Conrad Black: Liberals, not Trump, are the true threat to Canadian sovereignty
When former prime minister Justin Trudeau told Trump that 25 per cent American tariffs on Canada would cause the Canadian economy to collapse, Trump put that assertion together with the shameful record of Canada as a freeloading passenger in its own military defence, which in practice is almost entirely outsourced to the great military power of the United States, and concluded that if Canada was afraid of tariffs and couldn't make a serious contribution to its own national defence, it would be better off within the United States. Having uttered a great deal of fatuous nonsense about Canada being a post-national country and a vanguard for the realization of the Beatles' song about a world without nationalities or religions, Trudeau leapt with considerable spontaneity into promoting Trump's comments as a genuine threat to the continued existence of Canada as a sovereign state. As this week's events and exchanges confirmed, it remains the core of the Liberal campaign.
Somehow, we are to be persuaded that the United States is threatening Canada's existence, which it is not. Nothing Trump or any other American leader has said or done in nearly 200 years could be plausibly misconstrued to be a threat by the United States against the independence of Canada. It must be said that grasping at this unfeasible straw and waving it around through an election campaign like a bloody shirt has been a historic act of imaginative desperation in the interests of political survival. Trump did us a favour by pointing out the ludicrous anomaly of our agricultural price supports, which should be abolished and replaced, as appropriate, with straight income supplements to some categories of farmers. Beyond that, he seeks only reciprocally equal tariffs with Canada.
In Quebec, the issue has been a double-edged sword because Quebec nationalists have tended to regard Canada as an artificial country: a patching together of English Canada with a French Canada that would rather be independent and only joined Confederation because independence was not feasible in 1867 and Confederation with the English-Canadians was preferable to continuing in a colonial status or for Quebec to take its chances as the sole linguistic outsider in an English-speaking continent north of Mexico. In their more narcissistic and grandiose moments, French Quebec nationalists have pretended that English Canada is just a buffer zone of America to anaesthetize Quebec and to delay its rightful destiny as an independent French nation. This fabrication of a counterfeit fear of an American takeover has at least had the virtue of frightening Quebec into a heightened recognition of Canada's virtues.
It is galling that this waving about of the Maple Leaf flag has been conducted by the same party that has falsely accused Canada of cultural genocide against its Native people, although cultural genocide is not recognized by the United Nations. What is meant is an assimilation that immigrants to a society speaking a language other than their own voluntarily seek, but which was never attempted to be inflicted upon the Aboriginal peoples of Canada. And this is the same government that has po-facedly acquiesced in the attempted suppression of the English language in Quebec. If cultural genocide existed as a concept, the Government of Quebec under successive political parties has been guilty of attempting it against the principal language of this country and continent.
Apart from this slowly departing miasma of a supposed vocation to defend the ramparts of Canada against the American hordes (who are naturally oblivious to these suspicions since they are unfounded), the Liberal campaign is to forget about the innumerable failures and competitive debacle of Canada under 10 years of Liberal government. 'I just arrived,' said Liberal Leader Mark Carney. We are to place our confidence in someone with a confected CV, of no electoral experience, a controversial record in the private sector, a man immensely well-paid and under-taxed, someone who holds himself out as a Davos socialist truckling to the deprived with money taxed from those who've earned it while padding around the country goading the president of the United States as 'the orange man,' as he falsely accuses him of coveting the takeover of this country.
In this process, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has emerged as the best candidate. He is young but not too young in the Justin Trudeau manner, is a seasoned seven-term MP and has practical proposals for eliminating the grotesque Liberal deficit and restoring the competitive edge of Canada and its desirability as a place of investment and bootstrapping up its status as a NATO ally. It is no fault of Carney's that his grasp of French is inadequate for the office he seeks. Not everyone has had the privilege of learning two languages. But Canada cannot have a prime minister who sounds in one of the official languages like an Englishman trying to navigate a menu in Romania.
Polls indicate that something like 30 per cent of Quebecers and citizens of Saskatchewan and Alberta will entertain the separatist option if the Liberals are reelected. After nearly 160 years as an autonomous state, this country is in sight of dissolution. This is the product of 10 years of Justin Trudeau's assault upon the oil and gas and other natural resources industries, counselled by Mark Carney, who will continue and escalate that war. A vote for the Liberals on April 28 is a vote to play Russian roulette with Canadian Confederation. Don't do it.
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