It is coming up to forty years since Houston and Smyth made the claim that Orangeism in Canada: “is a peripheral movement restricted to a minority of aging participants and incomprehensible to most observers” (Houston and Smyth 1980: 160). If Orangeism was peripheral in the late 1970s, today it has become almost invisible, and the aging participants are now older and even fewer in number. Why then have we turned our academic attention to a fraternal movement that now seems so marginal? Our research into what remains of the Orange Order in Canada serves two social scientific purposes that we find compelling. First, from a historical and structural perspective, throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Orange Order had a dominant sociopolitical, religious, and economic presence in Canada. Historians have ably explained its decline in the context of Canadian developments (Houston and Smyth 1980; Wilson 2007; Smyth 2015), but none has examined the decline in the comparative framework of the fate of the Orange Order in Northern Ireland . How far do the trends that have influenced the decline in Canada reflect more general trends in Orangeism, and how far are the circumstances in the Canadian context unique? McAuley and his colleagues have examined in detail the contemporary Orange Order in Northern Ireland (McAuley 2010, 2016; McAuley et al. 2011). In this book, we examine the contemporary Orange Order in Canada in light of both that framework and contemporary Canadian sociopolitical life, which Nesbitt-Larking (2007, 2012, 2014), and Nesbitt-Larking and Bradford (2015) have investigated. In so doing, we reveal a series of fascinating comparisons and contrasts. We do this through our analyses of a range of primary and secondary documents, and in particular our content and discourse analysis of The Sentinel , the major publication of the Orange Order in Canada.
We also describe the reflections and responses of eighteen Canadian Orangemen , who generously devoted hours to conversations with us on contemporary Orangeism in Canada. Their information and insights furnished an invaluable resource as we attempted to address the experiential question of what it is like to be an Orangeman in contemporary Canada. It is their own words that inform the drive and direction of our book. This is the second major purpose of our research. Recent research on everyday resistance has uncovered the ways in which the marginalized and the oppressed are able to negotiate relations of power without access to conventional resources (de Certeau 1988; Scott 1990). How do women, ethno-racial and religious minorities, peasants, GBLTQ (gay, bisexual, lesbian, transgenered, queer) minorities, and others assert themselves and gain any influence in settings in which they are marginal and lack access to the dominant structures of power? Our work in this book builds upon certain insights derived from this scholarship, but applies them to the more mundane setting of a small community of aging white males in contemporary Canada. These are the members of the Orange Order . Our central purpose here is to explore the political realities of this once-dominant political and societal brotherhood, whose influence and status have undergone substantial diminution.
In the past, the Orange Order in Canada exerted substantial social and political influence, promoting the virtues of a united British Empire and the broad vision of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant society. The central research challenge of our project is to investigate the continued relevance of the Orange Order (as an institutional and organizational presence) and Orangeism (as an ideology) in contemporary Canadian society. Historically, the presence of the Orange Order looms large. With its origins in the early nineteenth century, and its formal beginnings in Canada in 1830, the Orange Order is associated with loyalism and conservatism in such pivotal movements as the anti-rebellion forces of 1837 and the anti-Riel forces in the 1870s. Orangemen dominated Toronto politics in the first half of the twentieth century, and Sir John A. Macdonald and John Diefenbaker were just two of the prominent politicians who were Orangemen. Indeed, so dominant was the Order in Toronto from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries that the city was referred to as “The Belfast of Canada” (Smyth 2015), both by its allies and its enemies. From its beginnings in the early nineteenth century, the Orange Order in Canada peaked in membership and influence in the 1920s. In 1921, the population of Canada was just under 8,800,000. At that time, the Orange Order consisted of at least 100,000 members (a conservative estimate), with many more who had been through an Orange Lodge or were related to a member (Wilson 2007: 21). In 1980, Houston and Smyth reported: “fewer than twenty thousand active members in the country and their average age cannot be less than fifty years” (Houston and Smyth 1980: 167). By June 2013, there were only 2,536 men (personal communication) remaining in the Orange Order across Canada in a population of 35,154,300. While the numbers do not tell the entire story, there is no denying the fact that contemporary Orangeism in Canada has been in serious decline since the 1950s (Smyth 2015). Throughout our interviews and examinations of contemporary Orange Order documents, we detect a sense of dignity and hope combined with a realistic appraisal of where Orangeism stands in Canada today. There is a certain poignancy about the decline in the ranks of Canadian Orangemen, evidenced in the words of Ontario West Grand Master, Dennis Glazier in 2011, who wrote:
The past year for this executive has been challenging to say the least. This in no way should be considered negative as we were up for each and every opportunity and welcomed them all … Our mission is to promote the Orange Order and do whatever possible to continue the operation in many communities; however, we must be realistic. If the ownership of a building is crippling a lodge and their membership is not evolving for tomorrow, the lodge has to consider redevelopment by amalgamation or selling the property. On a sad point, the year has again fallen witness to departed brothers which [sic] the Grand Secretary will give tribute. (Grand Orange Lodge of Ontario West 2011: 10, 12)
The Report of the Grand Secretary of Ontario West for 2011 indicates that only around thirty men became new members in the previous year, while at least seventeen were recorded as having passed away (Grand Orange Lodge of Ontario West 2011: 17, 18). While the year in review confronted the Association with the serious challenge of locating sufficient qualified men to fill various ceremonial offices, the spirit of pride and loyalty remained in place.
Our book is a detailed analysis of the ideas and ideals of those men who have kept the faith and who continue to meet, to organize, and to promote their Orange principles, increasingly now cut off both from Northern Irish roots and their own Canadian heritage. Throughout the book, we attempt to describe and analyze these perspectives with honesty, respect, and a critical orientation. The sociodemographic and structural insertion into contemporary Canadian society makes it inaccurate to describe them as marginal and as an oppressed minority. Being white, Protestant, and male carries with it a range of structured and historically conditioned privileges. These are further sustained by the adherence of most members of the Orange Order to a highly conventional and conservative belief system. It is, however, also inaccurate to describe contemporary Canadian Orangemen as members of a dominant elite. Throughout their history and even when they held a great deal of influence, they were outsiders to the establishment and excluded from the ruling classes. While their loyalty might have served a useful purpose in legitimizing the imperial order, their tribalism and literalism rendered them too crude and rough-hewn for the arenas of political and diplomatic life. In contemporary Canada, lacking now in numbers, social status, and influence, they share in common with the oppressed an invisibility and, if they are recognized at all, the popular portrayal of their core beliefs in stereotypical and negative ways that they are decreasingly able to correct in the court of public opinion. And yet, a few of them carries on and the Orange Order survives. If they cannot be said to practice everyday resistance, they are certainly practitioners of everyday resilience.
Among the most compelling reminders of this is the annual Toronto Orange Parade. The longest-running continuous Orange parade in North America, it is now coming up to its 200th year. In the heyday of the Canadian Orange Order , there would have been thousands marching and tens of thousands out to cheer along the thronged sidewalks. In recent years, with great effort, the Orange Order has been able to gather a few hundred marchers. However, their ...