There’s a certain amount of controversy over whether or not Stephen Harper actually said: “You’ll never recognize Canada when I’m through with it.”
There’s some consensus that he said something very similar in a post-election conversation with CBC’s Peter Mansbridge in 2006, as there is for this quote attributed to him in 2004 - “ We can create a country built on solid conservative values, not on expensive Liberal promises, a country the Liberals wouldn’t even recognize, the kind of country I want to lead.”
It is almost immaterial what Harper may or may not have said 12 or 14 years ago, especially if things continue to broil in Canada, as they have been since Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister in 2015.
We have consistently veered along the path to a Canada that very few of us can recognize and it fills us with dismay and a bewildering sense of unreality.
Since the 2015 election, Canada has become an even more divided country – and not in a good way.
Most prime ministers are challenged along the way as being out of line, running dictatorial one-man shows – it goes with the top job.
PMs like Pearson, Deifenbaker, certainly Pierre Trudeau, Jean Chretien, Brian Mulroney and the aforementioned Stephen Harper ran the show, so to speak, and made it extremely clear they were in charge, with required deference to the “people” and to some extent, the taxpayers.
To me, they didn’t do this as relentlessly as PM Justin Trudeau is doing – his continued harping on his feminism, his diversity and gender neutrality goals in daily life, (introducing these elements into NAFTA and other trade negotiations) his gender neutral equality efforts/boasts in cabinet – they all seem to be too much, too quickly – and again too divisive.
Will we recognize Canada as Trudeau’s first term end? I’m having trouble recognizing it now, with almost two years to go.
National Post columnist Christie Blatchford said it a lot better than me: “This government’s insistence on viewing the world through an ‘equity lens’ is pervasive and exhausting, not to mention distorting.
“Whether the PM is hectoring rich guys about the joys of hiring women at the World Economic Forum in Davos, as he did in January (to a crowd, as Rachel Giese wrote in Chatelaine, that would be described by the less genteel as a “sausage-fest”) or bragging that Canada’s new peacekeeping effort as part of the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali will include plenty of women in uniform because of Canada’s unabashedly feminist foreign policy, he’s relentless and wearing, as are his ministers.”
Relentless, the same word I used.
Now the Minister responsible for Service Canada and Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, John-Yves Duclos, has announced that Service Canada employees dealing with the public have been given a directive requiring them to use gender-neutral language to avoid “portraying a perceived bias toward a particular sex or gender.”
Service Canada has already begun carrying out the directive which seems to lean to discontinuing the use of such everyday honorifics – Mr, Mrs, Miss, Mz, with a trend to use gender neutral language like “parent” over the use of mother and father. Suggested is Parent 1 and 2. Not quite the same, to me.
Really, has anyone actually asked for this? Mr. and Mrs, mother and father, are tried, tested and true over the years. Is there a demand for changes as radical as these?
A child’s name, a date and place of birth, the identification of the mother and father and the new baby’s gender, male or female, have been the staple content of a birth certificate for decades.
A Conservative-led flareup in Question Period last Wednesday had Mr. Duclos backpedaling and rather dismissively defending the moves, insisting they are only designed as a matter of respect.
In an earlier Tweet, he specified the government department would continue to use Mr. and Mrs. when interacting with Canadians but would ask and take into account how people want to be addressed. “It is working to adapt to the reality of 21st century families,” Duclos added.
But Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declined to comment, saying he needed more time to look into the matter.
To me it is a truly divisive form of social engineering, bringing change to the normal Canadians’ expectations of government services, in the name of tolerance and more likely to meet perceived inclusivity needs of LGBTQ2 communities.
Ontario has already caved permitting the gender description X on drivers licenses and health cards.
Reviewing initial readers’ comments on the news, there is a need for reaction in pursuit of some common-sense. “When will they come after Mother’s Day and Father’s Day,” many ask. Authoritarian, controlling, out of touch with the majority, others say.
A few feel it is a forewarning – and it is well past the time for Canadians to take action to defend fundamental constitutional freedoms. I am fairly sure the Canadian taxpayer was not expecting the Liberals to do any of this.
Maybe it is time to stop the distractions and get on with the real work needed desperately by Canadians in a dysfunctional economic reality.
ahewitson@telus.net