Canada and the Canadian Question/Chapter 10/Independence

Confederation was followed by a movement in the direction of Independence, chiefly among the young men of Ontario, ​which was called "Canada First." The name was the title of a pamphlet written in 1871 by Mr. W. A. Foster, a barrister of Toronto, which fired a number of young hearts. To independence the movement manifestly tended, if this was not its avowed or definite aim. The authors of Confederation, to induce the people to accept their policy, had set before them glowing pictures of the resources of the country, and made strong appeals to patriotic pride, hope, and self-reliance. These produced their natural effect on ardent and sanguine souls. It happened that just at the same time the generation of immigrants from England which had occupied many of the leading places in the professions and commerce was passing off the scene and leaving the field clear for native ambition, while the withdrawal of the troops also brought socially to the front the young natives who had before been somewhat eclipsed in the eyes of ladies by the scarlet. "Canada First" was rather a circle than a party: it eschewed the name of party, and the Country above Party was its cry. Some of the group were merely nativists who desired that all power and all places should be filled by born Canadians, that the policy of Canada should be shaped by her own interest, and that she should be first in all Canadian hearts. With some a "national policy" for the protection of Canadian manufactures was probably a principal object. But that to which the leading spirits more or less consciously, more or less avowedly, looked forward was Independence. That they aimed at raising Canada above the condition of a mere dependency and investing her with the dignity of a nation they loudly proclaimed, and they would have found that this could not be done without putting off dependence. "Canada First" was violently denounced and assailed by the politicians of the two old parties, who betrayed in their treatment of the ​generous aspirations to which they had themselves appealed the real source of their policy and the spirit in which they had acted as the authors of Confederation. The Court of Ottawa also exerted its influence, including its influence over the masters of the Press, in the same direction. The movement found a leader, or thought that it had found a leader, in a native Canadian politician, who was the child of promise and the morning star at that time. But at the decisive moment party ties prevailed, the leader was lost, and the movement collapsed, not however without leaving strong traces of its existence, which are beginning to show themselves among the younger men at the present day.

In one respect, at all events, the men of "Canada First" were right. They saw or at least felt—even the least bold and the least clear-sighted of them felt—that a community in the New World must live its own life, face its own responsibilities, grow and mould itself in its own way; that Anglo-Saxon nations in North America could no more be tied for ever to the apron-strings of the mother country than England could have been tied for ever to the apron-strings of Friesland, or France to those of the mother country of the Franks.

There was nothing on the face of it impracticable in the aim of "Canada First." There is nothing in nature or in political circumstances to forbid the existence on this Continent of a nation independent of the United States. American aggression need not be feared. The violence and unscrupulousness bred of slavery having passed away, the Americans are a moral people. It would not be possible for Clay or any other demagogue now to excite them to an unprovoked attack upon another free nation or even to a manifest encroachment on its rights. If they had been filibusters they ​would have shown it when they had an immense army on foot, with a powerful navy, and when they were flushed with victory. The New England States, and the non-slavery element of the nation generally, were opposed to the War of 1812. An independent Canada, however inferior to them in force, might rest in perfect safety by their side. But when "Canada First" was born the North-West had only just been acquired. British Columbia was as yet hardly incorporated, and the absolute want of geographical compactness or even continuity was not so apparent as it is now. Enthusiasm was blind to the difficulty presented to the devotees of Canadian nationality by the separate nationality of Quebec, or if it was not blind, succeeded in cajoling itself by poetic talk about the value of French gifts and graces as ingredients for combination, without asking whether fusion was not the thing which the French most abhorred. There is no reason why Ontario should not be a nation if she were minded to be one. Her territory is compact. Her population is already as large as that of Denmark, and likely to be a good deal larger, probably as large as that of Switzerland; and it is sufficiently homogeneous if she can only repress French encroachment on her eastern border. She would have no access to the sea: no more has Switzerland, Hungary, or Servia. Already a great part of her trade goes through the United States in bond.

The same thing might have been said with regard to the Maritime Provinces—supposing them to have formed a legislative union—Quebec, British Columbia, or the North-West. In the North-West, rating its cultivable area at the lowest, there would be room for no mean nation. But the thread of each Province's destiny has now become so intertwined with the rest that the skein can hardly be disentangled. ​That the North-West, if it is not released from the strangling tariff, may take a course of its own is not unlikely; but it is unlikely that the course will be Independence.