A Fair Country

Published in the Catalyst, Vol. 32, No. 2 - Spring 2009

A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada
By John Ralston Saul
Toronto: Viking Canada, 2008

Reviewed by Maylanne Maybee

At a recent conference, a United Church minister described his experience of attending a prairie church in the 60s. Sunday by Sunday, the first several pews were filled by Aboriginal children in uniform from a nearby residential school. No one in the congregation spoke to them or about them, and none of the children participated in the Sunday School. It was as if they were invisible.

I recently read an account of a small Canso aircraft that crashed near Norway House in 1949, en route to a Winnipeg hospital. All 20 passengers, including white medical and airline personnel, and six Inuit patients, perished. The bodies of the white passengers were identified and sent to their home communities. But the Inuit passengers were buried anonymously in a mass grave. For 57 years, their families were never officially informed of the identities or fate of their loved ones. They were treated in life and death as non-persons.

My own schooling in the 60s and 70s left me almost entirely ignorant of the history or contribution of Aboriginal peoples in Canada. The Canada I learned about was a bi-cultural country discovered, founded, settled and “civilized” by explorers and colonizers from France and Britain.

A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada sets about, on a large scale, to make visible that which is in front of our eyes but which so many of us have failed to see. John Ralston Saul’s thesis is that Canada is a Métis country, and that Canadian institutions and culture are deeply rooted in Aboriginal values and practices, which we ignore to our peril and eternal confusion.

The book is essentially a compendium of four essays – the first, about Canada’s identity; the second, about Canada’s charter documents and the values of “peace, fairness, and good government” that inform them; the third – a bit of a rant – about the paucity of Canada’s intellectual elite; and a final essay about making what has been hidden and unconscious into an intentional agenda for our future.

Saul writes like a detective novelist, with hints, stories, and indirect evidence at every turn. He coins phrases too, which I wish he would unpack more than he does. For example, he cites the principle of “minimal impairment” – the notion that those with authority ought to do “as little damage as possible to people and to rights when exercising that authority”; and the idea of a “common bowl” (in contrast to a melting pot) as an inclusive egalitarianism through a balance of individual and group rights. I want him to say more, and to say it more explicitly.

What makes this study interesting is its reference to Canada’s courts and legal cases, and the role it attributes to our judges and higher courts in shaping Canada’s foundational values.

Yet it is not a history, and more than once I wish it were. Ralston Saul makes brilliant observations and conclusions, but does not always bring the reader along, and makes huge assumptions of fact and detail, which I for one do not possess.

It’s not really philosophy either – the contents are too concrete and contextual to apply generally. Rather, it is political analysis and theory combined with principles of public justice - a good read for CPJ types.

As one married to a former Governor General of Canada, Saul makes disappointingly few references to Canada’s rich tradition of art and literature which have contributed so significantly to the formation of the kind of Canadian collective unconscious which he refers to so frequently.

I recommend this for summer reading, but also recommend that you bring along some solid textbooks on the history and politics of Canada with special emphasis on its Aboriginal peoples: J.R. Miller’s Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens or Sweet Promises (University of Toronto Press); CPJ’s own Nation to Nation: Aboriginal Sovereignty and the Future of Canada (John Bird, Lorraine Land, Murray MacAdam, ed. Irwin Press); or People to People, Nation to Nation: Highlights from the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Bring some good fiction too, including the books Saul mentions: Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road, Marian Engel’s Bear, and even The Bible which gets fascinating treatment in a section of chapter 21, “How the Dominion ceased to be.”

CPJ board member Maylanne Maybee lives in Toronto, Ontario.