Exposing Canadian Business
HISTORIAN MICHAEL BLISS ASSESSES THE FAILURE AND SUCCESS OF CANADIAN ENTERPRISE, PAST AND PRESENT

Interview by Michael Owen

The writing of Canadian social history has blossomed in the last two decades. Academic historians have been assiduous in their efforts to ensure that the Canadian public becomes more aware of their past. As a result, Canadian history, never a dull subject, has become more accessible to Canadians, and Canadians have become more aware of their past.

The history of business in Canada was perceived by many as the history of the CPR or the Hudson’s Bay Company. Michael Bliss, a University of Toronto academic noted for his books Discovery of Insulin and Banting, has prepared a most impressive study of business in Canada from the first fishing expeditions of the Basques through the ancienne regime, the growth of national and international enterprises in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the booms and depressions of the twentieth century to the debates over financial failures and free trade in the 1980s. Northern Enterprise does not fail to consider the tougher questions which have faced business in Canada, including the prerogative of governments, colonial and modern, to intervene in the marketplace for the nation’s interest.

Northern Enterprise will remain a source book for Canadian academic historians but, more importantly, exposes the discerning reader to a provocative assessment of Canadian enterprise in the past and in the present.

Aurora: Has your experience as a writer of public history altered dramatically your approach to writing academic history? Is it more difficult to write history for the public than for the academic world?

Bliss: Let me answer more or less directly by saying that I don’t think of myself as an academic, but rather as a writing historian. My first love is literature. The highest calling is to try to write well. Within that I’m interested in the past as a historian, and I understand that the historian’s job is to be a witness to the past and to communicate a sense of that past to the widest popular market. That is why all of my writing is geared to a mythical reader who is not an academic, but simply a literate person. I don’t see any discontinuity between the kind of writing that I might do for a mainly academic audience and popular journalism. We’re talking really about clear and effective communication, which is hard work. It is greatly satisfying to be able to reach a wider audience without sacrificing what I hope are still academic standards.

Aurora: Do you think that Northern Enterprise, Peter Newman’s Company of Adventurers, Gerald Friesen’s The Canadian Prairies, and John Webster Grant’s Moon over Wintertime, each of which is essentially a survey of the field relying as much on the work of others as on archival research, represent a new trend in the writing of Canadian history?

Bliss: First, I think I would distinguish. I wouldn’t lump my book in with Company of Adventurers. What I am trying to do is completely different from anything Peter Newman is trying to do, and I don’t accept comparison. The comparison with Gerald Friesen’s work is sound. What you have in both cases are academic syntheses, and it’s not a new trend in the sense that historians from the days of Creighton and Innes all attempted syntheses. It happens that in the last ten or fifteen years, Canadian historical scholarship has tended to be increasingly specialized and fragmented, and now books like Friesen’s and mine represent attempts to begin to put it back together in new syntheses. While our syntheses are new, the idea of covering a lot of ground and building on the work of other scholars is quite familiar.

The dominant mode of Canadian historical scholarship for the last 15 years has led to what some people have called “boutique history.” It becomes so narrowly specialized that sometimes the practitioners are talking only to themselves. This represents a counter tendency which is, of course, very necessary if academic historians are not going to wind up just talking to smaller and smaller numbers of themselves.

Aurora: The reader who is familiar with Canadian history recognizes that your study of Canadian business differs greatly in approach from that of some of your colleagues. You view business more favourably. Did you set out to balance the record by writing a history of business from the perspective of the business community?

Bliss: My book is not written from the perspective of the business community. If it was, you wouldn’t find the last chapter beginning with an unrelieved litany of failure. You wouldn’t find a central argument running through the book to the effect that substantial numbers of businessmen haven’t understood the nature of the country and its resources. My book is a balanced portrayal of the role of business in the Canadian community.

Perhaps the central argument that might be thought of as ideological and where I do take a stand is my belief that free markets do a better and fairer job of distributing goods and services than controlled ones. I take a position that the vast majority of economists understand very well and that, alas, historians in their ignorance of elementary economics have trouble with and that Canadian historians, who have been notably ignorant of economics in the past, have particular trouble with.

Aurora: On a similar theme some historians might suggest that you have written a Whiggish history of Canadian business.

Bliss: One of the strongest themes in my book is failure in business. In fact, the central theme of the last few chapters is of the exaggerated sense of Canada’s wealth and prospects that developed after the First World War. The last chapter begins with the collapse of Massey, Dome, and Canada Air. This is anything but Whig history. One of my strongest beliefs about business history generally is that you have to write the history of failure as well as success, and if the book does nothing else, it conveys a sense of a business world which is fraught with peril, hazard, and frequent failure.

Aurora: How do you justify free trade between Canada and the U.S. or between Canada and the world?

Bliss: There is no doubt that at any time in the last 120 years large segments of Canadian business have prospered thanks to the tariff and that if you had opted for free trade there would have been destructive consequences for these businesses and for the people dependent on them. But free trade would have created opportunities which would have led to far greater growth and wealth and higher standards of living than we were able to achieve by freezing economic life into certain patterns determined by tariffs. So there would have been, and always will be, heavy costs involved in dismantling vested interests, but my view—supported by most economists—is that the benefits would be much greater.

Aurora: You have taken a strong line against government intervention in the economy. Do you see their unwillingness to let private enterprise and nationalized corporations respond solely to market forces as a theme that will continue in Canadian history?

Bliss: That is a hard question to answer. Governments believe that they have a responsibility and a capacity to solve almost all problems that come before it. Governments since the war have been remarkably confident and interventionist in all areas of our economic life including the idea of propping up failed industries. Governments have been responsive to vested interests and have tried to freeze existing patterns in the interest of those who benefit from the status quo.

Free markets and capitalism, on the other hand, are agents of radical change and not conservative in the way that we think. What has been really conservative about our economic life is the way in which vested interests such as trade unions or existing industries have tried to do everything they can to hold off the kind of change that a free market, free enterprise system creates.

By the 1980s, though, Canadian governments had begun to realize that the idea of forever bailing out dying industries was really a kind of dead-end propositionand that generally there were limits to a government’s ability to intervene effectively in economic life. We see this in the 1980s with the enthusiasm for privatization, which is really the withdrawal of government from various areas of our economic life, and we also see it in the interest in deregulation.

I’ve drawn up a kind of preliminary balance sheet on the Mulroney government which suggests that in some ways they have shrinked government involvement in economic. life, but in other ways they have continued it. I think it can be said that by the mid 1980s we had begun to enter a period of great uncertainty and confusion about the future role of government in our economy.

Aurora: Charles Davies, in his review of Northern Enterprise for Quill and Quire suggested that you may have created, quite unintentionally, many heroes for Canadian business, as well as identified some villains.

Bliss: I think maybe Davies was exaggerating. I hope Northern Enterprise will act as a standard history of Canadian business for years to come. That is largely what the book was intended to do. If people want business heroes, they should call up the Canadian Business Hall of Fame which exists to immortalize these guys. I have tried to describe some of the mountain-top achievements of Canadian entrepreneurs, yes, and to people who know nothing about Canadian business history, some of this stuff will seem new and exciting. But I also describe some of the villains and the absurdities.

Aurora: You identify many small firms, for example, Massey-Harris or Eaton’s, which began as home-based enterprises before becoming extraordinarily successful corporations. Would you comment on this emerging importance of small business in the Canadian economy?

Bliss: You are quite right. The process of economic change is almost always triggered by little guys, and if I were doing the book over again, I would have emphasized that theme even more strongly.

Aurora: Northern Enterprise, A Canadian Millionaire and Banting may be seen as historical works which focus on the role of the entrepreneur. Is the entrepreneur a driving force in your writing?

Bliss: I guess all of my books can be read as studies in achievement. I know that some of the historians of everyday life or the working class think that I am interested only in success and big events. There is some truth in that in the sense that I am interested in writing about the teams that win baseball games as opposed to the teams that lose them. But that is only one side of the work. The other theme that runs through all of my work is a sense of irony, a sense of limits, and a sense of failure. That is particularly marked in my business histories. That theme is triumphantly muted in the Discovery of Insulin which is a book about the ability of people to do something about our human condition, and of all my books the Discovery of Insulin is the one that I like best.

Aurora: What are your future plans?

Bliss: At the moment I’m resting and thinking what to do. I don’t know what my next projects will be except that presumably in whatever I write there will be this constant meditation on the tension between success and achievement on the one hand and mistakes, failure, and mortality on the other hand. As a historian I’m very reluctant to speculate about the future.

Books by Michael Bliss

Northern Enterprise. McClelland and Stewart, 1987.

Years of Change, 1967-1985. Grolier, 1986.

Banting: A Biography. McClelland and Stewart, 1984.

The Discovery of Insulin. McClelland and Stewart, 1982.

Confederation: A New Nationality. Grolier, 1981.

A Canadian Millionaire. Macmillan of Canada, 1978.

Confederation, 1867. Watts, 1975.

A Living Profit. McClelland and Stewart, 1974.

Canadian History in Documents, 1763-1966. Ryerson Press, 1966.

Dr. Owen is Assistant to the Vice-President, Academic, and has a special interest in social history.

An Aurora Update

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and an appointed Member of the Order of Canada, Dr. Bliss has also just earned (April, 2001) one of University of Toronto's highest honour, the rank of University Professor. As well as writing for magazines and newspapers, he comments on a range of topics related to history and current issues regularly on national radio and television. His latest book, William Osler: A Life in Medicine, was published in September 1999.

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Updated July 2001