Oh, now they love their country

Not hating Canada is back en vogue. All it had to take was a little saber-rattling from Donald J. Trump.

I remember it vividly. -30 in the sun. -40 in the shade. Hopeful, happy people, gathered together for the first time in years; many of whom had driven across the country because the hurt was so deep.

Hugs and smiles by trash barrel fire.

Some admittedly weird dudes up to no good, but a seldom few.

Shovelled sidewalks; impromptu soccer games; meals for the homeless.

At night, fireworks that lit up a country grown needlessly dark and dim.

Dance parties on top of truck beds and more fleur-de-lilles than the media’s perceived White Power Bills.

A couple kissing outside the Rideau Centre — a mall now plagued by violent drug addicts and fake refugees with rap sheets.

It was unwieldy, grew to be illegal, and was wildly imperfect — but boy did it keep its humanity.

The same can’t be said for the other Ottawa that I witnessed: outdoor-masked purple-hairs tossing coffee cups at those flying Canadian flags; profanity-laden shrieks of “I hope you die of Covid!” from the moon-faced bureaucrats on balconies above; a PM committed to othering and inflaming over speaking to all those he had deliberately hurt and wedged into desperation.

A Dudley Do-Wrong for a public safety minister who spread arson and rape hoaxes, and who felt the vapours while wishing for Tiananmen Square on Wellington Street.

Monsters.

On purpose — no. But monsters all the same. Sometimes, people “just follow orders.”

The summer of 2021 had been perhaps no less divisive. Spurned on by what is now accepted as a mass graves hoax, Canadian flags were yanked down or made to fly at half-mast for a better part of a year; two years if your bureaucrats were particularly lilly-livered.

Men like Gerald Butts and the Canadian chattering classes defended hundreds of burning churches; both great and modest statues were felled without a second thought for the crime of having lived through imperfect moments that now date as far forward as Y2-freaking-K.

Our entire education system was uprooted with suicide-afflicting race hustlers and “anti-colonial” wannabe revisionist historians, who have all but fed the minds of impressionable youth through a meatgrinder of guilt and shame.

I was in Ottawa for this too. I recall standing on Parliament Hill, where defenestration-laden displays had marred the halls of power worse than the decades-long big dig, and watched as fresh-faced, proud new immigrants attempted to stage photos around the displays of sullen white-Liberal self-indulgence.

("There was much that was dark about residential schools, but no graves have been confirmed at Kamloops to this day.” -Terry Glavin)

And it wasn’t just Ottawa, of course. Entire neighbourhoods, towns, our very social circles were electric with disunionist sentiment. Our very conversations were strapped to a 12-volt car battery, sometimes even those inside our home: speak out of turn; don’t post the black square on Instagram; forget to wear the hair shirt; show a little accidental mirth — be prepared to ride the lightning.

At times it felt as if the Canadian milieu would never recover. In many ways, it hasn’t. Without more forced changes to mass immigration and a grand Liberal-NDP exodus, it won’t.

Yet, remarkably, insultingly, it’s now these same meek and mewling mobs, these same anti-civilizational forces and those who took leave of their senses never for them to return, who have suddenly found nationalism; who no longer wish you ill, dead, or racist, for the kinds of sentiments echoed in Norman Rockwell’s often-satirized “Freedom of speech.”

All it took, evidently, was a game of Trump bully ball — from glaringly obvious chapters in The Art of the Deal and The Art of the Comeback — to get those who forgot to love their country to come racing back.

"Has no one read Art of the Deal in Canada? It’s clear embellishment and provocation to force the issue and get deals done," says a Trump source.

This, evidently, matters not. We have hairs to light on fire; shit to talk; premiers to elevate to the status of temporary prime minister.

And premiers, mind you, who are still keeping John A. Macdonald in a damned box.

“Great crack-ups of old consensus" (Weiss, below) are indeed underway in the wake of Trudeau putting one between his ears — ‘H-man’-style, down in Katie Telford’s bunker — but that makes this whole tariff sideshow no less sorry of a spectacle.

Bari Weiss: The Comprehensive Failure of Justin Trudeau

The Liberals who couldn’t find Canada on a map for nigh a decade, who sat back as your home was re-badged as ‘Turtle Island,’ have suddenly found their reading glasses, and “oh would you look at that, our love of country was under our nose this whole time.”

When all it takes is a little bombast and bluster from South of the border, that’s not patriotism; that’s narcissistic injury.

Non-apology apology not accepted.