Mark Bourrie Paper

http://www.gmj.uottawa.ca/1002/v3i2_bourrie.pdf

Here's how I write an academic paper.

Assignment 2: The West and the Rest

This assignment is geared to understanding two things: 1. Western alienation; and 2. the emergence of conservative media voices that dominate in the Prairies.
Preston Manning was leader of the Reform Party from its founding in the early 1990s until he was forced out in 2000 by Stockwell Day, the former finance minister of Alberta.
Manning, the son of an Alberta premier, started the party when Westerners began vocally complaining that all the important political and economic decisions were made in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. Albertans were particularly opposed to any federal role in energy policy. The Reform Party also fed on anger over concessions made to Quebec in constitution talks in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Manning led the Reform Party to a strong third-place finish in the 1992 election, and became leader of the Opposition in 1997. This occurred despite Manning's original opposition to running candidates for Parliament in eastern Canada, and his later decision to run Reform candidates against Progressive Conservatives everywhere. That decision, which split the conservative movement, may well have been the main reason Jean Chretien won three majority governments -- in 1993, 1997, and 2000. Often, Liberals were elected in three-way fights with juts 34 per cent of the vote. Many of the reasons for Manning's inability to win nationally are mentioned in the Gunter piece.
After Day was trounced in the 2000 election, Stephen Harper gained control of what was left of the Reform Party and merged it with the Progressive Conservatives. In 2006, Harper won a minority government.
Almost all the work on this assignment can be done through Google and Google Scholar. You should cite all of your sources, including web pages.

1. I want you to explain what writer Lorne Gunter says Preston Manning did that makes him a Canadian statesman (it's in the text. You don't need any other sources). 

2. I want you to discuss regional parties like the original Reform Party and the Bloc Quebecois and argue whether they strengthen democracy and the federal government or harm it.

3. I want you to think about why the Reform Party no longer exists and talk about the reasons you come up with. As well, keep in mind that the Bloc Quebecois, which, in 1993, was the second-largest party in Parliament, has just a handful of members now.

The paper is due Friday, Nov. 8

Preston Manning, profiled by Lorne Gunter, National Post, Nov. 11, 2005

 

'The West Wants In!" With those four words -- originally coined by magazine publisher Ted Byfield -- Preston Manning saved Canada from a two-front war for national unity.

 

 

 

The National Post is conducting a search to find Canada's most important "public intellectual." In today's instalment, Lorne Gunter profiles Preston Manning. Other profiles, as well as contest rules, appear at www.national post.com/beautifulminds.

- - -

'The West Wants In!" With those four words -- originally coined by magazine publisher Ted Byfield -- Preston Manning saved Canada from a two-front war for national unity.

Indeed, it was just one of Manning's words -- in -- that prevented the West from joining Quebec in agitating for the break-up of the country.

If Manning had raged "The West wants out!" at his Western Assembly in Vancouver in the spring of 1987, most of the nearly 100,000 Westerners who eventually joined his Reform Party (born four months later in Winnipeg) would have joined a Manning-led separatist movement instead.

All Western alienation lacked to transform it into Western separatism two decades ago was a credible leader. And while Manning was barely known back then, he was credible. Instantly. At least with Westerners.

With his Sunday-school-teacher appearance, his pinched, staccato speaking voice, his long, meticulously researched speeches and his genuine respect for ordinary people (one of Preston's favourite expressions is "the common sense of the common people"), Manning didn't seem capable of guile. He was to Western conservatives what Tommy Douglas had been to an earlier generation of Western socialists: the font of all knowledge and wisdom on the issues that mattered most.

Peter Lougheed, Allan Blakeney or Bill Bennett may have had more name recognition -- and arguably more charisma -- at the time. Each of them would have been a more natural choice as separatist leader, at least from an image-maker's perspective.

But there was just something about Manning. Maybe it was his preacher-like style or the qualities he shared with the ideal Scout master (honest, loyal, dutiful, modest, prepared). Perhaps it was his encyclopedic knowledge of the West's history, or his thorough understanding of how Canada's institutions worked (and didn't) and what could be done to rescue them and make them fairer.

Whatever it was Manning possessed that made people follow him, they followed him in droves, as loyally and fervently as I have ever seen voters follow a politician, with the possible exception of Pierre Trudeau. As Manning stumped from community hall to farm kitchen to church basement, they joined up to follow him toward the centre, toward Ottawa and a renewed Confederation, rather than away from all that.

As a public intellectual, Manning's greatest achievement may have been re-channelling the growing desire among Westerners to pull up their tents and leave Canada.

He's a different man now -- and I don't mean the coiffed hair. He was forced during and after his fight in 2000 for the leadership of the Canadian Alliance to become a politician. There is still more of the manse than the backroom in him. But his tactics at the time showed he could fight dirty, if not well, to retain and then reclaim his leadership.

And his vow to "do politics differently," which he made when he came to Ottawa at the head of the 52-seat Reform caucus in 1993, didn't turn out exactly as planned. It was naive to think the rest of the country would transform its institutions and political practices just for him, or his vision of a "New Canada," or his brand of populism, or even just to placate the West.

Still, it is hard to think of another politician -- prime minister or otherwise -- who has done more to transform Canada since Brian Mulroney.

Manning founded not one, but two political parties -- Reform and the Alliance -- that both became the official opposition. And now, with his new Manning Centre for Building Democracy (www.manningcentre.ca), he is seeking to build an intellectual and political infrastructure that can seed and grow conservative thinkers, activists, lawyers, writers and politicians who will, in time, achieve the intellectual transformation of the country's institutions that his political forays began but never completed.

With his books and reforming zeal, Manning has long been ahead of the curve. In 1967, along with his father, former Alberta premier Ernest Manning, Preston wrote a treatise entitled Political Realignment in which the two of them advocated a "social conservatism." Not conservative on social issues such as abortion and gay rights -- conservatism with a social conscience, with people rather than government as the agents for social justice. It predated George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" by more than 30 years.

At least Manning is consistent. He's still using his public intellectualism to stir the pot for political realignment.

Essays

Your essays are due at the beginning of class on Friday, Oct. 25

For information on footnotes and other essay tips, please see the large amount of material, including links, in the syllabus on the first page of this web site.

Lecture 2 Notes How We Talk to Each Other: Mass Culture in Canad

—  “Europeans fight against time, Americans fight against distance.”  --John Keegan, historian and journalist

—  Our first big national – even pre-national – projects were geared to making it easier to communicate and travel.

—  Railways were important

—  But telegraph lines were just as important

Mass media

—  Newspapers started mainly to get official news out and as a cure for homesickness

—  They also provided news people could use: shipping schedules, crop prices, notices

—  Every town had at least one, usually more

—  Religious groups, trades, ethnic groups had their own papers

—  But eventually, big media, requiring lots of money to get started, began to dominate and create a mass culture.

—  In many ways, early journalists were like modern bloggers

—  They were small operators, independent and vulnerable

—  People were more literate because of the new public school system, and had some leisure time

—  Though, much more than it is today, that free time was spent with other people

—  By the middle of the 1800s, big city newspapers became news factories, using heavy equipment like rotary presses and moving their offices into skyscrapers

—  … with floors of journalists, major business offices, ad agencies, big department store advertisers

Radio

— 

Radio networks made gigantic stars of the people who made music, performed in radio comedies, drama, music shows. It was the first mass media broadcast into every home, and it made staying home at night the norm for North American and European families.

Radio was not the same as the radio we know now, which is pretty much all news or phone-in shows. Radio carried everything, from music to drama shows, across North America on four large US networks and in Canada on the CBC.

·                     Television

           

             TV was shown at the 1938 and 1939 CNE and wad demonstrated in the window of the Ogilvie       department store in Montreal.

·                          In the first months of 1939, Canada had its first “tech stock” bubble but TV was delayed for years because of the Second World War

·                        1949: Federal government announces TV will be a mix of private and public broadcasters, a mix of the British model  (total government control) and the US free market system.

·                          The CBC would not license private broadcasters and refused to broadcast TV until 1952

·                           There were 146,000 TVs in Canada in 1952.

·                           Four years later, 2.5 million homes had them

·                          For years, choice of TV shows was so limited that, essentially, everyone watched the same shows, no matter what the demographics

·                         More than half of all the men, women and children in America watched the series finale of M*A*S*H* on Feb. 28, 1983

·                          Canada licensed its first pay TV channels, all for movies…

·                          Then, in the 1990s, came sports and music channels

·                           Canada licensed its first pay TV channels, all for movies…

·                          Then, in the 1990s, came sports and music channels

—                               The Internet became available, in very limited ways in the early 1990s

—                                The problem was in the hardware

—                                 300 and 1200 baud modems, inability to store data, poor graphics cards

—                               By 2001, we had something like the Internet we know today except only on computers, not on phones, with no social media as we know it now.

What the Internet has Done (So far)

—                                 Destroyed the monopolies of the big media companies

    —  Smashed “massed culture” as it was known in the 1900s

—                                  Added to the demographic split

—                               Provided new opportunities for learning while at the same time allowing people to line in echo chambers.

—                                Radically changed politics

—                                Gave people the opportunity to be filmmakers and publishers

—                                 Changed the way things are bought and sold

—                                  Changed the way we use leisure time and interact with each other

—                                  Changed, or undermined, privacy.

Lecture 11 Notes: The Myth of "English" Canada

¨  There’s a mythology that pre-1970s Canada was a harmonious place full of happy white people waxing fat on colonialism and privilege.

¨  The facts are considerably different.

.

The United Empire Loyalists

¨  There were English, Scottish, Irish and German United Empire Loyalists who arrived after 1783.

¨  A generation of politicians seeking self-government evolved in Canada. 

¨  Almost all of them had control of a newspaper. Parties also financed news media. George Brown of Ontario and Joseph Howe were two early important politician-editors.

      ¨  There were two the major differences between the citizenship of the people of Quebec in the French regime and the new British-run colonies.

¨  One was the idea of some kind of press:

¨  (It’s much too early to talk seriously about a free press in British North America. When the powers-that-be were vexed by the press they sent mobs to trash printing plants}

¨  Still, people inspired by events in England tried to make a free press here.

Great Canadian Newspaper Trashings of the 1830s

¨  Colonial Advocate: Toronto mob smashes up office, wrecks press, throws type into Lake Ontario.

¨  Grenville Gazette (Brockville): press wrecked.

¨  Belleville Plain Speaker: Office wrecked, editor forced to leave town

¨  Montreal Vindicator: Office trashed, editor forced to flee the country

¨  Kingston Whig: Office smashed, press wrecked, editor’s dog killed in the line of duty

¨  St John’s Ledger: Editor attacked, has ears cut off.

¨  St. John’s Ledger:  Press foreman’s ears cut off by mob.

¨  London Free Press: trashed by mob in 1849.

¨  The other thing the new British-approved immigrants, especially those from the US, expected some form of elected local and provincial government

.

      Anti-multiculturalism

¨  The Orange Lodge became the most powerful group in Canada

¨  More that 30% of Ontario’s MPPs were Orangemen in the 1920s.

¨  Prime Ministers Sir John A Macdonald,  John Abbott, Mackenzie Bowell and John Diefenbaker were members of the Orange Order, as was Tommy Douglas

Irish Immigration

¨  Ireland was struck by a vicious famine in 1845 when the potato crop failed. Potatoes were the main source of food for most of the people. Once the people began starving, they were easily targeted by diseases.

¨  The population was cut from 8 million to 4 million.

¨  1 million – more than 10% -- of the people starved or died of disease.

¨  About 3 million fled their country, with tens of thousands coming to Canada

¨  The Loyal Orange Lodge was determined to exclude these people from leadership in politics, business, the professions and the media.

¨  The Fenian raids of 1866, launched by Irish-American soldiers who wanted an independent Ireland,  caused the Macdonald government to impose almost police-state suspensions of civil liberties

¨  The laws were supposed to apply to everyone but were used against the Irish

¨  Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier encouraged people from the grain-growing regions of Central Europe to settle on the Canadian Prairies

¨  After World War II, hundreds of thousands of European political and economic refugees – Displaced Persons – settled in Canada.

¨  For the first time since the American Revolution ended in the 1780s, Canada accepted a large number of political refugees

¨  They radically changed Canada, especially Toronto and the West.

Beginning in the 1970s, Canada opened its doors to "visible minority" people from the Caribbean, to South Asians refugees persecuted by the Idi Amin regime in Africa, and from the subcontinent itself.  Starting in the 1980s, Canada also began attracting many more immigrants from China and Muslim countries (see chart below) 

Lecture 10: You, two, can be a A stoodent…

    Hints to help you get the most out of your time at the University of Ottawa:

       Read your assignments carefully

—  Don’t do any assignment without a trip to the library, preferably in person

—  Don’t rely on spell check

—  Don’t leave things to the last minute

—  Don’t try to do an assignment, even a short one, in one sitting.

—  Show up for class. You simply cannot do well in this course unless you actually show up.

—  Budget your time.

—  Get your priorities straight. Do you really want to be a university student?

—  Develop a work-life balance as quickly as possible. That means getting enough sleep, eating right, and avoiding time-wasters.

—  A simple way to do this is to devote your days to school work – a full six to eight hours – with evenings and probably most weekends off.

—  That means finding a quiet place to read, study, think and write.

—  Let yourself be creative. Take intellectual risks but be prepared to explain how you came to conclusions.

—  When in doubt, ask for help.

—  If you have trouble writing, take advantage of the Writing Centre. After all, you’re paying for it.

—  If you were smart enough to get in here, you’re smart enough to get out with a degree.

—  Have someone read your work oner. No one can be their own editor.

—  Really put some time and effort into your work. It always shows in the finished product.

—  Watch for both big and small mistakes.

—  There’s no excuse for spelling names wrong – especially when it’s done all the way through the paper.

—  Try to actually think about what you are doing. Come up with some ideas.

—  But when you do draw conclusions, back them up.

—  Use common sense. Remember the idea of the dog that doesn’t bark, i.e. the idea that St. Ignace was easily captured, yet 10 Iroquois warriors are dead.

—  Try to remember that people in the past were real, with feelings and motivations – along with strengths and weaknesses – like ours.

—  There’s no such thing as a dumb question. Seriously, if you don’t understand something, please ask.

—  Feel free to ask questions in class. We’re going through a huge amount of material in a very small time and many people will have questions.

—  If you find yourself falling behind, let me do what I can to help you out.

—  The university has support for just about every kind of problem you can think of – financial, writing, research, legal. As long as you’re willing to try, you can get whatever help you need.

—  Try to finish your assignment a few days early, then let it sit for a while and re-read it. You’ll be amazed at what you will find.

—  Read the comments on your paper.

—  If you got a D, you better see me today or next Friday, or make an appointment.

 Some common problems:

—  $50 words/jargon attempts

—  Using words that sound like other words so make it through spell check

—  Names and dates

—  Bias/biased

—  Who’s – whose

—  There-their-they’re

—  “Huronian” (check proper names)

—  Semi-colons

—  Commas

—  Apostrophes – huge problem

—  Lazy titles, bad puns, and titles that have nothing to do with the actual material

—  Papers that were far too short

—  People writing essays saying Edna Kenyon wrote the Jesuit Relations. (Careless reading of the question, which can make the entire effort an embarrassing waste of time and result in tears for both of us.)

—  Inconsistent usage – i.e. “Church” in some paragraphs, “church” in others, use of “Catholic” and “catholic”.

Lecture 9: Quebec -- Survivance in a sea of "enemies"

Major themes

•      At first, the French in Quebec were colonizers and traders who manipulated the First Nations.
•         The French colony was usually under serious threat from someone.
•        After the British took Quebec, the French were still colonizers, but they were also colonized
•       Survival in the face of threat (survivance) became a main theme of culture and politics and remains so now.
•        As we have seen in the lecture on propaganda , the creation of “enemies” and “threats” is an extremely powerful tool that’s used to unite people who normally have serious differences.

Explorers like Jacques Cartier were more concerned with exploitation that colonization.

France’s North American project was about strengthening France, not about developing a new country. That doesn’t mean French leaders did not care about the colony. It’s just that the priorities of France and the investors in the fur trade came first. The Church, almost a state-within-a-state, wanted converts wherever they could be found.

France made territorial claims while ignoring the actual political rights of First Nations. First Nations became military “proxies” for European powers like France and Britain, Holland and even, briefly, Sweden (which had a colony in what is now New Jersey).

Whether deliberately or not, the Europeans manipulated the First Nations politically, military and economically until they became dependent.

The Iroquois were the only Eastern First nation to remain  independent and powerful. That is one reason they got a bad press.

The French had no immediate plans to “settle” the interior. Instead, they traded from the edge of the continent. It was very lucrative. They could exploit the labour of the interior First Nations and generate big profits.

The French were able to find a silver lining to being on the losing side of the war between the French and the Iroquois. Threat became a major them in Quebec politics and culture after the killing of the Jesuit priests and the attacks on French settlements.

Here are some of the threats that are “remembered” in Quebec history and culture:

·         The Jesuit Martyrs

·         Adam Dollard

·         Madeline de Vercheres (Quebec’s Joan of Arc)

·         The Lachine  Massacre

Through most of the French regime, the Iroquois were a serious threat. So were the British, who tries twice to capture Quebec City.

France was over-populated but France did not try to get rid of its population surplus by colonizing.

Nor did it use its colonies as a dumping ground for criminals, political troublemakers or religious minorities, the way Britain did.

In many ways, the settlement of the St Lawrence Valley was an effort to supply and protect the Fur Trade.

From 1756 to 1763, Britain and France fought a World War, called The Seven Years War (in the US, it’s often called the French and Indian War, and in North America it actually lasted nine years but that won’t be on the exam.)

During the Battle of Quebec, the French commander the Marquis de Montcalm was killed (as was the British commander, James Wolfe). Montcalm became part of Quebec’s pantheon of martyrs – a courageous, honest and honorable man who fought the good fight but succumbed to overwhelming odds.

After the Conquest, the British guaranteed many of the rights of the Quebecois and First Nations by enshrining them in the Royal Proclamation (1763) and Quebec Act (1775). This caused problem with the Thirteen British Colonies along the Atlantic Coast. Their complaints about the Quebec Act are listed in the Declaration of Independence:

When Americans offered to let Quebec join the Revolution, most Quebeckers said No(n)

Quebec missed out on the rise of liberalism in France, the French Revolution, and the two subsequent smaller anti-monarchist revolutions of the 1800s.  In many ways, especially regarding religion, pre-Revolutionary France survived in Quebec, bolstered by Catholic priests who arrived for over 100 years as refugees from anti-religious policies in France.

The colony was fairly prosperous, very rural, with a simple staples economy based on furs, then lumber, with agriculture. Rural Quebec was always held up by Church intellectuals and Quebecois writers as the ideal bedrock society.

The one serious rebellion, in 1837, did not attract mass support and was crushed. Its leaders were hanged, sent to penal colonies in Australia or banished.

Through Quebec’s history, Montreal has always held both repulsion and attraction. Montreal had wealth and power but it also was dominated by English-speakers, and, in the 1900s, also had many foreigners, with new groups arriving all the time: English, Irish, Jews, and now Vietnamese, Muslims, Africans and Haitians. Very few of these newcomers (except a few English and Irish) lived in the countryside. Most formed communities in Montreal.

Through the early 1900s, writers like Abbe Lionel Groulx stressed the threats faced by Quebec from the British and Americans,  and reached back to the Jesuit Martyrs, Dollard, Montcalm and de Vercheres as heroes who stood up against overwhelming odds, even when they knew they would be defeated.

By the 1950s, the old deal between the Church, the province’s government, business owners (mostly Anglophone) and Ottawa began to fall apart. New Marxist-Nationalists wanted religion out of public life. Independence advocates of all ideologies wanted a strong Quebec provincial government. At the same time, many people stopped going to Catholic churches because of its teachings on birth control.  

Ideas of national self-determination, which underlay the recreation of states like Poland after World War I, took hold in Quebec.  The province’s political and media leaders started a revolution.

Some, like the Front de Liberation du Quebec wanted to move that revolution along much faster by using violent revolutionary tactics developed in Cuba and South America. France played its own game, financing the independence movement. Charles de Gaulle’s “long live free Quebec” speech in Montreal caused an international incident in 1967.

Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (196801979; 1980-1984) thought Quebec independence a ridiculous and dangerous idea and used a kidnapping crisis as a reason to crush violent revolutionaries and their sympathizers. Despite Parti Quebecois leader Rene Levesque’s charisma and personal popularity, he lost the 1980 independence vote.

With “independence” a non-starter with a majority, the PQ has sought new “threats” and has floated the idea of a “values” charter. Will fighting phantom enemies save the PQ? Or will Quebec’s campaign spread across the country and undermine multiculturalism in the rest of Canada?

Further reading: Susan Mann, The Dream of Nation: A Social and Intellectual History of Quebec (1983)