Book Review: Lament For A Nation: The Defeat Of Canadian Nationalism
When I came of age in the early 2000s, Canadian patriotism was everywhere. Molson’s “I Am Canadian” commercial struck a chord with Canadians. Canada’s men’s Olympic hockey team won its first gold medal in 50 years. Websites promoting Canadian patriotism and heritage popped up on the Internet. Proposals for closer political and economic ties with the United States like the Security and Prosperity Partnership were fiercely opposed. Similar opposition kept Canada from joining U.S. proposals like the 2003 invasion of Iraq or its missile defence shield.
These concerns weren’t new to Canada. In the mid-1960s, some observers thought that Canada was marching in full lockstep with the United States. The 1963 federal election that led to Lester Pearson defeating John Diefenbaker to become Prime Minister was fought over issues like Diefenbaker’s cancellation of the Avro Arrow program (which some people thought undermined Canada’s ability to have an independent defence policy) and the Bomarc Missile Crisis (which was based on whether U.S. nuclear missiles should be stationed on Canadian soil). More generally, some Canadians were alarmed by how much their country was pressured to cooperate with the U.S. on defence, particularly against Soviet-led Communism.
George Grant was one of those Canadians. A professor of everything from religion to philosophy to political science, Grant published Lament For A Nation: The Defeat Of Canadian Nationalism in 1963 (reprinted by McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000). In Lament For A Nation, Grant said that Canada was doomed to be absorbed by the United States and become a branch plant of the American economy. He considered Diefenbaker’s government to be the last attempt at creating a distinct society separate from the United States that could’ve had a higher purpose. The Liberals’ election under Pearson meant that assimilation was inevitable.
Modern conservatism emphasizes things like limited government, individual liberty and unregulated markets, but Grant’s conservatism saw society as an organic entity whose members had responsibilities to each other and the larger common good.
Much of Lament For A Nation centers around Grant’s criticisms of what he considers a ‘universal, homogenizing state.’ This state, personified by the U.S., erased peoples’ cultural, language and religious differences in favour of a technological marketplace society that focused on individual liberty and gain above everything else. Canada, which Grant saw as a ‘conservative’ society, was marching in lockstep with its southern neighbour, a path that inevitably meant that its own unique culture and heritage would be abandoned to be part of an American empire.
The conservatism Grant associated with Canada wasn’t the conservatism we often think of today. Modern conservatism emphasizes things like limited government, individual liberty and unregulated markets, but Grant’s conservatism saw society as an organic entity whose members had responsibilities to each other and the larger common good. Grant’s conservatism saw a positive role for state entities in building that society, and he cites Conservative nation-building examples like John A. Macdonald’s creating the Canadian Pacific Railway and R.B. Bennett creating the CBC and the Bank of Canada. It also has room for cultural differences. Grant cites the need to recognize and support the distinct cultures of both Quebec and Francophone Canada in general, as well as those of Indigenous people.
Such a society had space for freedom, but it also had a higher moral purpose in limiting some individuals’ freedoms so they didn’t run roughshod over their fellow citizens. Liberty is good in and of itself, but what should it be used for besides just making money?
In this, Grant distinguished between what he called the ‘necessary’ and what he called the ‘good’. The progress of technology and neoliberalism might make Canada’s being absorbed by the U.S. seem inevitable and necessary for individual liberty, but we’d lose out on the ‘good’ of our own unique history and culture, and any higher moral calling we might have. Grant’s biggest lament was that Canadians seemed happy to just accept what was ‘necessary’ and abandon anything that was ‘good’.
Grant might have been wrong about Canada’s ‘inevitable’ disappearance, but he was sadly all too right about the problems of a ‘greed is good’ ideology.
The next few years weren’t quite what Grant expected. He never intended Lament For A Nation as a rallying call, but many Canadians, particularly on the left, took it as one. An upsurge of ‘Canadianness’ followed for many of the next 20 years. Leftist advocates and politicians called for greater economic and cultural separation from the United States through everything from hiring Canadian rather than foreign professors in academia to government intervention such as the ‘CanCon’ requirements for TV and radio stations to air minimum amounts of Canadian-produced media. The late 1980s saw a surge of opposition to the proposed free trade agreement with the U.S., so that the 1988 federal election basically became a referendum on it. (The pro-agreement parties notably lost the popular vote in 1988, such that a majority of Canadians have never actually approved of free trade agreements, but that’s a story for another day.)
The ‘Canadianness’ movement died down somewhat in the 1990s, probably due to the 1995 referendum and the failed Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords, but it returned in the 2000s. The anti-free trade efforts failed in the 1980s, but the widespread opposition to the U.S.’s Iraq invasion and missile shield and attempts at further integration kept Canada from joining them.
In that sense, Grant was wrong about the inevitabiliy of Canada being absorbed by the U.S. If anything, his book may have actually helped prevent it with the ‘Canadianness’ it inspired. The fallout from Mission Failed in Iraq also seriously damaged the U.S.’s finances and influence. Now, many Canadians respect and like the U.S. as neighbours, but they probably oppose integration. The American political chaos of the last five or six years has probably just reinforced that feeling.
Grant might have been wrong about Canada’s ‘inevitable’ disappearance, but he was sadly all too right about the problems of a ‘greed is good’ ideology. The likes of Donald Trump in the U.S. and Pierre Poilievre here in Canada are gaining support even among conservatives by condemning the fallout of the neoliberal hardcore-free-market policies both countries have been following for the last 35+ years. Income inequality is so bad even globalist institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Economid Corum are worried about it; people have more and more trouble becoming homeowners; many people don’t feel like they have any hope of bettering themselves or their families. This widespread frustration and anger has been fresh meat for the alt-right in both countries. In his foreword to the 1970 edition of Lament, Grant wrote presciently about how one of his goals was to criticize the pretensions of the ‘universal state’, which led either ‘to planetary destruction or planetary tyranny.’
Another element of Grant’s thought that’s dated is arguably his orientation of the Liberal and Conservative parties. In the six decades since he wrote Lament, both parties’ orientations have drastically shifted. Grant is critical of the Liberals, but some of their actions both before and after he wrote Lament were critical to preserving a separate Canadian society and even working towards the ‘good’. Wilfrid Laurier skilfully defeated any attempts by British leadership to turn the British Empire into an imperial federation; Lester Pearson created public medicare, many other social safety programs, the start of official bilingualism and a new uniquely Canadian flag; and Pierre Trudeau created the Official Languages Act, the Foreign Investment Review Agency and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Even Grant acknowledged the hopeful signs of Canadian independence in 1970 among the Trudeau Liberals.
Meanwhile, since the 1980s conservative parties are the ones all-in on cutting taxes and spending while getting out of the way of unregulated markets and integrating with the U.S. In Grant’s time, old-style Tories found common cause with left-leaning nationalists, who both agreed about the need for society to have a higher moral purpose. That said, some of those elements arguably survive even among Canadian conservatives in ways that would make their U.S. counterparts break out in hives on everything from gun control to abortion both in Alberta and across all of Canada.
Other elements of Grant’s thought turned out to be far more astute than he likely realized. He wrote about the need for Anglophones to recognize and support the distinctiveness and rights of both Francophones and Indigenous people-and the assimilation of both communities into Anglophone society was seen as “necessary” the same way that Canada integrating with the U.S. was. The residential school system was justified as “helping” Indigenous people assimilate into non-Native society, which was seen as inevitable…and incidentally was furthered (but not started) by some of the same Tory politicians Grant admires.
Although Grant thought modernity meant that Canada would inevitably disappear, more and more people are questioning the standard “modern” paradigm we’ve been living in for the last few decades. Indigenous people have been working hard to restore their cultural traditions. Canada’s attempts to balance unity and diversity, while obviously not perfect, have also been cited as a model by other parts of the world. The neoliberal model is being increasingly questioned even by some of its biggest supporters.
Lament For A Nation is valuable both as a historical artifact and a commentary on the present. Many of Grant’s critiques and insights are just as valid today as they were in his time.
They might even help us find another way forward.
