Introduction by John Ralston Saul  

This is a country shaped in winter – 2 February 1848 in Halifax with Joseph Howe, who along with his disciples would later play a central role in the shaping of the west, and in particular of British Columbia; 11 March 1848 with LaFontaine and Baldwin and their francophone-anglophone pact, only made possible by a shared and clearly expressed idea of the public good. Suddenly democracy – flawed but still democracy – was in place. And with it there was an idea of the kind of society we would need to become in order to survive.

These, our first modern leaders injected into Canadian public debate the imagination and initiative to make sense of the country’s reality. That reality has grown to cover more than half a continent. The society whose foundations they laid has struggled to become increasingly inclusive in a web like way. The line from them to us, tonight in Vancouver, is now the unbroken thread of one of the world’s oldest continuous democracies. Unbroken, remarkable, yet unfulfilled, as any healthy organism must be.

This annual symposium was begun to create debate around the future of Canada’s civil culture. In 2002, in Vancouver, Georges Erasmus delivered a seminal lecture on the central role yesterday, today and tomorrow of the First Pillar – the Indigenous – of Canada’s triangular foundation. This year Adrienne Clarkson will carry us deep into the Canadian experiment of opening welcoming people from all over the world as Canadian citizens.

History lesson  

Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin were lawyers from Montreal and Toronto who started their public careers as members of their respective Assemblies around 1830. They came together in 1841 over the common cause of opposing the British administration’s attempts, following the Rebellions of 1837, to assimilate the French Canadians into the culture of English-speaking Upper Canada and to maintain power in the hands of the colonial elite.

LaFontaine and Baldwin are best known as architects of responsible government, the concept that the legitimacy of the democratic government rests on the ability of the elected representatives to decide who will govern. But they also had a revolutionary effect on public administration, the legal system, the creation of municipalities, as well as both public and university education. Having formed a government in March 1842 that brought together French and English Canadian reformers, LaFontaine and Baldwin resigned a year later when then Governor Metcalfe refused to consult them on public service nominations.  They were reelected in 1848 and their second term, “The Great Ministry”, saw the formal attainment of responsible government with the enactment of The Rebellion Losses Bill. Despite fierce opposition – including the burning of the parliament buildings in Montreal – the bill’s passage entrenched the right of the colony’s elected representatives to manage their own affairs.