Canada has a case of Stockholm Syndrome
Published in the The Epoch Times
Dear Friends and Readers,
A brief version of the expanded essay below, was published on The Epoch Times in the March 19th print newspaper edition, link here on Reader's Turn.
Pierre Poilievre recently joked that the Liberals are “not hope” asserting that Canadians need hope in order to “afford their lives”. Once upon a time, this is what Canada stood for – hope – why my immigrant parents sacrificed everything to come here, to give us hope for a better life. But what does it mean to have hope? To an immigrant Canadian like myself, this statement rings hollow, as opportunities, earnings, time, and hope, slip from our grasp. Hope, I argue, is rooted in boundaries: where the government gets out of the way whilst protecting the security, peace and liberty of each person, not groups of persons. Hope means that we have a cultural identity stemming from common values – that we identify with something (other than not being American), rather than a vague pursuit of inclusion, that paradoxically results in exclusion. Identity politics has divided us into seeing each other as the enemy rather than as human. It has made Canada a lonely, insufferable place to live, one impossible to thrive or flourish.
In his recently published book, The Polycentric Republic, David Thunder defines a good society as “the capacity of individuals to pursue and enjoy personal and communal flourishing in ways that are responsive to their own rationally informed and uncoerced choices and their own sense of meaning and purpose”. Why is it that living in a country as great, beautiful and as resource rich as Canada, is it no longer possible to make out our own happiness and shape our destiny? Canadians resort to their daily grind of struggle with grocery costs, unaffordable housing, lower wages, skyrocketing inflation, dwindling productivity, high unemployment, fight for basic parental rights, eroding rights for bodily autonomy, punishing regulations, disappearing property rights, state suicide veiled as virtue for illnesses that can be treated, going so far as bypassing the family’s consent for euthanizing young people, the horrifying expansion of euthanasia in babies, living funerals, deaths of despair in farmers, the macabre slaughter of 300 healthy, sentient ostriches in a kill pen when the tests were negative, expanding state of digital surveillance with Bill C-22, and so on.
Canada’s history is indelibly rooted in Christian values and it is these values that built our country: our legal and political frameworks emerged from British and French legal traditions, which assumed God’s supremacy and embedded ideals of liberty, moral duty and communal responsibility. However, thanks to liberal progressivism (unlike classical liberalism), our morality, culture, and national character, spun into an endless spiral of revisionism, have now collapsed. We have become a country of merely just surviving, not striving over mastery of our human potential, nor building a prosperous future embedded with pride, guided by common values of a beautiful land whose generations took immigrants like us, in. We have, in gratitude, adopted Canada as our home, by assimilating, contributing and producing.
As Professor Bruce Pardy asserts, the rise of the managerial state now aggressively seeks to criminalize our own thoughts and feelings alongside religious speech with its latest and crushing attempt at criminalizing “hate speech” with Bill C9: the censorship bill with terms of up to life imprisonment. Despite significant resistance raised by Canadians and civil rights groups, by top-down Liberal diktat, our Parliamentary Representatives have been censored from debating the censorship bill inside of Parliament. Bill C9, as it stands, is dangerously close to becoming law. Canadians then, are not even people anymore, they are machines managed by the state. MP Sandra Cobena, in a breathtaking exchange with Marc Miller, Minister of Identity and Culture, about clause 208 of the Budget Bill and Bill C-15, asked why cabinet ministers would have broad discretionary powers, effectively above the law, learned that it would be “helpful to have” and that “Canadians expect us to be judicious in our decision making.” Furthermore, at the last hour on March 17th, the Liberal government has once again appealed the invocation of the Emergencies Act to the Supreme Court, despite both the Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeals determining that invoking the Act did not meet the threshold. Twice, the same arguments were rejected. As Dr. Bruce Pardy forewarned us that this may happen, the biggest question now is, will Chief Justice Wagner recuse himself, as he rightfully should, having called the peaceful protest a “small beginning of anarchy where some people decided to take other citizens hostage”? It is clear, in my view, that our constitutional right to protest is slowly eroding, as the freezing of bank accounts has infused a sense of fear of professional persecution and economic harms. Suddenly, our willingness to exercise that basic right becomes too much of a risk to bear. Rather than our government getting out of the way then, they are here to decide for us, dismissing our responsibility to think for ourselves, to grow our potential, to define our destiny and to learn from our mistakes. They are here then, to strip us of hope.
This is not the Canada that rang hope from afar for my parents. This is not why they sacrificed so much to raise us here. This is Canada in an unrecognizable and accelerated economic, social and political decline, stripped of her wasted potential in a land inherently wealthy, vast and beautiful. A Canada that has broken millions of hearts. This is not flourishing; it is totalitarianism. It strips every Canadian of their right to agency, to purpose, to the pursuit of meaning through authenticity. If holding views that may be contrarian leaves us worrying who we may offend, and if this national paranoia is a requirement for social and economic survival, then Canada, by her own rulers, has been robbed of her very soul. Canadians don’t want to sing in the choir of life conducted by our rulers – we want to write our own song, not have it written for “our safety”. We can figure out what is hateful all on our own. We can also figure out what we believe to be true or not. As MP Andrew Lawton eloquently pointed out: “the best remedy, even for offensive speech, is more speech, not enforced silence…censorship is the confession of a society that it no longer trusts truth to win...in the absence of freedom of expression, there are only official lies… there is no citizen so small that their voice must be denied the light.”
Canada’s social structure has devolved into a toxic one, wherein our rulers fail to recognize where boundaries in society lie, as they continue to encroach upon how we navigate our social and economic lives. Canadians have been made to believe that we must obey as if we are children, by complying and being virtuous. In infantilizing our citizenry, purportedly for “our own good”, Canadians, in their vehement acquiescence towards our rulers, have ended up in a toxic relationship with one another. We no longer delineate the insidiousness of abuse but acquiesce towards it. As Thunder eloquently points out, when the state accumulates excessive power over its citizens, it is no longer able to recognize boundaries of autonomy or legitimate concerns raised by intermediaries under its authority. Canada has a case of Stockholm Syndrome: we are in love with our abuser to cope with surviving in our own country which we love. Rather than our rulers serving us, we have let them abuse us. It is time to stop this toxic cycle.
By cc: Dr. Leslyn Lewis, Preston Manning, Mattias Desmet, Trish Wood