Conrad Black: Although Ottawa Conservative Event Didn’t Delve Into Key Cultural Questions, Speakers Still Touched on Them

Commentary

The meeting of the Canada Strong and Free Network (formerly the Manning Institute) in Ottawa last week was the customary uplifting celebration of conservative goals and values.

Federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre stayed well within the bounds of parliamentary courtesy in making the point that the Carney government has done practically nothing in 13 months other than increase the deficit, layer new levels of bureaucracy for the tackling of important infrastructure projects, and committed Canada to a dubious pursuit of more productive relations with China. He was well received, and pointed out that Prime Minister Carney has mistakenly forsworn his ability to use Canadian energy and strategic minerals resources as bargaining points in the negotiations for renewal of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico trade pact. The implicit question was: If the prime minister is not going to play the best cards he has, what does he propose to substitute for them?

The leading foreign participant, former U.S. Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo, smoothly advised that Canada should not be frightened by Donald Trump and that democracies in general, and especially the United States and Canada, will get on together.

The keynote address was given by Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta and, in terms of her comprehensive ideological program, probably the leading conservative officeholder in Canada. She went over her agenda swiftly, rightly laying claim to an admirable record as a tax cutter in Alberta, to a series of policies that have made her province by some margin the fastest-growing part of Canada economically, including new housing construction that is substantially ahead of the rest of the country. She spoke of the measures her government has taken to restrain premature sex-change operations and ensure parents are informed of such matters in the case of underage youth. Smith also noted the restraints that Alberta has placed on medical assistance in dying (MAID), particularly prohibiting it for young people and in cases where mental illness is the only claimed justification.

These and other policy positions were staked out within the framework of Alberta’s overwhelming official rejection of wokeism. Smith’s address was a succinct summary following upon laudations from previous speakers of her record in office, and it was not appropriate for her to make what would amount to a partisan speech to an audience that was perfectly well aware and supportive of her views and her record. Canada and other modern Western countries would benefit, however, from a greater self-knowledge of why some of these ideas have taken hold as they have.

Our universal health-care system, which was long waved about like a battle standard as evidence of the superiority of our society over the United States, now suffers from intolerable waiting lists which bring unnecessary death to significant numbers of people every year, while at the same time the country is hobbled by a shortage of doctors. Because of this, almost all medical cases go directly to emergency rooms that tend to be congested with non-emergencies and are almost always overcrowded. Every informed person in the country is aware of these problems, but all the parties (except the Conservatives) and the health-care establishment have locked arms and remained defiant in their objection to private medicine and in their insistence that the only resolution of the shortcomings of our system is to hurl more tax revenues at it.

The percentage of our GDP already consumed by health-care expenses is unusually large, and there is ample evidence that health-care administration is chronically inefficient. The focus that our health-care system is increasingly putting on MAID is anomalous. We have become one of the most suicide-afflicted countries in the world, with the blessings of the public sector and the formerly universally embraced rationale for health care and the medical profession in general: the extension of useful life has been compromised by the promotion of the virtues of suicide. This is the work of a health-care system that is too ideologically hidebound to do the necessary to relieve the shortage of doctors. Canada has fewer doctors per capita than even much less prosperous countries, such as Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America.

The decriminalization of suicide is a reasonable step, but the systematic devaluation of life is not. If life is to be commoditized and all notion of it as a sacred gift that occurs in a universe where there is likely to be some sort of supernatural intelligence that many people seek to propitiate is implicitly dispensed with, then life has little value. In the absence of any intellectually respectable divergence from a policy of militant atheism and anti-theism, what will follow is the intellectual justification for the disposal of life, the “perfectibility” of man by other men, and the replacement of veneration for a deity by pagan festivals celebrating human gods like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

Obviously, Danielle Smith and the many other engaging and authoritative speakers at the True North Strong and Free conference did not get too far into those points. They did touch upon the related subject of the perverse and also somewhat suicidal enthusiasm for sex changes. Such extreme acts are within the rights of mature adults. But indulging the whims of children and juveniles in these matters and fighting any discussion of it with their parents is another savage assault on the institution of the family and on the Judeo-Christian ethics of Western civilization. Only adults can determine for themselves if they really wish to dispense with notions of procreation and even the enjoyability of conventional sex. And any departure from the fact that there are two sexes and that it is the perfect right of everyone to determine their own sexuality is nonsense.

As far as I could discern from following in the media, the conference in Ottawa did not directly address these issues either, but it certainly touched on them. All those who attended were aware that our society is going to have to deal forthrightly with these issues, which threaten almost everything most of us have ever believed in. The principal participants did an admirable job of discussing the approaches to the consideration of these overwhelming societal questions.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.