Hic et Ille V

The Prince and the Premier

As I have said in the past and will undoubtedly say again, contrary to the thinking of progressive republicans, royalty and all that it entails – kings and queens, princes and princesses, and the office of a reigning sovereign monarch - is more important and necessary now, in the age of democracy, than ever before. When the day to day running of the affairs of state is in the hands of officials who are chosen by popular election and are therefore, of necessity, politicians, people who by definition are more power-hungry, arrogant, and corruptible than anyone else, they must be humbled by being placed in the position of servants to the Crown. Treating them as servants of the people will not suffice. Every tyrant in the history of world has regarded himself as being the servant, friend, and spokesman of the people. Nothing is more gratifying to the ego of a politician, nothing feeds his deadly and dangerous hubris more, than the thought that he represents, speaks for and serves the people and that they love him for it. He must be forced to bend the knee to royalty for it is only this that keeps him in his proper place and checks the more unpalatable aspects of his nature.

We received an illustration of just this point last weekend. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge arrived in Canada with their children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte, on Saturday for a week-long tour of the west coast of the Dominion. When they debarked from their plane in Victoria they were greeted by Canadian officials including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Trudeau, that smarmy, slimy, embodiment of everything that is wrong with the present era, oozing the sickeningly superficial saccharine charm for which he is notorious, attempted to “high five” the young prince and was rebuffed. Prince George demonstrated his good taste and breeding by refusing to even shake the hand of the low-life who is an embarrassment to Canada and a disgrace to the office of Her Majesty’s first minister. Already at the age of three, the prince was able to put the haughtiest and most arrogant premier our country has ever known, in his place.

The Tycoon and the Witch

South of the border, due to the rebellious Whiggery of their forebears, our Yankee friends are not fortunate enough to have a royal Sovereign reigning over them and a royal family to keep their politicians in line. Consequently, they rely upon popular election to determine their head of state once every four years. This is one of those years and this Monday evening the first of the three debates between the Republican and the Democratic candidates for the office of President of the United States of America took place at Hofstra University in New York, moderated by NBC’s Lester Holt. The debate attracted more viewers than any other in the history of televised debates and will probably hold that record for quite some time having been something of a snoozer that is likely to discourage people from watching future debates.

In the period leading up to the debate, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton saw her eight point lead in the polls over Republican candidate Donald Trump shrink away to nothing. This was largely of her own making rather than to an improved performance on the part of Trump. As more and more damning information kept coming out about her compromising American national security by illegally using a private server for classified e-mails, how access to her while Secretary of State could be bought by large donations to the Clinton Foundation, and other such scandals, she did not help things by calling a sizable portion of the American public “irredeemable” and a “basket of deplorables” while speaking at a fund-raising banquet for the alphabet soup gang. Then, when she had to be taken away from the 9/11 memorial, the wall of media denial that there was anything to be concerned about in regards to her health collapsed. It turns out that all those midnight excursions on her broomstick to dance with the devil in mountaintop orgies had taken their toll, and she had come down with pneumonia.

The mainstream media, which is almost entirely on Clinton’s side, concluded after Monday night that she had managed to turn that around and to take back the momentum from Trump by defeating her opponent in debate. It is true that by the criteria ordinarily used to judge the outcome of a debate, Clinton did better than Trump. Trump did very well for the first portion of the debate in which he talked about trade and the disastrous consequences the trade deals of previous governments have had for American workers, but in the last two thirds of the debate wasted a lot of time defending himself on ridiculous rabbit trail matters like the Obama birth certificate and Rosie O’Donnell and missed a number of opportunities to go on the offensive against Clinton. Clinton definitely came across as the more skilled and expert debater which she, her team, and her echo chamber in the media all see as supporting the central argument in her campaign, namely that she has the experience and knowledge necessary for the position and her opponent does not. What they seem unable to see is that this also supports a key argument in Trump’s campaign – that she has been and is an entrenched part of the very establishment that has made all the bad decisions – free trade deals, lax border security, liberal immigration, the incompetent bumbling in the Middle East that has made ISIS into the threat it is today – that he has been railing against and that therefore, the experience upon which she bases her claim to being qualified to lead the country also disqualifies her. Trump made this very point Monday night when he said yeah she has all this experience but it is bad experience. This is a point which media liberals and other hard-core Clinton supporters will never understand but it is one that is likely to resonate with voters fed up with previous governments. It is their frustration that has been fueling the Trump train’s momentum which is why that momentum, to the consternation of the chattering classes, will probably continue to be built despite, or perhaps even because of, this debate.

The Attempted Lynching of Kellie Leitch

Dr. Kellie Leitch, who since 2011 has been the Conservative MP for the riding of Simcoe-Grey and who served as Minister of Labour and of the Status of Women in the last two years of the Harper premiership, has thrown her hat in the ring for the leadership of the Conservative Party. Whether or not she should get the leadership, I do not know. I do not know, for example, where she stands on the constitution. Nobody should lead the Conservative Party who is not a firm supporter of our traditional parliamentary constitution of House of Commons and Senate under the reigning monarch. I am not saying that she is not such, just that I have no information on where she stands on these things.

Whether or not she should get the position, the controversy that the liberal and progressive left have generated over her position on immigration is absolutely absurd. Indeed, it was not even a stated position or proposal that sparked the attacks on her, but merely a question put in a survey to her supporters. The question was "Should the Canadian government screen potential immigrants for anti-Canadian values as part of its normal screening for refugees and landed immigrants?"

The question is a reasonable one and quite mild. It did not even ask whether immigrants should be required to hold Canadian values, just whether they should be screened for anti-Canadian ones. The majority, not just of Leitch's supporters but of Canadians in general would answer "yes." Yet the liberal and progressive left - including leftists in the Conservative Party like Chad Rogers and her former colleague Jason Kenney - shrieked, and wailed, and wrung their hands in despair that such a horrible, mean-spirited, thought could ever have been expressed by someone seeking to lead a major Canadian party.

The irony is undoubtedly lost on these liberals that by screening "for anti-Canadian values" Leitch means screening for ideas that are contrary to their own, that is the liberals' own, dearly beloved values like equality of the sexes, tolerance, diversity, multiculturalism and all that other sappy nonsense. To acknowledge this would require that they acknowledge and address the fundamental contradictions in their own set of unrealistic beliefs. It is liberals who cherish "values", a term George Grant once pointed out had been taken from Nietzsche to refer to the constructions of our own wills that have taken the place of the eternal verities of goodness, truth, and beauty, and in Canada it has been liberals who have been telling us for decades what our "values" are. Conservatives cherish institutions, customs, traditions, and order over nebulous and malleable "values."

Imagine how the left would have howled had Leitch, instead of asking a survey question about screening for anti-Canadian values, instead outright proposed, as that great old Canadian political scientist, economist, social commentator and humourist Stephen Leacock once did that “we must see to it that our newcomers are British, or something so akin to it as to blend and fuse with the British Commonwealth as a natural part of it” (While There Is Time: The Case Against Social Catastrophe, McLelland & Stewart, 1945, p. 103). This was not a controversial proposal at the time and in fact reflected actual immigration policy, under both Conservative and Liberal governments, until the 1960s.

I would have no problem, were I running for Tory leader, with resurrecting Leacock's policy which, to anyone who treasures the rich heritage of English Common Law justice, ordered liberty and prescriptive rights, and parliamentary government all under and represented by the Sovereign Crown, it is a quite sensible safeguard against the erosion of these things. I will not be running for Tory leader, however, for to do so would require that I become a politician and I could never look myself in the mirror again if I were to do that.