The Canadian Ideology

The city of Ottawa found itself in the unusual position of being at the center of international media attention in early February when the Freedom Convoy occupied Parliament Hill. In the United States and elsewhere, right and left-wing commentators made the most of the crisis, each side integrating it into a preexisting narrative about either the rise of biomedical authoritarianism or the specter of fascism. By the middle of the month, as the events in Ottawa died down, a far more consequential crisis erupted on the other side of the globe when Russia invaded Ukraine.

The trucker rebellion was forgotten as quickly as it was picked up by the media. To the extent that it is recalled, it is likely in reference to either of the readymade interpretations provided by liberal or conservative pundits. Any chance to discern lessons from a deeper exploration of the events of the Freedom Convoy was lost. Outside of Canada, one influential piece from the Right went furthest in offering a sustained meditation on the larger significance of the incident, but it is notable less as an elucidation of the social conflicts underlying the convoy and more for what it says about the sensibilities of those who endorsed its arguments.

For just as thinking on the liberal center-left has ossified into a stale dogmatism, the writers and intellectuals of the populist Right (along with allies on the contrarian, anti-establishment Left) have proven to be every bit as susceptible to seeing the world in terms of reflexive formulas and comfortable conceits. The world, however, is often a more complex place than such narratives will allow, and the self-serving illusions of one camp are no less worth dispelling than the ones propagated by the other.

On February 16, 2022, as the convoy’s encampments were being dispersed by authorities, the pseudonymous writer “N.S. Lyons” published an essay entitled “Reality Honks Back.”¹ It quickly went viral and was shared on social media with approval by Canadian and foreign commentators sympathetic to the convoy’s cause, such as Jordan Peterson, Rod Dreher, and Andy Puzder, among others. Ross Douthat based a New York Times column on Lyons’s analysis.²

Unfortunately, Lyons’s piece falls victim to the same flaw that has marked much international coverage of the convoy insofar as it uncritically transposes class war narratives from elsewhere without much knowledge or concern about the uniquely Canadian circumstances that have shaped this event. If Lyons rightly accuses establishment media of parroting conventional liberal narratives about the convoy being a Russian-financed white supremacist terror threat, he makes an equally crude mistake by relying on tropes imported wholesale from conservative intellectual circles in America and other Western countries. This counternarrative supposes an unfolding class realignment between mostly working-class citizens who exist in the “real world” and arrogant elitist cosmopolitan types who sneer at them from an otherworldly realm of abstractions.

For obvious reasons, this view is enormously flattering to the self-image of its adherents on the right as it makes them out to be the noble underdogs. In addition, this narrative has allowed some conservative voices to claim for themselves—with gleeful irony—the mantle of Marx, the workers’ movement, and the revolutionary tradition.

Indeed, Lyons invokes the ex-Marxist Christopher Lasch, now a mainstay of the intellectual Right, and quotes his critique of the “thinking classes.” Though he could have just as easily referenced other similar polemical devices like Daniel Bell’s “new class” or Lionel Trilling’s “adversary culture,” favorite epithets of the old neoconservatives, or the more recent one devised by British commentator David Goodhart, “Anywheres versus Somewheres.” Lyons’s own “Physicals versus Virtuals” is but one more derivative addition to this by now somewhat tired and overused conservative variant of class war discourse.

More importantly, the application of such schemes, however useful they may be in the broader Western context, is much less appropriate in Canada. As I have argued here³ and elsewhere,⁴ the Canadian ruling class, known as “the Laurentian elite,” stands apart from other national elites. Unlike the faded American “Eastern Establishment” or the aristocracies of the old world, the Laurentian elites have yet to be overthrown. Their oligarchic ancestors willed the Canadian state into being as a means of furthering their economic interests; and they have, for the most part, held the levers of power ever since, marking Canada as a holdout in the present age of populism.

The Freedom Convoy might have once captured the hearts and minds of so many likeminded sympathizers around the world, including nearly the entire American Right, and some prominent figures on the contrarian Left like Bill Maher, Glenn Greenwald, and Matt Taibbi, who all voiced concern at what they saw as an unduly harsh government response. (Notably, progressive congresswoman Ilhan Omar also defended convoy supporters but against journalists rather than the government.) Tucker Carlson’s headline warning of “Canadian-style tyranny” seemed to encapsulate many Americans’ impression of their neighbor’s apparently draconian legal system. But the convoy was merely the latest in a long line of challengers to Laurentian hegemony, who came far only to fall short and suffer retribution. So, just what exactly were the dissenting truckers up against? 

Canada as a Commercial Empire

The Laurentian elite consists of the ruling business, political, administrative, and intellectual classes who live in the region along the St. Lawrence River and its watershed, encompassing the economic heartland of Central Canada, consisting of the two most populous provinces of Ontario and Quebec, and centering on the cities of Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. The partisan allegiances, economic orientations, and cultural self-conception of this elite has, of course, changed greatly over the years, but there has been a remarkable continuity in the concentration of national power in their hands.

The mid-century giant of the Canadian historical profession, Donald Creighton, described the ideology of this class in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a “Tory doctrine of material expansion through political unity” guided by a “fundamental political principle [of] unification and centralization of control.”⁵ Note (in light of Lyons’s dichotomy) the word “material”: unlike Thomas Jefferson and his ideological successors, the Laurentians were not moral or political idealists and were chiefly concerned with the material economic progress of their domain. Creighton’s 1937 book The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, 1760–1850 treats the history and early development of Canada as coterminous with the ambitions of this mercantile Tory oligarchy,⁶ known as the “Family Compact” in Upper Canada (now Ontario) and as the “Château Clique” in Lower Canada (now Quebec).

In the long-running philosophical debate between “wealth and virtue,” as documented by the historians of Anglo-American political thought J. G. A. Pocock, Bernard Bailyn, and Gordon S. Wood, Canada’s establishment and its form of political regime were, and arguably remain, firmly grounded on the side of “wealth” rather than “virtue”—that is, early modern commercial liberalism against the tradition of classical republicanism. The difference between the two worldviews, in the American context, has been summed up by M. Anthony Mills in a recent essay for National Affairs:

In formulating their vision for America, some founders drew especially heavily on the liberalism of theorists like Locke, Smith, and Hume—perhaps the most prominent among them being Alexander Hamilton. These founding-era liberals viewed commercial activity as a form of liberalization that not only increased wealth, but facilitated cooperative exchange, thereby engendering refinement and civility within the citizenry. 

Other founders, like Thomas Jefferson, saw commercial activity as a source of potential corruption. As Wood points out, these early American republicans—like the “country” republicans of Walpole’s England—worried that the “rise of banks, trading companies, and stock markets, plus the emergence of the new moneyed men, [and] the increasing public debt” would change the culture of the nascent republic, allowing self-interest to displace public virtue as society’s chief animating principle.⁷

While the United States has been home to both traditions, Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), among other works, showed how the latter Jeffersonian, republican, or “country party” strain has occupied the preeminent place in the rhetorical discourse and political legacy of 1776.⁸ The rival Hamiltonian “court party” strain has occupied the secondary position in U.S. history—largely only drawn upon in times when a strong state is required to coordinate and develop the economy. Canadian history, too, features an interplay between the two traditions, but the positions are reversed: the court party ideology favored by the Laurentian elites has been the leading tradition since Confederation in 1867 and well before, while the mantle of the country party has been adopted by their agrarian and populist adversaries in the Reform movement, who have played the part of the semi-permanent opposition.⁹

Reformers saw the Family Compact (often not inaccurately) as a corrupt, self-dealing club, whose members circulated offices and favors among themselves while using their privileged positions in the colonial state to line their pockets and exclude all outsiders from participation. This mirrored the original country party polemics of the Viscount Bolingbroke against the modernizing regime of Sir Robert Walpole, which later influenced the Patriots’ depiction of Britain as a corrupted, usurping tyranny during the American Revolution.¹⁰ In Upper Canada, this tendency found its most impassioned spokesman in firebrand newspaper editor and first mayor of Toronto, William Lyon Mackenzie.

For its part, the oligarchy looked upon Mackenzie and his kind as an ignorant rabble who trafficked in seditious republican sentiments. No one embodied this elitist attitude more than John Strachan, Anglican Bishop of Toronto. Described as a reactionary arch-Tory, Strachan “did not believe that the voice of the people was the voice of God”¹¹ and so dedicated his energies to building a hierarchical society patterned after the mother country. In religion, this meant adherence to the Church of England (though it was never formally established in Canada, acting more like a de facto rather than a de jure state religion); in politics, it called for loyalty to the Crown, deference to one’s betters in what he hoped would be a Canadian class system no less pervasive than the British one, and opposition to and all things American.

This visceral anti-American attitude among the Lauretnian elites and their counterparts in the Maritime colonies can be traced to the influx of Loyalist refugees fleeing the new United States in the 1780s. Many of the leading families in the Tory exodus—the Robinsons, the Sewells, the Uniackes—would resume their positions as members of the elite north of the forty-ninth parallel.

The Loyalist element also explains the difference between Canadian Toryism and what would become American conservatism, which was described by Ronald Reagan in a 1975 interview with Reason: “if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is . . . less centralized authority or more individual freedom.”¹² At the heart of the difference between these two worldviews was a disagreement over the nature and purposes of power. The view that animated the Patriot cause (which the Tories disagreed with) was summed up in the third chapter of Bailyn’s Ideological Origins, entitled “Power and Liberty: A Theory of Politics”:

The theory of politics that emerges from the political literature of the pre-Revolutionary years rests on the belief that what lay behind every political scene, the ultimate explanation of every political controversy, was the disposition of power. . . . The essence of what they meant by power was perhaps best revealed inadvertently by John Adams as he groped for words in drafting his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law. Twice choosing and then rejecting the word “power,” he finally selected as the specification of the thought he had in mind “dominion,” and in this association of words the whole generation concurred.

“Power” to them meant the dominion of some men over others, the human control of human life: ultimately force, compulsion. And it was, consequently, for them as it is for us “a richly connotative word”: some of its fascination may well have lain for them, as it has been said to lie for us, in its “sado-masochistic flavor,” for they dwelt on it endlessly, almost compulsively. . . .  [Their] discussion of power centered on its essential characteristic of aggressiveness: its endlessly propulsive tendency to expand itself beyond legitimate boundaries. . . . Power, it was said over and over again, has “an encroaching nature”; “. . . if at first it meets with no control [it] creeps by degrees and quick subdues the whole.”¹³

This deeply ingrained fear and suspicion of power (not merely the potential misuse of it but the very act of possessing it in any great degree) constituted a key feature of the republican country party ethos. In the early nineteenth century, this ideology started to spread and win converts in Canada, particularly among farmers and small-holders, roughly the same constituency for Jeffersonian and Jacksonian politics in the United States. Led by Mackenzie and his allies, they formed the militant wing of the colony’s Reform movement. Though it had never been dominant, the country party strain has made major contributions to Canada’s political evolution, the most notable of which was spurring the movement from the rule of colonial governors and their councils toward parliamentary self-government, or what in Canada is referred to as “responsible government” (in which the executive is responsible to the elected assembly).

The outbreak of a rebellion in 1837 at the hands of the Patriotes in Lower Canada and Mackenzie’s radicals in Upper Canada was the spark. Inspired by the republican spirit of the American and French revolutions, the rebels sought to overthrow the oligarchy and establish a constitution that would empower the elected assemblies over the executive; their economic vision entailed turning the Canadas into agrarian Jeffersonian republics. These uprisings (amounting to a series of skirmishes rather than a true social revolution) were defeated and the perpetrators were hanged, jailed, or exiled as far afield as Australia. Their efforts were not all in vain, however, as the local elite and Imperial government decided that the pressure for reform could no longer be ignored and set course for responsible government. This happened under the auspices of Lord Durham, the Governor General, who issued a famous report assessing the causes of the rebellion. In it, he recommended a union of the Canadas and introduction of responsible government, which was achieved in 1848 under the moderate Reformers Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine.

As responsible government took shape, so too did the modern party system: the Laurentian commercial elite based in Montreal and other urban centers would unite around the Conservative Party, which would favor economic development. The Reform movement, after having achieved its main goal of responsible government, splintered into moderate and radical “Clear Grit” factions (with some moderates joining the Conservatives), before regrouping and rebranding as the Liberal Party in the 1860s. The new party adopted Gladstone’s classical liberalism, a persuasion no less enamored of free trade, low taxes, and limited government, but without the political liability of Mackenzie’s republicanism.

Though parliamentary government was introduced as a result of the agitation and then the rebellion of the Reformers, the new political system proved to be more hospitable to the continued rule of their Tory opponents, as the latter half of the nineteenth century would be dominated by the Conservatives. This turn of events meant that while the demands of the rebels were ultimately met, they had been taken up by the very same elites the rebellion sought to depose, who would go on to shape Canadian institutions on their own terms. Meanwhile, the country party ideology would find new life in the Western prairies, manifesting as both right and left-wing populism, and continuing its role as the challenger to the Laurentian regime.¹⁴

This pattern, whereby the ruling class proactively manages the currents of political, economic, and social change from the top-down, would not only repeat itself at the time of Confederation a generation later in the 1860s, it would recur throughout the succeeding chapters of Canadian history, thus providing confirmation for the view, associated with Seymour Martin Lipsett, that “Contrary to the tumultuous republic to the south, Canada is a counter-revolutionary society.”¹⁵ In the same way that the country party ethos of the American Revolution lives on in the idioms and axioms of U.S. politics, the court party legacy of the Canadian founding can still be discerned in the dominant political and institutional culture of Canada today. It is, therefore, worth tracing the trajectory of Canada’s ruling ideology before reexamining the more recent conflicts underlying the Freedom Convoy, which may then be situated in a larger historical pattern.

Confederation and Dominion: The Court Party Ideology in Action

After the end of British mercantilism that came with the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws and the concurrent rise of protectionism in the United States, the Laurentians, who had previously relied on both the protective system of the Empire and reciprocal trade with the States for the export of their commodities, realized that the only way to secure their economic survival was to forge “a unified and competitive entity in North America.”¹⁶

This vision called for the Queen’s colonies to consolidate into a federation: the abundnant natural resources of the upper half of the continent would fuel Central Canada’s industrial sector in a vast internal market connected by railroads and subsequently protected by high tariffs. This was the essence of what in the 1870s would be dubbed the “National Policy” of Tory chieftain and first prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald: it was the Canadian answer to the Hamiltonian “American School” of state-led capitalist developmentalism—a model of political economy against which both Jeffersonian producerism and Gladstonian liberalism were opposed.

As with Hamilton’s Federalists or Henry Clay’s Whigs, the proponents of Confederation saw material and moral betterment as the common blessings of a commercial society. The view was expressed by Macdonald’s French Canadian partner, Sir George-Étienne Cartier, when he said: “commerce brings in its train . . . tranquillity, order, and rule,” and acted as “a cure for the most destructive prejudices; for it is almost a general rule, that wherever we find agreeable manners, there commerce flourishes. . . .”¹⁷ Cartier saw the British conquest of Quebec as a providential stroke that saved his people from the horror of the French Revolution. With their religion and the virtues of the ancien régime intact, Cartier thought the French Canadians all the more ready to imbibe the spirit of enterprise and join the English in becoming “men of faith and progress.”¹⁸

It was in pursuit of this idea of national and commercial greatness that the Canadas, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick came together by act of the British Parliament after a series of intercolonial conferences to form the modern Canadian state on July 1, 1867, to be joined by other provinces later on. (In line with the counter-revolutionary and anti-republican character of Confederation, appeals to the popular will were nowhere to be found in Canada’s founding documents.)

There was some disagreement as to what the formal name of this new entity would be: Macdonald preferred “Kingdom of Canada,” but the Colonial Office in London vetoed the idea for fear of offending the United States. New Brunswick premier Sir Samuel Leonard Tilley proposed another name taken from Psalm 72:8, which read: “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth.”¹⁹ It was fitting that the very word America’s founders had used to express their aversion to power was now taken up by Canada’s founders to christen their federation, for the new Dominion of Canada would operate on a distinct conception of power that was almost diametrically opposed to the one that held in the American republic.

Aghast at the ongoing U.S. Civil War, which Canadian observers attributed to weak central government, Macdonald (who had originally wished for a unitary state before conceding its implausibility for a country so large and diverse) opted for a highly centralized federal state. Canada’s constitutional motto, “peace, order and good government,” arose as an expression of its founders’ intent to reserve a broad scope of authority for the federal parliament over that of its provincial counterparts, according to the former any area of the law not explicitly delegated to either level of government (an inversion of the U.S. model).²⁰

Through later economic, political, and juridical developments, however, Canada would actually evolve steadily away from Macdonald’s ideal of a centralist Leviathan, and the country would end up as one of the more decentralized federations in the world, most evidently in key areas of domestic policy like healthcare and education.²¹ But there is another aspect of the court party ideology that proved to be more resilient and that is the emphasis on a strong executive, which remains to this day.

In contrast to the distinctly American fear of executive overreach, borne of the republican aversion to monarchical power, the statesmen of British North America and Canada positively embraced the prospect of an executive that could act boldly²² with “energy” and “despatch,” as Hamilton put it in Federalist no. 70. (It was for such views in support of a powerful federal government and executive, illustrated most clearly in his radical executive-centric constitutional proposal of June 18, 1787, that Hamilton was attacked as a closet monarchist and Anglophile.²³)

In “The Ideological Origins of Canadian Confederation” (1987), Peter J. Smith became the first scholar to apply the categories of the Pocock-Bailyn historiography to Canada. Smith detailed the court party ideology of Canada’s founders as one that called for “an expanded commercial state: a strong executive and political stability, underwritten by the availability of offices—the prizes of ambition necessary to mute the spirit of faction [along with] healthy public credit provided by an enlarged tax base, which also promoted political stability.”²⁴ Indeed, Smith observes that with Confederation, “Macdonald obtained most of what Alexander Hamilton wanted in 1787”²⁵ (that is, everything short of liquidating the states).²⁶

The late constitutional historian Frederick Vaughan traced the inspiration of Canada’s form of government to the aforementioned early modern commercial liberal tradition associated with Locke and Hobbes. Through this tradition, the ambitions of a rising commercial class represented in the Commons had been accommodated by a constitutional settlement that foreswore monarchical absolutism after 1688 in favor of a nearly unchecked parliamentary supremacy.²⁷ In effect, this meant an all-powerful executive, since the government rests on a fusion of the executive and legislature (where the prime minister and cabinet must be members of the parliament, and must enjoy the confidence of a majority in order to govern), which allows the head of the executive to directly shape and steer legislation as well as executive policy.

This is in contrast with the more straightforwardly republican premises of the Madisonian constitution, which envisions a strict formal and practical separation of powers:

Hobbes recognized that the tenuous hold of republican government on public order required a strong “monarch”—whether one or many fully armed. Hobbes’s and Locke’s new constitution framed a form of government that permitted the rulers—that is, the “executive”—to rule with the support of public force. There was to be no separation of powers or checks and balances beyond the apparent in the new English constitution. . . . Neither Hobbes nor Locke would have recognized the prince or the executive of the American constitution.

The British constitution learned from Hobbes that those who exercise the sovereign authority must not be “content with less power, than to the peace, and defence of the commonwealth is necessarily required.” From John Locke it learned that the one who “has the executive power” must be fully conscious of and fully prepared to use all those prerogative powers. . . . It is a tribute to the genius of the British constitution that it was able to accommodate the ambitions of the new commercial age under an executive government that could act with dispatch and authority.²⁸

Though it stems from common roots in the British constitution, Canada’s executive has grown to be unusually powerful even in comparison with its counterparts in other Westminster systems, hewing closest to the ideal of executive dominance envisioned by Hobbes and Hamilton to a remarkable extent that almost strains the standards of a modern Western liberal democracy.

With such titles as The Friendly Dictatorship (2001), “Prime Minister and Cabinet in Canada: An Autocracy in Need of Reform?” (2000), and Governing from the Centre: The Concentration of Power in Canadian Politics (1999), contemporary Canadian analysts have often tried to grapple with just how much power and discretion rests in the hands of prime ministers and executive organs like the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), even in instances of minority government.²⁹ They have noted the head of government’s vast sway over lawmaking, administrative, and political matters at the expense of both cabinet ministers and backbenchers—the latter having virtually no power in setting or altering the government’s agenda.³⁰ In Britain, backbenchers have some institutional conduits for airing their concerns and may exert considerable influence (as in the case of Margaret Thatcher’s downfall or in the more recent spate of post-Brexit backbench rebellions). In Australia, parliamentary party coups are an all-too-common occurrence. By contrast, Canada—at least in those matters of national policy reserved for the care of the federal government—appears to be something like a parliamentary autocracy with the prime minister as its Cromwell (or its Walpole). 

Against claims that this overmighty executive is a recent development from the 1970s or that it is a corruption of Canada’s system of government, historian Patrice Dutil ably demonstrated in Prime Ministerial Power in Canada (2017) that this apparent bug is actually a natural feature of the regime, established as a result of the design and intent of Canada’s early prime ministers.³¹ Dutil recognized Macdonald as the greatest influence, who “deliberately shaped government management according to his own wishes and inclinations.”³² He did this by centralizing control over the bureaucracy in his office, by cementing his political position through shrewd patronage appointments, and by applying the resulting executive leverage toward his central objective, realization of the National Policy. This had been the labor of years, but one crisis in particular exemplified the prime minister’s approach to the concerted and purposeful application of power.

Macdonald’s vision rested on the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), which was to be the first to connect the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts without passing through the United States, thereby making good on the Confederation’s promise to build a great commercial dominion “from sea to sea.” Macdonald had been thrown out of office in 1873 after a scandal revealed improper dealings around the negotiation of the CPR contract; his political fortunes revived, however, and he returned to the premiership five years later only to find that a floundering, financially unsound construction effort was about to jeopardize the railway’s completion.

Things took a bloody turn with the beginning of the North-West Rebellion of 1885. Métis leader and self-proclaimed prophet Louis Riel, returned from American exile and eager to avenge his previous failed uprising of 1869, declared it his mission to set up a theocratic state in the District of Saskatchewan, in the vicinity of the railway then under construction. Riel raised a small army among the Métis and, along with First Nations allies, began attacking forts and settlements. The federal government under Macdonald acted swiftly, mobilizing the militia and making use of the completed portions of the railway to transport them to the front. After early Métis victories, the rebellion was decisively defeated at the Battle of Batoche. The trial proved to be every bit as spectacular as the armed conflict.

The government singled out Riel among the seventy-two perpetrators with the charge of high treason. At this time, Canadian treason law carried no death penalty, however, and Macdonald appeared determined to produce such a sentence. The choice of which statute to apply was entirely up to the prime minister and his justice minister, Sir Alexander Campbell. Passing over the 1868 Canadian High Treason Felony Statute, Macdonald and Campbell selected a medieval law from 1351, the Statute of Treasons, passed under Edward III, which did entail death. The resulting charges sounded archaic even to Victorian ears and could have been drafted by a scribe in the Plantagenet court, for Riel was accused of “being moved and seduced by the devil” in plotting “most wickedly, maliciously and traitorously . . . against our Lady, the Queen.”³³

The defense pleaded insanity, but to no avail. Riel was found guilty. Macdonald turned down pleas for clemency from both the jury and a chorus of his own political supporters in Quebec, where the Francophone Catholic Riel became a figure of sympathy. Indeed, Riel’s execution was a great blow to Conservative fortunes in that province from which they never recovered. (Macdonald famously said: “He shall hang though every dog in Quebec bark in his favour.”) But the events of the rebellion turned out to be a catalyst for the completion of the CPR, as the railway proved indispensable in suppressing the insurgency. Increased public support helped to authorize funding for the remainder of the project and Macdonald’s vision of a transcontinental nation was fulfilled when the final tracks were laid in November 1885.³⁴

In the words of his rival and successor, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Macdonald “was fond of power and he never made any secret of it.”³⁵ What’s more, he knew how to use it creatively in the service of a long-term goal. It is in the institutional legacy he left behind after nineteen years as prime minister that the conception of power underlying Canada’s system of government can be discerned. Where America’s republican regime is premised on the fragmentation of power as a means of thwarting ambitions, the executive-centric Canadian regime rests on the opposite principle, namely the concentration of power as a means of testing ambitions. Even then, this struck American sensibilities as somewhat tyrannical, as evidenced by the 1891 New York Times obituary of Macdonald, which described him as “almost the autocratic ruler of the country.”³⁶

The Court Party’s New Clothes

The Canadian state was thus born in a calculated act of material self-preservation (and self-advancement) by a restless Laurentian elite, who found an outlet for their ambitions in a nation-building project consciously grounded in the pursuit of wealth and commercial expansion. The impetus behind Confederation can be distilled as the desire on the part of the reigning financial, rail, and manufacturing interests (Macdonald’s core constituencies) for, in Smith’s words, “a credit instrument that would provide the resources necessary for the economic development of the British North American colonies.”³⁷ This was the object of the court party ideology, which would survive in various incarnations as the modern Laurentian worldview.

Whereas the patriots of other countries might have infused their nation-building projects with a universalist mission to uphold self-evident truths about liberty or the inalienable rights of man, Canada’s commercially-minded founders limited themselves to the maintenance of “peace, order and good government,” or in other words, what today might be called a “good business climate.”

Of course, the parameters defining a good business climate would change over the years: the protectionist template of the National Policy would eventually give way to a greater acceptance of free trade once Canada became a mature industrial power in the middle of the twentieth century. It was also around this time that the Laurentian elites began to shift in their choice of political vehicle from the Conservative to the Liberal Party.

This switch began to take place during the Second World War. As a result of cohabitation in running the military-industrial complex, the economic elite centered on Toronto’s Bay Street (then in the process of displacing Montreal as the country’s financial capital) joined together with the political elite of the ruling Liberal Party and the administrative “mandarin” elite in the Ottawa civil service to forge a lasting realignment.³⁸ In the words of journalist Peter C. Newman, it was “the birth of a postwar network of connections and interconnections between business and government that fathered a new economy, its tentacles . . . spreading into every form of commercial enterprise across the country,” leading to the Liberals becoming the natural governing party “almost by default.”³⁹

As the descendants of the urban-based businessmen and industrialists who once formed the heart of the Conservative coalition of the previous century became Liberals, the party subsequently adopted their class outlook,⁴⁰ developing a twentieth-century center-left variant of the court party ideology—a “Laurentian Consensus”⁴¹ described by political scientist Andrew McDougall as “an attitudinal position towards Canadian political and institutional arrangements inside of a progressive matrix.”⁴²

Nevertheless, the progressive descriptor only makes sense to a degree: on another level, McDougall points out that “it does not make sense to speak of the Laurentian Consensus existing in any other country, as one might when thinking about being a classical liberal or conservative . . . to be considered a ‘Laurentian’ is not the same thing as a [conventional] political philosophy.”⁴³ It is rather a “zone of consensus” among national elites that brooks no easy classification.⁴⁴ The truly consequential battles in Canadian history have usually arisen from conflicts within the Laurentian elite, such as the conscription crises of the two world wars, the Quebec separation question of the 1960s to the 1990s, or the great free trade election of 1988.

It makes more sense to look at how the Laurentian elite has governed: in economic policy, this has meant the protection (or as critics might say, the “propping up”) of Central Canadian commerce and industry ranging from agriculture to finance to manufacturing, such as through the extension of support to favored firms like the engineering giant SNC Lavalin (the subject of a major Trudeau scandal) and Bombardier; in social policy, the Laurentians have tended to support binding national programs like Medicare or, more recently, the Canada Child Benefit; while in cultural policy, it has entailed the promotion of a distinct Canadian identity and nationalism usually implicitly defined against American hegemony.⁴⁵

Meanwhile, as the Laurentian realignment was taking place in the Liberal Party, the inheritors of the country party tradition—the present-day equivalents of those rural, exurban, and small producer constituencies who once formed the base of the Reform movement in the nineteenth century—would gradually migrate to the opposite end of the partisan divide.

Like the Grits of the 1850s, the Canadian Right, then known as the Progressive Conservative Party, splintered after a streak of apparent political success in the 1990s, fracturing into a centrist Eastern-based “Red Tory” rump and an ascendant populist, conservative-libertarian, and Western-based Reform Party. After a period of disunity on the right, which helped to elect successive Liberal majorities, the two parties reunited to create the modern Conservative Party in 2003 under ex-Reformer Stephen Harper, who would lead it to victory in 2006. Yet the Conservative refoundation was less a merger and more a takeover of the old PC party by Reform, which ensured the new entity resembled the latter more than the former.⁴⁶

Reform Party founder Preston Manning named it after the Reform movement of Mackenzie, as he hoped to evoke its legacy of resistance to elite rule. Manning also adopted Riel as a symbol of Western defiance against Ottawa.⁴⁷ Where Reformers of the previous century looked to Jefferson and Gladstone for inspiration, young Reform activists idolized Reagan and Thatcher. Another key influence among the younger activists was the 1986 book The Patriot Game: National Dreams and Political Realities by one Peter Brimelow⁴⁸ (written before he became a staple of the American alt-right), which employed a variant of the “new class” narrative to depict the Canadian federation as an elaborate protection racket by and for Laurentian elites—at the expense of the resource-rich Western provinces. Brimelow advocated instead for a North American English nationalism that stressed English Canadians’ fundamental cultural unity with the United States. (Different varieties of secessionist and pro-American annexationist sentiment often run through contemporary anti-Laurentian polemics.)

Against the entrenched Laurentian paradigm, with its privileging of Central Canadian concerns, this new populism offered an alternative decentralized political economy, one that would support Western Canada’s extractive sector (which it accuses Laurentian governments of neglecting or suppressing) while scaling back the state and endorsing liberalization of Central Canada’s semi-protected industries.⁴⁹ If this conservative paradigm ever took hold permanently, a possibility sketched out in Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson’s 2013 book The Big Shift, it would signal nothing less than the displacement of the Laurentian elite by a Western-based counter-elite.⁵⁰ And it is from this distinct ideological context, grounded in the dynamics of an intra-elite struggle that is quite particular to Canada’s history and politics—not some generalized uprising of the transatlantic working class, that the present incarnation of Canadian right-wing populism would grow.

One hundred and fifty years after Canada’s founding, both court and country parties have found new clothes. To paraphrase Reagan’s quote: if we were back in the days of Confederation, the Liberals today would be the Tories and the Conservatives would be the Reformers. Most people cannot see beyond aesthetics, but it matters less that the Liberal-Laurentian court party traded in Macdonald’s British-inflected Toryism for Pierre Trudeau’s constitutional patriotism (they are functionally identical vehicles for a centralist, anti-American nationalism), or that the modern-day Reformers have adopted the former’s symbolism and grafted it onto their otherwise American-inflected country party politics. The institutional and political economy positions are effectively reversed.

Having recounted, at least in broad strokes, the course of Canada’s political development, the record shows that its history is built on the backs of failed rebellions against the Laurentian center by various peripheries (usually but not exclusively colored by country party thought), of which there have been at least two kinds.

When these come in the form of movements advocating reforms that can be accommodated, the regime can easily diffuse the challenge through incorporation of their demands into its agenda. Examples include a number of small farmer-based parties or the social democratic Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, predecessor to today’s New Democratic Party.⁵¹ These movements, which served as the left-wing expressions of country party ideology, provided the ideas behind the Canadian welfare state, though these ideas were generally implemented by Liberals.⁵² When, on the other hand, the challenges come in the form of extra-parliamentary rebellions that threaten peace, order, and good government—that economic and political stability so treasured by the Laurentian elite—the Canadian state, as we have seen, has seldom ever hesitated to exercise its potent executive capacities as a means of extinguishing it.

Wealth against Virtue: Court and Country Rematch

In light of such precedents, the events surrounding the Freedom Convoy may be seen in a different light. Lyons believes that the convoy represents those most attached to the real material economy while the Trudeau government is the moralizing tyranny of the disembodied mind. But in fundamental ways, the exact opposite is true. Like every iteration of the Laurentian regime before him, Justin Trudeau acted decisively to preserve and defend the economic stability and commercial interests of Canadian society, that good business climate that has been the going concern of every government since Macdonald’s. He did this in the face of a movement that began as a boisterous demonstration in the capital, but that soon expanded into a far more radical and destabilizing effort to blockade the nation’s borders and clog the arteries of trade on which countless Canadian jobs and businesses depend.

Interestingly, Lyons makes no mention of the border in his essay, confining his descriptions of the convoy movement to the most innocuous features of the Ottawa protests like bouncy castles, dancing Sikhs, and “hug-ins.” But he neglected to mention the events that took place in border towns like Windsor, Ontario, Emmerson, Manitoba, Coutts, Alberta, and Surrey, British Columbia, where members of the Freedom Convoy blockaded points of entry to and from the United States. Going beyond anything that might be described as a nuisance or a protest, this act began a process of quite literally choking the Canadian economy.

Lyons does not consider that a small minority of convoy-aligned truckers (apparently no more than several dozen at each crossing) made it nearly impossible for the overwhelming majority of their colleagues (about 90 percent of whom were fully vaccinated and eligible for cross-border travel)⁵³ to do their jobs, causing endless lines and hours-long waits by Canadian and U.S. truckers and real damage to the society the convoy was trying to save from tyranny. What about this great, unheralded silent majority of truckers, the ones who actually delivered the goods they were entrusted with? (Trudeau could have said “I like the ones who didn’t rebel. . . .”) Where do they fit into Lyons’s moral dichotomy? And do they not, by their sheer numbers, stake a more legitimate claim to being representative of Canada’s “Physicals” in the transportation industry than the activists and sympathizers who swarmed either the border or the capital?

An accounting of the costs of the weeklong stunt is staggering. As the Ambassador Bridge connecting Michigan to Ontario is a vital artery for transporting parts and finished products to and from the many car assembly plants in the Windsor area, the auto industry alone lost about $300 million in wages and production, with lost wages for factory workers amounting to $144.9 million, on top of $155 million lost to General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Honda, and Toyota.⁵⁴

As for the total value of the disrupted trade in goods, the University of Windsor’s CrossBorder Institute estimated a ballpark figure of $3 to $6 billion—a large but unsurprising number given that the bridge is the busiest border crossing, accounting for 25 percent of Canada-U.S. trade.⁵⁵ The blockade also led to a 15–30 percent hike in freight costs, making it “particularly painful for the auto and agriculture industries,” and “harder for strained supply chains to normalize this year” according to Bloomberg.⁵⁶ Comparable losses were also caused by the blockades in Emerson, Manitoba, estimated at $73 million, and Coutts, Alberta, estimated at $48 million.⁵⁷

In terms that exude the Jeffersonian suspicion of “abstract institutions,” “informational middlemen,” and “civilizational innovation[s],”⁵⁸ Lyons identifies the “Physical” men and women of the convoy as the wholesome, practical, and sober-minded element, being grounded in the real world, while it is the “Virtual” ruling classes who are decadent, moralistic, and wedded to abstractions, trapped as they are in an illusory digital existence.

The border blockades, however, tell a very different story, for these multimillion-dollar figures were not mere numbers on a screen in somebody’s computer in downtown Toronto or Ottawa. They represented real physical goods going in and out of the country—driven by real physical people, i.e., the great mass of truckers who were content to simply do their jobs instead of playacting as freedom fighters. If anything, the majority of affected Canadians from both the “Physical” working class and the “Virtual” managerial class—whether they were sitting behind the wheel of a flatbed truck with overdue goods in the back, standing around waiting for parts at one of the disrupted assembly plants, or sitting anxiously in a cubicle at the local Toyota head office—could be seen as merely being interested in doing their jobs. Rather, it was the convoy that acted with such flippancy and disregard for the material economic security of the country that they were willing to sabotage it on behalf of a larger political morality. 

Ultimately, it was these developments at the border crossings and the mounting costs to the real economy, more so than the honking or the hot tubs on Parliament Hill, that finally compelled enforcement and dispersal of the convoy after days of inaction, first on the part of local and provincial governments, followed by the intervention of Trudeau’s federal government.

Taking a closer look at the convoy will reveal both its consistency with the characteristics of a virtual-based political movement, as Lyons has described it, and its basis in the Canadian country party tradition. Like Riel, who threatened the path of the railroad, and the radical Reformers, who attempted to forestall industrial modernity, the convoy stood in the way of commerce itself and thus invited the retribution of the Canadian state. As with Mackenzie’s rebellion, they appealed to “virtue” over and above “wealth,” a disposition best expressed by People’s Party of Canada leader and would-be tribune for the truckers, Maxime Bernier, when he tweeted: “Short-term economic disruptions caused by blocking border crossings are insignificant compared with the goal of ending . . . the government war against some of its citizens, and restoring our fundamental rights and freedoms.”⁵⁹

Though it would ordinarily be apt to describe the right-wing, libertarian milieu from which the Freedom Convoy came as being centered on free markets and laissez-faire capitalism, statements like Bernier’s give expression to the fundamentally noneconomic basis of the classical republican thought that underpins the country party ethos, with its emphasis on the value rationality of homo politicus rather than the instrumental rationality of homo mercator.⁶⁰

Thus Always to Rebels

Indeed, the historical parallels are quite glaring. Just as the rebels of 1837 adopted the idioms of the American and French Revolutions in their doomed revolt against the Tory oligarchy, so too did the Freedom Convoy present its message through a mostly imported symbolic vocabulary. The first noticeable feature of the convoy at an aesthetic level was the sheer saturation of Americanisms: U.S. flags, Gadsden flags, and Trump 2020 banners were second only to Canadian flags, many of which were hung upside down. The vivid and unapologetic Tea Party-style “We the People” message of fighting for liberty against tyranny and corruption were all vintage distillations of the country party polemic. The French Yellow Vest movement had also been a clear inspiration to the leadership of one of the antecedent organizations behind the Freedom Convoy, United We Roll—both in terms of its disruptive protest strategy and its exaggerated proletarian aesthetics.⁶¹

It is also worth noting that the activist organizations from which the convoy leadership came—groups like United We Roll,⁶² Canada Unity,⁶³ the Maverick Party⁶⁴ and Wexit Alberta⁶⁵—were all Western-based outfits. Hailing from the one region of Canada where the global populist currents that fueled Trump and Brexit are most active, these groups previously attempted organizing nationwide protest movements as far back as 2019, launching, for instance, a similar convoy to protest Trudeau’s carbon tax, but they attracted scant attention and hardly any outside support. Another effort at political mobilization in early 2020 aimed at breaking union picket lines at oil and gas facilities in Alberta and Saskatchewan made hardly a ripple in the news cycle.⁶⁶ (Such actions reveal just what kind of “worker’s movement” the Freedom Convoy aims to be.) As it turns out, Western alienation and its associated issues have limited resonance outside the Western provinces.

Furthermore, past attempts by such groups along with the People’s Party—a federal party but with its strongest regional concentration of support in the prairies—to superimpose issues like immigration and cultural identity fell flat in a Canadian political landscape where these issues are not salient, at least not in the same way as in other liberal democracies.⁶⁷ (This is in large part because the policies pursued by the Laurentian elite in areas like immigration or even trade are designed in such a way as to prevent backlash, thus Canada’s storied “immunity” to populism: see this author’s previous essay.⁶⁸) This meant that prior to the pandemic, right-wing populism of the Trumpian variety and the radical country party strain (outside the prairies and a few other isolated contexts) were suspended in states of dormancy: it was a rebellion in desperate search of a cause.⁶⁹ 

The cause finally came about with Covid-19 restrictions and vaccine mandates, a contingent, easily exploitable, and universally felt source of frustration, that like a gaping wound in the body politic, finally allowed the pathogen of American-style populism to enter and spread. This is another way of saying that the Freedom Convoy was sustained primarily by exogenous causes and inspirations—a localized inflammation and manifestation of a global movement that has otherwise struggled to find a foothold in a society where, as we have seen, the structural factors that motivate post-2016 populism are mostly absent.

As with the Trump movement and its counterparts in Europe, it is the populist insurgents of the Freedom Convoy who primarily inhabit de-territorialized political communities on the internet and social media, grounded in an online epistemic environment that is immaterial, infused with “enchantment” (in Max Weber’s sense), and essentially international in scope. It is from within this discursive space arising from “digital technology and global networks,”⁷⁰ in Lyons’s words, that scarcely distinguishable conspiratorial narratives about elite corruption are generated and reproduced mimetically across borders.

Where the ideologies of the Atlantic revolutions once exported a universalist discourse about the triumph of popular liberty against aristocratic elites in all the nations and empires of the nineteenth century, the contemporary global populist movement likewise relies on a radically homogenizing message that folds all moral and political questions, irrespective of local context, into a cosmic metanarrative that knows no boundaries. This is how the Freedom Convoy effectively repurposed tropes and memes taken wholesale from the global populist discourse with little or no reference to or sensitivity for Canada’s institutions.

The federal cross-border mandates affected a small minority of unvaccinated truckers yet the protests in Ottawa and elsewhere were filled with disgruntled people from all walks of life. It mattered little, however, that the vast majority of health regulations that affected these Canadians at an everyday level were introduced by the provinces who are constitutionally in charge of healthcare. It would not have sufficed to apportion 85 percent of the protests to the provincial premiers, who are the ones with actual control over most health regulations, and the other 15 percent toward the federal government in Ottawa (the protests directed against provincial authorities were mostly sideshows relative to the main event).⁷¹ Justin Trudeau was simply the most emotionally satisfying target and the globally acknowledged face of progressive liberalism: therefore, they had to focus their ire on the person of Trudeau and wave “F**k Trudeau” flags in much the same way that the sans-culottes burned effigies of Louis XVI.

The now infamous “Memorandum of Understanding,” the closest thing the convoy had to a mission statement, revealed a similar lack of understanding for (or interest in) the workings of Canada’s system of responsible government. In a press conference held on February 7, one week into the demonstration, the convoy’s leaders, led by spokesman Tom Mazzaro, brandished their memorandum and spoke casually of a readiness to meet with the Governor General in order to negotiate a new government consisting of a coalition of opposition parties. By then, both the (largely ceremonial) Governor General’s office and the (nonelected) Senate were being inundated with calls and emails from hundreds of convoy supporters to depose the sitting government.⁷² After this memorandum’s exposure was met with universal condemnation and ridicule, the organizers withdrew it the next day for of fear of “unintended interpretations.”⁷³

One interpretation is that the cosmic metanarrative of a global revolt against elites, so real and irrepressible when one inhabits the borderless world of social media, was finally coming to Canada. And the musty old laws and institutions of Canada could easily be swept away by an expression of the popular will in one grand Rosseauvian moment of revolutionary catharsis.

This disconnect with reality was illustrated by an exchange in organizer Dwayne Lich’s bail hearing on February 19. Lich defended himself by appealing to another country’s constitution: “I thought it was a peaceful protest and based on my first amendment—I thought that was part of our rights,” to which the judge replied, “What do you mean, first amendment? What’s that?”⁷⁴ (The first amendment to Canada’s constitution provides for the admission of Manitoba.) Perhaps in Lich’s mind, as with so many in the convoy, the existence of Canada as a distinct, separate, and sovereign entity is just an anachronism waiting to be dissolved into the universal culture war by which all people and places will become tributaries to America’s digital-epistemic empire.   

As these words and actions indicate, it is the rebel truckers and their sympathizers who, in Lyons’s terms, cheer on the chance for “liquid narrative to triumph over mundanely static reality, and for all the corrupt traditional bonds of the world to be severed, its atoms reconfigured in a more correct and desirable manner.”⁷⁵ It is they, and not the Laurentian elite, who most obviously encapsulate the radically cosmopolitan spirit of the “Virtuals” and the “Anywheres.” With their exhortations to “do your own research” and to “take the red pill,” the populists are the ones who possesses the keys to “hyperreality” or the secret knowledge that Lyons obsessively refers to as “Gnosis.”

By contrast, it is the Laurentian elite and the Canadian state, embodying the same entrenched sense of materiality that Creighton identified as the hallmark of their ancestral ideology, who acted in the interest of a physically bounded political unit called the nation-state. It is on the basis of the traditional authority of the nation-state and its laws that the Trudeau government intervened with the Emergencies Act to suppress the convoy, a political movement whose stated aim, according to its organizers, had been to effect a change of government.

It is also notable that Lyons sees Ottawa’s attempt to counteract the convoy’s use of digital assets like cryptocurrency as the “ultimate leverage now available to the Virtuals,”⁷⁶ when it is in fact the latter’s resort to novel, de-territorialized payment systems that betrays them, not the government, as the true embodiment of the virtual epoch. By asserting the authority of the physically bounded nation-state to regulate such instruments, it is the Canadian government that affirms the primacy of the local and the physical. 

In invoking the Emergencies Act, Trudeau and his ministers displayed the same determination to employ the force of executive power that Macdonald exhibited when he secured the death sentence for Riel, or that the colonial authorities showed when it dispatched the rebels of 1837 to labor camps in Tasmania, not to mention Pierre Trudeau’s use of the War Measures Act, predecessor to the current legislation, during the October Crisis of 1970. While not quite matching the ferocity of Prime Minister R.B. Bennett’s vow to meet Depression-era threats of communist agitation with “the iron heel of ruthlessness,” the response was nonetheless firm and more or less commensurate to the challenge. In each of these precedents, the Canadian (or the colonial) state was accused of tyranny by the “bleeding hearts,” as the elder Trudeau would have said. Yet the imperative to restore commerce and to defend peace, order, and good government always prevailed: the state acted in accord with the prerogatives of the Hobbesian sovereign and the court party executive. As with his predecessors, Justin Trudeau could do no other.

“Athens Was Not Immortal”

This ingrained instinct for material self-preservation has been a constant theme throughout Canadian history and serves as a common thread connecting the Laurentians of 1867 with the Laurentians of today. After all, their ambition to sustain a great northern nation has always coexisted uneasily with the awareness of just how inherently fragile (despite, or perhaps because of, its size) that nation is, sandwiched in between the shifting geopolitical and economic frontiers of far more powerful empires and often dependent for its survival on their mercies. The other no less complicating factor is the sheer heterogeneity of Canada’s people: there are Anglophones and Francophones, Catholics and Protestants, settlers and natives, and diverse regional cultures all making a home in the bosom of a sprawling but uncertain “political nationality.”

This combination of immovable external threats and internal centrifugal forces means that Canada’s elites are constantly confronted with a distinct sense of the country’s mortality and, not infrequently, the specter of its imminent extinction—whether in the form of annexation by the American colossus, secession by one province, excessive decentralization at the hands of all the provinces, or, quite simply, economic deprivation and collapse. This peculiarly Laurentian attitude was encapsulated in English Canada by Northrop Frye’s notion of “garrison mentality,” in which an isolated and besieged Canada must fend for itself in a hostile environment, and by the corresponding historic concept of ethno-national survivance in Quebec and French Canada.⁷⁷

So where Charles de Gaulle spoke of “la France éternelle” and where Vera Lynn once sang “There’ll Always Be an England,” the Laurentian elite is perpetually burdened with the thought that there might not always be a Canada. This sentiment was most tellingly captured by Pierre Trudeau’s remark, given in 1988 as part of his dramatic postretirement Senate testimony against adoption of the decentralizing Meech Lake Accord: “I for one will be convinced that the Canada we know and love will be gone forever. But, then, Thucydides wrote that Themistocles’ greatness lay in the fact that he realized Athens was not immortal. I think we have to realize that Canada is not immortal; but, if it is going to go, let it go with a bang rather than a whimper.”⁷⁸

It may be a stretch to put Canada in the same class as Israel, Taiwan, or the post-Soviet states, whose precarious positions afford them very small margins of error in their geopolitical and domestic policy calculations. But a comparable ultra-realist, existential mindset infuses Canada’s leadership class. Contrary to Lyons’s claim that they are enthralled to a “globalist class” consciousness,⁷⁹ they are, in fact, possessive guardians of their patria’s sovereignty and remain fixated on its material economic fate. Unlike other ruling classes, they are quite simply unable to take anything for granted. Looking at the performance of the Laurentians relative to other Western elites on those issues that cause populist backlash elsewhere will confirm as much.

On immigration and social cohesion, the single issue that above all animates the global populist revolution, Canada has (as demonstrated by this author) pioneered an immigration system that is far more stringent and sophisticated than any other Western democracy, thanks in large part to reforms initiated under the Liberal government of Lester B. Pearson.⁸⁰ Not only did Canada invent the points system adopted by Australia and the U.K. (and envied by U.S. conservatives), it has functional equivalents to “mandatory E-Verify” that not even Donald Trump could entertain.⁸¹ This is on top of other policies that preclude U.S.-style affirmative action, as shown by Joseph Heath in these pages.⁸²

On financial regulation, the Liberal governments of the 1990s may have outwardly resembled the Clinton-Blair paradigm of progressive neoliberalism. But in fact, Canada pursued a far more prudent version of deregulation under finance minister and later prime minister Paul Martin (the archetypal Laurentian elite), who stood apart from “the then-prevailing trends toward greater financial liberalization” and “rejected the two huge Canadian bank mergers of the late 1990s.” ⁸³

This ensured that the “too big to fail” philosophy that did so much to weaken the U.S. and world financial systems in 2008 did not take root.⁸⁴ Though of course affected by that crisis, Canada and its close-knit financial sector (a kind of “enlightened oligopoly”) were nonetheless able to weather the storm in better shape than the other more globally integrated Western economies. 

On foreign policy, as a member of NATO, Canada joined the United States and other allies in the post-9/11 mission in Afghanistan, staying until 2014. But the government of Jean Chrétien earned the ire of the George W. Bush administration by siding with France in refusing the invitation to join “the coalition of the willing” against Saddam Hussein. In line with the multilateralist tradition favored by the Laurentian elites, Canada could not countenance an invasion of Iraq without UN sanction.⁸⁵

On trade and industry, Canada is a trading nation and it embraced free trade along with other Western nations in the 1980s and 90s, most notably with the 1993 signing of NAFTA. It has, therefore, not been spared from the trend of deindustrialization. But as evidenced by the aforementioned protectionist streak that persisted among Laurentian elites even into the era of globalization, Canadian governments have carved out avenues for certain forms of sustained aid to firms and industries.⁸⁶

Perhaps the most indicative sign of the Laurentians elite’s foresight is in their early adoption of the industrial policy paradigm. Much has been written about how Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, and Emmanuel Macron have adopted industrial policies. Among major Western parties, it was Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, however, who first broke with neoliberal orthodoxy by embracing deficit-fueled stimulus spending outside of a recessionary period in order to invest in infrastructure and innovation back in 2015 (though these initiatives have lagged somewhat in execution).⁸⁷ In fact, it was this expansive fiscal policy that catapulted the party to first place in the middle of that year’s election campaign.⁸⁸

All this would suggest that if the Laurentian elite had been running the United States or Western Europe, it is likely that immigration would be far better controlled; the global financial crisis would not have been as severe or widespread; the Iraq War would not have taken place; and developmentalist industrial policies would be more advanced. This also shows that if there was a globalist conspiracy which dictated a sovereignty-dissolving agenda of open borders, global arbitrage, regulatory capture, and regime-change wars—the Laurentian program would, if anything, stand as a repudiation of it rather than its realization. This impressive policy record is, however, unlikely to deter the global populist discourse from continuing to crudely (and unfairly) project the particular sins of America’s elite, stemming from its radical Jeffersonian idealism, onto Canada’s far more sober and conscientious ruling class—for in this view, all elites are the same and there is little appetite for nuance or clarity of understanding.

None of this is to say that the Laurentians are perfect. They have their shortcomings, such as the tendency to run up ethics scandals; their slowness in reacting to issues not on their pre-set agenda, such as housing affordability—their Achilles’ heel and the one issue that could prove to be their undoing in the next election;⁸⁹ and not least, the noxious “woke” rhetoric and performative style that combines self-righteousness with self-flagellation—the one characteristic underlined by Lyons and others’ criticism that cannot be squared with the ideal of a self-assured ruling class.

This last is both the most stubbornly persistent flaw in that it can endanger the popularity of the Laurentian regime, irrespective of its performance on policy, and, at least theoretically, the easiest to fix, since it would mostly involve surface-level changes to messaging. But what is the source of the problem? If the Canadian Right is being Trumpified by way of social media osmosis, the center-left ground occupied by the Laurentian parties, too, is in danger of unconscious epistemic Americanization (even if they retain their nationalist political economy) by way of the influence of progressive academic and corporate jargon travelling north from the cultural metropole. What no one in the Laurentian elite seems to grasp is the inherent danger to their nation-building project posed by this deeply corrosive worldview, which actually produces a regressive, backward-looking vision of politics even as it defaces the past and deforms its inheritances.

The Laurentian intellectual classes might begin by remembering the difference between their inherited civil religion of Trudeauvian constitutional multiculturalism and American-style wokeism, which is analogous to the distinctions between High Church Anglicanism in John Strachan’s Upper Canada (or Roman Catholicism in Lower Canada) and dissenting sects like Methodism and Baptism. The former has the function of an establishment church, which is meant to regulate the moral temper and reconcile the subject with the social order; the latter, like so much of what emerged from the American Great Awakenings (to which wokeism is often compared) is meant to aggravate the moral temper and arouse the subject against the social order.

As with Strachan’s efforts to root out the subversive influence of “circuit riders,” mule-riding evangelical (usually Methodist) itinerant preachers from the United States, the Laurentian regime would benefit from a campaign to purge Canadian liberalism of American wokeisms. Such a move would strengthen court party rule by sundering the influence of a political sect that is both alien and alienating—it would rob country party rebels of one of the most effective cudgels they have in their war on elites. Otherwise, the risk of a U.S.-scale culture war taking root on the left and the right would constitute the single greatest threat to Canada’s peace, order and good government.    

The author would like to thank Patrice Dutil, Tom Flanagan, and Peter J. Smith for their advice and comments. All views and opinions expressed are solely the author’s own, however. ⁹⁰

This article is an American Affairs online exclusive, published May 20, 2022.

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Notes