‘‘CANADIANS USED TO HAVE A REPUTATION FOR BEING sane and moderate,” Oxford University professor Nigel Biggar said to me on a recent Quillette podcast. “If you have time, I’d like to know why you think Canada has gone the way it has.”
By “the way it has,” Prof. Biggar was alluding to my country’s strange, somewhat manic-seeming lurch into progressive radicalism since the election of Justin Trudeau, whose government now litters its policy agenda with paeans to intersectionality and anti-racism. This has been done with the express approval not just of Canada’s academic and activist establishment, but of the many Canadian journalists who now devote much of their time to hectoring readers and viewers about privilege, systemic racism and “decolonization”.
Of course, the rise of “wokeness” is the subject of complaint in all western countries. But its encroachment into public life is markedly more advanced in Canada than in other parts of the world. Why so?
IN SOME WAYS, CANADIAN INTELLECTUALS ARE UNLIKELY devotees of progressive race orthodoxy, since its precepts are entirely imported from American sources. A traditional point of emphasis among our intellectual class has always been Canada’s difference from the United States. Americans were the warmongers, the laissez-faire capitalists, the racists. We were the pacifists, the socialists, the multiculturalists.
As recently as a decade ago, our national
