The 28
April, 2025 Dominion election has come and gone in Canada and we have elected
our forty-fifth Parliament. This is what
a Dominion election is about. We go to
the polls to choose who will represent our local constituency in the House of
Commons, the lower house which along with the Senate, comprises Parliament, the
traditional institution in which by ancient prescription the legislative powers
of the Crown are exercised. This is good
and as it should be.
The members
of Parliament are divided into factions which we call parties. An unfortunate side effect of a Dominion
election is that one of these parties wins a larger number of seats than the
others. If that party wins 172 seats,
they have an outright majority of the seats in the House. If they win less than 172 but more than any
other party they have a plurality of the seats.
In either case, this party is said to have “won” the election and is customarily
invited by the King or, more commonly, his vice-regal representative the
Governor General, to form the next government. The King, Parliament, civil service, and
courts are all “the government,” of course, but in a narrower sense of the term
the government consists of the ministers who make the day to day decisions of
the King’s Privy Council, the institution in which the executive powers of the
Crown are vested. The leader of the
winning party becomes the first minister of His Majesty’s government, the prime
minister who chooses a cabinet of other executive ministers to head such
ministries as finance, transportation, and dog-walking.
In this
election, the Liberal Party won a plurality that came just short of a majority.
Initially this was reported as 169 seats
but a recount in Lower Canada has since reduced it to 168. I found this outcome disgusting and
appalling. The Grits have been in power
for the last ten years during which period they have: 1) sabotaged the
country’s economy, 2) waged war on the memory of her founders and historical leaders,
3) showed alarming disregard for their accountability to Parliament, 4) trod
roughshod on the basic rights and freedoms of all Canadians supposedly
protected by the Charter they are always patting themselves on the back for
introducing in 1982, 5) shoved the insane cultural revolutionary ideas
regarding sex, gender, race, and the like that are currently called “woke” down
everyone’s throats, 6) reignited the national unity crisis that had finally
died down after the first Trudeau premiership, 7) brought in an inexcusable
number of new immigrants exacerbating the housing and affordability crises they
the Liberals had created, 8) adapted and encouraged provincial governments to
adapt policies that enable and encourage rather than hinder and discourage a
lifestyle of drug abuse, 9) repeatedly attempted to take control over what
Canadians say or think on the internet in the name of fighting “hate” while
presiding over and tacitly encouraging a huge wave of hate crimes directed
against Christian churches, and 10) took what Pope John Paul II had dubbed the
“culture of death” to the nth degree as over the course of their decade in
power euthanasia was first legalized for those already dying, then expanded to
include virtually everyone else, and actively promoted to such an extreme that
even the United Nations condemned it. I
could say more, but I’ll limit the list to one each for each of the years they
have been in power. The point is they
did not deserve another term in office, much less an increase in their seat
count.
Four months
ago, when Captain Airhead, having made himself the most loathed prime minister
in the history of Canada – if not the entire Commonwealth – finally got the
hint and resigned, we were more sick and tired of the Liberals than we had ever
been. Their comeback cannot be
attributed to the qualities of the man who replaced Captain Airhead. An economist by education, Mark Carney spent
most of his career in banking, investment and central. He was an advisor to his predecessor and so
could not credibly claim to be a clean break from him, especially when it was
obvious that he was Captain Airhead’s hand-picked choice as successor. He completely lacks his predecessor’s
charisma and bears an uncanny resemblance to James Bond’s archnemesis Ernst
Stavro Blofeld as portrayed by Christoph Waltz in the Daniel Craig films. These aren’t the makings of someone capable
of breathing new life into the corpse of a political party.
That the
Liberals won another term and even increased their seats to four short of a
majority is all the more astonishing in that the Conservatives also gained
seats. In fact, the Conservative seat
total went up by twenty four since the previous Dominion election. The Liberals only gained sixteen seats. The collapse of the New Democratic Party is
what made this possible. The NDP went
from twenty-four seats to seven, losing seventeen seats and their official
party status. That the NDP was reduced
to single digit seats and that Jimmy Dhaliwal lost his own seat and stepped
down as leader of that awful party I would count among the positive outcomes of
the election with one caveat, that they are part of a larger shift that is not
positive. The Lower Canadian separatists
also lost ten seats and the Green Party lost one bringing its seat count down
to one, that of its former leader Elizabeth May. That the Liberals and Conservatives both saw
large seat increases, while the smaller parties saw devastating losses, is
indicative of a shift on the part of the electorate to thinking in terms of a
two-party rivalry. That is the way the
American system operates. It is not how
ours is supposed to operate.
That brings
us to the reason for the Liberal comeback.
It is almost entirely due to foreign interference in the election. No, not interference by Red China, of the type
the Liberals have been trying to cover up for years. Interference by the leader of Canada’s oldest
frenemy. I hate to use this pop culture
portmanteau but no other word adequately describes the relationship between the
United States and Canada. Canada and the
United States were founded on opposite principles and ideals. The United States was founded on the idea of
cutting ties to the Christian civilization of Great Britain and Europe and
establishing from scratch a new secular country based on ideals derived from
abstract reason. In other words she was
founded on liberalism. In defiance of
this concept, Canada was founded on loyalty, on retaining ties to British and
European Christendom, and adapting the institutions of the old country to the
circumstances of the new. In other
words, she was founded on conservatism. This
would make the two countries natural enemies.
Nevertheless, for most of our history we have enjoyed the world’s
longest undefended border, have been each other’s largest trade partner, and
fought on the same side in two World Wars and several other global conflicts. This is how friends behave. So, frenemies.
The current
president of the United States is a man allegedly
recruited by the KGB in 1987.
If true, his seeming attempts to engineer the collapse of international
trade and history’s biggest stock market crash since his re-election last year
become explicable as the actions of the ultimate Communist sleeper agent
seeking to destroy capitalism from within. It
would not be the first time a Communist was elected president of the United
States running on the Republican ticket. Whatever the truth of that
may be, about the same time he started dropping tariffs the way his
predecessors dropped bombs, Krasnov the Orange began saying that our country
should become his country’s fifty-first state.
Initially this seemed like a joke at the expense of Captain Airhead, but
he has kept it up ever since, including a particularly loathsome social media
post addressed to the Canadian electorate on the day of the election.
That
Carney’s Liberals were able to translate Krasnov’s threats into enough votes
for themselves to come back from political death is clearly the explanation of
their victory but the explanation itself needs an explanation. After all, the idea of Canada becoming an
American state is abhorrent and loathsome to almost all Canadians including
those, like myself, who find the thought of voting Liberal just as repugnant. The idea that the Liberals are the best
choice for dealing with Krasnov’s Anschluss threats makes no sense. The Liberals have a new leader with no
political experience, their own policies are largely to blame for the economic
weakness that Krasnov is exploiting, and, most importantly, the Liberals have
always, since the nineteenth century, sought to more closely integrate Canada
with the United States.
While it
was Brian Mulroney who signed the US-Canada Free Trade Agreement with Ronald
Reagan in 1988, this was in betrayal of his own party’s traditional
position. Free trade with the United
States was always the position of the Liberals.
Sir Wilfred Laurier ran on a platform of free trade – he called it
“reciprocity” – with the United States in 1891.
The same year, Goldwin Smith, a Liberal intellectual, published a book Canada and the Canadian Question in
which he maintained that Confederation was a mistake and that Canada should
seek to join the United States. John
Wesley Dafoe, who for the first half of the twentieth century edited the Winnipeg Free Press, which then as now
was a Liberal – big and little l – newspaper, and was Sir Wilfred Laurier’s
biographer, entitled his history of our country Canada: An American Nation (1935). The absence of “North” was
deliberate. Dafoe saw Canada as the same
kind of country as the United States, a country built on the foundation of
liberalism by breaking ties with Old World Christian civilization, albeit by
means other than a war of independence.
This interpretation of Canadian history is the Liberal interpretation,
what Donald Creighton, who like myself vehemently disagreed with it, called the
“Authorized Version.” Even in the 1960s,
when the Liberal Party leadership fell into the hands of Communists, it
remained the party of Americanization.
Lester Pearson, who had been an informant of Elizabeth Bentley’s Soviet
spy ring in the 1940s and who betrayed Canada’s traditional loyalties in his
actions in the Suez Canal Crisis to serve the interests of both the United
States and the Soviet Union, acted on behalf of JFK when he ousted Diefenbaker
in 1963. His successor, Pierre Trudeau,
who had visited the Soviet Union towards the end of Stalin’s regime as a
delegate to a Communist conference and as a far left journalist helped engineer
the “Quiet Revolution” against established Roman Catholicism in Lower Canada in
the 1950s, who admired Mao and basically never met a Communist he didn’t like,
as prime minister in the 1970s and 1980s, got all his inspiration for his
“communist” innovations from American models – LBJ’s “Great Society”, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the American
Bill of Rights. More recently, Captain
Airhead was a disgustingly obsequious “Amen
Charlie” to the American president, at least when Obama and J. Brandon
Magoo held the office.
To
summarize, the Liberal Party’s track record is such that they are the last
party in Canada that ought to be trusted with handling a threat of being
swallowed up by the United States.
It turns
out that they did not need a reliable track record in standing up to the United
States on behalf of Canada to be elected.
All they needed was to make standing up to the United States and more
specifically Krasnov the central issue of their campaign. By doing so, they aligned themselves with the
thinking of most Canadians that an existential threat to our country must be
treated more seriously than any other matter.
And yes, despite the efforts of some who ought to know better to pretend
otherwise, Krasnov’s rhetoric does indeed constitute an existential
threat. Lying through his teeth about
his country subsidizing ours to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars[1],
Krasnov keeps claiming that the only alternative is for us to become an
American state. If we became an American
state, our country would cease to exist, therefore this rhetoric, however much
worded politely in a Corleoneish “I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse”[2]
manner, constitutes an existential threat.
By treating
Krasnov’s threats to Canada as the central issue they were the Liberals were
able to win an election they did not deserve to win. For the Liberals to win, the Conservatives
had to “lose”, that is, if increasing your seat total by twenty-four deserves
to be called “losing.” The Conservatives
did not win the plurality or the majority that they had seemed on track for
winning until Krasnov opened his big mouth, but a Dominion election is not the same
sort of zero-sum, winner-take-all affair as an American presidential election. That is not how the Westminster parliamentary
system works. The Conservatives as the
second largest party remain His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and in a much
stronger position than before apart from the fact that their leader lost his
own seat.
No, that is
not my trying to put a positive gloss on a disappointing outcome. If there is one thing Canadians need it is a
better understanding of and appreciation for our constitution.[3] As for disappointment, my disappointment in
the composition of the forty-fifth Parliament lies in the fact that the
Liberals won and not that the Conservatives lost. Maxime Bernier has been saying, ever since he
lost the race for the Conservative leadership to Andrew Scheer and formed the
People’s Party of Canada that the Conservative Party is now conservative in
name only. He seemed to devote most of
his energies during this campaign to telling this to audiences of American
television stations which may explain why the People’s Party’s portion of the
vote dropped to below 1%. As it so
happens, I agree with his assessment of the Conservative Party although I
reject Bernier’s measuring stick for determining conservatism. Bernier’s standard of conservatism is what
has been called conservatism in the United States since World War II which is a
form of what everyone, everywhere else in the world, calls liberalism. It is a better form of liberalism – lower taxes,
freer markets, a lighter state, basically everything ancient Israel asked of
Rehoboam after the death of Solomon – than what currently goes by the name
liberalism in North America – basically, what Rehoboam, following the bad
advice of the young and ignoring that of the elders who had advised his father,
gave them - but it is still properly called liberalism rather than conservatism. If the Conservative Party were actually
conservative in other than name it would have won this election hands down because
there would not have been the slightest doubt that it was the best choice to
stand up to Krasnov’s bullying. Real conservatism
is about protecting the good things that have been handed down to us and
passing them down to those who will come after us, about adapting traditional
institutions rather than inventing new ones from scratch, about respecting the
sacred and refusing to subordinate all of life to the values of the
marketplace. A Conservative party that was
actually conservative – or better yet actually Tory[4] –
would have seen Krasnov’s suggestion that Canada join the United States as an
offense against everything for which it stands.
Having said
that, I think that actions that cost the Conservative Party the votes they
would have needed to win were mostly those of others than the party leader and
those actually running in the election.
The Alberta premier’s warning that the country would face a national
unity crisis if the Liberals won the election most likely had the opposite effect
of what was intended. In my youth, Lower
Canada would frequently use the threat of leaving and breaking up Confederation
to obtain what it wanted from the Dominion government. This was not well received out here in the
prairies and I very much doubt the similar rhetoric from Alberta took well
outside that province. Danielle Smith in
this case should probably be viewed as the messenger rather than the one making
the threat. On election night, as the
results from Atlantic Canada started to come in and the Liberals took an early
lead but well before the outcome of the election could be reasonably called, I
observed Albertan hotheads commenting in online threads about how they were
done with Canada, were going to leave and take their province with them, and
basically carry on like crybaby Hollywood liberals do every time they lose an
election. [5] It was rather satisfying, amidst the
disappointment of the Liberal victory, to see these types lose.
Then there
was the commentary from the Conservative Party’s supporters in the media. Yes, these are vastly outnumbered by Liberal
Party supporters in the media, but they do exist. Their approach to Krasnov and his threats did
not do the Conservative Party any favours.
Initially, when the threat was only of tariffs they justified Krasnov by
saying that his demands were not unreasonable and were that we do things we
should be doing for our own sakes, like crack down on fentanyl. They
were not entirely wrong, except in that Krasnov seemed to be demanding that we
prevent people from leaving our country the way Communist countries used to
(further evidence that he is KGB?)
Unfortunately, this persisted long after Krasnov’s threats had gone from
tariffs to Anschluss.
Worse, these
commentators often came across as mocking and ridiculing Canadians for being angry
at Krasnov’s attacks and for standing up for our country. The more responsible Conservative
commentators, like Brian Lilley, were careful to direct such criticism only
towards the Liberals and NDP and not for expressing Canadian patriotism in
itself but for their hypocrisy in having spent the last ten years bashing the
country, her history, and her heroes. Less
careful commentators, however, often came across as suggesting that the only
ones expressing Canadian patriotism were the Liberals and the Left in general
or even as mocking Canadian patriotism in itself. I
recall one commentator describing the booing at the American
national anthem at sporting events as “jingoism at its worst.” Seriously?
The president of the neighbour country says that our country shouldn’t
exist and should be swallowed up by his and booing his country’s national anthem
in response is a worse form of jingoism? As with the “I’m going to take my province and
leave” types, there is satisfaction in seeing the sort of person with so little
judgement or taste as to express such nonsense lose.
Unfortunately
the price of such satisfaction is having to put up with the premiership of
Blofeld, whom Krasnov seems to adore.
God Save
the King!
[1]
Krasnov was referring to the United States’ trade deficit with our country and
to our insufficient spending on defense.
Even if the trade deficit was as large as that, and it is not, it is
much smaller and disappears when energy exports are taken out of consideration,
it would not amount to a subsidy, because a trade deficit is not a
subsidy. A subsidy flows in
one-direction, from subsidizer to subsidized.
A trade deficit is what happens when two parties are exchanging cash for
other goods in both direction, and party A buys more of party B’s goods for
cash than party B buys of party A’s goods.
Party A is not subsidizing party B, because party A is getting party B’s
goods in return for his cash. In the
case of Canadian and American trade the only thing that resembles a subsidy is
the fact that the United States buys energy resources from us at well below the
market value. That is us subsidizing the
United States, not the other way around.
As for our insufficient spending on defense, while I find this
objectionable it does not amount to the United States subsidizing us and is in
fact our business and not Krasnov’s.
There is only one country that has ever tried to conquer Canada, and
that was the United States in the pre-Confederation period of the nineteenth
century. Krasnov’s claim that the United
States has been “protecting” us is identical to when a different kind of “Don”
sends his thugs to a shop owner to collect a payout with threats to the effect
of “This is a pretty nice place you got here.
Would be a pity if something were to happen to it.”
[2]
Okay, maybe the “Don” in the
previous note is not such a different kind from Krasnov after all.
[3]
Among the things they need a
better understanding of is the fact that a constitution is a set of governing
institutions, the system by which they operate, and the traditions that inform
and shape them and not a piece of paper that magically prevents the government
from abusing its powers. If Canadians understood
this better, they would not commit such errors as to think that Canada had no
constitution prior to 1982, that the Liberals gave us our constitution in 1982,
or that the Charter is our constitution (it is part of our constitutional law,
but not the whole of our constitutional law, much less the constitution itself)
and would be more enraged at the offences the Liberals keep committing against
our constitution.
[4]
A Tory is a specific kind of conservative
by the meaning of the word I have provided in the text of this essay. Conservatives tend to prefer monarchy, Tories
are monarchists and royalists, respect for the sacred is part of conservatism,
orthodox Churchmanship of Toryism.
[5]
Many Albertans and
neoconservatives elsewhere in Canada see Alberta as the most conservative
province in Canada. This, however, is
based on making American “conservatism”, i.e., the older form of liberalism,
the standard of conservatism. By the
standard of actual conservatism, Alberta is arguably the least conservative
province in Canada. It has been, at
least since the oil boom, the province of the young and the rootless, by which
I mean that a large part of its population are people who moved there from
elsewhere in Canada, from the United States, and from further abroad in their
youth in the hopes of becoming rich.
