Let’s just do the right thing by Heritage Canada and rename it for what it is, the Canadian Ministry of Propaganda. Or if you want to follow the official style sheet, Propaganda Canada.Top of mind today is a draft rewrite of Canada’s Citizenship Guide, Discover Canada. This is the book they give prospective immigrants, an explanation of how the Government of Canada sees itself, the country, and the people living in it. The present one was published in 2012 during the Stephen Harper ministry, when Heritage Canada was known as Canada Citizenship, Immigration, and Multiculturalism.This Western Standard article is based upon a Blacklock's Reporter story obtained through an Access to Information request and gives chapter and verse of proposed changes to the guide. Basically, though, if you’re white, conservative, and a war hero, you’re out. If you’re a prominent homosexual, indigenous, or trans person, you're in. It’s a matter of who you represent more than what you may have ever done..Citizenship guide rewrite spotlights Liberal appointees, omits historic figures.This isn’t accidental sloppiness. It’s the point. The Liberal government’s Heritage propagandists have produced a draft that systematically elevates behaviours and identities it wants Canadians to support and even esteem, while airbrushing out the histories and figures it wants us to forget. These would be the people whose accomplishments reveal by comparison today’s Liberals as the pitifully inadequate charlatans they are.It does, after all, take an entirely different skill set to knock a country down than it does to build one up..Anyway, so much for good old “Let us now praise famous men and our fathers that begat us.” (Ecclesiasticus 44.) The Liberals are busy erasing the fathers and replacing them with curated role models whose chief qualification is checking the right identity boxes. The goal is not a more accurate citizenship guide; it is a more pliable electorate. Elevate the right victims, suppress the wrong heroes, and watch the national mindset shift leftward in time for the next election.During my past incarnation in the Prime Minister’s Office (2009-2015) one of the occasional rewards for our department’s zeal was the acquaintance of historian Dr. Chris Champion..These days he’s the editor and publisher of the Dorchester Review but in those days he was busy at Citizenship, writing the guide the Liberals now want to dump. It was indeed a robust and red-blooded account of what it means to be Canadian that he prepared, heavy on the “Fight for Canada,” as the Harper government chose to remember the War of 1812.However, my main recollection of Dr. Champion's effort was the tremendous and apparently unreciprocated care he took to be fair to people who weren’t necessarily cheerleaders for a Conservative government..He recalls, “Jason [Minister Kenney] strove hard to create a consensus document that would stand the test of time. We deliberately left out a ‘greeting from the Minister’ or prime minister, which would have politicized it. Instead, we chose a picture of Commons Speaker Peter Milliken to illustrate the House of Commons, though he was a Liberal.”He adds, “When we created the audio version, we told the Department to approach Adrienne Clarkson (Liberal appointed) and Ian Hanomansing, deliberately avoiding partisanship. We highlighted gay athletes qua [sic] athletes to avoid divisive sexual politics. More importantly we did not avoid historical controversies and were honest about them, while also emphasizing that Canada historically was a place where the truth could be confronted and improvement made without lying about the past.”In other words, Champion’s 2012 guide treated people for what they were and did, not as political mascots..Not so the new draft, that treats accomplishment itself as optional, so long as the biography flatters the current government’s clientele. War heroes who happen to be white and male? Not interested. Indigenous or trans figures? Elevated, because symbolism now trumps substance.The pattern repeats everywhere Heritage money flows. One-in-ten federal historical plaques from the past century is now slated for rewriting or removal because they mention John A. Macdonald or smack of “colonial legacy.” Residential school figures, major political leaders, even the word “Eskimo” on old plaques, gone. Cabinet orders demand a review of anything that fails the test of “confronting colonialism, patriarchy, and racism.” Public “controversy” and indigenous consultants decide what stays. The message is clear: the Canada that built railways, fought wars, and confronted its own sins is an embarrassment to be memory holed.Canada Day grants follow the same cynical script. “Roughly three-quarters of the $25.5 million handed out annually now go to events that have quietly dropped the flag,” the anthem and any whiff of national pride. Organizers who want taxpayer cash must “evolve” their celebrations to focus on reconciliation and equity communities. No Canadian flag? No problem. Anti-colonial lectures? Approved. This government has decided that honouring the country that funds them is passé; dividing it into grievance groups is progressive. .Even the relentless federal obsession with “systemic racism” serves the same end. Heritage Canada shovels hundreds of thousands to advocacy groups that label Christian pro-life organizations “hate movements” and treat as a hate symbol the Red Ensign, under which a generation of Canadians fought fascism.Real fascists by the way, in tanks. Not the fascism of punk kids spray-painting swastikas in back alleys.But, today’s subtext is always the same. Traditional Canada was rotten, only the Liberal vision of perpetual atonement can redeem it. Differences in outcomes between groups? Never geography, education, culture, or time in country. Always hate. Always the fault of the old stock, the conservatives, the un-woke.Champion: “The Trudeau-Carney government is too stupid or cynical to see how important it is to avoid divisiveness and false narratives in something like a citizenship book. But it defines the Liberal political tradition in Canada to divide and conquer. They don't care how much damage they do if it secures a political constituency for their hold on power. The party always comes first, the country be damned. That's why they chose a leader in 2013 based solely on his name and heredity. Today, instead of updating a consensus citizenship book, they are pushing a divisive and false account of Canadian history.”.This is not cultural stewardship. It is clientelism dressed up as enlightenment. By deciding which histories Canadians are allowed to admire and which they must condemn, the Ministry of Propaganda is engineering the electorate it needs: one that sees itself as a collection of aggrieved tribes rather than a single nation with a shared past worth defending.The old consensus guide survived because it told the truth without pandering.If published as is, this new draft would not. It exists to make Liberals the indispensable champions of the “proper” kind of Canadian and to make everyone else the problem.
