Episode 51 of my podcast is now posted here (with copious links) and on YouTube. My guest is Bill Marchant, who writes the Northern Reaction blog and hosts a lively Twitter account. He is a member of Canada’s small (but growing) AltRight, and so I began by asking him why Canada is so pozzed.
And how pozzed is that? There are no conservative voices in the Canadian MSM. They have all been purged over the last decade. Or, like Michael Coren, they have recognized which way the wind is blowing and have become eligible for “Strange New Respect” awards. “Right-wing” Canadian pundits are all “fiscally conservative but socially liberal”—but as we saw after the 2008 economic crisis, their fiscal conservatism is entirely notional. Suffice to say that Ross Douthat is far further to the Right than is permitted in my country—and he writes for the New York Times.
How did this happen? Canada, unlike the United States, has always been a consensus country. That consensus was, until the 1960s, fairly conservative, though it did not manifest the perennial American suspicion of big government. Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, the Liberal prime ministers who led Canada from 1963 to 1984, turned that consensus on its head. All the attributes formerly associated with Canada were deemed not Canadian (and vice versa), and those who protested the revolution were deemed un-Canadian—traitors, really.
Marchant told me that Canada has become the globalist laboratory, particularly with regard to the theory and practice of multiculturalism. It is no coincidence that Justin Trudeau (son of Pierre and our simple-minded current prime minister) has declared Canada to be the world’s “first post-national state.” He explained:
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, to search for equality and justice.
In other words, Liberalism or Death! Canada is the country where boutique enthusiasms (such as gay marriage) become defining national characteristics within a decade. Justin Trudeau is correct that Canada is not a nation (although Quebec has been recognized formally as such). It is a multiethnic, multilingual, multinational empire. It is increasingly totalitarian, a place where a comedian is fined $42,000 for making a joke, where white people are being purged from its two major, formerly English-speaking, cities of Toronto and Vancouver and where unelected courts legalize prostitution and euthanasia, ban believers in God from making political decisions and rule that truth is not a defence to the accusation of “hate speech.”
So what, if anything, is to be done? How could Canada get woke? Donald Trump could be elected President. The Canadian MSM has become ever-more hysterical regarding this possibility, and it’s not because they’re worried about the future of the land of the free and the home of the brave. No, it’s because Trump’s triumph, like Brexit, would suggest that the end of global Leftist hegemony is at hand. Even in that happy event, however, we should never discount Canadian duplicity. Brian Mulroney passed himself off as another Thatcher or Reagan but after becoming prime minister in 1984 he proceeded to extend and amplify the one-party liberal state; for example, mandating racial quotas in federal and federally-regulated hiring.
A second possibility is rebellion. The advantage of the consensus polity is that, as Pearson and Trudeau proved, any change in the consensus can be quick and all pervading. I fully expect that within a decade the Supreme Court of Canada will rule that Christian churches must marry homosexuals or forfeit their statutory privileges (for a start). Should any Canadian government (federal or provincial) refuse to accept this ruling, a constitutional crisis would be initiated. In 1995, shortly after our last constitutional crisis, Quebec came within 54,000 votes of secession.
A third possibility (the most likely, in my opinion) is economic collapse. Even after continuous juking of the stats, Canada barely manages to avoid a depression. We never recovered from 2008 and that was before the collapse of oil prices in 2014. The Canadian provinces east of Manitoba are dependent on “transfer payments” from the “have” provinces in order to survive. Problem is, we’re running out of “haves,” with Alberta and Saskatchewan joining the “have-nots” by 2017. British Columbia alone is not rich enough to support the rest of Canada—even if it wanted to. In the event, our courts continue to grant aboriginals great though undefined power over resource industries, and the resulting uncertainty will devastate Canada’s mining, oil and natural gas industries.
Bill Marchant agrees that Canada as currently constituted may not survive, but argues that the Canadian people are strong and will forge new and superior political arrangements. I hope he’s right.
Wrestling with yet another dying computer prevented me from delivering to you a write-up of Grace & Steel Episode 50, wherein Kevin Steel and I have great fun with the MSM’s insistence that moribund Hillary Clinton is hale and hearty or fit as a fiddle or [your cliché here]. Ol’ Hill ain’t gettin’ any healthier any time soon, so this podcast remains as topical as ever. You can hear it on SoundCloud, at the 2Kevins website (with copious links) or on YouTube.
