Freedom Under Siege

I have never thought very highly of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms which was added to our constitution in 1982.   Note the wording there.   The Charter is not itself our constitution but merely a part of it and a late addition at that.   Those who make the mistake of calling the Charter itself our constitution have bought in to the American superstition that a constitution is a piece of paper that keeps a government from going bad through its magical powers.    A constitution is a country’s system of law and government, the institutions that comprise it, and the traditions that inform their motions.   The largest part of it is unwritten and this is true even in the American republic.  Documents like our Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the one the Americans call their Constitution are merely parts of the Canadian and American constitutions respectively.   They are the laws that define and set limits to the power of government institutions.   They have no power to keep government within those limits apart from the loyalty of those who hold public office in obeying them, the willingness of the courts to uphold them, and the faithful vigilance of the public.

 

My low estimation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is not because I don’t like the rights and freedoms that are listed in that document.   With a few exceptions, such as the “equality rights” written in Animal Farm style doublespeak in Section 15, these are rights and freedoms that I consider to be among the most valuable elements of our Common Law tradition.   It is rather because the Charter has made these rights and freedoms less secure rather than more.   In part this is due to flaws in the Charter itself such as the “notwithstanding clause” in Section 33 and the broad loophole in Section 1 which effectually nullify the Charter as far as the whole point of constitutionally protected rights and freedoms, that is to say that they are supposed to limit what the government can do so as to protect us from the abusive exercise of its powers, goes.   The Charter’s loopholes and exceptions protect the government instead of us and for this reason former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was right to say that it is not worth the paper it is written on.   It is also, however, because the Charter has encouraged a way of thinking about our rights and freedoms in a way that is the fundamental opposite of that which has historically belonged to our Common Law and traditional institutions of constitutional monarchy and parliament.   It encourages us to think of our rights and freedoms as privileges bestowed upon us by government to be limited or taken away by government freely as it sees fit, rather than our own property.

 

The consequences of this way of thinking having become pervasive have been most evident over the course of the last year.   Section 2 of the Charter identifies four freedoms as being fundamental.   The first of these is freedom of conscience and religion.   The third is the freedom of peaceful assembly.  The fourth is the freedom of association.    The whole point, remember, of having the Charter designate these freedoms as essential is to place limits on government power, to tell the government that it must keep its hands off of these things.   Yet ever since the World Health Organization declared the spread of the Wuhan bat flu to be a pandemic last March, our provincial governments have treated these freedoms as if they were completely non-existent, much less fundamental and protected by constitutional law and the Dominion government has constantly been urging the provincial governments to clamp down on us in violation of these freedoms in even more severe ways.

 

In 1986 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in the case of R v Oakes.  David Oakes had been arrested with drugs in his possession and under what was then Section 8 of the Narcotics Control Act was presumed to be guilty of trafficking.   He challenged the constitutionality of Section 8 on the grounds that it violated the presumption of innocence, a civil right spelled out in Section 11 (d) of the Charter and which had been long established as part of the Common Law tradition.     That the provision of the NCA being challenged did indeed violate the civil right in question was easily demonstrated, but the Court then had to decide whether the violation was justifiable under the “reasonable limits” loophole in Section 1 of the Charter.   The Court’s ruling established what has ever since been the litmus test for this question.    The Court ruled that for a law which violates a Charter right or freedom to be justifiable under the “reasonable limits” clause, it first had to have a “pressing and substantial” goal.   Second, it had to meet the three qualifications of a) being “rationally connected” to the goal of the law, b) only impairing the rights and freedoms in question minimally, and c) not overwhelming the benefit hoped to be achieved with its negative effects.

 

It is quite obvious that the public health measures fail to meet the second of the three qualifications of the second part of the Supreme Court’s Oakes’ test.   When the public health officer tells you that you cannot have any visitors to your home, even if you meet outside, as is currently the case in Manitoba, he is clearly not trying to only “minimally impair” your freedom of association.   What he is doing is disregarding freedom of association entirely.   The provincial legislature is not allowed to do this constitutionally, nor can it delegate to the public health officer the authority to do so.   The legislature cannot delegate what it does not legitimately possess itself.   When the public health officer orders churches, synagogues, and mosques not to meet for the largest part of a year, cancels the most important festivals of these religions, and only permits re-opening at a severely reduced capacity that requires churches to betray the tenets of their own faith and turn worshippers away, he is similarly disregarding freedom of conscience and religion rather than making sure that his orders only “minimally impair” this freedom.    There is also plenty of evidence that the public health orders fail to meet the third qualification of the Oakes’ test as well.   The costs of lockdowns, measured in the destruction of lives due to the breakdown of mental health and the rise in substance abuse and suicides, the erosion of community and social capital, and the devastation of businesses and livelihoods, has been tremendous and far exceeds any questionable benefits of these insane, unjust, evil and oppressive restrictions.   Indeed, I believe the case could be made that the public health measures fail every single element of the Oakes’ test.

 

The provincial governments have gotten away with all this stercus tauri because they have until fairly recently met with only minimal resistance on the part of the Canadian public.   This can be attributed to a number of causes.   One of these, of course, is the hysterical and irrational fear generated by the mainstream corporate media that have been deceitfully and despicably portraying a virus that produces no to mild symptoms in most people who contract it, from which the vast majority of people who actually do get sick recover, and which in many if not most jurisdictions has an average age of fatality that is higher than the average expected lifespan of the general public, as if it were the second coming of the bubonic plague.   Another cause is the new attitude which has been encouraged among Canadians, especially by the Liberals, since 1982, of regarding our rights and freedoms as privileges bestowed upon us by the government in the Charter rather than what they are, our lawful property as free subjects of the Crown which it is the government’s duty to respect.  

 

The assault on our freedoms of religion, peaceful assembly, and association have come from the provincial governments.    At the same time the second of the four freedoms designated as fundamental in the Charter has come under attack from the Liberals who are in power in the Dominion government.    This is the freedom of “thought, belief, opinion and expression”.   Whereas our freedoms of religion, peaceful assembly, and association have never been this besieged before in Canadian history, our freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression has taken hits every time the Liberal Party led by a Trudeau has come to power in Ottawa.   It has been less than ten years since we finally got rid of one of the vilest elements of Pierre Trudeau’s legacy, the notorious Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.   While the entire Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977 is, in fact, an affront to freedom of thought because, despite its title, it has nothing to do with protecting our rights either as Canadians or human beings from government abuses, but is instead all about prohibiting the crimethink of discrimination on the part of individual Canadians, Section 13 was the Act’s worst provision by far.   By defining any electronic communication of information “likely to” expose someone protected against discrimination “to hatred or contempt” as an act of discrimination it in effect forbade all negative criticism of groups protected against discrimination or individuals belonging to such groups, regardless of the truthfulness or justice of the criticism in question.  

 

Section 13 was finally abolished during the premiership of Stephen Harper thanks to a private member’s bill repealing the foul section that received enough support from Conservative MPs and Liberal MPs of the pre-Trudeau variety – these had not yet been purged from the party – to pass Parliament.    Neither Stephen Harper nor his Minister of Multiculturalism, Jason Kenney, who is currently overseeing the throwing of pastors in gaol and the barricading of churches in Alberta, had much to do with this for although they had spoken out against Human Rights Tribunals and their unjust infringement upon freedom of thought and speech on their road to power, in office they betrayed most of what they had once stood for, apparently having sold their souls to get there.  The demise of Section 13 has long been lamented by Pierre Trudeau’s son, Captain Airhead, and when he became Prime Minister in 2015 he dropped a number of hints that he would be seeking to revive it.   The appeal of Section 13 to Captain Airhead was based on more than just the fact that it had been originally introduced when his father was in power.   More than any previous Liberal leader, Captain Airhead has been of the mindset that once a progressive goal has been attained, all debate about it ought to cease.   This was evident even before he became Prime Minister when he purged the party of its pro-life members.   More than any previous Liberal leader, he has enthusiastically endorsed fringe progressive causes that could not possibly achieve widespread popular support on their own merits without measures that intimidate and suppress dissenters.   More than any previous Liberal leader he has been prone to tell Canadians who disagree with him that they are not welcome in their own country.   He has used the expression “there is no place for X in Canada” far more liberally than any previous leader and with a much wider range of Xs. (1)   In all of this he has demonstrated the sort of sick, censorious, mindset to which something like Section 13 appeals.    In December of 2019, after he won re-election in the sense that he managed to squeak out a plurality despite falling majorly in the polls from where he had been four years previously, he instructed his Cabinet that fighting online “hate speech” would be one of their priorities in the new session of Parliament.   Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault was specifically charged with finding a way to force social media platforms to remove what the Liberals consider to be “hate speech” within twenty-four hours of being told by the government to do so.   This would be Section 13 magnified to the nth degree.

 

In response to this directive, Guilbeault came up with a bill that pursued the same goal as Section 13 through a different avenue.   Last November he introduced Bill C-10, or “An Act to Amend the Broadcasting Act” into Parliament.   This bill if passed would place internet media under the same regulatory authority of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) as older electronic media such as radio and television broadcasters.   By going this route, Guilbeault could maintain that his goal was not to censor what individual Canadians post on the internet, but to ensure that the companies that make shows and movies available through online streaming follow the same Canadian content guidelines as other broadcasters, a goal consistent with his portfolio as Heritage Minister.   That having been said, the Bill as originally drafted would have given the CRTC regulatory authority over individual Canadians’ user-generated content on social media.   When objections to this were raised the Bill was amended to include an exception for individual user-generated content, but this exception was removed in committee late last month around the same time that the government moved to shut down debate on a motion that the Conservatives had introduced calling for a review of whether or not the bill violated the Charter.   None of this inspires much confidence in the Heritage Minister’s claim that the aim of this bill is cultural protectionism and not censorship of thought.   On Monday, faced with backlash over all of this, Guilbeault promised that they would make it “crystal clear” that the user-generated content will not be subjected to the same sort of regulatory control as television programming.   Needless to say, he ought not to be taken at his word on this.    Indeed, Michael Geist, the law professor at the University of Ottawa who has been one of the foremost critics of Bill C-10, has already said that the amendment the Heritage Committee proposed on Thursday evening fails to follow through on Guilbeault’s promises.

 

It is worth observing here that with Bill C-10, Captain Airhead and Steven Guilbeault have returned to the very first thing the original Trudeau Liberals did to control the minds of Canadians and limit their freedom of thought.   At the very beginning of the first Trudeau premiership the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker pointed out how the Liberals were threatening freedom of thought through the powers of the CRTC.   In a speech entitled “The Twilight of Liberty”, the second included in the collection Those Things We Treasure (Macmillan, 1972), Diefenbaker said:

 

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, (2) 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 leveled 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.

 

Diefenbaker’s warning of decades ago has gone largely unheeded, perhaps because the CRTC’s official raison d’être  is cultural protectionism which appeals to a much broader range of Canadians than its more covert purpose of limiting freedom of thought.   Certainly right-of-centre Canadians of the more traditional variety, such as Diefenbaker himself or this writer, would have no objections to the idea that Canadian culture ought to remain Canadian.   It needs to be pointed out, however, that the CRTC has been a total failure in this regards.    Fifty-three years later, the Canada of 2021 is far more Americanized culturally than the Canada of 1968 was.   Indeed, much of what Canadians regard as distinctly “Canadian” culture today, is merely Hollywood culture with a maple leaf stamped on it.   Read the novels of Mazo de la Roche and Robertson Davies if you want a taste of the more authentic pre-CRTC Canadian culture.    Since the CRTC failed in its official appointed task, probably because its real purpose was thought control all along, there is hardly grounds here for extending its reach over the new online media.    Indeed, the scarcely disguised agenda of censorship and thought control behind the move to so extend its reach, is sufficient reason why this bill, amended or otherwise, must never be allowed to pass.  It is also more than sufficient reason for voting the Trudeau Liberals who dreamed it up in the first place out of Parliament and never allowing them to resume power again.   For as Rex Murphy pointed out earlier this week, “What is more galling and more threatening that the bill itself, however, is the set of mind behind it”, and that won’t go away even if the bill itself does.

 

(1)       Disturbingly, the leaders of the other parties – including the present leader of the Conservatives – have taken to aping his example in this.

(2)       The full name of this agency was changed into the awkward and absurd redundancy that it is now in 1976, but the acronym remains the same.

Last Freedom Standing

The second section of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms reads as follows:

Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
(a) freedom of conscience and religion;
(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
(c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
(d) freedom of association.

As I point out every time I mention the Charter, I am not an admirer of this document. My problem is not with the rights and freedoms spelled out in it. I don't like that, contrary to widespread but mistaken opinion, this document makes these rights and freedoms less secure than they were before by including two gigantic loopholes. I also have a huge problem with the revolting notion that this Charter is the source of our rights and freedoms, that we did not have them prior to 1982, and that we should all bow in idolatrous worship before a statue of Pierre Trudeau, thank him for giving us our rights and freedoms, and perpetually vote his party into government, All of the basic rights and freedoms in the Charter had belonged to Canadians, as free subjects of the Queen, as part of our Common Law heritage, long before Pierre Trudeau was making an ass of himself with his swastika helmet, goose-stepping, and Roman salute during World War II, and praising every Communist regime on the planet for the rest of his miserable life.

Having included that necessary disclaimer, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that during the COVID-19 panic our Dominion and provincial governments, on the advice of their public health officials, have taken freedoms a), c), and d) from us, and most Canadians have, pitifully and pathetically, willingly surrendered them. Up until now b) has not been touched. This in itself has been remarkable, as of all the four freedoms it is the one that the Liberal Party has undermined and attacked most often in the past, especially when the Party has been led by a Trudeau.

Consider the second part of b) "freedom of the press and other media of communication." Ever since Justin Trudeau first became Prime Minister he has sought government control over internet based "social media" which would certainly fall under "other media of communication." In his first term as Prime Minister he wasted millions of dollars taken from hard-working Canadian taxpayers to prop up failing media outlets. Needless to say, the small independent media companies that have subjected him and his Cabinet to the most intense scrutiny and criticism did not see a dime of this money. Worse, in the months leading up to last year's Dominion election, especially after the campaign was underway, he tried to exclude all but sympathetic reporters from his press conferences, even going so far as to have adversarial reporters arrested. These are not the actions of someone who respects "freedom of the press and other media of communication." They are quite in keeping with the precedent set by the current Prime Minister's father. Consider what the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker had to say about freedom of press under Trudeau pere in 1972:

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. (Those Things We Treasure, pp. 32-33).

Freedom of the press is a meaningless concept if it is limited only to the press that is sympathetic to the government and of which the government approves.

Similarly, "freedom of thought, belief, opinion, and expression" means nothing if it does not include the freedom to think thoughts the government disapproves of and to express those thoughts. Ever since Pierre Trudeau became leader of the Liberal Party, however, and it was already leaning in this direction under Lester Pearson's leadership, the Grits have maintained that freedom of thought and expression does not include the freedom to think and express thoughts which they disapprove of because they consider them to be "discriminatory." The entire Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977 - the entire Act, mind you, and not just the especially bad former Section 13 - includes no provisions that prevent the government from infringing upon people's basic rights and freedoms, as one might otherwise suppose based on its title, but consists entirely of definitions of acts of private individuals and companies as being "discrimination", that is to say, expressions of thoughts of which the Liberal Party does not approve. Since the CHRA does not fall under the umbrella of criminal law, despite including provisions for crippling, punitive, and vindictive penalties, the agency charged with investigating and charging people with violations of this act is not subject to most of the limitations of the regular police and Crown prosecutors. All of this is in complete violation of freedom of thought and expression, and belongs in some Communist regime, not in a free Commonwealth realm.

Our Dominion and provincial governments have already taken away our freedom of religion and conscience by closing the Churches, and our freedoms of peaceful assembly and association by telling us we cannot meet in public or private in groups of larger than ten, or in some jurisdictions even less. The Liberal government in Ottawa already tried to sneak a provision that would give it two years of unlimited, unaccountable, power to tax and spend into a COVID-19 Emergency Spending bill. Now, as the Dominion Parliament is scheduled to resume session on April 20th, this same Liberal government, a government that has talked seriously about using software on Canadians' cellphones and other electronic devices to track their movements, which has encouraged us to switch to cashless - and thus trackable - transactions, and otherwise behaved exactly like the kind of government described in any post-apocalyptic, totalitarian, dystopic novel of the last century or so, has dropped hints that it will be tabling legislation against the spread of "misinformation" regarding the pandemic. Such legislation, if enacted, would of course, mean, that the government that passed it, decides what constitutes "misinformation." Since it is constantly changing its own mind about what the facts are - masks don't help, masks do help being merely one example - this is not exactly reassuring. This kind of legislation would inevitably be used to silence critics of the government's approach to the pandemic. It would mean that it would be safe to agree with the government, but not safe to disagree, which would be yet another way in which COVID-19 measures have brought us closer to the kind of regime that existed in the Soviet Union - or the Reich of the man on whose birthday Parliament is set to re-open.

The Prime Minister has been trying to prevent Parliament from resuming in full session, proposing alternatives which would greatly decrease the ability of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition and the smaller parties to hold the government accountable. Parliament's power to hold the Prime Minister and Cabinet accountable is far more important than government ministers having the power to act quickly in a crisis. If the Prime Minister were to get his way on this, it would be much easier for him to push legislation like the proposed anti-"misinformation" bill through a reduced Parliament, Pray that Andrew Scheer keeps up his noble fight against these Liberal power grabs.

Here is a petition from the Alberta Institute against the government's planned assault on free speech: https://www.albertainstitute.ca/defend_free_speech

Sign it while you still can.
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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!