Good Riddance

On Sunday, 9 March, the Liberal Party chose a new leader.  That Mark Carney will be His Majesty’s next Prime Minister in the Dominion of Canada is no cause for celebration because he is as bad, if not worse, than his predecessor.  Mercifully, his premiership should be very short.  There is a Dominion election coming up this year.  Despite the legacy media’s treatment of the Liberal leadership campaign as if it were a Dominion election it was not.  When the next session of Parliament begins on the eve of Lady Day, it will still be the forty-fourth Parliament that sits. 

 

While some polls have been indicating a resurgence of support for the Liberals after their previous leader drove it to an all-time low those in the legacy media who have been translating this into a prediction of a Liberal victory, even a majority government, come the actual election, are being a bit premature.  Carney is in the same situation that Kim Campbell was in in 1993 and John Turner in 1984. In both of these instances a prime minister resigned and turned the leadership of his party over to someone else who briefly became prime minister before the next Dominion election in which the party suffered a major defeat.  After the first Trudeau handed over the Liberal Party to Turner in 1984, Brian Mulroney led the Progressive Conservatives to a historical victory, winning 211 seats, the largest majority government in Canadian history by seat count.[1]  In 1993, Mulroney stepped down from the leadership of the Conservatives who were hemorrhaging support to the Western populist Reform Party, and Kim Campbell led the party to the humiliating defeat in which it was reduced to 2 seats, and John Chretien’s Liberals won a majority government.

 

Historical precedent, therefore, does not favour a Liberal victory in the upcoming Dominion election.  Nor does the fact that Carney lacks the charisma of his predecessor while sharing all of the points that eventually made him the most hated prime minister in the history of the Dominion.  Nevertheless, I am not going to imitate the legacy media in counting chickens before they are hatched.

 

The preceding is all by way of introduction to an essay which, as you have probably gathered from the title, is about the outgoing Liberal leader, Captain Airhead, or, as he is sometimes called, Justin Trudeau.  While I am not pleased to see Carney step into the Dominion premiership I am very happy to see Captain Airhead leave it.  He has been by far the worst prime minister in the history of Canada and probably of the entire British Commonwealth. 

 

Last week, in a farewell address, Captain Airhead said “On a personal level, I made sure that every single day in this office, I put Canadians first, and I have people’s backs, and that’s why I’m here to tell you all that we got you.”  He could not say this with a straight face, although laughter would have been more appropriate than the tears that broke his composure.  Perhaps he thought the qualifying phrase “on a personal level” made what is otherwise a bald-faced lie somehow true.  For in his public actions, he did the very opposite of put Canadians first.

 

To demonstrate this I am now going to switch to the second person and address Captain Airhead directly.

 

How exactly, Captain Airhead, were you putting Canadians first, when you raised foreign aid spending to approximately $7-8 billion annually?  Since the only money the Canadian government can spend is money that it has either a) obtained by taxing Canadians, b) borrowed and which will have to be paid back with interest by taxing Canadians in the future or c) printed, thus reducing the spending power of Canadian currency per unit and indirectly taxing Canadians now and in the future, you were taxing Canadians, either in the present or in the future, to spend in other countries.  That is not putting Canadians first.  Since you made a spectacle of tying foreign aid to spreading feminism and climate change alarmism around the world it looks more like you were putting your personal agenda first.

 

Related to the previous paragraph is the fact that in these years that you were so generous with the money of other Canadians, present and future, you never once came close to balancing a budget.  Granted, you gave us advance warning that you would be like that when you infamously said “the budget will balance itself.”  Each year you ran a deficit this added to the debt burden that Canadians will have to pay in the future.   How is that putting Canadians first?

 

Then there was your immigration policy.  Over the course of the last year you gradually admitted that immigration levels were too high.  In spring of last year you said that “Whether it’s temporary foreign workers or whether it’s international students in particular, that have grown at a rate far beyond what Canada has been able to absorb.”  Later in the fall, after your immigration minister, Marc Miller, announced that the number of permanent immigrants to be admitted this year would be reduced by about 20% while the number of temporary immigrants admitted would be almost halved, you admitted that permanent immigration levels were also a problem.  In your typical, “everybody else is to blame but me” fashion, you said “Increasingly bad actors like fake colleges and big chain corporations have been exploiting our immigration system for their own interests.”  This came after years of you dismissing those of us who pointed out that immigration was too high for the country to absorb as “racists”, an accusation you continued to shamelessly fling at others despite what the blackface scandal of 2019 revealed about yourself.  That you acknowledged this at all was only because everyone else in the country had long recognized that it is insane to be bringing in record numbers of immigrants at a time we are experiencing a major housing crisis.  Bringing in large numbers of newcomers when we are having trouble housing Canadians is not putting Canadians first. The problem is not “fake colleges” or “big chain corporations” exploiting what would otherwise be good policy.  Very early in your premiership you showed your contempt for Canadians when you said that you are “jealous” of new immigrants and addressing immigrants said “this is your country more than it is for others because we take it for granted, we default into this place.”

 

How was it putting Canadians first to constantly denigrate the founders and historical leaders of our country?  Over the last couple of months it has been heartwarming to see Canadians come forward to show their love of Canada in the face of insults and threats coming the megalomaniacal president of the United States.  That Canadian patriotism is alive today, however, is despite you, Captain Airhead, not because of you.  The way the memory of the foremost Father of Confederation, our first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald has been treated during your premiership has been a disgrace.  You have made countless apologies for the acts of previous Canadian governments, acts of which you show little to no historical comprehension.  Since you were not the one who committed the acts for which you were apologizing and for the most part those to whom you were apologizing were not the ones who were on the receiving end of those acts, these were absolutely devoid of worth as apologies and would be so even if the historical incidents were as shameful as you think they are which in most cases they were not.

 On 18 May, 2016, for example, a little over halfway into the first year of your premiership, you apologized in the House of Commons for the Komagata Maru incident.  The incident took place in 1914, before your father, let alone yourself, had even been born.  Nobody alive today or in 2016 had been on board the Japanese ship when it was turned away from Vancouver.  Furthermore, we were not in the wrong to turn them away.  The man who had chartered the cargo ship to carry 376 mostly-Sikh, Punjabis to Canada, Gundit Singh, was well aware that he was defying Canadian immigration rules.  He had bragged that he would successfully challenge the rules in court and that he would bring another 25 000 Punjabis over.  Singh was a supporter of the revolutionary nationalist Ghadarite movement as were many of those on board the Komagata Maru.  The violent actions of these during the incident more than justified the decision not to allow them to disembark.  If anyone is owed an apology in connection to this incident it Canadian Sikhs who owe Canada an apology for honouring as a martyr Mewa Singh, who in the aftermath of the incident murdered Canadian immigration inspector William C. Hopkinson and was justly executed for his capital crime.

 

Moreover you have actively embraced blood libel against Canada.  In 2021 when ground disturbances were discovered by sonar on the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, the media dishonestly distorted this into a claim that evidence of genocide having been committed in the Indian Residential Schools had been discovered.  This claim has since been thoroughly rebutted.  It was patently absurd even at the time. You, however, lowered the Canadian flag on Parliament Hill and kept the flag at half-mast for almost half a year.  By embracing this blood libel, you encouraged that summer’s wave of statue toppling and other “Year Zero” attacks on Canadian history.  You also encouraged the biggest wave of hate crimes Canada has ever seen as 112 church buildings were burned or otherwise vandalized.  As this was going on you held conferences about anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, about both of which you are known to wax eloquent in your indignant condemnation of these prejudices as un-Canadian, but were notably silent on the subject of the Christophobia that you helped stoke, directed against what is still the majority religion in Canada, until pressed to comment, at which point you gave a weak statement that the church burnings were “unacceptable and wrong” while adding that you thought the anger behind them was “fully understandable”, a qualification you have never used about bigotry against any other religion.  How exactly was this putting Canadians first?

 

Early in your premiership you cancelled the Northern Gateway pipeline and placed so many roadblocks in the way of the Energy East pipeline that the company that owned it, then called TransCanada, cancelled it themselves.  The Trans Mountain pipeline had been approved for an expansion project that would twin the pipeline but was facing protests from environmentalists and Indians, or at least from professional protesters claiming to be environmentalists and Indians.  This and the uncooperative behaviour of the BC provincial government at the time led the company that owned Trans Mountain to wash its hands of the project. You bought the pipeline from them for $4.5 billion and the TMX was finally completed last year.  Those other pipelines should have been built too.  Your Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, François-Philippe Champagne said in the light of the current trade war with the United States “That may mean you need pipelines that go west-east.”  In other words, precisely the pipelines you got in the way of being built.  It should not have taken threats and tariffs from an unhinged American president to realize that we need east-west pipelines.  If we had these we would not have to import oil from OPEC and would not have to sell most of our oil to the Americans at a rate far below the world market value.  If, instead of removing Sir John A. Macdonald from our currency and allowing his reputation to be besmirched you had paid attention to his example you would have realized this.  The most important infrastructure project of his premiership was the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway.  It was first conceived as part of Macdonald’s National Policy in 1873 and was completed in 1885.  The purpose of the project was to build national unity, political and economic, by facilitating east-west trade, and in pushing the project through to completion Macdonald had to successfully fight several attempts by American interests to defeat the purpose of the project by having the route changed so that east-west trade could be diverted in a southern direction.  The need for east-west pipelines is basically an application of the same principle.  You were hardly putting Canadians and our country first when you let your idiotic climate ideology get in the way of building such pipelines.

 

On a related note, neither were you putting Canadians or our country first, when you, again driven by your climate ideology, basically declared war on the petroleum industry.  Did you really think that when you shot your mouth off about how “We need to phase them [the oil sands] out” that this would not reignite the feelings of resentment and alienation in Alberta that your father lit with the National Energy Program in 1980?  With much more justification for these feelings, might I add, since your father’s NEP, hopelessly flawed as it was, was a form of economic nationalism aimed at limiting foreign ownership of the Canadian energy sector, expanding the energy industry, doing what I criticized you for not doing in the previous paragraph, and basically making sure the industry works for the national interest, whereas your remarks came across as a threat to eventually – the sentence preceding the one already quoted was “We can’t shut down the oil sands tomorrow.” – shut down the petroleum industry.  Since you surrounded yourself with anti-petroleum radicals like Gerald Butts and Stephen Guilbeault Alberta had every reason to feel threatened.  Bringing back the national unity crisis of the 1970s to mid-1990s was hardly acting in the interest of Canadians and our country.  Especially now that we are faced with threats of economic warfare and Anschluss from a power mad American president who is degenerating further into a deranged lunatic and despot every day.

 

Perhaps you think you were putting Canadians first, looking out for us, and having our backs, during the absurd paranoia from 2020 to 2022 over a new strain of respiratory disease that while having a slightly higher mortality rate than the seasonal flu was far more comparable to it than to MERS or even the original SARS to which it was related and basically posed a significant danger only to those to whom the seasonal flu also poses a significant danger.  If so, let me remind you of what actually happened.  You suspended all of the fundamental freedoms identified as such in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the addition of which to our constitutional law in 1982 when your father was prime minister is one of the few events of Canadian history of which you have spoken positively.  You arbitrarily declared some people’s jobs and businesses to be essential and others to be non-essential, shut down those unfortunate enough to be declared non-essential, and ordered everybody to stay home and paid them to do so.  You forced them to wear masks designed to prevent large particles from dropping into bodies opened up during surgery and entirely ineffective at preventing the transmission of respiratory disease when you did let them out.  Then you tried to require them in order to be readmitted to society to take injections of a type never before used on human beings involving the modification of mRNA (the messenger that brings your body the instructions from your genes) and which had been rushed to production with inadequate testing.  When you introduced new requirements of this nature at a time when every other country was removing restrictions, some Canadians said enough is enough, and supported a convey of long-distance truckers who drove to Ottawa and conducted a peaceful albeit noisy protest by basically holding a long block party celebrating Canada and freedom.  Your response was to unjustifiably invoke the Emergencies Act, a piece of legislation designed for use as a means of last resort in combatting terrorism, insurrection, and the like, to crush the protest.  Through this period of over two years, you refused to listen to anyone critical of what you were doing, accused those who stated the plain facts which contradicted what your Public Health Officer was saying of spreading “misinformation” and “disinformation”, said that those who disagreed with you held “unacceptable views” and bizarrely accused them all of being “racists” and “white supremacists.”  These are not the actions of someone who puts Canadians first and has our backs.  These are the actions of a narcissist who is in love with power.  You and the American president have a lot in common.

 

How is it putting Canadians first and having our backs to limit our access to information to sources of which you approve and restrict what we can say ourselves in public, both of which you have been obsessed with doing for the duration of your premiership?

 

How is it putting Canadians first to make medically assisted suicide widely available for pretty much any reason whatsoever and to encourage Canadians to choose it as an alternative to medical treatment, social assistance, or any other help that they actually need?

 

How is it putting Canadians first to condemn provincial governments that ban the prescription of puberty blockers and gender reassignment surgery to minors as if they were attacking the vulnerable rather than what they are obviously actually doing which is protecting them from making irreversible decisions that they are too young to make?  Or to accuse parents who object to their children being indoctrinated with radical gender identity politics and ideology in school of hatred and bigotry?  Is this not rather putting your own ridiculous ideological agenda first and Canadians last?  

 

I think I have sufficiently made my point.

 

While I do not look forward to the premiership of the man who will be replacing you as His Majesty’s prime minister, Captain Airhead, I hope that premiership will be very short.  In the meantime, I am very pleased to see you go.  It should have happened long before now.  You will not be missed.

 

 

 

---

[1] John Diefenbaker’s 1958 victory of 208 seats is still the largest in terms of percentage of the House.  There were 265 total seats in 1958, 282 in 1984, and 338 today.

Captain Airhead Fesses Up, But Only Partially

Last week Captain Airhead made an interesting admission.   He was in Halifax announcing that the government was committing $6, 000, 000, 000 to a new housing and infrastructure development fund.   He was asked if the government would also be scaling back the immigration that has been making housing so unaffordable for Canadians.   In his answer he acknowledged that “over the past few years we’ve seen a massive spike in temporary immigration, whether it’s temporary foreign workers or whether it’s international students in particular that have grown at a rate far beyond what Canada has been able to absorb.”

 

Was this admission immediately followed by an apology to all the Canadians he has accused of racism for pointing out that immigration was too high before he was willing to admit it himself?

 

Yeah right.  In Captain Airhead’s dictionary racist is a word that always applies to his opponents even if they are at odds over something that has nothing to do with race, such as when he accused people who opposed mandatory vaccination of racism, and never applies to him even when he does something that he would regard as racist, perhaps extremely so, in anyone else, such as all those times he was photographed or caught on video in blackface.   Words that are used in this way are absolutely meaningless and it is imperative that all the rest of us recognize this and ignore these words entirely so as to rob scumbags like Captain Airhead of the ability to use them as weapons.

 

What Captain Airhead admitted to was, of course, only a part of a larger truth the rest of which he continues to deny.  Just before the admission he said the following: “It’s really important to understand the context around immigration. Every year we bring in about 450,000, now close to 500,000, permanent residents a year, and that is part of the necessary growth of Canada. It benefits our citizens, our communities, it benefits our economy.”

 

Captain Airhead, in other words, was trying to divide permanent from temporary immigration and to say that it is only temporary immigration has gotten out of control and is being conducted on an unsustainable scale.   This, however, is nonsense.

 

If we eliminate the distinction between permanent and temporary then the rest of what he said about immigration being necessary and benefiting our citizens, communities, and economy would have been true had he been talking about Canada in the first few decades after Confederation when the country was basically being built.   Immigration is, indeed, necessary to a country in the building phase in which the struggles to build a new country serve to sift out the temporary from the permanent immigrants. The immigrants who come to participate in the building of the country either succeed in making a life for themselves in the new country and so become permanent or they do not and go back from whence they came in which case they are only temporary.  

 

Canada is long past this building phase.   One of the most basic problems with the Liberal Party of Canada is that it has never been able to accept this.   The Liberal Party cannot claim credit for Confederation or for building the country in those early decades when there was a very real danger that Confederation would fail and the country in whole or in part would be swallowed up by the American republic if we did not get our basic national economic and transportation infrastructure built and communities established from sea to sea, thus requiring large scale immigration.   The Liberal Party has ever since been trying to re-create the country in its own image, which has always been derived from either the United States or some Communist hell hole depending upon whether it is someone like Mackenzie King or someone like the Trudeaus who is leading the Grits at the time.   This is one reason why the Liberal Party tends to think building phase immigration should be a permanent feature of the country.   For them Canada is always in the building phase because they are constantly reinventing it.  Lest it be thought that I am attributing this problem solely to the Grits allow me to point out that one of the biggest failures of the Conservatives in the two periods in which they governed at the Dominion level since American neoconservatism replaced traditional Toryism as the party’s basic philosophy – the period in which the late Brian Mulroney was Prime Minister and the period in which Stephen Harper was Prime Minister – they went out of their way to not provide a sensible alternative to the Liberal Party’s approach to immigration and arguably made the problem worse.   Nor are they particularly strong on this point today.   While I cannot support him because of his neoconservative republicanism I give Maxime Bernier of the People’s Party credit for being the only federal politician willing to talk sanely and sensibly about immigration today.

 

Am I saying that a country should shut down immigration altogether after the building phase?

 

No, that would be an extreme almost as silly and absurd as the one represented by the current status quo.

 

A country like Canada that is already built and established needs to determine its immigration level on a year to year basis, based upon the needs and circumstances of the country in the year in question.  The sort of arguments based on economic necessity that might have been valid in the building phase should not be retained to argue for a permanent immigration target and especially not for a target that is set at a record high.   However many immigrants a built country may need in a particular year, it will under any but the most extraordinary of circumstances be far less than what she needed per year in the building phase.   Such circumstances as economic recession, high unemployment, and a shortage of affordable housing call for a radical reduction in immigration – all types, permanent and temporary.  

 

If the government is claiming that taking in half a million permanent immigrants per year is necessary despite circumstances that clearly call for its reduction then either a) the government is lying,  b) the necessity is an artificial one created by other types of government mismanagement, or c) all of the above.   With regards to what those other types of government mismanagement might look like, suppose that the necessity lies in the size of the tax-paying population.   If high immigration targets are needed to have enough tax payers to keep the government solvent then a) massive deficit spending on a yearly basis, b) an anti-natal program consisting of legal abortion that is easily accessible up to the very end of the pregnancy, heavy promotion of alternatives to heterosexuality, and the like and c) trying to keep health-care costs down by offering euthanasia as the answer to every sort of ill, are among the types of government mismanagement that would artificially produce this necessity.  These are all policies of the present Liberal government that Captain Airhead has gone out of his way to mark as belonging to his particular brand.

 

What is needed is not a scapegoating of temporary immigrants for the problems created by bad government immigration policy but a radical reduction of immigration of all types.   At a more fundamental level there needs to be a questioning of the ideas that almost everyone in leadership in the state, church, academy and fourth estate have held or at least given lip service to for several decades causing them to stifle and squash all deviation and dissent from the liberal “the more the merrier” approach to immigration.   For example, one of those ideas appears to be that since diversity is a strength therefore more diversity makes us stronger and maximum diversity would make us the strongest we can possibly be.  The comparative and superlative in this line of reasoning may follow from the initial premise although the principle that things that are good in themselves may cease to be good when taken to excess would argue against this being necessarily so.  Moreover, the initial premise is far from being infallibly established.  “Diversity can be a strength” is a far more rationally defensible statement than “diversity is a strength.”

The Ups and Downs of Deviancy

I  have commented in the past on the sick, twisted, irony that the same period that saw tobacco use demonized, driven out of public spaces – even outdoors ones – and increasingly private spaces as well, saw the legalization, normalization, and glorification of the use of marijuana.   Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who sat as a Democrat in the American Senate representing New York in the days when Democrats, even Democrats from New York, were not all open cheerleaders for civilizational collapse, wrote an article for The American Scholar in 1993 entitled “Defining Deviancy Down”.   The gist of the article was that many were responding to the explosion of social and moral problems, such as family breakups, single-parenthood, and crime by simply lowering standards and expectations, and that this was not a good thing.   Later that year neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer responded to Moynihan’s article with a speech to the American Enterprise Institute entitled “Defining Deviancy Up” in which he argued that the Senator was right, but that he addressed only half the story, the other half being the imposition of new standards on ordinary people so that “once innocent behavior now stands condemned as deviant”.   A few years later Robert H. Bork, the American jurist and law professor whose appointment to the American Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan had been defeated in the Senate, expanded upon both of these themes at book length in his Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (1993).   The war on tobacco which is carcinogenic, especially when chemicals have been added to it as is the case with cigarettes, but which can both calm and stimulate minds without impairing them in the slightest, fought simultaneously with a campaign to promote marijuana which is known to mess up people’s minds, is this set of complementary phenomena, defining deviancy both down and up at the same time, manifesting itself in the realm of substance use and abuse.   One could, of course, take the position that the old ideal of mens sana in corpore sano calls for opposition to both tobacco and marijuana, but the position taken by our contemporary culture shows just how much it has come to elevate the body over the mind.   Plato would be appalled.

 

Here in the Dominion of Canada we are now seeing the combination of defining deviancy up/down manifesting itself in yet another way in this same area.   Earlier this week, an organization called the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction made international headlines.   Before commenting on how it did that a few words about the organization itself are appropriate.   The CCSA was established by an act of Parliament during the premiership of Brian Mulroney in 1988.   At the time it was called the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, which name is still reflected in the acronym, the new name having been adopted for reasons of political correctness.   The organization’s board is appointed by the Governor-in-Council and it operates under the oversight of Health Canada.   Therefore, while the organization was set up as a non-profit charity that accepts private funding and claims to occupy the space between government agency and non-government organization, it is questionable as to how large or how real the distance between it and the government it answers to actually is.   It made headlines by releasing a report, commissioned and funded by Health Canada, on alcohol use which basically said, in about 90 pages, that there is no safe level of consumption, that there are no health benefits to drinking, that bottles of booze should come with warning labels, and that Canadians should limit themselves to a maximum of two “standard” drinks per week.   This attracted so much attention because of how radically out of sync these recommendations are with those of health agencies in the United Kingdom and the rest of the Commonwealth, the United States, France, and basically all of Europe except the Netherlands.

 

The admirably reactionary David Warren, retired Ottawa Citizen columnist and former editor of the sadly defunct Idler, sees this as a step towards a revival of prohibition.    While some might say that this is reading too much into the report I am inclined to think that Warren is right, as he usually is about most matters that don’t pertain to the patriarch of Rome’s claim to supremacy over the entire Church.   The same media that spent the last two to three years demanding total suppression of Canadians’ basic freedoms of movement, assembly, and religion because “experts” said that “social distancing” and “lockdowns” and basically enforced isolation were “necessary” to stop the spread of a virus that they were depicting as far more lethal than it actually was (even at the beginning) and insisting that anyone who disagreed with them was promoting “misinformation” and “disinformation” and must be silenced, even as they gaslighted everyone with obvious nonsense such as their denial of natural immunity, has been promoting the CCSA’s report and recommendations in much the same manner.   Take the CBC for example.  CBC writers Ioanna Roumeliotis and Brenda Witmer wrote up the story with the same attitude of “the experts” have spoken, we must all bow down and obey that has become so nauseatingly familiar since 2020.   With regards to the CCSA report saying that “no amount of alcohol is safe” they use the words “points out that” rather than the more objective and accurate “claims”.   The appeals to the authority of the World Health Organization are there too and the gaslighting.   The gaslighting is most obvious in the denial of there being health benefits alongside the risks.   Even the claim the most Canadians are unware of the risks is highly dubious.  While the claim applies specifically to the risk focused on in the report, i.e., the risk with regards to cancer, it is absurd to say that most Canadians are unaware of the many other risks attendant upon drinking alcohol, and I very much doubt that anyone undeterred by the risk of DTs, liver cirrhosis, getting into a brawl, driving into a tree or making a total ass of oneself in public and alienating one’s friends and family, is going to care much about a risk of cancer.   Sunlight is carcinogenic.   Is that good reason to either adopt a vampire’s schedule or erect a sunblocker ala The Simpsons’ C. Montgomery Burns?   Bill Gates, in the unlikely event you happen to be reading this, the answer to that last question is “no”.

 

Whether or not our government is about to repeat the famously failed social experiment of a century past when, due to the estrogen poisoning brought on by having given women the vote, we temporarily imposed a total ban on alcoholic beverages, (1) by sponsoring this ridiculous report they are certainly engaging in Krauthammer’s “defining deviancy up”.   One does not have to look far to find the corresponding acts of “defining deviancy down”.   The province of British Columbia is currently decriminalizing the possession of hard drugs, something that its largest city Vancouver did two years ago.    As of the last day of this month, it will be legal for adults in British Columbia to possess small amounts of cocaine, opiates, and methamphetamine.   Both city and province required the cooperation of Health Canada for this, as the federal agency needed to grant a waiver under the Controlled Drug and Substances Act.   It was not difficult to obtain such an exemption as the current Dominion premier is on board with British Columbia’s approach to the drug crisis.   Neither the Prime Minister nor the government of British Columbia nor the city council of Vancouver are libertarian purists who support decriminalization because they don’t think the government should be dictating personal choices.  These are the same people, remember, who a year ago were telling people that they had to have a new, man-made, substance injected into their bloodstream if they wanted anything resembling a normal life in society.   Their argument for decriminalization in the midst of a drug crisis is that they think it will decrease the number of drug deaths.   The reasoning behind this is that as long as hard drugs are illegal, those who use them must rely upon illicit sources, which may be tainted with such substances as fentanyl and down which can cause overdoses in amounts that are miniscule compared to other drugs.   This is also the reasoning used by those who argue that the government should provide, at the taxpayers’ expense, “safe” drugs, needles, and places to use them.    Indeed, those who argue for decriminalization for other than libertarian reasons and those who support government provided “safe injection sites” are generally the same people.    At the very least, this way of thinking can be criticized as myopic, focusing on the danger that fentanyl and other contaminants pose to drug users as if this were the whole of the drug problem, and ignoring the countless other dangers posed by hard drugs, often to other members of society who don’t use them themselves.   A man who is walking down the sidewalk, minding his own business, and gets his head punched in by someone whom he doesn’t know from Adam, because that someone is in a meth-induced paranoia and thinks that he, the man he punches that is, is an alien hitman sent after him by the demonic overlord of a planet in some distant galaxy, will require just as much stiches, hospital time, or morgue space depending on the severity of the attack, if the meth was obtained from a government-funded “safe” site as if it were obtained on the street.   At least if it were obtained from the street, the man would not have been forced to contribute to his own assault with his taxes.   Note that those who advocate this approach of dealing with the drug crisis are the ones who speak about the need to “destigmatize” drug use.   To destigmatize something, however, is to remove societal disapproval, and, as we have already seen with regards to marijuana this, if not nipped in the bud, will become a demand for societal approval of hard drug use and a cultural campaign to promote it.   We are already witnessing this taking shape around us.

 

To summarize, we are being told by the CCSA, Health Canada, and the CBC that there is no “safe” amount of alcohol that can be consumed at the same time that we are being told that hard drugs should be decriminalized and, worse, “destigmatized” and  safe” injection sites provided for their use by the government at our expense.   It is tobacco v. marijuana and the defining of deviancy both up and down at the same time all over again.

 

This time around, however, there is a spiritual aspect to this that was not there when tobacco was being driven out to make room for marijuana.   Neither tobacco, which was unknown to the Old World until imported from the Americas, nor hemp, the plant from which marijuana is obtained and which was certainly present in the Ancient Near East, are mentioned anywhere in the Holy Scriptures by name.   Alcoholic beverages, however, are certainly mentioned in the Bible and the New Testament makes use of the Greek family of words from which our “pharmacy” is derived.   With regards to the nouns φαρμακός and φαρμακεία, these are usually rendered “sorcerer” and “witchcraft” or “sorcery” respectively in English translations of the New Testament.   Their primary reference is with regards to drugs.   The first is often rendered “poisoner” in uses outside of the New Testament, and the second can mean both the administration of drugs and poisoning.    They are translated the way they are in English Bibles because the idea in the New Testament is of the use of substances in magic and communication with the spirit world.   They are never used in a positive sense. 

 

The Bible speaks of alcoholic beverages, primarily wine, far more frequently and by contrast the overwhelming majority of references are positive.   Drunkenness is condemned, but wine is spoken of as a gift of God given to cheer the heart of men.   In what St. John the Evangelist identifies as the very first miracle that Our Lord performed, He instructed the servants at a wedding He attended at Cana at some point between His Baptism and the beginning of His public ministry in Galilee to fill six stone waterpots, each capable of holding twenty to thirty gallons, with water after the wedding wine supply had run out.   He then told them to take the pots to the chief steward.   The roughly 120 gallons of water was transformed into roughly 120 gallons of wine which the chief steward proclaimed to be better than that which had already been consumed.    Four chapters later, after the Feeding of the Five Thousand, the only miracle other than the Resurrection which St. John records in common with the Synoptic Evangelists, Jesus in His Bread of Life discourse with the multitude proclaimed the necessity to eat His body and drink His blood.   Later, at the Last Supper, the final Passover meal that He shared with His Apostles before the Crucifixion, Jesus would reveal how this was to be done by instituting the Sacrament of the Eucharist or Holy Communion in which His followers would partake of bread as His body, broken for us, and wine as His blood of the New Testament, shed for us and for many for the remission of sins.   Partaking of wine as Christ’s blood in this way, has been essential to the main ceremony of regular Christian worship in all the most ancient Churches ever since.   Only in the last couple of centuries in North America have certain sects – separatist groups – substituted the Islamic view of wine for the traditional Christian one, and in support of this substitution invented spurious arguments that Jesus turned the water into unfermented, concentrated grape juice and that this is what should be used in Communion. (2)   Therefore, those who define deviancy up to include the drinking of any amount of alcohol in so doing attack the central rite of the Christian faith and religion, while in defining deviancy down so as to “de-stigmatize” the use of hard drugs, they have embraced behaviour that in the Scriptures is inseparable from trafficking with evil spirits.

 

In this, the true nature of this aspect of the “culture war” is evident.   Ultimately, it is on the spiritual field, that this battle will be won or lost.

 

(1)   About the only thing positive I have to say about prohibition was that it inspired Stephen Leacock, the great Canadian humourist, economist, and political scientist to write an excellent essay against it.  Entitled “The Tyranny of Prohibition” it first appeared in the August 2, 1919 issue of The Living Age, and can be found in several anthologies of Leacock’s essays.   Prohibition is also discussed in his “The Woman Question” which was first published in 1915 and can also be found in Leacock anthologies, including Essays and Literary Studies, the first edition of which was published in 1916.   The two essays taken together can be read as a before and after look at the two big social experiments that occurred together at the end of the First World War.

 

(2)   The sects and revivalists who thought up this idea also started up, in conjunction with the early feminists, a prohibition movement that they inappropriately called “temperance”, which word used properly means the virtue of “self-control” and “moderation”.   This idea remains in circulation largely due to the influence of the book Bible Wines: The Laws of Fermentation and the Wines of the Ancients by Rev. William Patton, first published in 1871.   This book employs the same kind of arguments that Alexander Hislop used in The Two Babylons to back up his claim that everything in the pre-Reformation Christian tradition other than the Bible itself was the pagan religion of ancient Babylon dressed up to look Christian.  There are plenty of quotes and plenty of footnotes which look very convincing unless you take the time to look up the quotes in the original sources, most of which are very obscure to discourage you from doing this.   If you do, however, you realize quickly that the entire book is pure codswallop.     I diagnose those who promote the messages of these books as suffering from a severe case of κεφαληανααυτουπρωκτόςις.  

Moloch Worshippers Fear Their Idol’s Stranglehold on North America is Weakening

It would appear that the Supreme Court of the United States of America is about to overturn that body’s own infamous ruling in the 1973 case of Jane Roe et al. v. Henry Wade, District Attorney of Dallas Country.   It so appears becomes somebody – unidentified as of the time of this writing – leaked the initial draft of the majority opinion ruling written by Justice Samuel Alito in the case of Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of Mississippi Department of Health, et al., v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, et al. to Politico on the second of May.   The following day Chief Justice John Roberts confirmed the authenticity of the document.

 

Predictably, liberals, progressives, and leftists – since their posturing in response to the ruling, when they aren’t breaking down in tears, is rather aggressive as if intended to evoke the image of lions, tigers, and bears, I shall add “oh my” - are all up in a flap about this.   To hear them yap about it, one would think that the immediate effect of overturning Roe v. Wade would be that the very next day no woman anywhere in the Yankee republic would be able to get a legal abortion and would have to resort to letting some quack rip out her insides with a wire hanger in a back alley or – and this option is more upsetting to these types than the former – finish out her pregnancy and give birth without giving in to the unnatural impulse to murder her child while it is still unborn.   For all one knows they actually do think it works this way.  

 

This, of course, is not how it would play out.   Before the 1973 ruling, most American abortion laws were those enacted by the constituent states of their republic.   The Court, by ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment provides constitutional protection to a pregnant woman’s choice to have an abortion for the first two trimesters, both struck down a battery of state laws limiting and prohibiting abortion and essentially transferred the entire matter from state to federal jurisdiction.   An overturning of that ruling would have the effect of returning that matter to its original jurisdiction.   Whether abortion would again be prohibited would be up to the governments of the states.   In the history of the American republic, the trajectory has been away from a very decentralized federalism – that of the 1777 Articles of Confederation would represent it at its most decentralized – to a more centralized unitary nation-state – what the Americans now call their Constitution, the document drafted in 1787 which went into effect in 1789 was the first step towards this, subsequent steps have tended to coincide with America’s military conflicts including and perhaps especially their internecine conflict of 1861-1865, which was fought over, among other things, the conflict between decentralized federalism and highly centralized nationalism.   Americans who identify themselves and liberal and progressive – from an older Tory perspective such as my own the entire American tradition is liberal and progressive, of course – tend to be in favour of this process of increasing centralization.  A certain school within American “conservatism” – not those who are ordinarily called “neoconservatives” per se, although there is a lot of overlap between the two groups, but rather the followers of the late Harry V. Jaffa of Claremont McKenna College (1) – are of the same view as the progressives.   Thus, the liberals and progressives have another reason, other than the threat to their sacred sacrament of Molochian baby murder, to object to the forthcoming Supreme Court reversal, although it is not one that seems to be emphasized  or much brought up at all in their rhetoric.

 

Canadian progressive are also having conniptions about what is happening south of the border.    The Prime Minister, whose top priority is projecting the image of being the most progressive leader in the world and whose lowest priority is doing the job to which he was elected, said “The right to choose is a woman’s right and a woman’s right alone.  Every woman in Canada has a right to a safe and legal abortion.  We’ll never back down from protecting and promoting women’s rights in Canada and around the world.”   Interesting words coming from the man who has spent much of the last two months trying to escalate the Russo-Ukrainian War into a global conflict that would endanger the lives of every man, woman, and child on the planet, seemingly in a “Wag the Dog” attempt to deflect attention from growing domestic discontent with his policies and his grossly heavy-handed response to such discontent.     Jimmy Dhaliwal, the clown who leads the official socialist party, seldom if ever opens his mouth except to stick his foot in it and make a fool out of himself, but this time he outdid himself.  “We know that when abortion rights are denied or when abortion services are denied, the result is women die” he said.   That is not remotely as indisputable as the fact that when abortion is permitted and allowed babies die.  

 

Does a woman die every time she is denied an abortion? 

 

Obviously the answer is no.

 

Does a woman die every time she gets an illegal abortion?

 

Again, obviously the answer is no.

 

Does a baby die every time an abortion is performed? 

 

Yes.   Absolutely yes.   This is because killing a baby is essential to the very meaning of abortion.   It is a sine qua non.   Without a baby being killed, there is no abortion.

 

Now, it should be noted that in Canada the situation is quite different from in the United States.   The statute banning abortion that eventually became section 251 of the Criminal Code was passed in 1869, two years after Confederation.   The abortion issue has always been a Dominion rather than a provincial matter in Canada because constitutionally criminal law falls under the sole jurisdiction of the Queen in the Dominion Parliament.   In the Dominion of Canada, where the Fathers of Confederation wisely established a strong central government in the hopes of avoiding a conflict like the one the American federation had gone through earlier in the same decade as Confederation, and where progressive constitutional subversion has generally taken the form of Americanization the historical trajectory favoured by the progressive left has not been strictly one of centralization, per se, but rather a combination of centralization and decentralization in which the federal government, through hook and crook, grabbed to itself powers allotted to the provinces in 1867, while shrugging off onto the provinces responsibilities that had originally been placed on the federal government.

 

In 1968 Pierre Trudeau, upon succeeding Lester Pearson as leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister of Canada, introduced a bill to amend section 251 of the Criminal Code.   The bill passed in 1969 and subsection 4 was introduced which established Therapeutic Abortion Committees in accredited Canadian hospitals.  These were boards of three doctors, who would issue certificates declaring an abortion to be necessary for medical reasons.   If they did so, an abortion would then be permitted in an accredited hospital.   This was the only exception, otherwise the general ban on abortion remained.  Ironically, it was this new clause introducing an exception brought in by Trudeau that the Supreme Court of Canada found objectionable when it ruled that section 251 violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the case of Dr. Henry Morgantaler, Dr. Leslie Frank Smoling, and Dr. Robert Scott v. Her Majesty the Queen (1988).   The Charter was another innovation of Trudeau’s, having been added to the constitution in 1982, and apart from which the Supreme Court would not have had this American-style power to overturn the acts of Queen-in-Parliament in this way.  

 

Now, given what we have just observed, in the extremely unlikely event that our Supreme Court were to follow the American example and reverse its 1988 ruling this, in theory at least, would have the instantaneous country-wide effect that progressives mistakenly think the reversal of Roe v. Wade would have in the United States.    It would restore the status quo ante of 1988.   This writer would prefer the status quo ante of 1869-1969, but 1969-1988 is better than post-1988.   This might help explain why our progressives are behaving so ridiculously about something happening south of the border – if they actually understand the differences I have just explained, which is highly doubtful.

 

Another reason why the shift away from abortion-on-demand in the Yankee republic has the knickers of Canadian progressives all tied up in a knot is the fact that their position is not remotely as settled and secure up here as they have long pretended it to be, they know this full well to be the case, and are petrified that their vulnerability is about to be exposed.     This is evident in their behaviour.   The Prime Minister expelled pro-life members of his party prior to the Dominion election in which he became Prime Minister, and Jimmy Dhaliwal’s predecessor did the same to pro-life members of the socialist party.   The Conservative Party is constantly under pressure from both of these parties to whip or expel members who are perceived as likely to “re-open” the abortion debate in Parliament and to repudiate the pro-life segment of its base.  These are not the actions of people who feel their position is secure.   Nor is the Prime Minister’s directing his Finance Minister to terminate the charitable status of pro-life organizations that offer help to unwed expecting mothers or the government’s persistent efforts to bring the internet under their control to hinder the spread of views they don’t like and disagree with which would obviously include opposition to their stance on abortion.   Even their recent proposal to make the Holocaust into the essential tenet of a new state faith demonstrates their lack of confidence in the security of their position on abortion – I will let you draw your own inferences about what it says about their confidence in the historical narrative about the event to be so euhemerized (2) – since the proposed law would criminalize the denial, condoning or diminishing of the Holocaust, into which last category making comparisons between the slaughter of the unborn and the Holocaust, as pro-life activists are prone to do, might be taken as falling and almost certainly is intended by the Liberals to be taken as falling.    All of this demonstrates just how insecure the progressive left considers their sacred “abortion rights” to be.  

 

They have cause for this lack of confidence in the security of their position.  Contrary to the way progressives talk, the present status quo in Canada with regards to abortion was not the result of a debate, where the progressive side won, and consensus was achieved.     Nor do the court rulings that produced the present status quo quite say what progressives claim they say.  The Supreme Court of Canada did not rule in the Morgantaler decision that a woman had a “right to an abortion” per se.   It found section 251 to violate a woman’s rights, but these were rights specifically named as such in the Charter, not a “right to an abortion” which is not so named.

 

A number of smaller rulings made by the Supreme Court of Canada shortly after the Morgantaler ruling – Chantal Daigle v. Jean-Guy Tremblay (1989), Joseph Borowksi v. the Attorney-General of Canada (1989), and Mary C. Sullivan and Gloria J. Lemay v. Her Majesty the Queen (1991) are often taken as finishing the task of establishing “abortion rights” in Canada.   As with the Morgantaler ruling itself, however, the progressive take reads more into these than what the Court actually declared.   These cases all deal in one way or another with the question of the personhood and rights of the foetus.   In the Borowski case, the complainant had challenged section 251(4) of the Criminal Code on the opposite grounds to those of Henry Morgantaler – he complained that the therapeutic exception violated the rights of the foetus under Sections 7 and 15 of the Charter.   Joseph Borowski, a pro-life activist who had previously served in Ed Schreyer’s NDP government here in Manitoba a fact entirely irrelevant to this discussion except as an illustration of just how far to the intolerant totalitarian loonie left that party has moved since then, had lost before the Court of Queen’s Bench and the Court of Appeal for Saskatchewan.   The Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear his final appeal.   While the progressive take on this is that the Supreme Court thereby approved the lower courts’ rulings that the foetus is not protected by Charter rights, the Supreme Court’s decision was based upon the fact that the Section Borowski was challenging had already been overturned, and thus he had lost his standing to pursue his appeal any further.    In Daigle v. Tremblay, the Supreme Court overturned the previous ruling of the Quebec Court of Appeal in a case which involved a man seeking an injunction against his ex-girlfriend who was seeking to terminate her pregnancy with their child.   While the Supreme Court based its decision on the question of the legal personhood of the foetus, it excluded from its ruling the question of the foetus’ position under the federal Charter, because this case was a civil matter not involving the government.   None of these rulings, on its own, or taken collectively, constitute a ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada that the foetus is not a person with legal rights under the Charter.   Indeed, the Supreme Court very much gave the impression that it did not want to rule on that question one way or another and closed off avenues of litigation precisely in order to avoid ever being put in the position to have to do so.   Furthermore, all of these rulings would fall like a stack of dominoes should Morgantaler ever fall, and Morgantaler can stand only so long as the Supreme Court is able to practice the clever deflection just described.

 

In its Morgantaler ruling the Supreme Court referred the matter back to Parliament, suggesting that they pass new Charter-compatible legislation to take the place of section 251.    Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government attempted to do this twice.   The first time took place shortly after the Supreme Court’s ruling.   The bill was an attempt at a compromise – easier access to early abortions, complete ban on late abortions – and was defeated in the House because both sides rejected the compromise.   The second attempt, the following year, would have basically restored the status quo ante.   It would have banned all abortions except those where the woman’s doctor believed her health or life to be jeopardized by the pregnancy.   The bill passed in the House by nine votes.   It was defeated, however, when the Senate split evenly on it, constituting a defeat and the government did not press the issue.    Note that the bill which was more strongly anti-abortion did better in the House than the bill which was more of a compromise.   This is not what a society settling the abortion debate by arriving at a pro-abortion consensus looks like.

 

Progressives further like to maintain that public opinion is on their side on this issue.   While it is correct to say that the public is more slanted towards the progressive view today than it was in 1989, opinion polls on the matter are frequently designed to skew the results towards to progressive side and need to be read in terms of what is not asked or spelled out, as well as what is.   If, for example, those polled are presented with a choice between the present status quo with no explanation of what that status quo is and the pre-1969 status quo, the majority will choose the former.   If, however, it is explained that the present status quo means that abortion is available and paid for by the taxpayer with no legal restrictions whatsoever right up to the moment of birth, support for it drops considerably.   If asked about restrictions on third-trimester abortions rather than an outright blanket ban, support rises from very low into a solid majority.   Explain to Canadians what the intact dilation and extraction method of abortion is all about and support for restrictions rises further.  Neither I, who would like to see a return to a blanket ban on abortion without exceptions, nor the Prime Minister, who wants the present status quo preserved at all costs and would bitterly oppose any new restrictions on abortion, even a ban on the procedure mentioned in the last sentence, can claim widespread public support for our positions if the public is provided with a truthful and complete explanation of what the Prime Minister’s position actually amounts to.   This does not matter in the slightest to me as I see the protection of the lives of the innocent as a duty placed on civil authority by God and in no way requiring the support of popular opinion.   It ought to bother the Prime Minister since he is always shooting his mouth off about “democracy” although by this term he seems to mean his right to do what he wants and govern autocratically as an elected dictator for the duration of his term, with no accountability between elections to Queen-in-Parliament, the public, constitutional law, or God.  

 

The Prime Minister could, of course, get out of this dilemma by basing his position on a higher law that trumps public opinion and the laws governments pass, but think about what that higher law would have to look like.   It would be a law that gives one specific category of human beings – women – a right unique to themselves to decide whether another specific category of human beings – pre-birth babies – lives or dies.   Some “higher law”!  (3)  Note that the same people who believe that a woman has a special right to life or death over her unborn child by virtue of the fact that the child is growing within the woman’s body have been saying for two years now that no person – man, woman, or whatever – has a right to choose with regards to his, her or its own body when it comes to deciding whether to have a newly invented, not-yet-fully-tested, foreign substance injected into it.  By contrast, the higher law to which I appeal in maintaining my own support for the pre-1969 status quo ante against widespread popular opinion is the right to life bestowed upon all human beings by their Creator, forfeitable only by capital crime, of which the unborn are innocent, which civil society has a duty to protect and an extra duty to do so in the case of the unborn because they are completely dependent and vulnerable and unable to speak for or defend themselves.

 

My higher law is clearly superior in every way to the Prime Minister’s.  

 

Whether considered in terms of the court rulings that produced it, informed public opinion about it, or the ethical philosophy underlying it, the entire position of the Prime Minister and other Canadian progressives on abortion is not the sturdy fortress they pretend it to be but rather resembles a house of cards that could be toppled at any minute.   No wonder they are having kittens at the thought of the blow the similar house of cards is about to take in the country next door.

 

 (1)   To be fair to the late Prof. Jaffa, while he supported the sort of constitutional thinking evoked by the American Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, he opposed the ruling itself, and, indeed, in his debates with Robert Bork took the position that natural law and the American constitution provided an absolute protection to the life of the foetus.   

(2)   Euhemerism, taken from the name of the 4^th century BC court mythographer of Cassander of Macedon, usually refers to a method of interpreting myths, i.e., as having arisen out of historical events.    Euhemerus, for example, argued that Zeus was originally a king of Crete, whom subsequent Greeks venerated as the king of the gods of Olympus.   The method usually begins with the acknowledged myths of a people and works backwards to find the history behind them.   The verb related to this word that I have used here usually has the meaning of taking a figure from myth and placing him in history.   I have used it in the opposite sense of converting an event from secular history into heilsgeschichte, similar to what is meant by deifying in reference to individual figures.

(3)  “The decision of the Supreme Court concerning abortion could be seen as comedy – if it did not concern the slaughter of the young.  Any laughter is quelled by a sense of desolation for our country.  Yet the comedy too must be looked at to understand our political institutions.  The comedy arises from the fact that the majority of the judges used the language of North American liberalism to say ‘yes’ to the very core of fascist thought – the triumph of the will.  Their decision is a good example of Huey Long’s wise dictum: ‘When fascism comes to America it will come in the name of democracy.’   The court says yes to those who claim the right to mastery over their own bodies, even if that mastery includes the killing of other human beings.” George Grant, “The Triumph of the Will”, published in Denyse O’Leary ed., The Issue is Life: A Christian Response to Abortion in Canada, Burlington, Welsh Publishing, 1988.

Whips and Scorpions - Captain Airhead’s St. Valentine’s Day Manic Meltdown

 

In the 2015 Dominion election Captain Airhead, the son of the man who up to that point had been the worst Prime Minister in the history of Canada, was swept into the Prime Minister’s office by a second wave of Trudeaumania, much worse than the first, and he has remained in that office ever since, despite scandal after scandal and a combination of gross incompetency with massive egotistical arrogance that resembles a dark, sinister, unfunny version of the kind we associate with characters portrayed by Peter Sellers in the movies..   He was whittled down to a plurality of seats in 2019, which he just managed to retain in 2021, but with help, sometimes from the socialists, sometimes from the separatists, he has managed to cling to office.   In his hubris, which puts even that of his father to shame, he has continued to govern as if he had the mandate of a majority government – even a supermajority – in the House behind him.

 

Captain Airhead has always seemed to be more concerned about the image he projects than anything else, including the good of the country whose government he leads.   The groups he has most often sought to impress have been the young and the woke – his domestic support base – and the “international community”.   His efforts have at times failed in ways that rendered him – and Canada – a laughing stock.   Earlier this year we were given yet another example of this.   When the rest of the world was finally coming around and deciding to treat the bat flu like the normal flu and lifting restrictions and mandates, he, who had been scapegoating the unvaccinated for all the country’s problems since last summer, decided to double down instead and removed the vaccine mandate exemption for long haul truck drivers crossing the border from the United States.    This led truckers, vaccinated and unvaccinated, from all across the Dominion to head towards Ottawa in one big protest convoy.   As they approached, he hurled insults at them and then, as they began to pour into the capital, he fled to an “undisclosed secure location”, citing a conveniently timed need to self-isolate due to exposure to the bat flu.    This earned him the scorn and derision of his opponents and allies, at home and abroad, alike.    The image he was clearly projecting for all to see was that of a sniveling coward.   

 

The trucker protest has been ongoing since, both in Ottawa and other major Canadian cities.   Captain Airhead, in an address to the nation from his hiding place on the Monday after the convoy arrived in Ottawa doubled down on his insulting language and his arrogant tone but despite his efforts and those of his sycophants in the media to portray the trucker protest as a small group of astroturfed racist ideologues it was apparent to everybody watching that unlike the protests he himself supports – anti-pipeline and anti-petroleum environmentalist protests, Black Lives Matter, etc., which typically consist of professional protesters funded by far left billionaires like George Soros – this was a genuine, grassroots, working and middle class protest.    

 

It differed from the kind of protest Captain Airhead admires in one other way.    Whereas Black Lives Matter rallies broke out into riots, vandalism and looting in major cities all across North America and last year’s demonstrations arising out of wild and irresponsible allegations against the former Indian Residential Schools led to the arson and other vandalism over well over fifty churches and the toppling and decapitation of statues, the truckers’ protest has been an actual peaceful protest rather than an anarchistic riot declared to be peaceful by media fiat.   While loud and noisy, it has not been violent and destructive and, indeed, would be best described as the world’s largest and longest block party.   Where some of the spin-off protests have arguably crossed the line from expressing their legitimate complaints about the infringement of their own rights and freedoms into interfering with those of others has been the impediment of traffic across the border with the US at important commercial crossings such as the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, Emerson here in Manitoba, and Coutts in Alberta.   Many have noted, however, and rightly so, that those condemning the freedom protestors on these grounds had no objection to the entire border being closed by the government to anything but supply-chain commercial transport for almost two years nor have they ever insisted that the government do anything when groups of Indians – in many cases paid environmentalist protestors claiming to be Indians would probably be more accurate - have blockaded commercial infrastructure such as highways or railroads to back up some demand or another of theirs.

 

Over the past couple of weeks most Canadians when asked, regardless of what they thought of pandemic measures or the truckers’ protest itself, agreed that Captain Airhead’s attitude and behaviour were only making things worse.   In the midst of calls from everyone except the most bootlicking of his supporters to deescalate the situation he seemed determined to do the exact opposite.

 

On Monday, the fourteenth of February, Captain Airhead decided to do just that and to send a Valentine to those questioning and challenging his heavy-handed pandemic policies in the form of the invocation of the Emergency Measures Act.   Technically this is the first time this act has been used, although it was introduced in the premiership of Brian Mulroney in 1988, not as a first-of-its-kind piece of legislation, but as an update and replacement for the War Measures Act.   Captain Airhead’s own father had been the last to invoke the War Measures Act – and the only Prime Minister to do so in peacetime.   Indeed, the thought that was almost certainly foremost in Captain Airhead’s mind as he decided to do this was that he could dispel the image of a coward he had crafted for himself by conjuring up that of his father’s handling of the October Crisis.

 

He has succeeded, however, only in presenting the image of a weak man trying to appear strong, of a little man – or potato, to borrow China’s favourite contemptuous epithet for him - trying to appear big.    The contrasts with his father are far greater than the similarities.

 

In 1970 Pierre Trudeau was dealing with a militant Quebec separatist organization that had been committing acts of terrorism against Canada since the early ‘60s.   These had been increasing in intensity.   The previous year they had bombed the Montreal Stock Exchange, injuring several people and causing a million dollars’ worth of damage.   In the crisis in which Trudeau acted the FLQ had kidnapped the British Trade Commissioner James Cross and then kidnapped and murdered the Labour Minister of Quebec – he was also deputy premier of the province – Pierre Laporte.   This was a situation that called for a display of government strength although Pierre Trudeau was criticized then and afterwards – justly in my opinion – for taking this to an unnecessary extreme.

 

By contrast, the people over whom Captain Airhead is throwing a tantrum have not blown anything up, kidnapped anyone, murdered anyone, or done anything remotely similar.    They have parked their trucks in the vicinity of Parliament – and several provincial legislatures – with the declared intention of not leaving until their demands are met.   Those demands, unlike the separatist demands of the FLQ, are entirely reasonable.   They are demanding that the government return to them – and to all Canadians – the basic freedoms that belong to them, that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is supposed to protect, but which the government has treated as if they were its own to give and take away as it sees fit for the duration of the bat flu pandemic of the last two years.    Since these reasonable demands translate into a reasonable objection to government overreach, piling more government overreach on top – indeed, the maximum overreach available to the government – after two weeks of doing nothing but insult the protestors, can only be seen as an irresponsible and incendiary response.

 

It is not his father, Captain Airhead has come across as resembling, so much as Rehoboam, the son and heir of King Solomon.   At his coronation at Shechem as recorded in the twelfth chapter of I Kings, Rehoboam received a delegation of Israelites headed by Jeroboam which asked him to lighten the yoke his father had laid upon them.   He asked them to come back in three days for an answer, then consulted with the wise elders of Israel, who advised him to grant the request.   Then he asked the advice of the hot-headed youth of his own generation.   They told him to make the yoke heavier instead of lighter.   Rehoboam discarded the advice of the wise elders, and heeded instead the reckless advice of the fools he had grown up with and told the delegation “My father made your yoke heavy, and I will add to your yoke: my father also chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.”    This went down as one of the most boneheaded moves in all the history of Old Testament Israel.   By behaving this way Rehoboam provoked all the tribes of Israel except his own tribe, Judah, and Benjamin into rebelling against the Davidic dynasty and split the formerly united kingdom of Israel into the Northern and Southern kingdoms.   Captain Airhead’s similar response to the freedom protestors is unlikely to be looked upon any more favourably than Rehoboam’s in generations yet to come.  

 

This situation in no way meets the stringent requirements written into the Emergency Measures Act for its invocation.   The protests do not “seriously endanger the lives, health or safety” of Canadians nor do they “exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it” as ought to evident from the facts that even as Captain Airhead was preparing to make his announcement the Ambassador Bridge and Coutts border blockages were being cleared by ordinary police action and the provincial premiers – with the exception of the dolt in charge of Upper Canada – were all telling him to take a chill pill, they could handle the situation, the EMA was neither necessary nor wanted.   Captain Airhead most likely believes that none of this matters, that with the support of Jimmy Dhaliwal’s New Democrats he will be able to ram approval of the EMA through the House of Commons and get the Senate to rubber stamp it while the courts, if they act at all to hold the government accountable rather than merely defer to the government, will act too late to stop him.

 

The speech in which Captain Airhead announced this step was his most brazen one to date.   How he managed to keep a straight face while saying that this was not something a Prime Minister should do lightly, that it is not the first step, nor the second step, but the last step that should be considered, is beyond me.    Perhaps he is a better actor than I had given him credit for.  Michelle Ferreri, the Conservative MP for Peterborough-Kawartha put the question to the government in Question Period on Tuesday of what other steps had been tried first.   The “answer” from Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair sidestepped the question.   Obviously, the government did not exhaust all other means available to it before taking this step.   It did not, for example, try talking to the protestors, hearing their complaints, and negotiating.    Indeed, the only other “step” it appears to have taken has been to hurl insults, lies, threats, condescension and other abuse at the protestors.    

 

It was also mighty rich of Captain Airhead to smugly and self-righteously pat himself on the back and justify this unjustifiable power grab by saying that the people of Ottawa deserve to have their lives back.    That all Canadians deserve to have their lives back is, of course, precisely the point of the truckers’ protest.   The truckers’ protest has been going for about a month.   To whatever extent it can be said to interfere with the daily lives of the people of Ottawa that interference is insignificant in comparison with how requiring businesses to operate at a fraction of their capacity, closing churches and other places of worship, telling people that they cannot have friends over or meet with people outside of their own household other than through the internet, ordering people to wear masks everywhere, and forcing them to take a foreign substance into their bodies against their will by taking everything away from them until they “consent” has affected the daily lives of all Canadians.

 

Since Captain Airhead, for all of his talk about providing local law enforcement with the “tools” necessary to end the protests, does not seem to be interested in sending the military in to support local law enforcement – credible reports, prior to the invoking of the Emergency Measures Act, indicated that he had already asked the military to intervene and had been told, essentially, to “truck off” – it is obvious that it is the extra financial powers spelled out by Chrystia Freeland after his announcement that he is after.    This should come as a surprise to nobody.   Even though Freeland, Captain Airhead’s deputy prime minister, has only been in the Ministry of Finance since Bill Morneau was forced to fall on the sword to save Captain Airhead in the WE Charity scandal of 2020, she and the Prime Minister have been seeking to take control over their finances out of Canadians’ hands since they came to power a little over six years ago.   As smug and arrogant as her boss, on Monday she announced that under the Emergency Act the Canadian government would be requiring crowdfunding platforms and their payment providers to register with FINTRAC and report large and “suspicious” transactions, somehow regulating cryptocurrency, telling banks and other financial institutions to review the transactions of their accountholders, giving those institutions the power to freeze the accounts of convoy supporters without a court order and protecting them against civil liability for doing so.   In other words, she and the Prime Minister gave themselves the power to utterly destroy dissenters by seizing their assets without due process and leaving them no legal recourse.   For the record, I, like all sane people, am opposed to government ever having this kind of power under any circumstances.   Not even in a real emergency – which this is not.   Not even to combat real terrorists rather than non-violent protestors.   A government that has this kind of power is not a government limited by constitution.   Nota bene, Freeland also said that the government would be introducing legislation aimed at making its new financial powers permanent.   This shows the utter hollowness of the government’s assurances that their actions under the EMA would be subject to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

 

On Wednesday, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, presented the House with the motion that would confirm the Emergency Measures Act.   Let us hope and pray that there are many Liberal MPs chafing to get out from under Captain Airhead’s whip.   Let us hope and pray that there are NDP members left who can recognize that it would be a betrayal of an important legacy of their party which in 1970, led by the legendary Tommy Douglas, had the distinction of being the only party in Parliament to take a just stand against Pierre Trudeau’s peacetime use of the War Measures Act against actual terrorists, to follow Jimmy Dhaliwal in using martial law to crush a protest by the working class their party once claimed to stand for.   Let us hope and pray that there are enough of both who will stand with the Conservatives and the Bloc in refusing to confirm the EMA so as to send the message to Captain Airhead and his goons that their assaults on constitutional government and personal freedom will be tolerated by Parliament no longer and that they can take their whips and scorpions and stick them where the sun don’t shine.