A Tremendous Canada of Light

H. Graham Rawlinson teaches history at York University in Toronto.

What is Canada and what could it be? are the questions that animate this
thought-provoking, if inevitably, incomplete, essay on our elusive
national identity. Nearly half the book is taken up by the first
chapter, which assails Brian Mulroney for failing to understand his
country. According to Powe, the “slash and burn” politics of the
Mulroney years made the economic bottom line the key determinant of
government policy: the result was a moral vacuum that blurred
Canadians’ true identity.

Ironically, the author spends the rest of the book celebrating the
possibilities of Canadian blurriness. Borrowing generously from the
communications theory of Marshall McLuhan, Powe argues that Canada is
built on listening and on sharing information, not on traditional, more
tangible symbols. Thus, the real Canada is defined by its “process,”
“pluralism,” and “lack of single identity.” “A tremendous
Canada of light” would listen to everyone, and make everyone heard.

Canada has always seemed to defy modern notions of statehood, and Powe
does an admirable job in defining an anti-nation in a way that still
leaves Canada intact. Few could find fault with the compassionate and
tolerant communication state he advocates. Yet the articulation of his
vision seems hopelessly utopian, constructed as it is with little
reference to concrete political issues. As a practical response to the
real national problems that Powe himself introduces in his first
chapter, these ideas seem simplistic.

This essay succeeds best when the author avoids the attempt, which many
others have made, to build a Canadian identity artificially out of
tangible political, historical, and cultural symbols. Powe demonstrates
imagination and sensitivity, in trying to define the whole in terms of
its myriad parts. As an indictment of the ideology that informed the
Mulroney years, however, his book is wholly inadequate.