Canada’s relatively fine performance to date in FIFA 2026 is a cultural anomaly. Historian Gerry Bowler, in an article for the Winnipeg Sun, deplores that our Olympic motto has always been “Go For The Bronze.” Perhaps our distinctly multicultural soccer team will give us something to cheer about as events proceed. Yet even in sports competition, aside from our national game, hockey, the results have almost inevitably been inferior. In most other respects, too, lowering the bar has become a Canadian institution.
Consider education, a festival of low standards and forgiveness for all except the meritorious: “A flight from standardized testing in high schools has gone hand-in-hand with a rise in grade inflation and numbers of students graduating with a distorted sense of their own accomplishments,” writes Bowler. Screening tests in university are watered down or suspended as inherently discriminatory; instead, presumably subordinate or disempowered groups are given a pass—literally—and awarded special, favorable treatment.
The army is in shambles, with scarcely enough soldiers to fill a football stadium. It gets even worse. “More training resources were wasted on those who were going to fail,” says Bowler. “Allowing in those with mental health issues required more support downstream. Many recruits lacked the language skills needed to follow orders in either French or English. Some had problems adjusting to Canadian cultural expectations.” We have heard of brawling and infighting among mutually hostile immigrant individuals and units.
The political echelon is a reason for terminal despair. A corrupt and socialist Liberal Party helmed by a popular prime minister who is actually a bungling disaster is infallibly taking the country over the economic precipice. Our national territory is gradually drifting via aboriginal title to the Indians whose feather headdresses seem bought in costume outlets. The social landscape is ravaged by indiscriminate immigration, including Iranian mullahs, IRGC agents, and Hamas terrorists. Immigration is indeed rampant and unmonitored, driving natural citizens out of jobs and, in many cases, out of the country to seek employment elsewhere. The grass may not always be greener in the next meadow, but there is more of it.
Canadian indifference to excellence and reason is built into all our institutions. The criterion for many organizations across the board, laments Bowler, is to “bar healthy, white, heterosexual males from even applying,” reserving grants, chairs, posts and positions for “women, 2SLGBTQIA+ people, Indigenous peoples, racialized persons, and persons with disabilities.” The best people for “the job” are all too often relegated to the sidelines. The effect of this system of discrimination is that the labor pool grows increasingly incompetent, political wisdom is inexorably contaminated, the economy falters into bankruptcy, and social comity is replaced by resentment, opportunism, and domestic friction.
“Historically, Canadians have been an easy-going people, never demanding much of ourselves,” Bowler continues. Now we are demanding less. We are neither ambitious, hard-working, nor well-educated. There is scarcely an area of Canadian life that has not been debilitated.
Canadians need to start looking at reality and striving to arrive at practicable solutions involving education, labor, social monitoring and immigration while at the same time remaining aware of talent, intelligence and productive personality traits among the workforce and candidates for promotion. What is needed is a realistic assessment of the culture’s relation to the morality of common decency, the commitment to social reciprocity, the imperative of hard work, and the principles of competence and meritocracy. It entails an administration that places the welfare of the country over the seductions of ideology and the temptations of both power and profiteering. We need what we do not have at present. That is where we are and where, barring a miracle, we are likely to remain.
The conditions of the social framework and the mindset of our leaders that disadvantage the nation need to be changed if Canada is ever to recover its mojo. This is obvious. Competence, excellence, and propriety among the citizenry and the elite political class remain social and professional prerequisites. We have to remember who built this country, our debt to our ancestors, and our common roots in the world’s greatest civilization. We need to honor those who gave us the government, stability, and prosperity we have taken for granted and proceeded to fritter away. We need to have high expectations. We need to test for input, not manage outcomes. The chances are remote to slim. Restitution will remain a dead letter unless we come up with and chant a new and encouraging slogan: Go For The Gold.
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