Trudeau’s American-style rhetoric
The most striking thing about Justin Trudeau’s speech on liberty last week was how American it was, not just the staging, fanfare and teleprompter, but its in fact very welcome focus on liberty, which Canadians historically have regarded as an American preoccupation — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and all that. Our traditional shtick has been “deference to authority.” If we’re now freedom-lovers and -fighters, despite the American pedigree of such ideas, all the better for us.
The speech’s nationalistic bombast and provincialism were also something many Canadians would regard as typically American. When an American politician says about the U.S. the kinds of things Trudeau said about Canada, Liberal eyeballs normally roll skyward. Thus we are supposedly a “constitutional superpower,” because other countries have adopted charters of rights and freedoms, as if a written bill of rights were something we thought up. Magna Carta is 800 years old this June. The Brits passed a bill of rights in 1689. The Americans constitutionalized theirs in 1789. We’re also hardly the first country to be founded on common values rather than “religion, language, or ethnicity … (which was) at its root, a leap of faith, and a very new idea.” Sorry — France tried it in 1789, admittedly with mixed success, the Americans in 1776, even if the values they held in common weren’t for black people.
Did we invent tolerance? Are we a uniquely successful country? There are lots of open, tolerant places in the world. Ask the citizens of any one of them whether theirs is best and they’ll probably say yes. People tend to think that about where they have chosen to live. And most of these other places haven’t actually gone through the experience of being so tolerant, inclusive and successful they came within a half a percentage point vote of breaking up, as we did in 1995.
Unfortunately, when you get down to it, Canadian liberty — or “Canadian Liberty,” as Trudeau’s speechwriters put it, as I don’t imagine he typed the final text — is quite different from American liberty, or just-plain liberty, as most freedom-thinkers would define it. Mainly what he has in mind is what used to be called “religious tolerance,” which means people get to practise their religion in almost any way they please even if that includes a wardrobe others find peculiar or offensive.
The more robust American idea of liberty, that our presumption should always favour the individual’s desire to be free of interference from the government, didn’t really come up. Trudeau made two substantive points: One, head scarves are fine in court, which is easy because just about everyone, including the prime minister, agrees, and, two, during a citizenship ceremony, which is an occasion of welcoming, Muslim women should be free to cover their face — which the prime minister, and likely lots of Canadians, find very strange: We welcome her but she hides from us? Not something to legislate on, maybe, but hardly bigotry to puzzle over.
Apart from that, it’s not a comprehensive liberty manifesto. Whether Trudeau believes, say, that employers, including governments, can insist their employees show their faces when serving the public, we don’t yet know. He does say we can object to how our fellow citizens behave or to the various choices they make — “That is your right” — but when the prime minister expresses rather mild reservations about the citizenship ceremony he is accused of deliberately fomenting anti-Muslim hysteria for political purposes.
Beyond religious dress, how does Trudeau feel about parents’ freedom to choose the language of their child’s instruction, which only some Quebecers have or for that matter, as the Financial Post’s Terence Corcoran has noted, to import cheese from France? We don’t know — though we can guess the liberty agenda doesn’t go that far.
A final way in which Trudeau exhibits his Americanism is in his mistrust of Parliament, something he shares with James Madison and the other U. S. founding fathers. “Heaven knows,” he says, “it would have taken a lot longer to win (our) freedoms, had the effort been left in the hands of Parliament.” It’s a strange position for a democratic politician to take. Maybe he should be aiming for the Supreme Court, not 24 Sussex.