CANADA'S FASHIONABLE LIE

National Review

 

Canada’s Fashionable Lie

 

Canada's prime minister Justin Trudeau speaks during a pride flag raising ceremony on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Canada, June 14, 2017. (Chris Wattie/Reuters)

By NOAH ROTHMAN

August 30, 2023 11:17 AM

 

The California man who shot and killed the owner of the Mag.Pi clothing store in Cedar Glen, Calif. , on August 18 did so after making “disparaging remarks” about the Pride flag that adorned the establishment. The suspect, who was later killed by police, is alleged to have attempted to take down Pride-related regalia outside the store and issued homophobic remarks ahead of the violence. The sequence of events suggests that anti-LGBT sentiment at least partly inspired this attack. The event made headlines across the United States, in part, because atrocities like these are so blessedly rare.

 

That’s not a fact you’re likely to see related in mainstream-media coverage of allegedly hate-fueled assaults such as these. Indeed, the opposite claim is emphasized: Hate crimes (or, at least, the threat of hate crimes) against LGBT Americans and their supporters are on the rise. But the baseline is low. The FBI’s supplemental to its 2021 hate-crime statistics, the most recent data set available, indicates that the vast majority of that year’s 10,500 single-bias incidents relate to race and ethnicity. Just under 16 percent of those events were inspired by sexual-orientation bias and only 3 percent were informed by the offender’s gender-identity bias. That is an inconvenient set of circumstances for those who are invested in the notion that the United States is a putrid sewer of hatred and violence — a body of opinion that now includes the Canadian government.

 

This week, Ottawa issued a travel advisory to its citizens who identify as “two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning or intersex — or 2SLGBTQI+” to apply particular caution when traveling to the United States, but not in response to any specific threat to their physical safety. Indeed, the warning is impressively vague. It maintains merely that “some states have enacted laws and policies that may affect 2SLGBTQI+ persons.” What states? Which laws? The warning doesn’t explain. It merely directs interested Canadians to a blanket admonition counseling wariness when traveling to “countries where 2SLGBTQI+ people are persecuted.” There, “you should assume that police are monitoring 2SLGBTQI+-themed websites, apps, and visitors to these platforms,” be cautious when engaging with locals, and refrain from “public displays of affection.”

 

Gay, lesbian, and transgender Canadians will encounter similar warnings against travel to places such as Syria, Russia, Uganda, and Saudi Arabia. But unlike these and other specific travel advisories, which also warn of broader threats to individual physical safety and security, the risk to Canadians traveling to the U.S. is apparently exclusive to the LGBT community. Overall, Canadians are advised to “take normal security precautions” similar to those that would be best practice when traveling in any other industrialized democracy.

 

What Ottawa has done with its too-clever appeal here is to bait the international press into covering its maneuver as though it was anything other than a political stunt designed to influence legislative affairs inside the United States. A spokesperson for the Canadian government eventually all but confirmed that the warning was little more than a commentary on domestic American politics. “Since the beginning of 2023, certain states in the U.S. have passed laws banning drag shows and restricting the transgender community from access to gender-affirming care and from participation in sporting events,” the individual warned. Those criteria would narrow the number of regions where Canadians of particular sexual orientations and gender identities could presumably expect threats to their safety. If the Canadian government wasn’t playing a sordid game here, its functionaries might have been more specific. But because they hope to discourage unwanted scrutiny of their claims, they’ve opted for sophistry.

 

Canada’s initiative dovetails with an agenda inside Western newsrooms, which conflates violence with the proper and lawful conduct of legislatures — what the Washington Post deems “legislative attacks.” But by politicizing its travel-warning system, the Canadian government has undermined the utility of what its citizens properly rely upon for useful and valid information before traveling abroad. Trudeau’s administration is adulterating its warning system to advance a political narrative. That is a reckless abdication of Ottawa’s responsibility to be truthful to its citizenry, but the lie is a useful lie. It is of a piece with similar lies to which the global intellectual elite sometimes commit themselves.

 

Canada’s effort to defame the United States is akin to the mendacious slander academics endorsed at the height of the MeToo movement in 2018, in which they alleged that America was among the worst places on Earth to be a woman — a pariah status shared by countries such as Yemen, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s not dissimilar to the notion retailed by The Economist that same year that American democracy had entered a state of radical decline after 2017 when that was the fashionable thing to say following Donald Trump’s election. Canada isn’t issuing a substantive warning to its public; it’s striking a pose and preening for the cameras.

 

Canadians deserve a government that cares more about being honest with them than seeding the media landscape with scurrilous implications.