A nation culturally paralyzed by an intractable identity crisis is a godsend to a revolutionary party. If a people don’t know who they are anymore, all you need to do is swoop in and tell them. Erasing the old symbols that remind them of who they used to be meets with little resistance, and you can easily replace them with new symbols that represent what you want them to be, instead. It’s no accident that, as the national identity crisis was at its most consciously acute, Canada adopted a new flag in 1965, at the initiative of a Liberal government. The old Red Ensign displayed both the Union Jack and the Canadian coat of arms, tribal heraldry that served as a reminder of the British, English, Scottish, Irish, and French origins of the Canadian nation; the well-known maple leaf erased all of that.
The national anthem
4 wasn’t adopted until 1980, around the same time that the liberal principles of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (which does not include a right to bear arms) was enacted (1982), which was the same year that July 1st, Dominion Day, commemorating Canada’s birth in 1867 as a Dominion of the British Empire, was renamed as the nondescript and historically mute Canada Day. All of those innovations in the 1980s happened under Liberal prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the (alleged) father of the current prime minister.
The invariant vector of these changes has been to progressively deracinate Canadians, concealing them from their past, leaving them adrift in an eternal present in which their only guiding principles are whatever the revolutionary liberals say they are.
You even see this at the municipal level. Toronto’s old motto was “Industry, Integrity, Intelligence”. These virtues were exchanged in 1999 for “Diversity Our Strength”. The jokes write themselves on that one.
In the wake of the newest addition to Canada’s ersatz national antimyth, the supposed schoolocaust of First Nations children in the residential schools (not a single body has yet been produced, by the way), the iconoclastic imperative has expanded to include the
arson of over a hundred churches (some of the schools, near which no bodies have been found, were run by the church, you see) and defacement and removal of statues of Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. MacDonald (he was, you understand,
a racist).