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True Patriot Love: Four Generations in Search of Canada, by Michael Ignatieff, Viking Canada, 211 pages, $30

Five years before the Liberal Party persuaded Michael Ignatieff to come back to Canada, in 2005, the expatriate author, journalist and human rights scholar made a return of his own.

With his wife Zsuzsanna, to whom True Patriot Love is dedicated, and his children, Theo and Sophie, to whom he says the book is a tribute, Ignatieff followed the route that his great-grandfather, George Monro Grant, had taken, in 1872, in the company of Sandford Fleming, the railroad engineer and surveyor who was the inventor of standard time and an early proponent of a coast-to-coast railway in Canada.

In that summer of 2000, Ignatieff had committed himself to a book about his mother's side of the family, as he had already done for his father's line in The Russian Album (1987). But political events soon overshadowed this more modest plan; successfully running for the Liberal Party in 2006 and then, two years later, leading it, made of Ignatieff a writer conflicted in his intentions. In the wrestling of his remarkable capacities, it is the rigorous scholar who has conceded the ground.

How can this not be said when, beneath The Inheritance, the ambiguously titled last chapter, a photograph of the author appears? This little bit of vainglory comes after the book's long rendition of family history in which the portrait of no one at all comes off badly – but, that is, for inconvenient George. That would be the second one, not the great-grandfather Monro but Michael's uncle George Grant, the Second world War pacifist and author of Lament for a Nation, a famous tract deploring the failing country that he imagined Canada, too much in the American sphere of influence, would become.

Doubters of Michael Ignatieff's “inheritance,” brace yourselves, for uncle George seems to be the only even slightly complicated character in Ignatieff's otherwise straightforwardly patriotic family tree.

Starting back in 1848, when George Monro took on Nova Scotia politician Joseph Howe's resistance to confederation with Canada, and persisting through the formation of the UN, Lester Pearson's creation of the world's first peacekeeping force and then NATO, the Grants and Ignatieffs appear to have been on the right side of pretty well all the pivotal arguments ever to have arisen in Canada, particularly those affecting issues of the present day.

They supported pioneers, miners, farmers, the Québécois, immigrants, Chinese-Canadians, Cree, Ojibwa, Louis Riel and the Métis, French Catholics struggling with Protestant school boards, the soldiers at Vimy, the hoi polloi who gathered there 90 years later, but also Parks Canada, truck drivers and the West Edmonton Mall. Had Ignatieff dug any deeper he would surely have found that a Grant or Ignatieff helped out a little old Inuk lady somewhere. (The Inuit are the only major constituency I can think of that's been left out.)

Without the acuity of The Russian Album , Ignatieff is merely warming himself in the sunny light of his progenitors. “A people can truly be united only when minorities do not feel themselves treated with injustice,” he quotes George Monro Grant as saying, back in 1895. The son, William Grant, writes to his wife, Maude Parkin, in 1918, “We both come of good blood, my dear, and it is something to be proud of.” Even the renegade Uncle George, safely pastured out to Halifax academia by then, comes around to Canada and war's valiant cause in the end.

Where George Monro Grant's “dream” of a fully-realized country, one that in turn became William's before it was Michael's, does not come across as sufficiently clear, it is inferred through proxies – in the author's reference, for instance, to the photograph of “The Last Spike” driven into the ground at Craigellachie, even if George Monro Grant “doesn't figure” in it. Or in the conversation that his own father, George Ignatieff, recalls having had with Lester Pearson, then a diplomat in wartime London, the two of them acting as fire wardens on the top of Canada House, in Trafalgar Square. The man who would later be prime minister deplores the indiscriminate bombardment of civilians, declaring that “there [has] to be a better way.”

Then, as in his recounting of Fleming and Grant's trip across Canada, Ignatieff deftly gathers the light. “After the war, he and [George] Ignatieff threw themselves into the creation of the United Nations, and then, as the Cold War developed, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In 1956, they worked together for the deployment of the first UN peacekeepers in Sinai, for which Pearson was awarded the Nobel Prize.”

Sometimes this habit of intertwining the family and Canadian history is a bit of a stretch. Ignatieff finds the point along the South Saskatchewan where his great-grandfather and Fleming swam across the river because the ferryman was absent that day, 130-odd years before, and writes: “The boatman working the crossing that summer, the records tell us, was one Gabriel Dumont, Métis Scout, guide and later rebel leader.” The assistant, he notes, was one “Xavier Latendre, the Métis trader nicknamed Batoche.” More territory covered.

At other, worse, times, the point of Ignatieff's empathy for Canada in all its guises is woefully suspect and even hilarious, as when, for instance, he writes of he and Zsuzsanna jauntily staying “in small motels where we shared hot tubs or pools with truckers with sunburnt arms and faces.” Ignatieff, in this newfound heady state, even marvels at how, when “the old homesteads are cleared away for a supermarket or a highway, they are jacked up on onto a trailer, together with their split-rail fences, [and] set down, along with lots of other buildings, in an interpretive centre,” as if all those years in Europe and travelling for the BBC never presented him with a similarly mundane job of preservation. What, I wonder, is at risk here – an allegiance to “shovel-ready” projects, the tarmac unions, or to Wal-Mart? Is there no vote this man will not chance to alienate?

Along their sentimental journey, the Ignatieffs look for their favourite pie and find it in a Ukrainian café, the name of which they cannot remember; and, in the literary equivalent of a politician's family photo opportunity, he and the kids reach the West Edmonton Mall and “its beach with plastic palms, terrifying (at least to me) water slides, a pirate ship in the middle of a supermarket and other wonders to behold.” Ignatieff, of course, is attempting to be ironic and to see Canada through the eyes of a child, but so much of the book is written in these sugary, crowd-pleasing tones that he stumbles. The downtown of the new Canada is a “multicultural bazaar.” On he goes, even finding a “prairie grass museum, about an acre of native-flower filled prairie-grass, the same kind George Grant rode through on horseback, driving the plovers and bumblebees up into the air.”

Gigantic marauding horseflies, more like. Except that Ignatieff, foregoing the distance and scrutiny of his previous work, has put on a cloak of rapture and the “we” that he once used to embrace the Americans whose territory he was sharing is now being applied to Canada with all the besotted indiscrimination of a teenager in love, caressing store windows, bricks, anything he passes; it's all the thigh of his beloved now.

Still, there are interesting tidbits to be picked out. Ignatieff's paean to nationalism as a community's shared act of the imagination that must be acted upon nicely begins the book, though its reduction of the sort of internationalist tendencies that characterized Canada in its prior peacekeeping era to “cosmopolitan” thinking resting on global, middle class privilege belittles this worldview and confuses, as is routinely the case these days, meta- and anti-nationalism. Canadians, after all, can want the object of their true love for others, quite legitimately, without being lesser patriots.

The political platform that Ignatieff eventually offers up is too brief and incomplete, but it is illuminating to see how his ideas of a trans-Canadian transport and labour corridor and a national energy strategy are so clearly rooted in the historical achievement of his great-great grandfather's journey with Fleming. Even Ignatieff's views about American preponderance, and the ways in which our cultural differences have constituted a sound defence against it, echo his uncle George's concerns, even though they refute them and, weakly argued, can seem like a bit of a sop thrown Canadians' way.

Family accounts for a lot. Ignatieff's grandfather, William Lawson Grant, was an author too, one who wrote “the most widely used historical textbook in secondary schools in the 1920s” while he was principal of Upper Canada College.

And yet, while schoolteacher William's place in the “inheritance” helps explain a little of the book's pandering tone, it does not excuse how this one is not enquiring, bold or controversial in the way that Ignatieff's other books are. What could have been the set of penetrating reflections about Canada that Ignatieff's literary followers have good reason to expect, or even the more thorough biography of his uncle George Grant, or his grandfather George, that might have ensued from the original project, has evolved instead into a slim and disappointing brochure intended to advertise the author's apparently incontestable Canadian pedigree.

Noah Richler is the author of This is My Country, What's Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada.