From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Susan Martinuk 

Oh, Canada. You have been too nice.  Too kind.  Too silent. For too long.

And now a noisy minority is undermining our country’s values, laws and institutions.

Protestors have taken over many university campuses and they are fomenting hatred toward Jews and Israel. Few Canadians are speaking out. We seem incapable of responding to bigotry and hatred – even when it is occurring right in front of us.

Our silence has allowed (what at one point were) 15 pro-Palestinian encampments (tent cities) to be established in universities across Canada. It’s as if students no longer have to study or find a summer job to pay for tuition.

Instead of doing something productive, they are protesting against Israel’s war against Hamas (the Palestinian government that is also a designated terrorist group). But, in doing so, they have pushed aside the academic tenets that call for a free exchange of ideas and respectful debate on issues.

They are outright demanding that the universities divest any funding that has ties to/or support for Israel.  Some groups are even demanding that they sever ties with Israeli academics and their institutions.

Negotiating divestments? Asking for a change to financial policies hardly seems like it could lead to hate-filled invective.

It is always a challenge to know where to draw the line between free speech and hate speech. But nasty words can lead to even worse actions and, in this case, it wasn’t long before the protests took a long jump across that line.

Tensions quickly escalated at McGill University when senior administrators were followed and harassed by masked protestors at their homes and offices. Others hung an effigy of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a striped outfit resembling the uniforms that Jews were forced to wear in concentration camps – you know, where Nazis deliberately killed six million Jews. Yet the police would only act when protesters stormed the admin building. Fifteen were arrested.

Other blatant displays of anti-Semitism popped up on campuses – chants of “Go back to Europe” and “Zionists are terrorists.” Some Jewish students received threats of “We will find you” on their social media accounts.

Can you imagine the response of Canadians if such slogans targeted aboriginals or homosexuals? What if they were chanting “All Muslims are terrorists”?

The outcry would be immediate and in no time at all the protest camp would be shut down. That can be said with certainty because our twisted and biased sense of morality has already reared its ugly head.

At the University of Toronto, a small group of pro-Israel students tried to establish a camp to counter the anti-Jewish vigil. But they were immediately whisked away by police — because of the huge security risk they posed.

Back at McGill, the tent city is now hosting a “revolutionary youth summer program” and even advertised it with an image of terrorists wearing keffiyehs (black and white scarves), covering their faces and clutching machine guns. It was a picture from decades ago but that doesn’t negate its power to incite fear and violence.

Jewish students told a House of Commons committee that they no longer feel safe and are forced to hide their identities. The University of Waterloo had to tell students making complaints of anti-Semitism that they could no longer do anything about it because there were too many complaints to investigate!

McGill University’s president says, “none of this is peaceful protesting. It is designed to threaten, coerce and scare people.” The president at U of T told MPs that “anti -Semitism has been a growing presence recently in our university.”

As tensions have escalated, very little action has been taken. The police don’t seem to want to act, and administrators are too busy wringing their hands. The primary criticism against taking action is that it would be seen as too ‘authoritarian’ to shut down free speech. After all, this is Canada.

Of course, having to hide your ethnicity and Semitic identity in public doesn’t exactly smack of Canadian values either.

Canadians have been silent as we witness the fragmentation of our civil society. It brings to mind a famous poem entitled “First They Came.” It was written by a German who was initially a Nazi supporter but changed his views when he was imprisoned for speaking out against Nazi control of the churches.

“First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist;

Then they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist;’

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist;

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew;

Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

 This week, as we celebrate Canada and Canadian values, take some time to think about the things we are willing to stand for and the things which we must stand against.

Susan Martinuk is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and author of the book, Patients at Risk: Exposing Canada’s Health-care Crisis.

We are watching the national anthem played as Canada’s mens soccer team advances to the second round of the Copa America tournament. It’s Canada Day weekend, which always stirs up sentimental patriotism, even when the mid-wits in the PMO change the words to O Canada. But something feels different.

This team, of course, looks nothing like Team Canada in the 1972 showdown with the Soviets, for instance. Demographically they’re Trudeau’s wet dream of races, ethnicities and languages. Fair enough. They made it through qualifying. Props.

But having changed the look of Canada to the world, just what remains of the nation that was gripped by the 1972 Canada/ Russia series, games so existential that Canadians felt a loss meant the death of a culture? What does today’s Canada stand for anymore to them? And why are elite politicians pushing so hard on a policy that has little support?

A recent Ipsos poll asked “Do you agree or disagree that ‘Canada is broken’?” The result? Conservatives: 96%/PPC: 86%/ Greens: 63%/ BQ: 58%/ NDP: 57%/ Liberals: 34%. Understand that what has changed for Conservatives is very different from the Bloc or NDP. But they are all adrift in Trudeau’s Canada.

As the players sang along to O Canada in Orlando it’s clear that Canada right now is not a nation. It’s a brand. One constructed by politicians, not the people of the country. Liberals apparently like it that way, but getting a lump in the throat from remembering our war dead or the creation of single-payer healthcare is so yesterday for the PMO posse. Governments like Canada’s have chucked their independence in deference to world governments deciding financial, health and military policy.

One friend says all that binds this new Canadian brand is hockey and equalization payments. With polling numbers such as these it’s fair to ask why the political class continues to push this aggressive WEF branding when so much of the nation prefers the old homegrown model? While immigration is a laudable goal, fire-hose immigration like Canada is seeing is kefafta.

It’s not just a Canada thing. No, this is a branding exercise writ globally. Look at the lineup for Chile that faced Canada on Saturday. Names such as Igor Lishnovsky, Erick Pulgar and Benjamin Kusevic hardly stir up the traditional profile of a South American nation. The Euro 2024 championships running simultaneously have cultural shocks to those who have not being paying attention.

The lineups of England, France, Belgium, Germany and even Italy feature players who are black, brown or Arab, reflecting the imperial reach of those countries a century ago. If the goal is to emulate the Jackie Robinson model of integrating through sport then this would seem to be a success. If it is, then why do banners around the pitch still rage about ending racism? Or is the real goal coercion? Do the Brussels bunch (as well as Canada’s elite) just like to lecture people about their faults so they can be re-structured?

There are holdouts to this movement. Hungary, Poland and the Balkan nations remain largely homogeneous culturally (while being threatened by the EU for not accepting more of the world’s wandering population). So do Asian nations like Japan. (You’re supposed to ignore them.) But it would be disingenuous to suggest that there is a simple way to reverse the course of this forced march, to protect the cultures that have existed in Europe for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years.

The Marseillaise has gone from a stirring revolutionary call to the tricoleure to sentimental background music for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. Like Edith Piaf. All facilitated by the willing loss of cultural sovereignty in the Western world.

Not for nothing is Israel a rogue state for defying the WEF and the UN demands for a ceasefire as they avenge the heinous October 7 massacres by Hamas. Through its zombie president Joe Biden, the American power elite is telling Israel that they’re hurting energy rapprochement with Saudi Arabia and Iran in the Middle East. Be more like Ukraine, they say, and sacrifice a generation of your young men to keep natural gas domination out of the hands of Gasprom, Vladimir Putin’s piggyback.

Less Bibi Netanyahu and more Vladimir Zelensky, the plucky kleptocrat in Ché Guevara fatigues. Succumb, bitch.

Sometimes the message is subtle. Sometimes not so much. UFC star Connor MacGregor suggested that perhaps immigration was behind the anger of Irish protesters who rioted after an immigrant murdered five people. He was quickly  upraised by Taioseach hack Pauline O’Connell:  “If your views on other people’s identities go to make their lives unsafe, insecure, and cause them such deep discomfort that they cannot live in peace, then I believe that it is our job as legislators to restrict those freedoms for the common good.”

How did this brand-management happen? There is an old quote that goes, ‘For my friend everything. For my enemies the law.’ Indeed, the law has been used (or misused) to bring the unruly like MacGregor to heel. New “hate speech” laws have been enacted to trip up those who, like Michael Richards of Seinfeld fame, are made to disappear for upsetting audience members unhinged by comedy. It doesn’t stop there. New Canadian laws talk about multi-million dollar fines for denying the climate ruse.

As we predicted in November of 2023, “Next speech regulation is silence. Or non-speech. Under the new rules, silence will be no defence when the mob orders you to “wear the ribbon”. UC Berkeley Law Professor Savala Trepczynski gave away the game, saying that “White silence is incredibly powerful … It’s not neutral. It acts like a weapon.” Writes legal specialist Jonathan Turley, “In a world where silence is violence and civility is complicity, there is little room for true free speech.”

So sing out loud and proud when O Canada plays at this summer’s Olympics. Talk about sea to sea to sea. But don’t get any ideas about old Canada. Brand loyalty is the coming thing.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.