Conrad Black: Canada must mature as a nation

Article content

Matters like this are normally worked out between mature countries with a minimum of public histrionics in a compromise that reflects the balance of the competing interests. What is happening now is a sort of primal scream therapy expressing 150 or more years of Canadian frustration at our smaller population and lesser influence in the world than the United States, and particularly our inability to rival or emulate the American genius for the spectacle and for self-glorification. The Declaration of Independence led directly to Hollywood and the Super Bowl: the Declaration was beautifully written, but three quarters of it was complete fiction, but America has electrified the world these 250 years. Canada has not been electrifying, but it has kept pace with American growth, until the last 10 years, a remarkable achievement.

Article content

It is hard to avoid the suspicion that a considerable impulse in the Canadian position is derived from the socialistic and dirigist tendencies of our prime minister. Carney seems to take himself for the global David firing his slingshot at the orange-tufted Goliath of the American president. He is overtly doing his best to hurt Trump in the midterm elections in November and while bandying recondite but irrelevant asides about the ancient Greeks, he is trying to fill the role of Trump-tamer of the world. This isn’t Finland resisting Russia in 1940; it is more like Romania declaring war on Germany in 1915, (without the inducements provided by the Allies). If this brinkmanship goes much further, it will not be sane.

Article content

Article content

Carney is pushing a “war” against the country to which we sell about 70 per cent of our exports, the country upon which we are completely dependent for our own military security. And Carney appears to be much more the continuator than the reformer of the helter-skelter immigration policies that have put terrible pressure on housing costs for Canadians of modest incomes. The fact that nearly 45 per cent of Canadians are foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents heaps tremendous social costs on the country. Canada’s fertility rate of 1.25 is among the lowest in the Western world and we are the assisted suicide capital of the world with the beaming encouragement of our terribly inadequate public health-care system.

Article content

Diversification of Canadian trade is an admirable objective; leaping into the arms of the Chinese, who attempted to disguise the nature and extent of the Covid threat for which Chinese negligence, if not malice, was responsible, is not an acceptable answer. The Chinese are conducting a form of genocide on the Uighurs, and have meddled in Canadian elections, and profess to be the proud continuators of the greatest murderer in history: Mao Zedong, who was responsible for the deaths of 70 to 90 million of his countrymen.

Article content

Article content

Does anyone really want to replace the U.S. with China, even if that were possible? It is our self-destructive immigration, economic and energy policies that have caused us to tumble down the charts of the world’s most prosperous countries per capita. The United States did not compel us to adopt European-style socialism, disorganized mass immigration, absurdly subsidized green energy, effective disarmament through negligence. The Americans didn’t tell us not to have children or limit our health care costs by promoting the virtues of suicide: we have ourselves to thank for those inspirations.

Article content

Carney apparently thought he was facing an open opposition goal mixing it up with Trump, who is rebuilding American foreign policy with its principal allies being countries that pursue parallel goals by parallel means, such as Argentina, United Arab Emirates, and Japan. He has little time for freeloading, piously moralizing pseudo-allies. Canada likes to reply to Trump’s annoying insults, but in any sort of nonviolent conflict with the United States, we are greatly more vulnerable than the adversary: the U.S. accounts for half of our GDP; the reciprocal figure is only about three per cent. We saw hints of this in August when Canada lost 42,000 jobs while the United States gained 160,000.