A Trudeau Too Far

'Canada has survived the American Revolution, the War of 1812, two World Wars, the Cold War, and domestic terrorism, but Justin Trudeau may well be the end of us.'

From City Journal

By Michael Bonner

Canada is disintegrating under the weight of its prime minister’s far-left ideology.

If there’s any Western government that isn’t struggling now, I’ve yet to hear of it. Public debt, inflation, housing shortages, lawlessness, uncontrolled immigration, ruinous environmental regulations, and progressive ideological nonsense worry or infuriate most people. Rather than looking for solutions, governing elites condescend, berate their critics, and even resort to speech codes and censorship. The real problem, as elites see it, is not their own ill-conceived ideas but ordinary people’s failure to accept them. The German playwright Bertolt Brecht joked about this phenomenon during the East German uprising against Soviet policies in 1953. Instead of crushing the dissidents, wouldn’t it be easier for the government to dissolve the people and elect a new one?

In Canada, Brecht’s joke may as well be government policy. The Liberal Party has long been unhappy with the Canadian people. The old flag and royalist symbols represented an embarrassing attachment to Britain, so they were abolished. The Liberal elite saw themselves as above parochial politics. Linguistic, cultural, and regional divisions were frustrating; they preferred the United Nations and international forums and aimed to dissolve long-established Canadian identities within an official multiculturalism in the 1970s and 1980s.

If there is one person to blame for most of this, it is Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the former prime minister and father of the current one, Justin Trudeau. But the son is worse than the father.

Before becoming prime minister, Justin Trudeau suggested breaking up the country if Canada proved insufficiently progressive. As prime minister, he declared that Canada was a post-national state with “no mainstream” and “no core identity.” Furthermore, being Canadian “by default” is nothing special, since (according to Trudeau) recent immigrants have a stronger claim of ownership on the country. Artwork representing Canadian culture and history has been stripped out of the new passports. Statues of monarchs, prime ministers, and other national figures are regularly pulled down without resistance. Streets and institutions have been renamed in conformity with leftist ideology. Normal Canadian culture is racist, homophobic, and colonialist, we are constantly told. A government-funded anti-hate “toolkit” for schools deemed the old Canadian flag (under which we fought the Nazis) a “hate-promoting symbol.” Trudeau even suggested that the entire country was complicit in an ongoing genocide, though he notably neglected to turn himself in at the Hague.

Then, in 2021, came a shocking allegation of the discovery of “mass graves” at a residential school where many indigenous children were sent to be educated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Alas, two years of archaeological digs and radar scans refuted the allegation. No one doubts that other appalling forms of neglect and abuse took place at such schools, and policies of reconciliation and economic opportunity must be implemented. But there was no mass murder. Nevertheless, Trudeau commissioned a report that suggested criminalizing “denialism.”

The resulting liberal hysteria triggered a wave of church burnings. Curiously, Trudeau called the burnings both “unacceptable and wrong” and “understandable.” Other policies have troubled Canadian Christians as well. The cross and the fleur-de-lys have been removed from the crown that sits above Canada’s coat of arms. Many applications for government funding now include checklists confirming one’s support for progressive nostrums, including abortion. This is most obviously the case in the Canada Summer Jobs Programme, which funds institutions offering summer jobs to teenagers.

If there is indeed a plan to vilify Canadians belonging to certain religious communities, it seems to be working. A 2022 survey conducted by Angus Reid suggested that Canadians increasingly view Catholic and Evangelical Christianity, as well as Islam, as “damaging.” When Muslim and Christian parents opposed gender ideology in schools, Trudeau called them hateful and misled by the “far right.”

But religious parents got off easy compared with some. The government visited its full wrath on the “Freedom Convoy”—a protest of truckers and others fed up with Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates. That protest admittedly included a grab-bag of oddballs—some with eccentric views of the Canadian constitution—and a small number of extremists, but most were ordinary people. Trudeau, however, invoked the draconian Emergencies Act, froze their banking accounts, and denounced even well-meaning critics who just wanted to get on with their lives as a “fringe minority” with “unacceptable views.”

What else could all this amount to but a campaign to destroy the old Canada and build a new one in conformity with progressivist dogma? God help us if it lasts much longer. Canada has survived the American Revolution, the War of 1812, two World Wars, the Cold War, and domestic terrorism, but Justin Trudeau may well be the end of us.