Canada: An Introduction For American ConservativesLiberal hegemony makes the situation of conservatives in Canada today desperate indeed.
JULY 1, 2022|12:01 AM
MARK WEGIERSKI
Canada, at that time often called the Dominion of Canada, was founded on July 1, 1867, 155 years ago, with the passage of the British North America Act in the British House of Commons in London. It was informally a union of two historic nations in the northern half of North America: the English Canadians and the French-Canadians (mostly centered in Quebec). The Aboriginal peoples were included, insofar as they were traditionally considered to be under the special protection of the Crown.
In 1867, Canada was organized into four provinces—Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia—each with local legislatures and Premiers, and a countrywide federal legislature and prime minister based in Ottawa. Canada later expanded to the ten provinces and three northern territories that constitute it today. The prime minister is the head of the largest party, or a majority coalition of parties, in the Canadian House of Commons, where executive and legislative functions are conjoined. The members of legislatures are elected from geographic electoral districts of roughly equal population (though greatly varying territorial size) colloquially called ridings, based on “first-past-the-post” voting. That means that the candidate with the largest number of votes (even if that number is considerably less than 50 percent, given various “third parties” in contention) wins the riding. There is also a Senate that consists of appointed members, and is far weaker than the U.S. Senate. The appointed governor general and provincial lieutenant governors are representatives of the monarch (currently Queen Elizabeth II) and give royal assent to legislation. The various areas of federal and provincial jurisdiction have been carefully delineated in the British North America Act.
Until 1896, Canada was mostly dominated by the Conservatives/“Bleus,” led by the illustrious statesmen Sir John A. Macdonald (Canada’s first prime minister) and Sir George-Étienne Cartier. The Dominion of Canada, with its founding principles of “peace, order, and good government,” was profoundly anti-revolutionary. However, after 1896, Canada has tended to elect Liberal governments, based on the overwhelming support of Quebec voters in federal elections. In 1957, the staunch Tory, John G. Diefenbaker, won a minority government, and, a year later, one of the largest majorities in Canadian history (partially based on unusual support from Quebec voters). However, in 1962, Diefenbaker’s majority was reduced to a minority government.
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Ever since this transformative period, the Canadian right has been fighting one losing battle after another. One of the central reasons for the Canadian right’s continuing failure since the 1960s has been the ongoing establishment of vast liberal-leaning media, juridical, academic, educational, bureaucratic, and corporate structures—a nexus of interests that certain American and European critics have called “the managerial-therapeutic regime”—which could be characterized as socially liberal and economically conservative. These multifarious structures and arrangements are also sometimes called the “Trudeaupia.” There is also the fact that “North American” pop-culture is the primary “lived cultural reality” for most people in Canada, which tends to reinforce socially liberal, consumerist/consumptionist, and antinomian attitudes, especially among the young. Unlike most other Western countries, where countervailing factors of various kinds exist to the hegemony of the managerial-therapeutic regime, current-day Canada probably is an example of such a managerial-therapeutic system in its “purest” form.
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The Canadian medical system is stringently socialized to an extent unheard of in the United States. While most medical services do not require payment, the trade-off is that most medical care is subject to severe rationing, which in practice amounts to long delays. Canadians are not permitted to buy extra medical services, so wealthier persons often end up going to the United States for medical treatment. There are now 1.3 million people in Ontario (of a total population of about 14.5 million people) without a family doctor. The Canadian medical system is often seen as a central feature of “Canadian values” that are alleged to make Canada definitively more compassionate, caring, and ethical, than the said-to-be morally indifferent United States. Many Canadians are willing to accede to virtually anything the government demands—if they can only be assured of quality medical care.
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Canadians appear to be characterized both today and in their earlier history by an unusual deference to governmental authority. Before 1965, Canada probably was a substantively more conservative society than the United States (in the better sense of conservatism), but now, when the paradigm at the top has been fundamentally altered—in the wake of the Pierre “Trudeau revolution”—most Canadians are manifestly willing to follow the new, politically correct line from Ottawa. There is virtually no heritage of independence, self-reliance, or belief in rambunctious free speech in Canada. Indeed, many Canadian officials and citizens point proudly to their aggressive and sweeping laws restricting freedom of expression under often too broadly defined “hate speech” laws as being highly necessary. They often say they do not have “the American hang-ups” about restricting freedom of speech.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/canada-an-introduction-for-american-conservatives/
