While completing my last term as a citizenship judge in 2018, I got an email from Ottawa with the directive: “Every citizenship ceremony will (now) be opened by a First Nations Elder, offering a Native Spirituality Prayer.”

I had nothing to lose, so I replied: “Since 40 per cent of natives are Catholic and 30 per cent Protestant, can this include the Lord’s Prayer?”

Ottawa responded: “LOL.” 

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The Gideon Bible was banned in 2004. Now, 350,000 new citizens a year are taught that Canada worships the Great Spirit, Gitchi Manitou, or Wakan Tanka.

Meanwhile, on July 29, the Department of National Defence forbade its chaplains (and volunteers, students, and contractors), from engaging in public prayer. Instead, they must provide “spiritual reflections, which do not use religious specific languages, including references to God etc.”

So, Ottawa platforms Gitchi Manitou and cancels Jesus Christ.

Can Ottawa really be trying to ban Christianity? In a National Post interview, long-time Indigenous affairs reporter Terry Glavin called the 2021 residential school graves scandal an “urban myth...created entirely by the federal government and media.” Month after month, “new discoveries” soon totalled 1,300 “murdered children.” None have been found. 

Responding with maudlin drama, cradling a teddy bear, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau posed “taking the knee” at a normal local cemetery.

Elsewhere, Chief Joe Pierre awoke one morning to the headline: “182 Unmarked Graves Discovered Near Residential School, First Nation Says.” In fact, the tribe was building a golf course near a hospital cemetery and had to map its boundary. 

“That’s all that happened,” Pierre said.

Yet he saw it torqued into 182 children’s corpses.  

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Why Gitchi Manitou and not Jesus Christ? Contending cultures: the Bureaucratic Bubble preaching harmless idols versus vaguely Christian Canadians who might start thinking for themselves.

What’s the Bureaucratic Bubble? 

In my last year as a citizenship judge, I also received an email announcing the promotion of a senior bureaucrat who, it said, had worked for 20 years at Canadian Heritage “building Canadian society.” 

Ahem! A faceless bureaucrat in a closeted federal department was “building Canadian society”? We might assume we’re the ones “building Canadian society” in the form of restaurants, bars, bakeries, strip malls, sports leagues, theatres and orchestras, food banks, community leagues, friendships and, most importantly, our families and churches. But surprise. Ambitious bureaucrats believe they’re not simply serving a society of free citizens; they are the patrons of the society. We Canadians are apparently only its dependent clients. The bureaucracy is building Canadian society as it ought to be. And, as George Orwell said, he who controls the past, controls the future.

Canadian Heritage has long disseminated the historical revisionism dominating public schools. It promotes, for example, John Ralston Saul’s musings that the old Iroquois federation inspired Canadian federalism, and that its government was a consensual matriarchy. In fact, the Iroquois formed a military treaty obliging all Five Tribes to go to war if any one did. So, after the Mohawks butchered poor Isaac Jogues in 1646, they forced the other tribes to violate their treaty with the French and launch a genocide of the Catholic Hurons and Jesuits. As for matriarchy, grandmothers ran the villages because the warriors were off having fun, hunting, and warring. 

Bureaucrats in universities, media, and governments promote the myth that pre-Columbian Indigenous were pacifist, collectivist, feminist and environmentalist, i.e., morally superior to their conquerors. (That would be us.) Why? Well, if you want to build a new Canada with all those virtues, you must discredit and disperse the oppressive, selfish, sexist and exploitative Christian culture already here.

This is not a conspiracy. For historical reasons, a bureaucratic regime has grown up within our country like a cuckoo in the nest with its own natural dynamics. There’s no “outside” for the monolith, no real cost-benefit analysis of success or failure, and it has limitless revenue. Success is limitless expansion of public regulation into the wider society. Every program of restorative justice, racial preference, gender equity, or earth worship was launched within the government bureaucracy.

But the Bubble has a problem. Even when it rolls over and betrays the memory of gentle missionaries like Bishop Grandin or Father Lacombe, the Catholic Church remains a free moral authority. That’s infuriating for the Bubble dwellers and, as with a wimp in a biker bar, weakness encourages aggression. 

What does this mean for the DND ban on religious specific languages? Nothing good. The CAF was the last federal authority permitting any institutional expression of faith. The truth about the graves is slowly emerging but the media convinces those within the Bubble of their success. Now is an opportune moment to eradicate the last vestiges of faith among its own employees. 

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Fifty years ago, when the military was disproportionately Christian, you’d have seen a raft of officers resigning in protest over the July edict. Today? Just read the e-mail. 

(Joseph Woodard is a research fellow at the Gregory the Great Institute.)