True Patriot Love (3 page)

The national anthem we sing together is not the same in each language. In the French we vow that we will “
protégera nos foyers et nos droits
,” while in the English we vow
to “stand on guard for thee.” We sing the same tune but not the same words, and in this way we acknowledge what divides us, and in acknowledging it, we cross it.

Our treaty relations with Aboriginal peoples also presuppose that we reason together, nation to nation, across the divide of history. The treaty relationship says Aboriginals must be treated as constituent peoples. They cannot be treated just as individual citizens. They were here first. They had their own laws and institutions. The rest of us came as conquerors. Aboriginals accept the new country, but we must deal with them as a people. This is the basic understanding. Of course, this is only the first act of empathy. Others should follow, though they often do not.

If you ask me what I am proud of as a Canadian, it is that we are trying to understand each other across differences that have broken other countries apart. Our enduring exercise of empathy is the example we have to offer. It is the moral meaning of this country.

Countries should have a moral meaning. A country is a common enterprise that calls us out of our solitude. It calls us out of the cocoon of our selves. It appeals to us to be better, to reach out, to trust and to share. The fact that we are only rarely capable of what the country demands of us is not the main point. The main point is that it asks us to try.

Our histories are many, and the histories of French, English and Aboriginal conflict with each other. Our
population is spread out across a great lone land. On any rail journey across this country at night in winter, the lights of houses on the snow give way, pretty quickly, to blackness, bleakness and cold. The railway stations are few and far between, frigid lozenges of light cast on snow. We know we have to stick together to make our country work, but there have never been quite enough of us, and we are so different, one from the other, that there is sometimes not enough empathy, not enough imagining together, to hold the common project intact. But the past tells us that we have been here a long time, and that we have prevailed over many difficulties. If that is so, there is still time enough to build the country we imagine. We are still a band of incorrigible romantics. We still believe in that imagined Canada, just beyond the horizon, which one day we could make our own.

Patriotism runs in families. Patriotic sentiment—questioning, declaiming, affirming—runs through my family soundtrack like the refrain of an old song.

My father’s people, the Ignatieffs, were Russian political refugees who came to Canada in 1928. As soon as they got off the boat, the five sons fanned out across the country in search of a new start, while their parents settled
down in a farmhouse in Quebec, tending a garden and watching their children become trilingual devotees of a new land. For the Ignatieffs, Canada was hope personified, the land of the second chance. The chief ingredient of their love of country was gratitude.

To give the flavour of this, I need only mention my father, who, within six months of his arrival at age seventeen, and against his mother’s entreaties, journeyed west, on a CNR rail pass, to lay track in British Columbia. He laid rails in the Kootenay Mountains all summer, jumped into Kootenay Lake to survive a forest fire, threw an axe in a rage at someone who called him a
bohunk
, a term of abuse for Eastern European immigrants, earned a livid red scar above his left knee when the axe was thrown back at him, and returned to his mother that fall, ten pounds lighter and deeply tanned, and a passionate Canadian.

Thirty years later, by then a husband and father of two boys, he took his family across Canada by rail, and one morning, when the train entered the Kootenays, he stood up in the parlour car and commanded silence of us all. “There, do you hear it?” he cried. “What?” his sons asked. “The tracks! The tracks!” The joy on his face as we passed over tracks that he believed, rightly or wrongly, he had laid himself was a lesson in how deeply he associated his own life story with the building of a country.

In
The Russian Album
, a book I published twenty years ago, I told the story of my Russian family. Now it is time
to tell a different kind of story about the Grants, the family my father cast his lot with when he married my mother, Alison Grant, in 1945.

This is not the history of her family, but the story of that family’s love of their country. Over three generations they conducted a spirited public argument about what Canada was and should be; they argued with each other across time about the country’s destiny, and they shaped Canadian public consciousness with their arguments. I belong to the fourth generation, and this book is both a tribute to and a reckoning with that inheritance.

The story begins with George Monro Grant, my great-grandfather. He was principal of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, from 1877 until his death in 1902, transforming it from a Presbyterian bible college to a major institution. He was a stupendously energetic Victorian worthy, a Presbyterian clergyman, a devoted husband, a domineering father, an indefatigable public polemicist as well as a friend of two prime ministers, John A. Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier.

The decisive event of his life occurred in the summer of 1872, when he was thirty-seven years old. With the railway engineer Sandford Fleming, Grant undertook the very first journey ever made by Canadians across Canada from coast to coast, from Halifax to Victoria. The purpose of the journey was to survey the line for the transcontinental railway.

His account of that journey,
Ocean to Ocean
, was the first description Canadians were given of their vast new home, and the book has remained a defining articulation of our national vision. Grant left Halifax in July 1872, unsure if the new Dominion had a future. On his return in late October, he was certain it had a grand destiny.

Its destiny—he thought countries should have destinies—was to serve as a granary, armoury and refuge for the yeomen immigrants, remittance men and working labourers of Britain. When he saw Canada on the map of the world, he saw it as one of the pink dominions stretching around the globe from London to Cape Town, from Vancouver to Sydney.

He was a puzzling paradox: a nationalist imperialist, a passionate Canadian who believed that the country’s survival next door to the United States depended on strengthening the British connection. He engaged in rumbustious public controversy with intellectuals who believed that Canada’s alternative destiny lay in free trade and eventual assimilation into the United States.

He lived long enough to see this vision enter its defining crisis in the Boer War of 1898, when South Africa dared to revolt against the British Empire and Canada was asked to put down the rebellion. Grant’s life ended in 1902, just as his imperial faith was stretched to breaking point.

His son, my grandfather, William Lawson Grant, at first followed in his father’s footsteps, lecturing in imperial
British history at Oxford. But with the coming of World War I, his imperial certainties entered their hour of trial. Major Grant fought for the empire at the battle of the Somme, and was wounded and repatriated to Canada, forever changed by his experience. On his return home, he distanced himself from his father’s imperial beliefs, becoming a lifelong champion of the first of the post-imperial world institutions, the League of Nations. Principal of Upper Canada College in Toronto, he was the author of the most widely used history textbook in secondary schools in the 1920s. The Canadian destiny for his generation was to make the passage from colony to nation. And so Canada did.

Upon his death, the same skein of reflection was taken up by his only son, George Parkin Grant. As a young Oxford student in Britain during World War II, he had to decide whether to fight for “King and Country” as his father had done. He chose against the weight of family tradition and served instead as an air raid warden in the London docks. There he witnessed the horror of a direct hit on a civilian bomb shelter. In 1942, after suffering a breakdown, he was repatriated to Canada. Out of this crisis, he slowly emerged, a passionately conservative Christian philosopher who, however much he stood against other family allegiances, remained true to the family vocation of public intellectual. In 1965 he published
Lament for a Nation
, a grieving elegy for the Canada
his grandfather had dreamed of, as well as a passionate polemic against what the American Empire had done to the Canadian soul.

It is unusual for a single family to sustain, through four generations, one continuous strand of reflection about a single country. What sustained illusion of self-importance propelled us to believe, generation after generation, that Canadians would care what we thought, would listen to what we had to say? Our Canada, after all, was not the Canada of the French, the Aboriginals or the new immigrants. It was white Anglo-Saxon Canada, and we made a myth of it and passed it off as if we had the right to speak for the whole country.

I can see how vain and distorted our family myth making could be, but for all that, I cannot disavow it. It is part of me.

It is impossible to overstate how present, how alive these three generations were in my childhood. George Monro Grant was the most remote, being farthest away in time. But there was Grant Hall at Queen’s, and in the Queen’s Archives, one day, while I was looking for something else, I came upon a box that, when its contents tumbled onto the desk, turned out to be three perfectly preserved rolls of birchbark, the size of foolscap. On them I could make out line after meticulous line of a sermon in my great-grandfather’s hand. As for my grandfather, there was Grant House at Upper Canada College, where he lived
and where my mother grew up in the 1930s, and where I was a boarder in the early 1960s. Even thirty years later, there were old masters who still remembered “Choppy” Grant. There was my grandmother’s house at 7 Prince Arthur Avenue in Toronto. That house—long since flattened to make way for the Park Hyatt Hotel—was a carpeted treasure trove of mysterious links to the past. Dresser drawers revealed shell fragments from bombs that fell on London in 1917 and even a fragment of aluminum fuselage from a Zeppelin downed in an early air raid. There were wooden animals from Africa—zebras, lions and wildebeests—brought back from my great-grandfather Sir George Parkin’s visit to South Africa in 1903.

Choppy Grant died twelve years before I was born, yet he made occasional appearances, like a departed shade, in the memories of his daughters. My mother remembered him wrapping her up in a blanket at the cottage at Otter Lake and taking her out on an August night, sitting on his shoulders, to see the stars. The names she taught me as a child— Cassiopeia, the Polar Star—were the ones he taught her.

I recall one afternoon in Vancouver thirty years ago when my aunt Margaret, my mother’s older sister, drove me to the airport and I began asking her what Choppy had been like. She said that what she valued most about him actually was how ordinary he had been. I looked over and there she was, gripping the wheel, staring straight ahead, tears flowing down beneath her glasses onto her cheeks.

As for my uncle George, my mother’s brother, he was a huge presence in my childhood: gigantic, shambling, dishevelled, smoking cigarette after cigarette, but so engrossed in his talk that he would not notice as the ash fell upon the lapels of his jacket. He was by then a famous man, known for his programs on CBC radio and television, and for the infamous
Lament
.

He was a notorious public scourge of liberals, whether big L or small L, and he knew me to be both, so his gentleness with me required rare forbearance. We disagreed about everything, but I found him irresistible and magnetic. It was hard not to be entranced by someone who sang out loud to operas on the stereo and, after motioning for reverent silence whenever the quintet in Mozart’s
Cosi fan tutti
was sung, bent his head and listened in tears.

Given this family, given its presence in my early life, the question for me was always: What can I add? Is there anything of my own to say? It has taken me a long time to figure out what that might be.

Nine years ago, long before I went into politics, I began to reassemble the skein that linked the three generations of Grants together. I reread their works, tracked down the voluminous Grant-Parkin correspondence in Canada’s national archives and travelled the country with my wife, following my great-grandfather’s journey in
Ocean to Ocean
. One continuing theme emerged from my search for their traces. The crux of the family obsession
was always, Is there enough here? Is there enough to make a great country?

The Canada the Grants conjured up was never the one that was before their eyes. It was always a Canada they imagined in the future, a Canada yoked to some greater destiny or a Canada, in the case of Uncle George, irreparably lost in the past. If they pushed themselves forward as commentators and public intellectuals, it was because they believed the country needed them, needed the shaping act of the imagination that only they could provide. Yes, such self-importance was ridiculous, but it is what they believed and it is what I inherited.

The starting point they all shared was that Canada alone—the stump-filled fields, the small brick-built towns, the lonely expanses of prairie between the station stops— was not enough. These places became grand, became worth caring about, because their stars were hitched to something greater: the emerging global civilization of an empire on which the sun, as the saying went, never set.

The empire was much more than power, dominion and technology. It was also an ideal of progress, Christianity and the slow and steady spread of the good. George Monro Grant could be as scathing as his grandson about the rapacity and violence of empire—but its failings were, in his eyes at least, incidental. The ways of empire were the ways of God.

The deeper ambiguity in this nationalism—and it was a passionate and proud Canadian nationalism—lay in the proposition that Canada would be forever a provincial and insignificant sketch unless set within the magnificent gilt frame of empire. When the empire foundered in the First World War, the limitations of the imperial vision became all too apparent. The dominions bled on the fields of France, and the bright narrative of Canada marching hand in hand with Britain to global dominion now seemed like a poor delusion. When Major William Lawson Grant returned to Canada, the narrative he created for the country was its organic emancipation from empire, its passage from colony to nation.