"A Certain Imperial Feeling:" First and Fourth of July Reflections, 2023
Original Kitchener, Ontario, Canada
I wanted to send out an upbeat post for Canada Day this time around. The inspiration came from a textbook widely used in public schools across Canada about a century ago: By chance, in a used book store up in Fergus, I came across a 1918 Ontario edition of Canadian Civics by R.S. Jenkins.
The copy now in my possession once belonged to an Alex Martin, presumably a high school student, who lived on Ontario Street in Stratford. The near local connection is important, because my Canada begins and ends in my city, specifically, in downtown Kitchener and the ground on which it was built and where we live: Waterloo County, the Haldimand Tract, the Grand River watershed, in Great Lakes Ontario.
This is a book that was written at about the same time the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire gifted citizens of Berlin, Canada, with that troublesome memorial to their late Queen, Victoria, that still stands in the public park that bears her name (the first edition of Canadian Civics was published in 1909).
The textbook covers ten topics related to national affairs and then turns to provincial matters (The Provincial Government; Municipal Government; The Courts of Law; Education). I found the tone refreshingly confident:
“In Canada we have what is said by enthusiastic observers to have the most perfect constitution yet devised by man. It seems to possess all the advantages of the noble constitution of the American Republic, yet with few of the latter’s defects.”
I found Topic 3, Part 1 especially interesting: “The Empire and the Colonies.” Canadian Civics makes it clear that this was a relationship that was in flux at the time of writing:
“Some think that after a time the several divisions that are in the same position as ourselves [i.e., the other dominions], will be placed on an equal footing with the ruling division, Great Britain, and that some way will be devised of making them all work together as one nation, when dealing with the rest of the world. Others believe that this plan of “allied nations” is not practicable, and that, if we try to carry it out, it will lead to the breaking up of the Empire. Here is one of our great problems, and no one yet can see a good solution.”
The author returns to the theme of empire towards the end of the book, in a postscript on “Duties of the Citizen:”
“Since Canada has now assumed in a definite way the duties of empire, there is a certain imperial feeling that we should strive to develop. The British Empire is so vast that it contains within itself nations of all languages and all religions. As a citizen of the Empire you should, therefore, have respect and toleration for the opinions of others. Our Empire cannot long continue to exist, unless it is something for which our brother nations may all have an ardent loyalty, whatever may be their creed, race or tongue. This imperial feeling will also help us in our national affairs, for it will enable us to be sympathetic with our fellow citizens throughout the Dominion.”
I thought this passage could serve as a text for another playful but earnest essay on how to distinguish, and ultimately reconcile, what I’ve been describing as the dominant Virginia way -- rebellion; separation; thus always to tyrants; live free or die -- and Ontario’s almost forgotten “loyal she began; loyal she remains” heritage.
When Canada Day finally arrived, I woke up under another sky heavy with the smoke of burning forests. There’d been reports of a philosophy professor and two of her students stabbed in Hagey Hall of the Humanities, a place that will always be special for me because of all the time I’ve spent there studying, and later teaching, history. I learned later that the victim of this hate-motivated assault is someone who I got to know through her involvement with the Cafe Philo happenings organized by a friend through Inter Arts Matrix. A chilling thought came to mind: Would I be putting my friend in some kind of danger if I mentioned her name?
There had also been news of another midnight strike by the nameless, faceless red paint vandal against the memorial to Queen Victoria in Kitchener’s historic public parklands: No real blood here, but hateful and purposefully offensive nonetheless, towards a project led by women to honour someone explicitly identified as symbol of motherhood, who, by accident of birth, became, and arguably remains, the grandest female personage of all time, in the political sphere at least.
Meanwhile, the homeless encampment at Victoria and Weber remains in place, albeit somewhat diminished in size, while the remnants of the "Occupy Roos Island" protest encampment in Victoria Park, surrounded by chain link fencing and yellow-vested guardians of the peace hired through private security providers, have started to resemble a miniature concentration camp.
It was hard to keep hope afloat, and avoid sinking into discouragement. Added to the mix of impressions for the day were a number of social media posts reminding us that this particular Canada Day happened to be the 100th anniversary of the day the Chinese Exclusion Act came into effect in what was then still the Dominion of Canada.
The fact that these reminders came from people in my own community whom I know and respect, and included a request to share their message through my networks, deepened the relevance and impact to my Canada Day.
By chance, I spent part of the morning putting together the next issue of the “community radio magazine” I produce, which includes an interview with historian Marlene Epp about the 100th anniversary of the Russlaender Mennonites arriving in Canada as refugees from the newly-formed Soviet Union. This example of Canadians opening the doors to some at the exact moment we closed the border to others, with race, religion and culture appearing to be the primary distinguishing factors, struck me as profound.
I‘ve since learned that in the wake of the “red scare” and the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, Canadian immigration rules were amended to exclude Doukhobors, Mennonites, Hutterites and others because of their “peculiar customs, habits, modes of life and methods of holding property.” This restriction was repealed after W.L.M. King’s government was elected in 1921. This was the same administration, led by a Berlin/Kitchener Ontario native, that would soon be banning immigration from China.
The fact that we welcomed the Russlaender to our shores doesn’t mitigate the racism or the injustice of simultaneously excluding, through the Chinese Immigration Act, a significant proportion of the human race. I haven’t seen any mention of the fact that, like Manifest Destiny/Sea to Sea continental expansion, the reservation system for concentrating and segregating the Indigenous peoples of the continent, and residential schools for assimilating their children into modern society, Chinese exclusion is another example of Canada following an example set by the United States when it was still an emerging continental empire on the path towards global dominance. The fact that we were following patterns set in the U.S. doesn’t render Canada, the people and the sovereign nation state, less blameworthy for any of these historical wrongs, which, due to their enormity, are ultimately incomprehensible, and beyond any restitution that could be considered just or complete. But it can help us understand how and why things happened the way they did.
The parallels matter. I’m following the same line of reasoning here that I’ve been presenting in the Making Peace With Victoria musings: It seems self-evident, to me, that the deeds and omissions of a distant queen who has been buried for 122 years cannot help explain, much less solve, anything meaningful or significant. It is the history of Canada that matters -- Canada under home rule, recognized as separate and sovereign even by the twin anglo empires, the continental and the maritime, in whose shadow we have always lived.
I’ve been trying to make a case, if not for celebrating Canada on July 1st, then at least taking our country and all that it signifies to heart and to mind once a year.
I’ve also been trying to explain why I am convinced we’d all be better off if citizens and residents of Kitchener found a way to accept, even embrace, the presence of the memorial to Queen Victoria, with the British lion on guard at her feet, right where she has stood, in the park that carries her name, for another 100 years or more.
One of the reasons I feel this way is the fact that the aspect of Canada’s very nature and being that this statue symbolizes is one of the few distinguishing factors between what we celebrate as the “True North strong and free” and the revolutionary republic to the south. And it is important for us to know who we are, and how we came to be what we are. Taking down this statue will just make us forget.
I’m not suggesting that as heirs to what can be called the loyalist legacy we’re better than the prodigal sons and daughters of the colonial orders out of which we as settler communities all evolved. But it seems fairly obvious that the drive towards exclusion and segregation is more in tune with the separatist cause celebrated on the Fourth of July, and from there to settler home rule, federation, manifest destiny and continental expansion, than it is to Britannia ruling the waves for about 200 years.
The drive towards exclusion had been there from the beginning. A critical turning point came after the United States invaded Mexico, triumphantly capturing the very Halls of Montezuma, and then, looking at the extent and character of what they’d conquered, hesitated. The next step was the decision to keep only the relatively sparsely populated northern territories, and exclude those teeming millions of Spanish-speaking Catholics of mixed race in the deep south from what they imagined to be the republic’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent.”
This may have been for the best. In Algeria, the southern domains annexed by France at the same time the United States carved off northern Mexico, the conquerers chose absorption rather than separation, and struggled with the results until, at U.S. insistence, independence was restored. We’re grateful, after all, that the American republic never got around to absorbing thinly populated, mostly white Canada.
It didn’t all start on the Fourth of July, 1776, of course. Benjamin Franklin complained about the incompatibility of the Dutch/German “Palatine Boor” with Pennsylvanian values before anyone even imagined an independent republic (Franklin included Germans, along with Africans, Asians and other Europeans such Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, among the “Blacks and Tawneys” of the world, whom he wanted kept out of the colony while “increasing the lovely White [meaning Saxon and English] and Red”).
One of the “Intolerable Acts” that drove the colonists to rebellion against the British Empire was the decision to tolerate the Catholic religion in Quebec. Regardless of what it says on the Statue of Liberty, the settler republic would have restricted immigration much earlier if they had access to modern methods for controlling masses of people.
Sustained efforts to keep America, Canada and Australia white, anglo-saxon and preferably protestant can be seen as a corollary to the principle self-determination of peoples, famously articulated by Woodrow Wilson around the same time as Canada and the U.S. began systematically restricting immigration. What we’re dealing with here are the consequences of modern nation building, which in some respects is the antithesis of inter-continental imperialism.
In both Canada and the United States, developments such as continental expansion, immigration restriction, segregation and assimilation in the form of a mass social engineering project like residential schools are all the actions of a people and a nation defining and determining itself. These are not vestiges of an old hierarchical order led by kings, dukes, counts, popes and bishops, but thoroughly modern developments. It is the dawn of the 20th century and all its horrors that we’re witnessing here, not a fading echo of an archaic order.
It is important that we face this truth. Attacking a statue that has been rusting away in a city park for more than a century is denying what should be obvious, and distracting us from what really needs to be done.
What I’ve been trying to express is a faint but glimmering hope that the distinction between what began as the Dominion of Canada, complete with our peculiar symbolic monarchy and everything it signifies, in comparison to all the presidential republics throughout the rest of the hemisphere, not to mention all the other revolutionary people’s republics around the world, past and present, may prove to be our saving grace.
Discovering that while all this was going on a century or so ago -- sea to sea expansion, concentration, segregation, assimilation and exclusion -- high school students were being encouraged to strive to develop “a certain imperial feeling” of respect and toleration for all nations, regardless of “creed, race or tongue,” encourages such hopes. But it doesn’t anchor them.
I’m not going to take too much store by an isolated passage in an old textbook. This may have been an unusual position to take. I’m sure that if I dove into the records of the Daughters of the Empire (which I’d love to do someday) I’d find all kinds of horrendously offensive pronouncements on race, faith and national destinies. No one would argue that the British Empire was more equitable, just, fair, kind or generous than a revolutionary republic like the U.S.A., or a fledgling nation of settlers shaping their own destiny like Canada or Australia between 1901 and 1923. But an empire is heterogeneous, fluid, inconsistent, unanticipated, mostly unintentional and infinitely complex. And being able to deal with these and other distinguishing features of a former empire can be an advantage for dealing with the state of the world in 2023.
What is striking is how the line of reasoning R.S. Jenkins follows here turns the logic of the Declaration of Independence on its head. Thomas Jefferson contended that, because all men are created equal, they have a right, even a duty, to rebel against, and separate from a tyrannical state ranked according to class or other differences. For Jenkins, the glory of the British Empire is that “contains within itself nations of all languages and all religions.” Association is preferable over separation, in part because it helps strengthen our collective capacity for respecting differences, as opposed to natural commonalities that render us indistinguishable from one another: “all men are created equal.” When equality, or sameness, is the foundation of a political order, difference runs against the grain, and must be excluded, contained, erased or annihilated.
To me, what distinguishes us from the revolutionary republican mainstream is continuity, multiplicity, connectedness, conservation, progress, loyalty, peace and liberty, all in balanced measure. I’m confident that if we take Canada to mind and to heart -- our best and our worst; the accomplishments and the omissions; the strengths and the weaknesses; how we got here, and what we’ve become; what we have in common with other powers, past and present, and what sets us apart -- we have a chance for making a breakthrough towards truth and reconciliation on multiple fronts.
By taking Canada to heart and to mind we’re setting the stage for taking her to task, both as a sovereign nation state and as a democracy. Since Canada as an independent nation state is a body politic in which we, the people, as represented in the House of Commons, are fully in charge, this would mean pulling up our sleeves and taking on the work ourselves, as citizens.
And I firmly believe, in part because of those distinguishing features of what Canada is that are represented by that totally inert and therefore powerless statue, the people of Canada are up to the task.
Looking over past reflections on this topic, I find that I’m repeating, almost verbatim, what I wrote for CultKW and THEMUSEUM going on three years ago, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter march in Kitchener, with refrains from the Rolling Stones anthem “Street Fighting Man” ringing in my head. I imagined the symbolism expressed by Victoria and the Lion as
… the antithesis of what the seal and flag of Virginia exclaim. Gradually, over the centuries, we have been transforming the King and all his servants into a living, breathing symbol. We’ve left them standing, with all their majesty and most of their wealth intact, but with no actual power over our daily lives.
Ontario, along with the other British colonies where an influx of loyalist refugees were a founding element, are the unVirgina. But that doesn’t make us the anti-Virginia.
The fact that the transition has been remarkably peaceful counts for a great deal. So does our continuity: No “new deals”, no shuffling the deck, no disruption, no tearing asunder, no re-formation into a more perfect order. At the same time, there has been no going backward either: no “making Ontario great again,” no reactionary resistance to change. There are no “founding fathers” whose original intent writing the Book of Canada must be revered as though it were holy writ.
Ontario also readily adapts. The evolutionary path is not necessarily that of moderation, compromise and delay. With so many different points of origin, and the ever increasing diversity of streams adding to the flow, the tendency is towards synthesis: reconciling divergences that at first glance may appear contradictory, and recombining them in ways that turn divisions into solutions. A trickle can suddenly become a torrent, and when multiplied, a rising tide.
If you tell the story this way, joining or leading causes that aim to separate the sheep from the goats -- true believers from those trapped in ignorance; the vanguard from those that fall behind; the chosen from the heathen; our side and the other -- is unCanadian.
In a world where, for going on 250 years, the revolutionary republican storyline has been the assumed trajectory of modern progress, the ways and means of the U.S. are the standard, it is the Canadian path that has been exceptional.
The Canada I’m imagining emerging on the horizon acknowledges and accepts the fact that as a nation state we are rooted in both imperial globalism and settler colonial separatism. The trajectory, however, is towards truth and reconciliation, in other words, towards peace. Instead of conquest, subjugation and separation, what I’m calling the way of the loyalist remains, joins, adapts, receives and combines.
Decolonization in the conventional sense, crudely expressed through the vandalization of the statue of Queen Victoria around the corner from where I live, is basically following the Virginia storyline. Done the Canadian way, redemption would involve constant work, not a battle; evolution, not revolution. It would be moving forward (in other words, progressive), but also considerate, careful and conservatory. And it would be popular: The only human force on the planet that should be held to account here, and the only force that is capable of doing what needs to be done, are the people of Canada taking action in thought, word and deed as a body politic.