What they did

Downtown Montreal, 1964

Our progressive leaders herded us into some completely ridiculous causes—for instance, that what you identify with is the equivalent of being that thing—this defied common sense; or they implemented policies that were against our accepted collective beliefs and traditions, and they made any disagreement with their progressive causes an opportunity to cancel offenders, to silence us, to ridicule  us, to deny free speech, and howled with anger and derision if religion was mentioned; they turned contemporary art into something not based on a foundation of hundreds of years of artistic expression but on fashion, sexual politics, and turned art into an expression of Wokeness; Wokeness, for them, was the real content of art. They attempted to make us into a society without any moral values; they were always out for an opportunity to impose their ideology on average people. The progressives promoted the worst people in universities, encouraged violent protests, denied free speech, and destroyed the humanities with pseudo disciplines like gender studies, and it’s still going on. They allowed unlimited immigration, a free-for-all of unrestricted and unvetted population growth, and instead of listening to the electorate, managing the country's economy, being frugal with our tax dollars, not spending us into debt, they didn’t care because their ideology came first; they didn't represent the citizenry but promoted their social justice warrior causes. This was a time of darkness and now that time is coming to an end new bullies are taking power; democracy and good government was not promoted or protected by the Woke, and to their shame that is the Woke legacy. 

On liberty, from Barbara Amiel's Confessions

 

Confessions (1980, 1981) by Barbara Amiel

We Canadians take freedom for granted; unlike Americans we were never big on liberty and even less so today. I am not sure freedom was ever an issue in Canada, independence from the United Kingdom was greeted with a yawn; we have been complacent and lazy and assumed the government was benign. And now freedom and liberty have become verboten words, they associate anyone saying them with being a conservative and we all know the anti-conservative bias of the CBC. Conservatives are condemned out of hand by progressives and liberals. Conservatives are cancelled. 

Why did the parents of some of my former students come to Canada? Some were boat people from Viet Nam, some were from Cambodia, others were from Afghanistan and other places where freedom didn't exist. All of these people love freedom and came to Canada in order to be free, which means to have the opportunity to fulfill one's capacity, one's ambition, and one's intelligence; to speak freely, express one's religion freely, to buy and own property as one wishes. Most of these people have flourished in Canada which has given them a new life of opportunities in a new country. These people came to Canada for liberty and freedom but the times have changed; in Canada today, the desire is to restrict people's liberty and criticize anyone who speaks of freedom. Being safe is the priority of our federal government, and Justin Trudeau is quick to praise being safe; maybe he's right . . . but you don't build a great country by being safe.

Still worth reading over forty years after it was first published, here is what Barbara Amiel writes on liberty; from Barbara Amiel's Confessions (1980,1981), pages 118-119:

And why is liberty important? Liberty itself, of course, doesn't solve any of the problems of existence. It doesn't even address itself to their solution. All it does is to leave each person free to find an answer to a pressing human need, lack, or iniquity. It does not attempt to substitute a party's, a dictator's, a saint's, or a philosopher's view for the goodwill and ingenuity of millions of free individuals.

Does liberty have a price? It certainly does. When people are free to act well, they are also free to act badly. When they are free to hold humane and accurate views, they are also free to hold inhuman and stupid opinions. But the safety-net of classical liberalism rests on the not unreasonable belief that free people will act for the good with at least the same frequency as they act for the bad, while excesses of malice and greed can be held in check by ordinary criminal laws guarding citizens against injury, theft, fraud, libel, and the like.

Does liberty work better than the planned society? For millennia centralized kingdoms, empires, and religious states have planned diligently for prosperity which eluded them (or was theirs only temporarily as a result of bloody conquest) until the ideals of classic liberalism allowed a small part of the world in which they took hold -- North America and Western Europe, mainly -- to create undreamed-of riches. Of course, the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution played an immense part in this -- but were themselves largely produced by this freedom.

The wealth created by a relatively undirected, uncanonized, untheological, un-feudal, free-trading, supply-and-demand economy was, of course, not distributed equally among citizens, but who can deny that it was distributed more equally -- and more equitably -- than the wealth of any centrally regulated regulated system, monarchy, or dictatorship, before or since? And while justice in such free societies was far from perfect, who can deny that it was far more perfect than justice meted out in  a regulated state?