My NEW Taki’s column about Kellie Leitch and ‘Canadian values’

“JOOOOOOOZ!!” will get the blame in the comments for pushing multiculturalism and mass immigration. (I presume…)

No matter:

On the topic of semantics, American readers can be forgiven for presuming the phrase “Canadian values” is considered hopelessly retrograde up here—comically corny, like “women’s lib.” Or perhaps a northern varietal of the “-values” garlic and wolfsbane from which all leftoids recoil, such as the more common “family-” and “traditional-” types.

Yeah, no. You see, within living memory, Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien and his cohorts in the Natural Governing Party never shut up about “da Can-AY-dee-yun val-YOOZ.”

Yet I don’t recall the CBC ever once complaining, as they just roused themselves to do, per Leitch. Not to be outdone, “The suggestion that there are government-defined ‘Canadian values’ is frightening,” the Globe and Mail suddenly realized over the weekend.

Because a Conservative had the gall to employ this particular locution—the sheer uppity presumption to drink from a “Liberals Only” fountain!—the ruling class is now pretending they’ve never heard it before.

(To parry with a favorite idiom of my own, I believe this practice is referred to as “gaslighting”…)

PS: After writing my column, someone tweeted (I think) this survey from five years ago, showing that 97% of Canadians approved of screening immigrants for Canadian values.

(Hilariously, the survey was conducted on behalf of an institution named after Pierre Trudeau.)

Now, I can’t really accept the veracity of a survey on any topic that brings back a 97% “yes” result. But still…