With few constraints, Justin Trudeau has turned Canada into a laboratory for left-wing policies.
With few constraints, Justin Trudeau has turned Canada into a laboratory for left-wing policies.
T here is little reason why Canada should feature in National Review or deserve journalistic treatment anywhere, except as a joke. It’s a nation without a purpose for its existence and a void in place of a national character. Whereas America is defined by its political freedom, Britain by its rich cultural and political history, Australia by its frontier spirit, and New Zealand by its unique Anglo-Maori culture, Canada is the only Western, anglophone, liberal democracy with absolutely nothing else about it. This lack of national identity — or, as its prime minister, Justin Trudeau, describes it, “post-national” — makes it dull, uninteresting, and unworthy of respect. Ask Canadian citizens what their country means to the world, and they’ll genuinely struggle to give you an answer. As a citizen of Canada myself, I readily conclude that there is none.
Yet despite its pipsqueak significance, Canada has done something that should give Americans pause. Last weekend, Trudeau announced his government’s plans to dramatically curtail firearm ownership in the country. A new bill introduced in Canada’s parliament would ban the purchase, sale, import, or transfer of handguns, freezing the number of such weapons in the country. Meanwhile, over 1,500 types of long-barreled guns — sweepingly termed “assault-style weapons” — including the AR-15, would not only be banned but would be subject to seizure by the government, without owners’ consent, for destruction, with compensation after the fact. The first of such “buybacks,” as they’ve been euphemized, is set to begin before the end of the year.
To anyone who has ever thought of Canada for more than five seconds (there aren’t too many), this will come as no surprise. In the absence of any national myth, the country has spent its life clinging to a crude, absurd fiction — namely, that it’s “better than the United States” — for self-validation. Expressing a moral condescension as policy, Canada uses anti-Americanism to affirm its supposed relevance to a world of divided opinions of the U.S., while sidestepping its own long-running existential crisis. As Jonah Goldberg once put it in NR, it is the “sick man of North America.” Given that in conserving its Constitution, America is an inherently conservative country, this has meant that Canada — always looking for a soapbox on which to lecture Americans — has been veering ever leftward. In keeping with that, Trudeau’s progressive Liberal Party has held power for 75 of the last 100 years, often winning on expressly anti-American platforms; during this time the country has become a Fabian socialist paradise. Universal single-payer health care, high rates of income and sales taxes, a small and decrepit military, online restrictions on free speech, and radical climate policy are among the policies in place up north — always held up in shining contrast to the south.
This impulse is the immediate rationale behind Trudeau’s gun ban, announced after the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, last week. Never mind that Canada is a separate country with no connection to the tragedy whatsoever — and no sustained problem of mass shootings, either. Canada found a moment to condescend to a grieving America while further tightening its own witheringly strict gun laws. “We need only look south of the border to know that if we do not take action, firmly and rapidly, it gets worse and worse and more difficult to counter,” Trudeau said, dripping with self-righteousness, at a press conference announcing the law. He added, “Other than using firearms for sport shooting and hunting, there is no reason anyone in Canada should need guns in their everyday lives.”
On one hand, this goes to show that America has a nasty neighbor. Beneath Canada’s polite smile and gross dependence on the U.S. economy is spiteful jealousy. Frankly, like Canada itself, this too can be ignored. More important, however, is what its gun ban could illustrate to Americans — i.e., what might happen if a country’s Left wins its war on its own domestic institutions and proceeds to enact its true agenda, without constraint. To wit: In Canada, the Left has not just dominated the government but conquered public life in its entirety.
Indeed, the Liberal Party’s dominance and policies are just the tip of the iceberg. In Canada, there are no inviolable “rights” under the law — no rights to speech, press freedom, or equal protection of the law, and no protections against arbitrary detention, or cruel and unusual punishment; in stark contrast to the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, under which no person can be deprived of life without due process of the law, it is a quirk of Canadian law that a person may theoretically be so deprived. The Canadian constitution allows them all to be suspended with a simple majority in parliament or a provincial legislature. Unlike the U.S. Senate, the Canadian Senate is not a body that gives weaker provinces a voice on par with the strong. Instead, it’s a chamber of “sober second thought” with a composition skewed to the largest, progressive provinces; its members are unelected, instead appointed by the prime minister, and have no term limits, and its powers are nearly coequal with those of the House.
Virtually all of Canada’s judges are appointed by executive fiat, with no advise-and-consent provision for Parliament. This enables progressives to pack the courts with left-wing jurists, who have rubber-stamped everything from Covid travel bans to curbs on the presumption of innocence in legal proceedings. It’s what has allowed Trudeau — who holds no majority in Parliament and lost the popular vote to conservatives in Canada’s last two elections — to push through a full agenda of progressive and left-wing policies, including drug legalization, broadcast regulation, limits on online speech, and reparations (to aboriginal groups). Gun restrictions are but one more ghastly creation in the left-wing laboratory that is Canada’s government.
Needless to say, this is most unlike America — a nation with an enduring constitution and individual rights, not least among them the right to bear arms. Yet when the Court-packing, Senate filibuster–hating, anti-gun wing of the Democratic Party looks to the north, it sees a utopia, a model of how to remake our system of government and reimagine the Constitution to serve its agenda. On guns, these Democrats do not view the Second Amendment as a natural right, and they don’t think citizens may legitimately use guns for self-defense. It’s why they have tried to set up roadblocks to gun access, claim that the Second Amendment pertains only to service in a “militia” (misinterpreting D.C. v. Heller), and even — as no less a figure than retired justice John Paul Stevens did — call for its total repeal. On a smaller scale, with free rein in Trudeau’s northern fiefdom, Canada’s progressives have achieved what their American counterparts apparently seek.
This should be a reminder to all Americans of the slippery slope that tends to follow from progressive policies. If we’re not vigilant on gun rights — both the House and the Senate are set to consider Democratic-led gun-control measures — and other proposed reforms to institutions — e.g., the filibuster, the Supreme Court, and the Electoral College — the Left will gleefully erode the principles that define America. In short, America may become like Canada — something that nobody ought to want, not even Canada itself.