True Patriot Love (15 page)

Hope in the future has been and is the chief opiate of modern life. Its danger is that it prevents men from looking clearly at their situation.… Moral fervour is too precious a commodity not to be put into the service of reality.

The Canadians who heard him that day believed he was actually calling for a revival of Canadian nationalism, and they took him at his word. He may have counselled fatalism but, happily, Canadians did not listen. Ironically, he played his part in reviving a political debate about Canada and its relation to the United States that endures to this day.

He made the mistake of believing that the differences that separated the culture of liberty in Canada and the United States were vestigial and doomed to die away. But they were more stubborn and substantial differences than he supposed, and the defence of them has proved successful.

America and Canada are both free nations. But our freedom is different: there is no right to bear arms north of the 49th parallel, and no capital punishment either; we believe in collective rights to language and land, and, in our rights culture, these can trump individual rights. Not so south of the border. Rights that are still being fought for south of the border—public health care, for example—have been ours for a generation. These differences are major, and George Grant’s conclusion that they were minor misunderstood Canadian history and our enduringly different political tradition.

His second mistake was to believe that since we had lost the anchorage of Britain, we had lost the feature that distinguished us from the Americans. This had been the
ruling illusion of both his grandfather and his father—that Britishness defined of who we were as a people.

But we had never just been British. Our myths of origin are plural, not singular. We have three competing ones, English, French and Aboriginal. Three peoples share a state and a land. George Grant paid almost no attention to the constitutive role of the Aboriginals and Metis in Canadian identity and tended to regard
la survivance
of Quebec as a noble but dying vestige of the pre-industrial era.

The third mistake was that he gave up on his country at exactly the moment when it roused itself to action. At the moment of
Lament
’s appearance, Canada went through the most extraordinary reinvention of its identity in history. And to no one’s surprise but his own, much of the impetus behind this was inspired by the party he detested, the Liberal Party of Canada. In the twenty years after
Lament for a Nation
was published, Canada staged Expo 67, the most triumphant affirmation of Canadian pride before or since; we had the Quiet Revolution and the resurgent reaffirmation of Quebec identity in North America; we had the promotion of official bilingualism; the modern Canadian welfare state—medicare and the Canada Pension Plan—was created, distinguishing us ever more sharply from the United States; we had the repatriation of the Canadian constitution, the next-to-last symbol of our dependency on the British, and the creation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, incarnating a distinctive
national rights culture; and we gave ourselves a national anthem and a flag. And last but not least, we opened our doors to immigration from the four corners of the world, transforming the population and internationalizing our identity as never before.

We are still taking the measures of these changes, but no reasonable person can look at Canada in the fifty years since the publication of
Lament for a Nation
and conclude that the Canadian identity is weaker now than it was in 1965.

Yes, we’ve gone into free trade with the United States and, as we did so, we feared assimilation, loss of identity and loss of sovereignty. Can we honestly say these fears have been realized?

And as for George’s larger argument about the impact of global consumer capitalism on national consciousness in general, the remarkable feature of modernity is not the erosion of local, national attachments, but, on the contrary, the reassertion of ethnicity, language and race as markers of national identity in the modern world.

To paraphrase Isaiah Berlin, the bent twig of national identity, pushed down by the forces of global commerce, the American way of life and communist tyranny, snapped back with the end of the Cold War, and everywhere you looked—whether it was the former Yugoslavia, Quebec, the Basque country, Scotland or the Middle East—a passionate resurgence of ethnic, religious, tribal and local
identities had rewritten the history Grant had thought was leading us to imperial domination and cultural uniformity.

So he was wrong. Wrong. Wrong again.

And yet
Lament for a Nation
remains a masterpiece of grief and anger. It continues to speak to an elemental anxiety about our country, that sense that there is not enough here to make a great country. For the imperialists in the family, greatness would come to Canada if it aligned its destiny with an imperial British future. Their grandson George saw this future die in wartime London, as a battered England surrendered its hegemony to the arriving Americans. He then asked, If the dream was done, what would replace it as the guiding mythology of his native land? Around him he felt the American way of life sweeping away the small-town Canada he so loved. Against this gathering wave, he could mount only a cry of despair.

The family tradition from which he spoke, and which lives in me and my generation, need not end in lament. He gave up on the country. He should not have. The country is not done. The story has only just begun. There is so much more to tell, so much more to do.

I last saw my uncle George and my aunt Sheila in the small, cramped front room of their house on Walnut Street in Halifax in June 1983. I was a young academic then and I had come to town for the Learned Society meetings. Every few minutes as I sat with them, another student
from the past would knock on the door and be admitted to sit with him. Some of them were very young, and some were very distinguished, but they all sat in reverent awe as he held forth, this great shambling patriarch with a straggly beard and a huge laugh that revealed a frightful set of crooked and stained teeth. His visitors came to be in his presence, and he was gracious and regal with all. By then, he was loaded with honours, including degrees and the gold medal of the Royal Society of Canada. The old lion had finally been accepted by Canadian academic life as one of its great ones.

When we were left alone, I talked, with gingerly care, about some work I had been doing on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, worried that I might bait the bear with liberal provocations. He didn’t take the bait, and we shared our love of Rousseau’s demonic, extreme, visionary side. I didn’t venture onto conflicted ground, his and Sheila’s by then notorious—or, if you felt otherwise, courageous—opposition to abortion. Beginning after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1974, Uncle George and Aunt Sheila had written increasingly forceful polemics, arguing that abortion revealed modern liberalism’s nihilistic and instrumental view of human life. I could not go there. For me abortion was a settled question. So as we had done all our lives, the conservative uncle and his liberal nephew skated around the chasm that had opened up between our sides of the family.

He was saddened when I told him that his sister Alison—my mother—was now struggling with Alzheimer’s disease, as their own mother had. There were tears in his eyes, but he said nothing, and I was left to wonder what moment of rupture between them had occurred in London so long before. There was no one else left to tell me, and to hold on to those memories of wartime London and his younger, intolerable self, now lost forever.

From there, I remember, our talk moved over to memories of his mother, Maude, and the fabled address, 7 Prince Arthur Avenue, where he had come home to rest and recover in 1942. We both remembered its bookcases and back pantry and carpeted sitting rooms, the water plants flowering in the battery jars by the windows, the silver cigarette cases on side tables, George Parkin’s African animals on display shelves, every object holding out a promise that the past would be secure and unchanging and a place of refuge in time of trouble. In fact, of course, 7 Prince Arthur offered no such comfort. It had already been torn down, twenty years earlier.

I told him that I last remembered climbing into my grandmother’s bed in 7 Prince Arthur, when I was seven or eight and she was about seventy-five. She wore a long flannel nightie buttoned at the neck, and her voluminous grey hair, usually pinned in a tight chignon, flowed loose and thick on the pillows. She had a breakfast tray on her
lap, with a silver tea service and a plate of buttered Ryvita biscuits from England. I remember she gave me one to eat while she folded
The Times
of London, in its feather-light international edition, and read the death notices to me, remarking occasionally that she knew the deceased.

As I told him this—one single morning in my childhood, and the last in which I had a direct connection with the traditions described in this book—Uncle George’s face crumpled. He stood up and, clenching his fists close to his chest, exclaimed in a voice of pain and pure longing, “Oh God, I wish that had happened to me!” It took me aback to see this giant of a man so nakedly exposed in all his need and unresolved love of his mother, dead for twenty years. But I am glad to think back on it now, for it taught me—and I needed to know this—that family traditions are more than arguments with the dead, more than collections of family letters you try to decipher. A tradition is also a channel of memory through which fierce and unrequited longings surge, longings that define and shape a whole life.

George Grant lived five more years after that meeting, though I never saw him again. He died of cancer in 1988, at the age of seventy, and is buried in the graveyard at Terrence Bay, Nova Scotia, where he had built a cottage years before, because, he said, it seemed a holy place. His headstone reads: George Parkin Grant, 1918–1988. “Out of the Shadows and Imaginings into the Truth.”

I
n July 2000, my wife, Zsuzsanna, and I set off to retrace my great-grandfather’s original journey. We would have liked to take a steamer through the Great Lakes, but passenger boats stopped running on the lakes decades ago, so we flew to Thunder Bay and our journey began at the car rental counter at the airport.

I thought it would be hard to find any traces of George Monro Grant, but this country takes better care of its past than I expected. The old Hudson’s Bay forts have been restored and turned into museums. Moccasins, blankets and trade beads are on sale in their stores. When the old homesteads are cleared away for a supermarket or a highway, they are jacked up onto a trailer, together with their split-rail fences, and they are set down, along with lots of other old buildings, in an interpretive centre. The buildings may have the forlorn look of animals in a zoo, but it’s good to walk through the parlours of the old
houses to get the feel of the dimensions in which our people once lived and died.

Governments, too, have done their part to preserve the past. In the 1960s, the federal government put up sturdy red brass plaques in the two official languages at many of our national heritage sites—and provincial governments followed suit and municipalities put up theirs, too. We’ve kept up the remains. There’s a lot to show the kids.

It’s relatively easy to find the old Dawson Road, even when it snakes through forest, way off the beaten track. The road leads you to Kakabeka Falls, which Grant and Fleming portaged around in July 1872. On the provincial park plaque, there was even a quotation from George Monro Grant informing tourists, though they hardly needed to be told, that the water tumbling off a shale ledge and then cascading into a narrow gorge a hundred feet below is indeed a magnificent sight.

Fleming and Grant helped to carry the birchbark freight canoes through the portage routes around those falls. Back in the water, of course, they sat in style in the middle with Ignace and Toma keeping up a stroke to the cry of “hi hi.” We travelled in a rented Ford with country music on the radio. Travel was so easy for us that it was sometimes hard to feel the contours of the land that they struggled to master.