"Canadian" Values, Apparently

Canada was once a nation of explorers and builders.

We knew who we were.

Not anymore:

On June 12, 2026, the eyes of the nation were fixed on a stadium in Toronto where Canada met Bosnia in a soccer game; the result was a 1-1 tie. Great was the rejoicing in the tents of Canadian fans of the sport. Never before had Canada gained a point in a World Cup tournament!

In two previous tournaments, we lost all six games we played and only managed to put the ball in the opposing net twice. Clearly a tie with Bosnia was a massive improvement. The CBC reported that it “should be a point of pride for Canada ... a huge confidence booster for the co-hosts.”

Colour me unimpressed. Celebrating a tie against a nation of three million ranked 65th in the FIFA rankings seems to be setting the bar at a very low height.

The problem is not soccer. The problem is that lowering the bar has become a habit across Canadian institutions.

Consider the case of recruiting to the Canadian Armed Forces. The military has struggled for years to fill thousands of vacant positions. Our government discovered that, despite the generous provision of tampons in male bathrooms, a life of low pay, substandard housing, and obsolete equipment was not appealing enough. To woo troops, it was deemed necessary to lower standards. Security screening was relaxed, fitness standards lowered, and aptitude tests ditched.

How did that work out?

Well, how did you think that accepting more of the less-qualified would work out? More training resources were wasted on those who were going to fail. Allowing in those with mental health issues required more support downstream. Many recruits lacked the language skills needed to follow orders in either French or English. Some had problems adjusting to Canadian cultural expectations and resisted heeding female officers.

Need another example?

Witness the fruit of lowered standards in our educational system. A flight from standardized testing in high schools has gone hand-in-hand with a rise in grade inflation and numbers of students graduating with a distorted sense of their own accomplishments. Having been on the honour roll in high school, they believe they are prepared for success at a university level only to discover that they cannot do basic math or write an essay without the help of artificial intelligence. That sound you hear is the noise made by professors tearing out their hair and banging their heads on the wall in frustration.

Will universities respond by requiring admission tests to screen out the unprepared? Of course not. Such tests would be termed inherently discriminatory with a disproportionate effect on marginalized groups. Rather than invest in bringing up the level of those groups earlier in their education, it is deemed better to let them into university where they will fail and drop out at higher rates.

Canadian indifference to excellence is also built into the criteria for Canada Research Chairs and university professorships. Many of these positions now specifically bar healthy, white, heterosexual males from even applying, reserving them for “women, 2SLGBTQIA+ people, Indigenous peoples, racialized persons, and persons with disabilities.”

This is regrettable for two reasons. Firstly, it assumes with soft bigotry that professionals from these groups could not compete in an open market and leaves them open forever after to the condescending stigma of the “diversity hire.” Secondly, by cutting the recruiting pool in half, we have dramatically reduced the chances of finding the best-qualified candidate.

Historically, Canadians have been an easy-going people, never demanding much of ourselves. Our Olympic motto has always been “Go for the bronze!” or “It’s an honour just to compete!” Only in hockey do we care about being the best.

In the 21st century, if we don’t want other countries—more ambitious, harder-working, and better educated—to eat our lunch, that has got to change.

 

Is this the same country where people carved out the land using only their wits and their brawn? 

** 

Rather than inviting Canadians to wrestle with one of the world’s most complex conflicts, it teaches visitors to understand the conflict as solely a consequence of Israel’s creation. In doing so, genuine Palestinian suffering is transformed into a perpetual weapon targeting everything related to Israel, and encourages the public to view millions of Jews as the beneficiaries and defenders of an ongoing historical injustice.

This is not the pursuit of historical truth. It is a toxic political instruction delivered with the authority of the Canadian state.

Walking through the museum, located in the heart of Winnipeg, one design choice immediately stood out. The Nakba exhibit is physically positioned after the museum’s Holocaust gallery, meaning visitors move directly from one of history’s best documented genocides into a highly politicized presentation of the 1948 Arab Israeli conflict.

That transition creates a subtle but unmistakable emotional and interpretive bridge between two entirely different historical contexts, carrying visitors from a universally recognized moral framework into a contemporary political narrative with the implication that the same categories of understanding naturally apply. While the implicit promotion of Holocaust Inversion certainly informs the conclusions visitors are invited to draw.

Inside the exhibit, that framing quickly becomes more pronounced. The material is not presented as a set of competing historical interpretations or unresolved debates. Instead, it is organized around a single guiding premise: that Palestinian displacement in 1948 is not simply a historical event with several causes, but the beginning of an “ongoing” Jewish Israeli-imposed tragedy that entirely ignores Palestinian suffering when Israel cannot be blamed.

 

These Palestinians: 

1953: Yehud attack

1970: Avivim school bus bombing

1972: the Munich massacre

1974: the Ma'alot massacre

1976: the Entebbe raid

1985: the murder of Leon Klinghoffer 

July 1989: the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem bus attack 

1994: the Dizengoff bus bombing 

1997: the Mahane Yehuda bombings

October 2023: the October 7th attacks

 

Hardly a comprehensive list and my hands got tired from typing the multitudes of violent acts perpetrated by the Palestinians.

** 

A Liberal-appointed trustee who quit the Canadian Museum for Human Rights over an anti-Israel exhibit says he was “berated by board members for my views.” Mark Berlin, former director with the federal Department of Justice, told a B’nai Brith podcast the Museum was “a tool of propaganda.” 

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Among Canadians who say they have become more negative toward Jewish people in Canada since the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel, 51 per cent strongly agree that the Holocaust is mostly an issue of the past. This view is also held by 41 per cent of those who strongly agree that Israel’s military actions in Gaza justify negative attitudes toward Jewish people in Canada. Among those who strongly agree that Jewish people in Canada are responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, 55 per cent strongly agree that the Holocaust belongs to the past.

What explains the connection between endorsing antisemitic tropes and the desire to “move on” from the Holocaust? It’s that its memory gets in the way. For those seeking to justify hostility toward Jews in Canada as a legitimate response to events in the Middle East, the Holocaust remains an impediment: a moral, historical and political warning against collective blame, demonization and the normalization of antisemitism. Declaring the Holocaust irrelevant to the present helps remove that obstacle.

But this does not usually stop at forgetting. More often, it involves displacement: pushing the Holocaust out of the centre of historical memory and replacing it with an alternate version of the past, one in which Jews are no longer primarily remembered as victims of hatred but recast as beneficiaries of excessive sympathy, privilege, or even as perpetrators whose suffering has been overemphasized. In that reframing, Holocaust memory is not merely neglected; it is contested, minimized, inverted, or turned against Jews themselves.

This helps explain why antisemitic attitudes and the desire to “move on” from the Holocaust are connected. The Holocaust stands as a rebuke to the mindset that antisemitism depends on: treating Jews as collectively responsible, imagining Jewish influence as insidious and presenting hostility toward Jews as a form of moral or political resistance. ...

In this sense, the desire to consign the Holocaust to the past is not simply amnesia. It is often an attempt to reorder memory in the service of a present-day political agenda — one that requires Jewish vulnerability to be forgotten, relativized, or replaced by a narrative in which antisemitism can be justified.

On Canadian Multiculturalism Day, June 27, the survey results are especially insightful because they reveal how fragile the boundary can be between celebrating diversity and tolerating narratives that undermine it. Multiculturalism is not only about recognizing difference; it also depends on a shared refusal to hold communities collectively responsible for conflicts abroad, and on the willingness to protect minority communities from being judged through political grievances directed elsewhere.

 

The Holocaust isn't a stumbling block. 

One could omit it from the discussion but all that one would be left with is the knowledge that ONE pervasive and repugnant ideology is responsible for the incomprehensible hatred of international Jewry.

It's not "mental illness" and we know it.

Furthermore, political multiculturalism - the idea that all cultures have something of equal value to offer and are equally beneficial (regardless of what some aging, double-talking, irrelevant, unaccomplished creep might think)  - is not just demonstrably false, it serves to divide the public instead of uniting it under the banner of common causes and ideas, especially if those coming do not see themselves as even residents of the host country but willing to live off of it and bring their old hatreds with them. After all, there is no impetus to acclimate or get along.

That would be causing a fuss. 

 

Political multiculturalism is a moral and political failure, a cancer on the country which must be excised if there is ever to be unity.

The bleating against throwing political multiculturalism into the dust-bin of history is a lazy and inflammatory misdirection and deflection.

No country was founded on political multiculturalism and no country can survive with it. No country can benefit from elevating one group over another and no country can run smoothly by creating elites and purported victims of injustices, real or imagined.

Look no further than Canada to see political multiculturalism's "success".