In his 1970 introduction to Lament for a Nation, Professor George Grant modestly expressed doubt whether his study had an enduring importance beyond the particular circumstances occasioning its appearance. He questioned whether his appeal to the distinctiveness of our political heritage would strike a responsive chord in a generation witnessing other historical events and participating in new social experiences. Yet, Grant's modesty aside, one should urge readers to renew their acquaintance with his passionate defense of our Canadian identity, if for no other reason than that we are still, and perhaps to an even greater extent, subject to widespread homogenizing, continentalist forces which have been shaping our destiny for the past two decades. For those whose lives have been deeply affected by massive continental economic restructuring, who have begun to experience the political and social implications of living within the new continental trade region formed under the North American Free Trade Agreement, and who are attempting to navigate between equally powerful globalizing forces and the recrudescence of fragmenting local attachments, Grant's tocsin still warns with unsurpassed clarity of the dangerous shoals surrounding us.