In a
world of great power rivalry, the countries in-between have a choice: compete
with each other for favour, or combine to create a third path with impact. We shouldn’t allow the rise of hard power to
blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity, and rules will
remain strong if we choose to wield it together.
~ Prime
Minister Mark Carney at the World Economic Forum in Davos, January 20, 2026.
In Mark
Carney, the “middle” rides again, and we see it clearly in his speech today in
Davos, where he invoked the terms “middle powers”, “a third path”, and the
“in-between”. It’s a text co-written by
Lester Pearson, Tony Blair, and Gilles Deleuze.
But the Canadian script has long been inspired by Hegel and accompanied
by the dialogue of reconciliation. Here,
presumably for the benefit of my readers, is an updated version of my original
post, dated August 03, 2025:
The
Roots of “Reconciliation”, Or: A Reassessment of Hegel’s Canada
Much has
been said of Hegel’s influence in Canada – maybe too much. Hegel’s philosophy
is considered one of the reasons behind the landmark achievements of Canada’s
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which submitted its conclusions in 2015. Then it should be no surprise that a related
book of philosophy followed in 2018, Hegel and Canada: Unity of Opposites?
Taking
titular inspiration from Patrick Anderson’s 1943 poem “Dialectics”, Hegel
and Canada evokes the legacy of that mighty trinity of philosophers:
Charles Taylor, Henry S. Harris, and Emil Fackenheim. It begins with a
contribution by John Burbidge, Fackenheim’s student, and what follows are the
voices of other intellectual companions. Hegel’s influence in Canada can be
traced back to the nineteenth century, in particular to the philosopher John
Watson (1847–1939), long at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, a figure
who also played an instrumental role in the founding of the United Church of
Canada.
Canadians
ruminate at length about how a Scottish thinker, Watson, ended up imprinting
the nation, even, it appears, the Supreme Court of Canada, with a Hegelian, or
dialectical, approach towards thinking. Did it have something to do with a
sense of German Romanticism brooding amid once pristine Canadian forests? Was
it a Scottish reading of Hegel, Burbidge’s position, that crossed the Atlantic into
Canada and colonized our minds? In my view, it was neither of the above.
First, we
must reckon with the fact that Hegel (1770-1831) had a huge influence in the
nineteenth century, on Darwin and Marx, especially. He was also in vogue elsewhere in the world
during Watson’s own time, not just in Canada.
Italy had its Hegelian idealist in Benedetto Croce (1866-1952). In England, F.H. Bradley (1846-1924) was its
standard bearer. And in the United
States Josiah Royce (1855-1916) was representative. What is also clear is that Germany was
decidedly not Hegelian in the period from, say, 1870 to 1920 when,
rather, neo-Kantianism was flourishing there.
We see evidence of this in the Weimar Republic. Since Watson’s time, perhaps by means of the
United Church itself, Hegelianism came to dominate intellectual culture in
Canada to a degree that seems unparalleled in the Hegelian world (outside of,
say, the former Soviet Union and Communist China).
However,
it looks as if Hegelianism suited the Canadian way of thinking because we were already
predisposed to the idea of “reconciliation” well in advance of the philosophy
of Hegel and any “unity of opposites”. There were two rich historical sources
to Canadian “reconciliation” – one known by a different name, the other not so
well known. The first was the American War of Independence. If we look at Thomas Paine’s widely-read
revolutionary work Common Sense (1776), we see that he presented the
American colonists at the time with two stark choices: “Reconciliation or Independance
[sic]”. Thus, it was the United Empire Loyalists, faithful to the
British Crown, who found a new home in Canada, in great numbers particularly
around the Toronto area: in other words, they had “reconciled” themselves to
the Crown.
A similar
event occurred more than a century prior to the American Revolution. It followed
the aftermath of the mid-seventeenth century English Civil Wars and the
short-lived republican Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. The Royal Charter by
King Charles II, which launched the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670, occurred just
ten years into the Stuart Restoration. It brought the son of King Charles I
(who was executed by axe) to the throne of England. It speaks volumes that the
largest land grant in global history, made by a King who still espoused divine
right, served as a foundation for Rupert’s Land (and 200 years later, Canada),
thus establishing trading posts in Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Victoria and
many other places. What symbolically better
way was there to take control and reconstitute the authority of the Crown? The Hudson’s Bay Company was formed (and so, eventually,
was Canada) after England had “reconciled” to the idea of itself as a Kingdom –
and was no longer a fleeting republican “experiment” under Cromwell.
This
suggests that the United Empire Loyalists were following in the footsteps of
the HBC’s traders and explorers. Who knows what would have happened to Canada
if this earlier Rupert’s Land “reconciliation” had not occurred beforehand. It
is also interesting to note that, most recently, while the HBC faded from
commercial history into bankruptcy, discomfitted Canadians were at the same
time revisiting “reconciliation” with yet another King from England (Charles
III), who read the speech from the throne from Ottawa on 27 May 2025 in the
face of new threats to our sovereignty from Donald Trump.
It is
important to consider Canada’s creation (as viewed via the Hudson’s Bay
Company), at least in part, as a royal act. And that it occurred while the spirit of
“reconciliation” was on the rise in England. This was neither a Puritan inspiration
nor a product of the subsequent Glorious Revolution (1688/89), which limited
the monarchy, established a Bill of Rights, and rightfully signified the
supremacy of Parliament. This in turn draws attention away from the presumed
place of John Locke (1632-1704) and the influence of his political thought here. Locke may
actually have played a limited role in the formation of Canada, unlike in the
USA (where his legacy is in decline as Enlightenment ideals continue to fade
from the political imagination).
Borrowing from
Louis B. Hartz’s famous thesis in The Founding of New Societies (1964),
it could be argued that the establishment of the Hudson’s Bay Company
represented the Stuart Restoration in Canada but one frozen in time. “For when
a part of a European nation is detached from the whole of it, and hurled
outward onto new soil, it loses the stimulus towards change that the whole provides.
It lapses into a kind of immobility.” This is the reason why there is
Puritanism in the USA, but no longer any in England; why Ontario was considered
more Scottish than Scotland; and why the City of Victoria, British Columbia, seems
stuck in time.
In other
words, the leap from “reconciliation” to a Hegelian unity – or synthesis – of
opposites was prepared by a distinctly Canadian predisposition for the Crown.
We see it in the Hudson’s Bay Company, and we see it in the United Empire
Loyalists who followed in its footsteps. We also see it in that Canadian
neologism: “winning by acclamation” – that most modest of Canadian sayings. In
the United States if one wins an election unopposed, one wins an election
unopposed. If this happens in Canada, you are “acclaimed”. To suggest as much
is to imply deference to the elected – and possibly, as well, to give a nod to
divine authority, so-called, or: the Crown.
Consider
also the motto of The Globe and Mail (“Canada’s National Newspaper”) as
attributed to Junius: “The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate
will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures.” The word “subject”,
followed by the words “truly loyal” and “the Chief Magistrate”, dwell on the
experience of the United Empire Loyalists and displace George Brown’s (founder
of The Globe) liberal “neither/nor” phraseology. It is because Americans see
themselves as “citizens” that the idea of “acclamation” is not commonplace
there. It is because Canadians still see themselves as “subjects” that the idea
of “acclamation” is commonplace here.
Of course,
liberalism and “reconciliation” can be also be complementary, despite the
latter’s royalist implications and the connotations of Empire. Canada’s Hegel culture was at its apex here
when Lester Pearson was Prime Minister playing Canada’s role as the “middle
power” in the era of Cold War extremes. Anyone
interested in Hegel and the idea of the “middle” will benefit from consulting
the work of Emil Fackenheim, especially his Religious Dimensions in Hegel’s
Thought (1967). But Hegel, a
notoriously difficult writer and thinker, could not have anticipated our
Nobel-prize winning Prime Minister, nor the generous number of Canadian fellow
philosophers, most of whom, when looking at Hegel and Canada, occupy
positions at universities in Ontario, Quebec, or Nova Scotia. Of the fifteen
different contributors to Hegel and Canada, only Barry Cooper of the
University of Calgary lives west of the Ontario border. The telling title of his article: “Hegel’s
Laurentian Fragments.”
So, it
appears that Hegelianism per se is in some ways distinguishable from the
earlier prevailing - and likely more widespread - sentiment for “reconciliation”. Greater attention to the geographical nature
of ideas would be of benefit here. This,
in turn, invites the thought that Hegelianism, which seems to be a
preoccupation of central Canada, might also have stemmed from the “dialectical
opposition” between what, in Hegel’s day and age, became Upper and Lower Canada
– a possible third source of historical “reconciliation”. And, Hegel, as an intellectual participant of
the early nineteenth century, was also a keen observer of ceaseless forms of
political “activity and retro-activity”, especially when looking at France
since the Revolution of 1789. Hegel
sought unity in mutual understanding, and Canadians found Hegel in our search
for “reconciliation”.
In broad
brush-strokes then, Hegel’s thought is to Canada what Adam Smith’s Wealth of
Nations (1776), or Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (written
1680–1683) were to the USA, and maybe what Marx’s Communist Manifesto
(1848) was to China – not comparable revolutionary texts by any means, but an
inherently reciprocal philosophy which first found attraction here in a desire
to reconcile with the Crown.
