With the sesquicentennial celebration of Confederation now safely behind us, the time for sober, if somewhat groggy, second thought is at hand. Yet, upon further reflection, it has struck me that a nation with a unicorn hugging Prime Minister as well as "150" flags sporting technicolour poinsettias might not have the attention span for a serious historical-biographical exploration of our heritage.
So, taking a page out of my enemy's book, I'll co-opt familiar phrases and concepts to keep you engaged.
Let's begin with a very simple idea - the connection in this country between the divine and our liberties.
In our anthem, we say "God keep our land, glorious and free;" the first sentence of Trudeau Senior's Canada Act cites "the supremacy of God and the rule of law;" and our motto is based upon a psalm about God's dominion from "sea to sea."
By these few words alone, all arguments about the inherently secular nature of Canada are irrevocably revoked, and so we must investigate further.
But before trying to elucidate the word "God," let us for a moment truly consider what else could have been written in this same space: monarchy, democracy, parliament, judicial review, the CAF, the RCMP are all contenders. Given the times we live in, more banal things, such as the Prime Minister, the CBC, the environment, or even Gary the Unicorn could just as well have been put in place of the word "God."
Instead, freedom is given an eternal defender, the Lord God Almighty.
Call me an angry throne and altar Tory hell bent on destroying the Marxists, but the bracketing of our freedoms in this manner means something more than meets the eye.
My own conclusion is that Canada's single concrete heritage, thanks to its egregious amount of land, the make-up of its peoples, and even the ineffectiveness of all our governments, is truly liberty. And by these same caveats, that heritage can only be preserved by embracing and celebrating its transcendent quality.
Transcendence begets an "otherness" that can't be explicitly defined, but given our prosperity and good fortune as a nation, it is probable that this "other" is a benevolent being, which stacks up well with our knowledge of God. And far from being a reason for the more skeptical and secular among us to be offended, even frightened by these obvious conclusions, there ought to be a great sigh of relief, even joyous celebration that would put all of our more garish parades to shame.
Why?
Because if you want rights, it makes more sense to argue from the position that each Canadian is guaranteed certain liberties by God, than to argue we are little more than disposable material in the great wheel of history's class struggle ergo give me rights.
Not only is the latter terribly boring as well as illogical, but it garners no real fealty, only schadenfreude.
For example, euthanasia is wrong, but if its proponents self-administered this procedure en masse, I'm not sure I'd feel sad.
Sorry.
And thus, we come full circle to my plundering of the enemy's playbook for convincing methods to tell hard beautiful truths instead of seductive wicked lies.
There is something transcendent about our country and the people in it, but it has nothing to do with the prudish insistence on neo-apartheid in the classroom, or hyperbolic statements about personhood that use up ever more letters of the alphabet while having no basis in hard science. These are limits, not extensions, to our freedoms.
The most convincing reason for our need to ground our liberty not in mankind but the divine is being made day in and day out by liberators and their crusade against the very words and categories that allow us to communicate our deepest beliefs about ourselves.
In their own words, it's a race to the bottom, but for something much more sinister than any "rip and ship" capitalist could ever imagine: we are digging to the basest levels of our psyche, no matter the cost to our human dignity.
Freedom, like God, can only be defined by what it is not. In our founding, we were given no positive list of rights, effectively telling us they were too many to number.
That is our folly: we try to enumerate ever more rights in finite terms, all while our founders knew only the infinite would suffice.
