After Lament

Assessing George Grant's Masterpiece

(Former prime ministers Lester B. Pearson and John George Diefenbaker at a federal-provincial conference in 1969 [John McNeill/The Globe & Mail])

Never before this year has the question of whether Canada’s disappearance as a nation would be good or necessary been more resoundingly answered in the negative.

This statement deliberately echoes the first line of Lament for a Nation, George Grant’s brilliant 1965 broadside against continentalism and the Liberal Party of Canada. It also refutes that book’s overarching claim that Canada had ceased to be a nation.

My opening may also be an understatement. Far from being inevitable, Canada’s disappearance as an independent state seems today out of the question.

In our April 28^th election, in which nearly twenty million Canadians cast ballots, 85 percent chose one of the two national parties that, in various forms, have shaped Canada’s union, confederation and independence over two centuries.