Much has been said of Hegel’s influence in Canada – maybe too much.  Hegel’s philosophy is considered one of the reasons behind the landmark achievements of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which submitted its conclusions in 2015.  So, it was no accident that a related book of philosophy followed in 2018, Hegel and Canada: Unity of Opposites?[1] Taking titular inspiration from Patrick Anderson’s 1943 poem “Dialectics”, Hegel and Canada evokes the legacy of that mighty trinity of philosophers: Charles Taylor, Henry S. Harris, and Emile Fackenheim.  It begins with a contribution by John Burbidge, a student of Fackenheim, and what follows are the voices of other intellectual companions. Hegel’s influence in Canada can be traced back to the end of the nineteenth century, in particular to the philosopher John Watson (1847-1939), long at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and who played an instrumental role in the founding of the United Church of Canada. Canadians ruminate at length about how a Scottish thinker, Watson, ended up imprinting the nation with a Hegel-derived or dialectical approach towards thinking.  Did it have something to do with murky German Romanticism resonating inside our once pristine Canadian forests?  Was it a Scottish reading of Hegel that crossed the Atlantic and colonized our minds?  In my view, it was none of the above. I would like to argue here that Hegel already suited the Canadian way of thinking because we, as Canadians, were predisposed to the idea of “reconciliation”, well in advance of Hegel (1770 – 1831) and any “unity of opposites”.  There were two rich historical sources to Canadian “reconciliation” – one known by a different name, the other not so well known.  The first was the American War of Independence, and if we look at Thomas Paine’s widely-read revolutionary polemic Common Sense (1776), we see that he presented the American colonists at the time with two stark choices: “Reconciliation or Independance”.[2]  Thus, it was the United Empire Loyalists, faithful to the British Crown, who found a new home in Canada, mostly around the Toronto area:  in other words, they had “reconciled” themselves to the Crown. A similar event occurred more than a century prior to the American revolution.  In fact, it happened in the aftermath of the mid-seventeenth century English Civil Wars and the short-lived republican commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell.  I am speaking of the royal charter by King Charles II which launched the Hudson’s Bay Company In 1670, just ten years after the Stuart Restauration which brought the son of King Charles I (who was executed by axe) to the throne of England.  It speaks volumes that the largest land grant in global history, made by a King who still espoused divine right, served as the foundation for Canada, thus establishing trading posts in Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Victoria and many other places.  In other words, the Hudson’s Bay Company was formed (and so was Canada) after England had “reconciled” to the idea of itself as a Kingdom – not to a fleeting republican “experiment” under Cromwell. This suggests that the United Empire Loyalists were following in the footsteps of the HBC’s traders and explorers.  Who knows what would have happened to Canada if this earlier “reconciliation” had not occurred in the first place.  It is also interesting to note that today, while the ‘HBC’ faded from commercial history into bankruptcy, Canadians were at the same time engaged in “reconciliation” with yet another King from England (Charles III), who read the speech from the throne from Ottawa on 27 May 2025 in the face of new threats to our sovereignty from Donald Trump. It is important to appreciate that Canada’s creation (via the Hudson’s Bay Company) was a royal act.  And that it occurred when the spirit of “reconciliation” remained high in England. This was neither a Cromwellian/republican inspiration nor a product of the following Glorious Revolution (1688/89), which limited the monarchy and established the supremacy of Parliament.  This also reinforces my earlier writings elsewhere indicating that Locke’s thought played a limited role in Canada, unlike in the USA.    I would also like to suggest – and here I borrow from Louis B. Hartz’s famous thesis – that the founding of the Hudson’s Bay Company represented the Stuart Restauration in Canada but one frozen in time. “For when a part of a European nation is detached from the whole of it, and hurled outward onto new soil, it loses the stimulus towards change that the whole provides.  It lapses into a kind of immobility.”[3] This is the reason why there is Puritanism in the USA, but no longer any in England; why Ontario was considered more Scottish than Scotland[4]; and why the City of Victoria, British Columbia, remains a fossil. I am suggesting here that the leap from “reconciliation” to a Hegelian unity – or synthesis – of opposites was prepared by a distinctly Canadian predisposition for the Crown.  We see it in the Hudson’s Bay Company, and we see it in the United Empire Loyalists who followed in its footsteps.  We also see it in that Canadian neologism about which I have spoken elsewhere: “winning by acclamation” – that most modest of Canadian sayings.  In the United States if one wins an election unopposed, one wins an election unopposed.  If this happens in Canada, you are “acclaimed”.  To suggest as much is to imply deference to the elected – and possibly, as well, to give a nod to divine authority so-called, in other words, the Crown.[5] Just look to the motto of the Globe and Mail (“Canada’s National Newspaper”) as attributed to Junius: “The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures.”  The first word “subject”, followed by “truly loyal” and “the Chief Magistrate” are rooted in the experience of the United Empire Loyalists and drown out George Brown’s (founder of The Globe) liberal “neither/nor” phraseology.  It is because Americans see themselves as “citizens” that the idea of “acclamation” is not commonplace there.  It is because Canadians still see themselves as “subjects” that the idea of “acclamation” is commonplace here. Of course, liberalism and reconciliation can be complementary, despite the latter’s royalist connotations, and Canada’s Hegel culture was at its apex here when Lester Pearson was Prime Minister playing Canada’s role as the “middle power” in the era of the Cold War.  Anyone interested in Hegel and the “middle” should look to Emile Fackenheim, especially his Religious Dimensions in Hegel’s Thought (1967). But Hegel, a notoriously difficult thinker, could not have anticipated our Nobel-prize winning Prime Minister, nor the generous number of Canadian fellow philosophers.  Upon observing the activity and retro-activity of nineteenth-century Europe, in particular France since the Revolution of 1789, Hegel sought unity in mutual understanding, and Canadians found him in our search for reconciliation.[6]  I suspect Hegel’s work is to Canada what Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), or Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (written 1680-1683) were to the USA, and maybe what Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848) was to China – not revolutionary texts by any means, but a philosophy which expressed compatible sympathies first inspired here by a desire to reconcile with the Crown.   [1] Susan M. Dodd and Neil G. Robertson, eds., Hegel and Canada: Unity of Opposites (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018). [2] Thomas Paine, Common Sense and The American Crisis I, intro. By Richard Beeman (New York: Penguin, 2015), p. 66. [3] Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1964), p. 3. [4] David MacGregor, “Canada’s Hegel: Our nation of compromise”, Literary Review of Canada (Feb 1994), accessed online. [5] Joseph Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought, 300-1450 (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 9. [6] See Joachim Ritter, Hegel and the French Revolution: Essays on the Philosophy of Right, tr. Richard Dien Winfield (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1982). 

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