"Limited Identities" Revisited: Regionalism and Nationalism in Canadian History

AS EVERYONE IN THIS AUDIENCE is undoubtedly aware, it was Ramsay Cook who coined the term “limited identities”. He first used it in a 1967 article entitled “Canadian Centennial Cerebrations”, the main purpose of which was to attack the journal Canadian Dimension for demanding greater government support for Canadian publishers. Such a policy, Cook predicted, would only lead to further outpourings of books featuring “contemplation of the Canadian navel”. Indeed, he mused whether anything would be achieved by new books on “the great Canadian problem — our lack of unity and identity” and suggested that “Perhaps instead of constantly deploring our lack of identity, we should attempt to understand and explain the regional, ethnic and class identities that we do have. It might just be that it is in these limited identities that ‘Canadianism’ is found”.1 Maurice Careless popularized the term in his oft-cited 1969 article, “‘Limited Identities’ in Canada”, in which he insisted that the “Canadian experience” must be “discerned and defined” through the “limited identities of region, culture and class referred to by Professor Cook”. Careless concluded that it was this very diversity which largely differentiates Canada from the United States and that “the whole may indeed be greater than the sum of its parts, producing through its internal relationships some sort of common Canadianism”.2 Cook returned to this theme in a 1970 paper on “Nationalism in Canada, or Portnoy’s Complaint Revisited”, in which he argued that Canada has suffered “from a somewhat more orthodox and less titillating version of Portnoy’s complaint: the inability to develop a secure and unique identity”. As Cook put it, “Canadian intellectuals and politicians have attempted to play psychiatrist to the Canadian Portnoy” in order to provide Canadians with a national identity which would enable them to transform “selfdeprecation” into “self-assurance”. Fortunately, Cook concluded, Canada “stubbornly refuses to exchange its occasionally anarchic pluralism for a strait-jacket identity. Perhaps it is this heterogeneous pluralism itself that is the Canadian identity”.3 It is important to keep in mind the political context in which these comments were made. Prior to the 1960s, Canadian historians had seen as their central responsibility the need to emphasize the economic and political unity of Canada as it evolved from a colony into an independent nation-state. After the Second World War that approach was virtually unchallenged. There were liberal nationalists such as A.R.M. Lower and Frank Underhill, and there were conservative nationalists such as Donald Creighton and C.P. Stacey; but virtually every English-Canadian historian accepted the legitimacy of the Canadian nation-state as a frame of reference. Their approach to