by Doug Munro
90 Cook, ‘Introduction’, Watching Quebec, x.
91 Author’s interview with Ramsay Cook, 14 July 2014.
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internationalism. Besides, he was a kid from the prairies with, in his words,
‘an instinctive suspicion that what passed as nation-building in Ontario’
was really ‘industrial tariff protection’ to be paid for by the western farmer
in the form of more expensive farm machinery.92 As part of his courses
with Rose, Cook read Johann Gottfried Herder, the eighteenth-century
German philosopher and intellectual father of nationalism, who insisted
that the nation consisted of a people, or volk, with a shared ethnicity and
language, and, in turn, that the nation was the natural basis of the state.
Reading Herder against the backdrop of ‘the Second World War and the
destruction of most of Europe’s Jews’, and reading him on the prairies that
did not have, and never would have, a shared ethnicity, Cook, frankly,
‘disliked him’.93 Still, Rose taught him that nationalism was a force in
history that could be its own field of study.
Encouraged by his professors, especially by Ken McNaught who recognised
something pretty special in him, Cook decided to pursue graduate work,
either at Toronto or Queen’s.94 Toronto had a bigger program, but Queen’s
offered a bigger scholarship. And he now thought that he might like to
work in Ottawa, in the Department of External Affairs, where the action
was and where the bright and ambitious set their sights. Cook was both,
but his ambition was not crass and he was not a young man on the make.
Money, status and rank did not matter to him. Ideas did, and he was
increasingly drawn to a life of the mind. He had found in history a new
language that could be a moral language because it included questions
of right and wrong, making it, he said many years later, ‘an essential
component of a developing moral imagination’.95 History compels the
writer to enter the lives of real people and to see them as men and women
struggling, striving, succeeding, failing, doing good things and sometimes
doing very bad things. In short, it compels the writer to walk a mile in
someone else’s shoes, which is the essence of a moral imagination.
92 Cook, ‘Who Broadened Canadian History?’
93 Cook, ‘Introduction’, Watching Quebec, x. Guy Laforest believes that Cook misread Herder and was too quick to dismiss nationalism, believing that ‘une autre lecture, plus nuancée, de la pensée herdérienne et de la nature du nationalisme dans le monde contemporain’ is possible. Of course, Laforest has never agreed with Cook. See Guy Laforest, ‘Herder, Kedourie et les errements de
l’antinationalisme du Canada’, in Raymond Hudon and Réjean Pelletier, eds, L’engagement intellectuel: Mélanges en honneur de Léon Dion (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1991).
94 In his memoirs, Ken McNaught fondly remembered Ramsay Cook as a bright student who
‘let me get away with nothing’. McNaught, Conscience and History, 85.
95 Ramsay Cook, ‘Identities Are Not Like Hats’, Canadian Historical Review, 81:2 (2000), 260.
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Understood as a moral discipline, history was replacing religion in Cook’s
life. Attending Sunday school, singing in the church choir, listening to his
father’s sermons and watching his mother leave the house to attend yet
another meeting of the Women’s Association, the Women’s Missionary
Society or Canadian Girls in Training gave him an ethical and moral
compass, a sense of obligation and service. As the son of a United Church
minister and a United Church minister’s wife, he had learnt right from
wrong in his childhood and adolescence, but now in his early 20s, he
felt his faith recede to the point where he became an agnostic. Neither
epiphanic nor sudden, it was a process with no clear beginning and no
clear ending. He did not, like Michael Bliss, one day take a shower, decide
that God was a ‘superstitious invention’, and watch his faith go down the
drain.96 At some point, though, he decided that the answers to questions
of equality and inequality, tolerance and intolerance, nationalism,
patriotism, self-determination, identity and minority rights, would be
found in the archives, not in the Sermon on the Mount, while answers to
questions of life and death would be found not in the Psalms of David but
in the poetry of T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats, and in Who Has Seen the Wind,
ultimately a novel about the unalterable mystery of death.97
V
Canada is a supreme act of faith.
— Arthur Lower
Every generation had to work out Canada’s reason for being, according
to Arthur Lower. For him, that reason was a nation independent of Great
Britain, separate from the United States, neither English nor French, but
united by history and geography, by the shared historical experience of
living on the northern half of North America. ‘You can call it nonsense’,
he wrote, ‘you can call it what you will’, but nationalism gives ‘form and
substance to the vague and formless’: ‘I have faith that we will win through,
96 Ramsay Cook, email to author, 15 May 2015. Michael Bliss had been studying for the ministry and even had a mission field in the Northwest Territories, but during a long shower in the fall of 1961, he became a lifelong sceptic. See Michael Bliss, Writing History: A Professor’s Life (Toronto: Dundurn, 2011), 94.
97 See Ramsay Cook, ‘Donald Creighton: Tribute to a Scholar’, University of Toronto Bulletin, 25 February 1980; and Cook, The Teeth of Time.
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that Canada is not a mere name’ on some world map.98 Lower could have
never guessed that the ‘brilliant young man’ with the mop of red hair who
had come from Manitoba to work with him in the fall of 1954 would call
it nonsense and, within five or six years, emerge as one of the key figures
in the articulation and defence of a new reason for being.99 And Ramsay
Cook could not have known that the formidable figure who had agreed
to supervise his MA thesis would introduce him to a subject that, 60 years
later, still fascinates him.
Lower co-taught a seminar on French Canada. From behind stacks of
paper, he emphasised French-Canadian culture while Fred Gibson, who
never knew when to stop, covered French-Canadian politics. Cook loved
it. Ken McNaught had made Canada interesting, but here was a part
of the country that Cook barely knew existed and that was on the cusp
of something revolutionary. Quebec’s traditional, defensive and Catholic
nationalists were being challenged by a new generation of neo-nationalists
who talked about a modern, bureaucratic, secular Quebec that was master
in its own house. It was a lively seminar: Lower, who had the ‘hide of an
elephant’, lived for the fight and expected his students to challenge the
generalisations that he lobbed into a seminar for effect; and Gibson, who
knew everything there was to know about national politics from having
worked in Ottawa at what was then the Public Archives and as an assistant
to Mackenzie King in the sorting of his papers, was a ‘very demanding
teacher’.100 He
was also a fun teacher because he knew where the bodies
were buried and how to tell a good story. Later, Gibson hired Cook as
a research assistant for a project on the 1909 to 1911 naval debate, which
had broken along linguistic lines, pitting English-speaking Canadians
who believed Canada had a duty to the mother country against French-
speaking Canadians who foresaw Canada being dragged into Britain’s wars.
In short, the naval debate was the clash of two nationalisms.101 The seed
had been sown and Cook was nearing one of the key insights of his career:
Canada’s problem was not too little nationalism, it was too much.
98 Arthur Lower, Diary, 23 February 1964, Queen’s University Archives, Arthur Lower fonds,
5072, box 57, E75.
99 Arthur Lower, My First Seventy-Five Years (Toronto: Macmillan, 1967), 324. On Cook as a public intellectual, see Patrice A. Dutil, ‘Ramsay Cook’s Quest for an Intellectual “Phoenix,” 1960–
1968’, in Behiels and Martel, Nation, Ideas, Identities.
100 Author’s interview with Ramsay Cook, 14 July 2014.
101 See Brown and Cook, Canada, 1896–1921, ch. 13 ‘The Clash of Nationalisms’.
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That seminar and that research taught him something else: French
Canadians were not ‘one minority among many’ and they could claim
rights that, for example, Ukrainian Canadians could not. The Ukrainians
had become Canadians by choice; the French had become Canadians by
conquest.102 Equality, he realised, was not sameness and equal treatment
was not the same treatment. And if groups could be treated equally and
differently, then French language and education rights were compatible
with equality, not contradictory. John Diefenbaker’s unhyphenated
Canadian could never include French Canadians, especially French
Canadians outside of Quebec, because the hyphen was all that stood
between them and assimilation. At Lower’s urging, Cook became
a faithful reader of Le Devoir, Quebec’s newspaper of record edited by
the neo-nationalist André Laurendeau. Then a classmate introduced him
to Cité Libre, a small, left-liberal, anti-clerical, pro-labour journal edited
by an up-and-coming intellectual named Pierre Trudeau. Laurendeau
and Le Devoir; Trudeau and Cité Libre; neo-nationalists on the one hand,
Citélibristes on the other: although he did not fully appreciate it, Cook
had a front row seat at the prelude to the Quiet Revolution. ‘My interest
in Quebec was born at Queen’s’, he now says.103
Cook shared something else with his thesis supervisor: a commitment
to liberalism and a concern for what had happened during the Second
World War when 21,000 Japanese Canadians were interned and basic
civil liberties were mocked by a security state. Because Lower had been
a founding member and first chair of the Civil Liberties Association of
Winnipeg in the 1940s, he was able to give Cook access to his personal
papers and put him in touch with F.R. Scott, the McGill law professor and
longtime champion of civil liberties in a province plagued by a reactionary
and corrupt government, and with Andrew Brewin, the Toronto lawyer
who had led the legal fight against the planned deportation of Japanese
Canadians after the war.104 A ‘taskmaster’, Lower also instructed Cook to
look for the forest and not just the trees, to look beyond the minutes of
meetings, press reports and parliamentary debates by reading widely in
102 Cook, ‘Introduction’, Watching Quebec, x–xi.
103 Author’s interview with Ramsay Cook, 14 July 2014. See Michael Behiels, Prelude to the Quiet Revolution: Liberalism vs Neo-Nationalism, 1945–1960 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985).
104 For the history of civil liberties in Canada, see Christopher MacLennan, Toward the Charter: Canadians and the Demand for a National Bill of Rights, 1929–1960 (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003) and Dominique Clément, Canada’s Rights Revolution: Social Movements and Social Change, 1937–1982 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008).
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the history of liberal thought. Using the Douglas Library’s card catalogue,
Cook went into the stacks where he read the Magna Carta’s promise ‘that
there exists a rule of law and that everyone, including the King, must be
governed by it’; he studied the seventeenth-century’s vindication of liberty
in the Habeas Corpus Act and the Bill of Rights; and he read A.V. Dicey’s
insistence that freedom was dependent on parliamentary sovereignty, an
independent judiciary and the rule of law.105
However, one book shone above the others, as if it cast a great light. Lord
Acton’s History of Freedom and Other Essays confirmed Cook’s experience
growing up on Clifford Sifton’s prairies and now his experience studying
French Canada. The schools in Raymore, Wynyard, Brandon and Morden,
the lectures, seminars and bull sessions at United College, the coffee
and cigarettes at Tony’s, and the debates over Canada and the French-
Canadian question at Queen’s came together in a moment of clarity.
A nation founded on ‘race’, Acton said, is a nation founded on ‘a fictitious
unity’; the idea that the ‘State and nation must be co-extensive’ is a lie; and
the ‘divided patriotism’ stemming from ‘the presence of different nations
under the same sovereignty’ is not a bad thing, it is a good thing because
it resists ‘centralisation’, ‘corruption’ and ‘absolutism’: ‘The co-existence
of several nations under the same State is a test, as well as the best security,
of its freedom.’106 ‘On first reading Acton, I thought of Canada’, Cook
said many years later.107
Opening with a nod to Lord Acton, ‘Canadian Liberalism in Wartime’
argues that Canadian liberalism had been encouraged by the presence of
two main cultures, although it still remains vulnerable to governments in
both wartime and peacetime: the War Measures Act in the First World
War was an obvious example, as were the amendments to the Immigration
Act and the Criminal Code to deal with the Winnipeg General Strike.
The Second World War again saw the federal government use the War
Measures Act and the Defence of Canada Regulations to intimidate,
105 Ramsay Cook, ‘Canadian Liberalism in Wartime: A Study of the Defence of Canada Regulations and Some Canadian Attitudes to Civil Liberties in Wartime, 1939–1945’ (MA thesis, Queen’s
University, 1955), iii, 11. Nineteen years later, he published a version of his thesis in a festschrift to his supervisor and friend. See Ramsay Cook, ‘Canadian Freedom in Wartime, 1939–1945’, in W.H.
Heick and Roger Graham, eds, His Own Man: Essays in Honour of Arthur Reginald Marsden Lower (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974).
106 Lord Acton, ‘On Nationality’, in John E.E. Dalberg Acton, The History of Freedom and Other Essays (New York: Cosimo, 2007), 288, 285, 289, 290.
107 Cook, The Teeth of Time, 12. Another Manitoba historian, W.L. Morton, also found Lord Acton’s insights helpful to understanding Canada. See Morton, ‘Clio in Canada’.
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silence, jail and, in the case of the Japanese, intern. The removal of the
Japane
se Canadians from their homes and the disposal of their property at
fire sale prices was, Cook wrote, a ‘flagrant abuse’ made possible by years
of ‘strong prejudice’, wartime hysteria and the government’s assumption
of ‘arbitrary powers’. The internment confirmed the dictum, he wrote,
that ‘once a government is allowed to assume extraordinary powers it
will use them’. While there were important voices of dissent in the press,
parliament, organised labour and civil liberties associations, why were they
so few in number? Why were such ‘illiberal security regulations’ met with
such ‘silence’? Because, he concluded, Canada did not have an eighteenth
century, meaning Canadian liberalism had been inherited, not won. Later,
in the last third of the nineteenth century and opening decade of the
twentieth century, railways and tariffs were the great national questions.
‘With tangible economic questions rather than abstract constitutional
points the main concern of Canadians, our Burkes and Foxes have been
Galts and Siftons.’108
An impressive piece of research and writing for a 23-year-old graduate
student, ‘Canadian Liberalism in Wartime’ is also moving: Cook’s
childhood friend, the little boy who had taught him how to fish, would
have been interned along with his family, their property seized and
effectively given away. Of the ‘several blots’ left on Canadian liberalism
by ‘wartime security regulations’, the ‘case of Japanese Canadians’ is ‘the
blackest’. Perhaps this explains his anger, restrained and academic, but
present between the lines. Once conceived as a moral discipline, historians
must be prepared ‘to pass judgment’, Cook argued, sounding not unlike
his parents. The apple had not fallen all that far from the tree after all.
Cook’s judgement of a government that allowed internal security to
trump civil liberties and of Canadians that failed to stop that government
and its technocrats, that had allowed liberalism to become ‘chamber of
commerce oratory’, was quick and unambiguous.109 And on that note, he
closed his thesis in the same way that he had opened it, with a nod to Lord
Acton: ‘Liberty is not a means to a political end. It is itself the highest
political end.’110