On Being Canadian

"Neither, Mr. Coyne. Canada vs Trump is a false choice fallacy."

Trump's trolling about Canada becoming the 51st State has set our country on fire.

The "establishment" is rallying together in defense, terrified of Trump on the one hand and equally terrified on the other to discover that a sizeable portion of Canadians are so angry and feel so betrayed with the top-down federal and provincial political systems as a whole (rather than just being angry at one leader or one party) that they see Trump's idea not as a threat, but as glimmer of hope of liberation.

The last time a foreign leader caused such a big stir was in 1967 when France's President Charles de Gaulle delivered a speech to a crowd in Montreal. He finished with a rhetorical flourish by declaring "Vive le Québec libre !", with particular emphasis on the word libre (Translation: Long live a free Quebec!).

Unlike Trump, de Gaulle didn't fully appreciate the full depths of the simmering cauldron of emotions he was tapping into... or the diplomatic and cultural firestorm that he was about to unleash. It quickly proved to be a watershed moment in Quebec's emergent and increasingly bitter sovereignty movement, known as the Quiet Revolution, in which francophones in Quebec turned to nationalism as a way of shaking off more than a century of relentless efforts by the Laurentian Elites to suppress francophone culture and convert them into Englishmen.

(There are many other layers to the Quiet Revolution, including religious ones, but I think this cuts to the heart of the matter from the Québécois point of view, though it tends to be portrayed somewhat differently in English-language discussions of it.)

Trump's troll similarly poked a finger into a festering wound and, with similar force to what happened in 1967, that wound has now erupted for all to see.

Top-down social engineering is nothing new in Canada — indeed, it is built (by design) into the DNA of how Confederation was structured in 1867. Only this time, the victims squirming beneath the thumb of Canada's latest social engineering scheme stretch from coast to coast to coast.

Canadians are waking up to the hard-edged reality of what Canada’s motto of "peace, order, and good governance" actually means in terms of their ability to defend themselves when those who rule over us get it into their heads that they know better what is best for us. And this time, the internet is making it a lot harder for the government-subsidized media to shape Canadians’ understanding of what is actually going on in Canada.

Once again, the elites, rather than try to understand all these unhappy Canadian voices, are responding with outrage, flag-waving, and threats.

On January 7th, Liberal MP Taleeb Noormohamed (MP for Vancouver Granville) went as far as posting this tweet:

Words from a sitting politician carry more diplomatic and legal weight than those uttered by emotional citizens. A demand for unconditional loyalty. A reference to the War of 1812 when British and Canadian troops burned down the White House in response to an American invasion. And painting unhappy Canadians as "traitors".

Whether the use of the term "traitor" was mere rhetorical flourish or is creeping towards being used in a legal sense remains to be seen, but we're reaching levels of hysteria towards dissident voices that we haven't seen since the height of Covid.

Prominent Canadian journalist Andrew Coyne (who also happens to be the son of Canada's second Governor of the Bank of Canada) drew a similar line in the sand on January 7th when he posted the following tweet on X:

My article-length reply to Mr. Coyne on X caused a bit of a stir. As I write this, it has already surpassed 78.9K views and was the topic of my interview on the Trish Wood Podcast (Julius Ruechel — On Being Canadian).

What follows is my full reply to Mr. Coyne that I posted on X in the hope that a more nuanced message can reach our fellow Canadians than the cartoonish binary presented by our panicking politicians and media.

~ ~ ~

(Link to my original post on X).

Neither, Mr. Coyne. Canada vs Trump is a false choice fallacy.

My allegiance is to my family, my friends, and to my community to protect them from what Canada has become.

Perhaps you don't understand how deeply we have been betrayed by our country and how thoroughly the govt has obliterated the social contract between the govt and the people.

For that matter, can you even define what this thing called Canada is anymore, other than a tax and regulatory system that is plundering us at every turn? From my perspective, it looks a lot like govt for the benefit of the governors and their friends, with us as voiceless serfs.

What cultural values does Canada represent? What principles does it preserve? The border of a nation is a line where one culture stops, and another begins. Can you identify what it is about being Canadian that you value so much, other than the fact that you're "not American."

Incidentally, I notice in your Twitter profile that you have four flags in your bio. Yet, the flag of our post-national state -- Canada -- is not among them.

What exactly is still worth defending about Canada? Do you seriously think this country is reformable when our voices and concerns are NEVER represented in the debates happening inside Parliament?

Maybe you should watch a Parliamentary session and tell me whether this is a country that gives serious consideration to the real concerns of its people. A kindergarten with 338 unsupervised children would be capable of producing more meaningful discussion.

The very structure of our parliamentary system makes the kind of bottom-up reforms that are possible in the US impossible to achieve in Canada.

Before you sneer at those of us willing to seriously consider Trump's tongue-in-cheek idea, perhaps you might take a moment to try to understand why so many Canadians are receptive, and what led us to lose faith in our country. I assure you, my willingness to consider Trump's idea of the 51st State is not something taken lightly. Your simple reduction of a complex issue to "Canada vs Trump" highlights a blindness of the real issues at stake.

When you see the young people in your life desperately scouring the globe for opportunities outside of Canada because they no longer see a future for themselves here, is that a system worth upholding and a flag worth fighting for? In that equation, to whom do you owe your allegiance?

I am from an immigrant family. I know the sacrifice and pain that accompanies leaving the old country behind. Building a new future in another country is not for the faint of heart.

To see so many young people unable to envision a future in the country of their birth breaks my heart. I know full well the heartache they will face in distant lands as their ties to their homeland weaken, as they raise their children far from grandparents, as FaceTime replaces tea on a porch together, and as they are condemned to watch far-away parents suffering in old age yet be too distant to provide support in the everyday trials of old age... that is the reality of what these young people are contemplating because of what Canada has become. Our country has shredded the unwritten social contract as the torch is passed between generations — perhaps that is the biggest betrayal of all.

When you see so many friends and family in the process of fleeing these shores, or who have already left, permanently, because they could no longer afford to wait for reforms that never come, and to see so many around me terrified of facing old age in this broken country, is that a country worth preserving?

When you see so many loved ones trapped in despair and depression as everything they've spent a lifetime building is stripped away by the latest social engineering initiative, yet unable to defend themselves through a political system that essentially denies them a voice, is that a system that fuels pride for king and country?

When you see your town fill up with homeless camps, drug addicts, and filth, and your culture slowly fade into a grey uninspiring fog, and to be confronted daily with the powerlessness of not being able to do anything to stop it because at every turn we are shut out of the political system, humiliated and name-called for raising our voices, mocked by our leaders and our mainstream media, and utterly ignored by the political parties that claim to represent us, even as our money and our sovereignty is systematically frittered away on the world stage to signal the virtue and flatter the egos of our leaders, does that make our flag a symbol worthy of our pride and allegiance?

Previous generations risked life and limb to the defend our country from becoming what it has become today. And yet, here we are. I keep hearing people say, "Fight for your country". Why? A true patriot fights to protect his loved ones from everything that this country has become, not to preserve a rotting status quo that is destroying his loved ones and his community.

Ironically, the people who are suddenly defending our sovereignty and culture are the same ones who have been spreading the hatred of our country, from land acknowledgements to unchecked and unassimilated mass migration, and countless other points besides. I wonder if the real reason for their sudden patriotism is that constitutional reform or annexation would cut their taxpayer-subsidized careers off from my tax dollars? Pigs at a trough, afraid that the trough will be taken away.

I, like many others from immigrant families, worked hard to assimilate, to learn and internalize Canadian history and Canadian values, to build ties and put down roots in Canada in ways that honor the sacrifices made by previous generations who built what drew us to these shores.

To see our post-national govt encourage hatred of our culture, to see our govt cater to those who go out of their way NOT to assimilate, to watch others import their ethic conflicts onto our streets, to watch long-established immigrant communities suddenly feel unsafe in their own homes because of the hateful activism pursued by newer arrivals who are using Canada as a staging ground to continue ethnic wars raging in their home countries, is a betrayal of both old stock and new and everything that Canada once stood for.

I cannot even begin to tell you how many immigrant families - the ones who truly valued the vision that Canada once had of itself - are now actively making plans to leave Canada because they are afraid for themselves, their children, and their futures, and because they are disgusted that this country shows no willingness to uphold its own values. Those who still have strong ties to the old country are leaving the fastest — the exodus is growing by the day.

My father once told me that what he loved most about this country is that a man in Canada is judged by what he builds with his own two hands, and not by the last name inherited from his father. That, as an immigrant arriving in a small Canadian farming community, he could buy or sell an entire year's crop of cattle with no further guarantee than a handshake and the reputation he had built in his community.

No more. That Canada is all but gone. Replaced by tribalism, skin color, and DEI. I miss him, but I am relieved that he never had to see what became of the country that once welcomed him and gave him the courage to try to build something that he expected would last for generations.

When his dreams came to an untimely end, our whole community rallied together to help us through those tough times, to help us with harvests, and to watch over our family until we found our bearings without a strong father at the head of our family. If that sense of community doesn't mean something, I don't know what does. I don't care about a flag. But that community means the world to me.

We BUILT roots here. It took hard work on all sides to build the bridges that assimilated us into our broader community. These are my people. I would put my hand in the fire for them, as they have done for me. Do those living the laptop lifestyle who run our country, manage our corporations, and work in our media, even know what that means?

Flags can be changed. Communities cannot. My allegiance is to whatever is best for my people, not to a system that best suits the grifters and power-hungry parasites in distant halls of power.

It all leaves me speechless. How can a culture completely turn its back on everything it once stood for, without any meaningful effort at self-preservation, all because a few pathetic losers have learned to weaponize empathy as a political strategy? Does this country even have a pulse?

The course correction never comes. A culture of self-loathing, tribalism, and meaningless land acknowledgements is not the basis of a long-lived and unified nation. How many more generations should we stay trapped in this never-ending cycle of voting for the "other guy" to save us from the "current guy", even as the country is stuck on a one-way ratchet taking us to the same hollow destination no matter who is in charge.

Slowly, out of necessity and bitter experience, we are learning the true nature of the political system that underpins our nation, we are discovering the lack of real checks and balances, and that "Canada the people" and "Canada the political system" are two entirely different and often antagonistic things. And so, we are looking for change. For the sake of "Canada the People". That other nasty thing up there on Parliament Hill, with the defunct flag hanging over it, it has to go.

Our leaders, in their utopian quest to centrally plan a better world, have social-engineered the destruction of our nation -- it is no longer an anchor around which we can all rally. But through their thirst for power and plunder, they squandered the opportunity to build the greatest, freest, and most prosperous nation that ever could have lived. I see no path forward to reform this through the existing political system. They have no one to blame but themselves.

You think this is about Trudeau and 9 years of destructive Liberal rule? No. If we had a properly functioning system with proper checks and balances, what they did could never have reached such extremes. The last 9 years are merely a symptom of a much bigger problem that cuts to the heart of our parliamentary system.

Maybe you've forgotten what our political system enabled Pierre Elliott Trudeau to do to Canada in the 80s as he tried to impose his vision on the rest of us. You still can't mention his name in Alberta without someone spitting on the floor.

Or maybe you've forgotten how Mulroney signed us up for this fraudulent climate crap or how Harper endorsed it and participated in signing away slices of our sovereignty to one of the most corrupt and self-serving intranational organizations in the world. The whole thing has nothing to do with science, but everything to do with using fear to acquire lucrative research grants and weaponize fear as cover for the latest social engineering schemes. Don't believe me? I've meticulously documented both the politics and the fraudulent science in my latest book, Plunderers of the Earth (#CommissionsEarned), and how politics and bad land management, not CO2, are directly to blame for the environmental deterioration that so many of us are seeing right outside our doorstep. Read it, and maybe you'll understand one of the reasons why we hate the media so much.

And maybe you've forgotten why confederation happened in the first place - to neutralize Quebec - and the systematic effort by the Canadian govt to erase and erode their culture in order to anglicize them, until they turned to nationalism in self defense, only to flush their integrity down the toilet as they learned how to play the federal system to their advantage instead of being a victim of it. I don't blame them. I've lived in Quebec for a brief time -- they are not our enemies. Ottawa is. Ottawa sowed the seeds of the division, not Quebec. If the term "les nègres blancs d'Amérique" means anything to you from the upheaval that happened in Quebec in the 1960s as they reached their breaking point, you'll understand how deep the bitterness runs in Quebec about being exploited for decades as low-wage serfs in their own country by their Eastern Anglo overlords.

Or maybe you've also forgotten how Sir John A. MacDonald and his peers used the cozy relationship between govt and corporations to milk farmers in the newly settled West by giving the CPR a monopoly on railway building and setting freight prices (which allowed them to suck every ounce of profit out of farmers with no other options to get crops to market), while using the power of the law to prevent farmers from building competing rail lines to access US markets.

Before Trudeau Sr. came along in the 80s, no other event produced a greater mass exodus of Canadians who fled their shattered dreams to rebuild their lives south of the border. That exodus is repeating itself again today as one social engineering event follows another. Trudeau Jr. is not the root of the problem. He is the symptom of something much deeper.

Or consider the failed residential school experiment as an example of how, when social engineering schemes go wrong, bureaucratic egos and inertia in govt override the voices of those trying to point out problems. Our system lacks real political representation, and so the steamroller can continue for generations without a course correction, even as our media, with their cozy relation to govt, kept everyone in the dark out of fear of ruffling feathers with their govt sponsors. And then, when political winds changed, silence was replaced with spin and weaponized lies to suit the social engineering agendas of the current age while the cold and complex hard realities remain as deeply buried as ever -- these lies are reopening wounds between our peoples that had begun to heal before "woke" activists, "woke" politicians", and "woke" media weaponized it all and began to divide us once again.

Or need I remind you of how a newly minted Canada used its raw power to forcibly absorb Manitoba and Saskatchewan into Confederation without asking those that lived there for permission or input, and how Canada initially tried to deny them representation in govt in Ottawa and refused to recognize their land titles in their seigneurial system inherited from their French roots.

Canada literally flooded their colonies with surveyors who trampled over their farms as Canada prepared to sell their lands out from underneath them to Eastern investors. Louis Riel and his peers tried to stand up for their community, got steamrolled, and when they finally felt pushed so far into a corner that their emotions got the better of them and things turned nasty, they hung him. Yet no govt official ever paid a price for their role in the madness. Even today it is a festering wound in the Metis community. Welcome to Canada, where everything is peachy until you stand in the way of the latest govt agenda.

Canada's history is one long never-ending drama of social engineering schemes even as the core issues never get addressed. Waves upon waves of Canadians left to pursue better lives south of the border, disillusioned by what was done to them by their government, but before social media only their neighbors noticed.

The tyranny of the experts. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I'm tired of building a future on a foundation that can be swept away at a moment's notice because some new muppet rises to power and uses the absence of meaningful checks and balances to impose their vision on us, and ignores our voices when we try to say 'no'. In theory, the government has limits, and we have rights guaranteed by our constitution. In practice, it's all little more than an illusion. A right that is conditional upon govt whim is a privilege, not a right. I'd use what happened during Covid as an example, but since you are a member of the mainstream media, I fear it would probably fall on deaf ears.

This is my home. My roots are here now. I will embrace any opportunity that comes my way to defend my loved ones and my community. Flags come and go. Communities do not.

No amount of flag waving can change the fact that my home would be best served if it were part of a constitutional republic that offers my community protections and political representation that are wholly absent in Canada and that the Canadian political system has been hell-bent on resisting giving to its people throughout its 157-year history.

If Canada is willing to give me those protections by scrapping the broken parliamentary system and turning itself into a republic, great. But I'm not holding my breath. If it takes Trump threatening to annex us to acquire those things, also great. I honestly don't care which way we arrive at real rights and real political representation, as long as we get there.

...

I know the US is also drowning in problems as, generation after generation, it slowly erodes the constitutional limits at the heart of their republic.

But what if the idea of the 51st state is an opportunity to fix the problems plaguing both countries?

A true Great Reset to convert Canada into what it should have been but is not, and to reset America's Republic closer to what its Founding Fathers intended — limited govt, local autonomy, and a truly decentralized nation.

We don't have to passively accept their current Constitution. A merger requires opening the Constitution. It is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for reform.

What if, for the price of becoming one, we could fix the problems in two nations? Would you be interested?

I've explained it in more detail in this thread: https://x.com/JuliusRuechel/status/1877153755982082378

If, after giving it some thought, you decide it's not for you, perhaps you might at least add a Canadian flag to your bio. It adds credibility to your position.

I, on the other hand, am getting the BBQ ready so I can give our American brothers and sisters a warm welcome when they arrive to liberate us.

---

In all seriousness though, if we wait for Parliament, this will never be resolved. It's up to us — the people — to drive this conversation. Maybe an earnest conversation between people with entirely different views about the future of our country would be a good place to start.

Let's do what Parliament has lost the capacity to do and talk. Are you up for it? It is a genuine offer.