Parenting & Family Quote by Wilfrid Laurier

Laurier’s line is diplomacy dressed as destiny: a rhythmic command to hold two loyalties at once without letting either curdle into grievance. The repetition of “let them look” works like parliamentary choreography, a leader setting the tempo for a young country that could easily fracture into warring memories. He isn’t simply urging balance; he’s authorizing it, granting permission to immigrants and old-stock citizens alike to feel a double attachment without being accused of disloyalty.

The subtext is Canada’s perennial problem and selling point: a nation built less on a single founding myth than on negotiated coexistence. In Laurier’s era, that negotiation was acute. Canada was absorbing newcomers, managing British imperial gravity, and trying to stabilize the French-English compact that Confederation promised but politics kept testing. “Land of their ancestors” nods to the emotional force of Europe, faith, language, and kinship networks; it also quietly acknowledges that those ties don’t vanish at the port. “Land of their children” shifts the moral weight forward. It frames belonging not as blood inheritance but as investment: your kids will live with the consequences of what you build here, so build here.

There’s strategy in the tenderness. By casting the future as children rather than abstract “progress,” Laurier sidesteps ideology and goes straight to an argument few voters can refuse. The line makes pluralism sound like common sense, not a concession. It’s nation-making as rhetoric: don’t erase the past, but don’t be governed by it.