“We don’t need legislation to tell Canadians who they are — Canadians know who they are.”
— Maxime Bernier, Independent Conservative MP from Quebec.
Bernier was arguing against huge, bloated, centralized government, and the federal government’s equalization billions being sent to Quebec every year which just feeds it and makes it worse.
And that line — those words — flew out of his mouth and lit up my screen. They were just an off-the-cuff remark in response to the notion lobbed by the BNN anchor Rudyard Griffiths, who suggested that the federal government NEEDED to maintain its funding of national “healthcare” in “poor” Quebec, simply to show that everyone in Canada somehow deserves “basic services” such as equal national government-funded healthcare. “Isn’t that what it means to be Canadian?” he asked. Bear in mind this is a business channel. I have to keep reminding myself when I hear things like that.
But Bernier seems to cling to that radical theory which is also known as “sanity”, that governments are bloated and should be 
smaller and leaner and taxes should be slashed. And that bizarre notion also known as “a fact”, that health care is a provincial matter, based on the insane thing also known as “documented fact” that it’s what our constitution says, and like a real nut, he believes in a constitution. So somehow he already knows what it means to be Canadian? Yes, it turns out! And of course as if to prove it, he blurts out that “We don’t need legislation to tell Canadians who they are — Canadians know who they are.”
It turns out it’s my new favorite phrase. You could use it to argue against so many progressive ideological fallacies, besides just their national state-run “healthcare” fallacy: for example the progressives’ “Canadian Culture” and other social engineering projects of the progressive left; a more specific example being the liberals’ CRTC division, through which progressives attempt, via their delicious government controls buffet which is overflowing with their laws and policies and rules and regulations and subsidies and grants and myriad other funding schemes, to control what us poor useless Canadians see on TV and hear on our radios, and in what proportion of French versus English, and in what proportion of “Canadian content” versus what we really want 
to watch, which is good (sorry —American) shows; and so on. All to create a “Canadian Culture” by government decree, fearing as they do that Canadians are too stupid to do it on their own — we might do it wrong after all! As I say, this is the one and only time liberals hate the word “organic” and use tax dollars to fight it. Every other time, they subsidize it and attempt to mandate it.
Or the latest example of their massive failure — trying to pretend that what Canadians want is a “multicultural mosaic”, when in fact what they want is exactly not that, but rather a “melting pot” just like the Americans. This, after the progressives have spent countless — impossible to calculate — tens of billions or hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars foisting a “multicultural mosaic” on Canada and Canadians.
The phrase could be used to help start the salvation of Canada and fight one of, if not the most profound of its problems, that being the belief held by all progressives that government is the salvation of Canada and Canadians.
It is music to the ears of folks like me. Let’s say it again and let it sink in:
“We don’t need legislation to tell Canadians who they are — Canadians know who they are.”
By golly, it could be a damn fine election slogan and as a basis for reform.
Huh.
FOR THOSE OF YOU KEEPING SCORE AT HOME:
This is the second time in the very recent past that Maxime Bernier has said something so noteworthy that I felt compelled to mention it here. This is more than I can say for nearly any politician today. (Here is the previous time)
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