Keeping Canada out of the Anglo-Sphere

A century ago, the top Anglo-Canadian capitalists of the day and their publicists were determined to ape the British and to compel Canada to share the burden of British imperial struggles. In 1899, when Britain went to war against two small Afrikaner Republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, the pro-imperialists of the day clamoured for Canada to send troops to South Africa to stand shoulder to shoulder with the British.

The pro-imperialists condemned as disloyal anyone not ready to participate in the Boer War. 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."

Today the imperialist ultras are in power in Ottawa. Stephen Harper, his government and party, and the media outlets who are their backers, are pushing the imperialist agenda on Canadians. The words they use are not the same as those employed by the imperialists a century ago, but the meaning is very similar. The empire today is American, not British, and while the Harper Conservatives do not sound the praises of the Anglo-Saxon race, they are determined to have Canada join the Anglo-Sphere, whose charter members are the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.

Those three countries formed the heart of the “coalition of the willing” that invaded Iraq. While Canada stayed out of that conflict, the Harper government is using the mission in southern Afghanistan, whose bloody consequences for young Canadians are all too apparent, to secure membership in the Anglo-Sphere.

The Anglo-Sphere is the world’s tightest imperial alliance, constructed around the hoary idea that Anglo-Saxon civilization is the most advanced on earth and that the task falls to its members to bring enlightenment and liberty to the rest of humankind.

Canada has never been a very good fit for it because the ultimate logic of the Anglo-Sphere negates the very existence of this country. First, there is the fact of Francophone Canada, a quarter of the country, counting the Quebecois, Acadians and the French-Canadian minorities. Francophones have never been enthralled with being enroled in an Anglo-Saxon brotherhood. They weren’t in 1899, when the pro-imperialists pressured Canada into the Boer War and they are not today. Second, there is the rise of the Canada which is neither Anglo-Saxon, nor French, with its Aboriginal component, and with the growing weight of immigrants and the descendants of immigrants, from many parts of the world.

The Reform Party, the Canadian Alliance, and the Conservative Party of Canada, under leaders Preston Manning, Stockwell Day, and Stephen Harper, have always wanted to press this country onto the procrustean bed of the Anglo-Sphere. Their politics draws them closer to their ethnic cousins who run the United States than to the very large parts of Canada that don’t fit comfortably with their kind of people.

Ever since the American Revolution, the logic of our history has been that if the Anglo-Saxons of the continent could be drawn together it would be the end of Canada. To survive, Canada has had to be an alliance, or at the very least, a functioning union, between the diverse elements that make up the country. The logic of Canada has always depended on convincing people to overcome ethnic loyalties to a sufficient extent that the country can work. This has been a daunting, never ending challenge, but the result has been the creation of a remarkable country.

A century ago, the pro-imperialists who were the spiritual ancestors of today’s Anglo-Sphere zealots, came close to wrecking Canada. While the Liberal government of Wilfrid Laurier did manage to limit Canada’s participation in the Boer War to the sending of a few contingents to South Africa, during the First World War, the full horror of the imperial project struck the country with a vengeance. Under Conservative Prime Minister Robert Borden, Canada mobilized an enormous army first through voluntary enlistment and later through conscription.

Conscription tore Canada asunder with Anglo-Canada voting for it in the 1917 general election, while French Canada completely rejected it. There were anti-conscription riots in Quebec, and thousands of men dodging conscription hid out in the countryside.

Nearly sixty thousand Canadians died in the trenches on the western front.

Today, the American Empire and its allies in the Anglo-Sphere are engaged in a vast struggle that extends across the Middle East and into Central Asia. That struggle, about many things, including control of the world’s cheapest and most plentiful supply of oil, could yet erupt into a single major war, fought on a number of fronts all the way from Gaza to the border regions of Pakistan. There are neo-conservatives in the United States who relish the idea of such a wider conflagration, which they conceptualize as a Fourth World War (they call the Cold War the Third World War).

The number one priority of progressive Canadians must be to prevent this country from being drawn into that wider war, and to throw our weight on the side of those around the world who would prevent that conflagration from developing.

We can win the fight against Stephen Harper. This time, while Francophones remain the most determined to oppose the imperial agenda, opposition to it is strong right across the country. To defeat Harper in the next election, progressive Canadians will need to focus on what is at stake for the country and to put questions of party advantage into the background. That is never easy in a country with a first-past-the-post electoral system, in which party insiders think only about the number of seats they can win. That means that those of us who don’t plan to run for office will have to hold the feet of Liberals and New Democrats to the fire. The job is to get Harper out.