This article originally appeared in The Hub.
By Brian Lee Crowley, July 7, 2025
This year marks the 60th anniversary of Canadian philosopher George Grant’s Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism, a seminal work that reshaped Canadian political discourse. Published in 1965, Grant’s critique of American cultural dominance and technological modernity challenged Canadians to reconsider their national sovereignty and identity. To mark the occasion, this summer, The Hub will feature a series of essays from big thinkers exploring the book’s enduring legacy and how its insights remain vital to understanding Canada and its relationship with the United States today.
George Grant and his most memorable book, Lament for a Nation, cast a long shadow. Getting through a degree in Canadian history or political science is well-nigh impossible without reading or at least seeing copious references to Lament. Certainly, many faculty hold it up as proof that the Canadian political tradition is nationalist and anti-American.
Too bad that Lament is, not to put too fine a point on it, nine cubic yards of codswallop.
In defence of my verdict, consider three of the book’s overarching themes:
1. Modernity, exemplified by America’s individual liberty and technological prowess is the enemy of true conservatism in Canada and elsewhere;
2. Far from being the final defeat of conservatism in Canada, John Diefenbaker’s loss in the 1963 election was merely another chapter in the long-running saga of Canada’s ambivalence about America since our founding;
3. Diefenbaker’s refusal to permit American nuclear missiles in Canada and his 1963 defeat on the issue proved that Canadian sovereignty is merely a mirage.
Each one of these propositions is not just wrong, but egregiously so.
Let’s start with the idea that liberal modernity is the enemy of conservatism.
Lament for a notion
Grant’s lament is not for a nation, but rather a notion. That notion is that conservatism is embodied in a society composed of institutions (law, family, religion, community, and so forth) that inculcate in individuals the virtues and discipline needed to live a fully human life as understood by philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas.
In Grant’s mind, this “good life” is not something we choose for ourselves, but is rather a standard we are to be raised to aspire to. If we find ourselves wanting something else, to live according to some other values and priorities, that is an error that social institutions, including the law, exist to discourage and, at the limit, disallow.
The best concrete image of what this means in practice is a feudal aristocratic society where the village squire, magistrate, and priest keep a close eye on us hardy but emotionally constipated rural yeomen to ensure that we do not stray from the way of life handed down to us by our forebears since time immemorial. Our betters know what is good for us, you see. It is the Laurentian elite on steroids.
There’s no escaping modernity
Moreover, because this classical view sees one of the great dangers facing humanity as hubris—getting ideas above our station in the cosmic order—Grant fears technology, which he believes fools us into believing we are the masters of both physical and human nature. Yes, technology confronts us with great dangers: gender ideology (men can now effortlessly become women and vice versa), artificial intelligence, transhumanism, euthanasia, ubiquitous surveillance and pornography, nuclear arms races, panicked COVID-19 control mania, and a host of other ills.
But on the other hand, it has given us stunning knowledge of the inner and outer cosmos, instantaneous communication, the eradication of diseases, vast computing power, extended life spans, and an unprecedented increase in the planet’s carrying capacity to match humanity’s increasing numbers. Technology presents challenges, but all things considered, it is a huge boon for humanity.
Since individualism and technology are poison to Grant’s communitarian conservatism, he shuns America, the main fountainhead of those values. Ironically, the U.S., unlike Canada, constantly debates many of the issues, whose importance Grant thought liberal modernity was busy erasing: abortion, euthanasia, divorce, family, community, and national identity, to name just a few. The main challenge of modernity is actually to humanize—to place limits on—individualism and technology, to strive to enjoy their benefits while policing their dangers. Real conservatism is alive and well in America because it asks questions that even technology-addicted Americans understand must be asked.
Grant wants to duck out of the modernity rat race, and doesn’t mind paying the price of being a poorer, less dynamic country as a result. Yet there is no escaping modernity, and Grant’s prescription is worse than the disease he has diagnosed.
Since modernity is inescapable, Grant’s lament cannot be for a single nation and the book Canadian nationalists revere is deeply misunderstood by them: Grant’s argument, at its core, is that conservatism has been defeated by the modern world. The 1963 Canadian election was its last local gasp.
Canada’s place in the world
Grant has his history wrong. He argues that ever since the rebellion in the 13 colonies to our south, Canadians have been striving to create a kinder, gentler, less emotionally incontinent society. That’s fair enough, but it only goes so far. He takes his argument well past what the historical record will bear.
When the United Empire Loyalists flooded into Ontario and the Saint John Valley, they brought with them American ideas of individualism and democracy. While they were loyal to the Crown, they nonetheless did not discard the New World’s hope for a democratic society free from aristocrats and ruling cliques. They prized Locke and Kant more than Plato and Aristotle.
When my Irish ancestors, Laurence and Honora Crowley, got off the boat in the 1820s, they came to escape toil and vulnerability at the hands of unaccountable rulers. They wanted freedom, order, and property rights, not to tug their forelock as the magistrate rode by.
Our relationship with America was always one of love leavened by envy and fear. Grant lauds the inward-looking National Policy of Sir John A. Macdonald as an exercise of Canadian sovereignty, protecting a more conservative Canada from brash America. But he forgets that that policy was a reaction to the Americans abrogating the reciprocity (i.e., free trade) agreement between the Province of Canada and the U.S.. Macdonald always thought that the National Policy was a poor second best to free trade. And during the Confederation debates, he always had his copy of the Federalist Papers in his pocket.
As a young country, Canada’s choices never included going it alone, but instead which liberal-individualist technology incubator empire we would hitch our wagon to. We long played Britain and America off against each other. Britain finally faltered irrecoverably following the Second World War; we had little choice but to cozy up to America.
This has come with costs. But those costs are seriously outweighed by the benefits, Donald Trump notwithstanding. Bucolic fantasies about Jane Austenesque squires and seigneurs, yeomen and habitants resisting the siren call of American excess seem to me a profoundly unserious approach to Canada’s place in the world. Those who fantasize today about throwing in our lot with distant, feckless, and ineffectual Europe are thus Grant’s rightful inheritors.
Canadian sovereignty
That brings me to Lament’s third and final theme: Diefenbaker’s refusal to host American nuclear weapons. Grant takes Diefenbaker’s subsequent electoral defeat as proof of the unbearable frailty of Canadian sovereignty. But he takes it as self-evident that this policy was the right use of Canadian sovereignty. That’s nonsense.
In 1962, the world came to the brink of war over the Soviet Union planting nuclear missiles in Cuba. This seriously frightened our neighbours, who sought to shore up their defences. In this effort, they sought Canadian participation, not least because the shortest distance between the two superpowers was over Canadian territory.
Diefenbaker had already enraged Washington with his hesitant, somewhat hostile reaction to Kennedy’s naval blockade of Cuba. Given the importance to Canada of both the defence and the economic relationship between our two countries, and our enthusiastic membership of the anti-Soviet camp internationally, repairing our relationship by accepting the American missiles was a perfectly defensible, perhaps even necessary policy.
Sovereignty is not a good in itself, but an instrument. It means we get to decide how to use our resources in pursuit of our interests. Pearson and Diefenbaker presented their alternative policies to the voters, who then decided who best reflected their interests. And our sovereignty remained intact, as Jean Chretien demonstrated decades later when he refused to follow America into Iraq.
An unnecessary lament
Grant is right that a strong current of conservatism flows through Canadians’ veins. He is wrong, however, to frame the tension with liberalism as an “either/or proposition.” Canada’s mix of conservatism and liberalism may be a heady brew, but it is our own, and neither current ever wins a definitive victory, only momentary tactical advantages. As the Bard might have said, Canadians’ lives are made of mingled yarn, good and ill together. So far, neither facet of our complex character need be lamented.