Real Journalism?

 

Let us imagine that at some point in his youth Bartley Kives received a visit from the News Fairy who told him that someday, if he was very, very good, she would grant his wish and he would become a real journalist.   Kives, however, after high school went on to receive a degree in sociology from the University of Winnipeg.   It is very difficult to take a degree in sociology from anywhere without squashing your conscience like a chirping little annoying bug.   When the school is the University of Winnipeg it is virtually impossible.    While signing away your soul in a blood contract with Mephistopheles and Karl Marx may not actually be a formal requirement for the degree, it would seem to be de rigueur. 

 

For almost two decades Kives reported and wrote for the Winnipeg Free Press, covering pretty much everything from music to city politics to restaurants.   While occasionally the Winnipeg Free Press has employed a real journalist – Ted Byfield, believe it or not, worked for the paper back in the fifties and, of course, the late, great Tom Oleson graced its pages until shortly before his death almost ten years ago – for the most part Manitoba’s “paper of repute” has preferred hack writers that mindlessly toe its party line.    On issues that pertain to the Dominion of Canada as a whole, that party line is and always has been, Liberal, both big and small l.   In John Wesley Dafoe’s day the paper existed to promote the Grits’ agenda of Americanizing Canada and turning her into a vassal satellite of the United States.   When the federal Liberal Party was taken over by Communist operatives in the 1960s – Lester Pearson, who had been a Cambridge Five style Soviet spy when attached to our embassy in Washington D. C. in World War II, and Pierre Trudeau who had led the Canadian delegation to a Communist economic conference in Moscow in 1952 and who never met a Community tyrant he didn’t love and adore and fawn over – the paper dutifully followed its party into the fever swamps of the far left.   Radically opposite as those two positions seem, they were united in their contempt for the traditional constitution of Canada and for the Common Law freedoms of Canadians.  John Farthing showed in Freedom Wears a Crown, (1956) how the policies of the earlier, Mackenzie King Liberals, had undermined freedom and paved the way for Prime Ministerial dictatorship.   A decade earlier Eugene Forsey, after his doctoral dissertation was published, had debated the very same issues with Dafoe, making mincemeat out of the partisan publisher. On the provincial level, where the Grits have been mostly a non-entity for the larger part of a century, the paper has tended to support the NDP. 

 

In more recent years Kives has been reporting locally for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.   Abandoning the overt and heavy progressive bias of the Winnipeg Free Press is hardly a requirement for employment at the CBC.    Although the publicly funded Crown broadcaster is supposed to fairly represent the views of all Canadians it has long behaved like “anybody but the Conservatives” was its official policy, regardless of who happens to be in power at the moment in either Parliament or any of the provincial legislatures. 

 

The Progressive Conservatives have been in government in Manitoba since 2016 and the CBC, like the Winnipeg Free Press, has been striving to unseat them ever since.    Coincidentally or not 2016 was also the year that Kives was brought onboard CBC Manitoba.   In 2019, the efforts of the media failed and the Conservatives, led by Brian Pallister, were returned to power in an early provincial election.   The following year the bat flu pandemic struck, and the media in general, and Kives in particular found in it a stick with which to bludgeon the provincial government.

 

Now if, as has been thought to be case for centuries, it is the role and duty of the fourth estate to hold government accountable, to ask it the tough questions, to shine a light in every dark corner of the halls of authority, to expose all the secrets, to speak truth to power, does this not mean that the News Fairy has returned at long last and turned Kives into a real journalist after all?

 

Alas the answer is no.

 

It would be one thing if he really were asking Pallister and his chief health mandarin Brent Roussin the hard questions.   Questions like:

 

Do you recognize any constitutional limits to your powers that remain in effect even in an emergency?

 

In your opinion are the fundamental rights and freedoms of Manitobans their own property or something that is permitted to them by your government as you see fit?

 

How much mental, social, and economic damage would the lockdowns have to do before the cost of the lockdowns exceeds the cost of doing nothing at all?

 

How far would government restrictions have to go before you would admit they have gone too far and crossed a line that should never be crossed?

 

Kives does not seem to be interested in the answers to questions like these however.   He does not even seem to be interested in questions like those that Pallister groupie, Josh Aldrich of the Winnipeg Sun, is occasionally willing to interrupt his sycophantic boot-licking to ask about why the government has been consistently picking on small businesses and restaurants, which are not significant sources of transmission, with its public health orders.

 

No, the only questions Kives seems to be interested in are “why didn’t you lock us down again faster?” and “why didn’t you lock us down again harder?”

 

The theory that Kives appears to be operating on, based upon much of his recent commentary but especially “Lockdown 3, the one everyone could foresee” from the 8^th of May, and last Sunday’s “In Manitoba’s darkest days, the premier casts shade”, is that the province’s slapping down a hard lockdown as fast as possible last spring was a success, that their gradually increasing the restrictions in stages in the fall as the case numbers rose only to see them continue to rise was a failure, and that therefore they should have locked down the entire province hard as soon as they saw case numbers start to rise again this spring.  

 

One problem with this theory is that while Manitoba’s initial hard lockdown did indeed, seem to work, last spring, other provinces and other jurisdictions in other countries that tried the same thing at the same time, met with failure instead, and had the sort of results that we saw in the fall.   What is the explanation for this difference?

 

The most obvious explanation is that the virus had only just arrived in the province and had been caught before it had begun to spread in the brief period in which it was capable of being contained in this manner.      If this is indeed the true explanation, then last spring’s success would not have been duplicable in the fall.   All an earlier and harder lockdown would have accomplished would have been to make the lockdown that much worse in its harmful and destructive effects.  

 

Anybody familiar with the history of infectious disease and the way quarantines work should be able to grasp this.   Quarantines control the spread of infectious disease by either a) keeping it out in the first place or b) containing it so that it doesn’t spread.    The former is what the traditional method of placing ships and their passengers and cargo under quarantine before letting them into a country was designed to accomplish.   The latter is what the kind of quarantine where a doctor locked you into your house for a couple of weeks and had your neighbours drop food off on your doorstep when you had the smallpox or measles or some such thing was designed to accomplish.    The strongest quarantine of the latter type was the kind the French called the cordon sanitaire, where an entire city or region was sealed off, in the hopes of preventing the disease from spreading outside the area.   This practice was depicted in a fictional example by Albert Camus in The Plague (1947).   In more recent real life it was used in several places to contain the original SARS virus and Ebola.   What governments around the world have attempted to do with the lockdown model since last spring is something radically different from these traditional quarantine methods.   Indeed, it could be called the inversion of a quarantine.    It is not designed to keep a disease out of a country or contain it locally because it is imposed on societies where the disease is already present and spreading.   It is not imposed merely upon the sick and those known to have been in contact with the sick while contagious but upon all healthy members of a society, thus causing a ton of collateral damage.   It is not remotely as effective as traditional quarantines – last year’s experiment demonstrated that countries and regions that rejected the lockdown model did not end up being the countries and regions most devastated by the disease or even being significantly worse off than countries and regions that locked down.  In some cases they fared slightly better with regards to the disease itself and in all cases avoided the tremendous harmful effects of the lockdown.

 

Kives’ commentary is padded with tear-jerking rhetoric about the “deaths of hundreds of grandfathers and grandmothers”.   How many of those grandfathers and grandmothers died, not because of the disease this overhyped virus causes, but because of the extreme loneliness and despair created by being forced into social isolation in the name of saving their lives?   This is the sort of question a real journalist would be asking.   A real journalist would also be interested in all the sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters lost to opioid and other narcotic overdoses and suicides brought about by social isolation and/or the loss of the business in which all of their life’s work and savings had been invested caused by lockdown experiment.   Anyone interested in such people would not be so quick to shoot his mouth off about how the government has not been doing enough by not locking down fast enough and hard enough.

 

Where Kives does get it right is in raising questions about Brian Pallister’s stock excuse for how bad the province has done in the fall and again this spring.   In his remarks on Sunday, for example, Kives said:

 

The premier and public health officials routinely state that Manitobans are simply not following the rules at a time when community spread makes it difficult for people to avoid the virus in the workplace and elsewhere.

 

He then quoted an ICU physician from Winnipeg to the effect that most of her patients had been trying to follow the rules.

 

It is, of course, disgusting for Pallister, Roussin, and their underlings to continuously scapegoat ordinary Manitobans in this way.     To scapegoat is to blame someone else for your own failure.   The provincial government has failed Manitobans and not the other way around.   The government’s failure, however, is not a matter of them not suspending our constitutional rights and freedoms severely and quickly enough.   It is rather their refusal or inability to consider the myriad of options other than preventing us from socializing with one another until everyone is vaccinated.   

 

On Tuesday, the 25^th of May, a number of Manitoban physicians held a press conference in which they talked about “tens of thousands” of Manitobans who are suffering and dying, waiting for surgeries and cancer tests, because the hospitals are too busy dealing with bat flu patients.   They begged the province to issue a stay-at-home order and to order all “non-essential” businesses to shut down.   Sure enough, come the evening news, there is Bartley Kives on CBC, gushing all over these doctors and uncritically sympathizing with their plea, even though he was supposed to be reporting rather than editorializing.

 

“For nearly two months”, Kives said, “doctors have been pleading with the province to enact tougher restrictions to prevent the crush of COVID patients from getting out of hand.   Those pleas largely went unanswered.”

 

Who is he trying to kid?   For the nearly two months in question, I have watched as what little of Manitobans’ constitutional rights and freedoms as were left to us after the previous six months of Code Red have been whittled away as the government has given in to demand after demand from these doctors who are largely sheltered from the harmful effects of the fascism for which they are asking.

 

Doctors, as a rule, live in houses rather than apartments or single-rooms, and so, a stay-at-home order, restricting them to their homes outside of work hours and grocery shopping, would simply not be as confining to them as it would to the thousands of other Manitobans far more adversely affected by such an order.   Doctors are pretty much the hottest commodity in the marriage market and so, even though their notoriously insufferable egos keep the divorce rate high, a stay-at-home order would simply not leave them as completely isolated from human social contact as it would the thousands of people in the province who live alone.    Lockdowns do not threaten the livelihoods and savings of doctors – they will continue to rake in their highly overinflated salaries for the duration, with all the overtime they could dream of to boot.

 

Perhaps if a law were enacted requiring any doctor, journalist, or politician that calls for a lockdown to experience that lockdown in its harshest rather than its mildest form – confine them to a single room, not just their home in general, deny them contact with their immediate family, strip them of their salaries, for the duration of the orders they request – they would think twice before asking the government to place burdens on their neighbours that they are not willing to lift themselves.

 

Earlier, in his 8^th of May commentary, Kives had quoted Brent Roussin as saying, when he announced the third lockdown:

 

“We need to have these restrictions be the least restrictive that we need for that time.”

 

The necessity to which Roussin was likely alluding is that created by the requirements of our constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court of Canada in the 1986 Oakes ruling.   It is indeed, required, the Supreme Court ruled, that when the government has a legitimate reason for limiting our basic rights and freedoms, that the limits it so imposes be as few as possible.   A real journalist who believed it to be the fourth estate’s duty to stand up for the rights and freedoms of the people by sounding the alarm and calling the government out whenever it overstepped the constitutional boundaries on its powers, would have grilled Roussin on his claim that the restrictions he has imposed have indeed been minimal.

 

Kives, however, took the opposite approach of insisting that the government could have and should have done more.

 

Is it just me or did I see his nose grow a little in his last news segment?

 

He’s got a long way to go, I am afraid, before the News Fairy makes him a real journalist.  

Roussin’s Victims

 

The province of Manitoba in the Dominion of Canada, one of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s Commonwealth Realms, is my home.   We have seen two types of protests directed against the provincial government in recent months, both objecting to the province’s response to the spread of the Wuhan bat flu.   One type of protest, such as that which took place in Steinbach on the 14^th of November, expresses opposition to the public health orders as trampling all over our basic freedoms of association, assembly and religion and our prescriptive and constitutional civil rights.   The other type of protest expressed the views of the socialist opposition party, its leader Wab Kinew and his health critic, and their far left echo chamber in the media which features such automatons as the CBC’s Bartley Kives and the Winnipeg Free Press’s Dan Lett and Ryan Thorpe.   Those involved in this type of protest take the position that the government’s public health orders have been too few, too light, and too slowly enacted, and that the government by not imposing a harsh lockdown the moment the case numbers started to rise in the fall, is responsible for all the deaths we have seen since September.

 

 

My sympathies are entirely with the first group of protesters, as anyone who has read a word I have previously written on the subject already knows.   I should say that my sympathies are with the protesters' basic position.   I don’t much care for the rhetoric of civil disobedience, rebellion, and populism in which that position is often expressed at those protests.

 

 

While the second group of protesters are certainly entitled to their opinion and the free expression of the same, a freedom that I note many if not most of them would prefer to deny to me and others who take my side of the issue, their position is easily debunked from an ethical point of view.

 

 

When a virus is spreading, government is not required to do everything in its power to slow or stop the spread.   Indeed, it has a moral obligation NOT to do everything in its power to slow or stop the spread of the virus.   This is because the government has the power to do tremendous evil as well as good.

 

 

Let us agree that saving lives that are at risk from the virus is in itself a good and worthy goal.   Stopping and slowing the spread of the virus may be a means to that end, but whether it is a good means to a good end or a bad means to a good end is debatable.  Slowing the spread of the virus increases the total length of the pandemic, stretching out the time we have to deal with this plague over a much longer period than would otherwise be the case.   That can hardly be regarded as desirable in itself.   Quite the contrary in fact.   Whether this is an acceptable evil, worth tolerating in order to achieve the end of lives saved, depends upon a couple of considerations.

 

 

First it depends upon the effectiveness of the method of slowing the spread of the virus in saving lives.   If the method is not effective, then the evil of artificially lengthening the period of the pandemic is much less tolerable.

 

 

Second it depends upon the means whereby the stopping or slowing of the virus, considered as an end itself, is to be accomplished.   If those means are themselves bad, this compounds the evil of stretching out the pandemic.

 

 

Neither of these considerations provides much in the way of support for concluding that a longer pandemic is an evil made tolerable by a good end, such as saving lives.

 

 

With regards to the first consideration, it is by no means clear that any lives have been saved in this way at all.  Indeed, at the beginning of the first lockdown, back when everyone was repeating the phrase “flatten the curve” ad naseum, the experts advising this strategy told us that it would not decrease the total lives lost  but merely spread them out so that the hospitals would not be overwhelmed at once.   This, in my opinion at least, was not nearly as desirable an end as saving lives and not one sufficient to make the lockdown measures acceptable.

 

 

This brings us to our second criteria.   The means by which our government health officials have tried to slow or stop the spread of the virus are neither morally neutral nor positively good.   On the contrary, they are positively evil.  They inflict all sorts of unnecessary misery upon people.  Advocates of the lockdown method sometimes maintain that the damage inflicted is merely economic and therefore “worth it” to save lives.   This would be a dubious conclusion even if the premise were valid.   The premise is not valid, however, and it is highly unlikely that those who state it seriously believe what they are saying.  

 

 

Telling people to stay home and avoid all contact with other people does not just hurt people financially, although it certainly does that if their business is forced to close or their job is deemed by some bureaucrat to be “non-essential”.  It forces people to act against their nature as social beings, deprives them of social contact which is essential to their psychological and spiritual wellbeing, which are in turn essential to their physical wellbeing.   Mens sana in corpore sano.   The longer people are deprived of social contact, the more loneliness and a sense of isolation will erode away at their mental health.   Phone, e-mail, and even video chat, are not adequate substitutes for in-person social contact.

 

All of this was true of the first lockdown in the spring but it is that much more true with regards to the second lockdowns that are now being imposed.   The first lockdown was bad enough, but the second lockdown, imposed for at least a month, coming right before Christmas in the same year as the first, will be certain to pile a sense of hopelessness and despair on top of the inevitable loneliness and isolation.  The government has kept liquor stores and marijuana vendors open, even though the combination of alcohol and pot with hopelessness, loneliness, and despair is a recipe for self-destructive behaviour, while ordering all the churches, which offer, among other things, hope, to close.    This is evil of truly monstrous proportions.    It can only lead to death – whether by suicide, addictive self-destruction, or just plain heart brokenness.   

 

 

The protesters who accuse Brian Pallister and the government he leads of murder for having re-opened our economy from the first lockdown and not having imposed a second one right away when the cases began to rise are wrong-headed about the matter as they, generally being leftists, are wrong-headed about everything.   The government does not become morally culpable for deaths because it refrains from taking actions which are extremely morally wrong in themselves in order to achieve the goal of saving lives.   Not imposing a draconian lockdown does not translate into the murder of those for whom the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus becomes one health complication too many.

 

 

Where Pallister does bear moral culpability for deaths is with regards to all the people who will kill themselves, or perhaps snap and kill others, drink themselves to death or accomplish the same with drugs, or simply give up on life in hopeless gloom and despair because he has allowed Brent Roussin, once again, to impose these totalitarian public health orders.

 

 

Roussin has been going on television as of late, showing pictures of people who have died, and lecturing Manitobans on how these are not just numbers but people.   This is a kind of sleight-of-hand, by which he hopes to distract the public from all the harm he is actively causing, and he knows full well that lockdowns are themselves destructive and lethal for he admitted as much a couple of months ago thus compounding his guilt now, by manipulating their emotions.

 

 

Does Roussin realize that this street runs both ways?

 

 

What about the young man, Roussin, who would otherwise have had decades of life ahead of him, much more than those whose deaths you have been exploiting to justify your bad decisions, but who killed himself because you cancelled his job as "non-essential", took away  his social life, and left him with the prospect of long-term isolation?   Do you not realize that he is a person as well?

 

 

In the end, those who die from the lockdown may very well turn out to outnumber by far those who succumb to the bat flu.   In which case all that Roussin will have accomplished will have been to exchange a smaller number of deaths for which he would not have been morally responsible for a larger number of deaths that leave his hands permanently stained with blood.

 

Who Can’t Say What Now?

Here in Winnipeg, a local man by the name of Jamie Sitar has recently opted to take the Social Justice Warrior route in pursuit of his five minutes of fame. He has received assistance along the way to this ignoble end from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, paid for by your taxes and mine.

One cannot walk the SJW path without trampling all over people who usually – I would say always except that I don’t want to commit the basic philosophical fallacy of ruling out an albino crow on the grounds of the ninety-nine regular ones who proceeded him – don’t deserve it. That is the very nature of the road. Its every layer, from the upper pavement down to the subbase, is composed of the crushed human detritus of those who have been deemed insufficiently progressive and enlightened by the self-appointed watchmen of the moral and intellectual hygiene of public discussion.

In this case, the victim is John Sawatzky, the principal of the elementary school that belongs to Calvin Christian, an evangelical collegiate in Transcona that was founded by the Dutch Reformed sixty years ago. He committed what, in the eyes of the progressive Left, is an unpardonable example of crimethink when, earlier this week, he made reference to the last century’s most famous incident of missionary martyrdom in the devotional section of the school’s weekly newsletter.

The incident took place in 1956. Five American missionaries from various evangelical backgrounds and representing various mission agencies – Jim Elliott, Pete Fleming, Nate Saint, Ed McCully and Roger Rouderian – most of whom had been educated at Wheaton College, had been attempting to evangelize the native tribe in Ecuador that they knew only as the Aucas. This was the label that the much larger Quechua people who were their closest neighbours used for them. The reason the missionaries knew them only by this name, and not by the name by which they called themselves, was because this tribe was notoriously and extremely xenophobic and insular even by the standards of tribal societies in general. The missionaries’ evangelistic efforts had begun in the fall of the previous year, when they located their settlements and initiated contact by lowering gifts to them from their airplane. This led to further interaction between the missionaries and the aboriginals that seemed promising, but went south badly on January 8th. That day a party of the natives went to the missionaries’ camp on the bank of the Curaray River and, sending three of their women to the other side of the river, lured Elliot and Fleming into the water where one of the native men attacked them from behind with a spear. Meanwhile, the other three missionaries who were back on the shore were beset by the rest of the party who speared them to death. The incident made international news and the following year Jim Elliott’s widow Elizabeth published her bestseller Through Gates of Splendour which tells the story in detail. In 2005 Nate Saint’s son Steve published End of the Spear, which re-tells and continues the story, recounting the successful evangelism of the tribe, including the conversion of some of the killers themselves. This became the basis of a dramatized motion picture version of the events that was released the following year.

So why has Mr. Sawatzky’s reference to this story, that has been told and re-told, in books, films, and even on the stage, gotten Mr. Sitar’s knickers in a knot?

The following phrase appeared in it “The savage Auca Indians of Ecuador.”

It was the word “savage” in particular that rained on Mr. Sitar’s parade, hurt his precious little feelings, got his dander up and his blood boiling, so much so that he e-mailed a complaint to the principal the next day and brought the matter to the attention of the media.

Was Mr. Sitar upset about the redundancy in the phrase?

The word “Auca” you see, is the Quechua word for “savage.” It was how their closest neighbours, also indigenous South Americans, chose to describe them.

So is Mr. Sitar some sort of grammar policeman, blowing his whistle at the qualification of a noun by an adjective with the same semantic meaning?

Hardly.

Mr. Sitar apparently believes that describing a people group as “savage” is “racist.” Or perhaps he thinks that it is racist for someone from a higher civilization - permanent settlements, rule of law, constitutional government, monotheistic religion, advanced science and technology, etc. – to describe a tribal society as savage. One obvious flaw in that reasoning in this case is that the description of this tribal society as savage originated in the neighbouring tribal society.

It is worth observing that even if we were to grant the presupposition that seems to be assumed by Mr. Sitar – that calling another people group savage is racist – and to apply this consistently, by saying that the Quechua were racist in calling their neighbours the Auca, it can be argued that this is a lesser degree of racism than that which is to be found in this people group’s way of speaking of itself.

The people in question call themselves the Waoroni. In their own language their self-appellation is the word for “people”, as in, “human beings.” They called themselves this in order to distinguish the members of their tribe from those they derogatorily called the “Cowodi”, which included everyone outside their tribe, all of whom they looked upon as subhuman. This is, by the way, by no means atypical of the way tribal societies refer to themselves and their neighbours. The great irony is that the politically correct demand that we call each ethnos only by its own name for itself requires that we adopt a host of names that enshrine concepts of ethnic supremacy and are therefore more “racist” than mere derogatory slurs.

This illustrates an important truth which can be readily observed by anyone with eyes to see. The phenomena in the real world that most closely match the meaning that the word racism suggests to most people – the belief that one’s own people group is superior to all others on the one hand and a contemptuous view of other people groups on the other – is much stronger, far more intense, and much more likely to express itself in a violent way in societies that exist on the tribal level than in societies that have a higher civilization. In other words, the people the anti-colonialists and anti-imperialists usually see as the victims of racism are in fact far more racist than the people these same ideologues usually see as the perpetrators of racism. Indeed, this must inevitably be the case. For a society to advance beyond tribalism and build a higher civilization, requires that it engage in a much larger exchange of goods and ideas with other societies than ever exists at the tribal level. This in turn requires that to some degree or another, a concept of a common humanity be held by all the participants in this exchange.

This leads me to a further irony about the anti-racist ideologues themselves. Keep in mind that anti-racist is not the same thing as non-racist. Someone who does not subscribe to any sort of racialist ideology, belong to any organization devoted to such ideology, speak in slurs about other groups, or treat members of other groups unfairly in his personal interactions with them, can reasonably be described as a non-racist. An anti-racist, however, is someone who believes that he has the duty to seek out “racists”, call them out publicly, and, in many cases, drive them out of society, ruining their careers, reputations, social standing, sometimes marriages, and lives in the process. The people whom anti-racists target are not necessarily people committed to an explicit racialist ideology. Anyone who is skeptical of the one-world project, the latter days revival of King Nimrod’s Babel project (“Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” Genesis 11:4) by eliminating what boundaries remain between nations, societies, and civilizations, and who believes that such things as national borders, laws protecting the same, and privileges of citizenship are indispensable to civilized order is likely to be condemned by the anti-racists. The anti-racists profess to believe that these views are a regressive hold-over from tribalism and a roadblock in the way of progress towards their one-world utopia. It is this latter aspect that explains their irrational and intense hostility towards anyone they perceive as racist. The irony, however, is that if anything is a holdover from tribalism it is their own perspective. The one-world project is essentially a white liberal project. Its ideal, despite its ancient antecedent, is not an ideal universally held, by all peoples in all times, but is rather a white liberal ideal. If a sense of tribal superiority has survived among white Europeans in Western Civilization it is most obviously to be found, not among the handful of clowns who like to dress up in Schutzstaffel uniforms and celebrate every April 20th, but among the liberal antiracists, an almost exclusively white club, who regard this ideal of theirs, held almost exclusively by whites, to be superior to the sense of the importance of national loyalty and belonging that can be found in every people group of the world and which is the true ideal. The anti-racists are the true white supremacists.

However, by articulating this response to such people I have committed the grievous error of granting them and their position a respectability that it does not deserve. In reality, such people are just bullies who take full advantage of “sound-byte reporting”, an activist media, a debased moral, intellectual, cultural, and spiritual climate, and the other depravities of the age, to impose their will upon those they perceive to be vulnerable to such tactics. If you do not think the principal of Calvin Christian Elementary School to fall into such a category check out the “Respect for Human Dignity and Diversity Policy” of his employer, especially sections 12 and 13. Undoubtedly, the school adapted this policy with the idea that it would serve as a sort of protection against false accusations of discrimination in this perverse age of Human Rights Commissions. This is foolish because it does the exact opposite – it signals fear and vulnerability to the predatory enforcers of diversity.

Mr. Sitar is quoted by the CBC as having said of Mr. Sawatzky’s language that it “is inappropriate and racist and ethnocentric”, which, if that had been all he had said, I would probably not have bothered to type this essay. It would be merely his expression of his wrong-headed opinion and I couldn’t care less what he thinks about anything. The CBC, however, then quoted him as saying “You can’t say this.”

Oh really?

Well, perhaps it may be “ethnocentric” on my part to adhere strongly to old Saxon notions of freedom, but frankly, in the words of Rhett Butler, I don’t give a damn. The moment someone says “you can’t say this” or “you can’t say that” my gut response is to say exactly what they say you can’t say. Where, exactly, do people like this derive their assumed authority to tell other Canadians what they can and cannot say?

The answer is they don’t derive it legitimately from anywhere. Therefore it is usurped authority, the ancient term for which is tyranny.

The CBC, every time it manufactures a racial incident, likes to call upon one of the self-appointed experts on diversity, race, and hate. They have many to choose from because this type keeps popping up all over our country like some particularly noxious form of toadstool. In this case they called upon Ry Moran, the director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation in Winnipeg. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was the organization that produced a study of the Indian Residential Schools for the government a few years back which, despite its claim to be scientific, gives every impression, to me at least, of having started with its conclusion and worked towards it, suppressed whatever contrary evidence that it could, and where it could not, buried it in a report so long that most people, especially politicians, could not be bothered to read it but just jump to the conclusion. Whatever one thinks of the Residential Schools – and I unapologetically declare my opinion to be the opposite of whatever the TRC thinks – they had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what happened in Ecuador in 1956. Yet Moran, who like most professional anti-racists – look up pictures of Richard Warman, Evan Balgord, Bernie Farber, Helmut-Harry Loewen, Harry Abrams, and Kurt Phillips the recently doxxed figure behind the Nosferatu persona at AntiRacist Canada some time and note the conspicuous homogeneity in skin colour – appears to be lily-white, uses the schools to argue that the word to which objection is being made belongs to “a very problematic and longstanding narrative that frankly has no place in society anymore”. Which is just a more pedantic way of saying “you can’t say this.”

Perhaps the real problem that people like Mr. Sitar and Mr. Moran have with what Mr. Sawatzky wrote, has less to do with the word “savage” – amusingly the CBC article consistently uses the word “Auca” in reference to the tribe even when speaking in the writer’s own voice – than with what Mr. Elliott, et. al, were in Ecuador to do. After the above quotation from Moran the article goes on to say:

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 recommendations include calls to action for faith communities to proactively recognize Indigenous spirituality as being legitimate in its own right, he added.

In other words, the TRC is ordering Christians to abandon their belief that Jesus Christ is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” Who is the only way to God. Since Jesus Christ Himself was the one Who said this abandoning this belief is not an option for us. Any Christian leader that follows through on the TRC’s call to action thereby commits an act of apostasy.

As for Mr. Sawatzky, the same day he received Mr. Sitar’s complaint, he made an apology which is quoted in the CBC article:

I could have found a more helpful way to describe the event I shared, and again apologize to those who may have been unintentionally hurt by such descriptions.

Quod onus stercoris!

There was nothing wrong with what Mr. Sawatzky had originally said, the tribe which murdered the missionaries certainly deserved to be called “savage”, nobody who has demanded an apology from him deserves one, and issuing the apology has not done him any good since the CBC reported the whole story the next day paving the way for him to be bombarded with the kind of harassment that the SJW mob culture excels in.

The lesson to be learned from all this is to never give in to these sort of demands. When you give bullies what they want you only invite more bullying, not just of yourself, but of others as well. These kind of bullies have gotten away with this sort of bullying for so long, only because far too few of us have been willing to stand up to them, to say what they say we can’t say, and refuse to apologize for it.

Lord haste the day when once again we can say whatever we think in Canada. With the possible sole exception of “you can’t say this.”

Hic et Ille

Happy Birthday Your Majesty!

Congratulations to our divinely anointed and appointed, Sovereign Lady, Queen Elizabeth II on the achievement of her ninetieth birthday. While I am not ordinarily in the habit of apologizing for things I am not personally responsible for – and indeed, consider it to be one of the most reprehensible and contemptible forms of the liberal virtue signaling that plagues the age in which we live – I nevertheless thought it appropriate on Facebook yesterday to offer Her Majesty an apology on behalf of my countrymen for “the narcissistic, empty-headed, megalomaniacal humunculus we elected to head her government in Ottawa last year, proving ourselves unworthy of the privilege of electing her ministers.” Of course, as I had voted neither for Justin Trudeau nor any of his underlings, it is other Canadians who truly owe Her Majesty this apology.

Good Riddance!

If my fellow Canadians proved themselves unworthy of the voting franchise last fall, those here in Manitoba partly redeemed themselves this past Tuesday. The NDP, which had governed the province since 1999, and disastrously mismanaged its affairs under Greg Selinger, has been tossed out on its backside. It was reduced to 14 seats, losing a number of seats that had been regarded as safe for the NDP for decades, while a majority of 40 seats were won by the Progressive Conservatives. It was a humiliating defeat that the socialist party had certainly earned. It had raised the Provincial Sales Tax by a percentage, ignoring the law that says that this could not be done without holding a referendum first, and despite this and other tax increases, ran massive deficits during each year that Selinger was premier, ignoring another law that required him and his cabinet to take pay cuts if they could not balance the provincial budget. Meanwhile the quality of government services, most noticeably in health care, declined all over the province. The most disappointing thing about the outcome of Tuesday night was that Selinger retained his own seat, leading us to ask what judgement impairing chemicals might be in the water supply of St. Boniface.

Meanwhile at the Federal Level…

Greg Selinger had inherited the leadership of the Manitoba NDP from Gary Doer after the latter, a much more popular and capable premier than his successor, stepped down in order to accept an ambassadorship to the United States. Thomas Mulcair, who had been the official Opposition Leader during the premiership of Stephen Harper, had also inherited his leadership of the federal NDP from a more popular leader, the charismatic Jack Layton. It was Layton who had led the NDP into the 2011 election, winning them a record number of seats, only to step down shortly after the election, and to die of cancer soon after. Mulcair lost over half of these seats in in the 2015 election, a sizeable chunk of which loss can be attributed to his decision to take up cudgels on behalf of the niqab, alienating much of his support base in Quebec. Earlier this month, at the NDP convention in Edmonton, the party voted to hold a new leadership race, essentially doing what the Manitoba NDP had attempted but failed to do to Selinger two years ago when the handwriting on the wall had become apparent and turfing him, although Mulcair will remain in the position until the new leader is chosen.

Duffy Exonerated

Apart from his boneheaded defence of the Islamic face veil, perhaps the stupidest thing Thomas Mulcair had done during the last federal election campaign was to make the abolition of the upper chamber of Parliament a key plank in his platform. Canada is very fortunate to have inherited the Westminster parliamentary system of government from Great Britain, a system of government that developed over centuries to be the very embodiment of the idea of the stable, balanced, constitution that is a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy that Aristotle theorized about twenty three centuries ago, and the Senate, as I have argued at length in the past, is an essential element of that system. Mulcair’s contempt for our constitution and traditional institutions is reason enough for any patriotic Canadian to rejoice that he will not be leading a federal party much longer, not that his successor is likely to be much better.

Mulcair’s attacks on the Senate had arisen in the context of the scandal surrounding Senator Mike Duffy. The initial accusation against Duffy, was that he, despite having been a television journalist in Ottawa for years before his appointment to the Senate, had falsely claimed his home in P.E.I., the province he represented in the Senate, as his primary residence in order to claim living expenses from the Senate. The scandal grew as the CBC and its echo chambers among the privately owned media stations, seeing in it a noose wherewith to lynch then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper, whose office made things worse in a clumsy attempt to make the scandal disappear, piled on accusation after accusation. Other voices in the media sought to impugn the institution of the Senate itself. With an irony of which they themselves were undoubtedly ignorant, in many cases the same voices that could frequently be heard accusing Prime Minister Harper of trying to Americanize Canada, condemned the Senate for being unelected and undemocratic, implying that it was therefore also unaccountable and illegitimate, drawing upon the theory that the legitimacy and accountability of government institutions depends upon their being elected and democratic, a theory that belongs to the American tradition of republicanism and not to the Canadian tradition of parliamentary monarchy. It is also utter nonsense, as if the worst culprits for abusing expense accounts and fleecing the taxpayer have not always been our elected Members of Parliament, who recently voted themselves a significant salary increase.

Eventually, after the RCMP were hounded into an investigation, they charged Duffy with thirty one counts of fraud, bribery, and the like. Yesterday, he was acquitted of all charges. The verdict came as no surprise to anyone with better sense than to believe a word spoken on the CBC, but to the extent that this scandal contributed to Justin Trudeau's attaining power, the damage has already been done. Perhaps the RCMP should investigate the CBC over their role in imposing the madness of Trudeaumania on Canada a second time?

The Election Issue That Wasn't

On October 19th Canadians will be voting in our next federal election. In accordance with our established tradition the party that wins the most seats in the House of Commons will be asked to form Her Majesty’s next government and its leader will become our next Prime Minister. Several issues have been raised in the unusually long election campaign but, as in all previous elections of the last several decades, there is one issue that has not been raised despite its being of paramount importance.

That issue is immigration. It is not an election issue for the same reason it has not been an election issue in previous elections – no party dares raise the issue for fear of being labelled racist. The fear is a well-founded one because ever since the Liberal Party introduced our present system of immigration in the 1960s our public broadcaster, the CBC, and the private media companies that, thanks to broadcast regulation agency the CRTC, are more echo chambers of the CBC than its competitors, have all levelled that accusation against anyone and everyone who dares point out the flaws in that system.

Wait a moment, you might be saying, hasn’t immigration become an election issue through the Syrian refugee crisis and the death of Alan Kurdi.

No it has not. The leaders of all the parties have tried to turn Kurdi’s death into political capital by promising to resettle large numbers of Syrian refugees here or by accusing the present government of heartlessness and a lack of compassion in its response to the crisis, but nobody has raised the question of the flaws in our refugee policy which is itself only a part of our immigration and refugee system as a whole. Indeed, most accusations that have been made against the present government’s refugee policy condemn its strengths rather than its weaknesses. Our government is responsible, first and foremost, for the good of our own country and viewed from that light, the present government’s policy of giving precedence to refugee applications from groups that have been targeted by ISIS for persecution over the co-religionists of ISIS is basic sense. Only a deranged crackpot would think that it is more important for the government not to discriminate in its processing of refugee applications than for it to attempt to ensure that those it lets in are not agents of the group that is turning people into refugees overseas.

Thirteen years ago Daniel Stoffman addressed the real problems with the way we take in refugees in the seventh chapter of his book Who Gets In (1). He pointed out that there are two kinds of refugees whose applications we approve – those we find in refugee camps overseas, and those who show up here claiming to be refugees. The latter outnumber the former by far and, despite the fact that only a small percentage of this kind are really fleeing for their lives and of these most have arrived at a safe place already before coming here, we approve the vast majority of these applications. The absurdity of this can be seen in all those we have accepted as “refugees” who return to the country where their lives are supposedly at risk for visits and vacations. Stoffman explained the problem by saying that the Immigration and Refugee Board has a preference for those who come here to claim refugee status over those we find in refugee camps because the former are the bread and butter of immigration lawyers, consultants, and the IRB itself. The really ugly side of this is that most of the funds allocated to help refugees each year do not go to actual refugees.

The IRB was a creation of the Mulroney government in 1989. It is only one of the problems with our immigration system. The Immigration Act passed by the Trudeau government in 1976 requires the government to set a target for the number of immigrants it hopes to bring in each year. A target is not the same thing as a cap. A target says the government’s goal is to bring this number of immigrants in each year, a cap says that the government will only accept up to this number of immigrants each year, no more. Under ordinary circumstance setting a cap is more sensible than setting a target.

After the annual target became required, for about ten years it varied yearly in accordance with the economic conditions in Canada. Then, in 1986, the Mulroney government raised the target to the unprecedentedly high number of 250 000. It remained that high for the duration of Mulroney’s premiership, no longer tied to our fluctuating economic conditions and needs. When Chretien came to power he jacked the target up even higher to one percent of Canada’s population which would have been just over 300 000. (2) The target for this year is between 260 000 and 285 000.

At no point did any of these governments go to the electorate and ask for a popular mandate for setting immigration levels so high. They would not have received one had they done so. Opinion polls have fairly consistently shown that most Canadians think immigration levels are too high, that the government needs to do a better job of policing who gets in, and that immigration should not be allowed to radically alter the country's demographics.

Now just to be clear on this point, it is not always wrong for a government to go against the wishes of the majority. Contra modern democratic ideology, it is to accomplish the common good and not the will of the people that governments are established. As an old-fashioned Tory I would insist that where the common good and the will of the people are in conflict the government should seek the former and ignore the latter. There is a rather obvious reason, however, why this does not apply in this case.

Since the end of the post-World War II baby boom, fertility in Canada as in other Western countries have dropped below the level required for population replenishment and has remained low since. While this is part of the reason the Mulroney, Chretien, and Harper governments have kept immigration high – to keep the numbers of the taxpaying workforce up for economic and fiscal reasons – the combination of low fertility and high immigration over an extended period adds up to a policy of population replacement. Left-wing German poet-playwright Bertolt Brecht, in his poem “The Solution”, a commentary on the East German government’s use of force to crush an uprising in 1953, wrote:

Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

This is what a policy of using immigration to make up for low fertility does. Which is why such a policy ought to be brought before the electorate. While the modern idea of the will of the people is a deadly and dangerous “armed doctrine” the people certainly have a right to be consulted about their own replacement and when elected officials and bureaucrats seek to replace Her Majesty’s freeborn subjects without their consent they are working against, not for, the common good.

To dissolve the old people and elect a new one was clearly the intention of the Liberal governments that comprehensively overhauled our immigration system in the 1960s and ‘70s. When, in 1967, the Pearson government passed the Immigration Act that introduced the present system in which those applying to immigrate to Canada are awarded points towards their acceptance based upon such things as their education and ability to speak English or French, they and their supporters in the media and academia declared it to be a “fair” system. The older immigration policy that had prevailed since Confederation under Conservative and Liberal governments alike, of encouraging immigration when needed but only such immigration as would not radically alter the ethnic and cultural composition of the country, they declared to be racist. Their own policy, however, was not as race-neutral as they made it appear to be on paper.

At the time, prospective immigrants were required to apply from outside Canada. Their applications would be processed by our visa officers stationed in our consulates and High Commissions. After Pierre Trudeau succeeded Lester Pearson as leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister of Canada in 1968, he “began the quiet transfer of visa offices from traditional source countries to the Third World”. (3) In 1976 the Trudeau government passed an Immigration Act that came into effect in 1978 and which created different classes of immigrants, allowing those sponsored by relatives already in Canada to bypass the points system. Since Third World families tend to be much larger than those in traditional source countries the combined effect of Trudeau’s actions has been a radical transformation of the ethnic composition of Canada’s large cities where most of the immigrants settle.

There is no way this result could have been anything other than intentional. Furthermore, it is far more indefensibly racist than our original immigration policy was. In a sane day and age, a government would not be required to justify a policy aimed at keeping its country’s ethnic makeup the same. It is the government that seeks to change it that should be made to give account for its actions. To deliberately set out to change your country’s ethnic composition is to commit a form of aggression against your own people.

The only way this matter will ever be brought to a vote is if one of the parties breaks with the consensus of the others and makes it an election issue. Despite there being plenty of reasons for the Conservative, New Democrat, and Green parties to do so, none seem to possess courage enough to weather the accusations of racism that would come their way if they did, and so immigration remains the election issue that wasn’t.



(1) Daniel Stoffman, Who Gets In: What’s wrong with Canada’s immigration program – and how to fix it. (Toronto: Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2002), pp. 151-174.
(2) The Liberals claimed in their 1993 “Red Book” that the target had already been one percent of the population for the previous decade. Charles M. Campbell demonstrated this to be untrue in Betrayal & Deceit: The Politics of Canadian Immigration (West Vancouver: Jasmine Books, 2000), pp. 13-14.
(3) Ibid., p. 7.

Mr. Harper, Tear Down This Wall!

Far too many Canadians today accept the myth that freedom is a demarcation point between our country and that of our neighbours to the south. Americans, we are told, believe in and place a high value upon freedom, whereas Canadians don’t. Liberals, who prove themselves most unworthy of their name by only believing in the kind of freedoms available in the society depicted in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and socialists, regard this as a point in our country’s favour. Neoconservatives, who believe strongly in individual liberty and the principle of democracy, regard this as our country’s shame. The premise which both the liberal/socialist left and the neoconservative right accept, however, is that freedom is an idea that is somehow inherently American and therefore foreign to Canada.

I don’t accept that premise. When the American Revolution divided the rebellious American colonies from the United Empire Loyalists it was not, no matter how much American propaganda tried to make it out to be, over freedom itself. King George III was no tyrant, nor was Parliament oppressing the thirteen colonies. Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great eighteenth century lexicographer, poet, essayist, and conversationalist, and a true blue Tory, ridiculed the talk about liberty coming from men who were themselves “drivers of slaves”. What divided the Americans from the Canadians, was not that the former believed in freedom and the latter did not, but different concepts of what freedom was and where it was to be found. The Americans were enamoured of the ideas that freedom is vested, first and foremost, in the individual, that only democratic, republican forms of government can safeguard individual liberty, and that such forms of government should be obtained through revolution if necessary. The Canadians believed that the conditions in which liberty can thrive and grow, are generated by the stability and order of a rooted society, whose civil and social institutions are grounded in prescription and tradition. Americans believed in rebellion, Canadians in loyalty, but both believed in freedom.

The United States of America, in other words, was founded upon liberal republicanism, the Dominion of Canada upon conservative Toryism. What is called neoconservatism today is a version of the former rather than the latter. Canadian neoconsevatives like to think that they introduced the concept of freedom or liberty into Canada, that it was foreign to the older Tory tradition, but this is not the case. As the greatest living proponent of conservative Toryism, Dr. Roger Scruton explained in his The Meaning of Conservatism three and a half decades ago, while traditional Tory conservatism is not about freedom per se, those things which Toryism does stand for – tradition, established authority, lasting institutions – provide the necessary context for a healthy form of freedom to develop and flourish.

Canada’s traditional Tories, while opposed to liberal republicanism, were not hostile to freedom. George Grant, Canada’s greatest conservative philosopher, in his brilliant treatise exposing the failure of modern liberalism to provide the justice it promises, English Speaking Justice, said that “liberalism in its generic form” is accepted by all decent men including conservatives, defining this generic form of liberalism as “the belief that political liberty is a central human good”. John Farthing, in his classic Tory defence of traditional Canada, Freedom Wears a Crown, treated freedom as being just that – a central human good – and argued that the foundation of freedom in Canada is her traditional order under the Crown-in-Parliament, and that attempts to replace that order with republicanism or majoritarian democracy were therefore as great of threats to the freedoms of Canadians as Soviet-style revolutionary dictatorship. Similarly, the Rt. Hon. John G. Diefenbaker, the last Prime Minister who was unmistakably a true, blue, classical Canadian Tory, in his 1972 collection of speeches, Those Things We Treasure, warned of how Canadian freedom was being endangered by the Trudeau government’s actions which undermined both Parliament and the monarchy.

“The Trudeau Government clearly does not believe in freedom”, Diefenbaker said in a speech entitled “A Time to Speak Out”, found in the second chapter “The Twilight of Liberty”. To support this claim, he points to a number of examples of authoritarian legislation, such as “an Act to establish a National Farm Products Marketing Council which will make farmers across Canada the pawns of bureaucrats.” There is one particular example I wish to focus on, however, and so will quote the former Premier at length:

The Trudeau Government seems to be dedicated to controlling the thinking of Canadians. Through the power being exerted by Pierre Juneau, as Chairman of the Canadian Radio and Television Commission, private radio and T. V. station proprietors in Canada are frightened to speak, fearful of being subject to the cancellation of their licences. One such station was CKPM in Ottawa, which dared to have an open line program critical of the Government. Pierre Juneau did come before a Committee of the House and he uttered lachrymose words in reply to the criticism levelled at him that he wishes to determine what Canadians shall hear, and to deny them the right to listen to what they will. His attitude was different when he spoke to the Association of Private Broadcasting Companies and in effect stated: “When I ope my lips, let no dog bark.” Under him the broadcasting network owned by the people of Canada is allowed to broadcast what he permits.

The CRTC was a new agency at the time Diefenbaker spoke these words. It had been created by the Broadcasting Act passed by the Liberal government in 1968. Previous Canadian broadcasting legislation was moderate, pertaining primarily to the establishment of a public broadcaster (the CBC) in the 1930s and an agency to oversee that broadcaster. The CRTC, however, was created as a body that would have regulatory oversight over all radio and television broadcasting in Canada, private and public. The creation of the CRTC was very much part of a major twentieth century trend of creating large bureaucratic agencies with vast regulatory powers, overseen by Cabinet Ministers who answer to the Prime Minister, whose own accountability to the Crown-in-Parliament has been greatly diminished, thus in effect, transferring most of the powers of government away from the Parliamentary assembly that passes legislation with the authority of the Queen and into the hands of both the Prime Minister and his Cabinet and the bureaucratic agencies that extend their tentacles into every aspect of the everyday lives of Canadians. Men like Farthing and Diefenbaker were right in warning against the threat to Canada’s heritage of freedom posed by this trend.

As dangerous to traditional Canadian liberties as the growth of bureaucratic agencies, the government’s increasing reliance upon the multiplication of regulations rather than legislation, and the shift in power from the Crown and Parliament to the Prime Minister and his Cabinet at the head of the expansive bureaucracy, all are, the CRTC in particular poses a special threat due to the nature of the area over which it has been given regulatory powers. A fundamental principle of the Canadian political tradition and the British tradition in which the Canadian has its roots is that while behaviour conducted in public is appropriately subject to restriction by the Queen’s laws passed in Parliament, private thoughts and feelings are not. It is not the place of government to tell people what to think and feel. When the Parliament of Queen Elizabeth I passed laws requiring attendance at the services of the Church of England, they did not also require subscription to the tenets of the Anglican faith upon the part of anyone other than the clergy, and these were given considerable latitude in their interpretation of the 39 Articles. This is because church attendance was a matter of religion, and hence a public matter, subject to legislation, but questions of personal belief were matters of conscience, and hence private, outside of the jurisdiction of government.

Through the CRTC, Diefenbaker maintained, the Liberal government was violating this tradition by trying to control what Canadians thought. It was not the kind of overt thought control that takes place in totalitarian societies where you are in danger of being captured by the secret police and put in prison or worse if you dare express contraband opinions. It was a more subtle kind of thought control in which the agency would control the thoughts of Canadians by controlling the channels through which they gain access to the information necessary to form their thoughts. It was given power to regulate the new radio and television media, which were rapidly replacing the print media as the primary and often sole sources to which Canadians turned for information. That the new electronic media were replacing the traditional print media is itself cause for lamentation but that is a subject for another time. In 1976 the Telecommunications Act extended their jurisdiction over other telecommunications, such as telephone services, and changed the agency’s name to the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, keeping the old initials.

The CRTC answers to the Minister of Canadian Heritage and its mandate is to oversee and regulate radio and television broadcasting in Canada (including satellite and cable) to ensure that the policy defined in Section 3(1) of the Broadcasting Act is followed. Most of this policy can be summed up in the concept of cultural protectionism. The first subsection calls for Canadian ownership and control of the Canadian broadcasting system, the sixth for maximum use of Canadian creative talent and resources. While cultural protectionism is not a concept I find objectionable – indeed, I would argue that it is necessary up to the point where it starts to generate provincialism and that it is particularly necessary for a country like ours whose only neighbour shares the same language – I would also argue that the CRTC has failed to achieve any of the legitimate goals of cultural protectionism and has failed to protect any Canadian culture worth protecting. If you read the novels of L. M. Montgomery, set in rural P.E.I. and telling the story of Anne Shirley of Green Gables from just before Confederation until the end of the First World War, the Chronicles of the Whiteoaks of Jalna by Mazo de la Roche, a saga set in rural Ontario from the 1850s to the 1950s, the humorous short stories of Stephen Leacock and Robertson Davies’ three trilogies of novels (especially the first two) you will find, whether the communities depicted be Presbyterian, Anglican, or a mixture of the two, a distinct, North American adaptation of British culture, that was at one time recognizable as the culture of English Canada. Today, apart from remnant traces in rural Canada, this culture has largely disappeared. It disappeared in the period in which the CRTC has had jurisdiction over the airwaves. Nor can the CRTC be viewed as a success if we consider the matter from the angle of what we most needed protection from, i.e., the flood of cultural sewage flowing from the film and music studios of Los Angeles, California that has swept away most of what was good and decent in the cultures of both the United States and Canada.

This is because the CRTC has been engaged in a completely different kind of cultural protectionism. If you look at the Broadcasting Policy set forth in the Broadcasting Act you will see that declares that private, community, and public broadcasting (the CBC) are all to be part of an integrated, unified, “Canadian broadcasting system” that will offer “information and analysis concerning Canada and other countries from a Canadian point of view”. Since it also talks in more than one place about promoting such things as “equal rights”, “linguistic duality”, and “multiculturalism” it is hardly a stretch of the imagination to say that when the Broadcasting Act speaks of “a Canadian point of view” what it really means is “the left-wing point of view of the Pearson and Trudeau Liberals”. What the CRTC, charged with the task of enforcing this policy, in which private and community broadcasters are to be in sync with the CBC in an integrated system, is really protecting, then, is not the culture of Canada, or even Canada’s traditional cultural plurality, but the left-wing cultural policies introduced by the Trudeau government. It protects these policies, by interfering with the spread of information that might cast those policies in an unfavourable light, and by discouraging and hindering dissent from those policies, by treating them as a fundamental, not-to-be questioned, element of the “Canadian point of view”, although they would have been unrecognizable to Canadians only a few years before they were introduced.

Almost forty years ago, the Trudeau government passed the Canadian Human Rights Act, and while the event made the news, for four decades the radio and television media maintained silence about the bill truly meant and what its consequences were. The bill forbade discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, religion, and a slew of other things, which, translated into the language of ancient and traditional rights and liberties, meant that it told Canadians they were no longer free to associate with or refuse to associate with whoever they wanted, do business or refuse to do business with whoever they wanted, and worst of all, thanks to the notorious Section 13, express their thoughts if those thoughts happened to reflect negatively on people protected by their race, religion, sex, etc. This was a major abridgement of basic Canadian prescriptive liberties done in the name of the Trudeau doctrine of multiculturalism. The bill established an agency to investigate complaints, the Canadian Human Rights Commission, and a tribunal to hear complains, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. The former conducted its investigations at the taxpayers’ expense, those brought before the latter were subject to stiff penalties yet had none of the basic protections available to defendants in ordinary courts. Provincial governments followed the Trudeau government’s example and established their own equivalents. These Stalinist kangaroo courts were and are a grotesque mockery of our country’s tradition of justice and freedom. Yet one would never have known that any of this was going on if one turned only to the CBC or its various privately owned clones, for one’s information. The traditional print media, not subject to CRTC oversight, would sometimes report these things, particularly the Alberta Report magazine. The average Canadian, however, was clueless about what was going on.

In many cases the information that was blacked out by the radio and television news media would have greatly altered the way a story that was prominent in the news was received and perceived. I will give one example of this. In the late 1990s, when Jean Chretien was promoting proposed legislation that would change the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples and a private member’s bill introduced by Svend Robinson that would add “sexual orientation” to the list of categories over which the Canadian Human Rights Act forbids discrimination, he promised out of the side of his mouth, that the rights of those whose faith teaches that sexual relations between members of the same sex is a sin would not be infringed upon, because religious rights are guaranteed in the Charter and religion is already a protected category in the CHRA. These promises received airtime all over the radio and television media. What was not covered was the fact that even as Chretien was speaking those words, Christians were being hauled before Human Rights Tribunals all over Canada and charged with discrimination for such things as refusing to help promote a cause contrary to their faith (Scott Brockie, Ontario), refusing to rent a single room to two men in the bed and breakfast they ran out of their own home (Dagmar and Arnost Cepica, PEI) or even purchasing ad space in a newspaper and filling it with references to Bible verses that condemned homosexuality (Hugh Owen, Saskatchewan).

For most of the last four years, an alternative to the CBC and its doppelgangers was available to cable and satellite subscribers in the Sun News Network. Affiliated with the Sun Media newspaper chain, Sun News offered a neoconservative perspective which, while perhaps not entirely to my Old Tory tastes, was a refreshing breathe of fresh air compared to stale views and stories available on the other networks. At least they believed in other freedoms than the freedom to screw and smoke whoever and whatever you wanted. Any number of stories, from the RCMP gun grab at High River to the attempts of activists in the Law Societies to force Trinity Western University to abandon her faith-based community covenant if she wished to open her new law school, received better coverage because Sun News was there both to investigate and report the facts about these stories herself and to keep the other stations accountable. It was also nice to have one station that did not bow down and worship everytime Justin Trudeau opens his mouth to say something vapid.

Sun News ceased broadcasting earlier this month because it had been losing money and its parent company, Quebecor Media, was unable to find a purchaser for it. Many believe that this is due to the CRTC’s decision not to grant them Category-1, mandatory carry, status when they applied for it in 2013, and that that decision was made by the CRTC to deliberately kill the station. Whether or not that is the case, I will leave it to others to say, although it would not surprise me as Sun News certainly did not fit in to the unified and uniform “Canadian broadcasting system”, that the CRTC seeks to protect. What I will say about it is that Sun News showed, in its four years of broadcasting, why it is important that points of view other than those offered by the CBC and approved by the CRTC be available. Now that Sun News is gone it is imperative that the CRTC’s stranglehold over the channels of information available to Canadians be broken.

The present Prime Minister has claimed all his political life to be a believer in freedom. Since becoming Prime Minister he has restored some of the symbols of the older Canadian tradition, the foundation upon which traditional Canadian freedoms rested. His current efforts to meet the threat of terrorism by expanding the powers of CSIS rather than deal with the Trudeau-era immigration and multiculturalism policies that render us vulnerable provide us with good reason to question his commitment to Canadian tradition and freedom. If he truly believes in freedom he must prove it by doing something substantial towards restoring the freedom we have lost. The CRTC, far from being a protective barrier preserving Canadian culture from being swamped by foreign and especially American culture, has failed to preserve the best of Canadian culture while allowing the worst filth from Hollywood in. It has instead become a wall between Canadians and the information they need about what has been done to their culture, traditions, and freedoms, in order to protect what is left and restore what is lost. To borrow and adapt some famous words from the last decent man to hold the office of American President, Mr. Harper, tear down this wall!

This and That No. 17

In my last "This and That" I praised the Harper government for restoring "Royal" to the titles of our navy and airforce but warned against the Omnibus Crime Bill and the threat to privacy and free speech which it poses.

In this edition, I would like to again offer praise and criticism to the government. Prime Minister Harper has ordered all Canadian embassies to display a portrait of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. That is an excellent decision although it is unfortunate that it was necessary - the embassies should already have had the Queen's portrait on prominent display.

Now for the criticism.

In an interview with the CBC's Peter Mansbridge, Prime Minister Harper said that the biggest security threat to our country is Islamic terrorism. That may or may not be the case. It is not this statement of Harper's that I wish to criticism but his plan to revive the anti-terrorist legislation the Chretien government introduced 10 years ago after 9/11.

This legislation gives the police powers which they do not need to effectively fight terrorism. This violates the rights of all Canadians.

The United States, after the terrorist attack of ten years ago, passed the USA PATRIOT Act which granted enhanced investigatory powers to the executive branch of the American government. A couple of years later the Bush administration asked for yet more powers. The late Sam Francis, in his syndicated column, wrote the following:

It is thunderously noticeable in most of the defensive speeches, wisecracks and sarcasm about the critics of these laws that hardy anyone ever actually specifies why such vast powers are needed and what terrorism they have actually prevented. What we do know is that every few weeks the government issues yet another statement claiming that the "terrorist threat" remains serious or is greater than ever or may be getting worse. There seems to be no reason to think the new powers have helped us at all.

But the larger point is not what this administration does or doesn't do with the new powers.

The point is that the powers are far larger than the government of any free people should have and that whatever powers this administration doesn't use could still be used by future ones. (Sam Francis, "Bush Writing Last Chapters In Story of American Liberty", Creators Syndicate, September 25, 2003)

The same, of course, can be said of the Canadian equivalent of such legislation.

Here in Canada, we ought to be aware of the way measures taken to combat terrorism can threaten the liberty and rights of ordinary Canadians. Or have we already forgotten how Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act in peacetime in 1970, imposing martial law on the entire country, in response to the criminal actions of a domestic terrorist organization based in Quebec?

Pierre Trudeau had absolutely no respect for Canada's British tradition and the rights and freedoms which are the heritage of Canadians because of that tradition (he had no respect for Canada's French tradition either but that is not relevant in this context). Prime Minister Harper, however, by restoring the traditional titles of our military and properly insisting that our embassies display the Queen's portrait, has been telling Canada and the world that he does respect our British tradition.

That tradition consists of more that outward symbols, important as they are. It consists of rights and liberties too. As I wrote at Free Dominion the other day:

"Islamic terrorism poses no threat to Canada that a sensible immigration policy would not solve. There is no need for domestic surveillance and laws which further erode the traditional, prescriptive, rights of Canadians. It would be better for the government to work at undoing the damage to the traditional rights which all Canadians are supposed to possess as subjects of the Queen that was done by Trudeau's Charter of Rights and Freedoms." (http://www.freedominion.com.pa/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=146920#p1643469)

I am still working on my next essay in my "Arts and Culture" series. It is on the topic of music. I have re-written it a couple of times already and am still not satisfied with it, but will hopefully have it ready to post next week.