Leadership Quote by Preston Manning

Canada as a nation born from a vendetta against a small, damp mammal is funny because it’s almost true, and also because it’s an insult you can’t quite dispute without sounding humorless. Preston Manning’s line compresses a huge economic and political origin story into one absurd image: the beaver, fur, and the long commercial logic of the Hudson’s Bay Company. It works as a joke because it swaps the lofty founding myths other countries prefer - revolution, destiny, divine mandate - for something opportunistic and cold-eyed: trade routes, pelts, and profit.

The intent is slyly nationalist and faintly corrective. Manning isn’t denying Canada’s legitimacy; he’s reframing it as pragmatic, incremental, and market-made rather than blood-and-soil romantic. The subtext flatters a certain Canadian self-conception: we didn’t burn the place down to start over; we built a supply chain. That’s praise, delivered as a roast.

Context matters. Manning, a Reform Party architect, spent a career poking at central Canadian mythmaking and elite pieties. This quip fits his populist style: puncture the sanctimony, elevate “real” origins, hint that the country’s character is transactional and decentralized. Calling it a “relentless pursuit” also nods to the machinery of colonial expansion - the way commerce pulled settlers, governments, and borders across Indigenous lands. The beaver is cute on the nickel; the chase behind it was not.