To
use the linguistics of my household (tiredpants, crankypants, etc.) Mark Steyn is definitely a crankypants in his latest column for the Western Standard. Here is how it begins.
It’s in the nature of things that a conservative columnist in Trudeaupia spends much of his time lowering his readers into the abyss of despair.
And this abyss of despair is where you end up after finishing the column.
...Canada, unfortunately, has embarked on a much suppler, more slippery form of radical secularism: you don’t ban religion, you just subject it to the ever-sterner strictures of “tolerance”; you don’t forbid private enterprise, you just create a business climate where almost all successful ventures wind up dependent on state patronage and run by good friends of the ruling party; you don’t turn the people into wards of the state overnight, you just use an incremental accumulation of ostensibly benign measures, from government health care to government day care, to redefine the relationship between the “citizen” and his rulers. The soft totalitarianism of the Trudeaupian state is a much harder target to take aim at than the obvious wasteland of Andropov-era Soviet Communism.
...So what about Europe? Canadians are, at least psychologically, an honorary member of the EU: we take the “progressive” Euro-view on Kyoto, cradle-to-grave welfare, abortion, a bloated “public sector” workforce, confiscatory taxation, joke prison sentences, and just about everything else. But, as I’ve noted here before, the design flaw in the Euro-Canadian secular welfare state is that it needs a traditional religious-society birthrate to sustain it. In the EU, the fertility rate is now 1.46 children per childbearing woman--well below “replacement rate,” and well below what an aging population entitled to lavish state benefits needs.
...if the news from Europe over the next decade doesn’t serve as a wake-up call for Canada, we deserve to sleepwalk to the same grim end.
Has Mr. Steyn jumped the shark on this one or has he served a final wake up call. I am still trying to decide.
