The People's Republic of Canada

Despite a partially rigged popular vote and thanks to the Electoral College, America backed off a Hillary administration. Canada would have given her a heftier majority than it awarded the androgynous Justin Trudeau. We are heading pell-mell in the direction that would have sunk the United States. Business investment and industrial productivity are down, while taxes and real unemployment are up. We live in a Trumpless country. Canadian supporters of Trump have been taken to task for it innumerable times by people who know nothing of Trump except what the media tell them. Academics, especially, whose salaries are guaranteed and have nothing to worry about, despise the American president as a boor. The intellectual class in general considers Trump the manifest inferior of Barack Obama, whose silver tongue – or golden teleprompter – masked his hatred of his own country and whose policies brought foreign debacles and economic ruin in their train. Under Trump's administration, trade, industry, and employment numbers are flourishing in the U.S. Canadians, however, consider these gains an aberration that detracts from the social justice agenda that dominates the national temper.

Case in point: Canada's ongoing NAFTA trade negotiations with the U.S. tell an "it was a dark and stormy night" story that puts Canada's economic adventure under the Trudeau administration into dismal perspective. Trudeau has assigned his minister of foreign affairs, the ineffable Chrystia Freeland (of "100 years ago pretty much all women were beaten by their husbands" fame), to represent the country vis-à-vis Donald Trump. NAFTA is crucial to Canada's economic prosperity, given that Canada enjoys a massive trade surplus with the U.S. Yet, as John Mueller of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS) remarks regarding Freeland, "I thought the first time I saw her that she would singlehandedly sink the NAFTA discussions" (personal communication). Freeland wants to expand the agreement to include gendered and social justice goals. This is not going to work for Canada. The tussle between a self-inflated feminist manquette with a social justice agenda and a tough no-nonsense negotiator with his country's advantage at heart is really no contest. We can only hope Trump will play the gentleman, make a few concessions, and spare the poor lady the embarrassment of her dysfunctional brand of hubris. Canada needs NAFTA more than the U.S. does. Freeland's statement on World Day of Social Justice gives the show away. "As Canadians, we recognize that ... [s]ocial justice is about ensuring that everyone ... is afforded equal rights and opportunities[.] ... In the face of discrimination, xenophobia and prejudice, social justice also requires that we all promote the strength of diversity at home in our communities and around the world." These are noble sentiments and reputational suicide to disagree with, but what Freeland leaves out of her ringing declaration are the "rights and opportunities" of those expected to shoulder the economic burden of her program – namely, those who comprise the bedrock of national solvency and the public weal. The redistribution of public wealth – in effect stolen from self-reliant earners who commit to the work cycle, take risks, and subsidize the nation through their efforts – to special interest groups and in general those who claim to have been neglected or forgotten in the social sweepstakes constitutes the progressivist agenda in action. The job-killing taxes imposed on Canadians – the province of Ontario in particular carries "one of the highest rates in the developed world" – form a significant part of the redistribution mania. What we can expect in the next two years of Trudeau's term is a still heavier tax load and increased social justice spending lavished on women, native bands, Muslims (organizations, immigrants, refugees, and returning ISIS fighters), various "diversity" and multicultural programs, safe injection sites for drug addicts, gender studies in the universities, environmentalists and climate changers, Human Rights Tribunals – all at the expense of a rapidly shrinking middle class and agricultural sector. Along with this malign project goes the intention to equalize "outcomes," a favorite word of social justice types for whom "input" is a non-factor in their thinking. Outcomers take precedence over inputters. The race to the bottom is picking up speed. We can be grateful, I suppose, that Trudeaulatry appears to be on the decline among a more or less cataleptic population. Nonetheless, owing to Trudeau's bloated budget, which has nothing really to do with economic growth or sustainability, and which panders, according to Andrew Coyne writing in the National Post, "to every conceivable Liberal client group and policy cult," we are in for a rough ride. In fact, the Trudeau government "is on track to record a deficit of $28.5 billion this fiscal year (2017-18)." The projected deficit over a four-year span of Liberal governance now clocks in at $102.3 billion – a daunting figure for a country of approximately 33 million people. But not to worry. According to Trudeau, budgets balance themselves – no doubt as a form of economic Mayurasama. The People's Republic of Canada desperately needs a Trumplike figure who knows how to husband the economy, lead a country to prosperity, and abolish the national leveling program gutting the tax base while sacrificing the generative sap of the country's future to the radical fiction of "equality" – the essence of leftism. Regrettably, we have no such paragon on the political horizon. Our destiny, it appears, is to serve as an object lesson for our neighbors to the south in what not to do in order to escape the snare and delusion of social justice.