00:00:00.000Good evening Western Standard viewers and welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show of the
00:00:21.200Western Standard. It is Thursday, April the 9th. Heritage Canada is preparing to publish a new
00:00:26.840Citizenship 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
00:00:39.320view 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.
00:00:52.040Some Canadian heroes you think should be in the book aren't, and others are in and you may wonder
00:00:58.760why. Michael Bonner, our guest this week, is a former policy advisor in the field from the Harper
00:01:05.240days. These days he's a political strategist with Atlas Strategic Advisors. He's also a historian,
00:01:12.120a senior fellow with the Calgary-based Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy and author of the
00:01:17.960forthcoming book, The Crisis of Liberalism, The Origin and Destiny of Freedom. Michael,
00:01:23.720you seem almost overqualified for us, but thank you for being here.
00:01:28.120It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me back.
00:01:31.000Excellent. Michael, the Western Standard published this story on Tuesday, and I think
00:01:35.960a lot of our readers are really surprised and maybe appalled at some of the ideas
00:01:40.840this government thinks you should believe and support. It's certainly very one-sided on the
00:01:46.440indigenous file, very gay and trans friendly, and there's a lot of people who you would expect to
00:01:52.280see in it who are very downplayed. It seems to be trying to paint a very different picture of what
00:01:57.960it is to be a Canadian than what Canadians themselves have experienced or might think it ought to be.
00:02:03.160What's going on here? Well, I mean, I don't know. I find it very difficult to sort of enter the0.77
00:02:10.200thought world of the of the liberal uh hegemony in in ottawa whether in the trudeau years or now
00:02:19.640the citizenship guide seems to have been a problem for uh trudeau jr since before he um
00:02:29.320became prime minister there was that famous incident over the use of the word barbaric
00:02:33.880cultural practices condemning such things as female genital mutilation and forced marriages,
00:02:40.600which seems to be an odd sort of thing to die in a ditch over. But this has been a preoccupation
00:02:48.600for some time, and based on what I see in the media about this, I sincerely hope that
00:02:53.800the descriptions we're seeing will not come to pass. Is Sir John A. Macdonald in the rewrite?
00:03:01.720not 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
00:03:18.520yes i think i think that would be a serious omission and this sort of the sort of war on
00:03:22.940john a you know if if this is indeed what we're facing you know it's yet another uh
00:03:29.660First of all, it's embarrassing. Second, it just makes the Canadian past increasingly incomprehensible and promotes the kind of, you know, forgetfulness that leaves people sort of out of touch with their own history.
00:03:49.280So, yes, if that is the case, if we have no John A.,
00:03:52.840if we're losing touch with the historical foundations of our country
00:03:57.000in the Citizenship Guide, that, to me, seems like a very serious problem.
00:04:01.440Now, I think a lot of Canadians who were born here
00:04:04.160have never had any reason to study history
00:04:06.760and therefore might not be familiar with this particular document.
00:04:14.320It is referred to in the story as a draft,
00:04:17.240and it was secured under an access to information request from Blacklock's reporter,
00:04:23.080an organization with which we have the most cordial relationship.
00:04:27.640It seems to me that, well, a couple of things are funny about that.
00:04:31.400First of all, is this document actually out there to be discussed and maybe amended?
00:04:39.880Or are they going ahead with it and we just happened to intercept it before it went to the
00:04:45.160printers what's your sense of why there's a draft that we're talking about well it's possible to
00:04:51.160obtain draft government documents under most circumstances if you request them through the
00:04:58.280access to information protocol i suspect that that's what happened in this case unless somebody
00:05:06.360leaked it for some particular reason which is also possible but it seems less likely
00:05:12.360um you know on the one hand i think a citizenship guide made by committee with sort of constant
00:05:21.280input from the public left right and center would probably not really turn out very well
00:05:27.060um on the other hand a kind of proclamation from on high as to what liberal overclass thinks
00:05:36.360everybody should believe about Canada is equally bad.
00:05:43.740for changing the citizenship guide in the first place.
00:05:49.360It was a deliberately non-partisan document.
00:05:56.200The minister, my former boss, Jason Kenney,
00:05:59.600went out of his way to avoid so much as even appearing
00:06:03.000in the in in the document to you know avoid the perception of of a partisanism and to avoid
00:06:11.680dating it avoid the avoid the appearance that it comes only from a specific time in in in our
00:06:22.100history is only relevant for a certain time I reject the idea that the citizenship guide has
00:06:27.760become irrelevant our history that is articulated there uh the uh discussions of the nature of
00:06:34.920parliament and so forth that doesn't go out of date well exactly i mean maybe can you talk about
00:06:43.020some of the things that uh that are likely to surprise canadians when they you know if they
00:06:48.700take the trouble to look at this i hope they would frankly but there are going to be certain
00:06:52.680people who are in and certain people are out could you maybe expand on that a little for us
00:06:57.760Well, I think there's the reason for it.
00:07:01.020I mean, I just I I I don't know what the reason is.
00:07:06.540But I mean, for example, the sort of the history of the of the governor's general, you know, there's a lot of it looks like based on what I see in Blacklock's reporter that there's there's a lot of emphasis on Adrian Clarkson and Michael Jean, you know, as as sort of.
00:07:27.760identitarian concerns so we're not talking about again if black ox reporter is right we're not
00:07:35.680talking about the the vice regal office or what these particular uh personages both you know both
00:07:43.040lovely people i'm sure uh long history of broadcasting on the cbc and so forth um
00:07:50.000But instead, instead of talking about the office and the particular achievements of these personages, we're talking about how one is the first refugee and that's it.
00:08:05.560the other is the first black lady you know these are obviously uh undeniable facts but
00:08:12.160in in in the world in which identity politics of both left and right have have riven western
00:08:20.340democracies and created a kind of polarization i i i would hope that our government would would
00:08:27.600have learned to sort of shy away from that sort of thing now so that's that's one example and you
00:08:34.700know there's a lot of there's a lot of sort of gender identitarian stuff too I mean to me it's
00:08:39.000identity politics and I think that we have seen the the kinds of evils that identity politics can0.55
00:08:46.460do in in the world we I thought we had all sort of had enough of that under the in the Trudeau
00:08:57.260years we've seen how absurd it can look if if if you look at any of the footage from the recent
00:09:03.860uh ndp convention um you know it's it's kind of laughable at this point but there are real
00:09:09.540dangers to it that you can um that we should be alert to based on um news abroad and that sort
00:09:17.760of thing so the last place i would like to see this sort of thing would be in a citizenship guide
00:09:22.040yes so i mean you mentioned a couple of uh governor general appointees that um would
00:09:31.080appear to have been made for what you could refer to as identitarian reasons, according
00:09:39.680to Blacklocks, there's nothing in there, however, about Georges Vanier, also a governor general,
00:09:45.400obviously a man, a decorated war hero, awarded the military cross, and I think a man with
00:09:51.020significant charitable work to his credit as well.
00:09:55.920I would have thought that a man like that would have qualified.
00:10:01.060And the other thing, ladies and gentlemen,
00:10:02.320we're talking about former prime ministers.
00:10:04.600We had that discussion about Sir John A. MacDonald,
00:10:08.740but I can say with certainty that the document references Lester Pearson,
00:10:14.320a liberal, John Diefenbaker, Pierre Trudeau, and Kim Campbell,
00:10:20.280but it doesn't say anything about Brian Mulroney,
00:10:22.940who, like him or not, was a far more successful prime minister
00:10:27.200than either Mr. Diefenbaker or Ms. Campbell.
00:10:33.540Then there's a whole bunch of people there that are not mentioned,
00:10:42.560such as Smokey Smith, one of our most decorated veterans,
00:10:47.420Roy Thompson, you know, newspaper baron.
00:10:51.200And it's Alexander Graham Bell did some great work in this country, no mention.
00:10:57.740I'm not a Glenn Gould fan, but he's not there anymore.
00:11:02.280Or explorers or, I mean, the War of 1812.
00:11:06.820I mean, one wonders whether it's still there.
00:11:08.740I mean, the motivation of the Harper era citizenship guide was to create a sense of history,
00:11:18.020Not 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 and marginalized groups and so forth.
00:11:42.240But to push Canadian history as far back into the past as it can realistically go.
00:11:51.040Now, there is, as we know, there is an alternative vision of Canadian history that is shaped almost entirely by the federal Liberal Party, which has historically, I think, seen Canadian history not as a unifying, not as a force for unity, warts and all, because not all of it is necessarily nice or pleasant.
00:12:18.960Some of it, if you're not inclined to, if you don't have a taste for constitutional history and political arguments, some of it might be very boring for you.
00:12:29.680But that's not the point. It happened and it is our history.
00:12:34.080There is an alternative view whereby this is divisive and it's harmful and it prevents the formation of, I don't know what, some sort of new vision of what it means to be Canadian.
00:12:59.900Now, I don't think that this is a good thing to do.
00:13:06.080I don't think that it is accurate to call us a post-national state.
00:13:10.120And even if we were, I don't think it would be good.
00:13:13.160the efforts to make this sort of meme this into existence have failed and again we need to
00:13:23.800know more about who we are uh where we came from and and we need to teach that to to to newcomers
00:13:34.520And ideally, we would do so as free from political and identitarian biases as we possibly can.
00:13:44.880Well, look, let's pick up on that point, because you and I both know the man who actually held the pen on this document.
00:13:53.080Jason Kenney, obviously, is the minister responsible at the time, has the responsibility for it.
00:13:59.620and frankly I think the honor of it because it was a tremendously well-written document,
00:14:05.700but it was actually Chris Champion who wrote it, and it seems to me that he went to extraordinary
00:14:14.180lengths to be fair. For example, there was no, and I believe our story talks about this, there was no
00:14:24.180message from the minister with this minister's smiling face that correct um can you can you just
00:14:31.380talk a little bit about the efforts that they went to that this could be a unifying document as
00:14:38.020opposed to one that just makes people think well i don't want anything to do with that
00:14:42.580the the first order of business was to create a description an accurate description as opposed to
00:14:52.500a political proclamation a description of the way things are of how canada is and how it has
00:14:58.900genuine has has truly evolved as opposed to a political proclamation about how it should be
00:15:06.020in in accordance with the views of a particular political uh party now that means that the the
00:15:14.420you know the beaming face of the minister as as though befitting uh a white paper or a some sort
00:15:22.420of formal report to uh you know to to the to the department or something like that you know that
00:15:30.820that is not the kind of uh tone that needs to be set there and the minister won't be the minister
00:15:39.060forever i mean um minister kenny was uh former minister kenny was minister of immigration for a
00:15:46.260long time but you know it eventually came to an end he's not going to be there uh and neither is
00:15:52.020the harper government but the truth of uh the history in question and the the facts that
00:15:58.260newcomers need to know those are perennial things that don't go out of date and uh what i detect
00:16:06.260again from the from the black lock story is more more sort of uh the the the niche concerns of a
00:16:18.180particular uh particularly sort of urban slice of the liberal electorate uh very much preoccupied
00:16:28.420with mid-2010s concerns, and that in and of itself, I think,
00:16:37.640is already out of date, and the emphasis should be much more
00:16:43.620on a shared, unifying narrative that avoids these sort
00:16:52.680of pointillist, minute concerns about, you know, identity and grievance, let's say.
00:17:02.060Now, Michael, you are a professional historian.
00:17:05.880I mean, you're working as a strategic advisor for Atlas, but you've actually got a book
00:17:10.560coming out later this fall talking about a crisis of liberalism.
00:17:16.520I'm going to give you a moment to just speak of that in a moment.
00:17:20.120But as a historian and somebody who worked in the Harper government, you know what is and isn't true here.
00:17:28.640So why do you think that other historians aren't chiming in and complaining that some of the very people who are being erased, why aren't they challenging this?
00:17:41.780Well, I suspect that very few people are aware that this...
00:17:45.400First of all, very few people know what goes into the process of gaining citizenship.
00:21:58.960The way our constitution is set up, as described in the old citizenship guide, these things don't need to be re-articulated every couple of years.
00:22:11.280And I would say that the burden of proof is on the people who wish to change it.
00:22:18.800Yeah, well, that's kind of what I find myself asking.
00:22:22.720I can only conclude that the government that we've had for the last 10 years concluded that a lot of Canadians needed an attitude adjustment and presumed that theirs was the job to give it to them and theirs was the attitude that the rest of us should accept.
00:22:41.000And I'm prepared to say what I wouldn't encourage you to say on this program, but sort them.
00:22:46.620Now, Michael, tell us a little about your book and then we've got to go.
00:22:50.000So my book is about liberalism, not liberalism with a capital L, but with a small L.
00:22:55.520So 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.
00:23:24.560And 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?
00:23:40.340Why do we have people in the West of every political persuasion now who think that perhaps there's too much freedom?
00:23:49.900Why 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.