Canadian national health in trouble

According to Powerline, the father of socialized medicine in Canada, Claude Castonguay, says the Canadian health system is in crisis and cannot be fixed short of giving a greater role to the private sector.

This is great news. But one must add that if Canadian socialized medicine is in crisis, something much larger is also in crisis: Canadian identity, which, since the 1960s, when Canada under Trudeau gave up being a country, has been based almost solely on Canada’s moral superiority to the non-socialized, backward, but annoyingly large country to its south. So what’s left for the Canadians to feel better than the U.S. about, now that they are a non-nation AND have lost their main claim to moral superiority?

I know: They’ll triple Muslim immigration, institute a crash program to establish sharia, and make all speech critical of Islam a criminal offense. That’ll show the Americans.

(So that the above not be misunderstood, see the comment from John R. from Canada and my reply, on June 12.)

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Kidist Paulos Asrat writes from Canada:

You have mentioned that Canada is becoming/has become a non-country. I’m afraid you are right. But the problem didn’t start with Trudeau. As much as there is talk about the unifying Fathers of Confederation (sounds like the US Founding Fathers doesn’t it?), Canada’s complex and tentative (non)unity started at its inception.

The country started as a compromise between the French and the British, which made Trudeau’s multi-nationalism (or multiculturalism) that much easier and logical. I put my own interpretation into this and call it an initial French/Scottish pact—in defiance of the English (who were the real leaders of Canada)—to make their own anti-English confederation.

Part of the constitution by the Fathers of Confederation was as a reaction to the American one. At the time of its formation, the US was going through its civil war, and Canadians wrote theirs partly to not be like the US. So reaction against the US started early.

The actual proponent of socialized medicine is an earlier Canadian—Tommy Douglas (another Scot!), Socialist Premier of Saskatchewan (1944-1961.) He was recently voted as the greatest Canadian by a CBC poll. Also, notice that Castonguay is a Quebec politician.

Finally, you predict that the Canadian government will start other “altruistic” practices to deflect its health care failures. You are not far off. Just this month, the conservative government made a formal apology to Indians who went through the residential schools’ “abuses”, and included quite large monetary compensations.

Only two years ago, they did the same to early Chinese laborers who had to pay head taxes. Yes, money was part of the apology.

We’ve been through the Japanese apology for their interments, and the Ukrainians, who were also interned after WWI, are still waiting.

Muslims are just waiting for the right, devastating, moment. And they will get it too. And I’m sure they will have their pockets full in the process.

LA replies:

My view of Canada was formed by Peter Brimelow’s The Patriot Game, in which he argued persuasively that the identity of Canada up to the time of Trudeau was as a British majority country with a French speaking minority. A majority, and a minority. And the majority identity defined the national identity. Thus Canada was a British nation (though an unusual one, given its large French minority), with many traditional aspects of nationhood, of which Brimelow gives examples. Trudeau changed Canada into a multicultural society with two equal cultures. And that was the great change.

Now the Brimelow view may be wrong. But nothing I have seen persuades me that it is wrong.

Kidist replies (June 28, posted June 30):

I have also read Peter Brimelow’s accounts. I agree that the facts direct Canada’s nationhood in the manner that he argues. But, I think nationhood is a subtle mixture of psychologies, stereotypes and events. Many things go on under the radar. I wonder at why the French became such an important minority that they were present at the founding of a nation? Why they weren’t destroyed (I mean this in a national sense, as the Americans have done with the Mexicans/Spanish and even incursions of the French as I believe occurred)?

I think the English may have just got tired. After all, they fought and lost a war with the U.S.

I think it is the Scottish element was decisive in this initial carving out of Canadian identity, which certainly included the French below that radar.

I think that was why Trudeau was so successful. His “great change” had a precedence.

John G. writes from Vancouver (June 29, posted June 30):

” … the identity of Canada up to the time of Trudeau was as a British majority country with a French speaking minority. A majority, and a minority. And the majority identity defined the national identity. Thus Canada was a British nation (though an unusual one, given its large French minority), with many traditional aspects of nationhood, of which Brimelow gives examples. Trudeau changed Canada into a multicultural society with two equal cultures. And that was the great change.”

I’m no fan of Trudeau’s legacy, but it would be better to say he exacerbated problems inherent in the Canadian situation than to imply he largely created the mess. Yes we were a British nation, but Britishness has always been a compromise between national and imperial identities. It is important to note that English Canadian culture has been most fundamentally marked by (Protestant) Irish, Scottish, and American experiences. Demographically, that’s where the bulk of settlers came from in the 19th C, bringing institutions often modeled on the Irish settler society and state, and with an approach to civil society and politics that was already adapted, in some respects, to American history. The anti-Americanism in Canada began with the refugee Loyalists from the first American civil war, but these people were already American culturally in various respects. Ours is the narcissism of small differences.

The Confederation of 1867, bringing together previously self-ruling (but not in foreign policy) colonies was the achievement of politicians who predominantly favoured a strong federal government; theirs was an attempt to create a new kind of national unity from a diverse array of British imperial and French settlers. But notwithstanding the evident centralist intention of the British North America Act (1867) the rights and powers of the provinces in the new federation were soon asserted and mostly supported by the high court (until the 1930s, this was the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in England).

Today, Canada is one of the more decentralized federations in the world. If the insular English nation has been a model for our nationalism (as well as, earlier, for the Scots, Irish, and Americans) along with the more confused British (half-national, half-imperial) identity, the more compact form of nationalism has had to adapt itself to provincial identities and local politics—many of the institutions of our civil society and state are provincial, not national, bodies. The federal state has always tended to be something of an imperial culture in comparison. And it has attracted people who find that appealing. There really are two kinds of political classes in Canada.

Trudeau came to power at a time when the big story, internationally, was the American civil rights movement (along with the larger anti-colonial sentiment in the rest of the world). Trudeau saw his home province, Quebec, as being controlled by a small conservative political oligarchy in alliance with the church (keeping down many of the French Canadians) and I think he viewed this as somewhat analogous to how he viewed southern American states. A “reactionary” provincial/local elite was keeping blacks/French Canadians from a full participation in society. Trudeau’s solution, as in America, was to envision a strong federal government that could override the provinces/states and integrate the provincials into a modern welfare state where rights and identities would become mobile across the country. Thus, for example, here in Vancouver we have state-funded Francophone tv and radio, even though very few people here are Francophone.

Trudeau was hardly the first Canadian politician to think in this way (the tension between insular-national-self-ruling and imperial-post-national/new national poles has been ever-present in our history); he was simply one of the most successful in moving the balance of power to the centre (new waves of immigration and “multiculturalism” were key to this) at the expense of the provinces which had grown in power, despite the 1867 constitution. Provincial sovereignty reflects the natural tendencies, in a large, sparsely-populated imperial country, of our insular Anglophone culture that puts a value on national/local self-rule.

I might also note that French Canadians have always been somewhat different from the French in France in that the Canadiens have demonstrated a greater spirit of independence and historically less regard for centralized forms of government. Despite the imposition of a feudal system on the peasants of New France, these peasants eschewed the French system of living in villages and instead lived isolated in farmhouses strung out along the rivers in a more typically North American style of settlement.

Today, after Trudeau, there are signs of a renewing instinct in French Canada to reject both strong federal and provincial separatist governments and to explore more truly independent, family-based politics. In the last Quebec election, the second largest party championed such values. The federal conservative party is also appealing to such instincts, championing a more decentralized federation. Whether these ideas will take off in a province with a very low birth rate and much secular liberalism remains to be seen. But clearly some people see the challenge …

Finally, as to the Mark Steyn affair. It is not simply a sign of what is going on today in Canada. It reflects a wrong turn we made in the 1960s-90s with an over-indulgence in liberalism, multiculturalism and victimary thinking. But very few people really paid much attention to what the “human rights” commissions were up to. Now that the implications of these evil bodies are before us, now that they are not just chasing down neo-Nazi nobodies, there has been a healthy (not exactly European) backlash against them. Pretty much every major newspaper has condemned at least those parts of the “human rights” laws that allow for these bureaucrats to police free speech in the media; and the “human rights” commissions have very few defenders in Canada at the moment. Even much of the left is against the regulation of political/social expression, wise to the possible implications for them. Even homosexual organizations are condemning homosexual activists who are trying to use these commissions to go after “homophobes.”

However, we are still at a point of testing the water to see how deep sentiments go. Risk-adverse politicians are slow to jump on the bandwagon of outrage that is still largely heard in the blogs and among segments of the political-media classes. Most Canadians, I dare say, don’t know much about what is going on. But among the influential classes, there is clearly much support for freedom of speech. The Muslims who launched the complaint against Maculae’s/Steyn are not even getting much support from Muslims. One has the sense that the victimary forces are on the wane, though not many politicians yet have the courage to engage fully the fight.

John R. writes from Ontario:

Your description of Canada as a “non-nation” is accurate. Indeed this concept is reflected in the desires of its elites. That one of the cornerstones of Canadian identity-socialized medicine- is in trouble is, as your analysis astutely points out, only a symptom of a far larger illness. The concept of multiculturalism was invented (debatably) by the Trudeau government in the early 1970s, in part, to weaken the emerging separatist movement in Quebec. Its ultimate effect has, of course, been the death of the idea of Canada as a nation of British, and now even of Western heritage. The novelist Yann Martel defined modern Canada as “the world’s greatest hotel,” in essence a place where you park your cultural baggage and receive services from the government. But, as the article from Powerline indicates, trouble, perhaps a vast time of tribulation, is on the horizon. Many Canadians have become aware of the huge corruption endemic within their government. The recent shameful debacle of the show trial of Mark Steyn and Macleans magazine by a “Human Rights Tribunal” have awakened multitudes to the erosion of the their right to free speech, a part of English common law for more than a millennium. “White flight” and an insane level of third-world immigration into major cities is creating a kind of ethnic chaos that insipid platitudes and cover-ups by the media and civic leaders is increasingly unable to hide. Dictatorial prime ministerial power is becoming more naked every year. The decline of cultural and social cohesion is creating a stronger sense of regional identity, something I now see as a positive development. If this non-nation called Canada is dead, something else will rise from its grave. Perhaps these entities will be regional bodies better adapted to the will and desires of its founding European descended peoples.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 27, 2008 06:28 PM | Send