Hi, friends, Luke here with a special solo episode for you today. I'm going to be talking about a very

strange and special book that was, for a time anyway, among the most widely read and influential

in Canada. Almost 60 years ago to the day in March 1965, a cerebral and hitherto mostly unknown professor of religion at McMaster

University named George Grant published Lament for a Nation, the Death of Canadian Nationalism.

As you can probably discern from that title, this was not a book that gestured optimistically

towards the future. Grant's argument in effect was that Canada

would inevitably be swallowed up by the United States and would cease to exist as a sovereign

nation if in fact it had not ceased to exist as sovereign already. So this was not a manifesto

for Canadian nationalism, but rather an extended eulogy for the idea of Canada itself.

To lament, Grant wrote in the book's opening chapter, is to cry out at the death or at the dying of something loved.

This lament mourns the end of Canada as a sovereign state. Political

laments are not usual in the age of progress because most people think that society

always moves forward to better things. Lamentation is not an indulgence in despair or

cynicism. In a lament for a child's death, there is not only pain and regret, but also celebration of past good, unquote.

But if Grant had intended to mourn Canada, the effect of his lament was something quite different.

The book was not only a national bestseller that established him as one of the country's leading public intellectuals.

It was also, for most of

those who read it, many of whom were leftist students and 60s radicals, an urgent and morally potent

statement about Canada's distinctiveness as a national community and a vital intervention on the need to

assert its economic and cultural independence in the face of looming

American domination. Lament for a nation was the most important book I ever read in my life, said

the political economist James Lackser, who in 1969 helped found the influential left-wing group

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