The Branding Exercise That Is Canada On Its 2024 Birthday

We are watching the national anthem played as Canada’s mens soccer team advances to the second round of the Copa America tournament. It’s Canada Day weekend, which always stirs up sentimental patriotism, even when the mid-wits in the PMO change the words to O Canada. But something feels different. 

This team, of course, looks nothing like Team Canada in the 1972 showdown with the Soviets, for instance. Demographically they’re Trudeau’s wet dream of races, ethnicities and languages. Fair enough. They made it through qualifying. Props. 

But having changed the look of Canada to the world, just what remains of the nation that was gripped by the 1972 Canada/ Russia series, games so existential that Canadians felt a loss meant the death of a culture? What does today’s Canada stand for anymore to them? And why are elite politicians pushing so hard on a policy that has little support?

A recent Ipsos poll asked "Do you agree or disagree that 'Canada is broken’?” The result? Conservatives: 96%/PPC: 86%/ Greens: 63%/ BQ: 58%/ NDP: 57%/ Liberals: 34%. Understand that what has changed for Conservatives is very different from the Bloc or NDP. But they are all adrift in Trudeau’s Canada.

As the players sang along to O Canada in Orlando it’s clear that Canada right now is not a nation. It’s a brand. One constructed by politicians, not the people of the country. Liberals apparently like it that way, but getting a lump in the throat from remembering our war dead or the creation of single-payer healthcare is so yesterday for the PMO posse. Governments like Canada’s have chucked their independence in deference to world governments deciding financial, health and military policy. 

One friend says all that binds this new Canadian brand is hockey and equalization payments. With polling numbers such as these it’s fair to ask why the political class continues to push this aggressive WEF branding when so much of the nation prefers the old homegrown model? While immigration is a laudable goal, fire-hose immigration like Canada is seeing is kefafta.

It’s not just a Canada thing. No, this is a branding exercise writ globally. Look at the lineup for Chile that faced Canada on Saturday. Names such as Igor Lishnovsky, Erick Pulgar and Benjamin Kusevic hardly stir up the traditional profile of a South American nation. The Euro 2024 championships running simultaneously have cultural shocks to those who have not being paying attention. 

The lineups of England, France, Belgium, Germany and even Italy feature players who are black, brown or Arab, reflecting the imperial reach of those countries a century ago. If the goal is to emulate the Jackie Robinson model of integrating through sport then this would seem to be a success. If it is, then why do banners around the pitch still rage about ending racism? Or is the real goal coercion? Do the Brussels bunch (as well as Canada’s elite) just like to lecture people about their faults so they can be re-structured? 

There are holdouts to this movement. Hungary, Poland and the Balkan nations remain largely homogeneous culturally (while being threatened by the EU for not accepting more of the world’s wandering population). So do Asian nations like Japan. (You’re supposed to ignore them.) But it would be disingenuous to suggest that there is a simple way to reverse the course of this forced march, to protect the cultures that have existed in Europe for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. 

The Marseillaise has gone from a stirring revolutionary call to the tricoleure to sentimental background music for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. Like Edith Piaf. All facilitated by the willing loss of cultural sovereignty in the Western world.

Not for nothing is Israel a rogue state for defying the WEF and the UN demands for a ceasefire as they avenge the heinous October 7 massacres by Hamas. Through its zombie president Joe Biden, the American power elite is telling Israel that they’re hurting energy rapprochement with Saudi Arabia and Iran in the Middle East. Be more like Ukraine, they say, and sacrifice a generation of your young men to keep natural gas domination out of the hands of Gasprom, Vladimir Putin’s piggyback.

Less Bibi Netanyahu and more Vladimir Zelensky, the plucky kleptocrat in Ché Guevara fatigues. Succumb, bitch.

Sometimes the message is subtle. Sometimes not so much. UFC star Connor MacGregor suggested that perhaps immigration was behind the anger of Irish protesters who rioted after an immigrant murdered five people. He was quickly  upraised by Taioseach hack Pauline O’Connell:  “If your views on other people’s identities go to make their lives unsafe, insecure, and cause them such deep discomfort that they cannot live in peace, then I believe that it is our job as legislators to restrict those freedoms for the common good.”

How did this brand-management happen? There is an old quote that goes, ‘For my friend everything. For my enemies the law.’ Indeed, the law has been used (or misused) to bring the unruly like MacGregor to heel. New “hate speech” laws have been enacted to trip up those who, like Michael Richards of Seinfeld fame, are made to disappear for upsetting audience members unhinged by comedy. It doesn’t stop there. New Canadian laws talk about multi-million dollar fines for denying the climate ruse.

As we predicted in November of 2023, “Next speech regulation is silence. Or non-speech. Under the new rules, silence will be no defence when the mob orders you to “wear the ribbon”. UC Berkeley Law Professor Savala Trepczynski gave away the game, saying that “White silence is incredibly powerful … It’s not neutral. It acts like a weapon.” Writes legal specialist Jonathan Turley, “In a world where silence is violence and civility is complicity, there is little room for true free speech.”

So sing out loud and proud when O Canada plays at this summer’s Olympics. Talk about sea to sea to sea. But don’t get any ideas about old Canada. Brand loyalty is the coming thing. 

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.