The Second Nation

Something is emptying out of Canadian life, and no one is quite naming it. The volunteers who used to come don't come anymore. The Legion halls and service clubs and community leagues are folding one by one. A country is retreating, house by house and heart by heart, into a comfortable and well-appointed solitude — even as it pours billions into building its future. In The Second Nation, Glen Pearson argues that Canada is making the same mistake twice. After the last war we built two nations at once: the structural nation of dams and highways, and the civic nation of halls and leagues and neighbours — the dam and the hall. Today we are rebuilding the first and forgetting the second. And borrowing the eye of Alexis de Tocqueville, who saw two centuries ago that democracy lives or dies in the ordinary habit of citizens joining together, Pearson asks the question beneath the national mood of building: if we are rebuilding the nation, who is rebuilding the citizens? But this is not a lament. Drawing on forty years co-directing a food bank in London, Ontario, Pearson shows that the capacity for common life is not gone — only starved of the conditions it needs. And in a row of five shipping containers on a college campus, raised by a community that refused to wait for permission, he finds the proof: that ordinary people, given back the room to build, will build — and that community is not the luxury a prosperous society affords, but the very ground prosperity grows from. Warm, unflinching, and finally hopeful, The Second Nation is a wager on the oldest and best thing a people can do: gather their own hands, and build.