Sandford Fleming outlines his plan for universal Standard Time to members of the Canadian Institute in Toronto on Feb. 8, 1879.Confederation Life Collection
John Boyko has written nine books addressing Canada’s history and politics, including the recently published In Pursuit of Tomorrow: The Inventive Life of Sandford Fleming.
The speech stated the threat and offered a solution. With the United States wishing to take us, he said, we must save ourselves by embracing infrastructure building as both nation-building and a bold declaration of sovereignty.
While the problem and solution sound familiar, the speech was delivered in 1858 by Sandford Fleming. History is like that. Unlike nostalgia that offers comforting balms, history is that annoying teacher who demands attention, that we think critically, challenge assumptions and learn from the lessons on offer.
Fleming, of course, is the guy we know for having changed the world with his creation of universal standard time. But he was a polymath who made far more contributions to Canada and the world than that. He was the chief engineer who surveyed the route then led the building of a railway connecting Lakes Ontario, Simcoe and Huron, and then another that tied Quebec to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
With that speech, he proposed something even more audacious and urgently needed.
Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, came to share Fleming’s beliefs about our response to American threats. He made the young country’s most famous citizen the Canadian Pacific Railway’s chief engineer. Fleming unshelved old plans and made new ones as he dispatched survey crews to build the world’s longest railway over its most inhospitable real estate.
As he had in his other railway projects, he also set out to survey the land himself. With a small crew and indispensable Indigenous guides, he paddled, portaged and walked across muskeg, prairie and mountains from Lake Superior to Victoria.
The enormous project worked. In boosting the country’s economy and asserting the Dominion’s dominion, it quieted, for a time at least, America’s Manifest Destiny dreams of annexation. It worked then, and many, including Prime Minister Mark Carney, are contending that such bold infrastructure developments will work again.
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But history doesn’t let us off that easily. Those arguing that new threats can be met with old solutions must consider not just the answers that Fleming’s example offers but also the questions it poses.
Some questions are obvious. What should the roles of government and the private sector be in nation-building enterprises meant to strengthen who we are while standing against those who wish us ill? Can we still build great things? Should we? Must Canada’s identity and direction always be informed by American actions?
There’s more. Fleming’s dedication to imperialism and Victorian-era colonial ideas demands that we consider whether a mature and fully sovereign Canada should remain a constitutional monarchy. Fleming’s plotting of rails through unceded land asks us how the rights of those paying a price for progress should be respected, however progress is defined. As Macdonald believed and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is now positing, should the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few?
Fleming and those with whom he worked, most clearly Sir John, ask us whether imperfect people should be forgiven their failings in recognition of great achievement. Must our forebears be flawless and error-free to be celebrated in bronze and print?
Should we judge those of the past according to the dominant beliefs of the present? Is wrong now wrong always? In that light, Fleming asks us whether in our legitimate and welcome celebration of diversity, we should disparage and dismiss the roles played now and in our development by old, white guys.
Fleming’s long life and many accomplishments also ask another of history’s difficult questions. Is there a point in the introduction of new technologies – be it railways then or AI now – when progress should not only be about promise and profit but also morality? Are our political systems up to the task of holding that debate?
History isn’t easy. But pondering its lessons and questions must play an essential role in tackling problems that, like in Fleming’s day, we did not cause but must solve ourselves if we are to save ourselves.