To remain a high-trust society, Canada requires sturdy institutions and a shared culture

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The classical liberal John Stuart Mill once warned that “free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities.” He wrote that, without a “united public opinion,” representative government lacked the common sympathies and culture required for it to work properly. He added that even entities like the army would cease to identify with the people and become another branch of the state.

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Liberty’s better theorists have always presumed a “we,” and Canada needs to find its “we” again.

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The problem is, that essential premise collides with modern liberalism, which pretends that rights and markets are not dependent on culture. The sharpest classical liberal minds were formed within a thick cultural environment they presumed was permanent. They just rarely mentioned it in their works.

Take Adam Smith, for example. He was not an advocate for borderless consumerism and called for free trade to be subordinated to the common good.

When Smith defended the Act of Navigation which required English ships to be crewed by Englishmen among other provisions, he asserted that “defence… is of much more importance than opulence.” He called the acts “perhaps, the wisest of all the commercial regulations of England.”

Smith’s point carved out security for the nation even as he favoured broad liberalization elsewhere. He feared a monopolizing spirit among the powerful, and expected British statesmen to discipline them for the common good and social trust, the offspring of a coherent people.

Our founding statesman, Sir John A. Macdonald, was hardly a liberal, and the Constitution Act, 1867 reflects this. Confederation was designed to keep the two founding peoples together in a single North American polity.

The Anglos and the French have never fully succeeded in forming a lasting cultural unity, and Mill’s warning about divided nationalities is reflected in the unending Quebec question of Canadian history.

After World War II, the federal government grew bigger and more controlling as it attempted to use institutions to find an accord with a nationalist Quebec. Official