True Patriot Love

by Michael Ignatieff

  To the world outside the Grant-Ignatieff families, Lament was a masterpiece of rhetorical invective, accusing the entire civil service establishment of Liberal Ottawa of a trahison des clercs, a betrayal of Canada to the Americans. Inside the family, Lament was seen as a reckless reckoning, with slights imagined and real, going back to wartime London.

  Canadian socialists and left-wingers loved the book’s denunciation of the civil service, the branch-plant economy and the dependence of the Canadian capitalist class on their American masters. For all the left-wing rhetoric—which had been a feature of George’s thinking since his time among the socialists and communists of Bermondsey—Lament’s real purpose was to reappropriate the family tradition as a defence of a conservative Christian Canada. He sought to channel the voices of the ancestors, but in doing so, he gave them his own voice alone. Neither his grandfather nor his father had ever been so uniformly negative about the Americans, so hostile to science and technology and everything that went by the name of progress. His grandfather Grant had opposed trade reciprocity with the Americans in the election of 1891, but his father, William, had been in favour of it in the election of 1911. To say that the family spoke with one voice—against economic integration with the United States—was never true. To say that Canada could only be conservative or it could not exist had never been the ancestral doctrine. But in George’s act of ventriloquism, the ancestors spoke, and they spoke in support of his vision of Canada.

  In doing so, however, George emptied the tradition of any capacity to inspire hope and faith in the country’s future. If Canada could exist only as a conservative country, and if liberals had sold it out to the Americans, with the complicity of most Canadians, what hope remained? Precious little. He had voided the ancestral traditions of what had been central to them, namely a faith that Canada could shape and master its own destiny. If politics and political action were futile, where were Canadians to look for salvation? George took refuge in his own religious faith, forgetting that this consolation was not necessarily available to most of his readers. The concluding paragraph of Lament ended in a note of otherworldly bleakness:

  Those who loved the older traditions of Canada may be allowed to lament what has been lost.… Multitudes of human beings through the course of history have had to live when their only political allegiance was irretrievably lost. What was lost was often something far nobler than what Canadians have lost. Beyond courage, it is also possible to live in the ancient faith, which asserts that changes in the world, even if they be recognized more as a loss than a gain, take place within an eternal order that is not affected by their taking place.

  Lament’s last line is a quotation from Virgil: Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore. “They were holding their arms outstretched in love toward the further shore.” If the ancestral traditions were calling us ever more faintly from an ever-increasing distance, then politics in Canada was finished, and all that was left was the consolation of faith.

  Only politics wasn’t finished. Everywhere anybody looked in 1965, the year Lament appeared, a generation of students and radicals was trying to stop the war in Vietnam. I invited my famous uncle to address a teach-in at the University of Toronto in 1965. I vividly remember the impression made by this gigantic figure, who appeared like a bearded patriarch, though he was only forty-six at the time. He stood before a crowd of five thousand people in Varsity Arena and announced, “I speak as a Canadian nationalist and as a conservative.” We should rage against the dying of the Canadian light, he told the crowd, but we should be under no illusions that it is dying. Even if the war in Vietnam could be ended, the impulses that had created the war—the American drive for imperial mastery propelled by the liberal faith in technology—were woven so deep into the psyches of even those who opposed the war that purging North American civilization of these imperatives was futile. Holding on to the vestigial, minor differences that distinguished Canada from the United States was hardly worth the political effort. He concluded that speech in 1965 with a dark admonition.

  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.”

  5

  THE INHERITANCE

  I

  In 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.

  We followed their route, the old fur-trader trails through Fort Frances, now a pulp town, and wended our way along the highway to towns like Kenora and Sioux Lookout, stopping at the gas stations that sell fishing licences and
rent boats. We passed signs pointing down gravel roads to reservation lands held by the descendants of the Ojibwa people my great-grandfather met in 1872.

  On the long traverse of northwestern Ontario and the forested part of eastern Manitoba, the two-lane blacktop, etched into the rock of the Canadian Shield, plunged through deep forest cover. We thought we saw a baby bear disappearing into the bush by the side of the road. The radio would give us the news and more country music and then the signal would grow fuzzy and die away. You could imagine how hard it must have been to cover this terrain in a Red River cart rattling over a plank-covered forest trail.

  When we burst through the forest cover, east of Winnipeg on the Trans-Canada, we felt some of the awe and wonder George Monro Grant felt that day in July 1872, as the big sky opened up above, the horizon widened out and the sun poured down on the vast prairie pastures all around us.

  Near Winnipeg airport, we even found a prairie grass museum, about an acre of native flower–filled prairie grass, the same kind George Grant rode through on horseback, driving the plovers and bumblebees up into the air.

  After Winnipeg, we picked up the Yellowhead route and threaded our way slowly through the small towns and farm lands of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. We took some wobbly video of each other in front of gas stations where semis, loaded with pipe and logs, were lined up for fuel. We stayed in small motels where we shared hot tubs or pools with truckers with sunburnt arms and faces. After some delicious roadhouse pie at a coffee shop in Manitoba, we decided to find the best homemade pie in the West.

  In central Saskatchewan, near Saskatoon, we stopped at Wanuskewin, once a dry river gorge with steep cliffs where the Cree used to drive the buffalo and, having slaughtered their share, would gather for feasts and ceremonies. Now there is a museum full of headdresses, beaded jackets, moccasins and life-sized buffalo sculptures. The herds are gone, but on one of the ranches nearby, buffalo were being raised for slaughter, and we stopped to photograph the creatures munching grass behind barbed wire.