BORING BUT DANGEROUS
Mark Steyn on Tony Blair's
disastrous project to turn the United Kingdom into Canada
Quebec A FEW years back, a writer at one of Lon- don's glossy monthlies called up and said she'd like to interview me for a big spread they were doing called '20 Canadians Who Aren't Boring'. I've been damned with faint praise before, but it doesn't come much fainter than that. Still, I'm a genial fellow, so I said, 'By all means, come on round.' A week later, she called to cancel the appointment: the editor had decided that even a feature on non-boring Canadi- ans was somehow intrinsically boring.
I wouldn't necessarily disagree with her judgment, to be honest. The boringness of the frozen north has been a standard British joke for decades: one recalls an early Monty Python episode discussing the crucial ques- tion, 'Whither Canada?' So it gives me some satisfaction to report that, after two and a half years, it's pretty clear what Tony Blair's exciting 'New Britain' boils down to in practice: boring old Canada. The answer to the question 'Whither Canada?' would seem to be: straight across the Atlantic to open a branch office in the North Sea. Cool Britannia, it turns out, is cool in the sense that Yellowknife in February is.
If you guys weren't so busy doing the languid ennui routine on Canada, you might have seen it coming. There is, after all, something quintessentially Canadian in Tony Blair's suffocatingly smug niceness. That said, one assumes that he is remod- elling the mother country along the lines of its forgotten dominion mostly uncon- sciously. Every one of his constitutional reforms is Canadian in character, which surely no one would do deliberately, given that Canada is one of the great constitu- tional swamps of the Western world. Yet New Labour's new House of Lords is, to all intents and purposes, a Canadian Sen- ate, an all-appointed body of cronies and has-beens, which Canadians have been try- ing to get rid of for 130 years. Of course, Mr Blair assures us that the immediate post-hereditary House is a mere staging post to a fully reformed body. But Britons will find that, once an ineffective legisla- ture of pliant deadbeats is up and running, the political establishment finds it hard to muster the will to overhaul it. Still, it's one thing to have been lumbered with a Canadian Senate since 1867, quite another to set out to create one from scratch in 1999. Again, Mr Blair's reasoning is banally Canadian: if you were starting out today, the argument runs, you'd never cre- ate a legislative body that you get into by accident of birth. But that's the point: you're not starting out today, you already have it — and blessed is the society whose institutions have been around long enough to become quaintly anachronistic. Most of the rest of the world should be so lucky. But then resentment of your own past is also quintessentially Canadian: everything has to be remade, eternally young, eternally new. `We are such a young country,' as our immi- gration minister Lucienne Robillard likes to say every Canada Day. Come again? Cabot got here 500 years ago, we've enjoyed half a century of constitutional evolution, and the tradition that we're heirs to goes back even further: we're a very old country. But in Mme Robillard's official federal orthodoxy it's always Year Zero — new flag, new anthem, new constitution, new oath of alle- giance, everything's always up for grabs. Our obsession with novelty has so infected every area of public life that our institutions' longevity is now their principal offence.
`When I see pageantry in Britain,' Tony Blair told Time, 'I think that's great, but it doesn't define what Britain is today.' No, indeed: what defines Britain today is the soft-rock version of 'God Save the Queen' that he inflicted on Her Majesty at that Euro-summit. When Blair-friendly think- A fig leafs fine but trousers are unacceptable.' tanks propose replacing the union flag with some designer logo, they're, consciously or not, searching for a British maple leaf.
But the Canadian-ness of the Blair pro- ject is at its most explicit in his new Celtic parliaments. I happen to be in favour of a federal UK. But it's telling that, in search- ing for a model, Labour disdained the most successful and stable federation in the world, the United States. Across two cen- turies, a yellowing parchment designed to bind a baker's dozen of English colonies has been successfully and uniformly applied across a continent and beyond, to the Arctic Circle and the South Pacific. But the British government preferred a Canadi- an concept, 'asymmetrical federalism', whereby privileges are accorded to differ- ent territories and groups. In the IRA's case, that extends to the right to murder Catholics — something one relaxed North- ern Ireland Office official calls a matter of `internal housekeeping', the sort of pater- nalistic respect for 'cultural differences' familiar to those of us who've watched how the laws of Canada have gradually ceased to apply to native peoples.
In its less bloody sense, 'asymmetrical fed- eralism' means that for the first time in its history the four constituent parts of the United Kingdom have quite separate forms of representative government: Scotland has a parliament with limited powers, Wales has a meaningless Assembly, England has zip, and Northern Ireland is allowed to have its own privileged relations with foreign gov- ernments (the Irish Republic) in the same way that Quebec has (with France). The general consensus is that the new Blairised UK — all exceptions and no rule — has gone smoothly so far, especially with the election results in Scotland. But, in fact, Scottish politics are now identical to Que- bec's. Both jurisdictions operate two-part)' systems — one party is avowedly separatist (the Patti Quebecois, the Scottish National Party), the other ostensibly federalist (the Quebec Liberal Party, the Scottish Labour Party). In reality, the difference is only one of degree: the PQ and the SNP would secede tomorrow, the Quebec Liberals and Scottish Labour would rather secede one policy at a time. Just as in Quebec, the so- called federalist party can only win by pla- cating the 'soft nationalists' so that they don't go flouncing off to the other guys. `Soft nationalists' seem more reasonable than the hatchet-faced hardliners, but they're actually more destabilising to the body politic. In Canada, they've perfected an unending dance I call the Quebec Hokey-Cokey: sometimes they're in, some- times they're out, but mostly they just want to shake it all about, demanding to be bought off with a concession here, another concession there. Thus Quebec now has its own immigration policy: a British subject who wants to live in Vancouver or Toronto will have his application processed by the Federal government but, if he wants to live in Montreal, Ottawa no longer has any say in the matter. Inevitably, each of the three Celtic quasi-nations will wind up setting precedents and providing incentives for the others; and, if you provide structures that enable a region to pretend to be a nation state, eventually it starts to become one. The monarchy will be the first victim. After the opening of the Scottish parlia- ment, it was generally agreed that the Queen had played a difficult hand extreme- ly well. But then she flies back to London and her Crown is left in the hands of the guys on the ground. We're told that Alex Salmond's views on the monarchy are more cautious than those of his openly republican subordinates. That, too, has a familiar ring: at the time of the 1995 Quebec referendum, the separatists were led by Jacques Parizeau, a London-educated Quebecker whose French is peppered with quaint Britishisms — 'By Jove!', etc. — and who has an undoubted fondness for his sovereign. But the reality is that most of his party see no point to the Queen: at the annual opening of Parliament they refuse to let her Viceroy, Quebec's Lieutenant-Gov- ernor, read the Speech from the Throne the sort of petty slight routinely inflicted on the Queen by her chippier ministers. Simi- larly, most of those elected to the Scottish parliament are either openly contemptuous or at best boorishly indifferent to Her Majesty.
As in Quebec, no one will propose abol- ishing the monarchy tomorrow. Instead, it will suffer death by a thousand cuts: the Queen's Celtic ministries will drop the Crown and other royal emblems until bit by bit the monarchy's public face disappears. When we think of what it means to become an independent country, we picture July the Fourth, an Independence Day, when a new nation steps forward and declares itself to the world. But there are other ways to become a country: Canada never had a Fourth of July, it just sorta evolved across the decades — from responsible govern- ment in 1867 to its creation of Canadian cit- izenship in 1947. Quebec and Scotland have taken their first steps down the same road. One day an unpopular government at West- minster will provoke the election of a hos- tile legislature in Edinburgh or Cardiff, determined to exercise its powers to the limit and shrewd enough to use its Toytown parliament as a launch-pad to the real thing.
But perhaps the most obviously Canadian comparison is the role the so-called majori- ty is required to play: England is being asked to placate Scots, Welsh and Irish nationalism by sublimating its own. In the same way, English Canada has been told for decades that if it only gives up this or that symbol — the Red Ensign, the Crown on the Canadian post-boxes — Quebec will finally be reconciled to Confederation. Pre- dictably enough, it hasn't happened. Que- beckers who were grudgingly respectful of God Save the Queen' in the 1950s cheerful- ly despise '0 Canada' in the 1990s. And who can blame them? Why would Quebec trust English Canada to protect French cul- ture when it lacked even the will to protect its own? Instead, the entire political debate winds up being conducted by one side: the majority is expected not only to cede more powers to ambitious Quebec nationalists in Quebec City but also to defer to ambitious Quebec federalists in Ottawa. From Pierre Trudeau and Rene Levesque in the 1970s to Jean Chretien and Lucien Bouchard today, both sides of the debate are represented by Quebeckers. The English are already being asked to sign up to the same arrangement: give the Scots their own parliament, but at the same time put up with their continuing over-representation and undue prominence in London. Given the already dispropor- tionate per capita spending on the Celts, Westminster will mostly (as Ottawa does with Quebec) be subsidising its own eclipse.
Sir Wilfred Laurier, one of our early prime ministers, declared confidently that the 20th century would belong to Canada — an assertion which has most of us weep- ing with laughter. But, looking at the world's two great English-speaking powers, you couldn't say that what we've tradition- ally understood as British or American val- ues are in a healthy state. The English common-law tradition — of a society ordered on the basis of precedent and unwritten conventions — is under sus- tained assault. The American tradition 'we the people', in our towns and counties and states, governing ourselves by our laws — is slowly being eaten away by the Feder- al government and the courts.
But Canadian values are rampant. Go back to the 1970s when the country first started codifying its dominant philosophy with government ministries for 'multicul- turalism' and women, and a formal dissen- sion with the American dream: 'We're not a melting pot, we're a mosaic.' In the last six years, those ideas — all at odds with the basic American principle of E pluribus unum — have found a new home in the Clintonised republic. Canada doesn't seem to have been influenced in the least by things that Americans take for granted, such as capitalism or non-confiscatory tax- ation. Instead, when it comes to the big ideas, the traffic's all one way. All Ameri- ca's most lethal viruses started north of the 49th parallel, and in Tony Blair they now have a British champion, too.
One wouldn't mind if Canada — how shall we put this? — worked. But it doesn't: it's a country that, constitutionally, is in a very unhealthy condition. Yet, for all its Blairite makeover, New Labour shares the reflexive anti-Americanism of its Neanderthal predecessor: it would rather take up failed Canadian ideas than proven American ones. There's an opening here for the Tories if they had the wit to see it: if Britain is going to copy North American federalism, it might as well mimic the successful model. But, as things stand, boring old Canada is on the verge of boring Britain into the ground.
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