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.
Shortly after being elected prime minister in 2015, Justin Trudeau sat down for an interview with the New York Times, in which he described Canada as the world’s “first postnational state.” Events would ultimately prove him wrong. It turned out that Canada was not the first country to move beyond nationalism, so much as the last one to experience its revival. Trudeau would learn this in a direct and painful way when his Conservative rival weaponized the rhetoric and symbols of Canadian nationhood against him. The lesson was then reinforced when his successor, Mark Carney, rode a wave of patriotism into office, rivalling anything we’ve seen since the heyday of Canadian nationalism in the 1970s. If Canada ever had been a postnational country, it was now a post-postnational one.
It is no coincidence that the recent revival of nationalism has been accompanied by a renewed interest in the ideas of the Canadian philosopher, George Grant. Grant shot to fame in 1965 with the publication of Lament for a Nation, a short, fiery book that predicted the inevitable death of this country, but paradoxically transformed its author into an intellectual icon among Canadian nationalists. His death in 1988 came the same year Canada took its first, decisive step into the era of neoliberal globalization, by signing a Free Trade Agreement with the United States. Unsurprisingly, as the idea of national sovereignty declined in the decades to come, so did Grant’s intellectual influence.
