Conrad Black: Canada must return to being a grown-up nation, now and post-COVID-19

It has been affirmed that Canada should become less dependent on foreign trade and the importation into this country of much of what is vital and that it becomes scarcer in times of crisis such as the current public health emergency.

It is clear that previously Canada could have become a major player in the vast arms industry, having had much more control over national security and been a serious player in commercial aircraft manufacturing and the wide variety of sophisticated and related businesses, technologically advanced. Instead, it has stuck with an antiaircraft system based on sand-filled warheads, until Lester Pearson was elected prime minister in 1963, and nuclear warheads were given the requirement of a joint agreement between the United States and Canada prior to the detonation.

A long way

For many years, the government of Canada was primarily in the hands of the liberals, and the country’s policy was, after 1963, to govern the left of the United States and grant jurisdiction to Quebec (Pearson), or to flood Quebec with money to buy your federalist membership (Pierre Trudeau). Brian Mulroney realized that the only way Canada was influential in the world was to be seen as an influence in the United States, and he did it, with President Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush, and he was vilified in this country. like an American Footman, as a result, a scandalous accusation. With free trade, he built Canadian self-confidence, as it ceased to be a country of branches, competed well, and added another cubit to its stature.

Although Canada’s position and resources and its primary ancestry from nations as distinguished as Great Britain and France are enviable, it has never been like falling off a log to make a viable national state out of a 200-mile wide belt along the 3,000-mile border with the US USA, with a population addicted to American popular culture. But Americans want to emulate the immigration system, which has given a population that will reach 40 million in a few years, and in fact, it is achieving a scale and critical mass that will possibly project to Canada values of liberality and civility in the world, if it acts as a self-assured and strong nation, but never abrasive.

It is time for Canada to become an adult nation again, scrap this government’s energy policy, and certainly to make sure it has and can produce what it needs in medicine and medical equipment and supplies.

Source: Conrad Black | National Post