Standing Up For Canada
The next leader of the Liberal Party needs, more than anything else, to unapologetically stand up for Canada, Canadian democracy, and Canadian sovereignty in the face of significant foreign and domestic threats to its very foundation. And they need to be seen by Canadians as able to speak for them.
Jean Chretien wrote an op ed in the Globe and Mail on Saturday, celebrating his 91st birthday in style. His message can be boiled down to this paragraph in the middle:
And that leads me to my second message, to all our leaders, federal and provincial, as well as those who are aspiring to lead our country: Start showing that spine and toughness. That’s what Canadians want to see – what they need to see. It’s called leadership. You need to lead. Canadians are ready to follow.
The threat to democracy from Donald Trump’s presidency cannot be overstated. His very confirmation as President is in contravention of article 3 of the 14th amendment of the American constitution, thanks to his attempted coup on January 6th, 2021:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Allowing him to take the Oath of Office in just five days is a very direct, very explicit statement that the rule of law has completed its death throes in the United States, that the country has transitioned from an empire of laws to an empire of men. The transition is following a familiar 1930s roadmap, and so it is not hard to see where the country — and its neighbours — are headed.
Trump and his co-president and the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, have clear imperial objectives. Leaders who for reasons of ego and greed seek to take control of their neighbours’ lands and expand their empire are not simple matters of ancient history from an uncivilised time. Such people exist today and are now in control of the United States, Russia, and China. Other powers like India, too, are attempting to use their enormous expatriate communities and economic power to effect political changes beneficial to them in countries such as our own. We have been describing these problems over the past year as a kind of abstract and vague “foreign interference” but this greatly understates the severity of what is going on.
Musk is hardly the first person whose objective it is to rule the entire world. It is not hard to extrapolate from his statements and his work over the past decade that his intention is not only to expand the human race to Mars, but to be the first person in history to rule over a multi-planetary civilisation. His interference in European politics and this week’s endorsement of Pierre Poilievre, which is catching worldwide attention, should be rousing every sleepy Canadian to the threat before us.
Standing up for Canada and defending the very being of our democracy against this existential threat should be our number one priority. In considering who we should have as our Prime Minister, we should consider ourselves only one narrow level below being on a war footing.
What we need is not a Neville Chamberlain, looking to placate our hungry neighbours and find ways to make peace and continue our happy-go-lucky Canadianness, but a Winston Churchill who will unite the people of Canada and guide our struggle to retain our independence as our allies fall one after another to the anti-democratic forces rising across the world.
We need a leader who is unapologetically Canadian, who will stand up to Trump, to Musk, and to their lackey Pierre Poilievre. Someone who will stand firmly on the side of Ukraine and Taiwan, who are further along in the process Trump is threatening to put Canada through.
Poilievre may try to state that he is the one to defend Canada, but it is those threatening us who are endorsing him most strongly. Pierre would rather be Prime Minister of an American client state than an opposition leader in a strongly sovereign Canada. All the more ironic given his mentor Stephen Harper’s slogan was “Stand Up For Canada".
Trump does not have a sense of humour. He is not joking about taking over Canada, Greenland, Panama, and whatever other territories he hasn’t yet named. Musk’s ambitions are even harder to overstate. It would be dangerous to underestimate the first men ever to conquer the United States.
Our options are limited. None of the potential leadership candidates for the Liberal Party are obviously going to fill this role. It is not too late for all of them to start signalling their intention to play hardball on the world stage and assert, in concrete and not only rhetorical terms, that Canada is not up for grabs.
Chilling. It may be too late for Americans, but Canadians need to wake up to the existential threat we, too, are facing.
The discussion about US-Canada relations ignores the Seaway which goes through Quebec and Ontario to the US Midwest. All we have to do is to tear up the present deal and start a tariff increase on US ships using OUR resources to compensate for our increased tariffs to the US.
We can not just turn of electricity to US towns, ordinary Americans will be hit hard by that. WE must hit the US economy in general rather than ordinary Americans.