It is always about freedom: the rhetoric of Canadian prime ministers

Freedom, in its many forms, has been a fundamental tenet of the political discourse of Canadian prime ministers, of their construction of the national identity, and of the creation of a national narrative for decades. This article examines how, since the Second World War, prime ministers have deployed the rhetoric of freedom and contributed to that discourse on freedom even as what it meant changed with new circumstances and new situations. What successive prime ministers meant when they invoked the concept of freedom was never constant, but several distinct elements of that discourse can be discerned in the rhetoric of prime ministers from the 1940s to the present.