“You’re having a history of Canada on the sly.”
Two days prior, from the same born-again professor: “Everything a politician does is political, but some things a politician does are less political than others. […] I hope you’ll forget the current context and we’ll have an interesting discussion about our country.”
For three days last week, Michael Ignatieff—academic, author, journalist, MP, and, many suppose, Liberal leadership hopeful—presented University College’s F.E.L. Priestley Memorial Lectures in the History of Ideas. His subject, “The Canadian Dream: Past, Present, and Future,” covered “three generations of sustained reflection on what Canada was, and what Canada could be” through what his mother’s side of the family, the Grants, hoped for this country.
Who do the Grants think they were? And why does Ignatieff think the audience would care?
Ignatieff justified his approach in the lecture: “It’s a double kind of thing I want us to go through: a sense of understanding how deeply their love of their country ran, but also how problematic some of their visions of our country turned out to be, and how much difficulty we’ve had as a country since, because we were saddled with the dreams that they gave. I don’t assume that the only thoughts were by my family. I’m crazy, but I’m not that crazy.”
Emblematic of Ignatieff’s approach might be the image he used to describe William Lawson Grant upon the death of his father. “The death of parents is a complex experience in any man or woman’s life, but it’s also a release, whether we admit it or not. The son was able to step out of the shadow of the father, yet the shadow had given the son’s life its meaning.”
Ignatieff admits that he has been “shadowed” by his family history. The lectures are related to a book he is working on, similar in nature to 1987’s Russian Album, in which he delved into the Ignatieff line.
“This was a ground-clearing exercise to figure out ‘What are some of the ideas we’ve had of Canada?’” Ignatieff said in an interview with The Varsity after the final lecture. “You gotta start somewhere, so you start with what you know and what’s familiar to you. Where we are now? I think we’re struggling, we’re trying to figure out how to make a multicultural, multiethnic, bilingual, multinational, transcontinental nation-state hold together, cohere, and be a model of tolerance for other countries.”
Three generations of Grant men thought of Canada in relation to empire. For Ignatieff’s great grandfather, George Monro Grant (who accompanied Sanford Flemming in his 1872 trek across Canada to survey a route for the Pacific Railway, and later became Principal of Queen’s University), if the sun never set on the British empire because of Canada’s place in it, it was as if that empire that ensured Canada’s place in the sun.
For William Lawson Grant there was no question about Canada supporting Britain during the First World War. His experiences at the Somme, though, convinced him that Canadians had earned their country’s sovereignty with their valour and their lives.
As George Parkin Grant famously grieved in Lament for a Nation, the waning post-war British colonial influence would surely result in Canada being engulfed by the United States.
“The intellectual history I’m telling you, which is I think a history of the illusions about Canada that we’ve believed in, is that they were powered by the mistaken belief that there wasn’t enough here,” Ignatieff said Thursday afternoon. “Part of what the burden, [John Ralson Saul’s] A Fair Country and others have argued, is that there was an awful lot here, we just didn’t see it.”
“The question now is how to deepen love for a country that remains unfinished and incomplete. The task for all of us is to rid ourselves of the feeling that life—real life—is somewhere else.”
The future of Canada remained the very large elephant in the small lecture hall. Because there were actually four generations participating in this sly history. Pleading it was a history as opposed to a campaign, Ignatieff deflected questions concerning whether he’ll run for the Liberal leadership.
“All appearances to the contrary, I do not want to convert a series of academic lectures into a political platform,” he apologized, though there were hints of how for the politician, everything is political. “As someone who’s gone into elected office for the first time in my life, the single most useful thing to me has been whatever knowledge I’ve had of the history of my country.” The historical was also political. “Canada was called into being by an act of choice, and she could only be sustained by an act of political will.”
No one called the bluff. Ignatieff did thank the college for allowing a practicing politician to give the lecture. “It’s a very daring thing for University College to do.” Asked a year ago to give this year’s lectures, perhaps Ignatieff didn’t know the question that would be on everyone’s mind.
Michael Grant Ignatieff was in his first year at U of T when Lament for a Nation was published in 1965. “I rebelled against that pessimism then, as I do today,” he said, noting that shortly after the book’s publication, Canada went through what he typified as the most rapid reassertion and transformation of its identity. “But,” back to Uncle George, “his pessimism lays down a challenge. There’s no easy answer to that challenge. For my uncle asked, as I think no one had ever done before: Is Canada possible? Can love of this country be sustained? Does this place make sense any more?”
The vision for Canada that Ignatieff presented did not depart from the points of his “What I would do if I were the Prime Minister” essay in Maclean’s in 2006, though he rooted his desire for “a shared dream that leaves no one out and no one behind” in the lessons learned about his ancestors’ dreams that had fractured the country.
On the campaign trail, “a shared dream for everyone” might sound like so much pap. Ignatieff acknowledged that patriotism is an unfashionable word, unless properly applied.
“Patriotism: enduring, impatient, non-ironic belief in the promise of the land you love, is the single greatest asset of successful societies. […] Patriotism is the source of that impatience and anger that makes abuses seem intolerable, injustices unacceptable, and complacency a delusion. Patriotism is the sentiment that makes us want to be one people. It is the shared feeling that allows us to rise above our differences and make a complex unity of us all. This unity, never certain, never to be taken for granted, is always a work in progress, and it has meaning for us, but it also offers an example to the world. Canadians know as much as anyone on earth about living together across the gulf of difference.”
