In Trudeau-land, maybe Canada is ‘post-national’
In 2015, newly minted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in an unguarded moment with the New York Times, glibly declared “Canada is the world’s first post-national state.”
He described Canadians’ “core values” as openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, “being there for each other,” and seeking equality and justice. But Trudeau stated “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.”
At the time, and since, it was easy to dismiss this as the undisciplined and pseudo-intellectual ramblings of an unserious mind. But in recent days there is a darker edge to this.
Perhaps in Justin Trudeau-land there really is no core Canadian identity; particularly in Western Canada nothing that anchors us — from longtime to new Canadians — to a common purpose or strives to unify us behind an ideal.
Intermittently since 2012, near B.C.’S Morice River, blockades have been erected by a tiny group of Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs opposing Coastal Gaslink’s natural gas pipeline, despite all 20 elected bands along the pipeline route supporting it, including the five Wet’suwet’en bands under the Indian Act. A bandowned business and many band members will work on the project.
In recent weeks, sympathy blockades have sprung up across the country. They invoke Indigenous rights and opposing pipelines in general, Coastal Gaslink in particular and the shipment of liquid natural gas (LNG) to China. It is difficult to understand opposition to Canadian shipments to China of less carbon-dioxide intensive LNG to replace coal’s higher CO2 emissions and atmospheric pollution.
There are two reasons that Trudeau bears responsibility for the growing activism, barricades and contempt for the law. First, his nonstop campaign of piety, virtue signalling, grandstanding and lecturing us on the holy troika of Indigenous reconciliation and “balancing the economy with the environment,” has been a green light for many activists to stop all oil and gas. His second failing comes in his anemic response to the blockades, which have inconvenienced thousands of people and cost the Canadian economy billions of dollars. Absent in the early days while trolling for UN Security Council votes in Africa and Europe, Trudeau literally phoned in suggestions that the dispute be fixed by “dialogue, negotiation, alignment, engagement, and consultation.”
As the blockage of the CN main line near Belleville, Ont., paralyzed passenger and freight service and resulted in many layoffs, Trudeau supported the police decision to “keep the peace” by ignoring the enforcement of criminal, railway and trespass laws, and even allowing activists to flout court injunctions. What followed was the predictable deterioration of public order and respect for law.
Finally, Trudeau’s return to Canada was mired in inertia; the only decisive move was to bar Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer from a leaders’ meeting because of Scheer’s “unacceptable speech,” which suggested blockades come down and the law be enforced. Three days later, a humbled Trudeau made the same decree but, as expected, it has since been largely ignored.
National Post columnist Jonathan Kay has observed that recently Canada’s identity has transformed to a country convinced that we are “a genocide state.” Canadian media, academic and political elites, Kay rightly points out, are obsessed with the narrative that we are “an ugly scar on traditional Indigenous lands,” and the “whole vocabulary — settler, neo-colonial, appropriation — declares that Canada is garbage, hoping that an attitude of self-abasement would somehow lead us to ‘reconciliation.’ We forgot that when garbage talks, no one listens.”
In the midst of this, hours before it was expected to be axed by the Trudeau cabinet, Teck Resources withdrew its Frontier oilsands expansion, along with $21 billion in spending, 2,500 permanent jobs, and $70 billion in tax revenue. This pushes to $120 billion the value of resource projects cancelled in the last three years.
Given the events of recent days, who does not believe this is merely a rehearsal for the anarchy that will come if the Trudeau government-owned Trans Mountain pipeline extension ever tries to lay pipe?
Post-national Canada indeed.
Gormley is a broadcaster, lawyer, author and former Progressive Conservative MP whose radio talk show is heard weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on 650 CKOM Saskatoon and 980 CJME Regina.