Jerry White: Can Quebec teach English-Canada something about nationalism?

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.1And 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.2Diefenbaker 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.3Dief 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.