EDITORIAL: How others see the new woke Canada

Article content

A seven-part series in London’s Daily Telegraph recently took a hard look at Canada’s lurch to the left, examining this country’s “progressive legislation on issues such as drugs, free speech, trans rights and assisted dying.”

The essays provide a unique perspective on this country — as others see us.

One scathing assessment was from Eric Kaufman, a politics professor at the University of Buckingham. He was raised in Vancouver but has spent three decades teaching in the U.K.

Under the headline “Canada is disintegrating,” he quotes Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from his triumphal 2015 New York Times interview: “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.”

Since then, Trudeau “set to work ripping the country’s historic identity to shreds,” says Kaufman.

“The three prongs of the attack involved setting fire to its past, promoting LGBTQ and critical race theory in schools and government and unleashing an unprecedented wave of mass migration.

“Only now that the full impact of this cultural revolution is sinking in is the country waking up,” Kaufman wrote.

He talks about how Trudeau has described arson attacks on churches as “understandable” in response to unmarked graves being found at residential schools.

He also criticizes human rights tribunals for acting like “kangaroo courts” for “subjectively-defined offences like misgendering. Trudeau’s government has majored on speech policing and authoritarianism towards the right, abusing the language of ‘hate’ and ‘misinformation’ while trafficking in both.”

He reports on the dire outcome of this left-wing bafflegab.

“The downstream effects of this woke revolution include falling per capita GDP, rising crime and youth unemployment, soaring house prices and a surge in homeless encampments.”

RECOMMENDED VIDEO

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

Try refreshing your browser, or
tap here to see other videos from our team.

Play Video

He slams Trudeau’s open-door immigration policy.

“If you think Britain, with 50% more people than Canada, took in a lot of immigrants last year, consider that Canada admitted a staggering 1.9 million to the U.K.’s 1.2 million.

He concludes by looking on the bright side.

“Perhaps the only silver lining to the story is that Trudeau’s dumpster fire seems to have woken people up. Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are crushing the Liberals in the polls by nearly 20 points, on course for a clear majority of seats.”

That’s the view from the outside. Of course, those of us who are living this “progressive” nightmare know all this already.