Zeitgeist

One only has to compare StatsCan Census 1981 to the most recent Census results to see how fast and furious the population has shifted from 80% European ancestry to 30% European ancestry to understand that the traditions, culture, and public morality associated with the founding cultures of Canada are simply crowded out of existence. Did the majority of Canadians want this or was it imposed without much public discussion or debate? I’m not suggesting that the influences are terrible. No doubt there are benefits and costs, but people shouldn’t be surprised if they feel that their communities and ways of relating have changed radically. Canada has had the highest immigration in the developed world for many years now. What’s more, due to our pitiful birth rate, that’s likely to continue for generations to come. Canada’s dominant religion will be Islam. Indigenous, who have a positive birth rate, will wring more money out of Parliament. The US doesn’t have this same rampant immigration and it has a higher birth rate than Canada, which will soon be a primarily Asian country but with growing numbers of Africans. It’s also increasingly LGBTQ2S+, which lowers our birth rate further. Trudeau also brought in free birth control and expanded assisted suicide, which lower our birth rate further. We’re also more urban, which lowers our birth rates further. We also have unlimited abortion up to the expected day of birth, which lowers our birth rate further. All of these policies mean that high immigration is here to stay and Canada’s cultural roots are fast on their way to extinction. These are facts, not opinions. If you like this trend, you’re in the right place.

I have to admit that Vimy is really the Canadian Holy of Holies. Only an utter demon would dare besmirch the symbols. Thank God we have the Peace Tower at the centre of our Parliament. Our ancestors understood what mattered and made sure it was the cornerstone of Ottawa. Too bad the Post-National State creepers now dominate those chambers.

The fact that there’s truth in these statements says how far we’ve fallen. Poilievre better be tough and forthright. The headwinds are bad.

What does Russia have to do with any of this. It looks weak to throw unsubstantiated accusations at people whose opinions you don’t like.

My gosh you’re coming late to the party. I know quite a lot about this going back to Lovelock’s book Gaia which talked about climate change in the 70’s. I don’t dispute that climate change is real and humans are influencing it. What is highly contestable is the extent of human influence on natural warming and cooling cycles, as well as the degree to which we can mitigate our influence through policy in relation to cost. To be honest these ideas were heavily discussed years ago. Also, you complained about Musk, whose EV technology and battery technology has probably made the single biggest impact on the switch away from combustion engines. These are complex issues without easy answers. Note that Canada has carbon taxes and the US doesn’t, yet their emissions have declined and ours are rising. You need to study energy. I have a $33000 solar power system on my roof that produces little power. I bought into the myth that we could power our energy grid through solar and wind, which are completely inadequate to the task. They actually require the backstopping of oil and gas when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, because you can’t dial up or down nuclear and hydro on demand. There’s a lot of shallow ignorance on these topics I don’t have time to explain why DEI is extremely problematic, particularly the diversity ideological take on equity. I’ve done years of reading on the topic Of course equality and making people feel included are important What I’m criticizing has zero to do with that. I want to reduce the rate of human made global warming too. LGBTQ2S+ are welcome to my social circle too. Most people agree about these things in a general sense, but you have to dig into the particulars of these topics to discern the consequences of potential policies and approaches. On some of these issues I’ve revised my views because I’ve seen the unintended consequences or ideological creep, etc

I know the old usage of that word. You seem to be citing Occupy Wall Street values. Those still carry some weight, but that’s not really the phenomenon I’m describing. I’d retell the whole story but I don’t have the time. A good place to start is looking at stakeholder capitalism and the alliance between government and corporations. It’s more sophisticated, powerful and dangerous, because it wears a mask of ethics, but it’s really about imposing forms of dependence and captivity on populations for self-aggrandizement, cloaked in the new false religion of inclusion and fighting climate change.

Dougie and I have talked these topics out for a long time. I agree that the word woke has become a bit of a catch-all term that people interpret in different ways. For me it’s a shorthand for cultural Marxism and the focus on race and identity groups that has become the obsession of DEI training and policy, but there’s a lot more to it than the above. My work and studies bring me into close involvement with this work actually. There’s a cultural rot which started out with people taking their rights and prosperity for granted and forgetting how hard won and improbable our liberal democracy is. Because we stopped fighting for it and valuing it, some very active voices at the extremes have essentially set up shop in our government and universities and corporations. Suddenly Canada is a colonial blight and all of our tremendous achievements are overruled by new narratives of oppression that are unfair but to which we’re required to adhere. It’s in our K-12 schools. People are starting to see the radical nature of this movement for what it is, yet they’re also genuinely scared of being cancelled for questioning it. The Americans are pushing back against it harder than we are because, as we’ve learned these past few years, their rights are sturdier than ours, especially on free speech.

Sorry, it’s been done too many times on here already. I believe you’re capable of that research.

The question is not so much about whether this polity should join another polity as whether democracy still lives in the way most people think it should, with representative government elected by the people for the people. It’s about whether people are self-determining their lives or have given up on that idea.

Well you know I’m on the Catholic side of Canada, but I’m very anti-woke. Look, I think both sides in our early history were glorious in their own ways, whether we’re talking Brant and the Six Nations Iroquois or the Hurons and Brebeuf. Both are heroic. Similarly the Brits and the Yanks of 1812 are both heroic. What I can’t stand are the woke cultural Marxists who desecrate it all as merely “oppressive settler colonial and genocidal”. That’s the enemy of Canada, Britain, France, America, First Nations, and Christianity. That’s the spiritual battle against dark forces in my book. Do I think these forces have infiltrated the Vatican? Yes. I guess you think it happened hundreds of years ago, but where are the Protestant churches now? Woke enough for ya?

But the better move for America is simply to incorporate Canada within itself and to do it by convincing Canadians that they can manage Canada’s economy better and make Canada more Canadian than the federal government in Ottawa. I don’t mean invasion, because that’s costly and makes America the ugly aggressive undemocratic power. No, you do it through the power of ideas, and freedom and prosperity are winning ideas. If the Canadian government can do a better job providing freedom and prosperity and protecting Canadian culture, great. Right now they seem intent on disparaging the Canadian identity and hamstringing its citizens economically and weakening their rights. They seem to care more about pleasing unaccountable global elites than representing Canadians’ interests.

I agree it’s a problem. It’s that cartel infiltration problem again.

Some of the boards, yes, but some have retained the pre-woke values. The battles are happening at board meetings as we speak.

I agree with some of this assessment, but note that the Protestants in the Anglo provinces gave up their education system to the woke mob. It’s called the public education system. Quebec scrapped its Catholic public education system and now relies on Bill 20 and the suppression of religious expression in order to assert its French Canadian identity. The Catholic Church used to do that quite well. Visit any old Catholic church in Quebec and you’ll know what I mean: The first medical care and education. Jeanne Mance. Marguerite Bourgoiys. The earliest European settlement in Ontario, St. Marie Among the Hurons in the 1640’s and the martyrs. The Quebec cultural Marxists slashed it all after the Quiet Revolution. English Canada, in fairness, has retained some of this culture, primarily through the last publicly funded Catholic education systems in Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan. Nevertheless, the Vatican seems to be collapsing under the woke mob right now. Alberta seems to be the last jurisdiction seriously fighting to defend and preserve Canada and its bicultural roots. It’s actually winning, though it could almost as easily be folded into the US. Quebec and BC and the Maritimes are pretty much lost to the cultural Marxists. Ontario may be done too.

This is the result of a population that’s been told that everything they valued and cared about is oppressive colonial garbage. The endless Trudeau apology and shame parade. We’re so disgusting and need to do better. Look more billions of hard-earned dollars to pay for the dismantling of Canada. It’s like watching an actor fire a fake gun into his temple over and over. He’s happy to throw more of your money at his designated good people and causes, but he’s going to make sure that gun never fires a real bullet. His crowd will say anything to look good and stay in power. Self-preservation. As for the government of Canada as an institution. What difference would it make to eliminate the federal government and replace it with a team of National Parks tour guides to show the architecture to tourists? Well it would be significantly cheaper. The provinces and territories have their own governments. What about federal services like unprofitable postal service to remote places, management of the St. Lawrence Seaway, and military? We could have an interprovincial committee run most of what doesn’t get divided among the provinces for provincial responsibility. The point is that Canada is extremely over governed by an overbearing nanny managerial class.

It’s not about countries invading countries in North America. That’s unnecessary and wouldn’t pass muster in any branch of any North American government without a damn good reason. It’s about the culture war, the war of ideas. The progressives have lost the culture war in the West, at least in North America. It was really a civil war in America that hit Canada in a big way during the last year of the pandemic. The Canadian government would change hands whether or not Trump won, but he did win. It all happened democratically, without a single battle. Trudeau knows he’s on the ropes. If Trump didn’t win, Poilievre would still win the next election, but he’d have a harder time implementing a conservative anti-woke agenda. With Trump in office, we should see a sweet ascendant political alignment on the conservative side like we haven’t seen since Mulroney and Reagan.

You may be right, and it may be the last line of defence to protect what’s left of that thing we keep harkening back to: the spirit of Vimy, the bilingual, bi-cultural impossible peace between the Protestants and the Catholics, and the glory days of Tecumseh, the Battle of Queenston Heights, and before that with Wolfe and Montcalm, and before with Brebeuf, and on and on…

Well I’d say half the country, largely but not exclusively Canadian born, see the existential attack on the founding cultures and early builders of Canada. That’s what the Freedom Convoy was really about. Vaccine mandate opposition was just about free speech and individual rights. It was the first large-scale test of the Charter that we were told by Pierre Trudeau and the CBC would protect the rights we thought we had as Canadians and that our ancestors fought to protect. Instead we learned that they’re so watered down as to be relatively worthless. It made us look to the US and back in time to the English Common Law we relied on before The Constitution Act. Canadians let a critical mistake happen: We forgot that not all cultures are equal and that you do have to rally around your own founding, controlling culture or you will succumb to the domination of others. Multiculturalism, the attack on traditional values with the Quiet Revolution, the dismantling of our military, and the poorly-supported, weakly-crafted Canadian Constitution essentially severed Canadians from their cultural roots and put us at the mercy of hordes of immigrants whose values and wars we don’t fully comprehend and that undermine some of the best aspects of Canada. It happened so quickly that we don’t know what hit us. Even worse, the dumbest, most radical left Canadians have become a kind of Maoist guard for the very forces that are dismantling our culture and way of life. They want communism and a kind of climate action totalitarianism. They consider Canadians to be settler colonialists and have allied with the radical burn it all down Indigenous activists. Christians and Jews are unsafe in what was recently a Judeo-Christian country. We’re not even allowed to develop and sell our natural resources, because our own government and education systems are telling us it’s colonial theft and destroying the planet. Basically our government isn’t acting in the interests of Canadians. It’s at the mercy of unaccountable international directives because they’ve dismantled Canada and made Canadians believe they deserve less.

Safe injection site is an oxymoron. Injecting hard drugs is inherently dangerous. Canada has become an addiction enabler, more specifically the sucky woke pushovers in BC. Heaven forbid they actually try to help people stop taking drugs. I’m waiting for a class action lawsuit of the parents of dead opioid overdosers to sue the BC government. They need to do it while the communists are still in office.

Canada has a fentanyl problem, but the Mexican government is literally in an ongoing war with the drug cartel over control of the country. There are parts of Mexico with curfews because the police can’t protect the citizens from the countless squads of criminals.

So you’ve identified the very large and real force that’s got the country in its grips. The only option is to do all we can to oppose it, even if it’s a losing battle, and it might be. It’s like running to the cartel-infiltrated police to complain about the cartel. The way such complaints are resolved in corrupt societies is to shoot the complainant. Nevertheless, if Canadians see their lifestyles depart significantly from our American neighbour’s way of life, no Canadian government will be able to contain the outrage, which we saw during the Freedom Convoy. How many more times can a Canadian government declare martial law before the majority of the public shows their outrage. You yourself said that the government doesn’t have enough willing police and soldiers to put down such opposition. This is why I oppose the CRTC and CBC and all the government-funded so-called cultural protections, because I’ve realized they’re just tools to keep the US and other international influences at bay. We have the talent already, and many of our most talented people have moved to places like Hollywood and New York. Many haven’t though — yet. When these people start commenting on the problems in Canada, then we know we’ve hit the wall of what the Canadian public will tolerate. The problem is that much American media (in NY and Hollywood, for example) supports the woke nonsense. America can do radical left lunacy with the best of ‘em. Trump knows this first hand, which is why his best move is to ally America with conservatism in Canada.

Well that’s exactly right. We’ve seen a pretty fast creep from restrictions on gay acts to removing those restrictions to legal gay marriage marriage to new requirements for homosexual symbols in the public square, and not just homosexual symbols. If the general public knew at the time that we’d eventually land at this place, I don’t think they’d have supported gay marriage. The whole HRC and government funding of these radical interests must go.

So we went from removing laws that banned homosexual acts because most people thought that they were unnatural and immoral to making the public celebrate acts that many people still think are unnatural or immoral, punishable by drastic fines and possible charges. Not even Sodom issued penalties for not supporting homosexual acts. Pathetic.

I share all of your criticisms about Canada being an ideologically captured woke-green quasi-fascist state, but I have to believe that the country and its people are bigger and better than the current regime. What choice is there? Canada has a lot going for it. It has to drastically change course and maintain the new trajectory for at least a decade to recapture what’s been lost. I think the biggest travesty that must be uprooted is the shaming of Canada as a so-called genocidal colonial state. Canada in its early history and through both World Wars up to Pearson was one of the most successful countries ever to have existed, with the least amount of bloodshed and conflict on its soil of just about anywhere. We’ve been sold boldfaced lies about ourselves by the current regime and it’s damaged our self-image and reputation in unprecedented ways. There are many problems with this federal government, but that’s the one I really can’t let go, perhaps more so than its terrible handling of the Freedom Convoy.

Yes it was the first successful US counter offensive against a major English naval attack. Those “bombs bursting in air”. The melody of that song comes from an old drinking song.