A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
Your search term is Canada. Scroll down for the results!
🔍 Search Within Selection
Canada is being viewed as a chapter. Search for all appearances
Viewing chapter Canada (46 quotes)
Thus the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, much like its British counterpart, is a federal body which controls all privately-owned radio stations. And a great proportion of our radio programs are inspired by conceptions of cultural uplift, or the highbrow's burden, for which Ottawa foots the bill.
“Defrosting Canadian Culture,” American Mercury, Vol. 74, No. 339, (1952), p 91
Year: 1952
One major benefit of this situation, incidentally, has been the high standard of Canadian radio drama. Bureaucratically controlled radio can never accept the attitude so natural to commercial companies, that programs should cater to the average taste.
“Defrosting Canadian Culture”, in American Mercury, Vol. 74, No. 339, (1952), pp 91-92
Year: 1952
Canadians are all a very humble bunch. They take it for granted that everything they do must be second rate.
Quoted in Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger (1989), p 119
Year: 1989
In the land of rye and caution fourteen million people are stretched out thinly along a 5000-mile frontier. There is no possibility of defense in depth against the aggression of American pin-up girls. Canadians are the only people on earth who read more alien than national cultural matter.
“Defrosting Canadian Culture”, in American Mercury, Vol. 74, No. 339, (1952), p 93
Year: 1952
By the time of the power press in the early 19th century, the newspapers were rapidly changing the character of politics by creating public opinion. In a new country like America the new medium of the press created the first instance of a state founded on public opinion. English political forms, predating the press, still depend much less on public opinion, as do those of Canada.
Counterblast, (1969), 125
Year: 1969
Such national unity as Canada possesses is the result of an East West railway which was rushed into being by the government to prevent American infiltration of the Western territories. The enormously expensive and unprofitable railway system thus constructed was more of a political gesture than an economic speculation. It naturally led to the negotiation of trade agreements with England to foster East-West movements of goods to pay for the railways.
“Defrosting Canadian Culture”, in American Mercury, Vol. 74, No. 339, (1952), p 92
Year: 1952
As a visiting Frenchman once pointed out, the Canadian is like a poor man sharing an apartment with a rich man. He lives continually beyond his means in a state of perpetual anxiety and expediency. Just as naturally he develops a power of acute observation and the ability to comment shrewdly on the ebullient comings and goings of his rich friend to the south of him.
“Defrosting Canadian Culture”, in American Mercury, Vol. 74, No. 339, (1952), p 92-93
Year: 1952
Drawn to McLuhan #1
The French English division in Canada has coincided with the natural geographic weakness of official East-West unity. And the natural North-South alignment is seen in the fact that there are nearly as many French who have moved to New England as there are left in Quebec itself.
“Defrosting Canadian Culture”, in American Mercury, Vol. 74, No. 339, (1952), p 93
Year: 1952
So far as quantity goes the printed book was the first instrument of mass culture.
“Culture without Literacy”, in Explorations #1, December (1953), p 124 reprinted in Essential McLuhan, (1995), p 309, additional reprint in Media Research Technology, Art and Communication (1997), p 134. and McLuhan Unbound #6, (2017)
Year: 1953
At the beginning of the twentieth century Canada was just ceasing to be a colony of Great Britain. But two wars have destroyed the British economy and fostered such extensive trade between Canada and the United States that Canada is now becoming a colony of the United States. And so, of course, is Great Britain. In fact, Canadians may soon be in demand in Britain to enlighten Englishmen in the art of being a colony. Canadians have had a long time to learn this peculiar art and even manage to be nonchalant about their skill.
“Defrosting Canadian Culture,” American Mercury, Vol. 74, No. 339, (1952), p 94
Year: 1952
So the Canadian, located between two great communities, the English and the American, is provincial to both. He would, therefore, be in a superb position to develop habits of critical insight if the developments of such habits were not paralyzed by colonial timidity or Scottish caution.
“Defrosting Canadian Culture”, in American Mercury, Vol. 74, No. 339, (1952), p 95
Year: 1952
Actually, the very absence of cluttering example and traditions in the arts is the main Canadian opportunity. The only possible strategy for the Canadian writer, poet, artist (as it was for Joyce, Pound, and Eliot when they found themselves in cultural backwaters) is to conquer the old traditions through the most revolutionary artistic techniques suggested by the current modes of science and technology. This is the really great advantage enjoyed by any provincial in a time of rapid change. He can not come to the new through the old, but must discover and master the old through what is most recent. By the very nature of his situation, he is familiar with the new and somewhat at a loss in the presence of the traditional. This was the advantage of the Elizabethans confronted by the high art of Italy and France. It was the advantage of Walter Scott and Tolstoy and Faulkner bringing the newest art techniques to unexploited provincial subject matter. For the men in the center of change have less opportunity for appraisal and invention than those on the periphery.
“Defrosting Canadian Culture”, in American Mercury, Vol. 74, No. 339, (1952), p 95
Year: 1952
Chapter:
Anticipating Change
…English Canada today is still Victorian in its “serious” culture and contemporary only insofar as it absorbs unconsciously the entertainment of the American mass-media. But the French in Canada are not handicapped by the same measure of culture-lag which in English Canada creates acute indigestion in the presence of the art and thought of as a technological world.
“Defrosting Canadian Culture”, in American Mercury, Vol. 74, No. 339, (1952), p 96
Year: 1952
The Royal Commission is squarely in line with our bureaucrats and Victorian patriarchs in supposing that culture is basically an unpleasant moral duty. According to this view, everything that people do spontaneously and with gusto, everything connected with industry, commerce, sport, and popular entertainment is merely vulgar. Americans are sufficiently familiar with this attitude through the genteel tradition of New England which dominates their academic life….Who knows? Perhaps the next Royal Commission on Canadian culture may include a brief notice on Walt Disney and ice-hockey as Canada’s outstanding contributions to world culture in the twentieth century.
“Defrosting Canadian Culture”, in American Mercury, Vol. 74, No. 339, (1952), pp 96-97
Year: 1952
Once Canadians adopt that attitude [of not trying to defend themselves against the culture of America or England] they will drop their defensive tactics against the “threat” from English and American culture and welcome such contacts. But it is probable that Ottawa will in the meantime spend considerable money on a cultural Maginot line which would do less harm if built in the Arctic Circle to protect us from the infiltration of Eskimo folklore.
“Defrosting Canadian Culture”, in American Mercury, Vol. 74, No. 339, (1952), p 97
Year: 1952
In fact, Walt Disney will serve very well as an instance of the peculiar advantages which Canadians enjoy when they are prepared to look at their situation in respect of the arts of the twentieth century. They have reached the end of the Gutenberg era of the printed word before, as Canadians, they have had anything very important to print. They are, therefore, free to exploit the new media without the exhausting effort of self-extraction from the old.
“Defrosting Canadian Culture”, in American Mercury, Vol. 74, No. 339, (1952), p 97
Year: 1952
Never having had the intense specialism of a mechanized consumer economy, French Canada retains its bonds with oral cultures and their total field approach. The all-at-onceness of electric data is not only organic and inclusive but reshapes the entire imaginative lives of highly literate communities.
Letter to Pierre Elliot Trudeau April 16, 1968, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 351
Year: 1968
One theme that may have some immediate relevance: Canada is the only country in the world that has never had a national identity. In an age when all homogeneous nations are losing their identity images through rapid technological change, Canada alone can "keep its cool." We have never been committed to a single course or goal. This is now our greatest asset. The parallel is to be found in the recent need of the business world to switch from private enterprise to tribal conglomerates on the pattern of medieval dynastic marriages, another massive example of decentralism foisted upon us by electric speeds.
Letter to Pierre Elliot Trudeau, December 2, 1968, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 359
Year: 1968
The Canadian is mildewed with caution!
“Understanding Canada and Sundry other matters: Marshall McLuhan “interview in Mademoiselle Magazine, January (1967), p 129
Year: 1967
I like living in Canada because it keeps me in a constant state of annoyance.
Quoted by B.W. Powe; said to him in conversation at the Coach House in September,1979
Year: 1979
Chapter:
McLuhan on McLuhan
“I had lunch with him after our class together ended, in the St. Michael's dining room. On our way back to the Coach House, we talked about Canada, being Canadian. He said…’Canada is a mosaic without an identity. And if you wanted to be a Nationalist, which part of the mosaic would you pick up and use?’ ...They were the seeds for my books, Towards a Canada of Light and Mystic Trudeau…. That was the last time I saw him well.”
B.W. Powe
Letter to the editor, The Globe and Mail, published in the issue of October 30, 2020
Year: 2020
We all feel so guilty, here in Canada, about what we did to the Indians.
Quoted by Tom Wolfe in his speech at the McLuhan Conference, Fordham University, 1999
Year: 1999
Assumption College, [where McLuhan was hired to teach in 1944] … is a little bay of silence – a little backwater in a stagnant stream. Oh the mental vacuum that is Canada.
Letter to Wyndham Lewis, December 13, 1944, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 165
Year: 1944
No, there is a huge inertia in Canada. I like this, because it enables me to sort of move ahead of the rest of them.
“Understanding Canada and Sundry other matters: Marshall McLuhan “interview in Mademoiselle Magazine, January 1967, p 130
Year: 1967
North Americans will need another refuge, a place where nostalgia, for example, could serve as a link with the stability of times gone by. If a U.S. citizen so chose, Canada could become an enormous psychic theme park; something like a Hollywood set that simultaneously links the past with the present, the city with the wilderness.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers (1989), p 148
Year: 1989
Chapter:
Predictions
But as a counter environment, Canada has the opportunity to achieve a kind of artistic awareness of the United States and typically Canadians have shown considerable aptitude in making ironic and comic and humorous observations about the United States.
“Telescope 67”, CBC TV show, Fletcher Markle (1967), Transcript,09:38
Year: 1967
Like Shaw, the Canadian "nobody" can have the best of two worlds—on the one hand, the human scale of the small country, and on the other hand, the immediate advantages of proximity to massive power.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers (1989), p 151
Year: 1989
Chapter:
Human Scale
The leapfrogging party, having no stake in the past, has a tremendous advantage in the 20th century. French Canadians, therefore, can be far more contemporary than English Canadians, and are automatically so in the arts and in daily life. They accept the 20th century naturally and with enthusiasm. The electronic age is congenial to such a retribalized group. It brings them so close together.
“Understanding Canada and Sundry other matters: Marshall McLuhan “interview in Mademoiselle Magazine, January 1967, p 128
Year: 1967
The fact that we are a counter environment, rather than an environment, is well reflected in the fact that they don't spend any time writing about us.
“Telescope 67”, CBC TV show, Fletcher Markle (1967), Transcript, 09:59
Year: 1967
People in any environment are much less privileged with regard to observing themselves, than those slightly outside. [Reference to the French and English in Canada]
“Telescope 67”, CBC TV show, Fletcher Markle (1967), Transcript, 09:15
Year: 1967
Without any self-consciousness English Canadians enjoy the advantages of a dual language. Canada is linguistically in the same relation to the United States as America is to England.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers (1989), p 152
Year: 1989
I have an essay coming out in a Harvard book on Canada called “Canada: The Borderline Case.” It's in a book called The Canadian Imagination. And the theme has to do with the strange effects of being on so many borderlines in Canada. We have so many cultural borderlines in every direction that it is very confusing to the idea of private identity or even group identity. But it is very enriching too, because people on frontiers have a very rich life of interplay with other people, other cultures.
Mike McManus TVO interview, 1977, transcript 26:10
Year: 1977
B L A S T
England ancient GHOST of culture
POACHING the EYES of the Canadian HAMLETS
USA COLOSSUS of the South, horizontal
HEAVYWEIGHT, flattening the Canadian imagination
CBC BBC NBC CBS
Nets of the BIG GAME hunters, lairs of the NEW BABBITTS
THE NEW YORKER whimsical syncophant of CREAM PUFF culture
Hevyaleprinceton, nurseries of the ivy-clawed adolescent, the creeper mind
The printed b(oo)k moth-eated STRAIGHT-JACKET of the Western mind abstract art linked with ABSOLUTE ZERO
and 1914
B L A S T (for kindly reasons)
C A N A D A
The indefensible Canadian border
The SCOTTISH FUR-TRADERS who haunt the trade routes and folkways of the Canadian psyche
B L A S T all FURRY thoughts
The Canadian B E A V E R,
Submarine symbol of the
SLOW
UNHAPPY
Subintelligentsias
The woodcraft of all beaver minds devoted
To CANADIAN PONDS AND STREAMS
The UNBLASTABLE Scottish psyche of
CANADA
BLAST its canny flint-eyed MYOPIA
The original Counterblast (1954), these lines were spread in a very large font over unnumbered pages 2 and 3
Year: 1954
But what complete isolation governs the maturing of any thought in this country! You have had a big taste of it.
Letter to Wyndham Lewis, January 17, 1944, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 147
Year: 1944
In print-oriented Toronto, poetry-reading in the public parks is a public offense. Religion and politics are permitted, but not poetry, as many young poets recently discovered.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 53
Year: 1964
A serious writer updates a culture – I don’t think there’s any serious writing going on in Canada today – by anybody.
Interview by Linda Sandler, in Miss Chatelaine, September 1974, p 59
Year: 1974
Nature and history seem to have agreed to designate us in Canada for a corporate, artistic role. As the U.S.A. becomes a world environment through its resources, technology, and enterprises, Canada takes on the function of making that world environment perceptible to those who occupy it. Any environment tends to be imperceptible to its users and occupants except to the degree that counter-environments are created by the artist.
“The Marfleet Lectures” , March 16-17, 1967, reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 104
Year: 1967
The U.S.A. is socially and informationally the environment of Canada. Canada is, by way of being anti-environment, a prepared situation that permits perception of the environment … Canada as anti-environment to the U.S.A. is able to perceive many of the ground rules and operational effects of the American environment that are quite imperceptible to the U.S.A. If the U.S.A. has built its distant-early-warning system in Canada for military use, let us observe that we can be of far greater use to the U.S.A. as an early warning system in the social and political spheres generally.
Letter to Claude Bissell, March 4, 1965, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 319.
Year: 1965
Canada has no identity because it has too many borderlines. Diversity does not create identity. It creates a very low-profile thing, whatever it is. If you want a real identity then you have to close off most of the borderlines and most of the cultural situations have to be thrown away to concentrate on a few strong positions and then you get a national identity. That’s why you need a war and a great big bloodbath to create a national identity…
“It Will Probably End the Motorcar” (1976), p 27
Year: 1976
Never having had a sharply defined national identity in the age of 19th century hardware, Canadians are enjoying a very great advantage of flexibility in the electric age. It is easy for them to adopt a wide range of roles in many parts of the world, without any sense of endangering or flawing their national character. An Englishman, a Frenchman, or an American, has an identity deeply embedded in comment to old hardware. Compared to these new realities, the old railway dream belongs to Disneyland. It may well be for this reason that it will become top entertainment.
Untitled typescript on Canada dated March 7, 1974; marginal note reads, “Can mag” but apparently never published
Year: 1974
MCMANUS: Would you like to tell us whether the country is going to stay together or not? And thereby be telling us what's happening to us now?
MCLUHAN: Well, that is a... I don't know if I'd call that a prophecy or not. There is a sense in which the separatism occurred long ago. But there is a hardware sense in which it is still intact. The country is still intact in a hardware sense, a legal sense. It is the hardware, I think, that is under danger under electric conditions. The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.
“Mike McManus TVO interview with Marshall McLuhan” (1977), transcript 27:12
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Predictions
MCMANUS: What about the multi-cultured mosaic?
MCLUHAN: That is an amazing ploy to preserve the cultural identity of Quebec and other minorities. It’s to...
MCMANUS: Why do you call it a ploy, though?
McLUHAN: The Quebecois are terrified of being merged in the American culture. I think it's as simple as that. And I think they're right. They're absolutely vulnerable. We're all vulnerable to the Americans, and they're a very attractive and wonderful people, and I think we could easily become merged in their lives, as we tend to be anyway.
MCMANUS: Does that mean, in order to lessen their fears, we attempt to paralyze different immigrant groups coming in at the state of their arrival?
MCLUHAN: And keep their cultures intact and separate. That is the meaning of the multi-cultural mosaic. The mosaic is static. It isn't in a state of constant inter-animation, or interplay. No, it's static. And that's exactly the way the French want to remain; they want to remain just the way they are. And so it's not that easy. So this is an amazing, as I say, ploy developed to make this possible. I don't know if it will work, but I certainly don't wish them ill on this manoeuvre. It is a kind of media ecology, you see? It's a way of using our available resources in communication to keep people apart. And to keep them intact without merging. So it is, I think, it's a drastic move. I never heard of it occurring in any other country, did you? I never heard of a multi-cultural mosaic as an idea for immigration. It's an amazing strategy of survival. Survival, however, is a legitimate goal in life, especially in a fast-changing world.
“Mike McManus TVO interview” (1977), transcript 24:14
Year: 1977
I have always felt that one of Canada’s great assets was it being a kind of “backwater”. Now having been totally involved in current trends it has been able to enjoy a flexibility that is rare.”
Letter to P.E. Trudeau, April 16, (1968), cited in, Been Hoping We Might Meet Again, edited by Elaine Kahn, (2019). p 51
Year: 1968
Chapter:
Trudeau, Pierre Elliott
Let me suggest that Canada as a counter-environment to the world environment created by the United States may not only be the means of creating a colossal artistic vision of the present meaning of the United States to the world, but that Canada may well incur the deep unpopularity that results from performing this necessary function.
Marfleet lecture, 1967, p 16 of original published version
Year: 1967
The advantage of living in Canada, in general, is to watch the United States making fools of themselves. They have become a research lab in which all sorts of hideous experiments are performed while we stand by and watch them kill themselves off. Canada is in the very fortunate themselves position of being a scientific observer of the most hideous experiments being performed on vast bodies of people.
“Speaking of Winnipeg,” 1974, p 28
Year: 1974
Chapter:
America, North America