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By Eric Kaufmann, October 29, 2024

What happens in a country without cultural conservatism? Look no further 
than Canada, where the national identity is disintegrating.

In 2015, soon after taking office, the new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau 
gushed to a fawning New York Times that, “There is no core identity, no 
mainstream in Canada. There are shared values – openness, respect, 
compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other – but 
there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.”

Along with his fellow travellers in the institutions, he set to work 
ripping the country’s historic identity to shreds. The three prongs of 
the attack involved setting fire to its past, promoting LGBTQ and 
critical race theory in schools and government, and unleashing an 
unprecedented wave of mass migration. Only now that the full impact of 
this cultural revolution is sinking in is the country waking up. Even 
the mainstream liberal left admits things have gone too far.

Journalist Omer Aziz, in the liberal establishment Globe and Mail, 
penned a viral piece about the betrayal of the ‘Canadian Dream’, which 
he characterised as on life support. He speaks of a social crisis, an 
immigration crisis, an economic crisis and a political crisis after the 
ravages of Trudeau. Former Tory cabinet minister Kevin Klein adds, 
‘Today, our country’s identity is under siege, not from outside invaders 
but from within – by an ideology that seeks to erase what it means to be 
Canadian. The left’s relentless attack on our values, history, and sense 
of belonging is tearing at the very fabric of our democracy.’

This summer I spent five weeks in the eastern part of my country, 
setting foot in the only two of the country’s ten provinces I had yet to 
visit. What greeted me? The progress pride flag fluttered everywhere 
across the picturesque small towns of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward 
Island. Food chains in these overwhelmingly British-origin provinces 
were staffed almost entirely by recent arrivals, the product of an 
unprecedented wave of temporary foreign workers encouraged by Trudeau’s 
Liberals. If you think Britain, with 50 percent more people than Canada, 
took in a lot of immigrants last year, consider that Canada admitted a 
staggering 1.9 million to the UK’s 1.2 million.

But perhaps the most symbolic events have been over 100 arson attacks on 
churches across Canada. These, which Trudeau called ‘understandable’, 
accompanied a wave of statue toppling of Canadian founders such as Sir 
John A. Macdonald (as well as Queen Victoria), and were motivated by 
leftist myths about the churches’ role in the country’s Residential 
Schools programme for indigenous First Nations people.

Though mistreatment of indigenous Canadians occurred at these schools, 
as they did in reserve and non-native schools, records show that native 
people who attended Residential Schools had significantly lower 
mortality rates from infectious diseases than their peers who remained 
on reserve. Documentary evidence reveals that children were not removed 
from reserves without parental consent. Aspirational native parents 
sought to have such schools constructed and wanted their children to 
attend. Many who attended spoke positively of their experience. The 
evidence also does not back up accusations that the schools were 
designed to erase the culture of First Nations people.

The charge that children were killed or placed in ‘mass graves’ by those 
who ran the schools has no basis in documentary or forensic records. 
Rather, it is based on selective oral testimony and ignores the 
considerable monetary and identity incentives shaping the narrative of 
plaintiffs, white progressive allies and well-paid lawyers. Recently, 
the Canadian government forked over a whopping $2.8 billion to atone for 
their claims. The notion that residential schools amounted to a form of 
‘genocide’ is based on misinformation and an abuse of the English 
language, but this did not stop the entire political and media 
establishment endorsing the lie. Telling such truths is smeared as 
‘denialism’ by woke elites, and zealots among them are trying to 
criminalise it.

Meanwhile, gender reassignment surgery and self-identification are the 
norm, the UK’s Cass Review has been dismissed and draconian human rights 
bills like C-16 and C-63 permit plaintiffs to haul people before 
kangaroo courts known as Human Rights Tribunals for subjectively-defined 
offences like misgendering. Trudeau’s government has majored on speech 
policing and authoritarianism towards the right, abusing the language of 
‘hate’ and ‘misinformation’ while trafficking in both.

The downstream effects of this woke revolution include falling per 
capita GDP, rising crime and youth unemployment, soaring house prices 
and a surge in homeless encampments. As I note in my new book Taboo, the 
so-called ‘culture war’ is about much more than culture.

Perhaps the only silver lining to the story is that Trudeau’s dumpster 
fire seems to have woken people up. Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are 
crushing the Liberals in the polls by nearly 20 points, on course for a 
clear majority of seats. Two-thirds of people want lower immigration and 
the issue is a top concern for voters for the first time I can remember. 
Meanwhile young Canadians, bucking trends elsewhere in the Anglosphere, 
appear to lean well to the right of their elders on some metrics.

Only time will tell if this is too little, too late.


Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham 
and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.



-- 
Dr. Auric D. Hellman
adhellman1@gmail.com