the Canadas, 1815-1873, by tanley B, Ryerson; Progress sooks, Toronto; $8.50 (cloth), 73 (paperback), 477 pages. ae M's federal election. It ae. More than that, of course, will quite safe to predict that it ae be illuminating’ the thinking a Nadians about their country qetiter Messrs. Trudeau and field have had their brief Tur upon the stage. Biss. the point needs to be em- now. Fe that this is a book for a te or there is too widespread lon Ndency to imagine that as rai one thinks one under- as the immediate political fos °S, history can be left to pro- sim Ors and students. This is Ply not true. apr large part of the failure to tomy ciate the importance of his- too arises out: of the way his- as been presented to us aS collection of seemingly un- bi facts and dates, as a re- - actj a Only of the ideas and Ons of individuals. Aewey Ryerson is not such a . oe He brings to his pains- Siene, Study of the facts the nal Ce of Marxism, which is = sense out of history. In Senge LoBue he defines the es- histo of the Marxist view of man oe It is the action of hu- ings that determines the This work of history is about be | epet : EEE course of history. Yet this his- tory is more than the simple arithmetical sum of billions of individual biographies. It is in the context of an evolving social existence that individual deci- sions, initiatives, mistakes, achievements, occur and in varying degree are meaningful.” It is this approach which Ryerson uses to demolish the anti-nationalism of Pierre Elliot Trudeau — our new ‘swinging prime minister which have made him so popular with the English- speaking Canadian establish- ment, and so suspect by SO many of his French-Canadian compatriots. For Trudeau: “The very idea of Nation-State is absurd. eee: The principle of nationalities has brought the world two cen- turies of wars and revolution, but not a single definite solu- tion.” Ryerson replies: “Not | the principle of nationalities,’ but capitalist development and the rise of the bourgeoisie are the reasons for the wars and revolu- tions of the post-feudal era, while the 20th century emer- gence of monopoly-capitalist im- perialism has brought with it a dual process: nationalism being exploited by the ultra-right and fascism, and tidal counter-move- ments of national colonial revolt and socialist revolution. So long as imperialism engenders na- bi A Gnd | tutio i O; oC So ne H cl Telat ee aa i iit ilemma, ELL Cute 1. ib | 1A pI’ Confederation and the Roots of Contlict in ? the Canadas, 1815-1873 STANLEY B. RYERSON canada’ “crisis of Confederation” has until now been probed ebated almost exclusively in ter ; ; Nal conflict. But what Shout SOCIAL STRUCTURE in psticn oe: National tensions and inequalities? Stanley Ryerson in ©" | SSYAL UNION invites us to consider a radical reinterpretation Gnada’s history; he examines the connection CIAL and the NATIONAL—between the origins © S$ society” and the patterns of colonialism in our ex °W early capitalist industrialism and the rise Ry of Canadian businessmen set their imprin tablished in 1867; and how the institution of wage labor, ms of cultural and consti- between the f a “busi- perience. to power of a t on the State the ae ion of “masters and men,” has affected the struggles for ‘€Pendence and national self-determination — °ng the questions dealt with in a stu ©n the origins and nature of the con these are dy that sheds fresh temporary Canadian PAPERBACK: $3.75—CLOTHBOUND: $8.50 Order from your local bookseller or from: PROGRESS BOOKS 487 ADELAIDE ST. W. TORONTO 2B @ 368-5336 Be ee 7 te i ee ke luality of excitement — Marks Ryerson’s new book tional oppression, the ‘principle of nationality’ will have the validity of an assertion of demo- cratic, community rights.” Trudeau’s outright rejection of the validity of that assertion is the guarantee that his prime ministership will indeed fail to produce “a single definite solu- tion” to the problems of Canada. Nor will such solutions come from Stanfield’s manoeuvrings for compromises “at the top” with his Quebec Tory counter- part Daniel Johnson — so remi- niscent of the deals concocted by those famous Fathers of Con- federation—MacDonald and Car- tier — which, as Ryerson de- scribes, brought about the Un- equal Union of 1867. It is this relevance of the past to the present that is so striking a feature of this book. The period covered includes the democratic revolution of 1837, “the driving forces of which were insufficiently mature to secure victory.” We read of the consequences for all our his- tory of the defeat of 1837 which nevertheless could not prevent far-reaching change: “The transi- tion from an economy dominat- ed by the old, mercantile-land- owner, ‘Family Compact’ ruling group to that of the new fndus- trial-railroad oligarchy is the main content of the bourgeois revolution in British North America. It is a revolution ef- fected ‘from above,’ the armed popular struggles having met defeat. (In this one respect, it bears some distant, similarity to the German experience of 1848- 71.) But as the experience of the 1840’s showed, mass popu- lar pressure was needed to se- cure the main measures of re- form: in the first place ‘respon- sible government’.” It is the story of “mass popu- lar pressure” which brings to Ryerson’s book a quality of ex- citement that makes it so much more readable than most his- tories. Through its pages march the people—the workers in their early struggles; the petitions and the great demonstrations for democracy; the early outcries against United States domina- tion; the movements for peace; the international solidarity of the British Chartists with the Patriots of ’37; the support of Canadian democrats : great anti-slavery struggle in the United States; the well- merited tribute to the Metis risings of the Northwest’ under the leadership of Riel, “the only instance of effective intervention ‘from below,’ by the masses in the Confederation settlement.” To conclude where we began, no one can understand the forces at work’and the issues at stake in the federal election of 1968 without understanding the con- nection in history of the strug- gle of the Canadian people for social advance with the strug- gle for the national rights of French Canada. In the conclud- ing words of Unequal Union: “The processes now working for such a social transformation in contemporary Canada are interwoven and interact with the struggle for national equal- ity and self-determination. . . The peoples of the Canadas, facing the need to rectify the ‘ynequal union’ of a colonialist Confederation, begin to sense the need to call in question something else as well: the so- cial system of corporate-business rule, the unequal society of ‘masters and men’,”” (N.C.) In the April 3 edition of the NDP paper The Common- wealth I see where CCF-cum- Liberal premier of Saskatche- wan, Ross Thatcher, is tackl- ing the problem of “inflation” right down at the grass roots. It appears that in some of those places where retarded children or other chronic cases of unfortunate human- ity must spend their drab and lonely days, some for a lifetime, Premier Thatcher has decided to cut out their bedtime snack of a hot choco- late and bologna sandwich. Such an “austerity” measures ought to go quite a ways in “stabilizing” the dollar — if not the unfortunate inmates. Thatcher and others of this political ilk are alway ready and willing to “save” the country from inflation — by the time-honoured process of ‘putting the economic squeeze upon those already squeezed dry; the wage earners, the _ poor farmers, pensioners and widows, the ailing and desti- tute. For all such “saviours” the old scriptural formula for curing inflation still holds good; ‘‘to him that hath, more shall be given—and to him that hath not, even that shall be taken away,” down to the last .miserable bologna sand- wich. Thatcher and his dollar “savers” are right in the “Christian” groove so _ to speak. Just about the time he was depriving a group of un- fortunate boys of their bed- time snack, all eleven of his cabinet members were receiv- ing absolutely free a shiny brand new 1968 sedan, fully equipped with licence plates, car insurance, etc. and etc., all at the Saskatchewan tax- payer’s expense, and all un- doubtedly regarded as “non- inflationary’ -— except the tires. As The Commonwealth cor- rectly commented—“The first year’s depreciation on eleven big shiny sedans would have paid for quite a bit of hot chocolate, but then _ that wouldn’t have been the Libe- ral-Tory-Socred way of “‘curb- for the ing inflation’. That fact was well illustrat- ed during recent days with- the publication of General Motors (GM) balance sheet on car sales, profits salaries bonuses and so on, all under- scoring the fact that “what is good for GM .. .” isn’t neces- sarily good for others. Personally I have never been much of an expert at dissecting corporation bal- ance sheets since there is gen- erally much more hidden than revealed in such documents. But when I see the president of GM pocketing an annual salary of $708,316 plus other “contingent expenses”, while a whole raft of GM corpora- tion officers, directors and lesser under-strappers taking home a total of $14,906,481 in salaries, bonuses, stock credits and what not, then I know that the prime “factory defect” on my goddam “heap” and .a few million others is not a mechanical one; not one that can be solved by depriv- ing an under-privileged child under the pretext of “curbing inflation”. In the April 21 New York Worker is a news story en- titled “Hogs at Chrysler Cor- poration Trough.” The mono- poly hogs we know, and ac- cording to Chrysler there were sure lots in the “trough,” no less than $200.4 million in net profit for 1967. after all taxes have been deducted. Of this vast boodle Chrys- ler officers and _ directors pocketed a cool $5,017,686 in salaries, bonuses and “‘oth- er compensations.” Chrysler’s president Boyd is reported to have “earned” a mere annual salary bagatelle of $292,700, a mite below GM’s president in round figures, but the dif- ference in his case is made up with a pocketful of stock shares, with an_ estimated market value of $264,576. Just imagine what a mountain of bologna and hot chocolate he could have for that lot! While we don’t expect the Thatchers ever to learn—we do hope the people will—and soon. Unequal Union debut Stanley Brehaut Ryerson was born in Toronto in 1911, attend- ed Upper Canada College and graduated in modern languages from the University of Toronto and the Paris Sorbonne. His writings since 1937 have jnclud- ed 1837: Birth of Canadian De- mocracy; Le Réveil du Canada francais; French Canada (in English and French editions;) ; A World to Win; The Open So- ciety—Paradox and Challenge; The Founding of Canada: Begin- nings to 1815. A great-grandson of Egerton Ryerson and grand- nephew of Wm. McDougall, one of the Fathers of Confederation, his maternal forebears include a Bréhaut “who came to New France in 1636 the year after the death of Champlain) . His under- standable interest in Canadian history turned to active research and writing as a result of in- volvement in the left-wing movement in Quebec, and con- frontation with the class and have probed during the past thirty years. He is at present editor of HORIZONS: the Marx- ist Quarterly and a director of Le Centre de Recherches marx- istes de Montréal. Ryerson’s book, Unequal Un- ion — Confederation and the Roots of Conflict in the Can- adas, 1815-1873, will be off the press shortly and preparations are under way for its debut, right across the country. Stanley Ryerson will be on tour, and there will be auto- graphing parties in the major centres, Toronto has its kickoff on: May 4, at the Horizons Re- search, 171 Spadina Road. Ryerson’s tour will include Winnipeg, Vancouver, Edmon- ton and Regina. Watch for dates of events in your area. This will be a big book physic- ally {approximately 475 pages) and in another sense big, be- cause it will have a major im- pact on the present crisis of Confederation. :