I’ve at all times 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 below British regulation, whereas July Fourth celebrates a violent revolution towards the crown. But after centuries of peace, with the 2 nations now sharing the longest undefended border on the planet, the timing usually feels much less like dueling celebrations than a week-long joint party.
So go away it to Donald Trump to reintroduce pressure to the vacations.
Final Friday, simply as Canadians had been preparing for the pre-holiday weekend, Trump declared that america 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’ll let Canada know the Tariff that they are going to be paying to do enterprise with america of America throughout 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 america. “Frankly, Canada needs to be the 51st state. It actually ought to,” he advised anchor Maria Bartiromo. “As a result of Canada depends fully on america. We don’t depend on Canada.”
In considering by all of this, I’ve discovered one voice particularly clarifying: the Canadian conservative thinker George Grant.
In 1965, Grant revealed a brief e book — titled Lament for a Nation — arguing that Canada’s rising integration with america was a type 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.
However it was additionally a type of non secular dying: By embracing free commerce and open borders with america, Grant argued, Canada was promoting its conservative soul to the American ethos of unending revolutionary progress. It was, in impact, turning Canada Day into an early July Fourth.
Given the Trump risk, Grant’s argument feels extra very 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 components 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 truth, probably the most philosophically intolerant administration in fashionable American historical past that threatens Canadian sovereignty.
And Canadian resistance to Yankee imperialism has rallied below the banner of Liberal Social gathering Prime Minister Mark Carney — a central banker who totally embraces Canada’s fashionable 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 Social gathering (now extra merely known as the Conservative Social gathering). Grant writes about him a bit the way in which that some on the mental proper discuss Trump at the moment: as an imperfect however mainly needed bulwark towards the depredations of the liberal elite.
A “prairie populist” raised in Saskatchewan, Diefenbaker was culturally and politically distinct from the standard 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, resembling eliminating commerce boundaries and joint participation within the North American Aerospace Protection Command (NORAD).
Diefenbaker, in Grant’s telling, took a unique 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 america would threaten Canadian nationhood.
It’s this hesitancy, Grant argues, that introduced the wrath of the elite class down on his head, finally resulting in the Progressive Conservatives’ defeat within the 1963 election. With Diefenbaker cleared away, there was not any barrier to a coverage of financial and political integration with america.
“Lamenting for Canada is inevitably related to the tragedy of Diefenbaker. His lack of ability to manipulate is linked with the shortcoming of this nation to be sovereign,” Grant writes.
It’s simple to ridicule this sentiment in hindsight. In spite of everything, Canada stays standing 60 years after Grant’s predictions of doom. Wasn’t he simply flawed 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 america would actually result in Canadian annexation. Slightly, it’s that Canada would lose the flexibility to chart its personal course, surrendering its efficient sovereignty and, extra essentially, sacrificing what made it culturally distinct from america.
The USA, 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 may 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 just isn’t about particular person freedom however quite 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 type of suspicion that we in Canada might be much less lawless and have a better sense of propriety than these in america.” 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 susceptible to American imperial affect within the absence of a political class keen 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 dwell subsequent to a society that’s the coronary heart of modernity. Third, practically all Canadians suppose that modernity is nice, so nothing distinguishes Canadians from Individuals. After 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 non secular dying at American fingers turned inevitable.
Grant within the age of Trump
At the moment, Canada is going through a nakedly imperialist American president who’s trying 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 totally different from what Grant may 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 at the moment going through 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 — at the least to us — who revered the fiction of our sovereignty. At the moment’s President disdains his allies and might’t cease telling Canada he needs we didn’t exist,” Ignatieff writes.
For that reason, the anti-Trump resistance has been led not by Canada’s Conservatives however by the Liberal Social gathering.
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 model appeared far too near Trump’s for Canadian consolation.
Carney received, in brief, 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. Previously a number of a long time, Canada has engaged in a collective nation-building undertaking to redefine its nationwide identification round concepts of tolerance and multiculturalism. This effort has been terribly profitable: Canada has a notably greater share of foreign-born residents than america, but faces a far weaker anti-immigrant backlash.
Grant would certainly 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 might type an efficient resistance towards Yankee imperialism.
Canadian nationalism at the moment is not only about symbols, just like the flag or the crown, however a few sense that Canadians are not looking for 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 types a key a part of the laborious ideological core uniting Canadians towards American stress.
On this sense, and maybe this sense solely, Canadians have turn into extra American than the Individuals. This yr, July Fourth could have come three days early.
