True Patriot Love

by Michael Ignatieff

  We took unpaved back roads wherever we could, a big plume of dust rising behind us, the only sound the rumble of the tires on the gravel. The canola was a warm shade of bright yellow and stood waist high in the fields. When we would get out of the car to stretch our legs, the thump of the door shutting behind us would echo for long seconds in the silence.

  There were churches everywhere on those back roads, Ukrainian and Russian ones with onion domes, white wood-frame United churches with silver steeples, a few French Catholic ones with images of the Sacred Heart on the walls, visible through the window panes. All of them were very neat, with the grass trimmed and cut flowers decorating the graves in the cemeteries.

  On a hillside above Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, Zsuzsanna—who is Hungarian—spent a long time among the headstones commemorating the Bartoks and Nagys, peasant families who were brought out in the 1880s by a CPR land agent called Count Esterhazy. He settled them on homestead plots and left them to fend for themselves. We visited a local museum and saw photos of the sod houses and the unsmiling women in kerchiefs standing outside them and the men with handlebar moustaches leaning on pitchforks, all of them burnt raw by the sun and the wind.

  My great-grandfather had dreamed of these pioneers and of the western horizon they would create, with the smoke wafting from their homesteads, their land fenced out and under the plough. It had all come to pass. But the hard faces in the photographs made it clear that creating a home on the plains had been tougher than he had imagined.

  From 1885 until the 1960s, all the settlement on the Prairies was strung out along the railroad tracks. But the railroad had long since ceased to serve as the spine of the country. The freights were still running, loaded with grain and pipe and potash, but the passenger trains had all but stopped. We met a former railwayman who cursed when he told us how they were smashing up the remaining passenger cars for scrap. The small western railway stations—stout, gabled brick buildings with sloping roofs that provided shade while you waited for the train—had been converted into restaurants or boutiques or were boarded shut.

  In Manitoba and Saskatchewan people were leaving the farms and small towns and heading for Winnipeg, Regina and Saskatoon. Little towns were struggling. The old wooden grain elevators were being torn down. Stores were boarded up in main streets all across the West. The Canada that George Monro Grant had dreamed of was passing away, but a new Canada was taking shape in the downtown universities and research institutes, the law firms and the business parks.

  The Canada that he thought was already doomed in 1885—Aboriginal, Metis, Cree and French—was still vividly present, especially so in one place. We found the crossing point on the South Saskatchewan River that Fleming and Grant had taken in August 1872. We crossed on a ferry hooked to a wire, which took us over the hundred yards of fast-running river in about ten minutes. They had forded the river with the horses, breasting the current waist high, laughing and wet because they couldn’t find a boatman to take them across on a scow. There was supposed to be one, but he wasn’t there that day.

  The boatman working the crossing that summer, so the records tell us, was one Gabriel Dumont, Metis scout, guide and later rebel leader. The Grant-Fleming party also missed Xavier Letendre, the Metis trader nicknamed Batoche, who was to build his trading post and liquor store on the river bank and whose name was given to the crossing place.

  At Batoche we went up the hill and talked to the carpenters restoring the old plain plank church. We went over to the graveyard, the final resting places of the Cree and Metis who made their last stand here against Middleton’s troops in 1885, the soldiers Macdonald had sent out on the railway. It was here that the army took Louis Riel prisoner. The photographs show him manacled, bare headed and unkempt, a broken visionary of a West that was Cree, Metis and French.

  When we reached Edmonton, we headed straight out to West Edmonton Mall. My children—Theo and Sophie—had joined us by then and they had been told the mall was the largest in the world. There was a beach with plastic palms, terrifying (at least to me) water slides, a pirate ship in the middle of a supermarket and other wonders to behold. It took some doing to imagine that one hundred and twenty-eight years before, my great-grandfather had ridden into Fort Edmonton, nearby, and had himself photographed in his riding chaps and buckskin jacket.

  From Edmonton, we made our way toward Jasper, where, after much searching up and down the river bank just out of town, we found the lobstick—the giant pine, its topmost branches cut away—and the rusty railway spike Fleming and Grant had smashed into the gnarled base of the trunk.

  West of Hinton, Alberta, on the Yellowhead Highway, we spent a night at the Black Cat Guest Ranch so we could do some horseback riding in the foothills. The shale tracks, through deep forest cover, leading to the Yellowhead Pass, had been the most exhausting stretch of the Fleming-Grant expedition. We spent a late afternoon on docile quarter horses, slowly going up the trails until we reached a summit with a view of the mountains ahead, their crags and peaks touched with golden light. While we were resting at the top, we heard a rumble and saw one hundred and forty boxcars—the children counted them—snaking through the gorge below us. The lonesome wail of a train whistle rose up in the evening air, echoing off the canyon walls.

  In the days that followed, we crossed the Great Divide, drove through the Yellowhead Pass and began making our way down to the Pacific. We drove through the sagebrush country around Kamloops. We passed through the narrow river gorges where Grant had seen the sweat lodges of the river people. In the Fraser Canyon, we stopped for a cappuccino at a trading post where they sold bentwood boxes made by Aboriginal inmates at the local provincial prison.

  We finally found the best pie of the journey—it was made from Okanagan peaches—at a Ukrainian family’s café, somewhere along the Thompson River valley.

  We doubled back through the Selkirk Mountains to Craigellachie. The kids clambered aboard the steam engine on the siding, and we toured the gift shop. You could buy pictures of Fleming and Smith, in their top hats, standing among the labourers as the last spike was driven in. Replicas of the last spike were on sale, some in bronze, some in inflatable plastic, but we didn’t buy any.

  Down the highway through the Fraser Valley, in driving rain, visibility close to zero, the trucks’ backwash dousing our windscreen, we reached journey’s end, in the auto shops, tract housing, malls and fast food restaurants of the Lower Mainland. When George Monro Grant arrived here in 1872, by steam launch down the Fraser, there had only been looming pines and silence broken by the keening of gulls.

  He had seemed a close presence all along the way.

  II

  The Canada of the Grants was a small-town nation of modest brick houses with white verandas, Protestant and Catholic churches on wide, leafy streets and the railway station within walking distance. George Parkin Grant’s Lament for a Nation was a cry of grief and rage at its passing. But that Canada is still there. Just go to Richmond, Quebec, or London, Ontario, or Halifax, Nova Scotia. There are beautiful streets in each of these towns where this Canada still remains. But there is a palpable sense that time is passing this Canada by.

  A new Canada has been built up around it—condominium towers, suburban tract housing, shopping plazas, sixteen-lane highways and the multicultural bazaar of downtown. This is now our home and native land.

  The Canada of the Grants may be slipping away, but their way of thinking about the country still offers enduring lessons. They believed in the country’s future with an enthusiasm that can still inspire. They thought the country was unfinished, that there was a great nation still to be built. They thought that it ought to have a purpose and a meaning. They were romantics.

  But there is more to their inheritance than romance.

  They also understood the deeper logic of the country.

  My great-grandfather and his generation—John A. Macdonald, Sandford Fleming and Donald Smith—were nation builders. They understood that Canada was called int
o being by an act of choice and that it could only be sustained by continual acts of political faith and willpower.

  They understood that the political ties that bound the country together ran east and west but the economic ties that kept Canada going ran north and south. The political task in Canada, these ancestors understood, was to build steel rails and bonds of citizenship from east to west to hold the country together in the face of the economic and geographic ties running north and south. If the east–west links of steel and citizenship were strong enough, then the country could survive and prosper. This remains the logic of Canada to this day. If we want a country to hand on to the next generation, we will have to strengthen those east–west linkages—of citizenship and common life together—to offset the north–south drift that fragments us.

  Are the east–west linkages strong enough to sustain us today? We have had free trade with the United States for twenty years, yet we still do not have free trade in labour and capital among Canadian provinces. We still do not maintain a single economic space from ocean to ocean. We still maintain barriers that prevent Canadians from doing business with each other or from pulling up stakes and moving where the work is. Our forefathers would not understand why we lack the will to pull them down.

  The ribbon of steel that used to tie us together is almost gone. Now we have the airlines and the bus companies and we pretend to have a national highway. In many places—northern Ontario or the interior of British Columbia—it dwindles down to two-lane blacktop, and the local residents will tell you these narrow sections make our national highway a death trap. We could do better. The Americans completed a four-lane national highway system fifty years ago. We are still awaiting ours.

  The Europeans have used high-speed railways to tie Europe together. After fifty years of studies, we are still considering a high-speed rail link to connect Windsor to Quebec City, Vancouver to Calgary and Calgary to Edmonton. If we want to tie Canadians together, if we want to be nation builders, we would start on them right now. Here the nineteenth-century buccaneers—Fleming, Van Horne, Rogers, John A. himself—offer an example of the political grit and daredevil entrepreneurship that Canada has always called upon when it truly wants to achieve great things.

  Those ancestors would look at our incredible panoply of resources in energy and say to us our work of nation building is not yet done.

  They would want to know why so much of the oil and gas we produce flows south without even being processed. We ship oil from Alberta and Saskatchewan to the American states while importing large quantities from Venezuela and the Middle East to meet the demand in Ontario, Quebec and the Atlantic provinces. Does this make sense? Why are we one of the few countries that has never created a petroleum reserve to protect our citizens against fluctuations in supply from foreign countries? In the future opening up before us, our children will judge us harshly for having no apparent national energy strategy whatever.

  It is possible we do this because we do not take ourselves seriously enough. My uncle George argued, like so many thinkers in the 1960s, that Canada was a mere branch plant of the United States. We are such captives of these worn-out clichés of dependency that we fail to grasp our newfound strength. We haven’t noticed that times have changed and so have the terms of trade with our neighbour. Nowadays, we export more oil to the United States than Saudi Arabia does. If energy is power, then we ought to have plenty of it. We have cards to play at the table of nations, and if we play the energy card with determination, we can build a country that commands respect—the respect that comes from being not just a good neighbour but a powerful one, too.

  These are not the only questions the ancestors would be asking.

  We are one of the greatest producers of hydroelectric power in the world. Quebec’s Quiet Revolution was paid for by its hydro. Why does so much of our hydro flow north to south rather than east to west? Why are the alternative energy sectors of our country—wind, solar and ocean power—crying out for more east–west grid capacity? Why can’t we build energy corridors to move Manitoba power to Ontario, Ontario nuclear power to Quebec and the power from the Lower Churchill to central and Atlantic Canada? Why can’t we develop a strategic vision of how to do this and then stick with it, over decades, until we have the national energy grid system we need?

  These are the crucial issues of energy security, national independence and national unity that a Fleming, a Grant, a John A. Macdonald or a Laurier would have seen as clear as day. We might be tempted to tell them that energy flows north to south because it flows to market. That’s the logic of money. But they would have waved this away with an impatient gesture. They would have told us the country wouldn’t exist at all if the logic of money had determined our destiny. We’d be Americans.

  So the question that they asked and answered, in their fashion, demands an answer in our time: What exactly is being Canadian worth to us, in dollars and cents? How much are we prepared to invest to keep our country in one piece?

  Ocean to Ocean—a Mare usque ad Mare—encapsulated the national vision of the railway age. Our ancestors would be asking us: What is the national vision of our age?

  The opening up of the Northwest Passage, once our frozen inland waterway, is an opportunity for Canada to develop a new frontier. Again, we do not appreciate the power we actually possess. As an Arctic nation, we are the sovereigns of a considerable portion of the world’s refrigeration system. The future of the planet’s weather depends on how we, along with other Arctic nations, stabilize this system and guarantee its future health for the benefit of the world.

  It is true we are a difficult country to govern, as Laurier said. Caution and compromise are properly the essence of our politics. Our union is fragile. But it is equally true, as these nineteenth-century voices remind us, that we wouldn’t exist at all if we hadn’t also been a nation of gamblers and daredevils, the kind of people who don’t take no for an answer. The ambition of our ancestors should be inspiring us to equal them in daring today and tomorrow.

  III

  As ministers of the cloth, school principals and professors—as the public intellectuals of their time—the Grants took it upon themselves to pose, and then to answer, the central question facing the country of their day.

  For my great-grandfather’s generation, the question was whether the Canada he grew up in, the five British colonies grouped along the St. Lawrence, could take possession of the West and transform itself into a continental nation-state. The answer, given after the journey in Ocean to Ocean, was yes.

  For my grandfather’s generation, the question was whether Canada could emancipate itself from the British Empire and achieve national independence. The answer, given at the Somme, at Vimy and at Passchendaele, was yes.

  For my uncle’s generation, the question was whether Canada, having emancipated itself from the British Empire, could now survive as an independent state within the American Empire. The right answer—though not the one he gave—is yes.

  The tradition of which I am part is an affirmation of Canadian possibility. But it is also a tradition that issues a challenge to the future. It asks the fourth generation to pose, in our turn, the key question about our country that we must answer.

  The Grants understood that the question about Canada is what place it can make for itself in a world of empires. Today the challenge is how Canada maintains its sovereignty and identity in the vortex of a globalization that is beyond the control of a single empire.

  The globalization the Grants understood was a benign creation of empire. My great-grandfather was never frightened by the pace of change or the violence of world events because he believed that the world was ordered by the flag, the navy and the crown. When Britain’s imperial era came to an end, Canada shaped an identity in the shadow of American power.

  My uncle George did his thinking in the imperial high noon of American power and believed that American rule would be eternal. In fact, no empire’s rule is eternal, and we are living the end of t
hat American noon hour. Over the past fifty years, the world’s centre of gravity has shifted away from the North Atlantic, where it rested as Canada grew into nationhood, and has moved east to the Pacific and the Indian oceans.

  These are the shifts in the tectonic plates that will define Canada’s place in the world and its very identity. The question now is how Canada finds a new place in a world where it can no longer count on any imperial partner or protector, a world in which, as a consequence, Canada must look to itself to guarantee its sovereignty and the integrity of its way of life.

  If the twenty-first century does not necessarily belong to America, then we owe it to ourselves to move out beyond North America and seek opportunities elsewhere, wherever we can find them. We owe it to ourselves to find other partners to build the kind of international order we need, with effective international law, responsible international development assistance and a fair world trading system. We cannot wait for the Americans or the Chinese. We should form our own coalitions of the willing—with European states and with developing democracies—and we should not be afraid to lead. This requires confidence in ourselves, but we should remember those ancestors of ours who fought for a Canadian place at the imperial gatherings that decided how the world would be ordered. We can surely do the same. The emerging world order of the twenty-first century is ours to shape and, to the degree that we play our part in shaping it, we can feel at home in it.

  What Uncle George did understand was that no national identity, not even of great nations, is secure and beyond challenge in a world of unregulated and uncontrolled globalization. Canada’s problem is not unique. Canada shares the same problem with larger nations, maintaining the integrity of its identity and citizenship in a globalizing economy that hammers away at the capacity of national institutions to deliver citizens control of their culture and their economy.