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John Fraser interview

On elections, democracy and responsibilities

I was raised by a mother and father who — my father was a sort of a liberal, but as my mother once said, a very conservative one. My mother was an old Irish Ontarian Tory.

Of course I grew up during the war. I never ever heard them argue about politics. But what was constant in everything I learned as I grew up, and I was about 14 when the war ended, was patriotism and service to your country. And, of course, family.

That’s the way I grew up and when I finally joined the Conservative Party on the campus at UBC, this would be 1949-1950. I was 17, I guess, when I started at UBC. I can remember my mother told my father, “your son has become a Conservative.” And he sat me down in front of the fire in the living room and he said, “look, you know son, John I will support you in anything that you think is honourable.” But he said, in British Columbia, as a young man probably going into law, and maybe eventually you might even be interested in politics, with the Liberal government that’s in this province and in the country, he said, “you have picked the hardest route you could for any success.”

But he was very encouraging.

And when I started off I did not intend to get elected. That wasn’t my idea. I thought you should work in a party and push things that you thought were important. A lot of people believed that — later on, years later, that well I was always going to do this. In fact, I got out of law school in 1954 and things had not been easy; my father was not well and financial difficulties and it wasn’t an easy time. And so I sort of looked around at the world, and I didn’t have a silver spoon to be handed by any means. And I said “well I don’t know how smart I am,” and I looked around at my class — and it was a good class by the way, the class that graduated in 1954 — and I said, “but I do know one thing: I can outwork any one of these people.” I had terrific regard for a lot of them, but I said I could outwork ’em. But I’m going to become such a good counsel, that’s a barrister, that even the Liberals, who I assumed would always be in power, would have to appoint me to the bench.

Well as it turned out, I never went to the bench and after many years of practicing law I finally did run. I ran first in 1968, and while I lost — the Conservatives lost every riding in British Columbia in that election, that was the Trudeau period. And while I didn’t win — I was running against Arthur Laing, who was a friend of my fathers and a Scottish name… but he kind of liked me. But I didn’t win, I wasn’t going to — I probably didn’t have a chance of winning against him. But it was the only riding in British Columbia where the Conservative vote went up from the election before. So they never me alone for the next four years.

Some of my friends still don’t believe this but my wife knows it. The decision to run again in 1972 was the single most difficult decision I’ve ever made in my life because I was in a terrific law firm, I was a partner, I loved the law — I mean it was very hard work, but I was good at it. And to leave the law was very, very difficult for me. I don’t have any regrets and I don’t indulge in nostalgia, but I missed it. I really, honestly missed it.

And of course then I was away for 21 years in the House of Commons.

But trying to come back on sort of the theme of your inquiry here, your conversation… I believe very, very profoundly that rights are very important. I voted for the Charter of Rights. I voted for the Charter of Rights because I felt that the Diefenbaker charter was being interpreted in the courts as only applicable to federal matters. I thought we needed one that covered the whole of the country. I think it has been both a good thing and at times some judges have, I think, put interpretations on it that were never intended by the committee that I was in that brought it about in the first place.

And also I’m a lawyer, and I have a tremendous regard for civil rights. And while lawyers are much maligned, they’ve played an incredible role over centuries in respecting the rights of the ordinary citizen and insisting on them. So I have a very strong view in that regard.

But I have an equally strong view, which I certainly got from my parents, about responsibility. So I have a profound conviction that a citizen hasn’t got any business just sitting back and ignoring what is going on in the political world around them, whether it’s municipal, provincial or federal. I think that is a lack of responsibility. I think it’s an abdication of a fundamental duty of a citizen.

I think that if you’re going to be a citizen and you’re going to insist on rights, you have got to have an equal consideration of what is your responsibility as an individual for the welfare and well being of this country and all the people in it.

By that I do not mean that everybody should necessarily join a political party or necessarily try to run. We’ve had, over the years, a number of people who’ve decided to run who probably might have served the country better by not running at all. So I’m not suggesting everybody has to be up to their ears in politics in a partisan sense or running for public office.

But I do suggest — I’m too old now to mince my words. I’m not just suggesting I’m asserting, that if a citizen is to do their duty they have got to, first of all, pay attention to what is going on, and then they have a duty to take their concerns to those they elect, and say “look, this is bothering us. What are you going to do about it? We want you to report back and tell us.”

My sense of things, over many years, too often individuals grump and complain but then when you ask then when did you last phone your Member of Parliament or your Member of the Legislative Assembly or even go to city council, well they haven’t done that. And you say, “well don’t you think that’s what you should be doing?”

Now, that may be a counsel of perfection and even if some people say “well, maybe Fraser’s right we should do this,” but they don’t, I still think that is something that… young people should be raised to consider. Because often, and I think this can be shown in any democracy, it’s the absence of commitment that let’s things happen, that afterwards they say “well how did these guys ever do this to us?” or “how did this ever happen?”

I mean, it’s no secret I’m a Tory and I’m a philosophic conservative. It doesn’t bother me a bit that other people have different views and different approaches. But in fairness to you or to anybody who reads anything you write you may as well know that my notion of what conservatism is, is it’s an instinctive recognition that the human being, which is the individual that governance is all about, is as capable of being a sinner as a saint. And those who want to deny this I just have very little patience with because I don’t think they’ve read any history.

And the challenge, both for an individual and also for those who are in a position of governance, is how do you take into account the nature of the human being and security, opportunity… very much opportunity, education, civility and a regime in which rights and responsibilities are understood and which the wisdom of the past is respected when one considers what changes need to be made in the present and the future.

And that that instinctive concern for tradition in our institutions in what we have developed as a democratic community, applies equally to the environment. I do not believe it is possible to be a philosophic conservative and not be a conservationist. And if anybody wants to argue with me on that I’ll take on the lot of them. There’s some around, I know that.

You may smile and say well, what about others of other political persuasions who want to be conservationists. And I say well, I’m not going to take away the instinct for conservation from anybody else. I’m just saying, because my background is conservative, I want to make that clear. And I think it is something that should be said more often. I keep saying it…

Anyone who philosophically is trying to conserve the values that we have struggle to obtain, that are so important to us, and can’t ignore… the almost fundamental value of clean air and clean water, and forests and… all that goes with the environmental side, is missing something absolutely essential.

And what it all comes down to is this: It’s a sense of community.

Now, I’ve got profound respect for the individual. I think an individual has to have opportunity, has to have security. You don’t want to ever discourage individual activity. But you’ve got to do it within the concept of what a community is all about. Because ultimately that’s what we are. We’re members of a community. And what I’ve always said in conversations and speeches year after year is the great obligation of the individual citizen is to ensure the continuing community from one generation to another. And that’s basically everything I’ve ever striven for.

I’m not saying for a moment that a lot of other people — and they don’t happen to all be Conservatives by any means — but it’s the consciousness of this that I think is very important for people to start to get into their heads.

Before, by the way, they’ve got out of Grade 12. Which brings me to another subject, and that is that if you want to have a future you’d better pay attention to your history. Right across this country provincial departments of education have let us down very badly in this regard, in my view.

 

Q: On history in particular?

Well, I don’t think you can understand where we are today if you don’t pay some attention to history. And history takes in so many other things. I mean it is impossible, for instance, to study the progression of English literature from Chaucer on, unless you also understand some of the history that goes with it. It is impossible, for instance, to understand what we take for granted in terms of the right to vote, or equality or, by the way, labour laws, if you don’t know any history. I mean one of the great battles in the 1800s, both in Great Britain and then eventually in Canada, was whether or not trade unions could form organizations and operate collectively.

If you don’t know any of the history of what was going on these things, they’re just words, they don’t mean anything to you. When you understand how hard we had to work to establish some of these things you also start to understand that we’ve got lots of work to do right now. Or else looking back on it from some future generation, they’ll wonder why we didn’t do it.

There’s a tremendous difference between saying that history is just a matter of memorizing a bunch of dates — that is a very shallow appreciation of what it’s all about. And some people shy away from trying to teach history because they say well there’s different view of what happened. Of course there are. There are different views of what happened scientifically, technologically, medically, politically and everything else. But that’s no way to dodge the responsibility for it.

When you consider this country of ours, Canada, we are a nation of complainers — and that’s not all together a bad thing. I was a soldier once and as long as soldiers were grumping you knew everything was okay. It was when they got silent that you knew there was trouble.

So — we are, and it’s partly because we’re a very free country. But we have done amazing things, and I can give you a litany of things that we should have done better, like anybody else can. But if you compare us to a lot of other places, we’re not doing too badly. Is it perfection? Not by a long shot. And you don’t want to hear a litany of some of the things I think we ought to do. But I’m just saying that… it didn’t just happen yesterday, and this notion, you know, that Canada was born on a sunny day in Ottawa in 1867, is just that, it’s a notion. It was coming a long time before that.

There’s another notion, that we didn’t become a nation until Vimy Ridge, in 1917. Certainly both events are very important in our history, but our history goes back a long time before that. And when you talk today about Canadian values, look, for goodness sakes, my Highland ancestors in 1758 brought values to this country which are just as current today as any.

I mean, this idea that we invented all this some time in the 1960s is, well, it’s flattering perhaps if all you’re talking to is the mirror, but it’s nonsense.

We brought a lot of values here. Not, by the way, just from Scotland or my mother’s people, Ireland, but from a lot of other places as well.

But if you don’t know your history and you don’t understand the significance of it, there’s very little chance that those values will, in the long run, in the present and in the future, have the same… be held in the same high regard to which I think they should be held.

But the idea that we just invented all these things is a very shallow look at things.

 

Somebody recently said that one of the reasons that politicians are not held in high esteem is because they are so critical of each other. If lawyers… at our best we were trained and raised in a profession in which, while we could strive mightily to promote our own views of the evidence and the law in contest with another fellow lawyer who had a different view, you could also go out and have dinner together. And in public life the degree to which individuals who get elected as Members of Parliament, or the legislature or anywhere else, forget that their job is to think through what is in the best public interest, and then to persuade people to support it. That does not need to engage the vitriolic personal attacks that so often take place, and which, in my view, are counterproductive. I think they demean both the person who flings the mud and the person who gets it. And the other thing is I don’t think it’s necessary. But there’s a lot of it and it’s regrettable.

Remember, I was Speaker of the House of Commons for many years and I tried very hard to make sure that that stuff didn’t get flung around inside the chamber. And there’s, of course, rules to make sure that it doesn’t. I’m not so sure that that’s been as well disciplined right now as it ought to be but I back away from being critical of the House of Commons now. I was there too long to sit in judgment on it when you’re not there every day.

 

The other thing about the democratic political system, and especially ours now where we have a multiplicity of parties, is that there are some issues which are so important that individual members ought to have the sense to realize we are going to have to find some accommodation with each other on these issues.

It doesn’t necessarily mean a coalition government, but it does mean that members from both sides of the House, on some things, have got to be thinking very hard about trying to find some kind of collaboration so that these matters can be dealt with.

If you want to look at it in the classic sense of war, nobody wants war but once you get into it you’ve either got to pull together or you’re going to be defeated. Certainly in the First World War there was in effect, though not perhaps in formal terms, a coming together of a lot of people from both the Liberal and Conservative side, with some exceptions of course, who were determined to make sure that, to the degree possible, Canada would pursue what it had to do as an ally, and to try and get a national effort behind it.

The same thing happened in the Second World War, though there was not as much collaboration between, for instance, the Conservatives and the Liberals. But there was a general sense that the country had to pull together. There were some arguments — conscription was one of them, of course.

And if somebody asked me today, what is the greatest single worry that we’ve got in the long term as a nation and as a member of the world community, I would say it is climate change and environmental concerns.

Now, I would be quick to add that if you’re going to meet those concerns you also have to do it on the basis of an economy that can carry the cost of it.

But — I’m not going to get into a partisan discussion here except to observe that there are a number of different approaches right now being enunciated as to how to resolve greenhouse gases and environmental issues. Now if I was in charge of everything, I would get everybody in a room and say… just as in olden times they denied the Cardinals of any food or water until they made a decision, I would do somewhat the same thing — and say look, you’re not all going to get your own way. But the only way we’re going to convince the ordinary citizens of this country to do what is necessary is we’re going to have to come up with some kind of approach that gets at least a significant majority of people saying there’s going to be some costs and pain to this but we have to do it.

And people will say well this is not possible. And my answer to that is it’s not possible if nobody promotes it. And secondly, I believe very strongly in this so I think it’s essential.

I was a Member of Parliament when we finally obtained the agreement, the understanding with the United States on what became called acid rain. I was the minister under the Clark government that first went to Washington to start talking about this. Now it took us a lot of years until the older President Bush came to Canada and we signed the accord. But what a lot of people have forgotten is that we had a cross-party group that worked on this for years, and that’s what brought it about. That’s why by the time Mulroney was able to go and make a speech to the United States Congress about the need to do something about acid rain and the environment, he knew the support was there on both sides of the House.

One of the reasons that Canadian corporations, and to some degree, some of the Canadian provincial jurisdictions, finally muted their objections is because with both sides of the House of Commons saying this has got to be done — the ones who didn’t want to do anything, some of them for ostensibly commercial reasons and others just because they didn’t really believe in it, they had no political home to go to.

So on some things, it seems to me that Parliament at its best — now remember, I’m talking about at its best — individual MPs are going to recognize that there are some issues that are so important that they’re going to have to really take off their partisan jackets and sit down with each other and say lwell ook, we’ve got to find some way to do this, and not just by calling each other names.

 

Q: Is there enough co-operation among MPs from different parties today?

Well I can remember… I’ll just give you a little example of why I think it’s important.

I was at a cabinet meeting in 1984 or 1985 and — I’m not giving out secrets I’m just saying — I was reporting on fisheries matters and I got asked about some other issues and I said, well I think climate change and global warming are absolutely key issues. Now this is a long time ago, and there were some remarks about it, it wasn’t on the agenda so it just came out.

And as I walked out of the cabinet meeting Michael Wilson stopped me. Michael Wilson was then finance minister, he’s now our ambassador in Washington. And he said John you raised this business of global warming and climate change. And I said yes.

He said, you’re serious about this. And I said Mike, if we can avoid flinging a nuclear weapon at ourselves, at our ideologically opposed opponents in the Soviet bloc, this then is going to be an absolutely crucial issue, not just for us domestically but for the world.

Now I know that there are a bunch of scientists who have signed petitions who say that we have nothing to do with what’s going on. I would like to believe that. We may not be the sole cause of it but I think we have a lot to do with what’s going on.

So I think that it’s a very serious issue. But it isn’t going to be resolved by three or four, or even more, different approaches to it, and each one being defended or proposed with a highly partisan sense of… I was going to use a much more difficult word, and less complimentary, but let’s say with… with too much misplaced enthusiasm.

 

There’s another side to all this business… when you talk about the community, the sense of the continuing community.

Some years ago, and I remember this very vividly, this country went through an extraordinarily difficult period of soul searching, about how do we keep it together. It’s not something that’s gone away, I mean we still are concerned about that.

But when you consider what we did collectively, and often with cross-party agreement — and there were lots of nay sayers — to try to make sure that our fellow Canadians in either Quebec or the Maritimes or Franco-Ontario, began to really believe that the rest of Canada not only valued them but was prepared to do a great many things to make sure that they as individuals did not lose their language and their culture, but were able to engage in all the opportunities that were available to citizens of a large and basically free and relatively stable country.

A lot of people today take much of that for granted. They think well, we’ve got kids growing up all over the country who speak both languages. We’ve got arrangements with French-speaking fellow citizens. But I remember how bitter some of this was.

This is why kids growing up have got to know some history. It’s also why citizens have got to be reminded of history; it’s only a few decades back.

As a Canadian — I was born in Japan but I grew up from the time I was three years old in Vancouver, Powell River and Vancouver. I was an officer cadet at the start of the Korean War training in the infantry at Borden — Camp Borden, Royal Canadian School of Infantry. That was the first time I ever met a French Canadian. About 30 per cent of our instructors were French Canadian soldiers. They were warrant officers and officers, all of whom had either been in the Second World War or had just come back from Korea. About 30 per cent of the fellow officer cadets were French Canadians, from Quebec. And what was amazing about that was that most of them had never met any of us, and yet in a very short period of time — we might have had different views of history or different arguments about this, that or the other thing — but it was amazing how rapidly a bonding took place.

This would be 1951. It had only been six or seven years before that this whole issue of unity was put under very, very great stress, especially in Quebec, during the Second World War.

I can remember arguments I had here long before I got elected, about why we should have an effective French immersion system in British Columbia. And I have never changed my view. Two of our daughters are completely bilingual and the way it’s going I think some of our granddaughters, some of them almost are now and I think they will be.

But it was not easy, for instance, in Vancouver South in 1968 when I first ran, to stand up and say that this white paper on bilingualism — supported, by the way, by the Conservative Bob Stanfield — is the way we have to go if we’re going to keep this country together. That was not what a lot of people wanted to hear. But as I say, my votes still went up.

So these things are issues that require the people that we elect to think the thing through and then have enough courage to stand up for them. No use sitting back and just mumbling about it. You’ve got to stand up for these things.

And in order to make it go you’ve got to find allies in other parties.

You say is it done enough now. Well, it depends on how you look at it. I mean one could say that in the last two and a half years there’s been a minority government that’s worked very well, because much of what the minority government put forward got passed. But whether there was really that much cross-party collaboration is very debatable. I suspect it had more to do with the fact that nobody, even those who talk differently, really wanted an election.

But certainly we’ve had a lot of years, not just since Kyoto but since 1990, which was Rio, to put together cross-party approaches on these environmental issues, and we for the most part have not done it.

I think we’ve not been — this is the great collective “we”, so I’m not picking on anybody. We have not adequately, in my view, thought through our relations with the United States. The notion, for instance, that just because the Americans do something it must be obviously bad and we shouldn’t do anything like the same is absolutely puerile childishness. They’re there, whether we like it or not. As Tom Thompson, who was the Social Credit leader once in the House of Commons said, “They are our best friends, whether we like it or not.”

Which does not mean that you have to agree with what the Americans are doing, but this narrow minded, petty, petulant, almost… almost dangerous anti-Americanism which some Canadians seem to think is another word for patriotism… First of all it’s stupid. Secondly, it’s not in our self-interest. And thirdly, it’s wrong. Because, whatever faults the Americans have, and they’ve got their faults alright — they believe more in what we believe in than some other countries I could mention.