Politics & Power Quote by Preston Manning

Neutrality sounds like modesty, but in politics it is also a weapon: a way to define what counts as legitimate public concern. Preston Manning’s line borrows the moral authority of church-state separation and smuggles it into the culture wars. By analogizing culture to religion, he frames both as private, plural, and potentially combustible - domains where government involvement is presumed to be coercive. It’s a neat rhetorical maneuver: “neutral” reads as fair-minded restraint, while any cultural policy starts to look like soft establishment.

The subtext is less evenhanded than it appears. Declaring neutrality toward culture quietly treats culture as something that simply happens in the marketplace or the community, not something structured by funding, broadcasting rules, education, language policy, or whose histories get commemorated. “Neutrality” is a choice to stand back from those levers - which often means letting existing power and majority taste do the steering. In that sense, it’s a small-government argument disguised as tolerance.

Context matters: Manning rose as a prairie populist and Reform Party leader in an era when Canadian conservatives were skeptical of Ottawa’s nation-building tools, including arts funding and Canadian content rules, and wary of multiculturalism as an official project. The quote signals a preference for procedural government over cultural ambition: the state should arbitrate rights, not curate identity. It works because it offers an appealing promise - no favoritism, no moralizing - while sidestepping the fact that governments are cultural actors even when they pretend not to be.