Reprinted from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute
What happens in a country without cultural conservatism? Look no further than Canada, where the national identity is disintegrating.
In 2015, soon after taking office, the new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gushed to a fawning New York Times that, “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada. There are shared values – openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other – but there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.”
Along with his fellow travelers in the institutions, he set to work ripping the country’s historic identity to shreds. The three prongs of the attack involved setting fire to its past, promoting LGBTQ and critical race theory in schools and government, and unleashing an unprecedented wave of mass migration. Only now that the full impact of this cultural revolution is sinking in is the country waking up. Even the mainstream liberal left admits things have gone too far.
Journalist Omer Aziz, in the liberal establishment Globe and Mail, penned a viral piece about the betrayal of the ‘Canadian Dream’, which he characterized as on life support. He speaks of a social crisis, an immigration crisis, an economic crisis and a political crisis after the ravages of Trudeau. Former Tory cabinet minister Kevin Klein adds, ‘Today, our country’s identity is under siege, not from outside invaders but from within – by an ideology that seeks to erase what it means to be Canadian. The left’s relentless attack on our values, history, and sense of belonging is tearing at the very fabric of our democracy.’
This summer I spent five weeks in the eastern part of my country, setting foot in the only two of the country’s ten provinces I had yet to visit. What greeted me? The progress pride flag fluttered everywhere across the picturesque small towns of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Food chains in these overwhelmingly British-origin provinces were staffed almost entirely by recent arrivals, the product of an unprecedented wave of temporary foreign workers encouraged by Trudeau’s Liberals. If you think Britain, with 50 percent more people than Canada, took in a lot of immigrants last year, consider that Canada admitted a staggering 1.9 million to the UK’s 1.2 million.
But perhaps the most symbolic events have been over 100 arson attacks on churches across Canada. These, which Trudeau called ‘understandable’, accompanied a wave of statue toppling of Canadian founders such as Sir John A. Macdonald (as well as Queen Victoria), and were motivated by leftist myths about the churches’ role in the country’s Residential Schools programme for indigenous First Nations people.
Though mistreatment of indigenous Canadians occurred at these schools, as they did in reserve and non-native schools, records show that native people who attended Residential Schools had significantly lower mortality rates from infectious diseases than their peers who remained on reserve. Documentary evidence reveals that children were not removed from reserves without parental consent. Aspirational native parents sought to have such schools constructed and wanted their children to attend. Many who attended spoke positively of their experience. The evidence also does not back up accusations that the schools were designed to erase the culture of First Nations people.
The charge that children were killed or placed in ‘mass graves’ by those who ran the schools has no basis in documentary or forensic records. Rather, it is based on selective oral testimony and ignores the considerable monetary and identity incentives shaping the narrative of plaintiffs, white progressive allies and well-paid lawyers. Recently, the Canadian government forked over a whopping $2.8 billion to atone for their claims. The notion that residential schools amounted to a form of ‘genocide’ is based on misinformation and an abuse of the English language, but this did not stop the entire political and media establishment endorsing the lie. Telling such truths is smeared as ‘denialism’ by woke elites, and zealots among them are trying to criminalize it.
Meanwhile, gender reassignment surgery and self-identification are the norm, the UK’s Cass Review has been dismissed and draconian human rights bills like C-16 and C-63 permit plaintiffs to haul people before kangaroo courts known as Human Rights Tribunals for subjectively-defined offences like misgendering. Trudeau’s government has majored on speech policing and authoritarianism towards the right, abusing the language of ‘hate’ and ‘misinformation’ while trafficking in both.
The downstream effects of this woke revolution include falling per capita GDP, rising crime and youth unemployment, soaring house prices and a surge in homeless encampments. As I note in my new book Taboo, the so-called ‘culture war’ is about much more than culture.
Perhaps the only silver lining to the story is that Trudeau’s dumpster fire seems to have woken people up. Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are crushing the Liberals in the polls by nearly 20 points, on course for a clear majority of seats. Two-thirds of people want lower immigration and the issue is a top concern for voters for the first time I can remember. Meanwhile young Canadians, bucking trends elsewhere in the Anglosphere, appear to lean well to the right of their elders on some metrics.
Only time will tell if this is too little, too late.
Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.