Episode 1: Introduction to the Canadian Myth

Welcome to the Maddock-Ferrie Files. Hosted by Blair Maddock-Ferrie, RMC. 

In this episode, meet your host, then examine Canada's origins through a realist lens, arguing that Canada was never built on a coherent national identity but rather assembled out of imperial necessity — a British buffer state populated by Loyalist refugees, conquered French Canadians, and displaced indigenous peoples, held together by myth rather than shared purpose. Blair traces how the foundational contradictions of Canadian statehood, from the brutality of early colonization and the War of 1812 to the systematic marginalization of Indigenous nations, were papered over by evolving national narratives that served the interests of colonial elites rather than reflecting any genuine collective will.

Transcript

 Hello and welcome to the Maddock Ferrie Files, where we discuss realism. I am your host, Blair Maddock Fairy. I am completing a master's degree in international affairs, where I study propaganda, cognitive warfare, and other forms of radicalization.

I'm also a published author and look into history with a history group from the Royal Military College, as well as a political science background. Today, we're discussing the myth of the Canadian nation-state and what those myths have led to. From a realist perspective, the Canadian state is inherently a contradiction, a contradiction that must exist.

As a state form of empire, a state form of necessity, does not get someone to die for it. Does not get someone to leave their country and immigrate to this great land of ours. What it does require, though, is the belief in hegemony of the land in question.

It requires the belief of certainty of action. It requires the necessity of brutality to do what early colonists did. And this is in no way excusing what happened with the indigenous population.

We'll get into that and how horrible it was in a second. But what it does say is from a British military empire perspective, to form a state as a buffer and a guarantee of control over critical trade routes in North America to ensure Halifax, the fur trade, possible resource exploitation, farming, and mercantilist systems, which were heavily in place at the time, continued. The British needed a state.

And that state didn't matter how it worked. It was supposed to be a mini Britain at one point. Then it became a democracy.

Then it became everything else. As the Canadian population and the British governance had to adopt these changing situations. And British governance was pragmatic to the most brutal degree.

In early Canada, the Canadian did not exist. There was Upper Canada and Lower Canada. Lower Canada was French, Canadian.

And they hated the English, as they had just been conquered no less than 40 years earlier. And they were conquered. The English who came up from the South America were those who were loyal to the British during the Revolutionary War, as the Revolutionary War is a civil war in many cases, backed by the French heavily.

They were brothers fighting brothers. There was religious divides. There was anti-slavery divides, as many anti-slavery activists came to Canada due to the American state reinforcing slavery institution almost immediately after its formation.

You have religious groups who are hated. You have Puritan ideas coming back into vogue in the United States. You have all these different factions.

And so when the American state formed, there was a mass social purge. And thousands of what we call now refugees fled north. And the British controlled the territory.

And the Americans had no real settlements up there. And there was no reluctance. And the attacks on Quebec under Ben O'Donnell didn't work.

As a result, the British had a foothold. And they intended to exploit it. But the British had no real settlements.

A couple did exist. But there was nothing major. No more than 10,000 population, the largest.

And even that was heavily dispersed. It wasn't considered a city by any means in the modern sense or even a town. It was more of a village just dispersed over kilometers that were sometimes dozens in size.

And so the British had this problem where they couldn't bring them back to England. They wanted them out in the first place. They didn't want political activists.

They didn't want people who were agitators. They wanted to have a clean England. That's why England was exploiting people in Australia at this point en masse.

And they needed to deal with their political excess and their pressure valves. The colonies largely were the English elite. They knew if there was a rebellion in England, they couldn't deal with it.

Social upheaval wouldn't work. As a result, even the illusion of escape to a new better world, quote unquote, to a new life where you might live, ignoring the fact that more than half of you will die before you ever get a chance to own your land, but small detail. As a result, the British have to deal with a number of things.

Number one, the indigenous groups who are very much in this area, who are very much here and are very much a political faction. They are not a group who are defeated yet. They are not a group who are cowed yet.

However, the one thing the British have on their side, in fact, the primary control of this area are the Iroquois and the Huron-Wendat. The Huron-Wendat being French allies historically, but at this point have largely obtained neutrality and toleration of the British, and the Iroquois being active allies of the British at this point. Then you also have the other tribes further west and also nations under Tecumseh who want their own nations, a proper nation state with a clear boundary and border.

The British make the Royal Proclamation of 1790, which declares the indigenous have rights. This sounds weird. It would happen later, but the indigenous have a right to their own territory, and the British will largely protect from American expansion.

As one of the key reasons why the revolution happened in the first place was because the British did not allow expansion in the Ohio Valley. It was a clear line saying, no, the indigenous tribes there who we have nations, who we have agreed are our friends, they are our allies, we will not cross that line. As a result, British settlement and American settlement later became hindered, and the expansion westward could not occur.

As a result, the Americans and their revolutionary fervor viewed this as an economic barrier, and when the British lost the Revolutionary War, it was opened up. As a result, you have indigenous groups now going farther west, you have nations not being pushed out, you have rapid colonization occurring and settlement happening rapidly. What you have is a cluster of desperate groups who are terrified, who are angry, who are afraid, and yet they're still American.

These people, they know they're British, and they love the British, and the elite certainly do. The family compact who rules up until the Upper Canada Rebellion, as well as Lower Canada Rebellion, but different compacts and different groups ruling that territory, are largely happy to be just not dead. They have land now, they have a place to be, but the land's not cleared, the land's not ready for settlement, it's not good land in many cases, it's often terrible, there's mass starvation, there's famines occurring constantly, and there's issues of disease.

For example, Kingston was a malaria cesspit up until they drained the swamps in the 1820s or 30s. For example, Fort Frederick, which is where RMC was at the point, one of the most common issues that came to the fort was dying malaria, up until the British put water wells in and managed to drain the swamps behind it. As a result, you have this miserable territory, and the British are expected to make this into not a country, but certainly a colony that's actually worth its weight.

And as a result, the British start flooding in populations, they give land grants, they sell land twice actively, knowing half the people would die before they even got there, they settled it, and also they would sell land they never met before, they would sell land thinking it's probably there and hope they got it was. This is the foundation of the Canadian state. Then you also have a conquered people in Quebec who are angry, who are being tolerated Catholicism, while the English actually persecuted in their own territories violently, with lynchings, with judicial persecution, as well as the genocide of the Irish happening simultaneously.

As a result, you have a very brutal and dichotomous political perspective that must be addressed, and the British don't have long to figure it out, because the Americans are looking to expand. And this new territory that has been cleared large in the past 20 years since the Revolutionary War looks pretty delicious to them, it looks like a great land grab. And though the Americans would say in Congress it was a land grab, they justify it by the fact that the British were doing anti-slavery endeavors in the Morocco area, because yes, the British Navy was anti-slave at this point, it's a bizarre contradiction that they still had slavery legal, but the slave translation was not banned by the Royal Navy, the Americans were still engaging it to some degree, they were still training the Polian, and during the Polionic Wars at this point are going on very violently.

And so the British start capturing American sailors and allegedly press them into service. How many of them actually happened is unclear historically, but certainly probably did. And the Americans declaring themselves neutral on the right of the seas and all that fun stuff and this revolutionary idea of law and order, the British go, yeah, no, we're trying to fight a World War here, we don't care, you cross our blockade, you are dead.

Or at the very least, your goods are seized and you're being put in prison or forced to fight for our military, which happened quite a bit for British citizens as well, as the press gangs would often go around London and coastal towns and say, you're drunk on a Tuesday, congratulations to the Royal Navy. No option. You want to run, you're now going AWOL and you're now going to be hanged for treason and for desertion, congratulations.

So welcome to the Navy. As a result, you have this very brutal political system in England and these constantly dealing with this, even the British Empire at its functional height, it is not hegemonic internally, it is fractured consistently. There are continuous social issues.

And so when the colonists start coming in and the Americans declare war, these quote-unquote Canadians, these pro-Canadians have no idea what's going on. They're like, oh, crap, because at first the Canadians don't welcome that at all, they're not liberators by any means, it's more of a case of where yours can occupy us peacefully, right? And the Americans quickly shatter that illusion very fast. Places such as burning down of Niagara-on-the-Lake, the destruction of York following that nation, the magazine retaliation, they burned it down, York being Toronto now.

All show this is a war that is almost total. This is not a war where you can just put your head down and hope to God it goes away. This is a brutal invasion and the Americans are putting us to the sword.

And as a result, Canada has this great idea, and so the elite's going, that war is dog shit, that was horrible, that fucking sucked, we can make a nation out of this. And the British almost on cue, the people thought themselves American, they were trading with Americans, for example, New Brunswick, which was neutral in the war, sent a regiment because they're under the British, but they said they were neutral with Maine, and Maine refused to fight in World War II at all, only state to refuse active participation to the point of where they almost threatened to leave the United States if they were forced to participate because of how good trade was in New Brunswick. They now see a Canadian nation-state, so those who are in the militia in these battles, who are bankers, who are lawyers, who are in positions of relative power anyway, are accelerated to claiming, I was in the war, I'm this.

At some point, if a fight is to claim you're there because everyone was dead, then no one would tell you otherwise. And if everyone's just poor, then no one's going to tell you otherwise either for a banker, no one's going to challenge you. And this becomes the new elite of Canada.

This becomes the people who drive the concept of Canadian nation-state and the Canadian concept, which is not manifest destiny, but it's pretty close. We are bound to the colonies, we are a white group, because bear in mind, this point in history, prior to this, ethnic groups in Europe meant far more than the overall quote-unquote right race, but now in the 1840s, we're talking about we have the concept of a white race. That is a concept that now comes out in European thinking.

As a result, the indigenous are the other. The indigenous having lost all political power in the war in 1812 due to the fact that the British simply didn't care, nor did the means of ensuring their little debt with the Comsci was there, because when the Comsci died, the one person the British negotiated with and they trusted was dead. Also, the person who could hold them to account was equally dead.

The indigenous nation-states and their coalitions fell apart. There was no unified bloc to create the nation-state that the Comsci desperately wanted to create, a nation-state in the Ohio Valley. That was gone.

The British didn't have to follow the treaties anymore. There was no critical political opposition on the continent when it came to the indigenous. The British saw this as a massive opportunity when residential schools started coming into place en masse, and they become a lot worse later, but they are the idea of going, we can basically get new settlers who are already here.

The British, the cheat code for numbers, and they use it, and they view the indigenous in fear regardless. The Iroquois they have some familiarity with and some level of respect, but they've been defeated. Their nation's mostly in modern-day upstate New York.

The Americans control that. The Americans are genociding under Clinton. Yes, related to the president.

They are actively politically gutted. They have no means of protection anymore, and the British do have some of the largest reservations in Upper Canada at the time. These are not pleasant places in town.

Nega, for example, still has great political power, and you have other ones that have had political crisis in the past, which are mostly Iroquois and Haudenosaunee, if that's the correct name. They are not a political faction the British simply care about at this point. Unfortunately, the British Empire's calculus, if they don't see you as a threat or something to deal with, you are worthless.

This is then reinforced into the white nationalist view of the world that's coming about in America, in Canadian intellectual circles, in British intellectual circles. It now becomes this narrative of Canada, Britain, empire, empire, justified civilization, civilizing everything, and this is when the wheels come off the civilization train, so to speak. This is when the myth of Canada gets perverted for the first time.

It'll be perverted multiple times for political necessity and for state expansion. This is when genocide starts to come down. We can call it genocide openly because that's what it was.

The prairies are purged due to the brutal oppression that happens in the 1860s, 1880s. Canadians give them, for example, allegations that occur, which is unclear if they've been proven, by giving moldy grain to ensure indigenous population would starve, giving land they knew could not be arable and could not grow crops to ensure their numbers would not be complete. They do a form of natural attrition, quote, unquote, basically starving them to death.

You have these horrific policies, but they're all justified in the idea of stopping the American expansion because we need to stop their expansion, or it's the white race's destiny, or it's for the glorious British empire, the civilizing force in the world, and the moral good by the very existence of it. You have these very, very conflicting narratives sometimes, but they all converge into horror in many cases. Bear in mind, the average settler is still getting screwed over.

The average settler is not reaping the benefits of this. A very small minority of population are actually getting benefits from the system. The British elite are, certain Canadian elites, certain family compacts, which are basically family groups that agree not to fight each other internally and basically create monopolies.

You have railroad tycoons come from the 1880s. You have people like Booth, who are horribly corrupt, and they know it. After the Canadian free and state policy, you have Canada forming in 1867, but here's the thing.

The reason why I haven't mentioned the Federation yet is because it's a pretty irrelevant thing that we have now post hoc creating this national ideal because all it functionally was was a consolidation of existing colonies into a single unified framework for bureaucratic means, and the British knew that. Though there were Canadian nationalists, for example, Laurier was a pro-Canadian nationalist, you have people like Mackenzie, like the first prime minister, Sir John A., who actively say, I am born in the British Empire, will die in the British Empire, quote, unquote, unquote. As a result, we're still very much British, and it's not until 1912 when Borden, Prime Minister Borden leads the envoy to the United States in the first ever consulate.

That's our first diplomatic envoy outside direct British Germany. You want to talk to Canada, you had to go to the British. For example, people ask, why didn't Canada buy Alaska from the Americans to cover the Russians and the Americans? The reason for that is very simple.

It's because the Russians hated the British and weren't going to sell it anyway, because it was a proxy sale on behalf of the Czarist government, number one. Number two, Canada was never asked. Number three, there was no population to gain there because the Russians certainly hadn't colonized Alaska very well.

There was virtually no population there anyway. They had like 20,000 people in the entire territory at that point under Russian rule, and the Americans wanted to screw over the British. As a result, the Canadian will, such that it existed, because BC is barely a province at this point, it's mostly still in Vancouver and along the coast, but nothing that far north in any sense of the imagination.

Alberta's not even a province yet. And you don't really, and Yukon yet exists with the gold brush, I guess, but it's not a political force and never really is in Canadian policy to look at, but it certainly wasn't back then either. As a result, there is no political will to do anything, and the Russians, again, hate the British.

This is the time period when the Russians are allegedly starting rebellions in India. British India tried to undermine them because it's part of the quote-unquote great game of empire at this point between the Russians and the British. As a result, there was no Canadian identity internationally yet.

There might be Canadian identity internally just to fight horrible policies and expansionism and et cetera, et cetera, but there isn't a national framework yet by any means. And that's where things become fascinating because Canada likes to pretend we're the good guys or some people say we're a horrible state because we've done horrible things, and both narratives are true to some perspective, but simple reality is that Canada is at the crossroads of power and always has been. Our identity is not formed based on what we can do.

It's based on what we can't. It's based on who's going to kill us if we don't comply, who's going to trade with us if we don't comply, and who actually defends us because here's the reality check for the lovely nationalist Canadians. Now, as someone who served in the armed forces, I can confirm this.

We have never defended ourselves in a real sense in any capacity throughout entire history. The militia in World War II collapsed almost immediately under fire. World War I, Canada fought very well, but there was no existential threat from Germany at that point.

No one could invade Canada. The Americans were allied later in the war anyway. There was no real existential threat.

The Americans had plans in the 20s to evade Canada, and Canada had plans under the Fargo Plan to attack Fargo, Minnesota, which was basically a, oh, look, send troops there to hopefully delay the invasion while the rest of the military goes off and becomes an insurgent group, which is the best plan we had available, which shows how well we could defend ourselves, and even today with the Americans claiming occasional annexation threats, what are we gonna do? We know the numbers. We know the manpower. We know the air defenses.

That's nothing new, but that's because Canada has always been tethered to empire. In the past post-World War II era, it's been the American empire. Pre-World War II was the British empire, and Canada has always relied on that trade-wise, going between nations.

We see new markets nowadays, and yet you got Europe, you got the States, you got China, so you got Empire A, America, and Europe. Pick your nation. Pick your side.

We can tear us all through, we think, but the problem is historically, it doesn't have worked because ultimately power is dictated by a greater onto a lesser, and the sad reality is is that as a middle power, if we can call ourselves that, there's arguments thrown against whether Canada actually is or not, but ultimately, we are bound to the great powers to our south, to our north, if you think about how Russia goes in the globe, and also to the east and to the west. Canada's at the crossroads of the place no one remembers until they need to, and that makes us bound by political wills that are not our own, by interests that are not our best, or even the ones we care about, and doing things which sometimes seem contradictory or immoral to survive, to maintain unity, to maintain stability, and to ensure that the nation-state we claim to be exists, because here's the big thing I've not touched on yet, but I've mentioned a couple times, hinted at least. Canada is not a unified state, if you look at the realist perspective of the matter.

Canada has provinces which are designed to fight each other internally, so how the federal system works. The federal government's supposed to act as the tailor, but it has no direct control of the rudder on the ship. The provinces basically police themselves with the constitution being passed, only done when Quebec left the room.

As a result, you have a consistent issue when it comes to groups declaring notwithstanding clause, basically the provinces are supposed to do what they want, whether it's legal or not, for five years. As a result, it's a system based in almost like the mongoose and the snake in the Indian analogy. Both sides can kill each other.

Both sides want to kill each other, but the hope is that neither side ever does, and thus it's safe for the person to put a hand in. It's functioning how the Canadian state is designed on a bureaucratic level, with the military having no ability to do insurgency domestically, and the police largely dealing with local threats in small-scale terrorist actions. As a result, the Canadian state is largely based on normative values, as discussed by Savoy and other philosophers in Canadian history, but it's also based on the powers that continually shape us.

Now, to bring a new perspective on this matter, we're going to bring in my lovely friend Sydney Weaver. 

Sydney: Hi, how are you? I'm doing wonderful today. How are you? 

Blair: Very well, thank you

Blair: So you've been hearing this in the background. Yeah. And what are your perspectives on this matter? 

Sydney: I think they're extremely informative, and I think for me coming from a slightly different background of communications and human rights, I think they certainly highlight the complexity of morality within an issue, especially when applied to governments, and how the idea of what Canada is isn't what we've been taught in schools. Much of what you mentioned, I don't remember ever covering in a textbook. The understanding of federalism that I got in public education was minimal at best. So I think it's highly informative, and I think it certainly brings to bear a more nuanced perspective to understanding what Canada is as a country, and who we are from a national perspective, and where we sit politically and geopolitically, and why we're kind of stuck in the middle, like you mentioned, like the annexation threats and things of that nature.

Blair: So I do think it brings to bear considerations that people need to think about more often when thinking about national civic matters. Because here's the question that I'm trying to bring up. Can a nation have agency when there are so many great powers dictating what we can and cannot do, and we are ultimately bound to their defense by their defense? 

Sydney: You tell me. You're the one with the stronger defence background.

Blair:  That's a philosophical question, because the argument in the Canadian perspective in many ways, in many thought circles, is if you can leverage enough diplomatic or soft power or intelligence or other soft skills, you can have influence just by sheer weight to other factors, acting as possibly a secondary negotiator, which we have done, for example, in Vietnam, on behalf of the Americans, Canada secretly negotiated with the Viet Cong and other factions within the North Vietnamese government to try to end the war quickly under American guidance. We have acted as a soft power, or a power broker, because the Americans view us as softer and thus the world views us as nice.

As a result, we are able to act in those ways and we can get favor from our imperial overlords to ensure our survival. 

Sydney: Yeah, in terms of Canadians being nice, I chuckle because every time I say that, or I hear that said, rather, it makes me think of World War I with the whole food deliveries to German trenches.

Blair:  For context there, the Canadians would bait the Germans by sending them food cans over and then either switch them out with grenades or put the grenades inside the food cans and cause them to blow up when they were desensitized to the grenade throws. As the joke goes in the military, Canada wrote half a new convention with things we did in World War I. So from that perspective, it always makes me giggle because militaristically speaking, when we want to be nice, we don't really live up to that. Well, the thing is, that's actually a great point because I think it brings up a very interesting point about Canadian history and Canadian identity is the fact that our military, when it fights, does so with incredible efficiency. But it kind of has to because the Americans can rely on numbers and rely on air power. They can rely on numerical supremacy, whether that's in the air, bombs, artillery raids, whatever. Canada can't. Our forces have to be aggressive. Our forces have to make a difference. Our forces have to do things and we have to sustain higher casualties per capita, which Canada did heavily in Afghanistan for the Americans. Canada has the highest per capita rate of any country, I believe, other than there's one where it beats us. But we are ridiculously high per capita compared to the entire of the Americans by a large margin, despite how long we were there for even taking the entire American occupation of Afghanistan into account. Because we are such a small force, to get that leverage geopolitically, we need a force that's highly aggressive, highly motivated, and willing to achieve the objective regardless of losses, regardless of shortages, regardless of deficiencies. We have to achieve it, so we will.

And so our forces are trained to be highly aggressive, highly competent, highly trained. It's a necessity. It's not a matter of morality or Canadian Spearsman or water.

It's a simple case of where if you want to be worth it, you have to make a difference. And making a difference in small numbers is hard unless you're aggressive and ruthless. So you're saying that resiliency and that toughness are fundamental to who Canada is as a state? No, as a power projection of that state and leverage for the state.

The military is a very small subset of the Canadian population. Okay, but I'm more talking about the quality of ruggedness. You bring in the military and our weather is not conducive to many either.

If you look at... Okay, it's a miserable place to grow crops, a miserable place to live half the year, and the other half of the time it's so hot. Some people love it and some people want to go to places drier. So from that perspective, when you look at the military and the conditions of which survival is dependent in Canada, that's where that ruggedness comes from, which transpires into how we navigate geopolitical events and morality ultimately.

Well, as the military says, train as hard as you fight. And when your conditions that you train are absolute dog shit, it forces you to be rather competent in situations that really suck. It's why I love a lot of Canadian practitioners of jungle warfare, for example, which Canada has no jungles for training realistically, but we are great practitioners of it.

We send the French routinely to train in Guyana. So as a result, we are great Arctic troops because there's an Arctic we have, we have a lot of snow, we have a lot of winter, so it makes sense to do that. And Canadian troops are in all conditions.

My buddy was in a trench at minus 20 in Gagetown for weeks and that was just part of his training. So it's perfectly normal to live in these conditions and to deal with them. And so when your life sucks to the point of comedy, consistently, and that's your baseline normal, when the enemy decides to make your life hell, it's like, oh, great, it's a little up to Andy.

Just the way you deliver that makes me giggle. But again, that's a very small subset. And the fact is that most of Canada doesn't live in Canada if you think of the overall geographic perspective of the nation.

You have major population centers, Montreal, Toronto, GTA, to some extent, basically along the St. Lawrence Seaway population there. Cornwall lived in now but was much larger historically. You have Calgary, you have Edmonton, you have Vancouver, Victoria.

That's, you had to have, I guess you say Winnipeg, but that's really it. That's over two-thirds, almost two-thirds population right there. The actual disbursement across our large, vast territories might be claimed the second largest nation by land mass.

Our actual population if it into a nation smaller than France if you condensed it. If you look at our population centers. This is true.

I mean, I think about that visually in my head. So as a result, most Canadians don't exist in resilient conditions, I challenge. I'd say very few actually do.

Yes, the outside sucks right?

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