Smith. "Commissioning 'Founding Races' and Settler Colonial Narratives"

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Malinda S. Smith

Canadian Ethnic Studies, Volume 46, Number 2, 2014, pp. 141-149 (Article)

P bl h d b n d n thn t d t nDOI: 10.1353/ces.2014.0024

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MALINDA S. SMITH

Commissioning “Founding Races” and SettlerColonial Narratives

Eve Haque’s pioneering work, Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework, invites

us to think about royal commissions and the role that they play in politics, public

policy and administration. But, uniquely, this book also reveals the central role of

royal commissions in narrating a racial order and settler colonialism at pivotal times

in Canadian history and politics. This important and timely study provides critical

insights into Canadian debates on race, language, culture and, specifically, the inter-

twined concepts of multiculturalism and bilingualism. In this review I focus on two

themes in Haque’s work in order to reflect upon the following: first, the role of royal

commissions, and specifically, the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and

Biculturalism, in narrating the nation, a racial order, and settler colonialism; second,

the use of contested concepts such as “founding races,” “other ethnic groups” and

“newcomers” and the ways in which the B and B Commission attempted to stabilize

and normalize these inherently unstable concepts and identities precisely at a

time when they were losing their coherence. Finally, this review concludes with the

urgent need to confront Canada’s colonial present and to decolonize white settler

colonialism.

Haque’s book engages in a close textual reading of the B and B Commission’s

use of language, nation, and race. She deconstructs the dividing practice evident in

the constitution of separate and unequal groups like “founding races” and “other

ethnic groups” (Haque 2012, 4-5, 50-60) and the silence, if not narrative expulsion

(Sassen 2014), of indigenous peoples in this official effort to narrate a nation. In the

process, the book illuminates the under-studied role that royal commissions often

play in narrating the settler nation state (e.g., Blake et al. 2011) and, also, in narrat-

ing a hierarchical racial order and colonial present. Haque also maps what she calls

the “durability of the white-settler bilingual/bicultural formulations in the present,

and its contemporary mode of ordering racialized immigrant Others” (see 9-30).

Haque’s meticulously researched book draws on interdisciplinary scholarship in

the humanities and social sciences in order to remind us that royal commissions and

commissions of inquiry have served many purposes in Canada, among them

helping to build social knowledge and social consensus. They have been used to help

CES Volume 46 Number 2 (2014), 141-149

CES Vol 46.2.2014_June 2014 2014-06-05 4:57 PM Page 141

policymakers clarify how we define a political problem or craft a social policy solution.

Academic engagement, especially among political and social science scholars, has been

central to the relative success of royal commissions as a governing instrument. “The

scale of the research, the co-optation of the scores of scholars from all parts of the

country to this endeavour, the publicity associated with their reports – these and other

features of commissions of inquiry made them a central mechanism in the reconcep-

tualization of Canadian federalism” (D. Smith 2010, 37). Jane Jenson refers to them as

“commissioning ideas” and notes that they “set out the terms of who we are, where we

have been and what we might become” and they are the “locales for some of the major

shifts in the ways that Canadians debate representations of themselves, their presents

and their futures” (Jenson 1994, 39-40; Haque, 30). Haque’s work makes clear that

“public inquiries do not just gather facts; rather, they authorize certain forms of social

discourse, which ultimately become truths because of the supposed neutrality of the

inquiries themselves” (Haque, 24; Anderson and Denis 2003, 381).

The book reminds us that royal commissions have played a major role in pub-

lic policymaking since before Confederation. The British colonial government estab-

lished various inquiries including Lord Durham’s Inquiry on the causes of two

rebellions in Lower and Upper Canada in 1837 and 1838 (Haque, 43, 86-7, 144, 265-

8). In Chapter 3, “Preliminary Hearings and Report” (52-92), Haque discusses the B

and B Commission’s Preliminary Report, which compares the situation in the 1830s

with the conditions that gave rise to the B and B Commission (87). Undertaken

during a five-week investigation in the British North American colonies by John

Georges Lambton, Lord Durham’s Inquiry led to a report tabled in London in 1838.

It provided Lord Durham’s assessment of the Affairs of the British North American

colonies and subsequently led to the British North American Act of 1867. As Haque

points out, these early commissions were saturated with hierarchical and racialized

discourses. For example, Lord Durham wrote,

I expected to find a contest between a government and a people: I found two nationswarring in the bosom of a single state: I found a struggle, not of principles, but of races;and I perceived that it would be idle to attempt any amelioration of laws or institutionsuntil we could first succeed in terminating the deadly animosity that now separates theinhabitants of Lower Canada into the hostile divisions of French and English. (Canada,Preliminary Report, 1965, 144; Bliss 1996: 49-62)

Lord Durham thought the Anglo-Saxons were a superior race. He wrote that the

French were a people “without history and without literature” and, over time, he

anticipated that this cultural-linguistic minority population would be assimilated

into the dominant English identity: “The language, the laws and the character of the

North American continent are English, and every other race than the English race is

Canadian Ethnic Studies/Études ethniques au Canada142 |


in a state of inferiority. It is in order to release them from this inferiority that I wish

to give the Canadiens [French] our English character” (Lord Durham’s Report quoted

in CBC 2001). This form of ethnocentrism was revisited by the B and B Commission

(Haque, 86-7). What is notable across time and space is the continuity of the histor-

ical erasures and silences. Lord Durham’s Report ignored the first peoples already

inhabiting Canada prior to the migration of English and French settlers; indigenous

peoples were narrated out of the nation. Likewise, where the B and B Commission

sought to address the grievances of the Québécois, it held steadfast to its terms of ref-

erence and mandate which excluded indigenous peoples. Consequently, both by acts

of omission and commission, the final report narrated a white settler colonial con-

ception of Canada as being “founded” by French and English-speaking settlers and

thus reproduced foundational settler narratives of terra nullius (empty land).

The political significance and policy impact of royal commissions has waxed and

waned over the years. From the 1960s to the 1990s, royal commissions were a fre-

quently used national policy mechanism. Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau

(1968-79, 1980-84), an enthusiastic advocate of social knowledge, appointed 45 com-

missions, while his predecessor, Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney (1984-

93), appointed 16 of them. However, royal commissions as a major policy instrument

began to recede with the ascendance of neoliberal market logics, which was already

becoming evident at the time the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP

1996) was established. In the 15-year period between Jean Chrétien’s (1993-2003) and

Paul Martin’s Liberals (2002-2006) and Stephen Harper’s Conservatives (2006-), less

than 10 such commissions were appointed; these included the RCAP under Chrétien,

which was basically shelved; the Gomery Inquiry, which derailed the Martin govern-

ment; and the long overdue Air India Inquiry (2006-08) under Harper. The contem-

porary silence of royal commissions is partly shaped by the growing concentration of

power in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). The lack of interest by senior politicians

and policymakers in such public inquiries also relates to the growing preference for

focused groups, targeted surveys, and private opinion polls as sources of political

knowledge (D. Smith, 38). In this light it is not surprising, then, that repeated calls for

a royal commission on missing and murdered Aboriginal women have been stub-

bornly resisted by the Harper government.

CONSTITUTING “FOUNDING RACES” AND RACIAL-LINGUISTIC OTHERS

One of the questions that animates Haque’s path-breaking book is this: “How, in

Canada, did language come to be the site for articulating exclusions which can no

longer be stated in terms of race and ethnicity?” (4) The book argues that race, cul-

ture, and language are inextricably linked to notions of nation and belonging in

Malinda S. Smith | 143


Canada. It traces the multidimensional ways in which language has come to function

as a “convenient alibi for racial ordering that can be provided by the multicultural

nation established on the foundation of a putatively open linguistic duality” (4) as

well as how “multiculturalism within a bilingual framework” functions to instanti-

ate a “racial order of difference and belonging through language in the ongoing proj-

ect of white settler nation-building” (5-7).

The meaning and signification of the concept of race in Canada has shifted over

time and space (Smith 2003). One of the first books on Canadian politics was French

geographer André Siegfred’s, Le Canada, les deux races: problèmes politiques contem-

porains (1906), which was published in English a year later as, The race question in

Canada (1907). Siegfred’s book of Canada’s “two races” offered a cogent discussion

of settler political culture and elite accommodation. It also shows that there has

always been an intersection between how “race” and “ethnicity” are understood in

Canada. Siegfred’s “two races” became the B and B Commission’s “two founding

races,” juxtaposed against both the indigenous first nations and the other ethnic

groups (see Haque, 54-92, 185-236).

The terms of reference of the B and B Commission produced the English and

the French as the “founding races” of Canada. This productive myth did at least three

things: first, it created a racial-linguistic hierarchy and language, which became the

basis for racial exclusion (14); second, it constituted all other non-indigenous inhab-

itants as Other – “other ethnic groups” – and “newcomers” (54-60); and, third, it

erased first nations, thereby reproducing formative settler colonial narratives. An

extended quote from “Indigenous cultures” in the key words section of the B and B

Commission’s Final Report imposes the exclusion as follows:

We should point out here that the Commission will not examine the question of theIndians and the Eskimos. Our terms of reference contain no allusion to Canada’s nativepopulations. They speak of “two founding races,” namely Canadians of British andFrench origin, and “other ethnic groups,” but mention neither the Indians nor theEskimos. Since it is obvious that these two groups do not form part of the “foundingraces,” as the phrase is used in the terms of reference, it would logically be necessary toinclude them under the heading “other ethnic groups.” Yet it is clear that the term “otherethnic groups” means those peoples of diverse origins who came to Canada during orafter the founding of the Canadian state and that it does not include the first inhabitantsof this country. (“General Introduction: Key Words,” Final Report, 1967, xxvi)

Haque points out in chapter 1 and especially in chapter 6, that this racial ordering is

evident in relation to the constitution of the “immigrant Other” (9, 24, 240-3). It

arbitrarily differentiates among intergenerational migrants on the basis of language,

despite the contradiction that English and French are spoken both by those consti-

tuted as “founding races” and those immigrants from former British and French



colonies who the B and B Commission’s terms of reference constituted as “other

ethnic groups.” This dividing practice performs a kind of semiotic violence to the

linguistic Other and especially to the invisiblized multiple linguistic groups among

first nations. These troubled distinctions have been normalized and even sanitized

in contemporary political and philosophical conceptions of citizenship. Haque

specifically points to Will Kymlicka’s conception of “multicultural citizenship

(Haque, 244-6) and “group-differentiated citizenship” (249). Inequity is built into

the very idea of “two founding races” and the “other ethnic groups” (see Book IV).

Haque suggests this racial ordering effectively produces a kind of separate and

unequal citizenship and, thus, is “antithetical to the cultural equality and pluralism

that multicultural policy purports to promote” (249; see also, Meyerhoff 1993-1994,

967-9).

The book traces the shift from a “white dominion” to a new form of white settler

colonialism in the present, one in which English and French bilingualism play a funda-

mental role in boundary making and marking. Canadian constitutional scholar Frank

R. Scott has suggested that the emergence of bilingualism was among the factors that

led to the disuse of “dominion,” in part, because there was no French-equivalent for the

concept (Scott 1944, 34-49). “Against the background of the commission’s terms of ref-

erence, which spoke of only ‘two founding races,” Haque explains, “it is possible to trace

how Indigenous groups’ claims were eventually set aside and other ethnic groups’

demands were muted.” She goes on to say that this “shift from overt racial distinctions

between founding and other ethnic groups onto the terrain of language and culture

meant that racial exclusions could be disavowed even as they were smuggled back in

through the contradictory operation of language and culture” (Haque, 6).

Despite the B and B’s Commission effort to narrate a nation and a shared nar-

rative of belonging, Haque’s archival and genealogical research shows otherwise.

“Submissions by ‘Indians and Eskimos’ and ‘other ethnic groups’ during the prelim-

inary hearings,” Haque writes, “reveal the counter-stories, deviations, and disjunc-

tures to both the commission’s terms of reference and its singular notion of a crisis

in the history of the country.” Moreover, she argues, “It is in these counter-stories

and disjunctures that the fault lines of an emerging racialized hierarchy between

founding races, Indigenous groups, and other ethnic groups can be detected” (53).

The race concept deployed in the B and B Commission was strongly contested and

resisted. “The ‘founding races’ vision was therefore the central point of tension in the

inquiry’s early days, with the commissioners being confronted by submissions from

Indigenous and other ethnic groups that rested on a much different view of the

country. The need to address this tension shaped the construction of the Preliminary

Report” (53-54). In the book, Haque draws on extensive archival materials to illus-

trate these tensions.



The B and B Commission attempted to naturalize the idea of the English and

French settlers in Canada as “founding races.” Both Commissioners André

Laurendeau and Davidson Dunton saw the terms of reference as determinative. “My

colleague, Davidson Dunton, will tell you presently that in our opinion the central

idea of the terms of reference is that of the equal partnership between the two found-

ing races.” Laurendeau elaborated further, “Implied in the word ‘biculturalism’ is the

fact that in Canada there are two main cultures, each related to one of the principal

languages, sharing much in common but each with many distinctive attributes” (55).

This singular and insisted focus on “two founding races” constituting Canada as a

“bilingual” and “bicultural” country informed the approach of the commissioners,

the focus of the public and private hearings, and the specific research the commis-

sioners sought to help them reach their conclusions.

Haque points out that the “hierarchical disjuncture between race and ethnicity

was one of the central points of disagreement over the terms of reference.” Book I of

the B and B Commission’s final report pays particular attention to the distinctiveness

of the two concepts (Haque, 59). One of the most fascinating discussions in the report

is over the concepts “founding races” versus “other ethnic groups” and “new

Canadians” (Haque, 50-8). The tension between the idea of the founding races and

other ethnic group was teased out in the hearings by Dr. I. Hlynka of the Ukrainian

Canadian Committee (Canada, Preliminary Hearing, 1963, 84). Dr. Hlynka argued

that the distinction produced “a division of Canadian citizens into two categories…

first- and second-class citizens” (as cited, Haque, 57). Moreover, in rejecting this divid-

ing practice Hlynka noted the distinction seemed to “recognize or to imply the supe-

riority of one group of Canadians over another, whether it be on the basis of their

ethnic origin, their culture, or the so-called prior historic right, because this means a

return to a colonial status from which it has taken so long to emerge” (as cited, 57).

The concept of “new Canadians” as used by the commissioners to distinguish

the other ethnic groups from the French and the English also posed a problem. How

new is “new”? Did the BNA Act guarantee cultural tolerance and accommodation for

all minority ethnic groups or did it privilege the French and English? The question

was important for all who had settled in Canada pre-Confederation, for those who

had migrated since the passage of the Confederation Statute, and especially for the

original inhabitants. There was a certain absurdity, too, in the efforts to privilege the

English and French in relation to the so-called “other ethnic groups.” At one point in

the hearings Commissioner Rudnyckyj queried: “If the German group came two

hundred years before Confederation, is this a newcomer group?” (as cited, 58).

The concept of new Canadian was especially problematic from the perspective

of indigenous peoples. In her testimony, Mrs. Saul Hayes, president of the National

Council of Women of Canada, an organization that included diverse ethnic groups



“such as the North American Indian, Polish, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, Negro,

Ukrainians and Greek” (Canada, Preliminary Hearing, 1963, 446) objected both to

the terms of reference and the differentiated citizenship signalled by founding races

and its Others: “The terms of reference,” Hayes noted, “have implications that give

rise to the basic objection of dividing Canada into a primary group of First Citizens

and a secondary group of citizens who may qualify as Canadians, under certain con-

ditions” (as cited, Haque, 59-60).

Hayes objected to the uniform constitution of non-English and French as “new

Canadians,” regardless of when they arrived in Canada and the constitution of French

and Anglo-Saxons as “founding races” whether they arrived in Canada before 1759 or

after 1947. The concept “new Canadians,” as many testimonies noted, originally meant

those who arrived in Canada after 1947. The B and B Commission, however, promul-

gated a mis-use, which extended the concept to non-English and non-French who

migrated to Canada after 1759. “According to this, it would follow that if a person came

from England in 1960, he is a Canadian, but if a Pole or a Ukrainian or a Jew traces his

origin in Canada to his grandfather in 1799, he is a ‘new Canadian’” (as cited, 58).

Hayes’ query was left unresolved, including her question: “When you say that ‘ethnic’

means racial, there is the distinction apparently intimated by the term used – the ‘two

founding races’ and referring to the ‘other ethnic groups.’ Well, if the words are inter-

changeable, I do not know why they use two different words to describe the same

meaning, right within this phrase, within the terms of reference itself” (as cited, 60).

Haque’s discussion of the testimony of Canadian Jewish Congress representa-

tive, Mr. M. Garber, is equally fascinating. Garber criticized the concept “two found-

ing races,” arguing “the word ‘race,’ which can be stretched into ‘racialism’ … is

reminiscent of the suffering of the smaller groups wherever this word is emphasized”

(as cited, 60). He noted that at the time of the B and B Commission, Jews had been

in Canada for 200 years and were not new Canadians. On behalf of the CJC Garber

“strongly urge[d]…that at least this loose document be so amended that that refer-

ence to races of ethnic groups be eliminated altogether” (Canada, Preliminary

Hearing, 1963, 261; Haque, 61). The claim that pre-Confederation Canada was con-

stituted only by Anglo-Saxons and French was also rejected and Garber’s response

may now be seen as prophetic. That “statement is wrong to the extent that today, and

certainly in the future, the majority of people probably will be neither Anglo-Saxons

nor French Canadians” (Canada, Preliminary Hearing, 1963, 262).

CONCLUSION

Haque’s book provides a deep analysis of a moment in Canadian history but its cen-

tral message resonates in contemporary politics. As Benedict Anderson (1991)



reminds us, national narratives are grounded in selective languages and practices of

remembering and forgetting. The B and B Commission was a response to the Quiet

Revolution in Québec in the 1960s but the recovery and reinvention of settler nar-

ratives of “founding” European peoples and cultures, as Haque so aptly demon-

strates, remains flawed and contradictory. The B and B Commission ushered in a

new era of bilingualism in Canada and, later, broad acceptance of the idea of multi-

culturalism (not without its own problems). But, it generated counter-narratives

and alternative identities, such as, for example, a shift from dominant constructions

of “Indians and Eskimos” to First Nations and indigenous peoples. As is often the

case, the use of descriptors such as language and culture as supplements for hierar-

chical racial orders often serve only to further expose rather than hide the racialized

underpinnings of national narratives. Haque’s provocative work brilliantly demon-

strates this paradox as it provides insights for reimagining the decolonization of the

settler state and hegemonic white settler narratives.

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Scott, Frank R. 1944. The End of Dominion States. The American Journal of International Law 38.1(January): 34-49.

Smith, David E. 2010. The Measure of Federalism. In Federalism and the Constitution of Canada. Toronto:University of Toronto Press, 29-35.

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MALINDA S. SMITH is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science

at the University of Alberta. She is the editor or co-editor of five books,

including Critical Concepts: An Introduction to Politics (Pearson, 2013), States of Race:

Critical Race Feminism for the 21st Century (Between the Lines, 2010), and Securing

Africa: Post-9/11 Discourses on Terrorism (Ashgate, 2010). She has published widely

on critical race feminism, equity, diversity and social justice, and critical terrorism

studies.



Smith. "Commissioning 'Founding Races' and Settler Colonial Narratives"

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