The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Saturday, February 11, 2017

Yes Antonia, There is a Threat to Canadian Freedom of Speech

Antonia Blumberg, the Associate Religion Editor for the progressive liberal disinformation site that some consider to be the online equivalent of a newspaper, the Huffington Post, has come to the defence of the anti-Islamophobia motion that Iqra Khalid, the Liberal MP representing Mississauga-Erin Mills has introduced into the Canadian Parliament. In doing so she has lived down to the stereotype, popular here in the Dominion of Canada, of the Yankee who spouts off about things of which she knows nothing.

Regardless of whether it is a non-binding motion or a bill, there is a very real threat to freedom of speech here, of which anyone familiar with the Liberal Party’s long war on the traditional rights and freedoms of Canadians would be well aware. There are many parallels between what the Liberal Party is doing now and what it did in the 1970s under the leadership of the father of the present federal premier. Then, as now, it decided that it was the government’s place to combat ideas and attitudes that the Liberals considered to be unacceptable. At the time it was racial and religious prejudice in general, and anti-Semitism in particular that the Liberals were going after. Warning Canadians that the threat of a potential Canadian Fourth Reich existed if these attitudes were not drummed out, stomped down, and extirpated with extreme prejudice, the Liberals, bereft of any sense of irony, established a Canadian equivalent of the Gestapo and the NKVD/NKGB/MGB/KGB in the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

Although progressives will undoubtedly sputter with offense and rage at the comparison in the last sentence it is entirely apt and valid. The difference between the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the secret police of the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian regimes is one of degree not of kind. If the Canadian Human Rights Commission brought you before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal you would not end up facing a firing squad or being shipped away to a forced labour camp. At most you would be fined an exorbitant and crippling amount of money, slapped with a lifetime gag order, and have your career and reputation completely and utterly destroyed. Nevertheless, the Canadian Human Rights Commission exists for the same reason its Nazi and Soviet equivalents existed – to track down and punish those considered guilty of what, in Orwellian Newspeak would be called crimethink. It was negative thoughts about those designated as “vulnerable minorities” that the Trudeau Liberals considered to be crimethink, rather than negative thoughts about the regime itself, as was the case in the Third Reich, Soviet Union, and Orwell’s 1984, but it was crimethink all the same, and those charged with crimethink found that there was very little in the way of defence available to them. More perhaps, than was available to the unfortunate victims of the totalitarian regimes, but much less than has been traditionally available to the free subject-citizens of one of Her Majesty’s realms. The Liberals were able to get away with this by classifying the legislation – the Canadian Human Rights Act – which the Canadian Human Rights Commission and Tribunal enforced as civil rather than criminal law. Civil law does not come with the same legal protections of the rights of the defendant that exist under criminal law. The progressive supporters of the Canadian Human Rights Act and its enforcing bodies deceive themselves, however, if they think this legislation exists to help people settle disputes among themselves, and not to punish people whose thoughts are considered criminal by the “Natural Ruling Party of Canada” as the Grits so arrogantly designate themselves.

Blumberg, citing the CBC, quotes Justin Trudeau as saying, in defence of Khalid’s motion “You’re not allowed to call ‘Fire!’ in a crowded movie theater and call that free speech.” This is not a valid comparison however, no matter how many times freedom-hating, totalitarian dolts make it. When you yell “fire” in a crowded movie theatre, you can create a panic in which people hurt or even kill people in their rush to get out. It is the act of mischief that is proscribed by law, not the idea expressed (“there is a fire in this theatre”). Indeed, if that idea were true, if there actually was a fire in the theatre, we would want that information to be conveyed, albeit in a more orderly fashion.

A law prohibiting so-called “hate speech” is not like this. If the Liberal Party passes a motion condemning Islamophobia and saying that the government must do everything in its power to combat Islamophobia, a hate speech law will be the next step they take. There is abundant evidence in their past track record to show this to be the case. It is the way they think. Such laws exist for one purpose, and one purpose only, to say “you are not allowed to think this or that.” The argument that says that “hate speech” also hurts people like yelling “fire” in a theatre because it can inspire someone to commit acts of violence is spurious, specious and downright mendacious. If one person expresses a negative view of a race, religion, sex or whatever, and another person who has heard this commits a violent act against a member of the group in question, it will not be an immediate, automatic, response like the panic in the theatre. It will involve someone thinking about the negative view expressed, deliberating on it, and concluding that violence is the right way to act on this information. Such a conclusion suggests that there was something wrong in this person’s head already, long before he heard the “hate speech”. Which is why “hate speech” is much less likely to produce a violent crime than calling “fire” in a theatre is likely to produce a panic. It would be more defensible, perhaps, to argue that speech that explicitly calls for a violent response, of the general “kill the -------s” type, ought to be proscribed, but the “hate speech” that is prohibited by such laws is never limited to just this, and at any rate, this sort of thing was already covered by the laws against incitement that have been around since long before someone dreamed up the idea of laws against hate and which are far better laws being designed to protect everyone and not some designated group.

What the Liberal Party has done in the past in the name of combatting racism and protecting “vulnerable minorities”, however worthy we may or may not consider these goals to be in themselves, is completely unacceptable in a country like Canada. It is now 150 years since men like Sir John A. MacDonald established Canada as a self-governing Dominion under the British Crown, with legislative and judicial institutions grounded in the tradition attached to the Crown, including all the rights and freedoms of the Common Law. The right way to protect “vulnerable minorities” in our country, would have been to do a better job of making sure that the full protection of these rights and freedoms was enjoyed by all of Her Majesty’s citizen-subjects in our free Dominion, whatever their race, ethnic origin, etc. might happen to be. Instead, the Liberal Party opted to give special protection to “vulnerable minorities” and to abridge the traditional rights and freedoms of all Canadians to do so, while doing everything in their power to undermine our British heritage and the tradition from which those rights and freedoms sprang.

It is evident to every patriotic Canadian who loves his country, its true heritage, and its traditional freedoms, and is aware of what is going on that the Liberal Party is preparing to do more of the same, even if an ignorant Yank writing for a silly left-wing trash site is completely clueless as to what is going on.

Thursday, February 2, 2017

Justin Trudeau Expands His Vocabulary

So it turns out the t word is part of Justin Trudeau’s vocabulary after all.

You would never have known it from his verbal responses to the countless acts of jihad that have been waged against Western countries since that ill-fated day when he became the Prime Minister of our country. We have heard him condemn the violence of these acts and use such banal adjectives as “senseless” to describe it, but we were stuck listening to the crickets chirp and counting the tumbleweeds rolling by as we sat around waiting for him to use the obvious word – “terrorism.” That he seemed to be allergic to this term was something that had been observed and commented on even before he won the right to lead Her Majesty’s Canadian government by winning the 2015 general election. In the fall of the year prior, two young Canadians who had become alienated from their own country, traditions and people and converted to Islam and pledged their loyalty to the Islamic State, launched their own personal jihads in our Dominion’s capital of Ottawa and in the Quebec city of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu. Trudeau eventually conceded that these were acts of terrorism when they were labelled as such by the RCMP investigators but why was a statement of what was obvious treated as a concession?

Well that certainly changed this weekend when someone shot up a mosque in Quebec City. As the Prime Minister’s butt-kissing sycophants and toadies in the press set about scrubbing the early reports of the incident to eliminate details out of sync with the official narrative that somebody has obviously ordered them to push, Trudeau set a record in the speed with which he denounced the shooting as an act of terrorism, almost as if he had a speech prepared and ready for the occasion.

What is objectionable in this is not that the Prime Minister was quick to denounce the mosque shooting as an act of terrorism. Shooting up a place of worship and murdering the worshippers obviously falls into this category. The problem is all those other occasions when he dithered and dawdled and danced around the obvious. Trudeau was quick to call a spade a spade where terrorism is concerned when Muslims were the victims, but avoided doing so like the plague when Muslims were the perpetrators. Is the one kind of terrorism worse than the other in Trudeau’s eyes?

The official narrative being pushed by the propaganda arm of the Liberal Party, aka the Canadian media is that the shooting was the work of a lone gunman, a French Canadian named Alexandre Bissonnette. Details that came out in the first reports while the story was fresh but which do not support the official narrative have been either scrubbed or, when this was not possible, reinterpreted. Initially, eye-witnesses within the mosque testified to multiple shooters who shouted “Allahu Akbar.” This detail, which contradicts the Prime Minister’s narrative, was quickly scrubbed. That a second suspect, a Moroccan Muslim named Mohamed Belkhadir had been taken into custody by the police, was reinterpreted to fit the narrative. He is now identified as a “witness”, despite having been identified as a “suspect” in the initial police press conference. In the absence of any official confession or statement of motive on the part of Bissonnette the media has been cherry picking details from his Facebook page to support its narrative of his being motivated by what they call “far right”, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, nativism. Their evidence for this is that he “liked” Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen on Facebook. He also “liked” Jack Layton and the NDP. It would no doubt come as a great surprise to the late Jack Layton to learn that he and the socialist party he led have undergone a dramatic shift to the far right of the political spectrum six years after his death.

I suspect it will be decades, if ever, before we learn the full truth of what happened that night. The Prime Minister’s office has been leaning heavily on the media, Canadian and otherwise, to make sure that only their approved version of the incident gets reported. You can be sure that when the PMO gets this involved in the reporting of a news story it is not to ensure that the truth comes out. Trudeau is determined to exploit the deaths of these Quebec Muslims for the gratification of his own ego and the furtherance of his personal political agenda. If that strikes you as being a little harsh then you are clearly unfamiliar with the ice-cold, calculating, love and worship of power in the dead, soulless, vacuum that lies behind the pretty boy exterior of Justin Trudeau and the grating, superficial, personality that he seemingly plagiarized from Barney the purple dinosaur. Indeed, the incident could hardly have served his purposes better if he had planned and arranged it himself.

It came after several weeks of humiliation for the federal premier in which he toured Canada in a failed attempt to restore the lustre of his image after it had taken several devastating hits over his Clintonesque cash-for-access behaviour such as the scandal over the family vacation he had accepted on an island owned by the Aga Khan. In city after city, in townhall style meetings, he was subjected to difficult questions about matters such as why he was trying to make things even harder for people already struggling to make ends meet by jacking up the cost of living with a carbon tax. It did not help that he was caught speaking out of both sides of his mouth on the question of the oil sands. To an audience in Peterborough, Ontario, presumably one sympathetic to such tree hugging drivel, he said that the oil sands needed to be phased out. This left him trying to explain to an audience in Calgary that he did not really mean to drive even more Albertans out of work and inflict further damage on their province’s already struggling economy. He was in need of a sleight-of-hand to distract the public from their growing awareness of just how pathetic a disgrace to the office of Her Majesty’s first minister he is.

This shooting incident not only provided him with that distraction it came at just the appropriate time to allow him to grandstand and show off his supposed moral superiority over American President Donald Trump. Two days before the shooting Trump had enraged liberals around the world by daring to put the security and wellbeing of his country ahead of political correctness by issuing a four month halt to the admission of refugees and a three month temporary ban on entrance to the United States from seven countries that are significant sources of jihadi terrorism. The day after this and the day before the shooting Trudeau sent out a tweet that, while worded as a statement of non-discriminatory policy in the admission of refugees, was clearly intended to mean that those who were excluded from the United States by the Trump ban would be welcome in Canada. To deliberately throw out the welcome mat to those excluded from another country on the basis of the high level of security risk they present is to say that you place diversity, tolerance, and non-discrimination ahead of the security and wellbeing of your country and its citizens. To Trudeau and his international admirers this may be an indication of virtue but to any sensible person it is an indication of gross stupidity and utter villainy.

Then along comes the shooting, and an airbrushed media narrative which seems to be designed to justify forcing ordinary Canadians yet again to pay the price for Trudeau’s peacocking his “tolerance”, “understanding” and “compassion” to his global audience. The Liberal Party has a history of infringing upon the traditional rights of Canadians to think and speak freely, whenever they want to shove acceptance of their values down our throats and to chastise Canadians for this-or-that thought crime. The father of the present Prime Minister was notoriously bad for this and a Liberal MP has already placed a bill that would condemn Islamophobia before the House. The bill was introduced long before the shooting. You would almost think they knew in advance it was coming.