Collected Works of George Grant, Vol. 3, 1960–1969

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

As George Grant has become a Canadian icon, publication of his works is
appropriate. One may or may not agree with the opinions of this man, who
admired John Diefenbaker and remained a convinced Christian, but anyone
interested in Canadian intellectual history ought to know what he
thought.

This volume includes his correspondence and his manuscripts (a sermon,
lectures, broadcasts, published writings) from the 1960s, as well as the
book that made Grant famous, Lament for a Nation (1965). Grant believed
that John Diefenbaker’s political demise in 1963 marked the beginning
of the end of Canada. Diefenbaker (who killed the Avro Arrow) was a
nationalist; Liberals such as Louis St. Laurent (who helped keep French
Canada onside during World War II and whose government financed the
Trans-Canada Highway) and Lester Pearson (father of peacekeeping, the
Maple Leaf flag, Canadian medicare, and the Canada Pension Plan) were
continentalists. Diefenbaker, whose government had invited the United
States to locate Bomarc missiles in Canada, was a hero not to accept
them. Pearson, who thought that the honourable course of action was to
fulfill our commitments after the U.S. had adjusted its policies to
accommodate Diefenbaker’s invitation, was less than patriotic.

As an Anglican, Grant favoured Roman Catholicism over secularism, and
when Ontario’s Anglican bishops opposed extension of the publicly
funded Roman Catholic school system at the secondary level, he
disagreed. Public schools, he said, were increasingly unchristian. Grant
admired the notoriously bigoted 19th-century Anglican Bishop John
Strachan. Grant blamed “reformist Protestantism” for promoting
“pluralist mass-consumption society” in Ontario. The secular 20th
century was the era of Communism, Nazism, and the use of nuclear
weapons. That religious fanatics of earlier centuries had used the
latest technology at their disposal to kill their enemies goes
unmentioned.

Grant was a strong opponent of the Vietnam War and Canadian complicity
(arms sales to the United States). Morality in the U.S., he believed,
had shallow roots.

Perhaps Grant is comparable to one of his heroes, the fifth-century
Bishop of Hippo, St. Augustine. Like St. Augustine, Grant had ideas, and
some of them were good.