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Dan Horner defends Valérie Lapointe-Gagnon’s Panser le Canada: Une histoire intellectuelle de la commission Laurendeau-Dunton.

Valérie Lapointe-Gagon’s Panser le Canada is a lively and exhaustively researched history of the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission, known to many as the Royal Commission on Biculturalism and Bilingualism.

 

Lapointe-Gagnon builds her argument around the Ancient Greek concept of Kairos. There are moments, she argues when social, cultural, and political forces come together to produce an opportune moment, when a window of opportunity is flung open, however briefly. In the 1960s, an opportunity arose around the cultural rift between English and French that lay at the heart of the Canadian state. Panser le Canada walks us through the forces that came together at this moment to create this fleeting opportunity to reach a diagnosis and prescribe a remedy to address these tensions. She outlines how factors such as the rise of Québec nationalism, the growing prestige and legitimacy assigned to the social sciences, and the mounting concern over the influence exerted by the United States created an impetus to appoint (and lavishly fund) an open-ended inquiry into the state of the relationship between English and French Canada. This is, however, a tragic narrative of conflict and squandered opportunity. Official Canada’s appetite to investigate dualism was short lived. The Liberal government grew fatigued with the glacial pace of its proceedings. Rifts opened between the commissioners who wished to limit the scope of the inquiry to forging a cultural response that would make the country’s official institutions and culture more inclusive to Francophones, and those who grew convinced that all of this required a profound revamping of the country’s constitutional architecture. Already a wounded beast by 1968, Lapointe-Gagnon argues that the ascendance of Pierre Trudeau would prove to be the commission’s death knell. Trudeau embraced the arguments of Jaroslav Rudnyckyj, the Ukranian-Canadian academic who was the one non-English or French commissioner, who grew increasingly vocal about the need to acknowledge Canada’s multicultural reality. This argument appealed to Trudeau’s liberal ethos because it allowed him to eschew calls to make some sort of acknowledgement of the collective rights of the Québécois in favour of a broader acknowledgement rooted in individualism. Lapointe-Gagnon laments this turn of events, arguing that Trudeau’s approach treated Québec’s Francophone majority as nothing more than just another minority group.

What is particularly revealing about the picture that Lapointe-Gagnon paints here is just how insular Canada’s public sphere was during a decade that we often conceptualize as tumultuous and transformative. The ten commissioners appointed by Lester Pearson to investigate the state of cultural relations in the country in 1963 were picked from a very shallow pool of journalists and academics in a country where post-secondary education remained the purview of a small elite. Many of the commissioners had already encountered each other in the course of their professional careers. They were ensconced in an inward looking world of private schools and classical colleges, of semesters abroad and fashionable dinner parties, and of university faculty clubs and national media outlets that made them, despite their linguistic differences, very comfortable around each other. There was only one woman amongst the commissioners, Gertrude Laing, who was identified in the official literature by her marital status rather than by her academic and professional accomplishments. The homogeneity leaps out at the reader from the book’s front cover, where we see eight of the ten commissioners assembled for an impromptu photograph. They are dressed in identical dark suits and skinny ties, their hair gleaming with a thick smear of Bryl Cream. If the CBC were tasked with creating a Canadian reboot of Mad Men they would, one could hope, set the drama not in a groovy advertising agency, but in the offices of the Royal Commission on Biculturalism and Bilingualism.

These nine men and one woman wielded incredible power. They essentially constructed the edifice for the political debates that would dominate public life in Canada for the next thirty years. I was born nearly a decade after the commission drew to a close, and the politics of my youth revolved incessantly around the questions that first gained traction at its hearings. Should the constitution be amended to grant Québec special status? Could a nation that functioned in two languages survive, or should we throw in the towel? In the twenty-first century, as we struggle with confronting the legacy of colonialism and the looming threat of ecological collapse, the conflicts at the heart of Panser le Canada seem like a distant memory. Some, it is likely, would even dismiss their rifts and vexations as navel gazing triviality. Indeed, Lapointe-Gagnon reminds us, many at the time did the same. Conservative critics, especially in Western Canada, dismissed the commission as an undisciplined exercise in government largesse. Their meandering investigation was labelled as a sop to Quebec. Existential concerns about dualism might have stoked anxiety in the salons of Westmount, amongst the parliamentary press corps, and in smoke-filled faculty clubs in Ottawa and the Quebec-Toronto corridor, but they were of little significance to Canadians who never stood a chance of being admitted into such sites of power and privilege. Indeed, Panser le Canada provides us with a good jumping off point to think about the origins of the populist attacks on the country’s postwar liberal consensus. It is a short walk from the commissions frustrating anti-conclusion to the rise of the Parti Québécois, the Reform Party, and even the anti-government rhetoric and feigned populism of today’s Canadian right.

While Lapointe-Gagnon’s finely executed book ends as a lament, it is not all pessimistic. The commission might have been homogenous, and it might have been focused entirely on the concerns of a tiny elite, but Panser le Canada rightly points out the lively democratic discourse that it created. Canadians from every walk of life flocked to its hearings and a whole range of community events and academic forums that sprung up around it. For every critic who raged against the commission as elitist and out of touch, many more took its calls to rethink their idea of Canada seriously. In a society where our experience of moments of truly deliberative democracy are sporadic and thin, we ought to be inspired by the process undertaken during these years. If Canadians committed themselves to tackling the problems that grip us more than a half century later with as much vigour as our predecessors did our civil society would likely be in better shape.

The commission’s blind spots leap out at twenty-first century readers and grab us by the throat.  Beyond Getrude Laing, women were given little voice in the proceedings. There appeared to never be any substantive discussions of inequality’s impact on any of this. Engagement with the country’s Indigenous people was limited to a handful of commissioners flying out to Northern Quebec, the Northwest Territories, and Labrador for a few days, after which they noted the naïve remarks made by the people they met there to inquiries about things like the language of schooling. The notion that Canada was a community built by two founding nations was a mantra repeated throughout the proceedings. We ought to harness our discomfort around these statements to think about our own blind spots. Lapointe-Gagnon also nudges us to reflect on the role that academics play in moments like this. Her analysis reaches deeper than the ten commissioners who served as the public face of the inquiry by examines the hundreds of advisors who contributed to the proceedings, a group that included prominent Canadian historians like Ramsay Cook and W.L. Morton, and social scientists like Léon Dion. In the 1960s money rained down on academics and graduate students to conduct countless studies of the issues surrounding bilingualism. The commission’s proceedings groaned under the weight of all this scholarly output. Lapointe-Gagnon suggests that all of this amounted to the manufacturing of a crisis. By the early 1960s many Canadians had became thoroughly convinced that immediate action needed to be taken in order to prevent the breakup of Canada or its complete absorption into the American sphere of influence. This raises questions about the role that we play as researchers, writers, and educators in producing knowledge and, more broadly, in ascribing legitimacy to the project of the nation state. It is essential that we think about this through a critical lens. For raising these issues in an engaging and rigorous way, Valérie Lapointe-Gagnon has made an interesting and surprisingly timely historiographical contribution.

Dan Horner

Dan Horner is an historian and an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology at Ryerson University. He is a member of the Groupe d’histoire de Montréal. His book, Taking to the Streets: Crowds, Politics, and the Urban Experience in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Montreal, should be out soon.

Be sure to join us tomorrow for Mary-Anne Shantz’ defence of Jean-François Lozier’s Flesh Reborn: The Saint Lawrence Valley Mission Settlements through the Seventeenth Century! See you then!

 

Don’t forget to check out the other posts in the series:

 

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