Happy Canada Day! … As Long As We Can Keep It

There are two kinds of citizens.

The first will fight for neighbours. If attacked, these citizens lay down life for family, community, and flag. Whether new citizens or old, these people think ancestors and descendants matter more than one’s own short life.

The second sees citizenship as a system of rights and privileges afforded by the state. Some may fight to protect such a system. But given external threat or possible collapse, these citizens would sooner run away to a system better suited to their needs.

The first sees Canada more like a giant, extended family. The second sees Canada more like a bureaucracy. The first feels a mutual bond with neighbours that transcends time and space. The second shares access to something owned by the state.

The first grieves at a politics of division. The second sees division as an inevitable outcome of atomized individuals served by big government. Canada is a bureaucracy: a gigantic soup kitchen. No ethos. No fabric. Just an efficient machine delivering tax-funded services.

The first citizens share ideas about what is good, true, and beautiful, starting with the country they share in common. A good country is not perfect, but it is worth defending. The second shares only the notion that Canada must change before it can be good.

Note: This has nothing to do with your country of origin or how long you’ve been in Canada. Each type of citizen can come from any kind of background: young, old, new Canadian, or old Canadian.

Happy Canada Day!

If you celebrate Canada Day, and I hope you do, know that you take a counter-cultural stand.

Celebration of nation — home, people, heritage — is an anachronism. Offensive to many. Out of touch at best. If this becomes majority opinion, you have no country, no nation.

In this sense, Prime Minister Trudeau thinks Canada ended long ago. The New York Times Magazine interviewed Trudeau in 2015.

“There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.” Canadians’ shared values make “us the first post-national state.”

What kind of citizens fill Canada today?

Are we more of the first kind, like the ones who fought world wars?

Or are we the second kind: citizens of Trudeau’s post-national state?

The End of the West

We stand at a crossroads in Western civilization.

COVID did not just show us how unprepared we were to face a pandemic. It showed us the state of our social fabric, our lack of institutional capacity, the fragmentation of what it means to be a citizen.

A nation has always been more than what politicians and pundits say it is. As we exit the pandemic, how we respond will show whether Canada still exists. Is Canada still alive, in the old sense of something we would die to save? Or is the old sense gone, and Canada is now something new?

We shall see. In the meantime,

Happy Canada Day! … as long we can keep it.