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Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin QUOTES

Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin QUOTES

1 " What would happen if a majority of francophones and anglophones consciously thought of themselves as being from here, not there? Being from here meant that a quite different political philosophy could somehow emerge. What if these francophones and anglophones decided to work together to develop such a political philosophy? The British, the compacts, the Tories and even the dwindling group of Whigs would not see this coming because of their belief that politics was all about race, religion, language and the division of the public spoils – patronage, contracts, land. "

― John Ralston Saul , Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin

2 " The British had a military, economic and political capacity to enforce their rules that we can no longer imagine. What’s more, they repeatedly did enforce them. And combined with a handful of other empires, they had an interlocking global system that one way or another controlled every continent and was far more organized than anything that exists today. Yet LaFontaine, Baldwin and Howe, carrying their movements with them, had somehow succeeded in talking their way – our way – out of the empire’s control system and into a new democratic model. "

― John Ralston Saul , Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin

3 " Voters do not choose prime ministers; they choose representatives. And the voters’ muscle is expressed through the right of their representatives to give their confidence to governments and to remove it. If the ability of the representatives to give or remove their confidence is interfered with, we are no longer a democracy. "

― John Ralston Saul , Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin

4 " The miracle of 1849 was that LaFontaine and Baldwin, with the full co-operation of Elgin, invented a new form of politics that would later be picked up by men like Gandhi and Mandela. They did this by refusing conflict, no matter how unbearable the taunts. In all, a dozen or so people died, not the tens of hundreds or thousands expected or the hundreds of thousands experienced in most other countries. The possibility of another idea of loyalty was affirmed – loyalty to the public good. "

― John Ralston Saul , Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin

5 " The events of 1848 and 1849 are interpreted and measured through the lens of the European option of the monolithic nation-state, which is curious since the essence of the Canadian reform movement that came to power in 1848 was the idea of a bilingual state, built on immigration, multiple religions and regional differences. In other words, a non-monolithic, non-European model. "

― John Ralston Saul , Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin

6 " The very idea of a nation-state intentionally built on ideas and a multiplicity of races, languages and myths doesn’t fit into the historic Western framework and therefore cannot be real. "

― John Ralston Saul , Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin