On March 12, 2004, during a lecture at the Department of Foreign Affairs, Michael Ignatieff made a claim that would have been given long odds, judging by both Canadians’ view of themselves and a new book of essays. In Canada, he claimed, the state had created the nation.
Few of the Confederation delegates in 1864–65 conceived of federal union in nationalist terms, and few thought a Canadian nationalism was possible. In the early 1900s, Wilfrid Laurier, witnessing the surging ethnic nationalism in Europe and the United States, believed that only a muted “political nationality” was possible in Canada. And in our day, the House of Commons passed a motion to recognize the “Québécois as a nation within a united Canada.”
A new collection of 14 essays, Canadas of the Mind: The Making and Unmaking of Canadian Nationalism in the Twentieth Century, edited by Norman Hillmer and Adam Chapnick, improves our understanding of Canadian nationalism in the early and middle periods of the 20th century. And by revealing the weakness—even the absence—of national feeling during the distant past in comparison to today, the collection will inspire those who believe Canadian nationalism is on the rise and pour cold water on those who foresee an end to Canadian identity.
In “Branding Canada,” Paula Hastings examines consumer goods from the 1890s to 1914 to estimate how strong national identification was prior to World War One. Hunting for symbolism and narrative presentation, she looks at advertisements for tomato chutney, encyclopedias, malt whisky, soap and eggs, flour and furnaces, and cream separators.
Tom Pokinko
There is more difference than similarity in the packaging of consumer products a hundred years ago compared with today. While the maple leaf and beaver were used then and now as iconic shorthand, symbols such as Jack Canuck and Miss Canada have disappeared. Goods were also visualized inside several narratives that have vanished: the Conquest of New France, or the farm and factory as engines of the young dominion. Politicians were frequently used to hawk goods: John A. Macdonald pushed tomato chutney, the Fathers of Confederation stood behind rubber boots and prime ministers Laurier and Borden teamed up to endorse shoe polish. Today, athletes and celebrities would do these jobs, and the difference tells us a lot about who the public holds in general esteem.
Consumer goods are an excellent research source. She makes the point that parliamentary speeches and election campaigns, the usual research material, are meaningfully available to only a narrow, elite segment of the population, because they require literacy and presume an interest in politics. (Widespread literacy could not be taken for granted in pre–World War One Canada, and many of Canada’s newest residents were literate in languages other than English or French.) The packaging and labels had both words and images, so the marginally literate and new arrivals to Canada could respond to the pictures, if not the words. Using this bottom-up approach, Hastings offers a good clue that national identification was felt in the population in general, and not merely in the political elites who are the usual suspects in typical studies of early nationalism.
In “John Buchan and the British Imperial Origins of Canadian Multiculturalism,” Peter Henshaw dusts off a semi-forgotten governor general to show the birth of an idea. John Buchan was GG from August 1935 to February 1940, and he spread a precociously modern notion of identity to a down and out Canada that was clawing its way out of the Great Depression.
After travelling the country in 1937, he wrote “we have this vast Dominion … with plenty of provincial loyalty but very little loyalty to the Dominion as a whole.” This echoed Henri Bourassa’s comment in 1907: “There is Ontario patriotism, Quebec patriotism, or western patriotism … but there is no Canadian patriotism and we can have no Canadian patriotism.” Buchan was facing not a poorly defined nationalism but its complete absence (more on this later).
He crisscrossed the country giving speeches with three related messages: preserve customs and ways from the old country; cultural difference is a source of national strength; and, in addition to your own background, embrace a distinctive Canadian identity. He repeated his message from Annapolis Royal to Gimli, but he put it most memorably to a gathering of Ukrainian Canadians in Manitoba: “You will all be better Canadians for being also good Ukrainians.”
His ideas had influence. Numerous groups referenced the “better Canadians” comment in their submissions to the Bilingualism and Biculturalism Royal Commission. Henshaw says that the word “multiculturalism” was likely coined by Ukrainian Canadians in the 1950s. (We now think of multiculturalism as a feature of urban Canada, but the original incubator of the idea was the prairie west of pre–World War Two.) Not only were these ideas translated into policy in Canada, but the policy was also exported from Canada to the world. The Oxford English Dictionary records the first usage with today’s meaning as Canadian, with the Bi and Bi Commission in 1965. Peter Henshaw’s excellent history of ideas shows how Canada got there first.
Steven Azzi examines “Foreign Investment and the Paradox of Economic Nationalism” by looking at changing Canadian attitudes to foreign investment in the 1950s. Foreign investment had long been favoured by Canadian policy makers, who knew Canadian economic development required outside capital to make up for insufficient domestic savings. This welcoming view to foreign investment shifted over a ten-year period (1945 to 1955) so that foreign investment, at least American foreign investment, came to be opposed.
Since foreign investment was a main cause of rising standards of living in post-war Canada, the paradox lay in opposing something that was not simply beneficial, but necessary. The story of these changing attitudes, centring on the fear of American ownership, has been told a number of times, from a number of points of view, including by Azzi himself.
Foreign investment has returned as a political issue, one that will potentially provoke a nationalist response. Between 2001 and 2006, more Canadian companies were purchased by foreigners than were companies in any other country except Australia (when adjusted for the size of the economy). A key difference between the episode Azzi describes and today is that the foreigner investors are now Brazilian, Swiss, Indian, Saudi, Russian and Chinese, not just American.
Part of the problem is perception. Since 1997 Canadian companies have bought more foreign companies than foreigners have bought Canadian companies, which is a reversal of the insufficient domestic savings problem. Canadian media outlets do not show Canadian acquisitions of Chilean copper mines, but they do show Saudi acquisition of Four Seasons Hotels. But there are also genuine problems. Many of the recent purchases were by government companies, or government-controlled companies, so the same acquisition could not have been made in reverse. Even though Brazil’s CVRD bought Inco, Inco could not have bought CVRD. The government panel convened to review Canada’s foreign investment and competition policy should amend the rules to prevent foreign investment Canadian companies could not themselves make.
In addition to these contributions, there are articles on a variety of other nationalisms: aboriginal identifications (by Michael Behiels), Canadian internationalism (by Hector Mackenzie), technological nationalism (by Robert MacDougall), public and institutional memory of war (by, separately, Alan Gordon and Roger Sarty), and prairie commemorations (by James Opp), plus five others.
Beyond the snapshots of early national feeling, the historical perspective of the book reveals a powerful insight: we have gone from the absence of nationalism, à la Bourassa and Buchan, to its undeniable presence. A home-grown, pan-Canadian nationalism—not the imperial conservative variety or an ethnic-based provincial loyalty—did not exist in the early period, and now it does. But there is a twist to today’s identification. There is a difference between strength of nationalism and content of nationalism, and the lack of defined content is routinely mistaken for a lack of strength.
Several pieces of evidence support this. When pollsters measure strength of nationalism—with questions such as “How close do you feel to your country?” and “Generally speaking, my country is a better country than most others”— Canadians respond as strongly as Americans. Two major polls, the World Values Survey and the Eurobarometer (designed to elicit feelings about the European Union), show that Canadians identify more strongly with their country than they do with their continent, province, and municipality or locality. Canadian identification with Canada is higher than national identification for the citizens of almost all other countries surveyed. And more Canadians chose Canada in 2000 than did so in 1981, so the strength of Canadian nationalism has been rising over time (in contrast with a lowering national identification for citizens of most European countries). This is empirical support for the claim that Canadian identity has begun to speak for itself with a brash and boisterous voice in the last decade.
But the lack of defined content to anchor Canadian nationalism discounts the perceived strength of nationalism, because it prevents us from explaining what, precisely, we are proud about. To the question of what makes them unique, Americans will answer that the U.S. is the birthplace of freedom or popular sovereignty or the leader of the world, and these things, not apple pie, jazz or baseball, are the contributions of the U.S. to civilization. Canadians do not have good answers here. Hockey supremacy is a contribution, not like popular sovereignty, but at the level of baseball or jazz, and we know it. Canada, as Michael Bliss and Mark Proudman have pointed out in these pages, has not made a unique contribution to civilization and does not have a societal purpose that goes beyond ensuring the material comforts of its citizens. What they do not say, however, is that if the standard for national pride must be a unique and enduring civilizational contribution, then only a handful of countries can be rightly said to meet this test.
Nationalism is typically shaped by extraordinary events, rather than ordinary processes. War, exile, sacrifice and suffering feed nationalism and cement national identities. The Civil War forged America into a cohesive unit, replacing local and sectional loyalties with a transcendent attachment to the nation as a whole. In her superb Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, Linda Colley shows British identity to be the result of a series of wars with Catholic France. These events were extraordinary in that they superimposed new loyalties onto older alignments. They took unions on paper and made them unions of practice, unions of the heart. They gave content to American and British nationalism, providing clear historical answers to questions of what the people should be proud about and what made them different from others.
Canadian nationalism, by contrast, is the result of ordinary processes: the passage of time, a growing economy, increased transportation and communication, and government programs. The passage of time breeds loyalty, while the physical linkage by transportation and the emotional linkage by communication widens the area of loyalty. In addition to the freedoms offered by Canada, the growing economy provides the way for people to succeed, to better themselves materially, to make themselves happier. And because civic nationalism is voluntary, this opportunity to succeed goes furthest in answering the question of what’s in it for me that anchors Canadian nationalism.
The whole of this book is greater than the sum of its parts. Individual essays provide excellent snapshots into veins of 20th-century Canadian nationalism, and some of the essays show that Canadian nationalism has gone from the condition of absence to one of presence. The observations of Bourassa and Buchan, in 1907 and 1937, evolved into the recognition, by the 1960s, that there was a Canadian nationalism. This nationalism was defined in a negative or relative way: Canada was different from the United States and had a different societal purpose than the United States.
But there may be one more transformational step left for national development. Having gone from the absence to the presence of nationalism, it is for the future to reveal if Canadian nationalism will take the step from negative to positive definition. This would be the step of defining Canada in relation to itself, of moving beyond the need to be different and the need for external validation. The U.S. would not need to be the measure of all things Canadian. At least one commentator (Frank Graves) has recently argued that a positive nationalism has replaced a negative nationalism. This is a big claim. While it is too early to know for certain, I would certainly not bet against it.
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