There used to be such a thing in Canada as “two solitudes.”
You might say language was an obsession in Canada.
Those solitudes are effectively dead today—except perhaps in the minds of the Bloc Quebecois and other separatists—and have been since Brian Mulroney was prime minister. I don’t think Mulroney was much of a conservative, but at least he was able to put to death the lie that the Conservatives—uppercase or lowercase—were somehow inherently anti-French and unable to articulate a vision for francophones.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper called Quebec a nation. That shocked a lot of people in Alberta and Western Canada who thought that they should be constituted as a nation also. That feeling of dissonance is at the bottom of the federal-provincial agreement between Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith over whether Alberta should have its own pension plan just like Quebec.
Current Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) Leader Pierre Poilievre recently revealed that he has his children in French immersion. He consistently opens every question period with a query to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in French. The CPC does not have a problem with speaking French. The most libertarian political leader in Canada is a francophone—Maxime Bernier—and he reminds us all that being from Quebec does not necessarily engender left-wing ideas.
So the simmering anger is largely gone that used to exist between anglophones who see francophones as unfairly positioned to take advantage of a bilingual country and francophones who believe they comprise a colony in English Canada. There might still be people who resent seeing the French language on the other side of their Cheerios, but they are not in any significant way contributing to the national debate.
We have come to realize that there are two new solitudes. And the division between the two is not based on race, language, or ethnicity but raw political judgment and—let’s say it—intelligence.
The two solitudes today are based on a difference between woke progressives and commonsense Canadians who might identify as conservative or classical liberal.
On the one side are Canadians who identify as small-c conservatives, or small-l liberals or large-L Libertarians. They are focused on political and economic freedom, nationalism—not globalism—and want the state to stop funding and promoting an increasingly large boutique of social fetishisms, from gender ideology in the schools to the notion that climate change constitutes an existential threat.
Increasingly, they are also done with financing foreign wars—especially when these conflicts serve as distractions for governments ignoring the economic collapse around us and the systematic erosion of fundamental rights and freedoms.
You can see these two solitudes at work during the daily House of Commons question period. No matter how many Conservative MPs demand fiscal relief for farmers who are being strangled by the carbon tax, the Liberals will respond by talking about climate change and the war in Ukraine and how the Official Opposition has “no plan” to fight either. Poilievre could be asking about escalating drug use and the answer will inevitably be about how Ukraine requires more money because it is defending freedom.
The ideological cleavage in Canada—as it is in the United States—can most clearly be discerned by the choice of news media.
Commonsense Canadians and Americans are no longer watching the same news that the woke left is.
They are watching new media—like The Epoch Times—or they are watching independent media like the shows you can find on YouTube or Rumble that are attracting larger audiences than the legacy media.
You see, you have to be relevant and tell the truth.
Just look at the numbers new media programming is getting on social media. In addition to hosting my own YouTube station, I appear once a week on “Redacted” to discuss the Canadian news with host Clayton Morris, a former Fox news anchor who has millions of subscribers. “Tucker Carlson Tonight” was the most popular news program on cable news, but since Fox fired Carlson, the journalist has achieved even larger audiences broadcasting on X.
For woke progressives, Carlson is a villain and most certainly a racist and white supremacist because he won’t buy into the left’s racial narrative. They are horrified that he is coming to Calgary—and Edmonton—on Jan. 24 and that he will be talking to Danielle Smith, Conrad Black, and Rex Murphy. There is even a petition online asking Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to stop Carlson from crossing the border into Canada.
Yes, it is insanity.
The left, of course, doesn’t watch Carlson’s interviews with Donald Trump or Alex Jones, but they do continue to watch CBC and are disgusted that the Conservatives are promising to defund this white elephant of a Crown corporation—and this time it looks like they’re serious.
Through the lens of the national broadcaster, the woke left has its perceptions of Canadians confirmed in laudatory articles about how biological men are competing in women’s sports, how depression can be solved through the medical assistance in dying program, and how Canadians stay up late worrying about the size of their carbon footprint and the courageous denizens of climate action at the recent COP28 summit resolved to “transition away” from fossil fuels.
Two solitudes. Two media experiences. Two realities. And each is equally dismissive of the other.
Commonsense Canadians are not negotiating their freedoms away. The woke left is pursuing a globalist agenda that will ultimately lead to a permanent underclass that can’t buy homes or heat them, can’t purchase vehicles with combustion engines or fill them with gas, can’t grow food on farms or sell it in grocery stores, can’t voice an opinion contrary to the government’s without it being labelled as “misinformation,” and can’t raise their children without teachers deciding what gender they are.
There are two visions of the future: freedom at home or globalist serfdom.
People need to choose their side wisely.
