Rise to Greatness Read online

  ALSO BY CONRAD BLACK

  Render Unto Caesar: The Life and Legacy of Maurice Duplessis

  A Life in Progress

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom

  The Invincible Quest: The Life of Richard Milhous Nixon

  A Matter of Principle

  Flight of the Eagle: A Strategic History of the United States

  COPYRIGHT © 2014 BY CONRAD BLACK CAPITAL CORPORATION

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Black, Conrad, author

  Rise to greatness : the history of Canada from the Vikings to the present / Conrad Black.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-7710-1354-6 (bound). – ISBN 978-0-7710-1355-3 (html)

  1. Canada – History. I. Title.

  FC165.B53 2014 971 C2014-904644-8

  C2014-904645-6

  Published simultaneously in the United States of America by

  McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014944153

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for use of copyrighted material.

  The excerpt from “Canada: Case History: 1945” by Earle Birney is taken from One Muddy Hand: Selected Poems, Harbour Publishing, 2006, www.harbourpublishing.com. Reprinted by permission.

  The poem “W.L.M.K.” by F.R. Scott has been reprinted with the permission of William Toye, literary executor for the estate of F.R. Scott.

  Cover and text design by CS Richardson

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  To these dear friends, by agreement in each case, all of whom assisted me in different ways with this book:

  PAUL G. DESMARAIS (1927–2013)

  PAUL JOHNSON

  GEORGE JONAS

  M. BRIAN MULRONEY

  JOHN N. TURNER

  GEORGE (LORD) WEIDENFELD

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  FOREWORD by Paul Johnson

  INTRODUCTION

  Prelude: “The Land God Gave to Cain”: Original Inhabitants and Early Explorers, 874–1603

  PART I: COLONY: 1603–1867

  Chapter 1: Champlain, the French Monarchy, New France, and the Maritime Colonies, 1603–1754

  Chapter 2: Carleton, American Wars, and the Birth of Canada and the United States. The British Defeat the French, the Americans and French Defeat the British, and the British and Canadians Draw with the Americans, 1754–1830

  Chapter 3: Baldwin, LaFontaine, and the Difficult Quest for Autonomy from Britain While Retaining British Protection from the United States, 1830–1867

  PART II: DOMINION: 1867–1949

  Chapter 4: Macdonald and the World’s First Transcontinental, Bicultural, Parliamentary Confederation. The Pacific Railway, the National Policy, and the Riel Rebellion, 1867–1896

  Chapter 5: Laurier, the Dawn of “Canada’s Century,” and the Great War, 1896–1919

  Chapter 6: King and the Art of Cunning Caution Between the Wars, 1919–1940

  Chapter 7: King and the Art of Cunning Caution in War and Cold War, 1940–1949. From “Premier Dominion of the Crown,” to Indispensable Anglo-American Ally

  PART III: REALM: 1949–2014

  Chapter 8: St. Laurent and Duplessis, Canada as a Middle Power, and Quebec in Pursuit of Autonomy, 1949–1966

  Chapter 9: Trudeau, Lévesque, and the Quebec Crisis, 1966–2000

  Chapter 10: A Force in the World at Last, 2000–2014

  CONCLUSION: REFLECTIONS AND PROSPECTS

  Photo Insert

  Photographic Credits

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  THANKS IN PARTICULAR, and for the sixth consecutive publication, to Barbara for her customary forbearance and to my close associate, Joan Maida, for her patient and efficient help, and thanks also to Doug Pepper and Jenny Bradshaw and their colleagues at Penguin Random House Canada. Others who have been helpful are very numerous, including those to whom the book is dedicated. Many can be deduced from the text as it has been my privilege to know a large number of the personalities prominent in the last fifty years of the narrative. I am deeply grateful to all who have assisted me.

  Foreword

  WHEN I SUGGESTED TO CONRAD BLACK that he should write a history of Canada, I knew that, if he accepted the idea, he would do it well. I had no idea that he would do it so quickly. I should have known better. Black is a man of decision. Once he has decided to do a thing, nothing is allowed to stand in his way. Having agreed with me that a history of Canada was needed, he set to. He was well, indeed superbly, qualified for the job. He has been a successful businessman. He has been an outstanding newspaper owner. He has been involved in politics at local, national and international levels. He is wonderfully articulate, and a man who sees things with remarkable clarity. Not least he is subtle.

  I stress subtlety because the history of Canada is a study in understatement. It is an enormous country, like the United States. But whereas, in America, everything that happens is proclaimed from the house-tops, printed in capital letters, painted in technicolour and reverberates with blood and thunder, Canadian history rarely rises above a whisper. Its story is fascinating but it is written in lower case. It has produced many remarkable men and, increasingly, women. But in the theatre of the world they seldom take centre stage. Its very size underlines its character. Amid its huge prairies and limitless tundra, its boundless wastes of ice-floes and frozen seas, the outstanding characteristic is silence. One must listen, and listen hard. And what emerges is paradox.

  Canada is like one of those banks said to be too big to go bust. Its sheer enormity saved it from outright conquest by any one state. Wrested from its native population by Samuel de Champlain – whose extraordinary life is an epic in itself – its very size in the eighteenth century proved too much for France to hold during a period of British naval supremacy. Yet equally the British were obliged to compromise with its French-speaking inhabitants to keep it against the “manifest destiny” of the United States. This bargain, the first in the history of colonialism – and the most enduring – was the prototype of many such in Canada’s two centuries of trade-offs and peaceful adjustments. Under a British flag Canada was able to avoid absorption in America until the aggressive moment had passed, and experiments in federation had taken root. The history of Canada during the nineteenth century and even the twentieth contains many anxious periods, and moments of near disaster, but catastrophe was always avoided, and the prevailing language of her march through the decades is one of concession and yielding, conciliation, rapprochement, mending and mediation, patching, healing and setting right. Studied closely, Canadian history reveals much heroism in detail, but a heroism enacted quietly and with the minimum of histrionics.

  Black recounts this progress with a lively satisfaction and often with humour, but he also narrates an accompanying saga of Canada’s emergence in the world as a model of calm common sense, good gov
ernment and quiet rectitude. Canada, like all countries, has made mistakes – and Black points them out – but she has seldom persisted in foolishness, and her record of learning from error, and not making the same mistake twice, is exemplary. Amid the deafening clamour of strident voices on the world scene, Canada’s has somehow contrived to make its own calm contribution listened to and even heeded. In recent years, indeed, Canada’s influence in the world has grown steadily, and with justice.

  Canada, as the saying goes, always punches above her weight, as the experience of two world wars plainly shows, though the metaphor ill pertains to a country always anxious to avoid the language of conflict. It is perhaps lucky that Canada, unlike Australia, never took up the English national game, cricket, a pastime characterized by long soporific spells punctuated by periods of raucous bellicosity. Canada chose, instead, to excel uncontroversially at ice-hockey.

  When I was a boy, the great thing I knew about Canada – all English boys in the 1930s knew it, and rejoiced in it – was the existence of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the “Mounties.” It may now seem archaic, for it is “Royal” and horse-bound. But it did, and still does, conjure up an image of security and manliness, of bringing order in a wild country and doing it with a touch of romance. “The Mounties always get their man” is a splendid phrase Canada has given the world, and the Mounties add a touch of colour to a country whose history is, as a rule, reassuringly monochrome.

  Black’s book certainly does not omit such rare but striking moments of glamour in the story he tells. But his chief task, and he does it with aplomb, is to concentrate on the way in which Canada has continued to avoid the pitfalls which beset nations – often only by a hair’s breadth – and to show how a physically vast portion of the world, which could so easily become unmanageable, has contrived to conduct its affairs with reason, justice and moderation, and to set its neighbours, big and small, near and distant, a good example. It is, on the whole, a noble story, and Black has told it well.

  PAUL JOHNSON

  Jacques Cartier (1491–1557), whose missions to Canada (as he called it) on behalf of the French king Francis I in 1534, 1535–1536, and 1541–1542 established him as the first European explorer of the St. Lawrence, which he also named, and the discoverer of Montreal (at the site of the bridge that now bears his name there). The painting, in 1844, is mere surmise, as no contemporary depictions of Cartier survive.

  Introduction

  CANADA HAS OFTEN HAD A PERILOUS EXISTENCE, but not for a long time has the threat been ravenously belligerent neighbours or exploitive colonizers. In order even to be conceived, Canada had to be, first, French so as not to be easily assimilated by the American colonists and revolutionaries, and then British, to have a protector to avoid being subsumed later into the great American project. For one hundred years prior to the First World War, Canada had gradually to wrest autonomy and then sovereignty from its distant Imperial protector while being important enough to Britain’s position in the world balance of power opposite Germany and America to merit the Empire’s protection from the United States. And it had to be resistant, but not offensive, to the inexorably rising power of America. It had to balance the strength of the British Empire against the appetites of the United States. These were large worldly forces for an underpopulated and tentative country to try to manage. Canada has often had to reformulate its natural purposes to avoid succumbing to the spontaneous temptations of annexation to its mighty and relentlessly successful neighbour; it has also had to be enough of a bulwark against an Anglo-Saxon tide to retain the federalist adherence of the French Canadians, however unenthusiastically at times. It has been a protracted and intricate, unheroic, but often almost artistic survival process. Canada was never threatened with a tragic or pitiable fate but has faced a constant threat to its will to nationality for more than two centuries.

  Though Britain’s eviction of France from Canada in the Seven Years War is generally referred to, especially in French Canada, as “the Conquest,” it was just the replacement of one European colonial power by another. French Canada has never been conquered; its triumph over demography and acculturation and climate has been astounding. Neither has English Canada been conquered. And Canada is, with the other three largest national land masses, Russia, China, and the United States, almost the only country that has been extant for more than four hundred years as a jurisdiction that has never been conquered. By contrast, in the lifetimes of many readers, almost every continental European country except Sweden, Portugal, Switzerland, and European Turkey has been militarily assaulted and wholly or partially overrun.

  The consequences of what Charles de Gaulle and William Lyon Mackenzie King called in 1944 the “overwhelming contiguity” of the United States to Canada were to promote a more fervent adherence to the British Empire and Commonwealth than would otherwise have been attractive to Canadians, tempered largely by the need not to seem to the French third of Canadians obsessed by maternal adoration at the expense of the (achingly slowly) emerging national interest of Canada. When the decline of Britain in the world made the British connection too threadbare to sustain Canadian nationality, Canada officially embraced its fortuitous status as a bicultural country, the home and beneficiary of two of the world’s most distinguished languages and cultural traditions within the same broad land. It was a commendable effort and it is genuinely embraced by many, including a very talented elite that has exercised an influence that many regard as disproportionate.

  But the fickle mood swings of Quebec – from cynical aspirations to creeping independence to genuine enthusiasm for an association of official equals – are far from the effervescent celebration of biculturalism that the initial promoters of this vision espoused. Generally Quebec’s default position has been a sullen and lethargic addiction to transfer payments from English Canada that enable Quebec to have an almost entirely white-collar, largely service economy where its non-French compatriots discreetly pick up much of the bill while the official Quebec apparat gambols in the trappings of subsidized nationhood. What has happened is that Canada has survived what was a severe federal crisis, almost without violence or excessive uncertainty. While doing this it has attained a scale of activity in most fields, including cultural and commercial activities, that make it interesting enough to itself to reduce the formerly insatiable preoccupation with American influence in every sphere.

  For 150 years, Canada’s lot was the honourable but unglamorous one of tugging at the trouser leg of the British and Americans and even, in the most unpromising circumstances, the French, trying to navigate between the ambitions and aversions of those countries, aligning now with one and now another, but almost never against any of them, while avoiding the extreme inflammation of Quebec nationalism. The skills acquired and practised were remarkable and sophisticated, but not the stuff of legends and anthems. As will be recounted in this book, Canada did, in its intuitive but nearly flawless calculations, move in parallel behind, but not too far behind, the United States as its survival and growth as a distinct jurisdiction required. So subtle, and often ingenious, has this progress been, half feline precision, half the plucky earnestness of the eagle scout, that Canadians have generally failed to notice their own virtuosity. And certainly the world has.

  As the American colonists moved, with world-historic strategic brilliance, to encourage the British to expel the French from America, and then persuaded the French, contrary to their own interests and overburdening their own capacities, to assist them in evicting the British from America, the French Canadians made their pact and peace with the prudently magnanimous British that enabled Quebec to resist the temptations of the American Revolution and salvaged the northern half of the continent, at least temporarily, for the British Crown. The American colonists’ manipulation of the world’s two greatest powers (France and Britain) was a work of genius. But the French-Canadian elicitation from Britain of generous guaranties of its language, law, and religion just before the American Revolution, f
ounded Canada, a haven for the French and for the American Loyalist resisters who quickly came. Canada was almost all French at the start of the American Revolution but almost half English in the aftermath of it, and had only one-twentieth of the population of the new Republic of Liberty (including its several hundred thousand indentured slaves). By a narrow margin, the French and English Canadians and their British garrison held the borders against the Americans in the War of 1812, and after the Napoleonic Wars the power of the British Empire enabled Canada to shelter under the Imperial wing for fifty years. While the United States descended toward civil war over issues related to slavery, Canada worked out Responsible Government, squaring the squabbling interests of its French and English, and the often exasperated British, with only minor incidences of violence.

  The agony of the American Civil War inflicted 750,000 dead on a population of thirty-one million, and reduced almost half the secessionist states to rubble and ashes. But America, at last, was unbound and united, with the greatest army in the world and an unlimited horizon. At just this point, and just in time, an improbable congeries of provincial Canadian statesmen persuaded a largely skeptical Mother Country to underwrite the world’s first transcontinental, officially bilingual, parliamentary confederation. A new country was launched, on a fantastically novel basis, to the bemused incredulity of the leaders of the triumphant American Union. But it grew quickly on steel rails and immigration borne by steamships and held its status as an autonomous democratic dominion within the British Empire. Despite the astounding economic and demographic growth in the United States that almost tripled its population between the Civil War and the First World War, Canada maintained its population generally at about 10 per cent of that of the United States and its level of prosperity quite close to that of America.