The Trouble with Canada ... Still

William D. Gairdner

Description

Two decades ago The Trouble with Canada sparked a conservative renewal and inspired a generation.

Now, in this completely revised update, William D. Gairdner rejoins the battle, showing that Canada suffered a disturbing regime change in the last quarter of the twentieth century and is now caught between two irreconcilable styles of government: top-down collectivism and bottom-up individualism.

The result is a regime besotted with high taxation and big government, a welfare culture that rewards laziness, and a hug-a-thug mentality that betrays justice.

In The Trouble with Canada ... Still! Gairdner puts familiar topics under a searing new light, and recent issues, such as immigration, diversity, and corruption of the law, are confronted head on, yielding many startling -- and sure to be controversial -- conclusions. This book is a clarion call to arms for Canada to examine and renew itself before it is too late.

Sujets

• JUSTICE
• Passion (emotion)
• Big government
• Analytic
• Politics
• Entertainment
• Conservatism
• Imposition (fiscalité)
• Family
• Passion
• Science
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: BPS Books
• Date de parution: 14 novembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781926645711
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

THE TROUBLE WITH CANADA STILL!
THE TROUBLE WITH CANADA STILL!
A CITIZEN SPEAKS OUT
WILLIAM D. GAIRDNER
Copyright 2010 by William D. Gairdner
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
First published in 2010 by Key Porter Books, Toronto
Published in 2011 by
BPS Books
Toronto and New York
www.bpsbooks.com
A division of Bastian Publishing Services Ltd.
ISBN 967-1-926645-67-4
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data available from Library
and Archives Canada.
Cover design: Sonya V. Thursby
Cover image: Veer
Text design and typesetting: Alison Carr
For my family and all who cherish freedom and responsibility
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
PART ONE: THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
1: Canada s Regime Change
2: Eight Popular Illusions: Obstacles to Clear Thinking
3: Democratic Capitalism: Breaking the Chains of Economic Stagnation
4: The Freedom System: How It Works
5: The Handicap System: The Socialist Reaction to Democratic Capitalism
6: The Political Parties: Where They Once Stood- Where They Stand Now-And Where You Stand
7: Canada at a Glance: The Graphic Details
PART TWO: THE SHAPE WE RE IN
Introduction
8: The Great Welfare Rip-off: Soaking Everyone, To Pay Everyone
9: Foreign Aid: How Much? To Whom? And Why?
10: Radical Feminism: Attacking Traditional Society
11: Medical Mediocrity: An Autopsy on the Canadian Health Care System
12: The Criminal Justice System: Hug-a-Thug, and Public Safety Be Damned
13: Multiculturalism, Immigration, and Terrorism: The Links
14: French-Fried: Official Bilingualism, Separatism, and the Politics of Language and Culture
15: Here Comes the Judge!: How Canadians Lost Their Real Rights and Freedoms
16: Going Forth Boldly: A Call to Action
Notes
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are many people to whom I owe the deepest gratitude for helping me shape this book. First and foremost are my wife, family, and friends, who so often, even when they found themselves unfairly captive to my concerns of the moment, willingly served as sounding board and critic for many of the ideas expressed here.
Many others have assisted by way of direct research, tax calculations and charts, fact-finding, editorial comment, or, most often, with counter-arguments in open discussion that helped with the discernments essential to any such enterprise. I thank most sincerely: Niels Veldhuis, Milagros Palacios, Nadeem Esmail, Martin Collacott, James Bissett, John Thompson, Kevin Gaudet, Derek Fildebrandt, Janet Ajzenstat, Ian Gentles, Rory Leishman, Gwen Landolt, Diane Watts, Rainer Knopff, Chris Sarlo, Tom Flanagan, Ken Kristjanson, Salim Mansur, John von Heyking, Jean-Luc Migu , Richard Bastien, Andr Carrel, and Brian Day.
My gratitude to the staff of Key Porter Books of Toronto for their confidence in undertaking the first edition of this anniversary edition of the book, especially for the enthusiasm and intellectual interest of executive editor Jonathan Schmidt, the careful copy editing by Liba Berry, the insights and energy of Tom Best, VP Marketing, and the efforts of publicist Katherine Wilson. My thanks as well to the intrepid warriors of BPS Books for publishing the paperback edition.
PREFACE TO THE 2010 EDITION
When I began this revised and updated version some twenty years after the original, I was a little surprised that my feelings and motives were no less strong than in 1990. For a writer, the revision process after such a long period is an adventure because it forces an encounter between the facts then, and the facts now, the author then, and the author now. So I confess to a certain curiosity because many of the facts of our national life have changed, and so have I. More time, deeper reading, and more thinking about the trouble with Canada meant I was going to have to argue a little with the person I was in 1990.
THE FIRST WARNINGS: WHEN I VOTED FOR TRUDEAU
My first sense there was trouble with Canada began during the Trudeau era (1968-1984) when I saw this fine country falling into the clutches of what I was quite certain were sweet-sounding but inherently destructive political, economic, and social policies. Until then, I was a completely non-political person who had actually voted once for the bright-sounding man with the rose in his lapel. I always admired Trudeau s strength of character, political savvy, passion, and decisiveness. In retrospect, I still do. But my instinct told me he was instigating a one-man regime change for the worse in the country I knew and loved. In all the most important political, economic, social, and legal aspects of Canadian life he was turning the country upside down. And by what right? Political and legislative change of the ordinary sort is one thing; that can be reversed by a free people. But changes to the fundamental moral, legal, economic, and even linguistic foundations and understandings of an entire people ought to require more than a slim majority in Parliament.
So, entirely new feelings began to arise, along with a pervasive sense of helplessness. For how do you fight back when the political parties among which we must choose are so identical in their thinking? No party back then was complaining-or has since complained-about the sudden transformation of Canada from a free, common law-based constitutional democracy in which the will of the people as voiced in Parliament was supreme, into a new, constitutionally mandated welfare state far too often directed by the rule of unelected judges who cannot be removed by any power in the land. 1 Trudeau plopped his Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms on top of us in 1982, and it states (sec. 52) that to the extent that any (existing or future) law of Canada is inconsistent with the Charter, it is of no force or effect. As I saw it, with the stroke of his pen, the will of the Canadian people was subjected forevermore to an alien form of entrenched, judge-dictated Statism. This book is one man s best effort to lay bare the details of this regime change and to suggest ways to reverse it and regain our true freedoms and rights.
This is not a book about Trudeau. But I am very critical of Trudeau and his socialist fellow-travellers of that time, for I saw him then, and still do, rather as Tolstoy saw Napoleon. The dictator, he said, was an actor in the tide of time, a man riding inside the carriage of history, holding ribbons that he thought were the reins. In the same vein, and with lots of personal flourish, Trudeau was a kind of flamboyant actor on the stage of Canadian history, reading his lines and cues from a script written mostly by influential French social planners of the seventeenth century and forward. So although Trudeau often comes under attack in this book, its main thrust is not personal. Rather, it is a critique of an entire style of continental rationalism of which his whole life-his lifelong motto was Reason before Passion -was an expression. I argue that even though this style of rational social planning gave rise to a politics alien to our founding ideals and to our roots in British liberty, he nevertheless almost single-handedly managed to impose it on an entire nation, and for that we continue to pay the price detailed in this book.
WESTERN COMMUNISM GONE (NOW ON DISPLAY ONLY IN TAX-FUNDED UNIVERSITIES)
In the twenty years since 1990, in many unexpected ways, Canada and the world have changed a lot. As if in an impossible dream, we witnessed the astonishingly rapid demise of international communism and the Soviet bloc, the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Evil Empire. Many of us hoped this would be a final and definitive lesson to the West that socialism doesn t work, except in heaven where you don t need it, and in hell where you already have it. But we can see now that the Evil Empire served a beneficial purpose, too. It was America s-and the West s-definitive ideological enemy, and by dint of sheer opposition it provoked us to hang on to the fragments and tatters of our founding belief in liberty. But there has not been a totalitarian enemy on the Left for some time now against which to contrast and defend those beliefs. And with the ascension of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency-an office that a tyranny-fearing American founder, in a wonderfully memorable expression, condemned as the fetus of Monarchy -we are at this very moment watching our once freedom-loving neighbours charge full steam into the arms of the State.
This still feels rather strange to anyone who recalls that in the aftermath of World War II, to call someone a socialist -let alone a Red, or a communist, or a pinko -was tantamount to the worst of insults, both in Canada and the United States. After all, people such as my godfather, who died at twenty-two when his Spitfire was shot down south of Paris with a 500-pound bomb on board, were convinced they were fighting to prevent the spread of Statism, whether national socialist (Nazism), or international socialist (communism). But now the word socialist has come into common parlance as a normal and acceptable descriptive term for . . . what we have become. I am certain if my godfather could return to see what we have done with the freedoms for which he gave his life, he would say he died in vain.
WORLD WAR IV AND THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
The other major change is still very much with us. The burning images of the Twin Towers collapsing and people leaping to their death