Oh, Canada
A recent effort of mine to challenge the received wisdom of our bureaucrats and oligarchs.
OH, CANADA!
“There are times when toleration becomes a vice, because it exceeds its proper sphere of mitigating struggle and, growing excessive, aims at the complete suppression of those contests which provide the stimulus to life.” Russell Kirk - The Conservative Mind
Tolerance: sympathy or indulgence for beliefs or practices differing from or conflicting with one's own b : the act of allowing something
The capacity of Canadians to live with ambiguity if not pure contradiction leads me to examine the state of our collective national conscience. One of the few positive by-products of a federal election, dominated as it is by the distortions of the media, is the occasion it provides for Canadians to think about what it means to them to be Canadian. I leave to another time, the examination of the apparent shallowness of that thinking process. For the moment I wish only to examine one aspect of our Canadian persona which was a popular topic of discussion during the last election - our professed pride in and desire to be a tolerant nation.
The accepted definitions of tolerance emphasize its inherent passivity. To tolerate something is to allow it to exist even though you disagree with it. In the context of a state and its laws, one can characterize tolerance as the conscious decision to allow certain things which the state has the power to prevent.
In the context of our immigration policy, tolerance takes the form of the acceptance of a certain degree of “otherness” which immigrants bring with them in the paraphernalia of language, religion, and cultural practices. In 1982 Canada enshrined certain fundamental freedoms which we as a nation agreed we would preserve and protect. By so doing it was intended that citizens and immigrants alike would know what core values all Canadians present and future could confidently expect to be protected and tolerated.
Tolerance is something I demonstrate to another. It is not an inwardly directed device. I regulate myself by the use of self-control, not by being tolerant of myself. Similarly, Canada as a nation must know itself and regulate itself through the implementation and enforcement of laws. Canada as a nation exhibits tolerance outwardly to other nations, and internally to its citizens and those who seek to become citizens. How that tolerance is exercised is the responsibility of our legal institutions – our parliament and our judiciary - and they in turn must operate under the supremacy of those founding principles which define us.
These fundamental freedoms contained in the Charter of Rights are a) freedom of conscience and religion; b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication; c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and d) freedom of association.
I am convinced that most Canadians have forgotten or are simply ignorant of, the foundational principles and traditions which pre-date the Charter of Rights and which I argue are at the core of Canada’s identity as a nation. Those principles don’t need to be tolerated by us as Canadians, they are who we are, they define us, and without them we are not Canadian.
The core founding principle of our nation as set out in the preamble to the Charter of Rights reads: Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law.
Canada is a nation founded upon principles that recognize a supreme God. We are a nation founded in the belief in the existence and supremacy of the transcendent, the immanent, that which is greater than us and even beyond our comprehension. These are powerful, radical and even controversial words in the context of the secular society we have allowed to develop. These words fly in the face of the relativists and moral nihilists who say there is no Truth, only individual truths. Nonetheless they are true.
As to the nature of the God under whose supremacy we declare ourselves to be, there can be no question but that it is the Christian God. An Ipsos-Reid survey conducted in 2000 revealed that sixty-nine percent of Canadians agree that “through the life, death and resurrection of Christ, God provided the way for the forgiveness of my sins”. Seventy percent of Canadians believe Jesus is the divine Son of God, eighty-four percent of Canadians believe in God, and sixty-seven percent say their religious faith is important in their day to day life.
Despite this overwhelming evidence that the vast majority of Canadians believe in a supreme God, Canadians have permitted our desire to have a tolerant secular civil society lead to outcomes which are not only inconsistent with but repugnant to our foundational belief in that same supremacy.
Let me cite but one recent example, there are many others. Just last week, the Canadian Bible Society was told that it will no longer be permitted to make available to new Canadians at their citizenship ceremonies, bibles containing the Psalms and the New Testament. The practice is "inconsistent with Canada's promotion of multiculturalism" says a senior citizenship judge writing on behalf of Citizenship and Immigration Canada.
This judge should be set straight. To deny the right of the Bible Society to distribute these Bibles is to deny these new immigrants the opportunity to understand the foundational principle upon which our nation and its laws exist. No one is forcing the new immigrants to take a Bible, but surely we must as a nation demonstrate enough confidence in our founding principle of being a nation under the supremacy of God, not only to declare that fact in our national anthem, but to offer a written record of the source of that belief to every new immigrant.
Tolerance has become a vice in Canada. Canada’s bureaucracy, its judiciary, its Liberal government, and certainly its press all seem intent on suppressing and even outright denying our core beliefs as Canadians. And it is all done under the guise of tolerance and protecting the “fundamental freedoms” of our minorities.
Tolerance has taken on the mantle of the superficial notion of the freedom to choose, and to choose again and again. This runs the danger of becoming unrecognizable from mere drift, a notion that seems well suited as a description of present day Canada.
OH, CANADA!
“There are times when toleration becomes a vice, because it exceeds its proper sphere of mitigating struggle and, growing excessive, aims at the complete suppression of those contests which provide the stimulus to life.” Russell Kirk - The Conservative Mind
Tolerance: sympathy or indulgence for beliefs or practices differing from or conflicting with one's own b : the act of allowing something
The capacity of Canadians to live with ambiguity if not pure contradiction leads me to examine the state of our collective national conscience. One of the few positive by-products of a federal election, dominated as it is by the distortions of the media, is the occasion it provides for Canadians to think about what it means to them to be Canadian. I leave to another time, the examination of the apparent shallowness of that thinking process. For the moment I wish only to examine one aspect of our Canadian persona which was a popular topic of discussion during the last election - our professed pride in and desire to be a tolerant nation.
The accepted definitions of tolerance emphasize its inherent passivity. To tolerate something is to allow it to exist even though you disagree with it. In the context of a state and its laws, one can characterize tolerance as the conscious decision to allow certain things which the state has the power to prevent.
In the context of our immigration policy, tolerance takes the form of the acceptance of a certain degree of “otherness” which immigrants bring with them in the paraphernalia of language, religion, and cultural practices. In 1982 Canada enshrined certain fundamental freedoms which we as a nation agreed we would preserve and protect. By so doing it was intended that citizens and immigrants alike would know what core values all Canadians present and future could confidently expect to be protected and tolerated.
Tolerance is something I demonstrate to another. It is not an inwardly directed device. I regulate myself by the use of self-control, not by being tolerant of myself. Similarly, Canada as a nation must know itself and regulate itself through the implementation and enforcement of laws. Canada as a nation exhibits tolerance outwardly to other nations, and internally to its citizens and those who seek to become citizens. How that tolerance is exercised is the responsibility of our legal institutions – our parliament and our judiciary - and they in turn must operate under the supremacy of those founding principles which define us.
These fundamental freedoms contained in the Charter of Rights are a) freedom of conscience and religion; b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication; c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and d) freedom of association.
I am convinced that most Canadians have forgotten or are simply ignorant of, the foundational principles and traditions which pre-date the Charter of Rights and which I argue are at the core of Canada’s identity as a nation. Those principles don’t need to be tolerated by us as Canadians, they are who we are, they define us, and without them we are not Canadian.
The core founding principle of our nation as set out in the preamble to the Charter of Rights reads: Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law.
Canada is a nation founded upon principles that recognize a supreme God. We are a nation founded in the belief in the existence and supremacy of the transcendent, the immanent, that which is greater than us and even beyond our comprehension. These are powerful, radical and even controversial words in the context of the secular society we have allowed to develop. These words fly in the face of the relativists and moral nihilists who say there is no Truth, only individual truths. Nonetheless they are true.
As to the nature of the God under whose supremacy we declare ourselves to be, there can be no question but that it is the Christian God. An Ipsos-Reid survey conducted in 2000 revealed that sixty-nine percent of Canadians agree that “through the life, death and resurrection of Christ, God provided the way for the forgiveness of my sins”. Seventy percent of Canadians believe Jesus is the divine Son of God, eighty-four percent of Canadians believe in God, and sixty-seven percent say their religious faith is important in their day to day life.
Despite this overwhelming evidence that the vast majority of Canadians believe in a supreme God, Canadians have permitted our desire to have a tolerant secular civil society lead to outcomes which are not only inconsistent with but repugnant to our foundational belief in that same supremacy.
Let me cite but one recent example, there are many others. Just last week, the Canadian Bible Society was told that it will no longer be permitted to make available to new Canadians at their citizenship ceremonies, bibles containing the Psalms and the New Testament. The practice is "inconsistent with Canada's promotion of multiculturalism" says a senior citizenship judge writing on behalf of Citizenship and Immigration Canada.
This judge should be set straight. To deny the right of the Bible Society to distribute these Bibles is to deny these new immigrants the opportunity to understand the foundational principle upon which our nation and its laws exist. No one is forcing the new immigrants to take a Bible, but surely we must as a nation demonstrate enough confidence in our founding principle of being a nation under the supremacy of God, not only to declare that fact in our national anthem, but to offer a written record of the source of that belief to every new immigrant.
Tolerance has become a vice in Canada. Canada’s bureaucracy, its judiciary, its Liberal government, and certainly its press all seem intent on suppressing and even outright denying our core beliefs as Canadians. And it is all done under the guise of tolerance and protecting the “fundamental freedoms” of our minorities.
Tolerance has taken on the mantle of the superficial notion of the freedom to choose, and to choose again and again. This runs the danger of becoming unrecognizable from mere drift, a notion that seems well suited as a description of present day Canada.
posted by Ben Buan | 10:12 p.m.
<< Home