I have a hideous premonition of the future. I see Canada’s woke politics spreading across the rest of the Anglosphere but divorced from that vast country’s redeeming qualities of courtesy, generosity, and humor. I see parties competing with one another to virtue-signal, to trash their national heroes, to engage in identity politics of the lowest kind. I see illiberalism with a warm, inclusive smile.
“Will the world’s wokest leader be reelected?” asked this column a couple of weeks ago. Silly question, really. Despite the cost of living crisis and the mounting debt, Canadians again plumped for a lightweight former teacher who says he doesn’t think about monetary policy. Economic issues are normally considered the Right’s strong suit, but despite having an eminently sensible recovery plan, the Canadian Conservatives were unable to get much more than a third of the popular vote, with most of the rest going to parties further to Trudeau’s left.
It has become a cliche to write about the “Great Realignment” — that is, the way in which culture wars are replacing economics as the main political divide. Most commentators tend to see the process as advantageous to conservatives, and so it is, at least in the short term. Working people feel abandoned and repelled by leftist leaders. They believe their values are disdained, their patriotism scorned. They are fed up with having identity politics rammed down their throats by people they see as privileged and out of touch. These things have created many new Republican voters in the United States and many new Tory voters in the United Kingdom.
But let’s wind the tape forward a few years. Older voters may see identity politics as, at best, an irritating distraction, but millennials have turned it into a religion, and there is no sign that they are changing their minds as they get older. Almost all the long-term trends tend to favor the woke Left. The population of the U.S., as of the West in general, is becoming more urban, more educated, more ethnically diverse, and more childless. All these factors tend to correlate with more wokery.
On this reading, Canada is not some politically correct outlier. It is a harbinger of our common future. It was exactly half a century ago that Pierre Trudeau, father of the current prime minister, declared his country multicultural. Coming just as what was left of the British Empire dissolved, taking with it what had been Anglophone Canada’s original identity, that malign decree redefined Canadian patriotism in essentially leftist terms. To be Canadian meant not being American. It meant being kinder, more cooperative, more statist, more highly taxed, more United Nations-compliant, and, not least, readier to repudiate your national story.
Wokery embedded itself in the national consciousness, spreading through schools and colleges. The recent Canadian election was preceded by a bout of statue-smashing. In a country that had been a model of successful race relations, a place to which slaves aspired to escape and the Western state with the highest level of immigration, it was not easy to find targets. But the iconoclasts didn’t let that put them off, knocking down statues of Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth II, and Sir John A. Macdonald, the closest thing Canada has to a founding father.
In theory, protesters were complaining about the deaths of aboriginal children in church-run boarding schools. There were, indeed, some wrenching tragedies — although, naturally, no effort was made to put them into perspective, either by comparison with deaths on the reservations or with deaths of non-aboriginal children in boarding schools during the Spanish flu pandemic. But this was never really about indigenous rights. When you topple statues of your nation’s founder and its current head of state, you’re arguing that the world would be a better place without Canada — which, given that country’s record of standing for freedom at home and abroad, is a preposterous claim.
Pointing this out would once have carried the Canadian Conservatives to an easy victory. But nowadays, the Great Realignment is working the other way. To accuse the Tories of being pro-gun or pro-God is enough to turn a goodly chunk of the electorate off them. To fly the flag at half-mast on your national day, as Trudeau did, is applauded.
This, over time, is where multiculturalism leads. At first, its tenets must be forced on a reluctant population. People are not easily pried away from their loyalties to queen and country. But eventually, supported by fanatical broadcasters and by proselytizing schoolteachers, those beliefs call into existence their own electoral constituency. Identity politics and inherited grievances become just one more landmark, as inevitable in retrospect as votes for women or the decriminalization of gay relationships.
Conservatives, look upon Canada and tremble.
