New vulnerabilities are surfacing. While most polls suggest the vast majority of Canadian adults are resolute in resisting any such takeover, the younger generation (18-35) is much more inclined – given certain favourable terms – to join the United States. The younger you are, the more likely you are to be susceptible to Trump and his appeals.
One of the most unacknowledged reasons is the failure of our school systems to teach the current generation about historic Canadian resistance to U.S. threats, incursions and trade sanctions going back to the American Revolution.
The result that alarmed Colin MacEachern, a former Halifax high school history educator now teaching in Australia, was the susceptibility of today’s students and their teachers to Trump’s bluster and blandishments.
MacEachern wrote on social media that his students would likely have no comprehension of the U.S. doctrine of “Manifest Destiny” or the American threat to Canada that was a major factor in nudging us toward Confederation.
It’s also fair to assume they have little or no knowledge of critical events of U.S. pressure on Canada such as the American invasion of Quebec in 1775, the War of 1812, the 1911 election reciprocity debate, the nuclear warheads controversy of the 1960s or American pressure to join the Iraq War in 2003.
While I accept the premise of the article, I find it misdirected. If we weren’t watching a national housing crisis, a cost of living crisis, the death of the middle class, the climate crisis, the demographic crisis, the healthcare crisis pile up on Canadians one after the other, no one would want change and would fight to preserve our way of life.
But we went down the yellow brick road of neoliberal plattitudes about free markets and privatization and made offshore tax evasion easy and risk free for wealthy Canadians and multinationals alike.
Even today, there are tremendous forces working hard with big money to privatise one of our most effective, efficient and formerly sacrosanct institutions. Healthcare. What good is not paying directly for a family doctor when you’ve never had one and can’t get one?
Public healthcare was fantastically productive and efficient, and the same voices that decry canada’s productivity crisis are happy to keep erroding public healthcare and march in the profiteers knowing full well it will be a disaster.
Happy people don’t revolt. You got unhappy people, it will be taken advantage of by your rivals and enemies.
If you actually read the article, it’s a guy complaining that kids are too woke and post-national to resist Trump because they don’t know enough about John A. Said guy is a person who sells history textbooks, if you then click through to the bio.
I read some of it but couldn’t stomach much more. The amount of thinly veiled racism was not the vibe for me. Also, I grew up in BC and am in the “young Canadian” age and we were most definitely taught Canadian history and the concept of manifest destiny. Guy just seems mad that they’re teaching the ugly parts of Canadian history now too.
There’s definitely an issue of how so many young Canadians are favouring fascist bullshit, but this ain’t it.
Knowing about the ugly parts of Canadian history doesn’t make me want to toss out Canada either. It makes me ask how I can help be part of the next history book that says stuff like “and then shit got better when people started thinking critically for a hot minute”.