Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century

Thomas M.F. Gerry is a professor of English at Laurentian University.

Reflections of a Siamese Twin revisits many of the core concepts
expressed in John Ralston Saul’s previous books, including
Voltaire’s Bastards and The Unconscious Civilization. These concepts
include Saul’s insistence on the need to accept the complexities of
political and social problems, and to approach such problems through
constructive doubting rather than glib, all-encompassing solutions; his
belief that furthering the public good should take priority over
following the agenda of supranational corporatism; and his argument for
the need to balance individual emotions, intuition, imagination, reason,
common sense, and ethics.

Saul looks anew at a host of people and events, and shows how they have
been de-emphasized, ignored, or otherwise distorted to fit with the
simplifications of corporate ideology. For instance, he adopts as a
paradigm the coming together in the early 1840s of the moderate
reformers Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin. In their
struggle to institute democracy, these Lower- and Upper-Canadian leaders
realized that they needed to work together against the Chвteau Clique
and the Family Compact to create a reform majority at the national
level. Saul terms this coalition “the key to the Canadian
sensibility,” and points out that the right-wing Chrétien government,
busily dismantling social infrastructures and imposing anti-debt laws
rather than anti-foreign ownership laws, is—like the Mulroney and
Borden governments—anomalous in Canada. The usual pattern, which has
enabled Canada’s success as one of the world’s oldest and wealthiest
democracies, is that our national government is left of centre, based on
a coalition of moderate reformers from across the land. Isolationists
such as the Parti Québécois, the Reform Party, and Ontario’s Harris
gang are, according to Saul, ignoring the public good of all Canadians
in order to facilitate narrow corporatist interests.

Packed with original insights and ideas, this exciting book is
essential reading for anyone who wants to understand our country more
fully.