Red Menace

Oh god, I'm just watching Newsworld and they've got some yahoo claiming that Canada was founded on christian principles, as if this were self-evident fact. The funny thing is that the caller is from BC, not a more explicitly religious province like Quebec or Alberta.

Now, there are three reasonable arguments we could make for what Canada was founded "on". French mercantile colonialism is the first. Second would be Empire Loyalist Refugees post-revolution. The third, Confederation, was more than anything an economic choice - the first of many attempts to create a Canadian market. The only reasonable argument one could make is that religion was a divisive issue to the parties at confederation, but "principles" really had nothing to do with it. The BNA talks about "peace, order and good government", and there's a passage about a government similar in kind to the British Parliament, but that's really it.

This is the problem with having Red-State fucking whackjobs so close to our border - their rhetoric spreads north, even though it has nothing to do with our own political history. Now, "christian principles" had nothing to do with the US's founding (at least not in the way Republicans mean it) either, but that's their own problem.