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Left-of-centre elites in this country — by which I mean most politicians and journalists — enjoy assuming Canadians share their beliefs, yet rarely bother to verify if they actually do.  A writer like Jon Kay, who recently wrote another one of his trademark essays stating with great confidence what "Canadians" feel about this-or-that, never fails to presume the ubiquity of his opinions, just like Prime Minister Trudeau whenever he gives a speech at some international forum making generous use of the pronoun "we."

Such taken-for-granted assumptions are generally flattering — we are a kind people, tolerant, polite, etc. — but also ideological.  They tend to assume a population comprising nothing but liberals, where a progressive consensus on everything from health care to gun control to immigration forms an unshakable part of the national psyche.

I don't doubt Canadians who speak with this sort of confidence about their countrymen genuinely believe their generalizations.  If you're wired tightly enough, it's not difficult to go through life only spotting evidence that reenforces your conclusions.  The problem is self-delusion can become extraordinarily self-destructive when your professional success is tied to accurately reading the public mood, as the massive backlash to the Omar Khadr payout has ably demonstrated.

Whatever newfound "concerns" Justin Trudeau now professes to have about the $10.5 million he handed Mr. Khadr to avoid fighting him in court, it seems clear the prime minister and the people around him did not anticipate the decision to offer such a massive settlement would be as poorly received as it was.  Doubtless, Trudeau and his handlers consume a mostly progressive media diet, reading the papers in which all the big columnists and reporters have spent years portraying Omar Khadr as a deeply tragic figure, unjustly screwed by the American war machine and the cruel Harper government.  No doubt the prime minister genuinely believes his election was at least partially a referendum on softening the Islamophobic edges of the war on terror, with his opposition to nasty Conservative policies like stripping the citizenship of convicted terrorists broadly popular.  Surely his party had convinced themselves that Canadians are such a permissive and progressive bunch that they would welcome — maybe even celebrate? — their government's generosity in showing Mr. Khadr just how compassionate Canada can be.

Unfortunately for them, one reality about Canadians that is very easy to prove, but completely absent from progressive conventional wisdom, is our general hard-heartedness on what could be called "law and order" issues.  A poll I like to cite is a 2010 Angus Reid survey that asked Canadians, among other questions, what sorts of crimes convicts deserved to be executed for.  62% supported executing murderers, 31% supported executing rapists, 17% supported executing kidnappers, and 6% supported executing those convicted of armed robbery.  Think about that for a moment — the number of Canadians who support executing kidnappers is roughly the same as the number of Canadians who voted NDP in the last election.  The idea of executing murderers has a higher approval rating than just about any politician anywhere in the country.  Yet how many people in Ottawa, or in privileged media jobs, would be likely to think "executing criminals" when conjuring up popular Canadian opinions?

Omar Khadr was an al-Qaeda operative who participated in armed combat against US forces in Afghanistan — in other words, he fought with our enemies against our allies in a war in which Canada was (and still is) a combatant.  He was captured, and held as a prisoner of war in Guantanamo Bay, and ultimately pled guilty to murdering Christopher Speer (and other terrorism-related charges), for which he served a prison sentence in Canada.  Whatever other legal complexities of his case, these are the indisputable facts, and the evidence suggests most Canadians are not inclined to be compassionate in the face of them.  A nation that supports executing murderers is not one eager to make them multi-millionaires, at least.

Nor are "we" particularly concerned with preserving the protections of citizenship to those who make war against their own country.  A 2012 poll from NRG Research found over 80% of Canadians supported stripping citizenship from convicted traitors and terrorists, a sentiment which later became law through the Harper government's Bill C-24.  (You may recall that this legislation was described as "controversial" by the press and opposition parties.)

Most Canadians clearly conceptualize citizenship as a privilege to be earned, as opposed to something that can be held indefinitely through an accident of birth, as was the case with Khadr, who lived barely a year in Canada before being shuttled back to Pakistan with his immigrant parents, themselves al-Qaeda traitors.  The prime minister's famous quip that a "Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian" may make a good soundbite, and may well reflect the prevailing view of the legal establishment, but as a summary of national sentiment it could not be more ignorant.

What the Trudeau government has hopefully learned from Khadrgate — already evidenced by the prime minister's rapidly changing, increasingly defensive tone — is that confident liberal assertions about Canada do not become reality by virtue of repetition.

Canadians may well be very progressive in some ways, and on certain issues, appreciably more progressive than Americans (which is the only measure most care about).  But there has never been much evidence to suggest the majority of Canadians have bought into what appears to be the elite consensus on crime and terror, namely that compassion is more important than punishment, and the legal status of citizenship infers victims a moral righteousness that can never be shed.

Written by J.J. McCullough

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.


It's hard to believe in such a welcoming place like Quebec, a small town like Saint-Apollinaire would vote to block a Muslim cemetery from being built.

Just kidding.  This is the province where six men were gunned down praying in a mosque and we've all — the rest of Canada included — basically moved on.

We've moved on so much, in fact, that just this week someone mailed a package that included a defaced Qur'an to the mosque where the six men were killed, along with a note saying the congregants should make their cemetery at a hog farm.

The two events are directly linked, according to one Montreal imam.  "It was a Machiavellian attempt to excite Muslims just before the referendum, thinking that Muslims will overreact," Hassan Guillet told CBC News.  "They [wanted] to use the reaction, or bad reaction, to fuel the hate and the fear of the citizens of Saint-Apollinaire."

It was with that in mind, that the board of the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City, which runs the mosque that received the threat, kept news of the package to themselves.  They didn't want to give the mailer the satisfaction of a reaction.

It's hard to imagine the self-restraint and grace it takes to keep quiet about such foul abuse, so as not to scare your neighbours by showing — well-justified! — emotion.  It's even worse that despite this grace, their neighbours still lacked the basic decency to allow for the cemetery to be built.

That a handful of their fellow citizens — fewer than 50 people bothered to vote — thought little enough of them to deny them a space to bury their dead is a stain on the town.

It's in this environment that NDP members in the province worry that Jagmeet Singh, a Sikh man who wears a turban, won't be electable because of his overt religiosity.

There's some truth to this idea that Quebec is uncomfortable with religion generally.  But we're clearly more uncomfortable with some religions over others.  For example, there's still a crucifix with a spot over the speaker's chair in Quebec's National Assembly, and a giant cross overlooking Montreal from the top of Mont Royal.

It's in this sorta-secularism that the Parti Quebecois' "charter of values" came about.  Essentially, the charter would have banned turbans, head coverings, and other visible forms of devotion were barred for public servants.  Large crucifix necklaces were off limits.  Tastefully sized ones were just fine.

Many have make the case the PQ lost the last provincial election because of the charter of values thing, but the election turned on more than just the one policy.  People seem to have forgotten the central role of a certain billionaire's raised fist and pledge to separate from Canada played in the whole thing.

Besides, if Quebec really wasn't receptive to the charter, would the current government be pushing a watered down bill to ban public servants from wearing face coverings?  It's all in the name of secularism, we tell ourselves.

But this quasi-secularism is, at least in some ways, a total farce.  While we were engaged, my wife and I looked at doing a courthouse wedding here in Montreal.  We didn't get married here, but researching the process was illuminating.

You need to sit down with your officiant about a month before you get married so they can make sure everything checks out: you're not already married, not related to each other, and are freely entering into the institution of marriage and all that.  Then they'll post a notice for 20 days, saying you're getting married so anyone who objects to your union can do so — or forever hold their peace.

The basic framework of a church wedding was transferred from the cathedral to the bureaucracy.  Instead of a Catholic priest, you're meeting with one who prays at the altar of paperwork.

What I'm getting at, is while Quebec is nominally secular, there's an identifiably Christian strain to that secularism.

And this is a form of pesudo-secularism that's present in Ontario, too.  Just ask John Tory, who a decade ago as leader of the Ontario PC's, proposed funding all religious schools with public funds.  One of the big undercurrents of opposition to this plan was that Muslim schools would be funded by the government.  Funding Catholic schools is fine, you see, funding non-Christian ones is blasphemy.

The common thread through all of this is that one form of religion is perfectly acceptable in this country, and this province, while another isn't.  Christianity, no matter how overt, is accepted as a sort of background noise.  While other displays of religious devotion, Islam most prominently, are seen as some kind of affront.

Until we grapple with this as a society, that we value one set of people above others, plenty of Canadians will feel emboldened to deny their fellow citizens their basic humanity.

That's why the disgrace of Saint-Apollinaire mars us all.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.