Conrad Black: Canada doesn’t have to be a declining nation

Discussion of American decline is premature and unsubstantiated. All the talk of it being quickly surpassed by China as an economic power has stopped. The issue is not whether the U.S. is in decline, but whether its status as a democracy practising the rule of law is endangered. The lack of clarity around who truly won the last election, the 83 percent conviction rate in federal criminal trials, 98 percent of them without a trial, and the use of the prosecution service to try to eliminate political opponents all raise serious questions of the status of the United States as the beacon of liberty that it has professed to be from its founding 250 years ago, and particularly since the abolition of slavery nearly 160 years ago.

If the United States fails these tests, while it will cease to have any serious claim as a leader of the democratic nations, it will continue, like the Roman Republic after the murder of the Gracchi reformers, to be the greatest power in the world, though a much diminished moral force. I do not believe this will happen, but under either scenario, Canada will retain the liberty to rise or decline.

In recent years, there is no doubt that Canada has lost ground in relative terms. It is completely inexcusable that countries like the Netherlands, cramped, almost without resources, and with not half our population, which was a flooded rubble heap when it was liberated by the Canadian Army in 1945, today has a significantly higher standard of living than Canada does. It is an unflattering reflection on our political maturity and leadership that our GDP per capita today, if recent trends continue, will soon be surpassed by South Korea, where there was scarcely a building standing in the entire country at the time of the armistice in 1953. Not to mention it did not manufacture anything.

We could also be surpassed by Israel, which has technically been at war throughout its entire lifespan of 76 years, from when it was a desert state of desperate fugitives from the pogroms of Europe, eking out their existence as kibbutzim. And let’s not forget the Czechs, who only escaped more than 50 years of Nazi and communist tyranny in 1991. The one positive element in this record of comparative failure is that an ambitious promotion of immigration has raised our population to over 40 million. We have more people than France did in the decades preceding the First World War, when it achieved its greatest distinction in literature, painting, music, and ultimately military heroism and success.

When the British assumed control of New France in 1763, Canada’s population was only about three percent of that of the American colonies, which were soon to assert their independence. When Canada became an autonomous Confederation in 1867, we were only about 7.5 percent of the population of the United States. Today we are approximately 12 percent of the population of the U.S. and 40 million people, with a skilled workforce, stable political institutions, the blessings of both English and French civilization, and the raw material from which one of the world’s great nationalities can be fashioned. Leaving aside the housing disaster that has been precipitated by the present government’s reckless pursuit of immigration without incentivizing appropriate construction of new homes, the only scenario in which Canada’s future is not far more brilliant than its distinguished history is if we fail to generate the political leadership a serious nation requires. The implications of such a state of affairs are onerous since in a democracy, the people get the government they deserve.

Canada is now, by most standards, a pleasant place to live but is an ambiguous nation-state. It had to begin as a French population or it would have been assimilated at once into the American colonies as a governed unit. It had to cease being French because ultimately the strategic demarcation in Europe was that France had the greatest army and Britain the greatest navy, and across the seas Britain took what it wanted, including America and India. But it had to become British as the Americans ceased to be British, or we would again have been assimilated into the Americans.

Canada was launched as an autonomous country; as a string of relatively small settlements along the U.S. border. It was only the brilliant statesmanship of the much-maligned Sir John A. Macdonald that created the only transcontinental, bicultural, parliamentary confederation in the history of the world, built a transcontinental railway largely over the Canadian Shield (one of the engineering wonders of the world), and narrowly suppressed secessionist movements led by Indigenous and Metis peoples in the western provinces. It has been no easy task convincing the French Canadians that they were better off as an influential minority in a transcontinental country than as masters in their own smaller house and that debate has not ended.

Traditionally, the world’s nations were those defined by distinct languages: the French spoke French, the English spoke English, the Spanish spoke Spanish, the Hungarians spoke Hungarian, and so forth. When the United States was established, it became the second English-speaking country, but it proclaimed itself a world nation and empire of the new world that was a democratic, meritocratic republic which would welcome immigration from all over the world; a place where hard, honest work would be rewarded, without regard to ethnicity or religion. In fact, the Americans had no more civil liberties after their revolution than they had had before it, but they had their own government. They were not more democratic than smaller European countries such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, and parts of Scandinavia, but they had the promise of populating half of a great continent, the benefits of the English language, and British institutions, apart from the monarchy against which they rebelled.

Within 80 years of its founding, the United States had surpassed Britain in population and standard of living. For over a century the United States has operated on a scale that the world had never imagined to be possible. At the end of the Second World War, its GDP was half the economic product of the entire war-ravaged world. Canada’s achievement, which it has failed to recognize and celebrate, is that it has more than kept pace with this phenomenal and unprecedented growth, other than in the last ten years or so, in economic terms both as a country and in per capita income.

If Canada sloughs off its obsolete obsession with not being American, does a course correction away from the post-national socialist fairy-land of the present federal government, adopts a policy of balanced and equitable economic growth, takes proper advantage of the inexhaustible storehouse of our resources, and emancipates itself from the green terror we have inflicted on ourselves, the country will grow steadily in every respect.

This growth will be manifested in an increasing but not arrogant confidence, in legislative and social innovation, and in artistic creativity that will gain the notice and the respect of the world while narrowing the cultural gap that yawns between Canada today and the time of France’s Zola and Renoir and Faure 120 years ago, when it had a population equal to ours today. There is nothing to retard or diminish this strength and success and self-confidence that new leadership and a new and constructively nationalist orientation would not resolve.