Canadians Are Abdicating Their Independence to the State

Humans are horrible creatures, if history is any authority. It seems they have a myriad of reasons for exerting their will over other humans, and rarely a good reason not to.

My grandfather recounted gruesome stories from his grandfather about the Bolshevik revolution. This revolution was one of the reasons my ancestors came to Canada and ended up settling in southern Manitoba.

As I mentioned, oppression is the way of humankind, regardless of colour, culture, or creed.

It irks me just a little when I hear people say that those who came here as refugees (in any age) came here and settled on "stolen land". If that's the case, then refugees are still doing that in Canada today - and our government is encouraging it.

Canada admittedly has some dark history in regards to its indigenous population, and obviously things could have been handled better here initially, but at this point, it is what it is. One group's suffering doesn't invalidate another group's suffering - and European settlers certainly haven't cornered the market on showing up unannounced.

The trend in perceived public opinion today seems to be that the answer for everything is always more government intervention - more laws (which are often redundant), a bigger public service to enforce these laws, government-enforced morality, and of course higher taxes to pay for it all. In Canada, our current federal government is the epitome of this. Regardless of whether or not you believe the government needs to atone for all these past sins, the reality is these things will likely never be atoned for or absolved by more government involvement. That was the problem right from the start.

This attitude of trusting the government to fix all our problems for us wasn't nearly so common a century ago, when people were coming here for freedom from government. Many of the uprisings here in the last few years are related to precisely that. Not so much that the government does stuff we don't like (although there is a good bit of that going on right now as well), but also that they simply do too much. In my opinion, the answer for most of the problems in society today is for the government to get out of the way and let people live their lives. If they had done this right off the bat, the residential schools would never even have happened here.

The problem is that more and more, this attitude of independence that the immigrants who built this country came here with - the attitude that said, “We're going to make this work and build a better life for our family come hell or high water” is increasingly being laid aside in favour of a paternalistic government that can supposedly fulfill all our needs and make all our decisions for us.

We've become a society wholly dependant on “experts” for everything, as if we need them to hold our hands as we navigate life. What used to be common sense now requires at least two citations of peer reviewed literature to be considered valid - or at least a blessing from the government.

It seems we have abdicated our critical thinking skills to nameless experts who have no idea what's really best for us.

Consider the recent Liberal government’s Bill C-11, also known as the Online Streaming Act. This act was supposed to force media companies like YouTube and others to amplify and promote Canadian content because evidently our government believes that Canadian creators simply aren't up to the challenge of competing against real creators from other countries. It's basically affirmative action for Canadian artists. The problem (as I outlined in this piece) is what Todd Beaupré, director of product management at YouTube says: namely that pushing Canadian content on those that don't want it will result in more negative reactions from those viewers. This negative feedback will teach the algorithms that “Canadian content isn't as engaging or satisfying as other content.” This in turn could result in those Canadian videos getting fewer recommendations from the YouTube algorithms.

Or the even more recent Bill C-18, aka the Online News Act. The intent of this bill was to make it better for Canadian news agencies by “levelling the playing field” against big tech firms like Google and Facebook. You may have been shocked to discover that it did exactly the opposite. I wasn't, but you might have been.

Once again, the immortal words of Ronald Reagan come to mind:

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.

Thanks, Justin.

Another aspect of this is that when a platform promotes one type of content over another, it's actually demoting other content in order to accomplish that goal.

Senator David Adams Richards in his awesome speech to the Senate regarding this bill had this to say:

I think, overall, we have lately become a land of scapegoaters and finger pointers, offering accusations and shame while believing we are a woke society. Cultural committees are based as much in bias and fear as in anything else. I’ve seen enough artistic committees to know that. That what George Orwell says we must resist is a prison of self-censorship. This bill goes a long way to construct such a prison.

I highly recommend reading his full speech.

Government censorship is a perfect example of this. The very act of censoring ideas (as was done during the COVID pandemic) disallows us from making up our own minds. It decides for us what we can handle, what is obscene, what might be triggering. It brings with it the message that, “We have decided for you, so you don't need to take the time to think about it. You don't need to exercise your moral muscles because we've done that work for you. You may now be happy in your ignorance.”

The less exercise these moral muscles get, the less good they do us and the less capable we are to make these kinds of decisions.

John Stuart Mill said:

He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties

Is it any wonder there are so many ape-like imitators out there on social media? In a world where “doing your own research” has become associated with alt-right extremism and anti-government sentiment, you’re basically discouraged from even attempting to think for yourself.

Independent people built this country largely because the government provided opportunities (in the form of land and jobs) and enabled them to do what they were good at and then stayed out of their way. These people were not dependant on “experts” to tell them how to live their lives, let alone government sanctioned ones.

Independent people are robust and resilient. They are antifragile. Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes the word antifragile as “things that gain from disorder” in his book of the same name. This is what we used to be and what successful people still are. This is what many immigrants are of necessity because they know they're basically alone in a strange land and they need to make it work.

Now our culture teaches kids to be fragile, to be always looking for offense, to be fearful of certain ideas and not to question certain other ones, and that government (instead of family) is their protector. We are turning them into a therapeutic culture where everyone has some kind of disability that they need to run to a therapist for, instead of empowering them with the confidence to make proper decisions on their own.

This is the way out: we must imbue the next generation with the confidence to do stuff on their own, to experiment, and to develop the critical thinking skills that enable them to make hard decisions. We need to help them develop that fierce independence that will make them thrive even in the midst of chaos. Another history lesson is that we can definitely not rely on the government or the school system to do that for us, and if we choose not to do it, we have failed our kids and doomed them to dependence on the state. This is the job of mothers and fathers, and there are no state-sanctioned experts that will ever be able to replace that.