Lord Durham: Father of Canada?

Compared to our American cousins, Canadians don’t do a lot of violent insurrection. Think about our militia-leading rebels: Louis Riel, Louis-Joseph Papineau, and William Lyon Mackenzie. That’s the whole list.

The Rebellions of 1837 were historically tame affairs. Just over three hundred deaths ensued and in some encounters both sides fled when the shooting started, being complete novices to warfare. In Nova Scotia, the “rebel” Joseph Howe restricted his battles to the courtroom.

Nevertheless, the Rebellions of 1837 were part of a global upsetting of apple carts and the colonial power, Great Britain thought it wise to understand and perhaps solve the root problems. Having recently lost its prize colonies in North America, it didn’t want to lose the rest.

Thus they sent over one of their best and brightest to figure out what had happened, and what changes were needed to ensure that things would settle down. Although “Peace, order, and good government” was yet to be written into our constitution, even then it was part of our DNA.

The young Lord Durham arrived in Canada not long after the Mackenzie and Papineau 1837 rebellions had fizzled out. In 1839 he presented his findings to the Colonial Office in London. Just another dusty file in the Old Country, on our side of the Atlantic the Durham Report is central to understanding Canada’s constitutional evolution.

Durham addressed the issue of a near absence of representative government and recommended legislation to widen the franchise to most property owning males over the age of twenty-one, a significant step in the development of responsible government in this country.

What was particularly perceptive on Durham’s part was that the British North American colonies contained “two nations warring in the bosom of a single state”, namely the English and the French. Not only two language groups, but at that time two quite different cultures, Protestant and Catholic, the former relative latecomers, the latter being a settled community with two centuries’ history isolated from the mother country.

Durham’s recommendations were important and useful to the extent they laid the groundwork for the development of our democratic way of life, but very much off the mark to the extent that he wanted to see the French speakers of Lower Canada transformed into anglophones. Canada’s success as a multicultural society has come about despite, not because of, those recommendations.

Short of outright warfare, our two nations had little choice but to tolerate each other, mostly grudgingly, but learning to find alliances such as that of John A. Macdonald and Georges-Etienne Cartier whose partnership was central to Confederation in 1867. Our struggle of a century and a half to learn first to tolerate, then to respect one another has led us to become one of the most multicultural and diverse societies on the planet. Jealous rivalry has given way to a functioning dualism, or more correctly, diversity.

But for today’s Canada Day, a tip of the hat to Lord Durham who helped give us many of the tools of government and democracy to build the wonderful land we call home.