Canada
On Being Canadian. By Vincent Massey. (Dent. 12s. 6d.) Canada: An International Power. By Andre Siegfried. (Cape. 12s: 6d.) THE RIGHT HON. VINCENT MASSEY, from his wide experience repre- senting Canada abroad and from his fruitful association with Canadian governance, education and the arts, touches upon the same problems as the French scholar who has given so much of his mind to the study of Canada ; yet their conclusions more than often are contrasting and answer, in some measure, each other. To Mr. Massey the Canadian as an individual is a recognisable type, and Canada is a society with'its own characteristics, an enduring society, not without stresses and strains, yet a society with sound founda- tions and no artificial phenomenon dangerously threatened by internal divisions between English and French-speaking Canadians or by the necessity of choosing between clashing North American and European forces. Common sense, tolerance, moderation are characteristics Mr. Massey finds predominant in Canadian society, and, fully aware of the delicate balance which the art of govern- ment in Canada must maintain between different economic, geographic and cultural sections, he has no doubts about the future of Canadian unity and survival.
Professor Siegfried accepts Canada as a " political personality" which, under present conditions, may " carry on indefinitely," but he is oppressed by what he defines as an " inherent contradiction" between the natural geographic " pulls " of the continental hemi- sphere, ever drawing Canada away from Europe and Britain, and the " essentially historical and artificial " east-west axis of Canadian growth a marl usque ad mare. The existence of the two so-called " axes " is obvious and familiar ; the problems of the dollar and sterling areas arc, in the immediate present, crucial examples, but Professor Siegfried's " inherent contradiction " is subject to large qualifications. The east-west direction of Canadian expansion has, in fact, a natural geographic basis ; • it was given its initial momentum by the St. Lawrence and related westward-pointing river systems and by the Pre-Cambrian Shield which led ever deeper into the northern half of the continent the fur-trader-explorers who laid Canada's foundations. Nor, as Professor Siegfried would have us believe, is the territory which Canadian confederation embraces " wholly American " in atmosphere. The St. Lawrence river, the Pre-Cambrian Shield, the whole of the North, their climate, vegeta- tion and economic resources are distinctively Canadian.
The Pre-Cambrian Shield, in particular, which Professor Siegfried dismisses as an area "of immobility, of grandeur, and of sadness devoid of dynamism," is precisely the area which gave the impetus to the development of a separate Canadian economy, related initially to European markets for timber and furs, and which today supplies the bulk of Canadian water-power, pulp and papet, minerals (including uranium and great newly-discovered bodies of iron ore), holiday resorts and landscape-painting. Professor Siegfried's mis- reading of the geographic influences at work also leads him to say that " the Latin and Anglo-Saxon people in the New World tread the same soil, breathe the same air . . . and react to international problems in the same way." Mr. Massey's Canadian soldier in Trafalgar Square is the commentary here. Where, in 1914 and 1939, were the Latin-American troops ? Canada's vital interests are, of course, North American, but are North American interests those primarily of the western hemisphere, or what Mr. Massey terms the northern and specifically the North Atlantic ? In two wars Canada predicted rather than followed American policy ; in the Atlantic Pact Canada sees the central purpose of her external policy by so much achieved, the joint assertion of the common interests of Britain, Western Europe and North America, and there is no western hemi- spheric consideration as important. Nor is it necessary to be as discouraged as Professor Siegfried concerning relations between the two languages and cultures in Canada. He found these relations becoming " more hostile " in 1945 ; he would modify this judgement in 1949. An English-Canadian majority has just elected to power the party led by a French Canadian Catholic, and the war has left singularly little animus between the two language groups.
Professor Siegfried has written easily the best study of relations between the two groups in Canada, Le Canada—Les Deux Races (1907). The present book, valuable as it is, falls short of equal dis- cernment in grasping the nature of Canada and Canadian policy. For Canada, at least, in contrast, perhaps, to European countries, the term " nation " is to be defined less by frontiers of disassociation than by frontiers of association. Craiiian nationality and its survival is not to be measured by its power to achieve separateness but by its ability, as Mr. Massey implies, to extend its associations, securing unity within by accepting rather than annihilating differences of language or religion, and achieving survival externally through broader and still broader communities in the world at large. In these purposes " there hath not failed one word of all his good
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