William Gairdner as Lord Durham: The Intellectual Basis of the Anti-French New Right

In the best-selling Canadian politics text of 1991, William Gairdner outlined the key ideas of a renascent Canadian anti-immigrant, anti-multicultural, anti-feminist right wing. Central to his argument was an analysis of the anti-democratic politics supposedly intrinsic to French Canadian culture. He maintained that the enlightenment from which our modern democracies sprang, had two different branches, which together formed the unstable basis of Canadian society. The English-Scottish enlightenment had as its dominant feature "not power but liberty". It was based on a "respect for the individual". The French enlightenment, by contrast, was “chiefly concerned with power.” It was “rooted in the belief that people basically need to be looked after and controlled. ... At bottom, it is a collectivist, authoritarian vision that gives rise to a New Class, based on tax money and political power.” With this as his framework, Gairdner attempted to demonstrate that "the French, through their master statesman Pierre Trudeau, decided to go to war against the English social and governmental model".This war involved a "state-imposed program to discriminate against English Canadians.” How could a "minority French population in a vast land like Canada have succeeded in dominating the linguistic, cultural, and constitutional framework of our nation? They have been very, very clever, and we very careless".
This paper will argue that it would be quite mistaken to treat these as the ideas of an isolated reactionary. Their resonance amongst a sizeable minority of the Canadian population has been made possible, in part, by the way in which an anti-French discourse is at the heart of mainstream Canadian political science. Lord Durham -- the man credited with introducing modern democratic institutions to Canadian politics -- did, after all, argue that “there can hardly be conceived a nationality more destitute of all that can invigorate and elevate a people, than that which is exhibited by the descendants of the French in Lower Canada.”
The paper will, outline the key political ideas of Gairdner, examine which of them have been picked up and developed by the new right-wing parties (typified by the Reform Party and the Confederation of Regions Party), see in what way his view of Quebec and French culture is in fact similar to the ideologies at the core of Canadian confederation, and outline the challenges this poses for left intellectuals.