War & Peace Quote by Kim Campbell

A clean demographic fact can be a political weapon when it’s deployed with this kind of calm certainty. Kim Campbell’s line reads like a neutral statistic, but its intent is to widen the frame: not “here’s a policy,” but “look at the scale of the country you’re arguing about.” By anchoring population growth “since the end of the Second World War,” she ties Canadian change to a moral and historical hinge point, when the liberal international order was rebuilt and immigration patterns, prosperity, and the welfare state expanded. The sentence borrows the gravitas of that era without needing to invoke ideology outright.

The subtext is pressure. A nation that has “more than doubled” is implicitly a nation whose institutions are being stress-tested: housing, health care, infrastructure, schools, labor markets, and the social contract itself. Campbell’s choice of “our” is doing quiet work too, pulling the listener into shared ownership of the numbers and pre-empting the usual partisan dodge that growth is someone else’s problem. It’s also a nudge against nostalgia politics. If the country has fundamentally changed in size, then a longing for an earlier, simpler Canada becomes less an argument than a refusal to do math.

Context matters: Campbell, as a former prime minister and a prominent voice in Canadian public life, often speaks from the register of national stewardship rather than campaign hype. The line is designed to sound non-combative while smuggling in a demand for adult governance: if Canada has doubled, policies can’t be scaled by sentiment. They have to be scaled by reality.