What is it about being Canadian that seems to impel us to make heroes out of those that are plainly not? Louis Riel, Tommy Douglas, Pierre Trudeau…each has been enshrined as an heroic figure. Yet any of the three could more accurately be described as an antagonist-even a villain, both in the context of the past as well as the present.

Louis Riel has a number of statues in his likeness and is revered at the same level as the fathers of confederation in his home province of Manitoba.
Yet people seem to forget Manitoba joined with Canada only after Metis rebel Riel played both sides of the 49th parallel floating the concept of possible union between Manitoba and the United States. Mentally unstable enough to have spent years in an asylum, Riel consistently incited violence to try to promote his own interest and obstruct national progress. His downfall came when he fomented unrest against the railway which eventually brought white settlers to western Canada. The country we live in and celebrate was one he never wanted. It may have been overly severe to put him to death as the government did, but its definitely an overreaction to make him out to be a hero/martyr because of it.

CBC viewers surveyed recently named former Saskatchewan premier and founding federal NDP leader Tommy Douglas the “Greatest Canadian” perhaps forgetting he was one of Canada’s most outspoken cheerleaders for eugenics and counselling to treat homosexuality.

Douglas is credited with bringing universal health care to Canada. In reality, he championed a fairly simplistic idea at the right time and thousands of bureaucrats and health care workers have been trying in vain to make it work ever since. Today its sustainability lies in question.

And yes, Trudeau haunts us still, particularly with his legacy of national debt and left wing supreme court judicial activism. Oil industry executives will likely never forget his destructive national energy program that almost ruined them. But then, there were few groups in Canada he was not the scourge of. An aloof man who often resorted to obvious sophistry in his role as an apologist for his own catastrophes, Trudeau left Canada much worse off then it had been before he took office. Our descendants will still be paying for his warped national vision long after most of us are gone and yet we recently had a CBC mini-series broadcast about Trudeau that was even more of a homage to the man than his memoirs were. Incidentally, CBC viewers ranked him number 3 on the “Greatest Canadians” list.

Now we are set to immortalize Nellie McClung and Emily Murphy on the back of the $50 bill in celebration of the “person’s case” that led to Murphy being allowed to sit as a senator. These two members of the famous five women named in that case both have been made subjects of quite flattering Heritage minute commercials in the past few years neither of which even hinted at their respective darker sides.

Emily Murphy was the leading female xenophobe of her day decrying miscegenation in her “Janey Canuck” articles. She and Nellie McClung both advocated forced sterilization of the mentally unfit. Women’s equality was but one thing they championed. During McClung’s time Alberta politics she was an enthusiastic proponent of prohibition. These two women were enemies of freedom.

Are heroes not those great achievers that sow mass benefit? The apparent idea the Canadian liberal-left establishment has is that we should celebrate those who are merely historically documented, radical chic and have been dead for awhile. The result is that we place upon our highest pedestals those who epitomize the mediocrity and shortsightedness which have impeded our potential for greatness as a nation and this attitude will yield more of the same.