Trapped In Ideology

The cracks in Canada’s health care “system” are opening rapidly due to declining care and rising costs that were utterly predictable when it all began a few decades ago. The system cannot survive, because socialism cannot survive. At least not without force, threats of jail, etc. In this respect – that we will jail citizens for infringements of the Canada Health Act - we are no different from Cubans and North Koreans. What is more amazing than this shameless association, however, is the extent to which our citizens were and are still blind to the radical nature of the ideological program (just to stay with this one of many radical changes) that was imposed on them in the first place.

Trudeau and the whole Gang of Five from Quebec were all boutique intellectuals and radical ideologues out to change Canada. They were determined to uproot us from our historical Anglo-Saxon ways by imposing on us an alien, top-down political tradition inherited from Rousseau, Saint Simon, and other European social-engineers, all of them suckled on the teats of Descartes. That is, on the idea that human societies can be successfully formulated, planned, and then engineered like some kind of simple math problem from the top, by philosopher Kings and Queens. To hell with the people. We will force a just society on them with our superior ideas, was the thinking. To be fair, Trudeau warned us all he was setting out to do this in his first book, Federalism and the French Canadians. But hardly anyone read it. All his life, Trudeau resorted to Rousseau’s concept of “the General Will” (la volonte generale), especially in his chapter “Federalism, Nationalism, and Reason” in that book. In Trudeau and Our Times, Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall wrote that it was at the London School of Economics that Trudeau “attached himself” to his mentor Harold Laski, Britain’s “most powerful spokesman for socialism” and “positioned himself for the first time decidedly on the political left.” The leftism lasted all his life. When he spoke against the Meech Lake Accord in Trudeau Speaks Out (1990) he seemed more obsessed than ever with Rousseau’s collectivist vision, and wrote that from 1927 until his Charter in 1982 Canadian federalism had striven “to create a national will … or ‘une volonte generale’ as Rousseau had called it”(p.45). I wrote about all this more extensively in my book Constitutional Crack-Up: Canada and the Coming Showdown With Quebec (1994). It sold out in three days and a Quebec journalist who called to interview me said I was (at least that week) "public enemy number one in Quebec." I wanted to title that book The Revenge of Montcalm, to indicate that although beaten by Wolfe and the English on the Plains of Abraham, the French had managed to surreptitiously take revenge by imposing Rousseau's vision on us, via the Charter, and things like socialized medicine. But I wasn't sure Canadians would remember who Montcalm was. 

Now, so many years later, we are still under the spell of Rousseau. Because instead of recognizing that socialized medicine, like so many other failed programs we have tried was flawed to begin with (think of the National Energy Program, for another) our leaders stumble forward apologetically. We read of “conservative” politicians agonizing over “new solutions” to “save the system.” What? Even conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper supports socialized medicine (at least for now, because he would never have gotten elected if he had spoken his true feelings about it). I like him, and think he will be a very good Prime Minister. He is already that. But he knows very well that no free person, and certainly no conservative worth the name can support the idea of government-controlled and rationed health care, and he will eventually open the door to free choice in medical care once again. This is just the thin edge of the wedge when it comes to unwinding the Trudeau legacy.

So what I am asking is this: can’t we grow up once and for all and just admit openly that Canada should never have allowed itself to be pushed into the socialist orbit in the first place? Can’t we be courageous and say this was a huge mistake, because it was in direct conflict with our common-law principles, our ancient love of individual freedom and responsibility, our respect for private property rights, our division of powers (medical care is still a provincial jurisdiction under our constitution, and NOT a federal one), our spirit of enterprise, the bold dreams expressed in our highest poetry, literature and music, our tough old insistence on self-reliance? Can we not admit that voluntary social co-operation in a free society is far superior to forced co-operation in a collectivist one, and that we ought never to have left the former ideal behind?

Once having admitted this huge mistake, can we not then clearly re-articulate such understandings as the true historical ground of our own political roots and thereby repudiate the ghost of Rousseau?

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[Note: I have just now had a call from a gentleman who is writing a biography of Peter Gzowski, which brought back some unpleasant memories of a few personal “interviews” I endured under Gzowski’s curmudgeonly, graying-beaver glare in the labyrinth of the old CBC building on Jarvis Street in Toronto. He intensely disliked all my books, especially War Against The Family. For that 1995 interview he mentioned at the very last minute that there would be “another guest” on the show, who turned out to be a flaming homosexual socialist professor from the University of Winnipeg. He shoved the fellow’s excuse for research at me with about a minute to go, and that professor and I, (with Gzowski soon taking the professor's side) got into a real pitched-battle shouting match such as had never been heard on sweet old self-deprecating Peter’s show in 25 years! One of his staff called me a week after and said they had received “an avalanche” of calls and letters and were now going to have two more shows in which they would be reading a lot of them. At any rate, when I got up to leave, I held out my hand to thank him, but this ostensibly neutral employee of our national radio network refused to shake my hand. That was a little embarrassing in front of all his staff. But as I left I rationalized it as a kind of reverse honour.]