That's not British

All my life I've lived with the Trudeaupian Problem - Canadian national identity. What is Canada for? What exactly are "Canadian values"? What does it mean to be culturally Canadian?

I think I understand what happened. Before the Trudeau/Pearson revolution no one ever bothered to ask; we all knew what being Canadian meant. But national identity crises seem to be the most useful tool the left has ever come up with to undermine national confidence. The first step is to establish a sense of unease, a feeling, (and make sure it is never more than a vague feeling) that we need looking after, that the world is hostile and more complex and incomprehensible than we had suspected. And, this is crucial, never, ever, define the threat clearly.

The first step in infantilising the people of Canada was to convince them first that there was some huge, incomprehensibly complex global movement sweeping the world that was erasing, like a computer virus, all the previous identity programming in the system. A new world, a newly globalised world, was coming, we were told, and the old paradigms were fading away and we would have to learn from the experts how to live and get along in it. We needed new rules.

Well, fade away the old certainties clearly did. The experiment worked. When a single party controls the media, all the means of mass communication, it is apparently easy to convince a whole population that they are in need. In need of a new direction, a new identity. We are in need of keepers. We need the experts to tell us what to do for a living, what marriage is, what womanhood and manhood is. We needed to be told that the old way of living and thinking is no good any more (because of course, it was working just fine and we could never have known by direct experience that it had become obsolete).

We needed to be re-instructed in what is right (recycling, gay sex, abortion, "Ms.", living on credit, rule by unelected courts, taxation, being careful what you say, condoms, no-fault divorce, the service sector, "reparative justice", therapy, pacifism, welfare, vegetarianism, herbal tea, open borders, fat-free diets, human rights tribunals, five-dollar coffee, aromatherapy, globalised labour markets, pornography, crystal-gazing, self-censorship) and wrong (smoking, the manufacturing industries, punishment for crime, veterans, having six children, the confessional, rule by elected Parliamentarians, national sovereignty, the death penalty, red meat, owning a gun, voluntary celibacy, Christianity, "Mr." "Mrs." or "Miss", moral absolutes, earning the money you spend, spending only the money you earn, keeping all your paycheque, saving for the future, saying out loud what you really think).

We must be instructed by panels of experts what to think of international affairs, what to think, even, about the weather. We cannot be trusted with handling our own money, with saving for our retirement. We must be provided with state-sponsored child-rearing supervisors to ensure that the kids grow up according to the established programmes. We must not be allowed to own our homes and if the mortgage ever gets paid, we must be forced by taxation to sell at a loss. We cannot be trusted with guns. We must be told what sort of lightbulb to use. We are in need of a large, permanently established pedagogical state to regulate every minute aspect of our lives, personal and public, internal and external.

But whatever did we do before Nanny came along to tell us the new, fat-free, environmentally sensitive, culturally tolerant way to tie our shoes?

I seem to recall, in the dim recesses of my childhood, that we used to know already how to get on in the world.

I think I recall things like the rule of law, the presumption of innocence, habeas corpus, the national interest, the ability to reward or replace our elected representatives. I remember that Parliament made laws and the courts were for upholding them and punishing miscreants. I recall that we had newspapers that could print opinions that differed from one paper to the next. I remember when "rights" went along with "duties".

I'm reading some interesting material today. The BNP's political manifesto. I am not really that surprised to find in it some very basic principles that are laid down by Catholic social teaching, (the old kind, not the "Justice n' Peace" kind). They are using terms like subsidiarity in the traditional Catholic way.