What Is Canada For?

When I left Canada in 1992, there was no reason to think Grant was wrong. We did a couple of significantly independent things — for instance, we stayed out of the Vietnam War — but the fear of being subsumed by the American project was always prevalent and widely accepted, and certainly felt in the 1988 Free Trade debate. In your book, you said that you voted for Brian Mulroney in 1984. But you were disenchanted with Canada by 1988 and certainly by the time you left the country in 1992. Was it Prime Minister Mulroney’s When Irish Eyes are Smiling song-and-dance routine with Ronald Reagan, or what was it? It wasn’t just that. It was the end of the Cold War, the seeming triumph of the American model, American economic hegemony. The sense that the future was very much centered around the US. People of my generation were looking to the U.S. When I finished law school at McGill, the best students were destined for New York and Washington. But then, something happened that made me rethink my assumptions. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s decision to stay out of the Iraq War was a direct contradiction of Grant’s thesis. At that time, in 2003, George W. Bush was a remarkably popular and powerful president. It seemed inconceivable that Canada could have said no to the U.S. But we did. http://www.rabble.ca/reviews/review.shtml?x=63649 [Proofreader’s note: this article was edited for spelling and typos November 13, 2007]

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