In my 29 January essay, The Canadian Right Needs to Reclaim its Roots and Stop Looking Southward for Inspiration, I said this of the Alberta separatists:
All that I have to say about this group in particular is
that while they claim to speak for all of their province, I have too high a
regard for the province named after Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter than to
believe it to be entirely populated by inbred, knuckle-dragging, troglodytic,
ass-tards as would have to be the case for these to be their legitimate
spokesmen.
The results of the Alberta referendum on Monday have, I
believe, proved my judgement to be sound on this point. There were ten
questions, the relevant one being the tenth, which read:
Should Alberta remain a province of Canada, or should the
Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian
Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta
should separate from Canada?
In the end, Alberta voted overwhelmingly to remain in the
Dominion, with a little over three-quarters voting to remain and a little under
a quarter voting for pursuing the path of separation.
The referendum and the separatists calling for it had been
heavily promoted by the neo-conservative media. The same people who,
rightly, have decried the war which progressives have been waging against the
memory and legacy of, among others, our first prime minister Sir John A.
Macdonald, have been the loudest cheerleaders of a movement aimed at undoing
that legacy, defeating the Confederation Project that Macdonald spearheaded,
and breaking up the Dominion he and the other Fathers of Confederation fought so
hard to build. Canadian neo-conservatives are in no danger of succumbing
to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s hobgoblin, with or without the oft-dropped “foolish”.
It was with much amusement that I read the headline of the
article by Clayton DeMaine reporting the results on Juno News, the
neo-conservative e-zine on Substack founded and edited by Candice Malcom and
Keeane Bexte. The headline read “Nearly 1 in 4 Albertans Vote Against
Staying in Canada.” Bravo. If there is an agency somewhere that
hands out awards for spinning your side’s loss as a win, this surely deserves
at least a nomination.
When I refer to such people as neo-conservatives, note that I
am using the word in its Canadian sense. The American sense of the word
is more familiar. In the United States the term neo-conservative refers
to the most hawkish element of the Republican Party, those who believe in a Pax
Americana in which the United States is the world’s policeman, perpetually toppling
regimes that they supported up to yesterday, in order to keep the world safe
for democracy, capitalism, and Israel, not necessarily in that order. In
Canada, neo-conservative refers to those who say they are conservatives, small
or big c, but give to this term its contemporary American meaning rather than
its traditional Canadian meaning. As a further point of clarification, it is
Canadian neo-conservatives of the small-c variety, especially the alternative
media and social media types, rather than those of the big-C variety (i.e. the
Conservative Party, its members and supporters) who have been cheering on the
Alberta separatist movement.
Traditional Canadian conservatism is the more legitimate
type. The United States was built on the foundation of classical
(Lockean) liberalism and its two parties are not the equivalent of the Canadian
Conservative and Liberal parties. If there is any direct correspondence between
American and Canadian parties it is between the American Republican
party and the Canadian Liberal party, both of which are descended from
seventeenth century Whiggery. The United States neither had nor wanted a
“conservatism” at the national level until the middle of the twentieth
century.
Canada was founded on her older, more traditional and more
legitimate, conservatism. The original English Canadians were the
Loyalists who opposed the American Revolution. Their conservatism was
that of Great Britain, modified by the acceptance of some early Modern
innovations but still recognizably descended from the seventeenth century
Toryism that opposed the Puritan Whiggery that was the ancestor of classical
liberalism and the American, French and eventually Bolshevik Revolutions.
French Canada, which having been ceded to the British Crown shortly before the
American Revolution and thereby avoided going through the French Revolution
that followed on its heels, was less Modern and more traditional than English
Canada prior to the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. When the two worked
together in Confederation in the 1860s to form the Dominion of Canada, it was
in order to build a country that did not throw away her past in revolution,
that adapted the time-tested institutions of parliamentary government under a
reigning royal monarchy that she inherited to her situation rather than
inventing new ones, and that tried to hold on to the older idea that there are
virtues higher than those of commerce and industry and that it is the pursuit
of these rather than the other that is the foundation of civilization.
It will come as no surprise to long-time readers that I have no sympathies
whatsoever with Canadian neo-conservatism no matter how often their views on
such-and-such a particular issue may happen to line up with my own. My long time wish for my country, Canada, is
a restoration based on the principles of Confederation in 1867, and for
Canadian conservatism that it would remember and recover its roots, preferably
bringing into itself more of the Toryism from which it is descended. These are moves in the opposite direction to
that the neo-conservatives desire. David
Warren once said that a conservative is a Tory who has lost his religion and a
neo-conservative is a conservative who has also lost his memory. As someone who both by instinct and by
application of the principles of orthodox Christianity is a royalist and
monarchist rather than a worshiper of the Modern idol of liberal democracy, I
call myself a Tory rather than a
conservative and am also quite comfortable with the self-application of the
term reactionary. As someone who calls
himself a patriot rather than a nationalist and knows that true patriotism is a
natural love of country akin to love for one’s family rather than the internal compulsion
to see one’s country through the eyes of an ideal of “greatness” I see no
reason why the stupid things that the Liberals have done while in power should lessen
my love of Canada. I naturally, therefore, have no sympathies with those who are
incapable of criticizing the Liberals without turning it into an opportunity to
condemn our country in the process and who wish to throw away our country’s
older, better, more authentic conservatism for the latest model of the American
conservatism that is less than a century old and whose roots run no deeper than
Modern liberalism. Especially when they
wish to do so at this moment in history when American conservatism has been
captured from within by a movement, MAGA, which has betrayed the promise and
potential it showed at its start about a decade and a half ago and rapidly become
a cult that idolatrously worships its thuggish leader even as he degenerates into
more and more of a caricature of what his enemies have thought him to be all
along on a daily basis.
Had the Canadian neo-conservatives been more interested in
our country’s own traditional Tory conservatism they might have been familiar
with Stephen Leacock who in 1937 published a book entitled My Discovery of the West. In
this Governor General’s Award winning book, an account of a lecture tour he had
given in western Canada after his retirement from McGill University the
previous year, he wrote the following:
It used to be said
that the last shot fired in defence of British institutions in America would be
fired by a French-Canadian. It looks now as if there would be one more shot
after his. It will be from the gun of an American whose name will be something
like John Bull McGregor. His people
will have been among the McGregors of Mississippi and the Bulls of the New York
police: so he won't miss what he shoots at.
Had they read this with any degree of comprehension they
might not have been so quick to pin their hopes of undoing Confederation,
tearing Canada apart, and fulfilling the nineteenth century American dream of
Manifest Destiny on a separatist referendum in Alberta.
God Save the King!
