Marche: ‘Acute, Sustained, Profound and Abiding Rage’: Canada Finds Its Voice

2025/08/11 Leave a comment

Good op-ed. But more needed in right and Trump-leaning media…:

The mind-set of Canada is changing, and the shift is cultural as much as economic or political. Since the 1960s, Canadian elites have been rewarded by integration with the United States. The snipers who fought with American forces. The scientists who worked at American labs. The writers who wrote for New York publications. The actors who made it in Hollywood. Mr. Carney himself was an icon of this integration as chair of the board of Bloomberg L.P., the financial news and data giant, as recently as 2023.

As America dismantles its elite institutions one by one, that aspirational connection is dissolving. The question is no longer how to stop comparing ourselves with the United States, but how to escape its grasp and its fate. Justin Trudeau, the former prime minister, used to speak of Canada as a “post-national state,” in which Canadian identity took second place to overcoming historical evils and various vague forms of virtue signaling. That nonsense is over. In several surveys, the overwhelming first choice for what makes the country unique is multiculturalism. This, in a world collapsing into stupid, impoverishing hatreds, is the distinctly Canadian national project.

Even after Covid and the failure to create adequate infrastructure for new Canadians, which lead to a pullback on immigration, Canada still has one of the highest rates of naturalization in the world. This country has always been plural. It has always contained many languages, ethnicities and tribes. The triumph of compromise among difference is the triumph of Canadian history. That seems to be an ideal worth fighting for.

Canada is now stuck in a double reality. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 59 percent of Canadians identified the United States as the country’s top threat, and 55 percent of Canadians identified the United States as the country’s most important ally. That is both an unsustainable contradiction and also a reality that will probably define the country for the foreseeable future. Canada is divided from America, and America is divided from itself. The relationship between Canada and America rides on that fissure.

Margaret Atwood was, and remains, the ultimate icon of 1960s Canadian nationalism and also one of the great prophets of American dystopia. “No. 1, hating all Americans is stupid,” she told me on “Gloves Off,” a podcast about how Canada can defend itself from America’s new threats. “That’s just silly because half of them would agree with you,” and “even a bunch of them are now having buyers’ regret.”

Large groups of people in Canada, and one assumes in America, too, hope this new animosity will pass with the passing of the Trump administration. “I can’t account for the rhetoric on behalf of our president,” Gov. Janet Mills of Maine said recently on a trip to Nova Scotia. “He doesn’t speak for us when he says those things.” Except he does. The current American ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, is the kind of man you send to a country to alienate it. During the first Trump administration, the State Department had to apologize for offensive remarks he made, which he had at one point denied. He has also said the administration finds Canadians “mean and nasty.” Such insults from such people are a badge of honor.

But it’s the American system — not just its presidency — that is in breakdown. From the Canadian side of the border, it is evident that the American left is in the middle of a grand abdication. No American institution, no matter how wealthy or privileged, seems willing to make any sacrifice for democratic values. If the president is Tony Soprano, the Democratic governors who plead with Canadian tourists to return are the Carmelas. They cluck their disapproval, but they can’t believe anyone would question their decency as they try to get along.

Canada is far from powerless in this new world; we are educated and resourceful. But we are alone in a way we never have been. Our current moment of national self-definition is different from previous nationalisms. It will involve connecting Canada more broadly rather than narrowing its focus. We can show that multiculturalism works, that it remains possible to have an open society that does not consume itself, in which divisions between liberals and conservatives are real and deep-seated but do not fester into violence and loathing. Canada will also have to serve as a connector between the world’s democracies, in a line that stretches from Taiwan and South Korea, across North America, to Poland and Ukraine.

Canada has experienced the second Trump administration like a teenager being kicked out of the house by an abusive father. We have to grow up fast and we can’t go back. And the choices we make now will matter forever. They will reveal our national character. Anger is a useful emotion, but only as a point of departure. We have to reckon with the fact that from now on, our power will come from only ourselves.

Source: ‘Acute, Sustained, Profound and Abiding Rage’: Canada Finds Its Voice

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J.L. Granatstein: Leaving the old country behind

2024/02/27 2 Comments

While the examples of diaspora politics and imported conflicts are valid and real, surveys such as the GSS indicate that by and large, multiculturalism is not a barrier to integration. But these conflicts do increase the challenges, as the Israel Hamas war and related increases in hate crimes demonstrate:

…What was going on? Clearly, the old country ties remained strong in immigrants to Canada. Ethnicity is a powerful force, naturally enough, but official multiculturalism encouraged ethnic communities to retain their identities. There were language schools funded by Ottawa, in addition to newspapers, community centres, and dance troupes. The money flowed because there were votes out there waiting to be harvested.

What was not going on was any effective effort by the state to turn immigrant communities into Canadians. Naomi Klein, (not someone I usually quote approvingly), wrote in 2005 after terrorist attacks in London “that the brand of multiculturalism practiced in Britain (and France, Germany, Canada …) has little to do with genuine equality,” she said. She continued:

It is instead a Faustian bargain, struck between vote-seeking politicians and self-appointed community leaders, one that keeps ethnic minorities tucked away in state-funded peripheral ghettoes while the centres of public life remain largely unaffected by seismic shifts in the national ethnic makeup.

Surely she was right, as we can readily observe when our parties scramble for ethnic votes in the suburban areas of the nation’s large cities.

Most Canadians believe immigration is important for Canada, the present difficulties notwithstanding. But polling also shows that most also believe that we must make Canadians of those who come here. It is not enough to leave them alone in the hope that they will quietly assimilate into accepting our values—peace, order and good government, civility, equality, tolerance, respect for rights—and that if they wish to join us they must understand and accept this. Canada is part of Western Civilization, not a community of communities, as Joe Clark put it, not a post-national state, as Justin Trudeau proclaimed. We are a well-established pluralist, democratic, secular nation.

To paraphrase the American writer David Rieff in the New York Times some years ago, the multicultural fantasy in Canada was that, in due course, assuming that the proper resources were committed and benevolence deployed, immigrants would eventually become liberals. As it was said, they would come to “accept” the values of their new countries. It was never clear how this vision was supposed to coexist with multiculturalism’s other main assumption, which was that group identity should be maintained. But by now that question is largely academic: the Canadian vision of multiculturalism, in all its simultaneous goodwill and self-congratulation, is no longer sustainable. And most Canadians know it. What they don’t know is what to do next.

Stephen Marche was right in saying that the old country must be left behind. It is long past time that Canadians figure out how to make this work.

Source: J.L. Granatstein: Leaving the old country behind

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Marche: When extremist activists drive the left to oblivion, what will remain?

2024/01/29 Leave a comment

Well worth reading:

…The foundation of Canadian multiculturalism rests on a basic piece of common sense: Leave your shoes at the door. Importing the world’s geopolitical nightmares into our country would end multiculturalism, and right quick. If the police and the courts allowed Ukrainian Canadians to vandalize the businesses of Russian Canadians who support Vladimir Putin, or if Sikhs were allowed to vandalize the businesses of Narendra Modi’s supporters, the result would be chaos, despite the entirely justifiable rage of those communities.

But common sense, as usual, doesn’t apply when it comes to the Jews.

Naomi Klein, Canada’s most famous living political writer, is a prime example of how far the left has declined into self-consuming purification, having become a prominent defender of hate-motivated mischief over the past three months. “The extraordinary raids, arrests and property seizures of the Indigo 11 represent an attack on political speech the likes of which I have not seen in Canada in my lifetime,” she wrote in the aftermath.

Ms. Klein’s defence of the Indigo 11 is grounded in the idea that Indigo is a fair target because Ms. Reisman has supported Israel and its military, co-founding an organization that provides scholarships and other awards for soldiers in the Israeli Defence Forces. By her logic, hundreds of thousands of Jews in this country could become legitimate targets, given that, through one vehicle or another, a vast number has given money to the state of Israel and, thus, the IDF, at some point over the course of their lives. She has also staunchly defended Ms. Jama, whom she has called “morally courageous” – a woman who, just to reiterate, claimed that the reports of the rapes committed by Hamas on Oct. 7 were “misinformation.”

Ms. Klein, of course, has just published a book about misinformation – and her book is still available behind the very window that was vandalized. Boycotts, divestment and sanctions are for others, one supposes.

The old phrase typically used to describe such loud and credulous cause-pushers was “useful idiots.” But describing tenured radicals such as Ms. Klein or academics such as those among the Indigo 11 as useful would be a misnomer: They are quite useless. Everywhere they survive, they are losing. Academic humanities departments, which regularly promote identity politics using government funding, are struggling: In Ontario, there was a 20-per-cent decline in undergraduate enrolments in the humanities between 2008 and 2017. The extremist champions of the establishment left are driving progressivism toward a lonely, impotent future….

Source: When extremist activists drive the left to oblivion, what will remain?

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Marche: If Canada wants to be healthy and decent and prosperous and stable, it needs to face its demons

2021/07/03 Leave a comment

One of the better commentaries. A friend suggested “the good, the bad and the ugly” which just about sums it up:

No country can be realistic about itself. Nations live by myths, both in the sense of collective stories that give meaning, and in the sense of lies. Ordinarily, the myths permeate the background of national life, unobserved and assumed. There are days when the myths go on display, like Canada Day, when everyone goes out and waves flags and talks about how lucky they are to live here. 

Then there are other days when the myths shatter, like when investigators discover the bodies of 751 Indigenous children in unmarked graves. This year the myth-displaying and the myth-shattering have come very close together, almost simultaneously. 

Canada is far from alone in finding an uncomfortable duality surrounding the stories it tells itself, a confusion of pride and horror. There’s a strange contradiction at play all around the world: The more successful a country is the less likely it is to celebrate itself. 

Anyone who has visited Germany over the past seventy years will have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of historical memory to be consumed. Germans reckon with the evils of their past in a continuous way. It’s not just Holocaust memorials and museums. There are over 75,000 stumbling stones in Germany, small brass plaques on the streets each identifying a separate national disgrace — a family sent to a concentration camp, a business burned to the ground. Their confrontation with horror, their humility in facing it, has had serious political consequences. It is no coincidence that Germany has become the world’s leading democracy, one of the most stable, prosperous and decent nations in the world. They have put the spiritual work in. 

Contrast Germany with Britain. On June 25, British schools celebrated “One Britain One Nation Day” in which the Education Secretary encouraged all school age children to sing the “Strong Britain, Great Nation” song. “We are British and we have one dream,” it begins, and the chorus which repeats itself ad nauseam is “Strong Britain, Great nation!” The sheer creepiness of the totalitarian esthetic is grotesque. But I honestly felt sorry for the British after I heard “Strong Britain, Great Nation.” Somebody had to commission that piece of music. Somebody had to compose it. Somebody’s children had to sing it. It’s so humiliating for everyone involved. 

England has chosen to decline in a fit of make-believe Imperialist nostalgia, embodied perfectly by Prime Minister Boris Johnson. In 2016, 44 per cent of Britains agreed with the statement that the British Empire was “something to be proud of.” Through Brexit, they have paid a heavy price for their comforting myths of their own magnificence: a sharp decline in global influence, a shrinking economy and the instability of the Union itself. The contrast between the rhetoric and the reality is growing ever more extreme: Five years after their great splurge to “take back control,” they don’t even have control over shipments of sausages to Northern Ireland. I guess that’s why they need to sing ridiculous hymns to their own strength. 

It’s not that the Germans are somehow better people than the English. It’s not that Germany doesn’t have its own problems with nationalism. It’s that Germany has chosen to reckon with its own history problems rather than pretend them away. In the case of America, the matter is starker: Four years of “Make America Great Again” have led to a political system in mid-collapse. Hollering for American greatness led to suffering American catastrophe. 

What all of this shows is simple enough intellectually if hard to grasp emotionally: If you want your country to be healthy and decent and prosperous and stable, you should want it to face its demons. “I think Canada is a great historical achievement,” Alberta Premier Jason Kenney said recently. “It is an imperfect country, but it is still a great country, just as John Macdonald was an imperfect man but was still a great leader.” Kenney was not exactly wrong (the full text of his remarks is far more nuanced and reasonable than the reaction to the sound bite clips would lead anyone to believe) but, to me, the frame of his question is a false dichotomy: Every country is imperfect just as every person is imperfect. Facing the imperfections is what patriotism looks like, not turning away from them. The celebration and the confrontation must occur together to be meaningful.

Quite apart from the political future of Canada’s relationship to Indigenous communities, the process of truth and reconciliation is essential for our own survival. Every former residential school in this country should be a museum. Every school age child should visit one. These locations are the very black diamond of our national evil. We must face them not because we hate Canada but because we love it. The honour of this country is at stake, and Canadian honour is worth fighting for. It is our duty to fight for it. 

Four hundred thousand people are going to move to Canada next year. That’s not a myth. That’s a fact. They’re not moving here for the weather. There is a great deal in Canada that is lovable, but love comes at a cost. Let’s celebrate this country, but quietly this year. Let’s celebrate, but remember.

Source: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/analysis/2021/07/01/if-canada-wants-to-be-healthy-and-decent-and-prosperous-and-stable-it-needs-to-face-its-demons.html?li_source=LI&li_medium=thestar_recommended_for_you

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The Woke Will Always Break Your Heart [on Trudeau and the left]

2019/10/08 Leave a comment

Good column. What struck me with the various commentaries on Trudeau’s blackface, was just how few of them, on the right or particularly the left, completely ignored any discussion or analysis of the Liberal record on “diversity and inclusion.” (See, for example, my Taking stock of Ottawa’s diversity promises):

The 2019 election is a test for Canadian progressives: style or substance. The Liberal government of Justin Trudeau is the most successful progressive government in the world. It instituted a carbon tax and legalized marijuana. Last year, for the first time, Canada settled more refugees than any other country. Because of higher government benefits, child poverty is at its lowest level in history. Economic growth this year reached 3 percent. That is what Trudeau has done. He also appeared in brownface at an Aladdin-themed costume party in 2001 at the age of 29.

Canadian progressives, like progressives all over the world, must decide whether they care more about the pursuit of social and cultural change, through the eradication of racist and sexist imagery, or the pursuit of transformative policies. In 2015, Trudeau promised both. He was the shining ideal of maximum wokeness, imposing a gender-equal cabinet and offering as the explanation, “Because it’s 2015.” Well, it’s 2019 now.

How racist Trudeau’s appearance in brownface was, and therefore how forgivable, is subject to debate. People of color in Canada—by no means a contiguous body or voting bloc—have differences of opinion about the gravity of Trudeau’s browning up. Sunny Khurana, a Sikh man who appears in one of Trudeau’s photos from the “Arabian Nights” theme party at West Point Grey Academy, did not find his appearance there racist in the slightest. “He wasn’t trying to demean anybody who was a person of color, and from what I can recall from that function, it never came across as that, not at all,” he said recently. “I mean, I didn’t even think twice of it. It was a good party. We had fun.”

Others read the costume as symptomatic of Canada’s racist history generally, and in particular its history with minstrel shows, which is more extensive than you might think. (The composer of Canada’s national anthem performed in blackface.) Others, such as the society gossip columnist Shinan Govani, have acknowledged personal conflicts: “It is the season of moral gymnastics, here in Canada,” he wrote in the Daily Beast.

Needless to say, dispassionate debate about the significance of Trudeau’s costume—parsing his intentions and the context—is not possible, given that we’re in the middle of an election. The picture went viral; that’s what counts. Liberal Party candidates have been struggling. “It was wrong then, and it’s wrong now,” Harjit Sajjan, the defense minister, told the CBC. “But I’m also here to talk about the person I know, in terms of how much he is standing up for people.”

Whatever Canadians may think about the photograph itself, it closes off a major line of attack for Trudeau. Live by the sword of political correctness, die by the sword of political correctness. You can’t argue that your opponents are a bunch of embarrassing antiquities living in the political past—by, say, replaying the Conservative leader’s 2005 speech opposing gay marriage, which the Liberals were doing right up until this story broke—when the internet is rife with your face in brown makeup.

The Trudeau scandal points to a larger problem: The woke will always break your heart. It’s not just that nobody’s perfect, and it’s not just that times change, and it’s not even that the instinct to punish that defines so much of the left is inherently self-defeating. If people want to sell you morality, of any kind, they always have something to hide.

The main criticism from Trudeau’s opponents on the right has usually been that he’s a spoiled brat—a son of privilege—not up to running the country. A faker. The brownface debacle has now become, on the left, a symbol of his lack of real commitment to progressive values. But the cross-party consensus that Trudeau is slight and phony doesn’t survive even a cursory examination of his record. An independent assessment by two dozen Canadian academics found that Trudeau has kept 92 percent of his campaign promises, fully or partially, the most by any Canadian government in 35 years. He is measurably, demonstrably the most sincere and effective prime minister in living memory. He is the rare case of a man whose virtue-signaling has distracted from his real virtues.

Only the left struggles with these standards of style. Right-wing political opponents in Canada and elsewhere have a completely different understanding of acceptable behavior. In the United States, President Donald Trump’s supporters take his brand of nastiness, his aggressive rejection of even the most basic social norms, as a sign of authenticity. Meanwhile, Senator Elizabeth Warren is still apologizing for her Cherokee-ancestry claim.

This imbalance matters, because the left’s aesthetic vulnerability comes at a moment of real threat for progressives. Multiculturalism as a project is dying globally, and not because of a sudden outbreak of brownface performances. The “Howdy Modi” event in Houston revealed how the world is turning: populism, xenophobia, the bragging stupidity of ethnic pride. During the last election, Trudeau’s main opponent, the Conservatives, promised “barbaric cultural practices” hotlines and “Canadian values tests” alongside a two-tiered citizenship system under which dual citizens and immigrants could have their citizenship revoked while natural-born Canadians could not. If voters who believe in multiculturalism cannot forgive face paint, the multicultural project as policy may not survive.

In this context, it’s unclear whether the extreme blandness of Trudeau’s main opponent, Andrew Scheer, helps or hurts the prime minister’s chances for reelection. Scheer does not bother with costumes. He’s not photogenic enough. He, too, is embroiled in a scandal, however—about whether he was properly accredited to claim he worked as an insurance broker for a few months. This may be not just the most boring scandal in this election, and or in Canadian history, but the most boring scandal imaginable. I cannot imagine a duller one. Nobody thinks about Scheer much. But perhaps Canadians want a prime minister they don’t have to think about much.

“The fact of the matter is that I’ve always—and you’ll know this—been more enthusiastic about costumes than is sometimes appropriate,” Trudeau acknowledged in the first of a seemingly endless series of apologies. Progressives loved Trudeau’s best costume: Captain Woke. We’ll find out in October whether they were with him for his policies or his poses. They can’t have both. But they can have neither.

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/trudeaus-progressive-style/599203/

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