Devon Eriksen responds to a cringey video that claims to explain Canada Day to Americans. The thumbnail image includes some of the usual suspects for this kind of embarrassing nonsense — “free healthcare!” … “poutine!”.
Once again, we see that Canada defines itself as Not-America.
So much so that in the very video where they try to explain their national identity, they require Straw-America as a prop.
But, having embraced multiculturalism and ethnic erasure of White people, they have painted themselves into a corner. Any positive Canadian identity, which identified Canada as what it is, rather than what it is not, would by definition distinguish it from other countries in the world, rather than just America. And this would exclude people of and from those cultures from being Canadian.
Which would be racist, or something.
So what this ends up meaning is that you may talk about what distinguishes Canada from America, and why Canadians are not American and Americans are not Canadian.
But you may NOT talk about what distinguishes Canada from India, and why Canadians are not Indian and Indians are not Canadian.
Or they’ll throw you in jail.
No culture, group, or organization can survive indefinitely by defining itself with a negative, which is why, for example, there are no atheist churches.
Canadians, accordingly, now share no common values, no common ethos, telos, or even logos, have nothing they can agree on, and nothing that binds them together other than physical geolocation and legal jurisdiction.
This is not patriotism, and patriotism, while it is regarded by liberals as a sort of embarrassing social disease, is actually required to get humans to act in concert for mutual good.
Canadians need something to celebrate on Canada Day other than their fear and resentment of Americans who barely think about them at all in any given month.
I honestly don’t know what the average Canadian would say, if he was asked to define a Canadian without referencing America. If he was asked to define a Canadian in a way that didn’t include Brits or Australians. If he was asked to define a Canadian in a way that didn’t include government programs and minor food idiosyncrasies.
You can’t just be the nation of gravy and cheese curds on fries.
You have to stand for something.
YourSmartAsianFriend also responds to the video:
Now from a real Canadian:
You better have a snack with you because wait times in Emergency often exceed 10 hours.
Most of us don’t eat poutine — or do so on rare occasion — but eating probably the most unhealthy dish ever conceived not something to boast about.
The entire system is fine but again, bragging about a your measurement standard is absurd, and moreover if you ask most Canadians what their height is, they’ll respond: 5’6, 6’2, etc. … if you say … he was 184 cm … you’ll get mostly blank looks.
Our plastic bag milk is wholly subsidized and controlled by our government dairy cartel — insuring higher prices for all.
What we also have is: emergencies act unlawfully used to crackdown on citizens including seizing their bank accounts, media funded by the government and thus beholden to them. New censorship laws on the way resulting in even more tech companies saying they’ll leave Canada. The highest cellphone rates because again we have regulated our own phone company cartel. We have severe housing shortages (while importing millions of undocumented and temporary visa foreigners) driving housing prices to astronomical levels. We have indigenous peoples now making legally endorsed claims to developed land calling into question much of Canada’s development — the same indigenous groups who have been funded with huge sums and have carved out their own independent country within Canada with the threat of going even farther.
There are many more issues, however, fear not — we have utterly vapid Liberal memes to distract us!
Full disclosure: on Tuesday I actually did order and eat a plate of poutine in a restaurant. In my defence, it was the first poutine I’d eaten in several months … while I enjoy the dish that has been described as “the culinary equivalent of having unprotected sex with a stripper in the parking lot of a truck stop in eastern Quebec”, it’s a very occasional item in my diet.
