“JOOOOOOOZ!!” will get the blame in the comments for pushing multiculturalism and mass immigration. (I presume…)
On the topic of semantics, American readers can be forgiven for presuming the phrase “Canadian values” is considered hopelessly retrograde up here—comically corny, like “women’s lib.” Or perhaps a northern varietal of the “-values” garlic and wolfsbane from which all leftoids recoil, such as the more common “family-” and “traditional-” types.
Yeah, no. You see, within living memory, Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien and his cohorts in the Natural Governing Party never shut up about “da Can-AY-dee-yun val-YOOZ.”
Yet I don’t recall the CBC ever once complaining, as they just roused themselves to do, per Leitch. Not to be outdone, “The suggestion that there are government-defined ‘Canadian values’ is frightening,” the Globe and Mail suddenly realized over the weekend.
Because a Conservative had the gall to employ this particular locution—the sheer uppity presumption to drink from a “Liberals Only” fountain!—the ruling class is now pretending they’ve never heard it before.
(To parry with a favorite idiom of my own, I believe this practice is referred to as “gaslighting”…)
PS: After writing my column, someone tweeted (I think) this survey from five years ago, showing that 97% of Canadians approved of screening immigrants for Canadian values.
(Hilariously, the survey was conducted on behalf of an institution named after Pierre Trudeau.)
Now, I can’t really accept the veracity of a survey on any topic that brings back a 97% “yes” result. But still…
