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This is a confession as much as an indictment: I was all in on this boondoggle. In fact, I spent a big chunk of that April afternoon talking up a representative from another Canada 150 “Signature Project” — who was then in the process of putting together the guest list for a 23,000-kilometre “Coast-to-Coast-to-Coast” expedition to ferry lucky passengers from Toronto to Victoria via the Northwest Passage. As (then) editor of a plummy little arts-and-letters monthly, I told him, I’d be the ideal candidate to gush to the world about the glories of the Arctic.

Alas, I never got the gig. And good thing, too. Because if press accounts of the things that went on aboard that boat are to be believed, I would have jumped off and let the frigid ocean waters deliver me to the mercies of the afterlife.

Photo by Jim Wells/Postmedia

According to one lengthy account by Ian Brown of the Globe and Mail, shipboard social life degenerated into shrill arguments about “cultural authoritarianism” and white supremacism. For those who tired of the sour, off-putting experience of debating Canada 150 on Twitter, here was a chance to have the exact same debates in Canada Goose jackets. From coast to coast to coast, the cruise helped confirm, our intellectual class has decided to celebrate Canada 150 with an orgy of cranky recrimination.

The sesquicentennial ushered in a bizarre rhetorical world wherein even the most harmless gesture carries harbingers of genocide. When the tour officials delivered a gift of hockey sticks to the Nunavut community of Clyde River, a passenger compared the gesture to “colonialists giving blankets (to First Nations), which gave them smallpox.” When a passenger mentioned how amazing it is that traditional Inuit were able to survive harsh Arctic winters, an Indigenous woman attacked the comment as an indirect justification of colonialism. And this was just the daytime itinerary. At night, passengers gathered in a common room to engage in “reconciliation” — which is to say, a frenzy of bitter racial accusations and melodrama. The whole horrifying exercise reportedly ended when a group of black and Indigenous Canadians prepared an impromptu manifesto containing “a list of instructions for white Canada.”