Our nation must regain moral clarity
If countries could make New Year’s resolutions, Canada’s should be to regain our moral clarity. After eight years of Liberal leadership, our sense of national identity and shared ideals have wasted away so rapidly and so dramatically, it’s as though someone injected them with Ozempic.
Much like the trendy weight-loss drug, it was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s penchant for easy fixes and superficial wins that led us here. His government has been to do just about anything in the name of optics, regardless of longterm effect to the nation’s health.
Now, our country that was once known around the world for moral fortitude, for defending democracy and doing what’s right for both Canadians at home and global citizens abroad, is a shell of its former self.
Name just about any issue, and you’ll find a rapidly spinning moral compass at its root. Our wilting international influence and suddenly distant allies? What else can we expect when we continually refuse to stand strong against the rising tide of authoritarianism and show the simplest forms of solidarity, such as enforcing sanctions, creating a foreign agent registry, meaningfully investigating foreign interference or designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization under the Criminal Code?
Rather than do these basic things, actions many of our peer countries took in recent years, we continue to allow foreign bad actors to intimidate and terrorize innocents both inside and outside our borders. The Trudeau government’s lack of moral clarity surrounding the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel has been particularly galling. Calling out and fighting forcefully against antisemitism used to be a given in mainstream political circles — not anymore in this country.
However, it’s not just geopolitical issues that suffer from the gaping cavity where our morals used to reside. While there have always been economic and class distinctions in Canada, the past eight years saw us toss aside any meaningful effort to shrink them and provide not equal outcomes, but the equality of opportunity that fuels thriving economies and societies.
Instead, we saw the proliferation of corporate welfare, kowtowing to low-wage employers, disturbing comfort with anticompetitive corporate behaviour and deliberate economic repression of anyone who isn’t a wealthy white-collar worker with at least one investment property.
One of the most basic ways to judge the moral heart of a country is whether it endeavours to offer each new generation a better life than the last. Throughout Canada’s 156 years, this has been a constant. Until now.
Now, Canada’s young are financially and socially adrift, paying the price for political decisions that not only put their futures last, time and time again, but gorge on them. Even worse, the intent is to hand the bill over to us at the end of the day, with interest, saddling millennials and Gen-z with the lethal duo of stolen economic opportunity and crippling debt.
We also used to be a country that valued families and communities. Without these foundational pillars, shared identity and values on the larger national scale become near impossible to maintain.
The affordability and housing crises continue to force people out of their communities, away from friends and family. Young Canadians are delaying or choosing not to have children not because they don’t want them, but because they feel they can’t afford them or provide the quality of life they enjoyed as children. Too many of us can barely pay our own rent or feed ourselves, let alone a growing family.
None of these issues, international, economic or otherwise, will be solved until we decide what type of country and people we want to be. It’s not good enough to print passports or field Olympic teams; a country must have a heart that guides its actions. If things are to turn around in 2024, political leaders must urgently define and promote what makes Canada’s beat.
Moral clarity isn’t a luxury or “nice to have” — it’s essential to our future. It’s step one to solving every crisis that ails us. Let’s all resolve to find it in this new year.
A COUNTRY MUST HAVE A HEART THAT GUIDES ITS ACTIONS.