True Patriot Love by Michael Ignatieff Page A
Authors: Michael Ignatieff
Tags: History, Non-Fiction
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demanding a pardon. Grant thought Riel a poor deluded fool and called publicly for pardon. Prime Minister Macdonald bowed to Ontario. Riel went to the gallows, and a martyr, for both the Metis nation and for Quebec, was born.
Riel’s execution caused fury throughout Quebec. The rising star of the Liberal Party, Wilfrid Laurier, took the stage at a rally in Montreal in November 1885, shortly after the execution, and defended Riel in vehement terms,saying that had he himself been on the banks of the Saskatchewan, he, too, would have taken up a musket against the troops. Protestant Ontario never allowed him to forget those words.
The achievement of Grant’s dream, therefore, drove fissures through the fabric of Canada that remain to this day. Quebec’s leading figures believed that the railway had been used to destroy French society in the West.
In 1890, when the government of Manitoba went so far as to abolish the separate Roman Catholic school system and replace it with a single “national” board, Quebec’s worst fears were confirmed, and for six years, the federation was convulsed by a crisis at once religious, educational and national in character.
The Manitoba schools crisis grieved Grant—the worst civil war, he wrote, is that in which “a church is arrayed against the state.” In September 1895, by now pushing sixty, he took a month away from his duties as university president and went to Manitoba, patiently reporting from both sides of the dispute for the Toronto
Globe
.
His reports strongly condemned the Manitoba government for shutting down the French school system, remarking tartly that there was no need to burn a house down in order to taste crackling. Already Winnipeg schools were crowded with the new immigrants floodinginto the West—Norwegians, Icelanders, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians—but the Franco-Manitobans were staying away, attending their own underfunded private schools rather than submit to Protestant instruction in English. Grant understood and accepted their refusal. He came away believing that national unity did not require a single national school system; confessional education in two languages was a necessity in a country as divided as Canada. What the nation needed was more bilingual education, so that citizens grew up comfortable in both official languages and comfortable with the religious opinions of their neighbours. Nor did he favour the use of federal power to compel national standards. He did not believe the federal government had the right to disallow the provincial schools legislation; instead, he urged the province to think again and provide public support for French Catholic education.
He had learned an important lesson from those hours on the trail with the French Metis, from those days spent patiently listening to aggrieved French schoolteachers in small schoolrooms in St. Boniface. He wrote that the alluring vision of a homogeneous and united people sometimes tempts Canadians, but they must never forget “that a people can be truly united only when great minorities do not feel themselves treated with injustice.”
III
The railway forged Canada’s identity as a nation from ocean to ocean, but the national vision was linked, in Grant’s and Fleming’s minds, to a still grander imperial design. The transcontinental shortened the distance between London and the Antipodes. It drew the global empire closer together and increased Canada’s importance as a global spoke in the imperial hub. The CPR quickly became a worldwide transportation company, with grand hotels at every terminus, from the Château Frontenac in Quebec to the Empress in Victoria, and steamships travelling from Vancouver to Sydney, Australia, to Yokahama, Japan, and to Calcutta, India.
For Grant this was the grander destiny that made the slog up to the Rogers Pass worthwhile, the vision that made him persevere back home among the doubters and doomsayers, the scornful homebodies whose horizon was the
Riel’s execution caused fury throughout Quebec. The rising star of the Liberal Party, Wilfrid Laurier, took the stage at a rally in Montreal in November 1885, shortly after the execution, and defended Riel in vehement terms,saying that had he himself been on the banks of the Saskatchewan, he, too, would have taken up a musket against the troops. Protestant Ontario never allowed him to forget those words.
The achievement of Grant’s dream, therefore, drove fissures through the fabric of Canada that remain to this day. Quebec’s leading figures believed that the railway had been used to destroy French society in the West.
In 1890, when the government of Manitoba went so far as to abolish the separate Roman Catholic school system and replace it with a single “national” board, Quebec’s worst fears were confirmed, and for six years, the federation was convulsed by a crisis at once religious, educational and national in character.
The Manitoba schools crisis grieved Grant—the worst civil war, he wrote, is that in which “a church is arrayed against the state.” In September 1895, by now pushing sixty, he took a month away from his duties as university president and went to Manitoba, patiently reporting from both sides of the dispute for the Toronto
Globe
.
His reports strongly condemned the Manitoba government for shutting down the French school system, remarking tartly that there was no need to burn a house down in order to taste crackling. Already Winnipeg schools were crowded with the new immigrants floodinginto the West—Norwegians, Icelanders, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians—but the Franco-Manitobans were staying away, attending their own underfunded private schools rather than submit to Protestant instruction in English. Grant understood and accepted their refusal. He came away believing that national unity did not require a single national school system; confessional education in two languages was a necessity in a country as divided as Canada. What the nation needed was more bilingual education, so that citizens grew up comfortable in both official languages and comfortable with the religious opinions of their neighbours. Nor did he favour the use of federal power to compel national standards. He did not believe the federal government had the right to disallow the provincial schools legislation; instead, he urged the province to think again and provide public support for French Catholic education.
He had learned an important lesson from those hours on the trail with the French Metis, from those days spent patiently listening to aggrieved French schoolteachers in small schoolrooms in St. Boniface. He wrote that the alluring vision of a homogeneous and united people sometimes tempts Canadians, but they must never forget “that a people can be truly united only when great minorities do not feel themselves treated with injustice.”
III
The railway forged Canada’s identity as a nation from ocean to ocean, but the national vision was linked, in Grant’s and Fleming’s minds, to a still grander imperial design. The transcontinental shortened the distance between London and the Antipodes. It drew the global empire closer together and increased Canada’s importance as a global spoke in the imperial hub. The CPR quickly became a worldwide transportation company, with grand hotels at every terminus, from the Château Frontenac in Quebec to the Empress in Victoria, and steamships travelling from Vancouver to Sydney, Australia, to Yokahama, Japan, and to Calcutta, India.
For Grant this was the grander destiny that made the slog up to the Rogers Pass worthwhile, the vision that made him persevere back home among the doubters and doomsayers, the scornful homebodies whose horizon was the
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