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The latest disclosure came when Radio Canada announced the "Felix" awards for Quebec-generated popular music. A folk-song group calling itself "Mes Aieux" (My Ancestors) had produced what was voted the most popular song in Quebec. It's called "Dégénérations" which (when spoken) could mean either "degeneration," an apt description of what has been happening in Quebec, or perhaps just "generations," a wistful observance of changing times. The words of the song leave no doubt, however, about its message. They recall and extol the old Quebecois, who courageously broke the land and founded French Canada. The song likewise deplores their descendants who...

The insistence of a Washington state couple that they have a right to build a four-foot concrete wall along 80 feet of the 1,270-mile-long U.S.-Canada boundary in the West has cost a U.S. member of the International Joint Commission his job, according to reports appearing last week in the Canadian news media. If the incident did nothing else, it gave Canadians (prone always to accept the dicta of officialdom) an inkling of how things work on the other side of the border. Apparently, it all started because Herbert and Shirley Ann Leu of Blaine, Wash., couldn't prevent dogs escaping from...

Canada's tar sands, which have become a major and secure supplier of oil to the United States, have also been singled out as a major target for American and Canadian environmentalists. Issuing press releases against them, however, is one thing. Going without the increasing flood of oil they are pouring into the American market would be quite another. Two American environmental groups have declared war on the tar sands. One is the Freedom from Oil Coalition whose San Francisco-based director is formerly of Alberta, the province where almost all the tar sands are located. He was in Alberta last week...

Stéphane Dion, who came from fourth-place standing to win the leadership of Canada's Liberal Party early this month, declared immediate war on the minority Conservative government last week, and made it clear he is determined to force a late-winter election. Implicitly, he made something else clear. He will attack the government on two principal issues, both of them integral to Canadian-American relations. One is the Kyoto Treaty, the other the Canadian role in Afghanistan. If he wins the election, therefore, America's northern neighbor will once again become vaguely hostile territory, as it was under the last Liberal government. On Kyoto,...

Canada's Christians have been trounced and their venture into the sacrosanct precinct of secular politics has proved a singular failure, brayed the heathen last week, after the House of Commons endorsed gay marriage by a much bigger majority than when it approved of it last year. The heathen in this case was a senior columnist in the super-secularist Globe and Mail, who wrote in undisguised exaltation: "Thoughtful evangelical Christians must [now] ask themselves some hard questions, such as: 'Isn't it about time we admit we've failed? That, both here and in the United States, our efforts to influence the political...

Mark Steyn, a Canadian journalist and columnist widely read in the United States and Great Britain, whose current book, "America Alone," is an alarming portrait of a rapidly rising Islamic Europe, has served his cause better than he could have hoped. Not only does his book convincingly demonstrate the catastrophic demographic consequence of Europe's descending birth rate and ascending Muslim population, it did one thing more. The only review of it that I could find in Canada's largely liberal print media showed unmistakably that the liberal Western world has no solution to the problem. It is utterly baffled. It doesn't...

One of the most significant phenomena in current Canadian politics – i.e. the growing shift of Canada's Jewish community from the Liberal to the Conservative Party – took a major stride last week when the top contender for the Liberal leadership accused Israel of committing a war crime. Michael Ignatieff, a longtime Harvard authority on human rights and international law who came back to Canada two years ago to seek the Liberal leadership, seemed to stumble into the accusation. In an interview with the Toronto Star last August, he was asked about the Israeli bombing of the Lebanese town of...

Canada's Harper government delightfully surprised both its friends and its foes last week. It leaked the fact that it may bring in a "Defence of Religions Act" to protect critics of homosexual practice from prosecution under human rights codes, and to prohibit the firing of marriage commissioners who refuse on the grounds of their religion to "marry" homosexual couples. Social conservative allies were surprised because opposition to gay marriage, which had begun to seem a lost cause, was being revived. Government foes are equally delighted, because they assume that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has finally made a blunder that will...

The three federally funded agencies most responsible for turning Canada from a stolid conservative backwater into a raving feminist-gay backwater were cut off at the knees this week in a budget brought down by the Harper government. Reducing federal spending for the first time in nine years, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty also reported a $13-billion surplus in last year's operations. The surplus, he said, would be directed to debt reduction. Liberal governments had been increasing spending by an average 8.2 percent annually, peaking in their final year with a whopping 14.4-percent increase. That had been done in a desperate attempt...

Pope Benedict set off an anti-Catholic flash fire in the Canadian media this month. In an audience at Rome with six Ontario Catholic bishops he deplored Canada's adoption of gay marriage and the "daily destruction of unborn children," all done "in the name of tolerance." Irate letters to the newspapers directed the Pope to "stay out of Canadian politics." The Toronto Star hired firebrand ex-nun Joanna Manning to compose a 750-word denunciation of the Catholic Church, depicting it as the enemy of Jesus Christ who, she says, preached "freedom and tolerance." The Globe and Mail hired Michael Higgins, president of...

Prime Minister Steve Harper did it again last week. With little prior warning, he disclosed his intention of carrying out yet another promise he made during last winter's election campaign. He intends to launch a "step-by-step" reform of the Canadian Senate, arguably the most baffling and pointless legislative body extant in any Western democracy. To Ottawa's seasoned skeptics his announcement was doubly shocking. First, unlike almost all his prime ministerial predecessors, Harper apparently takes seriously the promises he made back then. One of those predecessors, Liberal Jean Chretien, announced at one point that he considered it unfair to demand that...

Canada's new Conservative government, elected on the short-term promise of repairing some of the more grievous deficiencies of its Liberal predecessor, will have to develop a long-term vision for the nation before it can hope to win a majority, says an observant academic writing last week in the National Post. The historical record shows, he says, that only leaders with an inspiring perspective of the future win majorities in Canada. The writer is Adam Chapnick, and he teaches history to the Canadian Forces College, the equivalent of an Annapolis and a West Point combined. In his prognosis, Chapnick sees what...

Canada's nationalized health-care system, admired by the left all over the world and deplored by the right all over Canada, took another hit last week. The Canadian Medical Association, long its unfailing supporter, suddenly turned against it. The CMA elected as president Dr. Brian Day, a Vancouver surgeon and one-time supporter of state medicine, who is now an outspoken critic of Canada's "Medicare" system. In fact, he runs the largest private clinic in the country, offering an array of surgical procedures to people prepared to pay for them. In doing so, he challenges the Canada Health Act, which prohibits for-profit...

Once-great churches are falling apart By Ted Byfield Calgary Sun Sunday, July 2, 2006 It's a sad state of affairs, one has to admit, but news of the last week makes it hard to doubt Canadians are currently watching the demise of two great churches -- the United and the Anglican. The United Church is currently condemning Israel as a "rogue nation." Among the Anglicans, the Archbishop of Canterbury is pronouncing his worldwide church as two churches -- those that accept sodomite clergy and those who don't. Both initiatives are so bizarre they seem to foreshadow only one thing...

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who electioneered by promising Canadians a more "open" government, took two measures last month aimed at establishing a more "closed" one – closed, that is, to the media. In so doing, he appeared to have declared war on the parliamentary press gallery. First, he decreed that all public communications from his Cabinet ministers – everything from speeches, to press releases, to policy statements, to letters to the editor – must have the prior approval of the Prime Minister's Office. Second, he ruled that the meetings of his Cabinet will no longer be announced in advance, and...

Canada's new prime minister, Stephen Harper, whose minority government was elected on the promise he would break the highly centralized power of "the PMO," the Prime Minister's Office, has begun by establishing what is beginning to look like the most powerful PMO in Canada's peacetime history. At the same time he has scored a publicity coup by paying a surprise visit to Canadian troops in Afghanistan, gaining top attention in the print and electronic media for three days running. He has also responded to left-wing demands that Canada withdraw from that country by refusing a parliamentary debate on the question...

Canada's government-run national health system, often held before Americans as a model method of delivering medical care, has been gradually falling to pieces in recent years, and last week it received what many fear will prove the knock-out blow. That blow came from Alberta where the provincial Conservative government of Premier Ralph Klein is defying federal laws intended to safeguard the system against private medical practice. Klein unveiled a plan to institute a controversial "two-tier system" in his province – meaning two levels of medical care, one run by the government and delivered without fee, the other delivered privately with...

Canadians brought about a minority Conservative government on Monday by electing a House of Commons in which 60 percent of the members will be out to destroy it. That is, they gave Prime Minister-elect Stephen Harper's Conservative party 124 seats, outgoing Prime Minister Paul Martin's Liberals 103, the socialist New Democratic Party 29, and the Bloc Quebecois (whose declared purpose is to take Quebec out of Canada), 51. There was one independent. As soon as the results were in, Martin announced that he would not lead the Liberals in another election. The Conservatives formed a government that 36.3 percent of...

If Canadians in Monday's election bring about a minority Conservative government, as the polls declare they will, it will be the first time in 26 years they have elected a prime minister who is not from Quebec. If they give a non-Quebecker a majority, a distinct possibility, it will be for the first time in 47 years. In their massive perhaps premature celebration or commiseration of what they unanimously view as an impending Conservative victory, nowhere to my knowledge have the Canadian media mentioned this curious reality, which of course reflects Quebec's undeniable domination of the federal government for nearly...

The Canadian electorate, characteristically one of the most docile in the democratic world, suddenly seemed to have awakened from their sleep last week and decided that they had had enough. A poll, highly credible because it was conducted for the left-leaning Globe and Mail, showed a startling 10-percentage-point leap in electoral support for the Conservative Party. It was enough to assure them a minority government in the general election Jan. 23, with the bare possibility of a full majority. Moreover, the response to the poll of the Liberal Party and its leader, Prime Minister Paul Martin, was so strident that...