The French president, Emmanuel Macron, at the end of his visit to China this past week volunteered that the West is in a state of decline and that China is on the rise. My own belief is that the West is at a plateau from which it will resume its advance when the United States surmounts its current state of nervosity. Nor am I convinced of the inexorable rise of China: it is a totalitarian state prone to frequent errors in almost all aspects of its foreign and domestic policy and brutalizes its own population. Apart from the armed forces, and those with some reservation, no Chinese institution is much admired and no utterance or statistic published by the government of the People’s Republic is worthy of being believed.
China has practically no natural resources and hundreds of millions of people who still live primitively. It is much more adept at theft and espionage than at innovation and is hobbled by all the shortcomings of a largely command economy in an over-regimented society where much official energy is devoted to the suppression of freedom, particularly the freedom of religion. It is a phenomenal economic development story, but China is not about to take the leadership of the world.
The relevance to Canada of Macron’s remarks and similar statements is in their implications for our unique relationship with the United States. Canada has always had some difficulty defining its raison d’être as an independent country vis-à-vis the United States. The late leader of the federal Progressive Conservative party, Robert Stanfield, volunteered that if called upon to explain the difference between the two countries, that would give him “a great deal of difficulty,” but that there was a difference. There is. The United States has a revolutionary tradition: it is a people that used its own firearms in a popular and at times almost guerrilla war to secede from the British Empire, in a revolution that was in fact based on an undistinguished squabble about the right to tax. The real reason was that the Americans quite rightly felt that they could do a better job running their own country than the British could do for them, but they dressed it up and sold it as the birth of human liberty.
There has never in history been anything remotely comparable to the rapidity and force of the rise of America in only a couple of long lifetimes after the American Revolution to preeminence in the world, and for over a century the United States has operated on a scale that the world had never imagined to be possible. It attracted the attention of all mankind at its birth and has riveted the attention of the whole world ever since. The force, scale, panache and spectacular quality of America has somewhat intimidated Canada for centuries.
Canadians were initially a people composed of francophones who were afraid of being assimilated by the mass of English-speaking Americans, and anglophiles who wished to remain in solidarity with Great Britain. Both the French fact and the British connection served as mainstays of Canada’s national purpose for the first century of Canadian Confederation. But as English Canadians began to celebrate biculturalism and emphasize the learning of French in the mainly anglophone provinces, the French Canadians discovered the temptations of secession and independence and began the systematic oppression of the English language within Quebec.
This was the end of the French fact in Canada as a reinforcement of anglo-Canadian separation from America. The British connection has inevitably faded and Canada fell into the habit of effectively justifying its existence as an independent country because it was gentler, less competitive, and more socialistic than the gratingly pecuniary and comparatively violent United States, a country that however astounding its achievements, is every year more evidently a society that retains the nasty legacy of slavery and exercises the constitutional right to bear arms. It is a nation of a third of a billion people with 400 million guns.
Forty years ago, a serious poll showed that approximately 20 per cent of Canadians would favour federal union with the United States, and about 10 years ago columnist and author Diane Francis wrote a book proposing that Canada sell itself to the United States. Since then, in the last few years, an astonished world has witnessed the partial disintegration of American society. Allowing over 5,000 illegal immigrants a day across the U.S. southern border, masking the entry of tons of fentanyl that kills 70,000 Americans a year; skyrocketing crime rates, the debacle in Afghanistan, the paralyzing wokeness, official prostration before minority gender groups, the widespread national self-hate that debunks traditional star-spangled American patriotism, and a chairman of the joint chiefs of staff who has twice as many decorations on his tunic as Generals Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Marshall combined and predicted the Russian occupation of all of Ukraine within two weeks and is mainly preoccupied with critical race theory and the status of transgender people in his ranks; all of this shows a bumbling and even self-loathing America the world has not seen before.
I am confident that this is a pause in American national development and that sanity will return and that a new administration will resume the sane pursuit of America’s legitimate national interest. But the present unprecedented torpor shows that Canada must abandon its fable as the world’s Peter Pan, and its juvenile “post-national,” economically illiterate phantasmagoric seance about the universal mutual love of “peoplekind” that is being peddled by our Charlie Chaplin “Ministry of Global Affairs.”
The American crisis imposes on the other major western countries a recognition that the free lunch is over: we can’t all go on coasting on American coat-tails; a country “led” by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Alejandro Mayorkas, Merrick Garland, and Pete Buttigieg has no coat-tails. The U.S. will snap out of it but a country where one half of the nation’s polity is routinely perverting and hijacking the intelligence agencies and the national police and the justice system to torment and destroy the other half is not morally or practically capable of leading or even assuring the survival of Western Civilization.
Canada’s greatest gift, apart from a skilled, well motivated, and relatively peaceable population, is that it is a treasure house of every natural resource except tropical fruit. No other country has such an abundance of oil, gas, base and precious metals, forest products, and almost all agriculture. But because of the intellectual terror imposed by the apostles of an unsubstantiated and self-destructive green policy, we have lumbered ourselves with a self-conscious resentment of our own good fortune as a resources-rich country. In an orgy of artificially confected snobbery, we have allowed our manufacturing capacity to deteriorate and over-committed ourselves to a service economy. Unless they are much more skillfully targeted and sophisticated than our service sector is, service economies do not add real value and will not produce a competitive growth rate or attract from either domestic or foreign sources a sustainably large level of new annual capital investment.
The French and British still have the habit of acting as if they were Great Powers; the Germans, Japanese, Italians, and Indians are raising their game. Canada cannot pretend any longer that international politics is just a friendly game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. We have to grow up-all other important countries have done it, and it’s our turn.
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I apologize to Greg Piasetzki and the Western Standard for inadvertently quoting a couple of lines from them last week without attribution. In recounting John A. Macdonald’s service to Indigenous people, I took a couple of lines from Mr. Piasetzki’s piece. It had been sent to me by a reader but I printed it out incompetently and did not realize that it was the published work of an identified author. It was a recitation of some of Macdonald’s policies and I did substantially alter what I used in the normal process of composition but accidentally quoted a small part of it verbatim with no credit to the source, because I was ignorant of the source. I am grateful that several readers pointed out the similarity, which enables me to make this apology and correct my oversight.
National Post
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