Your degeneracy is astonishing. Find God,” responded Josh Alexander to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s June 21 tweet from Reykjavik:“Took this yesterday before heading home – because we couldn’t leave Reykjavík without visiting Rainbow Street. To everyone celebrating Pride in Iceland, in Canada, and around the world: Happy Pride season!”
Thirty years after Canada’s centennial, prominent popular historian Pierre Berton wrote a book that was more prophetic than he knew. It was titled: 1967: The Last Good Year.
The book chronicled the landmarks of that year and also signalled the dangers looming straight ahead and just below the surface.
1967 was indeed a turning-point for Canada, a watershed year, a year of beginnings and endings concealing a nation in ferment. A year when one royal commission closed with a warning about the need for a new approach to Quebec, while another was launched to investigate, for the first time, the status of Canadian women; a year when new attitudes to divorce and homosexuality became enshrined in law. The year a charismatic and unprecedented figure, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, preached that the state had no place in the bedrooms of the nation.
Yet behind all the euphoria of Expo 67, Canada was shifting quietly with anxieties about the Americanization of every institution – from political conventions to Hockey Night in Canada and the thousands of baby-boomers holding love-ins in city parks and preaching ‘make love, not war’.
For still others, the most significant event of 1967 was Charles de Gaulle’s notorious “Vive le Quebec libre!” speech in Montreal which, in turn, elevated the burgeoning separatist movement to new legitimacy and enhanced Rene Levesque’s departure from the Liberal party later that year. A year, that in retrospect, was revealing two Canadas.
On the surface was a mood brimming with self-congratulation and faith in a cloudless future, set against a background of the cultural stars of the day, from prime ministers Lester Pearson and John Diefenbaker to those who’d already made Canada internationally famous and highly regarded, from Roy Thomson, Marshall McLuhan, Margaret Laurence and Glenn Gould to Canada’s distinguished World War I veteran and Governor-General Georges Vanier.
Yet lurking beneath the surface an opposite sentiment was building like a dark thread – the growing fear that Canada was facing its gravest crisis so far. The sense that something was going terribly wrong. If not, why all the anxiety? “Why all the hand wringing?” Berton asked readers.
All the denial notwithstanding, Berton was sensing that Canadians were growing uneasy about the real direction of their country which was, almost imperceptibly, succumbing to a liberalism that might one day destroy it. And that no amount of delusional justification would reverse: that first step into the poisonous pool – the fatal decision to legalize abortion which took place in 1967, the year Canada joined the Culture of Death, so accurately described by Pope John Paul II.
Which also meant that there would likely be no turning back. Which also meant that by 1997 – the year of Berton’s retrospective book – systemic death had become well entrenched in the culture, fed by the ongoing mass-media diet of ideological lies undermining Canada’s once healthy culture.
Enter Dr. Henry Morgentaler
At the centre of this folly was Dr. Henry Morgentaler who for the next four decades was Canada’s most visible and relentless abortion activist.
His career began in 1967 when he debuted on the national stage in a dramatic way, consistent with his dramatic past. A Polish-born Jew, he survived the Auschwitz death camps where both parents died at the hands of the Nazis and Hitler’s death machine. After his liberation, he won a scholarship to study medicine in Germany and, in 1950, the new doctor and his wife emigrated to Canada and settled in Montreal, where he practised medicine, championed abortion as an essential right, embraced humanism and was eventually well rewarded for his devotion to secular liberalism and its war on life and, ultimately, God.
Appearing before a government committee in 1967, Morgentaler advocated that any woman should have the right to end her pregnancy without risking death. This was a bold statement at a time when the performance of an abortion could result in a physician receiving a life term in prison and the woman receiving the abortion could face up to two years in prison.
Two years later, Morgentaler opened an abortion clinic in Montreal and began performing abortions “as a human right” openly and illegally – even allowing TV crews to film them. Condemnation was swift and eventually he was sentenced to 10 months in Montreal’s Bordeaux Jail. But by 1975, he was proudly declaring he had already performed more than 5,000 abortions.
Canada’s New Justice Minister
Meanwhile, in Ottawa, Canada’s new justice minister Pierre Trudeau was moving quickly behind the scenes to legalize abortion. This came two years later, in 1969 when now Prime Minister Trudeau’s Liberal government decriminalized contraception and allowed abortion under certain circumstances – performed in a hospital with the permission of three doctors.
Thus the deluge began. And since decriminalization in 1969, over 4 million preborn babies have been killed through abortion in Canada, averaging about 100,000 per year, according to Campaign Life, with one baby aborted for every four babies born alive and almost one third of Canadian women over 45 post-abortive.
Nor has there been any reversal. On January 28, 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the abortion law as unconstitutional, opening access to the procedure across the country. And, despite a few attempts to write a law with new protections for the unborn, all were thwarted. Leaving all unborn Canadians subsequently unprotected by law and Canada virtually alone in the world among countries without any law whatsoever restricting abortion which is now treated like any other medical procedure governed by provincial and medical regulations.
And Henry Morgentaler remained protected by law right up until the day he died at 90 in 2008, after being awarded the Order of Canada the same year, leaving behind him a practice entrenched as the cornerstone of Canada’s now secular-humanist culture, having upended the natural law on which the entirety of Christian civilization had been based for thousands of years facing little serious opposition.
Exit the Ten Commandments
Why? Because by 1967, modern liberalism had already developed a persuasive and powerful base in Canada, built upon a platform of the deceitful ideologies of progressivism, leftism, secularism, humanism, relativism, socialism, communism, radical environmentalism and now wokeism. Delivered daily via the activism of countless politicians, “social justice” lawyers and their ubiquitous, iniquitous 24/7 media messaging.
Thus in the public square, ‘sin’ as defined in Holy Scripture, has been converted into ‘rights’ as defined by Man and enshrined as his own unnatural law, thereby rejecting the Ten Commandments as written in the Book of Exodus 20.
Thus, the gradual process of dechristianization and decivilization has been implemented. Making it much easier for modern mankind to forget about God altogether, made all the easier by removing the strict punishments that long accompanied Mosaic law.
Beginning with the removal of the First Commandment – Thou Shalt Have No Gods Before Me – wherein liberalism and its whelps deny the very existence of God via atheism and secular humanism, liberalism’s prevailing false religion.
Next the rejection of the Second Commandment meant the acceptance of false gods and their related pantheistic and environmental offshoots. Followed by the wholesale rejection of the third commandment against blasphemy while allowing the profaning of the Sabbath with laws permitting 7-day commerce.
Consider too the wholesale dismissal of the fourth commandment to honour one’s father and mother in a narcissistic culture that no longer upholds family – the core of every society. Add the further harm of easy divorce and the abandonment of accepted norms of proper behaviour, particularly liberalism’s constant promotion of its long-standing pathology of supplanting parents with “progressive” government, diminishing parental rights and encouraging children to rebel against traditional conventions, even to the point of rejecting the very words ‘mother and father’. Which, in turn, may become the final blow to western civilization itself – ie. today’s sin-centered, anti-biblical notion of ‘gay marriage’ desecrating God’s design for true marriage and family with the obvious intention of undermining these life-supporting institutions.
Just as lethal is the rejection of the sixth commandment, Thou Shalt Not Kill, which undermines every aspect of the unholy trinity of the Culture of Death – contraception, abortion, and euthanasia, about which more later.
Add to this the abolition of the seventh commandment prohibiting adultery, which includes all sexual immorality as identified in Holy Scripture, including marital infidelity, fornication, homosexuality, bestiality, incest, and all perversions of God’s design for human sexuality. Which means that when it comes to sex in the liberal mind, there is no wrong so you can do no wrong.
Finally comes the rejection of the final commandments against lying, bearing false witness and coveting property. Which, some have said, can be centred exclusively in the justification for communism which, with class warfare and the redistributionist philosophies of Marx and Engels as its fuel, thrives on theft — taking wealth from those who produce and giving it to those who don’t. Add to this the sins of pathological lying with feel-good soundbites promising equality, tolerance and deceptive notions of social justice to remain in power and the world becomes an increasingly disordered place.
You get the point. In truth, liberalism, in both philosophical and practical terms, simply signifies man’s predisposition “to call evil good and good evil.”
A Moral Mess
So, 55 years after Berton’s The Last Good Year, where is Canada today? In a profound yet predictable moral mess. A dystopia. Today one of Canada’s major industries is pornography. Canada remains resource-rich yet, according to the precepts of the gospel of climate change, its governments insist on keeping these resources buried for a benefit so miniscule it can do no earthly good by denying God’s bounty to both the nation and the world. Canada gushes ideologically-driven gender advice while many Canadian streets are populated by homeless, often mentally ill and drug addicted, citizens ‘supported’ by a liberal ethos promoting gender confusion and ‘safe’ injections without any physical or moral substance that might actually help. And violence increases. Steadily.
Which is not the least surprising from a government whose very first legislation was the legalization of marijuana. Quickly followed by pipeline bans and then one major scandal followed another – from SNC Lavalin, the WE scandal, Chinese election interference and the Indigenous Schools Gravesite Hoax – among others — and the legalization of euthanasia.
Through all this Canadians seem to have been losing track of the vast and once rich nation they once knew: Canada – the world’s first ‘postnational state’, as declared by Justin Trudeau to the New York Times within days of his 2015 election and without ever defining what that phrase actually meant. But never mind. What are pesky details in a nation so morally confused, it seems unable to deny itself nothing — including life itself to inconvenient Canadians.
Suicide of the West
In fact, in Canada, the West’s suicide has become literal. And since government-assisted suicides were legalized in 2016 – initially applied to adults with terminal illnesses only — the practice has exploded, growing drastically in size and scope every year.
According to the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, Canada saw a sharp increase in government-assisted suicides last year, with an estimated 13,500 taking place in 2022 — a 35% increase over 2021, when 10,064 took their lives through the program. This number, in turn, represented 3.3% of all deaths in Canada that year.
According to Life News: “It has been reported that the province of Quebec saw a 51% surge in assisted suicides, with 3,663 such deaths being recorded in 2022 compared to 2,427 in 2021,” meaning that “7% of all deaths in Quebec in 2022 were therefore state-sanctioned assisted suicides.” Even worse, this figure earned Quebec the highest annual statistic in the entire world.
Equally worrying has been the expansion of the grounds for qualifying non-terminal people, some of whom have even qualified to be killed for hearing loss. And at the end of 2022, lawmakers expanded the program yet again to include people with mental illness which was initially set to go into effect in March 2023, but is now set for March 2024.
Euthanizing the Mentally Ill
Imagine the possibilities. Particularly for the category of ‘mental illness’. Might this one day stretch to include the homeless so rapidly filling our inner cities?
Well, Canadians got their answer October 18 when Trudeau’s Liberals blocked a bill that would have prevented Canada from euthanizing the mentally ill.
This means there is little now standing in the way of those with mental disorders, including the depressed whose suicidal ideation is likely a symptom, having the state put them down starting March 17, 2024.
Conservative lawmaker Ed Fast’s private members bill C-314 would have amended the Criminal Code to “provide that a mental disorder is not a grievous and irremediable medical condition for which a person could receive medical assistance in dying.”
Fast stressed in the preamble to his bill that vulnerable citizens should receive suicide prevention counseling rather than be exterminated by the state, adding that “Canada’s medical assistance in dying regime risks normalizing assisted dying as a solution for those suffering from a mental disorder.”
Besides noting that there are alternative treatments for mental illness besides death, critics have questioned whether mentally and emotionally compromised patients can legally provide consent for euthanasia.
Bill C-314 was introduced in February by Fast who, on October 5, told the House of Commons that his bill seeks to undo what he called the “terrible decision” of Canada legalizing euthanasia via “MAiD” which, he said, only 28 percent of Canadians agree should be expanded to those suffering from a mental illness.
But that’s unlikely to stop MAiD from also being considered for terminally ill minors, and promoted with a policy of compassion and support for persons who don’t want to suffer needlessly; hence their right to die. Aided and abetted by physicians and medical professionals who may, one day, be compelled to dispatch a patient. Or lose his right to practise medicine.
Never mind that once such a right is declared, limiting factors become nearly impossible to create, meaning that it’s only a manner of time before that “right to die” is extended to the young and healthy. Confirming at every stage that this ethos which breaks the fifth commandment at every stage is straight out of Hell.
Yet this is also the predictable outcome for secular Western countries with socialized or quasi-socialized medical systems where massive bureaucracies can quickly create incentives to push the old and less productive members of society to suicide rather than seek treatment to prolong their lives. So no surprise over the sudden push to replace hospice with MAiD which is so much more efficient. And to compel physicians currently involved in treating patients in Hospice to agree to administer MAiD. Or else.
“As assisted suicide has become an established part of Canadian society, the complex moral issues surrounding the end of life have drifted out of sight,” wrote New York Times columnist David Brooks in The Atlantic. “Decisions tend to be made within a bureaucratic context, where utilitarian considerations can come to dominate the foreground.”
So it’s not hard to imagine that treatment will be doled out not just in a ruthless, technocratic, and utilitarian manner, but in a way consistent with Canada’s half-century of ideological transformation where inconvenient Canadians may be encouraged – even pressured – to do their patriotic duty by submitting to MAiD.
How Nazi is that?
Nazis cheered in Parliament
Which also raises the question: given Canada’s current moral climate should Canadians be shocked – even surprised — by the behaviour of its government? Should today’s moral climate in Canada even be surprising? Consider the Trudeau government’s latest pair of scandals.
First, at the G20 meeting in September, the prime minister inexplicably failed to appear at the state dinner in New Delhi. Some time later, his aircraft was said to have technical difficulties, requiring a second plane to Canada. Yet soon after, that story was disputed in the Indian media by a former ambassador who claimed Trudeau’s plane was “full of cocaine” though no denial nor further explanation has been offered.
Upon his return to Canada, however, Justin Trudeau bluntly asserted that the government had “credible allegations” of a link between agents of the government of India and the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar — an outspoken British Columbia supporter of a separate homeland (Khalistan) for the Sikhs in parts of the Indian state of Punjab and Pakistan, though he has yet to provide evidence to back up his accusation, and allies have remained silent as relations between both countries remain severely strained.
Still, with that scandal brewing, no one was expecting what came next as Canadians were
suddenly confronted by MPs in the House of Commons honouring a Canadian-Ukrainian man from North Bay, Ont., with two standing ovations during a visit by Ukrainian president Volodymor Zelenskyy late last month. Yaroslav Hunka, 98, had served in a Nazi SS division in Ukraine during WWII. The honours quickly sparked anger on social media, prompting the resignation of House of Commons speaker Anthony Rota, who was said to have arranged for the SS soldier to be fêted, though no reason was offered. Trudeau, meanwhile, disappeared from view for three days before reappearing in the Commons to make a blanket apology on behalf of Canadians but without offering any credible explanation as to what really happened.
All of which appears to indicate that the moral code that knitted Canada together in 1967 has vanished — at least superficially. Some may even say Canada’s traditional morality, maintained for centuries, has disappeared altogether, just as the prime minister disappeared from view for three days.
What Trudeau and his government didn’t seem to notice, however, was the profound irony of a Nazi scandal in the very heart of Canada’s parliament which, for some, summoned memories of Josef Mengele, the Nazi physician and his grotesque experiments in eugenics at Auschwitz. How could it be that Nazism could be celebrated before an apparently oblivious House of Commons and denounced days later as some inexplicable mistake, oblivious to the inherent hypocrisy of this extraordinary scandal and whatever elements gave rise to it?
Jordan Peterson opines
Dr. Jordan Peterson may have an answer: In a recent article in The Telegraph, the clinical psychologist describes a sign of the times — the emergence of a contemporary Machiavellian personality type now much in evidence on the world stage, and demonstrating a combination of Machiavellian and narcissistic psychopathy (a malignant mixture of manipulativeness, deceitfulness, false self-esteem, criminal propensity, callousness, parasitism and even sadism). And in addition to these characteristics is the proclivity to claim positive virtue or outright victim status while pursuing their utterly self-serving, grandiose and destructive ends. “They lie, cheat, steal, gossip, reputation-savage, brag, claim credit when none is due, and distribute blame to everyone but themselves,” Peterson writes. “All the while pursuing nothing but their own immediate, immature, hedonistic self-gratification, trumpeting their moral virtue and/or brandishing their identity as oppressed innocents.”
He continues: “It is this narrow, and historically ostracised, behaviour that has been encouraged and facilitated in its distribution by contemporary social media. When such individuals organise – and this happens, from time to time – they threaten the integrity of the entire society within which they operate, hoping to light everything aflame and dance, orgiastically, in the ruins. This happened after the French Revolution. It happened in Soviet Russia. It happened in Nazi Germany. It’s happening now, in the West, with the rise of the most demented woke causes.”
Which have now become so extreme and so noteworthy that even in the expansion of euthanasia in Canada, Canada appears to be standing virtually alone in the West. This in turn has led to an international backlash, with The New York Times – an historically liberal paper – publishing an opinion column recently by conservative author Ross Douthat about the effect of medical suicide in Canada.
In a piece titled “What Euthanasia has done to Canada,” Douthat writes, “It is barbaric … to establish a bureaucratic system that offers death as a reliable treatment for suffering and enlists the healing profession in delivering this “cure.” And while there may be worse evils ahead, this isn’t a slippery slope argument: When 10,000 people are availing themselves of your euthanasia system every year, you have already entered the dystopia.”
A dystopia already experienced by Dr. Jordan Peterson and by Josh Alexander who was suspended earlier this year by the Renfrew County Catholic District school board for opposing gender ideology. In February, the Board justified the suspension by saying Alexander’s beliefs constitute the “bullying of trans students.”
How would Josh Alexander have responded to Dr. Peterson’s description of certain kinds of new personalities reaching contemporary helms of power? Would any of their behaviour have surprised Berton? My guess is that Berton would have been shocked that any of these fairly recent developments described in the above paragraphs had occurred at all.
Perhaps the greatest irony of all, however, is the incontrovertible fact that throughout time and eternity, the Lord God is not mocked and cannot be mocked because every breach of His every law always and everywhere confirms their eternal Truth and absoluteness. And, eventually, their just consequences.