What’s Up with Canada?
Vol: 18 Issue: 29 Saturday, March 29, 2003
Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien has decided not to visit Washington to receive an award next month, officials said. Bilateral relations have deteriorated badly since Ottawa decided not to send troops to Iraq and because of criticism of Washington by members of the ruling Liberal Party.
The U.S. National Parks Conservation Assn. had invited Chretien to a dinner to celebrate his decision to create 15 new national parks.
The snub was just the latest in a long string of actions on the part of the Canadian government designed to deliberately provoke the United States.
As a border resident, it astonishes me that Ottawa can detect a bullying, arrogant America somewhere out there that I’ve never been able to locate — and I’ve looked.
A little personal information is called for here. I was born in Canada, served in the US Marines, and lived about an equal amount of my life in each country. My wife is an American, born of American parents who lived their whole lives in Canada. My father was Canadian, but died and is buried in Buffalo, New York. Half my children are Canadian born, the other half are American born.
Either of my two American brothers who live in Buffalo could recite the same international family tree. Or my Canadian sister in Connecticut.
The point is, we are not unusual. That’s a typical family here along the border between Canada and the United States.
The distancing of the two governments is therefore, to us, inexplicable. Ottawa has taken the indefensible position of allowing a brutal, repressive dictator to remain in power, free to rape, pillage and murder his own countrymen, for no other reason but to stick a political thumb into George Bush’s eye.
What goes on here? That is what I am going to try and explain. And for the majority of our subscribers who are Americans, this is a ground level situation report from the scene.
Canada sort of lost its way back in the 60’s and 70’s under Pierre Trudeau. Trudeau injected a new kind of political thinking in the sense that Trudeau was to politics what Picasso was to art.
Ordinary people look at a Picasso, think it looks stupid, but speak of it admiringly for fear of appearing uncultured.
That is what the Canadian political scene does when attempting to justify Trudeau’s legacy. Political Picasso.
For example, Canada used to have a national identity. It used to be strongly rooted in Judeo-Christianity. In every public school I attended in Canada growing up, we began the day with the Lord’s Prayer before singing “God Save the Queen”. Both were mandatory, not that there was ever anyone I recall who objected.
Today, being a Canadian Christian is tantamount to being an enemy of the state while being gay means the government can’t do enough to make you comfortable. Even if it means arresting people who call homosexuality a sin. Everybody thinks its stupid, but speak of it in admiring tones for fear they’ll seem bigoted or unenlightened.
Trudeau doublespeak included a mad policy called ‘multiculturalism’ which, as a policy, put Canada on the fast track toward national disintegration.
The way Canada practices multiculturalism is to throw open the borders to all comers, then facilitate their collection into little expatriate ‘ghettos’.
As a consequence, there are little Russias, little Chinas, little Afghanistans, etc., etc., where those expatriate cultures are cultivated by Canada’s government.
The result is not a ‘melting pot’ of peoples into a single culture, like in America, but rather more like all the ingredients, like an unassembled stew, on the counter BESIDE the pot.
Struggling with the loss of its own national identity to the myth of Canadian multiculturalism, many Canadians now fear eventual absorption by the United States and tend over-compensate in their rhetoric.
Since almost everything Canada has comes from its proximity to the United States, Canadians are touchy about America the way a headstrong teenager gets about everything his parents do.
Trudeau created a kind of unsustainable socialism that is utterly dependent on the United States for its survival. But a generation of Canadians have grown up under the most comprehensive social safety net in the Western hemisphere.
They (we) like it. Canadian politicians owe their seats to it, and purchase re-election by augmenting it. Canadian socialism is programmed to automatically hate conservative Republicans like George Bush. Cretien’s undisguised animosity towards George Bush is part reflex, and part domestic politics.
Canadians pay for this social paradise through huge taxes, the state-owned lotteries and gambling casinos, and by enticing American tourists (and their dollars) to visit Canada. Plus the fact that Canada doesn’t have to pay for its own defense.
Assessment:
It is all really pretty difficult to explain to Americans — I am struggling with not sounding anti-this or pro-that. My intent is to provide some neutral background information explaining a bit of the whys behind the whats. Let me summarize the situation.
Though right-wing critics tend to focus on the collapse of the Canadian family and the burgeoning “culture of death,” and left-wing critics emphasize the harshness of American late capitalism, with its poverty and homelessness amidst great wealth, there are areas of overlap in the two critiques.
The main argument of both right- and left-leaning anti-Americanism is that it has failed in the far more important social and cultural realms.
But although some Canadians have comforted themselves with the notion that they are not like those grasping, vulgar Americans, they are wrong to believe that Canada has a stronger sense of real community, or that their country is avoiding many of the problems they detect in the United States.
The proximity of Canada to the United States has meant that Canada has absorbed many of the same aspects of America that they claim to deplore.
It is some comfort for the Canadian myth of national identity to fixate on anti-Americanism as a substitute for Canadian nationalism.
Canadians like to maintain illusions about Canada’s supposed manifold superiorities to the United States. Canadians find themselves in the midst of a long-term social and cultural decline and they’re a bit touchy about it.
But they aren’t fooling anybody. Not even themselves.
Omegaletter 