Commentary
Recent surveys indicate that patriotism is falling among Canadians. Now, a new poll reveals that the decline is steepest by far among Canadian youth. This is the predictable consequence of public schools teaching that Canadian society is made up of an oppressive majority group and a collection of disparate minority groups, while actively discouraging the formation of a patriotic attachment to country that could bind us together as a national community.
An Angus Reid poll released in December showed that the proportion of Canadians professing a “deep emotional attachment” to their country has plummeted to just 49 percent. Now, a new
Ipsos poll indicates that 43 percent of Canadians aged 18–34 would vote for Canada to become part of the United States if Canadians were offered “full US citizenship and a full conversion of the Canadian dollar and all personal financial assets into US dollars.” This is significantly higher than the 33 percent of Canadians aged 35–54, and the 17 percent of Canadians 55 and over, who would make this trade.
In other words, four in 10 young Canadians would exchange their national identity for increased individual financial well-being. One major reason for this patriotism deficit in our youth is the ideology instilled in them during their formative years in public elementary and secondary schools.
Educational bureaucracies are imposing a worldview in which the many racial identities that separate students are paramount, while the one national identity they have in common is something that needs to be constantly interrogated, scrutinized, and “decolonized.”
The national Canadian School Libraries organization recommends an
“equity-informed” approach to selecting books, by “amplifying the voices of people and communities who have been and continue to be marginalized due to oppressive structures.” Ideologically motivated book selection was on display in 2023 when internal training documents from the Peel District School Board revealed that librarians had been ordered to scrap “any harmful, oppressive, or colonial content.” In practice,
this meant most books published before 2008.
Last year, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB)
distributed a handbook which explained that “white supremacy is a structural reality” that “must be discussed and dismantled in classrooms,” and that “education is a colonial structure that centres whiteness and Eurocentricity and therefore it must be actively decolonized.” The handbook endorsed the view that “race” should take centre stage in Canadian society: “Race matters - it is a visible and dominant identity factor in determining peoples’ social, political, economic, and cultural experiences.”
While the current anti-woke backlash bubbling up across the Western world has encouraged some institutions to back away from these concepts, the TDSB continues to double down, with a
trustee committee recently calling for mandatory diversity, equity, and anti-racism training for all Ontario teachers.
It’s not just Ontario—divisive race ideology has taken root in schools across the country. In B.C., high schoolers
can take “Social Justice 12,” an official course in which students learn about such concepts as “privilege and power” and the “diverse belief systems and worldviews of minority groups.” In 2022, B.C.’s Surrey School District
launched “Black Studies 12,” a course on “the rich and diverse history of Black peoples in B.C.” as well as “ongoing issues of racism, oppression, decolonization and identity in today’s world.”
The Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation website
links to the “Black on the Prairies” teaching guide, which it describes as an “important resource” for K-12 teachers. The
guide argues that Canada’s history and present are steeped in racism: “In a country like Canada with a long history of colonization, institutional policies and practices have been created to give advantages to white people.” It includes a glossary of such terms as “white colonial gaze,” which means “the white supremacist lens in which white people view, define, limit, stereotype and judge racialized groups.”
This is a small sample, from just three provinces, of the school practices, teaching resources, and courses that reflect the ideology pushed from the top down by Canadian educational bureaucracies. Students are encouraged to view themselves either as members of an oppressive majority group who should unlearn the privilege which they have derived from Canada’s racist history, or one of many different oppressed ethnocultural minority groups who should cultivate a separate identity apart from our wider society.
Is it any wonder that recent polls show a precipitous decline in patriotism among Canadian youth, with a substantial minority now expressing a willingness to embrace annexation by the United States if their financial assets were converted to U.S. dollars? It would be entirely unfair to blame these young people for not being patriotic, after our schools have made every attempt to stamp out pride in national identity, and replace a sense of common heritage with an ideology that isolates students into separate race-based categories.
To reignite patriotism, this divisive ideology must be replaced with a traditional education model that instills in Canadian students of all backgrounds a healthy sense of pride in their country and its history.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
