This article originally appeared in Without Diminishment.
By Shawn Whatley, November 28, 2025
Calls to promote culture in politics are subversive. Those who work in the administrative state might even say it borders on sedition. Liberal politicians would call it undemocratic. Culture presents a material threat to the status quo, but not in the way you might assume.
We can see through the simplistic dichotomy of culture versus economy: You are not a socialist by supporting culture. We need both a cherished culture and a strong economy.
But the threat remains, and we need to unpack it.
Calls to re-emphasise culture ask for more than a simple reordering of social goods. By culture, we mean the lived norms, shared symbols, and inherited practices that bind a particular people into a common life. We ask government to change how it works, and change how it thinks. The whole approach threatens the status quo of the administrative state. And it challenges a central pillar of liberalism: the myth of the disinterested representative.
Calls to emphasise culture ask for something the administrative state cannot do.
To prioritise culture, officials must choose among competing visions of the good. To emphasise culture is to ask liberals to pick a side rather than defer to a pretend-neutrality that never quite exists in practice.
Calls to embrace culture ask for a new form of administration and a new vision of representation, at the same time.
Culture and administration
Picture an executive manager at the Ministry of Health preparing a report for her board of directors. She fills in her part of the board dashboard, which is a colour-coded spreadsheet, a snapshot of how the organisation is performing on its strategic plan. Each one of the strategic goals assigned to her department needs a label: green, amber, or red, which corresponds with all-systems-go, caution, and critical respectively. She adds quantitative key performance indicators (KPIs) to justify each coloured label. She might pull data from the latest statement of financial position, from a Gantt chart created by her project manager, and elsewhere.
Now imagine this executive has been asked to report on the culture in her department. What KPI does she use? Where does the data reside in her financial summary, Gantt chart, or board dashboard?
Culture represents an intangible asset. Broadly speaking, it is the collection of norms and behaviours that shape thoughts and behaviours within a particular group. Culture grows out of a peoples’ history and changes over time.
For example, staff working in one organisation will arrive early, stay late, and avoid slang. No rules dictate hours or language. They are simply part of the culture and expectations of that workplace. At another organisation, staff arrive late and swear like sailors.
But even though culture is an intangible asset, it is still an asset. Surely we can account for it in our spreadsheet-governed, KPI-driven, executive-managed approach? Just ask any accountant how hard, and often impossible, it can be to amortise a company’s intangible assets.
In this sense, culture is just one of many vital things that we cannot measure and struggle to manage. For example, how do we measure how much ‘peace’ a peace officer has kept? We can use proxies for intangible assets, such as management staff turnover or number of speeding tickets issued, but the assets themselves remain intangible.
Despite the challenge, culture remains crucial to the health of any group, organisation, or country. As Peter Drucker, management consultant, famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
Herein lies the crux.
Culture is a higher-order good that does not fit into a spreadsheet-governed, KPI-driven, executive-managed approach, for any organisation. This is why policy writers continue to craft proposals in terms of economics, law, and processes, even when more fundamental change is needed. It would be fruitless, and frustrating, to ask professional managers to implement a federal policy that simply calls for a culture of creativity and innovation.
Culture and representation
Considered at the level of federal politics, we can see that culture has not been ignored by intention. It is just irrelevant to the operation of government. Culture animates citizens, to be sure, but it falls outside concerns about state capacity, administrative function, regulatory capacity, and so on.
Today, politicians see themselves as overseers of an administrative machine. The machine drafts legislation and then implements whatever Parliament approves. We lack space to unpack the full nature of the machine itself. The point here is simply that politicians see themselves as overseers and, hopefully, masters of the machine beneath them.
A call to re-emphasise culture is actually a call for politicians to consider a higher-order good, something that falls outside the scope of the administrative state. This is unfamiliar in modern politics. It asks representatives to make decisions using criteria foreign to the status quo. You see it whenever a bill’s “regulatory impact analysis” tallies compliance costs and staffing needs. What it lacks is a line for what a measure does to civic memory, common rituals, or national symbols.
Culture asks politicians to embrace a new, much older notion of representation. We are asking them to become statesmen.
In the days of patriarchy and privilege, Samuel Johnson offered a vision of representation in government, in 1775. He said, “Parliament is a larger council to the King.” That is, representatives help the sovereign rule well.
Johnson goes on to describe the kind of people needed for Parliament to function. He says Parliament is a “great number of men of property concerned in the legislature, who, for their own interest, will not consent to bad laws.”
Of course, no one considers actual propertied interests in Parliament today. You needn’t be a landowner, male, or an aristocrat to hold office.
It is easy to miss the relevancy in Johnson’s point for us today. Johnson is not making a point about property or gender. He’s talking about interests, interests that bind representatives to the benefit of the country itself.
Politicians With Interest
Today, our parliamentarians too often appear to have no stake in Canada at all. Their interests are entirely their own. Canada just happens to be the particular vehicle in which they are able to achieve their own ends and those of their constituents. We even embrace parliamentarians who run for election as prime minister while actively opposing the nation of Canada itself. For example, a party whose constitutional project is secession.
Both left- and right-liberal politicians insist that true representation requires neutrality. One must never pick a side. It’s a pillar of democracy itself. We must insist that representation means nothing more than maintaining the neutral processes of the state.
The problem is that the pretense of neutrality turns towards diminishment of history and heritage in favour of greater individualism, equality, or some other universal value. Classical liberals have no resources to resist the turn. Despite their good work promoting liberty and representation in the 18th century, they remain powerless against progressive liberals who seek to dismantle any and all perceived limits on individual autonomy, including even biology.
The same pretense animates efforts to redesign the country in terms of liberal presuppositions. It puts a finger on the scale of all decision making, and right-liberal parties support it whole cloth. Better to admit the contest of visions than to smuggle one in under the language of neutrality.
Calls for culture take aim at the myth of neutrality. They ask our leaders to realise their ownership (interest) in the vision of Canada. We want representatives to defend that vision and oppose bad laws that threaten our beloved home, history, and culture.
In deciding how to vote in Parliament, the threat of negative impact need not be anywhere near a 50 per cent probability for a representative to oppose it. Potential threats to culture should remain central in representatives’ minds.
Furthermore, potential threats won’t be mentioned or measured by the professional managers who draft legislation or backgrounders. But representatives need to identify the risk and oppose the ‘bad laws’ as Samuel Johnson described. A statesman’s threshold for cultural risk should be low, precisely because what is lost is hard to restore.
Culture vs the status quo
Calls to promote culture in politics stand foursquare against the status quo of our administrative state and our liberal understanding of representation.
If political parties adopted this approach, it would threaten to disrupt the workflow and thinking of about 400,000 federal civil servants, not to mention several times as many consultants and experts who make a living advising the state.
Asking representatives to consider culture, history, and the vision of Canada in all their decisions would change how politicians speak and think.
Do not be fooled into framing this as a contest between culture and economics. We need great economic performance; that’s a given.
Instead, this is a contest between those who call for culture and the status quo of the whole administrative state. It challenges the liberal pretence of neutral representation and demands an authentic one that explicitly preferences a vision of Canada and its history.
Culture will not win without a fight, but it is a fight worth having.
Dr. Shawn Whatley is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
