We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw …

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper

T.S Elliot, The Hollow Men

Johnny: Good evening, my name is Johnny MacDonald, your host. Welcome to One-On-One with yours truly. This week is special. This week marks the 10^th anniversary of the dissolution of what was known as the Canadian Confederation, an event that modern historians commonly call The Fracture. Ten years ago this week the Parliament of Canada met for the last time.

If you are wondering why I began today’s program with a quote from the monumental poem The Hollow Men by T.S Elliot, it is because it is reminiscent of the way Canada disappeared. It disappeared with barely a whimper and the description of “hollow men headpiece filled with straw” is a good characterization of the men and women who let it happen.

We will have more to say about that fateful day when the Canadian Parliament met for the last time and more to say about these hollow men, and women, so busy pushing their own agenda; pursuing their own private quarrels in a public forum; voting their economics, race or religion; not caring what their narrow self-interest was doing to the country, for which they all professed a deep attachment and love; these hollow men and women more interested in confrontation than in compromise; these hollow men and women who destroyed what was known as the Canadian Confederation.

Not all of you, of course, will agree that the fragmentation of Canada was a bad thing, especially those of you who yearned to claim a piece of Canada’s geography as your own where only your brand of economics would be practiced; where only those who believed in your God would be allowed in; a piece of geography where you would be the master race and of course, those of you who preferred living under the Stars and Stripes to living under the Maple Leaf.

Canada went out with a whimper. What does this mean? It does not mean that there wasn’t any violence associated with The Fracture. There was quite a bit. The violence, however, was mainly associated with different groups fighting over Canada’s corpse. There was no real physical, sustained heroic effort made to keep Canada together and preventing it from becoming a corpse in the first place. We will be talking about this localised violence during the next five shows dedicated to the fracture of Canada.

The other reason why historians apply the whimper qualifier when talking about the fracture of Canada – apart from the fact that few people outside Canada’s border took notice and fewer people cared – was that the road to oblivion was gradual and sometimes paved with good intentions which further obscured the long term impact of some well-meaning but short-sighted decisions. That the mainly political decisions being made were putting the country on a path that could only lead to its eventual demise, while not obvious to everyone, should have been apparent to the interested and informed mind.

What were the events, the decisions that led to The Fracture, that caused what appeared to be a stable representative parliamentary democracy to just collapse almost from one day to the next? What could have been done, if anything, to prevent it, once the outcome was obvious? For the next five nights we will try to answer these and other questions about The Fracture. To try to get some answers, the producers of One-On-One have invited five distinguished guests to give us their opinions on the events, politics and whatever they feel made The Fracture inevitable.

The order of the appearance of our guests for this series on the disintegration of the Canadian Confederation, except for the Vice-President of Quebec who requested to be interviewed last, was random so you may not infer that the order of appearance of our guests means that the network favours one guest’s theory or opinion over another. Some of our guests have very strong and sometimes controversial views on the cause of The Fracture, so we hope you will keep an open mind and listen to what all our guests have to say before making up your own mind on the cause or causes of Canada’s disappearance from history.

With all that out of the way, I would like to introduce our first guest, Dr. Diane Frances Smith. She is a well-known and well-respected social economist, historian and writer. She has recently published a children’s book on economics called Freddy the Freeloading Country. Freddy, Freddy the country that is, is based on a character called Freddy the Freeloader portrayed by a mid-twentieth century comedian called Red Skelton. [shaking hands] Welcome to One-On-One Dr. Smith.

Diane: Thank you for having me on the show.

Johnny: May I call you Diane?

Diane: Of course, it’s not like we don’t know each other.

Johnny: Diane, when I talked to you before the show, you asked me to introduce you as the author of Freddy the Freeloading Country, a children’s introduction to economics as opposed to the writer of much more scholarly works. Why?