This year marks the 60th anniversary of Canadian philosopher George Grant’s Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism, a seminal work that reshaped Canadian political discourse. Published in 1965, Grant’s critique of American cultural dominance and technological modernity challenged Canadians to reconsider their national sovereignty and identity. To mark the occasion, this summer, The Hub will feature a series of essays from big thinkers exploring the book’s enduring legacy and how its insights remain vital to understanding Canada and its relationship with the United States today.
George Grant’s Lament for a Nation is not a promising subject for commemoration. Published in 1965, it was a furious eulogy for a country that, according to the book’s thesis, had already been dead some 30 years. Grant later admitted it was written in a state of “rage” at the sneering rejection of John Diefenbaker, in whom Grant had invested his last hope for the country, by “the Canadian establishment and its political instrument, the Liberal party.” Sixty years later, the Canada Grant lamented is utterly forgotten, and the Canada in which he wrote it is itself a grainy memory of an unrecoverable country.
I suspect Lament remains in print today for the same reason it was an unexpected success in 1965: as an anti-American tract. For a certain sort of Canadian whose gaze, then as now, is always fixed on the near horizon of the 49th parallel, the book confirmed their fear that we are being absorbed inexorably into the American empire, our birthright sold for a mess of Yankee pottage by a conspiracy of corporate greed and political expediency. If that sounds familiar today, it is why Lament remains popular, but it is not why it is still relevant.
Technology triumphant
Grant’s book is really two stories: there is the title story about the betrayal of Canada, the tale of a conservative country that couldn’t conserve itself, but it is embedded in a second story, a philosophical meditation about the threat that technology poses to the possibility of cultural nationalism anywhere. A Lament for Nations. The first story may be of minor interest to historians and sentimental reactionaries, but it is the second story—more an alarm than a lament—that demands our attention today.
The title story is a museum piece, incomprehensible to anyone too young to have heard the last enchantments of Old Canada whispered by those who knew her. The lost Canada Grant laments—the gentle Toryism of Upper Canada and the Catholicism of Lower Canada; the worlds of Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business and Philippe Panneton’s Trente arpents—are the things we have been taught to despise about our past; while the things that Grant deplores—the cult of progress and what today we call “globalisation”—are the things we are told we must embrace.
Whether Grant’s communitarian, hierarchical, and religious Canada ever really existed, it is now dead without a doubt. Professional conservatives today cheer on free trade, open borders, and Pierre Trudeau’s liberalising Charter from their moulded plastic TV studio chairs, alert to signs of retrograde nationalism in the nekulturny masses. Their exasperation with any lingering, sentimental attachment to the old Canada is palpable: “Didn’t we stop all that nonsense when we sent Don Cherry packing?” They needn’t worry. Lament it or forget it, that world is finished. Lament’s first story is history.
Unlike its first story, Lament’s second story is not yet finished. Despite his inclinary nostalgia, Grant could look forward as well as back. He saw that the threat was not America per se, but the rapid advance of technology spreading across the American border and around the globe. Just as English Toryism succumbed to the Whiggish cult of progress in the first Industrial Revolution, Grant saw what was left of the Tory spirit in Canada being crushed by the spinning disks, whirring centrifuges, and what he called the “basically inhuman” assumptions of a new technological revolution.
The impossibility of the old Canada, it follows, was only an instance of the impossibility of all local cultures under press of the new technology. As Grant predicted, first radio and television, then the internet and social media, and now large language models have flattened local cultures, and borderless capital has homogenised what is left. We were hit first because we were on the front lines, but the revolution has since come for everyone else.
The networks that crossed the Canada-U.S. border in the 1930s have cut their way across all countries and cultures. Technology is now global, and so is the threat. Every country is racing to empower so-called artificial intelligence, while transnational corporations are busy embedding it in the infrastructure of our lives. Its ominous omnipresence will soon be inescapable. The mechanical spirit that is the enemy of spontaneous human order and organic local culture now broods over all nations.
“Canada”
If Lament has a fault, it is that Grant was too pessimistic about his own age. He was too aware of what had been lost and too afraid of what was coming to appreciate what remained. In retrospect, the Canada of the 1960s looks like a Golden Age, even if the aureate tint was a trick of a setting sun. A government that would commission Alex Colville to design new coinage and Glenn Gould to produce The Idea of North looks incandescently ambitious compared to the desultory celebrations and slogans that pass for patriotism today. Elbows Up!
Grant was right about the death of Canada, but he was premature. Not without reason did Pierre Berton dub 1967—the year of Expo, nearly 900 Centennial buildings,Alas, too many in the Brutalist style that gives Canadian cities a deserved reputation for poured concrete ugliness. Energy in government is not enough; taste also matters. and (not coincidentally) the year before the elder Trudeau’s premiership—Canada’s “last good year.” Since Grant wrote Lament, we have a different flag, a different name, a different Constitution, a different population, and a new, fractured multiculture. Something called Canada still exists, of course, but it is a country almost completely cut off from its past, with no memory of where it’s been, no way back, and no way forward. Rudderless, adrift.
When Justin Trudeau told the New York Times that Canada was the “first postnational state” and that “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,” he wasn’t wrong. He wasn’t even original. Twenty years earlier, Richard Gwyn had described Canada as “no longer a nation-state but a postmodern something.” Trudeau looked on the wreck of liberalism that Grant had predicted and, with no context by which to judge it, decided that he loved it. Trudeau’s sin was not to tell the truth about the end of Canada—Grant had already done that—it was to celebrate what should be lamented.
Howard Anglin is a doctoral student at Oxford University. He was previously Deputy Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Principal…
