"Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"

The words of Cromwell directed at Charles I; repeated in May of 1940 by Leo Amery demanding the resignation of Chamberlain.  We do not, thankfully, face the same level of crisis today.  Canada is not threatened with external destruction, as was Britain in 1940, nor with near total internal collapse as in 1642.  The danger we face is perhaps more insidious.  Few then doubted the gravity of the situations they faced, and fewer were unclear about the basic issues.  Neither of this is true here and now. 

Most Canadians do not believe, or frankly understand, that our most important institution as a free people was subverted this week.  Stephen Harper did not over react to the actions, or more correctly the inactions, of Paul Martin.  The vote on Tuesday was not a clear vote of non-confidence.  It did however cast serious doubt on the legitimacy of the government to continue to rule.  It was the duty of the government to clearly re-establish, if possible, its legitimacy. 

By all precedent a clear vote of confidence should have been held within at most forty-eight hours.  One has to reach back, in British history, to January of 1784 when a government was defeated on a vote of confidence and remained in office regardless.  In Canada, nothing like this was happened since Lord Elgin was ordered by the Colonial Office to follow the advice of his ministers, Robert Baldwin and Hippolyte LaFontaine, and assent to the Rebellion Losses Bill.  More than a century and a half of responsible government, one of the hallmarks of Canadian nationhood, flouted casually and with only passing comment from the mainstream media.

All this to maintain the Liberal Party in power.  A party that wraps itself in the national flag - a flag which, incidentally, they imposed on us - with a skill and fanaticism with few rivals in the western world.  L'etat c'est moi is not a joke to the Liberal Party, it is so ingrained in their understanding of Canada and its political system it has become a kind of motto.  The desperate, and unscrupulous, might compare this attitude to the conflation of Hitler with Germany, or the Soviet Union with Stalin, under those respective regimes.  Though will leave such comments to the Minister of Immigration, who, along with Heddy Fry, has shown something of an aptitude for such rhetoric.

Why such passivity?  Why such cynicism? Why do the people of Canada shrug at such actions and say that politicians will be politicians?  This was not the general attitude toward our elected leaders even thirty years ago.  It is difficult for most Canadians to recall how highly regarded some of our elected leaders were in the years after the Second World War.  There were exceptions, Mackenzie King being the most notably.  Even with King, however, there was a feeling that his subterfuge was needed to maintain national unity and political stability.  He kept the socialists (CCF) and Quebec nationalists at bay.  If his lies were never noble, they could at least have been described as necessary.

Louis St. Laurent, John Diefenbaker, Lester Pearson, Leslie Frost, John Robarts, Robert Stanfield, and Paul Martin Sr., father of the current Prime Minister, were regarded as public servants seeking in their own way the public good.  Perhaps some of those men, in retrospect, did not deserve the respect that was given to them at the time.  Their ideas were often flawed, and occasionally pernicious, Medicare, for instance. Still, if one spoke of Pearson or Robarts as being men of high integrity it wasn't intended as an ironic joke.  That is the distance we have traveled within two generations, a very brief period in the history parliamentary democracy and the life of Canada.

Part of this cynicism is rooted in the evolution of the welfare state.  Well into the mid-1960s government spending, at all levels, remained below 30% of GDP.  While this was a peace time high, and three times what it had been before 1939, it was still considerably below the 52% level that was to be reached in the early 1990s.  Political promises about new programs and new spending could be made without having to make hard political choices.  People seemed comfortable with gradually increasing tax rates and ever expanding government.  A politician could promise and deliver. 

Once half of the average person's pay cheque was in the hands of the state, a politician's ability to deliver as before was severely hampered, as Bob Rae, among others, found out in the early 1990s.  A politicians could no longer keep his or her promises of new and expanded government services, and yet people continued to expect the "free" flow of goods and services.  It should not be surprising that public faith in the political system collapsed at about the same time.

The passivity of the Canadian people during the current crisis is more worrying than their cynicism.  Its origins date further back than the welfare state.  Robert Fulford once described a certain kind of uniquely Canadian mentality as being "fanatically moderate."  This group, particularly common among old line Red Tories, was less concerned with principles as with appearing to be moderate.  That this might require a rather inconsistent political philosophy, one that moved, often quite rapidly, with the times did not seem to bother the fanatical moderates.  If anything it was a source of pride.  The modern embodiment of this world view can still be found in the editorial pages of the Globe and Mail.  It lingers still, at some level, with many ordinary Canadians.

John Ralston Saul - Mr. Adrienne Clarkson - in his writings on Canadian history captures this spirit very well, particularly in his somewhat distorted interpretations of the movement for responsible government.  Under Saul's thesis Canada, unlike the United States, is  a pragmatic nation.  While our American cousins embrace a "monolithic" ideology and national myth, coupled with an equally monolithic sense of citizenship, Canada's approach has been one of compromise.  We swing neither too far to the right, nor too far to the left.  No Labour government of 1945, no NRA or Jerry Falwell either.

For Saul, this is a point of pride for his understanding of Canada, for Frank Underhill, it was one of the essential problems with Canada.  Underhill was one of this country's leading socialist thinkers and was the principal author of the Regina Manifesto, effectively the founding charter of the CCF, the NDP's forerunner.  Despite his politics Underhill was among the most perceptive minds in Canadian intellectual history. He was a star at the University of Toronto's Department of History in the 1950s and 1960s, the same time the department had such giants of Canadian scholarship as Harold Innis and Donald Creighton, and such up and comers as Michael Bliss and Jack Granatstein. 

One of Underhill's central insights into Canadian history was our lack of a revolutionary past.  There had been no watershed event in which political and social institutions, and their intellectual assumptions, had been turned over.  There was no Canadian Civil War, no Canadian War of Independence and Revolution, no violent and radical period of Canadian history.  Even the Rebellions of 1837-1838 did as much to confirm the political system of the day as to reform it.  As Underhill himself remarked shortly after the Second World War:

One reason for our backwardness, and the reason which interests me most at the moment, has been the weakness of the Radical and Reform parties of the Left in our Canadian history. A healthy society will consist of a great majority massed a little to the right and a little to the left of centre, with smaller groups of strong conservatives and strong radicals out on the wings. If these minority groups are not present in any significant force to provide a perpetual challenge to the majority, the conservatives and liberals of the centre are likely to he a pretty flabby lot, both intellectually and morally.

For this weakness of the Left in Canada, the ultimate explanation would seem to be that we never had an eighteenth century of our own. The intellectual life of our politics has not been periodically revived by fresh drafts from the invigorating fountain of eighteenth-century Enlightenment. In Catholic French Canada the doctrines of the rights of man and of Liberty Equality Fraternity were rejected from the start, and to this day they have never penetrated, save surreptitiously or spasmodically.

The mental climate of English Canada in its early formative years was determined by men who were fleeing from the practical application of the doctrines that all men are born equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights among which are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. All effective liberal and radical democratic movements in the nineteenth century have had their roots in this fertile eighteenth-century soil. But our ancestors made the great refusal in the eighteenth century. In Canada we have no revolutionary tradition; and our historians, political scientists, and philosophers have assiduously tried to educate us to be proud of this fact. How can such a people expect their democracy to be dynamic as the democracies of Britain and France and the United States have been?

What Canadians have been afraid of, since the Loyalists at least, is principles.  Radical, divisive and unpleasant principles.  What we need in Canada is extremists.  We needed a strong socialist party, to be matched by a strong pro-capitalist party.  In his book, The Fights of Our Lives, John Duffy remarks postively of Mackenzie King's move to the left after 1943.  In that year, with victory in the war certain, though the timing of course less so, political opinion polls in both Britain and Canada showed a strong swing in support toward socialist parties.  In Canada this was the CCF, in Britain the Labour Party. 

Churchill, and the British Tories, largely ignored the growing threat from the left and did little to change their platform.  In 1945 they were defeat and Labour, under Clement Attlee came to power.  In Canada, the consummate pragmatist Mackenzie King sensed this shift and stole just enough of the CCF's platform to insure his re-election.  This would be Liberal Party policy up until the present day.  Co-opt the policies of the left, until the 1980s, and from then on co-opt the policies the right.

We shouldn't give King too much credit for all this.  As Underhill himself points out, latter in the same speech, this kind of anti-radicalism was in play in the 1840s when respectable reformers, like Baldwin and LaFontaine, completely supplanted radicals like Mackenzie and Papineau. 

The problem with not having a Clement Attlee is that you never get a Margaret Thatcher.  No Franklin Roosevelt, no Ronald Reagan.  We need extremists to define our public discourse.  Compromise which obliterates, or smooths away unplesant and divisive ideas seems very attractive.  The negative effects of bad ideas, like socialism, are mitigated.  A measure of social peace is, at least temporarily, assured.  But what happens when the bad ideas are not clearly defined. 

Canada is being destroyed by a form of socialism, but it is not called socialism.  Even the NDP shy away from the s-word, and did so long before the fall of the Berlin Wall.  How do you fight an idea, or even examine it, when there is a tacit social convention not to speak about it.  Forget the Victorian morality brigades fainting at the mention of sex or women's suffrage.  Our modern moralists, who, in this country, are mostly on the left, will not let you use the s-word when talking about issues of public policy.  To do so is to be an extremist.  A sin at least as bad as immodesty a century ago.

We are a nation of muddlers.  Until we grow out of that I'm afraid the words "American-style" and "ideologically driven" will continue to frighten us away from seriously debating issues of public policy.