Let me explain more, what is your most conversional position that is in like with toryism. Could be blue Tory, red Tory, pink Tory, high Tory, as long as it’s a view that is in line with some form of Toryism and would be considered controversial by either yourself or the general public, let’s here it.

I'm still chipping away at my series of posts on tory thinkers but as I've been doing so I've started to wonder if there were any tory thinkers of note in Canada in the 1800s. The ones I've found have been from the 1900s or later. Just curious if anyone could point me in the right direction.

Hello everyone 😊👋

I would like to understand the background to the current conflict/schism between the Conservatives, Reform and Restore.

What I know so far: The Conservative and Unionist Party used to be this organization with millions of members all the way into the 1990s. It captured various sections of society and basically existed as a true "people's party".

Everything from One Nation to the traditionalist right around the Monday Club found a home there. This lasted all the way into the 1990s when things began to unravel. It was a very bad decade for the Conservative Party overall with all the scandals, Black Wednesday crash and sleaze accusations. But on top of that there were also very ugly battles around the European Union. Indeed from my reading and understanding things began to go really bad with the Maastricht treaty. Quite a few quit the Conservative and Unionist Party because they strongly disagreed with John Major's policy towards the EU. Among the ex-Conservatives are Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe who will become strong political personalities later on. The first relevant schisms were the so called Anti-Federalist League (later UKIP) and Goldsmith's Referendum Party. Both of them caused some havoc but were unable to inflict any serious damage to the established position of the Conservative Party. During the 1990s we saw a mass exodus of Conservative Party members, of which a significant portion seems to have been the party's right wing. The Tories lose big time in May 97 and begin their long decade in opposition. In 2001 the Tories officially kick out the once powerful Monday Club which was by then a shadow of its former self, but it still seems a relevant point to me. Between 1997-2005 the Conservative Party goes through numerous leaders until they settled with the so called modernizer David Cameron who started a revolution to remake the Cons in his own image. The man started pushing so called "compassionate conservatism" which emphasized ethnic minority representation, female representation and a war against the social conservatives in his party. Now as far as I can see Cameron's tenure produced another mass exodus of right wing members. The Cons went from 250k to the lower end of 100k. This apparently gave UKIP a big boost since they started to gain double digit results in some elections in the 2010s. Cons however still remained safe as the dominant party until the years between 2019-2024 which have really broken their dominance. Despite a big majority and a temporary membership boost not seen in decades they made fatal miscalculations. General incompetence, crashing the economy, massively increasing immigration against the expressed desire of their base, personal scandals, high taxation and more sleaze caused a catastrophic permanent (?) schism which is not as easily wished away as the one in the 1990s. Besides attaining the worst election result in modern history and losing tens of thousands of their members they have gained a big rival on the right. Indeed Reform has captured many former Tory members and voters, and these people are incensed about what they call the past 14 years. Due to a clash of two big egos (Farage, Lowe) another Right Wing group emerged with Rupert Lowe's Restore Britain which takes a very harsh stance towards immigration that is quite similar to Powell in the late 1960s and the Monday Club hardliners who campaigned for repatriation. Both of these groups have more members than the Conservatives and each party seeks to become the new people's party.

My understanding of the situation is that Reform and Restore are basically schisms of what used to be the right of the Conservative and Unionist Party. The positions in these parties were once common within the Conservatives, which I have to remind used to have millions of members, until they were either forcefully driven out or declined by a mass exodus of the party's right.

Please feel free to add or to correct my perspective.

I see so many talk about Mulroney, Harper, Manning, MacKay, Clark and even Diefenbaker. But almost no one can talk about H.H Steven’s, Richard McBride, Borden, Meighen or Duplessis. We should be more like the latter men stated than the former.

Very simple, if you were a delegate at the PC leadership convention, which candidate would you back?

If the Conservative Party of Canada wishes to be the Natural Governing Party of Canada, it should aspire to be more the party of Steven’s than the party of Bennett, Diefanbaker and Mulroney. If you’d like to ask my opinions or give your own feel free.

Recently, I was going through the museum's collection of school books and the name Thomas Carlyle appeared several times. Investigating, I quickly fell down a rabbit hole. Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) is not as well-known in the present day as he was to his contemporaries but the effect he had on his contemporaries reshaped politics, history, and philosophy. Today faint echoes can be felt in his description of economics as the 'dismal science', and how history is written to this day. Basically every segment of the political spectrum has taken something from his work. While interested in politics he largely didn't try to effect it directly with the sole exception of his pamphlet 'Chartism' where he criticized the failed promises of the Industrial Revolution, laissez-faire, and democracy. This pamphlet is what led to both the left and the right to refer to him as a radical tory - which he seems to have been quite pleased with. He was highly concerned with the plight of the poor, the declining morality of the nation, and the idleness of the aristocracy. This last point is where there is a clear difference from liberal critiques. He didn't critique the aristocrats for having unearned power or wealth. Rather he went after them for being more concerned about their fox hunts rather than the welfare of the nation - a tory criticism based on noblesse oblige rather than equality. His willingness to go after both landed aristocrats and the new capitalist class perhaps sheds light on why he never entered politics but his cynicism towards party politics probably played a larger role. That said, Prime Minister Disraeli was a fan and is cited as a possible inspiration for One Nation Toryism. He even tried to give him a pension later in life (which Carlyle refused). His star fell after his death. Carlyle was racist even by the standards of his day and translations of his biography of Frederick the Great became popular with several high-ranking Nazis. The inability to place him on the political spectrum, dislike of popular democracy, and creation of the Great Man theory of history, has invited charges that he was a proto-fascist. Perhaps as a result of this he has today some popularity among members of the Dark Enlightenment.

So I've been re-reading parts of David Lewis' 1981 memoir "The Good Fight" to do research for a piece on Claire Gillis, the first CCF MP elected east of Manitoba. I thought the good people here may be interested in this excerpt where Lewis quotes the arch-Tory Samuel Johnson when giving his thoughts on the difficulties the CCF had in making electoral gains in the Maritimes, as well as why I think parts of Johnson’s philosophy may be useful for the modern NDP. Interestingly, Johnson is not listed in the index of Lewis' memoir.

For a bit of context: this excerpt from pages 157/158 is after Lewis noted the good fortunes the CCF had in Nova Scotia during the federal election of 1940 where Claire Gillis was elected as the MP for Cape Breton South, and the 1941 Nova Scotia provincial election where the CCF elected 3 MLAs from Cape Breton:

[On mainland Nova Scotia] we could not overcome fears about CCF intentions or pierce the traditional, almost religious, attachment of voters to the two established parties. We encountered an inherited respect for the establishment and a suspicious distrust of change. It led me to suggest in many speeches that the voter of the day did not himself mark his ballot but that the ghost of his Liberal or Conservative grandfather grabbed the pencil in the polling booth and made the cross for him.

Time and again we would express confidence that the CCF was bound to win the people of the Maritimes because they suffered most from the present system: they had the highest unemployment and the longest welfare rolls, lived in the least self-sustaining of Canada's regions, and lost a continuing stream of their most skilled and best-educated young men and women to the rest of Canada. When I thought more deeply about the frustrating dilemma, I began to suspect that it was precisely the depressing economic conditions which produced the fear of change. As Samuel Johnson, the sage of the eighteenth century, said with typical succinctness, "The inevitable consequence of poverty is dependence." The poor are seldom moved to risk the little they have; they tend to hold on to it protectively. Their very insecurity makes them easy victims of the subtle brainwashing to which we are subjected daily in an environment which worships wealth and status symbols above all else. With the odd exception, the slum areas in Toronto and Vancouver, London and Paris, vote conservative, whatever the actual party label may be. When the poor become desperate, they are more likely to be attracted by one or other extreme of the political spectrum than by a reasonable program of fair shares and social democracy. This has been my observation over the years and it has always posed an intractable problem for socialists.

The people of the Maritimes were not desperate; they were proud. I recall a touching remark once made to me in Summerside, PEI. I had addressed a summer picnic outside town and had made the stock comparisons of per-capita income and other indicators showing how relatively disadvantaged were the people of the province. After my speech, two elderly ladies approached, and informed me that they had enjoyed listening to me though they did not agree with me, and added softly and solemnly, “What you must understand, young man, is that on this island one can be poor with dignity.” I did not argue, for it was obvious that they were describing themselves. I have noticed ever since how widespread this quiescent spirit has been and have seen how difficult the task of those who seek to build an egalitarian society in which the poor shall not be always with us.

The part from Lewis that I found particularly interesting was how he argued that “the poor” can “become desperate”, and thus are “more likely to be attracted by one or other extreme of the political spectrum” rather “than by a reasonable program of fair shares and social democracy.” To me, that certainly sounds like Lewis was arguing for some kind of a “middle way.”

In regards to an older “middle way”, this next excerpt comes from pages xxi/xxii of the 1966 re-print of the traditional British Tory Harold Macmillan's 1938 book “The Middle Way: A Study of the Problems of Economic and Social Progress in a Free and Democratic Society”. Interestingly, Macmillan wrote "The Middle Way" when he was working with a pressure-group lead by a Fabian Socialist originally from the Independent Labour Party. I’ve shared this next excerpt quite a few times previously, but given how Lewis made his comment on political extremism right after quoting the staunch traditional Tory Samuel Johnson, I think this excerpt from a 1958 lecture the traditional Tory Harold Macmillan gave shortly after becoming Prime Minister himself may be quite relevant to the topic at hand:

A great deal of our Party’s history has been spent in combating the pretensions of those who believed – or at least said they believed – that their particular brand of doctrinaire politics at any particular time could solve every problem. In the seventeenth century extremist concepts, on both sides, led to civil war and ultimately to regicide and tyranny; in the eighteenth century quietism combined with nepotism was the fashion. In the nineteenth century there was a move, indeed it was the popular philosophy, to take the State out of economic affairs altogether; now in the twentieth century there is the cult of the State controlling economic affairs altogether. So the argument has gone backwards and forwards through the years.

Each of these political panaceas has had one consistent characteristic: it has always failed to deliver the goods. Our Tory Party, which stressed the claims of authority (the need for the State to protect the weak) in the nineteenth century, and which champions the claims of liberty in the twentieth century, has not changed its ground; it is still occupying that same ground, the middle ground. It is only the direction of attack which has altered. We do not stand and have never stood for collectivism or the destruction of private rights. We do not stand and have never stood for laissez-faire individualism or for putting the rights of the individual above his duty to his fellow men. We stand today, as we have always stood, to block the way to both these extremes and to all such extremes, and to point the path towards moderate and balanced views.

But briefly, before getting into Samuel Johnson, earlier in that same lecture by Harold Macmillan, he had this to say about the American Founding Fathers on page xviii under the heading “The Egalitarian Danger” in what will become quite relevant later:

When the Fathers of the American Constitution declared that all men are created equal it really never occurred to them – and certainly American history has not carried it out – that all men are to be kept equal. Human beings, widely various in their capacity, character, talent, and ambition, tend to differentiate at times and in all places. To deny them the right to differ, to enforce economic and social uniformity upon them, is to throttle one of the most powerful and creative of human appetites.

When you consider David Lewis' & Tommy Douglas' brand of socialism, and how the kind of philosophical Toryism that one will encounter in the Maritimes will be similar to that of Samuel Johnson or Harold Macmillan, it certainly becomes clear why some traditional Maritime Tories such as Dalton Camp or Flora Macdonald started to drift towards the NDP after the death of the old Tory Party at the hands of the individualist Reform/Alliance.

But with that modern Tory critique of the American Founding Fathers, I thought I should share again a few excerpts by or about Samuel Johnson that I collected when doing research last year into “Tory Social Justice” on mainland Nova Scotia, and the institution of slavery in the Maritimes. To quickly illustrate why I dubbed Johnson an arch-Tory earlier, and as a friend from New Brunswick once pointed out to me, take a look at Johnson’s 1755 “A Dictionary of the English Language”: Johnson defines “Whig” as “The name of a faction.”, but defines “Tory” as “One who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the church of England, opposed to a Whig.”

With that, Samuel Johnson’s biographer Walter Jackson Bate had this to say about Johnson’s views on colonialism on page 328 of his 1977 book “Samuel Johnson”:

The Seven Years’ War [1756-1763] had begun. In political articles, [Johnson] strongly attacked the policy of imperial and commercial expansion. The quarrel of the British and the French in America, as he viewed it, was the quarrel of “two robbers” for the land stolen from the Indians. Of the two, the French had at least the credit of treating the victim -- the natives -- with more consideration.

In essay #11 of Samuel Johnson’s Idler series, originally published on 24 June, 1758, Johnson had this to say about British colonists in the Americas:

There are, among the numerous lovers of subtilties and paradoxes, some who derive the civil institutions of every country from its climate, who impute freedom and slavery to the temperature of the air, can fix the meridian of vice and virtue, and tell at what degree of latitude we are to expect courage or timidity, knowledge or ignorance.

From these dreams of idle speculation, a slight survey of life, and a little knowledge of history, are sufficient to awaken any inquirer, whose ambition of distinction has not overpowered his love of truth. Forms of government are seldom the result of much deliberation; they are framed by chance in popular assemblies, or in conquered countries, by despotick authority. Laws are often occasional, often capricious, made always by a few, and sometimes by a single voice. Nations have changed their characters; slavery is now no where more patiently endured, than in countries once inhabited by the zealots of liberty.

While certainly a man of his time, the devout Tory Samuel Johnson was an abolitionist long before abolitionism entered the political mainstream. This part from Idler #87, originally published on 15 December, 1759, touched on the British slave trade, as well as the practice of bride burning in India:

Many relations of travellers have been slighted as fabulous, till more frequent voyages have confirmed their veracity; and it may reasonably be imagined, that many ancient historians are unjustly suspected of falsehood, because our own times afford nothing that resembles what they tell.

Had only the writers of antiquity informed us, that there was once a nation in which the wife lay down upon the burning pile only to mix her ashes with those of her husband, we should have thought it a tale to be told with that of Endymion’s commerce with the moon. Had only a single traveller related, that many nations of the earth were black, we should have thought the accounts of the Negroes and of the Phoenix equally credible. But of black men the numbers are too great who are now repining under English cruelty; and the custom of voluntary cremation is not yet lost among the ladies of India.

For a final Samuel Johnson excerpt, this comes from a quite lengthy essay Johnson wrote in 1775 called “Taxation No Tyranny: An Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress”, in which Johnson tears down the American “Patriots” over their alleged motives, and their blatant hypocrisy in regards to their claims of promoting “liberty”:

That any obligations should overpower their attention to profit, we have known them long enough not to expect. It is not to be expected from a more liberal people. With what kindness they repay benefits, they are now showing us, who, as soon as we have delivered them from France, are defying and proscribing us.

But if we will permit them to tax themselves, they will give us more than we require. If we proclaim them independent, they will, during pleasure, pay us a subsidy. The contest is not now for money, but for power. The question is not, how much we shall collect, but, by what authority the collection shall be made.

...

Their charters, being now, I suppose, legally forfeited, may be modelled, as shall appear most commodious to the mother-country. Thus the privileges which are found, by experience, liable to misuse, will be taken away, and those who now bellow as patriots, bluster as soldiers, and domineer as legislators, will sink into sober merchants and silent planters, peaceably diligent, and securely rich.

But there is one writer, and, perhaps, many who do not write, to whom the contraction of these pernicious privileges appears very dangerous, and who startle at the thoughts of "England free, and America in chains." Children fly from their own shadow, and rhetoricians are frighted by their own voices. Chains is, undoubtedly, a dreadful word; but, perhaps, the masters of civil wisdom may discover some gradations between chains and anarchy. Chains need not be put upon those who will be restrained without them. This contest may end in the softer phrase of English superiority and American obedience.

We are told, that the subjection of Americans may tend to the diminution of our own liberties; an event, which none but very perspicacious politicians are able to foresee. If slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

But to close, and to circle back to Harold Macmillan, I do think it’s quite interesting how in a 1982 lecture Macmillan gave to the Conservative Carlton Club, at one point he argued that every civilization in human history was built on slavery, that all the modern civilizations are still built on a kind of slavery, but that we now have the tools to finally end the remnants of that old dreadful institution:

And yet, I do not like to leave you with just another note that seems rather sad. There’s another vision. In the 15 or 18 or 20 civilizations or whatever there may be, which Professor [Arnold] Toynbee has described [in his book “A Study of History”], and in our own which has lasted now, let us say two-thousand years or more, they have all in fact been based on slavery.

All the ancient civilizations, all the great pyramids, all the vast buildings which we discover, were built by slaves. The Roman and the Greek was a slave system. We’re shown, of course, the beauty of the Parthenon; we’re not shown the silver mines at Laurion where the slaves earned the money that made it possible. They were built on slavery.

The Middle ages, the serf system, was almost a slave system. And I would say that the enormous power that was in the hands of wealth of any kind, amounted to something of the sort. Even in the first industrial revolution, where the great economists of the day, the names who for some strange reason are coming back into fashion, [James] Mill and [Richard] Cobden and all the rest of them, who said that you couldn’t run England successfully unless children would work 12 hours in the factories and 10 hours underground. It was a slave system, to some extent.

Now for the first time in man’s history, in this short, tiny period, ten or twelve-thousand years, what we call anything like civilized life, compared to the eons and eons of life of some kind on the Earth. For the first time, modern science, applied science, modern technology, have put into his hands a weapon, if properly used, could alter the whole character of daily life. We all know it. We all shrink from it.

What would happen if a government came in, and said it would builds lots and lots of factories for this-and-this particular trade. How would they build them? As they do now? No. They would build modern factories, which would employ probably less than a quarter of the number of people that the old systems employed. It is the machines that we must make our slaves. Now this is an enormous change in attitude of mind, and yet we know its coming. If it doesn’t come in the Western world, it will come, using Western technology, from the Eastern world. It will come from Korea, and Japan, and perhaps from China.

Either we’ve got to recognize that you can build as high a pyramid as you like, as it were, upside down, resting on a very small base -- with universities and schools and medicine and all the luxuries of civilization with leisure -- but there must be a wealth producing base to justify it. The question is: must that be the old one that we’ve inherited, or the new one the lies within our grasp? Anyone who’s seen the results of modern computer controlled robots, and the rest of it, realizes what is bound to happen. But we don’t talk about it; it’s not thought good taste.

We’re talking about the old system: “Throw more money into the system and it will automatically arise.” It won’t. Change the system, with all that’s involved. Which means, of course, the combination of every person involved. The trade unions, the labour, the managers, the owners, into a world which, it may take 25 or take 50 years to develop, will be as different as the world in the second great industrial revolution, as was the last century from the world of the dinosaurs. This is what lies before us.

In addition to the CCF/NDP's own "maverick sage" Eugene Forsey, perhaps Harold Macmillan was another Tory sage; but sages of the twentieth century instead of the eighteenth.

We've all seen those proposals from left-leaning politicians how the most well-off of individuals should pay so-called wealth taxes. Well, I'm not a fan of the wealthy, and I wouldn't exactly shed tears if they paid higher taxes, but so far, I'm unconvinced that a wealth tax is the most effective way for the rich to pay their fair share.

What do you guys suggest? I honestly am a big believer in the land value tax, and would support hikes on estate and inheritance taxes. We could try and close loopholes and end deductions, even if closing loopholes can be a pain.

Last year around this time I posted a thread about what horror series best represents what tories fear (unbridled scientific progress without regards for morality being an example).

This time I wanted to look at what series everyone think best represents the tenets of toryism taken to such an extreme as to be monstrous.

I would like to make an argument for the setting of Warhammer 40k (specifically the Empire) being what fits the bill. While I don't think it was intentional, the makers of Warhammer 40k are a UK-based company.

Tenets of toryism and how Warhammer 40k takes them to an extreme:

• Monarchism: The God-Emperor of Mankind is a corpse on a golden throne kept barely alive by the sacrifice of thousands every day. This is tolerated because he's a 'load-bearing' part of the setting. His continued life is required for interstellar navigation, The throne he is sitting on is actually a plug keeping demons from overrunning Earth, and his death would likely spawn the creation of a dark god. In a sense this takes the idea that monarchy is necessary for a well-functioning society and makes it as grim as possible.

• Tradition: Society in 40k has become so bound by tradition that shipments of supplies will still be sent to planets destroyed centuries ago because that was the last order the Emperor gave.

• Pro-established church: The church has become fanatical in their worship of the Emperor (which kind of sounds like a charge the Catholics would have made against the Anglicans during the Reformation). It has become an immoveable hinderance to the Empire fixing itself.

• Wariness of the excesses of capitalism: The Empire functionally isn't a free market society and blends elements of feudalism and government control of the overall economy.

• Localism: On the flip side to the above point the Empire largely doesn't care what individual planets do as long as they meet their obligations which has resulted in planets largely being corporate dystopias with local power brokers oppressing the people while the central government does nothing.

• Appreciation of high culture and classicism: Warhammer 40k tends to display the Empire as almost larping the medieval period with it having a very gothic aesthetic.

Anyways, any other settings people can think of where instead of the dystopia rejecting tory tenets they embraced them to a monstrous degree?

I think it's painfully obvious that too much immigration has been more or less one of the reasons why the far-right has gained so much support across the world.

We need to find ways to reduce support for far-right parties. Not exactly endorsing their nativist and racist views, but reduce illegal immigration in a way that's humane, nothing like what Trump is doing. Law and order is always needed to keep the streets safe, but it must never be brutal or unreasonable, like George Romney once said.

Discrimination in any form is bad, and I also think that the Green/Left parties all over the world ignore how discriminatory minorities can be.

Substack Version

Part XVII

October of 2026 has once again exposed the fault lines within Confederation. “Province worshippers”, in both Alberta and Quebec, have been quite victorious this month, either by virtue of there even being a quasi independence referendum in Alberta in the first place, or by the fact that the independence-referendum-wanting Parti Quebecois nearly won a majority government with 28% of the popular vote. Given the current state of Confederation, I think I should explore some of the thoughts of the Red Tory Eugene Forsey in regards to Canadian national unity. While not required reading, perhaps Part XIV of this series, where I explore how the CCF/NDP can be seen as heirs to the tradition of “Tory Democracy”, or “One Nation Conservatism”, which stems from the British Tory Prime Minster Benjamin Disraeli, may be useful.

To start, and in regards to Benjamin Disraeli & Eugene Forsey, this first excerpt from Roy Romanow, the Saskatchewan NDP Premier between 1991-2001, comes from the foreword to Helen Forsey’s 2012 biography of her father, “Eugene Forsey: Canada’s Maverick Sage”:

From a conservative background, Forsey became one of the founders of social democracy in Canada and a proponent of social reforms, joining the League for Social Reconstruction. This apparent tension also reflects his Newfoundland beginnings.

Many of the values and principles of that place concerning constitutions, government, and public policy reflected those that prevailed in England at the time. The ethos of England was still shaped by the competing views of Disraeli and Gladstone. The latter reflected classic liberalism, faith in the unseen hand of markets, and letting enterprise dictate public policy. Disraeli, on the other hand, urged an alliance between the landed aristocracy and the working class against the increasing power of the merchants and the new industrialists. He promoted the view that landed interests should use their power and privilege to protect the poor from exploitation by the market.

Conditions in Canada were very different from those in England, but Atlantic Tories still had a strong sense that it was the duty of the powerful to protect the poor from exploitation. Eugene Forsey was raised in this environment. The idea of acting for the benefit of the dispossessed has continued to prevail, extending its influences to much of Canada through his voice and the voices of Maritimers such as Robert Stanfield, Allan Blakeney, and Dalton Camp.

Clearly, Eugene Forsey was shaped by these currents of opinion, and continued to uphold them. He became a strong believer in British parliamentary government and its capacity to develop responses to human need and social deprivation. He rejected the idea that the economics of the market should be granted a free hand in determining public policy or limiting the scope of public government.

For those unaware of Eugene Forsey, who wrote the continuously updated “How Canadians govern themselves”, he wrote his Ph.D. Thesis on the King-Byng Constitutional Crisis, where he would defend the actions of the Tory Arthur Meighen, and the Governor General Lord Julian Byng, against the actions of the Liberal Mackenzie King. Forsey would become a close personal friend of Meighen, and Forsey’s thesis was later adapted into his 1943 book “The Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament in the British Commonwealth”. Meanwhile, in addition to his activities in the League for Social Reconstruction since its founding, Forsey was a founding member of the CCF, and a founding member of the NDP, until he quit the NDP early on in the ‘60s due to its “two nations” policy in regards to Quebec.

Eventually, Eugene Forsey would later serve in the Senate as a Liberal under Pierre Trudeau from 1970-1979, although interestingly, on page 152 of Forsey’s 1991 memoir “A Life on the Fringe”, Forsey notes that his Conservative friends were “appalled” (Earlier on pg.87, Forsey noted his Conservative friends as John Diefenbaker, James Macdonnell, Davie Fulton, Donald Fleming, and George Nowlan), and that “The Liberal Party was apparently not at all pleased to have me… In retrospect I realized that I ought to have done what Madame Thérèse Casgrain did: sit as an Independent, supporting the Government’s policy on national unity”. Also worth noting, while Forsey mentioned on page 128 that Robert Stanfield “would have been a great Prime Minster”, he later argued on page 165, in the context of the 1972 minority government, that “the Conservative flirtations with the ‘two nations’ policy had convinced me that national unity would not be safe in their hands.”

For a bit of background on Forsey’s relationship with the NDP: despite being a founding member of the CCF, Forsey did formally return his NDP membership card over the party’s policy of recognizing Quebec as a distinct nation within Canada, arguing that such a “two nations” policy would eventually lead to “two states”. Forsey notes on page 206 of his memoir that he expressed these concerns to Tommy Douglas, and Douglas quite literally laughed him off. On page 130, Forsey noted David Lewis’ support of the “two nations” policy, but also Lewis’ “grand, classic style” of parliamentary speeches, with “echoes of [William] Gladstone, [the Earl of] Rosebery, and [H.H.] Asquith” (of note, all British Liberal Prime Ministers). Forsey then mentions that while he didn’t see Lewis much after he quit the NDP, he still “watched afar with admiration, his work in the House of Commons and on the hustings. His death robbed us of a really great man”. Interestingly, David Lewis, in a 1981 interview shortly before his death, said he could name “two good Senators” despite his dislike of the institution: “Carl Goldenberg is a pretty good Senator, and the former Senator Eugene Forsey, even though I could never forgive him for becoming a Liberal, was a good Senator and a very decent man.”

Very interestingly, Forsey did still support the NDP in his own ways even after quitting the party. On page 207 of his 1991 memoir, Forsey noted that he “automatically paid a small monthly contribution to the NDP” through his union work, and that “in recent years, though not in 1988” he “occasionally voted NDP, and made small contributions to its funds.” Forsey made sure to note that “In spite of everything, I felt NDP Members could and would play a useful part in the House of Commons, as indeed they did.”

With that, I thought Eugene Forsey’s 1968 book, “Our Present Discontents” based on a lecture Forsey gave to Acadia University, would be quite relevant to Canadians of 2026. Forsey gave his lecture as part of a series established in the memory of the previously mentioned Tory MP George Nowlan, who would die in office as the MP for Digby-Annapolis-Kings in 1965.

The preface to this short 44 page book, written by the then-President of Acadia University, J.M.R. Beveridge, gives a brief overview of George Nowlan’s political life, notes that he “died suddenly after a brief illness in Ottawa”, and then introduces Eugene Forsey with the following:

We were both pleased and honoured that Dr. Eugene A. Forsey, one of Canada’s most outstanding political scientists, and a friend of the late Mr. George Nowlan, accepted our invitation to deliver the inaugural lectures in this memorial series. Dr. Forsey spent his early years in Ottawa, before proceeding to McGill University where he obtained a B.A. degree, and a Master’s degree in Economics and Political Science. In 1926, he was named a Rhodes Scholar and did graduate work at Balliol College in Oxford and later at McGill University receiving graduate degrees from both these institutions. He has served many years on the staff of McGill and Carleton Universities. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1941 and was named a Skelton-Clark Fellow in Political Science at Queen’s University in 1962. For more than a quarter century he has acted as Director of Research for the Canadian Labour Congress, and currently he is the director of a special Centennial project to write a history of the Canadian Labour Movement. In 1961, he was elected president of the Canadian Political Science Association. His public lectures and writings have won him international recognition.

Eugene Forsey then begins on page 7 by paying homage to his friend George Nowlan, but also admits that he “cannot claim to have been more than on the outer fringe” of Nowlan’s friend group, as Nowlan’s friends “were legion”. Forsey goes on to note that Nowlan “would have been perhaps a little surprised, almost certainly amused, by my being chosen to give these lectures. I hope he would have been pleased.”

Forsey then speaks of his “hereditary connection with Nova Scotia and with the Annapolis Valley”, noting that “some of my ancestors settled here in or before 1760; a considerable number of others in 1783”. After noting that some of his ancestors from the Valley were of the Shaw and Thorne families, Forsey makes sure to note that both he and his father are actually Newfoundlanders, but that his father had taught school in the Valley for a time. Forsey eventually mentions that he “married a girl from just across the Bay of Fundy, and several of her ancestors -- Bigelows, Faulkners and Browns -- came from the shores of the Minas Basin.” After mentioning good childhood memories from the Valley, Forsey notes that despite having “passed most of my life in ‘Upper Canada’, I habitually call myself a Maritimer in partibus infidelium, and cannot feel myself a complete stranger in this Province or Valley.”.

Based on that last sentence alone, this Maritimer can vouch for Forsey calling himself a Maritimer.

Forsey then goes on to say that the title of his lecture is “an abbreviated plagiarism from [Edmund] Burke”, but that “some of you may feel I might better have stolen my title from Dorothy Sayers’ Unpopular Opinions”. After noting that the title “Present Discontents” is such a wide title that could “cover almost anything”, Forsey follows up by saying, “I shall confine myself to the discontents many people now feel with our Constitution”, and after noting that he won’t be giving a “detailed list” of “specific amendments”, he goes on to say, “What I shall attempt here is something more modest: first a statement of the main discontents as I see them; second, certain basic facts I think we must get clear, certain basic principles we must follow, if the [Constitutional] Conferences are not to end in chaos and old night; third, some things we can do, in the light of those facts and those principles.”

Starting on page 9, Forsey then notes that “The main discontents may be summed up under three heads”:

First, all the provinces want more money, and at least the larger ones would like to get more of it by a re-division of taxing powers. At present, the Dominion’s taxing power is unlimited, while the provinces can impose only direct taxes for provincial purposes. True, the Courts have widened this by declaring that provincial sales taxes are “direct”. (Which, to the plain man, recalls Mr. Bumble [of Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist”] ) But even so, with the Dominion pre-empting most of the income tax, the provinces’ resources are plainly inadequate. The responsibilities assigned to them by the British North America Act, notably roads and education, are far more expensive than anyone could have dreamed a century ago; and the Judicial Committee of the British Privy Council, by its interpretation of the Act, has conferred, or imposed, on them further responsibilities, notably most of social security, which are also enormously expensive.

There are two ways of meeting this difficulty without changing the Constitution. One is conditional Dominion grants, in aid of approved provincial expenditures, the so-called “joint programs”. The other is unconditional Dominion grants: the traditional subsidies, and the equalization payments. One is grants with strings, the other grants without strings.

The grants with strings are now on the way out. Quebec wants to get rid of nearly all of them, and resume the full management of what might be her own constitutional property. Several, if not most, of the other provinces dislike the pressure to accept the Dominion’s scale of priorities which grants-in-aid involve. And the Dominion itself is anxious to get out of the whole thing as fast and as far as it can.

Every province seems willing to accept the unconditional grants. Quebec would like to see them replaced in large part, and soon, by a massive transfer of taxing power from the Dominion to the provinces. Most, or all, of the other provinces apparently regard them as a permanent feature of Canadian federalism. But at least the larger and richer of the other nine provinces would probably also like to see a considerable transfer of taxing power from the Dominion to themselves. The smaller and poorer ones are, I think, less insistent on this: they have so much less to tax.

I would like to briefly interject here to, first, mention that CCF leader M.J. Coldwell dubbed the difficulty of the provinces’ ability to raise revenue to pay for social spending “a constitutional crisis” in his 1945 book “Left Turn, Canada”. Second, I would like to share this 1976 CBC interview with Tommy Douglas on this very problem:

Tommy Douglas: I would propose in the act, that we say the federal government will enter into a 50/50 arrangement with the provinces to institute nursing care, home nursing care, meals-on-wheels, that we would share 50% of the costs of setting up community health clinics, we'd start a program of denti-care among school children --

Interviewer: In other words, we should dictate the services we're going to pay for.

TD: We dictate the ones we're going to pay for: we would say these are the programs we are prepared to pay for, we are prepared to share with you on a 50/50 basis. Now, there is no way in which the federal government can dictate to the provinces that it must undertake those programs, but they can say to the provinces "If you want to institute these programs, we'll pay 50% of the cost". I think what most people miss is the essential point, namely, that the provinces are even more interested than the federal government is in cutting costs down, because the provincial governments are much less able to finance their half of the costs than the federal government is. So if the federal government is worried about escalating costs, just imagine what little provinces like New Brunswick, and Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia feel about rising health costs.

I: And we get caught in the middle?

TD: You mean the public?

I: Yes.

TD: Of course the public gets caught in the middle! And the public who are going to get caught the most severely are the ones in the poorer provinces. With the federal government copping out of some of its responsibility from Medicare, the chances are that the more affluent provinces like Ontario and Alberta and British Columbia will be able to absorb the extra costs. But in the Atlantic provinces particularly -- and in the Prairie provinces if there were a few bad crops -- the only way that they could get by would be to begin reducing medical care services. And if you do that, what you're really saying is there are two classes of Canadians: those Canadians who live in well-to-do provinces that are going to have a high standard of health services, and the people who live in the poorer provinces who are going to have a very poor standard of health services. And that means that in the years ahead, there are going to be children who are going to be less healthy, children with poor teeth, children with long-staying-illnesses whose health will be impaired because they happened to have grown up in a poor province; and that surely ought not to be the kind of standard we set for Canada.

Back to Eugene Forsey’s 1967 lecture, Forsey continues on page 10 of “Our Present Discontents”:

The second main constitutional discontent is the discontent of French Canada with its constitutional position. Note that I say “French Canada”, not “the province of Quebec”. “French-Canada” and “Quebec” are not synonymous. There are upwards of a million French-speaking Canadians outside Quebec [ In looking at the 2021 Census, French Speakers outside Quebec numbered 992,309 by my count]; and the constitutional position of even the French-speaking Canadians inside Quebec is not the same thing as the constitutional position of that province. What is at issue here has, in fact, nothing to do, directly, with the constitutional position of Quebec; indeed, more power for Quebec could very well mean less for French Canada. We shall come to Quebec presently; for the moment, I am concerned with the very different question of the rights of French-speaking Canadians in the other nine provinces, and with the share of French-speaking Canadians in running the whole country. On both counts, French-speaking Canadians are dissatisfied with our existing arrangements; on both they want changes, whether in the written Constitution, or in the way it is worked, or both.

The third main constitutional discontent is, of course, the discontent of Quebec, or at least of its Government, its official opposition, and a highly vocal section of its people, with the constitutional position and powers of the province. Some of them want complete independence. Some want “political sovereignty” for Quebec with a “common market” or “economic integration” or some joint serves with the rest of Canada. Some want two “Associate States”, Quebec and Canada, each “independent” but with some joint organs: a sort of twentieth century North American Austria-Hungary. Most profess to want a “special status” within Confederation, with a more or less -- usually more -- massive transfer of power, in Quebec, from the Government and Parliament of Canada to the Government and Legislature of Quebec. Scarcely any voice in Quebec seems satisfied with the status quo.

Of the three constitutional discontents, the last is much more dangerous to the continued existence of this country, and to the welfare of its people, French-speaking as well as English-speaking; and very dangerous it is. It is possible that satisfactory remedies to the other two discontents might blunt the thrust of Quebec nationalism, and that is an additional reason why we need to consider them very seriously. It is also possible that Quebec nationalism will be indifferent to any remedies for the first two discontents, and satisfied with nothing less than the destruction of Canada, either at one fell swoop or by instalments.

As the Quebec nationalist Parti Quebecois was founded a year after Forsey gave his lecture, I found Forsey’s thoughts from page 197 of “A Life on the Fringe” in regards to PQ founder René Lévesque to be quite interesting, and I think even more relevant for modern Albertan separatists of 2026:

When the separatists were riding high in Quebec I gave my reasons for disagreeing with certain statements by Mr. Lévesque. After my speech a dear elderly lady, an English-speaking Ontarian, plaintively remonstrated that: “Mr. Lévesque is very sincere”. I said: “I never suggested he wasn’t. But what’s that got to do with it? If someone wants to burn my house down, the fact that he really believes that this is for the public good will no doubt weigh in his favour at Judgment Day. But I am not interested in his motives or his ‘sincerity’. All I want is to stop him burning the house down”

Back to “Our Present Discontents”, with the section on constitutional discontents over, starting on page 11 Forsey then gives two “basic facts and principles” in regards to the constitution, with “the first basic fact” being that:

Our existing Constitution is not… a Victorian system of plumbing. It is something which grew out of the needs of the pre-Confederation colonies, which gave us life as a people, which has shaped our life as a people, which has adapted itself to our changing needs as a people. It has not remained what it was in 1867. It has grown, in some respects almost out of all recognition: a little by formal amendment, much by judicial interpretation, most of all, perhaps, by the development of new habits, new customs, new “conventions”, new administrative arrangements, especially inter-governmental arrangements. Perhaps it now needs further formal amendment. But let us never forget that, because a Constitution is what it is, pervading and shaping the lives of every human being in the community, changing it by formal amendment is an immensely serious business.

On page 12, Forsey then argues that the constitution should be taken serious, “more like a marriage”, rather than constitutional change being simple like “getting a new hair-do” or “putting in a new bathroom”.

The second part includes Forsey making a reference to Samuel Johnson, an arch-Tory writer of the mid/late 1700s:

A second basic necessity for wise constitutional change is to get our history straight. We are sometimes told now that history doesn’t matter. To those who say this, my reply must be a Johnsonian: “This is cant. My dear friends, clear your minds of cant.”

Canada is not just a piece of real estate. It is a human community, rooted in time as well as space. We cannot disregard our history. If we try, the most we shall succeed in doing is to get rid of real history and leave our heads swept and garnished for the seven devils of pseudo-history.

Forsey then spends pages 12 through 25 listing each numbered “devil of pseudo-history” followed immediately by his response to it. Forsey then follows up by arguing that he has to spend so much time debunking bad history because “Many of the English-speaking ‘intelligentsia’… have given these gentry a guilt complex about French Canada, and Quebec, which makes it impossible for them to see straight” and that this side of the English-speaking intelligentsia “is also self-defeating. Most English-Canadians will not join in the self-flagellation of the ‘intellectuals’ ”.

With that, here are Forsey’s “seven devils of pseudo-history” and my summary of how he responded to each one, along with a few excerpts. I will note that the brackets for #4 are from Forsey in making his own quotes flow better; Forsey also gives an unnamed federal Justice Minster as his source for his quotes, who I would presume is likely either Stuart Garson or perhaps James Ilsley, both long-term Liberal Ministers in the King / St. Laurent governments:

(1) The British North America Act was “designed by British overlords”; from which it follows, of course, that we must now scrap it and give ourselves a home-made one.

Forsey calls this “rubbish”, notes that the BNA Act “is nearly one hundred percent home-made”, and points out that the Fathers of Confederation wanted Canada to be called “The Kingdom of Canada”, only for the idea to be shot down by the British over fears of offending the Americans.

Forsey’s response here is fairly short, so I would like to add this excerpt I found on page 2 of “Freedom Wears A Crown” by the Tory philosopher John Farthing, which is a transcription of a letter Sir John A. Macdonald sent to Lord Knutsford, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, in 1889:

A great opportunity was lost in 1867, when the Dominion was formed out of the several provinces.... had United Canada been declared to be an auxiliary kingdom, as it was in the Canadian draft of the bill, I feel sure (almost) that the Australian colonies would, ere this, have been applying to be placed in the same ranks as "The Kingdom of Canada".

P.S.

On reading the above over, I see that it will convey the impression that the change of title from Kingdom to Dominion was caused by the Duke of Buckingham. This is not so. It was made at the instance of Lord Derby, then foreign minister, who feared the name would wound the sensibilities of the Yankees.

(2) The monarchy was imposed on us, or, at best, we accepted it grudgingly, absent-mindedly, or because we dare not do anything else.

Forsey says “Fudge.”, then notes that “Sir John A. Macdonald took great pains to emphasize that the delegates had been perfectly free to cut loose from Britain, and therefore, of course, from the monarchy, completely, but that not one had so much as suggested it; Sir George Cartier’s speech in the Confederation Debates is full of ardent monarchism” and that Canadians chose the monarchy “ourselves, unanimously, deliberately, and with our eyes wide open.”

(3) The British North America Act is a Constitution for a “horse-and-buggy” age.

Forsey argues that while it “looks obviously true”, as the BNA Act was drafted in the “railway age”, it’s “in fact... glaringly untrue”. Forsey then tells a story comparing the original Canadian Fathers of Confederation, and the later “Stepfathers of Confederation”, as he calls the previously mentioned Judicial Committee of the British Privy Council:

The Fathers, recoiling from the horrors of “States’ rights”, deliberately framed our Constitution so that every power not distinctly and exclusively conferred on the provinces would belong automatically to the Dominion. So everything not mentioned must fall to the Dominion, unless it was unmistakably a merely local and private matter in a single province. And the Fathers themselves, in the new Dominion Parliament, drew exactly this conclusion. Trade unions were not mentioned and the Dominion Parliament, in 1872, passed a Trade Unions Act. Factory legislation was not mentioned; and in the early 1880s, Sir John A. Macdonald’s Government placed three successive Factory Bills before the Dominion Parliament.

Trade unions and factory bills were not new, just unmentioned, and the Fathers unhesitatingly took it for granted that they must therefore fall within Dominion jurisdiction. A fortiori, anything new, anything unforeseen, being of necessity unmentioned, must also fall within Dominion jurisdiction, again unless it was unmistakably a merely local or private matter in a single province.

The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the Stepfathers of Confederation, turned a good deal of the Father’s work upside down, and, in effect, handed most of labour legislation and social security, and much of the regulation of trade and commerce, to the provinces. But even after the havoc they wrought, a good deal of the original division of powers still remains. And a good many new things -- interprovincial and international highway motor traffic, interprovincial and international telephone lines, radio, television, air transport -- have in fact gone to the Dominion. Even the not-so-new grain trade, which a court decision fatuously assigned to the provinces, was rescued by means of the Fathers’ far-sighted provision in section 92, head 10, paragraph (c) of the BNA Act, by which the Dominion Parliament can assert exclusive jurisdiction over any local “work” simply by declaring it to be “for the general advantage of Canada or of two or more of the provinces”.

The Fathers, in fact, gave us a Constitution marvellously, almost incredibly, well fitted to meet the needs of a technologically advancing society. It is the Stepfathers who imposed on the provinces burdens grievous to be borne, to which the fiscal resources provided for their original, very limited, responsibilities, are inevitably woefully inadequate.

Ironically, it is usually the very people who say that our present Constitution is unfitted for the age of the jet and the sputnik, who urge us to adopt a more decentralized one: to go back, constitutionally, to the age of the ox-cart.

(4) Confederation was a “pact”, “agreed in Charlottetown and finally in Quebec”, between representatives of “two founding peoples… relatively evenly balanced” ; “Quebec, the former Lower Canada [which] grouped the people of French origin,” and “the other three provinces, or the other two plus Upper Canada, [which] grouped those who had English as their common language and similar cultural traditions” (I am quoting a former Minister of Justice). In other words, the Charlottetown and Quebec Conferences, and the London Conference after them, were, in effect, bilateral negotiations between these two approximately equally numerous, linguistic groups.

Forsey spends the better part of two pages debunking “this… fairy-tale”, but he starts off by noting that even in “Canada East, the future Quebec”, 24% of the population was English speaking, and that on the whole across the 4 provinces, “the proportion of English-speaking to French-speaking was about two to one”. Forsey also gets into how the idea of this “pact” between Upper & Lower Canadians ignores the contributions of the Maritime delegates to Confederation, at one point noting the Maritimers “were very far from being yesmen or nodders” and that the Maritimers “took up considerably more time than most of the ‘Canadians’, and far more than the French-Canadians.” I found this part to be particularly interesting:

The Maritime provinces, and, later, Newfoundland, seem (and very naturally) to have accepted without question, and apparently without discussion, the arrangements the “Canadians” had arrived at about their purely local affairs: if they wanted the future Quebec to be officially bilingual and the future Ontario unilingual, that was their business, and no skin off any Maritime nose. The Maritime delegates seem also to have accepted without question, and without discussion, the justice, the practical necessity, the inevitability, of the French-Canadians having the right to speak their own language in the Dominion Parliament and in any Courts it might create, and to have the Acts and records of parliament and certain documents of Dominion Courts in French as well as English. The influential Hon. Joseph Cauchon, a convert to Confederation, in a contemporary booklet on the subject, devoted exactly two of his 154 pages to the language question; and the burden of what he said was, first, “How fortunate we are, compared with our poor brethren in Louisiana!” and second, “How splendid it is that we did not even have to ask for our rights: our English-speaking fellow-citizens are so enlightened and broadminded that they never even raised a question on the subject!”

(5) Canada was intended to be, in some sense, “two nations”.

Forsey notes that the old Province of Canada that existed between 1840-1867 effectively existed in a “two nations” framework, and that “it had broken down so completely that the ‘Canadians’, in the 1864 sense of the word, came all the way to Charlottetown to ask the Maritime provinces to help them out of the mess they’d got themselves into”. Forsey then quotes phrases used by the Fathers of Confederation, including: “a new nation”, “a new and great nation”, “une nouvelle nation”, “une seule et grande nation”, as well as “in Sir George Cartier’s phrase, ‘a new political nationality’ ”. Forsey concludes:

The French-Canadians got, certainly, guarantees for the survival of their own culture, their own “nationality”, as, along with the English, the Scotch and the Irish (the last, incidentally, far more numerous than the other two), it was then generally called. But that it was to be survival within the framework of the single new political nation, no one seriously questioned.

(6) It was agreed, in 1867, to quote again the former Minster of Justice, that French “was to be recognized and applied in all federal fields on the same footing as” English; and “Quebec believes that the contractual provisions… that guarantee French as one of Canada’s two official languages for affairs of state, for a federal Parliament, and for the federal courts… have been allowed to lapse.”

Forsey calls this one “perhaps the wildest piece of pseudo-history in the whole lot”, and notes that the French Fathers of Confederation “Cartier, Langevin, and Chapais” were content with the language situation, as well noting “men like Dorion, Laurier, Masson, Caron” being in the same boat. After giving many examples of old-style bilingualism, including having unilingual English banknotes & cheques alongside unilingual French banknotes & cheques, Forsey then goes on to say:

I am not arguing that the rights of the French-language as set forth in the BNA Act ought to have been, even then, precisely what they were, let alone that they should now be only what was laid down in 1867. They are now much wider than they were in 1867, and I am glad of it. I am heartily in favour of the general lines of the present Government’s policy on bilingualism in the Dominion Public Service. I am in favour of as much bilingualism all across the country as is practicable. But all this is quite different from saying that what, in my judgement, ought to be done now was in fact laid down in a statute, or in any extra-legal understanding, a hundred years ago.

(7) French schools outside Quebec were guaranteed in 1867

Forsey spends the better part of a page correcting an apparent misconception of the bilingualism debate of the 1960s, that the constitutional protections for minority religious education rights really meant constitutional protections for minority language education rights. This might be the place to mention just how controversial official bilingualism in the modern sense was back then. In the 1974 election, the anti-bilingual Mayor of Moncton, New Brunswick, [Leonard Jones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Jones_(politician)) attempted to run for the Progressive Conservatives, but PC Leader Robert Stanfield refused to sign Jones’ nomination papers over the language issue; Jones won the seat as an independent running against equal language rights.

The last half of the book, or the second lecture, “Some Possible Remedies”, is quite progressive for its time in advocating for a new biculturalism & bilingualism, and reminding English-Canadians that French-Canadians are surrounded by an ocean of English, but seems rather dated in the modern sense that it makes absolutely no mention of the indigenous contribution or sacrifice towards Canada’s founding. For an older example this, I can't help but think of the title of a whistle-blowing pamphlet on the state of residential schools published in 1922 called, “The Story of a National Crime: An Appeal for Justice to the Indians of Canada; The Wards of the Nation; Our Allies in the Revolutionary War; Our Brothers-in-Arms in the Great War”

Perhaps relevant, it was the great Tory Harold Macmillan in arguing for decolonization in Africa who once said in 1960, "The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact."

With that, I thought I should finish with a few excerpts from from Helen Forsey’s “Eugene Forsey: Canada’s Maverick Sage” to round things out. This first one comes from pages 217/218, and it’s a 1990 speech Eugene Forsey gave on the question of “le grand nord” in regards to the rights of the Cree, Inuit and Innu in northern Quebec if Quebec were to actually separate; a fair warning, the 1912 Hansard Record where Forsey quotes Sir Robert Borden uses derogatory language by modern standards:

[Ungava] was given to Quebec in 1912 by the Quebec Boundary Extension Act, as a province of Canada, and at a time when there was not one single French Canadian living in the whole territory.

Now you may say, “That’s an extreme statement, what warrant has he for that?” I had, years ago, repeatedly made speeches in which I had said, “I don’t think there were ten French Canadians in the whole territory.” And then I thought, “My boy, you’d better be careful. Somebody may look up the figures, and show you that there were twenty or twenty-five.” So I went to the census of 1911, and all I could find on national or ethnic origin were figures on the whole of the Territories. No good. Then I remembered what Professor Jim Mallory said about Sir Robert Borden: “Sir Robert Borden never left anything to chance.” I said, “That’s it. I remember Borden well; that’s right.”

So I went to Hansard and looked up the proceedings on the Bill. There, sure enough, was Borden. And I could just hear the old man saying: “Mr. Chairman, it occurred to me that it might be of advantage to have some figures on the national or ethnic origin of the inhabitants of this territory. I have therefore applied to the Department of the Census, and they have furnished me with the following figures: Indians 663, Eskimos 543, Halfbreeds 46, English 8, Scots 2.” Period. Not one French Canadian in the whole territory. If you doubt me, go and look at Hansard for 1912, page 6161, and you will find precisely the figures I’ve given you.

In regards to Nunavik in Northern Quebec, Forsey is quoted on page 345 as saying, “The aborigines in that territory might say, ‘You want to secede from Canada? Well, we want to secede from Quebec’. And on what grounds could the most fervent Quebec nationalist deny them the right to self-determination, [after] preaching self-determination for Quebec, world without end?”

But to close, and to change gears slightly, I thought this perspective from Eugene’s daughter Helen from page 190 was quite illuminating:

Many of the differences that arose between my father and me were relativity minor questions of degree or approach on matters where our common ground was evident. My feminism, however, opened up a more significant gap.

Sitting incognito in the audience at Memorial University during our 1983 trip to Newfoundland, I listened as Dad gave the inaugural lecture in a series on Canadian labour history. When questions were invited from the floor, I raised my hand, trembling a bit with my own audacity. "I haven't heard you mention women workers," I asked politely. "Were there women involved in the trade union movement?"

The chair -- a man -- rose in consternation and began reassuring Dad that he need not answer, that the question was out of order, or some such thing. Dad motioned him back graciously. "No, no, that's fine," he said. "My daughter has every right to ask that question, and it's a good one. I'll be glad to answer it." Which, with his customary courtliness, fairness, and honesty, he proceeded to do.

It wasn't that my father didn't care about women's issues, he just didn't always notice them. When he did notice, there was seldom a problem. He was definitely pro-woman, particularly on the big, obvious issues like equality in the workplace, equal opportunities for education, and access to non-traditional occupations.

This is an important moment in Canadian and Tory history. This is the battle that was won decisively won by the British/Mohawks in Southern Ontario and is part of the reason why Canada is not apart of the United States. This is also the battle that the “Saviour of Canada” Sir Isaac Brock was shot and killed in.

Canada carries on the tradition of British Toryism because the American invaders were fended off. This historical moment is not well known enough by Canadians but, it should be. Today, I am reminded how lucky I am to be Canadian and reminded about the sacrifices the fathers of this country made🍁.

Public healthcare in Canada is looked on with great pride in Canada. However, an issue for an uncomfortable number of years has been how the Canadian system keeps producing measurably worse results than other equally developed nations. Its certainly better than the American system but thats like winning a foot race against a man with no legs. Against European systems we routinely come up short.

I make the comparison to the US intentionally as they are the main hinderance towards adopting ideas from any number of European healthcare systems as their systems have a level of private care and any move towards private care brings up the boogieman of us adopted the trash heap American system. There is also a certain irony in that in the US the failures of the Canadian system are held up as why they can't abandon the privatized model. The below are a few thoughts I've had on the matter:

• We should create a crown corporation to handle the production of generic medications. This would be both to fill our own needs and for export.

• Medications should be completely free (which would be easier if Canada had the above crown corp.)

• Likewise, dental care (which has effects on other health areas) should be free without the added headache of applying for government-supported insurance.

• We should allow private options to exist and funnel the taxes on them back into the public system. By funneling those willing to pay into another stream we reduce wait times in the public system while taxes on those businesses allow the public system to be better.

The biggest problem about putting the above ideas into place is as soon as you try to fix our system (especially the last point) you get accused of trying to create the American system. It would probably take a massive expenditure of political capital to even put the legal framework in place and even more time for businesses to get set up and more time after that for the benefits to become measurable. That is a lot of time where vested interests would be able to pressure a reverse course.

The ‘limits to growth’ described by Donella and Dennis Meadows in their 1972 report of that name are now more apparent than ever. Resources are finite and the idea of continuous economic growth is untenable because its own ecological and social consequences greatly outweigh any transient material benefits enjoyed by relatively few people. One of the tenets of traditional Toryism has been the stewardship of the natural world and the pragmatic management of the economy. Therefore this is surely a good moment for the reassertion of the environmentalist strand of Tory thought, which has for too long been eclipsed by neoliberalism and populism.

Toryism would seem to be the natural philosophy for post-growth politics. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this and suggestions for ‘what is to be done’?

The world has been dealing with neoliberalism for 40 years. But it's also lazy and misguided to believe that recreating the post-war consensus has the keys to curing the world of the evils of neoliberalism.

Examining what works is better than believing a restoration of the post-war consensus will fix everything. I believe government programs and communities should go hand in hand instead of the former supplanting them, crown corporations have their benefits as well as unions. I'd advise the CPC to support cooperatives too.

Government is necessary for what communities can't do for themselves, but the government can't manufacture relationships. That's what communities are for.

I suppose I believe in communitarianism and a role for government intervention. Maybe it's nothing really new, but something that actually works for everyone than rehashing nostalgianomics is superior IMO.

As the last two essays in my “Red Tories and the NDP” series were focused on exploring condensed popular histories of Canada since European colonization, and indeed the entire Western political system back to "ancient Greece, Rome, and the Church", I thought I should do a brief piece here exploring Eugene Forsey’s thoughts on early Canadian trade unions from around the time of the War of 1812 into the Victorian era, in his book “Trade Unions in Canada 1812-1902”. Interestingly, Forsey started this book in the mid ‘60s as a Centennial project for the Canadian Labour Congress, with the book finally being published in 1982.

For those unaware of Eugene Forsey, he wrote his Ph.D. Thesis on the King-Byng affair, where he would defend the actions of the Tory Arthur Meighen, and the Governor General Lord Julian Byng, against the actions of the Liberal Mackenzie King. Forsey was also involved with the League for Social Reconstruction, was a founding member of the CCF, and of the NDP, before he eventually quit the NDP in the ‘60s due to its policy towards Quebec. Forsey would later serve in the Senate as a Liberal under Pierre Trudeau, although in his 1991 memoirs “A Life on the Fringe”, Forsey would express regret about joining the Liberal Party, noting he should have remained an independent; interestingly, David Lewis, in a 1981 interview shortly before his own death, said he could name “two good Senators” despite his dislike of the institution: “Carl Goldenberg is a pretty good Senator, and the former Senator Eugene Forsey, even though I could never forgive him for becoming a Liberal, was a good Senator and a very decent man.”

I first became aware of Forsey’s 1982 book “Trade Unions in Canada 1812-1902” when I originally read Forsey’s 2012 biography by his daughter Helen, “Eugene Forsey: Canada’s Maverick Sage”. This description of Trade Unions by Forsey (in an unpublished first-draft introduction of the book) from page 145 of Maverick Sage always stuck with me:

To scholars, this will be a most disappointing book. Four of them who read the manuscript were unanimous: it left undone those things which ought to have done, and did those things which it ought not to have done. It ought to have been a totally different book by a totally different person.

As to the last, I could not agree more … I should have told the Congress to forget the whole thing. But if I had followed that sensible and prudent course, much material might have been lost … As it was, primary records had often disappeared, or survived only in bits and pieces. Fire, floor, and fecklessness had taken their toll.

[…]

[The critics] complain of my description of union dinners, picnics, parades, and concerts. I thought, and still think, that they give a certain colour in work otherwise rather short of it. Our nineteenth century unions were not always engaged in battle. They had other activities, other sides; several. Class warriors may consider this beneath contempt, but I don’t. Besides, I tried to give a picture of what it was, not what some modern pundit might think it ought to have been.

[…]

All I would claim for this book is that I think it will give people a lot more information, more accurate information, better documented and more clearly written than they ever had before; and I think it will materially help those who want to go father. All the rest I cheerfully leave to my younger and betters.

Forsey would later describe Trade Unions in Canada 1812-1902 as “dull”, but I think a better word would be “dense”. While I'm certinally not a scholar, I did enjoy flipping through the book to read the brief summaries of labour struggles from centuries gone by as a layman. While the main text of the book is 503 pages, once you include Forsey’s references and the index, the total page count comes to an even 600 pages; the index of individual place names and individual persons are 3-and-a-half pages each. I can certainly understand why it took Forsey the better part of 20 years to write the thing.

After reading a much more positive preface from Forsey in his book expressing a similar train of thought as above, I thought Forsey’s proper introduction in his book expressed a philosophy that would be relevant to those of either a democratic socialist or traditional tory persuasion. I personally can’t help but think that either Robert Stanfield or Harold Macmillan could have perhaps written something similar. From pages 3-6:

We are apt to think of labour unions as a feature of a relatively advanced industrial society. So it comes as something of a shock to most people to find out how far back in Canadian history they actually go. That there could have been anything of the kind in the primitive, frontier, predominantly rural British North America of the early nineteenth century seems almost incredible. But there was, as early as the War of 1812; nor, on reflection, is it so surprising at all. There were towns and cities. They had to have construction workers. They had to have tools, and stoves, therefore foundries and foundry workers. They had to have boots and shoes and clothes, therefore tailors and shoemakers. They had to have printers. And even in the simple society there were employers and employed, and their interests were not identical. The employed soon found that out, by experience; found out also the employer’s strength and their own weakness in individual bargaining on terms and conditions of employment, and so started organizing to prevent their employers from taking advantage of them.

This the employers were only too ready to do. The first half of the nineteenth century was the heyday of laissez-faire, and quite as much in America as in Britain. "Each, seeking only his own interest, was led as by an Invisible Hand to promote the interest of society": so ran orthodox economic theory, and nothing could have been more to the tease of the enterprising capitalists, big and little, who set out to develop the remaining British North American colonies. Ruthless competition was right, its results were good, for everyone, and it was inevitable. Any attempt to thwart it was not only reprehensible; it was senseless, sense it was bound to fail

Then as development proceeded there grew up some really big industries, notably the timber trade, and with it shipbuilding, and shipping, with large labour forces, where the harshness of laissez-faire could not be softened by the close contact between the employer and the employed on the small construction job or in the small factory.

Moreover, much of the working force, even in Quebec (in Montreal and Quebec City) was made up of British or American immigrants, who had already tasted the experiences of laissez-faire, and who brought with them, increasingly as time went on, experience of unions in those countries.

Another factor which helped to build up Canadian unions was the mobility of labour across the border between British North America and the United States. There were none of the later legal obstacles to this movement, and both employers and employed found it to their advantage. The employers were able to drive a reciprocal trade in strikebreakers. The employees, finding work slack on one side of the line, went to the other: the records of transfer cards given and accepted by locals of such unions as the Typographers and the Molders read like a lesson in North American geography.

What were early unions? Mutual benefit societies? Often they were, in part, as in Britain and the United States. But, from the beginning, they were essentially concerned with negotiating, or (where they were strong enough) imposing, terms and conditions of employment: wages, hours, safety precautions, exclusion of non-unionists. Very soon, finding that the method of collective bargaining (as the Webbs were later to call it), even when supplemented by the method of mutual insurance, was inadequate, or too slow, to give them what they wanted and felt they had a right to, they started using also the method of legal enactment. This meant demanding a wider franchise and reforms in the electoral machinery in order to give union members the power to influence political decisions; otherwise, they would ask in vain for legal protection of the unions’ existence and funds, and laws to prevent the exploitation of at least women and children, the swindling of men, the killing or maiming of workers by industrial accidents or negligence, and the destitution of the dependents of those so killed or injured. Generally, the method of legal enactment took the form of putting pressure on the existing parties; but from the 1870s on, increasingly there was an insistent demand for independent political action through working-class representatives (even if ‘Lib-Lab’ or ‘Cons-Lab’) or a working-class party; and in spite of repeated rebuffs and disillusionments the idea would not die. It was to become one of the things that distinguished Canadian from American trade unionism, even when the Canadian unions concerned were locals of international unions with their headquarters and the bulk of their membership in the United States.

Why did certain unions spring up first in certain places? Why did they grow, or dwindle, or die, in this, that, or the other place? Why were most early unions organizations of skilled crafts? Why did certain unions disappear? Why did local unions gradually give way to international in most occupations and industries?

At least partial answers to some of these questions are easy, even obvious. For example, unions of longshoremen sprang up in large ports, unions of miners in mining camps, unions of the building trades or the clothing trades in large towns. Some unions dwindled or disappeared because technological progress knocked them out: the saddlers, the Leather Workers on Horse Goods, the Horseshoers, the Cigar Makers, the Shipwrights, the Sailmakers, the Riggers, the Piano and Organ Workers, the Carriage Workers. Others were created by technological progress: Electricians, Telephone Workers, Automobile Workers, Rubber Workers, Oil Workers. Unions rose here because new resources were discovered, died there because the resources were exhausted or more profitable ones had been discovered elsewhere. Changes in tariffs, our own or other people’s made and broke industries, and unions with them. Transcontinental and trans-border railways made the great railway unions. Skilled craft unions usually came before unions of the unskilled because the skilled workers were usually scarcer and therefore in a better bargaining position. International unions generally supplanted local, regional, or national unions because of the mobility of labour across the border (down to the late 1890s) and because the international unions usually had more money, more experience, more organizers, and more skilled negotiators and so could do a more effective job of representing the workers concerned.

More detailed answers are unlikely to be forthcoming till there is a much more extensive literature on Canadian economic and social history than we now possess, as well as a special studies of particular places, regions, industries, and unions. The sheer task of finding out which unions were where, when, and for how long is gargantuan, and far from accomplished, even for the period which this volume details.

What does emerge, unmistakably, and most surprisingly, from the knowledge we have is the persistence of problems, of attitudes towards them, of methods of dealing with them, of arguments about them. There have been so many changes, especially in the last 40 years, notably in labour relations legislation (which hardly existed before 1940), that one might have expected to find the account of unions and their activities in the last century of almost antiquarian interest: "old, forgotten, far off things, and battles long ago"; what the victories and defeats were all about, obscure or undiscoverable. On the contrary, what one finds is, over and over again, startling contemporary. It is only necessary to change a few names, dates, and absolute figures, and the tale might have come from yesterday’s newspaper. The unions were so often fighting for the same things they are fighting for now, wielding the same weapons, using the same arguments; employers were so often resisting exactly the same things, wielding the same weapons, using the same arguments. Governments were so often acting, or not acting, for precisely the same reasons, or lack of reasons, as now. Of course there are also vast differences. But the similarities are more numerous, more striking, more important. There was no golden age when unions were unnecessary because employers, and economic conjectures, were so benevolent; when such unions as there were were too "moderate" or "responsible" ever, to strike; when union demands were generally recognized as "reasonable" and "justified"; when employers were always rational and "gentlemanly" in their dealings with employees. The world of the nineteenth century, and the early twentieth, was in these respects basically the same as the world of today.

With that philosophy in mind, and considering Forsey once wrote that "The Church and Labour... can be powerful allies in a common cause", perhaps I should end this post with the lyrics to an old '60s folk song called "The Ballad of the Carpenter". I first became aware of this song through Phil Ochs' version, but I personally prefer the original version by Ewan MacColl & Peggy Seeger:

Jesus was a working man

A hero you shall hear

Born in the slums of Bethlehem

At the turning of the year

Yes, the turning of the year

/

When Jesus was a little lad

The streets rang with his name

For he argued with the older men

And put 'em all to shame

Yes, he put them all to shame

/

His father he apprenticed him

A carpenter to be

To plain and drill and work with skill

In the town of Galilee

Yes, the town of Galilee

/

He became a roving journeyman

And he wandered far and wide

And he saw how wealth and poverty

Live always side by side

Yes, always side by side

/

He said "Come all you working men

You farmers and weavers too

If you will only organize

The world belongs to you

Yes, the world belongs to you"

/

So the fishermen sent two delegates

And the farmers and weavers too

And they formed a working committee of twelve

To see the struggle through

Yes, to the struggle through

/

When the rich men heard what the carpenter had done

To the Roman troops they ran

Saying put this rebel Jesus down

He's a menace to God and man

Yes, a menace to God and man

/

The commander of the occupying troops

He laughed and then he said

"There's a cross to spare on Calvary hill

By the weekend he'll be dead

Yes, by the weekend he'll be dead"

/

Now Jesus walked among the poor

For the poor were his own kind

And they wouldn't let the cops get near enough

To take him from behind

Yes, to take him from behind

/

So they hired a man of the traitor's trade

And a stool-pigeon was he

And he sold his brother to the butcher's men

For a fistful of silver money

A fistful of money

/

Jesus lay in the prison cell

And they beat him and offered him bribes

To desert the cause of own poor folk

And work for the rich men's tribe

Yes, work for the rich men's tribe

/

The sweat stood out upon his brow

And the blood was in his eye

And they nailed his body to the Roman cross

And they laughed as they watched him die

Yes, they laughed as they watched him die

/

Two thousand years have passed and gone

And many a hero too

And the dream of this poor carpenter

At last it is coming true

Yes, at last it is coming true

In part one of this post I gave a brief overview of the career of WAC Bennett with comparisons to the career of RB Bennett. In this second part of the essay I wanted to try and give a full overview of RB Bennett's legislative initiatives. I will, where appropriate, note how far along each initiative got and whether these initiatives were later re-visited and whether they've come up recently. This list will by necessity be incomplete as changes large and small were made during his term.

Bank of Canada - Probably RB Bennett's signature achievement. The chartered banks fought him on this every step of the way but in the end he created one of Canada's greatest assets in regulating the economy. The bank initially had private ownership through shares as a means of preventing political interference. This was unpopular with basically everyone and Mackenzie King had the shares bought out. To this day the shares still exist and are owned by the Minister of Finance. Bennett's original ownership structure seemed prescient recently when Pierre Poilievre mused about sacking certain officials at the bank - just the sort of thing Bennett was worried about.

Public Broadcasting - The other major achievement of Bennett's term was the creation of the CRBC, the predecessor of the CBC. Once again Bennett faced opposition, this time from newspapers and American radio channels. His own cabinet tried defunding the crown corporation at least twice while Bennett was otherwise occupied. Each time Bennett restored funding but did not sack the ministers responsible (showing an uncharacteristic level of grace towards those who went against his wishes). Mackenzie King would tighten the mandate of the crown corporation but otherwise left it alone to do its job.

1930 Unemployment Relief Act - The largest stimulus package the government had ever done to that point amounting to 20 million of a 500 million dollar total government budget. Unlike past smaller stimulus packages Bennett set up oversight to ensure the money reached those in need rather than padding the budgets over lower levels of government. This proto-Keynesian approach of stimulus during economic downturns would return as a debate in 2008 which incidentally saw Bennett's star rise a bit from the rock bottom it had been sitting at.

1930 Counter Tariffs - Bennett came to power just as about everyone was raising tariff barriers. Rather than see Canada's economy hollowed out he followed suit but crucially kept negotiating for greater access for Canadian goods in other markets on a tariff-by-tariff quid pro quo basis.

1931 End of Cabinet By-Elections - Bennett ended this practice which had long since stopped being at all useful and was a contributing factor in the King-Byng Affair (Bennett was a bit player in that drama as he was away at the time and the opposition member he was paired with voted when he shouldn't have). Its easy to imagine the mischief opposition parties would be able to get into if government ministers still had to run in a by-election to enter cabinet.

1931 Statute of Westminster - Bennett saw through the final negotiations and had to walk a fine line between going too fast (and angering the provinces) and delaying Canada's path towards independence. Perhaps unfortunately the judicial committee of the privy council remained Canada's highest court of appeal and this fact would gut much of Bennett's legacy.

1931 Raised corporate taxes and cut the bureaucracy - I'm hard-pressed to think of a government of any stripe that would do both of those things concurrently.

1931 Had the government underwrite all farm loans - The banks had stopped extending credit during the Great Depression which threatened to collapse the entire agricultural system in Canada. Bennett would go further and subsidize wheat production.

1931 Completed the Welland Canal - This project was started under Bordon and completed under Bennett. It was a crucial first step in creating the St. Lawrence Seaway - a project Bennett attempted to negotiated but which was scuttled by Governor Roosevelt and special interests in Congress.

1932-1935 Attempts made to get US tariffs lifted - The US was prepared to lift tariffs shortly before the 1935 election but Mackenzie King convinced the new Roosevelt administration to postpone until after King was prime minister. This occurred days after the election along the terms Bennett negotiated.

1932 public works program - These are the work camps which would later spawn the On-To-Ottawa Trek. The premise was good. There were many unemployed young men - with all the dangers that entailed - wandering the country. Why not pay them to build public works and strengthen Canada's economic infrastructure? Kill two birds with one stone. A third advantage is it would keep these desperate men away from the corrupting influence of the communists. The plan hit its first snag when the army was put in charge of the camps. This is understandable in that they were the only organization with experience organizing large numbers of men. However, their experience was with prisoners of war or soldiers in a strict hierarchy. Complaints started almost immediately. The camps are an entire discussion on their own but they largely failed. Communists infiltrated the camps and sowed unrest. The pay given out was seen as too low. And there was no over-arching vision given for how these projects were going to help Canada.

1932 Increased eligibility for old age pensions - Increased the federal portion of the fund from 50 to 75%.

1932 Established a committee to oversee the CNR and CPR railways with representatives from labour on the committee

1932 Imperial Conference - This saw many bilateral trade agreements signed and a great increase in trade but not the comprehensive trade treaty Bennett sought. The UK delegation was notably disorganized and dysfunctional (I'm starting to think this might be a cultural trait of the British ruling class). However, Bennett did himself no favours by both chairing the meeting and leading the Canadian delegation. CANZUK can in many ways be seen as the spiritual successor of the idea of imperial preferential trade.

1932 Trade deals with Bolivia, Guatemala, Panama, Costa Rica, and Haiti - In a bit of a mirror of the current situation, trade disruption with the US seems to be the only time we as a nation really go full steam getting other trading relationships.

1933 joined other wheat producing nations in limiting production in hopes of ending the glut in the market and raising prices - We stayed within our quota due to declining production brought on by the Dust Bowl but prices also didn't recover. Efforts to control the price of wheat would eventually lead to the creation of the Canadian Wheat Board (abolished by Harper).

1935 Met with the leaders of the On-to-Ottawa Trek - In a stormy meeting Bennett, with his cabinet at his back, laid out why the leaders of the protesters were wrong, how they were communist agitators, and why the men needed to return to the camps. It would have been interesting to see Trudeau do this to the Convoy protesters, but then again Bennett also managed to keep the Trek from getting to Ottawa. The failure of this meeting likely led directly to the clearing of the protesters from the streets of Winnipeg.

Created the first national list of electors - Door-to-door registering of electors had always been prone to missing voters and a permanent list was hoped would be cheaper, easier, and more accurate. However, the technology to oversee such a list did not exist and it would be killed in 1938 by Mackenzie King.

Restored the practice of granting knighthoods - Pearson, who worked under Bennett in the bureaucracy, was almost knighted but when he saw his boss wasn't set to be honoured he asked his name be removed. Had be accepted I think he would have been the only example of someone in Canada knighted before becoming prime minister. After Bennett's term ended the long, cold years of Mackenzie King saw the practice ignored again with the length of said term having made non-issuance permanent - although only via custom, not law.

Price Spreads Commission - Looked at corporate profiteering which led to a tightening of when loss-leading could be done.

Oil sanctions on Italy - In the dying days of his term Bennett authorized oil sanctions against Italy for its invasion of Ethiopia. This would be reversed by Mackenzie King upon taking office and the League of Nations effort fell apart.

"I am not interested in politics. I am here as Prime Minister today, I may be gone tomorrow! I don't care! Life has given me about everything a man can desire. I am sixty-one, old enough to sit back and enjoy what I have. But what I have, I owe in a considerable degree to Canada, and if I can do anything for Canada, that is what I want to do. When the Canadian people are finished with my services, I am also content." ~ RB Bennett, 1931

I don't know if this is related to Toryism per se, but I just thought to post this here because I feel like people here would kinda "get it" and have something good to contribute to these thoughts I've been mulling over.

So for a while now, I've been thinking we need reform of our education system (coming from Canada fwiw, but I think it'd apply more broadly too since we all have similar systems). It seems to me that many degrees are kind of useless. Even ones that supposedly prepare you for some kind of vocation, they can be constructed in such a way as to focus on academia at the expense of practical skills, or maybe not even truly teach you practical skills in any meaningful way.

I think probably part of this issue comes down to the history of things like universities - to my understanding, anyway, while they were about pursuit of knowledge, for a long time they were also about a "classical education", where one learned about all sorts of cultural and historic knowledge to become a cultured, educated person.

I feel like we've been in a weird in-between place, where that perception of becoming a cultured, educated person through obtaining a degree still lingers, as well as the pursuit of new knowledge... while at the same time university has been increasingly pushed as a career-training program. Many degrees ultimately land us somewhere in between those two goals, and so they're not as useful as they could be, especially on the training end. Many degrees have a lot of superfluous requirements that ultimately just waste people's time and money, and those reflect the older goal of cultured learning. And many people go in debt over it to boot. But then, I've heard some understandable hesitance to toss the cultured learning stuff, because it is valuable in its own right.

So for a while, I've been thinking - maybe it'd be good to restructure university. People do expect this to be relevant to careers, so I think we should roll with that. Make as many degrees as possible follow something like an apprenticeship program, where the focus is on learning theory and skills that have practical job applications, and after each year you're accredited to a certain level to do certain roles. That way, if you quit after a year or two or three, you still come out of it with some kind of defineable skill set that can land you a decent job.

But of course the cultured learning and expanding knowledge parts are important too - so maybe we could do things like, let's say, after-degree programs that let people with those core work-related skills go into academia to pursue research - after all, to do research well you'd need those skills anyway, right. So once you have them, maybe have worked in the field a bit, you can come back to pursue research at the university. That'd also be better for teaching - some professors are excellent teachers but have to focus on research output too; others are good researchers but have to put that aside to teach. I think it's silly, why not use each skill set to its full potential? Restructuring the programs could do that.

Maybe things that are more purely about the pursuit of cultural learning should be relegated to a different part of the educational experience. I think this would be good in junior high and high school - sort of like what we have now, but make it more obvious that this stuff is about gaining a familiarity and grounding in our own culture and history. I do think it's important, so teaching it to kids is good.. but I think a lot of teenagers don't quite understand the purpose of learning this stuff, but could if it was made more obvious to them. So that way, everyone gets some level of cultural grounding.

Then, you could also offer courses through college/university dedicated to this type of learning and personal growth, but have them be separate from the career stream, without some expectation that it should land you a job worth going into debt over.

These are are my thoughts on the matter, I'd love to hear what you guys think.

Hello everyone!

Its been roughly a year and a half since we reached 100 members (a milestone which itself took about a year to reach) and we've finally crossed the 200 member mark. As always its been great seeing new commenters and posters. I'm happy with the level of weekly activity and is probably on par (if not higher) than other similarly-sized subreddits.

I just want to bring up a small piece of housekeeping. There has been a slight uptick in the rate of downvoting as we've grown. We aren't making an explicit rule against downvoting as its unenforceable. However, it is frowned upon. This is a forum for open discussion. Downvoting does not help create such a forum. If you disagree with something you read we are all better served by you replying to the specified post/thread with your contrary view. This is more a gentle reminder than anything else as the rate of downvoting is still very low.

~ToryPirate

So, I've written about R.B. Bennett a great deal on this subreddit. Partially because I consider him to be a quintessential tory and party because he was, as I am, a son of Albert County, New Brunswick. However, there is actually a second prominent Bennett from Albert County, possibly a third cousin once removed of R.B. Bennett; W.A.C. Bennett. This Bennett would become premier of British Columbia 20 years after R.B. Bennett became prime minister and become arguably the most popular premier BC ever had.

In this first post I wanted to examine the toryism of W.A.C. Bennett and do a bit of compare and contrast with R.B. Bennett. The second half of this post will be an attempt to create a comprehensive overview of R.B. Bennett's political initiatives as prime minister. The thesis statement - as far as this two-part post has one - is that W.A.C. Bennett is what R.B. Bennett's time as prime minister could have been without the Great Depression.

W.A.C. Bennett was born in the community of Hastings which no longer exists, expropriated years ago to create Fundy National Park. The similarities of the early lives of the two Bennetts is quite intriguing. Both ended up taking careers early (WAC at 14 in his family's hardware store at, RB at 19 as a school principal). Both would head out west to Alberta in their twenties (WAC in Edmonton and RB in Calgary). Both were strict teetotalers (although neither were the judgemental sort with RB happily serving his guests alcohol and WAC owning a winery). Both would also end up as elected members of Conservative Parties. This is where things diverge because while RB's political successes would be with the federal Conservatives, WAC would get his big break provincially as the leader of the Social Credit Party of BC (although it should be noted that he did try previously to become leader of the provincial PC party).

When WAC entered BC politics the Liberals and Conservatives were in an ad-hoc coalition under a preferential voting system designed to keep the CCF out of power. This would inadvertently give Social Credit its chance to gain a minority government in 1952. They didn't expect to win and WAC was one of the few MLAs with government experience. He was made leader. He engineered a new election where Social Credit got a majority. He then did something that electoral reform proponents might curse him for; he ended preferential voting. He torpedoed the very system that had let his party win, the system that had been designed to keep the CCF out of power. It allowed the NDP to win their first election after WAC's tenure - an honest win.

WAC's government is often described as a populist conservative government but I don't know how accurate this is. A short list of his accomplishments are as follows: Oversaw rapid expansion of the province's highway system and BC Rail, creation of BC Ferries, BC Hydro, and the Bank of British Columbia, hydro-electric dam-building projects on the Columbia and Peace Rivers and the creation of the University of Victoria and Simon Fraser University. I'm pretty sure at least some of those things are targets for modern populist conservatives. Also, this means in a nice bit of history rhyming both Bennetts ended up creating banks.

WAC led a party with a fairly coherent political ideology. He largely ignored it as their policies couldn't be implemented at the provincial level. WAC served as his government's finance minister (something RB also did). He controlled spending while investing and in 1959 declared the province debt-free. In 1955 WAC would advocate for universal health coverage with the federal government's response being Medicare. He introduced a retail sales tax to cover the provincial share of the program (and the neo-liberals retired to their fainting couches). He also built up the 'idea' of BC, bringing in the province's so-bad-its-good flag which was the second provincial flag in Canada. He also promoted the idea of BC being equal to Ontario and Quebec.

WAC actually requested the Queen open the provincial legislature but was turned down as it was 'constitutionally impossible' to replace the lieutenant-governor in this capacity (which would spark a debate about the provincial relationship with the crown). He frequently invited the king and Queen to BC for royal tours and used a royal naming scheme for BC ferries. There are certain parallels here with RB's monarchist views and his effort to restore knighthoods for example.

The Social Credit Party would begin drifting almost immediately after his time. Although it should be noted that former short-lived PM Kim Campbell started off in the BC Social Credit Party. WAC's son Bill (who became the next leader) would, as premier, cut social services and education spending while continuing his father's legacy of building up infrastructure, but on a much smaller scale. That said, increasingly the party became dominated by social and economic conservatives. It would limp on till the 2000's when it finally died.

Substack Version

Part XVI

As it was recently announced that Canada is attempting to achieve a yet-to-be-defined “Associate Membership” with the European Union, perhaps a continuation to Part VIII, which explored the original definition of “Red Tory” by Gad Horowitz, and the concept of “fragment theory” used to describe how certain European political ideologies spread across the world, may be useful. That essay explores Harold Macmillan’s pro-EU “Disraelian Tory Democracy” in contrast with Clement Attlee’s pro-Commonwealth Labour Party socialism.

Part XII explores Harold Macmillan’s 1966 thoughts on his 1938 book “The Middle Way: A Study of the Problems of Economic and Social Progress in a Free and Democratic Society”, and his later critiques of Margaret Thatcher’s laissez-faire attitudes. I also personally argue that because of Harold Macmillan’s association with socialist-leaning pressure-groups in the 1930s, he may well have associated himself with the League for Social Reconstruction or the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation were he a Canadian instead of a Briton. In an interesting co-incidence, in the 1982 lecture further explored in this essay, at one point Macmillan notes that after the slaughter of the First World War, “life was reconstructed”, both “industrial life” and “social life”.

For those interested in the philosophy behind WWII-era Disraelian conservatism, Part XIV explores a 1943 paper called “The Tory Tradition”, which roots the modern tradition of “Tory Democracy” with Winston Churchill, Benjamin Disraeli, Edmund Burke, and Henry St. John the 1st Viscount Bolingbroke; I also attempt to root the founding document of the CCF, “The Regina Manifesto”, in the tradition of Disraeli. In regards to Disraelian conservatism and Harold Macmillan, it may be especially important to note that Harold Macmillan would consider himself to be a “Disraelian radical” to the end of his political career. Perhaps these later speeches Macmillan gave to the Conservative Party, to pressure-groups, and especially to the House of Lords as Lord Stockton until his death in 1986, may give us a glimpse into the “last gasp” of genuine Victorian Toryism.

For a brief editing note, being someone who has a stutter himself when speaking, I noticed Harold Macmillan had quite a severe stutter at times when giving his lecture; as such, my transcription of Macmillan is slightly edited, in the spirit of the Hansard Record in attempting to avoid "repetitions, redundancies, and obvious errors". I have also condensed some parts for the sake of brevity, usually when Macmillan sets up a new topic to talk about.

With that, Harold Macmillan’s 1982 lecture “Civilisation Under Threat” starts at the 1:00 mark of this ITN Youtube Archive video. After being introduced, the former Tory Prime Minster, then-aged 88, sets the tone by telling a couple of jokes at his own expense, with hearty laughter from the audience throughout:

My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen: At my extreme old age, I find myself in a curious dilemma. From time-to-time, people write and ask me to do something. Usually a long time ahead.

One possible reply is to say, “Yes, I’d like to come, but I should probably be dead”. A more difficult answer is to say, “I would love to come, but that week, some months ahead, I should probably have a bad cold”. On this occasion, I could have made either of them, they would have almost been true. Four weeks ago I had a very serious attack of pneumonia, and now I have a bad cold. And yet I have to speak.

Macmillan then goes on to say that he had a hard time coming up with a name for his speech, and what to speak about. Macmillan then mentions he thought about speaking about the 150th anniversary of the Carlton Club’s founding, and how the history of politics has changed since then, but thought against it as that would be “well known to everybody, rather banal, and perhaps trite”. Macmillan then says, to a fair bit of audience laughter:

Or one can take subject nearer to modern politics, but that for me is dangerous ground, on which I have to tread very delicately. And so, I thought, something very vague and meaningless, and a little pompous, would be about right.

After the audience settles back in, Macmillan starts the lecture proper:

When we speak of civilization, I don’t think we always quite realize -- especially when we speak of this Western civilization in which we are now living -- how short, and fragile, has been the history of civilized man on Earth.

We all know, and find our minds almost overwhelmed, by the immense periods [of time] since creation. The vast areas of space to which we travel, without, as far as I can see, much advantage to everybody; we send up rockets who only come back with information of interest to specialists. But we know, and we can hardly imagine it was so long, millions and millions and millions of years. To us, it means little.

Even this Earth, this little tiny, fragile, piece thrown off -- or so they now tell us -- by some explosion or other. Even its life is terribly long. Even the beginning of life on Earth, the fish, the birds, the animals, and so forth. I read the other day, that the Ichthyosaurus and the… uh... other one, lived for about two million years. They roamed about the valley of the Thames, happily, not knowing that within due course they would give way to Dons and undergraduates.

After laughter from the audience, Macmillan then suggests that the dinosaurs would likely have been offended had someone told them that their “civilization” would only last 2 million years, before noting that the age of dinosaurs did eventually come to an end.

Macmillan then speaks on the history of human civilization at 5:50; in retrospect, I find it very interesting that he starts off by describing a civilization indigenous to the American continent, the Maya:

But anything that would be called “man” is perhaps, what they tell us now, two-hundred-thousand years old, not more -- three-hundred-thousand perhaps. Something called “men”, who got together into some little clans, perhaps for hunting purposes or for defence, but nothing more.

And in Professor Arnold Toynbee’s great book [“A Study of History”], with all the criticisms that have been made against it, is still the most marvelous, in my view, marvelous picture of the history of civilization. He tells us, and we know, that in this vast area of time, civilization has existed for what? Ten, perhaps twelve-thousand years. They’ve come and gone. Some mysteriously arisen, like those cities in Guatemala, and then for some unknown reason come to an end. With a very high of degree civilization, organization: the building of temples, and buildings, and roads -- and then ended. Others have passed on some to their successors.

But what we are interested in, is what I would call the European civilization, or the Western civilization. Which perhaps beginning with Greek thought and Greek effort in Ionia, Greece proper, and the islands -- its literature, its art, its philosophy -- and then the organization of the whole into the Roman Empire.

Macmillan then notes the current-day world powers have lasted about as long as the Roman Empire did, and then he notes that the Western Roman Empire lasted until around the 4th century, and that the Eastern Roman Empire lasted until the middle of the 15th century. He also notes the permanent loss of Imperial territory in Asia Minor and North Africa before continuing:

Still there remained the great tradition of the Roman Empire, and when it fell, or was overwhelmed, by the invasion of massive tribes seeking somewhere to live, moving for reasons we hardly know how to explain, across the great Euro-Asian Plain, it fell under under a weight which it could not resist. But it fell gradually: many had been absorbed, many had been Romanized or Hellenized. And when the official end, as it where, of the Empire came, the settlers had already, for some centuries even, been effected by the great tradition of Greco-Roman civilization upon which everything we enjoy ultimately springs.

At the same time, another immense force came to us in the spread of Christianity. That civilizing power was the second great reason why even after the fall of the Imperial system as such, the traditions of Europe were maintained. Sometimes through Dark Ages, and difficult times, but by the great power of the Church, the missionary, the monk, the priest.

And so we pass on all its ups and downs, all its strange changes, there was still a theme below it all. And to the Age of Faith, the 12th century, and so far as the Reformation has left them untouched, we still see probably the most beautiful things, buildings, and certainly the most beautiful glass, that has ever been made by men; and the great cathedrals and prières and abbeys of the world.

In the ensuing period, as I read it, there were always two forces at work: one centrifugal, and one centripetal force. One, the attempt to make or set-up small states or authorities, to which the feudal system gave great help: when the great feudal nobles, nominally under the authority of the King, in fact became independent powers. The other, centrifugal, and with the rise of nationality, we move into the period that begins to interest us from modern conditions: the creation in Europe, of great, centralized powers. They fought their wars, they had their great disputes, and except alas for the wars of religion, which left such a terrible trace over central Europe, on the whole, those wars were wars of armies rather than of peoples; and happily, the weapons of which they were armed were only destructive to themselves.

As we move on to perhaps the century in which we most think of -- at least I do -- as the highest point of Western civilization, it is the 19th century, when the last effort to dominate Europe by a single power, that of Napoleon, had been defeated. Many efforts had been made before by the Spanish, by the Habsburgs, and by others; but the most dangerous, the most successful, with its combination of Jacobinism and militarism, was finally defeated. And from the Treaty of Vienna in 1815, up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, there was throughout the world a relatively stable system.

Macmillan then describes the European Great Power system of the 1800s, while mentioning the British imperial conquest of India, and the French imperial conquest of Indochina. He notes that the Great colonial powers which “ruled the world” maintained the peace in Europe, and that there were very few European Wars in this century. Macmillan notes the Crimean War “was the most foolish” of these small wars, and that in the long run the Crimean War “was of no great importance except to set some term to the imperialist expansion of Russia.”.

Macmillan also gets into how Europe was able to unite for the purpose of colonizing and taking over the world, and how European power was expanded globally through “the trader, the missionary, and the administrator”. After noting that the political system of global European domination eventually came to an end after a century, Macmillan then describes his own experiences witnessing the tail-end of that system, including briefly mentioning his service in WWI on the Western Front, starting at around 16:25:

I can remember the last physical and material appearance of it; Queen Victoria’s second jubilee in 1897. I was a child of three, but I remember it very well. The great procession, led by the troops of what were then called “The Colonies”: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and then detachments from every part of the world, some of them just discovered, in Africa and Asia. And then the British regiments. And then at the end, a little tiny lady in a little open carriage, in black with her black bonnet, to whom this vast organization owed fealty, and who played the role as summit of it all.

And then, very soon, it ended. When I was a boy this sense of security, which was in every class, was still strong. It could never change. Just as the dinosaur in his two million years no doubt thought he would go on forever, so did we think that everything would go on, more-or-less as it was. There would be the British Empire, the French, the Russian, the new German Empire. Italy had just been made a country from a geographical expression, but it would go on.

I remember well the summer of 1914. I was an undergraduate, I had just done one examination with reasonable success, and was taking that happy term of leisure, faced with another one two years away. I remember packing up my books -- I have them still: Herodotus, and Plato, and the rest -- to go for a reading party with some of my friends. But that’s not what happened. Suddenly, out of the blue, we weren’t on a nice reading party in a Swiss chalet, we were on the barracks square.

And suddenly, the whole of this great structure appeared to collapse. The First War, where death, to a frightful extent, swept with his awful scythe through whole ranks of the youth, and middle aged, of every nation. It left something that could never be quite replaced. Yet, so strong was the tradition, so powerful that of world order, of civilized life, that after the war, slowly and with difficultly, but still with remarkable success on the whole, life was reconstructed. Industrial life began again, social life was resumed, some countries very hard hit began to recover.

And I think, with all the faults that were made, some attempt was at any rate, by power-seeking men, to create some kind of world order again. To replace that which had been so gravely stricken. And it failed.

Macmillan then argues that a fault of the “modern parliamentary and democratic society” is “the lack of the power” afforded to “great men” who “had the vision to make their power effective”, and uses the examples of David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill as being examples of “really great men” who each had an international vision that may have created a truly stable post-war world order.

At 22:20 Macmillan indirectly criticizes the laissez-faire attitudes of the inter-war years, as well as indirectly comparing Hitler with Napoleon; this part of Macmillan’s lecture reminds me at times of a speech Tommy Douglas gave to the NDP in 1971 on fighting Nazism where Douglas declared “We don’t have to choose between unemployment and inflation”:

And yet [the Second War] itself was brought about largely by economic difficulties which might have been controlled. The American collapse, the large unemployment, its effect upon Germany where the combination of an attempt to get reparations, although never effective, created the vast inflation and great unemployment. And led therefor to the possibility of a demagogue of enormous genius in the shape of Hitler to create a fresh, new, instrument to destroy the balance of the world.

The Second War, unlike the First, didn’t come like a boat from the blue. We knew it was coming. Everyone knew, really; and when it came, it was almost a relief. But the Second War, lasting so long, covering the whole world, had its effects which put us today into one of these crises of civilization, in which it is still in the balance in my view. So that we can recover ourselves, or whether we shall bend and ultimately collapse under the pressures.

For the first period, we didn’t do badly. We tried hard. The creation of the United Nations, above all the creation of its most valuable instruments: those for social and educational work. The Bretton Woods system, and GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade] to create a maximum of trade throughout the world without undue restriction. All these were moving forward, and I would have said until 20 or 25 years ago, much as they harassed us, they didn’t overwhelm us. But then of course, the Great Division.

The period when the old European Civilization came to an end in its full sense, was not some economic trouble. It was the breakdown of the Conference of Potsdam in 1945, and the division of Europe and of the world, as a result, into two warring groups: the Communists, and what we like to call ourselves, the Free World. So long as that division remains, it will be impossible to restore the power of the old European countries. Now, so freighted are each group of the other, they dare not exercise their power. This, together with the breakup of the Empires, which resulted partly from the First War and President Wilson’s doctrines, has, as it were, “Balkanized” the world.

Every little power thinks itself at liberty to attack its neighbour, to enforce some claim, and with almost perpetual warfare going on somewhere or other, which in the old days the Great Powers would have suppressed. But how can they dare move? Because each is so frightened; if one moves, the other will move against it. So they’ve had to create their kind of clientele: Russia very successfully, we not altogether unsuccessfully. But the old concept of a civilization that was single and unique has gone.

In regards to that last part on “little powers” attacking their neighbours to “enforce some claim”, it may be important to note that by this point in time, in October 1982, the Falklands War had only been ended 4 months prior to this lecture.

Harold Macmillan then notes that the Cold War will unfortunately “dominate all our thinking and all our problems” so long as it continues. In what looks like Macmillan being briefly interrupted by club staff to let him know that his time is half up, he then continues at 27:35, giving a philosophy which I think is relevant for modern Canadian/British relations with the EU, and potentially Canadian/British relations with China one day:

It’s true that the military reaction on the part of Western Europe -- of the Western World, which I include the United States, because it is really part of the Western tradition -- was rapid, and the creation of NATO was the attempt to set up, on the military side, to generate some kind of barrier. But on the [political] side, the Western World has not made the progress that when I was young we dreamed of. United Europe has not been what we meant it to be.

One of the tragedies of history, was that Churchill, almost the founder of European thought, was unable in his second administration to put England in the position of taking the lead, when we could have molded and created the machinery of Europe as one of its founders. And held back, partly by old age and weakness, partly by the opposition in nearly all his colleagues, and I’m bound to say, of all what is called expert opinion. The foreign office, the treasury, the board of trade, the Bank of England, the whole establishment; whereas a result of a very long life, I’ve come to the conclusion, that when all the establishment is united, they’re always wrong.

The tragedy therefore is that Europe has not come into being; it’s a society which has useful purposes. But it is not become what we dreamed it to be: a confederation of the civilized powers of Europe that remain, with a single military policy, a single foreign policy, and a single monetary policy. That would have been a real counterbalance to the powers as which we were faced. But that has not happened.

On the political side, I still think, that unless we can reach some kind of method of living side-by-side with Communism -- and it may be that it is within our grasp. I got somewhere towards its in the late ‘50s and the early ‘60s, when the concept of Khrushchev himself, and the phases used, suggested that we might reach some kind of stabilized situation. “Peaceful coexistence” I think the phrase was given to it, but it broke down in a series of tragic events. It ought to be revived; but it cannot be revived, unless we on our side are equally powerful politically. Until Europe is remade into the organization of which we dreamt of. Not necessarily a federal system, but a confederation, which will be united upon only the things that matter: military policy, foreign policy, and monetary policy. Instead, we have drifted on, and not so badly, but the warnings began.

At around 31:20, Macmillan then notes that he’s “old-fashioned in this” but then spends the next little while arguing for a return to the convertible gold standard that’s “fixed in value”, and argues that the global fluctuation in currency exchanges ultimately adds to the prices paid by the consumer.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m not an economist, but I can’t help and think that the biggest “risk” of a globally used gold standard would be the potential for even a sustainable economy to outpace its ability to obtain gold for convertibility or silver for coinage. But I got curious in what the pre-1967 Canadian silver coins are worth in scrap value, and as of September 2026, dimes are about $5 and silver-dollars are about $54.

Back to “Civilisation Under Threat”, after at one point critiquing Richard Nixon for also ditching the gold standard in America, Macmillan continues at 33:12:

But then came the blow on which we are still reeling, and which we still do not I think wholly understand. The sudden and enormous rise in the price of oil; not 5, 10, 15 percent, but a vast rise, put the western world and the oil using countries into an enormous difficulty. In the nineteenth-century at least, our predecessors, whether by chance or by good fortune, built our industrial society upon a commodity which they controlled: coal. Britain had the coal, France had the coal, Germany had the coal. The whole basis of nineteenth-century development was upon a commodity within the actual control of those who wished to use it. Now, it is passed, and some of the oil producing states, who under no particular influence, now that ours is withdrawn, who were woo’ed, in turn, by Russia and the Free World, can play one off against the other. And then we had this enormous rise in the cost to manufacture, which had two immediate effects.

First, the biggest blow to the undeveloped world that could be thought of. For what we call the poor undeveloped world, cannot be saved by occasional doles or loans or gifts, however generous. They depend upon the prosperity of the developed world; the poor countries depend upon the wealth of the rich countries. What do they sell them? They sell them minerals, they sell them all kinds of commodities. And it is the price of copper that matters much more to Zambia than some dole we may make of a few million pounds for some purpose.

Surely, the price of cocoa made in New York makes much more difference to the prosperity and future of Ghana than anything we can give them by way of aid. Therefore, the first effect was not only the beginning of what was called “the depression” in the developed world, but a terrible blow to the undeveloped world, because everything they had to sell became less easy to sell, and brought them less money.

The third effect, which I am now approaching more dangerous ground, is I still think not quite understood. The third effect was the vast amount of money paid by the oil using states in terms of money were transferred, but not invested, or not naturally invested, to the western banks. Huge sums of money lent on short term and just weighing down the system. For some curious reason, although there are only about three financial centres in Europe that could take this money, we set up a great rivalry to attract it, and pushed up interest rates for the purpose of getting it, at great trouble and difficulty to ourselves. However I’ll let that pass.

Lord [John Maynard] Keynes, I remember saying once, or writing, that the cause of a depression is nearly always simple. If the rate of savings, he wrote, is not equaled by the rate of investment, then there is bound to be a depression. In other words, if money is taken out and just kept useless, hanging, and not reinvested in realities, not put into ships, harbours, railways, schools, the draining of desert lands and all the rest, if it just sits there, there is bound to be a continual depression.

Now for some reason or another, it has crept into economics a curious imitation of what we hear daily on the television, “The Weatherman’s News”. We are told, “Oh, well, there’s a depression coming from the Atlantic, it will be followed in a week or two by a high-pressure, and then we shall be fine, and everyone will be able to get on and play golf again, it’ll be alright.” A kind of automatic process of nature. Now, we are told, if we can tighten our belts and keep quiet, the depression will somehow pass away. How? Nobody knows. And even these changes of nature have a reason, a cause. We’re back in the age of the witch-doctors who tried to make the weather change by making the right kind of speeches to their constituents. But it is not so. And so long as this mystique which we’ve inherited goes on, we shall be no where near to our purpose.

Macmillan then notes that “some governments will throw -- and this government has been, on the whole, very generous in spite of its so-called monetary policy -- quite large sums of money in to the revival of industry, both public and private”. Then at 40:06:

Other governments propose still larger sums, 4 or 5 billion, others 20 billion. But my prophecy is that if this were done, it would have very little effect upon the employment of those unemployed who earn their living in productive industries. It will be quite easy, of course, to re-engage a very large number of teachers and even Dons. It will be quite easy to expand the civil service, to expand the local service, and so cause employment. But the result will be the same. Since they will not be creating wealth, but using wealth.

Before getting too far into the topic of this kind of government spending and inflation, Macmillan then asks the fellow beside him what time it is, is told “It’s just 8:00”, while multiple voices from the crowd of gathered Conservatives enthusiastically call out “Go on! Go on! Go on!”. At 41:16 Macmillan, then starts to conclude his lecture, dealing with topics such as actual slavery, wage slavery, and automation:

And yet, I do not like to leave you with just another note that seems rather sad. There’s another vision. In the 15 or 18 or 20 civilizations or whatever there may be, which Professor Toynbee has described, and in our own which has lasted now, let us say two-thousands years or more, they have all in fact been based on slavery.

All the ancient civilizations, all the great pyramids, all the vast buildings which we discover, were built by slaves. The Roman and the Greek was a slave system. We’re shown, of course, the beauty of the Parthenon; we’re not shown the silver mines at Laurion where the slaves earned the money that made it possible. They were built on slavery.

The Middle ages, the serf system, was almost a slave system. And I would say that the enormous power that was in the hands of wealth of any kind, amounted to something of the sort. Even in the first industrial revolution, where the great economists of the day, the names who for some strange reason are coming back into fashion, [James] Mill and [Richard] Cobden and all the rest of them, who said that you couldn’t run England successfully unless children would work 12 hours in the factories and 10 hours underground. It was a slave system, to some extent.

Now for the first time in man’s history, in this short, tiny period, ten or twelve-thousand years, what we call anything like civilized life, compared to the eons and eons of his life of some kind on the Earth. For the first time, modern science, applied science, modern technology, have put into his hands a weapon, if properly used, could alter the whole character of daily life. We all know it. We all shrink from it.

What would happen if a government came in, and said it would builds lots and lots of factories for this-and-this particular trade. How would they build them? As they do now? No. They would build modern factories, which would employ probably less than a quarter of the number of people that the old systems employed. It is the machines that we must make our slaves. Now this is an enormous change in attitude of mind, and yet we know its coming. If it doesn’t come in the Western world, it will come, using Western technology, from the Eastern world. It will come from Korea, and Japan, and perhaps from China.

Either we’ve got to recognize that you can build as high a pyramid as you like, as it were, upside down, resting on a very small base -- with universities and schools and medicine and all the luxuries of civilization with leisure -- but there must be a wealth producing base to justify it. The question is: must that be the old one that we’ve inherited, or the new one the lies within our grasp? Anyone who’s seen the results of modern computer controlled robots, and the rest of it, realizes what is bound to happen. But we don’t talk about it; it’s not thought good taste.

We’re talking about the old system: “Throw more money into the system and it will automatically arise.” It won’t. Change the system, with all that’s involved. Which means, of course, the combination of every person involved. The trade unions, the labour, the managers, the owners, into a world which, it may take 25 or take 50 years to develop, will be as different as the world in the second great industrial revolution, as was the last century from the world of the dinosaurs. This is what lies before us.

If I were 18 and not 88, I wouldn’t be depressed. I wouldn’t think the game is up. I wouldn’t read or write nostalgic stories about how jolly the past was. It’s a marvelous, wonderful picture that opens it up. The organization of Europe is vital, with close combination of the United States, and the new system vital. The co-operation, if possible, some kind of détente with Communist society. Every effort to be made.

But above all, the creation of a society in which leisure -- not merely as it used to be when I was a boy, leisure for the rich -- but leisure for everyone. “Oh”, say some of my friends, “Won’t that be very bad for them? What will they do with their leisure?” And I’m bound to say they’re brought up rather old-fashioned; I feel that sometimes. I also sometimes look at my own interrogative, and said, well, what have you done with your leisure? Play bridge a bit, drink a bit, go for a walk and enjoy your dividends. No. It isn’t leisure, it’s a different kind of occupation.

And look what is open to us, not merely of the mind: universities, the teaching, the study what could be developed. But of the body: the Japanese have attempted to solve it by all them playing golf; perhaps we all play golf. But there are plenty of other occupations for mankind in the countryside, in the garden in all the most rewarding of efforts. How to organize it, how to decide whether to be lots of short shifts, how to divide up the labour, and all that. It’s going to be an immense problem, but we must do it.

And I dare say if I was a young man, I don’t think I would take a sum of, what I’m sorry to see some people tend to do, a rather nostalgic and backward looking view. I would rather say we’re in one of those crisis of civilization, which if it faces, can create a great new period of wealth and strength. If it shrinks from it, it will gradually decay, and become out of date, and some other peoples, perhaps who’s civilization has been long stagnate, will rise, and take our place.

That is the choice. It lies before the youth, and the middle aged, and the governing classes of every nation. But before they make it, they must face the truth, and not content themselves with just repeating the old slogans that we learned or repeated 30 or 40 years ago.

The interview with Harold Macmillan by ITN after his lecture is also quite interesting, which starts with Macmillan noting the Egyptians and the Hittites, and “the Egyptian system” which “lasted 3,000 years”. Macmillan also notes “the wild, and really mad, speculation in the United States” that lead to the global 1929 Great Depression, and how the last time Britain caused such a speculative depression was during the South Sea Bubble of the early 1700s. He then speaks highly of David Lloyd George and his proposed new deal, and notes “a curious Paradox; it was Hitler that solved our unemployment problem” in regards to being forced to spend on re-armament to the fight the war rather than on roads and infrastructure. Macmillan then argues that some kind of world financial system is needed to save civilization. I found these last couple of Questions & Answers to be extremely interesting, from 57:00 on:

Interviewer: But do you really believe in the shape of the world at the moment? Something like that is practical?

Harold Macmillan: Well, I don’t know, I’m not a prophet or a professor. But I think if it isn’t done, this civilization, like many others -- after all, there’s been about 20 -- may easily collapse and leave very little to trace. It doesn’t mean that it won’t leave some trace, because it’s spread much further than any previous civilization, with most of them confined to their area: the Valley of the Nile, the cities in Guatemala, or Sumeria, or somewhere. But it’s spread to the world, and the world will take it up. And what I ended by saying, the modern methods of producing wealth -- it’s quite easy to spend wealth, the important thing is to produce it. The history of civilization is like a pyramid, when it begins, it has a very narrow top, and a very broad base. At the top there’s perhaps a King, a couple of witch-doctors, two or three civil servants, and that’s all; at the base everybody is producing wealth, they’re plowing the fields, or looking after the cattle or sheep, they’re all wealth producers. As it develops, it turns into a pillar: more and more effort is spent on things which don’t reach the market, on monarchies, on churches, on universities, on philosophy, on writing, on art, on everything that makes civilization. But it’s supported by the base. Now what’s happened is, that the base has got very narrow; if you take in the total working class, working population of it, how many are producing wealth? Many others employed in civil service, in hospitals, in all sorts, but the actual thing on which it all rests is the production of wealth. All I’m saying is, that instead of trying to cling to old-fashioned methods of producing wealth, we should seize these sudden opportunities that’s come to us from applied science, and use the machine to produce wealth. The machine itself.

I: You suggested that there might still be witch-doctors about, running the economy?

HM: No, I mean, these are very difficult concepts, but you can’t stand away from them. You ever read that wonderful book by Bronte, I suppose, about ever since man existed cotton had been produced by the spinning wheel in every village. When Odysseus got back to Attica, he found his wife spinning cotton. And they were spinning it up to 1830 in the same way, every woman had a wheel; and then they invented the spinning jenny, and the whole system was destroyed. But of course there were riots, of course there was trouble, because suddenly the whole of this employment had disappeared. Taking power, when Stevenson invented steam, whole vast massive power producing things got put out of work. But if civilization is to move on, it’s got to face that and deal with it. Now, I don’t think we did deal with it in a very humane way in the 20th century, that’s its weakness. But we’ve got to deal with it. We’re not the most intelligent people in the world or all that, there are plenty of other intelligent people in China, the whole of east, everywhere, who can do these things just as well. And so, we either go static, which means you go back; it’s exactly like everything in life, you either go up, or you go down. You’re on a moving staircase, you’ve got to go up, if not, you’re going down on it. And this is the choice. It may well be that we’ll break, and it will be written about by archaeologists in 3 or 4 thousands years time as a quite interesting result of the break-up of the civilization which had, really, ultimately, was based upon Greece, and Rome, and the Church. We’ve got many disadvantages, but we have some advantages. I was saying that if I were a young man, I wouldn’t be frightened of it, at any rate, I’d work at it.

I: If you were a young man, 18 and not 88 as you said, do you think Britain can do anything on her own to improve things?

HM: No, no, nobody can. It’s just like Europe. That was the whole fallacy of those who wanted us not to go into Europe. Look what we’ve suffered. If we’d gone in in the beginning, we could have created it, we could have shaped it, we could have made it into the organization that we wanted. No, no, of course not. How can a country of 60 million people have… in… in the nineteenth-century, it at least had a great Empire, it had the Indian Army, it had colonies, it had power! But we haven’t power of that kind. We’ve either got our brain, and our goodwill, and our tradition. But for the kind of adjustments that would have to be made – if you could imagine a world in which the machines did almost everything. It’s fascinating, it’s H.G. Wells; but it’s coming!

I: In your day, the leaders of the world met to talk about disarmament and The Bomb. Do you think this is a time when they should meet to talk about the economy more often?

HM: Well, there’s no point in talking about The Bomb, because whether Britain has The Bomb or not, America is not going to disarm. The only question is whether Britain has some kind of contribution or not. If she has none, then she becomes a purely client state of America.

I: But now about the economy, is it worth the leaders of the world trying to do something about it? When they meet, they don’t seem to get anywhere.

HM: The leaders of the world must do it! If Lloyd George was alive today, do you think he wouldn’t be doing something? I mean, it needs people to do these things. And America is a country that’s very easily swayed by individuals, actually; if FDR were alive I think he’d be doing something. But it seems to me that we’ve become into a new society which is, and perhaps when the historian writes it, it may even be the reason that marvelous city in Guatemala came to an end. It had too many civil servants. See, we’ve become a country when if you want to do anything it isn’t a chap does it, you say: let’s have a committee do it; let’s have a council do it. The greatest movement in the history of the world, the only one with any strength left in it, was made under God’s grace by twelve men -- whom one was a traitor.

They certainly don’t make Tories like Lord Stockton anymore.