Still Standing - a Reactionary Tory in 2022

After the second of two anni horribiles in a row, the Kalends of January is upon us once again.   In the civil calendar this is New Year's Day and in the sacred Kalendar it is the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ.    When I began to write I borrowed a custom from one of my favourite writers, the late Charley Reese, a curmudgeonly, common-sense conservative, op-ed writer from the Orlando Sentinel with a thrice-weekly syndicated column.   At the beginning or end of each year he would write a column in which he talked about himself, his  positions, the causes he supported, and the organizations to which he belonged.   He encouraged other writers to do the same because he felt they owed it to their readers to regularly disclose these things so their readers would know where the opinions they were reading were coming from.   Reese's column would come out in late December or early January on a day his column was scheduled to appear.   Since I self-publish my essays on a blog and can keep my own schedule I have always timed mine to come out on New Year's Day.

I am 45 years old.  I have lived in the city of Winnipeg for almost a quarter of a century.  I have lived in the province of Manitoba, of which Winnipeg is the capital, in the Dominion of Canada all my life.   I grew up on a farm in southwestern Manitoba near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers, and studied theology for five years at what is now Providence University College (at the time it was called Providence College and Theological Seminary) in Otterburne, about a half-hour south of Winnipeg.

There are two words that I regularly use to describe my general point of view in all of its aspects - political, theological, philosophical, cultural, etc.   These are reactionary and Tory.  The former has long been a term of abuse by progressives or leftists and I learned the habit of self-applying it from the late historian John Lukacs.   When I do so, I use it more in the sense in which he used it, and in which Michael Warren Davis uses it in his just published The Reactionary Mind: Why "Conservative" Isn't Enough, than in the sense that in which Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug, et al, use it, although by making this distinction I do not mean to disparage the latter who have written much that is worthy in criticism of the Modern and what has followed it.     In this sense it means someone who looks back to the social, civil, and religious order of Christendom, the civilization that preceded Modern Western Civilization, and rather than finding there darkness from which he thanks Modernity for rescuing us, finds goodness and light and a solid place to cast his anchor so as to keep from being tossed adrift on the stormy seas of Modernity and Postmodernity.   A reactionary then is very different from a conservative.   The latter is usually someone who values Western Civilization only for the achievements of Modernity, distinguishing himself from progressives merely by the fact that the strain of Modernity he prefers, is the older, somewhat saner, form of liberalism, rather than that of the increasingly looney left.

From what I have just said about being a reactionary, it should already be clear that when I describe myself as a Tory I don't mean a small-c conservative, although I usually agree with small-c conservatives in their disputes with progressives, much less a big-C Conservative.     I mean it in the sense of Dr. Johnson's famous definition as "one who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolic hierarchy of the church of England, opposed to a whig" and of T. S. Eliot's description of himself, which reads like an update of Dr. Johnson's definition, and goes " an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics."

When it comes to the political aspect of being a Tory, the "royalist in politics", I have been one all my life.   Although a subtle distinction can be made between a royalist and a monarchist - the former denotes loyalty to royal blood, the latter denotes loyalty to and belief in the institution and office of the monarch - I will use the word royalist to encompass both meanings.   I have always been glad that my country is a parliamentary monarchy, with Queen Elizabeth II as our head of state and the head of the family of nations, the Commonwealth, to which we belong, rather than a republic.   Like Anthony Burgess, one of my favourite novelists who had similar views, "I hate all republics", although I might make the long defunct Confederate States of America the exception that proves the rule, if only because the kind of people who would be most offended by my doing so are also the sort of people who irritate me the most.  As I learned the history of my country, I was very pleased - I don't like to use the word proud because Pride is the worst of all sins and vices - to know that Canada's history diverged from that of our republican neighbour because we chose the way of the older virtues of Loyalty to the Crown and Honour, over that of rebellion and sedition in the name of new-fangled abstract ideals.   I very much despise the way Modern man prefers abstract ideals over time -proven concrete institutions.    I am very much the opposite of that in my thinking, which is why I will defend parliament, the time-honoured institution that legislates under the reign of the Crown, but not democracy, the abstract ideal, and insist that this distinction is crucial.   It always infuriates me when certain small-c conservatives speak gushingly about democracy and disparagingly about the Crown.   The Honourable Eugene Forsey was raised Conservative, but became a socialist, was one of the founders of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (predecessor to today's New Democratic Party), worked as research-director for the Canadian Labour Congress, and was appointed to the Senate as a Liberal by Pierre Eliot Trudeau.   There were a great many issues on which his position was the polar opposite of mine.   Nevertheless, he was a great defender of Canada's constitution, about which he knew more than any other Canadian in history except the Fathers of Confederation, and of the monarchy and always called himself a "Sir John A. Macdonald Conservative".   I gladly acknowledge him to have been a brother Tory.  I would not extend the same courtesy to such small-c conservatives as Anthony Furey, Lorne Gunter, J. J. McCullough and Spencer Fernando who have expressed their preference for the republican form of government, even though on a wide battery of other issues I would agree with them.   I would recommend that they all read John Farthing's Freedom Wears a Crown.  The most totalitarian governments in history have been republics, the freest have been headed by monarchs.  The more I have read and reflected on political science over the years, the more confirmed I have become in a royalism that was at first instinctual.   A country needs a hereditary, unelected, head of state who is above partisan politics, and so can truly fulfil the role of the office of head of state, which is to represent the country as a whole, including not just all the various factions of those living in the present, but those who have gone before and who are yet to come as well.  Only a king or queen can do this.

I had what for Canadians of my generation was a fairly typical mainstream Protestant upbringing.   My mother attended the United Church in Oak River, my grandmother on my father's side subscribed to the Anglican Journal and the newspaper of the Brandon diocese, we were read Bible stories and said the Lord's Prayer in school, and celebrated the two main Christian holidays.   From the New Testament the Gideons gave me when I was twelve and Christian books I borrowed from the library, I gained a fuller understanding of Who Jesus Christ was, and why He died on the Cross and rose again.   When I was 15 I placed my faith in Him as my Saviour.   I was baptized in a Baptist church about a year and a half later and a couple of decades after that was confirmed as an adult in the Anglican Church.  Several years ago, Michael Coren, a writer who had been a prominent social and religious conservative, left the Church of Rome and joined the Anglican Church in which he was later ordained.   Nowadays, whenever he appears in print, he can be depended upon to consistently take the wrong position on whatever hot button topic he has been invited to address.   For Coren the move from Romanism to Anglicanism was a move from conservatism to liberalism, a move that I had suspected that he would one day take ever since I had seen him take the republican side in a in-print debate about the monarchy in the National Post years earlier.   My decision to join the Anglican Church was very different from this.   For me, it was the outcome of a deepening of my theological conservatism from a mere Protestant fundamentalism to a High Anglican orthodoxy.

There was an instinctual element to my theological conservatism as there was to my political royalism.   Even before my conversion theological liberalism had repulsed me.  By theological liberalism I don't mean the making of theological arguments for politically liberal positions.  I mean the approach to Christianity of those churchgoers who either pick and choose from the Creed what they want to believe and discard what they don't (keeping heaven and getting rid of hell is an obvious example of this) or profess a "belief" in the articles of the Creed that looks more like unbelief in disguise (think of the sort of person who says he believes in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ but means by it something that did not require Jesus' body to return to life and leave the tomb).    This sort of thing disgusted me before I was  a believer, and the disgust intensified when I became a believer.   Over the years I have come to recognize in what I call hyper-Protestantism something that is akin to theological liberalism in attitude and spirit and arguably its immediate ancestor.   Hyper-Protestantism goes beyond Protestantism's rejection of what can be clearly demonstrated from Scripture to be the errors of the Church of Rome and rejects everything it associates with the Church of Rome which is not absolutely required by Scripture even if it is genuinely Catholic, that is to say, held by all the ancient Churches that go back to the unbroken Communion of Churches of the early centuries, from those early centuries to this day.   I have come to be as repulsed by this attitude as by liberalism and as a consequence my theological conservatism has deepened and matured.

I hold to the fundamental truths of the Reformation as much now as ever.   The first of these is that the Holy Bible, Old and New Testaments, is the inspired written Word of God, and as such its authority is infallible.   The Church, whether it be the actual Catholic Church - all Churches that were once part of the unbroken Communion - or a particular Church, such as the Roman, that falsely claims to be the entire Catholic Church, is not infallible.   The Bible, therefore, is the infallible standard of truth, to which the Church is held accountable.   Hyper-Protestantism, however, takes this way too far.   Rather than merely saying the Church is not infallible, it assumes the Church - not just the Roman Church but the actual Catholic Church - to be wrong about everything, unless it is clearly, in the most literal way possible, proven by Scripture, and takes the position that it is better for the individual believer to ignore the Church and rely directly upon the Holy Spirit for understanding the truth of the Bible.   This, however, in effect, treats the private interpretation of the individual believer as infallible, which is a far worse error than that of Rome.   The promise of Christ that the Holy Spirit would guide to all truth, was not made to the individual believer but to the collective society of believers the Church, in the persons of the Apostles whom He had set as governors over the Church.   This did not make the Church infallible, but it means that personal interpretation must be subject to the teaching of the actual Catholic Church, just as the latter must be subject to the corrective authority of the infallible Word of God.

The second fundamental truth of the Reformation is that salvation in its spiritual sense of the restoration of the sinner to God's favour, including such things as eternal life and bliss, pardon for sins, and righteousness in God's eyes, is something that is utterly beyond the reach of our own efforts - we cannot achieve it for ourselves, earn it, or exchange anything for it - and so it has been freely given to us in the gift of our Saviour Jesus Christ, Who in His Incarnation, life, suffering, and death did everything necessary to accomplish that salvation and in His Resurrection and Ascension demonstrated it to be complete.   We merely receive our salvation as the gift it is in the only way a gift of this nature can be received - by faith, which is believing and trusting, believing the Gospel message that proclaims to us that God has given us a Saviour Who has taken away our sins, trusting Him to have accomplished for us what the Gospel says He has accomplished, which are, of course, the same thing stated two different ways.   Our own works - our efforts to please God by what we think, say, and do - as important, essential and necessary, as they are, contribute nothing to our salvation, but rather flow out of our salvation as the effect of its liberating and transforming aspects and our way of thanking God for it.    Our works cannot please God in any way, even the sense in which He graciously accepts the imperfect works of believers, if they are done with the intent of contributing to our salvation.   The Reformers stressed this truth which is so central to the Johannine and Pauline writings of the New Testament against the the teachings of the Church of Rome which, by the sixteenth century, had fallen so far from the grace of God, that not only did its teachings make salvation resemble a carrot dangled in front of a horse from a stick, but its Patriarch even stooped to the sacrilege and blasphemy of trying to sell salvation as a fund-raiser.   Hyper-Protestantism, however, in the name of this fundamental truth, rejects what the Scriptures and Catholic - not just Roman - doctrine clearly teach about the ordinary means God has appointed through which He works to bring the freely give grace (favour) Christ obtained for us on the Cross to us and to create in us the faith by which we receive it.   In the New Testament, Jesus Christ establishes a religious society called the Church, which people became members of through the initiatory ritual of baptism, appointing His Apostles as governors over the Church and committing to them the ministry of the Gospel, which included both teaching and preaching and the administration of baptism and the Lord's Supper, the Gospel Sacraments.    The Church, her Apostolic government, and her Gospel ministries of Word and Sacrament are the appointed ordinary means through which God works to bring the grace of Christ to us, and to create in us the faith by which we receive it.   Hyper-Protestants reject this in the name of the Reformation truth of the freeness of God's saving grace, but place themselves in a quandary with regards to the New Testament verses that taken literally, as hyper-Protestants usually claim they prefer Scripture to be taken, tell us that baptism unites us with Jesus Christ (Rom. 6:3-4, Col. 2:12) and that the food that sustains our spiritual life is the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ (John 6:53-58) which, of course, is offered us as food only in the Eucharist.   Since they see baptism and the Lord's Supper as works, things we do in obedience to God in order to please Him, rather than Sacraments, things through which God works to bless us, they see works salvation in the literal meaning of these passages, and must twist them to fit their theology.   Ironically, hyper-Protestants are themselves susceptible to the charge of works salvation.  If they are Arminians, they make faith itself into a work by making it into an act of our will by which we meet God's condition for salvation.   If they are Calvinists, they teach that God gave Christ to save only a limited few elect, and that we can only know we are of this elect by seeing the evidence of it in our holy lives, thus essentially telling us to place our faith in our works instead of Christ.   By contrast, the Catholic doctrine based on the literal meaning of the above passages is entirely consistent with the freeness of God's saving grace if Sacraments are understand, as they have been since the Church Fathers - see St. Augustine especially - as a visible, tangible, way of preaching the Gospel, and if it is understood that God works through extraordinary as well as ordinary means.

In both of the above examples of hyper-Protestantism twisting fundamental Reformation truths to attack genuinely Catholic doctrine as well as Roman error it is obvious that hyper-Protestantism is fundamentally rebellion against the legitimate authority God has placed in His Church and not just the exaggerated claims of Rome.    In rejecting the Patriarch of Rome's claim to supreme authority over the entire Catholic Church, the Reformers were actually taking the Catholic position for early attempts by said Patriarch to assert such supremacy were clearly rebuffed in the Ecumenical Councils.   Hyper-Protestants, however, reject the entire Episcopal College's claim to authority over the Catholic Church.   That claim, however, is founded in the Bible.   Jesus Christ gave the government of His Church to the Apostles, which governing authority could only be passed on to others from those who had it before, which is precisely what we see the Apostles doing in the New Testament when they admitted others such as Timothy and Titus to their government over the lower Orders they, on their Christ-given authority had created, the Presbyters and Deacons.   Dr. Luther taught the New Testament truth of the universal priesthood of all believers.   Hyper-Protestants conclude from it that if all Christians are priests, then Christ could not have established a more specific priesthood and set it over His Church.   This logic, however, would condemn the Levitical priesthood of the Old Testament, because national Israel was also described as a nation of priests (Ex. 19:6).   The accounts of the Last Supper, especially those of St. John and St. Luke taken together, make it quite clear that Christ established His Apostles as the new priesthood of His Church.   Compare the ritual footwashing described by St John at the beginning of his account (13:3-18) with the ritual washing when the Aaronic priesthood was established (Ex 40:12, 30-31).   Then note the institution of the Eucharist, the bread and wine of which clearly allude to the grain and drink offerings of the Levitical system, and which are proclaimed to be the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, the One effective sacrifice to which the animal sacrifices of the Old Testament pointed.   If it were not already obvious that when the Lord told the Apostles to perform this rite  He was telling them to do something only priests could do, note that the word St. Luke uses for "this do" in instituting the Sacrament while generally meaning "make this" or "do this" has a ceremonial meaning of "offer this".  The hyper-Protestant position smacks of the rebellious attitude of Dathan, Korah and Abiram.

The more I studied this the more I came to see how hyper-Protestantism led to theological liberalism, because the rejection of the legitimate albeit not-infallible authority Christ had placed in those He set over His Church and not just the false supremacy claimed by the Roman Patriarch was a step towards rejecting the infallible authority God had placed in His written Word.   Latitudinarianism paved the way for deism and rationalism, and Puritanism became the ancestor of both political liberalism (the Whigs began as the successors to the Puritan party in Parliament) and leftism (the French Revolution, the template of all subsequent Communist totalitarian revolutions, was itself inspired by the Puritan rebellion against the godly King Charles I).   This led me to place a much higher value on the ancient Creeds, the teachings of the Fathers, and the Councils of the early Church than I had before, and my theological conservatism matured into High Anglican orthodoxy.

The last two years have put a strain on these theological convictions, as the leaders, not only of the Anglican Communion, but the other Communions with an Apostolic ministry, have with few exceptions, submitted to the tyranny of the new false religion of Antichrist that has made an idol out of physical health to which it has demanded that spiritual health and wellbeing as well as psychological health and the health of society, economy, and community all be sacrificed.   Abusing the Keys Christ gave to the Apostles - not just St. Peter - they have locked people away from the Gospel Ministry of Word and Sacrament, not because of unrepentant open sin, but because a respiratory disease that resembles the flu far more than it does cholera, the Black Death, or any of the other far worse historical plagues that nobody ever behaved this stupidly over has been going around.   When they opened the Churches again, they imposed all sorts of "safety protocols" such as capacity limitations, social distancing, wearing masks, and in some cases, mercifully much fewer, vaccine passports , all of which are completely contrary to the example set by Him Who healed the sick that were brought to Him, including the infectious lepers, rebuked His disciples for sending the little children away, and promised that whoever comes to Him He would in no wise cast out.  Some of these, especially the masks and vaccine passports, are chillingly reminiscent of St. John's prophecy of the Mark of the Beast.   Christ promised, however, that the gates of hell would not prevail against His Church, and I pray that He will rescue her from this apostasy soon.

It is difficult to be a classicist in culture today in a practical rather than a merely theoretical sense because of the aforementioned false religion of Antichrist.   The medical Beast has locked me out of museums, the Centennial Concert Hall where I used to attend the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and Manitoba Opera, or anywhere else where edifying culture might be found, except libraries, because I refuse to be bullied into taking his vaccine.   Even if I were fully persuaded that the vaccine was 100% safe and effective I would not take it because the bullying manner in which it is being imposed on people is behaviour that ought not to be either rewarded or even tolerated by the civilized.   When I look at what the Winnipeg Art Gallery currently has on exhibition according to its website, and the current season of the Manitoba Opera, the loss becomes somewhat more bearable.   Having to miss Beethoven's Fifth a little over a month ago and Haydn's final symphony later this month is rather stinging however.   On the popular culture front I am also shut out of the movie theatres.   That is perhaps something to be thankful for.  Movies and television shows have been noticeably declining in quality for decades and this has recently accelerated.   Look at everything that is now being released through the online streaming platforms.  Or better yet don't.   It is all trying to preach the message of "wokeness", i.e., the racial superiority of people of colour, the sexual superiority of women, the normality of homosexuality and transgender identity and abnormality of heterosexuality and cisgender identity, the impending doom from climate change unless we all stop burning fossil fuels and start eating vegan, and other nonsense of the sort.   On the plus side, plenty of  classic older films, Shakespeare plays , and the like are readily available to stream as well, although the habit of spending all of one's time watching a screen is not one that ought to be cultivated.

Happy New Year

God Save the Queen!

Pallister is Under Attack for All the Wrong Reasons

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.

 

(1)   English Canada grew out of the United Empire Loyalists who parted ways with the Americans by declaring their loyalty to the monarchy when the Americans rebelled and became republicans.  It was the Crown’s guarantee of protection of French culture, civil law, language and the Roman Catholic religion in Quebec following the Seven Year’s War that preserved French Canadian identity and kept French Canada loyal during the American revolution and down through Confederation in which all the French Canadian Fathers joined the English Fathers in unanimous support for making the new country a parliamentary monarchy rather than a republic.  The Crown is the other signatory to the Indian treaties – Queen Victoria, whose statue was so insultingly treated by the left wing mob, was the reigning monarch when most of these treaties were made.   All new comers to Canada from whatever other country and background have sworn loyalty to the monarch and her heirs to become citizens.  Therefore the monarchy is the one and only national symbol that belongs to all Canadians, albeit in different ways, and thus unites them.    To attack this symbol as a symbol of “imperialism” and “colonialism” in the derogatory sense which Marxists attach to these words is to insult all Canadians of all races, religions, and languages.

Why We Need the Monarchy

With His Excellency, the Right Honourable David Johnston’s term as Governor General of Canada coming to an end a new vice-regal representative has been chosen. Her name is Julie Payette, she hails from Montreal, Quebec, and has an impressive resume albeit one that is rather unusual for the position for which she has been selected. At first a computer engineer, she underwent training as an astronaut in the 1990s and served in this capacity for most of the first decade of this century. Her experience as an astronaut included flights into space aboard both the Discovery and the Endeavour shuttles. The National Post quoted Robert Finch, the Dominion Chairman of the Monarchist League of Canada, as saying that this breaking of new ground in appointing someone whose experience is outside the political provides “a good opportunity for her to elevate that office right across the country.” Juxtaposed with Finch’s comments was one by Philippe Lagasse of Carleton University who is quoted as saying:

The reaction might be, well, look, why do we need Royals when we can have such stellar people as our head of state, as opposed to our head of state’s representative? It calls into question, I would say, the necessity of having the monarchy.

Thanks to decades of failure on the part of our educational system to teach our history and civics with the respect they deserve there are many, sadly, who would like to complete the Liberal Party’s agenda of Americanizing our country by turning it into a republic. While this sentiment is most often found on the left, there are, sadly, a number of prominent neoconservatives – or perhaps pseudoconservatives would be the more appropriate term – such as Anthony Furey, Lorne Gunter, and J. J. McCullough who have also indicated their support for republicanism. Conversely, of course, there are a handful of individuals on the left who as staunch monarchists are better conservatives than the aforementioned. Green Party leader Elizabeth May is one, the late leader of the NDP, Jack Layton, was another. The following is my answer to republicans, whether of the left or the phony right, who raise this question.

First, the false Canadian nationalism that says that we should become a republic and have someone who was born and who lives here as our head of state, goes against the very idea of Canada.

150 years ago the Fathers of Confederation had a certain idea in mind when they founded our country. The building blocks out of which they fashioned the Dominion of Canada were the provinces of the British Empire that had remained loyal when the Thirteen Colonies rebelled and which had fought alongside the British army in repelling the American invaders in the War of 1812. The idea the Fathers of Confederation had, was to join these provinces into a federation that would be large enough and strong enough to resist being pulled into the orbit of the United States whose institutions would not be drawn up from scratch based on the abstract ideals of Enlightenment philosophy, like those of the United States, but would be borrowed with some appropriate adaptation from those of the United Kingdom with which we would deliberately maintain our connection. The monarchy that America’s Fathers rejected, the Fathers of Confederation embraced and to say that Canada ought to replace the monarch with some other kind of head of state is like saying that the United States ought to abandon “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for “death, slavery, and the pursuit of misery.”

Second, a hereditary, royal, monarch is the best possible head of state. Although this is considered heresy in our democratic modern age it is nevertheless easily demonstrated to be true. A legislative assembly consists of elected representatives. Except for city-states small enough to include all of their citizens in the assembly this will inevitably the case. Our legislative assembly, the House of Commons, is formed by members elected as the representatives of constituencies. This, by the way, is the best way to elect an assembly. The alternatives, such as proportional representation, that are much touted by progressives today, would have the effect of producing a more partisan, ideological, assembly in which the representatives, even more than is already the case, would be accountable only to their party and its party line. This would in no way be an improvement. The members are ideological and partisan enough as it is, but it is the role of each to represent and speak for the interests of the constituency which elected him. None of them represents the country as a whole, nor do the parties to which they belong. Even the Prime Minister, who heads the party that commands at most a majority, often merely a plurality, of the elected members, does not represent the country as a whole. This most important of roles falls to the head of state. For the head of state to perform this role properly she must be above partisan politics. This cannot be the case if the office is filled by popular election. Consider last year’s presidential election in our southern neighbour, the hostility and division it generated and how the United States remains bitterly divided still.

There is another dimension to the way in which a royal monarch can represent the whole of a country in its unity better than any president. A royal monarch inherits the throne from those who reigned over the country in past generations and passes the throne on to those who will reign over future generations. A monarchy, therefore, embodies and represents the organic unity of a country over time. This is sorely needed in our day and age as a counter to the temptation to forget the past and ignore the future in pursuit of our interests in the present.

Those who point to the unpopularity of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales in comparison with his mother as an argument for breaking with the monarchy at the next secession fail completely to grasp these points. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are very popular indeed but the republicans see the relative unpopularity of the Prince of Wales in the present as an excuse for robbing future generations of a more popular king and queen. Furthermore, it is precisely the fact that the monarchy does not derive its legitimacy from the fickle whims of a present day electorate but from tradition, that the monarch can transcend partisan politics to represent the country as a whole. Those who make an idol out of democracy would do well to pay heed to G. K. Chesterton’s wise words about how “tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.”

It is a fiction of liberal and American thought that equates hereditary monarchy with tyranny. Plato and Aristotle knew better and warned that democracy was the seed from which tyranny springs. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is called both “the father of modern democracy” and “the father of totalitarianism” for a reason. The government should be the voice of the “general will” of the people, he maintained – democracy – and those who dissent from the general will must be “forced to be free” and if he resists exiled or put to death – totalitarianism. Those most susceptible to being corrupted by power are those who desire it for themselves and to be elected to office, a person must first run, thereby indicating his desire for power. Tyrants, typically, begin as demagogues who rally the masses behind them and history’s most notorious despots are those who saw themselves as belonging to and speaking for the common folk, as the first among equals or, in Orwell’s phrase “Big Brother.”

The monarch who, by contrast, stands in loco parentis to the nation is a safeguard against tyranny. Sir Winston Churchill famously observed that had we not at the insistence of the Americans forced the monarchs of Austria and Germany off their thrones at the end of the First World War, Adolf Hitler would never have risen to power. In our own country freedom, as John Farthing and Eugene Forsey pointed out, “wears a crown” and the Liberal Party started us down the path to Prime Ministerial dictatorship eighty-nine years ago by challenging the royal prerogative to refuse a requested dissolution of Parliament and so hold the Prime Minister accountable to the assembly.

Our monarchy is, as the Fathers of Confederation intended, the source of internal unity in our country. The first English Canadians were the Loyalists who refused to join in the Thirteen Colonies’ rebellion against the Crown, were consequently persecuted by the American republicans, and fled up here. It was also the Crown which offered protection to the language, religion, and culture of the French Canadians against Puritan bigotry and with whom the native tribes entered into treaties. Immigrants who wish to become citizens have been required to pledge their allegiance to the monarchy thus joining them into our national unity. The monarchy is also, however, and this is my final point, our connection with something beyond our own borders, something larger than our own country.

It is as Queen of Canada that Elizabeth II reigns over us. It is as the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland that she reigns over Great Britain. The distinction between the two crowns is an important one because the one country is not subservient to the other. That the same person wears both crowns is also important because it joins the two countries with each other – and with Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Grenada, Jamaica, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu over each of which Elizabeth II reigns as Queen. The crowns are distinct, none of these countries is subservient to any of the others, and each parliament passes laws for its own country and not for the others. Yet through the Queen who reigns over all of us we are connected.

A connection with other nations of this sort that in no way infringes upon our own right to pass our own laws and determine our own policies is a rare and precious heritage. The kind of “nationalism” that would throw this away is introspective and short-sighted and completely out of sync with the spirit of the Fathers of Confederation. Let us, as true Canadian patriots, ever be on our guard against this kind of thinking.

Congratulations to Julie Payette on her appointment. May she remember what Liberal nominees have been prone to forget in recent decades, that the job of the Governor General is to represent the Queen in Canada and not to represent Canada to the world.

God save the Queen!

The Monarchy is More Important Now Than Ever Before

Her Majesty Elizabeth II reigns over the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and her other Commonwealth realms and that reign has now surpassed that of Queen Victoria as the longest in our line of monarchs. This is reason to celebrate and to wish Her Majesty many more years upon the throne.

Unfortunately there are those who insist on spoiling occasions like this. One such person is Anthony Furey, former comment editor of the Ottawa Sun and columnist for the Sunmedia chain of newspapers. We are living in days of great confusion about our identities, as was evident in the recent media circus surrounding Bruce Jenner's apogynosis, and Mr. Furey is a confused individual of an all too common type - a liberal who thinks he's a conservative.

I don't mean he is a liberal in the contemporary North American sense of a progressive who believes in the nanny state, coddling criminals, and the soft tyranny of sensitivity classes and human rights tribunals. He is a classical liberal, a true believer, in Eric Hoffer's sense of that term, in capitalism, individual liberty, and democracy. That is better than the other kind of liberal, but it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference, and his Toronto Sun column of Sunday, September 6th, is one of those times. He choose this time in which we are rejoicing in Her Majesty's long reign to suggest that Canada severe our ties to her successors and become a republic.

That shows the kind of lack of class one would expect from a Grit or an NDP supporter. Perhaps not a Green supporter, as, while I would say that their leader, Elizabeth May, is wrong about many things, perhaps most things, she at least is a monarchist who understands the importance of the institution. It is most unbecoming, however, in a supporter of the party that calls itself Conservative, and is so to the extent at least that it takes seriously the eighth of their Founding Principles.

Furey begins his screed the way most republicans do, by talking about newcomers to Canada and projecting onto them puzzlement over why the "democracy" to which they have come to flee "tyranny, instability, or religious fervour" is a monarchy and not a republic "like our neighbours to the south". This is the updated version of an old liberal trick. It used to be, when the Liberals would attack our country's British heritage and institutions, they would do so in the name of French Canadians, not because French Canadians had told them these things were offensive to them, but because they assumed they would be. It was a dirty trick, for the Liberals wished to replace our country's British institutions and, not coincidentally, secure their hold on power in the country, by turning French and English Canadians against one another. They came very close to tearing the country apart. More recently, progressive opponents of the monarchy, usually from the NDP, have expressed this opposition in the name of New Canadians but this is the same old dirty trick - trying to turn Old Canadians and New Canadians against each other for political gain. One would think that no one who has moved to Canada in the last forty years bothered to find out any basic information, such as that it is a Commonwealth country and a constitutional monarchy, before coming here.

There will be a "crisis of confidence" in the monarchy at the next succession, Furey argues, which may very well be the case but it will not be due to any fault in the institution, but rather to republicans bent on stirring up trouble. Failing to grasp the distinction between the regality and dignity attached to the office of monarch with that of the person who holds the office, which latter is due in part to personal traits of character and in part to having absorbed it from the office during a long and successful reign, he states that neither Prince Charles nor Prince William carry the same "heft" as the queen, which could not reasonably be expected of them until they have reigned as long and as well as she has. He brings up the cost of converting all of our currency over to the name and image of the new monarch, ignoring the fact that this would have to be done if we converted the country into a republic as well, but with the additional cost of opening up the constitution again, which, the last time it happened, created a crisis that for the good part of two decades threatened to split the country.

Furey shows no understanding of either the country or the institution of which he writes. "Time to set us free", he says, but this is nonsense. The idea that to be free one must be a citizen of a republic rather than a subject of a monarch belongs to the country south of our border and was adopted by that country at a time when they were the largest slave-owning country in the world. One of the reasons the Americans rebelled against the Crown was that it had guaranteed the French Canadians the right to the practice of their Roman Catholic religion after the Seven Years War and they wanted all of North America to be Protestant.

Does this sound like their republic was a more free system of government?

We are free subjects of Her Majesty and if we are less free today than we once were it is entirely due to acts of our elected officials. Furthermore, much of the legislation that has lessened our freedom has been done by our politicians in imitation of laws first passed by the American Republic. Income tax, which takes far more out of our pockets than any other tax, which requires us to hand over our records of employment to the government, and for the government to maintain a large tax collecting agency, was introduced by the Americans temporarily in the 1860s, then permanently in 1913. We introduced it in 1917, the year the Americans entered the war we had already been fighting for three years. The expansive social security network that we call the Welfare or Provider State was introduced in North America in two big leaps, the 1930s and 1960s. In both cases the Canadian government followed the example of an American President, FDR and his New Deal and LBJ with his Great Society. In 1964 the Americans passed the Civil Rights Act, which was unnecessary to end de jure segregation in the South as it had already been ruled unconstitutional by the American Supreme Court in 1955, but which interfered with the freedom of association of all Americans by telling them they could not privately discriminate as individuals in certain situations. In 1977 our country followed their example by passing the Canadian Human Rights Act. This went further than the American bill because it included a section, mercifully recently removed, that told us what we could and could not say on the telephone and on the internet, but we would never have passed this Act at all without the American example. More recently, both the Liberal government of Jean Chretien and the Conservative government of Stephen Harper followed the example of the second Bush administration in the United States by passing laws, in the name of fighting terrorism, that weakened the ancient constitutional safeguard of our freedoms that requires police agencies to get a judicial warrant before investigating and arresting us.

Clearly it is not the monarchy which is to blame for the erosion of our liberties and following the example of the American republic has not made us any freer.

Indeed, in Canada, the monarchy is the basis of our freedom, as two real conservatives, John Farthing and John G. Diefenbaker, explained in their books Freedom Wears a Crown and Those Things We Treasure, both sadly out of print. Diefenbaker explained how the erosion of our basic rights and freedoms under the Trudeau premiership went hand-in-glove with that government's attack on the institution of monarchy, and Farthing explained how the attack on the Crown's reserve powers and reduction of its role to the purely ceremonial, under Liberal governments going back to Mackenzie King's, undermined the accountability of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet to both Crown above and Parliament below, paving the way for Prime Ministerial dictatorship.

The Americans, when they put together their federal republic after the Treaty of Paris, relied heavily on Montesquieu for their idea of the separation of powers into executive, legislative, and judicial. What they did not want to admit was that Montesquieu had gotten the idea by observing this same division of powers in the British Parliament. Nor did they want to admit that not only did the British Parliament, and later our own in Canada, already contain this division into the executive powers of the Crown ministers led by the Prime Minister, the legislative powers of the whole of Parliament, and the judicial powers of the courts, Montesquieu saw that it also embodied Aristotle's idea of the most stable constitution - one that combined the elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy in a mixed constitution that would avoid the destructive cycle of constitutions that he had observed in the ancient Mediterranean city states. We, having inherited this mixed constitution from the UK, would be fools to give it up, which we would be doing if we ceased to be a monarchy.

The fact of the matter is that democracy is not the source of freedom that Furey thinks it is. The ancients believed it to be the worst of the three simple forms of government, each of which could be good or bad, depending on whether the one, the few, or the many, ruled for the common good or their own interest only. They regarded democracy as the worst because its good form was closest to its bad form and it contained no internal brakes on adopting its bad form. This is all the more true of modern democracy, which is based on the idea of the collective sovereignty of the people. When sovereignty belongs to the people, and the people are the government, everything the government does is the action of the people to themselves. Anything and everything can be justified.

The American founders recognized this, which is why they set up their republic the way they did. It was not to be a simple democracy - even the president would be elected only indirectly by the general populace, through the Electoral College. Indeed, what is truly praiseworthy about modern Western governments is not that they are democracies but that so many of them have kept democracy's worst tendencies in check. This is a basic characteristic of the English-speaking world but it was not true of the French Republic of the 1790s, of Russia after the Tsar was deposed, or Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. What made the difference was that English-speaking countries were liberal in the best sense of the word - holding to the idea that individuals had rights and freedoms which all governments, even democratic ones, must respect, and if they are to be violated in the name of the common good, it must be under extraordinary circumstances, and under clearly defined limits.

Effective as liberalism has been in holding democracy's excesses in check, it does not have an infinite capacity to do so. It is not a naturally stable check on what Tocqueville called "the tyranny of the majority" because it sees itself as being based upon principles of abstract reason that are universally applicable and available, and does not recognize that it could only have developed and can only operate in certain contexts, under certain conditions. It functions best in the British parliamentary monarchy system in which it first developed for this system contains additional checks on the excesses both of democracy and of liberalism itself.

One of the negative aspects of democracy is that it places power in the hands of politicians, who are by definition ambitious people who seek power. Lord Acton was not entirely correct when he said that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely, but it is true to say that power is very dangerous in the hands of those who seek it for themselves. Our system divides the ownership from the exercise of power. The sovereign ownership of the powers of government belongs to the monarch, but they are exercised in her name by the Crown Ministers, the Parliamentary assembly, and the courts. The House of Commons is filled with politicians including the Crown Ministers but the fact that they are in the position of servants, exercising the Queen's powers in her name, injects a degree of humility that would not be present if they were merely representatives of the people. Governments that speak in the name of the people - like the 1790s French Republic, the Third Reich, and every Communist "People's Republic" the world has ever known, are the most arrogant and cruel governments possible.

Canadians made the right choice in choosing loyalty to the Crown and the British model of government. The French Canadians, who had only just come under the British Crown after the Seven Years War, chose to remain loyal when the Americans rebelled. The English-speaking Loyalists chose to come up here and live under the Crown over persecution and dispossession in the United States. When the Americans tried to "liberate" us from the Crown in the War of 1812 we fought back, and when we confederated as a nation in 1867, English and French Canadians alike agreed to a federation of provinces, with our own federal parliament under the shared Crown. A great many Canadians would still look upon the moment when, no longer automatically at war when Britain was, we declared war on Nazi Germany and fought side by side with Britain, for our separate countries and common king, as our country's finest moment. To describe our monarchy as foreign is to be out of touch completely with our country, its nature, and its history.

No, Mr. Furey, we still need the monarchy. Indeed, we need it more now than ever, to keep our increasingly arrogant politicians humble, to give our government a touch of class and dignity that is above the demeaning circus of democratic electoral politics, and in these turbulent, ever-changing times, to provide us with a link to our past, history, and heritage, that has withstood the test of time.

God Save the Queen,
Long May She Reign