Politics, Culture, and Intergroup Relations

English place-names litter the map of Canada, some bestowed by English settlers and others by English or anglophilic explorers and administrators in advance of settlement. Thus, the Yorkshire township names in the Toronto area and Lincolnshire ones in the Niagara peninsula date back to Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe’s largely abortive plan to build a “Little England” in Upper Canada, with its own hereditary aristocracy and its capital at London on the Thames River. As in places with Yorkshire names in western Quebec, such names do not necessarily reflect actual English settlement.

The colonial political system was modelled on British prototypes, but it was designed in pre-Confederation times along more conservative lines than the English one, minimizing the powers of the elective elements of the constitution in order to avoid the democratic excesses that were seen as root causes of the American Revolution. The consequence was a form of government in which appointive offices were the important ones. Power was monopolized in all the colonies by cliques of arch-conservative colonials, supported by coteries of appointed local elites drawn largely from the ranks of emigrant gentry. Responsible government, which at the middle of the nineteenth century shifted the balance of both colonial and local authority towards elected officials, was conceded by a changing Britain more than won by democratically minded colonists, but on the whole Canada’s English political legacy is an autocratic not a democratic one.

Nevertheless, many early-nineteenth-century English immigrants were dissenters in religion and radicals in politics who fled a countryside as disturbed as rural Ireland and later supported the Reform movement of George Brown. Some early trade union activists, such as the Tolpuddle martyrs who settled near London, concealed from descendants the cause of their emigration. Edwardian immigrants included many labour activists, though a strong conservative streak also marked a large segment of the immigrant working class.

The sense of Canada as an English country arose as a result partly of the heavy pre–World War I influx and partly of the spirit of imperial nationalism abroad in that era. Canadian participation in both world wars probably helped, though the wars are usually seen as having been formative of Canadian nationalism and successively less anglophilic Liberal governments led the country into a closer association with the United States, a policy also pursued by the Conservative administration of Brian Mulroney (1984–93).

Things English still had a strong cultural impact in early-twentieth-century Canada, but they struggled and intermingled with American ideas. By the eve of the Great War, some Canadians, including many of English birth, were searching for literary and artistic forms that better expressed a sense of Canadianness. Eden Smith, who came to Canada from Birmingham in 1885, became Toronto’s most prolific and imitated designer of houses and public buildings for Toronto’s upper-middle class. Many of his early houses were conscious adaptations of the English arts and crafts style, and one of his early developments was Wychwood Park, a neighbourhood with “heavily wooded lots . . . arranged romantically around a pond” and named for the Oxfordshire origins of the landowner, English landscape painter Marmaduke Matthews. Smith lived there for a time, a member of a community of artists and academics with English picturesque or pre-Raphaelite associations. Though many of Smith’s houses looked on the outside like English cottages, he exhibited originality in reversing the interior plans to put the kitchen at the front and the living rooms at the rear away from the street. As the Canadian artistic community began to move away from English landscape painting in quest of a distinctively Canadian portrayal of scenes of Canadian relevance, Smith became a founding member of the Arts and Letters Club and designed the Studio Building for the Group of Seven. He was able to move at will between designs that evoked traditional English cultural authority and ones that seemed somehow different and therefore distinctly Canadian, while sometimes, as in his houses, combining the elements.

The popularity of English artistic design in the early twentieth century is reflected in the fact that the Art Gallery of Ontario was able to assemble a representative exhibit of William Morris’s domestic accoutrements in 1993 entirely from surviving Canadian-owned examples. In the realm of architecture, the rural mansions and townhouses of the colonial gentry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had had obvious English prototypes, and early-twentieth-century arrivistes demanded mock-Tudor giants even in new cities such as Calgary. The pre-1914 urban development models were, however, both English and American. The civic grandeur inspired by the American “City Beautiful” movement, with its classical public buildings and grand processional avenues, appealed to the vanity of town fathers from coast to coast during the late 1890s and early 1900s and left some small impress upon the Canadian urban landscape. The competing English model, Ebenezer Howard’s “Garden City” of Letchworth, drew upon industrial England’s idealization of the countryside to merge the best of urban and rural. It attracted those with more social conscience than vanity, but, as with the City Beautiful, the ideals were seldom put into effect before the economic downturn on the eve of the war. One of Howard’s disciples, Thomas Adams, himself a Scot, became town planner for the federal Commission of Conservation and was responsible for the design of the Lindenlea district in Ottawa, the reconstructed north end of Halifax after the 1917 explosion, and several northern resource towns including Témiscaming and Corner Brook (1923). The houses in north Halifax’s Richmond district are reminiscent of Raymond Unwin’s arts and crafts cottages for Howard’s Letchworth in Hertfordshire, though built in an unromantic but virtually indestructible hydrostone concrete. More frequently, the contrary attractions of English and American ideas were debased into mere marketing echoes, as in the Ottawa subdivision of Brantwood where streets were named both for City Beautiful’s godfather Daniel Burnham and for Howard’s Garden City.

In the twentieth century, English cultural influence struggled increasingly with the influence of American mass culture, especially after the advent of radio and television. At a more esoteric level, anglophone-Canadian folk music, of which urban people were largely unaware until the 1950s, is said to be 70 to 80 percent British in origin, though the distinctions among Irish, Scottish, and English are not often made in the literature. Folklorist Edith Fowke has commented that, historically, “strait-laced English and Scotch Protestants, who set their imprint on Ontario’s rural communities, preferred hymns to worldly songs. Fortunately Catholics had no such prejudices.” Yet this oft-echoed comment on the unmusicality of Protestants probably applies more to the Scots than to the English. The record of English Anglicans during the temperance agitation of the late nineteenth century suggests that they were much less strait-laced in that respect than Methodists or Scots Presbyterians. Traditional English ballads have been widely collected but students of this music emphasize the eclecticism and wide currency of the most popular songs, which were often learned in multi-ethnic lumber camps.

Traditional English music has played an important role in the folk revivals of the past forty years, though the ballad tradition has been revived mostly by recent English immigrants and does not enjoy the same popularity as Celtic music and dance. Partly for this reason, English balladeers tend to perform with singers from Scotland and Ireland and to expand their repertoires to include more Canadian material.

Some English traditions, on the other hand, exist in an attenuated or adapted form mostly outside the ranks of those with any realistic sense of English cultural identity. Pauline Greenhill has noted the Canadian middle-class appropriation of morris dance. Its traditionalism appeals to the anti-modernism of its current devotees and some are drawn by its supposed associations with a former society close to nature; its Englishness is acknowledged but ethnic association seems not to be a vital part of its popularity, unlike step-dancing or Scottish country dance. The ersatz Englishness of Stratford, Ontario, home of a world-renowned Shakespearean theatrical festival, was imposed upon a small industrial town by Toronto purveyors of elite culture and has become highly commercialized, conflating all manner of elements perceived as English. The pseudo-Dickensian and Victorian flourish alongside the Shakespearean and Elizabethan to the extent that festival promoters portray the town’s Victorian architecture as English, a perception neither shared nor encouraged by local residents. In recent decades, of course, culturally specific patriotic songs such as “Jerusalem” have enjoyed wide popularity and contemporary English music, from the Beatles to punk, has captured the world, appealing generationally rather than to those of specifically English ethnicity.

In Canada, as noted, the word “English” is often equated with anglophone, and the hybrid term Anglo-Celt has not supplanted the largely pejorative WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). The English contribution to the settlement of individual provinces has also been minimized by tourism policies which, since the 1930s, have emphasized Scottish traditions in Nova Scotia and P.E.I., and Newfoundland is now incorrectly seen as a largely Irish province. In the west, historical writing has focused on the eastern European block settlements and on the discriminatory treatment meted out by a supposedly English-Canadian population.

An awareness of cultural difference long has been a constant in the relationship between Canadians and first-generation English immigrants, however; indeed, English confidence in the superiority of English ways appears to thrive among them as it did at the turn of the century. English immigrants on the whole have not expected to find life very different in Canada, but cultural divergences quickly become evident in the linguistic arena. Most English immigrants conclude that Canadians debase the English language, using words that are imprecise or inappropriate. To immigrants, a bungalow is not a house, for that is a two-storey residence, and a container for fruit is not a box but a punnet. Canadians and the English will also disagree on whether “bloody” or “bitch” can be used in polite company. The differences in English usage are not insignificant. Immigrant schoolchildren suffer taunts mostly about accent and clothing. The perception of language difference also serves as a basis for ethnic self-identification.

Norms of interpersonal relations are different, too, and many English are reluctant to defer to Canadians in dictating the terms of casual social contact, believing Canadian practices to be inferior. Many are annoyed by Canadians’ reticence, interpreting as unfriendly their reluctance to say “Good morning” to strangers or to strike up casual conversations. Canadian bars tend not to be the convivial social centres that English neighbourhood pubs are, though bars with a superficial patina of Englishness have sprung up in commercial areas during the last decade or so. Conversely, many English are appalled by how readily Canadians address strangers by forename on the rare occasions when conversation actually occurs. The Canadian sense of humour is felt to be less subtle, contingent upon punchlines or insult rather than situation. The tendency of the English to assume the superiority of English ways even in a colonial or foreign context continues to grate upon Canadians, who may not, of course, be any more culturally relativist when abroad. That Canadians sometimes see justice in the British observations does nothing to reduce the tension. Canadian perceptions of the English were the basis of Stephen Leacock’s My Discovery of England (1922), a book very English in its humour. Many of the younger generation of Canadians now profess not to find Leacock funny, though he was once wildly popular in England – evidence, perhaps, that our humour is becoming Americanized.

It has been suggested that ethnic self-identification surfaces most strongly in situations of conflict with other groups. This may explain why the higher socioeconomic classes have been less assertively English than working-class immigrants competing for jobs. English immigrants tend to call themselves British, which is perhaps indicative of a continuing imperialism on their part. It is also possible that the growth of pan-British identity has its roots in the tendency of immigrants to draw together against perceived others; certainly, English, Scots, Welsh, and at least Protestant Irish abroad have long seen themselves as having more in common with one another than with their host societies.

In Canada, the sense of English group identity is now restricted largely to the immigrant generation. As early as 1938, the Sons of England had complained that “the boys of English parentage born in Canada are developing a completely Canadian complex. They are not being taught the privileges of their English birthright.” Though offspring may retain in adulthood a childish affection for hedgehogs and the like, they seldom develop notably exclusive social relationships with adults of English ancestry outside their immediate family circle. They become in every other sense undifferentiated Canadians.