The Big Shift

The Seismic Change in Canadian Politics, Business, and Culture and What It Means for Our Future

Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781443416467
• eBook ISBN: 9781443416474
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For almost its entire history, Canada has been run by the political, media and business elites of Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. But in the past few years, these groups have lost their power—and most of them still do not realize it's gone. The Laurentian Consensus, the term John Ibbitson has coined for the dusty liberal elite, has been replaced by a new, powerful coalition based in the West and supported by immigrant voters in Ontario. How did this happen?

Most people are unaware that the keystone economic and political drivers of this country are now Western Canada and immigrants from China, India and other Asian countries. Politicians and businesspeople have underestimated how conservative these newcomers are making our country. Canada, with its ever-evolving economy and fluid demographic base, has become divorced from the traditions of its past and is moving in an entirely new direction.

In The Big Shift, Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson argue that one of the world's most consensual countries is becoming polarized, exhibiting stark differences between East and West, cities and suburbs, Canadianborn citizens and immigrants. The winners—in both politics and business— will be those who can capitalize on the tremendous changes that the Big Shift will bring.

1

The Death of the Laurentian Consensus
WHY THE PEOPLE WHO USED TO MATTER MOST DON’T ANYMORE

The first course was asparagus soup. Not too much cream, because everyone eats sensibly nowadays. But asparagus is in season for such a short time, and it was such a decadent contrast to the lamb and couscous. Things were going so well until Gerald brought up politics, as Gerald always must.

“Do you see what he’s done now?”

“Who?” Celia asked.

“Who do you think?” Gerald growled, mopping the bowl with his bread. “He’s cutting funding to the National Ballet.”

“No!” Celia lowered her spoon.

Gerald nodded grimly. “And the Canadian Opera Company. And the Toronto Symphony.”

They were silent for a moment. The spring rain washed softly across the leaded glass panes of the dining room window.

“Are you sure?” Roberta tried to hide her alarm, for Gerald could easily ruin an entire evening if he got going. “I thought that was just what the Opposition was claiming.”

“Oh, he’s going to do it, all right, just you wait.” Gerald leaned back, clenching the napkin in his right hand. “He hates the arts. Can’t stand ’em.”

“Such a damn shame,” Maurice muttered, holding up his bowl. “Roberta, are there seconds?”

“I could live with the tax cuts.” The guests exchanged quiet glances. Gerald was off and running again. “I could live with the tax cuts, though they’re all wrong.” His scowl deepened. “I could live with the nonsense about Israel, even if it does destroy 50 years of Canadian diplomacy.” He tossed the napkin on the table in disgust. “But Kyoto. Simply walking away from Kyoto. Walking away!”

People clucked sympathetically. Gerald could be tiresome, but he was right.

“And the prisons, when crime is going down. Putting boys in jail with hardened criminals for keeping a couple of plants—”

“Well, six, actually,” Roberta corrected, but nobody was listening.

“I smoked pot when I was in college. Everybody did.” Gerald stuck out his chin as though daring contradiction. But most of his table companions still smoked when the kids were away on the weekend.

“It’s this law-and-order garbage, and this ramming everything through without thinking—and gutting the census—gutting it!—and this kowtowing to the Americans, and if it’s not the Americans it’s the Chinese—”

“The Internet snooping bill’s what frightens me,” Maurice interjected, hoping to guide the conversation to calmer waters. “I was talking the other day to one of the guys in IT. And he said—”

But no luck. Gerald was under full sail.

“And the Internet snooping bill. And beating the bureaucracy into submission. And that spectacle at the G20. And shutting down that water research station. And especially what they did to Irwin Cotler.” The Tories—who, everyone knew, coveted Cotler’s Montreal riding—had been circulating rumours that the Liberal MP was stepping down, which Cotler adamantly denied.

“Poor Irwin.” Celia shook her head sadly.

“They’re all just a bunch of thugs.” Gerald was out of his chair, leaning over the table. “A bunch of thugs. Stole the election, that’s what they did! You saw what happened in Guelph.” Robocalls directing Liberal supporters to non-existent polling stations. Shocking.

“And it wasn’t just Guelph, if you ask me.” Maurice lowered his voice, as if they were being overheard. “I think it was everywhere.”

“He’s the worst prime minister we’ve ever had. Why can’t people see that?” Gerald, his face flushed, pounded the table with his fist. “Why can’t those damned Brampton Sikhs see that?”

Maurice was out of his chair, his arm around Gerald’s shoulder. “Come on, my friend, let’s get some air.”

“Damned thugs.” Gerald’s voice trailed through the air as Maurice guided him to the front porch. “That’s all they are. Just a bunch of damned thugs.”

You might have witnessed a conversation such as this. It could have been at a dinner party in any comfortable neighbourhood in any Central Canadian city that has a decent university in it. Or maybe you were at a restaurant, or a reception. Maybe it was over a Guinness in a pub, or on a squash court. Maybe you were just listening in. Or maybe you’re one of them yourself.

They are the Laurentian Consensus. From the time of Confederation until quite recently, the political, academic, cultural, media, and business elites in the communities along the watershed of the St. Lawrence River ran this country. On all of the great issues of the day, these Laurentian elites debated among themselves, reached a consensus, and implemented that consensus. They governed.

These elites are in a very bad mood right now—the worst in their lives, as far as politics is concerned. No one is listening to them anymore. At one level they understand this; at another they don’t. It’s impossible for them to comprehend the influence they have lost. The Laurentian Consensus in eclipse? Nonsense. You might as well claim the CBC is irrelevant.

What happened to the Laurentian Consensus, and why? What replaced it? What comes next? That is what this book is about.

How close should Canada’s relationship with Great Britain be? How close should Canada be to the United States? What should we do about conscription? What should we do about the Depression? What should we do about poverty? What does Quebec want, and should we give it? How do we bring home the Constitution? What should we do about the deficit?

The Laurentian elites grappled with these and other great issues from the time of Confederation until not very long ago. The debates played out in the pages of the major newspapers, in books, on television, and on university campuses. But most of the discussion was held behind closed doors: in faculty clubs, the hallways of legislatures, in dining rooms. Especially in dining rooms.

The leading figures of the Consensus form the spine of Canadian political and cultural thought: George Brown, John A. Macdonald, George-Étienne Cartier, Ernest Lapointe, O.D. Skelton, Henri Bourassa, Harold Innis, Hume Wrong, Lester Pearson, Vincent Massey, George Grant, Walter Gordon, Marshall McLuhan, Bora Laskin, Pierre Trudeau, René Lévesque, Tom Kent, Charles Taylor, Lucien Bouchard, Jeffrey Simpson, Margaret Atwood, Adrienne Clarkson, André Pratte. And these are just the names you might come up with off the top of your head.

Sometimes they couldn’t agree and the voters had to decide, as they did in the free trade election of 1988. More often than not, however, the Laurentian elites forged a consensus by accommodating one another’s concerns, and then presented that consensus to the public as a fait accompli, sometimes in the form of proposed legislation, sometimes through federal–provincial agreements, other times through simple social osmosis. The discussions over sherry or Scotch, the academic paper or editorial that made the rounds, the quid that both sides accepted in exchange for the quo, became that most entrenched of all wisdoms: conventional.

We need high tariffs to protect Canadian manufacturers from American competition. Conscription, yes, but as little of it as possible. Ottawa must take the lead in social policy, because only Ottawa has sufficient power to tax. Quebec can and must be accommodated, but within limits. The deficit is not the most important concern. The deficit is the most important concern.

Issue after issue, decade after decade, the Laurentian Consensus shaped the public policy arc of this country.

Its members were and are few enough that most of them knew or know each other. At first they were largely of British stock and largely Protestant, though any bias against the French, Catholics, or Jews was far from proscriptive; indeed, agreement between the French and English elites was essential, and whenever it was not obtained, things went badly. They were, for the most part, from the upper ranks of the middle class, though the membrane was permeable. They were almost invariably small-l liberals who voted for the large-L party. Indeed, the Liberal Party of Canada was the most obvious and powerful manifestation of the Laurentian Consensus.

But it would be wrong to say that the Laurentian Consensus and the Liberal Party were synonymous. Conservative governments, while treated with suspicion, were tolerated, provided they knew their place. R.B. Bennett created the forerunner of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the official broadcaster of the Laurentian Consensus. Progressive Conservatives governed Ontario for 42 years. Brian Mulroney, who initially opposed free trade, embraced it when the Macdonald Commission’s 1985 report signalled the consensus on tariffs had started to shift. Hugh Segal—once an aide to Ontario Premier Bill Davis, then an aspirant to the leadership of the Progressive Conservatives, and now a Conservative senator—still moves easily through the drawing rooms of the Laurentian elites, who didn’t know how much they missed the Progressives Conservatives until they disappeared.

If a premier or prime minister did defy the Consensus, woe betide him. Why do we still today, more than 50 years later, see books, documentaries, and articles raging against John Diefenbaker’s decision to cancel the Avro Arrow? Because he did so in defiance of the Laurentian Consensus, and the Consensus still hasn’t forgiven him.

Yet we should not be stingy in our praise. If Canada is a great country—and we think it is—we have the Laurentian elites to thank. They guided us through two great and terrible wars, launched an infrastructure revolution in the 1950s that created the highways and airports we still use today. They pushed through the St. Lawrence Seaway, created a national social security system, nurtured cultural industries behind non-tariff walls, navigated the shoals of Quebec separatism (though it was a close-run thing), and brought home a Constitution with a Charter of Rights and Freedoms that is now emulated by more countries around the world than its American equivalent, and is watched over by a damn fine Supreme Court.

They did much, much else besides. The national parks system. Public broadcasting. The equalization program. The Canada Council.

Lord knows they had their flaws. Though they were no more anti-Semitic than was common at the time, it was enough to shut Canada’s doors to Jews in the 1930s. How many died in concentration camps as a result? The internment of Japanese Canadians is a similar stain. The Consensus exhibited, and still exhibits, an anti-American chippiness that reflects its own famous insecurity. Canada was so much smaller than the United States, and so much more virtuous. It simply wasn’t fair.

Worst of all—by far the worst of all—their treatment of Canada’s Aboriginal peoples combined condescension, incomprehension, and a misdirected sense of guilt to produce policies that First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities struggle to overcome to this day.¹

But they got one big thing right: they created an open-door immigration policy that, starting in the 1960s, encouraged newcomers from Asia and elsewhere to immigrate to Canada. And that is why Canada is evolving so quickly into the word’s first post-national state.

If the Laurentianists were honest, they’d admit this wasn’t what they’d planned. For decades they had glumly pondered the failure of the Canadian nation. The French and English simply didn’t get along that well; they never had, not since 1066. The French formed a nation within Canada, and Atlantic Canada jealously protected a discernible, though not definable, culture of its own. The rest of the country evolved into a collection of cities, farms, and bush that shared English as a common language and broadly embraced the Western ethos of capitalism, democracy, and the rule of law but otherwise had little in common despite Laurentian efforts to forge something, anything, that could be called a national culture.

The Canadian nation? There is no such thing, and never was.

But the inability of English and French to do more than tolerate each other produced a culture of accommodation that makes it possible for people of diverse backgrounds to live together in the largely urban, polyglot, intensely creative, and simply fabulous country that we celebrate today.

Open-door immigration combined with multicultural tolerance represents the finest achievement of the Laurentian elites. It has also helped do them in.

It was a beautiful July day, and the young boy was very excited because his grandmother was taking him to see a parade. The small town in central Ontario where they lived rarely hosted parades, and certainly there had never been a parade like this. The boy watched in awe as marching band followed float followed marching band. Men in bright sashes and their best Sunday suits walked proudly past, some carrying banners with phrases the boy didn’t understand. A man with a grey beard dressed in a strange uniform cantered past on a high-spirited white horse. It was better than Christmas, but it was all very odd.

“What is the parade for?” John Ibbitson asked his grandmother, who still spoke with a Yorkshire lilt.

“To celebrate the Glorious Twelfth,” she answered.

“What’s the Glorious Twelfth?”

“It’s the day we beat the Catholics.”

Today the Orange Lodge is virtually extinct. But back in the 1960s its various local lodges could still come together to mount parades that filled the street for an hour. The settler culture that dominated central Ontario was fiercely anti-Catholic, except for those parts where Irish or Polish immigrants dominated, such as the Ottawa Valley. In places where the two cultures lived side by side, tensions often ran high on July 12, when Protestants celebrated the defeat of the Stuart armies at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

Protestant Canada voted Conservative, and because it voted Conservative, Liberals almost always won elections, thanks to Catholic immigrants. In the late 1800s, Canada had trouble attracting immigrants because most people coming to North America from Europe preferred to settle in the United States, where it was warmer and where there were already many of their own kind. Clifford Sifton, Wilfrid Laurier’s minister of the interior, began aggressively recruiting new arrivals to fill the vast and mostly empty prairies. He launched what was effectively an immigration marketing campaign across Europe, promoting Canada as a welcoming host with plenty of good land and a much better-ordered society than its Wild West counterpart to the south. By the early 1900s, the country was increasingly the destination of Eastern Europeans, most of them Catholic or Jewish, who fled the pogroms and poverty of the old countries and whom the Americans perversely considered undesirables who would never fit in. Sifton famously described the ideal candidate as “a stalwart peasant in a sheepskin coat, born on the soil, whose forefathers have been peasants for 10 generations, with a stout wife and a half-dozen children.”² The already established settlers in English Canada were suspicious of these waves of exotic immigrants, and the Conservative Party that they supported gained a reputation for being British, Protestant, and intolerant. Immigrants mostly shunned it, gratefully delivering their votes to the Liberal Party instead.

After the Second World War, millions abandoned a ravaged and impoverished Europe, filling Canada’s cities with new arrivals from Italy and Portugal, from the Baltics and the Balkans. In 1967, the Liberal government of Lester Pearson lifted restrictions that for almost a century had sought to keep out Asian immigrants, especially the Chinese, either through a head tax or an outright ban. With each passing year, the country’s largest cities became increasingly cosmopoli...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Preface: You Need to Stop Listening
• 1. The Death of the Laurentian Consensus: Why the people who used to matter most don’t anymore
• 2. The Great Divide: Conservative values and the Big Shift
• 3. Quebec: The sun sets. The sun might just possibly rise.
• 4. It’s Not ROC Anymore: The Ottawa River Curtain descends
• 5. The Wests: Getting used to being in charge
• 6. They Don’t Get It: And why they don’t
• 7. The Conservative Century: Why the Tories will rule, and how they’ll be defeated
• 8. Not So Fragile: The Canada your mother never knew
• 9. The Big Shift Means Business: Is yours ready?
• 10. The Decline of the Laurentian Media: Why it doesn’t matter if the press gallery doesn’t like Stephen Harper
• 11. Things Will Change (1): At home
• 12. Things Will Change (2): Abroad
• Conclusion: Margin of Error
• Acknowledgements from Darrell Bricker
• Acknowledgements from John Ibbitson
• Notes
• About the Authors
• Copyright
• About the Publisher