The latest entry in the exit sweepstakes is oil-rich but hard-done-by Alberta, a province which suffered under the National Energy Program introduced in 1980 by the current PM’s father Pierre Trudeau, and is currently struggling under a concerted left-wing campaign, sponsored by Green-progressivist foundations (American consortiums masking via proxies as Canadian coalitions), clueless Nobel laureates at their virtue-signaling best, and a Liberal government ideologically aligned with the NDP (New Democratic Party) and the Greens, to prevent the development of its vast oil reserves. Alberta has always resented the indifference to and domination of the Canadian West by the so-called Laurentian Elite comprising “the political, academic, cultural, media and business elites” of central Canada. There is now a Wexit movement gathering momentum.
It might just as plausibly be argued that Canada is composed of a veritable congeries of competing, self-identified mini-nations—English, French, Islamic, Chinese, Sikh, native tribes with multiple patrimonies and unpronounceable names, and sundry political constituencies affiliated with the global left. Contributing factors like indiscriminate immigration from dysfunctional countries, metastasizing socialist doctrine verging on nascent totalitarianism, a state-funded national broadcaster and a deeply compromised print media subsidized by the Liberal government added to the destabilizing brew. Meanwhile, to quote lawyer and former philosophy professor Grant Brown, “the education system invites Extinction Rebellion kooks into the classroom to terrify the children” (personal communication). An army of little Gretas will carry the country-killing revolution even further.
George Grant’s 1965 Lament for a Nation argued that Canada had ceased to be a nation, having surrendered its identity to the continental thrust of American dynamism and to the historical progress of the “universalist and homogeneous state [as] the pinnacle of political striving.” He goes on to argue that the “impossibility of conservatism in our era is the impossibility of Canada,” especially as the country falls ever more under the sway of “the Canadian establishment and its political instrument, the Liberals.” The book has been extremely controversial and may appear a little dated, shrouded in the mists of nostalgia for “the narrow provincialism and our backwoods culture”—although, no doubt tongue in cheek, suggesting that “Perhaps we should rejoice in the disappearance of Canada.” Lamenting or rejoicing, we are looking at a fait accompli.