Western Standard - April 10, 2026


Ottawa is trying to redefine what it means to be Canadian

Topics
liberalism crisis
Hosted by
Nigel Hannaford
Mentioned
Michael Bonner John A. Macdonald Atlas Strategic Advisors John Diefenbaker Pierre Trudeau Jason Kenney Kim Campbell Harper Trudeau Jr. Alexander Graham Bell John Stuart Mill Georges Vanier Lester Pearson Brian Mulroney Chris Champion Michael Jan Smokey Smith Roy Thompson Glenn Beck Goldline John Locke
Floor crossing gives Liberals their majority THE PIPELINE： Floor crossing gives Liberals their majority

Episode Stats


Length

24 minutes

Words per minute

140.02

Word count

3,500

Sentence count

110

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Michael Bonner is a former policy advisor in the field from the Harper days. These days, he s a political strategist with Atlas Strategic Advisors. He s also a historian, a senior fellow with the Calgary-based Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, and author of the forthcoming book The Crisis of Liberalism: The Origin and Destiny of Freedom.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Good evening Western Standard viewers and welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show of the
00:00:21.200 Western Standard. It is Thursday, April the 9th. Heritage Canada is preparing to publish a new
00:00:26.840 Citizenship Guide. This is the book that the government gives to new Canadians to prep them
00:00:32.280 for the citizenship test that they have to pass. It also reflects the official Government of Canada
00:00:39.320 view of who and what Canada is and the things that we value and the things that we don't.
00:00:45.880 But if you know anything about real Canadian history, you might not recognize your old country.
00:00:52.040 Some Canadian heroes you think should be in the book aren't, and others are in and you may wonder
00:00:58.760 why. Michael Bonner, our guest this week, is a former policy advisor in the field from the Harper
00:01:05.240 days. These days he's a political strategist with Atlas Strategic Advisors. He's also a historian,
00:01:12.120 a senior fellow with the Calgary-based Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy and author of the
00:01:17.960 forthcoming book, The Crisis of Liberalism, The Origin and Destiny of Freedom. Michael,
00:01:23.720 you seem almost overqualified for us, but thank you for being here.
00:01:28.120 It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me back.
00:01:31.000 Excellent. Michael, the Western Standard published this story on Tuesday, and I think
00:01:35.960 a lot of our readers are really surprised and maybe appalled at some of the ideas
00:01:40.840 this government thinks you should believe and support. It's certainly very one-sided on the
00:01:46.440 indigenous file, very gay and trans friendly, and there's a lot of people who you would expect to
00:01:52.280 see in it who are very downplayed. It seems to be trying to paint a very different picture of what
00:01:57.960 it is to be a Canadian than what Canadians themselves have experienced or might think it ought to be.
00:02:03.160 What's going on here? Well, I mean, I don't know. I find it very difficult to sort of enter the 0.77
00:02:10.200 thought world of the of the liberal uh hegemony in in ottawa whether in the trudeau years or now
00:02:19.640 the citizenship guide seems to have been a problem for uh trudeau jr since before he um
00:02:29.320 became prime minister there was that famous incident over the use of the word barbaric
00:02:33.880 cultural practices condemning such things as female genital mutilation and forced marriages,
00:02:40.600 which seems to be an odd sort of thing to die in a ditch over. But this has been a preoccupation
00:02:48.600 for some time, and based on what I see in the media about this, I sincerely hope that
00:02:53.800 the descriptions we're seeing will not come to pass. Is Sir John A. Macdonald in the rewrite?
00:03:01.720 not as far as i have seen no that would seem to me a as if if it is in fact not there that would
00:03:12.600 seem a significant of a mission to have the country's first prime minister not mentioned
00:03:18.520 yes i think i think that would be a serious omission and this sort of the sort of war on
00:03:22.940 john a you know if if this is indeed what we're facing you know it's yet another uh
00:03:29.660 First 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.
00:03:49.280 So, yes, if that is the case, if we have no John A.,
00:03:52.840 if we're losing touch with the historical foundations of our country
00:03:57.000 in the Citizenship Guide, that, to me, seems like a very serious problem.
00:04:01.440 Now, I think a lot of Canadians who were born here
00:04:04.160 have never had any reason to study history
00:04:06.760 and therefore might not be familiar with this particular document.
00:04:14.320 It is referred to in the story as a draft,
00:04:17.240 and it was secured under an access to information request from Blacklock's reporter,
00:04:23.080 an organization with which we have the most cordial relationship.
00:04:27.640 It seems to me that, well, a couple of things are funny about that.
00:04:31.400 First of all, is this document actually out there to be discussed and maybe amended?
00:04:39.880 Or are they going ahead with it and we just happened to intercept it before it went to the
00:04:45.160 printers what's your sense of why there's a draft that we're talking about well it's possible to
00:04:51.160 obtain draft government documents under most circumstances if you request them through the
00:04:58.280 access to information protocol i suspect that that's what happened in this case unless somebody
00:05:06.360 leaked it for some particular reason which is also possible but it seems less likely
00:05:12.360 um you know on the one hand i think a citizenship guide made by committee with sort of constant
00:05:21.280 input from the public left right and center would probably not really turn out very well
00:05:27.060 um on the other hand a kind of proclamation from on high as to what liberal overclass thinks
00:05:36.360 everybody should believe about Canada is equally bad.
00:05:40.660 I just don't see what the reason is
00:05:43.740 for changing the citizenship guide in the first place.
00:05:49.360 It was a deliberately non-partisan document.
00:05:56.200 The minister, my former boss, Jason Kenney,
00:05:59.600 went out of his way to avoid so much as even appearing
00:06:03.000 in the in in the document to you know avoid the perception of of a partisanism and to avoid
00:06:11.680 dating it avoid the avoid the appearance that it comes only from a specific time in in in our
00:06:22.100 history is only relevant for a certain time I reject the idea that the citizenship guide has
00:06:27.760 become irrelevant our history that is articulated there uh the uh discussions of the nature of
00:06:34.920 parliament and so forth that doesn't go out of date well exactly i mean maybe can you talk about
00:06:43.020 some of the things that uh that are likely to surprise canadians when they you know if they
00:06:48.700 take the trouble to look at this i hope they would frankly but there are going to be certain
00:06:52.680 people who are in and certain people are out could you maybe expand on that a little for us
00:06:57.760 Well, I think there's the reason for it.
00:07:01.020 I mean, I just I I I don't know what the reason is.
00:07:06.540 But 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.
00:07:27.760 identitarian concerns so we're not talking about again if black ox reporter is right we're not
00:07:35.680 talking about the the vice regal office or what these particular uh personages both you know both
00:07:43.040 lovely people i'm sure uh long history of broadcasting on the cbc and so forth um
00:07:50.000 But 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.
00:08:05.560 the other is the first black lady you know these are obviously uh undeniable facts but
00:08:12.160 in in in the world in which identity politics of both left and right have have riven western
00:08:20.340 democracies and created a kind of polarization i i i would hope that our government would would
00:08:27.600 have learned to sort of shy away from that sort of thing now so that's that's one example and you
00:08:34.700 know there's a lot of there's a lot of sort of gender identitarian stuff too I mean to me it's
00:08:39.000 identity politics and I think that we have seen the the kinds of evils that identity politics can 0.55
00:08:46.460 do in in the world we I thought we had all sort of had enough of that under the in the Trudeau
00:08:57.260 years we've seen how absurd it can look if if if you look at any of the footage from the recent
00:09:03.860 uh ndp convention um you know it's it's kind of laughable at this point but there are real
00:09:09.540 dangers to it that you can um that we should be alert to based on um news abroad and that sort
00:09:17.760 of thing so the last place i would like to see this sort of thing would be in a citizenship guide
00:09:22.040 yes so i mean you mentioned a couple of uh governor general appointees that um would
00:09:31.080 appear to have been made for what you could refer to as identitarian reasons, according
00:09:39.680 to Blacklocks, there's nothing in there, however, about Georges Vanier, also a governor general,
00:09:45.400 obviously a man, a decorated war hero, awarded the military cross, and I think a man with
00:09:51.020 significant charitable work to his credit as well.
00:09:55.920 I would have thought that a man like that would have qualified.
00:10:01.060 And the other thing, ladies and gentlemen,
00:10:02.320 we're talking about former prime ministers.
00:10:04.600 We had that discussion about Sir John A. MacDonald,
00:10:08.740 but I can say with certainty that the document references Lester Pearson,
00:10:14.320 a liberal, John Diefenbaker, Pierre Trudeau, and Kim Campbell,
00:10:20.280 but it doesn't say anything about Brian Mulroney,
00:10:22.940 who, like him or not, was a far more successful prime minister
00:10:27.200 than either Mr. Diefenbaker or Ms. Campbell.
00:10:33.540 Then there's a whole bunch of people there that are not mentioned,
00:10:42.560 such as Smokey Smith, one of our most decorated veterans,
00:10:47.420 Roy Thompson, you know, newspaper baron.
00:10:51.200 And it's Alexander Graham Bell did some great work in this country, no mention.
00:10:57.740 I'm not a Glenn Gould fan, but he's not there anymore.
00:11:01.620 He was once.
00:11:02.280 Or explorers or, I mean, the War of 1812.
00:11:06.820 I mean, one wonders whether it's still there.
00:11:08.740 I mean, the motivation of the Harper era citizenship guide was to create a sense of history,
00:11:18.020 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 and marginalized groups and so forth.
00:11:42.240 But to push Canadian history as far back into the past as it can realistically go.
00:11:51.040 Now, 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.
00:12:18.960 Some 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.
00:12:29.680 But that's not the point. It happened and it is our history.
00:12:34.080 There 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.
00:12:47.580 or some sort of post-national,
00:12:51.040 and this horrific phrase that Trudeau Jr. gave us,
00:12:56.080 some sort of post-national Canada.
00:12:59.900 Now, I don't think that this is a good thing to do.
00:13:06.080 I don't think that it is accurate to call us a post-national state.
00:13:10.120 And even if we were, I don't think it would be good.
00:13:13.160 the efforts to make this sort of meme this into existence have failed and again we need to
00:13:23.800 know more about who we are uh where we came from and and we need to teach that to to to newcomers
00:13:34.520 And ideally, we would do so as free from political and identitarian biases as we possibly can.
00:13:44.880 Well, look, let's pick up on that point, because you and I both know the man who actually held the pen on this document.
00:13:53.080 Jason Kenney, obviously, is the minister responsible at the time, has the responsibility for it.
00:13:59.620 and frankly I think the honor of it because it was a tremendously well-written document,
00:14:05.700 but it was actually Chris Champion who wrote it, and it seems to me that he went to extraordinary
00:14:14.180 lengths to be fair. For example, there was no, and I believe our story talks about this, there was no
00:14:24.180 message from the minister with this minister's smiling face that correct um can you can you just
00:14:31.380 talk a little bit about the efforts that they went to that this could be a unifying document as
00:14:38.020 opposed to one that just makes people think well i don't want anything to do with that
00:14:42.580 the the first order of business was to create a description an accurate description as opposed to
00:14:52.500 a political proclamation a description of the way things are of how canada is and how it has
00:14:58.900 genuine has has truly evolved as opposed to a political proclamation about how it should be
00:15:06.020 in in accordance with the views of a particular political uh party now that means that the the
00:15:14.420 you know the beaming face of the minister as as though befitting uh a white paper or a some sort
00:15:22.420 of formal report to uh you know to to the to the department or something like that you know that
00:15:30.820 that is not the kind of uh tone that needs to be set there and the minister won't be the minister
00:15:39.060 forever i mean um minister kenny was uh former minister kenny was minister of immigration for a
00:15:46.260 long time but you know it eventually came to an end he's not going to be there uh and neither is
00:15:52.020 the harper government but the truth of uh the history in question and the the facts that
00:15:58.260 newcomers need to know those are perennial things that don't go out of date and uh what i detect
00:16:06.260 again from the from the black lock story is more more sort of uh the the the niche concerns of a
00:16:18.180 particular uh particularly sort of urban slice of the liberal electorate uh very much preoccupied
00:16:28.420 with mid-2010s concerns, and that in and of itself, I think,
00:16:37.640 is already out of date, and the emphasis should be much more
00:16:43.620 on a shared, unifying narrative that avoids these sort
00:16:52.680 of pointillist, minute concerns about, you know, identity and grievance, let's say.
00:17:02.060 Now, Michael, you are a professional historian.
00:17:05.880 I mean, you're working as a strategic advisor for Atlas, but you've actually got a book
00:17:10.560 coming out later this fall talking about a crisis of liberalism.
00:17:16.520 I'm going to give you a moment to just speak of that in a moment.
00:17:20.120 But as a historian and somebody who worked in the Harper government, you know what is and isn't true here.
00:17:28.640 So 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?
00:17:41.780 Well, I suspect that very few people are aware that this...
00:17:45.400 First of all, very few people know what goes into the process of gaining citizenship.
00:17:54.940 I mean, that's just a fact.
00:17:55.860 I don't know why your typical Canadian would take an interest in that.
00:18:00.440 It's not in the top five issues that I think most people would be worrying about.
00:18:07.200 So that's one thing.
00:18:07.840 The second thing is people probably haven't heard of the citizenship guide
00:18:11.080 or would very rarely come across one.
00:18:15.360 And this process has not, as far as I know,
00:18:22.360 been subject to a public consultation.
00:18:27.000 They may well have had input from academic
00:18:32.800 historians or other non, you know, other historians outside
00:18:37.840 academia, they may have had their input. And some of that input may well have been critical,
00:18:44.080 as far as I know. I mean, I know that there's a certain groupthink within academia, but they're,
00:18:53.640 you know, I'm willing to suppose that at least some academic historians would hold a different
00:19:00.300 sort of view but i i don't think that that that objection or those those objections or critiques
00:19:08.480 if they were made would have held the day uh in the face of what i think is a is a very sort of
00:19:15.800 ideological um liberal progressivist vision of uh not only canadian history but also what it means
00:19:23.380 to be a citizen i mean i think that that's something that has been left out of this which
00:19:27.540 i might have actually mentioned earlier that part of the emphasis of the former citizenship guide
00:19:34.980 was on the duties of citizenship was on the the the the expectations of uh of uh of a new canadian
00:19:45.300 well of any kind of canadian citizen new old what have you that um there are rights of course which
00:19:53.300 we've heard about non-stop since the Trudeau first Trudeau era but there are also duties that go along
00:20:00.180 with those rights and I you know I'm not going to make a necessarily a blanket statement about this
00:20:09.780 but the question of what is expected of a citizen what a good citizen should do or should not do
00:20:18.740 that is not really part of a contempt of the contemporary progressivist liberal discourse
00:20:27.540 if i can if i can put it that way there's a sense in which it's also absent from um uh other forms
00:20:34.080 of say libertarian thought where there's very much an emphasis on the rights of the of the
00:20:40.640 person but not on his duties um i believe that the previous guide uh got that balance precisely
00:20:49.320 right i think that it's not there uh or not to an adequate degree in in contemporary uh discourse
00:20:59.580 uh from the from the progressivist liberal quarters michael we're rapidly running out of
00:21:06.340 time this has been a fascinating conversation but one last question uh we think we elect
00:21:11.320 governments to do certain things those are the things that they present in their platform
00:21:15.900 an election but i don't recall this government ever getting a mandate to rewrite canadian history
00:21:23.020 i mean did i miss something i i don't think they have such a mandate at all uh you know if it ain't
00:21:29.900 broke don't fix it what was wrong with the previous guide i don't think there was anything and you
00:21:35.940 You know, history is, you know, there's room for new opinions and so forth,
00:21:40.820 but the key facts of the evolution of our country are, they don't change.
00:21:48.420 I mean, they don't just sort of need to be updated every so often.
00:21:53.540 The nature and workings of parliament don't change.
00:21:58.260 They haven't changed.
00:21:58.960 The 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.
00:22:11.280 And I would say that the burden of proof is on the people who wish to change it.
00:22:17.020 Why? What's the reason?
00:22:18.800 Yeah, well, that's kind of what I find myself asking.
00:22:22.720 I 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.
00:22:41.000 And I'm prepared to say what I wouldn't encourage you to say on this program, but sort them.
00:22:46.620 Now, Michael, tell us a little about your book and then we've got to go.
00:22:50.000 So my book is about liberalism, not liberalism with a capital L, but with a small L.
00:22:55.520 So 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.
00:23:13.380 Now, this is still dominant theory in Canada, in the West, in the United States, Britain, France, everywhere, at least in the West.
00:23:24.560 And there are other places in the world that still aspire to be free and liberal.
00:23:29.220 But everybody knows that there's something wrong with it.
00:23:33.140 There is a crisis.
00:23:34.720 Why did liberalism not spread more after the end of the Cold War?
00:23:40.340 Why do we have people in the West of every political persuasion now who think that perhaps there's too much freedom?
00:23:49.900 Why did we have a liberal party effectively go to war against something called the freedom convoy?
00:23:57.120 Perhaps there's something that we don't understand about freedom.
00:24:00.440 Perhaps 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.
00:24:17.400 This is what I explore in the book.
00:24:19.720 It'll be out at the end of April, and I hope that people will read it and maybe get a kick out of it.
00:24:27.100 even if they hate it i you know i hope they get a kick out of it i can think of at least five
00:24:32.540 former conservative mps who ought to be made to read it and then write an essay about it anyway
00:24:38.700 in the meantime look i wish you every success with it and it's it's a message that certainly
00:24:44.860 needs to be widely understood much more widely than it is now thank you for coming on the program
00:24:50.860 Thank you.
00:24:51.860 Michael Bonner talking to us about the new citizenship guide for the Western Standard.
00:24:58.660 I'm Nigel Hannaford.