Making Up the People: Ideas of Common Peoplehood and Citizenship
In his editorial comments in the February 1898 edition of the Canadian Magazine, John Cooper mused about the slow but gradual growth of “common elements of national life” in Canada. He remarked that the various parts of the Dominion were growing closer, particularly the French and English, which he credited to the emergence of “a more liberal basis for a common citizenship,” signified by “the national feeling ... rising above race and religious differences.”1 The idea of a “liberal” citizenship implied a sense of common belonging based more on shared political identity than on racial or religious differences, which, Cooper argued, helped to bring unity and shared purpose to Canadians. It is not surprising then that Cooper frequently used the term “citizenship” in his editorials and columns on the development of Canadian nationalism.2
The idea of a modern or liberal citizenship, supposedly rooted in shared political rather than sectional affiliations, became an increasingly common feature of descriptions of Canada in the decades following Confederation. This chapter argues that English Canadian writers who deployed the concept of citizenship sought to provide Canada with human frontiers; they thought of Canada not just as a political jurisdiction, but as a community of particular individuals connected by shared partnership to the nation. This concerted effort to describe and inculcate a sense of Canadian citizenship was a critical element in the conceptual development of Canada as a distinct nationality, but unlike the concept of nationality, which imagined the basis of collective association, citizenship stressed the role of the individual by linking a person’s identity to the parameters of a given nation. The liberal individual was the critical constituent of the modern nation. Moreover, as the term “citizenship” increasingly came to refer to the political status and behaviour of individuals, so too did it become increasingly connected to the state, and to the Canadian state in particular.
The fact that “citizenship” was not a term explicitly defined and regulated in law in the nineteenth-century empire meant that it was often used in different ways to describe varying visions of a people and the ties that bound them. It is important then to understand citizenship as part of a developing language that described perceived common social and political networks of people. It was a language developed and articulated by individuals in civil society rather than one that was necessarily provided by the state. American historian William J. Novak rightly urges us to avoid reading a “modern understanding of citizenship and statecraft ... back into reluctant historical materials as scholars search for the roots of present political aspirations.”3 Rather than view citizenship as derivative of statutes or legal regulations, studying the language of citizenship points to the ways that such rhetoric may anticipate and condition the development of statutory demarcations of citizenship.
The study of this language is particularly essential in the history of the British Empire, where citizenship existed primarily as a rhetorical category until the mid-twentieth century. In her study of imperial citizenship in colonial India, Sukanya Banerjee stresses “the extralegal life of citizenship, the modes of self-representation it generates even before it is codified, [and] the political claims it triggers because it is deferred.”4 This extralegal aspect is especially important in Banerjee’s study of colonial India, because, as she illustrates, citizenship often acted as a means of claiming certain rights and privileges that were thought to be attendant aspects of the status of British subject. Yet, while Banerjee examines how British subjects in India made claims to citizenship, the language of citizenship elsewhere in the empire enforced racialized boundaries that resisted those very claims. Turning to the Canadian context, this chapter shows how the use of the term “citizenship” inferred a distinction within the status of British subjects, dividing those who were full political members from those who were not.
As the previous chapters have examined, Confederation prompted sustained deliberation about the future political development of the British Empire and the emergence of local constitutional nationalities within it. Not only was the term “nation” mutable and indistinct, but it was ambiguously applied within the late Victorian empire, where many looked to either local colonies or the wider empire, or both, as the basis of a national community. The problem with the idea of nation is that it is ultimately an abstraction, an “imagined community,” for which the meaning can shift based on context.5 The idea of citizenship, on the other hand, provides demographic frontiers to the nation, giving individuals an imagined collective in which they may locate social and political affiliation. As Étienne Balibar has pointed out, every community “is based on the projection of individual existence into the weft of a collective narrative.”6 The development of ideas of people holding a common citizenship identity is therefore a critical element in the attempt to produce political order.
While citizenship often implied a certain political or legal status of individuals, the description of the imagined aggregate of citizens was often framed as a community of common people. Invocation of the “people” has long been a fundamental feature of political rhetoric, though, as Margaret Canovan argues, its potent implications have been an under-examined concept in political theory.7 Rogers Smith argues that the idea of “peoplehood” has been a powerful discourse of membership deployed by political rulers to “construct communities that are also enduring structures of political power.”8 In his analysis of the “modern” concept of “peoplehood,” John Lie points to the nineteenth century as a transition period when the idea of the people became largely correlative to the state.9 The connection between political community and sovereignty, especially defined in constitutional terms, has often been based in the concept of the people. In the United States, for example, the political sovereignty powerfully expressed in the Declaration of Independence ultimately emerged from the invention of the people by the founders.10 It is not altogether remarkable then that, in his landmark survey of Canadian constitutional history, Peter Russell asks whether the “Canadian people,” and not the “Canadian state,” can become sovereign.11
But a people do not spontaneously appear. The Canadian people did not precede the creation of the post-Confederation Canadian state, but were created consequent to it. Jacques Derrida succinctly stated in his paper on the more famous “We the People” of the American Declaration of Independence that “the signature invents the signer.”12 In the case of Canada, there was no “signature,” no moment at which the inhabitants of what became Canada convened and assented to their new appellation.13 Instead, as this chapter illustrates, the process of developing a Canadian people was a process of conceptual change, promoted by some and resisted by others. As chapter one indicated, however, the boundaries of political community were not completely clear in the late-nineteenth-century British Empire, and the idea of the people was similarly divided between imperial, federal, and provincial identities. Especially given the relative absence of a pre-political or, more specifically, pre-Confederation sense of a unique shared local identity, the development of a concept of a people in Canada emerged more languorously, devised most often in the imaginings and aspirations of public writers and sold to a sometimes unreceptive or indifferent populace. The project of promoting a common citizenship in Canada, and the efforts to inculcate its subjects with an accordant practice of civic behaviour, became for many of the writers examined here an essential aspect of the project of naturalizing Canada and encouraging and enforcing relationships between certain individuals and a new political order.
The connection of citizenship to the Canadian state was not straightforward or uncontroversial, as it emerged alongside a forceful narrative of global British imperial citizenship. The first part of this chapter examines these ideas of global Anglo-British citizenship, which underpinned in many ways the imperial federation movement. The following section looks at how this idea of citizenship contrasted with the idea of a distinct Canadian citizenship, which saw the Canadian state as providing the boundaries of a common people. By looking to the Canadian state as the basis of citizenship, various writers emphasized the political duties that each citizen held in the state. This viewpoint often meant subordinating other political identities, especially provincial identity, so that citizenship denoted membership in the Canadian state specifically. The final section examines a number of examples of how these concepts of citizenship translated into practical efforts to make individuals think of themselves as particular kinds of citizens. Concepts of citizenship, after all, are enlivened when their imagined subjects subscribe to the categorization. This last section includes an assessment of educational efforts on the subject of “citizenship,” most of which were aimed at youth in order to inculcate certain “citizen” behaviours.
Imperial and Anglo Citizenship
Although it is often regarded as a foundational principle of political sovereignty, citizenship did not figure prominently in the Confederation debates that led to the union of the British North American colonies.14 Yet, in the decades that followed, the term “citizenship” became a staple of imperialist rhetoric, typically used to signify Canada’s place in the empire. The sense that Confederation was one stage in the political consolidation of the British Empire was often expressed in terms of the need for Canadians to acquire a more complete citizenship status. For proponents of imperial federation in particular, the political development of Canada could be traced by its acquisition of “full” citizenship in the empire, by participating in imperial governance on equal terms with Britain. In this sense then, “citizenship” was the political antonym of “colonist.” New Brunswick politician George Foster captured the apparent urgency of this status at the inaugural meeting of the Imperial Federation League in Canada, telling the crowd that, in a federated empire, “none are to be subjects of the other, but all free citizens, with common rights, equal privileges, and mutual aspirations.”15 Confederation was an incomplete step in the development of citizenship because it did not provide Canadians with full citizenship in the empire. The only way to correct this inferior status was to consolidate the empire along closer lines.
Not only did appeals to imperial citizenship persist in the decades following Confederation, but the constitutional realignment within the empire motivated new efforts to formalize the ties of empire-wide citizenship. Yet, the idea of imperial citizenship was about more than the legal standing of Canada within the empire. It was also a way of ensuring that the perceived common origins of British people across the globe maintained a unified civic identity. As much as the nineteenth century marked the devolution of sovereignty in the British Empire, it also witnessed new attempts to recognize civic identity that superseded the boundaries of political jurisdiction and geographical expanse. Indeed, what is particularly remarkable about citizenship discourse in the late nineteenth century is the willingness to separate the capacity of citizens from the legal and jurisdictional frameworks of the sovereign, territorial state. Citizenship, especially as it was defined and influenced by idealist thinkers like T.H. Green, represented the sinews of community, wherein the individual was inseparable from the common good.16 The connection between citizen and citizenry was therefore not necessarily produced by and reflected in the state. As a result, it was not only possible but, to some, preferable to think of citizenship as a status that signified common standing in a particular community, often thought of as a kinship based in racial ties.
The importance of ideas of race in articulations of common citizenship was especially evident among imperialists, who used the term to express the idea of a global British nation. Numerous writers looked beyond the Canadian state to locate the boundaries of citizenship identity, based primarily on the belief that citizenship denoted a sense of shared racial heritage that superseded jurisdictional divisions within the empire or, in other cases, within the states of the “Anglo-Saxon race.”17 The absence of formal legal definitions of citizenship in Canada and the broader British Empire meant that what constituted “Canadian” or “imperial” citizenship was subject to much ambiguity and variation, which was less a product of systematic thinking about the nature of citizenship than the use of the term as a rhetorical device for expressing the idea of common community. Imperial citizenship, according to historian Daniel Gorman, reflected “efforts to integrate cultural, social, and political identities within a broader imperial identity.”18 References to imperial citizenship did not reflect a unified definition of citizenship, but were used in various ways to describe a common identity held by people of loosely defined “British” descent. The concept of imperial citizenship highlights how understandings of citizenship in the late nineteenth century transcended spatial limitations and superseded local political identities within the British Empire, unlike the more “liberal” and, to some, “modern” idea of citizenship that was contingent on the status of the individual in the territorial state.
Not all British “subjects” were thought to be imperial “citizens,” and the latter term became a way of dividing subjects into those who comprised the British nation and those who were inexorably exterior to it.19 Many English Canadian writers who used the term “imperial citizenship” also did so to distinguish themselves from the subordinating term “colonist,” which inferred a sense of inferiority. Unlike the colonists of the empire, who were politically subordinate, imperial citizenship conveyed a much more direct and robust participation in the governance of the empire. George Parkin, the prominent New Brunswick–born advocate of imperial federation, believed that it was only through the formal federation of the empire that British people in self-governing colonies could share in what he called the “higher dignity of full citizenship.”20 The term “citizenship” was regularly used in this sense by proponents of greater imperial consolidation. Constitutional scholar A.H.F. Lefroy, for example, described the need “to take up the full citizenship of the Empire” in order to “bear a fair proportion of its burdens.”21 Similarly, Nova Scotian librarian Francis Blake Crofton insisted that, for Canada to “secure a co-ordinate status instead of a subordinate one, a full instead of partial citizenship, [it] must assume equal burdens and reciprocal obligations with the other federating partners.”22 Citizenship, in this sense, reflected not merely a collective identity for Canada but an elevated political standing that the colonial status impeded it from achieving. What the “burdens” of full citizenship included was not always clear, but it was certain that they involved greater Canadian military and political involvement in imperial matters.23
For advocates of imperial federation, the value of imperial citizenship was that it offered promise of wider imperial growth, particularly in Canada, which was expanding into the continental interior. Citizenship, from their perspective, inferred a status that could be carried throughout the federated empire, making it possible to imagine British citizens “replenishing” the ostensibly empty and fertile parts of the empire, especially in the Canadian Northwest.24 In distinctly Malthusian terms, an article on imperial citizenship in the Imperial Federation League’s journal described the crowding and malnourishment in Britain and asked: “Are we claiming our rights as citizens, while we contemplate this misery unmoved, and allow countless acres in other parts of the same Empire to lie untrodden and unfilled?”25 Accordingly, the sense that the Canadian Northwest offered a fertile space for the settlement of imperial citizens was a central element of the western expansionist movement in the late nineteenth century.26
As much as the idea of imperial citizenship represented the consolidation of the British Empire along political lines like federation, it also appealed to those who sought to strengthen the ties between members of the “Anglo-Saxon race.” As Duncan Bell has illustrated, “proponents of ‘Anglo’ hegemony re-imagined the scope and content of citizenship, challenging the isomorphic relationship between the territorial state, sovereignty and political membership.”27 The prominent English legal scholar Albert Venn Dicey called this concept “isopolitan citizenship” in an 1897 article that argued for a common citizenship for the “English race,” where an individual from the United States or Britain and the dominion colonies could move across jurisdictions unfettered by legal restrictions of naturalization or domicile rights.28 The idea of shared “Anglo” citizenship was supported by numerous proponents of closer Anglo-American unity at the end of the nineteenth century, including Andrew Carnegie, Edward Freeman, and James Bryce.29 Their view of citizenship claimed that the common civic affiliation between different elements of the Anglo world endured regardless of the division of state boundaries. It signified an understanding of citizenship that took racial unity rather than membership in a sovereign state as its primary referent.
In Canada, Goldwin Smith was the strongest advocate of the idea of “isopolitan” citizenship. For Smith, citizenship did not derive from the political sovereignty of any given state; instead, he described it as a natural bond among Anglo-Saxon people, regardless of whether they lived in Canada, the United States, or Britain. There was a clear distinction for him between the political sovereignty of a given jurisdiction and the endurance of a common citizenship. “Governorships do not propagate English sentiment,” he wrote in reaction to the idea that imperial federation would elevate imperial citizenship. The bonds of citizenship, he argued instead, were enforced by “language, literature, intercourse, history, transmitted habits, institutions and forms of thought.”30 Accordingly, he claimed in 1884 that “mutual citizenship exists between the people of the colonies and those of the mother country” and hoped that “it may be extended to the old colonists of England in the United States.”31 The status of citizenship, according to this view, was not contingent on the political status of British colonies. Smith did not perceive the political independence of British colonies to represent the retrenchment of citizenship but, rather, believed that “mutual citizenship, which the advocates of Independence cherish as strongly as any Imperialist, amounts to political unity, without the complications or the liabilities which are incident to the present relation, and which Imperial Federation would immeasurably increase.”32 This interpretation did not mean, however, that political rights were entirely unrelated to Smith’s conception of shared citizenship, but that such rights were the product of an existing common community. According to Smith, the formal separation of Canada from the British Empire would not diminish the “mutual citizenship” that existed between the people within the separate jurisdictions.
Later, in his controversial continentalist treatise, Canada and the Canadian Question, Smith declared: “There is no apparent reason why, among all the states of our race, there should not be community of citizenship.”33 As noted in chapter one, this idea was one of the only aspects of the book that elicited agreement from otherwise critical imperialists like George Monro Grant. The difference between Smith and his imperial federationist interlocutors was that, while federationists believed that political unity of the empire would affirm equal citizenship, Smith believed that such equality already existed irrespective of political or legal boundaries. Both he and proponents of federation, however, used the term “citizenship” to describe a common identity of people of a white “Anglo” community. As with the concept of nationality, it was a common ground between two outwardly different positions based on their shared assumption that political order in the world was drawing closer together along the lines of racial community.
“Confederation Made Us a People”
If Confederation made a new “Canadian” people, it did not unmake an “imperial” people. The idea of imperial citizenship did not necessarily conflict with expressions of Canadian citizenship; in fact, some writers used both terms without a sense of contradiction. John Castell Hopkins captured this sense of dual identity when he wrote in the Week that “a British citizenship as truly exists as does a Canadian ... Thus we have a double privilege – a local citizenship and an Imperial one.”34 This affirmation of “local” and “imperial” citizenships indicated that, for imperialists like Hopkins, the sense of being a Canadian citizen did not necessarily detract from the idea of individual membership in an imperial community. Even for imperial sceptics like Nova Scotian politician J.W. Longley, it was impossible to ignore the supposed prestige and power of Britain when contemplating the future of Canada. “Even a Canadian, living three thousand miles away,” he wrote, “may be pardoned for feeling a certain pride in belonging to such an Empire, and claiming citizenship with such a people.”35
Although proponents of imperial federation did not see any apparent contradiction in what Hopkins called the “double privilege” of Canadian and imperial citizenships, the idea of Canadian citizenship was for others a distinct status that signified a different kind of relationship between the individual and the Canadian state. Imperial citizenship often seemed too ambiguous to signify a specific status, and in place of this ambiguity, the status of Canadian citizenship offered a more concrete political identity. This view was the basis of the Week’s front-page rebuttal of a letter written to the magazine by George Monro Grant, who proclaimed the need for “full citizenship in connection with Imperial Federation.” In response, the Week argued that “to say to young Canadians of today that they may not look forward to a future when they shall be citizens of a Canadian nation is to cut them off from the one strong incentive and the one grand ambition which can make them permanently loyal to the land of their birth or adoption.” It was clear to the magazine that what imperial federation offered was something distinct and incompatible with what it called the “dignity of full citizenship.”36 On the other hand, as John Castell Hopkins replied the following week, imperial federationists believed that imperial unity would allow Canadians to “take up the burdens and responsibilities of British development” by becoming “citizens of a world-wide Empire.”37
Other writers, however, particularly those who understood Confederation as the beginning of a new political nationality, increasingly tied the term “citizen” to the civic and political duties of the individual to the state. By defining citizenship in this way, the Canadian state became the more significant container of citizenship identity. Imperial and Canadian identities were distinct, according to Montreal-based writer and philosopher William Douw Lighthall, who wrote: “We have our more constant everyday duty to those whom God has placed near us and bound up in the same nation.” The article, which argued for the importance of universities in promoting Canadian nationalism, stressed that, while loyalty to the empire remained important, “our nearest duty lies here; our call to act is here; the demand to remedy the wrongs, the grossness, the vice and misgovernment in this country is a demand upon us, and to which we, both as individuals and as a people, both as citizens and as universities, must all do what we can to respond.”38 Not only did Lighthall look to the Canadian state as the boundaries of both a people and citizens, but he also characterized that container of citizenship as one that demanded political duties of citizens in participating in governance.
William Norris, the unreserved proponent of Canadian independence, similarly invoked the term “citizenship” numerous times in his appeals for establishing an independent Canadian nationality. For Norris, Canadians could not be true citizens unless Canada was to become constitutionally independent. More than his contemporaries, Norris clearly framed citizenship as an individual’s political status, signified most clearly through naturalization laws and franchise rights.39 He looked to the United States as an example of rights-based citizenship and worried that Americans would not migrate to the Canadian Northwest because “they never will give up citizenship to become colonists.”40 For Norris, citizenship was a state-defined status held by an individual in an autonomous political community. Such a definition of citizenship was complicated in the British Empire, because British subjects in the colonies did not typically have direct involvement in British governance, either through elections or office holding.41
Norris was purposeful in using the term “citizenship” to denote the political rights of individuals in a sovereign state, a usage that would become more commonplace in the twentieth century. This model of citizenship held distinctly republican undertones, and likely for this reason most other writers emphasized instead the appearance of a new and distinct people in Canada following Confederation. For them, imagining a Canadian nation meant transforming political boundaries into human frontiers so that those living in Canada were not simply incidental inhabitants of a common jurisdiction, but members of the same nation. This concept was often signified in efforts to describe a common “Canadian people,” a powerful term that implied a certain organic or coherent identity. Like the idea of a Canadian constitution rooted in a deep historical lineage of shared political and social experience, the concept of a Canadian people conveyed the image of a nation that was composed of self-aware members. “Confederation made us a people,” the Dominion Illustrated proudly declared in its 1889 Dominion Day issue. Accordingly, the article asked: “Can [we] survey the record of intervening years with the proud consciousness that we have done our duty as citizens, as communities, as a people?”42 The people referenced in this column was created by Confederation, supposedly formed from otherwise unrelated individuals fused into common association.
The term “people” was particularly forceful in this context because it implied that Confederation was not just a legal or political arrangement but, more substantially, one that repurposed individuals’ identities, making them Canadians and giving them accompanying duties as members of that state. Of course, this idea of a common peoplehood was laden with assumptions about the kind of person who could belong to the imagined collective. Unlike imperial citizenship, with its implied homogeneity and racial basis, descriptions of a common Canadian people often recognized that it represented a diverse populace that needed to be united under a common name. Like Cooper implied with his reference to a more “liberal” basis of citizenship, the idea of a single Canadian people promised for many an identity that could unite people because it transcended “sectional” labels.
This concept did not mean, however, that references to Canadian citizenship or common peoplehood necessarily represented ethnic or linguistic diversity. On the contrary, the category of “Canadian” often came to infer a distinct group of people based on peculiar attributes that set them apart from other groups of people. Cooper made this point clear in one editorial in Canadian Magazine, where he observed that “the people of Canada differ from the people of any other country of the world ... Their modes of life, their standards of living, their habits and general characteristics mark them out as a separate and peculiar people.”43 The people he described were not defined as such by their mere inhabitation in Canada, but because they demonstrated characteristics and habits that distinguished them from other people. Taking this point even further, Oliver Aiken Howland suggested that the consolidation of Canada had facilitated a growing civic homogeneity that had made the name of Canada “to a large portion of inhabitants of the united Dominion become a national, almost racial name.”44 In this sense, the heterogeneous reality of the population of Canada contributed not to a demographic mosaic, but to an entirely new racial designation as a way to express the Canadian nation as a “natural” unit.
Yet, it was hard to ignore the fact that, in the decades following Confederation, differences in regional, religious, and “racial” identities challenged the notion of a new and united nation. The idea of Canadian citizenship, or the belief in shared civic affiliation with the Canadian state, seemed to offer a promise of uniting divergent regions and communities. John George Bourinot anticipated that a fuller Canadian nationality would develop “when the Dominion is fully established, and its people have forgotten their sectional prejudices, and commenced to feel that they are citizens of one great community.”45 For Bourinot, who, as we have seen, helped to popularize the idea of a Canadian constitution, the outcome of Canada assuming the quality of becoming a nationality was the feeling among its people that they were “citizens” of a common community. The supposedly liberal basis of Canadian citizenship signified a shift away from sectional identities, yet it did not necessarily move away from an assimilative basis of citizenship. Writers who described a new Canadian citizenship often replaced sectional identities with a Canadian one, which, despite its political foundation, transcended simple legal or political qualities. This understanding of citizenship was centred on Canada, and implied duties and responsibilities that individuals owed to it, often, as the next chapter will show, constructed by potent appeals to loyalty.
Descriptions of citizenship, however, often acted as a means of attempting to inculcate civic cohesion and solidify notions of a Canadian nationality. Doing so involved a process of ascribing certain characteristics and behaviours to the category of “Canadian citizen.” Those who deviated from such norms were therefore questionable citizens. This evaluation was true for some who doubted whether French Canadians could be considered citizens, given what they perceived to be a lack of their civic unity with English Canada. The Week noted that Quebec “is a foreign province having laws and institutions peculiar to itself, the seat of a people speaking another tongue, who pride themselves, not on being British citizens or citizens of the Confederation, but on being scions of old Christian France.”46 The same editorial columns had stated a year previous that French Canadians “have not yet risen to the conception of citizenship in the Dominion; much less have they any regard for the British Empire.”47 The issue of linguistic or “racial” difference between French- and English-speaking people provided pervasive and persistent occasions of doubt that Confederation could effectively make a new Canadian people. In the late nineteenth century, this distrust was especially obvious in tensions manifested most explicitly in the trial and execution of Métis leader Louis Riel and in questions about the right of minority Catholic schooling in provinces outside of Quebec. Historian A.I. Silver, for example, has illustrated how the case of Riel prompted considerable reaction in the Ontario partisan press and reflected the fears of some that French Canadian “distinctiveness could wreak Confederation.”48 For magazines that sought to promote a national perspective, these moments posed obvious problems for the narrative of common peoplehood, which caused concern that the French Catholic population impeded the sense of a common people.
In response to linguistic or “racial” divisions in Canada, some writers sought to emphasize the common legal and political ties that French and English Canadians held. F.W. Frith, the secretary of Bishop’s College in Lennoxville (now Sherbrooke), Quebec, wrote about the excesses of both French and English patriotisms in Canada. “The French are our fellow citizens,” he wrote, “and have rights like ourselves, defined and established by law. It is our duty as citizens to maintain them literally and honourably as they exist.”49 Descriptions of Canadian citizenship were often invoked in this sense to designate an imagined civic cohesion in Canada. For those who envisioned a common Canadian people, the challenge in the decades following Confederation was to enforce the term “Canadian” as a valued pronoun that would, they hoped, supersede other identities. One writer who viewed the “scattered provinces” as forming the “nucleus of a mighty nation” was assured that its people would be “proud to be called Canadians.”50 Another writer asked: “Why should our people not wish to be called Canadians? ... Canada will never be great until her children call themselves above every other name Canadians.”51 In his travels to the Canadian Maritimes, noted American philanthropist Elihu Burritt made a point of remarking on this tendency, claiming that the provinces were “assuming the coherence and consolidation of a national being,” meaning that “now Nova Scotia is learning to say we with Vancouver’s Island on the Pacific.”52 The 1875 New Year’s edition of the New Dominion Monthly claimed that a new generation “are learning to consider the name ‘Canadian’ as one to be proud of, and Canada as a country to be loved and gloried in.” It extended this claim further, adding that the name “Canadian” signified a people composed of diverse elements: “Men of different races and creeds are working together to fill a common destiny and build up a common Canadian nationality.”53 The process of claiming a common Canadian name and building a nationality were evidently understood to be interconnected imperatives.
It was clear from the beginning that there would be some difficulty in making people think of themselves as Canadians, especially given the endurance of regional and provincial identities. Historians have explained that inhabitants of Canada’s regions usually saw themselves as distinct peoples and regions, which were only gradually and unevenly Canadianized through economic and industrial consolidation like the National Policy.54 In addition to these material aspects of consolidation, however, it is useful to consider how writers described the concept of common citizenship to impart a sense of unity to the different provinces of the new Dominion. As philosopher Ian Hacking explains, naming should be understood as a dynamic process; we must not only look at how names come into being, but also at how those who are assigned a name respond or react to it.55 The status of pre-Confederation colonial identities was not suddenly erased or replaced, and therefore one of the greatest perceived threats to the concept of a Canadian people was the endurance of individuals’ affiliation with their local sub-national identity – an attachment often derogatively called “provincialism.”
The decision to name the new country Canada in 1867 seemingly compounded this problem because, following Confederation, people in erstwhile separate colonies assumed a name that had previously applied to an entirely different jurisdiction and people, “Canada” having been the legal and historical designation of what became the provinces of Ontario and Quebec. Sometimes, writers regretted that the name of the new dominion was a pre-existing provincial title rather than something entirely new to which all people of the Dominion could relate anew. Commenting on the lack of Canadian sentiment in the Maritime provinces in particular, the Week conceded: “Probably the mistake of retaining the name previously belonging to one part of the original territory helps to perpetuate this feeling.”56 The magazine later reiterated this point, stating: “We have always thought and still think that a less serious but still important mistake was made in naming the Confederation after its most populous and powerful member. This gave to the whole original process, so far as the smaller members of the Union were concerned, too much appearance of an annexation or absorption.”57 A writer from New Brunswick similarly suggested that people would be more likely to find attachment to their new appellation “had a new name been adopted for the Confederacy.”58 These reservations pointed to a more substantive underlying fact that, following Confederation, identification with pre-Confederation identities competed with the sense of identifying as a Canadian.
Imparting a shared sense of belonging to a common Canadian people was sometimes frustrating. Even as late as 1891, the Halifax-based Critic lamented: “We often hear of Nova Scotians speak of ‘going to Canada,’ when they mean the Upper Provinces of the Dominion of which we form a part.” Such nomenclature was insular, it claimed, and impressed upon its readers that “the fact remains that we are Canadians, and that we ought certainly to take quite as much pride in it as we do in the fact that we claim this Province by the sea as the land of our birth.”59 The same magazine had earlier noted that “many people in the Maritime Provinces still call their Upper-Province countrymen by the name Canadian, in its old sense,” and encouraged them to start using the name Canadian “only in its broader signification.”60 In an 1889 essay on the use of language in Canada, W.D. Lighthall regretted that “in Nova Scotia ‘Canada’ and ‘Canadian’ mean perhaps most frequently the former province of Canada (Upper and Lower) and its people.”61 Even a quarter century after Confederation, it seemed that pre-Confederation identities and the labels that accompanied them were difficult to abandon.
Conflicts between provincial and federal levels of government dominated political and legal debate in the early decades of post-Confederation history, usually framed as a battle between provincial premiers and their federal counterparts. The concept of Canadian peoplehood, however, which impelled individuals to think of themselves and their own political identity in relation to the Canadian state, could be an important antidote to provincial rights or provincialism. The importance of asserting the political affiliation of “Canadian” seemed especially pressing in the decades following Confederation, when numerous factors converged to give the impression that strong provinces would weaken the solidification of a common Canadian people. This problem was especially obvious in the vocal repeal movement in Nova Scotia, the strong “provincial rights” movement, and the campaigns for “better terms” of Confederation.62 In the case of British Columbia, which joined Confederation in 1871 despite enormous distance from the other provinces, geographical separation fostered a sense of distinctiveness from “Easterners.”63 Writing about English literature produced in Canada, author Joseph Edmund Collins hoped that it might lead to national unity, but conceded: “We are not now united, except by legislative cords that cut into the flesh of one another, for we are all pulling in different ways.”64 Another writer lamented: “It is generally admitted and as generally regretted that the Confederation of the provinces of British North America has not resulted in the complete creation of a Canadian people.” The reason, he continued, is that “the Provincial idea has never become subordinate to the Canadian.”65 The creation of a Canadian people, according to this view, required that individuals see themselves as members of the Canadian nation first, effectively removing or minimizing their prior provincial identity.
Carter Troop, a writer from Montreal, called provincialism “the bane of the Dominion,” also using the adjectives “greedy,” “undignified,” “injurious,” and “unpatriotic” to describe it. He argued that economic matters “alone will not make a united people ... We Canadians must look for something else, something higher and better to bring us together in spirit and in fact, if we as a people would work out our own salvation.”66 Part of this vexation stemmed from the perception that those who were to regard themselves as part of a Canadian people knew little about others who constituted the same imagined community, which some attributed to the strong influence of provinces. A writer in the Week complained that individuals in each province did not know much about people living in different provinces, arguing that “jealousies and heart-burnings have been kindled by the real or fancied wrongs. The preponderance of the more powerful Provinces has been very perceptible, and has been marked with bitterness by the weaker.”67 “The weakness of Confederation,” the Critic suggested, “lies in its sectional differences, which may be attributed to the fact that before the Union was consummated the inhabitants of the confederated provinces were comparative strangers to each other.”68 According to these views, the sense that the people of the new dominion formed a common community required that Canada be understood as a natural unit and, consequently, that provincial identities became submerged in this broader national community. To make this shift happen, it became an urgent matter to teach people, especially youth, the value of Canadian citizenship.
Making People Citizens: Teaching the Idea of Citizenship
By the close of the nineteenth century, Winnipeg had become a major urban centre in western Canada, serving as the central hub of commercial rail traffic and a destination for tens of thousands of immigrants from across Europe. In an article in Canada Educational Monthly, the principal of the Provincial Normal School reflected on the city’s rapid expansion and what it meant for school teachers. Teachers, William McIntyre wrote, must ask themselves: “Will you accept them all? Out of this heterogeneous combination can you bring unity? ... Can you teach British, French, German, Scandinavian, Icelander and Pole, that in this free land all are equally worthy if unreservedly they accept the honor and perform the duties of Canadian citizenship?”69 The phrase “duties of citizenship” became a very common one in the late nineteenth century, particularly in the context of civic education. It implied an active role for citizens and sought to foster greater connection between citizens and the imagined citizenry, which was most often tied to the political boundaries of the Canadian state. As a distinct political status, citizenship entailed expectations of certain civic behaviour that, many believed, had to be taught or inculcated to the broader public. As a result, the decades following Confederation witnessed a considerable growth in efforts to teach civic education and the values and behaviours of citizenship.
Descriptions of citizenship became most forceful in deliberate efforts to inculcate ideas of citizenship in the population through public and pedagogical initiatives. The creation of a Canadian people required that individuals understand themselves as citizens, which inferred duty to and knowledge of the imagined citizenry. The citizenry was imagined because it existed primarily as a rhetorical construction, and it typically described personal behaviour and civic comportment rather than a legally defined status. Its linguistic basis meant that it was never quite clear who or what made a citizen, but discussions of “good citizenship” often tied it to loyalty or duty to the Canadian state specifically. If citizenship existed as writers declared it to, then it had to be conveyed to those who were its subjects and internalized as part of their identity. Accordingly, an examination of languages of citizenship needs to consider discussions of the practical efforts to instil abstract ideas of citizenship in people.
Teaching citizenship was foundational to the project of normalizing the Canadian state as the primary site of civic identity and was, in many cases, predicated on the assumption that “citizen” denoted a particular kind of person. As Veronica Strong-Boag has illustrated in her examination of the voices of First Nations, organized workers, and feminists who challenged their exclusion from the narrative of nation and citizenship, the history of citizenship has been an essentially homogenizing process. She writes:
The experience of citizenship education for much of our history has given relatively few Canadians – notably those who are male, European in origin, middle class, heterosexual, able bodied, and so on – reason to feel full members of the nation state that came into being in 1867 ... The history of citizenship, then, is the history of failure, of the ultimate failure of largely non-representative institutions to impose their homogenous and homogenizing vision on diverse communities of citizens.70
Citizenship education, as well as the restriction of the political rights associated with citizenship, starkly reveals the “homogenizing vision” of citizenship that Strong-Boag describes. The language of citizenship in late-nineteenth-century Canada was likewise limited to a very particular and restrictive understanding of its composition. Beyond the explicit objective of crafting a robust understanding of Canadian citizenship to facilitate a homogenous unity, the near total absence of discussion of Indigenous people and non-European immigrants in discussions of citizenship reveals the underlying assumptions that guided it.
Citizenship education, as numerous scholars have made clear, has been an important aspect of liberal democracy, though it is often used to formalize certain ideas of nationalism by emphasizing the shared connection of citizens to the nation. Given the centrality of the state in this process, literature on civic education has tended to emphasize the role of government in developing ideas of citizenship. Political theorists who have written about the role of civic education in liberal democracies often emphasize the role of the state in developing school curriculum and pedagogical objectives.71
Historians have often looked to schooling as the most extensive and explicit foundation of civic training for young people, especially in the nineteenth century.72 In his study of elementary schooling in England, Stephen Heathorn describes classrooms as places where “children of the working masses first forged personal and collective identities within the context of systematic, state-sanctioned, academically constructed, nationalist aims.”73 In this sense, education played a pivotal role in inculcating liberal values and a sense of national identity to young people. A number of historians have therefore analysed how citizenship was developed through school curriculum in Canada. Amy von Heyking, for instance, has examined the instruction of citizenship in Alberta schools in the twentieth century, noting that, in the early part of that century, the cultivation of “good character” was a primary aspect of citizenship curriculum.74 The primary research basis for most of these studies has been classroom materials, particularly textbooks issued to students.75 These sources provide a means of assessing how governments have sought to guide instruction of citizenship, though, as some scholars note, these official sources do not always reflect the realities of the classrooms.76
Looking beyond formal schooling, however, reveals a wider concerted effort by writers and public thinkers to impose a homogenizing idea of citizenship that often used education as a primary means of enjoining individuals to a common Canadian people. Going beyond official curriculum is especially important to understanding citizenship education in the Canadian context, because many of its most vocal advocates appealed for a national strategy for teaching citizenship. As has been a persistent theme throughout this study, many contributors worried that provincialism threatened the emergence of a distinct Canadian nationality. Enforcing a strong sense of Canadian citizenship was therefore understood to be a remedy to local identities. Given that provinces maintained jurisdiction over education in Canada, a number of writers in Canadian magazines argued for the need to go beyond provincial curricula in order to inculcate a Canadian citizenship.77 For example, in an article promoting a dominion school system, John A. Dresser, a geologist from Richmond, Quebec, worried that having provincial education systems “is not promotive of a thorough national homogeneity.”78 Threatened by provincialism, others sought to go beyond formal provincial curricula to communicate ideas of citizenship. Prominent Quebec educational administrator John Murdoch Harper was especially vocal on this issue. He argued that “the British North America Act was evidently not a complete embodiment of all the unifying forces that tend to make a nation out of diverse elements.”79 The implication of this argument was that, left to the provinces, citizenship education in Canada would be unequal and localized or provincial. Instead, these writers argued that a sense of common Canadian citizenship could only be developed through a common educational experience that promoted a homogenous or unifying understanding of Canada.
Harper actively pursued this idea in his effort to establish a national educational bureau. While he recognized that removing provincial responsibility for education was unlikely, he presented the national educational bureau as a way of providing educators with a common platform for promoting what he called the consolidation of the Canadian people. In his speech to the Dominion Educational Convention at Halifax in 1898, he described his plan as part of a process of consolidation: “That there has been a drawing together of our interests as a consolidating people, a unifying of Provincial sympathies in a broader communal, no one can for a moment doubt.”80 As a national educational bureau would promote Canadian unity, he insisted that its “members [would be] of all creeds and races.”81 The Canadian Educational Monthly regularly promoted the idea of a national educational bureau, stating in 1897 that it would work for the “national aggrandizement” of Canada; in reporting Harper’s speech to the Dominion Educational Association, the magazine stressed the bureau’s role in helping “the consolidation of the various provinces as one people.”82 According to these arguments, the creation of a strong sense of common identity in Canada required that individuals view the Canadian state as the primary parameter of political association.
Ensuring the creation of good citizens became especially important against the backdrop of apparent changes to the familiar norms of political organization, notably the increasing ambit of who could exercise the right to vote and have a voice in the direction of the government. The education of citizenship was especially important in light of the expanding franchise in Canada, which raised fears that new voters would not be properly equipped with an understanding of the responsibilities that voting entailed.83 As W.A. Douglas told the Toronto Teachers’ Association in 1880, “political reformers have demanded the extension of the franchise, but the privilege of voting does not confer wisdom on the voter.”84 Citing the apparent turbulence of the times, including the overthrowing of monarchies in Europe, the rise of socialism and nihilism, and the gathering clouds of war, it seemed to Douglas that the importance of properly training citizens was never so urgent.85 Similarly, the Critic stressed the importance of citizenship training for youth, noting that “our boys and girls attend school for a number of years and finally develop into the attributes and responsibilities of citizenship, when they are called upon to exercise their franchise in civic matters without having received any instruction whatever on the subject.”86 Notably, the editorial refers to the citizenship duties of boys and girls, as women were typically able to vote at the municipal level; it was not always the case then that citizenship inferred an exclusively male domain. An Ottawa church minister, arguing that Canada required “good citizens” to overcome the divisions that impeded national unity, defined “good citizens” specifically as ones who had the requisite intelligence and freedom from influences to vote in elections and a sufficient stake in the welfare of the country.87 For those who worried about the lack of proper citizenship training, the best solution was to increase the teaching of political economy in schools in order to ensure that students understood what citizenship entailed.88
Concern about the nature of citizenship was shaped by the anxiety about the implications of “modern” political association, which seemed to replace engrained membership in an organic community with a seemingly fugacious and factitious contractual tie between individual citizens and the state. Consequently, writers sometimes described the moral nature of citizenship, stressing the importance of appreciating the significance of the connection between the individual and the citizenry. This interconnection was often described as qualities of good citizenship, which were typically imbued with moral overtones, particularly regarding the duties that were thought to be part of citizenship. The effort to describe the character of good citizenship reflected that, for many, it remained more than a strictly legal or political status, despite its increasing attachment to a specific political jurisdiction. With the subject of specifically religious education in Canadian public schools a frequent matter of political controversy in the late nineteenth century, moral or citizenship education became a response to secularization.89
The secularization of public education in Canada led numerous writers to consider the need for moral education, which was often closely aligned with citizenship. One observer commented: “That moral education is essential to good citizenship, is now a maxim of all civilized governments.”90 Kingston, Ontario, writer Agnes Maule Machar was a frequent voice in this debate. Writing under her pen name “Fidelis,” she asserted that “religious and moral training” for youth should be part of the training of the “duties of good citizenship.”91 The Week echoed this sentiment, declaring that “in a very large proportion of all our public schools there is nothing worthy of the name of ethical training, or even of training for citizenship.”92 Descriptions of citizenship in Canadian magazines often appeared in the context of deliberations of moral education and its implications for developing Canadian nationalism. In an article on moral education in Nova Scotia, education historian Robert Nicholas Bérard argues that it became increasingly popular with the growth of social gospel Christianity and the development of pan-Canadian pedagogical objectives. As the teaching of religious lessons diminished, he adds, “morality became almost totally identified with good citizenship – with a shift of emphasis from imperial to Canadian citizenship – and the state increasingly displaced the churches and the family as the ultimate arbiter of moral values.”93
Though the meaning of moral status tied to citizenship was not always clear, it was often linked to political behaviour or the duty of individual citizens to the state. Here the connection between citizenship and partnership in an imagined Canadian people became especially clear. To be a good citizen meant actively understanding and identifying with Canada and, specifically, as Robert M. Stamp has illustrated, a Canada that was proudly integral to the British Empire.94 But more often, the sense of inculcating citizenship meant specifically teaching individuals to identify as Canadian. A writer in the Canadian Magazine in 1899 decried the “lack of ideal citizenship” in Canada, identifying it as a chief problem for the young country. Canadian citizens, he argued, needed to have a greater awareness of and interest in their community. After describing the importance of the citizen’s duty to the state, he continued:
This is a day when citizens are required – citizens with a broad, understanding knowledge of what Canada was, is, and might be; citizens who will inquire as to what Canada requires of her sons; citizens who will study the history, the institutions, the literature, the political conditions of their native land. The man who exclusively pursues his own ends, his own purposes, and the almighty dollar is not a citizen. A citizen is a man of a higher, a nobler, a more unselfish type.95
This description of citizenship is particularly noteworthy for its active rejection of an individualist rights-based and economic sense of citizenship. Instead, citizenship was a reflection of one’s character, developed through an understanding of and “unselfish” devotion to one’s country.
The role of women in the training of young citizens was especially critical. As one Methodist minister from Newbury, Ontario, argued, recognizing the equal citizenship of women was a way of ensuring “social purity.”96 Schoolteacher Kate Seymour Maclean stressed this point, stating that “it is surely a not unworthy ambition for women, both as mother and as teacher,” to participate “in the training, mainly left in her hands, of the young citizens of the Dominion.”97 A prominent example of this participation was Margaret Polson Murray, who founded the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire in Canada. Murray turned to periodical literature as a means of instructing young people in the behaviours of citizenship. She founded and acted as editor-in-chief of the Young Canadian, a short-lived magazine that, as its mission statement explained, sought to “draw the youth of the various Provinces together; and to inspire them with a sense of the sacred and responsible duties which they owe their Native Country.”98 Its columns paralleled some of the issues and themes that appeared in other magazines, including political events, descriptions of Canadian history and “heroes,” and warnings about the dangers of party government. The magazine encouraged young readers to learn about and discuss Canadian history, inspiring twelve-year-old reader Max Aitken, the future Lord Beaverbrook, to start a “Young Canadian Club” to foster such endeavours and increase subscription numbers.99
Given the close connection of civic knowledge and citizenship, the teaching of politics and history became a central aspect of teaching citizenship in Canada. A review of the Canadian Encyclopaedia in the Canadian Magazine claimed that to become a citizen one must “know and appreciate the past,” because “no man can be a true Canadian until he has studied the making of the country to whom he pays allegiance.”100 The distinction of “true” Canadians implied again that membership in the Canadian citizenry or people required an extensive knowledge of Canada and its past, fastening the connection between the citizen and the Canadian state. Educational writer William Robertson insisted that this requirement meant teaching “the duty of the citizen to the State – his relation to the State – its effect upon him, and his effect upon it.”101 If citizenship implied an intimate and personal familiarity with the nation, then the study of Canada was to be an important objective for every true or good Canadian citizen.
Similar to the perceived need to write about and teach the Canadian “constitution” following Confederation, contributors also discussed the need to provide Canadian historical and political educational materials. This discourse was sometimes prompted by the perception that citizenship training and patriotism were more robust in the United States than in Canada.102 Numerous complaints about the inadequacy of good civic education, particularly for young Canadians, appeared in the pages of Canadian magazines.103 In one such article, Kate Seymour Maclean anguished that the lack of citizenship education would ultimately weaken “national sentiment” in Canada:
In a country whose population so largely made up, as ours is, by the influx of immigration from all the countries of the Old World, the strongest necessity exists for some potent influence which shall unite this vast mass of differing, and often conflicting, social and civil forces, and render them coherent and orderly elements of the body politic. That there can be no stronger assimilating power than that of a universal and controlling national sentiment in the example of the neighbouring Republic ... where each is made to feel himself a citizen.104
As Maclean made expressly clear, the task of inculcating the sense of being a citizen was especially important as a means of assimilating a population that was increasingly composed of new immigrants from across Europe.105 Citizenship therefore had the purpose not only of instilling a sense of duty to the Canadian state but, more potently, of minimizing conflicting forces in civil society. In this sense, it was less a particular status than a way of enforcing conformity and minimizing civil conflict.
In response to this perceived need for better citizenship education, textbooks that made explicit attempts to inculcate certain notions of citizenship to a Canadian audience started to appear. This trend was perhaps most evident in an 1893 competition facilitated by the Dominion Educational Association to commission a distinctly national history book for Canadian youth. The competition sought to inspire a book on Canadian history written from a distinctly national perspective, in contrast to what the association viewed as a provincial bias in most textbooks. The winning selection of the Dominion Educational Association’s contest was constitutional expert W.H.P. Clement’s History of the Dominion of Canada. The book’s preface by William Patterson, the secretary of the contest committee, stated that it promised to “impress on our future citizens that we not only have a united country, but are a united people.”106 The Canadian Magazine commended the book, noting that by 1897 it had been adapted for use in schools in most of the country.107 The book focused largely on the political or constitutional developments of Canadian history and included chapters on both French and British colonial rule and the development of separate colonies in British North America. Like monographs on the constitution published around the same time, including Clement’s own Law of the Canadian Constitution, the book presented a narrative of Canadian history that started with European exploration and followed a linear and seemingly inevitable march toward Confederation.
John Millar, deputy minister of education in Ontario, followed up in 1899 with his Canadian Citizenship: A Treatise on Civil Government. The purpose of the book was “to urge the importance of that moral and intellectual training which forms the basis of good citizenship.”108 The book, which highlighted government of “self,” “family,” and “school,” defined characteristics of “high moral principles” as a basis of Canadian citizenship, again tying such personal behaviour to the collective identity of the Canadian people. Though the book was primarily geared to a younger audience, a review in the Canadian Magazine declared the book so important that it “should be in the hands of every voter.”109 Millar stressed the role of the individual as the basis of political government, positioning personal self-regulation as the first principle of citizenship. Acknowledging that the “rank of citizen is not confined to men, but belongs also to women and children,” he outlined different political and civil rights that the status entailed, as well as its corresponding duties.110 In addition to the basic characteristics of obeying laws and paying taxes, the citizen had a duty to be patriotic and engage in deliberation of important social and political questions. This engagement was especially important, Millar noted, as the dawn of the twentieth century posed many new problems to be solved by young citizens, including the growth of cities, the increase of poverty, and the issues of working conditions and unionization. In its focus on the active role of individual citizens in government, books like Millar’s Canadian Citizenship emphasized the concept of citizenship as a civic status of the individual tied to the framework of the state. Additionally, as Ken Osborne notes, textbooks such as those written by Clement and Millar served a “nation-building purpose” that provided students with a very singular and stable narrative of national development.111 The publication of books that aimed to teach citizenship through descriptions of history and government continued to gain prominence in the early twentieth century.112
The increasing attention to civic education in the decades following Confederation coalesced with the developing idea that Confederation had created a new people, which signified the sense that those living within the boundaries of Canada assumed a new political identity that should replace other local affiliations. As a result, efforts to inculcate behaviours of citizenship often placed the Canadian state at the centre of civic education so that individuals would think of themselves not only as citizens, but as citizens of Canada in particular. This perspective did not detract from the culturally pervasive sentiment of British or imperial citizenship in English Canada, though it did position Canadian citizenship as a more distinctly political status. The category of citizen was not a neutral descriptor, but a means of instilling sentiments of patriotism so that individuals would form an affective bond with the Canadian state. As one school principal wrote in Canada Educational Monthly, patriotism meant “love and devotion to one’s country; the spirit that prompts obedience to its laws, to the support and defence of its existence, rights and institutions, and to the promotion of its welfare.”113 The promotion of patriotism among Canadians more generally was part of a process of instilling ideas of loyalty, which often centred the state as the object of civic identity, as the following chapter examines.
Conclusion
In late-nineteenth-century English Canada, the concept of citizenship had a variety of meanings, acting both as an explicit category of civic identity and more indirectly as a sense of belonging to a given group of people. While descriptions of imperial or Anglo-Saxon citizenship and Canadian citizenship were not necessarily thought to be antithetical or incompatible identities, developing descriptions of common Canadian citizenship and rejections of provincialism situated the Canadian state as a primary location of civic affiliation. This standpoint reflected and facilitated a general though uneven conceptual shift that saw the idea of citizenship change from an inherited or loosely biological status to a political status that denoted membership in a given state.
The idea of imperial citizenship was especially influential in the context of the British Empire, where many who were legally recognized as British subjects were excluded from the imagined category of citizenship. The idea of imperial citizenship formed a colour line that bifurcated the empire into citizens and colonists, and English Canadian imperialists adamantly considered themselves part of the category of white, self-governing British citizens. The concept of citizenship again highlighted the assumptions shared by Goldwin Smith and his imperialist critics as they envisioned a concept of citizenship that transcended the political divisions of the “Anglo-Saxon” world. Yet, even as imperialists described the idea of imperial citizenship, many of them recognized their status as Canadian citizens, or what Hopkins called his “double privilege” as both an imperial and a Canadian citizen. This separate category of Canadian citizenship denoted a specific status based on the boundaries of the Canadian state. For William Norris, such a Canadian citizenship was very much a political status of equal individuals separate from any other identity. Most of the writers examined here, however, described instead the sense of being part of a Canadian people, a category also framed by the boundaries of the Canadian state that indicated a common civic affiliation of those living within its boundaries. The concerted effort to describe and enforce the term “Canadian” as a label of personal civic affiliation served to provide a link between individuals across Canada and the Canadian polity. Confederation prompted a new conceptualization of collective identity, where for many the category of Canada represented the logical and legitimate basis of collective association. Magazines pressed readers to think of themselves and call themselves Canadians above all else and to view Canada as an association of common people. This approach positioned the Canadian state as the centre of civic identity, which was further entrenched by citizenship education efforts that enforced duty to Canada as an obligation of moral importance.
This way of thinking, however, did not mean that appeals to imperial citizenship or British identity were abandoned; rather, these appeals increasingly became characterized as more abstract than concrete, more of a sentiment than a status. The idea of imperial citizenship continued to hold some resonance into the twentieth century, though even its strongest supporters recognized it as largely impractical. For example, in a 1912 collection of essays on the idea from authors across the empire, Frederick Walton, dean of the Faculty of Law at McGill University, cast doubts on the likelihood of the ultimate fruition of imperial citizenship.114 The idea of imperial citizenship, however, remained significant for many because it pointed to a common bond between people that lay beyond strictly political or legal boundaries. This ambiguity about the citizen status of British subjects, particularly in the context of British subjects from predominantly non-white parts of the empire, became more explicitly debated in changes to naturalization legislation in the British Empire, the subject of the final chapter of this study.
Moreover, the concept of a more modern or liberal Canadian citizenship did not mean that the racialized and homogenizing tendencies of the idea of citizenship were abandoned. Instead, as with the concept of nationality, many writers who described a common Canadian people used the term to encompass an increasingly diverse population under a singular name that would supersede other communal identities, whether provincial, linguistic, or ethnic. It is a tendency that, in many ways, continues to inform ideas of citizenship in Canada. As Eva Mackay observes in her study of modern Canadian identity, “the contradictory construction of Canadian identity paradoxically includes cultural difference, and at the same time constructs a notion of Canadianness in which the real and authoritative Canadian people are defined as white, culturally unmarked and assimilated Canadian-Canadians.”115 This vision of a Canadian people, articulated through the language of common association and citizenship imperatives, follows the historical discourses described in this chapter that sought to make sense of Canada and imbue it with significance as a container of common citizenship. This undertaking was not a passive or incidental process, but one that was shaped by concerted efforts in civil society to naturalize the new Canadian state as a community of people.