The Great Restack of Canada's Priorities
A full-throated patriotic rant about the magnificent Dominion of Canada
The political priorities in this country for the past decade have been… how to put this? It has felt like the kind of priorities you get to after you’ve checked off the actual priorities. When you’re inventing new human rights, when you’re blue sky ideating government strategies and strategystorming new mandates for newly invented ministries… well it feels like maybe you’ve run out of important things to accomplish.
It has become more and more apparent that we have lost sight of what is truly important as a country, and that even as we are funding larger and larger budgets for rethinking the way we have always done things in the past, other things are not happening. We are not keeping up with basic housing starts, transportation infrastructure, energy production, hospital capacity, policing... At the same time school curriculums have been sliding into ever more obscure niche topics, young men no longer seemingly work but somehow increase their narcotics consumption and leverage ever higher levels of debt for sports gambling, and all sorts of unrest keeps popping up on our streets. In small towns, parents no longer send their children to the public library unsupervised because the lobby now serves as a much needed warming centre for rough sleepers. In fact, where do you send your kids these days? Drug paraphernalia in parks, foul-mouthed drug users on public transportation, aggressive terrorist-sympathisers in malls… wait… wait. I’m getting carried away on the negatives, I need to get back on track here.
Well, it has occurred to me over this season of marked decline, that one thing that could possibly reset our priorities is a threat. A serious threat to our actual basic human rights might be able to provide the appropriate contrast required to view the new aspirational human rights as just that… aspirational. Or so the thinking went.
I was not expecting this threat to materialize, I was not anticipating it would come from the United States, and I had not predicted just how quickly it would have an impact, but boy has it sent a resonating rumble across the bureaucracies and advocacy groups and political organizations throughout the country as they restack their mandates and strategic goals! And all that without bringing in experts in deliverology and consultants in intersectionality to help steer any kind of brainstorming sessions!
Suddenly our post-national state that tried to cast our flag as far-right, who canceled our Canada Day fireworks so we could reflect on our on-going cultural genocidal biases, who broadcast to the world repentance for the earth destroying effect of our greatest national feat of engineering, who rewrote our national anthem, who sought to erase the fathers of our confederation from town squares and street names, who stripped our currency and our passports of any meaningful national historical significance… by golly, this beat up country pulled together within the matter of a day and started waving that dusty old Maple Leaf from coast to coast to coast and started to sound downright united and even I dare say it? Patriotic!
All it took was the most powerful commander-in-chief in the world to turn his attention to us from his side of the longest undefended land border on the planet and threaten our sovereignty… and voilà.
I have high hopes yet, for this magnificent country. I believe one day, with a lot of hard work and determination we will be able to buy British Columbia wine in Ontario, that we will be able to sell our natural resources to countries that are not the one currently threatening us, that we will be able to refine our own energy and sell it to our own citizens, that we will stop paying other countries to take our electricity for free, that we will have our own defense of our own borders all the way around the country, even in the cold parts! I can see a future where we fly the Canadian flag over our children’s schools, a time when we can acknowledge that Canadians stand for Canadian values, that those values are noble, worth preserving and sharing, and that whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law, Canadians are guaranteed real rights and freedoms, and I can even see a day when we will return Lord Stanley’s cup to this land and on that glorious day the beautiful diversity of our people will all join together as one with glowing hearts in the true patriot love this nation commands in all her sons!
I am going to hold on to these hopes for our country. What are your hopes for a rising True North strong and free?