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.
There’s no doubt of the status of George Grant’s Lament for a Nation as the signature text of English-Canadian nationalism. That movement—basically left-wing, effectively centred in Toronto with some outposts on the east and west coasts—fully integrated Grant’s hostility towards the U.S, militarism, and the technologically-led drive for control that defined both. They happily adopted Grant as their stern-but-caring paternalistic teacher. When Margaret Atwood’s treatise on Canadian literature, Survival, appeared in 1972, it seemed entirely natural for her to be deploying Grant’s formulations and including Lament in her book’s list of suggested further reading.
From the mid-1960s until well into the 1980s, Lament occupied a central place for those who consciously thought of themselves as English-Canadian and wanted to defend themselves and the national community they belonged to from the unpityingly homogenizing forces of the country my father refers to as “the breakaway republic to the south.”
But Lament is haunted by other possibilities, other examples that Grant thought needed more attention. Many of them were in French.
French Canada
Grant’s investment in Canada’s “French fact” was long-standing. His father, William Lawson Grant, while principal of Upper Canada College, was famously sympathetic to the concerns of French-Canadians. He arranged for his 18-year-old son to spend his summer living with a Québécois family. When Grant returned from studying at Oxford in 1943, he happened upon a rally in Magog, Quebec, where Henri Bourassa, the grand old man of French-Canadian nationalism and co-founder of Le Devoir, unexpectedly appeared. When he wrote to his mother about the event, he recalled, “Against all my judgment, it was the most moving moment I have ever had in Canada. The first feeling of being a Canadian since returning from England.”
Nearly 20 years later in 1962, the then-professor of religion at McMaster, sent a long letter, railing against the Liberal Party as incapable of defending “la culture française sur ce continent,” expressing surprise that the NDP didn’t have more support among the Québécois, and concluding that “those of us who are Christians and Canadians consider French Canada an authentic source of hope in North America.” Three years later, he published Lament.
By then, that hope of which he described to the readers of Le Devoir was fading, but he hung onto it. He wrote in Lament that “French-Canadian nationalism is a last-ditch stand. The French on this continent will at least disappear from history with more than the smirks and whimpers of their English-speaking compatriots—with their flags flying and, indeed, with some guns blazing.” Quebec was an inspiration to him because it was unassimilated, unapologetically wed to linguistic, economic, educational, and religious traditions that got in the way of (to use a term from Seinfeld) the industrial smoothing upon which an American-led technocratic liberalism was hell-bent.
By 1965, the religious aspect of Quebec’s distinctiveness had started to recede as the Quiet Revolution took hold. Grant could see that the educational piece would soon follow, and then all might be lost as it was in English Canada. “The new social sciences are dissolvents of the family, of Catholicism, of classical education,” he wrote in Lament. “It is surely more than a language that Lévesque wishes to preserve in his nation.”
Indeed, there were values former premier of Quebec René Lévesque was invested in that went beyond language: a belief in a certain kind of social democracy, a desire to integrate old-school conservative nationalists into the “big tent” of separatism, a vision of Quebec that included recent immigrants and ethnic minorities, etc. A belief in those kinds of non-market, communitarian (rather than liberal) values endeared Lévesque to Grant.And also to the Parti Québécois he built; when Lévesque died Grant wrote to his French translator that “I hope that Quebec will remember Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes when it comes to the NDP & maintain the Parti Québécois because the NDP stands for assimilation as much as the Liberals or for that matter the PCs.” But writing in Lament, he was under no illusions about Quebec as a whole, predicting that “the young intellectuals of the upper-middle class will gradually desert their existentialist nationalism and take the places made for them in the continental corporations.”
There was still hope to be found overseas. Lament is centred on the defeat of John Diefenbaker at the hands of the Liberals, which Grant saw as a symbol of the defeat of Canadian nationalism as a whole. I say this as an unabashed admirer of “The Chief,” who passes by his grave more days than not.Diefenbaker is buried along the South Saskatchewan River, on the edge of the University of Saskatchewan campus, about a five-minute walk from my office But Grant’s book is also an implicit lament that we got Diefenbaker instead of de Gaulle. Hoping for an alternative to the liberalism-fueled capitalism that was now basically everywhere, Grant writes in Lament that “[then-French president Charles] de Gaulle has been able to count on a deeply-felt nationalism. This is based on a tradition that pre-dates the age of progress and yet is held by men who can handle the modern world.” This is the combination that Grant was really longing for: a hard-nosed realist who also completely rejects the idea that we’re all best off by becoming some form of good little Americans.
Grant wished he had de Gaulle, but he was stuck with Diefenbaker. Loyal guy that he was, Grant defended him to the hilt. But he always seemed to know that there was something way better afoot at more or less the same time.Dief was in power from 1957–63, and de Gaulle from 1958–69.
Lament for a Nation, as many readers have pointed out, is essentially an elegy for nationalism and all the inefficiencies and obstacles to homogenization that such commitments entail. The Canadian elite, in Grant’s telling, allowed itself to be seduced by the easy pleasures that this kind of efficient homogenization seemed to promise: more material comfort, no more grappling with the types of genuinely difficult questions that are the stock-in-trade of religion, no more being held back by the limits on individual sovereignty that were inevitably imposed by such anti-modern drags as nations, communities, and families.
René Lévesque seemed to stand for something beyond that sort of ease and plenty. To Grant, he imagined a Quebec that, if it could overcome its own feckless elite, really could make a last stand for diversity on the North American continent.
De Gaulle offered another way. He spent the 1960s with two big geopolitical projects: driving Americans crazy with his refusal to acquiesce to France’s place in an America-topped global military hierarchy, and hurting the feelings of Brits who, even though they supported him during the Second World War, he tried to keep out of what was then the European Economic Community lest they become the beachhead of an individualist Anglo-Saxon assault on all things Euro-cooperative. And yet, he became both Lévesque and Grant’s stern-but-caring paternalistic teacher.
Sentimentally internationalist Francophile that I am, this is the George Grant I treasure: Grant, Péquiste; Grant, Gaullist. Vive le Canada libre.
