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More Canadian PC
More PC in Canada, the kinder, gentler part of British North America: a quota of 20% for visible minorities in hiring and promotion for Canada’s civil service. The program will be in addition to other set-asides for native people and women. Also, here’s one observance among many of the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, this one involving top university officials, a candlelit procession, speakers, flowers, ushers, refreshments, etc., etc. These things are “silly” but not trivial. If they were trivial they wouldn’t be taken so seriously throughout the West, and the “international community” wouldn’t be promoting them everywhere. What is behind the calls for hyperrepresentation of “historically-disadvantaged minorities” (including recent immigrants) in government and elsewhere? Why make opposition to certain forms of violence into a religion? It’s nothing so limited as concern about injustice or violence as such, since affirmative action creates obvious injustices, many more men than women are victims of violence, and women as well as men engage in violence—even domestic violence. Rather, it’s a demand for total transformation of social reality. The demand to “eliminate all forms of violence against women” and other forms of “hate” gives the key. Why not demand instead
to eliminate “all forms of corruption” or “all forms of godlessness?” Such demands are plainly fanatical. Nonetheless, they are
treated as if they were fundamental imperatives of government. What our rulers are committed to is not reform but worldly
realization of an absolute. The old world and all its ways must pass away, by force if necessary, and a new one come into being.
That requires total change in everything from the sort of people who occupy positions of authority to the definition of sex. How
has it been possible to turn opposition to such a destructive and dangerous undertaking into “extremism?”
Comments
I got a glimpse into the Canadian character and what drives them in this direction when William Buckley did an episode of Firing Line in Canada about 15 years ago. All the people in the audience, mostly young, were insufferably contemptuous of America and self-rightoues about Canada over one issue: Canada’s national health service. This appeared to be the one and only thing in their country that they cared about and were proud about. It justified their existence. It made Canada morally right. Needless to say, there was no sense expressed of Canada as a concrete historical society with worthwhile characteristics. No, it was just the moral superiority of having the right government program. I suspect that that same mentality is at work in each of the increasingly radical laws that Canada keeps adopting. It would seem that Canada truly is what some Americans imagine and want America to be: the first truly modern, truly universal, truly disembodied nation, whose only religion is equality. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on August 28, 2002 12:43 PMI am a Canadian. But I live in western Canada, where most people feel that an Imperially liberal Ottawa is trying to ram its ideology and government down our throats. There is a seperatist party here in Alberta that is decidedly right-wing, there are anti-abortion billboards in rural areas, and many people here have a ‘cowboy’ or ‘redneck’ mentality that admires the independent and militarily-strong U.S., opposes immigration, wants to privatize healthcare and wishes we had the death penalty. So, simply due to Canada’s size, it contains a range of cultural strands that cannot be characterized by what our rather insane government does to further the new world order of liberal ideology. In fact Albertans have more in common with those from Montana and Idaho than they do with Ontario, which is probably a lot like the east coast of the U.S. culturally. I don’t understand Canada. Paleocon sociology would say it has plenty of good things: lots of land, frontier, rural community, small towns, national identity, etc. Yet the entire nation seems locked in as a meaner, Green-er America. The smaller Protestant countries in North Europe take PC to extremes although they have many of the things you mention. The less populous settler societies like Canada and New Zealand go the same way. So maybe the real question is why the US is different. Probably one reason is federalism and sectional and racial divisions that have inhibited some kinds of national solidarity. Posted by: Jim Kalb on August 28, 2002 6:47 PMAh, Canada! A country close to my heart. I think Canada is a fascinating country. I grew up reading stories about the French and Indian War, the history of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and books such as John Buchan’s ‘Sick Heart River’. I spent much of my childhood in Western New York across the lake from Toronto, within 3 hours’ drive, and so it was the first ‘big city’ I was exposed to. I went to school and university with many Canadians. In some ways Canada, as a white settler nation, is (or was) a far more civilized place than the US. Culturally, sociallly, politically, parts of Canada — Victoria, Kingston, Quebec City, Quebec’s Eastern Townships, Halifax — are probably more amenable to European Americans of a traditionalist bent than much of our own country. But it’s a shame how much the place has declined: mass third world immigration, multiculturalism, globalism, rampant political correctness, etc. It’s quite possible Canada’s best days are behind her. What is left to decide is: when and how Quebec should achieve independence, and the deadline for incorporating the remaining provinces into the United States. Let’s be honest: Maine, New Hampshire, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick have a lot more in common with one another than they do with South Carolina, Oregon, British Columbia, or Ontario. Already the Maritimes and some New England states are forming special trade, security, and transport agreements. Posted by: William on August 28, 2002 7:32 PMAccording to George Grant (“Lament for a Nation”), the traditional Canadian identity basically died out in the 1960s around the time of the fall of the Diefenbaker government. What we seem to have nowadays is an artificial and fragile political entity which indeed bases its sense of identity on its liberal “superiority” to the United States, and in particular on a free universal medical service. Political union with the United States does seem to make sense under these conditions, but it has been remarked that the U.S. Senate is unlikely to approve of the admission of new states which are likely to prove solidly Democratic. Posted by: Ian Hare (Canada) on August 29, 2002 6:31 PMI’m glad to see my point about Canada (derived from watching a single tv show 15 years ago) get confirmed by a Canadian. A people that “bases its sense of identity on its liberal ‘superiority’ to the United States, and in particular on a free universal medical service” is pathetic. It’s not that Canada is inherently a pathetic country. It’s that any country that abandons its national identity and allows itself to be wholly formed by liberalism must of necessity become pathetic. America is only a couple of steps behind Canada on that path. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on August 30, 2002 2:33 PM |