“Health Canada considers sweeping ban on junk food ads aimed at children and teens.” So reads the headline at CBC News. And with that matter-of-fact announcement — just a normal day’s political news in the true north weak and socialist — a nation quietly declares itself lost to freedom forever. D-Day memories of the brave Canadians at Juno Beach washed away in a tide of authoritarian progressivism. Freedom traded for paternalistic social engineering in the name of protecting children from over-salted cheese.
“Most of the foods that are marketed to kids are these ones that are high in fat, high in sugar, high in sodium, so that’s what we’re looking at,” said Hasan Hutchinson, director general at Health Canada, who is overseeing the consultations.
“That would then cut out all of the things like, of course, your regular soda, most cookies, cakes, pies, puddings, ice cream, most cheeses because they are high in fat, they’re high in salt,” he said.
Health Canada would also target foods such as sugar-sweetened yogurt, frozen waffles, fruit juice, granola bars and potato chips.
When Canada elected Justin Trudeau, the foppish son of the foppish Maoist Pierre, I warned that what little was left of Canada as a representative democracy was on the verge of being swept into the ash heap of history by a wave of kneejerk neo-Marxist populism — imagine Barack Obama without any constitutional limits. Many of my fellow Canadians — collectively the most self-righteous “nicest people” in the world — accused me of overreacting to this disturbing new wave of nihilistic Trudeaumania, or of exaggerating the ideological seriousness of “young Trudeau,” as they breathlessly dubbed him.
But there is no way to overreact to the political dangers of a nationwide personality cult. And far from exaggerating Trudeau’s ideological purity, my point was precisely that Canada had fallen to such a level of ethico-political degradation that no ideologue was necessary to tip the scales toward totalitarian government; a vapid, politically correct attention-seeker would do the trick well enough.
And so he has, as his government has aligned itself with that of Kathleen Wynne, the Marxist premier of Ontario — the country’s most populous province — to produce government in a politburo style, with naturally curly hair. From legal preferences for sexual deviancy to legal punishments for emitting carbon, from Castro-loving to Christian-hating, and from outlawing criticism of Islam to normalizing drug abuse, Trudeau’s government is checking all the Euro-socialist boxes, all the while hiding behind the leader’s pretty-boy celebrity and prime ministerial pedigree.
But to remind everyone of that pedigree, Pierre Trudeau was the man who, through his panache and his clever exploitation of social trends of the 1960s and ’70s, shifted Canada irrevocably leftward: a close friend of Fidel Castro, a vocal admirer of Mao Tse-tung, and thus North America’s first openly communist-sympathizing national leader, preceding Obama by forty years.
Beyond all its legislative radicalism, the first Trudeau era was most significant for nudging Canadians into a gradual acceptance of a principle quite out of step with Western classical liberalism, but perfectly in keeping with Eastern collectivist authoritarianism, namely that the state is not a representative of the people whose interests it serves, but rather the rightful micromanager and mother hen of men’s daily lives, determining and enforcing correct attitudes and preferred interest groups with impunity and without restraint. In short, neo-Maoism.
Now “young Trudeau’s” government is proposing a “sweeping ban” on the marketing of legal food products. The absurdity of this proposal is outdone only by its paternalistic offensiveness.
