Beyond lament

Sixty years ago, philosopher George Parkin Grant (1918-1988) published his classic Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. At the time Grant was teaching in the religion department at McMaster University. A convert to Christianity in his youth, Grant would eventually become our country’s best-known public intellectual. Although he came from a prominent Liberal family – one that would produce his nephew Michael Ignatieff – Grant was a stubborn Conservative, albeit with sympathies for the old Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, now the New Democratic Party.

After John Diefenbaker’s Conservative government was defeated by Lester Pearson’s Liberals in 1963, Grant was convinced that Canada’s days as a distinct nation were numbered. Diefenbaker’s reluctance to accept American nuclear weapons on Canadian soil had irked the “ruling class,” whose members determined that he had to go. But Grant believed that Diefenbaker’s only offence was his conviction that Canadian defence policies should be made in Ottawa and not Washington.

I couldn’t help recalling Grant’s Lament as we have been subjected to Donald Trump’s repeated trolling comments about Canada becoming the 51st state of the United States. Grant would express anger at this, of course, but it’s far from clear that he would have rallied the (literal and metaphorical) troops in opposition. His professed purpose in his book was not to make “practical proposals for our survival as a nation,” but simply to lament – to grieve the loss of those traditions that had once made Canada distinctive.

Rare show of unity

Those traditions were made in both France and the British Isles but have been eroded by the homogenizing tendencies of technocratic liberalism. Canada’s formal existence may continue, Grant thought, but that would not forestall the long-range fate of the country as a branch plant of American capitalism.

Ironically, despite Grant’s protest to the contrary, Lament effectively mobilized a generation of English-speaking Canadian nationalists who sought to move beyond lament and to actively protect the country’s distinctiveness. Six decades later, despite Justin Trudeau’s ill-considered remarks about Canada becoming “the first post-national state,” Trump’s rhetorical threats to our country’s independence have effected a rare show of national unity – even across the English-French divide.

Several weeks ago, my wife and I attended a concert of the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra. As the conductor raised his baton, we expected to hear the opening bars of Maurice Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite. Instead, we heard a rousing rendition of O Canada. Delighted by this unexpected performance, the entire audience rose to its feet and sang our national anthem with unusual enthusiasm.

Perhaps we owe an ironic debt of gratitude to the current President of the United States, whose egregious threats to Canada have brought us together in a shared determination not to be American. I can’t be sure, of course, but I think Grant, who admittedly enjoyed defying people’s expectations, would approve.