Michael Bonner
A Trudeau Too Far
Canada is disintegrating under the weight of its prime minister’s far-left ideology.
/ Eye on the News /
Politics and law
Jul 26 2024
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.