The Courts

This week we in the Dominion of Canada received some good news from the Federal Court.   It came about a week after we received bad news from the Court of Appeal in Upper Canada.   The good news consisted of a ruling.   The bad news, by contrast, was a refusal to rule, or even to hear a case.   I take this as further support for my long-established opinion that the courts of Upper Canada are the most corrupt in the Dominion.   Except maybe the courts of British Columbia.

 

The bad news was that the Upper Canada – for those who insist upon being slaves to the present day, the contemporary and the up-to-date, this is what you would call Ontario – Court of Appeal had refused to hear the appeal of Jordan Peterson, the well-known psychologist, educator, author and philosopher, in his case against the province’s College of Psychologists, the body that issues his professional license.   The College had ordered him into sensitivity training because they didn’t like something he said on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.   The remark had nothing to do with his professional practice and was entirely political – he said something uncomplimentary about Captain Airhead.   That no professional licensing board ought to be able to discipline one of its members for expressing these sort of opinions in this way is a no-brainer.   Although Peterson could have just told the College to take a hike – he has not used his professional license in years and is not dependent upon it financially – he opted to take them to court and fight for the principle at stake.   Anybody whose job or career requires a professional license and who does not want the licensing board to be allowed to act as a proxy censor for his political or ideological opponents by blackmailing him into changing his opinions or keeping silent about them by holding a gun to his license should be grateful that someone was willing to do this.  

 

It should have been an easy win for Peterson.   The College of Psychologists was 100% in the wrong and should have been slapped down hard by the courts.   Instead the Divisional Court ruled in their favour.   By refusing to hear Peterson’s appeal, the Court of Appeal has closed the door to taking the case to a higher court.   You can only appeal rulings, not refusals to consider.   The right of a court to refuse to hear a case is for the purpose of preventing the judicial system from being swamped by trivial and nonsensical nuisance suits.   Like the man who dreams that his neighbour’s dog has torn up his flower bed and then repeatedly tries to sue his neighbour for damages.   This case is nothing like that.   The principle at stake - that professional licensing boards must not be allowed to serve as proxy censors for those who wish to “cancel” someone for his opinions – is vital and fundamental.   The Upper Canadian Court of Appeal, by abusing its right of refusal in this way, has demonstrated that it is no longer worthy of possessing that right.

 

The good news was that the Federal Court has ruled that Captain Airhead acted unreasonably in invoking the Emergencies Act on Valentine’s Day in 2022.   Captain Airhead, in case you are unfamiliar with him, is the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.   He has occupied the office of Prime Minister in His Majesty’s government in Ottawa since 2015.   He resembles nothing so much as the result of an experiment at producing a golem using bovine excrement rather than mud and the word  שֶׁקֶר (sheker, “lies”) rather than אֱמֶת (emet, “truth”).   The official story, however, is that he is the son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.  However he got here, we are in the ninth year of his misgovernment and everybody is pretty much sick of him.  

 

In 2022, we were going into the third year of the world-wide panic over a novel respiratory virus that proved to be more of a nasty strain of the flu than that apocalyptic, super-plague ala Stephen King’s The Stand that politicians, journalists, and the legal dope-peddlers that long ago supplanted the legitimate medical profession, claimed it to be.   By January 2022 the world was re-opening but Captain Airhead, who in the last Dominion election had flip-flopped and come down hard in favour of requiring people to take the experimental and inadequately tested new vaccines that had been rushed to production, hurling the most abusive terms in the liberal dictionary against anyone who thought correctly that the choice to be injected with such a substance must be strictly voluntary, doubled down and imposed new vaccine mandates as they were being lifted in other jurisdictions.   One such new mandate was on long-distance truck drivers who haul freight across the border with the United States.   In response, these truck drivers organized the biggest protest against heavy-handed, draconian, health protocols that Canada had yet seen.   Trucks from all over Canada formed the Freedom Convoy that descended upon Ottawa and encamped in the streets outside of Parliament.   It was an entirely peaceful protest that posed no threat to Canada’s national security.    The protesters basically threw a long, extended, block party in which they patriotically celebrated Canada and her traditional basic freedoms and exercised those freedoms in ways like associating with each other in large numbers, in person and close up that before 2020 we all took to be our basic Common Law right but which the politicians and health bureaucrats had been treating as crimes against humanity for two and a half years.   Their demands were quite reasonable – that the government abide by the constitutional limits on its powers, respect our fundamental freedoms, and stop committing the actual crime against humanity of forcing people, by denying them access to employment and society unless they comply, to agree to be injected with a foreign substance the safety of which they were not fully persuaded.  

 

Captain Airhead and his cronies refused to meet with the protesters to discuss their grievances, called them all sorts of bad names and accused them of all sorts of other political agendas that had nothing to do with the single-issue cause that brought them to Ottawa.   Then, on 14 February, Captain Airhead announced that he was invoking the Emergencies Act.  The Emergencies Act is a piece of legislation that was passed during the premiership of Brian Mulroney in 1988.  It replaced the War Measures Act that Captain Airhead’s father had invoked to crush the FLQ in the October Crisis of 1970.   In both cases this was major overkill.   The Emergencies Act like the War Measures Act gives the government extraordinary powers of detention by putting the governed under what is essentially martial law.   It came into effect immediately upon being invoked, although both Houses were required to confirm it.   When it became apparent the Senate was not likely to do so, Captain Airhead withdrew the invocation, but by this time the damage had been done.   The thuggish Ottawa police, led by one Steve Bell whose actions were so disgraceful that in my opinion the Canadian contemporary Christian artist of the same name might want to consider changing his, with the free rein given them had charged into the throng of protesters on horseback, trampling on some, beating others with batons, spraying many with pepper spray and tear gas, and otherwise brutalizing people who merely wanted the basic freedoms supposedly guaranteed to them by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms restored.   They were arrested in droves, their vehicles were vandalized and confiscated, and across the country the bank accounts of people who had donated to the protest were frozen.

 

In accordance with the requirements of the Emergencies Act an inquiry was called and while Captain Airhead attempted to frame the inquiry so that the light of its scrutiny fell upon the protesters rather than the government he led, he did not succeed in this.   During the proceedings, in which Captain Airhead and his ministers testified, the government claimed that it had received expert legal advice that the Emergencies Act was necessary and that the conditions for invoking it had been met but when asked to share that advice hid behind the privilege of counsel.   Despite their not being forthcoming with the supposed grounds of their thinking the use of the Emergencies Act was justified, in February of 2023 Justice Paul Rouleau who headed the inquiry declared that the findings of his commission were that the “very high threshold” for invoking the Emergencies Act had been met.   That this was not the case was obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together.   Rouleau’s ruling was widely dismissed as yet more Liberal Party cronyism.   Perhaps there is another explanation, but in any case, even had it ruled otherwise, the Public Order Emergency Commission was a toothless body that only had powers to investigate and give an opinion, not to make its findings binding in any way.

 

The Federal Court, by contrast, is a real court.   Its decisions are binding in law and affect future rulings.   When, therefore, its Justice Richard Mosley ruled that the government’s invocation of the Emergency Act “does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness – justification, transparency and intelligibility – and was not justified” this ruling has much more weight and potential consequences than had it come from Rouleau’s Public Order Emergency Commission.   It amounts, for example, to a ruling that Captain Airhead and his Cabinet broke the law.   Not just in the sense of a misdemeanour or even a regular felony.  They broke the law in what is arguably the worst possible way in which politicians can break the law.   Without meeting the requirements of the safeguards placed in the Emergencies Act to prevent this very situation, they invoked the Act in order to make use of the extraordinary powers it grants government in situations of real emergency and did so in order to essentially declare war on Canadians who posed no threat to national security and who were merely, peacefully if noisily, demanding that government abide by the constitutional limits on its powers.   We all knew at the time that this is what they were doing, this is what the testimony before the Public Order Emergency Commission indicates even if that body ruled otherwise, and now the Federal Court has affirmed it.

The only honourable thing left for Captain Airhead now – and for Chrystia Freeland and anyone else involved in that debacle – is to resign, and not just resign but follow the lead of David Lametti, who had been Minister of Justice and Attorney General at the time, and get out of politics altogether.   Unfortunately, people like Captain Airhead and Chrystia Freeland have no honour, and if they ever heard the word would probably have a conversation that would go like this:

 

Chrystia Freeland: “Duh, what’s honour?”

Captain Airhead: “Duh, I don’t know, a dress?”

Chrystia Freeland: “Duh, that’s sexist!”

 

My apologies for making Captain Airhead and Chrystia Freeland seem more intelligent in the above than they actually are.   It is difficult to invent dialogue that reaches their level of imbecility.

 

So they are likely going to cling to power to the bitter end.   Fortunately, coming so soon after a year in which what was left of their popularity rapidly swirled down the drain and was gone, this is probably going to hasten that end.

 

The Federal Court ruling could not have come at a better time.   Tucker Carlson, formerly of FOX News, now with the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, came up to Alberta this week to speak in Calgary and Edmonton.  He took our government to task for its promotion of Christophobic hate, for its promotion of social and cultural capital eroding mass immigration, for its insane MAID (medical assistance in dying) program and its equally insane drug policy (harm reduction through safe supply).   Needless to say, I have no objections to what Carlson said on these matters and probably agree with 98% of it if not higher.   It very much amused me to see Captain Airhead’s remaining flunkies, such as Steven Guilbeault whose past as an eco-nut ought to have disqualified him from his current position of Minister of Environment, have kittens over his speeches.   It is almost as comical as the mainstream media’s attempts to portray Carlson as a promoter of “white supremacy”.   One can only hope they continue to lay it on thick, because the more they do so, the less meaning that expression will have, and the sooner the day will come when liberals will no longer be able to use it as a stick to beat and frighten people with.    Most amusing of all, however, was how Carlson packaged his appearance by saying that he was coming to “liberate Canada” from Captain Airhead.  

 

This is funny on two levels.  There is the level intended by Carlson, which was basically the verbal equivalent of poking Captain Airhead in the eyes or pulling some other similar gag from the Three Stooges.   Then there is the level unintended by Carlson – the hilarity in the very idea of an American “liberating” Canada or anywhere else for that matter.   Americans believe their country to be uniquely built on liberty, and in a way that is true, but the American concept of liberty is basically what you get when you take the ancient heresy of Pelagianism and the Puritan version of Calvinism and produce a Hegelian synthesis from these antitheses. This is a pale substitute for freedom as conceived by pre-Modern orthodox Christianity, which flourishes best under the reign of a king, like our own King Charles III.    “Freedom” as John Farthing put it “wears a crown”.   The United States was founded in revolt against the order of Christendom, as modified in the English Reformation, and as Loyalist Canada inherited it.   As far from our roots as we have come, I note, that eventually, our Federal Court, ruled against the legality and constitutionality of Captain Airhead’s most egregious overstep over the powers of his office.   In Carlson’s own country, four years ago, Donald the Orange, winning a larger number of votes than when he was first elected president, somehow lost the election to J. Brandon Magoo, who was unpopular even among Democrat voters - how he got the nomination is something of a mystery, and who didn’t campaign.   Magoo, who obviously belongs in a rest home somewhere, is equally obviously the puppet of somebody else who is actually governing the United States in line with the globalist-internationalist-high immigration-free trade-invade-the-world-invite-the-world consensus that prevailed during the Bush I-Clinton-Bush II-Obama administrations and against which Donald the Orange had successfully campaigned.   For four years Americans have been kept from having any kind of serious national discussion about the shenanigans that clearly must have taken place for Magoo to have won that election, by the fear of reprisals from the regime.   This fear was instilled by the Magoo regime’s successful efforts to portray the events that transpired on Capitol Hill, Epiphany 2021 as an “insurrection” against the American order supported by the past president.   Before being ousted from FOX, Carlson broadcast film footage that cast serious doubt upon that narrative of which there had already been plenty of good reasons to be suspicious.   Captain Airhead in the narrative he tried to spin about the Freedom Convoy in invoking the Emergencies Act was clearly trying to import into Canada the narrative that has worked so well to prop up the Magoo regime in the United States.   He failed, however, to make the inquiry into the Emergencies Act a witch hunt for his political enemies, the way the Democrats have made the inquiries into the Capitol Hill incident a witch hunt against Donald the Orange and his supporters.   The inquiry was into his actions, not those of the Freedom Convoy.  When the Commission ruled in his favour, an actual Court finally ruled his actions to be illegal. Let us pray, for Tucker Carlson’s sake and for the sake of his country that the lies propping up the Magoo regime will meet with a similar fate.

God Save the King!