Canada?s Prime Ministers and the Shaping of a National Identity

Investigates how Canada crafted a national narrative after World War II.  

Since Confederation, Canadian prime ministers have consciously constructed the national story. Each created shared narratives, formulating and reformulating a series of unifying national ideas that served to keep this geographically large, ethnically diverse, and regionalized nation together. This book is about those narratives and stories.

Focusing on the post–Second World War period, Raymond B. Blake shows how, regardless of political stripe, prime ministers worked to build national unity, forge a citizenship based on inclusion, and define a place for Canada in the world. They created for citizens an ideal image of what the nation stood for and the path it should follow. They told a national story of Canada as a modern, progressive, liberal state with a strong commitment to inclusion, a deep respect for diversity and difference, and a fundamental belief in universal rights and freedoms. Ultimately, this innovative history provides readers with a new way to see and understand what Canada is and what holds it together as a nation.

Raymond B. Blake is professor of history at the University of Regina and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has held visiting professorships at Phillipps-Universitat Marburg and University College Dublin, where he has twice held the Craig Dobbin Chair of Canadian Studies. He was formerly director of the Saskatchewan Institute of Public Policy and director of the Centre for Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University. He has written and edited more than twenty books, including, most recently, Where Once They Stood: Newfoundland’s Rocky Road to Canada.