I’m not sure many people will recognize the Canada Kay portrays before 9/11, and many will take strong issue with his view of Canada today, but I think everyone would agree we’re not the country we were 11 years ago:
How much has Canada changed in the last eleven years? Consider this: As the World Trade Center rubble was still smoldering, the then-leader of Canada’s left-wing NDP party, Alexa McDonough, declared: “As responsible international citizens, it is important to reaffirm our commitment to pursuing peaceful solutions to the tensions and hostilities that breed such mindless violence.” A year later, in a CBC interview broadcast on the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, then-prime minister Jean Chrétien suggested the 9/11 attacks might have been a reaction to Western greed and arrogance: “You cannot exercise your powers to the point of humiliation for the others.”
Such remarks would be unthinkable now. Canada is a place where even most mainstream leftists recognize the need for military intervention as a means of disrupting terrorism and protecting local populations.
[. . .]
In short, the last 11 years have fundamentally transformed Canada’s attitude toward foreign policy, and the use of force more generally. After a quarter-century pacifist interregnum, we once again became comfortable with our proper historical role as an active military ally to the United States and Britain. Canadians now stand up and salute their soldiers at NHL hockey games. A major part of Ontario’s Highway 401 — the road travelled by fallen soldiers from CFB Trenton to the coroner’s office in Toronto — has been renamed the Highway of Heroes. These are small, symbolic gestures that any American would see as entirely normal. But they would have been unthinkable in the pre-9/11 era, when our Liberal leaders still entertained gauzy visions of a world without war.
