How Captain Airhead Makes Andrew Scheer Look Much Better Than He Really Is

The Conservative Party of Canada really ought to be paying Captain Airhead a salary. He is the best publicity man they have. He has been doing a much better job of promoting their cause in the upcoming Dominion election than their own lackluster leadership. I do not mean merely that he makes them look good by being such a lousy, awful, and indeed, downright, horrible, alternative, although that is certainly the case. What I mean is that if there were a speck of truth to be found in any of his recent, scare-mongering, accusations against the Conservatives, the party would certainly rise in my esteem as it would that of any sensible and sane person. Evelyn Waugh once said that the problem with the Conservative Party was that it “has not turned the clock back a single second” and the Canadian incarnation of the party has given no indication that it plans to do so any time in the near future. Yet Justin Trudeau would have us believe that the Conservatives, if elected, would set the clock back by about a hundred years. My response to which is to say that if this happens, it would be a good start, but we need to go much further than that.

To say this, of course, is to commit the unpardonable sin of the Modern Age, blasphemy against the spirit of progress. It is a sin to which I gladly, and unrepentantly, plead guilty. Readers of C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia might recall how in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Governor Gumpas of the Lone Islands, upon being told by King Caspian that the slave trade “must be stopped”, protests “But that would be putting the clock back”, adding “Have you no idea of progress, of development?” to which Caspian replies “I have seen then both in an egg…We call it ‘Going Bad’ in Narnia.” Needless to say, I subscribe to Caspian’s – and Lewis’ – view of progress. This is the view of genuine British and Canadian Toryism – that progress does not happen, and if it does it is a bad thing and we need to put a stop to it. Sadly, the Canadian Conservative Party of our day, like the British Conservative Party of Waugh’s day, have abandoned the more authentic views of their tradition for something closer to American republicanism, which worships at the altar of the same idol of progress as liberalism and the Left. Justin Trudeau is deluded if he seriously thinks otherwise.

I am not going to dwell at any length on Trudeau’s accusations that Andrew Scheer is in bed with “racists”, “white supremacists” and “white nationalists” as I have already dealt with this in another essay. It shows how extremely unhealthy, the political climate has become in present day Canada, that these labels can be attached to people who do not so describe themselves and who neither subscribe to a racialist ideology like National Socialism nor have engaged in violent rhetoric or action either as individuals or organized groups towards other races. All that one needs to do is to oppose a particular kind of racism – the anti-white racism manifested in the immigration policy of making the country as diverse as possible as fast as possible and hence as least white as possible as fast as possible, in the progressive notion that all whites and only whites are racists, and in the cartoonish re-writing of history into a bad melodrama in which whites are assigned the role of the moustache-twirling, villain in the top hat and large black coat and everyone else plays the helpless maiden whom he has tied to the railroad track. Heck, one does not even have to actively oppose this anti-white racism himself – it is sufficient to be seen in the same room as someone who does. My respect for Mr. Scheer and the Conservative Party would skyrocket if they actually did take a bold, consistent, and principled stand against this pervasive form of progressive anti-white racism, but I am not holding my breath waiting for that to happen. The accusations against them are entirely of the “you were seen with so-and-so, who said such-and-such” variety. Indeed, the disgusting manner in which Scheer threw Michael Cooper under the bus, the fact that he seems to have enforced silence upon his party about the Grits’ disturbing plans to bring back the vile Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, and the way in which Warren Kinsella, of all people, has been defending Scheer against Trudeau’s charges using arguments amusingly similar to those that I would have used to ridicule Kinsella’s book Web of Hate twenty years ago, all point inevitably to the conclusion that Scheer, like Harper before him, is on the same side as Trudeau on these issues, leaving the many Canadians who wish for the freedom to think differently from Kinsella, Richard Warman, Bernie Farber, Harry Abrams, Helmut-Harry Loewen and others of that ilk, without anyone in Parliament to speak for them.

What I am more interested in addressing here are Captain Airhead’s accusations of what he considers to be sexism. Back when Stephen Harper was Conservative leader the Liberals were constantly accusing him of having a “hidden agenda,” i.e., to re-criminalize abortion. Trudeau, who has constructed a political image of himself as a “male feminist” which has taken a severe beating over the last couple of years for reasons that I will not get into here, and who as part of that image takes a rather clownish, over-the-top, hard-line, “it’s a woman’s right” stance on abortion, has revived the old “hidden agenda” line for use against Scheer. He has been able to use recent events south of the border, where several states have passed strong anti-abortion legislation now that there is a perceived right-wing majority on the Supreme Court in the hopes of provoking a legal battle that will end in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, to help him stoke the fears of his feminist support base.

Again, if there were the slightest amount of truth to Trudeau’s accusations, the Conservative Party’s stock would certainly rise in my books. I remember very well, however, that while Stephen Harper allowed pro-life people to run for his party at a time even as the other major party leaders began telling them they were persona non grata, this was the extent of his “support” for the pro-life cause. Pro-life people were allowed to run as Conservatives but woe unto them if they actually tried to do something to end abortion. There is not the slightest amount of evidence that things are any different now. This is extremely unfortunate for Canada because the current status quo on abortion, of which Trudeau is so proud, is an ever growing bloodstain on our country that cries out to heaven for divine justice, and there are no realistic options for changing that status quo, that do not require action by the Conservatives in the Dominion parliament. Even if it could be accomplished at the provincial level, which it cannot, the provincial Conservatives seem to have no more inclination to do so than their federal counterparts. The right-populist premier of Upper Canada assured the media last month, after progressives threw a tantrum when one of his MPPs pledged at a pro-life rally “to make abortion unthinkable in our lifetime” that his government “will not re-open the abortion debate.” Even more recently the provincial Conservative government here in Manitoba has announced that an abortion pill will now be fully covered by the public. There are many health care products and services which are necessary to help people who are suffering from excruciating pain or are in danger of going blind which are not fully covered by the public, but a pill that murders babies soon will be.

It is difficult to think of anything that puts the lie to the entire left-liberal concept of progress more than this matter of abortion. The progressive position is that a pregnant woman has the right to terminate her pregnancy. Canadian progressives, including the leadership of the Liberal Party, take the most extreme degree of this position, which allows for no qualifications such as “up to this-or-that stage of development”, insists that this “right” be protected against even interference of the persuasive variety, requires that the public pay for it, insists that the debate is closed and that the other side should be made to shut up, and boasts that their victory shows how advanced we have become in our thinking. Their entire position, however, is based upon a lie. The position that a woman has or ought to have the right to terminate her pregnancy could scarcely be formulated, much less justified, apart from the notion that the pregnancy is something that concerns her, her body, and her health alone. “Pro-choice” lingo such as “the procedure”, “reproductive rights”, “control of her own body” is all carefully selected to create this impression. Yet, obviously, pregnancy is not simply a matter of a woman, her health, and her body. It also concerns her baby, whose very life is at stake in the pregnancy. An abortion is not merely a medical procedure undergone for the health of the pregnant woman. It is the termination of the life of a baby.

Far from being an advanced state of ethical thinking the so-called “pro-choice” position of the progressive left is a regression into the darkest form of paganism. In the times of ancient paganism, infanticide was not an uncommon way of keeping the family within the means of its resources. The story of Oedipus is but one of the ancient legends that address the cruelty of the practice of exposure by telling of a child rescued from this fate by a kindly couple. Worse, the worship of several pagan idols required the sacrifice of children, usually the first-born. Several of the most important ethicists of ancient Greece and Rome condemned this practice in Carthage, the city-state in what is now Tunisia in northern Africa which was Rome’s rival for control of the Mediterranean world in the third and fourth centuries BC. The Carthaginians would sacrifice their children to an idol, whom the Greek and Roman commentators identified with Kronos or Saturn from their own mythologies, by placing them in the heated arms of a huge bronze statue. This is a practice they inherited from Tyre, the Phoenician city-state in what is now Lebanon, of which Carthage was originally a colony. The Phoenicians shared this practice with their southern neighbours, the tribes of Canaan, and this practice is clearly identified in the Old Testament as one of the worst forms of the wickedness that brought divine judgement upon the Canaanites in the form of Israel being sent to conquer and drive them out of the Promised Land. Later, when the Israelites apostatized into the idolatry of their neighbours, this practice is again pointed to by the Prophets as having particularly defiled their land and led ultimately to the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities. A curse was pronounced upon the place outside Jerusalem where these sacrifices took place and by the time of the New Testament it was regarded as a defiled place, fit only for burning refuse and the bodies of criminals, and lent its name to the fate of those to be condemned at the Final Judgement.

Even before the Exodus, and the giving of the Mosaic Law which strictly forbade the Israelites from participating in the abominations of Canaan, such as child sacrifice, and required that they redeem their firstborn with animal sacrifices instead, the Book of Genesis draws a contrast between the true and living God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the false gods of the pagans. God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son, but prevents him from actually going through with the sacrifice, for it is faith and not his son, that God wanted from Abraham. Abraham, when asked by Isaac where the lamb for the sacrifice is, makes the prophecy that God Himself will provide a lamb, a prophecy that we see fulfilled in the New Testament when John the Baptist, speaking of Jesus, says “Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” The pagan idols, who are really devils, require their worshippers to sacrifice their children, the true and living God, gave His only-begotten Son as the sacrificial Lamb Who would take away the sin of the world.

As the Christian religion grew and spread throughout the ancient world, its influence led, among other things, to the Roman Empire’s finally banning infanticide. If anything actually deserves to be described as an enlightened ethical step forward in the right direction this was it. By using this language to describe the revival of pagan baby murder, the Left demonstrates just how much its concept of “progress” really is King Caspian’s “going bad” after all. It also reveals itself to be just another form of ancient, pagan, devil worship.

The question for Andrew Scheer and the Conservative Party is, what God do you serve? Scheer, who was raised in the Roman Catholic Church, claims to be a Christian but this is also the case with Justin Trudeau. As long as Scheer, like his predecessor Harper, prevents the members of his party from actively combating the evil of baby murder and instead requires them to join in the loony Left’s crusade against its chimerical bugbear of “white racism”, it is not the true and living God that he is serving.

Fortunately for him, he has Justin Trudeau to make him look so much better than he really is. How much better for us, it would be, however, if instead of relying on this, he were to come out and take a bold stand on the things for which the Conservative Party ought to be standing. He could start by promising the turn the clock back a century and a half, to right after Confederation before the Liberal Party got their grubby hands on the country and things started to go downhill.

The Senate Should Not Be Condemned For Doing Its Job Right

A couple of weeks ago Jim Warren, a Liberal strategist who worked for Dalton McGuinty in Ontario and who writes a weekly column for the neoconservative Sun newspaper chain explained why he has become a convert to Senate abolitionism. The Grits, over the last century, have been guilty of a great many crimes against the constitution that the Fathers of Confederation drew up for us in the Charlottetown, Quebec, and London Conferences, but unicameralism was not typically one of them. They left that to the socialists in the NDP. The neoconservatives in the Reform Party had advocated reforming the upper chamber to make it more like the American Senate – democratically elected, with each province being equally represented. The sin of the Grits, however, who have held power in the House of Commons more often than any other party, has ordinarily been to treat the seats in the Red Chamber as rewards for Liberal partisanship.

The Conservatives, who are the only other party to have ever formed a federal government, have succumbed to the same temptation when in office and five years ago the media decided to shine its spotlight on the dubious travel and expense claims made by a handful of Senators most of whom had been Conservative appointees. Far more heat than light was generated in the scandal that erupted and rather than just going after individual Senators for abusing their appointment and treating their seat as a means of personal enrichment instead of an office of public service, the media attacked the Conservative government that had appointed the Senators as if the Liberal Party, to which most members of the Canadian media are loyal sycophants, had a squeaky clean record of appointing only upright, honourable, disinterested, and dutiful individuals. Stephen Harper’s method of dealing with the scandal only added fuel to the flames. At any rate, in addition to the Conservative government, the media also made a target out of the Senate as an institution, mostly on the grounds of its being unelected, and there were loud calls for it to be done away with. Here again the media was being disingenuously selective in the facts it reported. Elected members of the House of Commons are no strangers to the temptation to abuse their expense accounts and enrich themselves at the expense of the public treasury. Indeed, I dare say the problem is much worse in the House than in the Senate.

Was it this scandal that drove Mr. Warren into his newfound belief in unicameralism?

No, he wrote that after that “I was prepared to give the Senate one last chance.”

What has happened since then to make him change his mind?

After a brief mention of the ongoing Senate inquiry into the harassment claims against former Senator Don Meredith he devoted several paragraphs to complaining about how the Senate had delayed the passing of Justin Trudeau’s budget bill. Then he wrote the following:

“Perhaps the straw that broke the camel’s back for me is the Senate delaying passage of Bill C-210. This is the private member’s bill of the late Mauril Belanger that changes the lyrics of O Canada to make them gender neutral.”

Now let us think about that for just a moment. Mr. Warren was “prepared to give the Senate one last chance” after the scandal in which Senators were accused of dishonestly claiming inflated housing and travel expenses against the taxpayer-funded public treasury but their delaying passage of a bill is the “straw that broke the camel’s back.” What that translates into is “I am willing to overlook it when you do your job badly, but I refuse to forgive you for doing your job right.”

If Bill C-210 were a bill authorizing the government to take some initiative that needed to happen immediately in order to save thousands of lives then this level of anger over its delay might be understandable. The bill is nothing of the sort. Ironically, Mr. Warren blames the delay of the bill on “pathetic partisan politics” in the Senate when the bill itself is nothing more than an example of playing games with a national symbol in a lame attempt to virtue signal to feminists, one of the interest groups in the Liberal Party’s support base. Think of all the other issues there are out there for Parliament to meddle with. There are probably at least a trillion more important than this one.

As for Justin Trudeau’s budget bill, we are talking about an omnibus bill of the sort that the Liberals complained about during the Harper years and claimed that they would do away with, containing a budget with a deficit close to $30 billion. This is not exactly the kind of legislation that deserves to be fast-tracked through Parliament.

Even if these bills were better and more important than they actually are, however, the Senate, in taking its time passing them, would merely be doing its job. Sir John A. MacDonald, a Father of Confederation and the first Prime Minister of Canada, said, when they were putting the constitution together, that the role of the Senate would be to provide a “sober second thought” to the decisions passed in the House. In other words its job would be to do precisely that which Mr. Warren is complaining about – slow down the passing of bills, by taking the time to think critically about them.

The Fathers of Confederation, in adapting the Westminster model of Parliament to the use of the new country they were building, knew and respected its history and traditions, and understood that the role of criticizing, objecting to, and slowing down legislation was just as important – indeed, more important – than the role of writing and passing legislation. Legislation that is quickly written and hastily passed is likely to be bad legislation. Furthermore, it is not good for the Prime Minister to get his way whenever he wants just because he commands a majority in the House.

This is why there are several hurdles that a government bill must pass before it can become law. It is not enough that it be written by a government that commands a majority in the elected House. It must be heard, and Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, traditionally the second largest party in the House, must be given the opportunity to scrutinize it, criticize it, raise objections to it, and basically hold the government accountable to the House and the people they were elected to represent. Having cleared that hurdle, it must then be heard by the Senate, who review it, and if necessary, recommend alterations or delay its passing. Anyone who thinks that this stage of review is unnecessary, needs to read the chapter of Eugene Forsey’s memoirs, A Life on the Fringe, in which he describes his years in the Senate, and all the poorly-written bad laws they had to deal with.

Mr. Warren appears to think that the Official Opposition is sufficient to hold the government accountable, but the Fathers of Confederation thought otherwise. Mr. Warren objects to an “unelected group of people” holding up government bills but, here too, his thought is miles removed from that of the Fathers of Confederation who deliberately built our country as a parliamentary monarchy. He does, however, reveal himself to be, with apologies to John Wayne, a “true Grit”, for the Liberal Party has never liked the roadblocks our parliamentary system places upon the Prime Minister, who as as head of the elected government is seen the voice of the will of the people, getting his way, and have sought to eliminate these obstacles wherever possible and to reduce the Crown, the Senate, and the elected House as a whole, to mere rubber stamps of the Prime Minister’s will.

Where Mr. Warren feels the Senate deserves condemnation, I insist that it deserves praise, and would suggest that if anything, the powers of the Senate to hold up the Prime Minister’s bills ought to be increased. The only thing that really, desperately, needs to be fixed with our Senate is that the Prime Minister controls the appointment process. For the Senate to truly provide the “sober second thought” that Sir John A. MacDonald envisioned, it needs to be independent of the Prime Minister who ought to surrender his right to advise the Crown on the appointment of Senators to some other group that is in no way beholden to the office of the Prime Minister – perhaps the provincial legislatures.

Eugene Forsey: Patriot of the Old Canada

One hundred and fifty years ago today the British North America Act came into effect and a new nation was born. A nation in the political rather than the cultural sense, she was given the name Canada, which had previously belonged to the provinces that after Confederation would be known as Ontario and Quebec, and the majestic title of Dominion. She was a federation of provinces, four at first but whose number would eventually swell to ten, governed by her own parliament under the monarchy she shared with the rest of the British Empire and later Commonwealth of Nations. She was founded, in other words, as an experiment in nation-building that was the exact opposite of that which had been attempted a century earlier in the land to her south. The Americans built their republic on the foundation of a revolt against and severance from the British Empire. Canada was built upon the opposite principle of loyalty to the Crown and the maintenance of the family connection to the British Empire/Commonwealth. It is fitting, on this important anniversary, to commemorate her birth with a look at one of her patriots who maintained his faith in the vision of the Fathers of Confederation throughout the twentieth century – the century in which the Liberal Party was doing everything it possibly could to remove Canada from her foundation and roots.

Eugene Alfred Forsey was born in Grand Bank, Newfoundland in 1904. This was forty-five years before Newfoundland joined Confederation and so Forsey joked in his memoirs that “At the age of eight months I became an involuntary immigrant to Canada.” This was when his mother moved back to live with her family in Ottawa after his father, a Methodist preacher and school teacher, passed away due to weak health worsened by a bout of bronchitis contracted in Mexico . He grew up, therefore, in the nation’s capital city, listening to the speeches and debates in the House of Commons, where his maternal grandfather served as Chief Clerk of Votes and Proceedings.

“There are many good Tories in the Labour Party”, Enoch Powell once said, and in Canada, Eugene Forsey was the classic example of this. Forsey was raised Conservative and in McGill University, which he initially entered with the idea of following his father into the Methodist ministry, but where he ultimately studied Economics and Political Science in the Department headed by arch-Tory Stephen Leacock under professors such as John Farthing (the author of the Canadian Conservative classic Freedom Wears a Crown), he was the vice-president of the Conservative Club. When, however, in 1926, he went off to Balliol College in Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, he joined the Labour Club. When he returned to Canada he joined a socialist think tank, founded by F. R. Scott and Frank Underhill, entitled the League for Social Reconstruction and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation for which he ran unsuccessfully as a candidate in several elections. After lecturing in Leacock’s department at McGill for twelve years, he went to Harvard on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and when he returned to Canada in 1942 accepted the position of Director of Research with the Canadian Congress of Labour. He nevertheless continued to call himself a “John A. MacDonald Conservative” and proved by many of the stands he took that this was not just rhetoric.

When he entered Balliol College as a socialist this was in part because he had been converted to this economic doctrine. In his memoirs, however, he wrote of Arthur Meighen “Had he remained Leader I do not think I could ever have left the Conservative Party.” Meighen resigned the leadership of the Conservative Party on September 24th, 1926. This was ten days after Mackenzie King’s Liberals had won a majority government in the election that ensued after the famous King-Byng affair. In this incident, Mackenzie King, whose government had less than a plurality in the House but was propped up by a third party, the Progressives, had asked for a dissolution when his government stood to censured by Parliament following a customs scandal. The Governor General refused the dissolution and asked Meighen, whose Conservatives held the plurality in the House, to form a government when Mackenzie King handed in his resignation. The Meighen government was shortly defeated in a confidence vote when Mackenzie King accused Byng and Meighen of acting improperly and unconstitutionally. Forsey, in his memoirs, wrote:

I was in the gallery of the House of Commons for almost every word of the debate on the Customs Scandal of 1926 and the subsequent constitutional crisis…I was also in the House when the King government was defeated in the small hours of June 26, and I was sitting behind Mrs Meighen when Meighen’s confidential messenger brought the news that Mr King had asked the Governor-General, Lord Byng, to dissolve Parliament that he had refused. King thereupon resigned and Meighen became Prime Minister. I had not, even then, the slightest doubt that Lord Byng’s refusal of Mr King’s request for a dissolution of Parliament was completely constitutional, and indeed essential to the preservation of parliamentary government. Nor had I the slightest doubt that Meighen’s temporary government of ministers without portfolio, acting ministers of departments, was constitutional. I watched with anguish from the gallery the fumblings of the Conservative front bench in reply to Mr King’s attacks on the constitutionality of the temporary government (attacks which, of course, were wholly and demonstrably without foundation).

The Liberal version of these events, in which Mackenzie King is the champion of Canadian domestic sovereignty against Lord Byng as representative of British imperialism quickly became a cornerstone of what Forsey’s friend and colleague, conservative historian Donald Creighton, mockingly called “The Authorized Version of Canadian History.” Fifteen years later, however, in his Ph.D. thesis entitled “The Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament in the British Commonwealth”, Forsey examined the crisis in depth, comparing it with precedent in the UK, elsewhere in the Commonwealth, and here in Canada, demonstrating that Lord Byng was in the right, that the request for dissolution under such circumstances was disgraceful and that the Crown’s right to refuse the request was “an essential safeguard of constitutional liberty.” Trimmed to about half its length – the dissertation is 440 pages long – this was published as a book by Oxford University Press in 1943 to the outrage of Liberal apologists such as Mackenzie King’s biographer Robert MacGregor Dawson and Winnipeg Free Press editor John Wesley Dafoe. Throughout his entire life he never deviated from the Tory position he took in that book, that the monarchy is important not merely as a symbol and a connection to the past, but as a safeguard against Prime Ministerial tyranny essential to the preservation of responsible parliamentary government and liberty and that its reserve powers can and should be used, whenever necessary, to prevent a Prime Minister from acting as a dictator. He would reiterate these arguments in the Australian constitutional crisis of 1975 in defence of the actions of their Governor General Sir John Kerr.

His “John A. MacDonald Conservative” principles were also on display when he sent back his membership card in the New Democratic Party in 1961. The CCF, of which Forsey had been a member since it was founded, joined with the Canadian Labour Congress, the successor of the Canadian Congress of Labour for which he still worked as Research Director, to form the NDP that year. He turned in his membership card, which had come automatically, because in his words:

It stated that by accepting it I accepted the constitution of the NDP. I wrote the ‘federal’ (not national! perish the thought!) secretary that I could not accept a party constitution from which the word ‘national’ had been deleted seventy-six times on the grounds stated by Mr. Brockelbank.

J. H. Brockelbank had talked the NDP founding committee into eliminating the word “national” from the new party’s constitution on the grounds that referring to Canada as a nation would offend French Canadians. Forsey, present at the meeting where Brockelbank had made his case, considered it to be an insult to the intelligence of all present and said so. He quoted from the French-speaking Fathers of Confederation such as Cartier and Tache who spoke of their work in putting together the Dominion of Canada as the founding of a “great nation.” He would later sarcastically comment:

This is probably the only occasion in the history when some thousands of people met to form a new national political party and began by resolving that there was no nation to form it in.

The word nation has a double meaning. It can mean a group defined by its culture – a shared language, religion, and ancestry. It can also mean a state with sovereign control over its own territory. It has this double meaning in both English and French, but Quebec nationalists, Forsey argued, were dishonestly attempting to pull a switch-and-bait in which recognition of French Canadians as a “nation” in the cultural sense of the term would be used as a stepping stone to obtaining recognition of Quebec as a “nation” in the political sense of the term. Such recognition would mean the end of the Confederation project of building the Dominion of Canada into a strong and united nation.

Canada’s English-speaking politicians were far too willing to appease the Quebec nationalists on this matter, Forsey, believed. This included not only the NDP but the Progressive Conservatives as well. In 1967, in the leadership convention that Dalton Camp had forced upon the party in order to oust John Diefenbaker, who like Meighen had been a long-time friend of Forsey’s, the Progressive Conservatives also voted on a resolution, drawn up by a pre-convention meeting of the party’s intelligentsia at Montmorency Falls, embracing a “two nations” view that was indistinguishable from that of the NDP. At the conference the party voted to reject Diefenbaker’s leadership and to accept the two nations policy. Although this was internally consistent – Diefenbaker, who would title his three-volume memoirs One Canada, was adamantly opposed to the two nations policy and spoke against it at the leadership conference – it was a reversal of the position the Conservative Party – the party of Confederation – had taken ever since Sir John A. MacDonald. It would become an albatross around the PC Party’s neck, dooming Mulroney’s Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords to failure, and leading to the party’s decimation in the polls in 1993.

This is why Forsey was able to write “When I was in the Senate I used to say that I sat as a Pierre Trudeau Liberal because I was a John A. MacDonald Conservative, and it was not just a witticism.” Forsey’s acquaintance with Trudeau had begun while they were both Quebec socialist intellectuals in the 1950s but his enthusiasm for Trudeau’s taking over the leadership of the Liberal Party and the premiership of Canada was built upon Trudeau’s strong support for Canadian national unity against Quebec separatism. “In my judgement”, he wrote, “Pierre Trudeau kept Quebec in Canada when nobody else could have done it.” I do not agree with Forsey’s judgement here, I must say, and consider it akin to the folly of those in the United States who credit Abraham Lincoln, whose election was the catalyst that split the American Republic into two warring factions, with keeping their country together.

At any rate Forsey accepted an appointment to the Senate from Trudeau in 1970 and upon doing so joined the Liberal Party in 1970. Rex Murphy, another Newfoundland-born Rhodes scholar, said that he was “one of the great ornaments of the Senate” by contrast with the “lickspittles and placeholders” who filled the Upper Chamber in more recent times. He remained in the Senate until he reached the upper age limit in 1979 and had to retire. During that time he spoke out and voted against the Trudeau government more often than in support of it. A particularly prominent clash occurred in 1978 when the Prime Minister tabled Bill C-60, the Constitutional Amendment Bill. Forsey, who saw that the bill would weaken both the monarchy and responsible government, campaigned vehemently against it. Charles Taylor, in his account of this conflict wrote:

During the battle, he was accosted at lunch in the Chateau Laurier Grill by Trudeau’s chief political aide, Jim Coutts. “Why are you doing this to us?” Coutts asked. Forsey looked at him scornfully: “Why are you doing this to the country?”

The Trudeau government lost this battle when the bill was referred to the Supreme Court of Canada but in 1982, three years after Forsey’s retirement from the Senate, Trudeau succeeded in having the constitution, repatriated to Canada. The process required the addition of a constitutional amendment formula, and Trudeau also tacked on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and devolved a considerable amount of power to the provincial governments. Forsey, in his retirement, was not silent on the subject. Charles Taylor, who heard him lecture on the subject at Erindale College in Toronto, gave this account:

“Had I been in the Senate I would have voted against it,” Forsey declaimed. “I would have voted for the original version – before the provincial warlords got at it.” In particular, he ridiculed “that ghastly ‘notwithstanding’ clause” – the clause that gives the provinces the power of opting out. “If you’re going to have a charter of rights – on balance I’m for it, but not without reservations – it had better be entrenched.” In fact, said Forsey, the new document offered the average citizen only a dubious protection for his rights.” “The thing is badly drafted. Chances are it will take a very long time for the courts to determine what it means. The lawyers will have a field day. For them, it’s a license to print money.” Above all, putting the courts above parliament was creating a very dangerous situation: “Judges should not mix themselves up in matters which are essentially political.”

He did, however, find some good mixed in among the bad, namely that the Monarchy and its vice-regal representation, as well as the Senate, had survived the process intact and entrenched. He was particularly exuberant over the fact that “Dominion” had also survived as the country’s official designation. He had been fighting Liberal attempts to eliminate it since the premiership of Louis St. Laurent and always referred to what most Canadians would call a general or federal election as a “Dominion election.” He saw the attempt to eliminate “Dominion” as a particularly bad example of the Liberal Party’s “attempts to rob Canada of her history”, other examples of which included the elimination of “Royal Mail” as the name of the Post Office and the introduction of the new flag in 1965. He fought on the side of the old traditions in each of these battles but objected particularly to the attack on “Dominion” because it was conducted in an underhanded, sneaky, and dishonest manner and because it was based on an outright falsehood – the idea that the title indicated a subservient or colonial status when it had actually been chosen from the Bible by the Fathers of Confederation themselves. The Liberal lie about “Dominion” was very similar to other myths they had been propagating in their efforts to undermine the constitution. Forsey, talking about the fight over Bill C-60 in his memoirs, wrote:

I had to cope more than once with people who suffered from the delusion that the British North America Act of 1867 had been imposed on us by the British Government when in fact it was based almost wholly on resolutions adopted at Quebec in 1864 and in London in 1866-7, by delegates of the British North American provinces, with not a single representative of the British Government even present.

Forsey’s life-long stand for the monarchy and our parliamentary constitution, for the vision of Canada as one nation that had been held by the English and French Fathers of Confederation, and upheld by every Conservative leader from Sir John A. MacDonald to John G. Diefenbaker, and for our British history, traditions, and symbols, was not typical of the average member of the CCF and would be even harder to find in that party’s successor, the NDP, whose typical members are more Liberal than the Liberals in their rejection of the traditions and heritage of the old Canada. It shows him, however, to have been a great patriot of the Dominion of Canada, worthy to be remembered on our nation’s sesquicentennial.

So in memory of the Honourable Eugene A. Forsey, PC, I say to you all:

Happy Dominion Day!
God save the Queen!

Bibliography:

Forsey, Eugene A. A Life on the Fringe: The Memoirs of Eugene Forsey. Toronto. Oxford University Press. 1990.

Forsey, Eugene A. The Royal Power of Dissolution in the British Commonwealth. Ph.D. Dissertation. McGill University. 1941.

Murphy, Rex. “Eugene Forsey and the Senate.” The National. CBC. May 23, 2013. Television.


Taylor, Charles. Radical Tories: The Conservative Tradition in Canada. Toronto. House of Anansi. 1982.

Hic et Ille VII

An Apology to My Readers

My posting has been light all year and it has now been over a month since my last post. I apologize for this. It is due to my writing time being tied up with projects external to this blog. One of these is quite a large project and is still not finished so posting may continue to be light for a few months to come – perhaps the remainder of this year.

So We Have a New Conservative Leader

In the Conservative Party of Canada’s leadership convention last month, Maxime Bernier the most libertarian of the candidates was leading up until the thirteenth ballot, which gave the leadership to Andrew Scheer. This outcome has its positives and its negatives, as of course would have been the case with any of the alternatives as well. Among the positives, Scheer is a strong royalist – an absolute essential for a Tory leader – and has the reputation of being a social conservative if not as staunch a one as Brad Trost or Pierre Lemieux. Also impressive is Scheer’s promise that as Prime Minister he would withdraw federal funds from universities that allow Social Justice Warriors to get away with bullying, harassing, and silencing those who hold opinions contrary to theirs.

The down-side to Scheer is that he is very much a Stephen Harper man. Apart from the fact that this taints him by association with the man who made himself so unliked during his time as Prime Minister that the country was willing to hand the reins of power over to a shallow little empty-headed egomaniac, there is something in the Harper brand of neo-conservatism that puts a damper on the enthusiasm that would otherwise be inspired by each of the listed positive points.

Harper-style neo-conservatism blends elements from the traditions of both the old Conservative Party and the Reform Party/Canadian Alliance. The latter was a very pro-American tradition that believed in closer economic partnership with the United States – free trade, traditionally a plank of the Liberal Party platform – and in introducing democratic reforms to the upper house of Parliament to make it more like the American Senate. These aspects of the Reform tradition have survived into the neo-conservatism of the present Conservative Party even though they are the most difficult to harmonize with the elements, such as royalism, taken from the tradition of the old Conservative Party. Scheer himself is on the record as saying “I support an elected Senate with meaningful term limits.” Many royalists such as myself would say that to insist upon elections and term limits for the Senate weakens the foundation upon which you will need to stand in fighting for our hereditary monarchy should it come under republican attack. (1)

Neo-conservatives are convinced that fiscal conservatism wins elections but social conservatism loses elections. This is what the media, the academics, and the other parties tell them, but what it boils down to is the idea that people want balanced budgets, spending cuts, and tax breaks more than they want secure homes and communities, strong marriages and families, and a stable moral environment in which to raise their children. This is nonsense – but try convincing a neoconservative of that. This is why social conservatives know that while neo-conservatives will court their votes and tolerate them within the “big tent” – which is more than can be expected from the leadership of the other parties – they will do nothing to advance the causes dear to their hearts.

Finally, as welcome as are Scheer’s proposals for cutting off funds to schools that allow politically incorrect viewpoints to be silenced by the tyranny of well-organized cultural Marxist bullies, civil libertarians will remember that the Harper administration was no friend to freedom of speech. The private members bill that finally brought about the repeal of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act – the “hate speech” clause – during the Harper years had the support of the governing party, but not of the government itself. Worse, while it is the Trudeau wing of the Liberal Party that has demonstrated a propensity for passing absurd laws that punish people for saying things about women and racial, religious, and sexual minorities that egalitarians consider offensive, the Harper neo-conservatives have shown themselves to be fond of enhancing the government’s powers to monitor our private conversations in the name of national security. This is what Bill C-51, which made Harper so unpopular towards the end of his premiership, was all about. The response of both the American and Canadian versions of neo-conservatism to the increasing threat of Islamic terrorism has not been the sensible policy of keeping potential jihadists out of our countries while letting Muslims live in peace if they can in their own. Rather it is the exact opposite of this – allowing mass Islamic immigration into our countries while bombing the hell out of them in their own. When, as any thinking person could have predicted, this produces an increase in incidents of Islamic terrorism, they then introduce intrusive domestic surveillance and other police state measures to deal with it.

If there is an unmixed positive about Scheer, something that does not have a corresponding negative to diminish it, it is that he has said that he would scrap the carbon tax which, like so many other of the schemes of the Liberals/NDP/Greens is an evil wearing the mask of a good. The carbon tax raises the cost of living for all Canadians while reducing the funds they have available to meet their expenses, hurting the poor and the working class the most. The villains who have imposed it, however, like that soulless monster Justin Trudeau, go around bragging about how caring and compassionate they are, because they are doing something for the environment. In reality the environment is not helped in the least by this shameless money grab. Let us hope that if Scheer gets the opportunity to put this promise into practice that he will follow through.

Kudos to America’s Caesar

Liberals have, for decades, denied the obvious fact that the news media, in its editorializing and increasingly in its reporting, is heavily biased in their favour. How much longer, one wonders, can they maintain this façade? It is difficult to know which is more sickening – the way the Canadian media fawns over our grossly incompetent, arrogant, and idiotic Prime Minister or the way the American media pounces on the smallest flaws they can find in their President as grounds for terminating his term in office. “He starts on the wrong side of his mouth when brushing his teeth – impeach him!”

While there is much that President Trump deserves criticism for – among other things, the way he has moved away from the Buchananite rhetoric of his campaign towards a more typical neo-conservatism with regards to the Middle East – he deserves praise for the move for which the international media has sought to crucify him over the last two weeks. On June 1st he announced that he was withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement adopted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change a year and a half ago. This agreement was a fraud of the same type as the Trudeau Liberal carbon tax, just on a larger scale.

Let me explain it to you. The climate on this planet of ours has never been constant. It has been changing for as long as there has been an earth and will continue to change for as long as earth exists. The amount of that change which can be attributed to human activity, past, present, or future, is a fraction of a fraction of a percentage point. Even if the theory of anthropogenic climate change were true – and it is not – and the earth’s climate was changing in the way the theory says it is, for the reasons it says it is, and with the results the theory predicts, the actions that the governments of the world agreed to take in the Paris Accord would not have the slightest effect on it.

The Paris Accord is about one thing and one thing only - allowing the political leaders of the world to show off, pose as saviours of the world, and otherwise virtue signal for a scheme that does nothing – absolutely nothing – except take wealth from poor and middle class taxpayers in rich white countries and give it to wealthy kleptocrats in poor non-white countries.

Kudos to Donald Trump for pulling his country out of this farce.

Ontario To Rename Itself New Sodom?

If, unlike the residents of George Orwell’s Oceania that we are all starting to resemble, you can think back a couple of decades and remember the past as it actually happened, you will recall that at the time one of the hot issues on the agenda of what was then called the gay-rights movement was the question of whether same-sex couples should be allowed to adopt children or not. Those who supported the status quo, which prevented them from adopting, did so on the basis of a child’s need for both a father and a mother. That their reasoning was perfectly sound and legitimate did not prevent the other side from getting into a tizzy, shrieking hysterically and calling it bigotry and discrimination and all sorts of other nasty and unpleasant sounding things. That was basically all that their own argument amounted to and eventually some judge got so sick and tired of their whining that they won.

Now, in the current year, the Liberal government of the Province of Ontario, headed by a hatchet-faced lesbian with an axe to grind, has just passed a law, Bill 89, which allows – or, perhaps, requires – foster and adoption agencies to turn down couples who oppose the agenda of the alphabet soup gang. In practice, this means “Evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants, traditional Roman Catholics, and orthodox Christians in general, need not apply.” Worse, it gives Children’s Aid the right to take natural children away from such parents.

It is remarkable, is it not, how quickly those who start out by saying “we just want our rights” can move to taking away rights from other people once they attain power.

Christians, of course, are not the only ones who hold quaint, old-fashioned, antiquated ideas like that if you are born with a penis you are male, if you are born with a vagina you are female, that males should pair with females and vice-versa, and that male-female couples should raise their children together. All of these Muslims that Kathleen Wynne, like Justin Trudeau, is so enthusiastic about bringing into the country, think the same way. Do you think that now that under the provisions of Bill 89 the Children’s Aid of Ontario is going to start taking their children away?

Yeah right.

(1) For a Senate Reform proposal that addresses the problems with the Senate as it stands, while remaining true to the principles the Fathers of Confederation had in mind when they made the upper chamber of our Parliament an appointed Senate, see my essay "Senate Reform": http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2012/08/senate-reform.html

The Conservative Leadership Race

As one whose lifelong Toryism is a matter of principle and conviction rather than partisan allegiance the present contest for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada has been of only tertiary interest, if that, to me. The party has compromised, sold-out, and otherwise betrayed the principles and ideals to which its name alludes time and time again.

Unfortunately, while the Conservatives cannot be trusted to live up to their own principles you can always count on the Grits to live down to our worst expectations of them as they do everything in their power to impose the latest version of their ever-changing insane ideology upon our country while feathering their nests, enhancing their power, and displaying the utmost arrogance and contempt for ordinary Canadians. The Liberal Party of Canada began its sordid existence as the party advocating selling out the heritage of honour and loyalty upon which our country was built for filthy American lucre and has spent a century and a half trying to undo Confederation, strip us of our traditions and legacy, rob us of our rights and freedoms and turn Canada into a pathetic, third-world, police state that hides the sheer nastiness of its politically correct oppressiveness behind a thin outward veneer of toxic niceness. Now, under the leadership of an intolerably arrogant, empty-headed and black-hearted coxcomb, the Grits have placed an onerous debt burden upon the backs of future generations of Canadians for centuries to come with their present extravagance, taken a gigantic first step towards the subjection of Christians, Jews, and all other non-Muslim Canadians to dhimmitude by passing, against widespread objection, a motion condemning Islamophobia, while seeking to shove the most recent gender insanity down all of our throats and, in complete disregard for the safety, well-being, and wishes of Canadians, thrown out the welcome mat to all those who pose enough of a security risk to be rejected as immigrants and asylum-seekers by our southern neighbour.

Therefore, while it is too much to hope that the Conservatives, returned to power, would actually put Tory principles into practice in their governance, such a return is to be wished if for no other reason than to rid the country of the disastrous misrule of the vile and loathsome gang of miscreants presently holding office. For a number of reasons – several decades worth of neglect in the teaching of Canadian civics in our schools and our having been swamped by Yankee pop culture in the same period being the chief two – the Canadian electorate treats our general elections as if they were the equivalent of American presidential contests and votes according to who the party leader is. Who the leader is, therefore, matters and so this race demands our attention.

Sadly, the quantity of the candidates seeking the leadership is far more impressive than the quality. Indeed, it is much easier to decide which candidates ought not to be allowed anywhere near the leadership than to pick one who stands out as deserving to win. Foremost among these is Kevin O’Leary. The Dragon’s Den star has been compared to American President Donald Trump but the comparison is cosmetic and superficial and has nothing to do with policy matters. O’Leary is a free trader and an immigration enthusiast, as well as being the most socially liberal candidate to ever seek the Tory leadership. He is most like Donald Trump in his personality – in his policies he is much closer to Justin Trudeau. It is hard to imagine a worse combination in a prospective Conservative leader.

The other Irishman, Erin O’Toole is also disqualified in my books. A Kisaragi Colour, the founder of the blog The Maple Monarchists, has surveyed the leadership candidates on their views of Canada’s constitutional monarchy. All who replied, either personally or through their staff, indicated their support of the institution to some degree or another, except O’Toole and Lisa Raitt, both of whom declined to indicate their position. This is a disqualifier. Royalism is a sine qua non of Canadian conservatism and someone who refuses to commit publicly to support of the monarchy has no business even running as a Conservative candidate much less for the leadership.

If the leadership were to be decided on that sole issue alone, Andrew Scheer would clearly be the best candidate as he indicated the most enthusiastic support for the royal institution by far of all the candidates in his response.

There are other issues to be considered, however, and here things become complicated because different candidates stand out as being the strongest on different sets of issues.

Take “social conservatism” for example. This commonly denotes the sort of moral and social positions that evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants, traditionalist Catholic and Orthodox, and other religious conservatives would support. This would include being pro-life, i.e., opposed to abortion and euthanasia, a supporter of traditional one man/one woman marriage, and an opponent of the alphabet soup gang agenda, of feminism, and often of the legalization of recreational drugs such as marijuana. For a couple of decades the conventional wisdom has been that no party running on a socially conservative platform stood a chance of winning because Canadians are fiscally conservative but socially liberal. In fact the opposite is the case. Opposition to moral and social breakdown will always be more popular than tightening the purse strings and anybody with an ounce of sense knows that. The conventional wisdom exists to browbeat the major parties into not putting it to the test by running a socially conservative campaign. On social conservatism, the strongest of the candidates would be Brad Trost, MP for Saskatoon-University. Trost is an evangelical Christian, who has been outspoken on socially conservative issues throughout his political career, and who has opposed the shift towards social liberalism taken by the party under the interim leadership of Rona Ambrose.

On culture and immigration there is no good candidate. A good candidate would be one who takes the position that immigration, legal and illegal, should not be allowed to change the character of the country, that our government and not the immigrants themselves will select who is allowed in and that it will place the needs of our country first in doing so rather than those of the prospective immigrants, that we will not admit large numbers of either immigrants or refugees in periods of high unemployment and economic recession, that illegal immigration will not be tolerated and will result in the permanent disqualification of the queue-jumper for even legal immigration, and that our refugee admission policies need to be reformed to recognize the reality that the vast majority of asylum seekers are frauds. A good candidate would denounce the toxic cultural atmosphere of ethnomasochism and oikophobia that liberalism spent much of the last fifty years creating. No candidate dares to take this position, of course. The closest thing to it is Kellie Leitch, who is not close at all but who merely wants prospective immigrants to be screened for values that conflict with Canadian values, by which she means the values of the multicultural, feminist, progressive, liberal, left that has been denouncing her as a bigot for wanting newcomers to hold to their values. On this, as with social conservatism, a platform much further to the right that provided Canadians with a real alternative to liberalism for a change would garner much more support than the conventional wisdom would acknowledge.

On fiscal and economic policy if any of the candidates stands out it is probably Maxime Bernier.

Ideally, the next Conservative leader would be strong on all of these issues, but such a person does not appear to be present among the current candidates. Practically, the next leader will also have to be someone around whom the party can unite and who can generate enough popular support to oust the Liberals. Although this quality is harder to gauge, here too there is no name jumping off of the candidates list as the obvious choice.

Perhaps the best we can hope for is that whoever the Conservatives choose as their leader will win by default simply because everyone will finally be sick to death of Justin Trudeau.

Canada's Donald

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do I have anyone in particular in mind?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Conservative Party’s Capitulation in the Culture War

It is almost thirty years since the label “culture war” was first attached to the relentless onslaught of liberalism, the ideology that misleadingly took its name from an adjective used by the Romans to denote generosity and all that is worthy of free people, against the traditions, religion, and ancestral ethnic groups of the Christian civilization that succeeded the Graeco-Roman civilization of antiquity. In Canada, the Liberal Party had turned the Supreme Court into a weapon of offence in this war by adding the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to our Constitution in 1982 and in 1988 that weapon was used to strike down all the laws against abortion in Canada, scoring a major victory for what Pope John Paul II would a few years thereafter call “the culture of death.” At the time, the Progressive Conservative Party was inclined to fight back against liberalism and in 1989 introduced Bill C-43, which would re-criminalize abortion while allowing it in instances where a mother’s life was in danger. The bill passed in the House of Commons, but died on its third reading in the Senate in 1991, when it received a tie-vote. The Tories, lamentably, did not press the issue further and today it would appear that the Conservative Party has raised the white flag in the culture war.

Last month, when Justin Trudeau’s Liberals introduced Bill C-16, Rona Ambrose, the interim leader of the Conservative Party, declared that she would not oppose the bill. Several other Conservative MPs followed suit. Bill C-16 is the bill which will make it illegal to discriminate against transgender people, i.e., people who think that they are a sex other than the one they actually are. In practice, what this means is that public facilities designated for the use of one sex, including washrooms, change rooms, and showers, will be required by law to be open to people of the other sex who maintain that they think or feel that they are of the sex for which the facilities have been reserved. It also means that anyone who turns down someone who is in disagreement with their X and/or Y chromosomes as to what sex he/she/it is for a job, passes over for promotion, or fires that person, may face a charge of discrimination in which he will have to bear the impossible onus of somehow proving that he is not guilty of the crimethink of which he accused. If all that were not bad enough the bill will also make “hate speech” against transgender people into an offence punishable with up to two years in prison. Note that the words “hate speech” do not, as sane people might be tempted to think, merely refer to explicit incitement to violence but include the expression of thoughts that contradict what progressives have decided all enlightened people must believe. If ever there was a time for Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition to oppose something, this is it.

Yet, not only is the Conservative leader supporting this insane new bill but the party, in its national convention held later in the same month, voted by a very large margin to abandon its position that marriage is something that exists “between one man and one woman.” It also voted to change its policy on marijuana and to take the position that the possession of small amounts ought to be decriminalized. The latter is a much lesser matter than the former but we can see the same train of thought at work in both decisions. The Conservatives were trounced majorly by the Liberals in last fall’s election and are now reasoning that this was because the Liberal positions on same-sex “marriage” and marijuana were more popular than theirs and that this means they must change their positions in order to survive as a party. To reason this way seems to be a perennial temptation for Conservatives whenever they lose elections. As long as Conservatives keep succumbing to this temptation, liberalism will keep winning, and will keep moving further and further to the left, dragging the rest of us along with it. The Liberal Party already has a pair of doppelgangers in the NDP and Green Parties and it does not need another one in the Conservatives.

The idea that it was the Conservative Party’s right-wing positions on matters like marriage and election that cost them the last election is absurd when one considers that they had done next to nothing about these issues while they were in office for the last nine years, even in the four years in which they had a majority government. The Civil Marriage Act that created the legal fiction of same-sex “marriage” nation-wide – the courts had already done this at the provincial level through most of the country – was passed during the Liberal premiership of Paul Martin in 2005, the year before the Conservative took power. It was only in that first year that they attempted to re-open the issue, at a time when they had a minority government making it inevitable that the attempt would fail. Nor did they attempt to reintroduce restrictions on abortion – indeed, then Conservative leader Stephen Harper had declared that the abortion debate would not be reopened during his premiership. On the matter of doctor-assisted suicide, Steven Fletcher, at the time a Conservative MP, actually introduced legislation similar to the bill the Liberals are currently ramming through Parliament a year previously.

In other words, the Conservative Party had already basically surrendered in the culture war by the beginning of the Harper premiership. This surrender was even more complete when it comes to immigration and the issues surrounding it than with regards to abortion, same-sex “marriage”, euthanasia and the other issues that are conventionally categorized as “social.” In the late 1960s, during the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, the Liberals launched an aggressive assault against white Anglophone Canadians. Their weapons were mass immigration, the Canadian Human Rights Act, the public schools and the national news media. Under the pretence of making Canada’s immigration laws fair and race-neutral, which the Conservatives had already done during the premiership of John Diefenbaker in 1962 having a negligible effect on the composition of immigration, the Liberals changed that composition from being almost ninety per cent traditional European at the beginning of Pierre Trudeau’s premiership to being seventy per cent Third World by its end. In the Canadian Human Rights Act they made it a civilly liable offence to discriminate on the basis of race. On paper, this looks like it applies to everyone – whites cannot discriminate against blacks, blacks cannot discriminate against whites – but in practice it was only enforced against whites, and only intended to be enforced against whites. This anti-white bias is what the Liberals really mean whenever they say “protecting vulnerable minorities”. They turned the public schools into indoctrination camps to program people into thinking that racism, bigotry, discrimination, prejudice, and xenophobia – on the part of white people, that is - were all greater sins than Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony and Lust. The news media branded anyone who dared to publicly disagree with the Liberals on any of this as a Hitlerite even if, like the late Doug Collins, he was a man who actually fought against Hitler during the war. No subsequent government has dared to do anything about any of this, certainly not the thoroughly cucked Conservatives under Stephen Harper’s leadership.

While liberals claim open-mindedness and tolerance as their virtues, on all of these matters they have insisted every time they have scored a victory in the culture war that all discussion of the issue ought to be closed, and that people who disagree with them publically ought to be punished. Since Canadian liberalism has made it absolutely clear that it will accept no victory short of a Carthaginian peace in this culture war, the Conservatives, in the face of such an attitude, ought never to have ever contemplated surrender.

Having said that, I could have told you thirteen years ago that something like this would happen.

That was the year that the present Conservative Party was formed when the merger between the old Conservative Party and the right-populist Reform Party was completed. Theoretically this could have produced a superior party that would combine the best of both. From the original Conservative Party, formed in the year of Confederation and which under the leadership of Sir John A. MacDonald, Father of Confederation and the first Prime Minister of Canada, governed the country for nineteen of its first twenty-four years, it could have taken its royalism, patriotism, Anglophilia, and economic nationalism. To this it could have added the small town, rural common sense of the Reform Party, founded as a Western protest party in 1988, as well as its opposition to such things as bureaucratic overregulation, progressive social engineering, and socialist wealth redistribution. The social and cultural conservative defence of the Christian religion, its ethical teachings and its traditional and historical role in Canada, an element the two parties had in common, could have served as the glue to make such a union work.

I could not see this happening, however. The old Conservative Party was hardly recognizable as the party of Sir John A. MacDonald any more. Having foolishly added the adjective Progressive to its name in 1942, thus creating a self-contradicting title and a confused identity to go along with it, the party ousted in 1966, John Diefenbaker, a leader who was patriotically fighting for Canada’s traditional symbols such as the old flag against Liberals determined to replace them, and, back in power in the 1980s, abandoned its traditional anti-contintentalist economic nationalism and negotiated a free trade deal with the United States. After its one failed attempt to recriminalize abortion it gave up and it made the immigration problem, started by the Liberals, even worse by jacking the yearly target of immigrants to be accepted up through the roof. As for the Reform Party, or the Canadian Alliance as it was then called after an initial, incomplete, attempt at merging with the Conservatives, its capitalism was always more important to it than its social conservatism. By 2003 – indeed, long before then – capitalism had evolved from a relatively benign, small town, competitive market into a globalist economy controlled by multinational megacorporations who, as an examination of the list of those who have intervened legally against state governments south of the border that have sought to protect traditional marriage or even the freedom of conscience of traditional religious believers, will reveal, have joined forces with liberalism in the culture war. I predicted that the new party would join the worst elements of the two parties rather than the best, and that social conservatism would be the first thing on the chopping block. I decided it would not be worthwhile joining.

Unfortunately, since all the other parties in the House of Commons are completely and extremely liberal, the betrayal of the Conservatives leaves those of us who love this country and would like to pull it out of the abyss of cultural and moral insanity into which it has sunk without a voice in the federal legislative assembly.

Is Stephen Harper a Conservative?

Betrayed! Stephen Harper’s war on principled conservatism by Connie J. Fournier, Createspace, 2015, pp. 148.

On the feast of Epiphany in the first year of the new millennium, an online forum for the discussion of Canadian political issues from a conservative perspective was launched. Its founders had been Canadian members of Free Republic, a similar message board in the United States, and so naturally, called the new forum Free Dominion. The founders and administrators, Mark and Connie Fournier, gave it the tagline “the voice of principled conservatism.”

Principled conservatism meant a conservatism that consisted of ideas and principles, rather than mere loyalty to the party which calls itself conservative. At the time there were two such parties, the Progressive Conservative Party and the Canadian Alliance, which had been formed the previous year in the first stage of a merger between the Western populist Reform Party and the PCs. Stockwell Day was leader of the Alliance at the time but by the end of the year he had resigned and early in the following year Stephen Harper was elected the new leader. In the year after that, the merger between the two parties was complete, and Mr. Harper became leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. In that capacity he served as Leader of the Opposition, then Prime Minister in a minority government, and finally won a majority government in 2011.

This was a triumph for the Conservative Party, for sure, but was it a victory for principled conservatism? Connie Fournier, in her new self-published book, Betrayed! says no, and she has good reasons for saying so. Some of these are personal, pertaining to the persecution she, her husband, and the forum they have put so much devotion into have undergone at the hands of government agencies and employees, all during the Harper premiership. Due to the nature of these injustices she cannot tell her story in full. She cannot, for example, name Richard Warman as the man who is responsible for most of the abuses of the legal system that Free Dominion has faced since shortly after Stephen Harper became Prime Minister. What she does tell, however, is told because it perfectly illustrates how the present leadership of the Conservative Party has abandoned its principles.

When Connie – who I had the pleasure of meeting a couple of years ago when she accompanied her husband, a truck driver by profession, on a run that took them through Winnipeg – speaks of conservative principles, she means the principles that underlay the Thatcherite and Reaganite movements in the United Kingdom and United States respectively, and the Reform Party here in Canada. This set of principles was created by a fusion – to borrow Frank Meyer’s word – of classical conservative views on society and morality with classical liberal views about government and the freedom of the individual. I am more of an unmixed classical conservative – a High Tory – not because I disagree with the ideas of limited, accountable, government and personal liberty, but because I hold strongly to the classical conservative view that these things can only exist in the context of a stable and secure order of established, traditional, institutions. I bring this up to make the point that while what Connie and I would regard as conservative principles are different – in a complementary rather than a contradictory way, I hope – I find her argument that Stephen Harper has betrayed those principles to be compelling and illuminating.

She tells the story of Stephen Harper’s rise to the federal premiership, showing him to have been ruthless in his pursuit of power right from the beginning. From the curious way in which he won the leadership of the Canadian Alliance away from socially conservative Stockwell Day and the heartless way in which he confiscated the party nomination for Calgary Southwest from Ezra Levant to his stacking the party council with his yes men and negotiating the merger of the two parties against the wishes of both parties' memberships, she demonstrates how within his own party he showed the same contempt for the people who elected him as he later would as the country’s Prime Minister.


She takes us through the way he has sold out one segment of the conservative support base after another, starting with the social conservatives who have no one else to speak for them having been told that their views, which were once, and within living memory, the consensus in the land, are now unwelcome, by the other parties. Harper, knowing this, has been able to collect the votes of social conservatives while doing nothing to deserve them, a pattern established early in his leadership when he offered social conservatives, who had started a grassroots effort to put a ban on partial-birth abortion into the party platform, a discussion of same-sex marriage instead, which never materialized. Even gun owners, widely though of as having benefited from the Conservative government with the abolition of the long-gun registry, are among the betrayed, Connie shows.


The biggest betrayal, however, is of those who fought for freedom of speech against Section 13. Section 13 was part of the 1977 Canadian Human Rights Act. This Act, modelled on the American Civil Rights Act of 1964, proscribed discrimination on certain grounds (race, sex, religion, ethnicity, etc.) and in certain circumstances (employment, housing, etc.) even between private individuals. Section 13 declared it to be an act of discrimination to communicate via telephone, anything that was “likely to” expose someone to “hatred or contempt” on the basis of one of the prohibited grounds of discrimination. Around the turn of the millennium this was made even worse by the adding of subsection 2, which extended its application to all electronic communications including, of course, the internet. This law had, as it was intended to have, a chilling effect on public debate, adding the force of law to the creepy contemporary phenomenon known as political correctness, that protects left-wing social and cultural engineering with loud and hysterical accusations of “racism”, “sexism”. “homophobia”, or some other made-up pathology, against its critics.


In the late 2000s, the public spotlight finally fell upon this terrible law, when Muslim groups laid charges under it against well-known conservative figures Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn. Traditionalists and libertarians united against it, and, through the means of a private member’s bill, ultimately succeeded in having it repealed. This was without the help of the present leadership of the Conservative Party. The charges against Levant and Steyn were made about the time Harper became Prime Minister, and it was during the battle over Section 13 that ensued, that Free Dominion’s legal woes began.


The Canadian Human Rights Commission, having received a complaint about some material that controversial Christian evangelist Bill Whatcott had posted on Free Dominion, urged the complainant to charge the website as well. At the time the CHRC had already targeted Free Dominion, having previously set up a dummy account “jadewarr” on the forum, for purposes of spying or, possibly, entrapment. The charge against Free Dominion was withdrawn by the complainant, but the CHRC, its doings, and Section 13 became hot topics on the discussion board. Richard Warman, the human rights lawyer and former CHRC employee who was responsible for most of the complaints under Section 13, launched a myriad of lawsuits against his online critics, including the suits that have been so devastating to Free Dominion and the Fourniers.


It is not just that all of this took place on Stephen Harper’s watch, however. His government has introduced bill after bill after bill in attempts to monitor and control discussion on the internet. These include bills that would order ISPs to spy on their customers and hand information over to law enforcement agencies without warrants. The worst of them is Bill C-51, which the government rammed through the House of Commons and Senate earlier this year. In the name of fighting terrorism, this bill authorizes law enforcement agencies to spy on Canadians without warrants, share the information they gather with each other, and even engage in disruptive activity.


In light of all of this damning evidence, Connie calls principled conservatives to hold the Conservative Party and their leadership accountable. The party needs to know that conservative votes cannot just be taken for granted, and that their betrayal of conservative principles and trampling all over the privacy and freedom of Canadians will not be tolerated, let alone rewarded.


Every Canadian, especially those who believe in the principles of conservatism, ought to read this book before the upcoming election.

Evelyn Waugh's Excellent Example

Evelyn Waugh, English novelist, satirist, Roman Catholic convert, and High Tory anarchist, stopped voting around the time of the Second World War. Christopher Sykes, his friend and biographer, wrote that he did so “on grounds of conscientious objection”. Waugh, according to Sykes, “maintained that it was disloyal presumption for a subject to advise the sovereign, even in the most indirect way, on the choice of ministers.” (1) In “Aspirations of a Mugwump”, his contribution to a symposium of election comments published by the Spectator in its October 2, 1959 issue, Waugh published this sentiment himself, expressing his hope “to see the Conservative Party return with a substantial majority” but saying that he himself “shall never vote unless a moral or religious issue is involved”. “In the last 300 years” he wrote “the Crown has adopted what seems to me a very hazardous process of choosing advisers: popular election” adding that by “usurping sovereignty the peoples of many civilized nations have incurred a restless and frustrated sense of responsibility which interferes with their proper work of earning their living and educating their children”. Ultimately he concludes that if he voted for the Conservative Party he would feel “morally inculpated in their follies” if they won and that he had “made submission to socialist oppression by admitting the validity of popular election if they lost” and so declared that “I do not aspire to advise my sovereign in her choice of servants”. (2)

As a lifelong royalist Tory, my sentiments are largely in accordance with these but I have long been reluctant to follow Waugh’s example in practice. This year, however, Stephen Harper has finally decided the matter for me. Without denying the good accomplished on his watch – such as the restoration of “Royal” to the air force and navy and the scrapping of the long gun registry – the most important good accomplished in Parliament under the present government, the abolition of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, was accomplished through a private member’s bill without the help of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet and, I must say, they gave every impression that it was against their wishes. Now that the Prime Minister has had his way, and Bill C-51, authorizing CSIS to invade the privacy of Canadians has passed the House and Senate, the evil this government has accomplished has so outweighed the good that I cannot in good conscience ever vote for them again.

This means that, barring a Libertarian or Christian Heritage candidate running in my riding – and neither party has run a candidate here in the last twenty years – I will never vote again. The Liberal Party will never, ever, ever have my vote. Founded as the party of free trade and continentalism – which the Conservative Party have adopted to their shame – it is the party of the so-called “Canadian nationalism” that would have our country turn its back on and forget its Loyalist heritage, its British traditions, institutions, and connections. It is the party that made an admirer of Communist dictator Mao Tse-Tung – Pierre Trudeau – its leader and then introduced political correctness to Canada when he and his sycophants in the media began accusing everyone of “racism”, “sexism”, and all other sorts of nasty-sounding “isms” for opposing his policies. While it calls itself by a name that suggests a belief in freedom, it launched a war against the basic freedom of Canadians to think and say what they want, and associate and do business with whom they want, when it passed the Canadian Human Rights Act in 1977. It partially legalized abortion in 1969, introduced same-sex marriage in 2005, and the present leader of the party, Justin Trudeau, son of the aforementioned Pierre, cracked the whip on his members last year declaring support for abortion to be mandatory for Liberal Members of Parliament. No, this party will never receive my vote, especially with a Trudeau at the helm.

As for the NDP – no thank you! Everything I most object to in the Liberal Party including its disrespect for Canada’s Loyalist heritage and British institutions and its political correctness is magnified to the nth degree in this party. Its supporters keep telling me that it speaks for “the working class”. If that is the case, why is it even more dead set against traditional morality and social arrangements, which have their strongest support in the working class, than the Liberals? When Justin Trudeau announced that nobody who is opposed to abortion would be allowed to run for the Liberals he made an exception for MPs already seated, and the creepy leader of the NDP condemned him for making this exception, saying that no NDP MP would ever vote against abortion. If the NDP speaks for Canadian workers why is it even more determined to replace them with immigrants than the other parties? Its platform calls for a quicker immigration process, with less hurdles, and with increased financial support for settlement, to be paid for from the taxes of those workers who the NDP supposedly speak for, and the NDP would like to see any worker who vocally objects to this charged with a hate crime. No, I would sooner die a terrible, excruciating, death from some horrible lingering disease than cast a vote for the NDP.

No, I think the time has come to follow Evelyn Waugh’s example and refrain from voting. As P. J. O’Rourke, adapting an old anarchist slogan put it in the title of a book a few years back, “don’t vote, it just encourages the bastards.” I will remain, as always, a loyal subject of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, but the ministers who abuse the powers they exercise in her name in Ottawa will never again be able to say they do so with my vote and approval.



(1) Christopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 365.
(2) “Aspirations of a Mugwump”, reprinted in Donat Gallagher, ed., The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, (New York: Penguin Books, 1983, 1986) p. 537.

Civil Libertarians of Canada, The Charter is Not Your Friend!

For several months now civil libertarians in Canada have been – rightly – concerned about Bill C-51, the anti-terrorism legislation introduced after the shootings in Ottawa last October, which passed its final reading in the House of Commons earlier this month and is now before the Senate. The primary concerns are that the bill defines terrorism so loosely that it could be used against legitimate dissenters and that the information collecting powers it gives to CSIS threatens the privacy of Canadians.

This is not the first time the threat of terrorism has been used as an excuse to pass legislation unnecessarily expanding the powers of government. Jean Chretien’s Liberals passed anti-terrorism legislation in the fall of 2001, similar to the USA PATRIOT Act and, like the American bill, a response to the September 11th terrorist attack against the United States. Predictably, the legislation was abused. Rather than being used to stop jihadists bent on murder, mayhem, and torture from harming Canadians it was used by our authorities to throw an elderly man, Ernst Zündel, who lived in Canada for decades without ever being a threat to anyone (although he himself had his home bombed by terrorists) into a 6 x 10 cell in which the lights were constantly on, where he was kept while an obviously biased judge was presented with “evidence” to which he and his lawyer were denied access maintaining that he was a threat to national security, which resulted in him being deported to a country where he faced, as our government was well aware, arrest, conviction, and a stiff prison sentence merely for uttering his controversial views. This, of course, violated all sorts of rights, liberties, and constitutional protections that have long been traditional in Canada and all other countries under the Crown.

The Chretien anti-terrorism legislation was actually a greater violation of our traditional rights and freedoms than Bill C-51 is. I say this, not to dismiss or play down concerns over Bill C-51 or to make excuses for the present government, but to make an important point about a flaw in the way opponents of Bill C-51 have been framing their arguments. The bill, we are told by serious civil libertarians, from whose number we will exclude the tinfoil hat crazies who see the bill as a plot against Indians, environmentalists, and non-jihadist Muslims, endangers the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Charter. Thus the whole issue is framed as a conflict between two documents, a good document, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms which guarantees and protects our liberties, and a bad documents, Bill C-51 which threatens them. The problem with that structure is that while Bill C-51 is certainly a threat, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is no solid ground for its opponents to stand on. The Chretien anti-terrorism legislation did violence to the traditional rights and freedoms of Canadians without violating the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

That so many Canadians think that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which was passed as part of the Constitution Act of 1982 that repatriated the British North America Act, either gave us or secured to us our basic rights and freedoms, indicates just how badly our educational system has failed us. The Charter’s second section identifies as “fundamental freedoms” belonging to “everyone” the following:

(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.

Canadians did not have to wait for the Trudeau Liberals to introduce the Charter in 1982 to possess these freedoms. Freedom of religion, not in the modern liberal sense of “the separation of church of state”, but in the sense of Roman Catholics being allowed to practice Roman Catholicism, Protestants being allowed to practice Protestantism, and so on, without persecution and interference, has long been part of the tradition upon which our country is built. Nor did the Charter make these freedoms any more secure.


Consider the “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication”. It was two years after the Charter was introduced that Ernst Zündel was first put on trial for publishing a pamphlet maintaining that significantly less than six million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis and that the Third Reich had no designs to physically exterminate European Jewry. He was put through two public trials over this, then was investigated by the Canadian Human Rights Commission for expressing the same views on the internet (an “other medium of communication”).


The agency that conducted this latter, much more secretive and less public, investigation was created in 1977 by the same government that gave us the Charter. The Act which created the CHRC is itself a major violation of the fourth of these fundamental freedoms, which bestows upon certain people because of their “race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability and conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted or in respect of which a record suspension has been ordered”, a right to not be discriminated against by others, which is a phony right because it places burdens upon other people other than a) those which arise naturally out of their relationships with the rights-bearers, b) those they have voluntarily contracted to or c) the basic duty to leave the rights-bearer to be in peace.


The fourth time our government went after Zündel, during the premiership of Chretien, it was more than just the freedom of “thought, belief, opinion, and expression” that was violated. The seventh section of the Charter says “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.” Is it in accordance with “the principles of fundamental justice” to throw somebody in a tiny cell with the lights on around the clock and refuse to allow his advocate to hear and respond to all of the claims against him? Not according to our traditional standards of justice and not according to the ninth through twelfth sections of the Charter either.

Nevertheless, the anti-terrorism legislation which allowed for this treatment of Zündel was not in violation of the Charter. This is because the first part of the thirty-third section of the Charter reads:

Parliament or the legislature of a province may expressly declare in an Act of Parliament or of the legislature, as the case may be, that the Act or a provision thereof shall operate notwithstanding a provision included in section 2 or sections 7 to 15 of this Charter.

The second section is the section about fundamental freedoms quoted in full above. Sections seven through fourteen are the sections about our legal rights. All of these freedoms and rights were part of our tradition before the Charter was passed. Rather than making them more secure, the Charter clearly makes them less secure by allowing Parliament and the provincial legislatures to disregard them entirely. There are limitations on the use of the notwithstanding clause – part three places a five year limitation on bills that make use of it, but the limitations are fangless as the next part allows for the legislation to be re-enacted.

So no, civil libertarians of Canada, the Charter is not on our side. All the present government would need to do to make Bill C-51 comply with the Charter is to insert a five-year sunset clause and invoke the notwithstanding clause. This is how the Chretien Liberals got away with passing the laws that allowed them to commit that grotesque injustice against Ernst Zündel.

The fundamental freedoms listed in the second section of the Charter and the legal rights listed in sections seven through fourteen already belonged to every Canadian long before the Charter was introduced. In 1776, British North America divided between those who declared their independence, established a federal republic, and put their faith in the ability of a parchment document to forever safeguard their rights and freedoms, and those who refused to break with Britain, remained loyal to the Crown, and built Canada within the older tradition the organic continuity with which had never been broken. This older tradition had evolved over more than a thousand years of history to include the rights, freedoms, and legal protections we regard as basic today, and while the Loyalists rightly rejected the American Revolutionaries’ claim that Parliament was violating these “Rights of Englishmen” by passing a small sales tax, they did not dispute that these rights belonged to the tradition. Canadians looked to this tradition and our organic connection to it as the source and safeguard of our rights and freedoms and the tradition never let us down. It was only when the Liberals turned their backs on the tradition and decided that we needed a written guarantee of our rights like the American Bill of Rights that these rights and freedoms were placed in serious jeopardy. The Liberals have never understood or appreciated how our rights and liberties are tied to our British institutions and tradition so that the former stand or fall with the latter.

The Old Conservatives did understand this and they defended our British traditions as the foundation of our rights and freedoms. This, unfortunately, is not the case with the Conservatives of the present day who, to a large degree, share the Liberal Party’s tendency to look away from our British heritage towards the United States. Bill C-51 is an attempt on the part of the present Conservative – supported by the Liberals – to follow the example set by the United States in the passing of the USA PATRIOT Act and the Department of Homeland Security. The example of a government whose first response to a terrorist attack is to vastly expand its own powers and to try to remove constitutional and legal roadblocks to the abuse of those powers while all the while doing a cheerleading dance for “freedom” and running it up the flag pole is a terrible example to follow.

Civil libertarians, however, will need solid ground to stand on in opposition to this bill rather than the sinking sand that is the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The only such ground is Canada’s British institutions and traditions. Alas, most of the opposition to the bill in Parliament is coming from the party which is not only the party of the tinfoil hat wingnuts who think that the true purpose of the bill is to allow the government to throw tree hugging hippies into jail but also the party most hostile to our British heritage. The outlook is not good for our traditional rights and freedoms.