Living with an Empire

(This article was originally written in 2003)

Just over a century ago, Canadians were embroiled in a passionate debate that was very similar to one being conducted today. How do we live with a world girdling empire?

In those days, the superpower pursuing a policy its leaders called "splendid isolation" was Great Britain, on whose possessions the sun never set. The British navy, greater in size than the next two navies combined, was the arbiter of global power. In 1899, the British went to war against two Afrikaner Republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.

The Boer War was an imperial venture and it engendered the wrath of the European great powers. But, far from united themselves, the Germans, the French and the Russians, were unable to take advantage of Britain’s faraway war. Moreover, whatever the Europeans thought, they were no match for the British navy.

Although they were militarily supreme, the British keenly felt the rising antagonism against them, and they turned to their self-governing colonies, Canada among them, for political and military support. What London wanted from Canada was a commitment of Canadian troops to fight in south Africa. The Boer War laid bare the deep divisions within Canada. French Canadians---Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier among them---felt no inclination to fight under the Union Jack in a war thousands of miles from home. But Laurier was under tremendous pressure from a wing of English Canadian opinion---the strident voices of pro-imperial sentiment.

The pro-imperialists condemned as disloyal anyone not ready to stand shoulder to shoulder with the British. The tory-imperialist Toronto News condemned those who opposed sending Canadian troops as people whose ideas "are not those of the Anglo-Saxon. They would cast off their allegiance to Britain’s Queen tomorrow if they dared."

Hoping to find a compromise that would keep everyone happy, Laurier decided to send a contingent of Canadian troops that would be recruited in Canada and paid for by the British. He later followed this with a second contingent. As it turned out, this was too little to satisfy the imperialists, but too much to protect him from the wrath of those who opposed sending Canadian troops.

The pro-imperialists of the day favoured a grand bargain with the Mother Country that would promote the much tighter political and economic integration of the British Empire. What they wanted was an imperial federation in which Canadians would elect a few members to a new imperial parliament to sit in London. Two years before the outbreak of the Boer War, it briefly appeared that they had won Laurier over as a convert to their ideas. At Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in London, Laurier declared that it would be the proudest moment of his life to see a French Canadian take his place in an Imperial Parliament at Westminster.

Back home, Laurier thought better of this heady rhetoric and steered a course whose goal was to maximize Canadian autonomy within the Empire. Fortunately for Canadians the pro-imperialists never managed to entangle the country in an Imperial Federation that would have blocked the road to full self-government.

Today, Canada is again divided about how to live with an Empire, this time the American Empire. With much of the world antagonized by the Bush administration’s intention to invade Iraq, with or without the sanction of the United Nations, today’s Canadian pro-imperialists are denouncing those who oppose taking America’s side in the war. Moreover, they are calling for deep integration, both economically and politically with the United States.

In a paper written for the C.D. Howe Institute last year, historian Jack Granatstein argued for a much tighter military alliance between Canada and the United States. Granatstein’s argument is that in the wake of September 11, the United States is determined to defend itself, with or without the cooperation of Canada. Therefore, "there is no choice at all: Canada must cooperate with the United States in its own interest." Dismissive of what he calls the Canadian penchant for "poking the Americans with the sharp stick of supposedly superior Canadian morality", he is sympathetic to the U.S. view of things. "The superpower neighbour," Granatstein writes "has global responsibilities and burdens, and it often tires of Canadian caution, endless remonstrances, and prickly independence when what it wants and needs is support."

Last spring, Wendy Dobson, Director of the Institute of International Business and Professor at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, authored a paper, again for the C.D. Howe Institute, that argued that Canada ought to seek much deeper economic integration with the United States. To make what she called this "Big Idea" fly in Washington, Dobson concluded that Canada would be required to propose steps that Washington would find attractive in the following areas: border security, immigration, defence, and energy security.

Those who want deep integration with the United States are today’s counterparts of the advocates of Imperial Federation a century ago. They desire a union with the United States that would effectively extinguish Canadian sovereignty. They believe that when America is at war Canada must also be at war.

A hundred years ago, Henri Bourassa, the founder and editor of Le Devoir in Montreal wrote the rejoinder to the imperialists that ought to stand in our time: "What I should like is this, that between the old British frigate which threatens to founder on the rock of Imperialism and the American corsair, making ready to pick up her wrecks, so cautiously and so steadily should we steer our bark that we shall neither be swallowed up in the abyss with the former, nor be carried away in the track of the latter."