warmuseum.ca

Andre Pratte, the author of a new mini-biography of Wilfrid Laurier for Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series, complains that the  man on the five-dollar bill has been mothballed by myth. “Laurier’s fame today is confined to old books on the shelves of public libraries,” he writes. It is the dual purpose of his book to resurrect the historic truth of Laurier’s life and career and to convince Canadians that only by returning to Laurier’s principles can the country possibly survive the 21st century in one piece. While this is no small task for a 208-page book, Pratte executes it with tact, balance, intelligence, and poise.

A recurring theme of the book is the Sisyphean task—for writer and reader both—of trying to nail down what exactly Laurier’s principles were. Whenever Laurier seemed close to taking a definite stance on a given issue, he was able to maneuver himself into precisely the opposite position within a few years. This is more a biography of several Lauriers than of what other biographers have considered to be one man.

For instance, can the man who denounced Confederation as “detrimental to the interest of Lower Canada” and “[binding] us hand and foot to the English colonies” be the same Laurier who, only a few years later, announced to the Quebec Legislative Assembly that federation was adopted only to maintain “the exceptional position of Quebec on the American continent”?

Pratte argues that compromise was the key to Laurier’s career as a public figure, and indeed, the politician eventually settled upon an alternative view of French Canadian patriotism. Pratte concludes that Laurier’s insistence on compromise was dictated by his need to both preserve the unity of the country and his party, and to win and hold on to power. However, it’s difficult to determine how much Laurier was motivated by the more noble concerns, and how much by the more selfish ones.

While the author admits one’s answer to this question depends on one’s general political disposition on any given issue, Pratte himself believes Laurier’s insistence on compromise was not only the best way of governing a country like Canada, but the only way. “If Canada still exists today,” Pratte writes, “it is because there have always been Canadians who felt that Laurier was right, that compromise is not surrender or cowardice, but rather daring and courage.”

One reason for Laurier’s immunity to the kind of reflexive xenophobia then gripping his fellow French Canadians might be his years spent at an English-speaking school a few kilometres from his home town. This could have given him a built-in resistance to the hypocrisy of the nationalists, who wanted the federal government to intervene in other provinces’ affairs—to help preserve the French language—but to refrain from meddling in Quebec’s own. Laurier insisted all French Canadians should learn English and be proud of their status as British subjects.

In this tendency toward cosmopolitanism and compromise, in his rhetorical skills, and even in his admiration for Abraham Lincoln, the Laurier of Pratte’s book closely resembles Barack Obama. What we like about Obama, we like about Laurier. Similarly, what we dislike about the one, we dislike about the other. Pratte could easily be writing about the 44th president when he calls the seventh prime minister “idealistic in his pragmatism,” and reliant on “moderation and reason in an area where emotion, prejudice, and rancor dominated on both sides.”

“Those who are seeking a knight in shining armour, a defender of principles against all odds, will be disappointed by Wilfrid Laurier,” Pratte writes. “Those who know that a man of principle can govern only by showing patience and realism will find in him a model.” This new biography proves what many Canadians—especially in this depressing election season—will probably only accept with great reluctance: if Canada wants its own Barack Obama, it would do better not to look forward to the future, but rather to the past.