branch-plant society could not possibly show independence over an issue on which the American government was seriously determined.” He thought that the defence crisis of 1963 proved his point: when the U.S. State Department publicly rebuked John Diefenbaker for refusing to allow nuclear-armed missiles on Canadian soil, Canadians did not rally around their embattled prime minister; they voted him out of office.
I was born in 1966, one year after Lament for a Nation was published, and I have lived with Grant’s thesis ever since. As a student at McGill, I remember one of my professors arguing that the 1988 “free-trade election” confirmed Grant’s prediction. Canadians had given Prime Minister Brian Mulroney a clear mandate to eliminate tariffs on U.S. exports and thus the need for U.S. corporations to maintain subsidiaries here. They also endorsed Mulroney’s acceptance that U.S. domestic law would apply to disputes between Canada and the United States over “dumping”—a technical term for the export of products, such as softwood lumber, at less than their alleged cost of production.
Around the same time, another young man was falling under the influence of a group of neo-conservative professors at the University of Calgary whose policy prescriptions would have made Canada almost indistinguishable from the United States. Although Stephen Harper ran against the Mulroney government in 1988 under the Reform Party banner, he supported the free trade agreement unequivocally.
Four years later, when I left Canada, I was convinced that the country was finished. My conviction deepened in 1994 when Jean Chrétien broke an election promise and ratified the North American Free Trade Agreement. The expanded pact shielded U.S. investors from Canadian environmental, health and safety regulations while mandating U.S. access to our energy supplies.
Chrétien’s decision to stay out of the 2003 Iraq War was momentous. Forty years after Diefenbaker’s downfall, a Canadian prime minister had declined to participate in a major U.S. military action. It seemed that, after all, economic sovereignty was not a prerequisite for independence in the foreign-policy domain.
Grant’s thesis was tested again in 2005. George W. Bush had deemed missile defence essential to U.S. national security and requested Canadian participation. But with polls indicating that most Canadians were against it, Paul Martin swallowed hard and said no.
Around the same time, pollsters discovered that the values of Canadians and Americans were diverging. Canadians had become more secular, tolerant of diversity and questioning of authority, while Americans were moving in the opposite direction. In Canada, these changes manifested themselves in the legalization of same-sex marriage and near-decriminalization of marijuana. In September 2003, the cover of the Economist was a moose in shades, under the banner “Canada is ‘cool’.”
Political scientists question whether individuals—as opposed to economic and political structures—have much influence on history. Yet it is difficult to explain Canada’s continued independence without referring to Tommy Douglas, Lester B. Pearson and Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Douglas held the balance of power in the two minority parliaments that followed Diefenbaker’s defeat. Together, he and Pearson introduced universal public health care and the Canada Pension Plan and kept Canada out of the Vietnam War. Trudeau then introduced the Official Languages Act, the Foreign Investment Review Agency, wage and price controls, and the national energy program. None of these leaders exhibited the all-encompassing, small-l liberalism and subservience to Washington that Grant had predicted of all subsequent Canadian governments. Diefenbaker was gone, but remnants of a socially conscious Canadian nationalism remained.
During the 1990s, Canada drifted towards the United States under the influence of free trade, a burgeoning U.S. economy and the charismatic moderation of Bill Clinton. So did many other countries. The relative peace and prosperity of the post–Cold War period—and the apparent victory of the liberal democratic capitalist model—prompted the economist Francis Fukuyama to announce the “end of history.”
Were it not for George W. Bush, Canada might be on its way to becoming the fifty-first American state. But the U.S. president’s bellicose rhetoric and overt religiosity made many Canadians nervous, while his administration’s regressive cuts to taxes and social programs and massive increases in defence spending transformed the United States into a more unequal, fearful and militaristic place. Canada might still be moving in the direction of the United States, but since the year 2000, the United States has been moving away much faster.
Grant’s thesis extended beyond the absorption of Canada into the United States. He believed that all countries would eventually unite into a “universal and homogeneous state” founded on a U.S.-centred modernism. Again, this prediction looks less likely today that it did in 2000, when the United States still seemed in ascendancy.
Bush’s advisers squandered “soft power” through their evident contempt for international law and the opinions of other countries, while running up a national debt that has given foreign creditors— most notably the Chinese government—a stranglehold over the U.S. economy. At the same time, they became locked in a nihilistic struggle with radical Islam, creating chasms in international society that are more reminiscent of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” than they are of Fukuyama’s—or Grant’s—transnational blending of differences into a worldwide version of the United States.
Today, China is not the only country that is gaining power and influence relative to the United States. India, with a population of 1.1 billion and an economic growth rate of 8 per cent, is poised to become a great power. Europe is now a single economy that is larger than that of the U.S. Russia, which made the ruble a fully convertible currency in 2006, is returning to geopolitical relevance on the back of high prices for oil and gas. Instead of hegemony or homogeneity, we seem to be witnessing the emergence of a multipolar world made up of interdependent—though still fiercely independent—nation-states.
Canada’s influence should be growing too, for all the reasons identified above and more: our geographic size and location; our well-educated, globally connected population; our high standard of living, strong public services and infrastructure; our abundant resources, large economy and firm fiscal foundations; our membership in international organizations and reputation for moderation and progressive thinking. Moreover, Canada has demonstrated the ability to achieve great things. We have done so internationally, for example, with the 1997 Landmines Convention. We have done so domestically, with universal public health care and our diverse, harmonious and livable cities. If Canadians have an inferiority complex, it is only because we became accustomed to living in the shadow of the world’s most powerful state.
All of which made Stephen Harper a strange choice for prime minister in January 2006. Harper had wanted Canada to join the Iraq War in 2003. As he explained to the House of Commons: “In an increasingly globalized and borderless world, the relationship between Canada and the United States is essential to our prosperity, to our democracy and to our future.” He also thought Canada should join the U.S. in missile defence. As early as May 2002, he criticized opponents of missile defence for offering “knee-jerk resistance… despite the fact that Canada is confronted by the same threats from rogue nations equipped with ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction as is the United States.”
Being elected prime minister changed neither Harper’s views nor those of his rebranded Conservative Party. Although the quest for a majority government temporarily modulated their domestic policies, in foreign affairs their continentalism remained starkly evident. In just one year, the Harper government extended our involvement in a U.S.-led war in Asia, gave the Pentagon access to maritime surveillance over our coastal waters, followed the lead of the Bush administration on climate change and the Middle East and took surreptitious steps towards participating in missile defence.
Harper and his colleagues have always believed that Canadians would just as happily be Americans, and they have done their best to make us so. Fortunately, George Grant was wrong. Our distinctiveness—our love of country—is
