Delphi complete works of.., p.796
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 796
By British we mean here not necessarily British direct from the British Isles but also British at one remove or in a transferred sense, as are tens of millions of the Americans so largely kindred in first origin, bred in the same freedom, sharing the same language and literature, the same history as one people for centuries and after that sharing it as honourable enemies or as allies under arms. These we count as proper material for a British country along with those peoples of Europe close to us in race and history and culture, the Scandinavian peoples, in a sense our own parent stock, and the Dutch, old-time enemies and old-time friends, but always in mutual honour and respect.
In this matter of large scale immigration we have to consider of course the ideas and the wishes of the French Canadians; not as a matter of legal obligation for in this the majority rules: but as a matter of common sense and goodwill and since any rule by the dead weight of a British majority is not a British way of ruling. The French Canadians object to immigration as lessening the proportional share of their race and language in the Dominion. The French from France have never migrated since the conquest and are not likely to try to do so now, except perhaps as Vichy fugitives despised of all men. But I do not think it difficult to open for the French Canadians a policy of “colonization” to offset the British policy of immigration. This means the filling up of the enormous area of French Canada itself with new “settlers in the bush,” multiplying Maria Chapdelaine, and rocking the cradle so vigorously on the Peribonka and the Ashuapmuchuan that its progeny will pop out as fast as the immigrants arriving on the plains. This implies a large measure of Dominion aid to all such projects, and the extension of family allowances to the full size of the family without the grudging limitation suggested, it seems to me, unjustly and unwisely. All this, however, belongs in the wider discussion of the next chapter.
Now in this new epoch of large scale migration and machine power we cannot develop our country on the old-fashioned one-man method of the pioneer with the axe, making a log house, the homesteader on the prairies in the sod hut, the prospector with a tin pan fighting bears with his bare hands. Such lives wrote into our Canadian history some of its noblest pages, welded into Canadian character some of its finest metal. But it is not for today. Time has moved on.
Turn then to what we can do to develop the country. The idea is to set on foot such a vast range of public enterprises as will draw to it the addition of private enterprise by a sort of suction, and draw in millions of immigrants and billions of capital for the simple reason that all the people we have, and all the capital goods we command will not be enough for the situation. We need not ask here whether we are to rely chiefly upon private enterprise or on public works. It does not matter. We must rely upon both. Private enterprise, wide awake to its own advantage, alert to find new opportunities anywhere throughout the length and breadth of the country, willing to take a chance, will supply motive power and incentive. And we must give private enterprise a real chance, the opportunity for substantial profits, freedom from all forms of taxation that will kill initiative and lead towards industrial stagnation. We should be willing, I think, to give to private enterprise here and there the temporary advantage of monopoly, never in such a degree as to create a permanent vested interest but a monopoly of sufficient prospective advantage to induce an initial risk. The principle of “a run for one’s money” contains an attraction that can call forth capital funds and individual effort willing to take a chance and stand a loss. Throughout all such encouragement to private enterprise it is possible, even if it needs vigilance, (the old time price of liberty) to protect the community against the unfair competition and illicit gain. I say it is possible, and I think it would prove difficult or easy according to the extent and amount of our public morality. With the animation, the inspiration of righteousness, the eagerness for a good world, crookedness will flee from us like a dark shadow. But it is only this inner light that can dispel it.
And here we must remember that the greatest of our private industries is agriculture. Towards this our most earnest encouragement must be directed. We must give the farmer a chance. And we cannot do so by applying the socialist doctrine of taking away his farm. If we did, he would cry for it at night. We must see that he can stay on his farm! must gather up all that vast book entry of farm debt that comes down from the years of depression, write it off or write it up or write it down or whatever you do in order to put it, in Abraham Lincoln’s phrase, “In the course of ultimate extinction.” With that should go facilities for cooperation (still inside individual ownership), electric service for the agricultural area, the adjustment of transport and marketing and, for the great staple products, a certain frame of floor and ceiling prices that removes from the individual farmer the danger of disaster, and guarantees to the consumer also that his food is within his reach. But all this program of reconstructed agriculture is familiar ground, the only problem is how to fit it in with the other parts of a national policy.
But, all said and done, private enterprise cannot suffice alone to meet our situation, especially in the critical years after the war. As we have said, we must set up a vast chain of public enterprise, moving not only for its own aims, but also to “take up the slack,” if need be, of the slackening chain of private enterprise in dull periods. The possible program is so wide that we need indicate only a part of it.
We need to replace and rebuild the whole of our public transport, a thing to be done without crookedness, graft or swollen company profits. We need in this as in all else the work of honest men. Without that the more we spend the more we lose. And in this case what the honest men are first to do is to think out what a railway is and what a railway train of the future is to be. They will find it to mean a broad straight track, level as a die, with no gradient but the rise above sea-level as you go inland, no curves, no twists, no level crossings. The trains move at 120 miles an hour and stop only at large centres. Trucks from factory to factory and from door to door run 100 miles as local traffic. For the longer haul trucks are swallowed up on board the great trains. The services are complementary, not competitive. So, too, if one had the detail to set it out, would appear the work of motor buses and private cars.
There is a story told of the early days of European railroad building when the routes selected used to wander round among hills and dales looking for an easy track. The first railroad planned for Russia was intended to connect St. Petersburg with Moscow. The engineers bent over their maps, planning twists and curves. The Czar of Russia took a ruler and pencil and drew a straight line from city to city and said, “Make it there.”
The story was told in its day as illustrating the ignorance of an autocrat. It should be retold now as a lesson in railway building. I’d like to have shown the Czar the railway line of his own date from Hamilton to Allandale and have had a good laugh with him. Best of all I’d want him to see the main line from Toronto to Montreal just where it leaves Toronto. Ever since 1855, when it was built, the railway within 16 miles climbs up 300 feet to the highland at Scarboro and then feels its way down 300 feet to the level where it started. For nearly 100 years every ton of freight has been needlessly lifted up that hill — and every passenger, no matter if he weighs 200 pounds, up he goes. All for the lack of a little shovelling.
So we rebuild the railways. And at the same time we can keep a few more millions busy for 10 years at least reconstructing the cities and rebuilding altogether vast sections of the heart of them. For these sections, the best in situation and access, have been made the worst by the course of history, turned to slums, mean crowded quarters, streets too narrow. Yet the ground values are of incalculable utility, of incalculable money value provided — and this condition is everything — that you can control the rebuilding of it all on a total, and not a spot here and a patch there, which is all that private building could do.
Expropriate it all. Shovel it up. Rebuild it with real streets, model factories and model apartment homes. Draw with a giant’s pencil. You can house here a quarter of a million people, in quadrangle blocks with the backs of the houses turned to the streets, their faces on an inner courtyard, all grass and trees and fountains, where the children can play. Anyone who cannot enthuse on that is as dead as a paving stone.
But private enterprise can never do all that, if clutching and grasping for profit. And anyway the profit isn’t there unless you control the whole operation, as only the State can do. Nor can state enterprise do it unless it works with clean hands, fighting graft, working under the inspiration of public-mindedness, of the spirit. Everything you will find, runs back to that.
These are what are called “self-liquidating” enterprises of Government, bringing their own physical and monetary returns. There is room for millions more to work on “cultural” enterprises, bringing in a return beyond the calculation of dollars. Such preeminently are schools and above all, the school of the new future. This is a school with recreation grounds, with reading rooms, a place for all day. There are rooms here for serving school meals, for the school must supplement the home where the home is still so poor that it cannot supply an adequate life. And of the school meals, one, the mid-day meal, would be eaten, by custom, in common by the rich and the poor. It would not be “the thing” for rich parents to keep their children from it.
And for the rich and poor alike the school must supplement the home for companionship’s sake. The school is the gateway to social progress, to that classless society of which we dream. Older people, adult people, are battered out of the shape they might have had and are not to be remade. But children are still in the making. To the schools are added the task of building up a whole range of cultural surroundings, things possessed in common — libraries, public gardens, amusements, museums, hospitals. Millions can work at them for years. There can be no unemployment till it is all done.
Even at that we have left out entirely what used to seem the main feature of development, the settlement of new country, of the open empty plains, the silent forests and the fertile valleys all unused, and the treasure ground of minerals under the soil. But here, as just said, we have no time for the methods of the past. The individual ruggedness of the pioneer wrote the finest pages of our history but we have turned a new leaf. New settlement must move as an army moves, going forward in a mass on a wide front. Before ever a settler comes, broad highways must be driven through the wilderness, like the Alaskan Highway (war’s accident that peace time would never have discovered), with side roads, drains, culverts; and with power stations, electricity and all that goes to abbreviate human labour in the wilderness. And with that, still before a settler comes, carload lots of fitted lumber, ready to set up school houses, meeting houses, hospitals — and when all is done settlement will move into its own, a new people in a new world carrying the old world with them.
In the light of this the silly question: Is there work enough? Is there food enough? Is there market enough? seem like the sniggering cautiousness of the Village Idiot, wary of novelty.
CHAPTER VII PROVINCES AND RACES
ALL GREAT INDUSTRIAL democracies share the problems of social justice and social security such as we have discussed. But in each country they present special aspects and special difficulties. In Canada more than in any other country the regulation of industrial society is complicated by the lack of legislative and racial unity. We have to fit everything into our fixed division, into provinces and our looser division (partly law, partly circumstance and custom) as between British and French.
Compare the case of Great Britain. It has its own peculiar initial disadvantage in its very limited extent of territory and natural resources which makes it dependent on the external relations of import of material, export of goods, shipping and world wide services of finance. Great Britain could not, even if it would, live on its own as we easily could in Canada and as the United States does perhaps to some 90 per cent of its economic life.
But for Social legislation Great Britain has the advantage of a unitary legislature (a Parliament of King, Lords and Commons) of plenary power. There is no law they cannot pass, nothing which (legally) is outside of their jurisdiction. When a decision of the courts (the Taft Vale Railway Case Decision) threatened all the funds of every labour union with possible confiscation (a thing that would have rendered labour union impossible and convulsed society), an act of parliament (1907) turned the law the other way, as easily as a juggler finds a rabbit in a hat. When the Scottish Churches decision handed over the bulk of the funds of most of the churches concerned in a proposed union to the little group of ministers, the Wee Kirk, who had refused to join it, an Act of Parliament took it all back from the Wee Kirk except enough to leave it as wee and as free as it wanted to be. And finally in 1936 the Parliament of the United Kingdom, of which the King is a part, removed the King off the throne with as little trouble and less legal redress than the passage of a “Montreal bill” in the Quebec legislature.
This is not to say that the Parliament of England does not frequently pass laws to apply solely to Scotland, or to Wales or to England itself. But it is not compelled to. It can apply anything as widely as it likes.
Now in Canada we cannot get away from this divided jurisdiction as between provinces and races; more especially as the hearts of our people cling to the provinces as the basis of our history, and the hearts of a large section of them are held in close affection to the race and religion of French Canada as distinct from the Dominion of Canada. But we can mitigate the situation by understanding it and make the most of it and the best of it by taking it as it is without attempting revolutionary change. Nothing within our sight can make Canada a country of unified legislation, or a country of a single speech. Nor, on the contrary can Canada live and flourish if divided into nine sovereignties and if one third of its people are forced back upon themselves as a racial unit and held in sullen isolation.
When Confederation joined them in its fold, the provinces were as feeble, as ridiculous, one may say, as sheep just shorn that seem to shrink to half their size.
Deprived of their power, feeble in their finances, now losing many of their best brains summoned to Ottawa, the provinces were still further vexed by the fact that nearly all of them had been reluctant to join into federation. For the two Canadas the federal union was accepted as the only means of escape from the ill-assorted and unworkable legislative union of 1841-1867. New Brunswick entered in haste in loyal alarm over a renewed Fenian invasion and repented at leisure. Nova Scotia was dragged in by a vote of the assembly against the known wishes of the majority of the people. Its first delegates only went to Ottawa to protest against going there. British Columbia came in on the promise of a railway (1871); Prince Edward Island (1873) by being relieved of one.
By all the signs and portents, either the Confederation of Canada should have broken asunder or else the provinces should have withered and atrophied under the shadow of the federal power. And then the unexpected began to happen. A new era brought a new economy. Sources of revenue unknown in 1867 began to flow into the provincial treasuries — the new form of taxes on public utilities and corporations opened by the era of electricity and power; the increasing returns of the “succession duties” (inheritance taxes) in a community growing in wealth and numbers, and the new tax field opened up by the mines in what had been the wilderness. Greatest of all was liquor. The progress of the Temperance Movement was accompanied by a conscientious adherence to drinking. The wave of prohibition created so strong a resistance that the community was presently willing, even glad, to pay taxes on liquor at a rate utterly impossible in 1867. It is recorded that in the earliest decade of American Independence the imposition in Pennsylvania of a tax of 25 cents a gallon on whisky provoked what is known as the Whisky Rebellion (1791). We may never have had the gallantry in Canada to take the musket off the wall at 25 cents a gallon. But the present rate of tax, if imposed in Sir John A. Macdonald’s day, would have certainly provoked an open rebellion, with the prime minister leading it.
So the provinces grew rich. All the richer because it turned out that the “Crown lands,” the public lands of the provinces, possessed new sources of wealth in their unknown minerals, and the once worthless scrub that turned into “pulpwood.” To make them richer the Dominion Government turned over to the western provinces, as if in repentance for its rapacity, all the public lands of the prairies (1931) with 26 years “compensation for disturbance” to the tune of $6¼ millions.
Not only wealth increased but jurisdiction, scope of provincial power, widened with every decade. The Fathers of Confederation, as said, had given the Dominion everything and the provinces nothing. Then, to make sure, they proceeded to define everything and nothing, and that muddled it all up. In everything, for example, was included marriage; and under nothing was included the solemnization of marriage.
Most fateful of all was the fact that “property and civil rights” were put in, being next to nothing, under the provincial power. Nobody knows what it means. It is like the “due process of law” of the American fourteenth amendment, the source of 80 years of legal fun in the States. “Property and civil rights” under the interpretation of the courts spread, like a banyan tree, from its own roots. The decisions of 1935 denying to the Dominion Government the right to enact a labour code to regulate labour and wages, to set up minimum wages, and provide for old age, cuts the very ground from under our forward footsteps. In this tangle of jurisdiction the proper way out should be by legal amendment of our constitution. But we on the contrary are utterly bound hand and foot with a chain and a padlock of which we have thrown away the key. No Canadian statute nor people’s vote can amend the Constitution.
