Politics & Power Quote by Alex Campbell

Campbell’s sentence is the kind of careful political prose that tries to smuggle urgency in under a blanket of reassurance. It starts by distributing ownership: “all of us as Canadians” folds the listener into a shared project, but the phrase immediately widens into “members of the North American cultural and economic environment.” That pivot is the tell. He’s acknowledging, without quite naming, the gravitational pull of the United States and the way trade, media, and consumer culture don’t respect borders. You can hear the diplomatic throat-clearing in “to a greater or lesser extent party to,” a passive construction that softens responsibility. No one is blamed; everyone is implicated.

The real payload sits in “significant attitudinal change towards our culture.” He doesn’t say the culture has changed; he says attitudes have. That’s strategic: it suggests a shift in confidence, in policy appetite, in what Canadians are willing to protect, fund, or define as “ours.” It also avoids the messy particulars - broadcasting rules, cultural subsidies, language politics, nationalist backlash - while still gesturing at them.

Contextually, this reads like late-20th-century Canadian anxiety and ambition in one breath: the push to modernize economically while fearing cultural dilution. Campbell frames Canada not as a sealed identity but as a participant in a continental system, then insists there’s a turning of the wheel. The subtext is a call for permission: if attitudes are changing, government action can follow - not as coercion, but as an overdue response to a collective mood already in motion.