Commentary
The old expression “straws in the wind” refers to small signs or hints that a significant change or event is coming—signs or hints so subtle that they rarely make the headlines or attract social media attention.
So here are four straws that most of us may have missed—missed because they wafted on the political breezes in Switzerland, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Denmark—but not in Canada, though we too greatly need what they portend.
On Jan. 22, 2026, in Davos, Switzerland, Argentinian President Javier Milei called not for some vague coalition of middle powers like Mr. Carney, nor for the assertion of global power as promised by Mr. Trump, but for a return by the Western democracies to “Judeo-Christian values,” framing them as the essential moral and cultural foundation of Western civilization.
On Sept. 21, 2025, in Glendale, Arizona, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking at Charlie Kirk’s funeral, ended his tribute with an explicit description of the Christian beliefs shared by himself and Kirk. It was one of the most explicit public declarations of faith in the teachings of Jesus Christ given by a practising American politician in recent memory.
On July 17, 2025, in a detailed speech to an empty House of Commons but which went viral immediately thereafter, British MP Danny Kruger described England as “founded and created consciously on the basis of the Bible and the story of the Hebrew people,” as the world’s “oldest Christian country and the prototype of nations across the West,” and concluded with an impassioned call for Britain to recover its Judeo-Christian Heritage.
On April 3, 2025, in Copenhagen, Denmark, one of the most secular nations on earth, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, a Social Democrat, stood before a group of university students and declared: “We will need a form of rearmament that is just as important [as the military one]. That is the spiritual one.” She added that the Church of Denmark should “step up, not merely as a cultural institution, but as a vital part of national life.”
In Denmark’s case, these remarks were prompted in part by the government’s attempt to recruit more young Danes into military service and finding that many of them were unwilling to fight for their country—not for its flag, its democratic institutions, or the welfare state that the previous generation had worked so hard to build. In the words of one commentator: No civilization can survive, let alone defend itself, without something sacred at its foundation, and when there is nothing left that we are willing to sacrifice ourselves for—nothing we value greater than ourselves—that is a real crisis.
So what about Canada? At first blush it would appear that there are no such straws as these blowing in the wind, or that what wind there is, is blowing in the opposite direction.
The preamble to our Charter of Rights and Freedoms declares that “Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God.” But a B.C. court declared years ago that this phrase is a “dead letter” that could only be “resurrected” by a decision of the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court years ago declared Canada to be a secular society, making any constitutional reference to the supremacy of God legally irrelevant.
Our mainstream media, academic, and education-system elites are for the most part atheistic and thoroughly secular, falling over themselves to demonstrate their intellectual sophistication and modernity by disparaging and tearing down the country’s spiritual traditions—in particular its Judeo-Christian foundations.
If a Canadian MP made a public speech in our House of Commons like that made by Danny Kruger, it would be either ignored by our mainstream media or castigated by the CBC and Toronto Star as an example of unwanted “right-wing extremism.” If a Canadian cabinet minister made a speech like Marco Rubio at a nationally televised event like the Kirk funeral, he or she would likely find themselves out of a job the next morning.
Quebec, which has increasingly become the base of the federal Liberal Party, is now Canada’s most anti-religious province, and also the province most severely infected by anti-Semitism.
But are there any straws in the winds which periodically blow across the Canadian landscape that might foreshadow a turning?
In Prime Minister Carney’s 540-page book titled “Value(s),” there is not a single substantive or explicit reference to Canada’s Judeo-Christian tradition as a relevant and commendable source of national values today. Yet very recently, the prime minister joined with 2,000 other politicians, media personalities, and laypersons at the National Prayer Breakfast in Ottawa to explicitly acknowledge and celebrate Canada’s spiritual heritage.
Even more significantly, according to a November 2025 survey of 5,000 nationally representative Canadians conducted by Angus Reid and the Cardus think tank, while it noted a general decline in “religious commitment” among older Canadians, the one demographic category in which there is a significant “uptick in religiosity” is among 18 to 34-year-olds.
Whether this “uptick in religiosity” will eventually draw heavily upon our Judeo-Christian foundations or something else remains to be seen. In the past, it has usually been assumed that it is the life-experienced older generation that is most capable of providing value-based guidance to the next generation. But when the values inherited by that older generation have been systematically trashed and abandoned, rendering it incapable of providing value-based leadership, might it be the younger generation to whom we must look for such leadership?
Straws in the wind? Let us hope and pray for the ability to recognize such signs if and when they occur, and to encourage rather than dampen efforts to recover and build upon those spiritual values required to sustain and guide Canada’s future.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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