The Evolution of Canada’s Key Institutions’ Value System
News Analysis
In rejecting the premise of the investigation, prompted by complaints that the cartoons sparked hatred, Levant opened his arms wide and said, “I published those cartoons to use the maximum freedom allowed.”
True to his word, he and his team at Rebel Media haven’t been shy to test boundaries. And regardless of what one may think of their approach to journalism, they have had the impact of showing the public how the boundary has been changing over the years and what value system has been defining it.
Mark Milke, president of the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, says while one doesn’t want to “second-guess” the actions of law enforcement to maintain public peace in the heat of the moment, there has been a “pattern” emerging in Canada, where the Jewish community has been attacked without much intervention. And that factors into the debate of keeping the peace and making sure “the basic norms are respected,” he says.
Philip Carl Salzman, professor emeritus of anthropology at McGill University, says what has been pushed in Canada as “moral virtue” in recent years is based on the neo-Marxist principle of dividing society into “oppressor” and “oppressed” classes.
“It’s not an economic class struggle [as it would be in Marxism], but it’s neo-Marxist because it still erases all the relations in favour of a class struggle, in this case, between oppressed and oppressor,” he told The Epoch Times.
In this value system, Salzman says, “all minorities are good as long as they’re victims, but if they’re successful minorities, then they’re white-adjacent, or hyphen-white, as Asians and Jews have been characterized.”
He says part of the problem is how people are schooled in institutes of higher learning in Canada. They in turn go on to take up key positions in society, and the resulting culture can impact judgment decisions.
“Universities are no longer places where people search for truth through examining evidence and making arguments and developing theories,” he says. Instead, students are trained to be “activists and to advance social change in the direction of crushing the ‘oppressors’ and benefiting the ‘oppressed,’” Salzman says.
Founding Principles
The issue of Canada’s overarching value system is being impacted by messaging that separates Canada from its founding principles, Milke says.
Milke notes, however, that Canada does have its own founding principles, which came from an “amalgamation of French and English traditions” based on the rule of law. They include the English tradition of aversion to the concentration of power, he says, and the French ideals of liberty.
“Canada has now become kind of broken. It doesn’t have a unifying idea,” he adds.
“And this isn’t about immigration, because plenty of immigrants come here from around the world precisely because they want a safe, prosperous society, because they want to be seen as individuals. … But what you’ve seen now is, it’s become a free-for-all.”
With no prevailing messaging about Canada’s founding values, along with a lack of drive to integrate people, Milke says people’s inherent tribalism is allowed to run unchecked, which also manifests in scenes of protest in the streets. He adds, however, that tribalism doesn’t excuse failure to differentiate between right and wrong.
“My background is German. My grandparents [who immigrated to Canada] didn’t side with Adolf Hitler and they didn’t side with the Nazis. They knew who was to blame: It was Nazi Germany who was a threat to civilization. This is why, for example, Iranian dissidents don’t blame Israel. They blame the Iranian regime for pushing the region into conflict,” he said.
“There is something [to ponder] about: What is the goal of the society? And are you going to be integrating people into the goal of a free, flourishing society based on individual rights?”