Captain Airhead Strikes Again!

It has been almost two years since a gullible Canadian electorate was duped into giving the Liberal Party a majority government in the last Dominion election. This means that that government, headed by Captain Airhead, is approaching the half-way point in its four year mandate. It has recently been reported that the Grits have passed less than half the legislation in that time than the previous Conservative government had. This is not surprising. The Prime Minister has been far too busy flying around the world, handing out money, and looking for photo-ops, all at the taxpayers’ expense, to actually do the job of governing the country. John Ibbitson, writing in the Globe and Mail, made the observation that “the amount of legislation a Parliament creates matters less than the quality of that legislation.” As true as that is, the quality of the bills the Trudeau Grits have passed is enough to make one wish that they had, the moment they were sworn in, called a term-length recess of Parliament and sent every member on a four-year paid Caribbean vacation.

One example of this is Bill C-16, which passed its third-reading in the Senate on Thursday, June 15th and which was signed into law by the Governor-General on Monday, June 19th. Bill C-16 is a bill which amends both the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code. To the former it adds “gender identity or expression” to the list of grounds of discrimination prohibited by the Act. To the latter it adds the same to Section 318, the “hate propaganda” clause of the Code. The Canadian Human Rights Act and Section 318 of the Criminal Code were both inflicted upon us by the present premier’s father in his long reign of terror and it would have been better had the present Parliament passed legislation striking both out of existence rather than amending them to increase the number of ways in which they can be used to persecute Canadians. When, a century and a half ago, the Fathers of Confederation put together the British North America Act which, coming into effect on July 1, 1867, established the Dominion of Canada as a new nation within what would soon develop into the British Commonwealth of Nations, their intention was to create a free country, whose citizens, English and French, as subjects of the Crown, would possess all the freedoms and the protection of all the rights that had accumulated to such in over a thousand years of legal evolution. The CHRA and Section 318 do not belong in such a country – they are more appropriate to totalitarian regimes like the former Soviet Union, Maoist China, and the Third Reich.

The CHRA, which Parliament passed in 1977 during the premiership of Pierre Trudeau, prohibits discrimination on a variety of grounds including race, religion, sex, and country of origin. It applies in a number of different areas with the provision of goods and services, facilities and accommodations, and employment being chief among them. Those charged with enforcing this legislation have generally operated according to an unwritten rule that it is only discrimination when whites, Christians, and males are the perpetrators rather than the victims, but even if that were not the case, the very idea of a law of this sort runs contrary to the basic principles of our traditional freedoms and system of justice. It dictates to employers, landlords, and several other people, what they can and cannot be thinking when conducting the everyday affairs of their business. It establishes a special police force and court – the Canadian Human Rights Commission and Tribunal respectively – to investigate and sit in judgement upon those private thoughts and prejudices. Those charged do not have the protection of the presumption of innocence because the CHRA is classified as civil rather than criminal law.

There are more protections for defendants under Section 318 because it is part of the Criminal Code but it is still a bad law. Incitement of criminal violence was already against the law long before Section 318 was added. It is not, therefore, the incitement of criminal violence per se that Section 318 was introduced to combat, for the existing laws were sufficient, but the thinking and verbal expression of thoughts that the Liberal Party has decided Canadians ought not to think and speak.

Bill C-16 takes these bad laws and makes them even worse. By adding “gender identity and expression” to the prohibited grounds of discrimination the Liberals are adding people who think and say that they belong to a gender that does not match up with their biological birth sex to the groups protected from discrimination. Now, ordinarily when people think they are something they are not, like, for example, the man who thinks he is Julius Caesar, we, if we are decent people, would say that this is grounds for pity and compassion, but we would not think of compelling others to go along with the delusion. Imagine a law that says that we have to regard a man who thinks he is Julius Caesar as actually being the Roman general! Such a law would be crazier than the man himself!

Bill C-16 is exactly that kind of law. Don’t be fooled by those who claim otherwise. The discrimination that trans activists, the Trudeau Liberals and their noise machine, i.e., the Canadian media, and everyone else who supports this bill, all want to see banned, is not just the refusing of jobs or apartments to transgender people but the refusal to accept as real a “gender identity” that does not match up with biological sex. Dr. Jordan Peterson, a professor at the University of Toronto who has been fighting this sort of nonsense at the provincial level for years, and who testified against the Bill before the Senate committee that reviewed it, has warned that it could lead to someone being charged with a “hate crime” for using the pronoun – “he” or “she” – that lines up with a person's birth sex, rather than some alternative pronoun made-up to designate that person’s “gender identity.” Supporters of the bill have mocked this assertion but we have seen this sort of thing before – progressives propose some sort of measure, someone points out that the measure will have this or that negative consequence, the progressives ridicule that person, and then, when the measure is passed and has precisely the negative consequences predicted, say that those negatively affected deserved it in the first place.

Indeed, progressive assurances that Peterson’s fears are unwarranted ring incredibly hollow when we consider that the Ontario Human Rights Commission has said that “refusing to refer to a trans person by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity” would be considered discrimination under a similar clause in Ontario’s provincial Human Rights Code, if it were to take place in a context where discrimination in general is prohibited, such as the workplace. Bruce Pardy, Professor of Law at Queen’s University, writing in the National Post, explains that this new expansion of human rights legislation goes way beyond previous “hate speech” laws in its infringement upon freedom of speech. “When speech is merely restricted, you can at least keep your thoughts to yourself,” Pardy writes, but “Compelled speech makes people say things with which they disagree.”

It is too much, perhaps, to expect Captain Airhead to understand or care about this. Like his father before him – and indeed, every Liberal Prime Minister going back to and including Mackenzie King – he has little to no appreciation of either the traditional freedoms that are part of Canada’s British heritage or the safeguards of those freedoms bequeathed us by the Fathers of Confederation in our parliamentary government under the Crown. For a century, Liberal governments have whittled away at every parliamentary obstacle to the absolute power of a Prime Minister backed by a House majority. The powers of the Crown, Senate, and the Opposition in the House to hold the Prime Minister and his Cabinet accountable have all been dangerously eroded in this manner. Last year the present government attempted to strip Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition of what few means it has left of delaying government legislation. The motion in question was withdrawn after the Prime Minister came under strong criticism for behaving like a spoiled, bullying, petty thug in the House but it revealed his character. These Opposition powers are a necessary safeguard against Prime Ministerial dictatorship but Captain Airhead, the son of an admirer of Stalin and Mao, regards them, like the freedoms they protect, as an unacceptable hindrance to his getting his way as fast as he possibly can. Years ago, George Grant wrote that the justices of the American Supreme Court in Roe v Wade had “used the language of North American liberalism to say yes to the very core of fascist thought - the triumph of the will.” This is also the modus operandi of Captain Airhead and the Liberal Party of Canada.

Canada's Donald

Political correctness in America suffered a tremendous blow last Tuesday with the election of Donald Trump. Whether or not the blow was fatal, only time will tell, but it is not one from which political correctness will be recovering any time soon. There is great cause for rejoicing in its defeat.

Political correctness is the term we use for that obnoxious and toxic form of totalitarian group think that on the one hand tells us that we must never say anything derogatory about non-white racial groups, ethnic and religious minorities, women, those with various and sundry sorts of alternative sexual practices and gender identities and on the other hand encourages contempt for working and middle class whites, males, Christians, heterosexuals, and especially those who belong to all of these categories. To criticize the protected groups, no matter how legitimately, to speak truths, no matter how substantiated by evidence, that portrays them in a less than positive light, is considered forbidden derogatory speech. Yet scapegoating, pejorative nicknames, and even outright expressions of violent hostility towards the despised groups is winked at.

These ridiculous standards were imposed by those who wish to limit the public conversation by dictating what terminology is and is not acceptable. Defenders of political correctness maintain that this was done for the sake of the protection of people who were “marginalized”, “disenfranchised” and “vulnerable.” In reality, however, the political agenda it protects targets whites, seeking to reduce their numbers and replace them, targets Christians by trying to drive their faith out of an increasingly secular public sector, and targets men by treating any and all masculine behaviour women object to as a form of sexual assault, by giving women a right to be believed in whatever accusations they chose to make against men and by obscenely giving women the power of life and death over the next generation.

This entire crazy system was shaken to its foundations when Donald Trump, who brazenly defied all the rules of political correctness and openly courted the votes of the targets of political correctness by championing their causes, won the presidency of the United States.

Ordinarily, I would not recommend that my country follow the lead of the United States. Canada is in the mess she is in today largely because the Liberal governments led by Mackenzie King, Pearson, and the two Trudeaus sought to imitate the policies of FDR, JFK, LBJ and Barack Obama. Indeed, as I pointed out in my last essay, the divisiveness of this year’s presidential election points to one of the many advantages of our form of government, the older Westminster model of parliamentary monarchy, over the American republican system.

Our country, however, desperately needs to break the chains of political correctness. It is a problem that is relatively newer in Canada than it is in the United States but which has been taken much further. The Liberal Party, since the days of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, has sought to make itself the permanent government of Canada by contemptuously dissolving the old Canadian people and electing a new one through mass third world immigration. During the premiership of Pierre Trudeau CSIS created a fake Canadian Nazi movement in order to generate a public scare in response to which the Liberals passed draconian speech laws like Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Now, under Justin Trudeau, the Liberals are bringing in thousands of poorly vetted “refugees” from the Middle East and the motion the Liberal-dominated Parliament just passed to condemn “Islamophobia” is a thinly-veiled attempt to intimidate Canadians who express disagreement with this and who have legitimate concerns about the possible connections of some of the asylum-seekers to jihadist terror groups. The Liberals have also introduced Bill C-16 which would add “gender identity or expression” to the grounds of prohibited discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act and to the “hate propaganda” section of the Criminal Code. This could potentially make it illegal to say that someone with an XY set of chromosomes and who was born with a male body but who thinks and says he is a woman is actually a man with a delusion. Dr. Jordan Peterson, a Psychology Professor at the University of Toronto, recently posted a series of videos on Youtube demonstrating the slide towards totalitarianism that such laws represent and the response he has received from social justice warriors determined to shut him up indicates the direction we are headed unless this political correctness is stopped firm in its tracks.

Canada, therefore, needs someone to break the stranglehold of political correctness the way Donald Trump has done in the United States. It will have to be done in a different way. In Canada, we do not vote for either our head of state or our head of government in a winner-take-all plebiscite. Our head of state comes to her position by royal inheritance and we vote to elect the House of Commons. The head of Her Majesty’s government in Ottawa is the person who has the largest amount of support in the House of Commons. The person who breaks political correctness in Canada, therefore, will have be the leader of a party and not a lone-gunman. He will have to be like Trump in some ways, but different in others.

Dr. Kellie Leitch, who is seeking the leadership of the Conservative Party, is one person who appears to want to usher in a Canadian version of the Trumpening. After the American election she told her supporters that Trump’s victory was “an exciting message and one that we need delivered in Canada as well.” I agree, and if she is capable of accomplishing the task, she has my support. As I explained in a previous essay, it took just the right set of circumstances and qualifications to produce a Trump victory, however, and it is fair to say that the same would have to be true for a Conservative leader who finally deals the death blow to political correctness in Canada. Does Dr. Leitch have those qualifications? Perhaps. It remains to be seen.

What would I look for in a Conservative leader? The next Conservative leader must, at the very least, be a firm royalist and a patriotic Canadian. If we are looking to re-create the Trump effect, however, it would help if this person were also a celebrity, as Trump is, especially considering that he will be contending against Justin Trudeau. A reputation for making offensive, politically incorrect remarks, is also a must. You cannot defeat political correctness by being politically correct.

Do I have anyone in particular in mind?

As it so happens, I can think of one Canadian who meets all the criteria I would be looking for. He is a staunch monarchist, a Prayer Book Society Anglican, and is known for his patriotic love of our country. He is as right-of-centre as they come in Canada, an outspoken supporter of our military and police, and has a long record of speaking his mind and making controversial statements. He is also an extremely famous super-celebrity whose name is virtually synonymous with our national sport.

Why, he even shares the same first name as America’s new president-elect.

The pinkos, liberals, and the rest of the politically correct crowd have been howling for him to retire for years, but I think that at eighty-two years young, perhaps the time has come for Don Cherry to take the next step in his career, lead the Tory Party to victory over Justin Trudeau in the next election, end political correctness, make Canada great again, and build a wall to keep out all those Hollywood liberals who keep threatening to come here every time they lose an election down south.

He is the ideal choice. If someone like George Soros were to hire thugs to stir up fights in his rallies a hockey game would just break out.

Heck, if he doesn’t put in his bid for the leadership himself the party ought to draft him.

Grapes, your country needs you! Don’t let us down.

Canada's Cultural Marxism was "Made in the USA"

In reporting on the Trudeau Liberals’ draconian new “transgender rights” bill the editors at Taki Theodoracopolus’ e-magazine made the remark that “[a]t any given moment, Canada is also about 15 years ahead of the USA down the murderous path of instituting Cultural Marxism as a state religion that must not be transgressed under penalty of death.” This is not, alas, an entirely erroneous statement, at least if we have the last few decades in view, but the most interesting thing about it is that it is essentially saying that Canadian progressives are attempting to be more American than the Americans. In Canada, Cultural Marxism is and always has been, a product imported from the United States.

Cultural Marxism is the use of culture to subvert and undermine the traditions of a society and civilization. It is usually thought of in terms of the attacks on people of white European ancestry, the Christian religion, the patriarchal family and the male sex in general, and heterosexual normality, that now permeate popular and academic culture. Political correctness is the popular appellation for Cultural Marxism in its coercive aspect.

American conservatives think of all of this as having been imported from Europe and they are correct in one sense in that Cultural Marxism as an actual strategy of infiltrating and subverting the institutions that generate and transmit culture such as schools, media, and churches was developed by European neo-Marxists such as Italian Communist Party leader Antonio Gramsci during the interwar period of the last century and brought to America by thinkers such as those of the Frankfurt School – Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse – who temporarily relocated to Columbia University in the 1930s and 1940s and had a surprisingly large amount of influence in the cultural upheavals of the 1960s for men whose theories were primarily a synthesis of the ideas of the two most boring and uninspired thinkers in all of history, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. If Europe was the birthplace of Cultural Marxism at the level of theory, however, Los Angeles, California has been the central base of operations from which it has conducted its highly successful campaign against the peoples, religion, and traditions of Western Civilization. Can there be any doubt that the most effective weapon in the arsenal of the Cultural Marxists has been the “pop culture” produced in music and motion picture recording studios of the City of Angels?

All of Cultural Marxism’s victories in its endless war against all things good, decent, and normal can be traced to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which was itself to a large degree a Hollywood fabrication. The conventional narrative of this history tells us that black Americans, having undergone a century of continued cruel oppression under segregation after they had been freed from slavery in the American Civil War, rose up against their oppressors under the leadership of a modern-day Spartacus, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and finally obtained their rights in the Civil Rights Act passed by the United States Congress in 1964. In reality, the US Supreme Court had dealt the deathblow to segregation in its ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, a year before the media elevated King to celebrity status in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The Civil Rights Act did not terminate the “separate but equal” state laws that had already been struck down by the Supreme Court ten years earlier but rather made it a civilly liable offence for private citizens to discriminate on the grounds of race or sex, in certain situations. By telling people what they were or were not allowed to be thinking while selling or renting a house, hiring, promoting and firing an employee, or serving or withholding service from customers, thus extending the rule of law into the realm of private conscience, and by placing an impossible burden of proof upon the accused, this bill was in itself a major assault on principles of justice that had been long established in the English-speaking world. Nevertheless, so effective was the falsified, media-generated, version of these events that the Civil Rights Movement has served as the template ever since for the “Social Justice Warriors” who, howling with outrage on behalf of one supposedly mistreated group or another, have demanded radical changes to society and the strict curtailing of how we are allowed to think or speak.

The American Civil Rights Act was obviously the model upon which the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977 was based. Like its American equivalent, the CHRA forbade private acts of discrimination, but it went the American bill one further by including the notorious Section 13, which defined as an act of discrimination, the communication via electronic media of words and ideas that were “likely” to expose people to “hatred or contempt” on the grounds of their race, sex, national origin, or any other prohibited grounds of discrimination. It was the Liberal government of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau that brought in the CHRA with Section 13 in 1977, and we can see a parallel with what the present Liberal government of Justin Trudeau is seeking to do by introducing Bill C-16, which proposes to make “hate speech” against transsexuals a criminal offence, punishable with up to two years of prison time. Both generations of Trudeaus looked to the United States for their inspiration, in Justin’s case to the President Barack Obama’s attempt to shove all this transgender rights nonsense down all the states’ throats by executive order. In both cases the Trudeaus have taken a rotten American idea and made it even worse.

In this we see how it is true for the editors of Takimag to say that Canada, with the Trudeau Liberals in power, is ahead of the United States in the game of instituting Cultural Marxism as a state religion, but that this is by imitating the United States and trying to outdo the Americans in their own game. The reorientation of Canada away from her British roots and connections and towards greater continental integration with the United States has been the goal of the Liberal Party since the nineteenth century. This remained the case when the Liberals came under the leadership of the Trudeaus, themselves a cheap, Canadian, knockoff of the trashy, American Kennedy family. To this day the Liberals look to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms as their greatest achievement during the premiership of Pierre Trudeau. The Charter is clearly a second-rate imitation of the American Bill of Rights. It is built on the same false premise as the American document – that rights and freedoms are better secured by being written down on paper than being enshrined in long-established custom and tradition – while making no mention of the basic right to one’s own property, and making the most important rights and freedoms mentioned, less secure than the multicultural, egalitarian, and feminist agenda that Pierre Trudeau had borrowed from Hollywood. The biggest effect of its having been added to our constitution was to make the Canadian Supreme Court more like the American, that is to say, a panel of activists carrying out a social, moral, and cultural “revolution from above” against the Christian religion and the customs, traditions, and way of life that had been identifiable as Canadian since Confederation. Six years after the Charter was introduced, the Canadian Supreme Court struck down all of Canada’s laws against abortion, a decision the American Supreme Court had anticipated by fifteen years. Last year it struck down all of our laws against doctor assisted suicide. In between were a string of liberalizing and secularizing decisions striking down long-established laws and traditions of the type the Americans have had to endure from their Supreme Court since at least the 1950s. Progressive activist judges in the United States had had the Fourteenth Amendment at their disposal since 1868. Their Canadian equivalents had to wait until 1982 to get the Charter.

It is deeply ironic, therefore, that virtually everything which progressives, including supporters of the NDP and Green Parties, both of which basically want all the same things as the Liberals only faster, think of as being “the Canadian way” as opposed to “the American way” is merely one American innovation or another taken to an absurd extreme. The original Canadian Tories, from Sir John A. MacDonald through to John G. Diefenbaker, knew that what set the Canadian way apart from the American was our loyalism, monarchism, and our remaining true to our British traditions and institutions within the larger British family of nations and it is pathetic, that the party that bears the Conservative name, has abandoned its opposition to same-sex marriage and endorsed the transgender rights bill thus essentially conceding the culture war to the Cultural Marxism that has infiltrated our country with “MADE IN THE USA” stamped all over it.