The front page of the Wednesday National Post featured a long essay by Jordan Peterson on what lousy friends Canadians have been to the Americans. Regular readers of the Western Standard will find little in the substance of his remarks that is new. His Laurentian readers will be shocked.The moral superiority, which Peterson has long decried among Canadians, has been nauseatingly evident in the governments of the Trudeaux, père et fils. The Liberal future looks no better because the promise of Mark Carney is to enhance the rottenness of policies dreamed up by the World Economic Forum. Indeed, unlike Justin, who simply swallowed their dreams, Carney helped weave them: stakeholder capitalism (formerly known as socialism), diversity, equity, and inclusion (formerly known as racism), and global degrowth. The whole ball of mud.This is the context for Peterson’s reflections on the position of Alberta in Canada, along with that of Saskatchewan and, if ever they opened their eyes, of British Columbia as well.Again. the details are familiar, from robbery of western wealth via transfer payments to Laurentian Canada (and especially to Quebec), to the nonsense of official bilingualism that ensures federal bureaucrats are drawn almost entirely from Laurentian Canada (and especially from Quebec) to the endless whining and demands for more that emanate from Quebec all by itself.Quebec alone, however, is not the problem. Peterson recounts a story from the late 1990s of his move from Harvard to the University of Toronto along with three of his graduate students. He tells his readers that he found it difficult to take them anywhere socially around the U of T without enduring the embarrassment of what he called “casual” anti-Americanism. It was evident whenever the question of their origin came up. They probably said “huh?” not “eh?” Or “out” not “oot.” A clear give-away.Professors conducting their exquisite lives within the refined air of what they think is Canada’s finest university directed remarks at his junior colleagues that, if aimed at any but Americans would have been considered racist and sexist and xenophobic. The anti-American attitudes of his senior colleagues were akin to the “genteel” anti-Semitism I can recall from my own youth.More to the point, when I also had the misfortune of living in Toronto a few years earlier, I noticed the same genteel anti-Americanism among my colleagues, even American ones!I was curious about where it came from so I introduced the first course ever taught on Canadian political thought. The next year one of my friends at the U of T, Don Forbes, introduced the second. Forbes came from the west as did Peterson and I. I don’t think that was accidental. Our formative years as undergraduates were lived beyond the assumptions and stifling mythologies of Laurentian Canada.Taking into consideration our own formation as westerners is the only addendum I would make to Peterson’s otherwise splendid discussion of the attitudes and pusillanimous behaviour of Canadian federal politicians.The question I was trying to answer in that long-ago course offering was: what is the myth my Ontario students found so comfortable that it informed their barely hidden and nearly axiomatic contempt for Americans? I found the answer in Ontario and Upper Canadian literature and eventually concluded that the experience that turned into an unquestioned truth –as myths tend to do—originated in the eighteenth century! It all began with the losers of the American Revolution, the Loyalists who settled in Upper Canada.Quebec’s losers’ myth began even earlier, with the British victory in 1759 on the Plains of Abraham. And the defining attribute of all losers’ myths is moral superiority. We can see an echo in the current attitudes of the NDP and the Greens.What about our own prairie myth? It is centered in the experience of homesteading, which is not a losers’ myth. The center of homesteader triumphalism, as we all know, is next-year country, Alberta.Peterson points this out indirectly with a beautiful account of a fictional conversation between Danielle Smith and Donald Trump when they were both at Mar-a-Lago, along with Kevin O’Leary. All the Americans need to do, Peterson’s fable goes, is offer to end the privilege of subsidizing Quebec in return for helping Alberta bring its products to market. Everything else is gravy: the northern peso replaced by the greenback, lower costs of manufactured goods, easy access to Arizona and Hawaii in the winter, membership in a genuine federation defended by a real military power. It all spells good riddance to everything contemptible about the Laurentians.Peterson doesn’t go so far. Nevertheless, Laurentians as well as Albertans would benefit from pondering his remarks. Because of their mythical blinders, the Laurentians will fume. And then the lights will go out and it will grow chilly, as Ralph Klein predicted a generation ago. For Albertans at least it will be a good start on our own long-postponed golden age.
