J.J. McCullough: George Grant’s modern-day heir? It’s Elizabeth May

Grant liked Diefenbaker because he seemed more anti-American than Lester B. Pearson and the Liberals, as measured by the two parties’ contrasting policies on stationing  Kennedy’s nuclear weapons in Canada—an episode Grant, characteristically, only half-understood, but still felt very strongly about. Pearson’s defeat of Diefenbaker in the 1963 election marked “the end of the Canadian experiment” in Grant’s mind, and was the reason his book was, to quote Mordecai Richler, so “bitchy.” Grant predicted the opposite of reality  It’s worth taking a moment to marvel at just how poorly (and quickly) this take has aged. Diefenbaker, recent Conservative Party efforts at revisionism notwithstanding, is not generally remembered as a very good or consequential prime minister—certainly not one whose electoral defeat represented the grand fulcrum point of 20th-century Canadian history. Grant’s melodramatic read of the nuclear weapons episode can at best be described as idiosyncratic; the mainstream historical consensus has long held that Diefenbaker simply equivocated irresponsibly at the last minute about a continental defence arrangement he himself had agreed to. Pearson, in turn, far from being the obedient Yankee stooge of Grant’s imagination, wound up ushering in a nearly 20-year epoch of progressive Canadian nationalism under the Liberals, which produced the maple leaf flag, medicare, gun control, and all manner of other things that would engorge Canada’s patriotic middle class with a renewed sense of anti-American purpose. The Liberal Party that Grant claimed robbed Canada of “our independence in defence and foreign affairs” similarly imposed protectionism over large swatches of the national economy, refused to participate in the American-led war in Vietnam, embraced the Fidel Castro regime in Cuba, and established ties to Red China two years before Richard Nixon. The Liberal Party’s indifference to America (especially when a Republican was in the White House) would eventually grow so dysfunctional that Brian Mulroney’s Conservative administration was elected in part on a pledge to repair ties. Thus, we see the defining theme of Canadian politics over the last seven decades: a Liberal Party consolidating itself as a bulwark of patriotic opposition to the United States, through economic nationalism, progressive social reform, and anti-interventionist foreign policy. This is resisted by a Canadian conservative movement opposed to statism, central planning, and confiscatory taxation, and buoyed by an anti-totalitarian, hawkish instinct in foreign policy that saw much to admire in the principled, nuclear-armed leadership of American presidents like Ronald Reagan and, indeed, Kennedy. Nothing in Grant’s 1965 book anticipates any of this. Indeed, it more or less predicts the opposite: that absent the sort of Anglophilic Toryism Diefenbaker provided, there could and would be no Canadian identity, no anti-Americanism, no conservatism. In fairness to Grant, plenty of people in the 1960s got a lot of things wrong. Still, plenty of scholars who’ve read Lament for a Nation closely—including Jack Granatstein, Barry Cooper, and Brian Lee Crowley—have also walked away concluding Grant didn’t really know what he was talking about, with his sweeping declarations of the fragility of Canadian independence often informed by a quite shocking ignorance of basic facts of Canadian history, politics, and economics. To cite one example, Grant confidently declared business interests in central Canada were the ones leading the drive for deeper economic integration with America, while the humble prairie farmers remained heroically loyal to John A. Macdonald’s dream of a national economy defined by East-West trade—a conclusion Cooper called “utterly bizarre.” In reality, the exact opposite was the case: big business in Ontario and Quebec provided the bulwark of opposition to ideas like continental free trade because they feared US competition; denial of easy access to American markets, in turn, was one of the earliest drivers of western alienation. It’s for reasons like this that it’s long been baffling that Canadian officialdom continues to insist Grant is worth reading—an admittedly often halting and uncertain endorsement that, again, is only really explicable in the context of a country that hasn’t produced many other political philosophers of note. Grant’s modern-day heir is far (Left) from the Conservatives Does Grant have a modern-day heir? My pick would be Elizabeth May, the Green Party’s eternal leader. May is usually placed on the far Left of the Canadian political spectrum, and can be reliably expected to offer the furthest Left platform during her endless quixotic bids for prime minister. Yet like Grant, her leftism is also coloured by all sorts of esoteric theories of Canadian identity and a flamboyant paranoia about the country’s spiritual conquest by the forces of Americanization. A boastfully devout woman who once studied for the Anglican priesthood, May’s climate change apocalypticism , coupled with her propensity to fall for an endless array of conspiracy theories about modern technology (beware of Wi-Fi!), can give her politics a gnostic quality. Perhaps owing to her status as an American expat, her reverence for Canada’s British ties can seem similarly religious; Parliament surely has a no more sincere monarchist. More than anything else, however, May fears and hates the United States, forever sniffing out secret schemes to ruin Canada with American-style Republicanism (both big and small R). She repeatedly claimed Stephen Harper, for instance, was some manner of American Manchurian sleeper agent because he once attended a “Young Republican summer camp south of the border.” May is not unlike any number of dime-a-dozen progressives positing a theory of Canadian nationalism that defines Canadian greatness through an eagerness to reject right-wing American ideas about health care or the war in Iraq or whatever. What has earned her a uniquely cult-like following, however, is her ability to weave emotional themes of spiritualism, mawkish Anglophilia, and a generalized technophobia into what would otherwise be a tendentious pitch. If he were still around, Grant would almost certainly support May, and I doubt he’d consider it a particularly difficult choice. Canada’s greatest philosopher, in other words, is now basically a 1 percent proposition.