Essays in Idleness

Canadians are, as the Irish were described by Jonathan Swift in his day, “A servile race, in folly nursed, who truckle most when treated worst.” Whether either were always so, I will open to debate; my experience is more with the (former) Dominion of Canada.

As has been confirmed, by the recent interruptions in our transport system, or the government’s extension of the “MAiD” (euthanasia) programme to kill off the least convenient portion of our population, we will stand for anything. We take pride in our obedience to the authorities of misrule, so long as their measures come with the fatuous label, “progressive.” We will even condemn what we’re told to condemn, should anyone express an intelligent objection, for it is a country where, as David Frum once explained, “There is always one side to every question.”

Our police will not even put out a fire, set by “native peoples” along a railway track that most certainly does not belong to them, for fear of a political incorrectitude. (The term in quotes is a malicious falsehood; it is designed to apply only to a select racial group.)

While I think it is over-polite, this statement from Archbishop Collins describes the latest expansion of the country’s horrific “euthanasia” laws. (Again, quotes around a poisonous euphemism.) Yet there was no Lenten appeal to Christians, for conspicuous penitential prayer. Must he assume that we are all saltless?

This item, by the Canadian poet and thinker David Solway, makes a summary of our situation, five years into the management of a contemptible prime minister. The statement on our “Dead Country Walking” has not the fault of excessive politeness. I endorse every line.

Through all my adult life, which began in the age of Trudeaumania, Canada has been in the forefront of “progressive” innovations. Indeed, an American deacon long in residence here, commented that the craziest Democrat pipe-dreamers back home, proposed policies that were legislated in Canada decades ago — such as a “single payer” medical bureaucracy, and compelling taxpayers unambiguously opposed to pay for abortion-on-demand. Objections of conscience are simply no longer acknowledged up here, and the old saw, that this is a “free country,” is now in disuse.

We are in the vanguard of public evil; yet in saying so I imply that the same “trends” have advanced throughout the Western world. The innovations are rarely if ever voted upon, here or elsewhere. Instead, the public are exhaustively “re-educated” to the new position, by organized propagandists in media and state. The “debate” on each issue consists of demonizing and smearing the few who offer any kind of argument. They are few because they know what happened to the last person who stood up — for what had through thousands of years in all human cultures been accepted as the good and the true.

In the end, each innovation is effectively confirmed by the great tide of “low-information, low-intelligence” voters. They confirm the agents of “progress” in power, on the basis of their own virtue-signalling postures. Those who express the slightest reservations, such as Canada’s retiring parliamentary opposition leader, are drummed out. (Although he promised not to do anything about them, he was accused of harbouring non-progressive views.)

My only reason to vote “Conservative” is to keep the “Liberals” out of power, thus slowing the rate at which new affronts to civilization are introduced. In some other Western countries, something more ambitious is being offered by the “Conservative” parties, and is proving quite successful. But even our “progressive” pope has openly condemned such “populists,” demanding that government bureaux and international organizations ignore them and press ahead on “climate change” socialism, ruinously open immigration, and so forth.

I cannot think of a response besides, don’t fall asleep. It was the agony Christ conveyed to his disciples in the garden at Gethsemane. The worst may yet happen, but will be transformed.