Barrel Strength

George Grant was one of those people whom I would feel it a privilege to have known, and I could never have agreed with him, not even as a late teenager when he first came to my attention. Grant was a Canadian philosopher who wrote the famous “Lament for a Nation”, a long diatribe against the Liberals and all their ilk, their policies of continental integration, and the loss of connection to the British strains of conservatism that, in his view, were vanishing from Canada.

The question he never asked himself was whether the Canada he lamented had ever existed outside his mind and some tiny circles of imperialists in Upper Canada. If you look at the geography of North America, you will observe that the Great Lakes region is drained by the Saint Lawrence. The continent is one: the political division between Canada and the United States is real, but artificial. The distinctions between Quebec and the rest of the continent are deeper than the distinctions between English Canada and the United States. I don’t feel I have reached a truly foreign part of the United States until I cross the Mason-Dixon line. Ontario and Michigan are populated by much the same people, and they live in much the same way, in houses and cities of the same pattern. My ancestors spent 145 years in New England before the Revolution, and I do not view the Republic as my enemy. They are just people who have gone on a so-far-successful political experiment, which more freely acknowledges its English origins tha this country. If and when they finally admit the errors of their ways, we shall welcome them back with open arms. And if not, we can always echo Chou En-Lai when asked whether the French Revolution was a success. “Too soon to tell” was his reply.

George Grant was an “impossibilist” politically – the country he postulated to exist never has existed. Contrary to Grant, the division between loyalists and rebel Americans is not cosmic, however bitter this dvisdion was in 1780. One branch of English protestant whig Americans opted for cutting the ties to the new fangled British Empire that was emerging in the 18th century, because they felt themselves to have always been independent. Another branch of English protestant whig Americans, the Loyalists, said that they would prefer one tyrant 3,000 miles away to 3,000 tyrants one mile away. From such narrow differences the two countries have sprung, and neither George Grant nor contemporary leftists can make these differences more important than they are.

I met the Anglican priest who had been present at the death of George Grant, and who told me he was sure he had been in the presence of a saint. I inquired of his impossibilist politics. “Oh the man was a complete fool politically.” And that, my friends, admirably sums him up: a great-souled man who lamented the loss of something that had never been there, and mistook the nature of what it is to be a conservative in North America. The differences between the United States and Canada may be significant from the point of view of English-speaking politics; but in the great scheme of things I doubt they are more than minor flavour differences between red wines. The differences between the American South and New England are at least as large as between Ontario and New England. We have a state and the Queen on the coin; the Confederacy never managed to secede. For a minor political flavour difference, Canadians are doing okay.

The current Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff, has written a book about his ancestors on his mother’s side, the Parkins and the Grants, among whom was his uncle, George Grant. Ignatieff says of Uncle George:

“You can still read Lament for a Nation now, 50 years later, and disagree with every page, and still think it the greatest 90 pages ever written about our country.”

I am not as generous towards Uncle George. To the extent he has had any influence, Grant has seriously distorted what conservatism ever could be in this country by associating it with a fuddy-duddy anti-Americanism, a nostalgia for Britishness. It also was bathed in a hostility to mechanical improvements (now known as technological advance), one that seemed to blame America for the things by which it is has principally benfited mankind: cellphones, cars, intermittent wipers, double-edged razors, television, new business models, and the Internet. George Grant was issuing a scream of protest against modernity as such. Considering that the relevant issue of the time was the survival of parliamentary forms of government against the Soviet Union and the communism which informed it, lamenting the economic and technical integration of Canada with the United States, and the placing of nuclear missiles in Canada, was ridiculous.

I hope the Conservatives have the wit to agree with Ignatieff on this one. Uncle George is buried. The Canada he lamented was a construct of his quite limited range of sympathies and lack of historical knowledge. I only wish I had ever been in the presence of the Christian George Grant, rather than a reader of the mistaken conservative George Grant. That man, the priest confessed, was great. I believe him.