Nathan Pinkoski: Canada is a moderate country? Nothing could be further from the truth

In the end, Grant warned, technological rationality devours our humanity. All forms of liberal modernity are complicit in this destruction because they are premised on embracing technological change. They necessarily incorporate innovation—revolution—into their political and social modes. So Canada and the United States are two rafts on that same revolutionary river. Each claimed “conservatives” who promised to stabilize the raft, at the moment that coincided with their particular material interests. Yet each was riding the current of liquid modernity to the destruction of all human order. Decline and fall As Grant put it in a later essay, he believed that Lament had proved “the impossibility of conservatism as a theoretical stance in the technological society.” But had it proved the defeat of Canadian nationalism? From the 1970s onwards, liberal nationalism seemed to have succeeded. Ottawa implemented national economic policies designed to boost the country’s independence from the United States, even at a steep cost to the Western provinces. As Canadians became less British, they defined themselves more in opposition to American culture and politics, even as they imitated its juridical institutions. The multicultural “cultural mosaic” experiment launched by the Liberal Party in the 1970s was, in part, a strategy to defeat Quebec separatism, and in part a strategy to redefine the country against America’s purported “melting pot.” The latter project picked up speed under Brian Mulroney in the 1980s. Long before Justin Trudeau, it was Mulroney who first used the phrase “diversity is our strength” in a 1985 speech. NATO was invented to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down. Canadian liberal nationalism was invented to keep the Americans out, the Albertans down, and to entice Quebec (and immigrants) to stay in. Canadian liberal nationalism did manage to keep Quebec in Confederation. But it has little else to show for itself. Two decades into the 21st century, the Canadian economy has never been so dependent on its trade with the United States. Canadians still have bitter regional conflicts that look little different from the 1980s. Canadian multiculturalism is a failure. The imagined distinction from the American “melting pot” was simply false: in 1992, a Republican vice president would likewise tell Americans that “diversity is our strength.” Nowadays, many immigrants find Canada unwelcoming and unaffordable, and 20 percent would rather be in the U.S. Canadians have been sold a counterfeit nationalism that imagines Canada playing a key role in a global symbolic struggle against American hegemony. They ended up being even more enthusiastic proponents of the technological empire. An indecent society Nowhere is this clearer than on the life issues that preoccupied Grant in his final years. Although Grant’s focus on these issues embarrassed many of his admirers, Grant held that they were critical to showing how the triumph of technological rationalism left one with an indecent society unworthy of conservation. Grant saw in Roe v. Wade an expression of the technological rationality that was intrinsic to modern liberalism and which fatally undermined the liberal moral framework. Abortion requires the rights of women who want an abortion to override the rights of those who are eliminated by abortion. This can only be resolved by an ontological decision: to decree that those whose right to life is violated are not human persons. Such a juridical decision enshrines the principle that some human beings—in the case of abortion, unborn children—have fewer rights than others. The liberal, technological order is the enemy of equal human rights. Liberal modernity, then, cannot be counted upon to defend the very moral order it boasts is its strength over the past historic system. Canadians see their country as moderate, avoiding the extremes of America’s culture wars. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the same year Grant died, 1988, the Canadian Supreme Court left Canada with no law regulating abortion. That’s been the situation ever since. Then there’s assisted suicide, which makes a mockery of equality of rights at the end of life. When some lives cease to be useful and pose a burden, the logic of technological efficiency ensures their elimination. In Canada, some lives are worth more than others. Canada’s extremes provide examples for others to emulate. Legal abortion up to birth (or even after) is a precedent that many American states have looked to Canada to follow. The United Kingdom has likewise approved assisted suicide, knowing full well how this will encourage elderly and disabled citizens to think their lives have no value. Just like in Canada, opportunistic relatives and caretakers will stoke that feeling of worthlessness. The health-care system will be reconfigured to hasten death, and doctors and nurses will be imported from around the world to help the elderly and disabled kill themselves. Grant foresaw the direction English-speaking countries were heading. Nowadays, “English-speaking Justice” refers to the legal system of unequal rights, the rationality of identifying inconvenient lives, and the administrative state that encourages their elimination. The best tribute one can offer a great thinker is to take his project further than he did. In his 1970 essay “Revolution and Tradition,” Grant said he had failed to come to terms with “what loyalty and respect one owes to a regime with which one does not feel any sympathy and how far one should act against the regime when its purposes pass beyond those with which one lacks sympathy and begin to appear monstrous.” For those who still live in the ruins of Grant’s Canada, this is the only political question worth asking.