The Sound of One Voice: Eugene Forsey and His Letters to the Press

Geoff Hayes is the director of International Studies Option at the
University of Waterloo.

Eugene Forsey was an academic, a labor advocate, a failed candidate for
the CCF, and a senator. This interesting and important volume reveals
that Forsey’s greatest legacy was the opinions he expressed in his
long-time newspaper correspondence.

J.E. Hodgetts does well to organize and interpret a wealth of letters
to the editor that Forsey began writing as a student at McGill and
Oxford in the 1920s. They ended just before his death in February 1991.
Forsey’s “sense of public obligation” prompted his lifetime
obsession with the nation’s editorial pages. As he admitted privately
just before his death, “My bad temper keeps me spluttering to the
newspapers over the nonsense that so often appears in them.”

Forsey’s letters cut through a wide swath of topics: the proper use
of the English language, the decline of Canada’s monarchical
institutions, Ottawa’s questionable choices in public sculpture.
Hodgetts reproduces many of Forsey’s letters, confirming a style that
Donald Creighton referred to as “thoroughness, exactitude and
trenchancy.” Above all, Forsey insisted that the facts at issue be
correct.

It was on constitutional matters that Forsey was best known, and
Hodgetts’s five chapters on that subject show the evolution and
consistency of Forsey’s thought. On the powers of the governor
general, Forsey’s wide knowledge led him to lament the appointment of
a Canadian to the position. On the Senate, Forsey once sought its
abolition; he then became one of its strongest defenders. On Meech Lake,
Forsey was initially supportive, then one of its harshest critics. As
Hodgetts shows, Forsey’s opinions were not always popular, but they
reflected a keen respect for constitutional rules and conventions.

On less technical, emotional, constitutional issues, such as the future
of Quebec, Hodgetts gently suggests that Forsey held “a heavy baggage
of terms which are less open to a resolution of the debate by a mere
invoking of the facts.” Forsey’s scathing indictment of the Allaire
report, published just after his death, is reprinted here to end the
volume. As always, Forsey got the last word.