This article originally appeared in the Epoch Times.
By Peter Menzies, March 26, 2024
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 cause in all their forms domestically but internationally.
Mr. Trudeau has brought LGBTQ2 and gender issues to the table in discussions involving trade partners with ASEAN nations and famously chided Italian Prime Minister Giogia Meloni at the G7 Summit in Hiroshima last year. He has been less vocal when it comes to Ukraine, where gay marriage is not legal, or Gaza, where homosexuality is so vigorously forbidden that its rulers, Hamas, executed one of their own leaders, Mahmound Ishtiwi, for having sex with another man.
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.
As the Washington Post editorial board, hardly renowned as a collection of reactionaries, put it: “The expansion of euthanasia Canada is currently contemplating … goes too far. … Its MAID regulations are looser than those of Belgium and the Netherlands, where psychiatric euthanasia has been lawful since 2002 — and where serious concerns have arisen about that practice.”
Those are just some of the big culture war issues of modern times and, while people in a few other countries tend to view these matters more liberally than Canadians, none have policies that reflect that.
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.
“Canada is hovering now just above 1.3 per cent and has no concrete plan to get to that 2 per cent, while other allies have made and created plans to get there, if not this year, in the next few years,” she said in an interview with CBC. “Here inside the NATO alliance, and certainly back in Washington, we very much encourage our friends in Canada to develop some sort of concrete plan to meet that 2 percent pledge.”
Little wonder then, that the RCMP recently warned that Canada faces pressure to cede some of the territory it is so disinterested in adequately patrolling.
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.
Writing in Britain’s The Telegraph, David Collins labelled the bill Trudeau’s “most tyrannical attack on freedom yet” being “brought to you by the same farcically-named ‘Liberal’ party who froze the bank accounts of the truckers who protested vaccine-mandates.”
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.
Peter Menzies is a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an award winning journalist, and former vice-chair of the CRTC.
