I’ve all the time discovered one thing charming about Canada Day, the July 1 nationwide celebration, touchdown simply three days earlier than America’s Independence Day.
The 2 holidays are ideologically opposed: Canada Day celebrates the nation’s 1867 confederation beneath British regulation, whereas July Fourth celebrates a violent revolution towards the crown. But after centuries of peace, with the 2 international locations now sharing the longest undefended border on this planet, the timing usually feels much less like dueling celebrations than a week-long joint birthday celebration.
So go away it to Donald Trump to reintroduce stress to the vacations.
Final Friday, simply as Canadians have been preparing for the pre-holiday weekend, Trump declared that the USA is renewing hostilities within the briefly suspended commerce struggle. “We’re hereby terminating ALL discussions on Commerce with Canada, efficient instantly,” he wrote on Fact Social, including that “we are going to let Canada know the Tariff that they are going to be paying to do enterprise with the USA of America inside the subsequent seven day interval.”
After which, in a Sunday interview on Fox Information, he renewed the rhetoric that the majority infuriated Canadians: his declare that Canada needs to be annexed by the USA. “Frankly, Canada needs to be the 51st state. It actually ought to,” he instructed anchor Maria Bartiromo. “As a result of Canada depends totally on the USA. We don’t depend on Canada.”
In pondering via all of this, I’ve discovered one voice particularly clarifying: the Canadian conservative thinker George Grant.
In 1965, Grant revealed a brief ebook — titled Lament for a Nation — arguing that Canada’s rising integration with the USA was a form of nationwide suicide. This was, partly, a political matter: By hitching its economic system and protection to these of a a lot bigger neighbor, Canada successfully surrendered its means to set its personal political course.
Nevertheless it was additionally a form of religious loss of life: By embracing free commerce and open borders with the USA, Grant argued, Canada was promoting its conservative soul to the American ethos of endless revolutionary progress. It was, in impact, turning Canada Day into an early July Fourth.
Given the Trump risk, Grant’s argument feels extra important than it has in a long time — prompting a spherical of mental reconsiderations. Current items by Patrick Deneen, a number one American “postliberal,” and Michael Ignatieff, a number one Canadian liberal mental (and Grant’s nephew), have highlighted parts of the argument that really feel particularly related within the present second.
But Lament for a Nation can also be notable for what it failed to foresee. Whereas Grant predicted America’s liberalism would swallow Canada, it’s, in reality, probably the most philosophically intolerant administration in trendy American historical past that threatens Canadian sovereignty.
And Canadian resistance to Yankee imperialism has rallied beneath the banner of Liberal Get together Prime Minister Mark Carney — a central banker who totally embraces Canada’s trendy identification as probably the most tolerant and multicultural nation on the planet.
A conservative Canadian’s Lament
Lament for a Nation takes, as its central occasion, the 1963 defeat of then-Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. His defeat, per Grant, was the second that Canada’s destiny was sealed.
Diefenbaker was the chief of the Progressive Conservative Get together (now extra merely known as the Conservative Get together). Grant writes about him a bit the way in which that some on the mental proper speak about Trump in the present day: as an imperfect however principally needed bulwark towards the depredations of the liberal elite.
A “prairie populist” raised in Saskatchewan, Diefenbaker was culturally and politically distinct from the normal energy elite in cities like Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. These elites, per Grant, believed that Canada benefited from rising financial and navy interconnections with the US, akin to eliminating commerce boundaries and joint participation within the North American Aerospace Protection Command (NORAD).
Diefenbaker, in Grant’s telling, took a special method — one which valued Canadian self-determination over the fabric advantages of commerce and safety cooperation. On key points, most notably the 1962–’63 debate over stationing American nuclear weapons on Canadian soil, Diefenbaker resisted the mental and political elite’s “continentalist” method — as a substitute elevating considerations that an excessive amount of integration with the USA would threaten Canadian nationhood.
It’s this hesitancy, Grant argues, that introduced the wrath of the elite class down on his head, in the end resulting in the Progressive Conservatives’ defeat within the 1963 election. With Diefenbaker cleared away, there was now not any barrier to a coverage of financial and political integration with the USA.
“Lamenting for Canada is inevitably related to the tragedy of Diefenbaker. His lack of ability to control is linked with the lack of this nation to be sovereign,” Grant writes.
It’s straightforward to ridicule this sentiment in hindsight. In any case, Canada stays standing 60 years after Grant’s predictions of doom. Wasn’t he simply fallacious that integration with the US meant nationwide suicide?
However to take this line is to misconceive Grant’s argument. His place was not that the combination with the USA would actually result in Canadian annexation. Somewhat, it’s that Canada would lose the flexibility to chart its personal course, surrendering its efficient sovereignty and, extra basically, sacrificing what made it culturally distinct from the USA.
America, per Grant, is the bodily avatar of Enlightenment liberalism: a worldview that he described as celebrating the emancipation of the person from no matter fetters society would possibly placed on them. The American ideology of capitalist freedom was a solvent dissolving native cultures and nationwide borders, homogenizing all the things right into a single mass of recent technological sameness.
Canada, against this, took its core identification from British conservatism — a way that politics shouldn’t be about particular person freedom however moderately conserving and incrementally enhancing the traditions and cultural inheritance that outline its essence and keep its good functioning.
In Canada, Grant says, this conservatism was “a form of suspicion that we in Canada may very well be much less lawless and have a higher sense of propriety than these in the USA.” Partnering with the French audio system in Quebec (Lament for a Nation made scant reference to indigenous Canadians), the brand new nation was in opposition to the American imaginative and prescient of frenetic capitalist change.
But this conservative identification, Grant feared, was weakly rooted — and weak to American imperial affect within the absence of a political class prepared to wield nationalist insurance policies in its protection. He narrated its ideological decline in three steps:
First, males all over the place transfer ineluctably towards membership within the common and homogenous liberal state. Second, Canadians reside subsequent to a society that’s the coronary heart of modernity. Third, practically all Canadians assume that modernity is sweet, so nothing distinguishes Canadians from Individuals. Once they oblate themselves earlier than “the American lifestyle,” they provide themselves on the altar of the reigning Western goddess.
Diefenbaker was, per Grant, the final gasp of genuine Canadian conservative resistance to this course of. His defeat marked the second that Canada’s religious loss of life at American palms turned inevitable.
Grant within the age of Trump
As we speak, Canada is dealing with a nakedly imperialist American president who’s making an attempt to weaponize Canadian dependence on American markets into political submission. Grant, the liberal Ignatieff writes, was “the primary to warn us that this was how continental integration would finish.”
But the circumstances are very completely different from what Grant might need anticipated. Whereas Grant warned that American ideology was seductive, that Canadians risked voluntarily submitting to a liberalism that might subtly alienate them from themselves, they’re in the present day dealing with a brash American illiberalism led by a right-wing populist most Canadians revile.
“Even within the fury of Lament for a Nation, America was seen as a benign hegemon — a minimum of to us — who revered the fiction of our sovereignty. As we speak’s President disdains his allies and might’t cease telling Canada he needs we didn’t exist,” Ignatieff writes.
Because of this, the anti-Trump resistance has been led not by Canada’s Conservatives however by the Liberal Get together.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals received Canada’s April election on the again of anti-Trump resistance. This was not solely as a result of Carney took vocally anti-Trump positions, however as a result of his chief rival — Conservative chief Pierre Poilievre — was a right-wing populist whose political type appeared far too near Trump’s for Canadian consolation.
Carney received, briefly, as a result of Canadians noticed conservatism as too American — and Carney’s liberalism a greater illustration of Canadianness within the present second.
This irony owes itself, partly, to Canada’s nationwide reinvention since Grant’s authentic publication. Prior to now a number of a long time, Canada has engaged in a collective nation-building venture to redefine its nationwide identification round concepts of tolerance and multiculturalism. This effort has been terribly profitable: Canada has a notably increased share of foreign-born residents than the USA, but faces a far weaker anti-immigrant backlash.
Grant would absolutely see this as vindication of his thesis: Canada has deserted its conventional identification in favor of a Canadian copy of America’s Ellis Island narrative. But what Grant didn’t foresee is that this sort of liberalism may kind an efficient resistance towards Yankee imperialism.
Canadian nationalism in the present day isn’t just about symbols, just like the flag or the crown, however a few sense that Canadians don’t want their politics to tackle the bitter ugliness of Trumpified American politics. Their attraction to what Grant recognized as too-American liberal beliefs of freedom and progress kinds a key a part of the exhausting ideological core uniting Canadians towards American stress.
On this sense, and maybe this sense solely, Canadians have develop into extra American than the Individuals. This yr, July Fourth might have come three days early.
