Nationalism without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian

J.L. Granatstein is a professor of history at York University, the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s, and the author of The Good
Fight.

Richard Gwyn of The Toronto Star is one of Canada’s sharpest
columnists, certainly the writer most attuned to new trends and blessed
with an original mind. His most recent book looks at Canada, present and
future, and Gwyn clearly does not like all he sees. He worries that
multiculturalism has created group politics, which—aided and abetted
by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms—has made gender, sexual
orientation, language, and disability into entitlements. All of this
threatens English-Canadian nationalism at the same time, he argues, that
English Canada has become a much more successful, more exciting place
than Quebec. Quebec nationalism, if it should be so unfortunate as to
succeed in separating Quebec from Canada, will create a backwater of no
significance. To Gwyn, Canada needs more emphasis on responsibilities
than on rights.

Every page in this book has fresh ideas, startling at first read, but
clearly sensible. Most newspaper columnists think in 750-word chunks,
but Gwyn is able to expand his ideas into book length with ease.
Nationalism Without Walls is a first-class piece of analysis and
prediction.