Sort of Political Monday: Existential crises

Don't feel bad if you don't follow Canadian politics as even most Canadians don't bother. But if you do, you will know that the son of a former prime minister made a bit of a fool of himself recently. The Canadian media, who usually get his back when he says stupid things, have been raining abuse on the poor guy. So I thought I'd stick up for him. Just a little.

Not because his argument isn't stupid but because everyone else makes the same stupid argument so it doesn't seem fair to be so harsh on him for merely doing what he sees his betters doing. Here is what he said:

I always say, if there came a point where I thought Canada really was Stephen Harper's Canada, that we were against abortion, against gay marriage, that we went backwards in 10,000 different ways, maybe I'd consider making Quebec a country. Oh yes. Absolutely. I know my values very well, even if I no longer recognized Canada.

It's a highly familiar argument, one that his father as well as former Prime Minister Jean Chretien made thousands upon thousands of times.  All except for one tiny twist and it was that tiny twist that messed things up for him.

But the fundamental argument is the existential crisis. "We have to stand for certain values or else we stop existing as a country". Young Trudeau went the extra step of saying that he'd consider separatism if it came to that. But, you know, the really crazy part of the argument is the first step: the claim that there is an existential crisis because the other side is doing what it promised it would do when it ran for election.  If young Trudeau had said that certain political moves will destroy the country as we know it hh would have said something immensely stupid but no one would have criticized him for doing so.

Here is the same wacky argument coming from the other end as advanced by Andrew Coyne:

The second, opposed tendency is to take a genuine existential threat like separation, the breakup and destruction of the country, and normalize it as just another "option" — a delusion in which Quebecers have been encouraged for decades.

Separatism could be a bad thing, especially for Quebec, but that isn't good enough for Andrew Coyne. He needs to rule the option an illegal move that would be an existential threat. But no it wouldn't be. Canada would get along just fine without Quebec. (Quebec without Canada, OTOH, would be Greece with rougher winters.) But it would not be an existential crisis for Canada. We'd get along okay, quite possibly better, without Quebec.

There are, of course, real existential turning points, but, you know, the thing that makes them so potent is that they aren't recognized as such when they are passed. If everyone is screaming that "X is an existential crisis", you can be pretty sure it isn't. All the people screaming about the supposed existential crisis are doing is trying rule the other side out of court. As a general rule of thumb, you probably wouldn't go too far wrong if you voted against every politician who ever made such an argument. And I don't mean that as the casual toss off it may sound. The whole point of liberal democracy is that government is not the guarantor of our culture and values.