Figures of Speech

If a nation is the sum of the stories it tells itself, then its political leaders might be something like its chief storytellers. But that role has long rested more comfortably on the shoulders of American presidents than with Canadian prime ministers; indeed, “storyteller-in-chief” was the title a New Yorker headline once bestowed upon Barack Obama.

The president gives an inaugural address and speaks annually to Congress in prime time. Every few years, the prime minister sits in a chair and listens as the governor general flatly reads the Speech from the Throne (the finance minister does give an annual budget speech, but typically everyone ignores it in the scramble to report the latest deficit number). The president regularly stands at a lectern, adorned with the seal of his office, to hold forth at length on the major issues of the day. The prime minister spends many weekday afternoons trading withering accusations in the barnyard atmosphere of question period. The president’s words are regularly quoted for generations: “Ask not what your country can do for you. . . . ” The prime minister’s words are measured for how far they depart from his or her actions: “2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system.”

Constitutional reasons might explain the difference: one figure is a head of state, the other is merely the head of government. It’s also not necessarily wrong for Canadians to spend less time worrying about the speechifying of their leaders. All the eloquence and pageantry haven’t kept American democracy from ending up where it is today. Still, there is much to be said for the power and value of words.

“The national narrative can be built in many ways, through literature, music, television, history, newspapers, and myriad other forms, including symbols such as flags and passports,” Raymond B. Blake writes in the introduction to his richly researched new book, Canada’s Prime Ministers and the Shaping of a National Identity. “My argument here is that words are also important, words matter, especially in the speeches and rhetoric of the prime ministers, as they attempted to evoke the identity of the nation.”

Blake is not blind to the distance that sometimes exists between the words and the deeds of prime ministers, but hundreds (thousands?) of books already amply and enthusiastically survey that terrain. Without being blind to what governments have done, Blake is most interested here in how prime ministers have told a national story: which words and ideas and principles have animated the idea of Canada that they have tried to conjure.

Blake opens with Mackenzie King, whose most famous pronouncement was the epitome of political equivocation: “Not necessarily conscription, but conscription if necessary.” If one can look past the caution (and the eccentricity), however, there are also valuable ideas to be found in King’s words.

At the first Canadian citizenship ceremony in 1947, broadcast to the country by the CBC, King said Canada was founded not on the “superiority of a single race or a single language” but on “the faith that two of the proudest races in the world, despite barriers of tongue and creed, could work together, in mutual tolerance and mutual respect, to develop a common nationality.” Canadians, he said at the Annual Field Day of the Waterloo County Federation of Agriculture that same year, must preserve the “spirit of tolerance, of understanding and good-will among men and women of different origins, occupations, races and creeds, which had become a recognized characteristic of the Canadian way of life.” In doing so, he believed, “we will do as much for the advancement of good relations throughout the world, as it would be possible for us to do in any other way. There is no force like the force of example.”

The man who would, in his careful way, begin to build Canada’s modern social safety net also said that “the war for freedom will not be won” until the fears of unemployment and insecurity were eliminated and that “the era of freedom will be achieved only as social security and human welfare becomes the main concern of men and nations.” You could build a pretty decent nation on the principles King described — and in many ways we have.

Some passing fancies and ideas have fallen away. John Diefenbaker was very keen on the Commonwealth, for instance. Louis St‑Laurent was deeply worried about Communism. (That concern may be coming back into fashion.) Others said words that now haunt: Stephen Harper went to Afghanistan in 2006 and declared that “cutting and running” is “not the Canadian way.” Internationally, our reach has often exceeded our rhetorical grasp, even if the principles — multilateralism, peace, humanity — have been admirable.

There are also spoken principles worth taking seriously: cooperation, compromise, reason, pluralism, minority rights, and, more recently, reconciliation. If words like “diversity” and “inclusion” have become controversial in some quarters, and if multiculturalism is too often thought of as a Trudeauvian idea, it is useful to remember that such ideas are not new. St‑Laurent said the “special experience of the Canadian nation bred tolerance and respect for others into our very bones.” Diefenbaker spoke of the “Canadian miracle of unity in the midst of great diversity.” Pierre Trudeau saw a country premised on the idea of “strength out of diversity.” Brian Mulroney heralded his first ill-fated package of constitutional reforms — the Meech Lake Accord — as symbolic of a country that “rejoices in our diversity.” Working together, Harper said in 2008, “Canadians of every conceivable ethnic background are building the most civilized society the world has ever known.” Our diversity, he maintained, offered a “ray of hope to the world.”

St‑Laurent talked of a “national family.” Lester B. Pearson spoke of a “montage” and a national “fabric.” Pierre Trudeau saw a “mosaic.” Our leaders have described this country as both an “experiment” and an “adventure.” Like King, they have dared to suggest that Canada might be an example to the world. “I do not think it is too much to hope,” St‑Laurent said, “that our national example, and the attitude of Canadians who have the responsibility of conducting our relations with other nations, may contribute to the development in the international sphere of the unity of purpose and the spirit of co‑operation so essential to the strength and the security of the free world.”

Although Trudeau the Elder was famously reluctant to dwell on the past, the national belief in diversity as a founding principle has, perhaps naturally, led to a willingness to acknowledge when this country has failed to respect its members. “Apologies are the only way we can cleanse the past,” Mulroney said, possibly overstating the power of saying sorry but still ushering in a new willingness to admit mistakes. It is, Harper explained, “at the core of the Canadian soul” to apologize and “strive to ensure that similar unjust practices are never allowed to happen again.”

Blake traces some of these ideas not just to King but to many of the nineteenth-century leaders whom we regard as having built this country. The story of Canada could be understood as one of ever-expanding appreciation for ever more diversity. And that consciousness of diversity has extended to economic, regional, and geographic differences, constructed upon our flexible (and sometimes maddening) form of federalism. The “genius” of Canadian federalism, Mulroney said, is a system that “combines self-rule and shared rule, sovereignty and association.” However messy, Pearson said, federalism is a way of “combining the advantages of unity with the necessity of diversity.” We believe, Trudeau said in 1968, “that regional disparity is as great a menace to Canada as a united country as would be cultural or linguistic differences.”

In the midst of so much diversity and flexibility, compromise and conciliation, we have also, of course, experienced regular bouts of worry. Shot through the Canadian story is a lingering sense of fragility — the “gnawing doubt” that Pierre Trudeau once described. Or as Pearson said in the House of Commons, “Our problem was not nation-building [but] nation saving — saving this nation from forces that weaken and could ultimately destroy it.” St‑Laurent warned, “We cannot take our nationhood for granted.” Such worrying might reflect poorly on the ties that are supposed to bind this country together. It’s true that some politicians and commentators have been quick to frame disputes and disagreements as existential threats. But we need vigilance too: a conscious understanding that conscious effort is necessary to hold a democracy together.

In making the case for his book, Blake argues that prime ministerial oration functions as a form of state action: “Political leaders make an impact through performative speech because a public utterance functions as an action. In other words, to say something is to do something.”

It might be tempting to scoff at that suggestion. We have become quite comfortable with the idea that political talk is inherently fatuous and often deceptive. Except when politicians have said something acutely divisive or inflammatory (or simply embarrassing), their words tend to be discounted. It’s surely not possible to speak a nation into existence. But if leadership matters, then so do the words. On their own, they can’t hold Confederation together. But they can certainly give voice to the better angels of our nature.

Blake’s book is backwards-looking, and he does not spend much time on our current prime minister. Justin Trudeau has expended his fair share of words — arguably more than his fair share — trying to tell the story of Canada in ways that occasionally echo his father’s notion of a “just society” (still the most evocative words ever used to describe this country and what it might aspire to). But Pierre’s son is now an example of how hard it can be for a leader to be heard when his or her voice has become all too familiar and the nation is feeling restless.

Indeed, this study of prime ministerial words lands at an opportune time. The nation has now come through one of its hardest periods: the four years since the start of the COVID‑19 pandemic. It has not emerged into a new era of prosperity and growth, like the one that followed the Second World War. The cost of everything is up. Housing is expensive, hard to find, or both. The summers keep getting hotter, and the forests are on fire. The colossus to our south is struggling to hold it together. (“Geography, history, economics, [and] defence, combine to make your interests in world affairs very largely our interests,” Pearson would tell American audiences. “When your security is weakened, we have cause to worry. When freedom falters with you, ours is diminished.”)

In grumpy times such as these, it helps to be reminded of the principles and hopes that our parents’ prime ministers spoke of and drew on. Pierre Trudeau saw this country as “an act of defiance against the history of mankind.” And Pearson said, harking back to the Charlottetown Conference, “In the very formation of Confederation, if they had been men of little faith there would have been no Canada today. Who are we to betray or diminish the faith that they had?”