In 2015, when Justin Trudeau described Canada to the New York Times as the world’s “first postnational state,” adding “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada”, he was said to be expressing a uniquely Canadian philosophy that some found bewildering – even reckless – but which could represent a radical new model of nationhood.
In retrospect, this could have meant no nationhood at all. Which may be why, as we approach Canada Day six years later, the world’s first postnational state is feeling like barely a country. A shell of itself. A foundering husk of a nation the world once knew and respected.
“I don’t recognize the country I was born into,” lamented Independent MP Derek Sloan recently as he hosted a forum of prominent Canadian doctors – including Dr. Byram W. Bridle, a viro-immunologist from the University of Guelph, Dr. Patrick Philips from Englehart Hospital, and Dr. Don Welsh from the University of Western Ontario who’ve all been punished for speaking out against the ongoing censorship of anyone questioning the mainstream COVID-19 narrative which, over the past 18 months, has hobbled the country to a near standstill with lockdowns and pushed it into an economic wilderness. All over a viral pandemic with a mortality rate of less than 1 percent.
Question: are the provincial and federal government’s draconian measures really in Canada’s best interests? Sloan is not alone in questioning the direction of a country whose government–subsidized media have become increasingly untrustworthy. This is due to their failure to report on many of the worrying results stemming directly from government policy, including the growing numbers of catastrophic side-effects resulting from a strictly experimental vaccine, along with the suppression of alternative therapies and the censorship of doctors and scientists across Canada, all of which was exposed in Sloane’s June 17th press conference on Parliament Hill and which immediately became the most viewed parliamentary proceeding ever on CPAC (Cable Public Affairs Channel), an event the mainstream media also refused to cover.
So what gives?
Marxism at Work
Is this not another indication that there is indeed a shift underway in Canada where, for the first time in their history, Canadians are witnessing the strange and unsettling phenomenon of towns across the country opting out of celebrating Canada Day this year?
This while Canadian Marxists – aka social justice warriors now drunk on Critical Race Theory –work feverishly to turn Canadians against their history and against each other by demonizing it with deliberate misinterpretations of events over which Canadians have neither control nor direct responsibility.
The latest round of this ongoing game was precipitated when, on May 27th , the Tk’emlúps teSecwe̓pemc First Nation announced that preliminary findings from ground-penetrating radar searches had found unmarked graves — not a mass grave, as some media have erroneously reported — on the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C. This made international headlines and spurred a wave of instant shrines and public mourning, and was followed, just weeks after the Kamloops findings, by news from Cowessess First Nation of a second graveyard of 751 unmarked graves found at the site of Marieval Residential School in Saskatchewan.
These events hearken back to a section of Canadian history about which most know little but which, predictably, attracts plenty of strong, if wrong, opinions. Which may also account for what happened next — the burning down of at least four Catholic Churches so far, all on Indigenous property. And the defacing of another, the doors of St.Paul’s Co-Cathedral in downtown Saskatoon, with bloody handprints. And just days ago, the statue of Pope John Paul II was found covered in red paint and red handprints outside Edmonton’s Holy Rosary Catholic Church. The church has priests of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, which operated 48 residential schools including the Kamloops and Marieval residential schools. Red footprints and stuffed animals were also found at the base of the statue, marking the latest act of vandalism against a Catholic structure.
We know there is no evidence whatsoever of any intent to hide these graves and no indication that the children buried in these long-forgotten cemeteries died of abuse or neglect. Yet, via media accounts, one is led to believe the worst, as little regard has been paid to the fact that wooden markers on residential graves disintegrated over time, as did the fences surrounding the cemeteries which became heavily overgrown by forest vegetation, making it difficult to determine the parameters of the cemetery and to learn about the individuals buried within them.
Residential Schools
Residential schools for Indigenous children – many of which functioned as orphanages –existed in Canada from the 17th century until the late 1990s. Prior to 1883, Catholic and Protestant missionaries established churches and schools and, in some cases, hospitals to care for Indigenous of all ages. These schools were intended to provide basic literacy and to care and acculturate children to non-Aboriginal social and religious values, and to provide vocational schools to enable them to assimilate into society more easily.
After 1883, a formal system for the residential schooling of Indigenous children was established and expanded across Canada. And with federal government involvement, Residential Schools were opened. It was then that the Canadian government under the Indian Affairs Department, took control and established larger institutions known as the ‘residential school system’ to provide academic and industrial training, with an eye on aiding their employment and integration within the increasingly dominant Euro-Canadian society. During this period it is estimated that at least 150,000 First Nation, Inuit, and Métis children attended residential schools still largely operated by churches and religious organizations and funded by the federal government through the following decades. In fact, it wasn’t until the early 1970s that the number of residential schools in operation began to decline sharply, and finally ceased operations in 1996.
This was followed in 2008 by the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission which examined mistreatment at Canada’s residential schools and found there had been more than 4,000 deaths at the institutions. However, in its final report released in 2015, little attention was made of the fact that in those years, tuberculosis, measles, smallpox and other plagues of infections often resulted in large death tolls among children.
Fast forward to 2021, and this important aspect of Canadian history and experience has become easy fodder for the cultural Marxists and Critical Race theorists in their quest to turn citizens across the West against each other and to encourage them to hate their countries and, in particular, their Christian roots and histories. All the while comforting themselves with what they imagine is their own moral virtue and superiority over all matters past.
CRT at work
The results are evident everywhere.
In big cities in Canada — such as Toronto and Ottawa — and in smaller communities such as South Indian Lake in Manitoba, jurisdictions across the country are responding to the `Woke`version of Canadian history by pulling down historic statues — statues of Sir John A.Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister and Egerton Ryerson, founder of Ryerson University and architect of the Indigenous boarding school system, whose statue head showed up recently on a spike in Caledonia, Ont. — the site of an ongoing land dispute between the Six Nations of the Grand River and local developers. Statues of Winston Churchill have also been defaced with gallons of red paint. Plus, there is much talk about renaming schools, parks and streets, such as Dundas Street, among the most commonly used street names in Canada. And cancelling Canada Day celebrations entirely.
Thus savaging our history and taking us back to what? Year One. Just as the Jacobins did during the French Revolution. Yes, the revolutionary game and its tactics and strategies are always the same.
So what are Canadians to make of all this? What does it all mean? Why is all this happening now? And is there anything to suggest that the ‘discoveries’ of known graves is mere happenstance? Particularly given the likelihood of a still-rumoured federal election this Fall?
Dismantling Canada
For the first time in its history — which began officially in 1867 with much celebration as thismajestic land forged itself into a new nation — Canada now appears to be dismantling itself. And without understanding why this is happening, its collapse is now feeling spontaneous, even unstoppable. Which explains the sensation of the land shifting under one’s feet so many Canadians seem to be feeling.
On Canada Day 2021, the nation is now deeply confused about itself, its identity, its purpose and its very history. Which is fast becoming a source of shame. And intentionally. At least in the eyes of mainstream media and the prime pinister who keeps nudging Canadians towards misdirected guilt and contrition. Not contrition for current personal sin and the damage it inflicts, mind you, but guilt for historic events over which contemporary Canadians have no control nor personal responsibility and cannot change. And subtly – in almost Pavlovian style – directing them towards an almost kneejerk disapproval, even hatred, of Canada’s national history. And of the elephant in the room – the Christian faith – that, unacknowledged, long earned Canada the high regard of the whole world.
The result? On the eve of Canada Day 2021, most public Canadian flags are still at half mast in memory of the imputed crimes of residential schools and the recent murder of a muslim family in London Ontario. With the lone exception of the Pride Flag which flies in more places than ever across this land, including many Catholic schools, and which will continue to fly, not for its usual month of June this year, but until September, at the prime minister’s behest.
Bottom line: Free-floating guilt now overhangs Canadian history with the exception of anything having roots in Leftism, progressivism, atheism, socialism, communism and ecological ideology—which has long since established Man as its god.
But here’s a question: is this apparent dismantling process spontaneous? Or the result of manipulation?
`Un-Canadian` events
Consider the evidence of recurring and decidedly ‘un-Canadian’ events:
For months, Artur Pawlowski and his family have been subjected to extensive harassment as Calgary police, enforcing COVID regulations, demanded he close his church and then subjectedthe Polish-born pastor’s to a daunting roadside arrest.
Also in Calgary, Christian pastor Tim Stephens was arrested a second time earlier this month for allegedly breaking COVID health rules by holding an underground church service, forcing the pastors’ eight children to tears as they witnessed their father being hauled away by police from their home.
Note too the apparent increase in tyranny employed by police charged with enforcing COVID rules. As evidenced by the arrest of Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada, in Winnipeg on June 11 for violating public health orders and released on bail later that day.
His arrest by RCMP for breaching provincial public health orders came during Bernier’s weekend tour of anti-lockdown rallies in Manitoba. Bernier was charged under the Public Health Act for assembling in a gathering at an outdoor public place and for failing to self-isolate once he got to Manitoba, the RCMP said. He was also ticketed earlier that day at his first stop, in town of Niverville.
“This isn’t Canada…this is China!” Bernier told a Mississauga talkshow host later, adding that police had treated him harshly, an attitude he finds unusual in Canada.
Yes, he’s a politician. But his words strike a troubling chord that has not gone unnoticed south of the border as more and more American pundits are asking out loud: “What’s going on in Canada?”
It`s a question being asked on both sides of the border. And prompting U.S. Senator Josh Hawley to call for Canada to be put on a religious freedom watch list over the recent COVID arrests: “I am troubled that our Canadian neighbors are effectively being forced to gather in secret, undisclosed locations to exercise their basic freedom to worship. Frankly, I would expect this sort of religious crackdown in Communist China, not in a prominent Western nation like Canada.“
The Broader Picture
On the economic front, developments are equally alarming, beginning with the official cancellation of the $9bn Keystone XL oil pipeline that has become a symbol of the rising political clout of climate advocates and a flashpoint in US-Canada relations.
Earlier this month, the pipeline, which was proposed in 2008 to bring oil from Canada’s western oilsands to US refiners, was halted by owner TC Energy after Joe Biden revoked a key permit needed for a US stretch of the 1,200-mile project, thereby creating a huge and unnecessary hole in Canada’s economy and income. Which, from a national perspective, is akin to a hardworking father of ten losing his job. To the power of thousands.
Add to that, the Trudeau government’s recent budget sending Canada’s debt into the trillion-dollar stratosphere, and the future looks bleak indeed.
But these are symptoms of decay, portending collapse. Not the cause.
Stages of Disintegration
The truth is that the disintegration of Canada has been a process long underway. Since 1968 actually — the year after the Centennial — the year the late Pierre Berton deemed Canada’s last good year, as laid out in his book 1967, The Last Good Year.
This was a turning point. A watershed of beginnings and endings. A year when one Royal Commission ended with a warning about the need for a new approach to Quebec. And another was launched to investigate, for the first time, the status of Canadian women in Canada, meaning that new attitudes to divorce and homosexuality were about to be enshrined in Canadian law.
All under the direction of the charismatic Pierre Elliott Trudeau who let it be known publicly that the state had no place in the bedrooms of the nation. Thus the seeds of Women’s Lib, Gay Pride and even Red Power were sown in that Centennial year where, at Expo 67, the Indigenous pavilion also had the greatest impact.
It was also the year that gave rise to The Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1968-69, an omnibusbill introduced as Bill C-150 by then Minister of Justice Pierre Trudeau in the second session of Canada’s 27th Parliament on December 21, 1967. The bill passed on May 14, 1969 after lengthy and heated debates, making abortion legal for the first time in Canada and placing underneath the Canadian firmament a slowly ticking time bomb.
Few realized, however — except for some of those ‘pesky’ Catholics — that by redefining abortion as a ‘right’ and ‘liberating’ women from pregnancy and motherhood, the soul of Canada had been fatally pierced. And it’s been bleeding ever since as the practise became so enshrined in Canadian law that, by the late 1980s, it was too big to be contained in any law whatsoever.Which is why in 1988, in a landmark decision in the case of R.v.Morgentaler, the Supreme Court declared the entirety of the country’s abortion law to be unconstitutional. All later efforts to draft and pass a new abortion law failed as well, leading to the unique situation of Canada having no abortion law whatsoever. Abortion is now treated like any other medical procedure, governed by provincial and medical regulations, leaving the unborn with no protections whatsoever. This is afact Canadians were reminded of recently when Parliament, almost laughably, tried to pass a law against aborting babies based on gender, oblivious to the complete absurdity of attempting to pass an abortion bill in a nation with no abortion law whatsoever!
Why Abortion is a Sin
This is why abortion is a sin. A mortal sin which, when unconfessed and unrepented, is always fatal. So that when it becomes habituated, it hardens the soul and savages any nation that not only permits it, but brags about the moral superiority of its tolerance and ‘compassion’ – as exemplified by installing abortionist Dr. Henry Morgenthaler into the Order of Canada.
As they say, you couldn’t make it up.
Toxifying Canada Day
So this year, over half a century after Trudeau Sr.’s Omnibus Bill and 154 years after Confederation, Canada Day is being given a pass in various towns across Canada in quiet rectitude over the graves in Kamloops and Saskatchewan and by their growing conviction that Canada and its history is ‘racist’. And that Christianity is the cause.
All the while denying that the centre of their nation isn’t holding; that it is foundering anddisintegrating due to the ravages of the sexual revolution and a culture now devoted almost exclusively to the fulfilment of self and the moral ‘convictions’ of contemporaryprogressiveness.
Well, knock yourselves out. Having turned their backs on all the teachings of Jesus Christ and having repudiated the natural law in favour of a humanistic creed called Progressivism (aka socialism and cultural Marxism) which elevates Man over God, Canadians are experiencing the results.
And through it all, Canada’s feminist prime minister, Justin Trudeau – whose radical Progressivism has prompted him to call humanity ‘people-kind’ – has continued to virtue signal, despite his ongoing parade of scandals. Yet he also remains unable to rescue the Two Michaels,jailed by the Chinese communist government, or fulfill his promise to end drinking water advisories in 61 Indigenous Communities still facing a water crisis – in the world’s most water-rich country.
Yet when the Kamloops story erupted, it took mere minutes for him to call Pope Francis and ask him to come to Canada to apologize for the Catholic Church’s role in running residential schools for Indigenous children, and for CNN to dub the schools as Canada’s ‘concentration camps’.
“I have spoken personally directly with His Holiness Pope Francis to press upon him how important it is not just that he makes an apology but that he makes an apology to indigenous Canadians on Canadian soil,” Trudeau told reporters in Ottawa.
In response, Pope Francis stopped short of a direct apology but said he was pained by the discovery of the remains of 215 children and called for respect for the rights and cultures of native peoples.
Totalitarian Legislation
Meanwhile, with all this going on, the growing spectre of tyranny rising in Canada continued apace with the forced passing of Bill C-10 in Parliament in the middle of the night, allowing the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to regulate the entire Internet in Canada. In other words, attacking free speech by permitting government totalitarian control over much of the content Canadians are allowed to see, all in the name of the as-yet undefined criteria of ‘Canadian content’— meaning the power to filter out content that doesn’t carry the desired ideological content.
And right after Bill C10 comes worse legislation – Bill C-36. Tabled on the final day of the current parliamentary season by Justice Minister David Lametti, this “hate speech” bill, if passed, would allow a tribunal to judge those found in violation of the new law, simply by someone complaining they are a target of “online” hate — which again is not defined.
Do Canadians Really Want This?
Who would want this? Any of this? Except the few Canadians in power wanting ever more power and control?
Yet all this is now happening in this long–blessed land after fifty-plus years of the gradual repudiation of the natural law and the gradual cultural expulsion of God – He Who must not be named – from the public square and daily life. Which means Canada is now facing a future without the protections and strengths that Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular provide, as now evidenced by the alienation of the Western provinces, the perceived favouritism of Quebec and the shadow of bankruptcy looming over Ontario and the Maritime provinces. This while the Indigenous peoples cry out for a justice and consolation that, ironically, only Christianity can provide.
Add to this the widespread evidence that even Canada’s once powerful Christian ethos — and the peace, order and prosperity it confers — has become superficial, something few are willing to fight for, as confirmed most recently by the willing shutdown of her churches, rationalized by the pandemic and reducing the number of Masses and other Christian prayer services exponentially … and their protections and spiritual ameliorations.
The ultimate consequence of this long drift is that Canada appears to have lost her glue, confirming Pope John Paul II’s famous dictum that any nation that kills its own children has no future. Which, as it turns out, is not about a woman`s right to choose but about whether a country built on the prayers, good will and hard work of centuries, will founder and collapse, or go into captivity, as it abandons those Christian cornerstones.
Thus, barring a miraculous change of heart, Canada now appears as further proof of this primal truth of life and nature. And that, taken together with her recent binge of destructive progressive legislation — including most lately euthanasia and banning conversion therapy for confused transgenders — this postnational state may have arrived at the point of no return.
Prompting a final question which may be impolite. But here it is: At this time next year, what will be the status of Canada and her many glorious shrines?
Saints Joseph (our national patron), Jean de Brebeuf, Noel Chabanel, Antoine Daniel, Charles Garnier, Isaac Jogues, Gabriel Lallemant, Rene Goupil, Jean deLalande, Marguerite Bourgeoys, Marie-Marguerite d’Youville, Alfred Bessette, Kateri Tekakwitha, Marie Guyart Martin and Francois de Montmorency-Laval pray for Canada. And pray for us.
