Dominion Day Dolour

It has been my custom for Dominion Day over the last few years, to write either sketches about specific individuals who exemplified the Canada of Confederation and her traditions or jeremiads lamenting the present state of the Dominion. I had not realized, until I checked the last six years, that this has followed an alternating pattern, in which this would be a year for a jeremiad. This suits me as the next individual I had on deck for a sketch was the great Canadian historian Donald Creighton, and while I read Donald Wright’s biography of him as recently as last year – I much prefer the chapter on him in Charles Taylor’s Radical Tories, since Wright’s political correctness infuriates me as much as it would have his subject – I would need more time than I had available to re-read Creighton’s own books in order to do him justice. So a jeremiad it is.

There is plenty for someone from my point of view to lament. There have been two traditions of thought that have borne the rather inaccurate label “conservative” in Canada. There is the old Tory tradition of Loyalism and royalism, which is monarchist rather than republican, holds the Westminster system of Parliament to be the best form of government ever to evolve on the face of the earth, dissents from the narrative of the rebellion of 1776 and is suspicious of the United States, utterly rejects socialism without fully embracing capitalism, and is socially, morally, and culturally traditionalist. Then there is neo-conservatism, which is very pro-American, holds to the basic political and economic views of nineteenth century liberalism, and regards anything from outside eighteenth to nineteenth century liberalism which has been traditionally associated with conservatism as dispensable. While the extent to which the official Conservative Party has ever really stood for either of these traditions is questionable, it was associated with the first until 1967 and the latter from about 1983 on, especially after the merger with what began as the Reform Party. I have belonged to the first tradition from the moment political thoughts first formed in my head, and am very much a representative of its right wing. Most other surviving members – David Warren is a very notable exception –speak for its left wing. In other words, I speak for a point of view, which the Liberal Party, egged on by the further left parties, and aided and abetted by the Conservatives, has striven to make as unwelcome as possible in Canada.

Earlier this year, our provincial governments, with the full backing and support of Ottawa, essentially eliminated what was left of our most basic freedoms. These freedoms are part of the Common Law tradition which we inherited when we became the Dominion of Canada on this date in 1867. They are not something which Pierre Trudeau gave us in 1982, despite the fact that our lying schoolteachers and our lying newsmedia commentators, most of whom sold their souls to the Liberal Party and its true leader in hell at the beginning of their careers, have been instilling that impression among the younger generations ever since that year. Although the Charter did not give us those freedoms, it does name four of them in its second section. The freedom of conscience and religion is the first named. The third and fourth named are freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association. There is no freedom of conscience and religion when the provincial government forbids us from going to Church for four months. There is no freedom of peaceful assembly when the same government tells us we cannot gather in groups larger than five or ten or whatever number. There is no freedom of association if the government tells us we must be six feet apart from each other in public at all times. The provincial governments got away with this totalitarian power grab with the help of a media-generated panic over the spread of a virus with a low fatality rate that produces mild to no symptoms in the vast majority of those who contract it, information which has been available all along to anybody willing to check out the facts.

In the meantime, the Liberal Party which was reduced to a minority government in last year’s Dominion election, took full advantage of this situation to seek, in an underhanded attack on the Magna Carta and the foundational principles of Parliament, unlimited tax and spend powers, and to prevent Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition from doing their job of holding the government accountable in Parliament.

Then, about a month ago, when Marxist organizations in the United States found a pretext for launching a race war against white people, the Prime Minister, despite his own hands being far from clean when it comes to matters concerning race as we discovered in the election campaign last year, jumped on board the bandwagon. Even though the public health restrictions at whatever stage of easing they were at from province to province remained in effect for everybody else, they were lifted completely for the anti-white hate rallies that were organized in Canada’s major cities. The Prime Minister, who has never given the slightest indication of sincere contrition over his many personal failings, but who is always ready to give an apology on behalf of the entire country to whatever designated victim group happens to feel the most offended at any given moment, showed up for a photo op of himself “taking the knee” in a gesture of false humility at the rally in Ottawa. A few days later on his syndicated morning television show he berated our country over its supposed “systemic racism.” This was the cue for everyone else to ritually acknowledge this systemic racism, whether they understood the concept or, more likely, did not, and for the “woke” to start “cancelling” anybody who failed to participate in this now mandatory ritual.

This requirement that everybody accept this ridiculous narrative, taken from the neo-Marxist Critical Theory, is, of course, an assault on yet another of our basic freedoms. As with the others, this too is a freedom from the Common Law tradition which is named in the second section of the Charter, where it is called the “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication.” If all Canadians are now required to confess the neo-Marxist narrative that our country is systemically racist, upon threat of being cancelled if we dissent, then it is a joke to say that we have freedom of thought, belief, opinion or expression. If the Crown broadcaster and all of the other news stations and newspapers that have been subsidized by this government are pushing this same narrative, while the government has been applying pressure to big tech social media companies to censor dissent, then there is no “freedom of the press and other media of communication.” The assault on this basic freedom has been going on since the premiership of the first Trudeau. It has been carried out in the name of combatting prejudice and promoting diversity, even though the most essential kind of diversity for a free country is the diversity of thought that is under attack.

All of Western Civilization is now threatened by these neo-Maoists who wish to raze history to the ground and bring us to Year Zero. They have the support of most of the mainstream media, the corporate world, academia, celebrities and a wide assortment of elected officials, civil servants and even the police forces they wish to see “defunded”. In Canada, they have demanded that the prestigious McGill University disown its founder and namesake. Worse, they are demanding that our country disavow the leading Father of Confederation and our first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald. Hilariously, they managed to get a newspaper or two to put trigger-warning labels on the flag. The reason this is so funny is because the flag in question is not the traditional, historical, flag of Canada, the Red Ensign, but rather the bland Maple Leaf which the Communist traitor, Lester Pearson chose to replace it with in 1965 precisely because it said nothing about Canada’s history, heritage, and legacy. Indeed, the Liberal Party’s assault on the traditional symbols of the Canada of Confederation during the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, starting with the old flag and ending with Dominion Day, could pretty much be said to have been the first wave to which the present wave of neo-Maoist, Year Zeroism is the second.

The Liberal Party rejected our country’s traditional symbols and was determined to replace them with ones bearing its own stamp. Today’s neo-Maoists demand a wholesale repudiation of our country’s founding and history. Symbols and history are important. Almost a century ago, the Mackenzie King Liberals attacked the Crown’s legitimate and necessary right to refuse an improper dissolution request (see Eugene Forsey, The Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament, 1943). This undermined Parliament’s right to hold the Prime Minister accountable and set the stage for Prime Ministerial dictatorship (see John Farthing, Freedom Wears a Crown, 1957). This year, we have seen the largest assault on Parliamentary prerogative since then, and on the part of a minority Liberal government to boot, while all the provincial governments ran roughshod over our most basic Common Law rights and freedoms. If we had valued our traditional symbols and our history more, we would not have so willingly acquiesced in this.

While I weep for my country, I wish you all a Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the Queen!