What the Right gets wrong about Canada Has the dull kingdom become a dystopia?

A longer view shows that Canada has allured but also vexed British observers ever since its creation. The Edwardian era produced an especially rich crop of writings on Canada. In 1887, the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, the first train from Montreal pulled into Vancouver. This completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) had persuaded the Crown colony of British Columbia to join in the new federation. In expanding Canada, the CPR also made it easier for British people to see the country. Having crossed from Liverpool to Montreal on a fast liner, they could visit most of its major cities, which were found on or near the railway.

Literary celebrities did so in enviable conditions. The CPR’s bosses loaned the poet Rudyard Kipling his own carriage in 1907, so he could travel in comfort and at his own speed. His impressions, which appeared in newspapers and then as Letters to the Family (1908), make for particularly resonant reading today. Although a man of strong prejudices, he had seen the country up close, rather than merely retweeting allegations about it, and was prepared to be surprised as well as disappointed by it.

Kipling’s contemporaries travelled with heavier and very different ideological baggage than we carry today. It was not wokery that worried them, but irreligion and greed, two poisons that had crept north from America. When the clergyman Hensley Henson steamed into Vancouver, in July 1909, he was horrified to see its beaches plastered with “vulgar advertisements”. The further West he travelled, the worse things became. The Anglican clergy were “weaklings” who made no dent on a materialistic society. Winnipeg was given over to “graft”. Young people in Ontario spoke like gum-chewing Yankees. Quebeckers were despoiling their province by setting up hydroelectric dams on its waterfalls.

Kipling did not share Henson’s churchy desire to scold his Canadian hosts. He was a cheerful freethinker who considered materialism a necessary part of nation-building. Canada had “big skies, and the big chances”: he admired its railway workers and lumberjacks for their insouciant and sometimes drunken swagger. Boom towns like Winnipeg excited him: he loved to see office blocks rise and streets flare with natural gas lamps; he lost considerable sums speculating on Vancouver real estate.

What worried him was rather Canada’s fading strategic commitment to the Empire. The modern Right understands Canada as a battleground for the values of “the West”. Kipling, who had married an American and lived for some years in Vermont, naturally believed in and did much to formulate the fervent if vague sense that English-speaking peoples share a civilisation. Yet this did not weaken his overriding concern for the political cohesion of the British Empire. Canada’s failure to join as enthusiastically in Britain’s recent war against the rebellious Dutch Boers of South Africa as he would have liked weighed on him — so much so that he kept calling the prairie the “veldt”. Kipling regarded the scepticism of Liberals and Socialists at home about whether the Empire offered value for money as a “blight”: now this “rot” seemed to be spreading like Bubonic plague, “with every steamer” to Canada.

The way to draw the dominion back to the motherland was to fill it with English settlers who shared his distaste for domestic Socialism. The dilution of English Canada worried Kipling. He allowed the Francophone Catholics of Quebec their differences — he found their basilicas romantic — but the policy of settling the prairies with hardy Slavs from the Habsburg and Russian Empires appalled him. These “beady-eyed, muddy-skinned, aproned women, with handkerchiefs on their heads and Oriental bundles in their hands” could never assimilate to English Canada. Nor did he care that many were fleeing oppression: people who renounce their country have “broken the rules of the game”.

There is something sadly contemporary about these fulminations: in Canada, as in Britain, it is once again becoming common to worry about the replacement of national cultures by an influx of unassimilable outsiders. Yet Kipling’s imperial preoccupations could limit as well as inflame his xenophobia. As he wanted British Columbia, which he regarded as a Pacific paradise, to become the Empire’s link to Asia, he condemned popular efforts to stop the immigration of the Japanese workers. Without them its fruit farms would never take off as exporters to the East. He despised a recent riot against Vancouver’s Japanese community as the work of American racists from Seattle.

The British have always projected their hopes and fears onto Canada. Edwardian Britain’s views from the train car nonetheless suggest that we should always allow Canada to be a more complex place than the thesis of the moment requires. Kipling, who doted on British Columbia as the garden of a new England, was startled but delighted to encounter hundreds of Sikh immigrants there. To hear the name Amritsar was as pleasant as a drink of “cold water in a thirsty land” to this old India hand. Sikhs were fellow subjects of King Edward. He urged (in vain) that Canadians must spare them from the violent extremes of colonial racism, or tales of their treatment would get back to their villages and weaken the Raj. We now rightly look askance at Kipling’s chauvinism, but our thinking about Canada could use some of his willingness to feel surprised as well as vindicated.

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Michael Ledger-Lomas is a historian of religion from Vancouver, British Columbia and the author of Queen Victoria: This Thorny Crown (2021). He is currently writing a book about the Edwardians and the gods.

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