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COMMENTARY: Canada is in a huge mess

I’m not going to wade into the weeds of the current trade war between Canada and U.S. President Donald Trump, because hundreds of articles from across virtually every newspaper in Canada (and some in the United States) have already dealt with it. My interest is in the political implications.

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To quote the title of a famous book about South Africa: Cry the Beloved Country, Canada is in a huge mess; everyone now sees that. When I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, that was not the case. The old “Dominion of Canada” had a fairly solid national identity. It was, for all its faults, a serious country.

Not anymore. Over the following half-century it has become, under a left-liberal political hegemony, a “protection racket,” that benefits its academic, cultural, economic and intellectual elites, who dominate the CBC, universities, film production and so on, who could not competitively and economically survive otherwise. It has been able to indulge in these activities precisely because it borders the United States – a country that, until Trump came along, paid it little........

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