It is irritating and distressing to see Canada robotically following the British and French and two other countries in imposing sanctions on two Israeli cabinet ministers over their comments related to the West Bank. It is also annoying that our new prime minister, who squeaked to a minority victory through a histrionic imposture of a modern Churchill against Donald Trump’s Hitler, trying to reconcile the extreme green zealotry of a lifetime with absolute commercial and political necessity, offers nonsense about “decarbonized” oil. Their Canadian and Britannic Majesties the King and Queen were recently dragooned into making a 24-hour visit to this realm to read the prime minister’s platitudinous throne speech, ritualistically beginning with what amounts to a false acknowledgment that we are occupiers of another people’s land. The king was allowed to present this fake confession of stealing the country from the then 200,000 indigenous people, almost all of them nomads, as “shared history as a nation,” (like the shared experiences of Poland, Germany, and the USSR from 1939 to 1945). We shout defiance at the Americans for reducing their trade deficit but prevail upon the King to tell us that we have no right to be here.
Avowedly separatist parties are now leading the polls in Quebec. The last ten years of the Justin Trudeau government acting on the theory that Canada was leading the world into an era of post-national renunciation of sovereignty and denigration of national self-respect, spiced with false self-afflicted blood libels about attempted genocide toward Indigenous people, has predictably enfeebled French Canada’s respect for this country. “Reconciliation” in practice, has been grovelling to the native victimhood industry instead of improving the lot of the Indigenous.
What has no precedent in our history is that at the same time Quebec is agitating, the war against the petroleum and related industries, the country’s principal potential source of prosperity, has pushed Alberta into serious and reluctant, but justified consideration of whether it too, would be better off seceding from this country. Quebec has been economically better managed than Canada for some years and the economic arguments against the independence of Quebec are not going to resonate as strongly as they did in the two referendums on Quebec’s future, (and in 1995 a substantial majority of French-speaking Quebecers voted for a vague concept of sovereignty with association). In the last ten years, as we have officially denigrated ourselves as a racist society of dubious legitimacy 400 years after our ancestors first arrived here, Canada has sustained substantial negative cash flows and lost position in the rating of the world’s countries by per capita income. This is the record of the government we have just reelected.
The government of Quebec has been attempting under all parties that have governed there in the last 50 years to exterminate the English language and effectively drive out the non-French. This has assisted the nationalist elites in moving to larger homes and more sumptuous offices left behind by those who have moved to Toronto or New York, but it has done great damage to Quebec’s respect for Canada as a country. The ancient ambition of French Canadians to have their own country has always been comprehensible and the only successful argument against it is the one espoused by Pierre Trudeau, of a much larger country in which French Canadians would have a coequal official position: Masters in our own house, but our house is Canada. (“Maitres chez nous, mais pour tout le Canada”). Canada is the only transcontinental, bicultural, parliamentary confederation in the history of the world, and of all large countries, our political institutions are senior to any except those of the United Kingdom and the United States. And the United Kingdom lost a large province, Ireland, a hundred years ago, and the United States had to fight a terrible civil war in which 750,000 people died in a population of 31 million, to prevent the secession of a third of the country. We don’t respect our own history because we don’t know it.
We have been by some measure the most successful large country in the world. Although the French Canadians are fewer than a quarter of the whole population, Quebecers have been the prime minister of Canada for 56 of the last 77 years. We have never engaged in discreditable, unjust, self-seeking, or unsuccessful wars, have been generous providers of aid to developing countries, and are probably the most receptive country to immigrants of any nation in the world. Our history is both admirable and interesting if presented with any imagination. It has been our task to keep pace with the overwhelming contiguity of the United States, which in two long lifetimes from 1783 to 1945 grew from a few million colonists and their slaves on the Atlantic coast to a colossal power which at the end of the Second World War had half the economic production of the world, a nuclear monopoly, brilliant civilian and military leadership-Roosevelt, Truman, Marshall, Eisenhower, MacArthur, Nimitz; and had for decades already operated on a scale the world had never imagined to be possible.
Without the might of the United States or its genius for showmanship or its dramatic revolutionary tradition and the immense and heroic agony of emancipating the slaves, or world-historic statesmen, we have more than kept pace with the growth of that astounding country. Despite our self-doubts and comparative indistinctiveness and the brain-drain, we have held our own and have built a country that is certainly not as great as the United States but is in many respects better. We have an infinitely superior and more honest justice system, though certainly an imperfect one, and without a revolution, we have avoided the American infatuation with firearms and the cult of self-help by recourse to them, with the resulting levels of gun-related crime. Because there was never any commercial reason for slavery in this country, we have never had the evil and violent legacy of what Abraham Lincoln called “the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil.”
Before it is too late, we must tear down and make a mighty bonfire of our ghastly wokeness, entice investment and make this treasure house of country, inhabited by more than 40 million relatively educated and motivated people (as many as France had in the Belle Epoque), a citizenship of pride without a trace of arrogance. There are green shoots of hope. The statue of John A. Macdonald in front of the provincial legislature in Toronto is being uncrated. He was the chief architect of this confederation, and of the engineering wonder of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, and he was seen as a great statesman by his illustrious contemporaries: Palmerston, Disraeli, Gladstone, and Lincoln. That we allowed ourselves to be bullied into being ashamed of the founder of our country is in itself shameful. If we do not act like and believe ourselves to be a serious nationality, the nationality will perish. That would be a terrible and needless failure that must not happen. Our leaders should think of that instead of gas-lighting and vain virtue-signalling to the gallant State of Israel, which has again done the world’s dirty work in Iran.
National Post
