I. Introduction
For many on the Canadian right, the label of Red Toryism has become something of a burden. Even in its infancy, the term suffered from definition drift and many thinkers and politicians who espoused its tenets refused to claim ownership of it. For some, this is cause to do away with it in its entirety. But neither misuse nor disuse of the term will make the idea disappear.
The cause for this is that while the label has only existed since the 1960s, it was coined to describe a much older, much more structural piece of Canadian political and economic history and thought.
The roots of this political tradition run deep into pre-Confederation Canada, where an economic interventionism born of geography and the trade of fur and timber converged with a counter-revolutionary culture and social order inherited from early settlement. It is this convergence that marks Red Toryism as a unique Canadian ideal, and its history is what this article sets out to explore.
II. The Economic Tradition
In the early 17th century, as fishing operations gave way to a nascent fur trade, the lands of Canada became a rapidly growing economic zone. Official fur trading operations were established by the French Crown in the form of monopolies and licenses given to select traders. The Ministry of Marine created a crown corporation, the Compagnie des Indes occidentales, that among other colonial administration tasks governed the price and sale of beaver and moose hides from these traders back to the Crown.
This style of economic partnership reigned in the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes region, but further West a truly state-run monopoly was growing with the creation of a company chartered by the British Crown – the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC).
Unlike the French system, there existed not even the pretense of individual entrepreneurship in the governance structure of the HBC. Instead, they maintained control over Rupert’s Land with a strong hand ruled from London. Attempts at competition from privately owned companies, such as the Northwest Company, ultimately failed and were all-but forced into mergers or acquisitions by the HBC.
The fur trade and its domination by the HBC is merely the first of many economic ventures that sustained the Canadian economy through resource extraction and the production of raw materials. Timber, wheat, minerals, and oil and gas followed in succession over the centuries. This understanding of Canadian economic history, first forwarded by the economic historian Harold Innis, is known as Staples Thesis.
These industries, which require heavy up-front capital to start and run, produced economic conditions in Canada that naturally lend themselves towards state-intervention. The scale of capital required to traverse the distances and terrain to produce economic goods at scale exceeded what private enterprise or individual entrepreneurship could sustain without state backing.
The industry that was able to be profitable in this economic context was not merely supported by the state, but a co-dependent relationship also formed from this structure. The mercantile elite supported monopoly and state power because that’s what their capital had been built on. It was a governing oligarchy allied with colonial government and power.
This relationship, once formed from necessity, became ideological as a consequence of the American Revolutionary War.
III. The Cultural Tradition
While economic life supplied the necessities of structure and hierarchy, it was the Loyalists that endowed it with legitimacy.
The Loyalists were the British-Americans who had sided with the British during the American Revolutionary War, and following the loss of thirteen North American colonies in 1783, were pushed northwards from their homes into the Maritimes and the western portion of the Province of Quebec, shortly after renamed to Upper Canada.
In a general sense they believed the American Revolution was an unnecessary and dangerous break with Britain, and revealed the worst excesses of mob rule and tyranny. They were loyal first and foremost to the Crown, but also to the ideas and promises of an ordered, structured society, that only a life centred on family, the community, and the Empire could provide.
The Loyalists did not come exclusively from the elite of American society. Many, in fact, came as farmers, labourers and other tradespeople, and what little they had was largely left behind. Despite these hardships, the Loyalists built settlements, cleared the land and tilled the soil, and developed industries.
Beyond the physical mark they left on Canada, their attitudes and beliefs built the first ideological touchpoints of society in English Canada. They created a Canada with a distinct culture from both the United States or Britain that became a cornerstone of Canadian national identity and in particular, conservative thought in Canada.
The Loyalists and their descendants institutionalized their beliefs through the creation of the Province of Upper Canada in 1791, and the formation of the critical elements of civil society in Upper Canada – schools, churches, governmental and legal structures, and the beginnings of an industrial economy.
By the end of the War of 1812 this uniquely Canadian Tory nationalism had grown substantially, especially in the province of Upper Canada, which had taken the brunt of the American incursion and pushed back at great cost.
It was at this time that two companion groups took control over the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada. The Family Compact in the former, and in the latter, the Château Clique. As the beneficiaries of state-capital funded industry and the progenitors of early state institutions, these factions sought total control over their respective provinces.
The Family Compact sought the creation of an established Anglican Church in Upper Canada, if not in law then in practice. They held senior positions on appointed councils and provided land grants to other loyalist elites. Their strong opposition to reform of these systems cannot simply be boiled down to corruption. Rather, they held an ideological belief that the legitimacy of their hierarchy they had established flowed from loyalty and birthright, which others could aspire to but not attain in the same way.
Conversely, Lower Canada’s Château Clique was largely made up of an Anglo-speaking merchant minority that ruled over a French Catholic majority and wished to make Lower Canada ‘more British’. This stood in stark contrast to the older, independent conservative tradition in French Canada, which was marked by ultramontane Catholicism and the seigneurial system. While that tradition has its own storied history, what emerged in the lead-up to the rebellions of the 1830s was a structural pattern in both provinces of chartered elites who derived economic power from collaboration with the state and fused this with unfettered political power.
IV. Synthesis
While Macdonald’s generation of conservatism in the 1860s had been somewhat diluted from its pure Tory inheritance by the success of the reformers two decades earlier, the political and cultural traditions he inherited from the Loyalists were not washed away entirely.
With Confederation in 1867, Macdonald had brought his vision for a country into fruition. He won for himself a federal state with strong central powers, backing from the Crown, and of course, the premiership itself. In his crafting of the nation on these terms, Macdonald imbued the country and the national project with a deeply Tory nationalist flavour.
Importantly, Macdonald also faced a new wave of pressure and influence from the South. The reminder of this ever-present liberal and revolutionary behemoth state that existed at his doorstep was both the impetus for Confederation, as well as a guiding path for what to do with the new nation.
Almost immediately, Macdonald set to work on the central scheme of his nation-building enterprise: the National Policy.
The National Policy pursued a protectionist economy through high tariffs and the creation of a state-sponsored and funded infrastructure project to connect one side of the country to the other via the Canadian Pacific Railway. Other infrastructure projects received massive government subsidies and land expropriations to hasten the development of burgeoning Canadian industries, like harbour development and steamship building. Western settlement was advanced through targeted immigration policies that brought large numbers of Central and Eastern Europeans to the prairies to establish homesteads and farms.
As we have seen, this style of economic development in Canada was not new, but instead the National Policy should be seen as the institutional descendant and inheritor of the same elite-driven, state-guided development of natural resources of the HBC and earlier waves of staples production. Macdonald synthesized this style of economic development with the cultural and political traditions derived from the Loyalists and the Family Compact.
In Macdonald, these two traditions were solidified in the foundations of the country. In sum, the idea that the economy should work in the national interest, and that this can best be achieved by administering the country with a firm-handed state that works to achieve peace and order.
This can be seen in many of his actions as Prime Minister. Macdonald routinely chose paths that were potentially more difficult and less profitable in order to protect Canadian sovereignty over its lands and economy. For example, the most economically efficient route for the Canadian Pacific Railway would have been to dip southwards through parts of the United States. But such a route would defeat the nation-building and sovereignty purposes of the railroad.
Similarly, it may have been economically smart (and classical liberals argued this at the time) to pursue a restoration of the reciprocity agreement with the United States, which had been abrogated after the Civil War. To do so would have been to hand economic power to a nation that wished to absorb Canada politically as well as economically.
These pragmatic necessities of economy and government did not derive just from geography and climate, but also from the cultural traditions and inheritance that supplied the legitimacy for state action. Though Canada has been impacted by the general homogenization and liberalization that many Western countries have experienced over the last several decades, these early principles of Canadian political and economic tradition are still present today.
V. Conclusion
The convergence of state intervention in the economy and a cultural bent towards hierarchy and loyalty is one of the defining characteristics of Canada as a nation. Perhaps it is too ubiquitous to even be named, and why attempts to do so continue to remain so controversial.
Regardless of what we call it, the phenomenon described by thinkers like Gad Horowitz is still relevant today as a theory that helps us grasp our own history through our own interpretive lens. As students of history we can see Red Toryism not so much a fringe mid-20th century notion, or a burden easy to shrug off and dismiss, but a way to understand how and why we came to have the country we do today.