The Counter-Revolution Will be Blogged

The Trudeaupian Project unravels:

We call them the Laurentian elites. They are a small, select group, found in Central Canada’s major centres, who up until very recently controlled the political and cultural levers of the country. Although they often disagree among themselves, they share a common set of assumptions about Canada: that it’s a fragile nation; that the federal government’s job is to bind together a country that would otherwise fall apart; that the biggest challenge is keeping Quebec inside Confederation; that the poorer regions must forever stay poor, propped up by the richer parts of the country; that the national identity — whatever it is — must be protected from the American juggernaut; that Canada is a helpful fixer in the world, a peacekeeper, a joiner of all the best clubs.

John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker are coming out with a new book, The Big Shift, arguing that Canada is undergoing the greatest cultural transformation since the 1960s. To put it in Right-wing blogsphere terms, two members of the MSM are realizing that the Trudeaupian Project is coming to an end. I've put the book on my reading list and we'll see if I can crank out a review. I'm currently making my way through Amity Shales' Coolidge (so far, so good) and I'll try to do something on that later in March. What follows is my executive summary take on the rise and fall of Trudeaupia.

The Trudeaupia Project was born of a national identity crisis. Unlike the United States we did not fight for our independence, instead we asked politely and received it. That's not a joke, that's actually what happened. While this process had immense advantages, namely it was bloodless and allowed the country to develop peacefully from foreign incursions, it had one unforeseen drawback: We only belatedly developed a sense of being Canadian.

Had you scanned the editorial pages of Canada a half century ago, even the Toronto Star, the one recurring theme in discussions about our national identity was how British we were. The idea of a Canadian was a Britisher adapted to the circumstances of North America. He had the vigour and enterprise of those upstart Yankees, but tempered with British restraint and civility. The Canadian would combine the best of the old and new worlds, all under Red Ensign or the even more popular Union Jack. The French and non-British ethnics were ignored or mentioned in passing.

That vision of Canada evaporated in the decade between Diefenbaker's fall and Trudeau's second majority government. Institutions which are today taken for granted, and which until the 1960s would have seemed alien, were established in this period: Canada Pension Plan, Medicare, the new flag, bilingualism and multiculturalism. Canada was not alone in this lurch to the Left. All the advanced liberal democracies experienced a similar political and cultural revolution. Yet in Canada it did more than change certain aspects of the culture, it changed our national identity.

Think of it this way: No continental European would image that their government health care program defines them as a nation. France, Germany, Italy and Spain have histories which are too rich and too long to imagine that any government program, no matter how popular, would define them as a people. When a German thinks of Germany he hears Bach and thinks of Goethe. A Canadian thinks of Canada and hears Tommy Douglas and thinks of Medicare. Even if you believe socialized health care to be a good thing, or at the very least a noble experiment gone wrong, it is a shrunk conception of a nation that can be reduced to a plastic card issued by the government.

How did it happen? That's a book length answer, a book which I'm currently researching and have no idea when I might finish. Here's what I've come up with so far: While the Fathers of Confederation believed in liberty just as much as America's Founding Father, they did not express their belief in bold and dramatic gestures. There is no Canadian Declaration of Independence and our constitution has never been viewed in grand and romantic terms. Confederation was a series of peaceful, orderly and somewhat dull negotiations over technical and administrative matters. It is a document that fails to stir the blood.

This was not for lack of principle on the parts of John A, George Brown, Cartier & Co. It was because there wasn't much of a reason. America emerged because of an existential threat to the liberty of the American colonists. Having found it necessary to become independent they then had to create a national mythology to explain themselves to themselves and to the world. It was a mythology that grew up over the next two and a half centuries, but it's founding principles were the liberty wrought in Philadelphia, Lexington and Concord.

The American colonists were Englishmen who felt that to remain English they had to leave England. Somewhere along the way they discovered they had re-invented themselves as Americans. That clean break allowed for the formation of a strong pro-liberty national identity. Even when statist revisionists such as FDR and LBJ proposed their reforms, they did so in the language of the American identity. Franklin Roosevelt invoked the Four Freedoms, a collection of positive and negative rights that would have been regarded with suspicion by the Founders. To undermine the American ideal they had to speak American, albeit an Orwellian version of the vernacular.

Because Canada never had that clean break, we never formed a clear national identity. This was a problem made worse by the often disruptive presence of the French Fact. Our moment of national psychological independence came in 1956 during the Suez Crisis. It was then, under the guidance of the Oxford educated Lester Pearson, that Canada opposed Britain's response to Nasser's seizure of the Suez Canal. Despite his Methodist Ontario upbringing Pearson was one of the most radical figures in Canadian history, the man without which Pierre Trudeau would have remained in Montreal with his twenty-something girlfriends and silver Mercedes.

In opposing Britain we asserted our independence from mother, albeit on specious grounds. This left the country in an awkward position, made even more so after the British Empire slowly dissolved and the Commonwealth withered into a talk shop. If Canada was not a British country, something that the textbooks and Dominion Day editorials all proclaimed, then what was Canada? As this existential question emerged so did Quebec's Quiet Revolution, an internal cultural revolution that had less to do with independence and more to do with smashing that province's conservative Catholic culture. All this was happening as the wider culture of the West was becoming toxic. We were searching for meaning at exactly the wrong moment in modern history.

The Trudeaupian Project was both a solution and a coup. A solution because it provided a prefab national identity that seemed to transcend the boundaries of ethnicity and language. It was a coup because that identity was essentially the ideas of the fashionable Left circa about 1960. The Liberal Party platform became the definition of what it meant to be Canadian. Anything that was too attached to the old order, especially anything strikingly British, was done away with. Out went the Red Ensign, Dominion Day, a decentralized federation and quaint notions of British liberty. The monarchy was shoved into the attic and brought out on special occasions, like a garish heirloom the adults in the family were slightly embarrassed by.

The contradictions inherent in the system lead to its destruction. The flood of Third World immigration, designed to dilute the traditional British-French cultures of Canada, had the ironic effect of re-introducing a strong strain of cultural and economic conservatism. The economics of Trudeaupia were inherently unsustainable, meaning that Canada hit the fiscal wall in the 1990s that the Americans and Europeans are pushing up against now. We find ourselves, for the first time in half a century, politically to the Right of the United States. Our flirtation with socialism has served as a kind of inoculation against more severe bouts of statist delirium.

Yes we still have Medicare and a bloated government at all levels. Yet the worse seems to have past. As the self-hating WASPs who weakened Canada pass from the scene, those who replace them will be unencumbered by many of the neuroses that lead to Trudeaupia. The question is will they know anything of the other Canada that existed before? That old Canada that for all its sins was virtuous enough to have built a great nation out of a vast wilderness. 

What do they know of Canada who only Trudeaupia know? We're about to find out.

 

Comments

[Mikeg81]

"Our flirtation with socialism has served as a kind of inoculation against more severe bouts of statist delirium."

I doubt it. I had a conversation with a colleague earlier this week, his solution to rising gas prices was for the gov't to nationalize all the oil companies and refineries and sell gas at cost to Canadians via gov't run gas stations.

I mentioned that Petro-Canada didn't work out, his response was that it wasn't done right the first time.

I've met Canadian "libertarians" that argue Canada is "better" than the US on the basis of our (gov't-run)health care, on the pretence that Canadians are known for helping people.

The statist rot runs deeper than you think...and that is exactly the desired result when the long march started during the cultural 'void' you mention in the late 1950's.

[John Chittick]

I wish I were wrong but I agree with Mikeg81. I can almost see the "logic" of some libertarians preferring Canadian Health care but not for its pseudo-humanitarianism but simplicity. Canada's system may be mediocre and rationed but in the US, the third party-payer system (under statist mandates) is dominant, complicated, overly expensive, unsustainable and integrated with three single-payer socialist systems. The American Left has shown no lack of enthusiasm to legislate with a fascist model that which they might otherwise prefer to do with a more overtly socialist model. The health care system is one such example.

My favorite example of Canadian statism etched into their souls is their tolerance and preference, even by self-described conservatives, for public ownership of 90% of the land mass. Even the utopian welfare state nations of Northern Europe thrive on almost exclusively privately owned land. For a resource-based economy, that leaves Canada highly vulnerable to Green Theocracy, whether domestic or foreign-driven.

[Mikeg81]

John, there is a reason I put "libertarian" in quotes. They usually started off a discussion saying "I'm a libertarian, but...", followed by something statist.

I want to be wrong, too, but I think we are going to be royally screwed in the long run.