Lament for a Nation is a brilliant book. It skewered Pearson’s Liberals with panache; foresaw Trudeau’s future failures; dissected miscues of Canada’s hapless Conservatives — all in less than one hundred pages. A manifesto against continentalism — the notion Canada was fated to be a “branch-plant satellite” of a liberal American hegemony that Grant fully expected to swallow Canada whole — it was also a passport to a new era of possibilities.
Grant’s philippic inspired many new avatars of Canadian nationalism. James Laxer and others fulminated against American corporate colonialism. Gad Horowitz pronounced Grant a ‘Red Tory’; the next Tory leaders after Diefenbaker — Stanfield and Clark — to some extent tried to fit this bill. Trudeau himself cloaked his far-reaching legal and social agenda in a veneer of nationalism, partly as a result of the patriotic tempest Grant had inspired. Perhaps most enduringly, a new wave of cultural nationalism inspired writers from Dennis Lee and Margaret Atwood to Scott Symons and George Elliott Clarke to launch a new wave of CanLit.
Lament’s enduring appeal stems from Grant’s pitch-perfect verdicts on Canadian politics. The picture he paints of a technocratic Liberal Party of Canada, presiding over continental integration after 1940, tempted but ultimately unpersuaded by socialist experiments under Pierre and Justin Trudeau, tracks the subsequent record of Pearson, Chrétien, Martin and Carney quite closely. His depiction is also true for the postwar Conservative Party of Canada, unmoored by Drew from its faith in government and crown corporations, flirting with an otherwise Liberal continental agenda under Mulroney, but unable to reconnect wholly with Révolution tranquille Québec or – with the exception of Harper’s nine-plus years – to move beyond populism and small-town free enterprise as its presiding spirits.
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