"One could argue that we've lost that unifying sense of right and wrong."

"The very sense of [the] liberal, permissive, non-judgmentally embracing society that our countries were fundamentally founded on is now being openly exploited for the purpose  of reshifting the balance." 

Former Vice-Chief of the Canadian Defence Staff, Mark Norman

 

"Symbolic politics has never been sufficient, it is a sign of weak leadership. Condemnations without enforcement, statements without consequences and gestures without policy are not leadership."

"Canadians do not need additional legislation layered over existing statutes. We need the consistent application of the laws already in force.e"

"Canada is lost and no longer immune. A nation cannot remain open if it forgets how to be a nation. The choice is not between tolerance and cohesion. It is between a confident pluralism anchored in shared civic norms, and a politics of endless accommodation that dissolves the very framework that makes diversity possible."

Larry Maher, CEO, Exigent Foundation

Anti-Israel protesters block a downtown Toronto street to pray as police watch. Photo by Caryma Sa’d/X

 

It took no more than a  decade to fundamentally alter Canada, reverse many of its values, not the least the outstanding human right assurance of equality and rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. With that assurance came the expected responsibility of each member of society to respect the social contract that ensured equal opportunities (if not equal outcomes) to succeed and prosper for Canadian citizens who obeyed Canadian laws and whose experience in the general education system helped them to understand their citizen obligations to the country. 

 

In an earlier era those rights and obligations were unevenly applied and issues of discrimination against minority groups reflected a European heritage of entitlement and belittlement of the exotic 'others' who had made their way into North America, many as refugees fleeing persecution and conflict. Under moderately good governance evinced by leaders who at best understood their own guiding obligations to the people they served, laws were passed that ushered Canada into an era of fair justice and social cohesion.

 

Migrants from abroad who entered Canada in the first half of the 20th century as immigrants from impoverished backgrounds to make a home for themselves in a new country where opportunities abounded worked hard, obeyed laws, and accommodated themselves to a new culture with values that suited their own notions of being and belonging. Canadian authorities refined immigration rules to eventually reflect Canada's needs in a point system that rewarded education, professional qualifications, age suitability and an assessed philosophical fit.

 

A succession of Liberal governments in more recent times gradually morphed toward the kind of liberal progressivism that loosened qualifications and requirements of suitability to join the Canadian population. Sympathy for people searching for haven from authoritarian governments, from endemic poverty, from societal crime rates, from conflict zones opened the gates of entry to Canada wide, including the refugee class and illegal migrants who bypassed normal entrance procedures to declare themselves refugees. 

 

Prime Minister Mark Carney, left, is greeted by Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, centre, as he arrives in Doha on Jan. 18. Photo by Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

 

The intake swelled, fulfilling what government and business leaders professed to be a need to replace an aging, low-child-bearing population with new recruits to build Canada's working population. Entry to the country no longer relied on screening for adaptability and suitability for integration into the prevailing culture, its values and its laws. To the point where landed immigrants and new citizens openly declared their defiance of those values and accompanying laws, bringing havoc and division and open discrimination to the very streets of the cities throughout the country where they settled in influential numbers.

 

Newcomers to the country felt no loyalty to the country that had adopted them and there were no expectations from government that they should integrate and accept the prevailing social order as it was. Instead religious and ideological divisions erupted and with no amending reaction from government and institutions at any level, those divisions deepened, becoming more publicly expressed, including through deliberate acts of law-breaking.   

 

Canadians of long standing were treated to displays of overt challenges to the  public order in universities and cultural institutions where mass protests took to the streets, bringing foreign campaigns, conflicts, ideological convictions averse to Canada's own, to the fore, with no government intervention at any level. All the while Canada congratulated itself as a bastion of liberal democracy. Politicians rather than applying themselves to Canada's and its populations' defense, eyeing the numbers of voluble protests and the votes they represented, chose appeasement of activist groups.

 

Canadian PM Mark Carney : China's President Xi Jinping AP

 

And from the outside world, lax attention to the actions of foreign powers that invaded Canada's sovereignty through the infiltration of foreign agents acting on their behalf on the social, academic and political levels exercised the 'soft power' of authoritarian regimes and of extremist movements, effectively interfering in Canada's politics as well as the social contract unique to Canada. Russia, China, Iran, 
Qatar, Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood all have made an indelible impact within Canada with their malign presence. 

 

The moral, institutional foundations of Canada's principles of equality and human rights have been assailed by Islamist, Marxist, socialist and other radical engagements in destabilizing Canada, as well as other Western nations they have entered both legally and under the radar. What all these Western nations appear to have in common is an attitude of oblivious disinterest in the interference and subtle changes being wrought in normalizing abnormal social behaviour and its effect on their institutions.

 

The exploitation of liberal societies, priding themselves on their Democratic principles of inclusion appear willing to accept the slow erosion of their adherence to the public weal rather than risk being labelled racist, exclusionary or 'Islamophobic'. Identity politics, moral relativism, and DEI guide governments content to do nothing in response to the unravelling of their nations' stability and social coherence. If there is a solution to Western democracies' inaction in the face of this dilemma, it has not yet shown its face. 

 

Canadian universities have seen a surge of pro-Palestinian protests following similar demonstrations across North America.  University Affairs