“The Trouble with Canada….still”

Author William Gairdner interviewed by Mark Sutcliffe of CFRA

Canadians for Language Fairness, December 28, 2010

By Kim McConnell

It still puzzles me why most Canadians are still not aware of the reasons for Canada being such an unhappy country – there are so many problems and none of them are easy to solve. 

Listen to this interview by CFRA’s Mark Sutcliffe and send your comments to William Gairdner at wgairdner@gmail.com

Those of us who have been paying attention will agree with Mr. Gairdner’s list of problems.  I mention here just a partial list:

 

• Welfare Statism
• Canada’s Health-care
• The Criminal Justice System
• Multiculturalism, Immigration and Terrorism
• Trudeau’s Charter

My focus is on Chapter 14 entitled, French-Fried – Official Bilingualism, Separatism and the Politics of Language & Culture.  He gives a complete history of how this is the result of the attempt to turn Canada into a socialist state. 

“The crucial national factor in this story was that Canada’s history of blandishments to French Canadians, once in the hands of the master politician Pierre Trudeau, became a key tool in the creation of his dream:  a more socialist nation, from sea to sea, along French rationalist lines…..What Trudeau’s Charter would eventually achieve legally, his 1969 OLA achieved culturally.  But his game plan went unnoticed by most English Canadians, who still see the learning of French simply as a fine (even a snobbish) cultural achievement.  Of course, learning any additional language is indeed a fine achievement.  But Trudeau’s official bilingualism was not primarily about language.  It was about national political power and unity.  What Trudeau wanted most---disliking intensely what he considered irrational English-style checkerboard federalism in general, and free-market capitalism in particular--- was a strong socialist nation governed by uniform national regulations, standards, and funding, coast to coast.”

The paragraph on the cost of Official Bilingualism ended in this sentence:

“Federally at least, Canada would today be a debt-free nation”

if not for the mandated spending on bilingualism by the public and private sectors over the past 40 years. 

There is so much that I could quote from Mr. Gairdner’s book but I will be selective.

“So here’s the picture:  we have a situation in which full and free language rights have been legally suppressed for English speakers living in Quebec, at the same time as all other Canadians are being told their public and commercial world must by law become increasingly bilingual.  The result is that since the 1970s unilingual Canadians have had a much harder time gaining public or private employment wherever bilingualism is required.  The government of Canada is our largest employer by far, and as we have seen, offers very cushy jobs with wages above the private sector equivalent with dream pensions.  But as journalist Richard Gwyn puts it, those in the majority were destined “to be disadvantaged in life, through no fault of their own…The central inescapable fact of bilingualism [is] clear: it mean[s] loss of power for unilingual English Canadians.”

Gairdner also quotes from Peter Brimelow:

“they [unilingual Anglophones] constitute an improbably large bloc…to be permanently reduced to the status of second-class citizens”.

He continues:

“That the children of the majority should be required to bear the brunt of acculturation, particularly when their language is that of the entire continent, is a measure of the extent to which the [French] minority has the moral [and political] initiative in Canada”

My particular interest is in his final paragraph, “What’s Next?” 

“Canada must return to a condition of true federalism….means a return to our original pre-Trudeau decentralization:  more or less a sovereign nation of sovereign provinces, the central government and the provinces each with well-defined rights and obligations according to general or local matters, accordingly.  That is exactly what Canada’s original Constitution – the 1867 BNA Act—prescribed.  That was our founding British vision”

“But to return to the vision of our founders, to that original freedom and independence from all-pervasive Statism, we would need to scrap the Charter, return to our Common Law roots, stop all socialist transfer payments to provinces (and regions); live within our means both provincially and nationally, withdraw central government from all provinces in all areas from which the general government is barred by the BNA Act.  Then Quebec, like every other province, could live in peace and tolerably run its own affairs.  Quebec could continue as a French-style welfare state within Canada all on its own but without taking money from the rest of us to do that.”

Now who can disagree with that?

Kim