The Patriot Game: National Dreams and Political Realities

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

This is a work intended to provoke conventional Canadian thinkers and mouthers of platitudinous patriotism to fury. It decisively accomplishes these purposes. The author maintains that Anglophone Canada has cravenly abdicated its heritage, while Francophones steadily acquire the symbols and institutions of nationhood; that the English/French division is inevitable, and that it will not be the only split. He points out the “fault lines” that delineate the West, British Columbia, the Maritimes and Newfoundland, as well as the burgeoning movement toward some form of independence for the peoples of the First Nations.

Brimelow refuses Trudeau the laurels, usually bestowed even by his detractors, of being clever or even wise: his personal greatness had nothing to do with goodness, and in the long term weakened rather than strengthened the ties of nationhood. Bilingualism he decries as a “supreme exercise in social engineering,” pernicious in its effects, and effectively shutting out most Canadians, who have no genuine need to be bilingual, from access to power, even to employment, where facility in French is purely an artificially created requirement.

Canadian-American relations, which have superseded the once powerful Imperial tie with Britain, are mismanaged and misunderstood. The Canadian Establishment prides itself on: “stalling the unification of the British Empire, orchestrating the U.N. attack on the Anglo-French Israeli Suez expedition — essentially negative.” “Rather than a beaver, the Canadian heraldic beast could well be a dog in a manger — rampant.” Brimelow’s work is often disturbing, always thought-provoking.