Elder Advice

Thinking Inside the Box - 162

As usual around Canada Day, Elder Advice has been dispensing wisdom from Prince Edward County. Surrounding him, apart from tidy farms and grey-green whitecaps of Lake Ontario, is a multitude of empty wine bottles and beer cans. Mute testament to his unwavering support of the local economy.

The County is home to generations of United Empire Loyalists. Whose ancestors received generous and strategic land grants from the Crown after they were shown the door by American rebels in 1776. The children of those original Loyalists, along with like-minded Quebecers and indigenous peoples, understood even before 1812 and the War of Southern Aggression that began that year, that there was something worth preserving and building on in the northern half of the continent. Together, they rejected Manifest Destiny and repulsed the waves of invading Americans who sought to spread it. The great-great-great-great-great grandchildren of those original Loyalists take Canada Day seriously. But not themselves. As anyone can plainly see.

Elder Advice was poised to offer a stirring call to arms on July 1 but decided to pause to see if this year’s Trump-inspired plethora of patriotism would last. Predictably, by July 3 - even here in a cradle of Canadian nationalism - only odd bits of red and white detritus were in evidence. Truthfully, he did not expect more. The experience of the past decade told him a call to armchairs - preferably ones close to the couch - would better suit the majority of Canadians and the torpidity of the times.

But is it any wonder that Canadians are at a loss to know where to position their trochoginglymoid joints at this moment in our history?

Elbows up? Down? Perpendicular? Slantwise? Wenis up? Wagina down? It is increasingly difficult to keep up with the inconsistent announcements of economic and political strategy and instructions from Ottawa. Although, to be fair, it is summertime and Elder Advice admits his preferred focus is on bending an elbow.

June’s G7 elbow rubbing in Alberta saw Carney and Trump each undertaking to reach a new trade deal by July 21, followed almost immediately by Carney’s pre-negotiation bending of the knee by capitulating on the Liberals’ signature Digital Services Tax, which would have taxed the revenues of tech companies like Google and Meta operating in the Canadian marketplace. The foreseeable failure of the submissive strategy - that doing so would make Trump fair and reasonable going forward - is now apparent with his ratcheting up of the steel and aluminum tariffs and his more recent musings of impending tariffs on Canadian copper. And it was evident from inception, given there has never been a sentence in the English language where “Trump”, “fair” and “reasonable” have been adjacent. Ottawa’s thinking behind this strategy - that decision-making in Washington is driven not by raw politics but by shared economic values and norms, and that rational economic choices will ultimately be made, is risible. Anyway, setting a short term date for agreement - rather than ragging the economic puck until the fall when the global market, whether or not assisted by the U.S Court of Appeals, will tank Trump’s absurd and unsustainable freelance tariff policies - makes no sense.

Perhaps the problem Canadians - including our leaders who should know better - are having is that everything the present U.S. administration says and does is antithetical to what is “Canadian”. Which, in this age of everyone’s incompatible views about absolutely everything, is not easy to explain.

Allow Elder Advice to venture a little clarity.

Since long before Confederation, Canadians have been bound together by adherence to a simple set of laudable principles - the rule of law, tolerance socially, prudence fiscally - assisted by a national personality that is self-effacing, slow to anger, and predisposed by geography and climate to both community and the imperative of collective responsibility. That, in Elder Advice’s chronically correct view, is the elusive “Canadian identity”, and it is difficult for most of us to understand when our closest neighbours and friends tolerate an administration which does not have any of them.

Now Elder Advice would be remiss if he did not admit to a growing concern, over the past decade of Canada Days, that we have failed to actively promote those principles and that personality. We have not required all young Canadians and those who wish to become Canadians to share and demonstrate those civic values. We have not required those from away to discard any ethnic values which are not fully compatible with them. Instead, we have permitted the institutional denigration of Canada’s historical record and abandoned the meaningful study of citizenship. All of which, no doubt, accounts for much of the lethargic patriotism presently on display. The concern? If all we now care about is the economic convenience of being Canadian; if all that now matters is what benefits we can individually wring from the public services set up to provide for those in need; if fear and inertia are all that now bind us, and not a sense of shared destiny, perhaps the battle cry of “NEVER 51” is inappropriate.

But not here. Even if Canada cannot muster 60 million sharp elbows, intruders can expect the same welcome here in the County as they received in 1812 …

… and should consider themselves warned.