Schadenfreude

On the fourth Sunday in Lent we were given a sermon on the “love thy enemy” passage in the Sermon on the Mount. While it is probably not entirely within the spirit of that passage to engage in schadenfreude over one's enemies' misfortunes, I find it impossible to resist doing so since this era of triumphant liberalism afford few opportunities for such to a man of the right.

The Liberal Party of Canada has, over the years, made itself odious to all sorts of Canadians but most consistently to two distinct groups who despise them for very different reasons. The old Tories of the kind frequently but erroneously called “Red,” (1) i.e., the ones who prize Canada’s British and Loyalist history, traditions, and heritage, her constitutional monarchy, Westminster parliamentary system of government, and Common Law, her ongoing ties to the British Commonwealth and who associate all of this with an older, more organic, more rooted, vision of society than modern, individualistic, commercialism see the Liberals, quite correctly, as a party of rootless, modernizers who can conceive of value in no terms other than those of a price tag and whose goal is to sell out the Dominion and everything for which she once stood to Yankee capitalism for a quick buck. On the other hand, the rugged, rural, inhabitants of the prairie provinces of the Canadian West whom the Liberals and their academic and media fellow travelers dismiss with “redneck” and other, worse, epithets, have long loathed the Grits as being a party of totalitarian socialists who a) tax them to death, b) ignore, or worse, aggravate, their economic difficulties, and c) display the same arrogant contempt towards them that the Obama/Clinton Democrats display towards middle and working class red state Americans. Both of these negative views of the Liberals are entirely valid. (2) Someone like myself, who has belonged to both groups simultaneously for all of his life - a Redneck Tory, would be one way of putting it, I suppose - has particularly good reason to look upon the Liberal Party with utter abhorrence.

The Liberal Party has always been bad but it has sunk to new depths of depravity under the current leadership of Captain Airhead who, more than any of his predecessors, has brought shame and disgrace upon the office of Her Majesty’s First Minister in this Dominion. Will Ferguson divided Canada’s Prime Ministers into two categories, “Boneheads” and “Bastards”, but Captain Airhead has the distinction of being both. Smug, arrogant, self-righteous and preening, all of his public statements and actions, before and after taking office, have been calculated to project, with the cooperation of a fawning media, a carefully crafted image of himself. Since that image was that of the opposite of, at first, his predecessor Stephen Harper, then later of American President Donald Trump, it has all along resembled a bad caricature of the worst sort of loony leftist. He began his term by trying to import the migrant crisis that has been threatening to inundate Europe and create a Camp of the Saints scenario for half of a decade, creating a miniature version of America’s southern border crisis on the 49th Parallel, and at the end of his term, signed an insane and evil United Nations accord on migration which in effect, amounted to an agreement to surrender the Dominion’s essential right to maintain and police her own borders. Any and all criticism of this, or, for that matter, any of his other policies, was met with accusations of "racism". He used the federal summer jobs funding program to coerce employers into agreeing with abortion on demand, having previously evicted pro-lifers from the Liberal Party, and otherwise attempted to shove his “woke” notions down all Canadians throats by legislation, or at any rate Parliamentary motions, condemning “Islamophobia” and protecting the new found “right” of individuals to choose or even make up their own gender identity. Jumping on board the bandwagon of an environmentalist movement that had long ago lost sight of its original, legitimate, goal – the conservation and preservation for future generations of natural resources and aesthetics – and gone to seed on apocalyptic, end-of-the-world, alarmism, he sabotaged and destroyed Canada’s energy industry and then, just this year, pulled the world’s most tasteless April Fool’s prank, by slapping down a carbon tax that will accomplish nothing but a needless rise in the cost of living, which hurts the poor and the working class the most. All the while his extravagance with the public purse has made his father, previously noted for his record deficits, look like a model of budgetary austerity in comparison. Speaking of money, he had the audacity to take the image of our first - and greatest - Prime Minister, the man who spearheaded the Confederation project and led the Dominion for most of its first two decades, fighting tooth and nail to get the railroad built and prevent the country from splitting up and falling into the avaricious hands of the republic to our south, off of our ten dollar bill and replace it with that of a woman who achieved fame, decades after the fact thanks to the Liberals' desperate sifting of Canadian history for an equivalent of the figures in America's Civil Rights Movement, for sitting down in a theatre.

It has been with much joy and pleasure, therefore, that I have been watching Captain Airhead’s image and popularity implode over the past couple of months. If there has been a cloud amidst all the silver lining of the SNC-Lavalin Affair it is that it took an ordinary, run-of-the-mill, corruption scandal to bring about the collapse of his reputation after all the evils mentioned in the preceding paragraph failed to do so. Perhaps the best way to look at that is to regard it as a case of the straw finally breaking the humpy back of the camel. To briefly summarize the scandal, a large corporation that has been a significant contributor to Liberal Party funds and which is based in the home province of the Prime Minister has been under prosecution for bribing a foreign government and last year our government snuck a bill in with the budget that allows for slap-on-the-wrist treatment of white collar crimes of this nature. When Jody Wilson-Raybould was shifted out of her Cabinet position of Minister of Justice and Attorney General in January of this year, rumours began to circulate that this was because she had refused to give in to pressure from the Prime Minister's Office to apply the new rules retroactively to SNC Lavalin. As Jay Currie observed, the real scandal in all of this ought to have been the revelation that the government snuck legislation in to give their friends a break. Instead, what everyone jumped on was the compromise of an independent judiciary by inappropriate political interference in a prosecution. To put the same matter in Canadian rather than Yankee terms, as our press should have been doing all along although they have probably long ago forgotten what little they ever knew of Canadian civics, the rulings of the courts of the Queen-on-the-bench are not to be decided and dictated for political reasons by the ministers of the Queen-in-Council. Whether we speak Canadian or American it is a rotten and corrupt thing to do - and the Prime Minister's being guilty of it would not have come as news to anyone still capable of remembering that we were not always at war with Eastasia. What, after all, did his inappropriate tweets following the Gerald Stanley jury acquittal last year constitute if not an unashamed and public display of such interference? Indeed, this was a far worse instance of such interference and one in which Jody Wilson-Raybould was equally guilty for it had all the appearance of promising changes to the jury selection process that would compromise such ancient principles as the right of the accused to presumption of innocence and the right of the accused - not the victim - to a trial of his peers and put in the place of the justice based on such principles, a primitive form of blood-based-vengeance, as if the Oresteia were being played out in reverse. It was at this point that Captain Airhead and the then-Justice Minister should both have received a summons to Rideau Hall and been told that Her Majesty no longer requires their services. Of course this didn't happen and for that we ought to burn an effigy of William Lyon Mackenzie King annually for it was that, longest sitting Grit premier, who subverted the Westminster system and undermined the accountability of the Prime Minister's Office turning it into a virtual dictatorship whenever there is a majority government..

As the SNC-Lavalin scandal developed, Captain Airhead's team tried desperately to salvage their leader's reputation, but their every effort, beginning with the self-immolation of Seymour Butts - my apologies to Matt Groening and his creative staff for appropriating what was originally a joke of theirs but I refuse to sully my own Christian name by admitting that it is shared by this man - was like adding fuel to the fire. Now, the very people who for the past four years swooned at the very mention of Captain Airhead's name, are falling over themselves in their efforts to get as far away from him as possible. The scandal having broken on the eve of the next Dominion election things have gotten so bad for the Airhead Grits that they can think of nothing else to do than recycle the lame tactics that failed to win Hilary Clinton the last American presidential election by telling us that Andrew Scheer is courting the "far right" and, most hilariously since it has come a week after Robert Mueller announced that he could find no evidence that the Trump team had colluded with Russia, warning us about Russian interference in the upcoming election.

There is a lesson in this for Captain "Because it is 2015" Airhead if he is capable of learning it. Those who ride to the top on the crest of the wave of fashion, will crash and crash hard, when the tide goes out. Taylor Swift may very well have been right and she and whoever she was singing to at the time will "never go out of style", but Justin, baby, you just ain't her.


(1) This is due mainly to the socialist sympathies of George Grant and Eugene Forsey. While Grant attempted to argue that “socialism” was “conservative” his argument depended entirely upon a clever redefinition of socialism and he, like Forsey, acknowledged that this positive view of socialism was not that of the Tories as a group.

(2) This is true despite the fact that one view sees the Grits as being capitalist while the other sees them as being socialist. Capitalism and socialism are but two sides to the same coin which is the economy of the Modern Age. The true reactionary seeks wisdom, economic and otherwise, in the older traditions that predated the Modern Age. George Grant was a man who sought to do just that and this is reflected in his admirable criticism of capitalism but it was lamentable, pun intended, that he chose to stay within the limits of Modern thinking in using the term "socialism" for the opposite of where capitalism had gone wrong. Friedrich Hayek, on the other hand, was a man who made no effort whatsoever to think outside of the Modern box, and while he produced an otherwise admirable critique of socialism, could see it in no other terms than a return to pre-Modern feudalism, which it was not.