News

In 1963, George Grant's mother, Maude Parkin Grant, died at 82 after five years lost in the white desert of Alzheimer's disease. By the end, if she acknowledged him at all, she mistook her son for her father, George Parkin. The woman he had called his anchor, the last living connection with the Parkin and Grant tradition, was now gone.

Two days after her death, the Liberal Party, led by Mike Pearson, combined with the other opposition parties to bring down the Conservative government of John Diefenbaker. The issue on which Diefenbaker fell was his refusal to allow American nuclear weapons – the Bomarc missile – on Canadian soil.

In another single, defining moment – with the severing of the last link with his ancestors, the perceived sellout of Canada by an old friend and the introduction of American weapons onto Canadian soil – Grant saw what he must do. Over the next year, he composed Lament for a Nation , a 97-page polemic that was, as he put it, “a celebration of ... the memory of that tenuous hope that was the principle of my ancestors.”

Diefenbaker's fall was the pretext, but the deeper source of the essay's extraordinary rhetorical power was his sense that a great tradition of patriotic identification with Canada, central to his being, had been betrayed by those, like Pearson, whom he had once considered friends.

The thesis of Lament for a Nation was simple and stark. Canada had gone from colony to nation to colony, from imperial subservience to Britain to imperial subservience to the United States. In the process, it had lost its identity and its soul. Its disappearance was only a matter of time.

But this was not all. The new empire of capitalism and commerce subverted all the smaller, local and provincial attachments that once went by the name of love of country.

In the era of technological modernity, love of country was a sentimental and retrograde illusion. A place like Canada could no longer serve as an object of love and longing.

Lament for a Nation appeared the year I began my undergraduate career at the University of Toronto. I rebelled against this pessimism then, as I do today. But George Grant's pessimism lays down the gauntlet. There is no easy answer to the challenge he posed – for he asked, as no one ever had before, Is Canada still possible?

He defended Diefenbaker and the Conservatives, he said, because, unlike the Liberals, “the character of Canada as British North America was in their flesh and bones.” He added that many men in the Conservative cabinet had been men of the 1939 war, as if this was proof of their loyalty to Britain, conveniently forgetting that he had been the pacifist and that “the ambitious little bureaucrat” – his acidic description of Pearson – had served in both the First and Second World Wars.

Prime Minister considered a sellout

George was equally scathing about Pearson's men – who now included his own brother-in-law, George Ignatieff (he had married Grant's sister Alison in 1945) – calling them acquiescent servants of American imperialism.

Ignatieff, who had preceded Grant as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol and was now working in the Canadian foreign service in Ottawa, did not enjoy George's remark that “the officials of External Affairs had mostly been educated in the twilight skepticism of Oxford liberalism.” In Grant's hands, “liberalism” became a catch-all term of abuse, a synonym for value-free secularism and supine acquiescence to the American takeover.

To the world outside the Grant-Ignatieff family, Lament was a masterpiece of rhetorical invective, accusing the entire civil service establishment of Liberal Ottawa of a trahison des clercs , a betrayal of Canada to the Americans. Canadian socialists and left-wingers loved the book's denunciation of the civil service, the branch-plant economy and the dependence of the Canadian capitalist class on their American masters.

Inside the family, Lament was seen as a reckless reckoning, with slights imagined and real, going back to wartime London. For all the left-wing rhetoric, its real purpose was to reappropriate the family tradition as a defence of a conservative Christian Canada.

Grant sought to channel the voices of the ancestors, but in doing so, he gave them his own voice alone. Neither his grandfather nor his father had ever been so uniformly negative about the Americans, so hostile to science and technology and everything that went by the name of progress. His grandfather had opposed trade reciprocity with the Americans in the election of 1891, but his father, William, had been in favour of it in the election of 1911. To say that the family spoke with one voice – against economic integration with the United States – was never true. To say that Canada could only be conservative or it could not exist had never been the ancestral doctrine. But in George's act of ventriloquism, the ancestors spoke, and they spoke in support of his vision of Canada.

In doing so, however, George emptied the tradition of any capacity to inspire hope and faith in the country's future. If Canada could exist only as a conservative country, and if liberals had sold it out to the Americans, with the complicity of most Canadians, what hope remained? Precious little. He had voided the ancestral traditions of what had been central to them, namely a faith that Canada could shape and master its own destiny. If politics and political action were futile, where were Canadians to look for salvation? George took refuge in his own religious faith, forgetting that this consolation was not necessarily available to most of his readers. The concluding paragraph of Lament ended in a note of otherworldly bleakness: Those who loved the older traditions of Canada may be allowed to lament what has been lost. ... Multitudes of human beings through the course of history have had to live when their only political allegiance was irretrievably lost. What was lost was often something far nobler than what Canadians have lost. Beyond courage, it is also possible to live in the ancient faith, which asserts that changes in the world, even if they be recognized more as a loss than a gain, take place within an eternal order that is not affected by their taking place.

Lament 's last line is a quotation from Virgil: Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore . “They were holding their arms outstretched in love toward the further shore.” If the ancestral traditions were calling us ever more faintly from an ever-increasing distance, then politics in Canada was finished, and all that was left was the consolation of faith.

DEATH DIAGNOSIS PREMATURE

Only politics wasn't finished. Everywhere anybody looked in 1965, the year Lament appeared, a generation of students and radicals was trying to stop the war in Vietnam.

I invited my famous uncle to address a teach-in at the University of Toronto. I vividly remember the impression made by this gigantic figure, who appeared like a bearded patriarch, though he was only 46 at the time. He stood before a crowd of 5,000 people in Varsity Arena and announced, “I speak as a Canadian nationalist and as a conservative.”

We should rage against the dying of the Canadian light, he told the crowd, but we should be under no illusions that it is dying. Even if the war in Vietnam could be ended, the impulses that had created the war – the American drive for imperial mastery propelled by the liberal faith in technology – were woven so deep into the psyches of even those who opposed the war that purging North American civilization of these imperatives was futile. Holding on to the vestigial, minor differences that distinguished Canada from the United States was hardly worth the political effort.

He concluded that speech with a dark admonition. Hope in the future has been and is the chief opiate of modern life. Its danger is that it prevents men from looking clearly at their situation. ... Moral fervour is too precious a commodity not to be put into the service of reality.

The Canadians who heard him that day believed he was actually calling for a revival of Canadian nationalism, and they took him at his word. He may have counselled fatalism but, happily, Canadians did not listen. Ironically, he played his part in reviving a political debate about Canada and its relation to the United States that endures to this day.

He made the mistake of believing that the differences that separated the culture of liberty in Canada and the United States were vestigial and doomed to die away. But they were more stubborn and substantial differences than he supposed, and the defence of them has proved successful.

America and Canada are both free nations. But our freedom is different: There is no right to bear arms north of the 49th parallel, and no capital punishment, either; we believe in collective rights to language and land, and, in our rights culture, these can trump individual rights. Not so south of the border. Rights that are still being fought for south of the border – public health care, for example – have been ours for a generation. These differences are major, and Grant's conclusion that they were minor misunderstood Canadian history and our enduringly different political tradition.

His second mistake was to believe that since we had lost the anchorage of Britain, we had lost the feature that distinguished us from the Americans. This had been the ruling illusion of both his grandfather and his father – that Britishness defined who we were as a people.

But we had never just been British. Our myths of origin are plural, not singular. We have three, English, French and aboriginal. Three peoples share a state, a land. Grant paid almost no attention to the constitutive role of the aboriginals and Métis in Canadian identity and tended to regard la survivance of Quebec as a noble but dying vestige of the pre-industrial era.

The third mistake was that he gave up on his country at exactly the moment when it roused itself to action. At the moment of Lament 's appearance, Canada went through the most extraordinary reinvention of its identity in history. And to no one's surprise but his own, much of the impetus behind this was inspired by the party he detested, the Liberal Party of Canada. In the 20 years after Lament for a Nation was published, Canada staged Expo 67, the most triumphant affirmation of Canadian pride before or since; we had the Quiet Revolution and the resurgent reaffirmation of Quebec identity in North America; we had the promotion of official bilingualism; the modern Canadian welfare state – medicare and the Canada Pension Plan – was created, distinguishing us ever more sharply from the United States; we had the repatriation of the Canadian Constitution, the next-to-last symbol of our dependency on the British, and the creation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, incarnating a distinctive national rights culture; and we gave ourselves a national anthem and a flag. And last but not least, we opened our doors to immigration from the four corners of the world, transforming the population and internationalizing our identity as never before.

We are still taking the measures of these changes, but no reasonable person can conclude that the Canadian identity is weaker now than it was in 1965. Yes, we've gone into free trade with the United States and, as we did so, we feared assimilation, loss of identity and loss of sovereignty. Can we honestly say these fears have been realized?

CAPITALISM IS A BOON TO NATIONALISM

And as for George's larger argument about the impact of global consumer capitalism on national consciousness in general, the remarkable feature of modernity is not the erosion of local, national attachments, but, on the contrary, the reassertion of ethnicity, language and race as markers of national identity in the modern world.

To paraphrase Isaiah Berlin, the bent twig of national identity, pushed down by the forces of global commerce, the American way of life and communist tyranny, snapped back with the end of the Cold War, and everywhere you looked – whether it was the former Yugoslavia, Quebec, the Basque country, Scotland or the Middle East – a passionate resurgence of ethnic, religious, tribal and local identities had rewritten the history Grant had thought was leading us to imperial domination and cultural uniformity.

So he was wrong. Wrong. Wrong again.

And yet Lament for a Nation remains a masterpiece of grief and anger. It continues to speak to an elemental anxiety about our country, that sense that there is not enough here to make a great country.

For the imperialists in the family, greatness would come to Canada if it aligned its destiny with an imperial British future. Their grandson George saw this future die in wartime London, as a battered England surrendered its hegemony to the arriving Americans. He then asked, If the dream was done, what would replace it as the guiding mythology of his native land? Around him he felt the American way of life sweeping away the small-town Canada he so loved.

Against this gathering wave, he could mount only a cry of despair.

The family tradition from which he spoke, and which lives in me and my generation, need not end in lament. He gave up on the country. He should not have. The country is not done. The story has only just begun. There is so much more to tell, so much more to do.

From True Patriot Love by Michael Ignatieff. © Michael Ignatieff 2009. Reprinted with permission of Penguin Group (Canada).