The Conception of a National Interest

Extract

We form a new and distinct political organization for promoting by a joint endeavour, the national interest upon a particular principle on which we are agreed.” So ran the “Address of the Canadian National Association to the People of Canada” in January, 1874. The Canada First movement of the early 1870's represents the first intrusion of intellectuals as such into the discussion of Canadian public problems. Its story has been surrounded with a romantic halo by our Canadian bourgeois political historians, prone as they are to fall an easy prey to the rhetoric of nationalism wherever they run across it. But the moral which really emerges from a study of the young idealists of Canada First is the difficulty of defining “the national interest” as something which comprehends and transcends those particular group interests whose competition with one another has ever since Confederation formed the subject matter of our day-to-day federal politics.