A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada

Abstract

From one of Canada’s foremost essayists John Ralston Saul comes a new 2008 book A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada. Iconoclastic Ralston Saul follows the older philosophical tradition of ruminating on a topic to open it for public discussion rather than the strictly empirical tradition of intellectual scholarship evidenced by citation rigor. In this format, Ralston Saul poses a disarmingly simple yet challenging thesis that disrupts the status quo of popular thinking about the origins of Canada’s predisposition toward inclusive egalitarianism and the balancing of individual and group rights. The thesis is this: Canada is a Metis civilization that has been inspired by centuries of Aboriginal society that preceded the eras of Western colonialism, immigration, industrialization, and globalization. Canada’s predispositions do not come solely from the French or the English, or more recently the Americans—whether it is specific notions of liberalism, justice, individualism, (social) democracy, and citizenship, or our ethical and emotional engagements. Saul asserts that Indigenous civilizations have shaped the Canadian way of being and many of our daily policies and practices much more than has ever been acknowledged by political and economic leaders, or in our case, scholars and educators. Ostensibly, then, this is his answer to the philosophical and historical question he asks for rumination: “If our [Canadian] civilization has been built out of the Western inheritance, how is it that the rest of the West is struggling precisely where we find the challenges quite easy?” (p. 4). Throughout the book he expands on the core ideas that Canada’s success as an immigrant-receiving society yielding high levels of cultural diversity per capita can be directly linked to the First Nations, the Metis, and the Inuit. Specifically, woven into the Canadian subconscious are the nonracial and nonlinear ideas of civilization; the idea of community and family as an inclusive circle that continually and dynamically expands; and the ideas of ongoing negotiation, mutual dependency, and partnership. The book is divided into four parts. The first section addresses in more detail his claim that Canada is a Metis civilization and what blocks broader understanding of this; the second section addresses the various origins and concepts of fairness and historical interpretations embedded in the phrase “peace, welfare [fairness or well-being of the citizenry, in his definition], and good government”; the third section examines what he calls “the castrati” or the colonial mindset of the Canadian elites who are steeped in fear and self-loathing manifesting in a

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