John Robson: Celebrate Dominion (Canada) Day With Gratitude and Drop the Anti-Canadian Propaganda

People watch a fireworks display at Ashbridges Bay during Canada Day festivities in Toronto on July 1, 2019. Cole Burston/Getty Images

Commentary

Happy Dominion Day, from the river to the ends of the Earth. It’s a bit archaic. But it sure beats Canada Day, where they smash statues of Sir John A. Macdonald and lower flags to half-mast because hundreds of bodies weren’t found, but if you say so they want to put you in jail.

Not that I’m bitter. But I am bewildered at the accelerating pace with which the Canada I knew is being trashed by people who don’t even realize censorship is an old horror. And before being cancelled as a dinosaur bitter over loss of “privilege,” I emit a Mesozoic roar of protest that the things I valued about the Old Dominion made it attractive to the immigrants in whose name, to a significant degree, it is now being smashed up.

Justin Trudeau famously called Canada “the first post-national state” with “no core identity, no mainstream.” Yet curiously he smugly casts any dissenter from his core values into the outer darkness, snarling “Far-right political actors are trying to outdo themselves with the types of cruelty and isolation they can inflict on these already vulnerable people.”

Also curiously, I don’t recall the populace ever being asked, by him, Trudeau Sr., or their professors whether we wanted our national identity abolished lest it offend the primly woke. Yet the revolution stomps on, statue by statue. Including Macdonald and Cartier sitting in Ottawa’s Macdonald-Cartier airport waiting room, one of the few things there to entertain restless children such as telling them how these visionaries put aside entrenched differences, including ethic bigotry, to build this nation. Now they’re evil, and so’s your country. Welcome to Canada. Put on a mask.

In the Canada of Psalm 72 we stood on guard for ourselves and our allies, cherished the Red Ensign and free speech, and our professors sought truth instead of denying its existence. Today we stand on deceitful blather, and don’t seem happy or prosperous.

Regarding those unmarked residential school graves into which thousands of victims of genocidal murder were surreptitiously not dumped, the new label slapped on those who want bodies with their bodies is “denialism.” Just like those skeptical of climate-change alarmism, brutal COVID lockdowns, or anything else state-approved.

Is this deliberate, dirty, attempt to link us with vermin who deny the Holocaust how Canadians argue? It is under a prime minister who smirks that people he disagrees with “take up some space,” while the radical left protests violently on purpose, and people try to “cancel” Jordan Peterson via garotte.

What went wrong? We were once so polite we apologized if someone stepped on our foot. We debated big issues, tackled major social problems, and searched our souls for defects. But we didn’t tweet obscenities, let men into women’s bathrooms, or routinely censor contrarian views… or mainstream ones.

It’s not primarily a political or “practical” problem. Ideas matter in the long run, and we have been subjected to a profound intellectual revolution that we need to unrevolve.

As Father Raymond de Souza just observed in the National Post, the “independent special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites associated with Indian residential schools,” a telling title, began her report “by stating that her role is ‘not to be neutral or objective,’ but to be a ‘fierce and fearless advocate,’ even if that ‘conflicts with my responsibility to function independently and impartially, in a non-partisan and transparent way.’”

There’s post-modern Canada. A fiery public victory dance on the desecrated remains of neutrality, impartiality, and transparency. No thanks.

Of course, the past wasn’t perfect. We lost our tempers. We had blind spots, especially on race and gender. As I just wrote in the Aristotle Foundation’s new book “The 1867 Project: Why Canada Should be Cherished—Not Cancelled,” nobody would be less surprised than Sir John A. and his colleagues to hear that their work, and they personally, were not perfect.

Indeed, their outstanding virtues included far more sober views of human nature than is common among utopians, including our second-rate set. But remember: It was old boring bland Toronto-the-Good Canada that explored its failings, repented of them, and made the changes it had to and the amends it could. The new snarling, intolerant, relativist version seems only able to discover the failings of others, denounce them, and jail them.

People call it progress. But I can think of other names. Still, I said I didn’t want to be bitter. So what can we do?

Tell the truth. Not mine or yours. The one and only. Frankly, fearlessly and with a smile. It’s the Canadian way.

One more thing. I hope most of us, emphatically including newcomers who, contrary to official anti-Canadian propaganda, find it a land of opportunity where sectarian and racial hate is mercifully rare, will celebrate Dominion Day the old way. With gratitude.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.