Canada: A partially postliberal constitutional monarchy

John Diefenbaker in 1957

Following last month’s perspective on liberalism in Japan, this month, we turn our attention to Canada with the help of a contribution from Dr. Paul L. Allen. Dr. Allen is the Dean of Undergraduate Studies at Corpus Christi College, Vancouver and Professor of Theology, St. Mark’s College. His scholarly work is situated in the fields of science-theology dialogue, theological anthropology and systematic theology. Publications include these book volumes: Ernan McMullin and Critical Realism in the Science-Theology Dialogue (2006); Catholicism and Science (2008); Theological Method: A Guide for the Perplexed (2012); and Augustine and Contemporary Social Issues (2023). Articles have appeared in such journals as Heythrop Journal of Theology, Ex Auditu, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie and American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. In addition, he is writing the entry on “Monarchy” for the St. Andrews Encyclopedia of Theology. He is the subject editor for the forthcoming T&T Clark Encyclopedia of Christian Theology and is working on a three-part systematic theological anthropology. In the current contribution, Dr. Allen paints a picture of Canadian post-liberalism, which he believes has not been adequately addressed in a recent substack by Patrick J. Deneen. He takes this opportunity to hold up a critical mirror to American postliberals.

On May 27, 2025, His Majesty King Charles III visited Canada to deliver the speech from the throne to open a new session of the federal parliament. The last time the monarch delivered the throne speech in 1957, it was Queen Elizabeth II, and the Prime Minister was a Conservative, John Diefenbaker. On April 28, a government led by the recently elected Prime Minister, Mark Carney, was re-elected.

This was the first time in almost 50 years that Canada’s monarch has offered the speech from the throne. It is customary that the monarch’s designate, the Governor General, delivers the speech that opens a new parliamentary session. The explanation for Canada’s invitation to the King is clear: Canada is under threat from another would-be king, Donald Trump, whose repeated threats against Canada were the centrepiece of the recent Canadian election. The majority of Canadians understand this threat. Many Americans are ignorant of our trepidation, but it is why the Liberal Party of Canada managed to win with almost 44% of the total votes, with a minority of 170 in a chamber of 343 seats. It’s an astonishing turnaround from a few months before, when their polling numbers had them moving toward a devastating defeat. Yet, the Conservative party under Pierre Poilievre had one of its best showings ever, attaining over 41% of the vote in an election that saw small parties drop to very low levels of support.

Throughout our over 150-year history as a country, Canada has struggled to identify its own distinct political culture, with our unique blend of Indigenous, British and French heritages, with a welcome mat laid out for millions of immigrant newcomers who have become Canadians. In fact, most immigrants to Canada have become strongly nationalist, deciding upon an alternative North American immigration destiny to the USA that is often touted as the ‘Canadian dream’. The recourse to a monarchical gesture in 2025 by a Liberal prime minister is the latest example of a rediscovery of deep-rooted Canadian resistance to American imperial ambition. And Trump, while the most flagrant imperialist yet of all American presidencies, is not without some precedent. The enduring power of the institution of monarchy could not have been predicted. We were once predicted to become a republic by now. But monarchy, like other Canadian traditions, draws from the deep well of a collective and conservative political culture of a people geographically extended across almost 10 million square kilometres.

Despite Canada’s tilt toward social liberalism in recent decades, there is still a powerful strain of its national life that values tradition, modesty and quiet vigilance – a curated conservatism that is minimally political. However, as evident in the inclinations of the Conservative party leader, a coarsened political culture has arisen that is individualist, populist and materialist. Some of that coarseness was evident in Patrick Deneen’s recent reporting from his visit to Ottawa to speak at the Canada Strong and Free Network conference. (Deneen is the author of the best-selling Why Liberalism Failed and more recent Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future.)

Canadians appreciate the attention to our political settlement from visiting American professors. Deneen’s article raises questions about what Americans in general perceive about Canadian strengths and shortcomings. As Deneen notes, Canadian liberals are nationalists, and Canadian conservatives agree with the left that international institutions backstop the global order and security. The Liberal Party’s colour is red, while Canadian conservatives go deep blue: we visibly defy American expectations. The old saw is generally right: the telling difference between Canadians and Americans is that Canadians know what that difference is (and Americans do not).

Deneen helpfully points to our most storied of political philosophers, George Grant, whose thought is either forgotten or misunderstood even in his home country. Yet the American tone deafness to broader Canadian political history is also evident in this article. Even adept American nuance can accidentally reinforce the covetous skepticism about Canada’s existence coming from the White House. Despite the straight line border running from the Lake of the Woods to the Pacific Ocean along the 49^th parallel, Canada is a country that defies theory. We are still defined by the land.

Roaming the Ottawa convention center, Deneen notices the ragtag ‘old right’, ‘fusionist’ and libertarian elements of the conservatism he understands. He’s looking for what he knows and what he rejects in the American right. But, had he scanned a broader historical and geographical Canadian horizon, he might have seen more about the difference Canada makes and more reasons why George Grant still makes sense. Deneen’s diagnosis is that “it appears that America today has a booming export industry of ‘new conservatives,’ while places such as Canada at the moment lack a home-grown brand.” Yet, Deneen’s perusing of a convention hall is its own colonialism without traction among the practical conservatism of immigrant Filipinos, Chinese and Indians, whose conservatism is a new religious, cultural and social national reservoir. Canada is not post-theory, but with the exception of the government of Alberta (an oil-rich western province), our post-liberalism is institution-based, immigrant-based and deferential. It diverges from American expectations on all these counts.

Arguably, the first post-liberalism was Canadian Red Toryism, a school of thought associated with George Grant himself. Its roots are traceable to the nineteenth century as Canada struck out on its own from both the United States and Great Britain. It is a practical sensibility, not an ideal. It is connected in the Canadian imagination to figures such as Thomas D’Arcy McGee, a Catholic, Irish-born parliamentarian turned monarchist who represented a western Montreal riding as a Conservative-Liberal. Canada does hybridity: it’s our specialty. McGee was assassinated in Ottawa by a Fenian (an anti-British Irish emigrant movement in North America) sympathizer in 1868. The national outpouring of grief and the enormous turnout at McGee’s funeral give us a glimpse of the complex strands of Canadian identity that were forged from an early date.

Epoch-making Canadian conservative leaders are not numerous, although John Diefenbaker’s prime ministership in the 1950s is often touted as such. In his article, Deneen compares the “titanic opposition of the establishment toward Diefenbaker, which anticipated the more recent response to Trump.” A more bizarre comparison could not be imagined given Trump’s pugilism, kleptocracy, and tech-addled cronyism. Diefenbaker, on the other hand, was a gentleman, a rhetorician, a lawyer and a parliamentarian. After being replaced by Robert Stanfield, he remained in the House of Commons until 1979, serving his constituents in Prince Albert, located in north central Saskatchewan. Having served as an MP from before World War II, which Canada entered a few days after Great Britain, Diefenbaker represented those in remote, obscure places. Public life was a vocation for him. Indeed, despite widespread cynicism, this is how many Canadians view politics even today, and this is how Red Toryism has conveyed its understanding of Canada for over a century.

The ‘Red’ in Red Toryism spoke to a collective will that arises from ties that bind a sparsely populated land rather than a revolutionary zeal to overthrow the elites of Montreal and Toronto. Dedication to public service is almost expected in a country whose vastness has shaped the approach to government. Red Tories concur that state institutions are not socialist luxury or bureaucratic creations. Snow plow operators, nurses, and firefighters are each seen as public servants. Thus, all Canadian governments have hewed to the centre, even the more right-wing administration of Stephen Harper (2006-2015). The need for a web of connection that binds people who live from the Pacific to the Arctic to the Atlantic implies a statism that Americans typically mistake for socialism. But until Justin Trudeau came to power in 2015, our state institutions were more conservative in nature. Only recently, and borrowing heavily from American and European norms, instruments of state in Canada moved to becoming tools of social engineering. With the more cautious approach of Carney amidst the imperial threat from the south, the illiberal liberalism of Trudeau may already be waning.

Deneen writes, “If we imagine for a moment that Canada had developed this alternate version of conservatism, in the first instance, it might well have provided a model that would have been recognized far earlier by its southern neighbor.” While this is music to the ears of any Canadian, one wonders about American appetite for anything involving both Canadians and moderation. Wouldn’t it bore them? Deneen writes that “unexpectedly, even miraculously, America has (at least momentarily) arrested its own progressivist liberal tendencies”. Arrested is an interesting choice of words, given the illegality of the U.S. president’s many flaws. But ‘momentarily’ is the keyword in the gloat. When the battle is perpetually ideological, the trench political warfare never ends. American liberals will eventually rise again.

Historically, the Canadian genius is to settle peaceably what are, in fact, tangible, empirical matters of polity and statehood. The reason many Canadians drifted toward the Liberal party in the recent election is linked to the decision to bring the monarch to Ottawa to deliver the forthcoming throne speech: to make national institutions work to foster loyalty and fidelity. Canadian loyalty is to symbols and gestures that transcend the government and politics in general. The buck does not stop at the Prime Minister’s desk despite the concentration of power that recent Prime Ministers, Trudeau especially, captured. Despite caustic national crises like the fentanyl overdose epidemic, the monarchy serves as an enduring ordered realm that indicates a grounding for all politics and virtue beyond ideological intrigue.

So, it only made sense for Canadians to choose a calm banker who defers to King Charles -- in order to oppose the most avaricious American regime in a century. Whereas the U.S. Declaration of Independence preaches “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” on the basis of the blank slate of Locke and Paine, loyalty to a monarch and the survival of civil norms work differently. Canada’s motto is “law, order and good government.” Red Tories have seen off American idealism since the flight of the Loyalists into Canada from the U.S. in the 18^th century. We follow in their footsteps because the transcendence of unlimited freedom is an illusion. And the monarch is enthroned in order to indicate the real limits of all earthly governance, especially governments that do not recognize those limits. This kind of polity is smaller but better for it.

George Grant’s diagnosis of the magnetic pull of technology toward liberal political regimes is indeed prophetic today as we face an American-Chinese axis of evil that assaults human cultures through Artificial Intelligence and global surveillance. This is one more reason why a political sensibility of inherent restraint is both historical and still valid. Who can even think of Trump and his Big Tech allies as in any way allied to a conservative cause? More to the point, considering Deneen’s public alliance with VP J.D. Vance, who could make peace with this misanthropy? From a Red Tory perspective, American postliberals, to the extent that they have made peace with this techno-economic revanchism, are just as rapacious and revolutionary as their liberal forbears.

What differentiates Red Toryism from such compromises with tyranny is exactly what binds this particular Canadian political philosophy to other Canadians: our adherence to the rule of law, grounded in the constitution and monarchical rule. Unlike republican postliberalism or corporate home-grown conservatism, Red Toryism is not an abstraction or an oppressive ideal. The individual, society, and state are functioning nodes in the Canadian polity that even the decadent Liberal Party of Canada must respect. Canada’s relatively large state, while overgrown and dysfunctional under Trudeau Jr., nevertheless serves the conservative goal of national preservation. In the American experience, liberal adherence to a large state renders the state liberal. In Canadian experience, excepting the Trudeau interregnum, liberal adherence to the state is modulated by the state’s inherent conservatism: Canadians value the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, lighthouse maintenance and the national broadcaster despite their many foibles for the good of order.

The future of Canadian conservatism will be driven by the concerns and worldviews of immigrants, many of whom deliberately chose Canada instead of the USA. The top 10 source countries for Canadian immigrants between 2016-2021 were republics, except for #10, the United Kingdom itself. Republics tend to move in an authoritarian direction compared to constitutional monarchies. In a world of climate disruption, fiscal decadence and republican dystopia, the sheer attraction of the adherence to law and a symbol of authentic transcendence outshines nostalgic brutalism (ie, “MAGA”). Red Toryism is a better postliberalism for not requiring an ideology to justify the rule of the rogue.

Canadian monarchs are limited and constitutional, and in Canada, whatever kinds of postliberalism emerge, they will likely resemble our pre-liberalism. In contrast, the U.S. president cannot distinguish his person and his office due to some bastardized divine right. In contrast, Canada’s ability to hew to the good of order is already presaged by our constitution, which acknowledges the supremacy of God and rule by monarch. George Grant’s Red Toryism cites this supremacy as an essential bulwark against the despotism that entails unbridled pursuits of happiness. Red Toryism is also fiscally conservative in ways that tax-cutting libertarians south of the border long ago abandoned to the current chagrin of central bankers and the bond market. Kings, regulated banking, RCMP officers: Canada is delightfully dull. If we are loyal to our history, the law, to the small ways of social restoration and to the king, we won’t need a false monarch to mitigate the decline of liberalism

Dr. Paul L. Allen (Corpus Christi College, Vancouver) pallen@corpuschristi.ca

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