Classicist at the University of Toronto and the least visible member of the Canadian line the series keeps tracing. He matters twice over: as the man who supplied Innis with the Greek background that shaped the Canadian argument, and as the subject of a long Kroker essay written forty years after his death. Start with dialogue 73, where Cameron produces him to explain where Kroker's Augustine came from.
Across the dialogues
Promoted from a name into a hinge — the classicist becomes the link that explains how Greek tragedy reached Innis, and how Kroker's Canada was already described four decades before he wrote it
The friendship is offered as a source of the Canadian sensibility itself — "the inside of the hick" names a provincial vantage that turns out to be an intellectual advantage rather than a limitation.
"Cochrane and Innis were very close, and that is another one of the sources of this, what can be called the inside of the hick."
The specific debt — Innis's reading of empire and communication rests on classical material he got from a colleague, which places Greek tragedy at the root of the Canadian tradition rather than beside it.
"Cochrane was able to give Innis the deep background in the Greeks, in Greek tragedy and Thucydides, to what was going on in the world and especially in Canada."
The date that makes the Kroker essay legible — Cochrane's early death fixes the forty-year interval Kroker was writing across.
"And Cochrane died in 1944, died young of cancer."
The reading that gives Cochrane his afterlife — Kroker treats a dead classicist's account as still the operative description of the country, which is why the Canadian argument keeps arriving pre-dated.
"Kroker saw Cochrane as defining Canada from 40 years before."
Connections
Cochrane gave Innis the Greek material — tragedy and Thucydides — that underwrites the Canadian reading.
Kroker devoted a long 1984 essay to Cochrane as the man who had defined Canada forty years earlier.