Canada’s Greatest Need

 

It is 1 July, the anniversary of the day in 1867 on which the British North America Act came into effect establishing the Confederation of the provinces of Canada – the single province into which Upper and Lower Canada had been united in 1841, now split into two provinces again - New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia into the Dominion of Canada.   Between 1867 and 1905, the provinces of Manitoba, British Columbia, Prince Edward Island, Saskatchewan and Alberta would be added to Confederation, with Newfoundland joining in 1949.   Also part of Canada since 1870 are the territories, originally all the Northwest Territories, with Yukon becoming a distinct territory in 1898 and Nunavut much more recently in 1999.   Until 1982 the anniversary of our country was celebrated as Dominion Day, because it was the day Canada became a Dominion – a term our Fathers of Confederation chose themselves, out of the Bible, as a substitute for their original choice of title “Kingdom” - and which became the designation within the British Empire of a country under the reign of the shared monarch which governed herself through her own Parliament.   When the British Empire evolved into the British Commonwealth the term Commonwealth Realm took on the same meaning within the new arrangement but Canada is still designated a Dominion in what was renamed the "Constitution Act, 1867" in the same year that the holiday was renamed.   Although the change of the name of the founding document was accomplished legally – unlike the change in the name of the holiday which was snuck through Parliament on a hot summer’s Friday with less than a quorum present – traditionalists such as myself still call it the British North America Act, just as we continue to celebrate today as Dominion Day.

 

This year for Dominion Day we shall be looking at our country’s greatest need, something that while it would not make all of the problems that afflict Canada – social, economic, cultural, moral, political, etc. – go away, would provide a large degree of relief in many if not all of these areas.   No, I do not mean a change in our federal premiership for while undoubtedly the present Prime Minister has contributed significantly to making all of our problems worse for the last eight years, there is no guarantee that his successor and replacement would be much or any better.   Our greatest need is for something much deeper than that.  It is for spiritual and religious revival.

 

In North America the word “revival” has had certain associations since the eighteenth century.   Itinerant open-air preaching of the type John Wesley and George Whitefield specialized in, threats of hell-fire and damnation like in the sermons of Jonathan Edwards, all-week camp meetings, tents and the sawdust trail, coming forward to confess Christ and shake the hand of sensationalist and theatrical ball-player turned evangelist Billy Sunday, “I see that hand”, the uncompromising morality and theology of Bob Jones Sr., and most recently Billy Graham and “Just as I Am”.   All of these associations are the outward trappings of a kind of revival that centred around the conversion of either outright unbelievers or those whose Christianity had been merely nominal or formal to an active personal faith in Jesus Christ.   When used in this sense, revival so overlaps evangelism that the distinction between the two is in danger of being lost.   The two, however, are not the same and the difference is an important one.

 

Revival comes from the verb revive which literally means to live again or to bring back to life although we generally use it in the sense of restoring consciousness or energy rather than resurrection.   While passing from spiritual death to new life in Jesus Christ certainly fits the literal definition the concept of revival, which is derived from the Old Testament, is of the restoring to new life of God’s people rather than of individuals.   In the Old Testament, the idea of God’s people as a specific nation, Israel, and the idea of God’s people as a spiritual assembly, the Congregation of the Lord, were to a great degree interchangeable.   This is not the case in the New Testament, in which God’s people are the Church, a spiritual assembly drawn from every kindred, tribe, and nation in which the wall between Israel and the Gentiles has been broken down.   The New Testament is the substance, the Old is the shadow, and so on this side of the Cross and Empty Tomb, revival is primarily the revival of the Church rather than the national societies in which the Church is found.   Paradoxically, however, since the Church is a multi-national society, when revival comes to the Church in a particular national community, the nation experiences a renewal or awakening to some degree as well.

 

When I say, therefore, that revival is Canada’s greatest need, I mean that our country’s greatest need is for the Church to undergo a spiritual reawakening here that will spill over into a renewal of our general society.

 

A genuine spiritual awakening of the Church does not have to outwardly resemble the revivals of the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries.   Historically, revivals of this type have been more associated with American expressions of Christianity than with those in Canada although an examination of revivals in the two countries reveals that differences in regional culture are just as important as differences in natural culture in determining the shape of revival.  In the early eighteenth century, before the American and Loyalist traditions broke from each other, with the Loyalist merging with the French Canadian tradition to become the national tradition of the Dominion of Canada, the revival known historically as the Great Awakening took place in both the colonies of New England which would become the core of Yankee culture and in what would become the Maritime Provinces.     In New England the Great Awakening proved to be less a revival of Christianity – the Churches in which it occurred would apostasize into deism, liberalism, and Unitarianism in less than a century – than of Puritanism, the schismatic, extremist, form of Calvinism that spawned that trio of Modern Age evils, liberalism, Americanism and Communism.   This was not the case with the same revival in the Maritimes which remained Loyal.  The difference was, perhaps, due to the less stringently Calvinist character of the revival in the Maritimes.     The Wesleyan revival in England is often credited with having had the opposite effect of the Puritan revival in New England and sparing the United Kingdom from experiencing the sort of bloody, Puritan-inspired, proto-Communist revolution that introduced murderous totalitarian republicanism to France in the late eighteenth century.  In North America, however, in pre-Confederation days, the United States sponsored Methodist revivalist meetings in English Canada for the purpose of generating class strife and undermining the Loyalist establishment.   This undoubtedly added significantly to the suspicion of revivalism already held by the more traditional expressions of Canadian Christianity – French Roman Catholicism, English Anglicanism, and Scottish Presbyterianism – on the grounds that it was unbalanced and placed too much weigh on personal experience.   These suspicions were hardly unfounded.   While John Wesley and George Whitefield had laid an orthodox foundation for the revival movement in the eighteenth century, their influence was eclipsed in the nineteenth century by that of Charles G. Finney, a converted lawyer whose anything-but-orthodox theology resembled the early Church heresy of Pelagianism and who taught a rationalistic, mechanical, doctrine of revival in which it was the automatic outcome of following a prescribed method or technique, prompting B. B. Warfield to harshly, but not inaccurately, say of his theology that “God might be eliminated from it entirely without changing its essential character”.

That notwithstanding, the North American evangelistic style of revival is not entirely foreign to Canada.   The best known distinctive Canadian revival of this sort is likely the one that began in Saskatoon in October of 1971 when Bill McLeod, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist, invited twin evangelists Ralph and Lou Sutra to hold a week and a half of meetings.   By the end of the week the crowds coming to the meetings had swelled to the point that they surpassed the capacity of the Baptist building, were moved to a larger Anglican Church, then to the larger yet Christian and Missionary Alliance building, before the Saskatoon Centennial Auditorium with a capacity of over 2000 had to be rented.   The week and a half, of course, had to be repeatedly extended and in the end went for seven weeks in total.   The revival spread from Saskatoon to the Saskatchewan provincial capital of Regina, then here to Winnipeg, the provincial capital of Manitoba which was McLeod’s home town, eventually spreading across the prairies and into British Columbia.   The story of this revival was told at book length by Kurt E. Koch in Revival Fires in Canada (1973), then again by Saskatoon-born Erwin Lutzer in Flames of Freedom (1976).  Note that this revival began in the prairie province of Saskatchewan, spread east to the prairie province of Manitoba, and made it to the west coast but was largely a prairie phenomenon.   This further illustrates what was said previously about regional cultural differences being as important as national ones.   It does not mean that the prairie provinces are more “American” than the rest of Canada – as a lifelong Manitoban and a lifelong Loyalist Tory, I would very much resent such a suggestion.   The prairies, however, and the American Midwest, share elements of a regional culture that may explain why revivals of this particular form are more common in these regions than elsewhere in both countries.

 

The last century also saw a new branch spring from the roots of the older revivalism.  Pentecostalism was born from the Holiness movement, the branch of Wesleyanism that stressed the most unfortunate false doctrine of perfection in this life, in the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles that began in 1906.   This was a different type of revival that in one very limited sense was closer to the Scriptural concept of revival.   That sense is that it was primarily something that occurred among those who already professed Christian faith, rather than the mass evangelism of the unconverted.   The Holiness movement already taught the idea of a “second blessing” in which the Holy Ghost comes upon a Christian after conversion and eradicates the sin nature.  Pentecostalism modified this concept of a “second blessing” into one in which the Holy Ghost comes upon the individual Christian and bestows upon him the sign-and-wonder working power exercised by the Apostles in the early days of the Church, this “second blessing” – “third blessing” at first, because the original Pentecostals were still Holiness believers – manifesting itself in the gift of tongues and being identical in Pentecostal thought, albeit not in orthodox truth, with baptism of the Holy Ghost.    Since the Pentecostal movement split into multiple schisms pretty much from its inception some of which revived not Christianity but ancient heresies like Sabellianism, those of us who are skeptical towards identifying this as a genuine revival might be pardoned for so being.  The Pentecostal movement developed into a denomination – or rather class of denominations – of its own.  Later in the twentieth century the distinctive doctrines of Pentecostalism and, more relevantly the associated concept of revival, was borrowed by the Charismatic movement that at first was distinguished from Pentecostalism primarily by its taking place in other, more traditional and mainstream, denominations of Christianity.  Eventually it too produced new denominations and out of one of these, John Wimber’s Vineyard Movement which began as a schism from Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel, itself a schism from the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, a Pentecostal sect founded by the American celebrity female evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, a string of revivals of the Pentecostal/Charismatic type broke out in the mid-1990s.   One of the first of these, and the one which attracted such international attention that its name is sometimes used synonymously with this entire wave of revival, took place in the provincial capital of Upper Canada.   This was the “Toronto Blessing” that began in what was then called the Toronto Airport Vineyard in January of 1994.   These revivals proved controversial among Christians, even more so than previous versions of this phenomenon.  Hank Hanegraaff, director of the Christian Research Institute took the position that rather than being genuine movements of God they did more harm than good, a position he argued at book length in his 1997 The Counterfeit Revival.   James A. Beverley, a professor at Tyndale Seminary, took a more nuanced approach in his Holy Laughter and the Toronto Blessing: An Investigative Report (1995).   As for myself, I was in my last semester in high school when the Toronto Blessing started and by the time I started my theological studies in the fall of the same year it was spreading.   Here in Winnipeg the phenomenon was dubbed “Prairie Fire” and it was very much the talk of the campus at the time.   I was a skeptic then and am a skeptic now.   I do not mean that I question those who say they experienced God and grew closer to Him through this.   What I mean is that when I compare how revival supposedly manifested itself in the 1990s – laughing, barking like a dog, collapsing, shaking – with how it manifested itself in Saskatoon in 1971 – people coming to faith in Jesus Christ, confessing their sins to the very large congregation and asking for forgiveness, confessing their crimes to the police, abandoning divorce proceedings and restoring their marriages – my impression of what happened in the ‘90s is best expressed in the words of Canadian country and western superstar Shania Twain, “that don’t impress me much”.

 

Which brings me back to the point that led in to this discussion and comparison of these well-known Canadian examples of evangelical and Charismatic revivals.   The genuine spiritual awakening within the Christian Churches that is our country’s greatest need will if it comes not be limited to although it may include these evangelical types of revival.   In Lower Canada, the decline into its lamentable present condition of secularism, welfare-socialism, and a language-based nationalism that is needlessly hostile to the unity of the country and the interests of other Canadians was directly tied to the decline of Roman Catholicism in the province into a surface nominalism, both declines culminating in the “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s.   Revival there would be more likely to take the form of a mass return of the province’s Roman Catholics to the authority, beliefs, ethical teachings and traditions of their Church.   It would be something along the lines of them all becoming SSPX Latin Mass types, probably sedevacantists too, and finally demanding and obtaining the excommunication of the Trudeau family if not demanding that the Trudeaus be turned over to the Holy Office or Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith or whatever name the Inquisition now goes under with the request that it go Medieval on their derrieres.  

 

The two largest Protestant denominations in Canada are according to the latest statistics still the United Church of Canada and the Anglican Church of Canada.   These are what have become of the two main Canadian Christian traditions other than French Roman Catholicism from before Confederation.   The United Church of Canada was formed in 1925 by the strange wedding of Presbyterianism with Methodism.   Until 1955 Canadian Anglicanism was still formally part of the Mother Church of the Anglican Communion, the Church of England, but in 1955 the Church’s ecclesiastical provinces in the Dominion of Canada were federated into the Anglican Church of Canada  in a process that rather resembled how the country was formed in Confederation.   That these are still the largest denominations other than the Roman Catholic Church may seem surprising to those familiar with the work in the sociology of religion done by the University of Lethbridge’s Reginald W. Bibby.   In a number of books, including Fragmented Gods (1987) and Unknown Gods (1993), Bibby has analyzed the decline of religion in Canada and one of his observations has been that Churches that remain conservative or orthodox retain their membership and even grow better than those that embrace liberalism.   Yet liberalism has so permeated the United Church that there is not much of anything else left and it has heavily infiltrated the Anglican Church as well although not quite to the same extent yet.   Part of the explanation, no doubt, is the gap between what people identify as their religion on surveys and their actual active involvement in the Church.   The vast majority of my relatives are either United Church or Anglican in affiliation but this does not mean that you will find most of them in the pew regularly or in some cases ever.   In one of Sir Kingsley Amis’ novels he says of a character that he always filled in the blank on forms for religion with “C of E” to indicate the Church whose door he never darkened and whose services he never attended.  This gap is much larger for the United Church and Anglican Church than for denominations in which liberalism is not such a problem.   Another part of the explanation is that conservative or orthodox Churches are divided over a large number of denominations no one of which is as large as the United or Anglican.

 

Liberalism in this context means a Church’s accommodation of her beliefs and teachings to ideas that spring from rationalist presuppositions that it is popularly but mistakenly assumed have been confirmed by science or some other form of Modern inquiry, the idea that science and Modern inquiry in general have the potential to confirm such presuppositions being itself a mistaken assumption.   It varies in extent and degree with the most severe being the kind that regards the supernatural or miraculous as primitive superstitious ideas that have been debunked by Modern technique and so rejects all the tenets of the Christian faith confessed in the ancient Creeds or reinterprets them in such a way that to confess them with the new interpretation would be to confess unbelief rather than faith.   It is a thought poison that kills Churches and the larger societies in which those Churches are found.   Since this is the disease killing the two Churches representing the Christian traditions other than the Roman Catholic that have played the most significant roles in our country’s history, the revival we need is a revival that brings these Churches back to life with an uncompromisingly orthodox adherence to and proclamation of essential Christian Truth against Modern and rationalistic ideas.

 

In the 1830s, the Church of England underwent a revival led by men seeking precisely this, to combat the encroaching influence of rationalism, Modernism, and liberalism.   This revival was very influential in pre-Confederation Canadian Anglicanism.   It began with a sermon entitled “National Apostasy” preached by the Rev. John Keble against the Reform Act from the University Pulpit at St. Mary’s, Oxford on 14 July, 1833.   It was spread through a series of “Tracts for the Times” published from 1833 to 1841.   The leaders of this revival, such as Keble, Edward B. Pousey, and John Henry Newman were associated with Oxford University.   Accordingly, the revival is known as “The Oxford Movement” or alternately the Tractarian Movement after the publications.   The Movement promoted primitive – in the positive sense of belonging to the early centuries of Christianity – orthodox Christianity, the practice of reading the Scriptures while sitting at the feet of the Fathers (1), frequent – and by this they meant daily not weekly – participation in Holy Communion, practical holiness, a renewed recognition of the authority established in the Church by Jesus Christ through His Apostles and that this and not that bestowed by the state is the Church’s true authority and establishment, and worshipping God liturgically in the “beauty of holiness” (Psalm 96:9).   Calvinists saw all this as a betrayal of the Reformation and were, unfortunately, given plenty of ammunition for making this accusation by Newman’s crossing the Tiber and receiving a cardinal’s cap.   They missed the point, as Calvinists usually do.   It was not the heritage of the Reformation, at least the English Reformation, that the Tractarians fought against but rationalism, liberalism, and Modernism, and they believed that the best way to combat these things was to renew their Church’s connection with the pre-Modern heritage and tradition of the entire Church.  

 

In Canada, the Right Reverend John Strachan who was consecrated the first Bishop of Toronto in 1839, while the Oxford Movement revival was underway, and who died the year of Confederation after a long career in which he arguably did more than any other single person to shape the form of Upper Canadian Anglicanism, was a man very much in sympathy with the Oxford Movement and expressed as much in his correspondence with John Henry Newman although strangely, considering his admirable and fierce opposition to Americanism, it was the Right Reverend John Henry Hobart, Episcopal Bishop of New York who had first influenced him in this direction before the Oxford Movement even began (Hobart died in 1830).   The Oxford Movement’s influence in Upper Canadian Anglicanism did not end with Bishop Strachan’s death but continued to spread.  John Charles Roper, who had studied in Keble College – founded in 1870 and named after John Keble – at Oxford, became the Professor of Divinity at Trinity College, the last of the many schools Bishop Strachan had founded, in 1886 and in this capacity promoted the vision of the Oxford Movement as he did as rector of the parish of St. Thomas.   He would later be consecrated Bishop of British Columbia before being translated to the See of Ottawa where he would serve for a quarter of a century and would become the Metropolitan Archbishop over the Ecclesiastical Province.   So yes, the Oxford Movement, the Anglican Catholic Revival, was very influential in the development of the Anglican Church of Canada and this influence can still be seen in the architecture, vestments, and practice of regular Communion even in parishes that would not wish to identify with the Oxford Movement.

 

The problem is that just as the sawdust trail, camp meetings, etc. were merely the outward trappings of the North American evangelistic revivals and not the inner essence which was the preaching of the Gospel and conversion of unbelievers, so the forms, rituals, etc. were the outward trappings of the Anglican Catholic Revival and not the inner essence, which was the renewal of the Church’s spiritual connection with the ancient, pre-Schism, Church to renew her to stand against the errors of Modernity.   I say this not to disparage these outward trappings – smells and bells are far more to my taste and liking than making “worship” as indistinguishable from a nightclub as possible, but because our  Anglican Church of Canada, I am afraid, has not been near as faithful to the inner essence of the Oxford Revival as it has to the outward trappings.   This is why our Church is in desperate need of the same kind of revival as is needed by the United Church – a revival of belief in the truths of Christianity as confessed in the ancient Creeds and taught by the Church Fathers rather than some watered down and explained away with rationalistic gibber gabber version of the same, and a revival of the courage to proclaim these truths, to proclaim Christ Crucified, in an uncompromising manner, rather than to preach social justice, recycling, cutting carbon emissions, the racist idea that racism is the worst of evils and that all whites are guilty of it and everybody else is the victim of it, gender ideology and the whole alphabet people agenda, and all the other garbage that apostate ministers fill their sermons with when they won’t preach Christ.  

 

Churches that preach every sort of liberal and left-wing clap trap imaginable but not Christ bleed members and die.  Their message does not meet the basic needs of the souls of men, it does not touch the human heart, and it does not have the blessing of the Holy Ghost.   When Churches commit suicide in this way, the larger society becomes increasingly secular.  When this happens, the country’s civil religion, for lack of a better expression, can become similarly corrupted, and a healthy patriotic respect for national traditions, institutions, and history be eroded and replaced with a cult of national self-loathing, endless apologies for the actions of our founders and past leaders as judged by the standards of today rather than their day, a disgusting violation of both the fifth and the ninth commandments in which our ancestors who are no longer around to defend themselves are defamed with an ugly lie in which the humanitarian educational efforts of the Churches and State are portrayed as “genocide”, and this sort of thing.

 

This is why a revival of sound, orthodox, Christianity in our Churches is what Canada needs the most.

 

Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the King!

 

(1)   This wording is not original with me.   Hans Boersma used a variation of it in a recent article, I have encountered other variations of it in the writings of Ron Dart, and I am fairly certain elsewhere, although exactly where eludes me at the moment.

 

Thanks for the Laugh Tucker, But No, His Majesty’s Free Canadian Subjects Do Not Need Your Type of “Liberation”

 As a madman who casteth firebrands, arrows, and death, So is the man that deceiveth his neighbor, and saith, Am not I in sport? (Proverbs 26:18-19)

 

There was a dinner once, one of those formal affairs that people pay to attend and where they are forced to listen to a seemingly endless program of speeches.  At this one, the audience was about evenly divided between Canadians and Americans and they were intermixed among the various tables.   At the table where the speakers were sitting a debate broke out over concepts and styles of humour.   One speaker took the position that Canadians and Americans were indistinguishable in their senses of humour.   Another argued that Canadian humour was distinct from American humour. 

 

The debate continued through a couple of the formal speeches until the second debater, the one who contended for a distinction between Canadian and American humour, was on dock to speak next.   At this point he said that he would settle the matter.   “I’m up next”, he said.  “I bet you that I can separate the Canadians from the Americans in the room with a single joke.”

 

His interlocutor agreed to the bet and the speaker ahead of him concluded his speech.   “The ones who laugh are the Canadians” he said before going to the podium.

 

“Ladies and gentlemen” he said “I’m afraid I have some bad news.   The world will end at 7:30 tonight.   8:00 in Newfoundland”.

 

The preceding joke has, of course, been made largely obsolete by the demise of broadcast television and the explosion of new communications technology as well as by the waning number of Canadians who listen to or watch the CBC in any media format.   Today, the “8:00 in Newfoundland” joke would be more effective at distinguishing between older and younger generations of Canadians than distinguishing between Canadians and Americans.

 

Fox News host Tucker Carlson maintains that we Canadians have no sense of humour and cannot take a joke.    Is he right?

 

The backstory to this begins with a remark he made towards the end of last month on “Tucker Carlson Today.”   This is the show he does on Fox Nation, the station’s streaming platform.  It has different content and a different format from “Tucker Carlson Tonight”,his weekday evening show on the station’s main cable/satellite platform.   He was joking with a guest about our Prime Minister, Captain Airhead.    In this context, he brought up all the money the United States is wasting on the Ukraine and asked “Why are we not sending an armed force north to liberate Canada from Trudeau?   And I mean it”.

 

This came to the attention of Matthew Green, the Member representing Hamilton Centre in the House of Commons, who raised a motion on Tuesday, 26 January, calling upon the House to unanimously condemn Carlson’s remark.   Green and the party he represents, the socialist NDP, apparently took the Fox host’s remark as a serious proposal.   The motion did not receive the unanimous consent that was sought and was defeated.  

 

This prompted a response from Carlson on his show the following Wednesday.   “We don’t want to be too picayune or anything, but we did not suggest the armed forces liberate Canada” he said, either having forgotten his exact words or attempting to get the maximum mileage out of the distinction between a suggestion and a question.   Then, after a few remarks about everyone who cares about rights having fled Canada, Canada having become a dictatorship, the United States not liking dictatorships, and the like, he said that there is “so little going on in Canada, like civil liberties, that if you tell a joke about Canada, they go bonkers”.  

 

Green and his party, who have not let the matter drop but taken it from the floor of the House of Commons to their webpage where they are asking people to sign an online petition telling Tucker Carlson that his “hate” isn’t welcome in Canada, have responded very foolishly.   Even though he said “And I mean it” the overall laughing, flippant, tone of the conversation rather contradicted these words which he seems to have used much in the same manner in which teenagers, college students, progressive activists and other empty-headed twits use the word “literally”, i.e., as a sort of emphatic punctuation rather than with its actual meaning.   Carlson was joking.   It was an extremely tasteless joke.   Jokes about invading someone else’s country belong in the same category as jokes about murdering someone else’s children or raping his wife.   It is best not to bestow dignity upon such by acknowledging them, much less making an issue out of them in the halls of Parliament.  

 

Everything I just said applies to the joke that Tucker Carlson told intentionally.   There is another joke in his words, one which I rather suspect he told unwittingly.   It is a much better joke.

 

It is a joke to think of the United States “liberating” another country.    From the moment they staged their Revolution in the Eighteenth Century the Americans have been talking incessantly about “freedom” and “liberating” people.  All this is and all it has ever been is enough hot air to float a fleet of Chinese spy balloons.  The Americans fought their Revolution to “free” themselves from the most liberal government in the world at the time.   That’s liberal in the older and better sense of the word which referred to the belief that government power needed to be restrained and limited to protect the personal rights and freedoms of the governed.  The American revolutionaries falsely accused the British government of tyrannizing them despite that government’s having taken a largely laissez-faire approach to them, because it would not let them forcibly convert the French Roman Catholics of Quebec to English-speaking Protestantism and would not let them go into Indian territory and take it by force.   When, about thirty years after their Revolution the Americans did indeed try to “liberate” Canada they found that the Canadians correctly understood their “liberation” to mean “conquest” and preferred to remain in the British Empire.   The Canadians fought alongside the British army and successfully repelled the American invaders.    In this period, between the Americans having attained independence from the British Empire in the eighteenth century and British North America’s Confederation into the Dominion of Canada in the late nineteenth century, we who remained in the British Empire generally enjoyed greater freedom, less regulation, and more decentralized governance than the Americans did under their new federal republic.

 

Before proceeding to comment on the United States’ next big “liberation” project I would like to expand upon the last sentence of the last paragraph by saying with regards to the relative freedom of Canada and the United States that the nineteenth century was not the last time in which the case could be made for Canada being the freer of the two countries.   It made news last month when the Frazer Institute in Canada and the Cato Institute in the United States released the 2022 edition of the Human Freedom Index and Canada was in thirteenth place – a drop from her previous spot of sixth, and the first time since 2012 that Canada has fallen below the top ten.   In the 2022 edition of the Index of Economic Freedom  Canada ranks lower yet, at fifteenth place.   Undoubtedly the present Liberal government has contributed significantly to the decline in Canadian freedom – the compilers of the Human Freedom Index say that a large part of this was due to Canada’s harsh pandemic measures and while provincial governments, mostly Conservative, contributed to this, the main push for lockdowns, forced masking, and vaccine mandates came from the Dominion government.   Note, however, where the United States stands on both of these Indexes.   She is twenty-third on the Human Freedom Index and twenty-fifth on the Index of Economic Freedom.   In other words on both she is ten spots below Canada.   If we switch from discussing freedom in general terms to specific freedoms examples of freedoms that seem to have stronger constitutional protection in the United States than in Canada can be found.   Among fundamental freedoms, freedom of speech is the example that stands out and among auxiliary freedoms, the freedom to own and carry arms.   This, however, merely makes the rankings in these indexes that deal with freedom in more general terms all the more striking. These relative rankings are not an anomaly of the 2022 editions.  Nor can they be explained by pro-Trudeau bias.   The Cato Institute and Frazer Institute are libertarian think tanks and the Index of Economic Freedom is published by the Heritage Foundation – the foremost American conservative think tank. If there is any bias it would be in the opposite direction.   Undoubtedly such facts will cause some sort of mental breakdown among those incapable of distinguishing between talking the most and the loudest about freedom on the one hand and actually possessing and practicing it on the other.    

 

After failing to conquer Canada in the War of 1812, the next big “liberation” project undertaken by the United States followed upon the organization of the Republican Party in 1854 and the first election of a nominee of that party to the office of President of the United States in 1860.   Thirteen states found Abraham Lincoln to be such an insufferable ass that upon his election they decided to exercise the right of secession which the founders of their republic had written into their constitution after the original thirteen colonies had illegally seceded from the British Empire.   The breakaway states formed their own federal republic, the Confederate States of America, which the United States promptly invaded and conquered, employing brutal scorched earth tactics in what remains the bloodiest war in their history.    The states that wanted to secede were subjugated and those that had remained in the Union found themselves, alongside the conquered South, now saddled with a federal government that was exponentially more centralized, more powerful, and more intrusive than it had been before.   Naturally, the American government spun this as a war of “liberation” or, to use the synonym that was in vogue at the time, “emancipation”, i.e., of the slaves, and to be sure, after the war they passed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing most types of slavery.   It is interesting, however, how that in his first Inaugural Address Lincoln had promised to do the exact opposite of that if the seceding states returned to the Union, whereas the Confederates had offered to abolish slavery if the United States would let them leave.   One might be tempted to think that the abolition of slavery, the accomplishment of which, oddly enough, required a deadly internecine war nowhere other than in the United States, was merely a pretext and that the true purpose of the war was to concentrate the political power that had previously been diffused through the American states in the American federal government in Washington D. C.

 

When the United States decided to enter World War I on the side of Great Britain, France and the other Allies their president at the time, Woodrow Wilson, sold it to Congress as a war to “make the world safe for democracy”.   Since such idealistic romantic drivel had nothing to do with the war as it had been fought  up to that point Wilson had to give the war a makeover and inserted into the conditions for peace at the end of the war that the German and Austrian emperors abdicate their thrones and these countries become republics.   This boneheaded blunder created the vacuum that two decades later was exploited by a man who consolidated both republics into one, made himself dictator, and set out to conquer Europe.   Once again Britain and the Commonwealth and France went to war with Germany and once again the United States joined us after her morally handicapped president figured out a way of maneuvering Japan into bombing his own country.   The Allies invaded Nazi-occupied Europe on D-Day and for once the United States took part in an invasion that actually was a liberation as the Allies drove the Nazi occupiers out of Western Europe.   Eastern Europe did not fare so well.   There it was the Soviet Union that drove the Wehrmacht back to Germany but rather than liberate these countries it enslaved them to Communism.   This was an outcome that the other Allies did not want but was forced upon them by American president Franklin Roosevelt, the bitch to Joseph Stalin’s butch.  

 

At the end of the Second World War, therefore, the Soviet Union occupied Eastern Europe up to and including East Germany.    Soon thereafter the Chinese Civil War would start up again and the Chinese Communists, whom the Americans had insisted must be part of any Chinese government that wished to have good relations with the United States, drove their main rivals the Chinese Nationalists off the mainland which they then turned into the People’s Republic of China.       The Americans had brought the Second World War to an end with the unconscionable act of actually using the new weapon of mass destruction they had invented in the Manhattan Project to kill thousands of civilians in a country that had been trying to negotiate peace terms for a year.   By the end of the decade the Soviets had obtained this technology and the nuclear arms race was on.   In the Cold War, the United States, now the leading power in the West, maintained military bases in Western Europe and a nuclear arsenal to deter invasion from the Communist bloc.   The nuclear arms race, however, meant that if the USA and the USSR were to directly attack each other both would end up destroyed and the whole world along with them.   Therefore, while the Soviets and Americans both sponsored revolutionary groups that sought to take over the governments of third party countries – and each described the goal of the groups they sponsored as “liberation” – neither was willing to risk the direct confrontation that would bring about Mutually Assured Destruction.  Accordingly, military ventures in which the United States came to the assistance of someone fighting against actual Communist forces, such as the Vietnam War tended to end in failure or at best stalemate as in Korea.   At the same time they used the Cold War as a pretext to overthrow the governments of several countries – Guatemala in 1954 for example – for reasons of their own that had nothing to do with Communism.  The countries they so “liberated” were hardly better off for it  

 

This last item, that the United States used the Cold War as a pretext to “liberate”, i.e., overthrow the governments of several countries for reasons that had nothing to do with containing or rolling back the spread of Soviet Communism, is the germ of truth in the interpretation of the Cold War popular with leftists of the Noam Chomsky variety.   Otherwise, this interpretation which treats the Soviet threat itself as having been non-existent, a fiction devised to cloak American capitalist imperialism, is wrong and laughably so.     Just as laughable, however, was the idea of the United States as the great protector of the free world against Soviet tyranny.  In many ways this is comparable to a mob protection racket.   You know how these work.   The mob boss sends some of the boys over to a local business where they say “real nice place you’ve got here, it would be a shame if something happened to it” and collect a payoff from the business owner for protection from themselves.  The Communist threat was real alright, but it came with a “Made in the USA” stamp on it.    I pointed out earlier how the United States’ having demanded the abolition of the German and Austrian monarchies created the vacuum that enabled Adolf Hitler to rise to power.  While the American government did not have the opportunity of overthrowing the Russian Tsar in the way she drove the Hohenzollern and Hapsburg dynasties from their thrones since Tsarist Russia was on the side of the Allies, her Wall Street bankers financed the Bolshevik Revolution that transformed Orthodox Tsarist Russia and her Empire into the Communist, atheist, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with the knowledge and approval of Woodrow Wilson.   As hard as it is for those raised in the Cold War with its dualistic mythos of the capitalist United States as the champion of light and freedom against the Communist Soviet Union the avatar of darkness and bondage to wrap their heads around the fact in the first half of the Twentieth Century right up to the start of the Cold War the attitude of the American government and indeed the American establishment in general towards the Bolsheviks and their regime was adulatory and supportive.   The Americans of that era saw the Bolsheviks as being brothers-in-arms in the common cause of Modern progress.   The difference between the Communist economic system and their own was less important to such Americans than their similarities.   Both the American and the Bolshevik regimes had been born out of revolution.   The Americans had rebelled against their king and established a federal republic, the Bolsheviks had murdered the Tsar and his family and established a federation of republics.   The Americans in their Bill of Rights had prohibited church establishment in their First Amendment, the Bolsheviks declared Soviet Russia to be officially atheist and sought to eradicate the church.   The Bolshevik approach was more murderous than the American, but both saw monarchy and the established church as that from which people needed to be liberated.   Both saw revolution as the means of liberation.   Both had a linear progressive or Whig view of history as moving from a dark past to a bright, shining, future and both had a materialistic faith in man’s ability to solve his problems through science and technology.   The United States was one of the first, if not the first, Western country to enact most of the planks of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto.   For example, the second and fifth planks (“a heavy progressive or graduated income tax” and “centralization of credit in the hands of the state”) were implemented in the United States in 1913, the year before World War I broke out (1).   FDR’s fawning and obsequious behavour towards the worst of the Soviet dictators was not just some sick idiosyncrasy of his own, it was this earlier, positive, American attitude towards Bolshevism taken to its extreme.   While Americans quickly learned the true nature of the Soviet regime with the onset of the Cold War elements of the earlier attitude persisted until 1959 when the Americans helped put Fidel Castro into power in Cuba.   This too they thought of as an act of “liberation”.

 

When it comes to freedom or liberty, Americanism is largely zeal without knowledge.   The idea of revolution as the means of liberation is nonsense to anyone familiar with the history of revolutions the outcome of which is generally tyranny.  A stable and secure civil order is the prerequisite of freedom.  Revolutions are by their very nature inimical to stability and security which furthermore are the properties of long established institutions not of newly minted ones.  The new regime that emerges from a revolution has seized power, but has not attained authority and so must rely upon naked power to govern.   The very word tyranny itself originally spoke of usurpation, an ancient testimony to the fact that power that is seized is power that is abused.   The equation of freedom with democracy or the republican form of government is also nonsense.   Every dictator in the history of the world has come to power by claiming to speak for the people as their voice and champion and the most brutal dictators have been those with the masses behind them.   Every Communist state has been republican in form as was Nazi Germany.  With only a couple of exceptions the freest countries of the last century and indeed all of history have had parliamentary governments under reigning monarchs.   This is hardly surprising given what we just stated about a stable and secure civil order being the prerequisite of freedom and stability and security being traits that come with long establishment.   Monarchy is the most ancient and stable of government institutions.   Our American friends and neighbours are quite ass-backwards on all this.

 

Tucker Carlson appears to think that Canada has become a dictatorship under the premiership of Captain Airhead.   Is he right?

 

Captain Airhead certainly has a dictatorial mindset.   This was evident in the way he led his own party before he became Prime Minister and it has been evident in the way he has governed Canada since.   It was most on display in his response to the Freedom Convoy last year.   Rather than meet with and speak to those who were loudly but peacefully protesting his vaccine mandates he became the first Prime Minister in the Dominion’s history to invoke the Emergencies Act.   His father had been widely thought to have acted dictatorially in 1970 when he invoked the War Measures Act to deal with terrorists who were kidnapping and murdering people.    Captain Airhead invoked the successor legislation to the War Measures Act to crush a peaceful protest and moreover did so when the only aspect of the protest that was anything more than a nuisance to other Canadians, the partial blocking of traffic on important trade routes, had already been dealt with by local law enforcement without the use of emergency powers.   This was clearly the act of a Prime Minister who had lost whatever respect he may ever have had for the limits that tradition, constitutional law, or even common decency place on the powers of his office.   He froze the bank accounts of ordinary Canadians who were fed up with draconian pandemic measures and had donated a few dollars to the protest against such, he sent armed and mounted policemen in to thuggishly brutalize the protestors, and threw the protest’s organizers in prison.   Then, nine days after it was invoked he rescinded it.  However much he might think and act like a dictator, Canada’s constitution still works sufficiently to prevent him from actually being one.  After the Prime Minister declares a public order emergency both chambers of Parliament have to confirm the invoking of the Emergencies Act.   Captain Airhead was able to obtain such confirmation from the House of Commons when he and the leader of the socialist party shut down debate and whipped their caucuses into voting for it.   The Senate, however, was not about to rubber stamp the Emergencies Act.  They debated it vigorously and it would seem that it was because he did not have enough votes in the Senate to obtain confirmation that the Prime Minister revoked the Act and voluntarily gave up his emergency powers rather than face the humiliation of being stripped of them by the chamber of sober second thought.   Another aspect of our constitution that likely contributed to the revoking of the Act is the fact that Canada is a federation.   The Prime Minister had consulted with the provincial premiers before invoking the Emergencies Act, had received the general response that it was a bad idea, and a few days before he revoked it a couple of provincial governments announced that they would be filing legal challenges to it.

 

Could this sort of thing ever happen in the United States?

 

The year before the Freedom Convoy was the year in which the United States swore in a new president, Mr. Magoo.   To secure his inauguration, they sent in thousands of National Guardsmen and other armed forces and turned Washington DC into a military occupied zone.   Rather poor imagery for a country that boasts of its peaceful transfers of power but this was deemed necessary because of an incident that had taken place two weeks prior on the Feast of Epiphany.  That was the day that the American Congress was scheduled to meet to confirm the results of the previous year’s presidential election.   These were highly irregular results to say the least.  The incumbent, even though he increased his vote count from the previous election and carried almost all the bellwether states and countries, ordinarily near infallible predictors of an incumbent victory, apparently lost to Mr. Magoo, who’s having been nominated by his own party was somewhat difficult to explain given how poorly he had done in the primaries.   At any rate, the incumbent, Donald the Orange, believed he had good cause to suspect foul play.   As Congress convened on Epiphany, he held a massive rally of his supporters and aired his grievances.  The rally concluded with a protest march, and a portion of the protestors broke away from the main group and entered the Capitol.   This was declared to be an “insurrection”, “storming of the Capitol”, “coup”, “occupation” and “attack” and the powers that be in America continue to insist upon the use of this language although the facts don’t seem to warrant it.   It is a strange sort of insurrection whose participants feel no need to arm themselves to the teeth and mostly just walk around in weird costumes and take selfies.   In the fighting that broke out as the police went in to clear and secure the Capitol there were several injuries on both sides but the protestors clearly got the worst of it.   One of them was shot by the police.

 

Captain Airhead and his cabinet in framing their response to the Freedom Convoy were obviously seeking to evoke the image of what had occurred in Washington DC on the previous year’s Epiphany.   In both countries these events were followed up by public inquiries.   Note the difference, however.   In the Dominion of Canada, the focus of the public inquiry was the government’s response to the Freedom Convoy protest, her use of the Emergencies Act, and the question of whether or not it was justified under the terms of the Act itself.   The cabinet, including the Prime Minister himself, were essentially put on trial, held account for their actions, and subjected to grilling cross-examination.   In the American republic, the focus of the ongoing inquiry by the US House Select Committee has been on Mr. Magoo’s predecessor whom they are desperately trying to blame and prosecute for the “insurrection”.

 

So thank you for the laugh, Tucker, but no, we are far better off and far more free as subjects of His Majesty Charles III here in the Dominion of Canada, even with that dimwitted moron Captain Airhead as Prime Minister, than we would be “liberated” by your republic.   Let us worry about Captain Airhead.   You have enough problems of your own with Mr. Magoo.

 

 

(1)  Canada, by contrast, introduced the income tax at the end of the War as a measure to pay for it.   The income tax here never got as heavy and progressive as it got in the United States from the 1940s to the early 1960s.   From 1944 to 1963 the top American income tax rate never dropped below 90%.   It never made it that high here in Canada.   The Bank of Canada was chartered in 1934, twenty one years after the United States passed the Federal Reserve Act.

Canada and Confederation are Worthy of Celebration

 

July 1^st is the anniversary of the day Canada became a country in 1867.   When I was born the annual commemoration of this event was still called Dominion Day.    This name, steeped in Canada’s history, was much better than “Canada Day” to which it was changed in 1982, prompting Robertson Davies to write to the Globe and Mail expressing his righteous indignation at the “folly” of the “handful of parliamentarians” who so trashed the “splendid title” of Dominion Day “in favour of the wet ‘Canada Day’ – only one letter removed from the name of a soft drink” which folly he described as “one of the inexplicable lunacies of a democratic system temporarily running to seed”.   The old name incorporated the title that the Fathers of Confederation had chosen themselves to designate the federation that was to be formed out of the provinces of Canada (formerly Upper and Lower Canada, which were separated again into Ontario and Quebec when the Dominion war formed), New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, to which five other provinces would soon after be added (1), and governed by its own Parliament modelled after the Mother Parliament of Westminster, under the reign of our shared monarch.    The new name simply adds “day” to the name of the country.    This would be like the Americans renaming “Independence Day” as “United States Day” – although, admittedly, it seems to be far more often simply referred to as the Fourth of July than by its official designation – or any other country renaming its main national celebration “Italy Day”, “France Day” or the like.   For this reason, and because the change was not accomplished constitutionally – the private member’s bill making the change passed all three readings on a single day in July when there were only thirteen members of the House of Commons, present, not near enough to constitute a quorum – I continue to use the older and better name.

 

This year, a movement to “cancel Canada Day” has arisen which has nothing to do with preference for the older name for the anniversary.    It is part of the “cancel culture” phenomenon associated with the radical, cultural Maoist, Left, and it is Canada herself, the country and her institutions that these crazies are really seeking to “cancel”.   It is a loony fringe movement that is opposed by the vast majority of Canadians.   It nevertheless has a powerful ally in the mainstream Canadian media, including, disgustingly, the Crown broadcaster, the CBC.   The media has provided its support to these radicals, by dishonestly spinning the discovery of the locations of unmarked cemeteries on the grounds of Indian Residential Schools in British Columbia and Saskatchewan as revealing something new about these schools (that they were there to be found has been known all along) and worse than what had been alleged against them in the past (that the bodies are of mass murder victims is extremely implausible).

 

Mercifully, there have been plenty of voices speaking out on behalf of Canada and why she should still be celebrated.   Lord Black gave us the sound advice to “Celebrate Canada, but not its political leaders or its propensity for self-flagellation”, meaning by “its political leaders” the current ones.   Even Erin O’Toole, the leader of the Conservative Party and of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, who in neither role has done much previously to inspire respect and confidence rather than disgust, was almost impressive when he correctly pointed out to his caucus last Wednesday that these wacko activists were attacking “the very idea of Canada itself” and observed that “there is not a place on the planet whose history can stand such close scrutiny” but that “there is a difference between acknowledging where we have fallen short, a difference between legitimate criticism and tearing down the country; always being on the side of those who run Canada down, always seeing the bad and never the good” and that “it’s time to build Canada up, not tear it down”.    Maxime Bernier of the People’s Party said it better when he tweeted “Every society in the world has injustices in its past and present.  The strategy of the far left is to exaggerate them so as to cancel our history, destroy our identity, and weaken our institutions.   They will then build their Marxist utopia on the smoking ruins.”  

 

Sadly, among Canada’s most prominent vocal defenders, those willing to say that the Emperor has no clothes with regards to the narrative being spun against her have been much fewer in number.   This would involve pointing out the difference between newly located graves and newly discovered deaths and saying that one of the great things about Canada is that traditionally we do not allow a man to be condemned after listening only to his accusers and telling his defenders to shut up, and that we are therefore no longer going to allow this to be done to the Churches, our historical figures, and the country as a whole, as has been done up until now with the Residential School narrative.

 

A common theme among those who have spoken and written in Canada’s defence is to praise her diversity.     They are obviously seeking to counter the charges of “racism” made by her accusers who are generally people who profess a very high regard for diversity, other than diversity of thought.    This is not the approach that I would take.   There are a few reasons for this, among them being that while I think diversity of the type mentioned has its advantages, I recognize its disadvantages too, and do not think that it should be turned into the object of cultish veneration the way it has.  The one most relevant in this context, however, is that the high degree of this type of diversity that exists in Canada today is the product of immigration policies introduced by the Liberals in the 1960s, primarily for the purpose of effecting a demographic change in the electorate that would, in their view, make it more likely to keep their party in government in perpetuity.   Since the main targets of those wishing to “cancel” Canada have been the Fathers of Confederation and the men who led the country prior to this period, this is not a particularly good counter to their accusations.   A better means would be to challenge the very idea that anything less than a full embrace of the widest diversity possible constitutes “racism”.

 

 

That having been said, there is an element of this appeal to diversity that can be salvaged and incorporated into a sounder defense of Canada.   As already observed the high degree of diversity that can be found in Canada today has been produced by the immigration policies of the last fifty years or so.    Immigration policy by itself cannot attract immigrants, however.   Imagine that the most repressive Communist regime on earth also had the most open, welcoming, immigration policy.   Not many people would want to take advantage of the latter.   Repressive regimes of this type typically have problems with too much emigration rather than too much immigration.   The Berlin Wall was there to keep East Germans in, not to keep other people out.

 

Therefore, the diversity that progressives have turned into a cult and which is the first thing to which most of Canada’s defenders turn, testifies to how Canada herself was attractive and appealing to a wide swathe of different people.   Now the basis of this attraction was not the opening, welcoming, immigration policy, since as seen in the previous paragraph this is insufficient in itself to constitute such an attraction.   Nor could it have been the diversity that is so much talked about today since this came later as a result of this immigration.     What appealed to and attracted so many different people, from so many different places, was Canada herself and, since the open immigration policy was one of the earliest changes introduced in the radically transformative – mostly not for the better – two decades of Liberal misrule under Pearson and Trudeau the Elder from the mid ‘60’s to the early ‘80’s, this means that it was Canada as she was prior to all the Liberal changes that was this appealing and attractive.

 

Could it be that what made Canada so attractive was the high degree of individual freedom that she, like other Western and especially English-speaking countries possessed, the protection of law that is largely absent from the autocracies and kleptocracies of the world, the parliamentary government built upon the Westminster model that has proven itself time and again to be vastly superior to all the strong-man dictatorships, military juntas, and peoples’ republics of the world, all the rights and freedoms protected by prescription, tradition, and constitution long before the Liberals added the Charter such as the right alluded to above not to be condemned on the basis of non-cross-examined accusations without a fair defense, and all the opportunities to make a decent life for yourself and your family afforded by all of the above?

 

That question, of course, was rhetorical, of the sort where the answer is yes.    It used to be that one did not have to point such things out.

 

Before proceeding, I must say that while all of these things are indeed what made Canada an attractive immigration destination for so many different people of so many different kinds from so many different places it is not the fact that these things were so attractive to so many that makes these things laudable.   They would be worth celebrating even if the only people to ever appreciate them had been the Canadians of the Dominion’s first century.   This is because these things are in themselves a blessing to the country fortunate enough to have them.

 

This cannot be emphasized enough, first, because all of those things were true of the Dominion of Canada from July 1^st, 1867 onward and we therefore owe a huge debt of gratitude to the Fathers of Confederation for establishing the country in such a way that all of these things, mostly inherited from the older British tradition, were true of Canada, and secondly, because those who are attacking the old Canada as being “racist” today rely heavily upon rhetoric borrowed from an ideology which thinks all of those things, or any others thought of as having been normative of white, European, Christian, Western Civilization, down to and including the notion that 2+2=4,  are themselves intrinsically “racist”.    Anytime you hear the expression “systemic racism”, (2) or “settler” used disparagingly, or some form of “colonize” used with people rather than a place as its object, you are hearing examples of the rhetoric of this insane ideology.   Perhaps the Canadian leaders of 1867 were not as “enlightened” on racial and cultural matters as today’s pampered and solipsistic generation like to think of themselves as being, but at least they were not so foolish that they could be taken in by such a vile ideological outlook, the product of decades of academic decline during which left-wing radicals took over most of our institutions of higher education and transformed them from traditional places of study and learning into mockeries of the same which more closely resemble Communist indoctrination camps.

 

I had intended to devote my Dominion Day essay for this year to Donald Creighton, who was, in my opinion, the greatest of Canadian historians, followed closely by W. L. Morton.    Current events have pre-empted this topic yet again.   I will say this about Creighton here, however, that throughout his career as a historian, he fiercely opposed what he mocked as “the Authorized Version”, that is to say, the interpretation of Canadian history associated with the Liberal Party that read Canada’s story as a version of the American story – a struggle to attain nationhood by achieving independence from the British Empire – by the boring means of diplomacy rather than the exciting means of war.    The Liberal version was, of course, the opposite of the reality of the Canadian story – the choice to grow up into nationhood within the British Empire as it evolved into the Commonwealth, by rejecting the American path and choosing the old loyalties and connections as a protection against encroaching Americanism.  We can only imagine what Creighton, who died in 1979, would have said could he have looked into the future and seen the day when much of the mainstream media would lend its support to a neo-Marxist re-interpretation of Canadian history which radical activists are using to trash the country and demand her “cancellation”.     We can be sure that he would not see it as leading us in any direction we would like to go.   His frequent warning that those who forget their past have no future applies all the more so to those who declare war on their past.

 

Let us not let the small minority of crazy radicals who want to cancel our country and her history win.  

 

Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the Queen!

 

 (1)   Newfoundland, which joined Confederation as the tenth province, did so much later in 1949.

(2)   “Systemic racism”, when used by neo-Marxists, especially of the Critical Race Theory type, does not mean, as many or perhaps most others think, either ideas and practices in Western institutions or attitudes on the part of those who administer them, that are to some degree or another “racist” in the meaning of the word that was conventional fifty years ago, but rather the entire Western way of doing everything conceived of as being irredeemably and wholesale “racist”.

Thanks, But No Thanks, Mr. Moriarty!

Michael Moriarty, the award-winning actor who portrayed Assistant District Attorney Benjamin Stone on Law and Order in the early 1990s, has responded to Don Cherry’s firing last week by proposing that Canada join the United States of America. It is surely a rather unusual way of showing support for a patriot who was unjustly fired for displaying his patriotism, to suggest that his country be swallowed up by its neighbour.

The proposal that Canada abandon its Loyalist history, give up on the Confederation project, and join the United States is not a new one. Goldwin Smith, the nineteenth century arch-liberal journalist, made just this proposal in 1891 in a book entitled Canada and the Canada Question. This was the same year in which Sir Wilfred Laurier, leader of the Liberal Party and the author of the phrase “sunny ways” which the present ultra-woke, progressive, Prime Minister of Canada adapted as a motto of sorts four years ago, campaigned on a platform of reciprocity – free trade – with the United States. The Tories, led by Sir John A. Macdonald, Father of Confederation, in the last election campaign of his career, denounced this as “veiled treason”, an attempt to lure Canadians from their “ancient loyalties.” The economic integration of the two countries, Sir John warned, would lead to Canada being swallowed up by the United States, first economically, then culturally, and finally politically.

The Liberals were defeated that year and Sir John won his last Dominion election campaigning with the slogan “the old flag, the old policy, the old leader.”

Historically, the call to draw Canada closer to the United States, make her more American, and in extreme cases to make her part of the United States, came from the centre-left party, the Liberals, and was opposed by the centre-right party, the party of Confederation, the Conservatives.

This historical alignment is the natural one. When in the present day, we hear the historical call of Canadian liberalism echoed in the voices of those, such as Mr. Moriarty, who are considered to be centre-right, it has a most unnatural ring to it.

Consider Mr. Moriarty’s own arguments. He writes:

Canada has become, within the scandal of Don Cherry’s firing by CBC, a docile and obedient member of The New World Order.
The case against Don Cherry basically reveals that he is more American than Canadian!
More Donald Trump than Justin Trudeau.
Cherry’s cry for all Canadians to wear the Poppy, the symbol honoring the Allied veterans and dead from both World War I and World War II?!
It is actually a cry from the deepest guts of the Holy Bible and the Judeo-Christian Civilization!
The grandest child of which is, indeed, the United States of America!
The “Nation Under God”!
Meanwhile, the creator of dreams for “The New World Order”?
The United Nations!

Don Cherry, of course, was fired by Sportsnet, a subsidiary of Rogers Media, which is privately owned, at least to the extent that this description has any meaning when applied to large, corporate, conglomerates like Rogers, and not by the public broadcaster the CBC, which lost the rights to Hockey Night in Canada to Sportsnet six years ago.

That is a fairly minor error compared to the major ones in the remainder of the above quoted remarks.

For one thing, the reason the Canadian Left hates Don Cherry so much is not because he is “more American than Canadian” but because he is more Canadian than they are and thus a perpetual reminder that their claim to be the natural rulers of Canada is false and that despite the “revolution within the form” perpetrated during the first Trudeau premiership, the real Canada is far more Don Cherry than it is Justin Trudeau.

More importantly, however, while I certainly agree with Mr. Moriarty that we ought to choose Christian civilization over the New World Order, I find it hard to believe that he is unaware that the words Novus Ordo Seclorum are a motto that has been inscribed on the Great Seal of the United States of America since 1782 and printed on its dollar bill for almost a century. Or that this is a lot longer than the phrase “under God” has been part of the American Pledge of Allegiance, having been added in the 1950s.

Now, he might argue that as a motto of the United States, Novus Ordo Seclorum – “New Order of the Ages” or “New World Order” – does not have the negative connotations which the Right frequently attaches to it, i.e., the replacement of Christian civilization with secular liberalism and the swallowing up of all countries into a single, global, order. This is not an easy position to maintain, however, given that a) the United States was the first Western country to take a major step towards modern secularism with the non-establishment clause of its First Amendment and b) the United Nations was the brainchild of two American presidents, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The New World Order of the present day is the result of a series of revolutions against the Old Order of Christendom. The Christian civilization of this Old Order was based upon the idea that Church and State both derived their authority from the same source, God, and were neither blended, as in a theocracy, nor separate, as in later, secular, liberalism, but had their own distinct roles, functions, and authority which complemented each other. To the civil state, headed by the king or queen, who upon coronation swore an oath to serve God and defend His Church, was given the ministry of the Law in which the sword was wielded in the administration of justice, the settlement of disputes, the punishment of crime, and the maintaining of the peace. To the Church, Whose head is Christ, Whose earthly deputies are those to whom the Apostles bequeathed their ministry, is given the ministry of the Gospel by Word and Sacrament, and a number of supporting ministries of charity, compassion, and good works. It is this Order, and the God it honours, against which progressivism has revolted, seeking to replace it with a New World Order of secularism, whether soft, like that of the original liberalism of the United States, or hard, like that of Communism.

The most important of the revolutions against Christendom were the Puritan revolts against the orthodox Church of England and the Royal House of Stuart in the seventeenth century, the American and French Revolutions in the eighteenth century, and the Russian Revolution, especially its Bolshevist phase, in the twentieth century. The last mentioned, which spawned imitation Communist revolutions all over the globe in the century that followed, took place in the first phase of the World War that reduced most of what was left of the Old Christian Order to rubble. In both phases of this War the United States was led by liberal Democrats who were determined that the war would result in a new world order. So it was that at the end of World War I, at Woodrow Wilson’s insistence, the Allies forced Kaiser Wilhelm and Emperor Karl I off of their thrones, with disastrous consequences, and created the League of Nations, forerunner to the United Nations. While it was a set of most unfortunate circumstances that forced us to ally ourselves with the greater of two evils, Stalin and his Soviet Union, to defeat the lesser of two evils, Hitler and his Third Reich, in the Second World War, it was the influence of FDR, after he successfully maneuvered the Empire of Japan into attacking his own country bringing him into the war that he so desperately wanted to enter in order to carry out his megalomaniacal messianic fantasies, that ensured that eastern Europe fell under Communist domination, that the Allies handed several million people who had fled Soviet repression back over to the Red Army, and the United Nations as we know it today was created. American re-education, imposed upon the defeated Germans by force and on the European Allies by bribery, became one of the largest, if not the single largest, contributing factors to the spread of the Cultural Marxim and political correctness that has in more recent decades been imported back to North America from Europe.

The United States, far from being the leader of the resistance to the New World Order, has been the most active and effective agent in engineering its construction.

In the Dominion of Canada, following the Second World War, the party of Americanization, the Liberal Party, gained a stranglehold on power in Ottawa just at the time that its own leadership had been captured by the hard left. They then proceeded to impose a far left transformation upon our country in which imitation of the United States was the means by which most of the changes were accomplished.

The two biggest examples of this took place during the premiership of Pierre Trudeau.

In 1964, almost ten years after the Supreme Court decision that struck down segregation, the United States government, giving in to demands from a Communist-affiliated, heretical preacher who began his career as a civil rights activist only after the aforementioned Supreme Court decision, passed a bill which replaced the injustice of de jure segregation with the injustice of de jure integration. Pierre Trudeau decided that Canada needed to follow the United States’ example and in 1977 passed the Canadian Human Rights Act, which established thought police and a thought crime tribunal. By imitating the United States, Trudeau made us more like the USSR.

Closer to the end of his premiership, Trudeau decided that since the United States has its lauded Bill of Rights, we needed an equivalent, and gave us one in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. Not only did this actually weaken our traditional Common Law rights and freedoms by giving both Parliament and the provincial legislatures the right to ignore them, it also saddled us with an autocratic Supreme Court, just like the American one, which then proceeded to wage war on our Christian traditions, customs, morality and heritage as SCUSA had been doing in the United States for decades prior to this. Six years later, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down all our abortion laws in R. v. Morgentaler. This was fifteen years after the equivalent American decision of Roe v. Wade and would not have been possible in Canada prior to 1982.

All attempts to move Canada closer to the United States have had the effect of shifting the country leftward. Consider the fact that our military, whose faithful service to God, King, Country, and Empire we rightly honour every November 11th, now serves as part of an international police force that serves the United Nations. An example of how this has led to our forces being woefully misused took place in the final decade of the last century when, with the blessing of then Prime Minister Jean Chretien, our troops participated in the ungodly UN/NATO campaign against the Orthodox Serbs on behalf of the Bosnian and Kosovan Muslims instigated by the Clinton administration in the United States. The placing of our troops in the service of the United Nations was initially due to the efforts of Lester Pearson, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his actions, in itself a good indicator that they are worthy of opprobrium. These same actions led to the defeat of the St. Laurent government in which Pearson served because the Canadian public correctly perceived them to be a betrayal of Canada’s traditional loyalties. Pearson had taken the side of the Eisenhower administration against the British – and, for that matter, the French and Israelis – in the Suez Crisis.

Given everything I have observed above, and the fact that Mr. Moriarty himself acknowledges that the American Left and such elements of the Republican Party as the Bush family are open supporters of the New World Order, it makes zero sense for him to argue that for Canada to join the United States would be some sort of triumph of Christian civilization over the New World Order.

Indeed, Loyalism and Confederation, the foundations of Canada, were efforts to resist the New World Order in its earliest stages. While liberalism had already permeated much of the United Kingdom by the middle of the eighteenth century when the Thirteen Colonies revolted, Great Britain retained, and still retains to this day, the outward form of the Old Christian Order. As a result, British civilization was a mixture of the old Christian civilization and the new liberal civilization in which the old institutions of Christendom exerted a restraining influence on the excesses of liberalism. Sadly, that influence has waned as liberalism has gained the ascendency. In the American Republic, liberalism was wholeheartedly embraced and the outward form of the Christian Order was rejected. The decision of the Loyalists and later the Fathers of Confederation to remain a part of British civilization and resist the pull of the American Republic was a decision to choose a weakened form of Christian civilization over a soft form of the New World Order.

For all these reasons, we must say thanks, but no thanks, Mr. Moriarty, for your kind offer to join the United States. As admirable as the current American President’s stand may be, on many issues, he is far from typical. Indeed, he is the exception to a norm represented by the Bushes, Clintons and Obamas.

God Save the Queen!