The Sinister White North

Today Michael Medved asked a question to conservatives: Is Canada Evil? He maintains that it is not, and if you compare Canada to Soviet Russia he might be right. Unfortunately there is a lot of evil between "Good" and being a totalitarian regime that slaughters and oppresses millions. I contend that Canada is evil.

Mr. Medved argues in his column that Canada is not evil, even if it is less free than the United States and to support that argument he cites statistics on Canada's relative economic prosperity. I disagree with his methods of proof for two reasons. First, material well-being has no bearing on morality as commonly understood in Western, that is to say Christian, society. Secondly, the assertion that Canada's material well-being is still acceptable under its system of government is misleading, despite the indicators he cited, and I believe, incorrect. Let me explain one step at a time.

I trust that no further explanation be needed about morality being independent of wealth. The rich man may have been wicked, but it wasn't because he had riches, but because he placed them above the Lord.

I don't dispute the accuracy of Mr. Medved's analysis about the relative levels of spending, taxes, and the like, but the way he presents them would lead the reader to believe that America and Canada exist in isolation from each other, as if America were on Mars and Canada on Venus. That is not the case, however, and it seems to me that it is impossible to calculate how much Canada has been enriched by America's good behavior over the decades. Canada has socialized medicine, which he notes is a travesty, but as abysmal as Canada's health care system is, it would be all the worse if not for Canada's proximity to the United States. Every time a Canadian comes to America for medical care it relieves some of the strain on Canada's system and lessens the expense. Moreover, Canada's health care industry benefits from the untold billions of dollars that American corporations have poured into research and development over the years, not to mention the millions of medical man hours developing new techniques that our for-profit doctors have put in. Likewise, Canada's comparable level of spending in terms of GDP is only possible because a muscular American military stands ready to repel all threats and provide a nuclear shield for the relatively defenseless Canada. The same can be said about many aspects of Canadian life; the bulk of the technology Canada and the rest of the world uses was developed or greatly improved by the power of American free markets.

So if Canada isn't the axe wielding lunatic filling mass graves and enslaving everyone around him, our neighbor to the North is at least a shifty ne'er-do-well who makes his neighbor do all the work and goes out to pickpocket during the evening hours. Canadian welfare mentality proffers as its basis the notion that the government ought to provide the public with "services" using confiscated money from productive citizens. Canadian socialized medicine accepts, in reality if not in doctrine, that many people should die prematurely or suffer treatable illnesses longer in order to pay homage to their shibboleth that everyone deserves medical care. Even the limitations on speech are more serious than you make them out to be. Lacking speech rights seriously harms a person's autonomy and degrades society's ability to watchdog its own government.

Canada's multicultural state has left it a moral wasteland where any number of vile ideologies have inserted themselves. Anti-Semitism is on the rise and its the kind that threatens violence. Israeli supporters were, just yesterday, attacked with a machete on a college campus. Standing by and tolerating radical beliefs in the name of multiculturalism is like watching someone get murdered and doing nothing to stop it. Right now I'm just using that as a simile, but if the machete-wielders get their way it may not stay that way for long.

Canada is a nation that robs disfavored classes of its people (the "rich"), oppresses freedom of speech, contributes to the death of its citizens (health care), and looks the other way when hateful ideologies reach for their machetes. Is it beginning to sound a little closer to Stalin than first suspected?

So yes, Canada is evil and becoming more so all the time.

As an aside, Canada has sheltered in the strength of American power, but has starved from a lack of American ideology responsible for American power. We have done the entire world a great disservice because we're too focused on the material well-being of other nations even as their civic institutions are rotting. The world didn't need America's wealth to survive and prosper, it needed America's ideology. We have failed to export the one true thing we have of indispensable value: our beliefs.