Yuan Yi Zhu is a research fellow at the University of Oxford.
Canada is the world’s second-largest country by landmass. Its major population centres are spread across a continent. But most of the time, it is governed by a remarkably small elite, interrelated with each other in ways which are remarkable even by the standards of the Old World.
And once in a while, Canadians are reminded of this fact, such as when Justin Trudeau recently appointed a “special rapporteur” to look into allegations of Chinese interference into Canadian politics.
The rapporteur, David Johnston, is a caricature of what the Canadian establishment looks like. A former university president and governor general, the affable Johnston has long sported the indispensable snowflake-shaped lapel pin of the Order of Canada, as well as a list of post-nominals longer than his actual name.
He also happens to be a former vacation-cottage neighbour of the Trudeaus, as well as a long-time friend of the family who has known Justin since his childhood. Until recently, he sat on the board of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, the taxpayer-endowed memorial to the family patriarch.
Inevitably, this led to an outcry from the Conservative opposition, who accused Trudeau of having appointed someone with a clear conflict of interest to the post (Johnston has since resigned from the Trudeau Foundation).
Defenders of the government then retorted, not unjustifiably, that since Johnston had helped shield a former Conservative prime minister from credible accusations of corruption, and was appointed governor general by another Tory premier, he is hardly your typical Liberal Party bagman.
But though Johnston is more politically ecumenical than most of his peers, it is undeniable that both he and Trudeau are both card-carrying members of the so-called Laurentian elite, the small group of people from Eastern Canada who, for most of its history, have shaped the course of Canadian development and made it, for better or worse, into the country it is today.
Unlike many countries’ socio-political elites, the Laurentians are not readily identifiable on sight. They have long abandoned their differentiated mid-Atlantic drawl; their houses do not have moats.
What distinguishes them above all else is the uniformity in their outlook. Britain is often said to be run by a consensus blob; but its Canadian equivalent make the Westminster blob seem positively anarchical.
As John Ibbitson, the great chronicler of the Laurentian elite, has written:
“Although they often disagree among themselves, they share a common set of assumptions about Canada: that it’s a fragile nation; that the federal government’s job is to bind together a country that would otherwise fall apart; that the biggest challenge is keeping Quebec inside Confederation; that the poorer regions must forever stay poor, propped up by the richer parts of the country; that the national identity—whatever it is—must be protected from the American juggernaut; that Canada is a helpful fixer in the world, a peacekeeper, a joiner of all the best clubs.”
Latterly they have added to this list the belief that Canada is a genocidal state built on stolen land, which should atone for its past through part-performative truth and reconciliation – without, however, actually giving any of the stolen land back. It is perhaps unnecessary to add that they are almost all small-l and/or big-L liberals.
This is not to say that their class background (in a country whose official ideology denies the existence of such a thing) is not highly homogenous. They are generally to be found in the two or three large cities of Ontario and Quebec. They tend to be from the upper-middle class families and be secularized.
Many will have been educated in the same private secondary schools; most will have attended a smattering of universities in Ontario and Quebec: the University of Toronto, Queen’s, and McGill (which Johnston headed when Trudeau was a student there).
A large number of them are bilingual, in a country where real bilingualism remains the exception.
Many have post-graduate degrees, often from abroad; something like a quarter of Mr Trudeau’s cabinet ministers have degrees from Oxbridge alone, a shocking figure given how uncommon they are among the population at large.
They then tend to gravitate into the same professional occupations, and they even live in the same few neighbourhoods in the same few cities. Sometimes, like the prime minister and his special rapporteur, they even end up sharing adjoining vacation cottages literally in the Laurentians region.
When he wrote his précis of the Laurentians in 2014, Ibbitson thought he was writing their obituary: Canada had a new Conservative prime minister with populist inclinations from Western Canada, a part of the world Laurentians tend to view with disdain. He had managed to overcome the structural handicaps in his party’s vote to pull together a coalition of disgruntled Westerners, suburban Ontarians, small-c conservative immigrants, and soft Quebec nationalists.
But the Laurentians struck back: the next year Trudeau, who was quite literally raised on the Laurentian consensus in the prime ministerial residence as a child, ousted the Western interloper and restored the natural order of things.
Pierre Poilievre, the current Tory leader, is now trying to rebuild the non-Laurentian coalition which gave Canada nine years of middling Conservative government not so long ago. Whether he will succeed is anyone’s guess. Until the matter is tested with the voters, the Laurentians’ hold on the Canadian body politic remains as strong as ever.