Canada and Its Woke Revolution

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Canada’s national identity is disappearing, the victim of a woke revolution that Trudeau and the left have brought about, argues Eric Kaufmann. But all is not lost. The young are more conservative than their elders. More of his despair — and hope — can be found here: “Canada is disintegrating,” by Eric Kaufmann, Telegraph, October 27, 2024:

What happens in a country without cultural conservatism? Look no further than Canada, where the national identity is disintegrating.

In 2015, soon after taking office, the new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gushed to a fawning New York Times that, “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada. There are shared values – openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other – but there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.”

Along with his fellow travellers in the institutions, he set to work ripping the country’s historic identity to shreds. The three prongs of the attack involved setting fire to its past, promoting LGBTQ and critical race theory in schools and government, and unleashing an unprecedented wave of mass migration. Only now that the full impact of this cultural revolution is sinking in is the country waking up. Even the mainstream liberal left admits things have gone too far.

Journalist Omer Aziz, in the liberal establishment Globe and Mail, penned a viral piece about the betrayal of the ‘Canadian Dream’, which he characterised as on life support. He speaks of a social crisis, an immigration crisis, an economic crisis and a political crisis after the ravages of Trudeau. Former Tory cabinet minister Kevin Klein adds, ‘Today, our country’s identity is under siege, not from outside invaders but from within – by an ideology that seeks to erase what it means to be Canadian. The left’s relentless attack on our values, history, and sense of belonging is tearing at the very fabric of our democracy.’

This summer I spent five weeks in the eastern part of my country, setting foot in the only two of the country’s ten provinces I had yet to visit. What greeted me? The progress pride flag fluttered everywhere across the picturesque small towns of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Food chains in these overwhelmingly British-origin provinces were staffed almost entirely by recent arrivals, the product of an unprecedented wave of temporary foreign workers encouraged by Trudeau’s Liberals. If you think Britain, with 50 percent more people than Canada, took in a lot of immigrants last year, consider that Canada admitted a staggering 1.9 million to the UK’s 1.2 million.

But perhaps the most symbolic events have been over 100 arson attacks on churches across Canada. These, which Trudeau called ‘understandable’, accompanied a wave of statue toppling of Canadian founders such as Sir John A. Macdonald (as well as Queen Victoria), and were motivated by leftist myths about the churches’ role in the country’s Residential Schools programme for indigenous First Nations people….

Twenty-four MPs from Trudeau’s own Liberal Party have now called on him to resign. So far, he refuses. But he may be forced, nonetheless, to call early elections. And in that case, the estimable Pierre Poilievre of the Conservative Party will likely win, and the war on wokeness in Canada will take off.

Poilievre, incidentally, traveled through Israel as a teenager and stayed in a kibbutz at Ein Gedi, a historic site and nature reserve near Masada and the Dead Sea. He saw missiles shot from Lebanon into Israel by Hezbollah. Ever since, he has been an unswerving supporter of the Jewish state. He told a synagogue audience that “the Jewish people are the only people I know of who, in the same language, worship the same faith on the same land in the same country as they did 3,000 years ago. That is a true indigenous people.” And while the Bidenites exacted a promise from Israel not to hit oil and nuclear installations in Iran, Poilievre called on Israel to do both, saying “I think the idea of allowing a genocidal, theocratic, unstable dictatorship that is desperate to avoid being overthrown by its own people to develop nuclear weapons is about the most dangerous and irresponsible thing that the world could ever allow.” And he added this: “If Israel were to stop that genocidal, theocratic, unstable government from acquiring nuclear weapons, it would be a gift by the Jewish state to humanity.”