Who Founded Canada?

SUMMER 2016 WHO FOUNDED CANADA? RANDY BOSWELL JACK JEDWAB AVIGAIL EISENBERG JOCELYN MACLURE SEBASTIEN GRAMMOND TOM FLANAGAN JEAN TEILLET KATHLEEN MAHONEY CHARMAINE A. NELSON TABLE OF CONTENTS 5 INTRODUCTION THE VEXING QUESTION OF WHO FOUNDED CANADA Randy Boswell 8 QUEBEC AND CANADA: BEYOND CONSTITUTIONAL ANGST Jocelyn Maclure 13 THE MÉTIS NATION: THE ONLY NATION – ENGLISH, FRENCH OR ABORIGINAL – THAT ACTUALLY PARTICIPATED IN THE FOUNDING OF CANADA Jean Teillet 17 THE POLITICS OF FOUNDING CANADA: THEN AND NOW Jack Jedwab 25 CANADA’S ‘FOUNDING PEOPLES’ AND THE SUPREME COURT Sebastien Grammond 29 THE ROADBLOCK TO RECONCILIATION: CANADA’S ORIGIN STORY Kathleen Mahoney 35 MULTICULTURALISM AND CANADA’S FOUNDING PEOPLES Avigail Eisenberg 39 THE MONEY OF FOOLS Tom Flanagan 43 NEITHER INDIGENOUS, NOR SETTLERS: THE PLACE OF AFRICANS IN CANADA’S ‘FOUNDING NATIONS’ MODEL Charmaine A. Nelson CANADIAN THEME IS PUBLISHED BY ASSOCIATION FOR CANADIAN STUDIES BOARD OF DIRECTORS Canadian Issues / Thèmes canadiens is a quarterly publication of the Association for Canadian Studies (ACS). AYMAN AL-ASSINI It is distributed free of charge to individual and institutional Montreal, Quebec, Chairperson of the Board of Directors members of the ACS. Canadian Issues is a bilingual publication. MADINE VANDERPLAAT All material prepared by the ACS is published in both French Professor, Sociology Department, Saint Mary’s University, and English. All other articles are published in the language Halifax, Nova Scotia in which they are written. Opinions expressed in articles are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the YOLANDE COHEN opinion of the ACS. The Association for Canadian Studies is Professor, History Department, Université du Québec a Montréal, Montréal, Québec a voluntary non-profit organization. It seeks to expand and disseminate knowledge about Canada through teaching, LLOYD WONG research and publications. Professor, Sociology Department, University of Calgary Canadian Issues / Thèmes canadiens acknowledges the MADELINE ZINIAK financial support of the Government of Canada through the Consultant, Chairperson of the Canadian Ethnic Canada History Fund of the Department of Canadian Heritage Media Association, Toronto, Ontario for this project. CLINE COOPER PhD Candidate, OISE/University of Toronto, Montreal, Quebec HERBERT MARX LETTERS Montreal, Quebec JEAN TEILLET Comments on this edition of Canadian Issues? Partner at Pape Salter Teillet LLP, Vancouver, British Columbia We want to hear from you! VIVEK VENKATESH Canadian Diversity / ACS Professor, Graduate Programs in Educational Technology, 1822A, rue Sherbrooke Ouest Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec Montréal, Québec H3H 1E4 Or e-mail us at <[email protected]> Your letters may be edited for length and clarity. @CANADIANSTUDIES JACK JEDWAB President and CEO JAMES ONDRICK Cover image by Paula Provost - www.paula-provost.com Director of Programs and Administration SARAH KOOI Senior Project Manager VICTORIA CHWALEK Translation CAMILAHGO. STUDIO CRÉATIF Design & Layout INTRODUCTION THE VEXING QUESTION OF WHO FOUNDED CANADA RANDY BOSWELL Guest editor Randy Boswell is a journalism professor at Carleton University and a writer specializing in Canadian history. From 2003 to 2013, he was a national reporter with Postmedia News covering issues and developments linked to Canada’s past. We know that the 1867 Confederation deal gave prised. They are, in a sense, sweeping generaliz- impetus to the idea that the country had two ations about when Canada was founded, who did founding nations—the French-Canadian and Eng- the founding and what, even, is meant by “Can- lish-Canadian inhabitants of the original four prov- ada” or “nation”. How are “nations” different than inces. More than a century later, by the time of the “peoples”? Can a nation be comprised of multiple 1982 patriation of the Constitution and adoption sub-nations? Where do the “founding” provinces fit of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canada— in? What, indeed, does “founding” actually mean? long since transformed into a vast land bounded by There are more questions: Can provincial bound- the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic oceans—was being aries delineate “peoples” or “nations”? How do lan- styled a nation of three founding peoples: French, guage, ethnicity, religion, culture and citizenship English and Aboriginal. More recently, along intersect with the questions above? How do official the same lines, there has been a push to formally bilingualism and multiculturalism relate to such redefine modern Canada as the legacy of three problems? Where do the Irish-Canadian, Chinese- founding nations, strengthening the position of Canadian, Jewish-Canadian, Muslim-Canadian Indigenous peoples within what philosopher John communities and myriad other “hyphenated” Ralston Saul has described as the “triangular reality” groupings fit into the “founding” framework? of Canada’s genesis and evolution. Our intention in curating essays for the present The terms employed in conceptualizing Canada’s edition of Canadian Issues/Thèmes Canadiens was to origins are contentious, and we shouldn’t be sur- have insightful contributors confront some of these 5 THE VEXING QUESTION OF WHO FOUNDED CANADA - RANDY BOSWELL questions and offer a wide range of perspectives on pivotal partners in nation-building. “The indigen- the “founding nations” of Canada. We are grateful ous population provided land for settlers,” she that they have done just that, supplying an array of states, “entered into trade agreements and peace fresh ideas—let’s call them “founding notions”—on and friendship treaties with them, and fought a subject that is at least as old as Confederation and, alongside them in colonial wars.” like Canada itself, enduringly vexing. Dr. Avigail Eisenberg, University of Victoria polit- Jack Jedwab, executive vice-president of the Asso- ical scientist and expert in indigenous governance, ciation for Canadian Studies, sets the frame for dis- calls attention to the risk of even looking for found- cussion with the results of a nationwide survey that ing peoples or moments in Canada’s past when the shows there is no clear consensus among Canadians country’s present challenges—including ongoing about whether the country is best imagined as a struggles over Quebec’s future, multiculturalism “bicultural compact” between French and English, and Indigenous rights—become even more compli- a tripartite entity that includes indigenous peoples cated in the context of that search. “It makes better as a founding force, or a political pact between four sense,” she argues, “to resist a politics that treats founding provinces. At the same time, Canadians the question of who is a founding people as settled are most likely to characterize the “predominant or celebrates an episode in the past as a founding vision of the federation” as a “multicultural country moment.” with two official languages.” Legal scholar Sébastien Grammond examines the Among the country’s founding peoples, insists issue through the lens of Supreme Court rulings McGill University professor Charmaine A. Nelson, and highlights the creative ambiguities present in were black Canadians—both enslaved and free— certain high court decisions that prove “compat- whose contributions to the settlement and develop- ible with a vision in which a person can belong ment of the nation have been, and will continue to to many peoples simultaneously”—including lan- be, overlooked unless “another paradigm” displaces guage-based, provincially framed, and coast-to- the traditional model of thinking about how Canada coast national conceptions of identity. came to be. Philosophy professor Jocelyn Maclure argues that University of Calgary law professor Kathleen any search for “an unequivocal definition of the Mahoney, a major architect of the Truth and Rec- country” will prove fruitless in a Canada where onciliation Commission, argues that the “living “multiple identities abound.” Expressing the view lie” that Canada was the product of “two founding that “it is possible to achieve a balance between fed- peoples, the British and the French,” must be dir- eralism, multinationalism and multiculturalism,” ectly challenged and formally corrected—“through he posits that Canada is simultaneously based on an Act of Parliament, a Proclamation, or a Parlia- a founding pact between pre-existing governments mentary motion,” ideally during the Canada 150 but also on conceptions of nationhood that can celebrations in 2017—to recognize First Peoples as encompass both “Canadian” as a whole and a “min- 6 THE VEXING QUESTION OF WHO FOUNDED CANADA - RANDY BOSWELL ority national identity”—such as that embraced by most Québécois, or one rooted in belonging to one of the hundreds of Aboriginal nations across Canada. To Tom Flanagan, the University of Calgary political scientist and historian, it is “pointless to debate whether a group of people does or does not con- stitute a nation” because such assertions of identity are ultimately bound up in the quest to secure and exercise power. Whether English-Canadian, Québécois, pan-Canadian or Aboriginal, talk of nations, he says, is best understood as a series of “rhetorical constructs” that distract and divide. But Jean Teillet, an aboriginal rights lawyer and the grand-neice of 19th-century Métis leader Louis Riel, argues that acknowledgement of the Métis people as a founding nation of Canada—“the only Aborig- inal nation that actively and positively participated in the negotiated founding

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