Lament
Sixty years ago, more or less precisely, Canada came to an end. The only person to write an obituary was George Grant, and his book, Lament for a Nation, though eloquent, was not taken seriously in these parts. It was, in effect, a better eulogy than the corpse deserved, and it was reviewed in the same smug, glib, newspapery way that Prof. Grant had anticipated, and would regret. Now, of course, with the patina of age, it is a received “Canadian classic,” and I imagine this is not the only mention of the anniversary passing.
“Suburban matrons and professors knew that there was an open season on Diefenbaker, and that jokes against him at cocktail parties would guarantee the medal of sophistication.” Progressive intellectuals were a closed front against him, and, “Only the rural and small-town people voted for Diefenbaker, en masse, … but such people are members of neither the ruling nor the opinion-forming classes.”
It was Grant’s genius to make his book a defence of John Diefenbaker, the despised and abused prime minister. The defence was eccentric. Diefenbaker was an embodiment of true patriot love, for what Canada was and not wasn’t; for its actual history and its actual purpose through extended time. It was indeed a nation, and had been, a mari usque ad mare, since Sir John A. Macdonald. French Canada, for instance, “did not want to be swallowed up by that sea which Henri Bourassa had called l’américanisme saxonisant.” It was, and had been from the start, a different and particular conception of America. For Diefenbaker, it was not an immigrant melting pot like the United States, but curiously, “deux nations” in one, and thus, improbably, within each other.
“British North America” applied to both, in companionship. The Monarchy was the seat of our freedom and identity; it had saved our respective loyalists from the American Revolution. It preserved us from the squalour of opinion polls, and represented something permanent and unchangeable, in parallel to the American republic’s constitution and flag.
But the Liberals (one uses this term with disgust) destroyed this through the Quiet (-ly noisy) Revolution in Quebec, aided by the failure of the Progressive Conservatives to found a force that could fight it, culturally.
Canada’s death was, as Grant concluded, inevitable, for our modern, liberal civilization “makes all local culture anachronistic.” And it has subsequently made civilization itself into an irretrievable anachronism.