True Patriot Love

by Michael Ignatieff

  We owe the Americans much—it’s hard to imagine how we could have remained either free or independent had they not too been a free and independent people. But our freedom is different, both in general and in detail: no right to bear arms, north of the 49th, and no capital punishment either. They had the Wild West. We had the Mounties. Rights that are still being fought for south of the border—public health care, for example—have been ours for a generation. A woman’s right to choose is secure here; there it remains contested ground. These differences are major, and the struggle to maintain them, while pursuing ever deeper integration with their richer economy, is the enduring challenge, not just of our identity but of our statecraft.

  Establishing a uniting national myth beside a nation as powerful and as supremely gifted at myth making as the United States is never going to be easy. The country that gave us Hollywood and Disneyland casts a glare that makes it hard to see the Canadian shape in the snow.

  Besides, we cannot create a single myth, like the United States, because we have three competing ones, English Canadian, French Canadian and Aboriginal. Three peoples share a state without sharing the same sense of the country at all. It is small wonder, then, that we have never been sure we can continue to imagine a common future.

  Nearly twenty percent of our citizens are also foreign born, from every country under the sun. Only Australia counts as many foreign-born nationals among her citizens. These Canadians frequently hold passports from other countries and import the attachments, passions and, occasionally, the ethnic and religious rivalries of their nations of birth. The loyalties of new Canadians are complex, transitional, sometimes divided. When granting them citizenship, their new country does not ask them to choose Canada and renounce all others. Even so, new Canadians have turned out to be among the most devoted citizens in the country. Why? Because we remain a land of hope and opportunity, and new Canadians see in our unfinished destiny an image of their own unfinished destinies.

  Despite these challenges, or because of them, most of us are quietly but intensely patriotic. Our nationalism exemplifies the paradox that feeling for a country increases with the difficulty of imagining it as a country at all.

  Imagining what we share is not easy. Imagining this land is never just to imagine it as it appears to you alone. It is to imagine it as an Inuit person might see it, a vast white place where the only sign of Canada is the Mountie detachment in the snow-girt command post at the edge of the settlement. To imagine it as a citizen is to imagine it as a resident of Yellow Quill reservation in Saskatchewan would have had to imagine it, this Canada where two half-naked children died in a snow-covered field in the sub-Arctic darkness because their father tried to take the sick little girls to his parents and never made it, and all you can hope is that death was as mercilessly quick as the cold can make it. What does a resident of Yellow Quill imagine, what do we Canadians imagine our country to be, the morning we learn that children have perished in this way? It is surely more than just a tragic story of one family. It is a story about us.

  To imagine Canada, you have to walk a mile in the moccasins of others. In other countries, where language, ethnicity and myths of origin are shared, less empathy is required and more simple identification, one citizen to the other, may be possible. Not with us. To imagine Canada as a citizen requires that you enter into the mind of someone who does not believe what you believe or share what matters to you.

  You have to imagine the country as a Québécois might see it, a Québécois who never felt attachment to the flag, to Parliament, to the memories of sacrifice that move you, sometimes, to tears. This is a fellow citizen who voted oui in referendums in 1980 and 1995 to break up the country, or, as it was presented at the time, to negotiate a new relationship between a sovereign Quebec and the rest of Canada. These referendums were the defining crisis of our recent history. We came within an inch of dissolution. We are still absorbing the lessons of a near-death experience.

  One of these lessons is that to survive as a country, we have to imagine what we have trouble understanding. We have no choice. A contract of mutual indifference between French and English will only defer the evil day. We must learn to live together now. The Québécois who lost the two referendums remain fellow citizens of Canada. They may not want to be here at all, and may still dream of independence one day. Yet we must all work together, if only until the next moment of rupture. Those Québécois will have to understand the intensity of an attachment to Canada they do not feel themselves. We all have to understand, if not respect, the dream they live for. To be a citizen of Canada is to imagine the feelings of those who do not believe what we believe. We have to enter into these feelings if we want to keep the country together.

  Imagining the feelings of those who disagree with you is one of the duties of citizenship we speak about least. Without the constant effort of imagining the world from the vantage point of races, languages and religions different from our own, we could not identify any common purposes as a country. Political deliberation would become a dialogue of the deaf. It’s hard to see how divided societies like ours could have survived without our shared ability to imagine our differences.

  In Canada, empathy has to encompass thirty-three million people, with competing and conflicting myths of origin, spread across six time zones, in five distinct economic regions, speaking, at least at home, almost every language spoken in the world and, in public, two official languages. In spite of everything, we have managed to keep this project in being for one hundred and forty years. This is no mean feat and, in a world ravaged by difference, it is our example to the world.

  The national anthem we sing together is not the same in each language. In the French we vow that we will “protégera nos foyers et nos droits,” while in the English we vow to “stand on guard for thee.” We sing the same tune but not the same words, and in this way we acknowledge what divides us, and in acknowledging it, we cross it.

  Our treaty relations with Aboriginal peoples also presuppose that we reason together, nation to nation, across the divide of history. The treaty relationship says Aboriginals must be treated as constituent peoples. They cannot be treated just as individual citizens. They were here first. They had their own laws and institutions. The rest of us came as conquerors. Aboriginals accept the new country, but we must deal with them as a people. This is the basic understanding. Of course, this is only the first act of empathy. Others should follow, though they often do not.

  If you ask me what I am proud of as a Canadian, it is that we are trying to understand each other across differences that have broken other countries apart. Our enduring exercise of empathy is the example we have to offer. It is the moral meaning of this country.

  Countries should have a moral meaning. A country is a common enterprise that calls us out of our solitude. It calls us out of the cocoon of our selves. It appeals to us to be better, to reach out, to trust and to share. The fact that we are only rarely capable of what the country demands of us is not the main point. The main point is that it asks us to try.

  Our histories are many, and the histories of French, English and Aboriginal conflict with each other. Our population is spread out across a great lone land. On any rail journey across this country at night in winter, the lights of houses on the snow give way, pretty quickly, to blackness, bleakness and cold. The railway stations are few and far between, frigid lozenges of light cast on snow. We know we have to stick together to make our country work, but there have never been quite enough of us, and we are so different, one from the other, that there is sometimes not enough empathy, not enough imagining together, to hold the common project intact. But the past tells us that we have been here a long time, and that we have prevailed over many difficulties. If that is so, there is still time enough to build the country we imagine. We are still a band of incorrigible romantics. We still believe in that imagined Canada, just beyond the horizon, which one day we could make our own.

  III

  Four Gene
rations of Canada

  Patriotism runs in families. Patriotic sentiment—questioning, declaiming, affirming—runs through my family soundtrack like the refrain of an old song.

  My father’s people, the Ignatieffs, were Russian political refugees who came to Canada in 1928. As soon as they got off the boat, the five sons fanned out across the country in search of a new start, while their parents settled down in a farmhouse in Quebec, tending a garden and watching their children become trilingual devotees of a new land. For the Ignatieffs, Canada was hope personified, the land of the second chance. The chief ingredient of their love of country was gratitude.

  To give the flavour of this, I need only mention my father, who, within six months of his arrival at age seventeen, and against his mother’s entreaties, journeyed west, on a CNR rail pass, to lay track in British Columbia. He laid rails in the Kootenay Mountains all summer, jumped into Kootenay Lake to survive a forest fire, threw an axe in a rage at someone who called him a bohunk, a term of abuse for Eastern European immigrants, earned a livid red scar above his left knee when the axe was thrown back at him, and returned to his mother that fall, ten pounds lighter and deeply tanned, and a passionate Canadian.

  Thirty years later, by then a husband and father of two boys, he took his family across Canada by rail, and one morning, when the train entered the Kootenays, he stood up in the parlour car and commanded silence of us all. “There, do you hear it?” he cried. “What?” his sons asked. “The tracks! The tracks!” The joy on his face as we passed over tracks that he believed, rightly or wrongly, he had laid himself was a lesson in how deeply he associated his own life story with the building of a country.

  In The Russian Album, a book I published twenty years ago, I told the story of my Russian family. Now it is time to tell a different kind of story about the Grants, the family my father cast his lot with when he married my mother, Alison Grant, in 1945.

  This is not the history of her family, but the story of that family’s love of their country. Over three generations they conducted a spirited public argument about what Canada was and should be; they argued with each other across time about the country’s destiny, and they shaped Canadian public consciousness with their arguments. I belong to the fourth generation, and this book is both a tribute to and a reckoning with that inheritance.

  The story begins with George Monro Grant, my great-grandfather. He was principal of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, from 1877 until his death in 1902, transforming it from a Presbyterian bible college to a major institution. He was a stupendously energetic Victorian worthy, a Presbyterian clergyman, a devoted husband, a domineering father, an indefatigable public polemicist as well as a friend of two prime ministers, John A. Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier.

  The decisive event of his life occurred in the summer of 1872, when he was thirty-seven years old. With the railway engineer Sandford Fleming, Grant undertook the very first journey ever made by Canadians across Canada from coast to coast, from Halifax to Victoria. The purpose of the journey was to survey the line for the transcontinental railway.

  His account of that journey, Ocean to Ocean, was the first description Canadians were given of their vast new home, and the book has remained a defining articulation of our national vision. Grant left Halifax in July 1872, unsure if the new Dominion had a future. On his return in late October, he was certain it had a grand destiny.

  Its destiny—he thought countries should have destinies—was to serve as a granary, armoury and refuge for the yeomen immigrants, remittance men and working labourers of Britain. When he saw Canada on the map of the world, he saw it as one of the pink dominions stretching around the globe from London to Cape Town, from Vancouver to Sydney.

  He was a puzzling paradox: a nationalist imperialist, a passionate Canadian who believed that the country’s survival next door to the United States depended on strengthening the British connection. He engaged in rumbustious public controversy with intellectuals who believed that Canada’s alternative destiny lay in free trade and eventual assimilation into the United States.

  He lived long enough to see this vision enter its defining crisis in the Boer War of 1898, when South Africa dared to revolt against the British Empire and Canada was asked to put down the rebellion. Grant’s life ended in 1902, just as his imperial faith was stretched to breaking point.

  His son, my grandfather, William Lawson Grant, at first followed in his father’s footsteps, lecturing in imperial British history at Oxford. But with the coming of World War I, his imperial certainties entered their hour of trial. Major Grant fought for the empire at the battle of the Somme, and was wounded and repatriated to Canada, forever changed by his experience. On his return home, he distanced himself from his father’s imperial beliefs, becoming a lifelong champion of the first of the post-imperial world institutions, the League of Nations. Principal of Upper Canada College in Toronto, he was the author of the most widely used history textbook in secondary schools in the 1920s. The Canadian destiny for his generation was to make the passage from colony to nation. And so Canada did.

  Upon his death, the same skein of reflection was taken up by his only son, George Parkin Grant. As a young Oxford student in Britain during World War II, he had to decide whether to fight for “King and Country” as his father had done. He chose against the weight of family tradition and served instead as an air raid warden in the London docks. There he witnessed the horror of a direct hit on a civilian bomb shelter. In 1942, after suffering a breakdown, he was repatriated to Canada. Out of this crisis, he slowly emerged, a passionately conservative Christian philosopher who, however much he stood against other family allegiances, remained true to the family vocation of public intellectual. In 1965 he published Lament for a Nation, a grieving elegy for the Canada his grandfather had dreamed of, as well as a passionate polemic against what the American Empire had done to the Canadian soul.

  It is unusual for a single family to sustain, through four generations, one continuous strand of reflection about a single country. What sustained illusion of self-importance propelled us to believe, generation after generation, that Canadians would care what we thought, would listen to what we had to say? Our Canada, after all, was not the Canada of the French, the Aboriginals or the new immigrants. It was white Anglo-Saxon Canada, and we made a myth of it and passed it off as if we had the right to speak for the whole country.

  I can see how vain and distorted our family myth making could be, but for all that, I cannot disavow it. It is part of me.

  It is impossible to overstate how present, how alive these three generations were in my childhood. George Monro Grant was the most remote, being farthest away in time. But there was Grant Hall at Queen’s, and in the Queen’s Archives, one day, while I was looking for something else, I came upon a box that, when its contents tumbled onto the desk, turned out to be three perfectly preserved rolls of birchbark, the size of foolscap. On them I could make out line after meticulous line of a sermon in my great-grandfather’s hand. As for my grandfather, there was Grant House at Upper Canada College, where he lived and where my mother grew up in the 1930s, and where I was a boarder in the early 1960s. Even thirty years later, there were old masters who still remembered “Choppy” Grant. There was my grandmother’s house at 7 Prince Arthur Avenue in Toronto. That house—long since flattened to make way for the Park Hyatt Hotel—was a carpeted treasure trove of mysterious links to the past. Dresser drawers revealed shell fragments from bombs that fell on London in 1917 and even a fragment of aluminum fuselage from a Zeppelin downed in an early air raid. There were wooden animals from Africa—zebras, lions and wildebeests—brought back from my great-grandfather Sir George Parkin’s visit to South Africa in 1903.

  Choppy Grant died twelve years before I was born, yet he made occasional appearances, like a departed shade, in the memories of his daughters. My mother remembered him wrapping her up in a blanket at the cottage at Otter Lake and taking her out on an August night, sitting on his shoulders
, to see the stars. The names she taught me as a child— Cassiopeia, the Polar Star—were the ones he taught her.

  I recall one afternoon in Vancouver thirty years ago when my aunt Margaret, my mother’s older sister, drove me to the airport and I began asking her what Choppy had been like. She said that what she valued most about him actually was how ordinary he had been. I looked over and there she was, gripping the wheel, staring straight ahead, tears flowing down beneath her glasses onto her cheeks.

  As for my uncle George, my mother’s brother, he was a huge presence in my childhood: gigantic, shambling, dishevelled, smoking cigarette after cigarette, but so engrossed in his talk that he would not notice as the ash fell upon the lapels of his jacket. He was by then a famous man, known for his programs on CBC radio and television, and for the infamous Lament.

  He was a notorious public scourge of liberals, whether big L or small L, and he knew me to be both, so his gentleness with me required rare forbearance. We disagreed about everything, but I found him irresistible and magnetic. It was hard not to be entranced by someone who sang out loud to operas on the stereo and, after motioning for reverent silence whenever the quintet in Mozart’s Cosi fan tutti was sung, bent his head and listened in tears.

  Given this family, given its presence in my early life, the question for me was always: What can I add? Is there anything of my own to say? It has taken me a long time to figure out what that might be.

  Nine years ago, long before I went into politics, I began to reassemble the skein that linked the three generations of Grants together. I reread their works, tracked down the voluminous Grant-Parkin correspondence in Canada’s national archives and travelled the country with my wife, following my great-grandfather’s journey in Ocean to Ocean. One continuing theme emerged from my search for their traces. The crux of the family obsession was always, Is there enough here? Is there enough to make a great country?