Delphi complete works of.., p.684
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 684
But a glance at the statistics involved will show that apparently the agitation of the Bishop and his friend is quite justified. Let us take the ‘mother tongue’ of the people of the West as indicating their racial status: and include, in accordance with the official Canadian practice, children of five years and under as speaking the tongue of their parents.
In Manitoba, out of a total population (1931 census) of 700,139 there were 399,009 with English as their mother tongue and 42,499 with French. There were 258,631 people whose language was something else. Among these one notices 57,312 of German language, 11,578 Icelanders, 31,758 Poles and 82,908 Ukrainians to say nothing of 19,187 talking Yiddish. The case at first sight looks pretty black, indeed as black as the Black Sea. Contrast it with the status of Prince Edward Island, where out of 88,038 Islanders, 86,463 have either English or French as their mother tongue: where there is not a single Ukrainian, only 1 Russian, not a damn Pole, and just 1 Greek; — how he got in is not said. There’s a real country: only the trouble with it is that the population decreases. At least Ukrainians don’t do that.
Or take Saskatchewan. It has 39 per cent. of its people with an alien mother tongue. Of its 921,785 inhabitants of 1931, no less than 138,499 were German in mother tongue (Mutter-Sprache) and 70,545 Ukrainian: after which the 18,742 Poles and the 17,085 Russians seem a matter of course. As to the 78 Bulgarians we wonder why they are so modest and don’t catch up to the 11,853 Hungarians.
Last comes Alberta. Its total percentage is not quite so high as that of Saskatchewan, but it’s high enough, 33 per cent. It has 461,713 speaking English. In all these statements English includes what the Americans talk, which is just as good anyway as what they speak in Clapham and makes Somerset sound like a foreign language. The Alberta French number only 28,145, with 63,410 Germans and 60,260 Ukrainians in a total Slavonic group of 91,820.
* * * * *
The case of the French and the French language in the West stands by itself and will draw from many Canadians a sigh and a regret for the history it represents. The French were the discoverers of the country. Radisson and Groseillers were on the Hudson Bay before the company, — indeed they brought the company there — La Vérendrye was on the plains (1731) half a century before Alexander Mackenzie. Even under the Hudson’s Bay Company the great majority of the ‘white’ settlers were the Métis, French-Canadian half-breeds. The language of the West was French, with a top layer of Scotch. St. Boniface on the Red and Assiniboine was a settlement of over 800 French-speaking people when Winnipeg was only a straggling set of shacks, outside of Fort Garry, sheltering 241 inhabitants. The province at its inception in 1870 had 9,800 French half-breeds in a population of 12,000. Early Manitoba was bi-lingual. Its parliament that first sat in Mr. Bannatyne’s house spoke and printed both languages. Its schools were French and English. If the star of the Empire glittered in the West for the English, the Church of the fathers was already there for the French.
From this joint heritage the course of history dispossessed them. The flood of Ontario settlers broke in on them. The Americans invaded them. Last of all, polyglot Europe washed over them, — much of it not even washed. Can one wonder that the French feel, one must not say a bitterness, but a wistful regret for their lost North West. And suppose we had had it and shared it on equal terms, with a bi-lingual culture to match the older East, it might seem perhaps a more balanced Canada, a more real unity.
It is strange what a queer touchiness surrounds the whole question of bi-lingualism in Canada. It shows how easily decent people can dispute among themselves over nothing. In the early spring of the present year quite a storm arose in the Canadian tea-cup when the gallant and distinguished English-Canadian at the head of our Broadcast Corporation, expressed his warm appreciation of our dual heritage and used the wrong phrase to express it. The Ontario members of parliament understood him to mean that he was going to teach them to speak French. The Leader of the Opposition quite rightly protested that he couldn’t do it. I know he was right because there are members now in the House to whom I tried to teach French at Upper Canada College forty years ago, and who can’t speak it yet.
French vanishes as one goes west. Winnipeg still has beside it St. Boniface with a French population of over 9,000. Even in Saskatchewan there are over 42,000 French. But in Alberta only 28,000. In British Columbia there are only 7,768 and by the time you get to Victoria, B.C., they can’t even pronounce “Parlez-vous Français.”
But the French increase and multiply. Their day may be coming. A distinguished Scottish-French Canadian of Montreal told a Vancouver Lunch Club a few years ago that if immigration remained blocked the French would come into their own. They would have their revanche du berceau. When I was in Vancouver the Club asked me what it meant, and whether Mayor McGeer would give it to them.
The language situation in the West is reflected, again on the surface and only on the surface, in its newspapers. The publication of foreign language newspapers in the Prairie Provinces of Canada has, so far as I know, no parallel in the world. The only thing one could compare it to would be a cocktail party of the League of Nations at Geneva.
Most of the papers, for obvious reasons, are published in Winnipeg: but the circulation reaches out over the plains. There are listed in Winnipeg as weekly papers the Swedish Tidningen, Posten, the Icelandic Lögberg, and Heimskringia Sameiningin, and with these the Czas, which is Polish and means the Times and also the Polish Gazeta Katolicka (I think that must mean Catholic Gazette) and in German, the Christlicher Jugendfreund, the Mennonitische Rundschau, and the Nordwesten, the Danish Church and Home, the Magyar Kanadai Ujsag, the Norwegian Narrona together with quite a string of Ukrainian papers, the Ranok and others whose titles translated mean, the Canadian Farmer, The Farmer’s Life, the Herald, the Voice and the Workingwoman and Militant Youth. If there is anything the Ukrainians have forgotten they can start another weekly and call it that. End up the list with the Yiddish Israelite Press and Jewish Post and you have a pretty varied lot, in all, counting a German paper of Steinbach, Manitoba, 22 weekly papers in languages other than English or French. Add to these the foreign weeklies published in Saskatchewan, — four German and one Ukrainian, and in Alberta, — one Ukrainian and one Danish, — and one has a formidable and interesting list. It is calculated at first sight to make the Bishop of London seem entirely right and to lead us to cable for his 10,000,000 Britishers at once. Some of these papers moreover have a considerable circulation, — the Winnipeg Swedish Tidningen is put at 7,600, the Norwegian Narrona at the same figure, the Polish Gazette at 7,000, the Regina German Courier 6,500, and the Edmonton Ukrainian News at 7,000. But these are the larger ones. The circulation of the lesser ones is so small that they blush to mention it and leave it blank.
But all of this, I repeat, is a surface phenomenon quite misleading as to the present government and future life of our country. The last thing these foreigners want to do is to go back home. They all want their children to learn English and to be English-Canadians. They welcome every opportunity to have it so. Apart from odd communists or revolutionaries they value our institutions. Of republicanism they have no trace. Their foreign papers and a few such things as Choral Societies, or Beer Gardens, are just a gesture, a wistful regret, a tribute to their former mother country. As it is they all want to learn to play hockey, to attend high-school and college, to join the Rotary Club, make money and move right up into golf and bridge and have their wives members of the Ladies Every-Other-Wednesday Culture Group. In other words they want to be like us. Can you blame them? Leave them alone and pretty soon the Ukrainians will think they won the battle of Trafalgar: and if the President of the Rotary Club is a Bulgarian all he will ask is to forget it.
Take the case of the children of 5 years and under. Statistically they would number in Manitoba about 90,000, in Saskatchewan 140,000, in Alberta 100,000. Of these the larger half can’t speak at all except to say ‘pop’ and ‘mumm’ which is good Ukrainian. In five years English will be native to them. In twenty years their mother tongue will be gone.
It is well known how the European languages, apart from English and French, wash out in America. Millions of Germans lost their mother tongue in a generation. I remember that when I lived as a student in Chicago forty years ago there were supposed to be in that city over 700,000 Germans and near-Germans, yet you’d look in vain for anyone selling a German newspaper on the street. I roomed for a little while with a German family. The old people had come as old people from Germany. They had little English. Their grown up sons and daughters spoke English only, even at home with one another. The grandchildren knew no German and were learning it in high-school. Thus it will be with the Canadian Northwest, the foreign languages, even the “thirty spoken in Edmonton” will all wash out. The ill-conceived Manitoba school law of 1897, as a way of keeping French, permitted any and every language in schools. That’s all gone now.
* * * * *
The foreign languages, I am told, are but little used, and are less and less used, in any public way on the plains. It is true that certain Mennonite congregations still read their Lutheran Bible and German service in their churches. But that is rather by conservatism of religion than of language. The same people would all use English at a political meeting.
English is indeed everywhere the language of politics. I can cite from direct knowledge the case of the constituency of a young and rising member of the legislature of Saskatchewan. The northwest part of it is overwhelmingly German in origin. There is a large section of ‘Americans’ in the centre, a heavy leaven of Ontario Scotsmen and a sweetening of Quebec French in the southeast. The rising young member is himself of Irish-Catholic-Canadian stock. Yet the language question never disturbs either political affiliation or personal contact. Human intercourse in the west is free and informal. Surnames are little used. Everybody is Dick, Bill and Fritz and Olie, and so everybody seems to come from everywhere.
* * * * *
In this discussion I leave out of count a few undigested and undigestible lumps of foreign nationality. Such are the Doukhobors, of whom we imported some 8,000 in 1901, increased to 14,000 in 1931. These people keep their own triumphant individuality. They believe in early Christian community of goods, think machinery wicked, go out hunting for Christ on the Prairie, like King Arthur’s Knights and the Holy Grail, and take a run in their shirt tail as a protest against textiles. Their standard is too high for us. It is a pity they ever took a fancy to us. We can’t live up to them. But in the broad aspect of our future they count for nothing.
* * * * *
None of the public institutions of the West are taken from those of these foreign peoples: none of its laws: nothing of its basic ideas.
The Western landholding system is more English than what they have in England now. It is based on the holding of the yeoman farmer, working his own land. In England, the yeoman, was dispossessed in favour of a landlord class with tenants. But the yeoman had been transplanted to New England — to Virginia and from there under the name of a “loyalist” to Upper Canada, and from there as a “homesteader” to the plains. He doesn’t know it but he’s an Anglo Saxon “thane” and beside him an English Norman Earl living on a rent roll is a thing of yesterday.
The West took its school system from Ontario, and its college system mainly from Scotland, via McGill, Queen’s and Toronto. The short session, the boarding-house student, the class-room lecture in place of the tutor, — all that is Glasgow and Edinburgh, not Oxford, — and certainly not the Ukraine. The churches, the public buildings, the Queen’s Birthday, all that is England or England via America. The government and its parties, liberalism and conservatism, all that was British till the United Farmers’ idea came from the States, and Social Credit from Scotland.
Who governs the West? Look down the list of the 65 members of the Alberta Legislative Assembly, elected in 1935; the names are practically all British. They are quite as much British as the list of the British House of Commons. Lack of space prevents proof. Any one interested may consult the list in the Canadian Parliamentary Guide, or the Canadian Almanac and that in Whitaker’s Almanac. The same is true of Saskatchewan, with an odd German name or two. The Manitoba legislature elected in 1932 is almost all British in name, except for a Mr. Hryhorczuk, who would feel lonely, except for Mr. Bachynsky. But suppose that a quarter of a million Scotchman had migrated to the Ukraine. Half of the legislature by this time would be called “Mac”: and the whole of the Cabinet.
Last of all one reverts to the “Americans” of whom we are told the West received a migration as between 1910 and 1914 alone of over 600,000. They brought with them, their own money and goods, and in money invested by and through and for them about $600,000,000. This was a calculation of our own government.
Did they Americanize, will they Americanize the West? They didn’t and they won’t. The West is more physically and socially separated from the United States than Eastern Canada. By an odd chance the forty-ninth parallel, an astronomical line, turned out to mean something. From Lake Superior to Manitoba the physical separation of the two countries is very real. Manitoba itself is an exception as the valley of the Red River presents a single and unified geography that makes Manitoba and Minnesota one. If steamboat days had lasted one could have imagined a dense, intermingled settlement making the two countries indistinguishable. The railway connection of East and West stopped it in time. But even now Manitoba connects more closely with the south than anything a long way east or west of it does. Seven railway lines and branches cross the frontier north and south. Even at that, Winnipeg and St. Paul are at arm’s length of 464 miles by rail, and the border towns and villages, Emerson — Pembina — amount to a little less than 1,000 people each.
For Saskatchewan and Alberta it is all different. The forty-ninth parallel marks fairly well the division of the water shed. The little streams that make the Missouri rise in Canada and of the little streams that go to make the South Saskatchewan the most distant tributaries rise in Montana. But the steamboat never knew anything of such waters either way.
The land along the border happens to be in great part arid and waterless. Old maps mark it as the desert of the Saskatchewan. From Portal (Saskatchewan) where the railway crosses as it slants from St. Paul to head for Vancouver, to Coutts, Alberta, below Lethbridge is a stretch of about 400 miles uncrossed by rail. Then comes the great barrier of the Rockies till it finally ends — to leave a coastal strip where Vancouver sits close to Seattle. Barring that connection there is little back and forward intercourse or give and take and the border is thinly settled. Along the south of Saskatchewan within forty miles of the border there are no towns of importance, except Estevan with a population of 3,000. The whole population (36 miles high) along the frontier of Saskatchewan is less than 60,000. Contrast this with Ontario where at the least 2,000,000 people live within forty miles either of the frontier itself or of the international navigable water of easy transit. On the American side of the line North Dakota, and still more, Montana, are but little settled along the border between the Missouri River and the parallel. The idea of people at a distance that the Canadian Northwest and the American Northwest are all intertangled has no foundation in fact.
If you want to see the real Canadian-American frontier you must go, not to the forty-ninth parallel, but to the Niagara-Buffalo boundary, — Go in summertime, round the first of July or the fourth, — they hardly know which is which. Go on a holiday and see the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack all mixed up together and the tourists pouring back and forward over the International Bridge: immigration men trying in vain to sort them out: Niagara mingling its American and Canadian waters and its honeymoon couples. Canadians buying curios in the States and Americans buying querrios in Canada, — and such a chattering and fraternisation that it is no wonder that foreigners can’t tell which is which of us. Or go to the Detroit-Windsor frontier and move back and forward with the flood of commuters, of Americans sampling beer in Windsor and Canadians sampling lager in Detroit: there you don’t really cross the frontier at all, you drive under it in a tunnel. Or come down here to Montreal and meet the Dartmouth boys playing hockey: or take the Eastern Townships of Quebec where Lake Memphremagog refuses to recognize any separation, and people out bass fishing hook up the international boundary; or go to a “Ball-game” of the International League and sit in your shirt-sleeves and root and try to remember which is your nationality.
Americans! Why, compared to us in the “east” the western people of Canada never see them, never hear of them. I’ll make a slight exception of the Lethbridge area, and Vancouver-Seattle and the Red River, elsewhere the two are separate.
But after all what does the “Americanization” talk amount to? Every now and then — and again quite recently — English newspapers break out into a discussion of what is called the “Americanization of Canada.” The basis of the discussion is always a sort of underlying fear that Canada is getting a little too close to the United States. It is the same sort of apprehension as is felt on a respectable farm when the daughter of the family is going out too much with the hired man. The idea is that you can’t tell what might happen.
In the case of Canada, the danger symptoms of what may happen are supposed to be that Canada is ‘flooded’ with American newspapers and magazines; that Canada is ‘deluged’ with American broadcasts, ‘saturated’ with American tourists, and ‘permeated’ with American ideas; that American tourists cross the border in an unending stream, and Canadian tourists go back with them like a receding tide; that conventions and reunions assemble indifferently on either side of the line; that education is almost indistinguishable as carried on at Harvard or at Toronto. All these things, and a hundred more, are produced as a terrible warning of what may follow next — the handwriting on the wall that signifies that our Belshazzar’s Feast of Friendship is nearly at an end. In other words, a relationship which should stand as a bright and conspicuous example for less fortunate nations, as an ideal and hope for distracted Europe, is turned against us as a mark of under-patriotism and lack of national spirit.
