Why Trudeau Keeps on Winning

by Geoffrey Clarfield

During the last three years, the Canadian government has been printing lots of money and hiring lots of employees. The number of government hires has been more than those in the private sector. We also now have illegal Chinese police stations in our major cities and the hint (God forbid!) that the Chinese Communist Party was interfering in our last national election. I am shocked!

Canada also had a week of martial law against truckers’ COVID protests. Then, during drawn-out hearings, it would appear that, from the Prime Minister down, no one in the higher echelons of government knew what was happening on the ground or who ordered what. Watching the investigation is like watching a modern version of Keystone Cops.

Only Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland suggested that martial law was declared because of American pressure. Those readers familiar with Canadian history will recognize that “Blame the Americans” is the oldest kind of scapegoating on record in this country but, of course, we still turn to America whenever the nation is really in trouble.

Even though the Conservative Party gained seats during the last election, Trudeau only managed to get a parliamentary majority by allying himself with the far-left New Democratic Party. With this weak coalition, one wonders whether, after another cold, expensive winter, the Liberals (and Trudeau) will lose an election that may be set in motion this spring? The answer is probably not. They may still win. I will try and explain how.

I have spent a lifetime as an anthropologist. Before the nihilistic left took over the field, anthropologists studied tribes and ethnic groups in developing countries and here, in the West. We would argue that common descent and origin, language, family, in-group identity, religious affiliation, and residence were and remain key aspects of the ethnic communities that now constitute the great cities of America and Canada.

Once multiculturalism became king in Canada, the winning political party is the one that knows how to play the “ethnic card.” Forgot about a common historical narrative, forget about the ordered liberty of Edmund Burke that was once the political and legal heritage of English Canada. Forget about the individualism and personal freedom that brings people to our shores. Instead, a political party that caters to ethnic groups wins elections. The Liberal Party of Canada must have some good anthropologists advising them for that is what they have been doing for decades. Here is how it works.

To be absolutely sure, I was correct, I consulted someone intimately familiar with party dynamics in Canada. This is what he told me.

The origin of multiculturalism was in 1971 in preparing for the Liberal Party Federal Campaign in 1972. It was purely a campaign strategy to deal with rising nationalism in Quebec and to win the 1972 election.

Multiculturalism facilitated and legitimized the Liberals in Ottawa by funding every ethnic newspaper, dance group, senior’s group, and organization in the GTA and elsewhere to gain votes, some might even say metaphorically to “buy votes”. This policy was so successful that it allowed Pierre Trudeau to hold on to power in 1971 when he made a coalition with the NDP.

Over the next two years, therefore, it became a national strategy whereby the Liberals retribalized Canadians into voting blocs based on their nationality of origin and bought them off with cash and policies that they liked.

The media, which is now bought (Today the CBC gets over a billion from the Government and it is knee-jerk pro-government) literally loved Pierre Trudeau and his anti-American, pro-Cuba irreverence. They still do that today, and liberal ethnic voting is still strongest in the Liberal fortress of the Greater Toronto area (“GTA”).

It is almost as if new immigrants know they must vote liberal for they perceive that that is the party that “brought them here” and since civics education here is weak, and that is how things are done “back home,” they “owe” the Liberals their vote. In 1974, as soon as polling showed Trudeau could get a majority back, he called an early election and got it, almost wiping out the NDP, which never recovered.

Justin is planning to do the same thing to the NDP with the same timing any month now. He is a chip off the old block of his late father and has learned well. Over the last few decades, the Liberals have legitimized the highest transfer payment to Quebec and all sorts of other favors on an ongoing basis to help defeat separatism, a sort of permanent shakedown of voters who wanted a united Canada and loved being a “multicultural” nation. The historical relationship between the French and English that elected Sir John A. MacDonald was relegated to history.

So, who were we? What national values did we all share? That became quite foggy. Freedom, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law faded into vague statements about health care. The Liberals also loved to play anti-American and got all excited that Trudeau had been to China., The Communist Chinese loved him, and Canada recognized China before Nixon did. But who remembers that?

So, being anti-American also became part of our identity in certain quarters. Pierre also made people who already had full Canadian citizenship by virtue of being born in the UK apply for the first time to be a citizen. This was a direct slap in the face of those who showed allegiance to what had come to be called the “Anglosphere.”

In 1974, the Liberals opened citizenship offices in the GTA, like the one at the nearby Dufferin Mall in Toronto which had invitational marquis-type lights. The Liberals put up a congenial Polish doctor as their candidate in Parkdale—Stanley Haidasz—and Pierre then put him in Cabinet.

 After that, the party that could corral the most ethnic votes in the GTA and other urban centers, including Quebecers, was the winning one. The notion that we invited immigrants to our country to give them the individual rights and freedoms that we cherish, that they did not have at home, and which attracted them to our shores, has been thrown out the window. And so, the son has followed the father.

 In 2015 Justin Trudeau made over 300 promises based on polling and won the election. In his first international speech, he announced that Canada is the first post-national nation in the world, which most Canadians do not really understand. This means many things, but the main thing is the Liberals would gain votes by funding ethnic groups.

The Conservatives will continue to lose because they are selling a version of Canada that no longer lives in the minds of our indoctrinated youth, who are fed a curriculum of superficial but politically sophisticated “multiculturalism” and “moral relativism” from kindergarten to Graduate School. Only moral giants like Jordan Peterson have had the courage to fight back. The rest of us fear for our jobs as opposition brings “cancellation.”

Trudeau and the Liberals have a good chance of winning this spring. They will do the polling, promise the prizes and, because they already own the media, they will sweep us ever more into a world that is in opposition to the British laws and Judeo-Christian values that were once the foundation of this fine country.

It is beginning to make sense to me. Issues count for nothing. Immigrants who have never experienced old-fashioned representative democracy will vote along ethnic lines. The rest of us, or what was once called ROC (“the rest of Canada”) will vote Conservative in the hope that we can stop the bleeding and return us to fiscal and ideological normality. It is a losing strategy.

First published in the American Thinker.