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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Frank Milligan, Eugene A. Forsey: An Intellectual Biography (Calgary: University of Calgary Press 2004)

EUGENE FORSEY was extraordinary as a Canadian thinker in that he linked the welfare of the working class with the virtues of the British constitutional tradition. What made Forsey typical of his countrymen was his belief that religion was the essential foundation of society, that it pointed the way to reform. In tracing the roots and development of Forsey's ideas, we are revisiting some of the political issues that confronted Canada in the 20th century. The fusion of the credo of national planning directed by Christian faith in the context of a parliamentary environment that provides for dialogue and guarantees freedom expired with Forsey's passing.

A Frank Underhill or a Tim Buck and their beliefs could have fit in quite well in Massachusetts or Milwaukee. Pierre Trudeau's principles could have been posited in Argentina or France. Forsey's ideas, however, were distinctively Canadian. The descendant of Loyalists and pre-Loyalists, he was fluently bilingual and a serial partisan: going from the Conservatives in the 1920s to the CCF in the 1930s to a Liberal senatorship in the 1970s. In 1950, he described himself to a young Trudeau as an "Independent Continuing Unprogressive Conservative CCF!" He was a force in the League for Social Reconstruction, the Fellowship for a Christian Social Order, the Canadian Civil Liberties Union, and the Canadian Congress of Labour. He was a failure (alas) in his one-time ambition to be elected to the House of Commons. He ran federally and provincially for the CCF three times in four years in the 1940s. His career and writings proved him the best parliamentarian Canada never had.

Frank Milligan's intellectual biography is competent, workmanlike, satisfying, and most welcome. (Nevertheless, there are some disconcerting errors: the LSR's Democracy Needs Socialism reappears, in the same paragraph (126) as Canada Needs Socialism.) By dissecting and ordering Forsey's ideas chronologically — through his lecture notes, unpublished manuscripts, correspondence, and published works — Milligan's book implicitly reminds us that Forsey's Canada is no more. Influenced by Burke and by Fabianism, Forsey advocated gradual reform and evolutionary change, but the ideas and values that now drive Canada represent in their totality a revolutionary change from Forsey's country of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Religion is in decline as secularization proceeds unabated; even socialists have given up on central planning; and parliament's foundation of responsible government has given way to courts, referenda, and the demeaning eclipse of parliament's dignified apex, Forsey's beloved Crown.

"Red tory" is a term that appears in the book a couple of times. Forsey uses it once and the author uses it to refer to George Grant, with whom Forsey corresponded. Both saw a central role for Christianity in public affairs and both were profoundly critical of capitalism and the dominant business élites, but they differed on human's innate nature. Forsey was optimistic about people's rational capacities; Grant was fearful of our irrationality. Thus Forsey became a CCFer and a socialist, while Grant remained a conservative and a Conservative until small-l liberals hijacked his party, something Forsey saw happening decades earlier. It is ironic that Milligan's rather longish listing of secondary sources neglects Gad Horowitz's seminal "Conservatism, Liberalism, and Socialism: An Interpretation," which appeared in his 1960s book Canadian Labour in Politics. It was there that the "red tory" debuted in the lexicon of Canadian politics and it is precisely there where Grant and Forsey are cited, cheek by jowl, as exemplars of the phenomenon which Forsey characterized as "a conscious socialist with some odd tory notions."

As a red tory, Forsey was a critic of blue tories (the anglophone Montreal business class in the 1920s and the Bay Street Dalton Camps of the 1960s who vied to control the Conservative party). He was a champion of Tory democracy as articulated by Disraeli and Randolph Churchill. In this view, the material and spiritual needs of the masses could be addressed if, united with the Crown, they deployed their institutions as bulwarks against the plutocratic tycoons and rapacious bourgeois classes that would exploit them. Where Forsey differed with Disraeli and Churchill, a difference Milligan does not develop, is that Forsey never identified with or saw the old landowning classes, or other exponents of noblesse oblige, leading the people. Their doing so would only prevent the development and leadership of the working class.

Forsey prized his friendship with Arthur Meighen (they exchanged over 400 letters) and considered him a supporter of Tory democratic social security. They shared a low esteem for Mackenzie King and saw eye-to-eye on the King-Byng affair. For Forsey, like his British heroes, the Crown was a "popular throne," which, along with parliament, represented the people. Tory democracy also went by the rubric "Tory social democracy."

It is curious that Milligan provides dates and details of Forsey's movements from McGill to Oxford and to a visit to Stalinist Russia, but we are not informed of the dates of his appointment to the Senate nor of his death. At McGill, Forsey was mentored by Stephen Leacock who later played a role in his dismissal from that institution. At Oxford, Forsey read the Webbs and Harold Laski, and was impressed with the lectures by G. D. H. Cole and A. D. Lindsay. However, the strongest influence on Forsey was a philosophy professor and a convert to Quakerism, John Macmurray. Forsey later adopted Quakerism as well. Macmurray, still quoted by Forsey in 1950, defined the heart of Christianity as action rather than doctrine. "Take away the spiritual,"wrote Forsey, "and Labour's whole struggle becomes meaningless." That was a perspective he shared with social gospellers like J. S. Woodsworth and Tommy Douglas.

Forsey styled himself a citizen economist, one in favour of a planned economy. The press labelled him a communist. During the Depression, he was a critic of Canadian immigration policy because he believed four times as many immigrants were being admitted as could be absorbed. Forsey's skills as a critical social scientist made him attractive to the CCL as its research director. According to the title of his own memoirs, Forsey lived a life on the fringe. This book, however, demonstrates the power, once upon a time, of both the democratic socialist and some tory notions of Canada. Mackenzie King liberalism trumped both decisively and marginalized what Forsey fought for.

Forsey eventually became a Liberal because of his position on the Quebec question. In the 1930s, he and fellow Montrealer Frank Scott feared an outbreak of racial fascism in Quebec. The NDP's embrace of the two-nations idea of Canada in the 1960s led Forsey to leave its fold. He was a Pierre Trudeau Liberal, he told people, because he was a John A. Macdonald Conservative. Oddly then, there is nothing in the book on his views of Trudeau's Charter, although we are exposed to Forsey's early efforts on behalf of civil liberties and told that he supported the Constitution Act, 1982 despite his deep suspicion of the courts weighing in on constitutional conventions.

There is a photo of Forsey on the cover of this easy-to-read paperback. It is split in two: one side is coloured salmon, the other mauve. Both are tinged with pink. Make of that what you will.


Nelson Wiseman University of Toronto

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