How 9/11 Changed Canada for the Better
How much has Canada changed in the last eleven years? Consider this: As the World Trade Center rubble was still smoldering, the then-leader of Canada’s left-wing NDP party, Alexa McDonough, declared: “As responsible international citizens, it is important to reaffirm our commitment to pursuing peaceful solutions to the tensions and hostilities that breed such mindless violence.” A year later, in a CBC interview broadcast on the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, then-prime minister Jean Chrétien suggested the 9/11 attacks might have been a reaction to Western greed and arrogance: “You cannot exercise your powers to the point of humiliation for the others.”
Such remarks would be unthinkable now. Canada is a place where even most mainstream leftists recognize the need for military intervention as a means of disrupting terrorism and protecting local populations.
Before 9/11, for instance, Canada’s involvement in the bombing of Muammar Gaddafi’s loyalists in Libya in the spring of 2011 would have been a major political issue: Ms. McDonough and other well-known Canadian activists such as Naomi Klein and Judy Rebick would have locked arms and marched on Parliament Hill, demanding a “peaceful solution.” Yet in the 2011 federal election campaign, the word “Libya” was scarcely mentioned by any politician of note, even as the bombs were falling. Nor did anyone make much of Afghanistan, where 158 Canadian soldiers have died.