Canada: A Dead Country Walking
Canada
is presently in the throes of social and political disintegration. A
left-leaning electorate has once again empowered a socialist government
promoting all the lunatic ideological shibboleths of the day: global
warming or “climate change,” radical feminism, indigenous sovereignty,
expansionary government, environmental strangulation of energy
production, and the presumed efficiency of totalitarian legislation. Industry and manufacturing are abandoning the country in droves and heading south.
Canada is now reaping the
whirlwind. The Red-Green Axis consisting of social justice warriors,
hereditary band chiefs, renewable energy cronies, cultural Marxists, and
their political and media enablers have effectively shut down the
country. The economy is at a standstill, legislatures and City Halls
have been barricaded, blockades dot the landscape, roads and bridges have been sabotaged, trains have been derailed (three crude-by-rail spillages in the last two
months), goods are rotting in warehouses, heating supplies remain
undelivered, violent protests and demonstrations continue to wreak
havoc—and the hapless Prime Minister, who spent a week swanning around
Africa as the crisis unfolded, is clearly out of his depth and has no
idea how to control the mayhem. No surprise here.
A wock pupper politico in thrall to the Marxist project and corporate financial interests, Justin Trudeau is generally baffed out when it comes to any serious or demanding concerns involving the welfare of the people and the economic vitality of the nation. Little is to be expected of him in the current emergency apart from boilerplate clichés and vague exhalations of roseate sentiment.
Still, Trudeau may have been right about one thing when he told The New York Times
that Canada had no core identity—although this is not what a Prime
Minister should say in public. Canada was always two “nations,” based on
two founding peoples, the French and the English, which novelist Hugh
MacLennan famously described as “two solitudes” in his book
of that title. But it may be closer to the truth to portray Canada as
an imaginary nation which comprises three territories and ten provinces,
two of which, Quebec and Newfoundland, cherish a near-majoritarian
conception of themselves as independent countries in their own right.
Newfoundland narrowly joined Confederation only in 1949 and Quebec held
two successive sovereignty referenda that came a hair’s breadth from
breaking up the country.
The latest entry in the exit sweepstakes is oil-rich but hard-done-by Alberta, a province which suffered under the National Energy Program
introduced in 1980 by the current PM’s father Pierre Trudeau, and is
currently struggling under a concerted left-wing campaign, sponsored by
Green-progressivist foundations (American consortiums masking via proxies as Canadian coalitions), clueless Nobel laureates at their virtue-signaling best, and a Liberal government ideologically
aligned with the NDP (New Democratic Party) and the Greens, to prevent
the development of its vast oil reserves.
Alberta has always resented the indifference to and domination of the Canadian West by the so-called Laurentian Elite comprising “the political, academic, cultural, media and business elites” of central Canada. There is now a Wexit movement gathering momentum.
It might just as plausibly be
argued that Canada is composed of a veritable congeries of competing,
self-identified mini-nations—English, French, Islamic, Chinese, Sikh,
native tribes with multiple patrimonies and unpronounceable names, and
sundry political constituencies affiliated with the global left.
Contributing factors like indiscriminate immigration from dysfunctional
countries, metastasizing socialist doctrine verging on nascent
totalitarianism, a state-funded national broadcaster and a deeply
compromised print media subsidized by the Liberal government added to
the destabilizing brew. Meanwhile, to quote lawyer and former philosophy
professor Grant Brown,
“the education system invites Extinction Rebellion kooks into the
classroom to terrify the children” (personal communication).
An army of little Gretas will carry the country-killing revolution even further.
George Grant’s 1965 Lament for a Nation
argued that Canada had ceased to be a nation, having surrendered its
identity to the continental thrust of American dynamism and to the
historical progress of the “universalist and homogeneous state [as] the
pinnacle of political striving.” He goes on to argue that the
“impossibility of conservatism in our era is the impossibility of
Canada,” especially as the country falls ever more under the sway of
“the Canadian establishment and its political instrument, the Liberals.”
The book has been extremely controversial and may appear a little
dated, shrouded in the mists of nostalgia for “the narrow provincialism
and our backwoods culture”—although, no doubt tongue in cheek,
suggesting that “Perhaps we should rejoice in the disappearance of
Canada.” Lamenting or rejoicing, we are looking at a fait accompli.
It is often noted that America is a nation evenly divided between
progressivist and conservative populations, a civil dilemma not easily
resolved. But Canada is divided approximately 65-35 by these
constituencies, and if one considers that the federal Conservative Party
in its present manifestation can fairly be described as Liberal Lite,
the breakdown is more like 95-5.
This means there is no chance of reconciliation between our political disparities, such as they are, and Canada is doomed to plummet down the esker of every failed socialist experiment that preceded it and, indeed, that is presently on display in various foundering nations around the globe—North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and counting.
Trudeau père invoked the War Measures Act in 1970 to quell the Quebec separatist movement, the Front de Libération du Québec
(FLQ), after a series of bombings and murders. It is obvious that the
son has neither the political smarts nor the strength of character to
act decisively against those who are busy reducing an already patchwork
country into a heap of shards and rubble. And there we find the proof
that, whatever Canada may once have been and whatever the talking heads
may incessantly proclaim, Canada is no longer a viable political
construct. It is a dead country walking.
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