At a breakfast meeting in Toronto with the late George Jonas—an author of keen insight and perspicacity—I asked him what it was like to live under totalitarian rule in Hungary before escaping to Canada in 1956? I will never forget what he said:
“I thought I was fleeing a disease. But … it followed me!”
This was cause for instant sorrow, and I wept inwardly for my country.
Canada’s freedom of speech, action, and thought, limited only by traditional bounds of law and custom, was at its high point during the pre-confederation period, when settlers might never see an agent of government their entire lives. It was lauded most poignantly in 1896 by Canada’s seventh prime minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, in words that rang throughout the unfree world like a proud and resounding gong: “Canada is free, and freedom is its nationality!”
And that is why I wept. For we simply cannot say those words today.
Canada is no longer the free country it was.
Our proud inheritance of ordered liberty began to weaken around the mid-20th century, when along with most other Western democracies we set out to become what observers variously describe as a welfare state, or a social-welfare state. A form of soft socialism.
But events of recent decades, and especially of the past few years, lead me to state cautiously that free and liberal democracy is dead in Canada, for we have definitively crossed the line between soft socialism, and soft totalitarianism. This is a condition of state characterized by the growth of government at all three levels, huge structural debt that will never be paid off, taxation of everything that moves, and minute, pervasive, and intrusive regulation. Last week an Ontario wildlife officer came to my home and threatened to fine me if I fail daily to clean up the seeds that fall from my birdfeeder.
But perhaps the most reliable clue that the country has mutated to soft totalitarianism is the growth of pervasive negative punishments. Negative because although there are some recent instances of arrest for defying the law, by and large they specialize in the forbidding of nonconforming thought, speech, and action, in threats to suspend professional licences, in fining, shunning, and firing, in the destruction of reputations, and more, but fall just short of arbitrary physical manhandling, arresting, threatening law-abiding citizens, and carting them off to jail. But we are one step closer.
Last week the COVID police called a friend’s daughter who had just returned from a trip to the USA, and peppered her with questions about whether or not her 8-year-old is vaccinated. She answered that her children’s health was her business alone, and refused to reply. You know what the official said? She said, “If you do not reply to my questions, I will send the police to your home, and they will use their authority to make you reply.”
When we think of hard totalitarianism, we think of machine guns at every corner, of jackboots and gulags, of pervasive government spying, of the “psychiatric” confinement of political enemies for no particular reason, of dissidents and undesirables sent to gulag camps in the north, and the like. For now, I’m still fairly certain the tradition of British liberties and common law, of checks and balances, and the division of powers that is our long and glorious inheritance will make that sort of hard totalitarianism impossible in a country like Canada. Or at least, highly improbable.
But we must be wary, for the softer sort is clearly here already, much of it supported and spread not only by government at all levels, but also by Woke citizens, Woke corporations, Woke universities and schools, and Woke media. It showed up in a militant way just a few years ago. The first stage is the State’s effort to persuade via the publication and promotion of “correct” positions on things like abortion (slogans like “my body, my right”), on homosexuality (posters in schools shouting “gay is okay”) with the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion troops invading everywhere. This has all progressed rather rapidly to public edicts and warnings meant to stifle, or deplatform, opposing views; to direct control of citizen speech and thought via political correctness pressures; to the invention of trigger warnings; to official shaming of youth in schools, and media for non-conforming attitudes contrary to the public narrative; to coerced use of language such as gender pronouns, and even to the forced public recognition as “women” of people who are biological men, or vice versa.
Canada has already moved beyond such soft methods to punishment by way of actual prosecution via phony paralegal bodies such as “Human Rights Tribunals,” which are just Soviet-style kangaroo courts given the power to fine offenders, and force conformity and “re-education.” Still no prison yet, but close. We used to ridicule the former USSR for doing this. But now they are gone, and we are doing it. George was right. The disease is here.
Three appalling soft-totalitarian initiatives—there are many more—deserve special attention, for they are still with us. The federal government’s 2018 Bill C-25 (section 2.2.1.1.) forces corporations “to provide annual reports on their approach to fostering gender diversity on their boards of directors and among their executive officers.” This begins with the supposed need for 50 percent females on corporate boards, but soon progresses to demands for the whole diversity “rainbow” encompassing religion, culture, sexual “orientation,” economic status, disability, and more, to be represented on every board and management team in the nation.
We note that if this measure succeeds, corporate boards in future will have to comprise 50 percent women (or—because gender is now deemed to be a “fluid” entity—some lower, but equal percentage of people who self-identify as men or women (but who may not be), plus a confused percentage of LGBTQers, transgendered, etc., etc.), 18 percent visible minorities, 14 percent people with disabilities; 5 percent Indigenous people, and so on. What a mess. But clearly, still a soft-totalitarian mess. Here’s the distinction: The government has its foot on your life and work, but not yet on your neck.
Private corporations in free societies have never been wholly free, of course. They exist by licence of the State and have been forbidden to do lots of things (such as false advertising) and compelled to do others (like, file tax returns, keep minutes, obey labour laws, etc). But they have never before been compelled by the State to alter their own freely chosen, private, sink-or-swim governance structure, which, given the massive regulatory environment in which they operate, was almost the last thing that made them free and private.
Another alarm came via the Law Society of Upper Canada, a quasi-government agency that controls the licensing of 60,000 lawyers in the Province of Ontario, when in 2017 it released a mandate that all lawyers and paralegals in the province were required to sign an individual Statement of Principles that acknowledges “their obligation to promote equality, diversity and inclusion generally, and in their behaviour towards colleagues, employees, clients and the public.”
Personally, I do not believe that “equality” should be forced upon unequals in anything; nor that “diversity” is necessarily a good thing in a world where unity is crumbling everywhere, and nations fragmenting into hundreds of mini-nations within their own borders. For the truth is you can have diversity within unity, but you cannot derive unity from diversity. Nor should “inclusion” be forced upon people or organizations that don’t necessarily want to work, socialize, or associate with those for whom they may not care very much. Diversity and inclusion are in effect weapons in a social and administrative war against the principle of merit that has always been central to free people, and only to them.
And the march from soft socialist to soft totalitarian is picking up pace. The public cannot be trusted to know its own mind. So there must be regulations dictating behaviors, then laws enforcing them, then government spies to ensure compliance, then punishment of offenders. George said that when he left Hungary, there were government agents spying on all citizens who were not Communist Party members. They stood on the street corner outside his apartment, even in the rain, all day long. Every day. And my old friend Martin McGrady, a dirt-poor American who became a world-record holder in track and field, and was raised in a terrible ghetto in Baltimore, told me that on a U.S. track tour to Russia there was a communist spy seated at the end of every hallway, on every floor in his flea-bitten hotel, keeping an eye on him and all other guests (rather, inmates). He said he preferred life in the Baltimore ghetto, any day.
Yet another deeply offensive soft-totalitarian move of the Canadian government arose as a form of coercive bribery, or blackmail. The government floats a “Canada Summer Jobs” program to help hundreds of churches, camps, and many charitable organizations hire extra summer help. This program has coughed up millions every year to fund about 70,000 jobs. But our self-righteous high-school drama-teacher prime minister embarked on, well, outright cash-bribery, denying funding to all organizations that refused to sign an “attestation” (that word, again) to the effect that they support “the Government of Canada’s commitment to human rights, which include women’s rights and women’s reproductive rights, and the rights of gender-diverse and transgender Canadians.” The government’s website will not accept an application unless that box is checked.
If for moral reasons your organization respects the dignity of all human life from conception, or cannot in religious conscience promote contraception, or because, like the vast majority, it believes that the male/female biological order of the entire reproductive world is natural, and not a matter of choice? Tough luck.
As I said, I doubt a country like Canada will ever get to the citizen-spying stage, or … Oops! I just remembered that Ontario’s socialist former Premier Kathleen Wynne hired 175 “inspectors” (aka spies) whom she sent around the province to ensure that business owners were actually paying her newly legislated minimum wage. And I did say it’s a long way from soft to hard totalitarianism. But, think about it: We already have speech spies, feminism spies, pay-equity spies, human rights spies, the whole paraphernalia of government “re-education” courses for offenders, and shaming and firings.
It’s a long road from soft to hard totalitarianism. And some friends are certain we’re there already. But I say not quite, and I will write about the differences between these two conditions soon. But it all starts somewhere, and the road has gotten a lot shorter since my breakfast with George. Canada has put on the soft-totalitarian slippers, and will soon want to exchange them for boots.
Listen for the shuffle outside your door.
