Canada

Early in the corona era the historian David Starkey gave some thoughts on Covid. ‘We’ve got a Chinese virus,’ he said, ‘and we’ll finish up with a Chinese society.’ I remember at the time thinking the phrase neat, but doubtful. Fast forward a couple of years and the doubts have eroded. Although Britain seems to have avoided becoming a permanent Covid state (and is indeed one of the first societies to try leaping out of the Covid age), other parts of the West certainly do seem to be trying to meet the CCP more than halfway. Foremost among them is Justin Trudeau’s Canada. There is no shortage of things going

Two-and-a-half centuries ago in 2015 I had a video call with a Canadian friend who lives in my hometown of Toronto. As we spoke, she was putting together a Middle Eastern spice box for the Syrian refugee family she’d sponsored through her daughter’s school, carefully printing the labels in Arabic. Canada had recently committed to accepting 25,000 refugees, compared with the UK’s 10,000, which we both agreed was stingy. I explained to her that although there were lots of charities and refugee initiatives here, the public attitude was different. Not xenophobic, I insisted, just less precious. None of the parents at my son’s school, as far as I knew, were

The first wave of truckers in the Freedom Convoy arrived in Ottawa on Friday, having travelled across Canada to protest the vaccine mandates and to fight Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s tyrannical Covid restrictions. While the rest of the world has begun to admit that we simply need to learn to live with Covid, like any virus, Canada’s Liberal government has clamped down with vaccine passports, lockdowns, and vaccine and mask mandates. It’s those same measures that the truckers are determined to fight. In a January 26 press release, the organisers of the Freedom Convoy explained: ‘The supply chain has been in shambles for well over a year due to the

What if William Howe, the dithering British commander, hadn’t let the American army escape in the Battle of Long Island in 1776? What if he had nipped the whole damn thing in the bud? In that case, as dual Canadian-American citizen Adam Gopnik complains in the New Yorker, ‘We Could Have Been Canada’. That’s not exactly a hill to die on, but it’s catnip for other dual nationals such as Malcolm Gladwell, who some years back produced an amusing plea for Canadian World Domination in the Washington Post. Gladwell wrote that in 1993. Gopnik’s essay is more recent. The earlier essay was light-handed and witty. Gopnik’s was ponderous and dry.

In 1966, a year before Pierre Elliott Trudeau first blazed to power, the bard-poet Leonard Cohen published his second and final novel, Beautiful Losers. The book is a hallucinogenic, stream-of-consciousness steam bath of Catholic allusions, French separatist indignance and extra-marital forest porn with hot indigenous chicks. Needless to say it’s basically unreadable. Back home in Canada though, the book is still widely taught and read. Over half a century on it still sells thousands of copies each year. The reason, as one early critic noted, is that the book, while being an obvious failure, is nonetheless ‘an important failure.’ Which brings me to the matter of our Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau. Having