Canada Day shouldn't be cancelled, but there's less to celebrate this year

National Post, 01 July 2021

Canadian confidence in good government, our health-care system and our basic rights has taken a pounding during the pandemic.

The country limps toward Canada Day, with not a few voices suggesting that the entire nation-building enterprise was a venal venture, corrupting all generations down to the present day.

Leave aside for another day the questions raised by those who wish to cancel Canada Day. Those who are generally proud of the Canadian project face a grim reality, too. Three things which usually rank high in surveys about what is best about Canada are in rough shape.

First, good government. It is one of our distinguishing features from the American behemoth, namely that “we the people” did not form a government as much as a series of governments assembled various peoples. We had no Wild West; the North-West Mounted Police went first to establish order. So it was that our constitutional history is rooted in “peace, order and good government.”

That’s a tough sell today. Canadian confidence in good government has taken a pounding during the pandemic, both from those who think the various governments have done too little and those who think they have done too much. Both sides are frustrated by the contradictions and confusions, not only at the beginning, but even to the present day. They seem to agree that whether too little or too much, it has not been done well.

The question of who was governing even came into play, as vast areas of the common life were handed over to unelected, mostly unknown and largely unaccountable health officials to regulate. Were Canadians being governed at all — in the sense of the tradition of responsible government — or just subject to arbitrary authority?

Second, the health-care system. For decades, Canada’s health-care system has come at the top of the list of surveys on what makes Canada distinct from and better than other nations. For a long time now, close observers have known that despite our high health-care spending, our outcomes are not notably better than many other countries.

The pandemic made the weaknesses of our health-care system evident. The conflicting advice from public health officials cost them much of their credibility. The debacle in long-term care homes illustrated how a major sector of health care was massively dysfunctional. Our hospitals were exposed as having so little capacity or flexibility that tens of thousands of “elective” surgeries were cancelled.

All the praise for health-care workers was something of a distraction from the perverse reversal of the normal order of things. The sick were asked to sacrifice their health care to protect the health system. Instead of bragging about our supposedly vaunted system, Canadians were asked not to use it. That is not a point of pride.

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