Lament for a Nation
On Annexing Canada and Some Old Book Reviews
Never did I think I would have occasion to Google: "Trump annex Canada." I did so, so I could quote the following accurately:
"You get rid of that artificially drawn line, and you take a look at what that looks like, and it would also be much better for national security," Trump said at a press conference at his Florida Mar-a Lago home on Tuesday [January 7, 2025].
"Canada and the United States, that would really be something."
The chaser is to Google "Thomas Jefferson annex Canada:"
...the acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching (Thomas Jefferson to William Duane, 4 August 1812).
At this point, it may be useful to remind readers that George Grant declared that Canada lost its sovereignty over 60 years ago in this polemic, Lament for a Nation (1965). From the first chapter:
To lament is to cry at the death or at the dying of something loved. This lament mourns the end of Canada as a sovereign state.
See also CBC Radio's 2024 essay on Grant's thesis.
It's not, of course, that Canada disappeared, as it yet might. Instead, Grant mourns the loss of the possibility of a nation at the north end of the North American continent that is free to shape its own destiny and character. From the beginning Canada faced long odds, as its neighbour to the south rose out of revolution and implemented an anti-monarchical republicanism that prioritized the individual's life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
As the USAmericans followed Locke et al to implement Manifest Destiny, Canada, according to Grant, attempted to implement an older English conservatism that privileged tradition, moderation, and community.
Against globalized forces (both political ideas and emergent technologies), which Grant calls liberalism, based in fortress America, could Old Canada be sustained? In short, no. Inevitably, no.
From the sixth chapter:
The impossibility of conservatism in our era is the impossibility of Canada. As Canadians we attempted a ridiculous task in trying to build a conservative nation in the age of progress, on a continent we share with the most dynamic nation on earth. The current of modern history is against us.
How long ago this so-called inevitable tide turning happened, decades before Trump, is perhaps symbolized most simply by a quotation from Harold Innis noted by Andrew Potter in his introduction to the 40th anniversary edition of Lament for a Nation. Potter notes that in August 1940, Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King met with US President F.D. Roosevelt and "committed Canada to intimate and ongoing ties with the United States."
Potter:
As Harold Innis remarked to a British audience in 1949, in a few short years Canada had moved "from colony to nation to colony." ... After World War II, the Cold War put a damper on any pretensions of independence in military or foreign relations.
Re: conservative/liberal. Grant's use of the terms, as Potter also notes, is likely "to strike many readers that it gets Canada's current political alignment almost exactly backwards." Grant's terms have a classical grounding: his conservatives look to the past for grounded principles of “the good,” and Grant's liberals advance the breakdown of traditions in the name of progress, technological innovation, and individual advancement via, in the extreme, greed is good.
In these terms, Trump is a liberal. Conservatives have all but vanished.
Grant might say the question now is between authoritarian liberals and democratic liberals, though he'd also say liberalism bends towards the unifying, the totalizing, the authoritarian (efficient) system.
Note, for example, that Canada's politicians aren't responding to Trump's threats with promises to protect Canada's traditions. No, they are bending over backwards to try to persuade the US administration that "you have demand, we have supply." I saw one Premier on TV saying we need to show Trump that Canada is a resource economy and the US is a manufacturing economy, and the net benefit of that relationship is to them, not us. We have cheap oil to drive your economy, we have the critical minerals you need. We are already your submissive, don't you understand that? Our governments are running TV ads pleading the case that our country, right now, the status quo, the main purpose of our existence is to make America great.
That's not our job, eh? But as King said to Roosevelt in 1940, let's get together. It's not a partnership that was ever equal.
Our independence was lost long ago, if it ever fully existed, Grant argued. We took their nuclear weapons. There was never any question that we would. Diefenbaker said no, and Canadian elites removed him (Grant's perspective), then Pearson quickly said yes.
One of Potter's footnotes quotes from Mordecai Richler's review of Lament for a Nation (Bookweek, October 21, 1965):
He wrote that the upshot of Canadian nationalism was “to turn pinched back on the most exciting events on the continent and to be a party to one of the most foolish, unnecessary, and artificial of frontiers.”
Now go back to the top and read that Trump quote again — about the artificially drawn line.
In 2000, I reviewed an updated version of Grant's argument. Responding to Clarence Bolt's Does Canada Matter? Liberalism and the Illusion of Sovereignty (1999), I found that Canada was buoyant and perky, even if it's existence was questionable.
Now, I don't like the flippant tone of that review (pasted below), though I found much there to admire. I certainly wasn't anticipating a USAmerican President-elect discussing how pleasant it would be to erase the border. I was thinking more about Canadians' spunky uniqueness; we surrender a lot, but we haven't surrendered everything. Not yet.
No, I’m not going to note how Atwood said we’re all survivors. Ooops.
Carol Shields used to tell a story about she moved to Canada from the US in 1957, not understanding Canada's specific ways. She told her American relatives a Canadian joke: "Why did the Canadian cross the road? To get to the middle." To her audience, this was meaningless. But you get it, eh?
See, also, Michael Adams' 2003 book, Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada, and the Myth of Converging Values, where he tracked changes in "social values" in both Canada and the United States.
Potter writes:
Adams' results are interesting. He argues that since 1992 social values between the two countries have diverged in significant ways and that the long-term trend points to increasing divergence. Both countries are trending to move away from traditional values and are becoming less deferential to authority and more individualistic. But while Canadians are moving towards cosmopolitan values associated with idealism and personal self-fulfillment (e.g., creativity, tolerance, and cultural sampling), Americans are moving en masse from the trends associated with civic engagement and social and ecological concern. Instead, Americans are retrenching, becoming paranoid and isolated in an increasingly Hobbesian society in which it is the war of all against all. Says Adams, "What is remarkable about social change in America is the society's absolute failure — or refusal — to postmodernize. Nothing is more striking than the country's wholesale retreat from the idealism and fulfillment side of the map.
This analysis is from 2003. Before the worst years of Gulf War II, before social media, before COVID, well before Trump. I'm sure readers can think of counter-examples, I can, too (Canadians have now become accustomed to paranoid political stylings, too), but still. Wow.
It's also true that social mores are one thing, our economy is something else. Grant saw the 1965 Canada-US Autopact as another surrender. Canada wouldn't have a car industry, we would simply supply the American one. Trump, however, sees the Autopact as a Canadian scam. Against all economic analysis, he thinks the USA should just build the cars and manufacture all of the parts in Detroit. To do so, would make the cars uncompetitive in the global marketplace. Here, again, is another example of Canada's goal to show it has been appropriately submissive and codependent to American power, corporations and consumers. (We didn't do this for us, don't you see? We did it for you!)
From colony to nation to colony. To 51st state?
Muddle along we will, I suppose, seeking the middle, slowly negotiating, per Grant's vision, our disappearance. The political debate remains, how quickly?
Re-reading Potter's introduction recently, I was struck by the significance Grant gives to technology. Potter notes Grant had a "picture of technology as a universalizing and homogenizing force that dissolves all particularity." That is, it was liberal — and bad. He goes on to say this Heideggerian critique of technology is "the bread and butter of today's anti-globalist activists, who worry that the cultural uniformity that has swept through North America will soon extend to the rest of the planet." From 2025, we can easily say that technology has expanded and sped up this unifying gravity at a force Grant could barely have dreamed of, especially since 2007, after which we have Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone. Now we are all friends — and datapoints.
A reminder that for McLuhan (a conservative) the Global Village wasn't a good thing, just inevitable.
For Trumpism, technology is bred in the bone. The Silicon Valley billionaires are cozied up to the new administration, barking about free speech — but also that all the big questions have finally been answered; progress is over; the need for speech is over; henceforth what remains is amusing ourselves to death. Grant's analysis pessimistically charted these territories six decades ago, paths he further developed in his later book, Technology and Empire (1969). Potter says that later book completes the arguments Grant began in Lament.
Thinking through these bits, I did not expect to find so much continuity. The past isn't even past. Strange days indeed.
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I will post below some of the Canada-related book reviews I've done over the years, starting with the Bolt title. Most are from a quarter-century ago.
First, the man himself.
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Book Reviews
Does Canada Matter? Liberalism and the Illusion of Sovereignty by Clarence Bolt (1999)
Prime Ministers: Ranking Canada’s Leaders by J.L. Granatstein and Norman Hillmer (1999)
Bastards & Boneheads: Our Glorious Leaders, Past and Present by Will Ferguson (1999)
Egotists and Autocrats: The Prime Ministers of Canada by George Bowering (1999)
Memos to the Prime Minister: What Canada Could Be in the 21st Century. Ed., Harvey Schachter (2001)
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Does Canada Matter? Liberalism and the Illusion of Sovereignty by Clarence Bolt (1999)
[This review first appeared in The Danforth Review]
Oh Canada! Do you matter? From the evidence presented here, the answer is NO. For the entire length of its existence, back to 1867 and way earlier, Clarence Bolt argues, Canada has been a kid brother to the Liberal / Enlightenment / Modernist experiment — and the only way the country can save its sovereignty is to pull itself out of the tide of history. The unspoken assumption here is that Canada has never been independent, and never will be if drastic action isn't taken.
However, if Canada has never existed apart from the Big Brother's of "Liberalism", then the question must be not "does Canada matter?", but "is there any such nation as Canada?" This latter question echoes the absurdities of Philosophy 101 (do I exist?), and also Lucien Bouchard's off the cuff remark that Canada isn't a real country. Bolt seems to agree with Bouchard on this latter point, although they go in different directions after that — Bouchard believing Canadians should stop pretending they're a nation, and Bolt arguing that Canadians should get busy becoming one.
About three-quarters of the way through the book Bolt writes:
Canadians must leave the welcoming party for the new global order, although it will not be easy, since seldom in the history of humanity have subjects embraced imperialism as eagerly as in our time.
This could very well be the central quotation in Bolt's extended essay, since it will take a paragraph or two to unpack it. There is, of course, that weasel word "imperialism", which will require definition. There is also that (George) Bushian phrase "the new global order" and the metaphor of "the welcoming party." What is going on here? What is Bolt getting at? To answer those questions it is necessary to outline the broad scope of his argument.
Bolt borrows heavily from George Grant's analysis of Canada in his 1960s classic Lament for a Nation. Grant argued that PM John Diefenbaker had been Canada's last great hope, since Dief had stood up to the Americans and articulated a small-c conservatism that emphasized community values. With the fall of Dief's PCs, Canada fell solidly in line with the Liberal / Enlightenment / Modernist project represented most obviously by the U.S.A., but also by Western capitalism in general. "Liberal" here does not mean the Liberal Party, nor does it have any of the connotations of socialism as in "Ted Kennedy is a well-known Liberal." Bolt uses term Liberal as it became prominently known in the 18th-century, associated with such capitalist thinkers as Adam Smith and John Hume.
The 18th-century Liberals provided the theoretical framework for the rising industrialism of the 19th-century. They championed individual rights, particularly property rights, and the rights set out in the U.S. constitution to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Grant spent a good part of his career articulating the shadow side of this Liberal / Enlightenment dream. In particular, Grant pointed out repeatedly how Liberalism elevated technology to a force of nature, which "evolved" naturally and served as a rhetorical crutch for everything from public policy to environmental destruction in the name of development and "progress."
This is the argument picked up and extended by Bolt. We are now more than 30 years past Grant's Lament for a Nation, and much of what he predicted has come true. Bolt uses Grant's prophecies as argument for turning back — his optimism is almost as tragic as it is naive.
The "imperialism" named by Bolt in the quotation above is the technological world-view first articulated by Grant, and now extended to the lasted dot-com stock craze. The "new global order" is the capitalist dream enforced by the World Bank on struggling "developing" nations around the world. The "welcoming party" is the unchecked optimism of the new breed "neo-conservatives" — who see big government as the enemy of the people, and taxpayers instead of citizens. Bolt rightly points out that these conservatives are actually old-time Liberals. There is little conservative about them. For sure, there is no John Diefenbaker in them!
A couple of years ago it was fashionable to ask, what happened to the left? Was there any left left? Perhaps there isn't. Perhaps Canada has ceased to exist, too — or maybe it never existed — though every day I witness bits and pieces of it. The newspapers are full of stories about "re-investing in health-care." Perhaps this is all Canada ever was ... a giant health-care plan ... with a national hockey team ... and a railway ... and a sea-to-sea hatred of Toronto.
Does Canada matter? No. But Bolt's visions of alternatives to Liberalism do terribly. And his articulation of our Enlightenment inheritance is a great gift. His nationalism, however, is misplaced idealism. We are all pawns in a larger game. (Didn't Leonard Cohen sing that?).... That's no way to say goodbye.
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Prime Ministers: Ranking Canada’s Leaders by J.L. Granatstein and Norman Hillmer (1999)
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Bastards & Boneheads: Our Glorious Leaders, Past and Present by Will Ferguson (1999)
(Quill & Quire, November 1999)
Repeat after me. Canadian history isn’t boring; Canadian historians are boring. Most of them, anyway. As Will Ferguson amply illustrates in his survey of Canada’s glorious leaders past and present, Bastards & Boneheads, the history of the European invasion of the northern half of this continent has just as much drama, conflict, and intrigue as the self-narrative of those deluded followers of manifest destiny to the south of us. Canada has long been a country in need of a storyteller. And Ferguson is an apt one.
First, however, let’s size up the opposition, represented here by J.L. Granatstein and Norman Hillmer’s expanded top 20 list titled Prime Ministers: Ranking Canada’s Leaders. Granatstein has been making the rounds lately decrying how little Canadian high schoolers know about their nation’s history. He does his cause little service here, however, despite using the Chatelaine-like technique of listing the PMs in order of greatness. If only he had called Chatelaine and asked their advice! Surely a survey of the sex lives of our PMs would have done more to focus the minds of teenagers on the significance of leadership in national affairs (no pun intended).
Whereas the nature of Granatstein’s and Hillmer’s exercise limits them to the country’s leaders from Confederation to the present, Ferguson casts a wider net. His narrative begins with the arrival of the first French colonialists (1604) and includes chapters on glorious leaders like Chief Tecumseh, Lord Durham, Louis Riel, and the suffragettes. Ferguson scores here, since his survey of winners and losers includes not only those sanctioned powerful by Parliament, but those who exercised influence in other jurisdictions.
The decision by Granatstein and Hillmer to focus on parliamentary leadership leads them to interpret Canadian history through the challenges faced by our PMs; mainly, how to govern a large, underpopulated country prone to regional conflicts and struggling to wean itself from one empire (British) while avoiding being sucked up into another (American). This is narrative with interesting but familiar features. For example, it raises the eternal specter of Canada’s collapse, either from inside or from without. On the one hand, we have the War of 1812 and Free Trade. On the other, Canada’s PMs have done battle with openly separatist movements in Quebec and Nova Scotia and sought means to pacify Western idealists from before Riel to the present day.
Ferguson adopts a less conventional view: “If we are good, if we are very, very good, we [Canadians] may one day become Acadians.” The Acadians (remember them?) were French settlers in Nova Scotia for 100-odd years until most of them were forcibly expelled by British military thugs in 1755. A few remained; many were deported to the then-French colony of Louisiana; some managed to return to the Bay of Fundy area and settle in what is now Canada’s only officially bilingual province, New Brunswick. Ferguson presents the Acadians as victims of history who nonetheless overcame the odds and remained big-hearted and prosperous. They are a model for the rest of us.
In Ferguson’s view, if Quebec faced facts it would see it has nurtured a victim narrative out of proportion to the details of the past. If English Canada faced facts, it would see the plan to assimilate the First Nations was a disaster; it took too long for women to get the vote; Canada’s failure to accept Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany was one of the nation’s darkest hours. None of these events figure prominently in the book by Granatstein and Hillmer. They were not priorities of Canada’s PMs, and they are not the priorities of Canada’s leading historians. How boring — and unfortunate.
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Egotists and Autocrats: The Prime Ministers of Canada by George Bowering (1999)
(Quill & Quire, September 1999)
Not so many years ago, when Brian Mulroney led this country into yet another of his misbegotten constitutional adventures, The Globe and Mail ran an editorial reminding readers that Canada was a country-in-progress. We all know that Canada was “born” on July 1, 1867, but was it really? Perhaps it started a few years earlier with the merger of Upper and Lower Canada. Perhaps it began on the Plains of Abraham. Perhaps things didn’t really get started until Trudeau brought home the constitution in 1982.
For over 100 years Canada has been asserting its independence, George Bowering tells us in his thorough and amusing survey of our usually illustrious prime ministers. And similar issues come up again and again. Will Canada send troops to fight Imperial wars? Will Canada get its own navy? What about its own flag? Will Canada embrace Free Trade or a home-grown economic policy? Can Ottawa expropriate provincial land so the Americans can test their latest super-duper torpedoes? The questions never cease.
In Bowering’s view, Canada has never been led so much as watched over. Our prime ministers have suffered the thankless task of overseeing a vast underpopulated land ready to be torn apart by regional lunatics or swallowed up by Imperial so-called friends: mainly, Britain and/or the U.S. You can almost see Bowering’s wry smile as he recounts the struggle of various PMs to balance the country’s competing interests. Mulroney didn’t invent East/West conflict, he only perfected it, and he left the country, as Bowering says, with “Laurier’s nightmare.”
It’s a pity that Mulroney will likely never share Bowering’s view of history, wherein the patterns repeat and those who try to “fix” the intersecting gears are quickly ground to dust. With the country now full of me-firsters and other assorted Mulroney-spawn, it’s left for us to hope that Bowering’s book will prove a useful antidote to the poisonous spores that still drift about the land.
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Memos to the Prime Minister: What Canada Could Be in the 21st Century by Harvey Schachter, ed. (2001)
(Quill & Quire, September 2001)
Canadians dissatisfied with the lack of discussion of clear public policy alternatives during last fall’s federal election campaign can rejoice at the arrival of this new resource. In Memos to the Prime Minister, Harvey Schachter has compiled over two dozen messages for our leader from some of Canada’s top businesspeople and thinkers.
The writers fire advice at Mr. Chretien from the left, the right, and numerous points in between, leaving readers to wonder what direction the PM will move in. Perhaps he’ll prefer to sit in the middle weighing his options. Bob Rae begins his memo claiming this quiet approach “would be a great mistake. There is much to be done.”
Schachter asked the contributors to be prescriptive, so it is not surprising that the writers follow Rae in urging the Prime Minister to do more, more, more. Cut more taxes. Increase program spending. Innovate health care by providing individuals with their own “health care dollars” accounts. Innovate health care by focusing on quality management systems. Save the environment through tougher regulations. Save the environment by letting the free market rule.
After reading Memos, readers will no longer wonder where the public policy debate has gone in the country. They are more likely to question why the biggest issue the opposition parties can think to raise in Parliament is the PM’s financial relationship to a hotel beside a golf course.
What’s missing from this collection? Artists and church folk. Groups like the Canadian Council of Bishops and the Mennonite Central Committee make policy recommendations to the government all the time. It is strange that their voices are not heard here. Artists also have points to make. It is sad that their ideas to remain unacknowledged.
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