Hic et Ille VII

An Apology to My Readers

My posting has been light all year and it has now been over a month since my last post. I apologize for this. It is due to my writing time being tied up with projects external to this blog. One of these is quite a large project and is still not finished so posting may continue to be light for a few months to come – perhaps the remainder of this year.

So We Have a New Conservative Leader

In the Conservative Party of Canada’s leadership convention last month, Maxime Bernier the most libertarian of the candidates was leading up until the thirteenth ballot, which gave the leadership to Andrew Scheer. This outcome has its positives and its negatives, as of course would have been the case with any of the alternatives as well. Among the positives, Scheer is a strong royalist – an absolute essential for a Tory leader – and has the reputation of being a social conservative if not as staunch a one as Brad Trost or Pierre Lemieux. Also impressive is Scheer’s promise that as Prime Minister he would withdraw federal funds from universities that allow Social Justice Warriors to get away with bullying, harassing, and silencing those who hold opinions contrary to theirs.

The down-side to Scheer is that he is very much a Stephen Harper man. Apart from the fact that this taints him by association with the man who made himself so unliked during his time as Prime Minister that the country was willing to hand the reins of power over to a shallow little empty-headed egomaniac, there is something in the Harper brand of neo-conservatism that puts a damper on the enthusiasm that would otherwise be inspired by each of the listed positive points.

Harper-style neo-conservatism blends elements from the traditions of both the old Conservative Party and the Reform Party/Canadian Alliance. The latter was a very pro-American tradition that believed in closer economic partnership with the United States – free trade, traditionally a plank of the Liberal Party platform – and in introducing democratic reforms to the upper house of Parliament to make it more like the American Senate. These aspects of the Reform tradition have survived into the neo-conservatism of the present Conservative Party even though they are the most difficult to harmonize with the elements, such as royalism, taken from the tradition of the old Conservative Party. Scheer himself is on the record as saying “I support an elected Senate with meaningful term limits.” Many royalists such as myself would say that to insist upon elections and term limits for the Senate weakens the foundation upon which you will need to stand in fighting for our hereditary monarchy should it come under republican attack. (1)

Neo-conservatives are convinced that fiscal conservatism wins elections but social conservatism loses elections. This is what the media, the academics, and the other parties tell them, but what it boils down to is the idea that people want balanced budgets, spending cuts, and tax breaks more than they want secure homes and communities, strong marriages and families, and a stable moral environment in which to raise their children. This is nonsense – but try convincing a neoconservative of that. This is why social conservatives know that while neo-conservatives will court their votes and tolerate them within the “big tent” – which is more than can be expected from the leadership of the other parties – they will do nothing to advance the causes dear to their hearts.

Finally, as welcome as are Scheer’s proposals for cutting off funds to schools that allow politically incorrect viewpoints to be silenced by the tyranny of well-organized cultural Marxist bullies, civil libertarians will remember that the Harper administration was no friend to freedom of speech. The private members bill that finally brought about the repeal of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act – the “hate speech” clause – during the Harper years had the support of the governing party, but not of the government itself. Worse, while it is the Trudeau wing of the Liberal Party that has demonstrated a propensity for passing absurd laws that punish people for saying things about women and racial, religious, and sexual minorities that egalitarians consider offensive, the Harper neo-conservatives have shown themselves to be fond of enhancing the government’s powers to monitor our private conversations in the name of national security. This is what Bill C-51, which made Harper so unpopular towards the end of his premiership, was all about. The response of both the American and Canadian versions of neo-conservatism to the increasing threat of Islamic terrorism has not been the sensible policy of keeping potential jihadists out of our countries while letting Muslims live in peace if they can in their own. Rather it is the exact opposite of this – allowing mass Islamic immigration into our countries while bombing the hell out of them in their own. When, as any thinking person could have predicted, this produces an increase in incidents of Islamic terrorism, they then introduce intrusive domestic surveillance and other police state measures to deal with it.

If there is an unmixed positive about Scheer, something that does not have a corresponding negative to diminish it, it is that he has said that he would scrap the carbon tax which, like so many other of the schemes of the Liberals/NDP/Greens is an evil wearing the mask of a good. The carbon tax raises the cost of living for all Canadians while reducing the funds they have available to meet their expenses, hurting the poor and the working class the most. The villains who have imposed it, however, like that soulless monster Justin Trudeau, go around bragging about how caring and compassionate they are, because they are doing something for the environment. In reality the environment is not helped in the least by this shameless money grab. Let us hope that if Scheer gets the opportunity to put this promise into practice that he will follow through.

Kudos to America’s Caesar

Liberals have, for decades, denied the obvious fact that the news media, in its editorializing and increasingly in its reporting, is heavily biased in their favour. How much longer, one wonders, can they maintain this façade? It is difficult to know which is more sickening – the way the Canadian media fawns over our grossly incompetent, arrogant, and idiotic Prime Minister or the way the American media pounces on the smallest flaws they can find in their President as grounds for terminating his term in office. “He starts on the wrong side of his mouth when brushing his teeth – impeach him!”

While there is much that President Trump deserves criticism for – among other things, the way he has moved away from the Buchananite rhetoric of his campaign towards a more typical neo-conservatism with regards to the Middle East – he deserves praise for the move for which the international media has sought to crucify him over the last two weeks. On June 1st he announced that he was withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement adopted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change a year and a half ago. This agreement was a fraud of the same type as the Trudeau Liberal carbon tax, just on a larger scale.

Let me explain it to you. The climate on this planet of ours has never been constant. It has been changing for as long as there has been an earth and will continue to change for as long as earth exists. The amount of that change which can be attributed to human activity, past, present, or future, is a fraction of a fraction of a percentage point. Even if the theory of anthropogenic climate change were true – and it is not – and the earth’s climate was changing in the way the theory says it is, for the reasons it says it is, and with the results the theory predicts, the actions that the governments of the world agreed to take in the Paris Accord would not have the slightest effect on it.

The Paris Accord is about one thing and one thing only - allowing the political leaders of the world to show off, pose as saviours of the world, and otherwise virtue signal for a scheme that does nothing – absolutely nothing – except take wealth from poor and middle class taxpayers in rich white countries and give it to wealthy kleptocrats in poor non-white countries.

Kudos to Donald Trump for pulling his country out of this farce.

Ontario To Rename Itself New Sodom?

If, unlike the residents of George Orwell’s Oceania that we are all starting to resemble, you can think back a couple of decades and remember the past as it actually happened, you will recall that at the time one of the hot issues on the agenda of what was then called the gay-rights movement was the question of whether same-sex couples should be allowed to adopt children or not. Those who supported the status quo, which prevented them from adopting, did so on the basis of a child’s need for both a father and a mother. That their reasoning was perfectly sound and legitimate did not prevent the other side from getting into a tizzy, shrieking hysterically and calling it bigotry and discrimination and all sorts of other nasty and unpleasant sounding things. That was basically all that their own argument amounted to and eventually some judge got so sick and tired of their whining that they won.

Now, in the current year, the Liberal government of the Province of Ontario, headed by a hatchet-faced lesbian with an axe to grind, has just passed a law, Bill 89, which allows – or, perhaps, requires – foster and adoption agencies to turn down couples who oppose the agenda of the alphabet soup gang. In practice, this means “Evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants, traditional Roman Catholics, and orthodox Christians in general, need not apply.” Worse, it gives Children’s Aid the right to take natural children away from such parents.

It is remarkable, is it not, how quickly those who start out by saying “we just want our rights” can move to taking away rights from other people once they attain power.

Christians, of course, are not the only ones who hold quaint, old-fashioned, antiquated ideas like that if you are born with a penis you are male, if you are born with a vagina you are female, that males should pair with females and vice-versa, and that male-female couples should raise their children together. All of these Muslims that Kathleen Wynne, like Justin Trudeau, is so enthusiastic about bringing into the country, think the same way. Do you think that now that under the provisions of Bill 89 the Children’s Aid of Ontario is going to start taking their children away?

Yeah right.

(1) For a Senate Reform proposal that addresses the problems with the Senate as it stands, while remaining true to the principles the Fathers of Confederation had in mind when they made the upper chamber of our Parliament an appointed Senate, see my essay "Senate Reform": http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2012/08/senate-reform.html