Substack Version

Part XVII

October of 2026 has once again exposed the fault lines within Confederation. “Province worshippers”, in both Alberta and Quebec, have been quite victorious this month, either by virtue of there even being a quasi independence referendum in Alberta in the first place, or by the fact that the independence-referendum-wanting Parti Quebecois nearly won a majority government with 28% of the popular vote. Given the current state of Confederation, I think I should explore some of the thoughts of the Red Tory Eugene Forsey in regards to Canadian national unity. While not required reading, perhaps Part XIV of this series, where I explore how the CCF/NDP can be seen as heirs to the tradition of “Tory Democracy”, or “One Nation Conservatism”, which stems from the British Tory Prime Minster Benjamin Disraeli, may be useful.

To start, and in regards to Benjamin Disraeli & Eugene Forsey, this first excerpt from Roy Romanow, the Saskatchewan NDP Premier between 1991-2001, comes from the foreword to Helen Forsey’s 2012 biography of her father, “Eugene Forsey: Canada’s Maverick Sage”:

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From a conservative background, Forsey became one of the founders of social democracy in Canada and a proponent of social reforms, joining the League for Social Reconstruction. This apparent tension also reflects his Newfoundland beginnings.

Many of the values and principles of that place concerning constitutions, government, and public policy reflected those that prevailed in England at the time. The ethos of England was still shaped by the competing views of Disraeli and Gladstone. The latter reflected classic liberalism, faith in the unseen hand of markets, and letting enterprise dictate public policy. Disraeli, on the other hand, urged an alliance between the landed aristocracy and the working class against the increasing power of the merchants and the new industrialists. He promoted the view that landed interests should use their power and privilege to protect the poor from exploitation by the market.

Conditions in Canada were very different from those in England, but Atlantic Tories still had a strong sense that it was the duty of the powerful to protect the poor from exploitation. Eugene Forsey was raised in this environment. The idea of acting for the benefit of the dispossessed has continued to prevail, extending its influences to much of Canada through his voice and the voices of Maritimers such as Robert Stanfield, Allan Blakeney, and Dalton Camp.

Clearly, Eugene Forsey was shaped by these currents of opinion, and continued to uphold them. He became a strong believer in British parliamentary government and its capacity to develop responses to human need and social deprivation. He rejected the idea that the economics of the market should be granted a free hand in determining public policy or limiting the scope of public government.

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For those unaware of Eugene Forsey, who wrote the continuously updated “How Canadians govern themselves”, he wrote his Ph.D. Thesis on the King-Byng Constitutional Crisis, where he would defend the actions of the Tory Arthur Meighen, and the Governor General Lord Julian Byng, against the actions of the Liberal Mackenzie King. Forsey would become a close personal friend of Meighen, and Forsey’s thesis was later adapted into his 1943 book “The Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament in the British Commonwealth”. Meanwhile, in addition to his activities in the League for Social Reconstruction since its founding, Forsey was a founding member of the CCF, and a founding member of the NDP, until he quit the NDP early on in the ‘60s due to its “two nations” policy in regards to Quebec.

Eventually, Eugene Forsey would later serve in the Senate as a Liberal under Pierre Trudeau from 1970-1979, although interestingly, on page 152 of Forsey’s 1991 memoir “A Life on the Fringe”, Forsey notes that his Conservative friends were “appalled” (Earlier on pg.87, Forsey noted his Conservative friends as John Diefenbaker, James Macdonnell, Davie Fulton, Donald Fleming, and George Nowlan), and that “The Liberal Party was apparently not at all pleased to have me… In retrospect I realized that I ought to have done what Madame Thérèse Casgrain did: sit as an Independent, supporting the Government’s policy on national unity”. Also worth noting, while Forsey mentioned on page 128 that Robert Stanfield “would have been a great Prime Minster”, he later argued on page 165, in the context of the 1972 minority government, that “the Conservative flirtations with the ‘two nations’ policy had convinced me that national unity would not be safe in their hands.”

For a bit of background on Forsey’s relationship with the NDP: despite being a founding member of the CCF, Forsey did formally return his NDP membership card over the party’s policy of recognizing Quebec as a distinct nation within Canada, arguing that such a “two nations” policy would eventually lead to “two states”. Forsey notes on page 206 of his memoir that he expressed these concerns to Tommy Douglas, and Douglas quite literally laughed him off. On page 130, Forsey noted David Lewis’ support of the “two nations” policy, but also Lewis’ “grand, classic style” of parliamentary speeches, with “echoes of [William] Gladstone, [the Earl of] Rosebery, and [H.H.] Asquith” (of note, all British Liberal Prime Ministers). Forsey then mentions that while he didn’t see Lewis much after he quit the NDP, he still “watched afar with admiration, his work in the House of Commons and on the hustings. His death robbed us of a really great man”. Interestingly, David Lewis, in a 1981 interview shortly before his death, said he could name “two good Senators” despite his dislike of the institution: “Carl Goldenberg is a pretty good Senator, and the former Senator Eugene Forsey, even though I could never forgive him for becoming a Liberal, was a good Senator and a very decent man.”

Very interestingly, Forsey did still support the NDP in his own ways even after quitting the party. On page 207 of his 1991 memoir, Forsey noted that he “automatically paid a small monthly contribution to the NDP” through his union work, and that “in recent years, though not in 1988” he “occasionally voted NDP, and made small contributions to its funds.” Forsey made sure to note that “In spite of everything, I felt NDP Members could and would play a useful part in the House of Commons, as indeed they did.”

With that, I thought Eugene Forsey’s 1968 book, “Our Present Discontents” based on a lecture Forsey gave to Acadia University, would be quite relevant to Canadians of 2026. Forsey gave his lecture as part of a series established in the memory of the previously mentioned Tory MP George Nowlan, who would die in office as the MP for Digby-Annapolis-Kings in 1965.

The preface to this short 44 page book, written by the then-President of Acadia University, J.M.R. Beveridge, gives a brief overview of George Nowlan’s political life, notes that he “died suddenly after a brief illness in Ottawa”, and then introduces Eugene Forsey with the following:

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We were both pleased and honoured that Dr. Eugene A. Forsey, one of Canada’s most outstanding political scientists, and a friend of the late Mr. George Nowlan, accepted our invitation to deliver the inaugural lectures in this memorial series. Dr. Forsey spent his early years in Ottawa, before proceeding to McGill University where he obtained a B.A. degree, and a Master’s degree in Economics and Political Science. In 1926, he was named a Rhodes Scholar and did graduate work at Balliol College in Oxford and later at McGill University receiving graduate degrees from both these institutions. He has served many years on the staff of McGill and Carleton Universities. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1941 and was named a Skelton-Clark Fellow in Political Science at Queen’s University in 1962. For more than a quarter century he has acted as Director of Research for the Canadian Labour Congress, and currently he is the director of a special Centennial project to write a history of the Canadian Labour Movement. In 1961, he was elected president of the Canadian Political Science Association. His public lectures and writings have won him international recognition.

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Eugene Forsey then begins on page 7 by paying homage to his friend George Nowlan, but also admits that he “cannot claim to have been more than on the outer fringe” of Nowlan’s friend group, as Nowlan’s friends “were legion”. Forsey goes on to note that Nowlan “would have been perhaps a little surprised, almost certainly amused, by my being chosen to give these lectures. I hope he would have been pleased.”

Forsey then speaks of his “hereditary connection with Nova Scotia and with the Annapolis Valley”, noting that “some of my ancestors settled here in or before 1760; a considerable number of others in 1783”. After noting that some of his ancestors from the Valley were of the Shaw and Thorne families, Forsey makes sure to note that both he and his father are actually Newfoundlanders, but that his father had taught school in the Valley for a time. Forsey eventually mentions that he “married a girl from just across the Bay of Fundy, and several of her ancestors -- Bigelows, Faulkners and Browns -- came from the shores of the Minas Basin.” After mentioning good childhood memories from the Valley, Forsey notes that despite having “passed most of my life in ‘Upper Canada’, I habitually call myself a Maritimer in partibus infidelium, and cannot feel myself a complete stranger in this Province or Valley.”.

Based on that last sentence alone, this Maritimer can vouch for Forsey calling himself a Maritimer.

Forsey then goes on to say that the title of his lecture is “an abbreviated plagiarism from [Edmund] Burke”, but that “some of you may feel I might better have stolen my title from Dorothy Sayers’ Unpopular Opinions”. After noting that the title “Present Discontents” is such a wide title that could “cover almost anything”, Forsey follows up by saying, “I shall confine myself to the discontents many people now feel with our Constitution”, and after noting that he won’t be giving a “detailed list” of “specific amendments”, he goes on to say, “What I shall attempt here is something more modest: first a statement of the main discontents as I see them; second, certain basic facts I think we must get clear, certain basic principles we must follow, if the [Constitutional] Conferences are not to end in chaos and old night; third, some things we can do, in the light of those facts and those principles.”

Starting on page 9, Forsey then notes that “The main discontents may be summed up under three heads”:

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First, all the provinces want more money, and at least the larger ones would like to get more of it by a re-division of taxing powers. At present, the Dominion’s taxing power is unlimited, while the provinces can impose only direct taxes for provincial purposes. True, the Courts have widened this by declaring that provincial sales taxes are “direct”. (Which, to the plain man, recalls Mr. Bumble [of Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist”] ) But even so, with the Dominion pre-empting most of the income tax, the provinces’ resources are plainly inadequate. The responsibilities assigned to them by the British North America Act, notably roads and education, are far more expensive than anyone could have dreamed a century ago; and the Judicial Committee of the British Privy Council, by its interpretation of the Act, has conferred, or imposed, on them further responsibilities, notably most of social security, which are also enormously expensive.

There are two ways of meeting this difficulty without changing the Constitution. One is conditional Dominion grants, in aid of approved provincial expenditures, the so-called “joint programs”. The other is unconditional Dominion grants: the traditional subsidies, and the equalization payments. One is grants with strings, the other grants without strings.

The grants with strings are now on the way out. Quebec wants to get rid of nearly all of them, and resume the full management of what might be her own constitutional property. Several, if not most, of the other provinces dislike the pressure to accept the Dominion’s scale of priorities which grants-in-aid involve. And the Dominion itself is anxious to get out of the whole thing as fast and as far as it can.

Every province seems willing to accept the unconditional grants. Quebec would like to see them replaced in large part, and soon, by a massive transfer of taxing power from the Dominion to the provinces. Most, or all, of the other provinces apparently regard them as a permanent feature of Canadian federalism. But at least the larger and richer of the other nine provinces would probably also like to see a considerable transfer of taxing power from the Dominion to themselves. The smaller and poorer ones are, I think, less insistent on this: they have so much less to tax.

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I would like to briefly interject here to, first, mention that CCF leader M.J. Coldwell dubbed the difficulty of the provinces’ ability to raise revenue to pay for social spending “a constitutional crisis” in his 1945 book “Left Turn, Canada”. Second, I would like to share this 1976 CBC interview with Tommy Douglas on this very problem:

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Tommy Douglas: I would propose in the act, that we say the federal government will enter into a 50/50 arrangement with the provinces to institute nursing care, home nursing care, meals-on-wheels, that we would share 50% of the costs of setting up community health clinics, we'd start a program of denti-care among school children --

Interviewer: In other words, we should dictate the services we're going to pay for.

TD: We dictate the ones we're going to pay for: we would say these are the programs we are prepared to pay for, we are prepared to share with you on a 50/50 basis. Now, there is no way in which the federal government can dictate to the provinces that it must undertake those programs, but they can say to the provinces "If you want to institute these programs, we'll pay 50% of the cost". I think what most people miss is the essential point, namely, that the provinces are even more interested than the federal government is in cutting costs down, because the provincial governments are much less able to finance their half of the costs than the federal government is. So if the federal government is worried about escalating costs, just imagine what little provinces like New Brunswick, and Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia feel about rising health costs.

I: And we get caught in the middle?

TD: You mean the public?

I: Yes.

TD: Of course the public gets caught in the middle! And the public who are going to get caught the most severely are the ones in the poorer provinces. With the federal government copping out of some of its responsibility from Medicare, the chances are that the more affluent provinces like Ontario and Alberta and British Columbia will be able to absorb the extra costs. But in the Atlantic provinces particularly -- and in the Prairie provinces if there were a few bad crops -- the only way that they could get by would be to begin reducing medical care services. And if you do that, what you're really saying is there are two classes of Canadians: those Canadians who live in well-to-do provinces that are going to have a high standard of health services, and the people who live in the poorer provinces who are going to have a very poor standard of health services. And that means that in the years ahead, there are going to be children who are going to be less healthy, children with poor teeth, children with long-staying-illnesses whose health will be impaired because they happened to have grown up in a poor province; and that surely ought not to be the kind of standard we set for Canada.

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Back to Eugene Forsey’s 1967 lecture, Forsey continues on page 10 of “Our Present Discontents”:

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The second main constitutional discontent is the discontent of French Canada with its constitutional position. Note that I say “French Canada”, not “the province of Quebec”. “French-Canada” and “Quebec” are not synonymous. There are upwards of a million French-speaking Canadians outside Quebec [ In looking at the 2021 Census, French Speakers outside Quebec numbered 992,309 by my count]; and the constitutional position of even the French-speaking Canadians inside Quebec is not the same thing as the constitutional position of that province. What is at issue here has, in fact, nothing to do, directly, with the constitutional position of Quebec; indeed, more power for Quebec could very well mean less for French Canada. We shall come to Quebec presently; for the moment, I am concerned with the very different question of the rights of French-speaking Canadians in the other nine provinces, and with the share of French-speaking Canadians in running the whole country. On both counts, French-speaking Canadians are dissatisfied with our existing arrangements; on both they want changes, whether in the written Constitution, or in the way it is worked, or both.

The third main constitutional discontent is, of course, the discontent of Quebec, or at least of its Government, its official opposition, and a highly vocal section of its people, with the constitutional position and powers of the province. Some of them want complete independence. Some want “political sovereignty” for Quebec with a “common market” or “economic integration” or some joint serves with the rest of Canada. Some want two “Associate States”, Quebec and Canada, each “independent” but with some joint organs: a sort of twentieth century North American Austria-Hungary. Most profess to want a “special status” within Confederation, with a more or less -- usually more -- massive transfer of power, in Quebec, from the Government and Parliament of Canada to the Government and Legislature of Quebec. Scarcely any voice in Quebec seems satisfied with the status quo.

Of the three constitutional discontents, the last is much more dangerous to the continued existence of this country, and to the welfare of its people, French-speaking as well as English-speaking; and very dangerous it is. It is possible that satisfactory remedies to the other two discontents might blunt the thrust of Quebec nationalism, and that is an additional reason why we need to consider them very seriously. It is also possible that Quebec nationalism will be indifferent to any remedies for the first two discontents, and satisfied with nothing less than the destruction of Canada, either at one fell swoop or by instalments.

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As the Quebec nationalist Parti Quebecois was founded a year after Forsey gave his lecture, I found Forsey’s thoughts from page 197 of “A Life on the Fringe” in regards to PQ founder René Lévesque to be quite interesting, and I think even more relevant for modern Albertan separatists of 2026:

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When the separatists were riding high in Quebec I gave my reasons for disagreeing with certain statements by Mr. Lévesque. After my speech a dear elderly lady, an English-speaking Ontarian, plaintively remonstrated that: “Mr. Lévesque is very sincere”. I said: “I never suggested he wasn’t. But what’s that got to do with it? If someone wants to burn my house down, the fact that he really believes that this is for the public good will no doubt weigh in his favour at Judgment Day. But I am not interested in his motives or his ‘sincerity’. All I want is to stop him burning the house down”

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Back to “Our Present Discontents”, with the section on constitutional discontents over, starting on page 11 Forsey then gives two “basic facts and principles” in regards to the constitution, with “the first basic fact” being that:

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Our existing Constitution is not… a Victorian system of plumbing. It is something which grew out of the needs of the pre-Confederation colonies, which gave us life as a people, which has shaped our life as a people, which has adapted itself to our changing needs as a people. It has not remained what it was in 1867. It has grown, in some respects almost out of all recognition: a little by formal amendment, much by judicial interpretation, most of all, perhaps, by the development of new habits, new customs, new “conventions”, new administrative arrangements, especially inter-governmental arrangements. Perhaps it now needs further formal amendment. But let us never forget that, because a Constitution is what it is, pervading and shaping the lives of every human being in the community, changing it by formal amendment is an immensely serious business.

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On page 12, Forsey then argues that the constitution should be taken serious, “more like a marriage”, rather than constitutional change being simple like “getting a new hair-do” or “putting in a new bathroom”.

The second part includes Forsey making a reference to Samuel Johnson, an arch-Tory writer of the mid/late 1700s:

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A second basic necessity for wise constitutional change is to get our history straight. We are sometimes told now that history doesn’t matter. To those who say this, my reply must be a Johnsonian: “This is cant. My dear friends, clear your minds of cant.”

Canada is not just a piece of real estate. It is a human community, rooted in time as well as space. We cannot disregard our history. If we try, the most we shall succeed in doing is to get rid of real history and leave our heads swept and garnished for the seven devils of pseudo-history.

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Forsey then spends pages 12 through 25 listing each numbered “devil of pseudo-history” followed immediately by his response to it. Forsey then follows up by arguing that he has to spend so much time debunking bad history because “Many of the English-speaking ‘intelligentsia’… have given these gentry a guilt complex about French Canada, and Quebec, which makes it impossible for them to see straight” and that this side of the English-speaking intelligentsia “is also self-defeating. Most English-Canadians will not join in the self-flagellation of the ‘intellectuals’ ”.

With that, here are Forsey’s “seven devils of pseudo-history” and my summary of how he responded to each one, along with a few excerpts. I will note that the brackets for #4 are from Forsey in making his own quotes flow better; Forsey also gives an unnamed federal Justice Minster as his source for his quotes, who I would presume is likely either Stuart Garson or perhaps James Ilsley, both long-term Liberal Ministers in the King / St. Laurent governments:

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(1) The British North America Act was “designed by British overlords”; from which it follows, of course, that we must now scrap it and give ourselves a home-made one.

Forsey calls this “rubbish”, notes that the BNA Act “is nearly one hundred percent home-made”, and points out that the Fathers of Confederation wanted Canada to be called “The Kingdom of Canada”, only for the idea to be shot down by the British over fears of offending the Americans.

Forsey’s response here is fairly short, so I would like to add this excerpt I found on page 2 of “Freedom Wears A Crown” by the Tory philosopher John Farthing, which is a transcription of a letter Sir John A. Macdonald sent to Lord Knutsford, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, in 1889:

A great opportunity was lost in 1867, when the Dominion was formed out of the several provinces.... had United Canada been declared to be an auxiliary kingdom, as it was in the Canadian draft of the bill, I feel sure (almost) that the Australian colonies would, ere this, have been applying to be placed in the same ranks as "The Kingdom of Canada".

P.S.

On reading the above over, I see that it will convey the impression that the change of title from Kingdom to Dominion was caused by the Duke of Buckingham. This is not so. It was made at the instance of Lord Derby, then foreign minister, who feared the name would wound the sensibilities of the Yankees.

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(2) The monarchy was imposed on us, or, at best, we accepted it grudgingly, absent-mindedly, or because we dare not do anything else.

Forsey says “Fudge.”, then notes that “Sir John A. Macdonald took great pains to emphasize that the delegates had been perfectly free to cut loose from Britain, and therefore, of course, from the monarchy, completely, but that not one had so much as suggested it; Sir George Cartier’s speech in the Confederation Debates is full of ardent monarchism” and that Canadians chose the monarchy “ourselves, unanimously, deliberately, and with our eyes wide open.”

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(3) The British North America Act is a Constitution for a “horse-and-buggy” age.

Forsey argues that while it “looks obviously true”, as the BNA Act was drafted in the “railway age”, it’s “in fact... glaringly untrue”. Forsey then tells a story comparing the original Canadian Fathers of Confederation, and the later “Stepfathers of Confederation”, as he calls the previously mentioned Judicial Committee of the British Privy Council:

The Fathers, recoiling from the horrors of “States’ rights”, deliberately framed our Constitution so that every power not distinctly and exclusively conferred on the provinces would belong automatically to the Dominion. So everything not mentioned must fall to the Dominion, unless it was unmistakably a merely local and private matter in a single province. And the Fathers themselves, in the new Dominion Parliament, drew exactly this conclusion. Trade unions were not mentioned and the Dominion Parliament, in 1872, passed a Trade Unions Act. Factory legislation was not mentioned; and in the early 1880s, Sir John A. Macdonald’s Government placed three successive Factory Bills before the Dominion Parliament.

Trade unions and factory bills were not new, just unmentioned, and the Fathers unhesitatingly took it for granted that they must therefore fall within Dominion jurisdiction. A fortiori, anything new, anything unforeseen, being of necessity unmentioned, must also fall within Dominion jurisdiction, again unless it was unmistakably a merely local or private matter in a single province.

The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the Stepfathers of Confederation, turned a good deal of the Father’s work upside down, and, in effect, handed most of labour legislation and social security, and much of the regulation of trade and commerce, to the provinces. But even after the havoc they wrought, a good deal of the original division of powers still remains. And a good many new things -- interprovincial and international highway motor traffic, interprovincial and international telephone lines, radio, television, air transport -- have in fact gone to the Dominion. Even the not-so-new grain trade, which a court decision fatuously assigned to the provinces, was rescued by means of the Fathers’ far-sighted provision in section 92, head 10, paragraph (c) of the BNA Act, by which the Dominion Parliament can assert exclusive jurisdiction over any local “work” simply by declaring it to be “for the general advantage of Canada or of two or more of the provinces”.

The Fathers, in fact, gave us a Constitution marvellously, almost incredibly, well fitted to meet the needs of a technologically advancing society. It is the Stepfathers who imposed on the provinces burdens grievous to be borne, to which the fiscal resources provided for their original, very limited, responsibilities, are inevitably woefully inadequate.

Ironically, it is usually the very people who say that our present Constitution is unfitted for the age of the jet and the sputnik, who urge us to adopt a more decentralized one: to go back, constitutionally, to the age of the ox-cart.

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(4) Confederation was a “pact”, “agreed in Charlottetown and finally in Quebec”, between representatives of “two founding peoples… relatively evenly balanced” ; “Quebec, the former Lower Canada [which] grouped the people of French origin,” and “the other three provinces, or the other two plus Upper Canada, [which] grouped those who had English as their common language and similar cultural traditions” (I am quoting a former Minister of Justice). In other words, the Charlottetown and Quebec Conferences, and the London Conference after them, were, in effect, bilateral negotiations between these two approximately equally numerous, linguistic groups.

Forsey spends the better part of two pages debunking “this… fairy-tale”, but he starts off by noting that even in “Canada East, the future Quebec”, 24% of the population was English speaking, and that on the whole across the 4 provinces, “the proportion of English-speaking to French-speaking was about two to one”. Forsey also gets into how the idea of this “pact” between Upper & Lower Canadians ignores the contributions of the Maritime delegates to Confederation, at one point noting the Maritimers “were very far from being yesmen or nodders” and that the Maritimers “took up considerably more time than most of the ‘Canadians’, and far more than the French-Canadians.” I found this part to be particularly interesting:

The Maritime provinces, and, later, Newfoundland, seem (and very naturally) to have accepted without question, and apparently without discussion, the arrangements the “Canadians” had arrived at about their purely local affairs: if they wanted the future Quebec to be officially bilingual and the future Ontario unilingual, that was their business, and no skin off any Maritime nose. The Maritime delegates seem also to have accepted without question, and without discussion, the justice, the practical necessity, the inevitability, of the French-Canadians having the right to speak their own language in the Dominion Parliament and in any Courts it might create, and to have the Acts and records of parliament and certain documents of Dominion Courts in French as well as English. The influential Hon. Joseph Cauchon, a convert to Confederation, in a contemporary booklet on the subject, devoted exactly two of his 154 pages to the language question; and the burden of what he said was, first, “How fortunate we are, compared with our poor brethren in Louisiana!” and second, “How splendid it is that we did not even have to ask for our rights: our English-speaking fellow-citizens are so enlightened and broadminded that they never even raised a question on the subject!”

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(5) Canada was intended to be, in some sense, “two nations”.

Forsey notes that the old Province of Canada that existed between 1840-1867 effectively existed in a “two nations” framework, and that “it had broken down so completely that the ‘Canadians’, in the 1864 sense of the word, came all the way to Charlottetown to ask the Maritime provinces to help them out of the mess they’d got themselves into”. Forsey then quotes phrases used by the Fathers of Confederation, including: “a new nation”, “a new and great nation”, “une nouvelle nation”, “une seule et grande nation”, as well as “in Sir George Cartier’s phrase, ‘a new political nationality’ ”. Forsey concludes:

The French-Canadians got, certainly, guarantees for the survival of their own culture, their own “nationality”, as, along with the English, the Scotch and the Irish (the last, incidentally, far more numerous than the other two), it was then generally called. But that it was to be survival within the framework of the single new political nation, no one seriously questioned.

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(6) It was agreed, in 1867, to quote again the former Minster of Justice, that French “was to be recognized and applied in all federal fields on the same footing as” English; and “Quebec believes that the contractual provisions… that guarantee French as one of Canada’s two official languages for affairs of state, for a federal Parliament, and for the federal courts… have been allowed to lapse.”

Forsey calls this one “perhaps the wildest piece of pseudo-history in the whole lot”, and notes that the French Fathers of Confederation “Cartier, Langevin, and Chapais” were content with the language situation, as well noting “men like Dorion, Laurier, Masson, Caron” being in the same boat. After giving many examples of old-style bilingualism, including having unilingual English banknotes & cheques alongside unilingual French banknotes & cheques, Forsey then goes on to say:

I am not arguing that the rights of the French-language as set forth in the BNA Act ought to have been, even then, precisely what they were, let alone that they should now be only what was laid down in 1867. They are now much wider than they were in 1867, and I am glad of it. I am heartily in favour of the general lines of the present Government’s policy on bilingualism in the Dominion Public Service. I am in favour of as much bilingualism all across the country as is practicable. But all this is quite different from saying that what, in my judgement, ought to be done now was in fact laid down in a statute, or in any extra-legal understanding, a hundred years ago.

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(7) French schools outside Quebec were guaranteed in 1867

Forsey spends the better part of a page correcting an apparent misconception of the bilingualism debate of the 1960s, that the constitutional protections for minority religious education rights really meant constitutional protections for minority language education rights. This might be the place to mention just how controversial official bilingualism in the modern sense was back then. In the 1974 election, the anti-bilingual Mayor of Moncton, New Brunswick, Leonard Jones attempted to run for the Progressive Conservatives, but PC Leader Robert Stanfield refused to sign Jones’ nomination papers over the language issue; Jones won the seat as an independent running against equal language rights.

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The last half of the book, or the second lecture, “Some Possible Remedies”, is quite progressive for its time in advocating for a new biculturalism & bilingualism, and reminding English-Canadians that French-Canadians are surrounded by an ocean of English, but seems rather dated in the modern sense that it makes absolutely no mention of the indigenous contribution or sacrifice towards Canada’s founding. For an older example this, I can't help but think of the title of a whistle-blowing pamphlet on the state of residential schools published in 1922 called, “The Story of a National Crime: An Appeal for Justice to the Indians of Canada; The Wards of the Nation; Our Allies in the Revolutionary War; Our Brothers-in-Arms in the Great War”

Perhaps relevant, it was the great Tory Harold Macmillan in arguing for decolonization in Africa who once said in 1960, "The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact."

With that, I thought I should finish with a few excerpts from from Helen Forsey’s “Eugene Forsey: Canada’s Maverick Sage” to round things out. This first one comes from pages 217/218, and it’s a 1990 speech Eugene Forsey gave on the question of “le grand nord” in regards to the rights of the Cree, Inuit and Innu in northern Quebec if Quebec were to actually separate; a fair warning, the 1912 Hansard Record where Forsey quotes Sir Robert Borden uses derogatory language by modern standards:

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[Ungava] was given to Quebec in 1912 by the Quebec Boundary Extension Act, as a province of Canada, and at a time when there was not one single French Canadian living in the whole territory.

Now you may say, “That’s an extreme statement, what warrant has he for that?” I had, years ago, repeatedly made speeches in which I had said, “I don’t think there were ten French Canadians in the whole territory.” And then I thought, “My boy, you’d better be careful. Somebody may look up the figures, and show you that there were twenty or twenty-five.” So I went to the census of 1911, and all I could find on national or ethnic origin were figures on the whole of the Territories. No good. Then I remembered what Professor Jim Mallory said about Sir Robert Borden: “Sir Robert Borden never left anything to chance.” I said, “That’s it. I remember Borden well; that’s right.”

So I went to Hansard and looked up the proceedings on the Bill. There, sure enough, was Borden. And I could just hear the old man saying: “Mr. Chairman, it occurred to me that it might be of advantage to have some figures on the national or ethnic origin of the inhabitants of this territory. I have therefore applied to the Department of the Census, and they have furnished me with the following figures: Indians 663, Eskimos 543, Halfbreeds 46, English 8, Scots 2.” Period. Not one French Canadian in the whole territory. If you doubt me, go and look at Hansard for 1912, page 6161, and you will find precisely the figures I’ve given you.

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In regards to Nunavik in Northern Quebec, Forsey is quoted on page 345 as saying, “The aborigines in that territory might say, ‘You want to secede from Canada? Well, we want to secede from Quebec’. And on what grounds could the most fervent Quebec nationalist deny them the right to self-determination, [after] preaching self-determination for Quebec, world without end?”

But to close, and to change gears slightly, I thought this perspective from Eugene’s daughter Helen from page 190 was quite illuminating:

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Many of the differences that arose between my father and me were relativity minor questions of degree or approach on matters where our common ground was evident. My feminism, however, opened up a more significant gap.

Sitting incognito in the audience at Memorial University during our 1983 trip to Newfoundland, I listened as Dad gave the inaugural lecture in a series on Canadian labour history. When questions were invited from the floor, I raised my hand, trembling a bit with my own audacity. "I haven't heard you mention women workers," I asked politely. "Were there women involved in the trade union movement?"

The chair -- a man -- rose in consternation and began reassuring Dad that he need not answer, that the question was out of order, or some such thing. Dad motioned him back graciously. "No, no, that's fine," he said. "My daughter has every right to ask that question, and it's a good one. I'll be glad to answer it." Which, with his customary courtliness, fairness, and honesty, he proceeded to do.

It wasn't that my father didn't care about women's issues, he just didn't always notice them. When he did notice, there was seldom a problem. He was definitely pro-woman, particularly on the big, obvious issues like equality in the workplace, equal opportunities for education, and access to non-traditional occupations.

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