The last time the old Conservative Party was led by someone
whose political philosophy I would feel comfortable acknowledging as my own was
almost a decade before my birth. The Right Honourable John G.
Diefenbaker, who became leader of the Progressive Conservative Party when it
was in Opposition in 1956, led it to victory (a minority government) in the
1957 Dominion election, shortly before winning the party’s largest majority in
percentage of seats ever the following year. Reduced to a minority
government again in 1962, Diefenbaker’s government fell in 1963 when Tommy
Douglas’ socialists and the right-wing Social Credit Party both supported
Liberal leader Lester Pearson when he called for a vote of no confidence
because of Diefenbaker’s refusal to allow Washington D. C. to dictate policy in
Ottawa on the matter of the nuclear arming of the Bomarc missiles.
Pearson, who had betrayed his country to the Stalinist regime in the Soviet
Union when he was attached to our Washington embassy in World War II (see the
testimony of Elizabeth Bentley before the American House of Un-American
Activities Committee), and betrayed the entire Commonwealth to both the Soviets
and the Americans when he sided with these powers against the alliance of
Britain, France, and Israel in 1957 as a Minister in the government of Louis
St. Laurent, was here acting on behalf of John F. Kennedy’s government in the
United States. Diefenbaker continued to lead the party in
Opposition for the next four years, which saw the shining moment of his entire
career, when he led the Conservatives in fierce opposition to the new flag of
1965, the first major step taken by the Liberals during the long period in
which they were led by Lester Pearson and his successor Pierre Trudeau to
radically re-invent the country, and strip it of the most visible symbols of
its Loyalist heritage and identity. In 1967, Diefenbaker was
replaced by Robert Stanfield as party leader in a leadership convention that
was the culmination of two years’ worth of effort on the part of Dalton Camp,
then the party president (which is not the same thing as party leader) to oust
him.
While I admit that Diefenbaker’s performance in the office
of Prime Minister was far less stellar than his performance in the office of
Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, his political philosophy was what I
admire most about him. He was a fierce defender of Canada’s Loyalist
history and heritage, the traditional institutions derived from these such as
the monarchy, Parliament, and the Common Law, and the symbols of all of these,
such as the old flag. While most if not all of his successors have
paid lip service to much of this, it has never been with his passion. He
opposed all threats to Canadian freedom, whether it was the external threat
posed by increasing American cultural and economic influence – or, as in the
case of the Bomarc missiles incident, political influence – or the internal
threat posed by the subversion of Parliamentary tradition, the exponential
growth of the civil service, and the alarming way in which the government was
increasingly treating the latter as a means of bypassing the former to govern
by bureaucratic regulation rather than Parliamentary legislation.
His views are best stated in his own words in the speeches collected in
his Those Things We Treasure (1972). This book and
John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown (1956 – posthumously
edited by Judith Robinson) are the two classic texts of the political
philosophy associated with the old Conservative Party from Sir John A.
MacDonald to John G. Diefenbaker, a Canadian version of classical British
Toryism. Sadly both books have been out-of-print for years, although
Diefenbaker’s has been fairly easily and inexpensively obtainable through
used-book stores. (I first obtained a copy from Black’s Vintage
Books in Winnipeg, sadly no longer around, when I was still a theology student
in college. I had to send away for Farthing’s book when my
attention was drawn to it by Ron Dart several years later.) The
classic text of the religious philosophy underlying this political philosophy,
expressed as a jeremiad over the latter’s failure, was George Grant’s Lament
for a Nation (1965), which remains in print.
After Diefenbaker was ousted, the leadership of the
Progressive Conservatives fell alternately to people who were more-or-less
socialists in Conservative garb, like Stanfield, and had little-to-no problem
with increasing bureaucratization and its threat to Canadian freedom, or to
people who were basically big business liberals in Conservative garb, like
Brian Mulroney, who promoted free trade with the United States, which
throughout Canadian history had been a Liberal Party policy, and who had
little-to-no problem with increasing American economic and cultural influence over
Canada. It was while Stanfield led the party that a
"conservative movement" outside of the party began to form to oppose
what Pierre Trudeau's Liberals were doing and lobby for conservative causes,
obviously because it was felt that the Party was failing to do this.
While the organizations and publications that made up this movement
fought for good things for the most part - to give one example, Colin Brown
founded the National Citizens Coalition in 1975 to fight for government fiscal
accountability against Trudeau's huge deficits - it lamentably tended to ignore
the classical texts of Canadian Toryism mentioned in the previous paragraph and
look for inspiration to the American conservative movement. This
led to a blindness in the Mulroney years. They could perceive that
Mulroney had little interest in combatting the sweeping social, moral, and
cultural changes that were quickly being introduced as a result of Pierre
Trudeau's having given the Supreme Court powers similar to its American counterpart
by adding the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to the constitution (although to
give credit where credit is due Mulroney was the last Conservative leader to
attempt to pass legislation restricting abortion after the newly empowered
Court struck the existing laws down in 1988) and thus in that sense was way too
far to the Left like Stanfield, but failed to recognize that the problem
stemmed from unnaturally grafting an element of the American republican system
onto our system of Crown-in-Parliament where it neither belongs nor fits (a
mistake Tony Blair would later make in the United Kingdom) and to see
Mulroney's reversal of traditional Conservative opposition to free trade with
the United States for the betrayal it was. It was during the Mulroney
years that the conservative movement allied itself with a populism that had
been growing in the Western prairie provinces in response to the exceedingly
arrogant way in which they had been treated by Ottawa under Trudeau and how
Mulroney had offered little in the way of redress. Together they
formed a new party, the Reform Party of Canada.
This was not the first time conservatism and populism had
been united in Canadian history. John G. Diefenbaker, as explained
above, was the last Conservative leader to fully represent in a way that did
more than lip service, authentic traditional Canadian Toryism, but he was also
a prairie populist reformer, a role that arose naturally out of his early
career as a defence lawyer in Saskatchewan. W. L. Morton, who was
head of the history department at the University of Manitoba and the author of
the Kingdom of Canada and a Canadian historian second only to
Donald Creighton was, like Creighton, a traditional Tory, and, unlike
Creighton, a strong advocate for fairer representation of the West in the
Dominion government. Diefenbaker and Morton, however, combined
traditional Toryism with Western populism. The Reform Party
combined a neoconservatism that looked for inspiration to the United States with
Western populism and this was not a good mix. Ironically, they gave
their party what had originally been the Confederation era name of their
despised foe, the Liberals. Also ironic, but in a less amusing way,
their dividing the right-of-centre vote with the Progressive Conservatives kept
the Liberals in government from 1993 to 2005.
Realizing that their division would only keep the Liberals
in perpetual power, the Progressive Conservatives and the Reform Party began
"Unite the Right" discussions in the late 1990, partially merging
into the Canadian Alliance in 2000 and then fully uniting into the present
Conservative Party of Canada in 2003. They have had four leaders since
then. The first of these was Stephen Harper, who became Prime
Minister with a minority government in 2006, won a majority government in 2011,
and served as Prime Minister until 2015. When Captain Airhead led
the Liberals back into government in the Dominion election of that year, Harper
stepped down, was briefly replaced by Rona Ambrose as an interim leader, before
Andrew Scheer was chosen as the next leader. Scheer performed
incredibly poorly in that role, being initially too cautious as Opposition
Leader, then essentially throwing away an election that was practically being
handed to him by Captain Airhead with his self-destructive heaping of scandals
upon scandals, with his, that is Scheer’s, one shining moment coming in March
of last year, when he resolutely opposed the Liberals’ attempt to use the
pandemic to escape Parliamentary oversight for two years. At this
point, however, it was too late to salvage Scheer’s leadership, and Erin
O’Toole was chosen as the next leader.
Erin O’Toole has now set the record for the shortest time it
has ever taken for a Conservative leader to so disgust me that I vowed never to
vote for anyone in the party as long as he led it. It took Stephen
Harper until the last year of his premiership, when he introduced legislation
to enhance the powers of government to invade the privacy of Canadians and spy
on them, to do that. Erin O’Toole has not even been leader for a
full five months yet and he has already managed to do so.
On Monday O’Toole
announced that he would be seeking to kick Derek Sloan out of the party
caucus. Sloan is the Member who represents the Upper Canada riding
of Hastings-Lennox and Addington in the House of Commons. Although
he is a quite young MP – he is in his mid-thirties and was elected for the
first time in the Dominion election of two years ago – he was one of O’Toole’s
rivals in the leadership race last year. He had become a target of
the Left earlier that year when he asked the question of whether Theresa Tam,
the federal chief medical mandarin, was working for Canada or China. The
Left assumed this to be a racist question based upon Tam’s ethnicity, although
the question naturally arises out of the possible conflict of interests between
her position in Canada and her role in the World Health Organization over which
Red China has held an inordinate amount of influence, especially under its
current director. Sloan, a Seventh Day Adventist, is also a strong
social conservative who opposes abortion, gender-identity discrimination
legislation, and the Liberal government’s current attempts to ban conversion
therapy. O’Toole’s announcement was based upon the revelation that
Sloan had received a donation from Paul Fromm. On Wednesday the party voted to expel Sloan from
the caucus.
Sloan’s response to this, appropriately, was to call out
O’Toole for his blatant unfairness and hypocrisy. Sloan could not
have been reasonably expected to have known that the donation came from Paul
Fromm since he had used his first name, Frederick, in making it, nor, would I
add, is it reasonable in a free country to expect people who receive donations
to vet their donors to make sure they are not guilty of some sort of
crimethink. That is the unfairness – the hypocrisy is in the fact
that the party took a cut from the same donation and had sold a membership to
the donor.
This incident illustrates the biggest problem I have with
the post-Diefenbaker leadership of the Conservative Party whether of the
Left-leaning Stanfield variety or the American neo-liberal Mulroney
variety. They have all been terrified of being labelled “Far Right”
and since they have allowed the Liberals and the socialists to define the “Far
Right” and attach this label to whomever they wish without serious challenge,
this has meant that they have allowed the Liberals and the socialists to
dictate the acceptable parameters of thought within their own
party. Back in the period alluded to earlier, when discontent with
the performance of the Progressive Conservatives had led to the creation of
first a conservative movement and then the Reform Party of Canada, Dalton Camp,
the party official who had orchestrated the backstabbing of Diefenbaker, was a
regular commentator on the CBC. He was frequently part of a panel
with Erik Kierens of the Liberals and Stephen Lewis of the NDP as the
Conservative representative to create the false impression of balanced
commentary (like Kierens he very much represented the Left wing of his own
party). Camp shared with his Liberal and NDP colleagues an
abhorrence of social conservatism or “the Religious Right” as he called it, and
regarded the phenomenon as both an import from the United States and the next
thing to fascism. This was utter nonsense, of course – most of the
things that the Religious Right railed against – abortion on demand, the
relaxing of laws and liberalization of attitudes towards sexual morality, the
driving of the Bible and Lord’s Prayer out of schools – came to Canada much
later than they did to the United States and consequently what social
conservatives wish to return to had remained the status quo here much longer and
had been the status quo much more recently(1). Indeed, the first
issue in the Culture War between the Left and the Religious Right in which the
Left's triumph in Canada preceded its victory in the United States was same-sex
marriage, and Camp could hardly have claimed the Religious Right's stance on
this issue as an American import because he died of complications from a stroke
the year prior to the first court-ordered alteration to the status quo of 1 man
+ 1 woman = marriage and three years before the Liberals introduced the bill in
Parliament that generalized the change. The leadership of the
Conservative Party, however, was terrified of the accusations coming from the
Liberals, the NDP, the Left-dominated mainstream media, and their own Dalton
Camp, that the social conservative ideas of the conservative movement and
the new Reform Party were dangerously" Far Right".
That by taking this stance they were helping to move the
centre of the Canadian mainstream dangerously close to the "Far Left"
never seemed to occur to them.
Everything I have just said with regards to the social,
moral, and religious issues of the Culture War also applies to the issues
pertaining to immigration, nationality, and race except that with these issues,
the Progressive Conservative Party leadership was even quicker to concede to
the Liberals and to the Left the right to define a consensus and the acceptable
parameters containing that consensus from which all dissent would be excluded.
The capitulation was more complete. Furthermore, the
leadership of the Reform Party joined in this concession with regards to
these issues.
What is the consensus that the Liberals and their
further-to-the-Left allies, given this free reign, imposed upon Canada?
It amounts to this: if you are white, discriminating against
someone who is not is about the worst thing you could do, and the law must
protect others against your discrimination by giving the government the power
to punish you with complete and total economic and social destruction, but you
yourself must have no protection under law against discrimination, because you,
being white, are incapable of being discriminated against, and if you complain
about or even notice the unfairness of this then you are an evil, prejudiced
bigot, a racist, a Nazi, who must either be re-programmed or completely
excluded from society.
The Liberal Party worked hard at establishing this double
standard which is utterly repugnant morally and completely indefensible
intellectually as consensus, or rather state-imposed dogma, during the
premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau. In 1970
Parliament passed a bill introduced while Pearson was Prime Minister that added
sections 318-320 to the Criminal Code which created several new offences each
having to do in some way with "hate propaganda". This was
entirely unnecessary because anything criminalized by these sections that
really ought to be against the law was already against the existing laws
against inciting crime and violence. The existing laws were
superior in every way because they protected all Canadians alike.
In 1977, Trudeau's Liberals rammed the Canadian Human Rights Act through
Parliament. Despite the title, this bill had nothing to do with
ensuring that such basic rights as life, liberty, and property were guaranteed
to all people in Canada or in protecting anybody in Canada from the abuse by
the state that is the first thing that pops into most people's minds upon
hearing "human rights violations". The Act was entirely
about dictating to Canadians that they could not discriminate against each
other on the grounds of race, sex, etc. in their private lives. It
established an investigatory body to look into accusations of discrimination,
and a tribunal to hear the charges. Since it is considered
"civil law", the accused are denied the rights they would have as
defendants under criminal law. The reality, however, is that it
punishes the "crime" of wrongthink. Although the law is
written in such a way as to make the offence reside in the act of discriminating
rather than the race/sex/whatever of the complainant and the accused so that in
theory, the white person turned down from a job by an employer who only hires
people from his own Asian or African nationality ought to have just as strong a
case as someone in the reverse situation, that is not how it works in
practice. The Commission that investigates and the Tribunal
that hears these cases operate on an Animal Farm, "some
animals are more equal than others" basis, which is, of course, how the
Trudeau Liberals instructed them to operate from the beginning. In
the few instances when anybody has ever bothered to question the uneven way in
which this law is administered, the answer has always been to point back to the
intent behind the law, to protect "vulnerable minorities".
It is, of course, incredibly bad practice to allow the intent behind a
law that is worded in such a way as to suggest that it protects everybody from
racial discrimination to overrule the wording and turn it into a law that
protects people from some races and not others, but then, the law itself is bad
because it unnecessarily extends government control into the private lives of
Canadians to the point of telling them what they can and cannot be thinking
when interacting with others when all that was really called for was for the
government to lead by example in not practicing colour discrimination
itself. That, however, would have required going back to the
policies of John G. Diefenbaker, the Conservative Prime Minister who
militantly opposed racism and whose vision for the Dominion of Canada was one
of national unity, which he believed in so strongly that he made it the title
of his three volume memoir One Canada, instead of following the bad
example of the Americans, who at least had the sense to call their earlier and
equivalent law a "Civil Rights Act".
The protecting "vulnerable minorities"
justification for all this bad legislation and practice has grown in its
rhetorical force from then until now and Pierre Trudeau's foul offspring has
just trotted it out again in support of his upcoming efforts to seize even more
control over what Canadians are allowed to think and communicate to each
other. Its rhetorical force should have shrunk. At the
time it was first evoked, 96% of Canadians were white. This is no
longer the case today, indeed, we are
at the point where whites becoming a minority is on the near horizon, but the
voices from the Left telling us that everybody else belongs to a
"vulnerable" or "disadvantaged" minority that needs
increased government protection against whites are becoming louder, more
stringent and more hysterical by the day. Don't expect those
same voices to come to the defence of whites when they become a minority and
one far more vulnerable than any other in Canada has ever been due to decades
of this anti-white propaganda. The demographic transformation just
alluded to is the direct result of immigration changes introduced by Lester
Pearson and Pierre Trudeau. I don't mean the points system
introduced by Order-in-Council in 1967. It is itself an admirable
and fair way of processing applications based upon individual merit, although
the Pearson Liberals do not deserve the credit for eliminating racial
discrimination from immigration policy that the Liberal Interpretation of
Canadian History - what Donald Creighton dubbed "the Authorized
Version" - assigns them because Diefenbaker had already done that in
1962. I refer rather to a number of changes introduced quietly,
unannounced, and with no fanfare, whereby the civil servants charged with
processing applications were told to give priority to applications from
non-traditional source countries over those from traditional source countries
with the result that "traditional Euro-British sources of immigration were
effectively shut off in favour of migrants and their extended families from the
Third World" (Kenneth McDonald, A Wind in the Heath: A Memoir,
Epic Press, 2003).
Instead of opposing all of this, as they ought to have done,
the Progressive Conservatives whether the socialist Stanfield types, the
moderate Joe Clark types, or the neo-liberal Brian Mulroney types embraced
it. Indeed, when Brian Mulroney took over the leadership of the
party he basically sent out the message that opposition to the Trudeau agenda
on these issues would not be tolerated and that discrimination against whites
would be continued. As Prime Minister, in fact, he set out to
out-Trudeau Trudeau himself with regards to immigration. Perhaps
some of the Conservative leader were dense enough to think that Pearson and
Trudeau had been continuing Diefenbaker's "One Canada" vision rather
than subverting and inverting it. For the most part, however, they
were terrified of being labelled "Far Right" by the Liberals and the
press. The Liberals, in the Pearson-Trudeau period had attempted
the frighten the public into accepting their measures as necessary to fight a
non-existent "Far Right" threat, by creating a fake "Canadian
Nazi Party", which their media allies then splashed all over the headlines
and the television news. The Mulroney Conservatives, having
received the message, proceeded to pass it on when they gained competition for
the right-of-centre vote in the Reform Party. They ordered CSIS,
the spy agency created in the last month of the Trudeau premiership, to create
another fake neo-Nazi group, the Heritage Front, which the media again went
wild over. This was in 1989, two years after the Reform Party was
formed. The purpose seems to have been to smear the Reform Party by
association, a goal towards which they received assistance from lawyer,
activist and Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella in his 1997 book Web of
Deceit, which, in my opinion ought to be categorized as fiction, under
which genre it might actually deserve an award for its creative plot about the
imminent threat of a neo-Nazism working through the conservative
movement and the Reform Party to take over Canada. Note
this is the same Warren Kinsella, who should not be confused with the late
novelist W. P. Kinsella (W. P. stood for William Patrick, Warren is, I think, a
middle name), but who was, according to a Globe and Mail article
conveniently timed to come out just before the last Dominion election, hired by
Andrew Scheer's Conservatives to sling mud of a similar nature against Maxime
Bernier, Scheer's chief rival in the previous Conservative Party leadership
race, and his new People's Party of Canada.
Erin O'Toole has now followed the shameful examples of
Mulroney and Scheer. His motive is obvious enough - only a few
weeks ago he was jumped on by Captain Airhead, for giving an interview to Ezra
Levant's Rebel Media. Captain Airhead, who thinks that only media
that he subsidizes and which express views of which he approves, should be
allowed to exist, condemned the Rebel as being "Far Right".
If he had Ludwig von Mises concept of "Left" and
"Right" as a spectrum moving from total government control on the
Left to an absence of government on the Right, he might have had a point, as
The Rebel is quite libertarian, but I very much doubt he has read Mises or that
he possesses the capacity to do so. The interview, however, came
shortly before the incident on Epiphany when, as Donald the Orange was
addressing half a million of his supporters before the Washington Monument, a
smaller group entered the Congress building on Capitol Hill, took selfies and,
unfortunately in a handful of cases, got into violent skirmishes with the
Capitol Hill Police, all of which was blown up by the same media that supported
the BLM and Antifa anti-white hate riots that produced far more destruction,
violence, and death all across America, into the ludicrous lie of "Trump
incites insurrection". O'Toole, pissing himself, immediately
proceeded to proclaim how much he and the party he leads are against
"white supremacists", by which the media seems to mean anyone who
opposes anti-white racism and certainly everyone - all 75 million American
voters of them - who supported Trump. He also took the opportunity
to throw his own rival from last year's leadership race under the bus and out
of the party.
Well, perhaps he can instruct his party to stop soliciting
me for funds. I have not received a campaign contribution from Paul
Fromm, as I have never stooped so low as to run for office, but I have donated
to the Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform, the Canadian Association for Free
Expression, and the Canada First Immigration Reform Committee, all of which
were founded or co-founded by said Paul Fromm, whom I have known for
years. The first mentioned, which is also, I believe, the oldest is
"a group of aid reformers who eschew guilt and believe that population
control and free enterprise are the key to development". I
took that definition from the Glossary in my personally inscribed copy of Down
the Drain? A Critical Re-examination of Canadian Foreign Aid written
by Paul Fromm and James P. Hull and published by Griffin House, Toronto in
1981. Fromm and Hull's approach to foreign aid has always made more sense
to me than the Liberal policy of taxing poor people in rich countries to
subsidize rich people in poor countries, never more evident than under the
current Prime Minister. The Canadian Association for Free
Expression was founded shortly prior to when Brian Mulroney became Prime
Minister which was also around the time that Canada's two most publicized
trials for crimethink began, those of Ernst Zuendel, the German born graphic
artist and publisher who resided in Toronto and James Keegstra, the school
teacher and mayor from Eckville , Alberta. CAFE is committed to the
classical liberal view of John Stuart Mill that speech, whether right, wrong,
or somewhere in between, ought never to be suppressed. While there
are many who would think that the cases of Zuendel, whose publications
included The Hitler We Loved and Did Six Million
Really Die?, and Keegstra, who taught his students that the Jews were
behind a conspiracy to dominate the world, stretch that principle past its
breaking point, these are, in my opinion, wrong. Cases like this
are not the breaking point of freedom of speech, they are its test.
Only those willing to stand up for freedom of speech, when it is opinions
that the vast majority find loathsome that the government is trying to
suppress, can truly be said to have passed that test - men like Paul Fromm and
the late Doug Christie, who was the lawyer in both of these cases.
If the state is allowed to get away with suppressing extremely unpopular
opinions, it will move on to suppressing less unpopular opinions.
In Canada we have moved from the government persecuting a man for saying that
Hitler's victims were significantly less than six-million in number all the way
to where the government is trying to tell us that we cannot say that someone
born with a penis and testicles and who has XY chromosomes is a man if he
self-identifies as a woman. Give the state censors an inch and they
will take a mile. Pastor Martin Niemöller said "First they came for the socialists,
and I did not speak out-Because I was not a socialist. Then they came for
the trade unionists, and I did not speak out-Because I was not a trade
unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out-Because I
was not a Jew. Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak
for me". It astonishes me that there are those familiar with this
poem and the story behind it who miss the point completely and will get
offended at the application I am about to make. In 1984 - a rather
significant date don't you think - they came for Ernst Zuendel and James
Keegstra, and Doug Christie and Paul Fromm spoke out! Everyone who
values the freedom our country was built upon - Richard Cartwright famously
expressed the spirit of Confederation by saying that he preferred British
freedom over American equality - and for which we have always been told our
country went to war against Hitler, would do well to look to that example.
The progressive media, of course, in their lust to help
O'Toole crucify Sloan, has been calling Paul Fromm such names as "white
supremacist" and "neo-nazi", as have those members of the
neo-conservative press who have defended Sloan on the same grounds on which he
defended himself. Mr. Fromm has never applied such terms to
himself, which the media have thrown against him for decades, but has always
eschewed and disavowed them (I once witnessed him do so to someone who actually
was a self-proclaimed National Socialist). He has referred to
himself as a "white nationalist" but I remember that when he started
doing this the term had not developed the connotations it now has and simply
meant something along the lines of an advocate for the rights of white people,
similar to what groups like the NAACP are for black people in the United
States, and I have never gotten the impression that he meant it in any other
way. He should, perhaps, have foreseen the way the term would
evolve. I never liked the term, although I believe that now more
than ever, open advocates for the rights and liberties of white people, who are
demonized by racist hate groups such as BLM and Antifa with the full support of
the media and the politicians and who are officially discriminated against, are
needed. It confuses "race" with "nation" for
one thing. For another, nationalisms of any sort tend to conflict
with my Tory political philosophy. One's monarch is the proper
object of political allegiance, not a people, race, or nation, and in association
with one's monarch, one's country, which is a place, one's home writ large,
although not merely in the sense of a location on a map, but a place vested
with tradition and history, expressed in its institutions, and including, of
course, those who live there. This is what the old patriotic cry
"for King and country" meant.
This brings me back to Diefenbaker.
Diefenbaker, because he was the last Conservative leader -
and the last Canadian Prime Minister - to really embrace "King and
country" or "Queen and country" Toryism in a wholehearted way,
was the last Conservative leader and Prime Minister capable of taking the
strong stand against racism that he did, without replacing it with racism of
another sort, as the Liberals who governed after him did. This is
precisely because "Queen and country" is the only object of
allegiance which can truly provide civil unity and harmony. As W.
L. Morton put it "Any one, French, Irish, Ukrainian or Eskimo, can be a
subject of the Queen and a citizen of Canada without in any way changing or
ceasing to be himself." (The Canadian Identity, University of
Toronto Press, 1961, 1972) If that sounds like Pierre Trudeau's
"mosaic" vision of "multiculturalism", understand that
Trudeau's doctrine is actually a mockery of this. Instead of uniting
diverse people in loyalty to their Royal Sovereign so that they can all
participate in the country over which she reigns in a way that makes the
history, traditions, and legacy of freedom of that country their own, Trudeau's
doctrine turned diversity itself into an object of cult worship that keeps them
divided so that bureaucrats can increasingly manage their lives and rob them of
the freedom that is the property by right of all Her Majesty's subjects.
If Erin O'Toole really believes that "racism is a disease of the
soul" then he would do better to lead his party back to what it was when
Diefenbaker led it rather than to win Captain Airhead's approval by repeating
his totalitarian rhetoric about "It has no place in our country" and
opportunistically ejecting a rival from the party's caucus, over his
unknowingly having received a donation from the man who has for decades been
the most courageous opponent of the only racism that is truly a problem in
Canada today, the racism that has been enshrined in law since 1977,
anti-white racism.
(1) This also shows how utterly absurd the
expression “Red Tory” is. Originally, Gad Horowitz coined the term
to refer to traditional Tories like George Grant who had some positive views of
socialism. Grant, a strong social conservative who warned that in
the legalization of abortion the essence of fascism was coming to North
American under the guise of liberalism, did not like having this label applied
to him. Dalton Camp, who was a Mulroney Conservative until Mulroney
became a free trader – it is to Camp’s credit that he abandoned the Mulroney
camp over this – embraced the label. Grant wrote his Lament over
the fall of the Diefenbaker government, Camp was responsible for ousting Diefenbaker
from the party leadership. Any term coined to refer to the one and
appropriated by the other cannot possibly express anything meaningful.
