Wealth & Money Quote by Robertson Davies

Canada, in Davies's telling, is a nation with a split personality: it wants the wildness of the North on its resume, but insists on showing up to the interview in a pinstripe suit. The line works because it collapses a whole cultural anxiety into two vivid archetypes. "Mystical spirit" gestures at the romantic Canada of wilderness, Indigenous cosmologies (filtered, tellingly, through a settler literary imagination), and a landscape so large it starts to feel like metaphysics. "Which it fears" is the tell: this isn't pride, it's ambivalence. The country flinches at its own intensity, worried that awe looks like weirdness.

Then Davies lands the joke: "a Scotch banker". Not merely British, but soberly, Presbyterianly respectable. The phrase evokes thrift, restraint, and institutional legitimacy - the kind of identity you can export without alarming anyone. It's a jab at Canada's long habit of branding itself as orderly, moderate, and reliable: the safe alternative next door, the competent manager in a world of louder empires.

Context matters. Davies, writing out of mid-century anglophone Canada, watched a young country still negotiating post-imperial hangovers and American gravitational pull. The subtext is that Canada's self-presentation has often been a defensive performance - politeness as camouflage, bureaucracy as identity - while the real source of distinctiveness lies in what can't be easily monetized or explained. His satire isn't anti-Canadian; it's diagnostic. The tragedy, and the comedy, is how often Canada chooses the banker.