Evening Star Newspaper, December 16, 1934, Page 89

mm‘] ¢ Sunday Star Magasine WASHINGTON, D. C, DECEMBER 16, 1934. Features e —— 16 PAGES. = IS CANADA BREAKING UP? This Noted Canadian Says the United States May Have a Group of “Balkans” to the North—For, While Our Government Is Being Centralized, Dominion Provinces Are Demanding, and Getting, More and More Self-Rule. T THIS current moment the Province of Alberta is present- ing a claim against the Do- minion of Canada for the reimbursement of 25 years’ sale—from 1905 to 1930—of its public lands, before it owned them! To any one who has followed the progressive devel- opment of the relations of dominion and provinces in Canada this just about caps the climax of the economic separation which is threatening the life of the Dominion. In other words, Canada appears to be “Balkanizing” itself. It is threatening to turn—it is almost visibly turning—from what was meant to be a united nation into a confederate group of autonomous units. It is reproducing in itself the dis- ruption of the British Empire three gen- erations ago under the name of “re- sponsible government.” The economic resources of the British Empire are now so hopelessly divided that no single au- thority can make use of them. Those of Canada are going the same way. The federal union of British North America into the Dominion of Canada was brought about in the years 1864-67 under the sharp stimulus of a war scare. The general intention was to join the provinces under a real central govern- ment. There was to be no dual sov- ereignty, no state’s rights, no secession. The spectacle of the United States, torn with the Civil War, served as an example of the results of divided authority. UT a real union was difficult, almost impossible. The vast stretches of the wilderness called British North America, broken here and there with settlements and seaports, had scarcely any connec= tions with one another. Here on the Atlantic seaboard were the maritime provinces. They had no thought of union with Canada, upper and lower. They had a life of their own. They looked across the sea to England and down the coast to New England— never west. Their allegiance was British, their market was American and their in- tellectual center was Boston. With Can- ada, even in the season of navigation, they had hardly any. economic contact; in Winter none at all. Of the two Canadas, French or lower Canada was and is like nothing else in the world. It was not even homogeneous in itself. It included in Montreal half a city full of undigested Scotsmen— money-getters, empire builders—with a background of cemeteries, priests’ farms and stone-walled river seigneuries. It shared its bed—the bed of the St. Law- rence—with upper Canada, a totally different place. The wedge of land be- tween the lower lakes had been founded by “Loyalists”—that is to say, Americans from Massachusetts and Virginia. It had been fed by British immigration. It used Yankee schoolbooks, the New York shilling and Thanksgiving turkeys, but if you came near it, it waved the Union Jack at you. Both Canadas were cut off, north and west, by the illimitable wilder- ness, mostly unexplored. In Winter ac- cess to the outside world was only through the United States. There was no railroad, no road even, to the sea. Hundreds of miles to the west, beyond Lake Superior, the wilderness changed to the prairie of the northwest, and then went upward and onward to the infinite desolation of the Arctic. Few white people had ever seen it. The northwest was under the Hudson’s Bay Co., soverign except for allegiance to the Queen. Its The Peace Tower of Canada’s Parliament, at Ottawa, photographed through the portico of the prime minister’s entrance to the building. —P. & A. Photo. BY STEPHEN LEACOCK people came from Great Britain. They went in and out by Hudson Strait and Norway House. Canada never saw most of them. In all, they numbered round the forts a few hundred whites. With them on the plains and in the woods were a few French half-breeds and some 30,000 Indians. Outside the forts the lan- guage was French or Cree. Only on the Red River was there a “settlement.” Then came the Rocky Mountains, the very symbol of titanic isolation; beyond their uncounted peaks and gorges was the Pacific Coast. A little colony dozed at Victoria; a few diggers scratched for gold. In a country neéarly twice as large as the new German Empire of 1870 there were 11,000 white people and about 35,000 Mongolian Indians. Beyond was ‘the Pacific Ocean. TO “FE)DERATE" all this might seem impossible. But the British govern- ment forced the plan through. It bought out the Hudson’s Bay Co.’s overlordship for $1,500,000 and gave the northwest as a present to Canada. It guaranteed a railway to the sea. The maritime prov- inces, resisting and protesting, were dragged into the union—New Brunswick by a popular election on a momentary wave of indignation over the Fenian raids; Nova Scotia by a vote of the Leg- islature against the people’s will. Prince Edward Island a little later, in 1873, was bribed in by the purchase of its bankrupt railway. Newfoundland stayed out. The act of 1867 that made the union was all for central strength. The prov- inces had-only the power expressly given them: the Dominion had all the rest. It had, in addition, the right to nullify pro- vincial legislation if contrary to the gen= eral interest, of which the federal gov- ernment itself was the judge. It was sovereign if it wished to be so. There was no bill of rights, no reservation. The only special safeguards for the provinces referred to the language and religion of the French and to the actual areas of the provinces. Economic rights were not con- cerned. At first sight, the Dominion seemed to have them all. The Dominion’s ownership of the vast northwest (less only the little “posiage stamp” Province of Manitoba) made it supreme for land settlement, home- steads, immigration and the building of the transcontinental railway. It held in its hands the whole forward movement of the Dominion. Its power of taxation was not restricted, but as plenary as words could make it—“taxation by any mode or system.” The commerce clause was the same. The Dominion controlled money, legal tender banks, the customs, the excise. Its financial power seemed so great that there was little left for the provinces. They had to be put on a dole and re- ceived most of their revenue as a subsidy. The Dominion had the criminal law, a conspicuous success from the first. In Canada there is only one kind of murder, and people get hanged for it. They don't have to be extradited. THE provincial powers looked puny be- side those of the Dominion. They controlled “property’—that didn’t seem to mean much—“direct taxation for a provincial revenue” meaning in those days taxes on land, buildings and such. They controlled “licenses,” meaning such things as liquor and peddlers and dogs. At first all the prestige was with the Dominion. The leading men of the coun- try—English and French, east and west— sought its offices and the titled honors it bestowed. The Macdonalds and the Tuppers and Cartiers left the provincial field. Wilfred Laurier never entered it. The provinces were left to second-rate men and village politics. At Ottawa was a vice regal court with the princess royal to grace it, and be- yond that the honors of London and the countenance of the Queen. Beside all that the little old red brick “legislative assembly” in King street, Toronto, looked like a high school. Who could have foreseen the change? In the United States exactly the cpposite happened. The Federal Government be= gan with nothing. By interpretation and force of circumstances it acquired every= thing. It is now, for weal or woe, the author and instrument of national sal= vation. Not so in Canada. The economic de= velopment since 1867 shifted the center of life to the provinces. The rise and growth of the vast paper industry threw into high relief the importance of the .eastern forests and crown timber lands, all controlled by the provinces. It is Quebec and Ontario—King Taschereau and Prince Hepburn—who are now dic= tating terms to a vanquished America. Canada is rich beyond all the world in potential electric power, the main momentum of the world’s work when gasoline, a vanishing asset, backfires into space. Of the 33,617,000 horsepower esti- mated, only 731,000 is in territory (Arctie) controlled by the Dominion. The rest belongs to the provinces. More than this, Canada since confederation has become one of the greatest mining countries