RANDY BOSWELL, "RESTRAINT ROOTED IN OUR HISTORY," OTTAWA CITIZEN  (APRIL 3, 2003).

Copyright Ottawa Citizen 2003

War in Iraq

Saul: Reluctance to respond with violence goes back to 1849, author claims

Canadians struggling with the country's stance on the war in Iraq could find a host of historical precedents for resisting the use of force to solve explosive situations at home and abroad, author John Ralston Saul said as he launched a new archival exhibit in Ottawa celebrating what he claims was the defining moment in the creation of our national psyche of "restraint."

Mr. Saul, Canada's leading left-liberal intellectual and one of its best-known writers, is guarded about discussing specific government policies because he is also the husband of Gov. Gen. Adrienne Clarkson. But in an interview before the opening of a Rideau Hall exhibit titled Culture and Democracy -- which explores the role of 19th-century governor general Lord Elgin in the tumultuous events that brought responsible government to Canada -- Mr. Saul suggested that Canada's push for a United Nations-brokered solution to the Iraq crisis and its decision not to join the U.S. and Britain in battle reflect a mindset ultimately rooted in the state's rejection of violent reprisals during the Montreal riots of 1849.

"The Canadian position is absolutely within the historic line of Canadian positions -- the Boer War, the Chanak Crisis of 1925 ... Abyssinia, our position on Suez, our position on Vietnam. I mean, just go through Canadian history, and you'll find that there's a line," said Mr. Saul. "There are exceptions to the rule -- the First and Second World War -- but if I listen to speeches today explaining our position, I could take those speeches, and go back and take speeches of Laurier, Mackenzie King or Diefenbaker, and change a few words, and they're identical.

"When you look at it, you can actually see this line, which is pretty well unbroken. A lot of it's unconscious, but it's there."

Mr. Saul has argued for years that Canada's interests as a multilingual, multicultural "post-modern" country built upon historic compromises differentiates it profoundly from such "monolithic" nation states as the U.S. and Britain.

But his espousal of 1849 as the key turning point in Canada's history -- and his championing of Louis LaFontaine, Robert Baldwin and Lord Elgin as the founders of a conciliatory Canadian democracy unique in the world -- has become a particularly consuming passion for the 55-year-old scholar.

The French-English reform alliance of LaFontaine and Baldwin provided the central metaphor for Mr. Saul's 1997 best-seller Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century. His ideas prompted a 1998 ceremony on Parliament Hill in which Prime Minister Jean Chretien and Heritage Minister Sheila Copps celebrated the 150th anniversary of the election of LaFontaine and Baldwin as the "birth of democracy" in Canada.

Mr. Saul argues that there was a crucial moment in which a distinctive Canadian sensibility to governing, maintaining order and even dealing with international affairs was galvanized. When the LaFontaine-Baldwin administration passed the Rebellion Losses Bill - - decried by elites as an unjust reward to the rebels of 1837 for their treason-ous attempts to overthrow the governments of Upper and Lower Canada -- Montreal was turned into a riot zone and its parliament buildings were burned to the ground.

The lives of LaFontaine and Baldwin were threatened, their homes besieged by mobs. Lord Elgin, who had ceded much of his power to the reformist government and refused to trump the will of elected officials, was chased through the streets by stick-wielding rioters and his carriage pelted with rocks.

But the government -- as shown in 154-year-old, hand-written documents unearthed at the National Archives by Mr. Saul and now on display at Rideau Hall -- refused to send in troops to quell the violence.

The minutes from one meeting, held with protesters surrounding the makeshift council chambers and threatening to attack at any moment, note that government officials "deprecate the employment of the military to suppress these disturbances ... "

Says Mr. Saul: "This is actually an astonishing document in the history of modern democracies. There's no document like this in the United States. No document like this in England. Nothing in France. No European country made a decision to use restraint. In other words, 'Let them burn down a few more buildings. Property isn't that important. What's important is to avoid a division between people. Restraint. Remain calm. Don't rise to it'."

LaFontaine, Baldwin and Elgin captured the moral high ground, argues Mr. Saul, and the uprising -- robbed of dramatic clashes with soldiers that might have fuelled violence and sown racial and social discord -- failed to attract wide support.

In one display case at the Rideau Hall exhibit are two chunks of macadamized pavement ripped from a Montreal street and hurled through the windows of Lord Elgin's carriage. The governor general apparently kept the objects as a memento of the chaos he withstood in April 1849.

Mr. Saul obtained them from the current Earl of Elgin -- a direct descendant of the colonial governor who is visiting Ottawa this week from Scotland.

Mr. Saul says the worst "wounds" festering in Canadian society can be traced to the failures of political leaders to exercise the kind of forbearance demonstrated in 1849. For example, he has argued that the federal government's crushing of the Riel rebellions in the late 1800s betrayed the spirit of the LaFontaine-Baldwin brand of democracy and remains a source of bitterness among First Nations and French Canadians.

"When we fail, then, 100 years later or 150 years later, it still leaves a wound, a sore."

But mostly, says Mr. Saul, a restrained response to conflict has been the rule. When Canada's participation in the Boer War threatened to deeply divide French and English Canadians, Sir Wilfrid Laurier kept Canada out of the fight formally, but allowed Canadian volunteers to battle under the British flag. Even during the Second World War, when Canadian troops joined with allies to defeat Nazi Germany, prime minister Mackenzie King's delicate handling of the conscription crisis was "a very good example" of the restraint critical to Canadian unity and stability, says Mr. Saul.

Canadian peacemaking, he adds, helped avert war in the Middle East during the Suez Crisis in the 20th century and the U.S.-style exterminations of aboriginal people in the 19th.

The greatest testament to the policy of restraint, he claims, is that Canada -- virtually alone in this respect among nations of the world -- has lost fewer than 100 lives in its entire history as a result of domestic political violence.

In the 1840s, says Mr. Saul, "a series of decisions are made that, when you look back on it, become the foundation of what Canada was to become. How will we act in a crisis of public instability? Restraint. Everywhere else they're using violence; restraint becomes the essence of the Canadian democracy."