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ELIZABETH TROTT
and as the local school the rest of the week.’? His Queen’s graduates, before
specific locations of worship were built, had to imagine ways to talk about God
and find words to comfort many different religious followers sitting together.
The young teachers/preachers and political servants persisted, knowing
that “Increasingly, a rich system of possible solutions would enable us to
overcome the most obstinate disagreements.”*° Their job was not easy, and
required creative endeavours, not memory work or logic.
Multi-cultures: Can they be
a United Community of Communities?
What happens to the uneasy coalition of cultures should a national focus
emerge as the ‘other’ against which one can differentiate oneself? Resistance
to a central political focus stems from the negative impacts a locus of power
and control can have. Certainly, there have been multiple books (and more
are being written) about the repressive forces of early Canadian political
identity and cultural classes, for example, the frightful English landlords
and the Scottish iron grip on banks, universities and transportation systems.
The treatment of the Indigenous communities stands as a permanent stain
on Canada’s reputation as a collection of nice people. Canadians have been
as nasty as many others.*’ But Canada has also emerged with a national
culture that supports the common good, the needs of survival (health care),
and sustains the apologetic politeness that comedians worldwide find funny.
What happens to a focus on the idea of Canada in a multicultural state?
1 Stephen Leacock, Canadian comedic writer, Professor of political science, and an
acquaintance of Canadian philosopher John Clark Murray at McGill University wrote,
the Rival Churches of St. Asaph and St Osoph, in a collection of his stories Arcadian
Adventures with the Idle Rich, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1989, first published 1914.
The preacher of one church who was also a philosophy professor, concocted “a mixture of
St Paul, with Hegel, three parts to one for his Sunday sermon, and one part to three for his
Monday lecture”, 137.
20 Trott, Early Canadian Political Culture, in Hegel and Canada, 177.
Our first Prime Minister, John Macdonald, a Scot was creative, but not nice. An alcoholic
and a visionary, his mission was to build the CPR to unite the country, and he took down
anything in his way. He imported 17,000 Chinese labourers to help build it in very harsh
conditions with very little pay. Over 600 deaths were documented. No doubt there were
plenty of others. Using cheap Chinese labour was considered normal (“The Ties That
Bind,” Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 2010, https://www.mhso.ca/tiesthatbind/
ChineseRailWorkers.php [accessed 17 July 2020]). Canadians imported over a thousand
more Chinese during the First World War to clean trenches. See also, Dan Black, Harry
Livingstone’s Forgotten Men: Canadians and the Chinese Labour Corp. in the First World
War, Toronto, James Lorimer Ltd., 2019.
* 20 +