William Lyon Mackenzie King’s Role in the Reconstruction of National Identity

Abstract

All nations construct national identities that are important, though often ambiguous and sometimes conflicted. Ideas and policies that become part of the national identity are never fixed. They are subject to ever-changing contexts in the search for national well-being and new ways to sustain established political communities and accommodate new ones. At Confederation and in the decades that followed, the national narrative, and, by extension, the character of Canada promoted by successive prime ministers from Sir John A. Macdonald onwards, focused on Canada as a political community that had to recognize the existence of two founding settler communities, two languages, two cultures, and two different legal systems. Following the turmoil and upheaval of depression and war in the 1930s and the early 1940s, which threatened to destabilize Canada, a new national identity emerged. William Lyon Mackenzie King was at the centre of that reconstruction. Although King is often seen as a pragmatic and careful politician, he constructed a national identity for Canada that included a set of social rights, shared and available to all citizens. He hoped this would enhance a sense of community and build social cohesion as well as safeguarding the existing capitalist system. Coupled with a call for the ending of an isolationist foreign policy, the creation of new symbols, including a Citizenship Act, and the overhaul of Canada’s discriminatory immigration legislation, King believed this new approach to Canadian identity would strengthen the level of attachment of citizens to the nation and encourage them to see themselves as members of a single community, enjoying a common set of liberal ideas and values while sharing common obligations to each other and to the state.