The anniversary of that first May 27, 2021 unmarked-graves announcement came and went a few weeks ago, with barely a peep from prominent figures in the Canadian progressive firmament. And the same Trudeau who’d recently served up lurid sermons about our status as a blood-stained genocide state has now switched into proto-campaign mode, gushing manically about the Liberal horn of plenty set to deluge this nation with riches. According to the latest Liberal agitprop, in fact, patriotic Trudeauvian boosterism isn’t merely permissible — why, it’s obligatory. So light up those Canada Day backyard barbecues. Canuck Yom Kippur is finally over.
But before we dismiss this three-year interregnum as a dystopian fever dream, it’s worth asking how our collective Canadian identity could be hijacked — even temporarily — in such a radicalized manner. And the truth is that it isn’t just progressive ideologues who bear responsibility; but also their counterparts on all parts of the political spectrum, few of whom exhibited any inclination to offer pushback while these falsehoods took root in the media. Even many writers at this newspaper, generally held to be a right-leaning outlet, greeted the unmarked-graves claims by heaping shame on their country.
In every other comparably advanced society, there exists a natural tension between conservative nationalists who reverentially sentimentalize their history, and the progressive critics who reflexively denounce it. And it is from out of that tension that something approaching the historical truth emerges. Or, at least something close enough to the historical truth that it provides a stable and coherent basis upon which a society can confidently pin its collectively embraced national identity.
What we learned in 2021 is that this necessary tension doesn’t exist in Canada, because traditionalists can no longer describe their nation’s history in a way that gives voice to their emotionally felt patriotism without attracting claims of racism and neocolonialism. As a result, our marketplace of ideas lacks the checks and balances required to inure us against — oh, gee, I don’t know, let’s take a crazy example — apocalyptic medieval fables in which legions of Indigenous children are thrown into furnaces and shallow graves by cackling nuns and diabolical priests.
So yes, shame on Trudeau for lowering the Canadian flag on federal buildings for half a year to honour victims entombed in non-existent mass graves. But shame on the rest of us for staring at our shoes while this blood libel was being signal-boosted. And now that Trudeau seems on his way out — and, with him, the maudlin, tear-soaked, bent-knee political shtick that accompanied this descent into hysteria — we might turn our attention toward developing a national self-identity sufficiently robust that it doesn’t fall to pieces the next time someone claims to have found genocide’s residue under an old tetherball court.
Jonathan Kay, “Don’t let politicians misinform you. Learn about Canada’s true history for yourself”, National Post, 2024-07-01.
October 9, 2024
QotD: The hijacking of the Canadian identity
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