Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, I hope to be back behind the microphone taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members around the world at 3pm North American Eastern (8pm British Summer Time) for our latest Clubland Q&A. Hope you can swing by.
~To all my compatriots at home and abroad, a happy 158th birthday! At noon on this day in 1867, the British North America Act came into effect and the Provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Canada - that's Upper Canada (Ontario) and Lower Canada (Quebec) - were united into the brand new Dominion of Canada under a constitutional document that has since been applied, all but unmodified, to dozens of newborn nations in every corner of the globe.
Something to celebrate, you'd think. But, for any Canadians old enough to remember the glorious centennial year of 1967, the principal legacy of Jacinda Trudeau was to take advantage of the sesquicentennial to totally implode any viable sense of living Canadian nationhood.
When I was a kid, my aunt and uncle gave me a lavishly illustrated book on the US/Canadian border - "the longest undefended frontier in the world", until Chi-Com 19 came along. There was a quote in it that struck me even at the tender age of seven. It came from some prairie farmer:
What's the difference between Dominion Day and Independence Day? Oh, about forty-eight hours.
Cute line - although, even then, I wasn't entirely persuaded. By the time of my July 1st 2004 column I was openly sceptical:
If it was ever true, it isn't now: Can you imagine Washington changing the Fourth of July to America Day? Federally funding the parades and fireworks? Distributing cardboard hats saying 'Smile - it's America Day!'? Saying 'Hey, that old Uncle Sam guy's gotta go. He's not inclusive enough. And who wears tails with those striped pants these days?' Americans are novelty junkies when it comes to the Flavour of the Day at Starbuck's (decaf-hazelnut-raspberry-Eurasian milfoil-latte), but not about what counts: flags, constitutions, anthems, Pledges of Allegiance.
Well, okay, not all Americans - but enough to make a difference in insufficiently stolen elections, such as that of 2024. Back in 1867, Canada was, as the name of its founding document suggests, the British nation in North America. A century later, Pierre Trudeau embarked on an ambitious Liberace-like project. Liberace, you'll recall (or maybe not: these once dazzling entertainers fade so fast, don't you find?) ...where was I? Oh, yeah: the dazzling all-round entertainer beloved by the ladies (Liberace, I mean, not Pierre) made his young lover, Scott Thorson, have plastic surgery to make him look more like ...Liberace. So that Liberace might experience the sensation of making love to himself.
In a nutshell, that's what Pierre Trudeau did to Canada.
I take it as read that Pierre was a cold unfeeling father. Because there must be some explanation as to why his son and heir decided to prioritise the utter destruction of Trudeaupia, and its replacement by what Justin called "the first post-national nation". There were many takers for pop's Trudeaupia (don't blame me - I was never one of them); there were none for Junior's post-national nation. So, by the time the orange monster to the south started openly sneering at Canada as his fifty-first state, Mark Carney had no cards left to play but ...the King. Which Mr Carney played very successfully, just a few weeks ago. Trudeau père told me not long before he died that the monarchy was "a lot of hooey" (although his delightful and charming ex-wife likes them). But, thanks to his son, by the time Trump made his move on Canada, "a lot of hooey" was all there was to see him off.
Can Mr Carney do the same for Dominion Day and the British North America Act? "Canada Day", if not quite formally canceled, is to be more honour'd in the breach. That's not a problem for SteynOnline, because we have never honoured "Canada Day" at all. At this shingle we observe Dominion Day: always have done, always will. Canada Day is a bland insipid nullity, rushed through Parliament by a hack Liberal backbencher (Hal Herbert) with a bare quorum of members and the crap wankers of Joe Clark's Tory party as usual sleeping off lunch. Four decades on, it turns out Hal Herbert's supposedly minor act of vandalism on Canadian history has led to such a wholesale torching of all the rest of Canadian history that even Canada Day is ashes. Who'da foreseen that?
Dominion Day is specific; Canada Day is generalised pap - and, like any semi-decent author, I have a preference for the particular. At the very least, if an American asks you, "What the hell is this Dominion Day thing?", you have to give a bit of thought to the answer. Whereas, if he asks you what Canada Day is, you simply coo some vapid drivel about celebrating the vibrancy of our diversity. Nevertheless, in vaporising real history for Trudeaupian mush, one is implicitly rebuking the past - for serious nations do not change their national holidays in this way.
And, once one has implicitly rebuked the past, it would be unreasonable to expect other persons not to disdain it more explicitly. And so, entirely predictably, the multiculti crapola turns out to be merely an interim phase with no real purchase on people, and Canada is now full of "Canadians" who hate Canada Day and the Maple Leaf far more than ever Canadians of half-a-century back hated Dominion Day and the Red Ensign.
The present woes - and indeed the "fifty-first state" bollocks - were foretold by the total fiasco of Canada's sesquicentennial eight years ago, a fiasco any semi-competent opposition could have hung around Justin's neck with ease, but evidently not when that opposition is led by Andrew O'Toole or Erin McTosspot or whoever it was back then. As I wrote on that grim Dominion Day of 2017:
A national celebration of collective guilt is a hard act to pull off. An historical anniversary on which it's unsafe to mention any history doesn't leave a lot else... Half-a-century ago, the Liberal Party of Justin's dad offered us a rather wearisome nationalist boosterism. Now it's boosterism without the nationalism, which is even more wearisome. I would dearly have loved someone to walk out on stage and say, 'This is all total bollocks, isn't it?' But the nearest we got was Charles and Camilla involuntarily giggling through the Inuit throat-singing in Nunavut. And that probably wasn't a smart move, which the activists are sure to demand their pound of blubber over...
And yet, if you can pull off a Canada Day without Canadians, why not do it again? For Justin Trudeau, the man who hailed Canada as 'the first post-national state', what could be more natural than the first post-national national holiday?
There's a lot of that about. So Happy Dominion Day to all our readers, to whom it should be no surprise that the modish nothingness of Canada Day failed to make its fortieth birthday: North or south of the border, pandering to the vandals buys you very little time.
~We are not as old as Dominion Day, but The Mark Steyn Club is now in its ninth year. I'm thrilled by all those SteynOnline supporters across the globe - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Surrey to the Solomon Islands - who've signed up to be a part of it. My only regret is that we didn't launch it twenty-three years ago, but better late than never. You can find more information about the Club here - and, if you've a pal who might be partial to this sort of thing, don't forget our special Gift Membership.
