The Hand of God: Claude Ryan and the Fate of Canadian Liberalism, 1925-1971 by Michael Gauvreau

Author:Michael Gauvreau [Gauvreau, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780773551299
Google: cEczDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0773551298
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T01:04:16.595000+00:00

9

“We Choose the Canadian Hypothesis”

Defining the Ethics of Federalism, 1964

Those who have never lived this ideal are now compelled to grope towards its achievement. Those who have known it and experienced it, even in an imperfect way, have the duty to renew it and adapt it, not to demolish it.

Claude Ryan, “Plaidoyer pour un fédéralisme

économique canadien” (1964)

Two weeks after his unexpected rise to the directorship of Le Devoir, Claude Ryan devoted an editorial to a manifesto written by a new group of Montreal intellectuals. Manifestoes were a proliferating genre in a society where the word “liberation” – national, social, and personal – had taken on a talismanic quality, but this particular one caught his eye, both for the “austere” quality of the text, which avoided the usual rhetorical flights, and for its insistence on “examining real problems,” a goal that placed it within a North American conceptual framework shaped by the optimistic expectation of the end of ideology. Society’s problems, claimed the authors, would now be solved functionally, in a way that avoided the old ideological straitjackets or nationalist allegiances. In a judicious assessment, Ryan highlighted the central points around which all liberals, that audience of “men of good will,” could rally: the authors unhesitatingly proclaimed that “politics must rest, first and foremost, on the person and not on the race”; second, that “politics must be the work of reason and not of facile sentiment”; and finally, that “the most valuable modern tendencies are oriented towards a humanism that opens on the world, rather than narrowing it within borders.” The tone of the writing, though a little too inflected by “a haughty tone, dominated by a cult of ‘old Roman virtue,’” won his praise for its “almost complete absence of that false dogmatism that for some time now has threatened to poison civic life in Quebec.” Here, for Ryan, was a refreshing alternative to the “deformation of patriotism” of those “speechifiers who do the circuit between the student chapels and separatist coteries” and whose stock-intrade was that French Canadians had nothing in common with Canadians of other cultures, therefore Quebec had to become a separate national state.1 The manifesto, produced by a body styled the Comité pour une politique fonctionnelle (Committee for Realism in Politics), signalled a move to refurbish Pierre Elliott Trudeau, one of the authors, who had been somewhat tarnished since 1962 by his angry rants against nationalist intellectuals and by purges at the journal Cité libre, as a substantive political thinker and pole of attraction in the constellation of francophone intellectuals.2

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