Terry Newman: Justin Trudeau to America — we're actually better than you

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On Thursday, our still-prime-minister-despite-a-resignation-announcement, Justin Trudeau, sat down with CNN’s Jake Tapper to discuss his own definition of climate change, how helpful his texts with California Governor Gavin Newsom have been for their wildfires, and how his own “compassionate and selfless” leadership is modelled after the recently deceased President Jimmy Carter. Then, suddenly, despite Trudeau’s consistent claims against the existence of a Canadian national identity up until this point, Trudeau revealed to Tapper, an American, sitting right across from him, that Canada does, indeed, have a national identity — it’s anything America is not

This sudden proclamation of our national identity was made after Tapper asked Trudeau: “President-elect Trump has been needling you a bit, calling you Governor Trudeau, talking about making Canada the 51st state, did you have any interaction with him today?”

Trudeau responded, “No. Not today. But that’s not going to happen. Canadians are incredibly proud of being Canadian. One of the ways we define ourselves most easily is, well, we’re not American. There is such a depth of pride that that’s not actually an issue.”

So, according to Justin Trudeau, our newly-revealed proud national identity is, and should be, not an identity at all, but an anti-identity. One set up in contradiction to another nation which happens to border us and is supposed to our greatest friend and ally.

As for Trudeau’s face when he made the remarks, there was no hesitation. No moment where he looked like he may have said something ignorant or potentially offensive. No sign that he was at all aware that he was sitting directly across from an American when he said it.

Unfortunately, the camera wasn’t on Tapper at the time, but I would love to see that outtake, as well as the expressions of anyone in the studio at the time.

In short, our inspired-to-be “compassionate and selfless” prime minister accepted an interview on a foreign news station and essentially said, everything you stand for, our country is against?— and he did this on live television for the entire world to see.

Setting ourselves up in contradiction to Americans implies we believe we are better than them. This, simply put, is arrogance, and it negates the most common argument put forward for Canada’s superiority — that we are somehow nicer than them. This is the type of argument I expect from a mediocre social science undergrad, not from a serious leader of a country who is supposed to be an ally to, and who needs to negotiate with, our neighbours to the south.

This is a vision of national identity Canadians should refuse to accept. As a nation, if we fail to define ourselves, others will gladly do it for us.

So, if not an anti-American national identity, then what?

A Canadian national identity needs to be based on Canadian values. This is a notion that Justin Trudeau, his Liberals, and even our state-funded comedy has openly mocked. Most notable of these mockings were the attacks made by CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes on 2017 Conservative Party leadership candidate Kellie Leitch.

Leitch’s suggestions that Canada might need to start defining our values and test for them during immigration, or that a hotline might be needed to report dangerous instances at variance with our culture may have been clumsy, (for instance, good luck asking anyone on a citizenship test whether they’d break our values, as they could always just lie), but her concerns were not racist, which was widely suggested, and they did not exist in a vacuum.

At the time, Canada was starting to see horrific cultural practices we had never seen before — honour killings, most notably, the Shafia family murders, where a mother and father (and their son) were convicted in the killing of their three daughters and the father’s first wife. Whether or not the victims would still be alive today if there had been a hotline for them to call is unclear.

But at least Leitch had the courage to try to protect women from cultural acts like honour killings and the foresight to anticipate that cultural problems might grow. And grow they have.

In 2025, there are imams who openly call for the death of Jews and advocate for Sharia law in their mosques. Khalistani activists have violently attacked worshippers outside their Hindu temples. A Second Cup Manager at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal felt completely comfortable making a Nazi salute near her alma mater, Concordia University. Samidoun, which was only recently designated a terrorist group, burned the Canadian flag in the streets of Vancouver.

Elsewhere, things are much worse. In Britain, horrific reports of industrial scale grooming and child rape by predominately Muslim Pakistani men were frequently ignored due to authorities’ fears of being accused of racism and their concerns about “community cohesion” are now finally making their way to the public.

This is where our future lies, if we continue to fail to define our national identity and its values.

All of this is happening, and Trudeau chose to use that CNN broadcast, which would reach millions of viewers, to congratulate and compliment himself, and define our nation as anti-American? Maybe legalizing weed was a bad idea.

When asked by Tapper whether or not his dismally low approval rating had to do with voters not liking how he’s handled the economy and immigration, Trudeau eventually blamed an “intersection of both right-wing attacks and social media,” for “a lot of misinformation and disinformation” that made him unpopular. It appears reality now has a conservative bias.

National Post

tnewman@postmedia.com

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