W. Wesley Pue, in Patrick
Glenn, ed., Contemporary Law 1994 Droit contemporain, (Montréal:
Editions Yvons Blais, 1994.), 1-30.
Revolution by Legal Means
W. Wesley Pue, in Patrick
Glenn, ed., Contemporary Law 1994 Droit contemporain, (Montréal:
Editions Yvons Blais, 1994.), 1-30.
Revolution by Legal Means
ABSTRACT
A turn of the century social revolution through law represented, in Canadian history, the culmination of evolving economies, technologies and mentalities. Much of the nineteenth Century involved a re-working of the way in which space was conceptualized by British imperialists in Canada. Broadly, this involved a coalescence (and expansion) of an otherwise "empty" economic space (exemplified by the Hudson's Bay Company trading area), sovereign space (the demand for nominal fealty of residents of "British North American" space and the delineation of boundaries as against other "Christian" powers) and juridical/social space (involving the attempt to actually impose a uniform legality on the diverse places of Canada). This pattern is discernible in the early nineteenth Century and also in a series of later developments ranging from the confinement of "Indians" to small reserves and the concomitant obliteration of the "Red Man's land," the incorporation of "New Iceland" into Canada, attempts by government agents to fully incorporate the massive ethnic block settlements of the prairies into a "Canadian" way of life, the obliteration of Manitoba's eccentricity (exemplified by the "Manitoba schools question") and a generally decreasing tolerance for the continuance of more or less self-contained ethnic enclaves such as the Mennonite reserves of Southern Manitoba or the Doukhobor "colonies" further west.
Not surprisingly, when Canadian lawyers of this period attempted to think systematically about their profession they were heavily influenced by the intellectual culture of which they were part. In the early years of this century elite British Canadian lawyers envisioned a future in which they would lead their countrymen in the juridical construction of a new continent. In moments of disquiet they were haunted by nightmarish visions of a strange, dangerous and foreign Canadian space. The professional projects of elite Canadian lawyers took their shape from these alternative visions. Both the Canadian Bar Association and the professional projects of Anglo-Canadian law societies took form from the problems presented by Canada's unruly social, linguistic and physical spaces. The outline of this paper is as follows:
