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.
In the topsy-turvy first few months of the year in Canada, rhetorical liberal nationalism won the day. But as President Donald Trump’s provocations diminish (or as we take them less seriously), and the urgency around protectionism recedes, thought leaders and policymakers across the political spectrum are groping around for a nationalism that makes sense—and are generally coming up empty.
Indeed, while 21st-century capital L Liberal nationalism—the zenith of which was surely the Mike Myers “Elbows Up” ad—has ostensibly won the day, its hollowness was revealed in the weeks following the election, its over-compensating façade falling away to reveal a predictably vacant core.
This isn’t to say that capital C Conservative Canadian nationalism has a coherent story. We can be just as quick to grasp for rhetorical overreach, to leap at easy protectionism, and forget (did we ever even know?) what exactly needs protecting.
As American professor and author Patrick Deneen pointed out at the Canada Strong and Free Network conference in the middle of our federal election, it really is the perfect time to revisit Lament for a Nation. The book that made George Grant a famous public intellectual is both ripe for critique and shockingly prescient.
He identified the decay of our shared culture, but he also envisioned a much more accelerated technology-enabled globalism. He saw the rise of consolidated corporate power—what he called “private governments”—but didn’t fully realize that pseudo-protectionism (rather than free market orthodoxy) would be what enabled it. He foresaw the inevitability of Americanization but assumed it would be only free marketers who accelerated it, not progressive elites aping the cultural Marxism of American newsrooms and ivory towers.
In predicting that the soft nationalism of Canada’s Liberals (masking their true “continentalism”) would be the ultimate undoing of Canadian sovereignty, Grant couldn’t have expected that the rise of global progressivism would pervert free market liberalism even further. But his borrowed description of the efficacy of their approach—“the operation was a success, but the patient died”—perfectly captures the state of Canada’s culture and economy following decades of rarely interrupted natural-governing-party rule.
Grant was correct that Liberal rule would exacerbate the downfall of a truly sovereign Canada, but what he didn’t foresee was that it wouldn’t primarily happen because of open economic policy. Indeed, Liberal anti-history cultural imperialism, combined with soft economic protectionism, has led to the worst of both worlds: a bereft culture with none of the dynamism of a truly open entrepreneurial economy.
Culture
Take culture policy. While Canadian arts and culture have surely eroded, it is evidently not because of a lack of protectionism. Consider Canadian broadcast content, one of the most protected industries—whether due to Canadian content quotas (Cancon) or CBC funding—the output (a combination of “branch plant” Jeopardy syndication and downtown Toronto elite tastemaker Cancon) bears no connection to the organic regional cultures of regular Canadians.
A Canada flag is steamed as the final preparations are made for the Liberal leadership announcement in Ottawa on Sunday, March 9, 2025. Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press.
Perhaps apart from Radio Canada, protectionist broadcast (and now internet) policy has severed any market mechanism, decoupling local preference and culture from production. But of course, a populist market mechanism wouldn’t be enough. So much of culture policy—which museums are built, which history is celebrated (and which isn’t), even what post-secondary research is funded—is decided in Ottawa.
Conservatives have ceded the territory of civil society and the civil service by being neutral and not raising a fuss. In their stead, Liberals have happily taken up the cause, injecting every decision not with a neutral liberal proceduralism but increasingly with a heavily Americanized progressive worldview.
And of course, it hasn’t just been Liberals who’ve taken this approach to culture. Indeed, the Progressive Conservatives at Ontario’s Queen’s Park have draped the legislature with a giant Canadian flag, despite boarding up the park’s statue of Sir John A MacDonald for five years, as a gesture to American wokeism. Just as Prime Minister Mark Carney’s “Elbows Up” symbolism nods at nationalism as it further erodes our identity, Premier Doug Ford’s flag-waving distracts from the curriculum in schools, culture on campus, and the state of historical symbols in parks. The operation was a success, but the patient is dead.
Economy
What about economic policy? Grant targets the long-serving Liberal cabinet minister C.D. Howe at length in Lament for a Nation, blaming his pro-business, growth and integration-oriented approach to the Canadian economy for so much of the decline of nationalism. Indeed, the naïve Liberal view of technological advancement and globalism has often led to the erosion of ordered liberty in Canada, whether due to the limitless proliferation of smartphones and social media and their influence on children, or China’s free trade abuses and its impact on our intellectual property and industrial capacity.
But, worse than our occasional globalist naivete is our Laurentian economic protectionism. Grant foresaw the erosion of local and regional differences, but he couldn’t have predicted that the economic protection he implicitly recommended would lead our regulated oligopolies and subsidized corporations to overbuild American—style social justice—obsessed human resources departments.
This, while Western natural resource producers were forced to develop their own kind of organic nationalism, partnering with First Nations and doing battle with a state obsessed with stifling their Canadian entrepreneurialism. Grant worried about the impact of economic integration on our sovereignty, but energy trade with the U.S. has in many ways empowered a stronger Western nationalism, rooted in the wealth of the geology of the land and enabled by collaboration between First Nations, old stock Canadians, and entrepreneurial immigrants.
There’s still hope
So, if protectionist economic nationalism and liberal symbolic nationalism can’t save Canada, what can? I’m loath to end a meditation on Grant’s work on a high note, what with his insistence on lamentation, but I can’t help myself. While millions of Canadians opted in the last election to cast a ballot for vacant liberal nationalism, millions of others rejected that approach.
A much younger, more dynamic, more diverse group of voters yearned for something different. As Canada’s Conservatives grapple with how to keep that coalition together and build on its successes, Pierre Poilievre ought to pursue a narrative and a proposition that sounds a lot less like this, and a lot more like this. He should situate his populism and his free enterprise instincts in a historic, rooted, ordered vision of Canada’s past, present, and future. He should resist the twin temptations toward either destructive economic protectionism or limitless freedom and neutrality, calling for social and cultural order alongside entrepreneurial economic dynamism.
There may still be hope for what is left of Canada. And this year, on the 60th anniversary of Lament for a Nation, Grant and all of us should pick up a book to remind ourselves of something we were taught long before Donald Trump decided to take an interest in electoral politics: that we cannot take our country for granted.
Ginny Roth is a Partner at Crestview Strategy and a long-time conservative activist who most recently served as the Director of Communications…
