By Loving Our Own: George Grant and the Legacy of Lament for a Nation

Agar Adamson is the author of Letters of Agar Adamson, 1914–19 and former chair of the Department of Political Science at Acadia University in Nova Scotia.

George Grant’s Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian
Nationalism, published in 1965, continues to make an imprint on all
thoughtful Canadians. By Loving Our Own is a retrospective by such
“thoughtful Canadians” as Alex Colville, Dennis Lee, William
Christian, Mel Hurtig, Gad Horowitz, and Andrew Starr on Grant’s life
and work as a political and religious philosopher. Grant influenced many
Canadians, both directly in the classroom and, perhaps more importantly,
indirectly through his publications, as this volume so graphically
demonstrates.

The work is divided into four sections: an introduction and sections on
political independence of Canada, the revival of political philosophy,
and the possibilities of a religious life. Each section in its own way
displays Grant’s effect on his fellow Canadians.

Grant was first and foremost a teacher, but he was also a nationalist,
as David Warren illustrates: “The Canada to which Grant refers is not
the Canada in the morning’s Globe and Mail. As to its two founding
peoples: one of them shot pre-modern groups right into the soil of North
America, and grew through four centuries into a great sturdy oak until
recently it was sawn down for plywood. The other was the loser of that
revolutionary war in which the spirit of Liberty first burst its chains.
The French Canadian nation is transfigured in the medieval myth of Saint
John the Baptist, who was carried in his mother’s womb to a wise old
age: the English Canadian nation is descended from the first people to
be tarred and feathered in the name of the Rights of Man.”

Grant is perhaps best remembered for his nationalism and love of this
rather peculiar nation, for he awakened us to the future. But we should
also remember Grant, as this work illustrates, for his human kindness,
his intellect, his love of country, and his interest in so many facets
of life. George Grant, like Eugene Forsey, was a Canadian treasure.

We are all indebted to Peter C. Emberley for organizing this symposium
and for seeing that the papers from it appeared in this very readable
and valuable work.