SO MUCH FOR CANADIAN VALUES.

This is a government that, more than most, sets great store by “Canadian values.” In an important and well-received speech in 2017, its foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, said part of Canada’s mission in the world is to actively promote our values “for we are safer and more prosperous … when more of the world shares Canadian values.… (I)t is clearly not our role to impose our values around the world.… No one appointed us the world’s policeman. But it is our role to clearly stand for … rights both in Canada and abroad.” (“Oh, Lordie,” you can imagine the other foreign ministers nudging each other, “here come the Canadians and their blasted values again.”)

At the time of Freeland’s speech, most Canadians would have assumed parliamentary democracy was an important Canadian value. In fact, she happened to be speaking on June 6, the anniversary of D-Day, when 359 Canadians were killed and another 715 wounded storming the beaches of Normandy so Europeans could get their own democracies back. Canadians fought for many reasons in 1939-45. But democracy was high on the list, with all it entails: ballot boxes, elections, candidate debates, parliamentary back-and-forth, question period, decision-making, oversight, disclosure — the works.

In his own important and well-received speech in 2015, when he was still leader of the Opposition, Justin Trudeau spoke about the fundamental importance of liberty as a Canadian value. It was a surprising speech. Canadian politicians don’t speak about freedom nearly as often as American ones do. But, said the would-be prime minister, “I believe that one of the highest aims of Canadian political leadership is to protect and expand freedom for Canadians.” And a little later: “As my second-favourite prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier, once said: ‘Canada is free, and freedom is its nationality.’ ”

Freedom is its nationality.

A finger exercise in political philosophy is to debate which you would choose — liberty or democracy — if you could only have one. Personal freedom? Or a real say in how policies are decided in your society? It’s a trick question, of course. The correct answer is that they are inseparable. A person is not

INTERVENTIONS ARE ALSO ENTERTAINED FROM MPs

ATTENDING ONLINE, WHEN THEY REMEMBER TO UNMUTE THEMSELVES.

truly free if a government can make decisions without questioning, criticism or opposition from citizens — without, in other words, the continuing consent of the governed. A government answerable to no one is unlikely to honour the personal liberties citizens might believe they still possessed.

To be sure, Justin Trudeau’s 2015 vision of liberty tilted precariously toward progressive equality. “First, in Canada, when we are at our best, liberty means inclusion.” And it featured what now seems an ominously disparaging throwaway line about Parliament. Regarding the new liberties of unrestricted abortion, personal choice in sexual matters and assisted suicide, he said: “The Charter of Rights and Freedoms created the opportunity and the vehicle for Canadians to gain these new liberties for themselves. Heaven knows, it would have taken a lot longer to win those freedoms, had the effort been left in the hands of Parliament.”

But even people whose taste for freedom leans toward collective liberties, such as the right of Quebecers to override their fellow citizens’ speaking or display of English, and positive liberties, such as people’s supposed human right to this or that level of income, must also understand that full participation in democratic politics, including one’s representatives’ full participation in Parliament, is a fundamental freedom. Even a Parliament that is sometimes unco-operatively fusty-minded about social change remains the people’s forum, where the people’s representatives reason together — and, OK, also harangue, froth and backbite together — as they work through democratic self-government, something our forefathers (at the time only fathers) achieved for us two centuries ago.

So it is very strange that these supposed freedom-lovers’ not quite immediate reaction to the crisis was first to severely curtail MPs’ ability to probe and question government policy and now, finally, to shutter Parliament altogether until the fall. Maybe it should not have been surprising that people so sanctimonious about Canadian values would ditch one of the most important as soon as it became expedient to do so. But it was.

In what Canadians used to think of as the mother of parliaments in London, Prime Minister Boris Johnson continues to be regularly questioned, in detail, about his government’s conduct of the response to the coronavirus, including by new Labour party leader Keir Starmer, who is a much more impressive and effective presence than his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn. Check it out at parliamentlive.tv. The Commons chamber is almost empty. On the close-ups of speakers you can see in the row behind them the green check marks and red cross-outs that indicate where on the benches members may or may not sit. Social distancing requires many more of the red than the green. But interventions are also entertained from MPs attending online, when they remember to unmute themselves.

The U.K. is having an awful pandemic, with the highest death toll in Europe, much worse than ours. Yet, as it did through the Blitz of 1940, Parliament continues to meet and the government remains subject to probing criticism and debate.

It is cheering, isn’t it, that Canadian values persist at least somewhere in the world?