To win “by acclamation” is a Canadianism: What does this indicate?

Winning “by acclamation” - that is, without a contesting opponent in an election – may suggest a unique but also unwelcome feature behind Canadian political thinking and behaviour. In my view, it implies that Canadians are not inclined to cultivate an atmosphere of dissent, and as a result we tend to be politically passive, to wit: “Peace, Order and Good Government.”

If we look beyond our borders, particularly to the U.K., where the idiosyncratic tends to be the norm, and where screaming Fleet Street headlines are habitually provocative, and where - because of lively opposition in the Commons – the oratory soars, with concomitant political life often being volatile. So, the idea of running and winning unopposed likely appears anathema there. As a student in England in my graduate and postgraduate years starting in the mid 1980’s, I had the impression that the U.K. was undergoing a civil war as Margaret Thatcher ratcheted up pressure against striking coal miners and their leader Arthur Scargill.  And, of course, I will never forget walking outside the Grand Hotel hours before the Brighton Bombing.

If you look to the U.K, today, while it may have previously succumbed to the populist charisma of Bumbling Boris, its parliamentarians have also summarily dispatched with the nation’s former Prime Minister for lying to parliament.  That the chief dramatist behind the Brexit vote in 2016 no longer has a seat in the House of Commons of 2023 suggests the following: 1) that Britain’s parliamentary system is still healthy; and, 2) the British are not conflict-avoiders. This is a round-about-way of saying that Britain probably would not have had a way of censuring (and, in effect, removing) Boris Johnson if they were known for coining Canada’s term, winning “by acclamation.”

While British culture may still be diffused with a spirit of what once was aristocratic freedom, America is imbued with a widespread sense of democratic freedom, that is, if de Tocqueville holds true to this today.  The U.K.’s parliamentary system is clearly more effective than the American Congress in ridding itself of would-be tyrants, and, given Trump’s continuing grip on the Republican party, it is sorry to behold that his pathetic rival and Florida governor Ron DeSantis has taken three years to publicly admit that Trump actually lost the last election.  Having said that, it is still hard to think of anyone these days in American politics winning “by acclamation,” certainly in light of that nation’s polarized climate.  Given its free market ethos, the spirit of political struggle is still strong in the U.S., and it emanates from the differences between the various and many States.  America might not be “united”, but fortunately there are still ongoing contests for power.

Unlike Canada, both England and the U.S.A. experienced revolution, and certainly Americans continue to pivot to theirs, in one form or another, always animated by the fervor of opposition.  While Boris Johnson may have been an incarnation of Cromwell spewing the Darwinian dogma of Herbert Spencer, Americans are fighting their Civil War anew, which some might argue never ended, at least in racial terms.  Incidentally, as the U.S. revisits its riven conflict of the Lincoln presidency, Russians are returning to serfdom vis-à-vis Putin.   In effect, this is the reverse of their past emancipation by Tsar Alexander II in the era of America’s Civil War.

Like Americans, Canadians also look back on the nineteenth century, but they fixate on a philosopher – not an event, most notably Hegel, and on what one recent title describes as the “unity of opposites”.[1]  Originally, this may in-and-of itself have stemmed from a reaction of aghast French and English-Canadians to the Civil War in America, as there is apparently quite a long tradition of Hegelian thought here, beginning with the reception of German Idealism by our early Scottish settlers and what has become the United Church.  Between Charles Taylor at McGill, Emile Fackenheim at the University of Toronto and Henry Harris at York University (and sometime at Victoria) these three main philosophers from central Canada helped generate a spirit consistent with “mediated relations” - or “combining opposites” - that pervades in Canada to this day.[2]  Clearly even our judiciary is also steeped in Hegel, and it began generations ago.[3]  From Hegel’s dialectic of thesis and antithesis comes the synthesis, or now, in another word, “reconciliation” in both its Christian and Indigenous senses.

What does Hegel have to do with winning “by acclamation”?  Maybe everything.  In my view, the pervasiveness of Hegelian thought in Canada, or at least its recent-day manifestations, indicates that we may have been indulgent of our three philosopher kings.  Is this now a kind of cultural blind spot? Certainly to “reconcile” is to be agreeable - and to accept - but is it not also suggestive of passivity?

When someone is elected unopposed, it means another person is not prepared to contest the political space with their own vision.  In other words, it is indicative of an unwillingness to enter into a clash.  By default, this places the emphasis on “unity” and not on its opposite, dissent, so, in effect, we are pre-emptively dismembering one leg of the Hegelian dialectic, which he considered a logical process. Like Hegel, some Canadians may presume that History is still the rational unfolding of the spirit of freedom by means of this dialectic. Rather than actually fight for rights, we may subsequently disavow struggle, and succumb to the hope that ‘the system’ will take care of us.  We thus become inured to fate. Put another away: I am not proud of the fact that winning “by acclamation” is a Canadian expression.

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[1] Susan M. Dodd and Neil G. Robertson, eds., Hegel and Canada; Unity of Opposites? (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018).

[2] See Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 453.

[3] Frederick Vaughan, Viscount Haldane: ‘The Wicked Step-father of the Canadian Constitution’ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press/Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2010).