Oh, Canada… A Liberal Immigrant’s Lament
Currents
I was born an Indian Muslim. Today, I’m a Canadian atheist. I have lived and worked in some of the most war-torn regions of the world. I know what repressive cultures look like, which is why I’m troubled by the political shifts of the past decade. The Canada I grew to love in my youth is regressing into something eerily reminiscent of the cultural climate my parents fled from — one that shuns skepticism, enforces orthodoxy, and imposes rigidly hierarchical thinking.
My family moved from India to Canada in 1975 when I was a small boy. Shortly after we settled in, representatives from the local mosque showed up at our home. They came to tell my father how to be a “good” Muslim, explaining exactly how he was to worship and conduct himself as a member of their community. After a few minutes, I watched in shock as my father unceremoniously showed these religious leaders the door. Once they were gone, he told us no one could dictate what we were supposed to believe — that this was a country where people were free to go their own way. That lesson stuck with me.
A few years later, we visited our grandparents back in India. Being happily acclimated to Canada and having been too young to fully understand life in India the first time around, it was a massive culture shock. Seeing the caste system in action, the unquestioned obedience to all authority figures, and the many servants in my grandfather's house was a jarring contrast to life in Canada. At the time in India, there wasn’t much in the way of a middle class. Most people were poor, and many scraped by as servants. Some of my grandfather’s servants were children my age — robbed of childhoods, waking up before sunrise to begin cleaning, and after helping to cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner, working late into the night. It made me so thankful my parents had moved us to Canada.
Young Obaid with his family in 1971.
In my 30s, I became a globetrotter. I took on IT contracts with the military and government in war zones and disaster areas around the world, including Bosnia, Kosovo, Sudan, Haiti, and Afghanistan. I traveled extensively, returning to India every few years. The more countries I lived in, the more I appreciated what we so often take for granted in the West — not just the comforts and standard of living, but things like free speech, freedom of belief, and tolerance of differing views.
After nearly 15 years abroad, I returned to Canada in 2014, but it wasn’t the same Canada I’d left in 2001. There were now topics of conversation that were off-limits and issues that could not be discussed without sticking to a narrow, approved script. What jumped out at me immediately was that criticizing Islam was vilified as a form of bigotry. As an atheist who was born in India, raised Muslim, and just moved from Afghanistan, where I’d spent six years on my final overseas IT contract, I had plenty to say on the subject of Islam. The notion that, in an ostensibly free country, harshly criticizing Islam was deemed racism or “Islamophobia” and thus illegal according to “hate speech” laws made no sense to me.
Where I’d never previously felt the need, I began speaking out about Islam. I explained the links between groups like the Taliban and the doctrines of Islam with regard to concepts like martyrdom, jihad, and apostasy. I pointed out the misogyny of the hijab and niqab, and criticized Islamic homophobia. It started on social media. Before long, I was writing articles, being interviewed by journalists, and running a podcast of my own. Non-Muslim friends privately told me they wished they could voice their thoughts as openly as I did, but they were afraid to speak. I urged them to speak out and not listen to radicals and bullies. I hadn't realized how much the state of speech culture had eroded. Shout-downs, smear campaigns, and de-platforming became increasingly common. My inbox was flooded with messages from white lefties telling me I was a hate-monger or a white supremacist. The claim of white supremacy both confused and animated me. I found myself sucked in by the gravitational pull of the culture wars — and I wasn’t the only one.
In 2015, Canadian politics, just as in the US, took a sharply identitarian turn, and Justin Trudeau rode these newly ascendent attitudes to Canada's premiership. At every turn, he created divisions based on “protected identities.” During the election, Trudeau used the niqab as a wedge issue against then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper. A year after getting elected, he visited a sex-segregated mosque in which women were confined to the balcony and remarked on the situation, not to bring attention to the sexism, but to praise it. In 2018, when an elderly woman asked him if the federal government would pay back the $146 million it cost her province to absorb an influx of illegal border-crossers, he told her, “Your racism has no place in Canada.” During COVID-19 and the lead-up to the anti-lockdown trucker convoy, he said that people who don’t vaccinate are categorically racist and misogynistic. Trudeau was hardly alone in these types of sweeping judgments, and they were not confined to matters of religion or race.
The politics of youth gender medicine have pitted parents against radical activists. School boards around the nation now both aid and hide student transitions from parents. Some gender clinics can provide hormone therapy or puberty blockers to minors without parental approval, and girls as young as 16 can have mastectomies without the consent of their parents. What’s more, federal law now equates guardrails on youth transition with “conversion therapy.” Even as other Western countries such as the UK, Sweden, and Norway pump the brakes on youth gender medicine in favor of more cautious approaches, Trudeau, parroting the new orthodoxy, said that parental rights are a “far-right” issue. That branding has been largely successful. Indeed, anyone who voices what was common sense just a few years ago becomes persona non grata in many professional and institutional circles. Gender transition, especially for youth, is still a relatively new field, and science doesn’t work when government and activists get to choose what is true and what is false before research has even begun.
During parliamentary debates on the aforementioned bill to equate youth gender medicine guardrails with conversion therapy, some MPs asserted that detransitioners — those who transition, change their mind, and transition back — were so rare that any appeal to them was part of a “false detransitioning narrative.” This is contradicted by much of the data. Studies spanning 1972–2013 suggest that 60–90% of gender non-conforming children turn out not to be trans by adulthood. Research out of the University of Toronto found that “63.6% of boys with early onset gender dysphoria, who received ‘watchful waiting’ treatment and no pre-pubertal social transition, grew up to be gay or bisexual.” And a 2022 study found that between 2009 and 2018, over 25% of minors who began gender-affirming hormone therapy stopped getting refills within four years.
The recurring pattern I’ve seen over the past decade on issues ranging from Islam, to race, to trans, and to free expression generally, worries me. I see in our discourse and the actions of the Canadian government a cultural trend disturbingly reminiscent of the India my parents moved us away from. Growing up, I embraced the values I saw in Canada — values such as free expression, open inquiry, individual rights, and the right to believe or not as we see fit. Now I see our government routinely undermine those rights, our media applaud them, and a censorious activist class enforce a chilling effect where independent thought is shunned and where dissent is dismissed by Trudeau and his supporters as American-style Trumpism.
What worries me most about this illiberal regression is the effect it might have on future would-be immigrants. The liberal West has advanced, both economically and culturally, beyond the wildest imaginings of the most utopian dreamer from centuries ago. Its societies have become the envy of those who were not lucky enough to have been born into them, and a coveted destination for immigrants seeking a freer life for their families. If, under the influence of extremist ideologies, Western societies like Canada allow Enlightenment values and the human rights that sprung from them to disintegrate, where will people like my parents turn to? Where will those trapped in repressive societies with little opportunity go? It’s become quite trendy to bash the West for sins past and present, but the irony is that if we bash it to pieces, it’s the world’s downtrodden who will ultimately pay the highest price.
Published Mar 20, 2024
