Conditional Love (See Under: Nationalism-Canada) features a personal narrative intercut with home movies, a reading by the poet Robin Blaser, interviews ranging from a heart to heart with Robert MacNeil, to on the street encounters at Canada Day celebrations north and south of the border, "from sea to sea", which is Canada's motto in Latin, ad mare usque as mare.

"There is no meta-narrative" Lister says in the tape, "or as Yeats once wrote, 'the centre cannot hold.'" Does this lack of a traditional nationalist ideology in a decentred Canada become a model for a working post-modern country, a 'new notion of a nation'?