Canadian Liberalism's Long Slow-Motion Suicide.

Ottawa Citizen Op-ed blog:
My essay in today's Ottawa Citizen, an extended-play version of my usual column, reflects upon the kuffar timidity of liberalism’s spoiled Canadian beneficiaries, the abandonment of Canadian Muslims to Khomeinist-patrolled identity ghettos and the very specific reasons why it's all so strangely unmentionable in polite company. For starters.

By the tone I took I expect I've betrayed my low opinion of Justin Trudeau. I admit it, I don't much fancy him or the mock-liberalism he personifies. That isn't to say I have some axe to grind with the Liberals, as I'll explain.

But first, another thing I may not have made clear enough. It isn't the original Canadian conception of multiculturalism that gets up my nose, and it certainly isn't the function it was intended to serve, which, in a cruel irony, was the emancipation of Canadians from their perpetual identity crises once and for all. It's "actually-existing" multiculturalism I was on about, and the influences of the social sciences and humanities departments would have caused it to go haywire even if we hadn't entrenched the idea in Canada's constitution.

The occasion of last weekend's weirdness in Toronto wasn't the first time that I've been struck by melancholia, or nostalgia, about what a fine thing it would be if Canada had a liberal party. The notion came to me several times while I was reading the British journalist Nick Cohen's sharply lively You Can’t Read This Book. 

It's a delineation of all the new legal, digital and speech-code ramparts that have lately sprung up to reinforce the battlements around God, money and the state. Cohen makes a convincing case that the great emancipation of the Internet Age is mostly an illusion. The recent bedlamming that settled on a 14-minute Youtube video as its pretext, the violently illiberal demands that have ensued and the scramble to apologize and censor as a response, all seem to prove the soundness of that particular aspect of Cohen's observation.

Do buy Nick's book. It will do you good. While I'm at it, read Nick regularly. He's top drawer, as they used to say. Really. Just read his latest: God, Guns, Welfare - Conspiracy Theories about Working-Class Americans.    

Anyway, it was when I noticed the Canadian parallels to the ways the British and European elites have betrayed liberalism’s bedrock principles, as Cohen makes painfully clear, that the idea first occurred to me that Canada would very much benefit from a federal liberal party and that the Liberal Party of Canada might give it a go. It would do the Grits some good, besides, to spend some time wondering about their own complicity in Canadian liberalism’s routs and humiliations.

Mind you, it would not be easy work. The party would have to begin by confronting its own sordid and long-standing complicities with the moneybags tyranny in Beijing, if only because Beijing's ill-gotten capital is weighing Canada's galleon down to the gunwhales at the moment with the Conservatives happily at the helm. The Liberal Party would also have to abandon all saccharine whingeing about big tents, purge its ranks from top to bottom and ruthlessly patrol its precincts against the mock-liberal bigots who prefer to soothe and infantilize Muslims by making the excuse for Islamist crackpottery that pretends it’s somehow all “our” fault. 

The party would have to do all of that and much more besides if it hoped to make any use of itself at all  to liberalism’s bold cause. It does seems unlikely, I know, and that's another reason why I'm not holding my breath. It's not just because the party of Wilfrid Laurier appears to be rushing headlong to anoint, as its new leader, the Honourable Member for Zoolander. 

Honest, I don't mean to single out the Liberal Party. There are quite a few stand-up gadgies in the party and some of them are MPs for whom I have some sincere respect, and even affection, in one or two cases.

I could have gone after the Conservative Party too, if only to note in passing that its capacity to defend liberalism from the specific threats I was on about is encumbered not just by its name (they're not called Conservatives for nothing and they're not called Progressive Conservatives anymore). The rank and file remains susceptible to a species of bigotry that holds Muslims to be incorrigibly rage-prone and congenitally ill-disposed to democracy. There. I've said it. Happy now? Now I will ruin things by noting in passing that they're doing a much better job defending liberal principles these days than I'd have imagined.   

I didn't bother examining the New Democrats' suitability to defend liberalism, but it wasn't to go easy on them. to be fair, the NDP just doesn't have much of a track record in defending liberal principles because that was always somebody else’s job. It should say enough that in the influential Toronto sections of the NDP’s activist base, the Khomeinist Zafar Bangash (my Citizen piece makes clear I don't much fancy him either) will be most familiar as that nice man from the Toronto Stop the War Coalition who makes all those delightfully rousing speeches about the wicked American imperialists.

The Liberal Party of Canada, though, does still call itself the Liberal Party of Canada.