True Patriot Love (4 page)

Even here, the history was shadowed by the same doubt that had haunted his father’s vision: Is there enough here? If the story is the passage from colony to nation, what will our independence be worth when we get it? Once the frame of empire is removed from the picture, what significance will still attach to the sketch of a country that remains?

My grandfather left this question for his son to answer, and the despairing answer came thirty years later in
Lament for a Nation
. Canada had gone from colony to nation to colony, without any autonomous period of true freedom in between. But this was not all. In the era of technological modernity, love of country was a sentimental
and retrograde illusion. A place like Canada, George Grant argued, could no longer serve as an object of love and longing.

I rebelled against this pessimism then, as I still do today. But his pessimism lays down the gauntlet. There is no easy answer to the challenge posed by George Grant, for he asked, as no one had ever done before, Is Canada possible? These are all serious questions, and the way to take them seriously is not to give them easy answers.

My own life exemplifies these questions. I grew up in a Canadian household where my parents did think that life was elsewhere. This is how it is in small countries and provincial societies everywhere in the world. My mother used to go about the house humming a Judy Garland song with a line about how, if you haven’t played the Palace, you might as well be dead. The Palace Theatre was elsewhere— not in Ottawa, where I grew up, but in the big bright world beyond. So the family question wormed its way into how I thought of my life, and the answer I gave myself was to get out of here, to go out into the bright world beyond and play the palace.

I played the palace in London for twenty years, as a journalist and writer, and for five years at Harvard as a professor. And then I did what they all did—my great-grandfather, my grandfather, my uncle: I came home. Life was elsewhere all right, but this place was my place, my problem, my obsession, my home. The questions my
family had always asked—Is there enough here? How do we make this place worthy of our dreams? How do we fix what is so obviously wrong?—those questions became my own. It’s why I came back. It’s why I entered politics. It’s why I’m here.

The spiritual task is to deepen love for a country that remains incomplete. The political task is to narrow the gap between the country we actually live in and the country we imagine. This is the task three generations of my family set itself, and now it is my turn to try.

The best way to begin is to get our bearings, to return to the past and to explore again what these Canadians once believed their country’s destiny to be. For what is inspiring about this—and so necessary for us now in our more skeptical half-light—is that our ancestors thought our destiny could be glorious indeed. The best reason to return to the past is that we often discover our ancestors believed in us and our future more than we do ourselves.

One morning in mid-August 1872, when my great-grandfather stood waist high in the grass and looked out at the prairie, somewhere in what is now southeastern Manitoba, alive with songbirds and open to the wide horizon, empty of every human soul, he thought he could see a mighty nation arising here—farmers and labourers, populating these gigantic plains, feeding the world and powering a country to a great place in the world of nations. The mere sight of that empty plain convinced
him, he later said, that he had been wrong to doubt the future of Canada. Now he could see the bright horizon. It is good to see that horizon through his eyes, even if the future has come to pass, and is not as bright as he thought. For without this faith, this ancestral belief that we are capable of great things, love of country will die.

T
he Grants emigrated from lowland Scotland to Pictou County in Nova Scotia in 1826. Of the founding father, James Grant, we know only that he was an unsuccessful farmer who married the more considerable figure, Mary Monro, in 1831 and had three children. My great-grandfather, George Monro Grant, was born in 1835. At the age of nine, while playing with other boys in front of an open-cast coal mine near Stellarton, he thrust his hand into the maw of a threshing machine and lost all the fingers of his right hand. Coal miners carried him home, one of them calling out “I have the fingers, Geordie, I have the fingers!” In 1844 in colonial Nova Scotia, the fingers were never going to be sewn back, and George was lucky to escape with his life. His mother slowly nursed him back to health and he became, as might
be expected, her special treasure. Perhaps because of this, he came to think of his injury as a blessing in disguise.

The loss of full use of his hand also made him unfit for farming, so after a time at Pictou Academy, where he did well, the Presbyterian church offered him a scholarship to study in Scotland if he would come back to serve the kirk afterward. This he did, returning in the early 1860s, and he soon received a call from the congregation of the St. Matthew’s Church in Halifax, where he became the minister.

His faith was optimistic, earnestly practical and, within the limits of the day, enlightened. He hated anti-Catholic sectarianism and stood against the dourest elements of Presbyterianism. He always remembered, with a shudder, the kirks of his childhood, where the men and women sat apart with bowed heads and hell and damnation poured forth from the pulpit in thick Gaelic. His favourite biblical text was St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians Chapter Five, which begins with the ringing exhortation “Stand fast, therefore, in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.” Faith was freedom, the freedom to choose the path to salvation. Perhaps it was not a coincidence either that there was an echo of Galatians in the Grant family battle cry, descended from the Scottish clans of old, “Stand fast, Craigellachie!”

He was a riveting preacher, clear, direct, hopeful and gentle with sinners. The walls of St. Matthew’s, the gloomy
establishment on Barrington Street where he was minister between 1863 and 1877, still display a plaque put up by grateful parishioners. He was a sought-after dinner guest, and at one such a dinner he met Jessie Lawson, daughter of one of the founders of the Bank of Nova Scotia. He married Jessie, a quiet, frequently bedridden woman of deep intelligence, whom he consulted about everything. They had two sons together, and the tragedy of their lives was the death of Geordie, their youngest, a handicapped child who perished of typhoid at the age of twelve.

Grant proved to be an often absent but unquestionably affectionate husband, writing his wife daily and calling her in his letters “Dear Mother,” “My Darling Wife,” and signing himself “Your Always Devoted Husband.” When he was on the road, his remaining son, my grandfather, always received a special letter, written in large letters so the child could comprehend.

Grant was soon a coming man, a frequent contributor to the newspapers of the day, where in 1866 he argued that the colony should confederate with the rest of Canada. He took on his idol, Joseph Howe, the colonial orator who in 1848 had secured responsible government—quasi-independent status—for Nova Scotia, the first British colonial territory to do so. Howe saw nothing to be gained from confederating with the rest of Canada, and much to lose.

My great-grandfather won this argument for Canada, and he was to win many others. In photographs, he cuts a striking figure: five foot nine in height, slim and wiry, with thinning hair, dressed in a clergyman’s black suit and white collar, the stump of his right hand hidden inside a black glove. His eyes radiate vitality, self-confidence and humour. His failings, by his own account, included shortness of temper, irritability and a tendency to drive himself to exhaustion.

In his congregation at St. Matthew’s, Halifax, was an equally passionate proponent of Confederation, Sandford Fleming, the prosperous railway engineer who was overseeing work on the building of the Intercolonial Railway that was to link the colonies of the Atlantic with the colonies on the St. Lawrence. Grant and Fleming formed a lifelong partnership, at once political and personal. Both were canny Scots, indefatigable, self-possessed, big men in small ponds, determined to make their marks, devout Christians and, most importantly, romantic adventurers with a touch of the permanent adolescent.

It was Fleming who had the crazy idea of being the first Canadians to journey ocean to ocean. Prime Minister John A. Macdonald had secured British Columbia’s entry into Confederation with the promise of a railway, and Fleming was determined to be the man to build it. He had got himself appointed as engineer in chief and wanted to survey the line himself. But he knew that railways meant
politics and politics required propaganda. When he listened to Grant’s sermons, Fleming knew he had found the propagandist he needed. Before they set out, Grant and Fleming agreed that Grant should write a book. They even agreed on the title and Fleming promised Grant $400 for a completed manuscript. Fleming would demonstrate that the railroad was practicable. Grant would demonstrate that it was irresistible.

Still, they were rank amateurs, and crossing Canada was a risky scheme. Just consider what such a journey involved in the summer of 1872. You’d begin with a train from Halifax to Pictou on the Northumberland Strait. From there, a steamer would take you up the St. Lawrence to Trois Rivières. From there you transferred to the Grand Trunk, which took you to Montreal, then to Toronto and finally to Collingwood on the southern shore of Lake Huron. That was where Canada ended, at least as far as the railway was concerned.

From Collingwood, a steamer would take you through the Great Lakes to Port Arthur at the western tip of Lake Superior. At this point, just halfway across the continent, modern forms of transportation gave way to the horse, cart or canoe. Ahead of you stretched a thousand miles of the Canadian Shield’s best swamp, forest and rapids. After that, a further thousand miles of winding tracks through the prairies. After that, the cliff faces of the Rockies barred your way to the ocean. If you wanted to create a country,
this was what you had to conquer. The Americans had done it, driving in the last spike of their railway in 1869. If they could do it, Fleming and Grant believed, so could Canadians.

So let us begin that journey where the steamer left them, on the rickety wooden dock at Port Arthur, now Thunder Bay, at first light on July 22, 1872. Besides Grant, the expedition consisted of the rotund figure of Sandford Fleming, his teenage son Frank, a botanist named Macoun, whom they had picked up on the steamer, and Dr. Moren, a mild Halifax physician who was there to keep them healthy. Luggage and provisions were loaded onto carts and the party set off on the Dawson Road, a narrow single track of logs laid across muskeg through dense, wet woods. At Shebandowan Lake, the next morning, everything was loaded into three freight canoes, their birchbark seams caulked with black pitch. Each canoe had a name,
Beaver, Sun
and
Buffalo
, and each came with a steersman fore and aft.

Fleming had engaged two Metis and two Iroquois traders to guide them to Lake of the Woods. They showed up for work in British regimental jackets, grey tunics with brass buttons, white cotton shirts and woollen trousers held up with a coloured Metis sash. They had all been in the service of Sir George Simpson, the legendary governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, in the days when the Bay owned the entire Canadian North West. The staple of the
trade, the beaver, was vanishing—and these men, now in late middle age and making their living by paddling settlers west to the plains, were the aristocrats of a trade in its final hours.

Grant settled into the middle of a canoe with Ignace behind and Louis in front, and they set off at a brisk pace through the complex system of portages, rapids, lakes and rivers that led from the western end of the Great Lakes to the Lake of the Woods and the western plains beyond.

For the next eight days, they shot rapids, toted the canoes through long portages or surged through the rivers at dusk, the paddles keeping up a steady stroke. When the rivers broadened out into a lake, the guides would shout “hi hi” and race each other to the night’s landing place, where the canoes would be pulled out, turned over and repaired. They were noble company, these Metis and Iroquois steersmen. When they came out of their tents in the morning, Grant noticed, they washed themselves meticulously and re-braided their pigtails. When he held his first Sunday service on a large rock in the middle of one of the rivers, they sang the hymn “Veni Creator Spiritus” in the Iroquois language.