Joyce Wayne, ed., A National Awakening: Robin Mathews & the Struggle for Canadian Identity. Oakville, ON: Mosaic Press 2024. 140 pages.
In the late 1960s and 1970s Canadian nationalism rose to prominence as a political, economic and cultural development in new and unprecedented ways. Emerging out of the shadow of the British Empire after the Second World War, Canada had by the 1960s become a relatively prosperous middle power in the world. But increasing numbers of Canadians, especially younger Canadians, were asking questions about their country’s real status.
In the bipolar world of the Cold War, Canada was a very junior partner to American global hegemony. Canadians watched in helpless anxiety as the doomsday clock reached one minute to midnight during the American-Soviet nuclear confrontation in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis; a Canadian government fell in 1963 over the rancorous issue of American nuclear weapons on Canadian soil. Canadians awoke to the reality that we had a branch-plant economy largely under American capitalist ownership and control. New media of communication brought the inundation of American popular culture, the “soft-power” partner to the hard power of military and economic domination, threatening to submerge distinctive Canadian culture.
Some despaired. In 1965 George Grant published his elegiac Lament for a Nation, subtitled The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. In the late 1960s and early 1970s various political movements and initiatives tried to make Canadian nationalism a central focus of politics. The Waffle movement for an independent socialist Canada sought unsuccessfully to implant its ideas in the NDP. The Committee for an Independent Canada tried to become a nonpartisan force for focusing on Canadian ownership.
There were, however, deeper and troubling questions. What exactly was this “nation” that activists were seeking to protect? Canada was not like most other Western nation-states in that it was culturally and linguistically split into two nations, the same two that Lord Durham had long ago found “warring in the bosom of a single state.” In the 1960s and 1970s, “French Canada” was metamorphosing into a Quebec nation. Quebec’s linguistically and culturally distinct society generated a vivid and vital nationalism seeking expression in autonomy or outright independence. An early but misguided route was a “national liberation” movement that culminated in the October Crisis of 1970, with the federal government invoking the War Measures Act against an “apprehended insurrection.” A larger number of Quebec nationalists turned to the ballot box, and in 1976 they elected the Parti Québécois to a majority government. In 1980 the PQ held the first of two (so far) sovereignty referendums, failing to win a democratic mandate to achieve independence.
In the “rest of Canada” (the nomenclature itself is revealing) there was no correspondingly fiery nationalist focus. The Québécois are very much aware of where they have come from and how this has shaped their present and their future. This context was, and is, less well-defined, more diffuse, in the rest of Canada.
Into this uncertain terrain stepped the unlikely figure of a professor of English literature, Robin Mathews. In 1969 Mathews and his Carleton University colleague James Steele published The Struggle for Canadian Universities, in which they detailed the lack of Canadian content in Canadian university course offerings, especially in the humanities and social sciences. They connected this to the large number of American academics hired in the 1960s set against the much smaller numbers of Canadian recruits. Some departments were almost completely dominated by American professors and American-centred approaches to knowledge: for example, English departments that offered few courses – in some cases none at all – on Canadian literature.
Mathews and Steele sparked wider debate and conversation about Canadian identity and the need to foster greater national self-consciousness – in the universities in the first instance, but broadly in Canadian society. The debate extended to theatre and the arts; publishing; foreign, mainly American, ownership of Canadian industry; a trade union movement dominated by international (i.e., American) unions; and a Canadian defence and foreign policy closely tied to, if not embedded in, American Cold War hegemony.
In A National Awakening, Joyce Wayne has brought together ten academics, writers and public intellectuals who knew and worked with Robin, both to memorialize his contribution and to examine his legacy in fostering greater national awareness. Daniel Drache and Duncan Cameron provide overviews of his public career; Pat Smart, Sinclair Robinson and Donald Smith trace his impact on French departments in Canadian universities; Alvin Finkel details his campaign for Canadianization of trade unions; Bill Law, Miso Dean and Susan Crean have separate contributions on his impact on theatre, literature and the arts; and Erroll Sharpe deals with the complicated questions of his left politics. All contributors were and remain supporters of Robin, so the treatment here is generally positive, although some contributors suggest flaws and point to difficulties sometimes experienced in working with him politically even if they agreed with his ideas.
Meeting Canadian demand with American supply
At this point I should enter a personal disclaimer. I taught in the politics department at Carleton from 1972 to 1984, so my time there overlapped with most of Robin’s Carleton career (we both left in 1984 – Robin to retirement from academic life, although not from nationalist advocacy). Since I was involved in left nationalist politics as well, our paths inevitably crossed – but not on particularly friendly or comradely terms. I had come out of the Waffle NDP and was readier to try to work within existing institutions, with the inevitable compromises and negotiations that involved. But for Robin, compromise and negotiation were just not on the agenda. For those of us who thought it wise not to make the perfect the enemy of the good, Robin had nothing but scorn.
Max Weber once wrote about two streams of political ethics: the absolute ethic and the ethic of consequences. The absolute ethic is the ethic of the saint or the prophet who holds no position of power over or direct responsibility for others; the ethic of consequences is the ethic of those whose decisions impact others. If Robin had any historical models, it might be the likes of Martin Luther, who nailed his subversive Ninety-five Theses to the church door, reportedly declaring “Here I stand. I can do no other.” With this act Luther set off the great schism in Christianity between Catholicism and Protestantism – and, as it turned out, grim wars of religion that ravaged Europe.
Robin’s nationalist call did not have such dramatic consequences, but it did inspire a generation to put Canada onto the political, economic and cultural agenda. Reading this collection, I can now understand how his personality lent itself well to forcing change, but also how it was less suited to managing that change.
We might start with Robin’s initial chosen battleground: Canadian content and Canadian teachers in Canadian universities. Choosing this particular struggle might at first glance seem puzzling: amid the wider political, economic, social and cultural issues of Canadian identity, why focus on institutions of higher learning as crucial? The answer explains both the focus and the problem.
In the late 1950s, Soviet success at getting ahead of the United States in the space race sent a Cold War chill down Western spines. I can remember as a teenager curiously scanning the night sky for sight of the first Sputnik satellite and snorting in derision as news came of American rockets blowing up on their launch pads. The response among politicians and business people was a call to arms: how had we fallen behind the Soviet Communists in science and technology, and what could we do about it?
Canada was not immune to this Cold War alarm, and one clear focus was on higher education, where Canada had traditionally had a small number of elite universities producing relatively small coteries of (mostly white male) graduates each year to take up elite postings in government and business. In the greater Toronto area, as a direct result of the Sputnik scare, an entire new suburban university, York, was launched to compete side with side with the venerable University of Toronto. York was only one of many new universities that sprang up across the country, alongside greatly enlarged older institutions. The postwar baby boomers reaching university age in the 1960s provided a demographic basis for this expansion of postsecondary education. A growing economy demanded more and more well-educated young people to staff expanding businesses serving an ever-increasing population, swollen by immigration from all corners of the earth.
But herein lay a problem. Where would the teachers, researchers and scholars be found to staff these rapidly expanding universities? Of course there was the great Republic to our south, which was producing a surplus of just these kinds of qualified applicants. Thus Canadian demand for academics was met by American supply, not unlike the way in which Canadian economic demand was being met by American branch-plant production. This came at a heavy price. American academics, trained at American universities, tended to bring with them American-centred ideas and often a singular lack of interest in or even recognition of Canada as a different country with a different history and its own literature, art and culture. The Americanization of Canadian minds, powerfully reinforced by American mass media and mass culture – the soft power matching America’s Cold War military and economic hard power – was a seemingly endemic feature of Canadian university education.
This was a historical moment at which universities were at the heart of the national agenda. That Canadian universities might be no more than branch-plant American universities, with clear implications for the future of Canada itself as an independent sovereign nation, posed a serious national challenge. This was the stage onto which Robin Mathews entered.
The Struggle for Canadian Universities created a considerable stir, much of it initially knee-jerk negativity decrying an “ugly anti-Americanism” that allegedly threatened academic freedom by imposing exclusionary citizenship qualifications. This was before gender, race, Indigeneity, LGBTQ+, disability, etc. became equity criteria for university hires, making alarm at simple citizenship preference seem rather quaint and antiquated. At the time it took courage, a thick skin and an unwavering conviction of the righteousness of the cause to face the onslaught of criticism stirred up by raising the national dimension in the ivory tower. Robin had all these attributes in excess and they served him well, as he and Steele spoke at countless campus gatherings across the country tirelessly promoting the issue of Canadianization.
In the end there were gains made, of sorts. In the mid-1970s universities adopted formal, transparent hiring processes to replace the informal old-boy hiring practices which had helped Americans in place quietly hire yet more Americans. Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government eventually imposed a “Canada First” hiring policy in 1982 that specified preference for qualified Canadian applicants, but this came with no enforcement mechanisms. More importantly, Mathews and Steele had encouraged a transformation in academic consciousness, putting Canadianization firmly on the agenda not only for hiring but also for curriculum, where they had managed to embarrass departments that had shamefully neglected or ignored Canadian content into efforts at rebalancing.
I would add a qualification to this issue. While the case against Americanization was a strong one, Robin’s “you’re either with us or against us” zeal did obscure some less threatening aspects of Americans in Canadian academia. Not all Americans were America Firsters. Although many used their Canadian postings merely to leverage better American positions, in the 1960s and early 1970s the debacle of American imperialism in Vietnam led to many draft dodgers, defectors and dissenters coming to Canada. Some of them ended up in university jobs, where they have stayed the course as Canadians, becoming virtually indistinguishable from their native Canadian colleagues. Many of my academic friends and colleagues over the years fit that bill. More recently, the blunt force trauma of the unhinged Trump autocracy has been driving more defectors into Canada, including some very high-profile academics. As with American academics fleeing McCarthyism in the 1950s, or academic refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1930s in the United States itself, host universities can potentially gain a great deal from this exodus.
The new wave of Canadian nationalism
Effective as he may have been as an inspiring advocate, Robin was not the sort of activist who could easily work with others in a common political cause. An example, detailed in this collection, is his break with the Waffle wing of the NDP, which shared much of his left-nationalism, over the issue of international (i.e. American) trade unions in Canada. To Robin, Canadian-based and Canadian-led trade unions were a no-brainer. Typically, he would brook no dissent from his position, and this led to political division with Waffle leaders like Mel Watkins and Jim Laxer. The Waffle leaders actually agreed that Canadian unions were desirable, but trying to work within the union-backed NDP and with the existing unions made moderating aspirations toward more Canadian unions prudent politics. Robin denounced this as a sellout to continentalization and moved further to the sectarian left.
History moves in ironic ways. The Waffle was expelled from the NDP despite its relatively moderated nationalist stands, including on international unions. At the same time, a broad move toward Canadianization of international unions emerged in the late 1970s, culminating in the large and strategically placed Canadian Automobile Workers (now Unifor) breaking away from the Detroit-based United Auto Workers in 1984. This Canadianization was very much a bottom-up grassroots movement arising from within the membership ranks, demanding greater accountability of the unions to Canadian workers’ concerns – the best way for social change to take hold.
The wisdom of Canadianization of international unions is obvious in 2025 as the UAW – against the economic interests of the Big Three automakers in the United States as well as the core interests of Canadian auto workers – has come down in shameful support of Donald Trump’s bizarre and anachronistic tariff war on the world, including his open intention to “destroy the Canadian auto industry” on the harebrained assumption that this would drag Canadian jobs across the border into American workers’ hands. Members of any remaining international unions in Canada will have to take careful note of this lesson in how American selfishness, not to speak of American stupidity, trumps (pun intended) international labour solidarity. Robin and the Waffle were both right about Canadianized unions but neither was right about how best to get there.
The spectre of Trump the destroyer looming over the world as he assiduously works at subverting American democracy and turning the putative “Land of the Free” into a quasi-fascist autocracy has aroused a wave of Canadian nationalism across the land like nothing we have ever witnessed before. Robin would have been delighted but also, perhaps, somewhat amazed. This is visceral, gut-level nationalism – not of the “what your country can do for you” but of the “what you can do for your country” variety, as people accept the costs of retaliatory tariffs against American threats of tariffs to force annexation. This nationalism is not ideologically anchored on the centre-left but extends rightward to conservatives who thought the Americans were their friends and allies but now feel betrayed.
The new nationalism is also rife with paradox. In 1988 the great free trade election posed Canadian autonomy against continental free trade for the first time since 1911. More voters chose anti–free trade parties, but that vote was split between the Liberals and the NDP, while the sole pro–free trade party, Brian Mulroney’s Conservatives, returned with another majority. Free trade with the United States was enshrined in law, later expanded into NAFTA to include Mexico as well. Old-style left nationalists were devastated, but Canada survived and indeed did well economically under continental free trade. By the time of the first Trump presidency, 2017 to 2021, Trump’s threat to tear up NAFTA brought forth a concerted and bipartisan effort to save the deal. The Justin Trudeau Liberals deemed saving NAFTA one of their proudest achievements over their decade in office, and Canadians agreed. Now in the second Trump reign, it is Trump’s threat to abandon all pretence of free trade and institute 19th-century-like tariffs against the entire world, including Canada, that has instigated the unprecedented wave of Canadian nationalism in reaction – in defence of free trade.
Robin Mathews and the left nationalists of the 1960s and 1970s, not to speak of John A. Macdonald, would be shaking their heads in disbelief. Have we stepped through Alice’s Looking Glass into a strange new world where Canadian nationalism rests on free trade and sees protectionism as a threat? Well, yes and no. Free trade did not in itself undermine Canadian national autonomy or distinctiveness. For instance, in 1988 alarmists warned that free trade could bring about the end of the Canadian public health care system, swamped by for-profit American companies. Instead it was the Americans who blinked, bringing in their own, admittedly inadequate, national health care plan with Obamacare.
On the other hand, free trade made Canada far too dependent on integration into the North American market, leaving it extremely vulnerable when Trump got it into his head to pull the plug. Piling paradox upon paradox, Canada’s response to the end of free trade with the United States is to seek other markets and freer trade abroad, in Europe and Asia. Nobody is arguing for narrow autarky, a surefire loser in today’s world. But the days when America was Canada’s closest friend and ally are definitively over, as Prime Minister Mark Carney has publicly stated. That part of the Mathews agenda has been fulfilled, although perhaps not in the way that Robin imagined.
Now that we are on the other side of the Looking Glass, there are many unanswered questions. How will the new nationalism stand up to the stress of American hostility, and for how long? What directions will the new nationalism take in terms of its political, economic, social and cultural content? We have little idea at this point, other than to note the immediate political cataclysm opened up after Trump, upending the configuration of Conservative dominance and Liberal decline. Short of war or invasion, we have never seen external events impact domestic politics in such a dramatic reversal before. Even the Quebec sovereigntists of the Bloc Québécois have been overtaken by pan-Canadian solidarity. They recognize a far greater threat than English Canada to Quebec’s language, culture and economy in the form of Donald Trump (who helpfully decreed by executive fiat that English would be the sole language of the USA just as he was asserting that Canada should become his 51st state). As Alice would say, “curiouser and curiouser.”
Robin Mathews’s greatest strength and weakness
A few years ago I received a lengthy, handwritten (he never did adopt modern email and computer technology) and indignant letter from Robin, who had been reading an article I had published on the 1970 October Crisis and the War Measures Act. He had taken strong exception to a single point I had made, which he had interpreted as conceding ground to the Trudeau government in proclaiming the act. The details are unimportant, but suffice to say that the entire thrust of my piece was to reject the Trudeau government’s rationale in invoking a state of emergency in Quebec and suspending civil liberties. In the real world, however, things are rarely entirely black and white, and the government did have a few points on its side, making scarcely a dent in the case against. But to Robin, typically, one slight shade of grey was intolerable. I was going to reply but then I realized that he was not seeking a discussion but rather a concession that he was right and I was wrong. I set his letter aside, and in any event, in 2023 Robin passed away.
I mention this only to underline Robin Mathews’s greatest strength, as well as his weakness. Unwavering conviction of the total rightness of your stand does not make for easy relations with others. It may, however, be an absolute necessity for a prophet willing to stand against the current conventional wisdom and make things uncomfortable for those resisting change. In this collection, Joyce Wayne has assembled a fitting tribute to Robin Mathews the prophet and activist and, in the words of one contributor, “shit-disturber.” The shit needed disturbing, as Canadians now overwhelmingly understand in the age of Trump.
