Conrad Black: Pierre Poilievre the man to raise Canada out of its infantile stupor
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The first plausible sign of a more adult direction in public policy leadership for some years is coming from Poilievre
Publishing date:
Aug 06, 2022 • 1 day ago • 6 minute read • 227 Comments 
Photo by KIER GILMOUR/OTTAWA CITIZEN/POSTMEDIA Article content
All my conscient life, Canada has been struggling to produce a serious raison d’être distinguishing it from the United States. Now, the United States is in a temporary shambles of apparent decline, and the question has faded. But Canada is not markedly more purposeful. The British connection gradually gave way as our rationale for independence to a brief Centennial freshet of English-Canadian enthusiasm for the French-Canadians, causing millions of anglophone school students across the country to be given French as an elementary school subject. But when this was unrequited and the majority of French-speaking Quebecers, but a bare minority of the province as a whole, effectively voted to secede in the second Quebec referendum of 1995, that faded and we flopped back to the feeble claim that our welfare system was more generous than that of the U.S. This argument, apart from being weak on its merits, is imperilled by the progressive collapse of our health-care system.
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Despite its present parlous condition, the United States is the greatest and most successful country in the history of the world. Because we do not have the legacy of slavery, nor a revolutionary tradition, nor a constitutional right to bear arms, this is a much more peaceable place and a less complicated, if a less exciting, society. The United States is now, for the first time in its history, having a crisis of self-confidence. Many have lost faith in the electoral process, crime is skyrocketing, millions of people are pouring across its southern border. We, in Canada, have tired of the Americans’ endless incantations about their “exceptionalism,” which is now exclusively a matter of scale. The world’s greatest promoter of democracy, the U.S., is not now one of the world’s better functioning democracies.
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It is time for Canada to grow up. The U.S. will snap out of its present torpor. But in our new-found complacency, our competitive position as a prosperous country is steadily declining, and we have wasted the last six years crossing the public policy desert in morbidly exaggerated shame and guilt about Canada’s treatment of its Indigenous people, in constant paroxysms of infantilistic hysteria about climate change and in tying ourselves in futile knots about gender issues that need not have required more than a month of debate. Except for a few people, including myself, the whole country has sat like suet puddings while our principal language is the subject, to use a particularly vacuous Canadian expression, of cultural genocide — in Quebec, English no longer has any standing, even in the offices of the federal government. There is absolutely no reason to be concerned about our proximity to the Americans. But we should not wait for the U.S. to pull itself together to turn Canada into a laboratory of accelerated immigration, intensified capital formation, increased tangible and philosophical encouragement of genuine cultural activity, resurrection of respectable educational standards and a constructive nationalism, including substantially strengthened Armed Forces and original foreign policy thinking recognizing the irreplaceable role of legitimate national interests, starting with our own.
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When I was very young, Canada was a Dominion — a word purportedly adapted to political science by New Brunswick’s principal Father of Confederation, Samuel L. Tilley — which was somewhere between a colony and a sovereign country. It is now a kingdom with a non-resident monarch. Likewise, most Canadian companies included the words ”Canada Ltd.,” indicating that they were branch plants of American companies. When Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent and his then-external affairs minister, Lester B. Pearson, promoted what was originally an American plan for disengaging British, French and Israeli forces from Egypt in the 1956 Suez Crisis, it was the first time Canada received serious commendation in the world for an overt initiative in an international organization.
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The rise of French Quebec nationalism in the early 1960s was based in part on the theory that Canada was a make-believe country, a mere scaffolding set up by the Anglo-Americans from which Quebec should secede and crown the repressed French-Canadian ambitions of two centuries. In the mid-’60s, Pearson’s government replaced the Red Ensign with the British Union flag in the upper left with the now world-familiar Maple Leaf flag, and began enacting the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, and airlifted prominent French-Canadian federalists into Parliament from Quebec, especially Pierre Elliott Trudeau. In July 1967, as Canada celebrated its centenary as the only officially bicultural, transcontinental parliamentary Confederation in the history of the world, French President Charles de Gaulle came to Quebec ostensibly in observation of the centenary and advised Quebec to secede from Canada: “This evening, here, and all along my route, I found the same kind of atmosphere as that of the liberation.… Vive le Québec libre!” (The Canadian Army, not the French, landed in Normandy on D-Day with the British and Americans to liberate France. It was an astounding insult from de Gaulle.)
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Some readers will recall Pierre Trudeau’s efforts to emphasize Canadian independence, such as in upgrading relations with Cuba, China and other communist countries. As an unusually flamboyant leader by Canadian standards, he received a good deal of international attention. Quebec’s avowedly separatist vote, under René Lévesque’s new Parti Québécois, won the election of 1976 but was defeated, approximately 60 to 40 per cent, in the first referendum on Quebec independence in 1980. The issue was a trick question authorizing negotiation of the sovereignty of Quebec with continued association with Canada: the consumption and retention of the same cake.
Trudeau responded by negotiating the transfer from the British Parliament (which was happy to be rid of it) of the power to amend Canada’s Constitution and adding a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Progressive Conservatives under Brian Mulroney, in 1988, advocated for a free trade agreement with the United States. Canada ceased to be a branch-plant country and has competed successfully with the U.S. and the world ever since. All through these decades, Canada responded effectively to threats to its political stability.
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Our population now is as great as that of France 140 years ago, with its brilliant fin de siècle writers, impressionist painters and composers, but unlike France, we don’t have a language to ourselves or the psychology of national greatness. Canada is objectively one of the 12 or so most important countries in the world. But it still can’t explain exactly what its purpose is, other than to be more caring and sharing and kinder and gentler than the United States. The growth of this country from the founding of Quebec by Samuel de Champlain more than 400 years ago has been an almost unblemished history of success, despite our frenzied recent effort to portray ourselves to the world as quasi-Nazi former slaveholders. All we need is a maturation of attitude.
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The first plausible sign of a more adult direction in public policy leadership for some years is coming from Pierre Poilievre, the likely next federal Conservative leader. The obligatory blast of criticism of him as harsh and confrontational should be ignored as the simpering of our frightened and inadequate elites. It is time for Canada to exercise its vocation as not only one of the world’s best countries, but also as one of its great countries, by becoming one of the world’s most original and creative countries. We can do it and no one else will do it for us.
National Post
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