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Canadian Political Science Association2025 Annual Conference Programme
The Politics of Belonging: Conflict,
Community, Curriculum
Hosted at George Brown College, Toronto, CANADA
June 3 to June 5, 20252025 Annual Conference Programme
The Politics of Belonging: Conflict,
Community, Curriculum
Hosted at George Brown College
June 3 to June 5, 2025
Political Theory
H04(a) - Author Meets Critics Session: Land and the Liberal Project - Canada’s Violent Expansion
Date: Jun 3 | Time: 01:45pm to 03:15pm | Location:
Chair/Président/Présidente : Didier Zúñiga (University of Alberta)
Éléna Choquette (Université du Québec en Outaouais)Melissa Williams (University of Toronto)
Daniel Rück (University of Ottawa)
Corey Snelgrove (University of Alberta)
Phil Henderson (University of Toronto)
Abstract: Éléna Choquette's 'Land and the Liberal Project - Canada's violent expansion'. Book abstract: “In 1867, Canada was a small country flanking the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes, but within a few years its claims to sovereignty spanned the continent. With Confederation had come the vaunting ambition to create an empire from sea to sea. How did Canada lay claim to so much land so quickly? Land and the Liberal Project examines the political, legal, and rhetorical tactics deployed by Canadian officialdom in the cause of nation making, from the first articulation of expansionism in the 1857 Gradual Civilization Act to the consolidation of authority over the prairies following the North-West Resistance of 1885. Drawing on numerous archival sources, Éléna Choquette contends that although the dominion purported to favour a gentle absorption of Indigenous lands through constitutionalism, administration, and law, it resorted to police repression and military force in the face of Indigenous resistance. She investigates the liberal concept that underpinned land appropriation and legitimized violence: Indigenous territory and people were to be “improved,” the former by agrarian capitalism, the latter by so-called protection and enforced schooling. By rethinking this tainted approach to building a transcontinental state, Choquette’s clear-eyed exposé of the Canadian expansionist project offers new ways to understand colonization. This challenge to nationalistic narratives will find a keen audience among scholars and students of political science and political theory, Canadian history, and Indigenous studies.”