The woke utopians are wrong: Canada should be celebrated

There are many reasons to celebrate Canada on Canada Day

Mark Milke, Financial Post, June 30, 2022 (Read the Financial Post version here.)

To understand why it’s popular among the chattering classes to trash Canada this time of year, it helps to understand the power of utopian thinking. In past centuries, utopian movements sprang from religious impulses and secular versions of the same. Religious examples include communes, which in extreme forms separated themselves from what they viewed as an impure world. The goal was utopian: to create a mini-heaven on earth.

Secular utopian movements included 20th-century Marxists, be they Russian revolutionaries from 1917 on or Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge killing fields in 1970s Cambodia, with plenty of other examples, not all quite so deadly, in between. The common impulse was a utopian vision of radical economic equality.

Past religious and secular utopian movements were anti-reality — utopians typically ignore human imperfections or diverse human abilities, desires and choices when it comes to an economy — but at least they focused on creating a future paradise.

In contrast, today’s reflexive Canada critics apply utopian thinking to the past. They look back and see that Canada’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, or some other historical figure, was imperfect and didn’t have 2022 views in 1867. But why would we expect our predecessors to have been flawless — we certainly aren’t! — or follow 21st-century policy prescriptions in the 19th century?

The inevitable result of applying such utopian thinking to the past is the attempt to “cancel” such figures, to send their history and genuine accomplishments down some 1984 memory hole.

Utopianism is one mistake when looking in the rear-view mirror. Another is to see the flaws in its history as defining a nation like Canada, rather than prompting the question: How did we move away from the wrongs that were once routine in almost every civilization?

Slavery, for instance, was ubiquitous in the ancient world and common in many places until very recently in historical terms. Slaves of every colour, creed, and ethnicity were once taken captive on every continent: Africa, Asia, the Americas, and even from Europe and the North Atlantic regions. According to historian Robert Davis of Ohio State University, one million Europeans were taken into slavery between 1530 and 1780 by slave-traders originating in North Africa.

Thus the most interesting thing about slavery is not the fact of its historical existence but the questions of why and how it came to be abolished. The answer? Thanks to people like British parliamentarian and lifelong abolitionist William Wilberforce and the evolution of the British Empire post-1833, including attempts by British colonialists to abolish slavery among Indigenous communities in 19th- century British Columbia.

Both pre-and post-Confederation Canada was ahead of the curve on slavery and other important social issues. Though slavery was effectively abolished in Canada in 1820, it took the Americans until Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation to declare slaves free and the Union’s 1865 victory over the slaveholding south to make that declaration a reality.

Many other nations didn’t abolish slavery until the first half the 20th century. Those included China, Malaysia, Morocco, Turkey and Kuwait. Oman and Mauritania only outlawed it in 1970 and 1981, respectively — a century and a half after Canada did.

Or consider the emancipation of women. At the federal level, Canada granted the vote to women in 1917. That didn’t happen until 1944 in France, 1949 in China, 1950 in India, 2005 in Kuwait, and 2015 in Saudi Arabia, where women still can vote only in municipal elections.

Finally, consider Canada’s treatment of minorities. Rampant mistreatment of those different from the majority — whether defined by colour, ethnicity, religion, or language — has been routine throughout human history until very recently. What is truly historically noteworthy has been the move away from seeing people as defined by such characteristics and instead treating them as individuals in law and policy. (Temptations to renewed official discrimination remain: Think of Quebec’s new laws regarding language and religious symbols.)

But on this problem, as well, Canada was ahead of the curve: Ontario passed laws against discrimination in employment and accommodation based on colour, ethnicity, religion and gender in the early 1950s.

There are many reasons to celebrate Canada on Canada Day. Don’t let the utopian perfectionists who think the past should have been unblemished dissuade you from celebrating a tremendous accomplishment: Canada, which over time, has turned into a free and flourishing nation for people from almost literally everywhere.

Mark Milke is executive director of The Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy. His latest book is The Victim Cult: How the Grievance Culture Hurts Everyone and Wrecks Civilization. Image credit: Pixabay.