Colloquium, October 16, 2025, 2-4pm – Fellows & External Fellows Only – in-person only

Anthology of comments and quotations on Canadian Identity and Diversity

“Society is indeed a contract . . But the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade in pepper and coffee . . . It is a partnership in all science, in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born.” Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

“In the government you called civilised the happiness of the people is constantly sacrificed to the splendour of empire.” Chief Joseph Brant. (On his deathbed, 24 November 1807, he said to his chosen successor “Pity the poor Indian. If you can get any influence with the great, endeavour to do them all the good you can.”)

“I expected to find a contest between a government and a people. I found two nations warring in the bosom of a single state. I found a struggle, not of principles but of race and i perceived that it would be idle to attempt an amelioration of laws or institutions until we could first succeed in termination the deadly animosity that now separates the inhabitants of Lower Canada into the hostile divisions of French and English.” Lord Durham, Report on the Affairs of British North America, 1839

[In the event his reliance on “entrusting the management of public affairs . . . to the persons who have the confidence of the representative body” (we would say “responsible government”) brought about considerable amelioration.]

“54.40 or fight.” Slogan of President-to-be Polk in his 1844 election campaign (Polk was a man of his word; when he found he could not have “54.40,” he fought, but that was in Texas.

“Be assured we will never forget our allegiance till the last cannon that is shot on this continent in defence of Great Britain is fired by the hand of a French Canadian.”

Etienne Paschal Tache, 24 April 1846

“I for one am deeply convinced of the impolicy of all such attempts to denationlise the French. Generally speaking they produce the opposite effect than intended, causing the flame of national prejudice and animosity to burn more brightly. . . . Let them feel on the other hand that their religion, their habits, their prepossessions, their prejudices if you will, are more respected here than in other parts of this vast continent  . . . and who will venture to say that the last hand that waves the British flag on American ground may not be that of a French Canadian?”                         Lord Elgin (Governor) to Lord Grey (Secretary of State), 4 May 1848

“Confederation through at six o’clock this evening . . . complete reform of all the abuses and injustices we have complained of . . . French Canadianism entirely extinguished.” George Brown, 26 October 1864

“From the day on which the Government (Either the Hudson Bay company or the British Government) we had always respected abandoned us by transferring us to a foreign power [the Government of Canada] the sacred authority [? confided] to it, the people of Rupertsland and the North West became free and exempt from all allegiance to the said Government.”

The National Committee [Red River] John Bruce, President, Louis Riel, Secretary, 8 December 1869, N

“The time will come when this national spirit that has been spoken of will be truly felt among us, when we shall realise that we are four million Britons who are not free, when we shall be ready to take up that freedom, and to ask [for] what the late prime minister of England assured us we should not be denied  — our share of national rights.”

Edward Blake, at Aurora, 3 October 1873

“Until that [rail]road is built to British Columbia and the Pacific, this Dominion is a mere geographical expression. Until bound by this iron link, as we have bound Nova Scotia and New Brunswick by the Intercolonial Railway, we are not a Dominion in fact.” John A. Macdonald, 29 November 1875.

“No man has a right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation. No man has a right to say to his country — thus far shalt thou go and no further.”

Charles Stewart Parnell, 1885

“Strangle Riel with the French flag. That is the only use that rag can have in this country.” The Toronto News,18 May 1885. (Riel was hanged 16 November 1885)

“We may not assimilate, we may not blend, but we are still the component parts of the same country.” Wilfrid Laurier, 10 December 1886

“Let us be English or let us be French, but above all let us be Canadians.” John A. Macdonald. Colombo’s Canadian Quotations, p.381, does not give a reference and I have not found one.

“The sum of the impressions produced on me by my sight-seeing in London during the first month of my stay was a feeling of pride and exultation that I belonged to a country of so much glory and greatness, that I had a part and share in this proud heritage which nothing could take away.” (Visit to London in 1893). Public Servant: The Memoirs of Sir Joseph Pope, ed Maurice Pope (Toronto, OUP, 1960) p.86

“To be born an Englishman is to have won first prize in the lottery of life.” Cecil Rhodes

“There is Ontario patriotism, Quebec patriotism or Western patriotism, each based on the hope that it may swallow up the others, but there is no Canadian patriotism and we can have no Canadian nation when we have no Canadian patriotism.” Henri Bourassa, addressing the Canadian Club of Toronto, 22 January 1907

“Our master, the past.” Abbe Groulx, July 1917; “This French state is due [owed to] us and we shall have it,” Abbe Groulx, 1937,

“America was thus clearly Top Nation and History came to a .” at the end of the Great War. Sellar and Yeatman, 1066 and All That (1932). Earlier in their book the authors had said England had become Top Nation by winning the Battle of Waterloo in 1815

“What we all believe in is the Empire but my father . . . believed in Canada and my great-uncle John was what they call a Father of Confederation. My mother’s family was against Confederation and wanted Nova Scotia to be on its own as part of the Empire. I find it hard to think of Canada. It is so enormous, all those prairies and mountains and cities and open spaces. Nova Scotia is small enough to understand and even when I want to get away from it I know it is my country.”  Diary entry for 2 April 1925, Charles Ritchie, An Appetite for Life, p.33-4

“They stood at Vimy Ridge that 9th day of April, men from Quebec stood shoulder-to-shoulder with men from Ontario, men from the Maritimes with men from British Columbia and there was forged a nation tempered by the fire of sacrifice and hammered on the anvil of high adventure.” Lord Byng, summer 1922

” Not necessarily conscription but conscription if necessary” Mackenzie King in Parliament, 10 June 1942, repeated 7 July 1942

“In the House of Commons today in my party we have Members of Italian, Dutch, German, Scadinavian, Chinese and Ukrainian origins — and they are all Canadians.” J. G. Diefenbaker, 29 March 1958

“Maitres chez nous.” Quebec Liberal election slogan, 1962

“You can be a French Canadian, you can be an English Canadian but not a ‘Canadian.’ We know how to live without an identity and this is one of our marvelous resources.”

Marshall McLuhan, 29 May 1967

“Canada will be a strong country when Canadians of all provinces feel at home in all parts of the country . . . . Masters in our own house, but our house is the whole of Canada.”

Pierre Trudeau, 5 April 1968

“Jean Lesage could never make up his mind whether he wanted to be the next Prime Minister of Canada or the first President of Quebec.”

Peter Newman, The Distemper of our Times (1968), p.305

“This appears to be the most discriminatory action taken by a federal government against a particular province in the entire history of Confederation.”

Peter Lougheed, Premier of Alberta, 14 September 1973, in response to Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Policy

“Money and the ethnic vote,” Jacques Parizeau, immediately after the very narrow defeat of the 1995 independence referendum in Quebec

“In order to redress the legacy of the residential schools and advance the process of reconciliation the Truth and reconciliation Commission makes the following [94] calls to action.”

Th Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2015

The World Needs More Canada, ed Heather Reisman (Toronto, Indigo Press, 2017). 106 contributors, among whom Margaret Atwood ended her contribution ” ‘Be as Canadian as possible, under the circumstances’ used to be a joke. Now it’s a hope. Yes, Canada, be as Canadian as you can.” And Chris Hadfield ended his contribution “Even though I was off the planet, as far from home as any of us has ever been, I have never felt more completely, proudly Canadian.”

“There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada. There are shared values; openness, respect, compassion, willingness to lend a hand, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice.” Vancouver Sun, 13 March 2016, quoting Justin Trudeau, with a journalist’s comment “When the Prime Minister says Canada is a “post-national state,” I believe he is saying this is a place where respect for minority groups trumps any one group’s way of doing things.”

“The Three Pillars continue their Odyssey” Title of the last section of Peter Russell, Canada’s Odyssey, 2017

“The core values that have been emphasised throughout his book: solidarity, fairness, responsibility, resilience, sustainability, dynamism and humility.”

Mark Carney, Value(s), p.474-5 (2021)

“I’ve never seen such a high level of separatist sentiment,” Danielle Smith, June 2025

Quebec Bill 21, Act respecting the laicity of the State,