Canada’s greatest thinker foretold its failure — and ours
A classic work of political philosophy celebrated its 60th anniversary this year. Published in 1965, George Grant’s Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism is exactly what the title suggests: an essay, sometimes angry, often elegiac, at times lyrical, mourning the wreck of the hope that once animated the Canadian experiment. Grant thought the possibility of building, alongside the United States — a more restrained and ordered society that ranked the common good above individual autonomy — had faded. But the book is also much more.
Grant wrote Lament for a Nation in anger at the fall of Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, who was defeated in his re-election bid due to backlash over his refusal to accept US nuclear warheads on Canadian soil. According to Grant, Diefenbaker’s “actions turned the ruling class into a pack howling for his blood.” It was no ordinary political defeat, in Grant’s view. He believed that it signaled the end of Canada as a distinct political and moral project.
If you have a spare 10 hours …
