Justin Trudeau is no Friend of Canada

I, as long time readers will be well aware, am a Canadian and a patriot of my country. Many Canadians seem to think that being a patriotic Canadian means being anti-American but I like to quote one of my two favourite Prime Ministers, (1) John G. Diefenbaker, who said "I am not anti-American, I am very pro-Canadian." Of course, for a Tory like myself, being a Canadian patriot does involve a firm belief in my country's own institutions and traditions rather than those of the United States. I believe in parliamentary government, reigned over by a king or queen, rather than republican government presided over by an elected president, and have argued this point at length. I have a very low view of sedition, rebellion, and revolution, which history demonstrates almost always produce a worse and more oppressive government, and so cannot share the common American belief, born out of their founding mythos, that these are the well-spring of liberty. I say rather, with the long-neglected Canadian conservative John Farthing, that "freedom wears a crown" and believe the tradition of loyalty upon which our country was founded and which led us to stand by Britain from the beginning of the Second World War to be a virtuous tradition worthy of honour. I trust that you can see the difference between this attitude and the juvenile, left-wing, anti-Americanism that the Liberals, NDP and Greens seem to think is part and parcel of Canadian patriotism.

I see, therefore, no patriotic reason to come the the defence of Her Majesty's First Minister in Ottawa simply because he has been on the receiving end of a barrage of insults from the American President and members of his administration. Frankly, he deserved them. While I have no problem with a Canadian Prime Minister standing up for our country - it is his job, after all - Justin Trudeau, in his choice of time and place to say that Canada "will not be pushed around" displayed a stupidity far in excess of that for which his reputation is already well-established. When the G7 summit in Charlevoix, Quebec, commenced, a trade war was already impending between our two countries. Somehow, the leaders had managed to come to an agreement of sorts and an official communication of this had been sent out before Donald Trump took off to Singapore to negotiate what will hopefully be the end of hostilities on the Korean peninsula with Kim Jong-un. It was then that Trudeau called a press conference and uttered his now infamous words, which, given at that particular moment, could only be understood as gloating at having won one over on Trump. This earned him, as was undoubtedly his intention, the admiration of anti-American leftists around the world, but, as with so much other of his grandstanding, it is ordinary Canadians who will have to pay the price in the upcoming trade war which our country simply cannot win. Trudeau has shown his contempt for the teachings of the Holy Scriptures on many occasions but it would have served him well to have read over Luke 14:28-32 before he shot his mouth off and applied its literal meaning even if he continued to ignore the intended spiritual application.

Not only was it the wrong time and place for Trudeau to boast about standing up for Canadians, he was the wrong person to do so. He might have thought that he was simply imitating Trump's Mr. Tough Guy nationalist rhetoric but there is a huge difference. Trump, for as long as he has been in politics has taken his stand on a hard core, America First, Buchananite, populist-nationalist platform. Trudeau, on the other hand, has worked hard to establish the reputation of being the same kind of left-liberal, cosmopolitan, globalist citizen-of-the-world that his father was. The idea that he would ever put the interests of Canadians ahead of whatever inane brain rot is the latest fashion among liberal intellectuals (2) is laughable.

Consider his track record. His biggest concern in picking the Ministers to fill his Cabinet was not their competency but that the levels of estrogen and testosterone be equal. Feminist ideology and the adoration of the multitudes of young people who have been brainwashed by universities into swallowing that mindless tripe, took precedence for him over the interest of ordinary Canadians in the Ministries of Her Majesty's government being competently administered. One of the very first things he did in office was to take Canadian taxpayers' dollars, use it to bring large numbers of the economic migrants invading Europe under the pretence of being refugees from the Syrian Civil War over here, and then take more of the Canadian taxpayers' dollars to bribe Canadian employers into giving the "refugees" jobs instead of Canadians. He then bullied anyone who objected to this by accusing them of racism. (3)

Trudeau's attitude towards the Canadian energy industry can only be described as one of arrogant hostility and while this might earn him brownie points with the green gang it does not benefit the average Canadian and works against the interests of all the Canadians employed by the energy industry directly but also those who depend upon the jobs available in an economy that itself is heavily dependent upon affordable energy to survive. He has shut down most of the pipeline projects that would have benefited Canadians across the Dominion, constantly sided with anti-pipeline agitators that are funded by foreign energy interests, and, rather than use force to protect the rights of the petroleum company that had jumped through all sorts of ridiculous loops to obtain legal permission to expand an existing pipeline, opted to buy out the pipeline at the taxpayers' expence. He has imposed a carbon tax upon the country, driving the cost of gas through the roof, for absolutely no good reason, (4) hurting the most those who were already just barely getting by on the wages from jobs that require vehicular transportation to get to. He has imposed massive debt on future generations of Canadian taxpayers with his runaway defecits, which include large amounts of spending on global projects that do not benefit Canadians, and has increased the cost of living, while reducing the ability of most Canadians to pay through tax increases.

If Canadians have only recently begun to feel the impact of Trudeau's green agenda on their pocketbooks, we have so far been shielded from the full impact of his anti-business agenda on Canadian employment by the relatively free trade that has existed between our country and the United States, thus allowing us to benefit from economic boom the United States has seen since the election of Donald Trump. That will no longer be the case if Trudeau has gotten us into an unwinnable trade war. Note that I say this as an economic patriot not as a doctrinaire free trader. The basic idea of economic patriotism is that of doing what is best for the economic interests of your country. (5) It is not in your country's best interests to piss off your largest trading partner, especially if that partner has much more economic clout than you do. Neither, however, is it in your country's economic best interests to sign free trade agreements that make your country that vulnerable in the first place. Trudeau's foolish words today would not have the potential to harm us today if Brian Mulroney had not betrayed his party's historical platform (6) thirty years ago and signed the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement that later evolved into NAFTA and which plunged us into three decades of addictive dependency on free trade.

What will eventually come out of all of this only time can tell. What we do know is that we have no reason whatsoever to be proud of our lousy Prime Minister who serious needs to learn to keep his hubristic tongue in his mouth.


(1) The other, of course, being Sir John A. MacDonald.

(2) When I use the word "intellectuals" I have in mind the way Paul Johnson uses the word in his book of that title (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988) and the following quotation from the late, great, Tom Wolfe: "We must be careful to make a distinction between the intellectual and the person of intellectual achievement. The two are very, very different animals. There are people of intellectual achievement who increase the sum of human knowledge, the powers of human insight, and analysis. And then there are the intellectuals. An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others. Starting in the early twentieth century, for the first time an ordinary storyteller, a novelist, a short story writer, a poet, a playwright, in certain cases a composer, an artist, or even an opera singer could achieve a tremendous eminence by becoming morally indignant about some public issue. It required no intellectual effort whatsoever. Suddenly he was elevated to a plane from which he could look down upon ordinary people. Conversely — this fascinates me — conversely, if you are merely a brilliant scholar, merely someone who has added immeasurably to the sum of human knowledge and the powers of human insight, that does not qualify you for the eminence of being an intellectual."

(3) Berkeley professor and former Clinton cabinet secretary Robert Reich maintains that blaming economic stress on immigrants is the sign of an ascending tyrant. This is nonsense. A much more reliable observer, Aristotle, noted almost two and a half millennia ago that a tyrant, unlike a true king, prefers and trusts foreigners over his own people. Politika, Book V.

(4) A carbon tax is an idiotic notion dreamed up in hell by the devil himself. A) CO2 is not a pollutant - it is naturally exhaled by all human and animal life and the more of it in the atmosphere, the better for plant life. B) Over 90% of the Greenhouse Effect is produced by water vapour and CO2 is only a fraction of the remainder. C) The Greenhouse Effect is a good thing not a bad thing - without it the earth would be a lifeless ball of ice. D) Climate has been constantly changing throughout all of history and until all of the causes of this are understood and taken into account - and climate science is not even remotely close to starting to have done this - there can be no way of telling how much recent climate change has been caused by human factors. E) The modern warming trend that is blamed on the burning of fossil fuels actually began with the end of the Little Ice Age decades before the industrial boom and included a forty-year period of cooling after World War II which coincided in time with a large rise in CO2 emissions due to accelerating industrialism. F) The "proof" for the theories of climate-change alarmists is not evidence from real world observations but the simulations of computer models. G) The global warming/climate change scare has been a deliberate fraud since day one. The day on which it was presented to a US Senate Subcommittee in 1988 was consciously chosen to be the statistically hottest day in summer, the summaries of the UN's IPCC's reports on climate change were written by environmental bureaucrats and released prior to the science reports which were then redacted to fit the summaries. H) "There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period" - Michael Crichton. I) Scientists funded by governments and international agencies like the UN are just as likely to provide the results they are paid to provide as scientists funded by petroleum companies.

(5) Adam Smith and David Ricardo's theories of absolute and comparative advantage ought to be considered, when determining what is best for your country, but they ought not to be treated as outweighing all other considerations.

(6) The Conservative government of Canada's first Prime Minister, Sir John A. MacDonald, introduced its "National Policy" to the public in 1876 (they had been discussing it internally since the 1860s), campaigned on it in 1878, and put it in practice in 1879. The policy was similar to that adopted by the new Republican Party in the United States a decade earlier and that which would be adopted by the government of the newly unified Germany - protecting domestic manufacturers with tariffs and the use of government revenue on internal infrastructure improvements, which in Canada's case meant the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. The policy worked quite well in developing the manufacturing base of all three countries, by contrast with the free trade practice introduced in England, the birthplace of industrialism, at the behest of the Manchester manufacturers. While it was agricultural tariffs (the Corn Laws) the latter sought to repeal, their practice of free trade in this same period that America and Germany were practicing economic nationalism led to their falling behind the USA in industrial development. The Canadian Conservative "National Policy" was something of a last-option-available measure initially, but it worked for Canada for almost a century, and it became a fixed plank in the Conservative platform until Mulroney removed it. The old Conservatives believed it to be necessary, not only for the protection of Canada's own industries and resources, but for her political and cultural protection as well (at least the cultural protection of English Canada, the Victorian-era British culture of which did not have the built-in protection against Americanization of a language barrier like French Canada). The Liberals were the party that wanted free trade and Americanization. Today's Grits are not likely to admit to being the party of the latter, although they obviously base their policies on what the craziest trend in Hollywood is at any given moment, spewing left-wing anti-Americanism of the sort that Jean-François Revel so ably exposed as irrational in his 2004 monograph of that title. Nevertheless, it was openly admitted by Liberal thinkers of the past such as Goldwyn Smith and John Wesley Dafoe. Their economic arguments and historical interpretations in favour of the Liberal project of undoing Confederation and moving Canada into the American orbit were fully rebutted by Harold Innis, Donald Creighton, and Eugene Forsey.