Talk Talk
Canada’s Prime Ministers and the Shaping of a National Identity
Raymond B. Blake
UBC Press, 398 pp.
I like to think that Donald Trump, in as much as he is capable of registering anything that lies outside his own monstrous narcissism, was surprised at the vehemence with which Canadians reacted to his suggestion that their country join the USA as its 51st state. On the one hand, he knew that his talk of annexation, and his references to the prime minister as “Governor of Canada,” was belittling. It was intended to be. By the same token, the American ego can hardly fathom that the US might be perceived in any light other than the self-congratulatory myths it has spun for itself. Who wouldn’t want to join the greatest, richest, freest, most powerful nation in the history of the world, given the chance? The insult to Canada was also intended as a compliment. Trump, after all, was not making the same offer to Mexico.
If there were ever any doubt, the visceral reaction to Trump’s musings about the Coca-colonization of Canada was evidence of a polity dedicated to itself, to a collective “we.” Canadians might not be able to easily articulate what their shared identity consists of, but they knew what they didn’t want any part of. (Most of them, at any rate. There are some pockets of far-right fervour who would prefer to be American, but there are also people who cannot be convinced that the Earth is not flat.)
It has been a longstanding canard that Canada’s national identity consists almost wholly of its rejection of the United States and Americanism. Canada is not the sum total of its attributes, because its regions and peoples really have so little in common, but is defined instead by what it is not. This was never actually true, but the response to Trump’s efforts to economically subjugate the country has prompted a renewed reflection on what it is the nation stands for; what we value about ourselves, and what would be lost were we to be Anschlussed into Greater America. The differences between Canada and the US have likely never been more vivid than at this moment in history, but the defence of our realm surely starts from more than simply recoiling from the political grotesqueries to our south.
Raymond B. Blake’s excellent book, Canada’s Prime Ministers and the Shaping of a National Identity, is therefore especially timely, and deservedly won the 2025 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. It focuses precisely on how the country has come to understand itself over the decades, and how a workable political union – an exercise in perpetual compromise – was forged without any of the anchors by which national identity was rooted in the Old World. Canada includes people who came from Spain and Sweden and Scotland, but Canada is not Spain or Sweden or Scotland. It is not a nation of a single people, united by one common language or a shared faith. It is a nation made up of people from other nations, including the First Nations and Indigenous peoples. It was this that prompted Justin Trudeau, on becoming prime minister in 2015, to muse aloud that, “There is no core identity … in Canada,” and this is what makes us “the first post-national state.” (There may be an element of truth in that, but it is lousy politics to tell a country that it has no core identity. “It was a claim,” Blake wryly observes, “that Trudeau would not repeat.”)
What Trudeau meant was that, in the absence of a fixed, historical identity as a people, Canadians instead share a set of values and aspirations, and that these have been collectively and willfully created and reworked over the years in response to changing circumstances and successive waves of immigration, while staying true to the core tenets. Canada, Blake notes, no less than any other nation and probably more so, is what the scholar Benedict Anderson called an “imagined community”: a place that conceives itself into being. It does so by contriving a constitution and passing legislation – laws that set down priorities and govern behaviour – but first it conjures a sense of itself by talking to itself.
Blake, a distinguished professor of history at the University of Regina, charts the development of Canadian values and aspirations by examining how eight of the most prominent Canadian prime ministers in the post-Second World War period (Mackenzie King, St-Laurent, Diefenbaker, Pearson, Pierre Trudeau, Mulroney, Chrétien, and Harper) gave voice to the narrative of Canada in their speeches and addresses to the nation. Each of them understood the country in different ways. Each of them led a government that pursued different policy goals. But what’s striking is how the narrative of the nation is a continuous thing. The Canada that each of these prime ministers wanted to build and defend is essentially the same place. Blake is especially instructive on how policy priorities percolate through time, from one government to the next. People of my generation think of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms as the creation of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, but in fact it was John Diefenbaker who first put a Canadian Bill of Rights into law, in 1958. Similarly, the legalization of marijuana, which young people today will see as a Justin Trudeau initiative, was pre-rolled, if you will, by Jean Chrétien in the 1990s.
What at the time felt like sharp political differences – the Canada of St-Laurent vs. the Canada of Diefenbaker; the Canada of Pierre Trudeau vs. the Canada of Mulroney; the Canada of Chrétien vs. the Canada of Harper – start to recede in the long view of history into mere differences of emphasis. Even more, much of what in the past looked like grubby political manoeuvring starts to look principled from the vantage point of today.
Diversity. Opportunity. Tolerance. Freedom. Justice. Standard of living. Security. Dignity. Compassion. All the values and fortune of a good place to live, a country anyone would be happy to call home, have always been the national aspiration. That’s been the promise of Canada since Mackenzie King and probably before. We fight over what to tax and how much to tax and what not to tax and how to spend the tax – the usual squabbles of a well-to-do democratic state. We have fights over what we mean by diversity or justice or freedom, or how best to create economic opportunity, but it’s all the same master narrative.
One must fight the temptation to see the Canada of today as somehow inevitable, as though of course John A. Macdonald’s Canada leads to the Canada of Laurier and King and Mulroney and Harper, and it has all teleologically culminated in where we are today, a prosperous, politically stable, resource-rich country that is not only important to the world as an economy but as an example, no matter who happens to be prime minister. But it was not inevitable. The rhetoric may have been there from the beginning, but the concrete elements that we today take to be the markers of a decent, caring, tolerant Canada were only added to the national superstructure over the decades, from Medicare to same-sex marriage.
Nor should we allow ourselves to be complacent in our sense of ourselves. The narratives of nation building have always been aspirational, and for a country that holds itself to be just and tolerant, Canada’s past and present are rife with injustices and intolerances. Amid the prosperity, there remains poverty. Alongside compassion there is an ineradicable strain of selfishness. The project that is Canada is not yet finished. Long may it remain a work in progress.
eg The Hill Times December 8, 2025