THE AUDACITY OF US. WATSON,

My favourite part of the Confederation story is how it took the Canadian delegates almost three days by government steamer to get to Charlottetown for the famous conference of 1864. They left Quebec on a late- summer Monday evening and arrived midday Thursday. They couldn’t have flown or driven, obviously ( although a student of mine did once argue on an exam that Sir John A. Macdonald’s National Policy of 1879 was meant to support the Canadian auto industry). In theory, rail was an option: The Grand Trunk Railway did run eastward from Montreal — but to Portland, Maine, not to British territory. In fact, the absence of all-British rail was one reason for Confederation.

So the good Fathers took the boat, and, amazingly, what we now regard as the primitive nature of their transportation and communications “infrastructure”— a word not yet invented — did not prevent them from conceiving a continental nation. This even though they represented only 3.4 million people, less than a tenth what we are now, not even the size of the modern- day Montreal metropolitan area. That a city could grow to millions of people would have been astonishing to them, of course: at Confederation, 85 per cent of Canadians lived in rural circumstances. If I’m reading the Historical Statistics of Canada correctly, only 107,000 of us lived in towns with a population over 100,000 — that being Montreal, presumably — while only 450,000 lived in towns of more than 5,000 people.

We forget how poor our country was 150 years ago. Although I’m not sure why, the OECD runs a very interesting project called “How Was Life?” It catalogues how people lived in previous decades, reaching all the way back to the early 19th century. One thing it tries to calculate is per capita GDP over the years.

That’s not easy to do. How do you compare Big Macs to pemmican, for instance, or ox carts to Lexuses (or is that Lexi?), or abaci to iPads? Still, making allowances for all that, the number the OECD comes up with for per capita GDP in 1860 in Canada is $1,451 (measured in U. S. dollars at their purchasing power of 1990). By contrast, in 2010 our per capita income measured in the same units was $ 24,941 — fully 17 times higher.

Our $1,451 per head wasn’t terrible for those times. True, it was barely half of per capita GDP in the U.K., the world’s economic powerhouse at the time. And it was two-thirds that in the U. S. (some things never change!). But it was higher than in most other places.

In absolute terms, of course, we would regard it as pitiful. In absolute terms it was less than 2010 per capita GDP in Poland, Russia, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, but also Egypt, Turkey, Nigeria, China, India, Indonesia and Thailand. About the only country the OECD tracks that had a 2010 per capita GDP lower than Canada’s 1860 per capita GDP was Kenya. Our Fathers of Confederation represented people who lived on what today we would regard as Third World incomes.

Other aspects of Confederation- era Canadians’ lives would also strike us as Third World- ish. We Canadians were actually the tallest people in the OECD’s historical sample, but our average population height was just 172 centimetres ( five feet, six inches), compared to 179.6 (five feet, nine inches) in the 1980s. The equivalent averages in the U. K. and Germany were 166.6 and 165.5 centimetres ( or five feet, five inches and five feet, four inches), respectively.

Life expectancy here was just 41.6 years, though that was compared to only 41.1 years in the U.K., 37.5 in the Netherlands and 36.4 in Japan. Still, on average, Canadians born July 1, 1867, could not expect to see Confederation’s 50th anniversary in 1917.

According to the OECD, the average education in Canada in 1870 was 5.7 years of school, which was actually pretty good by global standards. The same number was only 3.6 in the U. K., 4.1 in France and 1.0 in Japan. In 1867 in this country, average daily attendance at elementary and secondary schools was only 40.7 per cent. As for higher education, in 1866, only 257 bachelor’s degrees had been awarded in Canada. My department at McGill graduated almost that many students earlier this month.

One reaction to our forbears’ material privation is pity, combined with a sense of our own superiority for having furnished ourselves with such remarkable affluence by contrast, thanks in part, of course, to the political system they put in place. My own reaction is a little different. Despite their straitened circumstances — which of course they did not recognize as such — they dreamt large and we have Canada as a result. Our appropriate posture toward them on Confederation’s 150th birthday should be, not condescension regarding their era’s conventional beliefs about race, gender and class, but admiration, gratitude and even a little awe for their world- changing imagination and grit.

WE FORGET HOW POOR OUR COUNTRY WAS 150 YEARS AGO.