Coltin Lillico: The case against cosmopolitan Canada

The Trudeau family legacy of a Canada based on modern "values" denies us our identity and history, writes Guest Contributor Coltin Lillico.

Something in Canada feels diminished. Housing is out of reach, public order is fraying, and our shared institutions inspire more embarrassment than pride. Yet our political class offers little more than recycled slogans and an “elbows-up” nationalism that insists everything is fine because we are not American.

More than half a century ago, George Grant saw this coming. He warned that a rootless, technocratic mindset would hollow out our sense of the good, weaken our loyalties to family, community, and nation, and finally erode our confidence that Canada is worth preserving at all.

In this second instalment of our series, we turn from the myths around Lament for a Nation in part one, to Grant’s deeper diagnosis of Canada’s drift, and his warnings about the Trudeau family’s cosmopolitan project and its impact today.

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Part II

Coltin Lillico is a Vancouver-based historian and political professional.

Does anyone else feel like Canada just isn’t as good as it once was? Our societal crises compound upon one another, unaffordable housing, declining natality rate, rampant criminality, overburdened infrastructure. And yet our staid political discourse and leadership seem utterly inadequate to the problems ailing our country.

Over a half-century ago, Canadian thinker George Grant foresaw our current predicament, the problem is liberalism in its modern, cosmopolitan form.

Unfortunately, Grant has largely been forgotten in general public discourse. He rose to brief political fame after the publication of Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism in 1965, a short but poignant political tome reacting to the defeat of John Diefenbaker to Lester Pearson in which he proclaimed, “the impossibility of conservatism in our era is the impossibility of Canada.” Grant argued that Canada’s national identity, historically rooted in British customs and practices, was being subsumed into the orbit of the United States, the great hegemon of the Cold War. Importantly, Grant identified the dominant ideology of the USA, a universalising and homogenising form of liberalism.

Unwittingly, George Grant contributed to the rise of a pseudo-nationalist sentiment in the form of anti-Americanism on the Canadian Left, who digested Grant’s critique of Americanization, but ignored his more important critique of liberalism. This latent impulse has remained prominent since the 1960s. Canada is more liberal, tolerant, diverse, and therefore superior to the United States, so the logic goes.

We recently saw a minor resurgence of this phenomenon during the 2025 election and the successful “elbows-up” campaign put forward by Mark Carney and the Liberals. But as some perceptive critics have observed, this phenomenon seems now rather banal, motivated by a smug sense of self-superiority bordering on the delusional. “Elbows-up” nationalism is built on rather unsteady and unsure foundations because the Canada that Liberals like Carney seek to preserve is a pale shadow of its former self. Its unifying constructs, universal healthcare, multiculturalism, and the Charter of Rights, no longer rouse national pride but instead inspire dread and shame. The reasons for our national decline are inexorably tied to the problems of the cosmopolitan liberal ideology that became dominant in Canada in the 1960s.

At that time, George Grant, more than any other Canadian thinker, saw clearly the problems of modern liberalism. Liberals like Justin Trudeau’s father, then Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, preached a cosmopolitan, universal love of humanity without any particular attachments, hence his visceral opposition to both Quebec nationalism and traditional Anglo-Canadian nationalism. Grant described Pierre Trudeau as the embodiment of cosmopolitanism:

“In Mr. Trudeau’s writings there is evident distaste for what was by tradition his own, and what is put up along with that distaste are universalist goods which will be capable of dissolving that tradition.”

On the other hand, George Grant argued that society should be ordered from the particular, not the universal, “in human life there must always be place for love of the good and love of one’s own.”

The problem with liberalism in its cosmopolitan, secularised form is that it does not have the rooted attachments that made liberal thought possible in the first place. Grant argued that over time liberals would eventually lose sight of what the “good” really is and lose attachment to that which is our own, family, community, locality, nation, civilisation.

This is precisely what has transpired in our country, and countries across the Western world. Our leaders have lost sight of the particular value of our traditions, our culture, and the heritage bequeathed to us by our ancestors. It was with deep sadness, yet sober clarity, that one witnessed a British World War II veteran, interviewed on live television in the lead-up to Remembrance Day, break down and declare that his generation’s sacrifice wasn’t worth it considering the abysmal state of his country today.

Similarly, in Canada, we have grown estranged from our ancestors. Although the government of Stephen Harper made modest attempts to restore public interest in our history and heritage, such as celebrating the two-hundredth anniversary of the War of 1812 and promoting the historic discovery of the HMS Erebus from John Franklin’s fateful quest to find the Northwest Passage, the initiatives were condemned by academics and swiftly undermined by Harper’s successor, Justin Trudeau.

The prime ministership of Justin Trudeau from 2015 to 2025 represented the true nadir of cosmopolitan liberalism. His comments on Canadian identity exemplified the vapid endpoint of a spent ideology, largely consisting of inane slogans (“diversity is our strength”) and insulting observations (“We’re Canadian because we’re...not American”). Trudeau acted uninterested, and even understanding, as statues of historic figures were vandalised and removed. His few comments on Canadian history consisted of self-aggrandising apologies on behalf of our ancestors, who are no longer here to defend their actions.

But Trudeau was merely an avatar of a wider problem. It was, after all, some of our fellow Canadians who cheered maniacally as they tore down those statues. We should not be surprised. Canadian history is not mandated in most provinces’ educational curricula, including in B.C. And when it is taught, the tone is overwhelmingly negative and unnuanced. Each year, fewer and fewer Canadians wear poppies, attend Remembrance Day ceremonies, and pause for a minute of silence on November 11. Victoria Day, which should be considered the first truly Canadian holiday since it was brought about by the union of Upper and Lower Canada in 1841, is now merely considered another day off to pursue leisure activities. These are all symptoms of a hegemonic cosmopolitan liberalism which sees little value in our past and in developing a shared national community.

For years, Conservative politicians ceded ground on cultural issues, content to win the battle on economics. But as Grant observed, cosmopolitan capitalism is a poor substitute for goodness:

“Cosmopolitanism is an appeal to a universal culture which is shallow beyond measure and denies all the particularities of our roots… in the great cosmopolitanising of our English-speaking society we are all retreating into private life, and there is no place for people to take part in politics in a meaningful way.”

As the political spectrum has narrowed and tightened around this cosmopolitan liberal ideology, politics has become an increasingly superfluous contest between leadership styles and personalities. Meanwhile, questions of first principles, the ends to which society should be aimed, are seen as impolite at best and sinister at worst. The only guiding maxim of modern liberalism, according to Grant, is the autonomy of the will, to make the world as one pleases. This has clearly been the view of the Liberals since Pierre Trudeau as well as Canada’s Supreme Court in its interpretation of so-called “Charter Values.”

It is appropriate then that our current prime minister, Mark Carney, published a book titled Value(s): Building a Better World for All, embodying the very essence of cosmopolitan, value-neutral liberalism, which Grant connected to Nietzsche:

“Everybody uses the word ‘values’ to describe our making of the world. It is forgotten that before Nietzsche and his predecessors, men did not think about their actions in that language. They did not think they made the world valuable, but that they participated in its goodness.”

This form of liberalism, where the chief value is autonomy of one’s own will to make the world as one pleases, should alarm Canadians today because it is continuing to reshape our institutions and undermine the ground on which our society sits. Grant warned of the excess of this ideology leading to the weakening of obligations to one another. Decades before our disturbing euthanasia regime was enacted, not by elected representatives but by the Supreme Court’s interpretation of “Charter Values,” Grant spoke of his fear for the rights of the unheard, the unborn and just born, the old, and the poor.

As we look at the torn and sundered landscape of a country that has seemingly lost not only its sense of purpose but also its sense of what is good and just, it is high time we reorient our political discourse to a rediscovery of our own traditions and our understanding of justice and virtue.

George Grant should not be dismissed as a man nostalgic for a bygone era. It is perhaps clearer now than ever that he was in fact a prophet. A solitary canoe on a torrential river, paddling against the current of our liberal age. With that liberalism now in clear decline, those seeking to revitalise our civilisation ought to read George Grant. His writings offer an opportunity to think beyond liberalism, develop a positive alternative to the complacent “elbows-up” Canada offered by a static and uninspired political elite, and build a nation drawing from the roots of its own traditions and partaking in that which is good in the real sense of the word:

“In this era when the homogenising power of technology is almost unlimited, I do regret the disappearance of indigenous traditions, including my own. It is true that no particularism can adequately incarnate the good. But is it not also true that only through some particular roots, however partial, can human beings first grasp what is good and it is in the juice of such roots which for most men sustain their partaking in a more universal good?”

Coltin Lillico is a Vancouver-based historian studying Canadian conservatism in the post-war era. He is currently the President of the Vancouver Fraserview-South Burnaby Conservative EDA, and Executive Director of TEAM for a Livable Vancouver.