Opinion: If You Think Leftism in The US Is Bad, Just Look at Canada

Under Liberal Prime Ministers Lester B. Pearson (1963-1968) and Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1968-1984, except for nine months in 1979-1980), the country was taken through a series of wrenching transformations where Canada’s ruling paradigm was changed from the top. With most Canadians’ habitual deference to authority, they quickly became conformist “progressives.”

Today, small-c conservatives in Canada face an uphill battle which compares very unfavorably to the situation in the United States. Given the left-liberal predominance in the Canadian media, in the education system (from daycare to universities), in the judiciary and justice system, in the government bureaucracies, in so-called high culture (typified by government-subsidized “Can Lit”), in North American pop culture and “youth culture,” in the big Canadian banks and corporations, and in the leadership of the main churches, any existing small-c conservative tendencies are being continually ground down.

There is also the panoply of special interest groups, who receive extensive government and some corporate funding. To try to imagine the Canadian situation, consider what American society would be like today if about nine-tenths of the states could be characterized as “Blue States.”

Given the virtual annihilation of a “small-c conservative” social base in Canada, politics has taken on a highly dreary and disheartening aspect for the Canadian Right. Despite the Conservative Party holding power under Stephen Harper from 2006 to 2015, that era was characterized by “ultra-moderate,” centrist measures.

In the October 2015 federal election, Justin Trudeau (Pierre’s son) and his Liberal Party won a strong majority. This was a signal for dismantling whatever fragmentary conservative measures Harper might have been able to enact. Until the recent disastrous trip to India, Trudeau was virtually unassailable in popularity. The recent dip in Trudeau’s popularity gives a fleeting hope that the Conservative Party may have some chance of winning the upcoming federal election, expected in 2019.

Canada has certainly been marked by massive social transformation and upheaval since the 1960s — driven mostly by the federal Canadian government of the Liberals — and it is likely that these trends will continue. For example, Canada was the third country in the world (after the Netherlands and Belgium) to recognize “same-sex marriage.” There have been no restrictions on abortion since 1988, after the Supreme Court of Canada struck down some residual legal limits.

At the same time, Canada has embraced multiculturalism; mass, dissimilar immigration; affirmative action (called “employment equity” in Canada); and programmatic “diversity” with a great intensity. Indeed, the federal Liberal Party (assisted by the incredibly ideologically energetic left-wing New Democratic Party) has been practicing “activist,” “transformational” politics in the last five decades, decisively transforming the social and cultural landscape to maintain itself perpetually in power.

A very recent dissent from the cult of diversity was by the maverick Quebec Conservative Member of Parliament, Maxime Bernier. He had come very close to winning the leadership of the Conservative Party in the wake of Harper’s resignation. (The leadership was won by the Western Canadian Andrew Scheer, who has proven to be less effectual.) Bernier is also an impassioned critic of the Canadian supply management system (dairy, poultry, eggs) that has become a stumbling block in the Free Trade re-negotiations.

During the Quebec referendum crisis of 1995, it was said that the failure of current-day Canada would tend to extinguish much hope in the world of creating “successful” multicultural societies. Indeed, Canadian traditionalists and conservatives might eventually be looking to various forms of “provincialization” or regionalization or so-called “cantonization” to challenge the federal government behemoth.

Mark Wegierski is a Toronto-based writer, social critic and historical researcher and is published in major Canadian newspapers, as well as in U.S. scholarly journals such as Humanitas, Review of Metaphysics, and Telos, and in U.S. magazines such as Chronicles and The World & I. His writing has also appeared in Polish, British and German publications.