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.
The Hub has marked the 60th anniversary of George Grant’s Lament for a Nation with essays and interviews for the past several weeks. The contributors to the series have varied in their sympathies (or antipathies) towards Grant’s views on liberalism, capitalism, and even the essence of Canada itself. It’s been a spirited debate about the country’s past and its future.
The two sides can be crudely divided between those who share Grant’s conservative doubts about American-style liberalism and capitalism (and their attendant political and technological consequences) and those who see them less as a foreign imposition and more as key parts of Canada’s own intellectual heritage.
I happen to fall firmly in the latter camp. Which is to say, my view is that Lament’s central premise—Canada was conceived as a non-liberal state that was ideologically invaded by the United States—is wrong.
Canada was liberal from the beginning. Not in the modern, progressive sense, but in the classical tradition of individual liberty, responsible government, and cultural and religious pluralism. The founders of Canada—figures like Baldwin, LaFontaine, Cartier, and Macdonald—may not have been Jefferson-like rhetoricians, but they were fundamentally liberal and, in turn, sought to build a mostly liberal-democratic order.
Our political institutions were built on British liberal constitutionalism. Our economic system was oriented towards markets and mobility. And our culture prized peace, order, and good government, not because of deference to hierarchy, but out of a commitment to democratic self-rule.
It’s no coincidence that in the famous Hartz-Horowitz formulation about Canada’s political culture— “Lockean liberalism with a Tory touch”—liberalism is the subject and Toryism is the modifier. The country’s origin story, including the British North America Act and its underlying ideas, should be understood first and foremost as a liberal one tempered by history, geography, and a spirit of relative moderation.
Grant’s misread of the confederation project itself distorts the rest of his analysis. If Canada was never quite the communitarian and solidaristic society that he imagined, then his lament is misplaced. The issue isn’t that we became liberal and capitalistic over time. We started out that way. His real problem, in other words, was with Canada itself.
One gets the sense that this is shared among some of Grant’s contemporary conservative champions. It’s not a huge surprise, for instance, that Lament has found resonance with post-liberal scholars and thinkers like Patrick Deneen. They want to be able to imagine a society organized around their own idiosyncratic ideas about nationalism, traditionalism, and post-liberal romanticism.
Challenging Grant’s conception of Canada’s founding ideas is therefore important for a few different reasons. It challenges the basic thesis of his book. It contests those who want to use it to advance a false understanding of the country. And it also helps Canadian conservatives understand what they’re really supposed to be conserving.
It follows that if the country’s founding values were essentially liberal, then the purpose of Canadian conservatism, somewhat counterintuitively, is to protect and preserve our liberal inheritance. This can understandably be somewhat confusing. How can conservatives be liberal and committed to conserving liberalism?
The answer lies in an understanding of conservatism itself. Conservatism is contingent and particularistic rather than universal. A Saudi Arabian conservative is conserving something different than a French conservative or a Canadian conservative. The latter—particularly English Canadian conservatives—are aiming to conserve the ideals of the British North American Act and the spirit of the confederation project.
One way to understand this is through another book from the same era. In 1960, just a few years before Lament was published, the liberal economist Friedrich Hayek released The Constitution of Liberty. The book’s final chapter—famously titled “Why I Am Not a Conservative”—is often misunderstood as a wholesale rejection of conservatism. In truth, Hayek’s argument was more nuanced in ways that are relevant for our discussion.
He was critical of European conservatism for its Grantian qualities, like a resistance to change, its deference to authority, and its tendency to defend inherited privilege. But he acknowledged that in the North American context, the term “conservative” could take on a different meaning—namely, the effort to conserve the liberal tradition of constitutionalism, limited government, and the rule of law. In that setting, Hayek wrote, he could accept being called a conservative.
That distinction is essential for understanding the Canadian experience. Unlike the continental conservatism that Grant seemed to yearn for (and Hayek rejected), Canadian conservatism has historically been more egalitarian and individualistic and reconciled with dynamism and progress. Confederation itself was an audacious idea of nation-building and continental expansion.
This, of course, doesn’t mean that liberalism is perfect. Far from it. As we are seeing across the West, liberalism faces great challenges in the 21st century: institutional decay, rising populism, and the fraying of the moral and social fabric that once sustained it. Much of this stems from the breakdown of pre-liberal institutions, like the family, faith communities, and civil society. Liberalism depends on virtues it cannot itself create. And in that sense, Grant’s warnings about secularism and technocracy retain their force.
But for conservatives, perfection isn’t the standard. We are inherently skeptical of utopias. Our disposition is to choose the best of the available imperfect options and liberalism, with all its flaws, still provides the broadest space for people to live freely and responsibly. It enables pluralism. It tolerates dissent. It makes room for faith, tradition, and meaning without imposing them from above. It still grants the greatest potential for human flourishing.
In this light, the Canadian conservative project shouldn’t be about recovering a mythical past or opposing liberalism root and branch, as Grant seemed to suggest. It must be about conserving and repairing it—including shoring up the moral foundations and social institutions that make liberal democratic capitalism properly function. One can certainly debate whether that involves rebalancing the relationship between markets and community, rights and responsibilities, liberty and order. But it should begin from an acceptance of Canada’s fundamentally liberal character rather than a rejection of it.
It’s why Grant’s lament, however poignant, was ultimately misdirected. He wasn’t mourning the loss of some organic, pre-liberal Canada. He was mourning the absence of a country that never quite existed.
Sean Speer is The Hub's Editor-at-Large. He is also a university lecturer at the University of Toronto and Carleton University, as well…
