Garrison mentality

[1] The garrison mentality posits that unaccommodating external environments in Canada, whether they be physical or political, have influenced the psyche of its inhabitants to make them introspective and defensive.

For example, the unknown wilderness and cold emptiness of Canada's landscape during settlement is suggested to have caused such qualities, as isolating oneself from a dangerous environment is safer than attempting to tame it.

Frye stated that travellers and merchants who resided in early Canada developed these social traits because they lived in garrisons, or isolated military communities.

[7] The theory was later expanded upon by poet D. G. Jones in the book Butterfly on Rock (1970), arguing that the garrison mentality's defensive stance against nature has shifted into a more amicable relationship since colonisation.

[1] Jones also expanded upon Frye's metaphor by considering the theory from a biblical perspective, asserting that significant Canadian writers have the salvational task to break down the garrison mentality.

Professor William Beard from the University of Alberta has stated that “the Frye-Atwood model [of the garrison mentality is viewed] with contempt if not outright hostility” in film studies.

This criticism contends that the theory is confined “to an Anglo-colonial way of thinking that puts white British conquerors in charge of everything, so blind to the regionalism and multiculturalism of the refigured national conversation”.

Academic Sherrie Malisch suggested that the garrison mentality is used too freely as a "shorthand for deficiencies in the Canadian national spirit... [it] appears in everything from a political rant against 'Laurentian elites' to an institutional critique of the CBC".