It’s been a few years now since Canada was the moderate, sensible, dependable, and globally respected nation that it grew into during the 20th century.
What we have become instead is a country with the world’s most radical collection of social policies, that is mocked mercilessly by international media for its foolish extremism, is taunted for its unwillingness to defend itself, and no longer has any influence to speak of on the international stage. While we once had a voice that was respected, we now have one that solicits, if anything at all, condescending grins of amusement.
First, let’s deal with social policies. While all Western countries respect women’s right to make decisions involving their own bodies, Canada is the only one in which there are no laws or restrictions on abortions. At all. It is available on request and without any of the term limits imposed in other liberal democracies. There is, in fact, no law. You may think that’s great or you may disapprove. But what is undeniable is that you can’t get much more liberal than that.
When it comes to gay rights and gender issues, Canada has been a leader, particularly in recent years where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has not only championed those causes in all their forms domestically but internationally.
Again, you may agree or disagree with the prime minister’s primal progressivism, but no other national leader has been more iconoclastic.
Then there’s euthanasia, or as we call it in Canada, Medical Assistance in Dying. Initially justified as a way to allow people suffering from terminal illness to die without having to experience intolerable pain, it is now used to shut down Roman Catholic hospices that refuse to terminate lives onsite, and there are plans to expand the law to include the mentally ill and those with depression. These days, it is pointed to with alarm by disability groups and has been condemned internationally.
Then there’s the issue of what appears to me and our allies to be the Trudeau government’s almost complete disinterest in defending Canada’s sovereignty, let alone meeting our NATO commitment to spend 2 percent of GDP on our military. We are, at the moment, about $18 billion shy of that number and are so disinterested in making up that gap that the Royal Canadian Air Force announced it is retiring its training jets and will send its aspiring pilots to Texas, Finland, and Italy to earn their wings. This comes less than a month after Julianne Smith, the U.S. representative to NATO, made it clear Canada’s allies have run out of patience.
There’s no need to even start with how the government’s fence-sitting regarding the war in Gaza has coincided with a shocking rise in anti-Semitism and rendered Canada completely ineffective diplomatically. Or that the prime minister has declared his nation both genocidal and systemically racist and, in doing so, eliminated the moral authority it once possessed.
It is worth pointing out, however, that the government’s extremist effort to restrict freedom of speech via the Online Harms Act has further raised foreign eyebrows.
Canadians are awakening to the fact that they are no longer living in the sensible, respected, and prosperous middle power they thought they were. They are now in a nation where responsible, moderate opinions are casually labelled by politicians and supplicant observers as “far right.”
It’s unclear whether they have the courage to fix it.
