It’s remarkable how much our international reputation has faded over the past 10 years, both diplomatically and economically.
It is remarkable how much attitudes about Canada have shifted, both here and abroad, over the past 10 years. A decade ago, riding the wave of a booming economy, Canada was widely admired for a banking system that had got through the 2008-2009 global financial crisis without government bailouts. Today the country’s global stature is much diminished and Canadians are rapidly losing confidence in their economic prospects.
In the years leading up to 2016 Canadians grew accustomed to global accolades. In a 2003 cover story, The Economist touted the prospects for “cool Canada,” following up in 2006 that Canada’s relative economic performance made it a “superstar” as the “only country running both current-account and budget surpluses.” Steve Poloz, then chief economist at EDC, said in 2005 the stars were aligned for Canadian firms to achieve the “productivity miracle” already realized in the U.S. In 2012, the OECD secretariat forecast Canada’s economic growth would lead the G7 nations over the next 50 years. Our AAA credit rating, stable economy and resource riches prompted the IMF in 2012 to recommend central banks hold more currency reserves in Canadian dollars, leading to headlines about “loonie set to join global currency elite” as a safe haven in turbulent times.
A Maclean’s article reporting 2011 poll results proclaimed Canada was “on top of the world” and “Canadians have never felt so upbeat about the future.” A year later, Joe O’Connor could claim in this newspaper that “Canada’s got swagger.” This confidence was reinforced when Britain hired Mark Carney in 2012 as the first foreign-born governor of the Bank of England, calling him the “best central banker of his generation.” On the global stage, in 2016 U.S. President Barack Obama told Parliament: “the world needs more Canada.”
A stable banking system was not Canada’s only perceived financial advantage. Some analysts predicted Toronto would become a major trading centre for the North American cap-and-trade carbon market. Moody’s Analytics projected Toronto’s financial services industry would employ more people than London’s by 2017. Tiff Macklem, then dean of the Rotman School, wrote an op-ed in 2016 touting Toronto’s “potential to become the leading global fintech hub.”
That was then. Today Canada’s reality is much different than people were expecting before 2015. Its finance sector is known for being “an ATM and safe deposit box for money laundering,” according to Jonathan Manthorpe in his 2019 book, Claws of the Panda. In 2018, The Economist noted that Canada “has long had a reputation as a place to snow-wash money.” Regulation is split between federal and provincial governments and there are almost no restrictions on lawyers involved in laundering.
Instead of buoyant economic growth, the OECD last year downgraded Canada’s prospects to 2060 to dead last out of 38 nations. In a 2019 feature, The Economist noted that the top Canadian firm on Fortune’s list of the world’s largest companies ranked 241st, concluding that our “economy and business culture will have to become more American.”
Nothing has damaged Canada’s economy and global stature more than the obstacles governments have deployed to hamper our energy industry. In 2011, the late Jim Prentice, then vice-chairman of CIBC, reviewed the slew of Canadian energy projects then underway, from hydro in Labrador to Alberta’s oil sands, and concluded “no one else is bringing on energy projects on the pace and scale of Canada.” Today, by contrast, British Columbia and Quebec are struggling to meet electricity demand, while the oil sands have slashed investment.
The harm from discouraging oil and gas development was fully revealed after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Canada was unable to answer Europe’s desperate need for oil and gas. When German Chancellor Scholz visited Canada to plead for more natural gas, our prime minister claimed there was “no business case” to support LNG exports to Europe. Meanwhile, since March 2022, American firms have signed now fewer than 57 supply agreements with Europe for 73 million metric tons of LNG annually, according to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal.
A recent Nanos poll found even fewer Canadians (just 13 per cent) thought our global reputation had improved than were satisfied with the state of our economy (23 per cent). The Wall Street Journal said last year that Canada’s paltry defence spending should disqualify us from G7 membership, while Spain is openly lobbying to take our place. We have become irrelevant to the geopolitics of our natural allies, whether the problem at hand is the growing rivalry between the U.S. on the one hand and Russia and China on the other or the EU’s fixation on rectifying its energy and defence deficits.
More broadly, Canada has failed in its traditional role of explaining the U.S. to the rest of the world. Though it’s strange to recall, immediately after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the hope was Trudeau would be the “Trump Whisperer,” establishing Canada as an “indispensable nation,” to quote Maclean’s Scott Gilmore. Instead, we have reverted to our traditional sense of moral superiority over Americans and now parrot the global chorus condemning the direction of U.S. politics. We have a plan for dealing with Trump, the prime minister assures us. Good luck to us with that.
Philip Cross is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.
Associate Judge Catherine Coughlan rejected a lawsuit from more than 300 past and current members of the Canadian military who lost their jobs or were put on leave for not taking the experimental, dangerous COVID shots.
A Canadian federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit filed on behalf of some 330 past and current members of the nation’s military who lost their jobs or were placed on leave for refusing the experimental COVID shots, because she alleged that their lawsuit lacked “evidence” that the jabs were harmful.
The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) members had sought some $1.3 million in damages from the government for having their charter rights violated due to the military’s 2021 COVID mandates, according to their lawsuit.
In a November 13 ruling, Edmonton-based Associate Judge Catherine Coughlan ruled in favor of the Trudeau government, and thus military’s COVID jab mandate, to strike down the case. Coughlan remarked that the plaintiffs’ case lacked “material facts” along with “evidence” and was filled with “vexatious language.”
“The only indications of bad faith are found when the pleadings baldly assert that, among other claims, Canada failed to carry out safety and efficacy testing for the vaccines, and that the Directives were premature and ‘promoted the fraudulent use of the biologics’,” she wrote, overlooking reports of thousands of injuries due to the shots in Canada alone.
As a result of the lawsuit being tossed, all plaintiffs are now on the hook to pay some $5,040 out of pocket in legal costs.
As reported by LifeSiteNews in June, documents obtained by LifeSiteNews show that the number of jab injuries in the CAF rose over 800 percent in 2021, with the most being credited to Moderna’s experimental COVID shot.
The CAF members’ lawsuit was filed in June of 2023 and overall sought some $1 million in damages, along with an extra $350,000 in general damages. The lawsuit also had a condition that there be a declaration made that mandating the COVID shots for military members was a violation of their charter rights.
LifeSiteNews reported in July that a member of Canada’s military who was injured after taking the experimental mRNA COVID jabs has been denied compensation from the nation’s Veterans Affairs department.
Under the CAF’s mandate, hundreds of military members were fired, or one could say, purged for not getting the COVID shots. This is in addition to the thousands of public servants fired for not agreeing to take the COVID shots.
The CAF eventually ended its COVID mandate in October 2022, which was months after the federal mandate was lifted, but members are still “strongly encouraged” to take the experimental shot.
The federal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that its federal COVID shot workplace mandate would be dropped in June 2022, as would the mandate requiring domestic travelers have the shot to board planes and trains.
In November of 2023, a CAF member who spoke to LifeSiteNews under the condition of anonymity observed that the military considers members who refuse the COVID jab “a piece of garbage.”
In March, LifeSiteNews reported on large personnel losses causing the CAF to consider dropping its remaining requirements altogether.
Although Canada has a Vaccine Injury Support Program (VISP) program, active members of the CAF, as well as veterans, are not eligible for the civilian program. According to Christensen, this leaves many COVID jab-injured CAF members and veterans with no recourse other than Veterans Affairs Canada.
COVID shot mandates, which came from provincial governments with the support of Trudeau’s federal government, split Canadian society. The mRNA shots themselves have been linked to a multitude of negative and often severe side effects, such as heart diseases, stroke, and death, including in children.
There is a grave on a riverbank near Batoche, Saskatchewan. It contains the remains of a soldier from Ontario who died in 1885 under General Middleton during the last battle of the Northwest Rebellion. It has been tended for almost 150 years by the Métis families whose ancestors had fought against him. His name was Gunner William Phillips and he was 19 years old.
Up a dirt road in the Boshof District of Free State, South Africa is a memorial garden in which are buried the 34 bodies of Canadians killed at the Battle of Paardeberg in 1900. They fell driving a Boer kommando off the heights where they had been dug in and inflicting severe casualties on the British forces below. Private Zachary Richard Edmond Lewis of the Royal Canadian Regiment lies there. He was the son of Millicent Lewis and was 27 years old.
On April 22, 1915 the German army launched its first poison gas attack on Allied trenches near Ypres, Belgium during the First World War. When French troops on their flanks broke and ran, the 1st Canadian Division stood fast amid the chlorine cloud and repelled their attackers, suffering 2,000 casualties in the process. On the grave of Private Arthur Ernest Williams of the 8th Battalion are the words “Remember, He Who Yields His Life is a Soldier and a Man.” Private Williams was 16 years old.
When the Japanese invaded Hong Kong in December 1941, Canadian troops from the Winnipeg Grenadiers were there to resist them. Among them was Sergeant-Major J.R. Osborn whose men were surrounded and subject to grenade attacks. Osborn caught several of these and flung them back but when one could not be retrieved in time he threw himself on the grenade as it exploded trying to save his men. His body was never found after the battle but his name is inscribed on a monument in Sai Wan Bay War Cemetery.
In the hills south of Algiers is Dely Ibrahim Cemetery. This is where they buried the body of RCAF Pilot Officer John Michael Quinlan after the crash of his Wellington bomber in March, 1944. He was a movie-star handsome student from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan and my father’s best friend in the squadron. I carry his family name as my middle name as does my little grand-daughter.
The Kandahar Cenotaph in the Afghanistan Memorial Hall at National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa honours those Canadians who died fighting Islamic terrorists. 158 stones are bearing the faces of the soldiers who were repatriated from where they fell and now are buried in graves in their home communities across the country. One of those stones commemorates Warrant Officer Gaétan Joseph Francis Maxime Roberge of the Royal 22nd Regiment who is buried in a cemetery in Sudbury. He was 45 when he was killed by a bomb. He left behind a wife, an 11-year-old daughter and twin 6-year-old girls.
On November 11, we pause to remember the 118,000 Canadian men and women who died fighting, among others, Fenian invaders, Islamic jihadis in Sudan, the armies of Kaiser Wilhelm, Benito Mussolini, and Imperial Japan, Nazi SS Panzer regiments, Chinese and North Korean forces, ethnic warlords in the Balkans, and the Taliban. They died in North Atlantic convoys, in French trenches, in primitive field hospitals, on beaches in Normandy, in the air over England, on frozen hills in Korea, in jungle POW camps, on peace-keeping duty in Cyprus, in the Medak Pocket in Croatia, and in the mountain passes of Afghanistan. We also remember the hundreds of thousands more who returned home alive, but mutilated, shattered in body and mind, the families deprived of sons, fathers, and brothers, and the communities who lost teachers, hockey players, volunteers, pastors, nurses, and neighbours.
We remember them because in honouring their memory we honour the values on which Canada was built. They did not die to create a Canadian empire, acquire foreign territory or satisfy some ruler’s grandiosity; they fought and suffered to protect parliamentary democracy, freedom of expression and religion, a tolerant society, and the right to live in peace.
On November 11, let us be clear that the prosperity and tranquility enjoyed today by North Americans, Europeans, South Koreans, Japanese, Indians, Malaysians, Singaporeans, Filipinos, etc., etc., were purchased with the blood of heavily-armed men in military uniform, many of them with maple leaf patches on their shoulders. A country which is contemptuous towards its duty to maintain its armed forces, where schools forbid personnel in service dress from attending remembrance assemblies lest their presence makes children and parents “feel unsafe,” or where Forces chaplains are instructed to avoid religious language or symbols in services commemorating our dead, is a nation lost to its memories and unlikely to have much of a future.
KILLED IN ACTION. BELOVED DAUGHTER OF ANGUS & MARY MAUD MACDONALD,
Nursing Sister Katherine MacDonald, Canadian Army Nursing Service, May 19th 1918
HE WOULD GIVE HIS DINNER TO A HUNGRY DOG AND GO WITHOUT HIMSELF.
Gunner Charles Douglas Moore, Canadian Anti-Aircraft Battery, September 19th 1917
BREAK, DAY OF GOD, SWEET DAY OF PEACE, AND BID THE SHOUT OF WARRIORS CEASE.
Sergeant Wellesley Seymour Taylor, 14th Battalion, May 1st 1916
Gerry Bowler, historian, is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
