I don’t like Brian Pallister who is the premier of my province, Manitoba, very much. Oh, I was very glad to see him replace Greg Selinger in that office, voted for the Progressive Conservative party which he leads in the last two provincial elections, and even congratulated him in person on his re-election, but I was never particularly enthusiastic about his leadership qualities. In March of last year, I lost most of my respect for the man when he locked down the province harder than almost anywhere else in Canada before the bat flu had even really arrived here and did so by holding a press conference in which he arrogantly rubbed the heavy-handedness of his approach in all of our faces. In the year and a half since then, he has whittled away at what little of that respect remained by such behaviour as scapegoating ordinary Manitobans for the failure of the dictatorial public health orders of his power-mad public health mandarin Brent Roussin, setting up a snitch line and encouraging Manitobans to spy on their friends, family, and neighbours and rat them out for violations of these petty public health orders, showing complete and utter disregard for constitutional protections of Manitobans’ basic freedoms and rights, blasphemously raising himself to the level of God by adding an eleventh commandment to the Decalogue, and, most recently, using the means of bribery and blackmail to coerce Manitobans to give up their right to not be medicated against their freely given, informed, consent.
I have expressed my present attitude towards the premier in
the following lines of verse:
Brian Pallister is an
ignorant fool!
He’s a stupid, ugly,
loser and he smells bad too!
His one and only
virtue,
I hate to say it but it’s
true,
His one and only
virtue is –
He’s not Wab Kinew!
That having been said, Pallister has come under heavy attack
this month for reasons that have nothing to do with the draconian way in which
ran roughshod over all our rights and freedoms in order to swat the bat flu
bug. On Dominion Day an angry, lawless,
mob descended upon the grounds of the provincial legislature here in Winnipeg. The mob was not angrily demanding the
restoration of our rights and freedoms and small businesses and social
lives. They were mad, in both senses of
the word, because for the month previous far left activists masquerading as
journalists, that is to say, most of the mainstream media in Canada, had been using
the discovery of graves that are currently without markers near former Indian
Residential Schools to defame Canada, her founders and historical leaders, the
Christian religion and especially the Roman Catholic Church, and white people
in general, in a most vile and disgusting manner. The mob vandalized and tore down the large
statue of Queen Victoria that had stood in front of the legislature as well as
a smaller statue of Queen Elizabeth II that had stood near the Lieutenant
Governor’s residence. Since Queen
Victoria was the queen who signed the bill that established Canada as a country,
Queen Elizabeth II is the present reigning monarch and this was done on the
country’s anniversary this was an obvious assault on the very idea of Canada
herself.
Pallister, quite rightly, expressed his “disgust and
disappointment” at these actions, condemning them both at the time and in a
press conference the following Wednesday.
At the latter he said that the statues would be restored. He also said, with regards to the early
settlers of Canada “the people came here to this country, before it was a
country and since, didn’t come here to destroy anything, they came here to
build, they came to build better and build they did. They built farms and they built businesses,
they built communities and churches too.
They built these things for themselves and one another and they built
them with dedication and with pride and so we must dedicate ourselves to
building yet again”. This is what his
enemies wish to crucify him for saying. Much
to his credit, he has so far stood by his remarks.
In these comments Pallister depicted those who settled here and
built what became the country Canada as having been human beings rather than
devils. This is what the far left finds
so unforgiveable. The fundamental
essence of the political left, its sine
qua non, is the envious hatred of those who build, especially those who
have built in the past those things we enjoy and benefit from as a legacy in
the present, which envious hatred manifests itself as efforts to tear down and
destroy. They have to think of the
builders of the past as devils in order to avoid the suspicion that they
themselves are such.
The media, which everywhere but perhaps especially in Canada
is largely synonymous with the political left, has framed the controversy which
it has itself generated over Pallister’s remarks in racial and ethnic
terms. What is implied, or in some
cases practically stated outright, in all the criticism and condemnation of
Pallister’s words, is that speaking positively of the European, Christian,
settlers who came to what is now Canada over the last four to five centuries
and of their accomplishments rather than demonizing them is insensitive and
offensive to Native Indian Canadians.
We are essentially being told that our country, her history, and her
founders and historical figures from the early settlers through the Fathers of
Confederation to the present day, must only be spoken of in terms of shame,
that everything we have historically celebrated about our country must be
forgotten, and that we must instead forever be beating ourselves up over the
Indian Residential Schools. Should there
be anyone left in Canada still capable of thinking at the level of an adult,
such a person must surely recognize that it is this attitude on the part of the
progressive media rather than Pallister’s speech that is truly demeaning to the
Natives as it treats them as thin-skinned bigots who cannot hear anyone other
than themselves spoken of positively without taking it as an insult to
themselves. It also suggests that they
are incapable of telling when the left is cynically exploiting their suffering for
its own interests. The attack on the
symbols of the monarchy serves the cause of the left since republicanism,
whatever J. J. McCullough, Anthony Furey, Spencer Fernando, Lorne Gunter, and the
average American “conservative” may think to the contrary, is essentially
left-wing, but it is difficult to see how an attack on the only Canadian symbol
that unites all Canadians – aboriginal, English, French, and newer immigrants –
could genuinely serve the interests of Native people. (1)
I will note here, for whatever it is worth, that on the day
of Pallister’s press conference, the first attack on his words that I came
across was on the local CBC. The
segment, which was formatted as a news report although it was in reality an
editorial, was by a well-known local reporter and featured as an “expert” a man
on the faculty of the University of Manitoba who was described, amusingly in my
opinion, as a historian. Both men are
notorious for their left wing views, both are lily white, and both have British-Scandanavian
family names. The following day both
the Association of Manitoba Chiefs and the Southern Chiefs Organization issued
press releases condemning Pallister and his remarks which it would probably
have been fairer to these organizations to not have mentioned as the bigoted
and ill-informed terms in which they are written do them no credit whatsoever,
but white leftists appear to have been the ones that got the ball rolling on
this anti-Pallister campaign.
That ball has been picking up speed ever since. Helping it along have been a number of
defections from Pallister’s Cabinet and staff, starting with the resignation of
Eileen Clarke who had been Minister of Indigenous and Municipal Relations. The portfolio was then given to Alan
Lagimodiere, the Member of the Legislative Assembly for Selkirk. Although Lagimodiere is Metis, his
appointment has not exactly improved the situation for Pallister as he began
his opening speech in this office by saying that those who established the
Residential Schools “thought they were doing the right thing”. This is, as
Colby Cosh has pointed out, “a flat factual truth”. Obviously, a great many Canadians today are
of the opinion that they were not doing the right thing. Ordinarily, when people in one era do
something that they think is right and people of a later era, with the benefit
of hindsight, conclude that what was done was actually wrong, the latter do not
refuse to credit the former for the sincerity of their intentions. In this case, however, the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission has so poisoned the well of discussion with its
interpretation of the schools as a “cultural genocide”, a vile expression which
is a dishonest, morally outrageous, Marxist trick by which cultural
assimilation, whatever one might think about it, is treated as if it were the
equivalent of mass murder, which it is not, that it is impossible to speak the
truth Lagimodiere spoke without provoking an irrational, emotion-driven,
backlash. Needless to say, matters
have not been helped by the mainstream media’s having, in what constitutes criminal
incitement that has spawned a massive wave of hate crimes, spun the discovery of
graves lacking markers near the former Indian Residential Schools into a malicious
blood libel against our country and her churches. Lagimodiere was quickly interrupted by Wab
Kinew, the present leader of the provincial socialists who ever since taking
over that role from Selinger has been making his predecessor look better by
comparison, a rather difficult undertaking indeed. My personal
opinion of Kinew you can probably deduce from the verse about Pallister above. Kinew, applying the current left wing dogma
that nothing positive must ever be said about the Residential Schools and those
who established and ran them, a dogma which if applied retroactively would
condemn even Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner Murray Sinclair, told
Lagimodiere that he could not do the job to which he had appointed while
thinking the way he does.
Since then, there have been more resignations, more
condemnations and ultimatums from the chiefs, and more calls from the
progressive media for Pallister to step down.
If only all of this were in response to what he has done
wrong – suspending our constitutional rights and freedoms, treating in-person
social interaction which is both bonum in
se and absolutely essential to our wellbeing as if it were a crime,
destroying small local businesses, declaring religion and worship to be
non-essential but places that peddle mind-destroying , highly addictive, substances
to be essential, basically turning the province into a police state for a year
and a half, and holding normal life ransom in order to bully us all into
accepting a medical treatment whether we have made informed decisions as to
whether the benefits sufficiently outweigh the risks or not – rather than to
what he has done right – refusing to go along with the wholesale demonization
of Canada, her European Christian settlers, and her historical founders and leaders,
by the left which can only ever tear down and never build up, the media that is
so totally in its thrall, and those Native leaders who have shortsightedly joined
forces with the left.
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