaced fur as the primary export of the colony, though fur would remain highly relevant in trade until the middle of the century. From 1790 to 1815, Lower Canada (Quebec area) grew in population from 165,000 to 300,000, double what it had been in 1760. When England and her former colonies went to war again in 1812, Canada held out against American invasion. At the time, the largest force of the war was 10,000 strong while Napoleon mustered 600,000 in his invasion of Russia, for scale. The Americans may have lost because they lost Canadian hearts and minds. Unlike during the Revolution, Americans burned farms, mills, and houses, making the Canadians not want to join their side.

               Montreal and Quebec declined in prominence when New York built the Erie canal, connecting Lake Erie to the Hudson and therefore securing New York City’s position as the dominant port of entry to the continent. Lower Canada was further weakened by “two nations warring in the bosom of a single state,” as governor general Lord Durham put it. The society was divided by Protestants and Catholics, English merchants and French farmers, the old elite, and new politicians. “Both languages were found on both sides of politics,” writes Bothwell. In 1837, French inhabitants revolted and the governor raised forces to put them down from the loyal anglophones. The government was victorious and the question was largely settled that Canada would remain British. However, that was not the permanent end of the question. In the late 20^th century, the Quebecois would be back at it, attempting to gain independence of Canada, by that point independent of England.

               One major change in the relationship between Britain and her colony occurred thanks to the English liberalization of trade in 1846 that ended tariffs preferencing Canadian goods. It resulted that Canada lost a major share of its economy and trade was transferred from Montreal to New York (the Erie Canal at work too). The immediate impact was that Canadian leaders sought to transfer dependence from one nation to another, in this case the young United States of America. They drew up an “Annexation Manifesto,” but the British governor general handled the situation with skill, helped by an economic boom in the 1850s. In 1867, the several colonies confederated into one, Canada. The new, confederated colony would remain dependent on the British, but at the turn of the century the proportions began to shift. British investment in Canada dropped from 85% of foreign capital to 75% from 1900 to 1913, and US investment rose from 14% to 21%.

               World War One was the first war in which more men died in battle than from disease. It was a war in which many Canadian men would die, conscripted by their government. After the war began two decades of negotiations that resulted in Canada loosening its ties to Great Britain. In 1931, the Statute of Westminster renounced Parliament’s right to legislate for Canada, making it self-sufficient, legally and constitutionally.

               In the course of the Second World War, Canada’s economy doubled, largely thanks to military expenditures, and its troops were the third largest allied army, invading Italy and France as a key part of the allied coalition. Canada entered an era of tremendous activism in world politics and Prime Minister Pearson even negotiated the solution to the Suez Crisis of 1956, earning the Nobel Peace Prize. In the later half of the century, Canada replaced its military as a source of economic output with an energy industry based on oil and natural gas, found in abundance in the country’s large western regions. That government spending was not focused on social welfare, especially the new healthcare system, adopted in 1968 after American successes with Social Security. Canada became more and more closely tied to the United States economically, but further and further politically and socially. While they entered major trade agreements (especially important in the auto industry) with the Americans, many Canadians closely guarded their independence and became nationalistic and anti-American. Representative of the new nationalism, Canada adopted its signature Maple Leaf flag in 1965. In 1966, Canadians could no longer freely cross the border to the United States. Canada did not join with the USA in Vietnam, as no Canadian group supported the war, though many young Canadian men joined the American army to serve. It appears that in the 1960’s Canada and the USA began to drift apart from each other. It’s important to remember that Canada was largely founded based on the USA rejecting free trade with them, and it remained a major issue in Canadian politics in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

               A criticism I have of this book is that First Nations tribes basically disappear from the narrative for over 150 years. Surely they continued to exist, but the book completely ignores them until the rise of Indian activism in the 1960’s. The author tells us that,

“Indians and Inuit were an increasingly important and increasingly noticed section of the population. Yet they were still governed according to the standards and practices of the eighteenth century, as wards of the crown, subsidized but subordinate and governed by civil servants out of the federal department of Indian affairs. Two hundred years of trusteeship had resulted in a constellation of (mostly) rural slums whose inhabitants enjoyed much less than the standard of living of their white compatriots.

This situation seemed at variance with the mood of the times—against discrimination, racial categorization, and second-class status. The solution seemed obvious: abolish the special status of the Indians, and integrate them into the larger Canadian community.”

However, Native leaders saw through this very easily. It was an attempt by the Canadian government to absolve itself of responsibilities to the Native tribes, to assimilate them into Canada’s culture, and to forget about them. Tribes institutionalized a sort of confederation, the National Indian Brotherhood, which became the Assembly of First Nations in 1980, to fight for their rights. There the author loses track of them again.

               Pierre Trudeau dominated Canadian politics from the late 1960’s until the early 1980’s. In short, he was a real tough guy and a very “cool” Prime Minister who won huge support at times. He kept French Canada from seceding in the 1970’s and 80’s and when the Quebecois radicals got violent, he used the police force to put down the terrorists and free hostages. He also formalized Canada’s Constitution in 1982 and included “The Charter of Rights” of Canadians. Upon his death in 2003, he was remembered as transformational and I think I’d like to read a biography about him, especially relevant as his son, Justin Trudeau is the current Prime Minister.

               After Pierre Trudeau, the Conservative Prime Minister Mulroney pursued free trade with the United States, which eventually became NAFTA. By 1998, as a result of NAFTA, trade increased massively, as 40% of Ontario’s GDP was exported to the United States, doubling in just nine years, though employment in manufacturing declined by 10%.

               Canada embarked on a path of major reforms to its federal system, mainly due to the power of the Quebec Separatist movement and the general feeling in the rest of Canada that Quebec should remain. In 1987, the relationship was fundamentally redefined at Meech Lake, and the “Meech” system has run Canada for decades since. In it, the federal government gave up power to appoint to the Senate and the Supreme Court to the provinces and also gave all the provinces vetoes on constitutional amendments. It also decreed that the provincial premiers and the prime minister would meet yearly to discuss the constitution. It really pissed off Pierre Trudeau. He called its supporters weaklings and was very upset to see so much power decentralized. Nevertheless, Quebec attempted to secede. It did not work out but came down to a very close vote. The United States did not support the secession, not did most English Canadians.

               The last major issue in the book is the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Canada would send troops to aid the USA in Afghanistan, but not Iraq, where there was generally no political will to do so. At best, Canadians supported the invasion without UN approval around 20%. In the 21^st century, many Canadians are bot drawn and repulsed by the United States. They often describe Americans as honest, inventive, and hardworking, but are also more likely to associate Americans with rudeness, greed, and violence. Most recently, the book tells us that the conservatives reunited the Conservative Party to elect Stephen Harper as Prime Minister, though we know that Justin Trudeau beat him since the publishing of this book.

               In sum, this is a decent book for anyone who for some reason wants to learn Canada’s history. It is very reflective of American history and it’s nice to know a little bit more about our northern neighbors. Mainly I feel like I’ve gotten a little more familiar with the names of the major players and the big movements in Canadian history and now I don’t really know much more than the right questions to ask in a conversation, but that’s a start.

Miscellaneous Thoughts:

• Neville Chamberlain appeased Hitler on the basis that pre-World War One governments were criticized post-warfor rushing to war without exhausting all avenues for peace. Anthony Eden attacked the Suez Canal in 1956 because WWII politicians were criticized for cowardice and not beating Hitler early, appeasing him instead. UK politicians in the early to mid 20^th century really couldn’t get it right.
• First Ministers’ Conferences are an interesting idea and part of Canadian government that emerged in post-war Canada. It’s a weird thought to imagine the President of the USA having a yearly meeting with all the governors to discuss the constitution.