The anti-woke heroes pushing back against Canada's self-destructive torpor

Approximately 20 years ago, my distinguished friend Frank Buckley, a prominent intellectual commentator, author and academic, moved from Canada to the United States to accept a university appointment. He said he was “going from the best country in the world to the greatest country in the world,” and added that they are both great and good countries. While they remain great and good countries, they are both very beleaguered. The United States has a palsied administration that for two years has been incapable of any coherent activity except the provisioning of arms to Ukraine. Urban crime is skyrocketing and large districts of many cities have turned into shooting galleries. Millions of people are pouring in across the southern border, unskilled, undocumented, and enriching human traffickers. Three-quarters of Americans believe that their country is headed in the wrong direction, but are frightened by the opposition. Inflation is out of control. Of course the United States will recover, though probably without any serious reform of its extensive political corruption and dysfunctional legal system. It is incomparably the most powerful country in the world but it is enduring the most difficult times that have afflicted it since the Great Depression 90 years ago.

Canada remains a relatively civil country but it is progressively more paralyzed by unchallenged wokeness. At least in the United States, political correctness is violently contested and though its opponents are a minority in the media and the sports and entertainment industries, they are audible at all times, dividing government approximately in half and surely representing a majority of the country. In Canada, dissent from hopeless political correctness is conducted in periodic outbursts by a few of us trying to maintain a rearguard action until the heavy dough of Canadian public opinion mobilizes itself to the great cause that awaits it. One of Canada’s most justly illustrious people, who has not authorized me to name him, wrote me last week of his discouragement to read that the transgender schoolteacher in Ontario endowed with hypertrophic artificial breasts will be allowed to continue to teach in this mode and that a poll showed that the majority of Canadians would support the return of COVID mask mandates. These are disturbing developments; it is preposterous for a maladjusted exhibitionist to be permitted to teach in a public school, and the great majority of Canadians should by now be aware that most of our repressive COVID regime served little useful medical purpose and caused immense socioeconomic and psychological damage to the country.

Illustrative of Canada’s current malaise is the persecution, for stating uncontroversial facts, of a British Columbia schoolteacher and the ambiguous reception given to a distinguished veteran of the Armed Forces when he received the Vimy Award for exceptional merit as an officer. In the first case, Abbotsford, B.C., high school teacher Jim McMurtry has been tormented by students exploiting the fact that mere denunciation will spook the school administration into suspending a teacher. His principal alleged offence was that he attempted to reassure one student who was in a state of shocked grief over the allegation that priests and nuns had murdered 215 Indigenous children at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, by stating the fact that most of the children who died in the residential school system perished from disease. He was rebutting the frequent spin of many in the media — always overeager to accuse our ancestors and especially our Christian religious personnel of unspeakable atrocities against First Nations people. After variants of this gruesome fiction had been amplified to the whole world and Canadian flags kept at half mast for six months on all official sites, including our embassies abroad, it finally came to light that there is no evidence whatever to support any part of this charge. It is not clear that anyone was buried at the site mentioned, or that there was any misconduct. If anyone did die and was buried at that site in Kamloops, there is no reason to believe they died from anything other than natural causes. Yet the Abbotsford School District human resources director accused McMurtry of expressing an opinion that was ”inflammatory, inappropriate, insensitive and contrary to the district’s message of condolences and reconciliation.”

On an earlier occasion, McMurtry was censored for responding to a question about how convicted murderer Paul Bernardo was apprehended. There had also been a previous incident involving a reference by McMurtry to his wife, and although he was ultimately exonerated on this charge, the effect of these episodes has been that McMurtry, a highly educated man and the son of the very liberal-minded former attorney general of Ontario and high commissioner to the United Kingdom, Roy McMurtry, has been suspended for 15 of the last 22 months. This entire outrageous incident is a fascistic proceeding. That is where wokeness leads.

Retired Lt.-Gen. Michel Maisonneuve received a generous ovation for his Vimy Award address before a distinguished military-oriented audience in Ottawa on Nov. 9. Maisonneuve served 35 years in the Canadian Armed Forces and 10 years as the academic director of the Royal Military College Saint Jean. He gave evidence in The Hague against Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, is a well-known and effective advocate of veterans’ causes and of official bilingualism and was the first chief of staff of NATO’s Supreme Allied Command Transformation at the immense U.S. military complex in Norfolk, Va. In his remarks in Ottawa, he praised Canada’s history for its unbroken military success from the War of 1812 through the two world wars, as well as for the invention of the telephone, insulin, the zipper, the snowblower and for cultural figures such as Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of “Anne of Green Gables.” He blamed wokeness and the atomization of society into separate groups of complainers, and biased elements of the media, and inadequate education standards, for the fact that, as he put it, “Canada was a great nation,” but is “faltering today.” He does, however, “believe we can be great again (but) it will take leadership and service … to take the world stage again; to be thought of first when it comes to seeking alliances, to be seen as a serious country once again.” Of course, he is absolutely correct and an increasing number of Canadians are evidently subscribing to similar opinions. He was well received on the night, but much criticized afterwards by those who were discomfited by his remarks.

Our civilization is being awakened by these enormities from its self-destructive torpor. Maisonneuve and McMurtry should be promoted in their chosen fields of expertise to assist in the reconstruction of Canada as a country that respects itself and is admired in the world. We were admired once, and we will be again.

Material republished with the express permission of: National Post, a division of Postmedia Network Inc