The following book review examines Raymond B. Blake’s Canada’s Prime Ministers and the Shaping of a National Identity (UBC Press, 2024), which compares and contrasts the rhetoric of Canada’s prime ministers to the actual results of their governance.
Are prime ministers downstream from culture, or are they shaping it? And the specifically Canadian question that has become particularly salient in the last 10 years is how downstream are they from American culture and politics? You will find, after reading Raymond B. Blake’s new book, that it depends on who it is and what historical moment we find them in.
Blake documents prime ministerial rhetoric—official speeches, campaigning, interviews, off-the-cuff remarks—of all the post-Second World War PMs before 2015 and how their words fared against the actions they actually took.
True characters
As characters go, Pierre Trudeau and John Diefenbaker stand out of the bunch—and by character, I mean that bundle of individual gifts, flaws, and beliefs that can make a difference, for good and for ill, when a leader is faced with massive economic, historical and ecological gales. Historians will keep debating if events move in tectonic shifts that sweep away the individuals, or if it really mattered that it was humans named Churchill, Mao, and Joan of Arc finding themselves called at particular historical junctions. But as you go through the PMs in the book, it becomes clear that for some the character interacts more strongly with the situation than others.
The Diefenbaker era, for instance, was a combination of historical forces and personal virtues and foibles of the man himself. The Bill of Rights; ringing the alarm on economic merging with the U.S. economy; the importance of Canadian media ownership and culture; the idea that Canadianness extends beyond the Franco-Anglo drama, ethno-culturally; autonomy in international affairs and autonomy, as much as possible, in security—you can almost feel Diefenbaker’s irritation with President Kennedy and the U.S. Brahmin class all through it; and Diefenbaker’s out-of-the-way background, his uncoolness. Nowhere is it more obvious how downstream from America we’ve become since—and how endlessly responsive to its media and the internet our political leaders are—than in the pages that document Diefenbaker’s insistence on Canadian autonomy regarding the nuclear protection shield.
That Yankee historical force turned out to be unstoppable, and Lester Pearson’s Liberals won the election on a pro-American ticket. Diefenbaker’s insistence on no American nuclear weapons on Canadian territory “until, as a sovereign nation, we have equality in control—a joint control” sounds almost eccentric today. “Consultation, not briefing,” He insisted. And: “We have not sold Canada.” “I cannot accept the fears of those who believe we must be subservient in order to be a good ally or any country in the world,” he said in his address to the nation after losing his defence minister who resigned in protest, initiating a motion of non-confidence.
Out of the analyzed PMs, whose agenda was most ambitious, and whose government had the greatest effect on the notions of Canadian citizenship and Canada? There it’s Pierre Trudeau easily, but Brian Mulroney also competes, though he was somewhat hindered by the fact that two of his major projects—Meech and Charlottetown—did not pan out. But Mulroney’s agenda was vast and diverse, from environmental laws, a lot of sound foreign policy, and of course, free trade. He was not, however, “our Margaret Thatcher.” Social spending of his nation-building government, in spite of its rhetoric, actually increased, as did the national deficit, which though raised as a problem went largely untackled.
Our Thatcher squared was the Chretien-Martin duo and its 1995 austerity budget which cut and slashed unusually deep and fast into the nation’s capacities in order to fight the looming deficit and introduce fiscal restraint.
Canadian citizenship
The book is generally tone-neutral, which is welcome, excepting the odd bout of tut-tutting around Indigenous issues. How could Trudeau and company, comments Blake in the section on the 1969 “Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy,” even think about abolishing the Indian Act and proposing one universal citizenship for all in Canada, irrespective of ethnic background?
Well, Dr. Blake, how couldn’t they? Special rights tied to a singular ethnic group understood as having a special relationship to the land—and an attending special bureaucracy and jurisprudence tasked with managing who is and isn’t one of the special—is, for whatever merits it might have, not a liberal idea. The fact that we’ve since made this a guiding principle shows how different our understanding of Canadian citizenship is today. Trudeau’s efforts failed and he modified his publicly-stated opinions, but perhaps one could imagine a Canada that took a different turn away from one with different classes of citizens.
Since Trudeau the father, a lot of Canadian political thought has been obsessed with creating conditions for introducing cultural exceptions in the liberal democracy framework. You could argue that Quebeckers were the original citizens-plus, which was a way to sweeten the deal of staying in. Blake doesn’t deal with the current era, in which we make a distinction between Indigenous and Canadian and other identities—as if there’s a parallel national entity here, there, and everywhere that will keep the Canadian project ever fragmentary, Canadian nationhood forever postponed.
Has the unfortunate consequence of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms been that a lot of the nation-defining decisions are now moved to the judiciary? Are the lawyers and courts, instead of the Parliament and the cabinet, deciding what Canada is and test-driving its citizenship concepts and practices? Blake doesn’t weigh in, but there’s a parallel history to be written there too.
A crucial point that Blake does tease out in great detail is that while a lot of PMs may have campaigned against their opponent or predecessor by depicting them as devil incarnate, once in government they actually continue building on a good number of the preexisting projects and ideas their once-sworn enemies created.
Every PM, for example, added to the Canadian project of decoupling national belonging from ethnic and racial background, or religious belief or lack thereof. Citizenship detached from ethno-nationalism is still a rare phenomenon, globally, but to generations of Canadian political leaders from all over the political spectrum it came easily, at least in their public rhetoric. In foreign affairs, multilateralism and NATO membership were rarely if ever questioned.
Portraits of former prime ministers hang on the walls of the Foyer of the House of Commons behind former prime minister Jean Chretien, as he waits to participate in a TV interview, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Feb. 29, 2024. Justin Tang/The Canadian Press.
Going through changes
But some things have been dropped and others have evolved. We used to think of Canada as a “peacekeeper.” Luckily that kind of praise is now retired: UN peacekeeping worked in the Suez and brought Pearson deserved international accolades because the invading forces withdrew, but “peacekeeping” was nothing of the sort in the Balkans and in Rwanda when the directionless UN troops actively made the situation worse in Srebrenica and Kigali.
Faith, actively expressed in public life and speeches, phased itself out, similarly to what happened in Britain and France, but very unlike the U.S… Louis St. Laurent was ardently Catholic. Harper mostly kept his Christian faith private, if we don’t make too much of the “God Bless Canada.”
The notion of the “two founding races” was a powerful one until at least Diefenbaker and the 1960s. Offensive to modern ears, French- and Anglo-Canadians were deemed “races.” This concept was referring to, I expect, ethnicity and culture as opposed to our current (American) notion which refers to physical characteristics and skin colour. (Going back further, if you read J.S. Woodsworth’s writing, for example, you’ll find out that people from my south-eastern part of Europe had not yet been admitted into whiteness.)
Until fairly recently, “reconciliation” meant national reconciliation among Canada’s regions and between the two founding cultures.
It was Diefenbaker who appointed the first woman to the cabinet; the ostensibly liberal Pearson was, apparently, awkward with women.
The habit of establishing royal commissions also stands out as peculiar. Why do we keep doing it? Why do we then take some of them dead seriously and treat their recommendations as the Holy Scriptures, while others are put away promptly? Why delegate actual governing to a meeting, discoursing, consulting body?
I had forgotten that it was actually Harper who normalized apologizing in the House of Commons for the historical wrongs. But it was also Harper who’s probably read more history than all the others. One of the surprises of the book is how good PM Harper looks now. Did we give this PM a fair shake? History hopefully will; the honour killings and the FGM are barbaric cultural practices, what else can we call them? And the Kyoto Accord without China is absurd. How decent this man’s quiet patriotism looks now, after nearly 10 years of anti-historical nihilism and self-flagellation of living in a Canada, we are led to believe, of unexcavated mass graves of children and ongoing genocide.
But that, as we’ll certainly see in due course, is another book.
