Michael Ignatieff, 61, leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, is also an eminent writer. His family memoir, The Russian Album, won the Governor General’s non-fiction award in 1987, and his 1993 novel Scar Tissue was shortlisted for the Booker prize. In 2000, Ignatieff and his wife, Zsuzsanna, retraced the journey his great-grandfather George Monro Grant undertook with Sandford Fleming in 1872. Grant and Fleming were mapping out the railway line that would link Canada from ocean to ocean. Ignatieff’s aim was to see the country through his ancestor’s optimistic eyes and trace how four generations of his prominent family—including his uncle George Parkin Grant, author of Lament for a Nation (1965)—had grappled with the idea of Canada. Grant’s despairing view of Canada’s fate, that the nation was destined to dissolve into the American orbit, has made his book an icon of Canadian nationalism. His nephew’s view of our future, as set out in True Patriot Love (Penguin), is far more confident.
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, Que., or London, Ont., or Halifax, N.S. 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, 16-lane highways and the multicultural bazaar of downtown. This is now our home and native land.
ALSO AT MACLEANS.CA: A review of True Patriot Love
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 into 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 20 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 50 years ago. We are still awaiting ours.
The Europeans have used high-speed railways to tie Europe together. After 50 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 19th-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.
