By Don Curren
On the morning of March 22, 1841, Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine walked with 700 hundred followers toward the village of New Glasgow in Quebec.
LaFontaine was the leader of the Reform movement in Quebec, was running for election as the member of parliament for the Terrebonne riding. It was the first election in the newly unified British colony of Canada, which had just been stitched together out of the previously separate colonies of Upper and Lower Canada.
The hustings platform where the votes would be cast was surrounded by armed supporters of his Anglophone opponent, intent on preventing LaFontaine’s people from voting.
LaFontaine had not in the past shied away from the political violence that was surprisingly common in Canada at the time. He easily could have led his supporters into a violent confrontation with their opponents.
But he didn’t.
Instead, LaFontaine withdrew his candidacy and persuaded his followers to leave.
It looked like a defeat, but it was a victory.
LaFontaine could have done the expected thing and launched into a violent confrontation. But if he had, “(he) would have allowed himself to be taunted into descending into the old European terrain of hatred and violence between races and religions,” writes John Ralston Saul in his book Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin.
That book, part of the Extraordinary Canadian series published by Penguin, provides the basis of the narrative above.
“This was one of those moments … when the leader of the democratic movement understood that the true nature of Canada, if it were to exist, lay in restraint and the acceptance of complexity,” Ralston Saul writes.
His contention in the book is that LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin, working in concert for the cause of democratic reform, played a critical role in wrenching the British colonies out of the undemocratic control of the local elites and their absentee overlords in Great Britain.
Together they thereby created a new and unique society predicated on democratic government and the equality between the two founding nations.
They did so in part by their unswerving loyalty to each other and their mutual conviction that Upper and Lower Canada (English-speaking Ontario and French-speaking Quebec) had to enjoy equal status if a country forged from them was going to be a viable democracy.
What happened after LaFontaine refused to opt for violence in Terrebonne shows how close the partnership between the two Reformers was.
LaFontaine at first signalled that he would leave public life. But Baldwin had an idea: why not find a riding an Anglophone riding where LaFontaine could run and win?
LaFontaine was invited to run in the North Riding of York, a “safe seat” for the Reformers north of Toronto.
He embraced the idea. “(Thrown) into the strange environment of Protestant rural Ontario,” as Ralston Saul writes, LaFontaine was embraced by the Reform-minded voters and won the by-election.
He became de facto prime minister in 1842 after an establishment government collapsed in Parliament, and thereby became the leader of the first democratic government in “any colony in imperial history, any imperial history,” Ralston Saul writes.
A short while later when Baldwin ran into fierce opposition from the oligarchic Family Compact and the Orange Order in his riding in Ontario, Quebecois politicians found a safe seat for him in Rimouski in the heart of Francophone Lower Canada.
Together, patiently, deliberately, shrewdly and in the face of opposition from local elites and indifference or even outright hostility of Canada’s colonial masters in London, they nudged the unified colony toward democracy.
Often beset by the threat of violence from an embattled elite that was inclined to use Orangemen and other thugs to defend their status, Baldwin and LaFontaine consistently resisted the urge to strike back on the same level, instead relying on reason, debate and parliamentary deliberation to achieve their goals.
I tend to think of Canada’s evolution into a modern democratic state was kind of an inevitable, organic process that happened with the consent, if not the outright assistance, of the British.
Ralston Saul’s book is a salutary reminder that wasn’t the case.
It took the heroism of LaFontaine and Baldwin and their allies to make it happen. And the heroism they showed, Ralston Saul argues, was a distinctively Canadian kind - nonviolent, patient, committed to reason and debate, and intensely respectful of the rights of others.
While many in the Anglophone establishment were prepared to treat the Quebecois as less than full citizens in the Canadian political order, Baldwin was unequivocally committed to equality between the Francophone and Anglophone populations.
“I was an advocate for the union of the two Provinces and still am, but not for a union of parchment, but for the union of hearts of free born men. Not a union forced down the throats of people by bayonets, but a union of the voluntary choice of a free people,” Baldwin once told Parliament.
It’s unfortunate that their conception of equality fell short of universality, relegating women, members of Canada’s First Nations and others to an inferior status. But I would argue that it established a precedent for recognizing the rights of that could - and would - subsequently be extended.
It laid down the foundations for Canada’s emergence as a nation without an explicit core racial or ethnic identity, a characteristic I believe makes it powerfully resistant to fascism.
It’s interesting to speculate how the history of the United States would have evolved if all, or even some, of the Founding Fathers showed the same dedication to equality that Baldwin and LaFontaine did.
Canadians are often inundated with American myths, such that of the “Founding Fathers.”
Since we tend not to mythologize our past, those American myths can eclipse our sense of our own history, and our own heroes.
Ralston Saul’s book is an excellent corrective to that. It illustrates the stature and the brilliance of Baldwin and LaFontaine, how they developed what he depicts as a distinctively Canadian way of doing politics, and helped forge Canada in the process.
It’s a reminder of how unique and how valuable Canada is. And how essential it is that we fight to preserve it - and the values it embodies.
It’s also short (229 pages) and lively. And it poignantly depicts the personal lives of both men, and the price they paid for their devotion to Canada.
Reading it - and/or any other book that explores our rich and distinctive history - would be a good way to celebrate Canada Day next week.
However you spend it, here’s wishing you the very best on that happy occasion.
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