To think that we are a ‘Christian country’ or a ‘secular country’ or a ‘progressive country’ is to embrace terminal conflict, strife with no conceivable resolution. That is not just unintelligent, it is amnesia about the exceptional design of our country

Canada Day often revives the question Who are we? It seems we ask this so often because we do not know. In these several essays I have suggested that not knowing the answer will erase your kind from society, because without that knowledge you will not be doing (purposefully, as needed) what perpetuates you. You cannot replicate yourself by accident, or by instinct, since your instinct is to be chaotic. If you do not know who you are you will be talked by others into being like them, into swelling their society and their way, because they know who they are (it is what they dearly want you to be too).

Justin Trudeau has often been chided for saying, in 2015, that Canada is a “postnational state” (I am still seeing Tweets about this). Reactiveness, however, can prevent Canadians from seeing who they are. To pay actual attention to how Mr. Trudeau came to that (possibly spur-of-the-moment) conclusion – saying things like,

‘‘Countries with a strong national identity – linguistic, religious, or cultural – are finding it a challenge to effectively integrate people from different backgrounds’’

Justin Trudeau interviewed by Guy Lawson, “Trudeau’s Canada, Again,”
New York Times Magazine (8 December 2015)

– what he seems to have meant was, quite simply, that a ‘national state’ is one that is unified in ways like these (“linguistic, religious, or cultural”). Well, is it not true that Canada in 2015, Canada today, is not a unified country? Is it not clear that we do not have cultural unity, and should we not acknowledge this fact? – Ah, but that is complicated by the accident of having strayed, here, into the muck of unwelcome facts.

Trudeau himself does not seem to like this fact that he once stated: nor, apparently, do we. As Queens’ University law professor Bruce Pardy has put it, many Canadians

“carry something dark inside their hearts and that is … the conviction that everyone must live like them.”

Bruce Pardy, “2024 Rand Debate: Virtue vs. Freedom,” Augustine College, Ottawa (April 2024)

In the last essay I suggested that that is really an effect of something else: what people actually want is a home where they can live as themselves without the intrusion of another man’s ideology. But when they want this and also decide that that home is their country, they become, effortlessly, the dark-hearted people that Pardy describes. Fighting for their own liberty they become quite willing to thrust their spear into another person’s house, keen to make those people tiptoe around it in compliance with their ways. About the darkness in this, Pardy is right.

In one way Mr. Trudeau appears to be happy that we lack cultural unity, but everybody in the country is too; we, no less than he, are delighted with the usual multi-coloured diversity he goes on about.

“We’ve raised generation after generation of children who think nothing of hearing five or six different languages spoken on the playground….”

Justin Trudeau, “Diversity is Canada’s Strength,” speech in London, United Kingdom (26 November 2015)

Nobody bats an eye. Or put it like this:

“In what other country can you be in a part of a city known as Little Italy yet dining in an Indian restaurant that is owned by a Jew, albeit eating Vietnamese food and drinking ‘Maudite’ with your half-Brazilian, half-Croatian date, while being served by a Chinese waiter…?”

Kai L. Chan, “A Few of the Many Reasons to Envy Canada,” Kailchan.ca (1 December 2003)

Love it. We – even we problem-people – have no complaint about diversity. By problem-people I mean the virtual enemies of Canada identified by progressives (why not quote Trudeau) as

“those who would have us restrict, close ranks, and build walls.”

Trudeau, “Diversity is Canada’s Strength”

We don’t need walls against languages and cuisines, costumes and festivals. None of that is any kind of threat to our way of life. But there is a threat. What we wish, indeed, to “restrict” is the engineered erasure of our way of life, the more ‘traditional’ outlook that many Canadians embrace (‘traditional’ is now a word blackened with associations of homophobia, bigotry, extremism and absurdity of all kinds). We wish to halt the powers now laying out a minefield of rules to force one set of people into compliance with the outlook of another. We would indeed like to “build walls”, just thick enough to keep out of our living rooms the hostile spear-point of Policy 713, drafted by a school board to keep us from influencing our own children.

Linguistic, ethnic, and other such cultural differences are not counter-cultural differences. I repeat from the previous essay that it is not other people choosing other ways of life that is the problem: the problem is the counter-culture, the suppression of the traditional Canadian’s way of life implicit in the demand to “be inclusive” (and all that this means): it is a national cultural mandate (a thing that has no place in Canada); it is the imperative of leftist virtue, when virtue can be an imperative only within a culture. Whether we believe in the new outlook’s idea of progress or not we are being constrained to facilitate it and just let the old understanding of nature, marriage, women, family, sex, childhood, innocence, art, and morality slip quietly away into oblivion.

The current Prime Minister has explained himself with bracing clarity:

“I’m ultimately a social activist who’s going to look to how I can have a positive impact on the world. I did it as a teacher. I’m doing it now as a politician.”

Justin Trudeau, cited by Isaac Lamoureux, “Trudeau Embraces ‘Social Activist’ Role Amid Criticism Over Policies,” True North (29 April 2024)

What more is there to say?! Trudeau is what Pardy calls a “Virtue Person”.

Bruce Pardy, “Freedom and Virtue: Friends or Enemies?,” Brownstone Institute (26 Nov 2023)

As a British journalist writes, Trudeau’s

“virtuous impulses have been visible everywhere from his big-hearted approach to refugees (a policy of welcoming tens of thousands of unvetted immigrants per year from countries with documented connections to terrorism) to his zest for apologising to the point of nationally-enforced self-flagellation for Canada’s racist past,…. Canada, once a pleasant backwater largely beneath international notice, has become a useful warning to countries poised to elect leftists in the present era of mass migration, gender madness, and the obsession with race.”

Zoe Strimpel, “Justin Trudeau’s Woke Tyranny Offers a Warning of Britain Under Starmer,” The Telegraph (1 June 2024)

In the Rand Debate recently held at Augustine College, Pardy deprecated the proposition lined up for discussion.

“This debate is about whether the government should require you to behave virtuously. I have news. That’s what it’s doing now! … If government is going to foster a virtuous society it’s going to foster a virtuous society that it thinks is virtuous and that’s what it has been doing. I know the conservatives will say what that’s not what we mean; we don’t mean those virtues we mean these virtues. But you don’t get to pick….”

Bruce Pardy, “2024 Rand Debate”

And yet, it is that form of government that is traditional, that is the age-old and classical conception advanced by Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and John of Salisbury, the foremost political theorist of the later middle ages (who stated that the “public welfare” was knowable): government as an instrument of cultivation.

“The cultivation of public virtue is the general safeguard of each and every person….”

John of Salisbury, Policraticus (1159; Cambridge University Press, 1990), 16

– At the same time, do notice that Canada does not have only, or even primarily, a national government. When the Constitution of Canada handed to the provincial governments

“everything which touched the human side most nearly and which most influenced the Canadian citizen’s manner of living,”

Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry on Constitutional
Problems (Quebec, 1956), vol. 1, 37–38; cited in Donald V.
Smiley, “The Two Themes of Canadian Federalism,” in
The Canadian Political Tradition: Basic Readings, ed. R.S. Blair &
J.T. McLeod (Scarborough: Nelson Canada, 1989), 64

it followed that ancient model that Prof. Pardy has no use for. But if our constitution supports that model (acknowledging the provinces’ concern with that “manner of living”¹), is there any sort of problem in this? Isn’t our trouble, rather, that Canadians who are at war with each other for control of the country don’t know who they are: they appear not to understand what their constitution invites them to do. Nothing compels them to bend themselves under the yoke of the-values-Canadians-have-chosen (a largely anti-Canadian idea that is just some group’s propaganda). This country is not Trudeau’s Canada, or progressive Canada, or any shade of Canada; it is the land of people who believe highly contrary, directly contrary, things about their own welfare.

Canadians should stop fighting for one Canada or the other, assume the yoke of their freedom in obedience to their God (not the yoke of capitulation in obedience to their ‘Babylonian masters’), and make their profoundly divergent societies compete.

The saddest fact about Canada in its current state is the depth of the erosion of “civil amity”.

“How can I live with my neighbour, if he or she need only convince a court (rather than the rest of us) to recognize a right to ‘define the meaning of the universe’? Imagine a society that suffers a perpetual constitutional convention that, case by case, rewrites the social contract. Then imagine the resentment of citizens who discover they have no effective voice in that process.”

Russell Hittinger, The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law
in a Post-Christian World (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2003), 132

Canadians now don’t want other Canadians to have a voice.

Trudeau has said that though Canada no longer has a common culture, nevertheless “there are shared values” (somehow these are not cultural, not the currency of a way of life) but then he lists the very qualities that are missing from Canada today. He mentioned

“openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice. Those qualities are what make us the first postnational state.”

Trudeau interviewed by Guy Lawson, “Trudeau’s Canada, Again”

Some of this is window dressing (don’t we accept that people around the world are generally open, respectful, welcoming, … willing to work hard?), and so cannot be what Trudeau has in mind as “distinctly and definitively Canadian values.” But think about the expression “to be there for each other”. Doesn’t it speak of love, that topic so distant from politics to which I said I would return?

‘To be there for each other’ is a commitment to mutual care (on that score Trudeau specifically mentioned “respect” and “compassion”). But no man respects me who tells me that my way of life (the culture I choose for myself, a culture functioning all over the country) must be rejected and replaced by his way. (Let that man reject it for himself and leave me in peace.) No man feels even a trace of compassion for another person who intends to bend that person’s actions to get the social outcomes that he favours, when he himself has passionately hated and resented every historical effort to bend him to another person’s desired ends. There is no amity, no fellow feeling in this, whichever way it goes; this kind of coercion does not magically become ‘human’ when it accommodates him.

You might ask, on this Canada Day, who are we?: people who need control of others because they are ruining our homeland – or people who need a home, a place in which we can live by our own historically divergent but defining beliefs?

You must deny ancient wisdom not to see that what people want, most essentially, is a place where they can live in accord with the Order, as they understand it – they want a home, with their god in it. ‘To be there for’ another person ordinarily turns on his receiving not just something good for him but something already meaningful to him. We learn this from Jesus, who asks, in a way that could not be simpler,

“What do you want me to do for you?”

Matthew 20:32, Mark 10:36,51, Luke 18:41

This is the love of one man recognizing, open to, another. Ask this and you put the other man on the same plane as yourself. ‘Amity’, the love between friends (and let us think of each other in that way), would not involve threatening your friend’s family to bring his children under your gods. It would involve thinking about his needs as your equal, not your inferior. It would involve the love shown by Abraham.

The book of Genesis tells of the love of Abraham for his nephew Lot – a story set in stone in the fifth century in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, memorialized for all time in a mosaic, our final image in this series.

“Then Abram said to Lot, ‘Let there be no strife between you and me, … for we are kinsmen. Is not the whole land before you? Separate yourself from me. If you take the left hand, then I will go to the right, or if you take the right hand, then I will go to the left’.”

Genesis 13:8–10 ESV

What prompted this conflict is stated; it was, we might say, economic (“the land was not able to bear them”), but we need to see this shortage as a reality that is the cause of strife (“and there was strife between the herdmen of Abram’s cattle and the herdmen of Lot’s cattle”). It is the strife that was the problem (Abraham did not say, let us get more food by separating). The cause of this strife was the pivotal fact that the two families could not both have the same thing – eat the same mouthful, … wear the same crown, … turn the same law to two contrary ends?

These members of the same family could not, as a result, live together. The heads of the families could not end the conflict (arguments of rank and duties had failed); the two families, living together in each other’s space, could not get on together. (Notice that in the mosaic it is families, societies not just individuals, that are depicted.) Differences about fundamentals (about the people or the ends that a certain thing will serve) within a single household can be intolerable differences. To ‘play down’ such differences for the sake of peace is absurd advice if the price of that peace is defaulting on a duty – say, to help your own children. After doing our best to accommodate others for the sake of peace we will always come back to the reality of intolerable things, if such things mark our situation. In such a circumstance the right way must be found, collectively, and if as in Genesis 13 that does not happen (there is no agreement on what is right) there is strife that cannot be resolved.

Dissension, or difference, or divergence of this kind has a place in the world. Indeed, the situation is rather more pointed than that: if each party in the division is true to his god, his convictions and conscience, then,

“when [those others] chose another way which is not ours, that too is precious in the eyes of God.”

Jonathan Sacks, “The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations,”
Kenan Institute for Ethics Distinguished Lecture, Duke University (2007)

Intolerable differences between households deprive both households of something essential: the peace, the freedom, by which to live in accord with the Order, which bids them to love their neighbour. Abraham the father figure (Lot being his nephew) does not say to this man, who is beneath him, ‘But there is only one land, my land; I hold the power, the rules are my rules.’ Instead, and paternalistically – that is, loving his own child – he

“proposed a separation and magnanimously gave to Lot the choice of direction. Lot took his flocks into the Jordan valley,…. The narrative makes an intentional contrast: Lot chose the green, well watered valley, eventually making his way as far as … Sodom,…, while Abraham moved into the [sparser] highlands that were to be the land of promise.”

S.v. “Lot”, The Eerdmans Bible Dictionary, ed. Allen C. Myers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987)

But if those highlands turned out to be the land of promise they were also the lands that Lot did not want.

In the mosaic of this subject, a subject known to Christian culture as the Parting of Abraham and Lot, the two men at the forefront are presented as virtual equals: they are almost mirrors of each other, one to each side of a centrally marked space that completely separates them. It is even hard to tell which figure is which; only their children identify them (Lot’s two daughters and Abraham’s beloved son Isaac). (A secondary indication is the country on Abraham’s side and the city on Lot’s.) The whole structure of the picture is a duality, of two groups moving in opposite directions (the motion of parting, separating).

The men eye each other warily, yet this signals “strife”, separation over differences that cannot be resolved and cannot be ignored, not a repudiation of kinship or an absence of love. For his part, Abraham will risk his life to save Lot in the very next chapter of Genesis.

What is stunning to me is that Canadians once seemed to understand the message of the Parting of Abraham and Lot. It was implicit background to provisions in Canada’s Constitution, which was designed for

“the cessation of the cultural strife which had pervaded the politics of [colonial Canada].”

Smiley, 65

Separation, as in the division of distinct cultures in the colony of Canada into (English-speaking) Upper and (French-speaking) Lower Canada, is not intolerance of what ought to be tolerated; it is respect for differences between equals. After his election Trudeau boasted to the British,

“I’m standing here today as Prime Minister of Canada because Canadians rejected the forces that would divide us against ourselves.”

Trudeau, “Diversity is Canada’s Strength,” speech in London, U.K. (2015)

Callow youth! Canadians in the past had divided themselves for themselves, so as ‘to be there for each other’, so that each society could run itself. (The constant presumption that division is against people signals a deep-level ignorance: you must have no real knowledge of either history or humanity.)

Canada does not “divide us against ourselves” but divides us to be ourselves, recognizing each other as people with their own place. The proposal made by Abraham to “separate” was not the ‘separation’ that Quebec proposed in the late 20th century (exiting the family, breaking the relationship, dissolving the bond). Division of the land (the vast land of Abraham shown in a Dutch print of this same subject) involved recognition of the other as a person needing a home of his own, where he could govern his own people in his own way. The separate and different divisions of Canada, each with its own government, is acknowledgement of the terms on which the different can be neighbours (on which more was said in the previous essay).

In 1910 the Chiefs of the Shuswap, Okanagan, and Couteau tribes of British Columbia clarified to Canada’s then-prime minister the mind-set of the neighbour (the chiefs were speaking of the French traders). These were people who were truly alien in culture but with whom you could co-operate, and whom you could call

“good people. We could depend on their word,…. They did not interfere with us nor attempt to break up our tribal organizations, laws, customs. They did not try to force their conceptions of things on us to our harm.”

“Memorial” to Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Premier of the Dominion of Canada (1910)

I have explained, in two of these essays, that being the people we are is an absolute requirement – and that this is a duty that does mean freeing ourselves (raising shield and spear) from domination by those intent on replacing our culture with theirs. But how can achieving this – securing our rights – ever mean foisting on others ‘conceptions of things’ that they call destructive of life as they understand it?

Our problem in Canada is the 21st-century stupidity of pointing to the one country (count it: one) and the fact of our rights and then shrugging, … a shrug meaning, ‘What else can we do but seize control?’ – What else? Think like Abraham, the chiefs and the French traders, the architects of Confederation, and be neighbours, by adjusting your conception of the country so that the chief historical cultures that actually fill Canada (nowhere have I suggested a Balkanization of countless tiny rivals) would have domains of their own, in each of which institutions and laws will differ, as they need to, to be theirs – in order to let the people of Canada be who they are: obedient to their defining and ultimate concerns. Let these rival societies show us how good they are.

Abraham renounced a perfectly arguable claim to rule over all ‘his own’ land; he renounced it to achieve something greater: to be human, by satisfying terms that would one day spell out the logic of human acts (“Whatever you wish that others would do to you, …” – Matthew 7:12). He did so just to give another man his own thing, the independence to govern his household as he saw fit. Abraham acted as was best for both himself and his kin; by becoming a neighbour he created neighbours that kept out of each other’s business. What stops Canadians from doing the same?

Canada is no place for ideas like Christian nationalism or its nameless twin (“Canada is a progressive country that produces progressive people”), which join each other in broadcasting a future decisively rid of the neighbour. Fantasizing a future country instead of recognizing the man right in front of you is rejecting a duty the Order has laid on you (the one whose charges you claim are so important). Canadians would do well to recall that Canada was never a single culture. When formed into a nation it was a federation sworn to respect the terms of entry into Confederation that were asserted by the colonies.

“We do not wish to do away with our different customs, manner, and laws; on the contrary, those are precisely what we are desirous of protecting in the most complete manner by means of Confederation.”

Hector-Louis Langevin (1865), in Canada’s Founding Debates, ed. Janet Ajzenstat, Paul Romney,
Ian Gentler, & William D. Gairdner  (University of Toronto Press, 2003), 235

How, you might wonder, could you inspire co-operation in a country as deeply divided as we are today, but today’s antagonists have never killed each other in wars. The people made neighbours by the Constitution had done so. To keep former enemies on good terms,

“the powers [that were] entrusted to the federal government … bore on subjects which did not divide the two [cultural] groups and in which they had a common interest … [while reserving] to the provinces all … that concerned social, civil, family, school, and municipal organization; everything … which most influenced the Canadian citizen’s manner of living.”

Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry
on Constitutional Problems; cited in Smiley, 64

This is the nature of our federation, which it is senseless to think is primarily the formation of a federal government. No one lives in any land of the federal government; Canadians live in the provinces and territories, and in somewhat different ways. In fact one of the problems the Constitution directly addressed was

“two sets of values, which had been brought into paralyzing conflict ever since the days of the British conquest.”

Donald Creighton, “Conservatism and National Unity,” cited in Smiley, 64

That is what we have today.

What is Canada? On the continuum of governments it is a country whose constitution accommodates and contains corrosive difference in separate self-governing divisions. Might that be the way?

It makes some sense to suggest that there is no apparent way to achieve the separation proposed here when the two cultures clashing in Canada today are as thoroughly intermingled as they are. But if this is the decisive objection, take careful note of what it entails.

Pick a province with many progressive citizens but who form less than a majority; now suppose that province were to go anti-progressive (as Florida appears to be doing) – suppose that Alberta, say, were to tack very sharply conservative with culture-influencing laws: what is the objection? – The objection is that it would be unjust for a provincial government to pass laws that advanced the values of one Canadian outlook and shaped Albertan society around one conception of social flourishing (strong families, two sexes, a woke-free non-activist intellectual education, history taught as achievement as much as anything, health care oriented to life as traditionally defined, etc.) – unjust if a government shaped that kind of society rather than the alternative one (fluid families, a sex spectrum, progressive and politicized education, an object-lesson history, abortion on demand, etc.) when it contains progressive citizens. (But one law, remember, cannot serve two contrary objectives.) If you are right, that that would be unjust, then it is unjust now for the traditionally minded populations in this country to have had, inflicted upon them, pushback against ‘heteronormativity’, abortion for inconvenience, MAID for the end of life, for depression, for PTSD, and all that accompanies this. If it would be unjust to make the society traditional against the objections of progressives then it is unjust now to make the society progressive against the objections of traditionalists. And take note that the actual proportion of the many people who hold the inherited outlook (and who have been given, by the rough shape of 21st-C society, plenty of reason to hold onto it) has never been established. The objection only emphasizes the reigning injustice of the present.

To those who would now object that you cannot fix injustice with more of it, the response is, neither can you fix it by letting it be. The relevant question is simply this: which approach does anything at all to undo the trouble of injustice that ails us (which cannot be undone magically, at a stroke)? Which opens up any path along which Canadians could have the society they actually believe in and dream of having, while freeing progressive Canadians to do the same? Which pays any attention to the obsessively denied historical fact of the Cultural Divide in the modern West, which has given us two cultures governed by directly antithetical visions?

Some will argue that the traditional vision is obsolete (a pack of lies that should be encouraged nowhere), but it is not unjust in Canada that distinctly different answers be given to the matters over which the provinces have jurisdiction. For a province (providing it obtains true popular support) to adopt a traditional understanding of society is ordinary Canadian federalism. Other provinces would choose differently. There would be an era of adjustment (of the sort seen south of the border over the past decade) during which plenty of people will enfranchise themselves by voting with their feet.

Then again the path might be altogether different. Prof. Pardy argues, in a more libertarian manner, that the provinces should just get out of cultural business (like education); that is another possibility, one approach that a province could choose. It would take us back before Confederation, to when schools were built and run by organizations – at that time the churches, institutions of precisely the sort that reflected the beliefs of actual populations (something very far from what we see in schooling now).

But my purpose is not to suggest how we could be healed of our illness; it is to diagnose. Do Canadians accept that we are ill, for failing to be ourselves, failing to respect and support one another. The two approaches I have just sketched are both full of civil amity, the precious thing that the zero-sum culture war has so consummately destroyed.

Who, now, are the people of Canada and what project do they embrace? Have they committed to a plan of permanent civil strife, which they were lured into under a set of misapprehensions: that the ‘rebellion’ would pass, that ‘error has no rights’, that the ‘culture war is won’, that the only way to live as who we are is to capture the government and ‘take the country back’? Are people today able to see that not one of these things is true?

Who are Canadians today? They might be people who, once brought out of their fevered state, are actually respectful. Then again, they might be people who cannot get free of the illusions just mentioned, activists for whom “violence to the Souls of Men” is just everyday business (a dark prospect for a free country).

Our own tradition shows us the way out. The way to end the misery of the 2020s – which is not Wokeism coming from nowhere but age-old trouble – is to accept the place of difference in an Order that is not ours. It is, in obedience to that Order, to love via recognition as equals. It is also to recollect what this country is: a federation of people who live differently, as neighbours. Canada, in its design, is a gift offered to the West in its current dire need. Confederation never underwrote the imposition of any nationally “shared values”; the only creed in what George-Étienne Cartier called a “political nationality” is the very federal-provincial arrangement that gives historically opposed cultures their own home in the world, freeing people from mutual hostility to govern themselves in accord with the Order that gives their lives meaning. Because there must be such a country! (“Without us the world would not make sense.”)

1.  The provincial government simply perpetuated the work of the former governor of the colonies that, at Confederation, became provinces. The Constitution (The BNA Act) didn’t ‘assign’ this jurisdiction; it recognized the governments (and the traditional concerns of those governments) that were already in existence.