Justin buys into the progressive myth

After the Commons voted to pass Bill C-19, abolishing the long gun registry, Conservative MPS retired to a cocktail reception to celebrate. The sentiment was understandable enough: It had taken 17 years and six elections for the party to achieve its goal on this, perhaps its signature issue.

Among the opposition, however, the reaction was dismay. “Supporters of the long-gun registry,” Postmedia News reported, “were appalled by the festive attitude of the Conservatives.” The interim leader of the NDP said it showed “arrogance.” The interim leader of the Liberals called it “inappropriate.” In Quebec City, the Public Security minister found time in his busy day to pronounce on the extra-jurisdictional festivities. “I find this deplorable,” he said. “They have a right to their opinion. But to go so far as to celebrate ...”

These reactions strike me as entirely sincere. It was one thing for the Conservatives to pass their legislation. They had the numbers. Technically, they had won the election. But “to go so far as to celebrate” suggested a certain feeling of ... legitimacy: as if the Conservatives believed they had not only the power to pass such a legislation, but the right; as if this were the sort of thing any democratically elected government might do. Imagine.

So there is a context to Justin Trudeau. The Liberal dauphin caused an enormous stir with his remarks earlier this week to the effect that the Conservative government’s values were so contrary to those of the Canada he loved that, were it to go much further, he would himself take up the cause of Quebec independence. If Canada were really “the Canada of Stephen Harper,” if he “no longer rec- ognized Canada,” well, that was a Canada he could not love.

After the storm blew up, he attempted some damage control. It wasn’t that he wanted Quebec to separate. Quite the contrary: “Canada needs (Quebec) to balance out Harper’s vision.” Still, he warned, there were “millions of Quebecers” who do not recognize themselves in the values of the Harper government. Who could blame them if they were to go down the path he himself had mentally traversed?

The issue here to me isn’t Justin — although we certainly learned a lot about his judgment and conduct under pressure, none of it terribly flattering to his leadership chances. Rather, it is that such views are so commonplace. Justin was indeed, as his defenders hastened to argue, speaking for a great many others, or rather inhabits a milieu in which these ideas are current: for he is hardly the first to say any of it, even in public.

There are two broad strands to this kind of thinking. On the one hand, as I suggested, is the seeming inability of many members of the Liberal party in particular to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Conservative government. They are not merely a government whose policies some find disagreeable — they are beyond the pale. They are, quite literally, anti-canadian. This is what comes of spending too much time with people who think in exactly the same way as you. It becomes impossible to imagine how any rational person could think otherwise.

So that’s the first: the elevation of comparatively minor policy disagreements into mortal conflicts. The second, opposed tendency is to take a genuine existential threat like separation, the breakup and destruction of the country, and normalize it as just another “option” — a delusion in which Quebecers have been encouraged for decades.

What is perhaps novel, at least in a candidate for federal office, is to link the two — to suggest the government of the other party is so abhorrent that others, at least, would be justified in breaking up the country over it. This is Justin’s particular contribution to national life.

If he were only insulting the Harper government, that would be one thing. But it’s clear he holds the same views of Harper’s supporters, and of the parts of the country that elected him. Hence the need for Quebec as a counterbalance: as if the values of Canadians outside the province were entirely alien to Quebec’s; as if, indeed, they were barbarians, in need of Quebec’s civilizing influence.

Which he would be entitled to think, if not say, if it were remotely true. In fact, the supposed inherent progressivism of Quebecers is largely nationalist myth. It is in Quebec, for example, where user fees in health care are most common. The province pays far less in welfare benefits than neighbouring Ontario. Its liberal elites have little time for the multicultural pieties of their counterparts elsewhere: when it comes to banning the burka, Quebecers can see very much of themselves in the Harper government’s values.

I don’t doubt that some of the things the Harper government has done have been unpopular in Quebec. Forgive me if I suggest that is not enough, in itself, to condemn them. Every government does things that some people like, and some people don’t. That some of the latter group are in Quebec does not elevate the matter into a national emergency, as if it were impermissible that Quebecers could be dissatisfied: a guarantee given to no other section of the country.

The only reason it occurs to people to suggest it is because of the threat of separatism, and the only reason the threat has any currency is because of the willingness of others to indulge, or indeed validate it.