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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
July 13, 2008
Nation of noodles
While I unburdened myself last week of my contempt for Canada’s Governess-General, her Chief Justice, her Prime Minister, and other, undesignated officials -- in the affair of what I have come to call the “Order of Morgentaler” -- I’m not sure the people of Canada have yet been sufficiently condemned, and I will devote this week’s column to rectifying that oversight.Years ago -- years and years -- I was arguing with an intelligent pollster over beer that there is a way to measure Canadian complacency with statistical precision. Pick any event in which our Liberal/gliberal ruling class has “tried something on” in defiance of known Canadian attitudes and traditions. Then poll the level of public acceptance immediately before, during, and after the event. The most recent case study is that award to Canada’s, and possibly the world’s most famous abortionist. The only poll of which I am aware, before the event, was alas an unscientific “online” poll the Globe and Mail did when rumours that Henry Morgentaler might receive the Order of Canada first surfaced. Now, the Globe is not a notoriously rightwing newspaper, and its online polls tend to reflect national opinion less than the received views of people who live in e.g. Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood. Notwithstanding, the final tally was 8 percent for, 92 percent against, honouring the abortionist in that manner. Possibly that poll was stilted by some organized effort by pro-lifers to write in. I would have expected the “for” number to be a little higher. But my impression was, that even most “pro-choice” people shrank from “pushing the envelope” so far. The online polls I saw, just as the award was finally announced, were running 45/55 -- which is to say, still decisively against, but now a horserace. But the definitive CanWest poll, done by Ipsos Reid after the news had been assimilated, showed 65/35 either “strongly” or “somewhat” in favour. Even allowing for the possibility that the result was somewhat tainted by the “somewhat” (who were the clear majority of the pro-Morgantaler respondents), the trend is now clear. On the issue of same-sex marriage -- a proposition put in referenda before many U.S. states and consistently rejected by huge margins -- there was a similar swing. Canadians began totally opposed, were split by the time the “courts had decided,” and by now are, so far as I can see, hugely accepting. The same happened at the end of the 1960s, when abortion was first legalized in Canada. The “procedure” (as its advocates like to call it) went from being unthinkable, to being thinkable, to being generally accepted in a very short time. Yet no one had ever actually voted on the issue -- the thing was put through Parliament in an omnibus bill -- and had there in fact been a vote, I very much doubt the law could have been changed. It is worth noting in every case, that the urban voter, or poll respondent, leads the swing. I have written from time to time on what I call the “school of fish” phenomenon among urban electorates. The nicest, politest explanation of such swings is the Canadian desire for “peace in the family.” We may not like what is going to be done, but once it has been done, we won’t look back. Paradoxically, the success of “progressive” policies in Canada, advanced in consciously undemocratic ways by our political, legal, academic, and media elites, has depended upon a general public that is “conservative” in the lowest sense. That is to say, a public attitude of “don’t rock the boat,” which is maintained even when pirates are boarding it. Now, I am a Catholic, and my Church teaches that “despair” is a sin (since it involves the abandonment of hope in eternity). So I opt instead for “desolation,” which is not a sin, merely a psychological response to everything around one being in an advanced state of disintegration. For civilization requires, among other things, a general populace with moral ideas that cannot be altered by the slightest breeze. Alas, it also requires constant public reinforcement of those moral ideas, or they will in fact drift -- since human beings are very prone to choose “the easy way out,” and to tolerate the intolerable rather than make a fuss. Complacency in this sense is a general human, rather than specifically Canadian quality. Still, when I compare the amount of resistance that is offered to “envelope pushing” up here in Canada, to down there in the States, I cannot help but conclude that contemporary Canadians are relatively starch-free. The sad thing is that, while all trends are reversible, the amount of labour and sacrifice that will be required to rebuild a consensus in this country, in support of the moral order, is out of all proportion to the work that was needed to overturn it. It took centuries to inculcate such notions as “you must not kill people to solve your problems,” or, “freedom requires constant vigilance.” It takes only a few years to throw them over, and the task of Sisyphus must begin again.rn David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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