UPDATE: The “middle” rides again: Canada, Hegel, and Reconciliation

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.