The Patriot Game captures a unique characteristic, and problem, with Canadian conservatism. Lots of Canadian conservatives really don’t like Canada all that much. Brimelow is right to suggest that the contemporary Canadian identity is very much a creation of the Liberals and the New Class, and this isn’t one that conservatives feel all that comfortable with. What this has done is create a powerful anti-Canadian impulse in portions of the conservative movement.
Because the Liberals were so successful in creating this new identity, conservatives, especially Western conservatives (understandably) felt alienated in this new Canada. Brimelow gave some intellectual heft and crafted a coherent theory around why conservatives felt this way.
The broader narrative Brimelow, and others, put forward is that Canada’s British heritage was central to our identity and sense of who we are, but that this identity was destroyed by the Liberals who then built a new one in their own image. In the 1960s, Canadian Liberalism became self-consciously post-British, and the 1960s really do represent an approximate decade in which the “old Canada” died and a “new Canada” was born. The 1960s weren’t just a time of social change, they marked the end of the British Empire, the start of the Quiet Revolution, and of course most symbolically saw the replacement of the Red Ensign with the Maple Leaf flag. The battles between Diefenbaker and Pearson (and Pierre Trudeau) work as a stand in for the divide between old British Canada and new Liberal Canada.
Ben Woodfinden, “True North Patriotism and a Distinctly Canadian Conservatism”, The Dominion, 2020-10-20.
January 21, 2021
QotD: The Laurentian Elite and the “new Canada” of the 1960s
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