00:00:00.000Good evening Western Standard viewers and welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show of the
00:00:21.220Western Standard. It is Thursday, April the 9th. Heritage Canada is preparing to publish a new
00:00:26.860Citizenship Guide. This is the book that the government gives to new Canadians to prep them
00:00:32.280for the citizenship test that they have to pass. It also reflects the official Government of Canada
00:00:39.340view of who and what Canada is and the things that we value and the things that we don't.
00:00:45.880But if you know anything about real Canadian history, you might not recognize your old country.
00:00:52.060Some Canadian heroes you think should be in the book aren't, and others are in and you may wonder
00:00:58.780why. Michael Bonner, our guest this week, is a former policy advisor in the field from the Harper
00:01:05.260days. These days he's a political strategist with Atlas Strategic Advisors. He's also a historian,
00:01:12.140a senior fellow with the Calgary-based Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy and author of the
00:01:17.980forthcoming book, The Crisis of Liberalism, The Origin and Destiny of Freedom. Michael,
00:01:23.740you seem almost overqualified for us, but thank you for being here.
00:01:28.140It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me back.
00:01:31.020Excellent. Michael, the Western Standard published this story on Tuesday, and I think a lot of our
00:01:36.620readers are really surprised and maybe appalled at some of the ideas this government thinks you
00:01:42.300should believe and support it's certainly very one-sided on the indigenous file very gay and
00:01:48.380trans friendly and there's a lot of people who you would expect to see in it who are very downplayed
00:01:55.100seems to be trying to paint a very different picture of what it is to be a canadian than what
00:01:59.900canadians themselves have experienced or might think it ought to be what's going on here well
00:02:05.420i mean the i don't know i don't i i find it very difficult to sort of enter the thought world of
00:02:11.180the of the liberal uh hegemony in in ottawa whether in the trudeau years or now the citizenship guide
00:02:21.500seems to have been a problem for uh trudeau jr since before he um became prime minister there
00:02:30.540was that famous incident over the use of the word barbaric cultural practices uh condemning such
00:02:36.700things as female genital mutilation and forced marriages, which seems to be an odd sort of thing
00:02:42.780to die in a ditch over. But this has been a preoccupation for some time, and based on what
00:02:50.860I see in the media about this, I sincerely hope that the descriptions we're seeing will not
00:02:56.940come to pass. Is Sir John A. Macdonald in the rewrite?
00:03:01.740not as far as i have seen no that would seem to me a as if if it is in fact not there that would
00:03:12.600seem a significant of a mission to have the country's first prime minister not mentioned
00:03:18.540yes i think i think that would be a serious omission and this sort of the sort of war on
00:03:22.960john a you know if if this is indeed what we're facing you know it's yet another uh
00:03:29.680First of all, it's embarrassing. Second, it just makes the Canadian past increasingly incomprehensible and promotes the kind of forgetfulness that leaves people sort of out of touch with their own history.
00:03:49.260So yes, if that is the case, if we have no John A., if we're losing touch with the historical
00:03:55.660foundations of our country in the citizenship guide, that to me seems like a very serious problem.
00:04:01.260Now, I think a lot of Canadians who were born here have never had any reason to study history,
00:04:06.940and therefore might not be familiar with this particular document.
00:04:13.020It is referred to in the story as a draft, and it was secured under an Access to Information
00:04:20.220request from Blacklock's reporter, an organization with which we have a most cordial relationship.
00:04:27.580It seems to me that, well, a couple of things are funny about that. First of all, is this document
00:04:36.140actually out there to be discussed and maybe amended or are they going ahead with it and
00:04:43.100we just happened to intercept it before it went to the printers what's your sense of
00:04:47.420why there's a draft that we're talking about well it's possible to obtain draft government
00:04:53.340documents under most circumstances if you request them through the access to information protocol
00:05:00.780i suspect that that's what happened in this case unless somebody um leaked it uh for some
00:05:07.900particular reason which is also possible but it seems less likely um you know on the one hand i
00:05:16.380think a citizenship guide made by committee with sort of constant input from the public left right
00:05:23.340and center would probably not really turn out very well um on the other hand a kind of proclamation
00:05:32.220from on high as to what liberal overclass thinks everybody should believe about canada
00:05:39.020is equally bad i just don't see what the reason is for changing the the citizenship guide in
00:05:48.460the first place it was it was a deliberately non-partisan document the the minister my former
00:05:57.740boss uh jason kenney went out of his way to avoid so much as even appearing in the in in the document
00:06:05.500um to you know avoid the perception of of uh partisanism and to avoid uh dating it uh
00:06:14.140Avoid the appearance that it comes only from a specific time in our history. It's only relevant for a certain time.
00:06:25.140I reject the idea that the citizenship guide has become irrelevant. Our history that is articulated there, the discussions of the nature of parliament and so forth, that doesn't go out of date.
00:06:39.140Well, exactly. I mean, can you talk about some of the things that are likely to surprise Canadians if they take the trouble to look at this?
00:06:50.140I hope they would, frankly, but there are going to be certain people who are in and certain people are out.
00:06:55.140Could you maybe expand on that a little for us? What do you think is the reason for it?
00:07:00.140I mean, I just I don't know what the reason is, but I mean, for example, the sort of the history of the of the governor's general, you know, there's a lot.
00:07:13.740it looks like based on what i see in black locks uh reporter that there's there's a lot of emphasis
00:07:19.260on uh adrian clarkson and michael jean um you know as as uh sort of identitarian concerns so
00:07:30.780we're not talking about again if black ox reporter is right we're not talking about the the vice
00:07:37.420regal office or what these particular uh personages both you know both lovely people i'm sure uh long
00:07:45.420history of broadcasting on the cbc and so forth um but instead instead of talking about the the
00:07:54.460office and the the particular uh achievements of these personages we're talking about uh how
00:08:02.460one is the first refugee and that's it the other is the first black lady you know these are
00:08:08.540obviously uh undeniable facts but in in in the world in which identity politics of both left and
00:08:17.420right have have riven western democracies and created a kind of polarization i i i would hope
00:08:26.060that our government would would have learned to sort of shy away from that sort of thing now so
00:08:30.700that's that's one example and you know there's a lot of there's a lot of sort of gender identitarian
00:08:37.500stuff too i mean to me it's identity politics and i think that we have seen the the kinds of evils
00:08:44.940that identity politics can do uh in in in the world um we i thought we had all sort of had
00:08:52.300enough of that uh uh under the uh uh in the trudeau years we've seen how absurd it can look if if if
00:09:01.260you look at any of the uh footage from the recent uh ndp convention um you know it's it's kind of
00:09:07.740laughable at this point but there are real dangers to it that you can um that we should be alert to
00:09:13.740based on um news abroad and that sort of thing so the last place i would like to see this sort of
00:09:20.620thing would be in a citizenship guide. You mentioned a couple of
00:09:27.660governor general appointees that would appear to have been made for what you could refer to as
00:09:33.500identitarian reasons. According to Blacklocks, there's nothing in there, however, about Georges
00:09:42.860Vanier, also a governor general, obviously a man, a decorated war hero, awarded the military cross,
00:09:49.820and I think a man with significant charitable work to his credit as well. I would have thought
00:09:56.540that a man like that would have qualified. Talking about former prime ministers, we had
00:10:04.940that discussion about Sir John A. Macdonald, but I can say with certainty that the document
00:10:11.900references Lester Pearson, a liberal, John Diefenbaker, Pierre Trudeau, and Kim Campbell,
00:10:20.380but it doesn't say anything about Brian Mulroney, who, like him or not, was a far more successful
00:10:26.460prime minister than either Mr. Diefenbaker or Ms. Campbell. Then there's a whole bunch of people
00:10:39.420there that are not mentioned such as smoky smith one of our most decorated veterans
00:10:47.740roy thompson you know newspaper baron it's alexander graham bill did some great work on the
00:10:55.420in this country no mention glenn gould fan but he's not there anymore he was right or explorers
00:11:03.820or i mean the the war of 1812 i mean one one wonders whether it's still there i mean the
00:11:09.020The motivation of the Harper era citizenship guide was to create a sense of history, not to create a sense of historical grievances or a morality story about how the evils of the past are sort of gradually rectified through emphasis on identity.
00:14:28.740Can you just talk a little bit about the efforts that they went to, that this could
00:14:36.300be a unifying document as opposed to one that just makes people think well i don't want anything to
00:14:41.760do with that the the first order of business was to create a description an accurate description
00:14:51.060as opposed to a political proclamation a description of the way things are of how canada is
00:14:57.960and how it has genuine has has truly evolved as opposed to a political proclamation about how it
00:15:04.600should be in in accordance with the views of a particular political uh party now that means that
00:15:13.880the the you know the beaming face of the minister as as though befitting a white paper or a some
00:15:22.200sort of formal report to uh you know to to the to the department or something like that you know
00:15:30.520That is not the kind of tone that needs to be set there.
00:15:36.740And the minister won't be the minister forever.
00:15:39.440I mean, Minister Kenney was, former Minister Kenney was Minister of Immigration for a long time, but it eventually came to an end.
00:15:48.640He's not going to be there, and neither is the Harper government.
00:15:52.780But the truth of the history in question and the facts that newcomers need to know, those are perennial things that don't go out of date.
00:16:02.740And what I detect, again, from the Blacklock story, is more sort of the niche concerns of a particularly sort of urban slice of the liberal electorate,
00:16:25.820uh very much preoccupied with you know mid 2010s concerns um and that in and of itself i think is
00:16:37.880already out of date and the emphasis should be the emphasis should be much more on a shared
00:16:45.280unifying uh unifying narrative that that avoids these sort of pointillist
00:16:54.060uh minute concerns about um you know identity and grievance let's say now now michael you are
00:17:04.040a professional historian i mean you're working as a strategic advisor for atlas but you've actually
00:17:10.000got a book coming out later this fall talking about the crisis of liberalism um i'm going to
00:17:17.200give you a moment to just speak of that in a moment but as a historian and somebody who worked
00:17:23.340the Harper government, you know what is and isn't true here. So why do you think that other
00:17:31.820historians aren't chiming in and complaining that some of the very people who are being erased,
00:17:39.260why aren't they challenging this? Well, I suspect that very few people are aware that this
00:17:44.700Because first of all, very few people know what goes into the process of gaining citizenship.
00:21:25.860i i don't think they have such a mandate at all uh you know if it ain't broke don't fix it what
00:21:31.620was wrong with the previous guide i don't think there was anything and you know history history
00:21:37.700is you know there there's room for new opinions and so forth but but the the the key facts of of
00:21:43.460of the evolution of our country are they don't change i mean they they don't just sort of need
00:21:49.860to be updated uh every so often the nature and workings of parliament don't change they haven't
00:21:58.500changed um the way our constitution is is set up uh as described in the old citizenship guide
00:22:06.900these things don't need to be re-articulated every couple of years and i would say that the
00:22:12.500the the the burden of proof is on the people who wish to change it why what's the reason yeah well
00:22:19.060Well, that's kind of what I find myself asking.
00:22:23.120I can only conclude that the government that we've had for the last 10 years
00:22:28.540concluded that a lot of Canadians needed an attitude adjustment
00:22:32.500and presumed that theirs was the job to give it to them
00:22:35.760and theirs was the attitude that the rest of us should accept.
00:22:40.660And I'm prepared to say what I wouldn't encourage you to say on this program, but sort them.
00:22:46.640Now, Michael, tell us a little about your book, and then we've got to go.
00:22:50.920So my book is about liberalism, not liberalism with a capital L, but with a small L.
00:22:55.360So think of John Locke, John Stuart Mill, or the sort of general idea that dominates Western political discourse that we are by nature free and that politics must secure personal freedom.
00:23:13.380Now, this is still dominant theory in Canada, in the West, in the United States, Britain, France, everywhere, at least in the West.
00:23:24.580And there are other places in the world that still aspire to be free and liberal.
00:23:29.220But everybody knows that there's something wrong with it.
00:23:34.720Why did liberalism not spread more after the end of the Cold War?
00:23:40.360Why do we have people in the West of every political persuasion now who think that perhaps there's too much freedom?
00:23:49.840Why did we have a liberal party effectively go to war against something called the freedom convoy?
00:23:57.120Perhaps there's something that we don't understand about freedom.
00:24:00.440Perhaps there's some element of why we are or ought to be free that has been confused or lost in a discourse of ever-increasing personal rights and individual liberties and so forth.