Lament for a Nation

Can Canada survive?

On Canada Day, with negotiations between Canada and the US on our future relationship hanging in the balance, it’s a good moment to look back at the history of Canada’s long struggle to balance national independence and economic integration with her stronger neighbor to the south. I begin the story in 1965 when an unknown academic raised the question of survival we’ve been trying to answer ever since. What happened to his ideas is a parable about Canada’s struggle to defend itself. It’s also, as it happens, a family story.

Sixty years ago, an obscure professor of theology at McMaster University published the most excoriating attack on the Canadian liberal establishment ever written.

In an essay entitled Lament for a Nation – a torrent of righteous indignation funneled into ninety-five blistering pages – George Grant accused Lester Pearson and the Liberals of selling out the country to the Americans. John Diefenbaker and the Conservatives had at least tried to stand up to the empire, he argued, but the Liberals, having won the 1963 election, had capitulated to the Americans by allowing nuclear weapons to be stationed on Canadian soil.

This, Grant claimed, was the culmination of a long history whose fatal first step had been taken in 1940, when Liberal prime minister Mackenzie King and U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt had met at Ogdensburg, N.Y., and agreed to create a Permanent Joint Board on Defence. When America finally joined the Second World War in 1942, the two countries steadily integrated defence production. The Canadian War Production Board, led by the American-born Canadian industrialist C.D. Howe, transformed Canada into an industrial powerhouse that turned out ships, aircraft and tanks for the war in Europe and Asia.

This pattern of wartime continental integration only accelerated in peacetime. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Liberal governments built pipelines to ship Alberta‘s oil south, strung electricity grids to take our hydropower to American cities, and in 1965 signed a pact to integrate U.S. and Canadian auto production. As Canada joined NATO and then NORAD, completely subordinating our economy and defence to the interests of the empire, Liberals pretended we could hold on to our political freedom. Grant vehemently disagreed. Once a country surrendered its economy and its defence, he argued, it gave up its political independence. For Grant, all that was left was to lament the nation that its elites had allowed to die.

Sixty years later, the Canada that Grant thought was doomed is still here – but the questions he posed remain unanswered. His pessimism may have been unrelenting, but it had a bracing honesty even in its exaggerations. It feels more adequate to the threat we face from President Donald Trump than pretending, as we are doing now , that buying Canadian and cancelling our American vacations will get us through the crisis. For Grant struck a nerve by asking a question we still haven’t answered: What kind of national independence is possible, for a country that shares an undefended border with the incorrigibly violent, expansionist and yet irresistibly attractive monster state to the south?

In Grant’s era, the issue was allowing Americans to station nuclear weapons on our soil. Today, the issue before us is whether to sign up for Mr. Trump’s “Golden Dome,” the air defence system that is supposed to protect us at an estimated cost to us, Mr. Trump says, of US$71-billion – a number that grew by US$10-billion during the G7 summit. Canadians think Mr. Trump’s offer has turned North American defence into a protection racket.

The still more existential question that Grant asked Canadians sixty years ago, Mr. Trump has put to us once again. He asks, with his customary brutality: Since America protects Canada, and Canada couldn’t survive without U.S. markets and U.S. technology, why keep up the ridiculous fiction of pretending you are an independent country?

Mr. Trump’s questions may be infuriating, but they must be answered. Our newly liberal government is now trying to answer them, and unlike the elites of 60 years ago, they are at last responding to the economic threat to our sovereignty. Mark Carney’s government, together with the provinces, have promised to abolish internal trade barriers, strengthen our east-west connections with pipelines and power grids, railways and faster internet. We are supposed to be diversifying our markets and reducing our dependence on the U.S. in defence and in the economy. Recovering economic autonomy is the key to regaining political independence. That’s the program, but the key to its success is not in our hands. Mr. Trump remains a tariff man, as he proclaimed at the G7 meeting in Kananaskis. He just doesn’t care what we want, and what he wants, abolition of our digital services tax,for example or getting rid of supply management, our long-standing system of price support for our dairy farmers, threatens our sovereignty. The government has given in on digital services, but if it gives further ground, it may end up with nothing, and still lose access to his market that, whether we like it or not, remains the key to our prosperity, even our survival. We’re being taught a brutal lesson in the leverage that authoritarian leaders, backed by strong economies, can exert on smaller, weaker countries.

Sixty years ago, Pearson’s Liberals confronted the same challenge. Then-finance minister Walter Gordon wanted the federal government to respond to our economic and defence dependency on the Americans, but Pearson dropped Gordon and changed the subject, choosing instead to modernize Canada’s symbols and rid itself of the British vestiges that Grant believed were what had held us together. Pearson discarded the Red Ensign, the flag Canadian soldiers carried when they had fought for King and Empire. Pearson backed these gestures of emancipation from the old British identity by creating a new social contract at home, based on the national pension plan, Medicare and unemployment insurance. In 1967, amid the euphoria of self-discovery, the country celebrated the country’s achievements at Expo.

At the same time – less noticed, but even more fundamental – Canada opened its doors to non-European immigration and a new Canadian identity as a multicultural society began to take shape. Grant watched as Pierre Trudeau tried to rebuild a Canadian identity around the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a repatriated constitution, and overtures (albeit unsuccessful ones) to bring Quebec into his new constitutional order. Liberal elites are rightly proud of these changes and the new Canada of multicultural inclusion that came into being.

Looking back now, however, the question is whether multiculturalism and Trudeau’s ‘rights revolution’ – as I called it in my 2000 Massey Lectures –have brought the country together, or separated us into warring tribes of disputing rights claimants, each more insistent on what the country owes us than what we owe to the common enterprise. Aboriginal inclusion and reconciliation may one day strengthen our common bonds, but for now, we are locked in a painful impasse, at loggerheads over contending versions of our historical past.

When Justin Trudeau celebrated Canada’s new “post-national” identity in 2015, he inadvertently laid bare the weakness of our rituals, symbols and institutions of common national purpose. Like his father, the younger Trudeau had sought to give Canadians a post-modern identity, but left untouched the fundamental issue that Grant had placed at the centre of his polemic: our subordination to the American empire.

It was left to the Conservative branch of the Canadian elite, represented by Brian Mulroney, to address this question. He jettisoned Diefenbaker’s Prairie radical resistance to American integration and came out for continental free trade in the election of 1988. It was John Turner, another charter member of the old liberal elite, who turned himself into the avatar of Canadian nationalism, denouncing a trade deal which would “fundamentally alter our way of life, our way of doing things, the way we make choices as Canadians,” and trying to nail Mr. Mulroney as the prime minister “who signed over the sovereignty and independence of our nation.”

When Canadians handed Mr. Mulroney a majority government in 1988, they anchored into our country’s politics the settled conviction – whether reluctant, fatalistic or welcoming – that Canadian prosperity required greater integration with the American economy. When broadcaster Peter Gzowski famously asked Canadians to complete the sentence “as Canadian as,” and the winning entry was “as possible in the circumstances,” this revealed our grudging acceptance that we have only as much political sovereignty as the circumstances of our dependence on the Americans allow.

Grant may have been the first to warn us that this was how continental integration would end, but he could not have predicted how our story has played out under Mr. Trump. For we are in a new world, and the tables are turned. From Prime Minister John A. Macdonald’s time in the 1880’s until World War II, we were wary of free trade and sought to build up our economy behind tariff walls. Now, we are the ones pleading to restore it as the Americans seek to shut us out of their economy. We are the ones pleading for the Americans to stay in the NATO alliance and the G7, to maintain the multilateral order they once led, and it is the Americans whose bored President abandons the G7 meeting after a day and returns home, telling us he has better things to do. Even in the fury of Lament for a Nation, America was seen as a benign hegemon – at least to us – who respected the fiction of our sovereignty.

Today’s President disdains his allies and can’t stop telling Canada he wishes we didn’t exist.

Grant’s Lament remains worth reading again today, for he addressed a fear that runs even deeper than the Trump challenge. Grant wondered aloud whether the wellsprings of our identity had run dry, whether we still had what it takes to maintain a distinctive national culture and politics north of the 49th parallel. He believed these wellsprings could be found in Canada’s French and British founding strands. The Loyalists who came north to flee the American Revolution in 1776 did so to build a northern sovereign under the British crown; Quebeckers aligned with this nation-building project because it promised to protect their distinct language, culture and religion against the Americans. This mutual understanding of a Canadian nation under the British Crown, ratified in Confederation in 1867, was the lynchpin of national unity. Remaining true to British Parliamentary traditions, the Crown, the Loyalist tradition and, above all, its conservative inflection of “peace, order and good government” would have been the antidote to the foundational American conceit of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

With the Pearson Liberals’ surrender to the Americans in 1963, Grant argued, the lynchpin had snapped. Canadian independence was a mere memory. Quebec would seek its survival in independence, Grant predicted, while English Canada would settle into a dependent afterlife in the branch plant economy.

What else could Canada have done? Grant’s answer was to embrace radical left-wing populism. Only a populist government with the guts to cut its tie to the Americans and to launch a frankly socialist nationalization of the economy, he argued, could have preserved Canada’s sovereignty. Only then could Canada have remained master in its own house. His paradoxical belief in a socialist state made Grant, a religious conservative who was profoundly opposed to abortion, an unlikely darling of the Canadian left.

Grant’s politics may no longer make sense, but his diagnosis of our dilemmas remains as acute as ever. The French and British sources of our distinctive identity remain our lynchpin, but they remain in permanent tension even to this day. The day after King Charles opened Parliament in May, Quebec’s provincial legislature unanimously voted to disavow the connection to the Crown. Even so, judging by the province’s support for Mr. Carney’s Liberals votes in the last federal election, Quebec has discovered, yet again, that Canada, even with its British institutions, remains the best guarantor of its independence as a nation. The people of Alberta and Saskatchewan are less sure: Their hostility to the federal government and the centralizing pretensions of the liberal elite may sound like whining to Easterners, but it is a visceral feeling out west.

Today, we meet the Trump challenge at a moment of regional division and internal questioning, still struggling to answer the questions Grant raised more than a half-century ago. But a plan beats no plan, as the Prime Minister has said. A nationalist economic agenda that slowly and steadily rebuilds the ties that bind, helps us to rediscover what we gain from being together, and reduces our dependence on our neighbour to the south may be our best shot at regaining national cohesion and control over our economic destiny. George Grant, that gloomy but prescient sage, predicted that we no longer had what it takes to remain a free and sovereign people. He was my uncle, and I loved him, but I hope we seize this chance to prove him wrong.