“If you were a rocky, watery northern country, cool in climate, large in geographical

expanse, small but diverse in population, and with a huge aggressive neighbour to the
south, why wouldn’t you have concerns that varied from those of the huge aggressive
neighbour? . . . To justify the teaching of Canadian literature as such, here and now, thirty-
four years later [2003], you’d still have to start from the same axioms: i) it exists, and ii) it’s
distinct.”
2. “One could ask: Why keep it afloat? Why give your blood? The general answer is the
same as it always was: a country needs to hear its own voices, if it is to become or to
remain an aware society and a functioning democracy.”
3. “There is a sense in Canadian literature that the true and only season here is winter: the
others are either preludes to it or mirages concealing it.”
4. “The danger in ‘adopting’ the Indians as ancestors is that you may identify with them as
victims rather than as real inhabitants of a land.”
5. “If [an immigrant] does wipe away his ethnic origin, there is no new ‘Canadian’ identity
ready for him to step into: he is confronted only by a nebulosity, a blank; no ready-made
ideology is provided for him.”

6. “All Canadian revolutions are failed revolutions.”

7. “But if the enemy [the government] in its lawful authority is not really an enemy but a
necessary and mitigated evil, a fact of life, then the construction of ‘revolutionary’ heroes
becomes difficult; you get not so much a hero as one who has allowed himself to be a victim
of idiot circumstance, like a man who goes swimming in a thunderstorm.”
8. “The Great Canadian Baby is a literary institution; it could in some cases be termed the
Baby Ex Machina, since it is lowered at the end of the book to solve problems for the
characters which they obviously can’t solve for themselves.”
9. “If the central European experience is sex and the central mystery ‘what goes on in the
bedroom,’ and the central American experience is killing and the central mystery is ‘what
goes on in the forest’ (or in the slum streets), surely the central Canadian experience is
death and the central mystery is ‘what goes on in the coffin’.”
10. “[W]hen I discovered the shape of the national tradition I was depressed, and it’s
obvious why: it’s a fairly tough tradition to be saddled with, to have to come to terms with.
But I was exhilarated too. . . . A tradition doesn’t necessarily exist to bury you: it can also be
used as material for new departures.”