Canada’s old elites built up the grand railway hotels, founded businesses empires that spanned generations, and created family estates with neat hedgerows and sloping lawns. On a late summer afternoon, they could be seen taking tea at the Empress in the Victoria Harbour.
Their faults included arrogance and self-righteousness, and their sense of aristocratic virtue was mysteriously absent when it came to the wages of their workers. They distinguished themselves from our present elites, however, in one crucial respect: an unflagging patriotism and an unfailing loyalty to the country.
Our new elites work from their laptops in hyper-modern homes, attend foreign film festivals, and go on vacations to offbeat locations or undiscovered resorts. Over the course of several university degrees, they are initiated into the Leftist academic orthodoxy of white privilege, critical theory, deconstruction, and Foucault. Our elites cannot help but regard their newfound knowledge as a type of moral enlightenment. They look down on the majority, which continues to cling stubbornly to the old-time values of religion, family, and nation.
The outlook of the new elites is profoundly at odds with that of most Canadians. They possess what social commentator Rob Henderson calls “luxury beliefs”: woke values held by the affluent to signify their high social status. To the new elites, the country is systemically racist, our national history is a source of shame, male and female are social constructs, open borders are harmless, and it is the mandate of public schools to teach political correctness and a progressive stance on gender.
According to a Pollara Strategic Insights poll released in May, only 25% of Canadians describe themselves as “woke”. This minority of the population exerts a disproportionate amount of influence, through their domination of institutions such as school boards, museums, cultural organizations, universities, and government advisory committees.
One real-world consequence of this is the transformation of the landscapes of our cities and towns, notably by the removal of monuments celebrating national history. Most recently, the National Capital Commission voted to rename Ottawa’s Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway as Kichi Zībī Mīkan (in the Algonquin language).
Ryerson University has been renamed Toronto Metropolitan University, after a successful push by far Left activists, who also toppled the Ryerson statue. Egerton Ryerson, who established a system of free public schools in 19th century Ontario, stands accused by the mob of complicity in the residential school system (find out the truth at friendsofegertonryerson.ca).
The Girl Guides of Canada have removed the name Brownies, claiming that it has caused “personal harm” to “racialized girls”. In Toronto, Dundas Street has been jettisoned. There are even calls from the far Left to rename British Columbia.
Societies have always had elites, and always will. Canada’s new elites are unprecedented, however, in the divergence of their cultural values from those of the population. Their ongoing campaign to reshape the country and rewrite its history is provoking a growing backlash, putting them on a collision course with an increasingly resentful majority.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the Islands Marketplace magazine (islandsmarketplace.com/issue.pdf) in my bi-monthly column, Counter Current.
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