in World News Diaspora politics are confusing and destroying Canada
By Irvin Studin
There is only one flag that matters to the future of Canada – the Canadian flag. Full stop. Tout court!
No other flag, whatever its beauty or the cause it represents, can obviate this basic truth: we all live in Canada, and our fate as a people and country will be determined by increasingly difficult realities and decisions on the ground, in the second largest state on Earth.
The proliferation of foreign flags, external causes and alien hatreds – including a wretched, incipient antisemitism – on Canadian soil has conspired to confuse the Canadian political and strategic imagination at a time of already heightened national disorientation and underperformance. Our great country is barely emerging from a devastating pandemic period – one that resulted in seven to eight major systems crises spiralling across state and society.
Post-pandemic, we cannot even properly educate our own kids – but the protagonists of faraway conflicts are strangely top of mind. Post-pandemic, we toil amid the rubble of disintegrated Canadian business and enterprise – but upheaval in some distant land will somehow vindicate us in all moral respects. Post-pandemic, our country has grave domestic threats to its national unity and social cohesion – but a radical change in leadership and ideology on another continent will apparently save us from ourselves.
Let us cease with these degenerate escapisms. We are all Canadians. And only by reinstating the “Canadianness” of all things can we begin to regain our eroding national sanity.
This sanity turns on two elements: first, that Canadian decision-makers always know and feel the national (Canadian) interest; and two, that there is always a large portion of the Canadian population thinking about – and defending – the national interest.