Canada in Decay

Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Canada no longer seems like a serious country. The former drama teacher and the son of the man who made multiculturalism official state policy has made globalism the guiding philosophy of his administration. As he explained to the Global News, he is jealous of immigrants: “Anytime I meet people who got to make the deliberate choice, whose parents chose Canada, I’m jealous.” Such people, according to the PM, are better than “Canadians by default.”

Elsewhere, Prime Minister Trudeau has gallivanted around the world playing dress up. See here for some of his get ups. He also famously told a young person to say “peoplekind” rather than “mankind” so as to be more inclusive.

Justin Trudeau speaks during the Federal Liberal Caucus Thai Pongal and Tamil Heritage Month reception held in Scarborough, Ontario. The Canadian Parliament officially declared the month of January as Tamil Heritage Month in 2016. (Credit Image: © Creative Touch Imaging Ltd/NurPhoto via ZUMA Press)

Early last year, Trudeau put out the welcome mat for the world’s wretched by saying, “To those fleeing persecution, terror and war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith.” The hashtag #WelcomeToCanada helped to rouse even more immigration favor, and under Mr. Trudeau, Canada has taken in more immigrants in 2016 and 2017 then it has in the past two decades. The country is now experiencing a population boom driven almost exclusively by non-white immigration.

As in the case of Europe and the United States, a more “diverse” Canada has the potential to be a more violent, turbulent state. Between 2014 and 2017, the usually peaceful country saw five major terrorist attacks, with four being jihadist in origin.

Despite all of the evidence showing that state-enforced multiculturalism does not work, Canada, according to University of New Brunswick professor Ricardo Duchesne, has constantly shown a willingness to double down on left-wing programs. Prof. Duchesne’s book Canada in Decay says official attempts to turn Canada into a “post-nationalist nation” amount to “ethnocide” of Canada’s native Anglo and French people.

At well over three hundred pages, Prof. Duchesne’s work is a thoroughly researched examination on how Canadian elites are undermining the very idea that there is such a thing as a “native” Canadian. For those on the Left, any Canadian citizen not born into an Indian tribe is an “immigrant,” and therefore has no right to complain about new arrivals from such places as Syria, Afghanistan, or Somalia. Of course, as he notes, whites were hardly “immigrants:” “Almost all the men and women who came to Canada from the British Isles and elsewhere in Europe before 1914 were settlers seeking survival in a land sparsely populated and devoid of modern development.” [page 2]

Prof. Duchesne does not agree that Canada was “stolen” from the Indians. Canada did not come into being until French- and English-speaking people brought civilization in the form of roads, bridges, political systems, and cultivated land. Prof. Duchesne notes that you cannot find the Quebecois, the Acadians, or Anglo-Canadians anywhere else in the world, because they are the indigenous people of Canada.

Tragically, Canadian academics continue to write about a “nation of immigrants,” and the government happily pays their salaries. Well-known scholars such as J.M. Bumstead and Will Kymlicka argue that Canada and the entire West have always had a civic rather than nationalist or racial conception of citizenship. As Prof. Duchesne points out, Canada was founded by settlers and pioneers, not immigrants who moved to an already formed state. When Canada received large-scale immigration for the first time in the late 19th century, most immigrants came from the British Isles. Canada’s first serious immigration flood made the country whiter. The opposite has been happening since the 1960s, and against the will of the public.

The first to arrive in what would become Canada spoke French, and between 1608 and 1760, “immigration to New France consisted of only 10,000 settlers” [p. 28]. Population movements to New France then virtually ceased, but the French-speaking population continued to climb for centuries thanks to the fertility encouraged by the Catholic Church.

American Loyalists came from British North America. They were “internal” migrants who left the republican experiment of the United States for royalist Canada [p. 39]. Thus, by 1800, the dual nature of Canadian civilization had already been established: one British and one French.

Academics who recognize that Canada has European roots have a different argument: Canada was once a bigoted nation of racist whites, but thanks to Third World immigration, Canada will become a better place. Only immigration and multiculturalism can fulfill the liberal ideal. Prof. Duchesne finds this idea as ridiculous as the “nation of immigrants” idea. As Prof. Duchesne notes, “Millions of students have been wrongly made to believe that the liberal constitutions of Western nations make it mandatory to grant citizenship and group rights to endless masses of foreigners.” [p. 107] The country’s elites have pushed multiculturalism onto an unwilling citizenry. As Prof. Duchesne points out throughout the book, Canadians have long told pollsters they do not want a more diverse country.

Prof. Duchesne is himself an academic, which proves that not all academics are lost. A new generation of North American whites is opening its eyes, and Canada in Decay is a best-seller on Amazon.

This book does not explain what has caused Canada’s decline, but an earlier work does. In 1965, Canadian conservative George Grant published Lament for a Nation, which explained why Canadian nationalism was no longer possible. Grant pointed out that Canada had the misfortune of lying just north of the most dynamic country in human history. During the Second World War, Canada began detaching itself from Great Britain and building closer relations with the United States. Since then, Canada has aped American political and social movements, and this means America must be healthy for Canada to be healthy. Doing our duty to our own country likewise helps the “Great White North.”