It’s a subject where one fears to tread, but it needs be said.

Political correctness is casting a smothering blanket over one of Canada’s greatest and most consistent ideals, freedom of speech and civilized discourse.

It’s right and good that four major issues of the 21st century – climate change, the environment, aboriginal reconciliation and gender liberation – have surfaced as priorities and are being championed with enthusiasm and political will.

But enthusiasm is too often evolving into dogmatism and self-righteousness. If you’re not 100 per cent with us, you’re against us. Do not question – you will be vilified and scorned.

Civility and politeness, much-praised aspects of Canadian behaviour, have left the room. Today, perhaps because of the anonymity of Internet-facilitated commentary, intelligent individuals too often resort to personal insults rather than debate the issues at hand.

Climate change has become a rigid ideology, best illustrated by the attitude of Alberta’s current New Democrat provincial government. Wildrose Party renewables and electricity critic Don MacIntyre suggested, quite logically, that science has yet to determine how much of global warming is caused by man’s activities and how much by millennia-long oscillations in planetary warming and cooling.

For uttering such heresy, the New Democrat caucus suggested MacIntyre be removed from his critic’s position. New Democrat MLA Shaye Anderson sadly shook his head and said, if only Anderson “had all the facts.”

Aboriginal reconciliation should and is at the top of most agendas. Looking back, Canadians as a whole now recognize and genuinely regret the emotional scarring and dysfunction caused by the residential schools. We are, at least in gesture, trying to atone for this great injustice to Canada’s First Nations people and to correct on-going racism.

But sensitivity sometimes runs amok. City councillor Bryan Anderson, a profoundly reasonable human being, was tarred and feathered for suggesting the name of the 23rd Avenue extension to the Enoch Cree Nation, Maskekosihk Trail, could be confusing – if only because the Cree word could be pronounced many different ways in English. As the equally fair Paula Simons pointed out in her Edmonton Journal column, the word even has two pronunciations within the Cree language.

What’s disturbing was the scorn heaped upon Anderson – how dare he “disrespect” indigenous people’s names? “Language is part of conquest,” said our mayor.

For merely making a common-sense suggestion, with pros and cons to his argument, Anderson was lambasted to the point he felt compelled to apologize.

The acknowledgment and acceptance of complex gender identity, bolstered by scientific discovery, says much that is good and open in our society. We now understand the myriads of legitimate variations on being a man or a woman, on sexual attraction, on sexual identity.

But social zealots invented new pronouns - ze, zim, zer to replace he or she – that academics at the University of Toronto appear to have embraced. One professor, with compelling counter-arguments, voraciously argued against such gender interpretation, and what he persuasively argued was a fad.

For which Professor Jordan Peterson has been persecuted and vilified for daring to question such radical acts done in the name of gender equality. As he wrote, the “personal consequences of objecting are huge” and he has seen students and colleagues “bullied into states of mental uncertainty by politically correct peers.”

Finally, one name: Donald Trump. There’s no doubt the President-Elect of the U.S. is often a boor and made crude sexist remarks in the past. But the overwhelming dislike for the man by the Canadian establishment is without balance. In the year leading up to the American presidential election, National Post columnist Conrad Black consistently predicted Trump’s victory and gave compelling arguments why that victory would happen, and why such a victory could be advantageous to America’s future.

For which Black has been vilified, shunned and so on.

Perhaps squabbling, quarrelling political correctness is simply a luxury of a society without worry of conquest, pestilence or famine.

The obituary story for the late, great NHLer Milt Schmidt, who died at 98, recalled Milt and his two line-mates on the Boston Bruins “Kraut Line” (!!!) enlisting in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1942: Whereupon Schmidt and his line mates were carried off the ice on the shoulders of their arch rival Montreal Canadiens.

Does it take such greater adversity to push aside the tyrannical pettiness of political correctness?