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.
