I wrote and self-published a book, There Is No Difference, an argument based on the Enlightenment principle of equality under the law- an argument that is seemingly and strangely forbidden entry into the Canadian marketplace of ideas- for the repeal of all laws underlying the existence of Indian reserves and all other special rights and privileges possessed by Canada’s Aboriginal peoples, and for the completion of what I regard as the already well under way process of the social and economic assimilation of Canadian Aboriginals into the mainstream of modern, urban, 21st century Canada.
It’s a difficult argument to make in the sense that it advocates a goal that is completely contrary to the stated goals, beliefs and policies of the entirety of Canada’s political, legal, academic and media elites, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal. All the existing laws are against my quixotic, political non-starter of an argument. It swims against every current there is.
Over the eight years of spare time writing I took to write the book- a solitary and daunting project for a practising, small city lawyer- I found a lot of inspiration, support and guidance from reading good literary and historical works, which litter my book. As I wrote there:
Great literature-and the thoughts and emotions within it-timelessly reflects life as humans have always lived it. It will always inform, guide and comfort us. It will always make us think better- more critically-and on present day issues and on life generally, help us make better judgments. We are foolish not to look to it for partial answers to today’s political, philosophical and social problems.
An example of this are three intellectually thrilling and hugely absorbing novels of the 19th century English novelist Anthony Trollope- Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux and The Prime Minister– the general subject matter of which is the political and social goings-on of the English upper classes being beginning to be nipped at the heels by the rising, reform-demanding middle class. These amazing novels reveal the real timeless stuff of personal and social life as we all experience it, and of political life as those with the knack for it surely experience it. They are so worth reading- so worth waging and winning the fight against the trivial and enervating distractions of cable news and the IPhone.
Below are some ways in which these novels interacted in my mind with experiential aspects of There Is No Difference and the good but seemingly unwinnable arguments it makes.
The era of identity politics began about 1968, when I was twenty, with the anointment of Pierre Trudeau as Prime Minister, an era when people began to politically identify less with the civic whole of Canada and more with their racial, ethnic, sexual or similar formerly politically irrelevant subgroup. It’s been nonstop in this regard ever since. For forty years I thought a lot about this trend, looking in vain for any redeeming feature of it, finding little. Finally, when this trend metastasized to the point that one of these subgroups- Indigenous people- started claiming- to general elite acclaim- that they were so special that in many ways they weren’t even a fully legal part of the country, I was moved to speak out in the form of writing my book.
In doing so I was able to be confident that, right or wrong, my thoughts, having been chewed over for so long, were solidly my own. Anthony Trollope assured me that I had met the basic criteria for writing and publishing an authentic, considered dissent against the status quo. As one of his characters says in Phineas Finn:
On such subjects men must think long, and be sure they have thought in earnest, before they are justified in saying that their opinions are the results of their own thoughts.
For me one of the cardinal failings of this fundamentally personally selfish era we are still living in is a rejection of the traditions, sensibilities and political incrementalism of the past, a major theme of There Is No Difference. This fairly makes me a “conservative”, or, more to my liking, a nineteenth century liberal. It was Trollope’s novels that clarified this for me and provided my political soul with a home.
Trollope writes about “great (political) measures.” The “great measures” that our ruling classes have subjected us to since 1968- the “Just Society”, the Charter of Rights, (the latter a complete rejection of our hitherto well-serving British tradition of parliamentary supremacy in favour of the undemocratic American system of law making by Court decree), section 35 of the Constitution Act and companion Court decrees like the Haida Nation decision, (which effectively amended our constitution to make Indigenous groups a de facto third order of constitutional sovereignty)- have not produced the New Jerusalem that their adherents promised. Rather, the country is more divided and demoralized than ever. In my opinion, by so rejecting our past with all these radical “great measures” our leaders have failed us. As Trollope has one of his characters say in The Prime Minister:
A Prime Minister is of all men bound to follow the traditions of his country, or when he leaves them, to leave them with very gradual steps… I have never been a friend of great measures, knowing that when they come fast, one after another, more is broken in the rattle than is repaired by the reform.
Definitely, as I argue in my book, more is broken for our Indigenous peoples now than before this present norm-smashing, utopia-thinking, selfish “great measures” era began.
I found aid and comfort in Trollope’s sanguine, long-game, gradualist approach to meaningful, progressive political change, the over-arching purpose of which, as the Duke of Omnium, one of the protagonists in The Prime Minister says, is “the idea of lessening distances” between people, meaning social, economic and political distances, but with no hope or expectation of eliminating them, where the impetus for change comes, as Trollope says in Phineas Redux:
“…after that slow, silent, inargumentative fashion in which convictions force themselves upon us.”
(In Trollope’s case, charmingly by our standards, the distances the Duke was talking about lessening in that particular conversation were those between himself and his coachman!)
But how can we hope to lessen distances between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians when our elite classes are doing everything in their power to increase them?
Keep calm and stay the course, Trollope in effect says. First just get people talking about what you advocate. That means trying to make the subject something that people are allowed to talk about, which is presently not the case with regard to the Enlightenment message of There Is No Difference. That’s about all you can do, he says. Circumstances and human agency will move your dreams forward when they will.
That was my stated goal for There Is No Difference when I set out to write it, and I was heartened to see that reflected and confirmed by Trollope in Phineas Finn,where the following dialogue between young Phineas Finn and his world-wise political leader, Mr. Monk, after the latter’s progressive “tenant-right” bill was rejected in a quick huff by the aristocrat-controlled Parliament:
“And now,” said Mr. Monk, as he again walked home with Phineas, “the pity is that we are not a bit nearer to tenant-right than we were before.”
“But we are nearer to it.”
“In one sense, yes. Such a debate and such a majority will make men think. But no;- think is too high a word; as a rule men don’t think. But it will make them believe that there is something to it. Many who before regarded legislation on the subject as chimerical, will now fancy that it is only dangerous, or perhaps not more than difficult. And so in time it will come to be looked on as among the things possible, then among the things probable; and so at last it will be ranged in the list of those few measures which the country requires as being absolutely needed. That is the way in which public opinion is made.”
“It is no loss of time”, said Phineas, “to have taken the first great step in making it.”
“The first great step was taken long ago”, said Mr. Monk,-“taken by men who were looked upon as revolutionary demagogues, almost as traitors, because they took it. But it is a great step to take any step that leads us onwards.”
Or, as Phineas Finn says in The Prime Minister regarding some other then ill-fated progressive measure:
“We shall have made a step towards the step.”
Pierre Trudeau’s 1969 White Paper was the first step towards the step toward Aboriginal equality. But he wrongly stepped back when his toes got so harshly ground upon on by the boots of the then-ascending Indian Industry. My book is another, much smaller step. As a provincial without influence, the Indian Industry can afford to just ignore me. (But just in case all my shoes have steel toes.) In any event, the steps have been taken. This fundamental “chimerical” idea of absolute equality under the law between Canadian Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals- of needing to end the socially ruinous, apartheid-like reserve system- is out there, ready to be picked up by some morally courageous person of influence and moved by him or her through Trollope’s successive stages of political danger, difficulty, possibility, probability and finally inevitability- the same stages that the banning of slavery, universal suffrage, the vote for women, the legalization of labour unions and gay marriage went through, to name a few examples of this beneficent process.
This raises the final important political insight I gained from reading Anthony Trollope. It’s not enough for the just and righteousideas- the measures- of the White Paper or There Is No Difference to be out there. They have to be taken up by influential and courageous men and women and righteously marched into political action. As Trollope says in Phineas Redux:
“Men and not measures are, no doubt, the very life of politics.”
Canada has the measures. That’s the easy part. But given the circumstances of an entrenched Indian Industry supported by billions of dollars of various expenditures- of a status quo generally that is so entrenched that it is either oblivious or indifferent to the permanent, grievous harm it is causing to those it is purportedly serves- Canada needs powerful, courageous men and women to press for the carrying out of those measures. For, as written in the Introduction to Phineas Redux: “Power shapes policy more surely than political ideology.”
Michael Ignatieff, in the March 2015 issue of The Atlantic wrote an article about Vaclav Havel, The Hero Europe Needed. In it he wrote, aptly to Canada’s Indigenous situation, as follows:
Heroism is essential to politics. We live for an hour when a politician stands up in the dusty arena and we recognize, with astonishment, that here is a person ready to take risks, tell us what we don’t want to hear, face possible defeat for a principle, tackle insuperable odds, and by doing so, show us that politics need not be just the art of the possible…Heroism is in fact a social virtue, nurtured by loyalties to people you know you must defend if you are to live with yourself afterward.
Tragically, no present-day Canadian leader comes to mind when we read Mr. Ignatieff’s words. We see no prominent, influential Canadian from any walk of life who would, as Mr. Ignatieff wrote, “press for a world in which his own power would be inexorably lessened.”
So reform-minded Canadians, as Trollope would urge, should continue with their small efforts in this regard, but with little expectation of them having any near-term effect, while resignedly waiting for a change of circumstances and the arrival of leaders with the courage and capacity to “live in truth, outside the propaganda bubble”, (Ignatieff), who would start to engage the next stage of Trollope’s gradual processes of fundamental reform. Certainly, the vast majority of vulnerable, powerless, dependent Indigenous Canadians live in desperate need of such persons.
And, as a Trollope character says somewhere, until “the time is ripe” for that, (probably not in this writer’s lifetime,) the fundamental anti-Enlightenment betrayal of Canada’s Indigenous peoples by our country’s Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal elites continues at accelerating pace.
Peter Best
Sudbury
February 7, 2021
