Canada is big.
I know I have said this before. In fact, I say it every time I teach my Canadian politics class. It's the first thing I say to students when they come into my classroom on the first day. I always expect a number of the students to go and ask for a tuition refund saying, "I just paid x amount of the dollars for a supposedly learned scholar to tell me 'Canada is big.' I want my money back!"
So far, at least as far as I know, this hasn't happened yet.
You see I use this theme to help explain the complexity of Canadian politics and the Canadian political system.
I was thinking about this today because, as I write this, I am in Ottawa. I was out this morning walking and marveling at this beautiful city. As a political scientist it is hard not to notice how "federal" everything feels.
Our capital city represents the heart of the federal system. Obviously the most striking representation of the federal government is the Parliament buildings.
Their very British look reminds us of our constitutional promise that we will have a "Constitution similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom" which is true except for one important exception and that is our federal system.
Canada structured its politics to recognize and respect the unique political cultures that existed at 1867 and have developed as the country grew in size.
In a review of a the well-known book on Canadian federalism by Samuel L. Selva, John D. Whyte writes: "Goals like stability and dynamism are not easily made compatible. But Canada, like most nation states, is an expression of the hope that conflicting historical forces, and conflicting conceptions of the future can be mediated - can be held in a peaceful and constructive tension.
Under this notion of Canadian Confederation, the goal was not to render history obsolete, nor to reach a definitive resolution of Canada's conflicting goals but rather to reach the virtues of stability and dynamism that would forestall the need for further revolution - the need for the disruption of tyranny and oppression or of civil war and secession."
So Canada adopted a federal system in which each province would have a provincial government responsible for areas of jurisdiction that seemed "local" and, in some instances, fairly unimportant in 1867 like municipal government, education and health care.
In Ottawa the federal government feels very present. Beyond the Parliament buildings there are buildings on every street corner with the federal government symbol and the name of another branch like the Justice Building and the Supreme Court.
As I walked through the city I was thinking about how far northern B.C. is from the capital. I grew up in Ontario so I never really understood the idea of western alienation until I moved to Prince George and found a political culture much more steeped in
provincial identity. Since I have lived in Prince George now for almost 20 years, I have also noticed a much more local identity and although we are not very good at municipal voter turnout I see a strong connection to local and regional politics.
As the Canadian scholar Samuel L. Selva once wrote, the Canadian compromise "presupposed the existence of multiple identities and allegiances, the solution for complex institutional problems, and a sense of fairness throughout the county."
I always remind my students that those compromises were built on promises and proclamations that came before Canada existed. The Quebec Act of 1774 and the Royal Proclamation of 1763 recognized the diversity of peoples who already lived in the territory that Britain would come to "claim."
The French had an established system of law and religion and the Aboriginal Peoples lived on the land that both the French and the English were attempting to colonize.
The Royal Proclamation still holds legal standing and while Canadian history reveals a terrible legacy in terms of relations with First Nations peoples, our constitutional principles and the moral basis upon which the country was built still hold that our federalism is meant to work on the basis of a "sense of fairness."
So when the Prince George city council voted to change the name of Fort George Park to the Lheidli T'enneh Memorial Park, I cheered.
I know that some people find the change difficult but this is the right thing to do.
