Captain Airhead, Would You Please Go Now?

 Leap Day this year is the fortieth anniversary of Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s announcement that during a “walk in the snow” he had decided that he would step down and not lead the Liberal Party into the next Dominion election.  He had been leader of the Grits for sixteen years since Lester Pearson stepped down in April of 1968.   With the exception of the six month premiership of Joe Clark he had been Prime Minister all that time.   His was the third longest premiership in Canadian history.   The longest was that of William Lyon Mackenzie King who had been a different kind of Liberal leader.   King, like Trudeau, had been a traitor to Canada, her history, heritage, and traditions, but in his case it was American-style capitalist liberalism to which he had sold us out.   In the case of Pierre Trudeau it was Soviet and Chinese Communism that was his true master.   Canada’s second longest premiership was also her first that of Sir John A. Macdonald.   Sir John had been the leader of the Fathers of Confederation and never betrayed us.   Nor did Canadians ever grow tired of Old Tomorrow.   Shortly before his death in 1891 he won his sixth majority in that year’s Dominion Election by campaigning for “The Old Flag, the Old Policy, the Old Leader” against a Liberal Party that sought to move us closer economically and culturally into the orbit of the United States.   By contrast by the time Trudeau took his famous walk Canadians had grown absolutely sick and tired of him.   The Liberals were heading to defeat, Trudeau knew it, and in the interest of preserving his legacy and what was left of his reputation jumped off the ship before it sank.

 

The electorate’s having grown sick of Trudeau and his party should be regarded as the expected outcome when a Prime Minister remains in office for a long period of time.   Sir John’s enduring popularity can be taken as the exception explainable by the fact that he was an exceptional statesman, identified with the country he led as no other Prime Minister could ever hope to be due to his central role in her founding, and a personable leader to whom people could relate.   When a Sovereign, like Queen Victoria during whose reign Confederation took place or like our late Queen Elizabeth II of Blessed Memory, has an exceptionally long reign this is cause for celebration and rejoicing.   It is the role of the Sovereign, after all, to embody the principle of continuity and everything that is enduring, lasting, and permanent in the realm.   The man who fills the Prime Minister’s office, by contrast, is very much the man of the moment.   Premierships, therefore, are usually best kept short.

 

Pierre Trudeau’s son, Captain Airhead, has been Prime Minister since 2015 and Canadians are now far sicker of him than they ever were of his father.   Personally, I had had more than enough of him while he was still the third party leader prior to the 2015 Dominion Election.   Why it took this long for the rest of the country to catch up with me I have no idea but here we are.   It is 2024 and Canadians are divided on whether they would like Captain Airhead to follow his father’s footsteps and take a walk in the snow, whether they would like to see him suffer the humiliation of going down in defeat in the next Dominion Election or whether they would like to see him brought down in an act of direct divine intervention involving a lightning bolt that strikes the ground beneath him causing it to open up, swallow him whole, and belch out fire and brimstone.  What unites Canadians is that we all wish that he would make like Dr. Seuss’ Marvin K. Mooney and “please go now.”   Thermidor is rapidly approaching for Captain Airhead and his version of the Liberal Party as it eventually comes for all Jacobins.

 

The Canadian Robespierre seems determined, however, not to go to his inevitable guillotine without one last stab at imposing his ghoulish and clownish version of the Reign of Terror.   On Monday the Liberals tabled, as they have been threatening to do since the last Dominion Election, Bill C-63, an omnibus bill that would enhance government power in the name of combatting “online harms.”   A note to American readers, in the Commonwealth to “table” a bill does not mean to take it off the table, i.e., to suspend or postpone it as in the United States, but rather to put it on the table, i.e., to introduce it.   Defenders of omnibus bills regard them as efficient time-savers.   They are also convenient ways to smuggle in something objectionable that is unlikely to pass if forced to stand on its own merits by rolling it up with something that is desirable and difficult or impossible to oppose without making yourself look bad.   In this case, the Liberals are trying to smuggle in legislation that would allow Canadians to sue other Canadians for up to $20 000, with the possibility of being fined another $50 000 payable to the government thrown in on top of it, over online speech they consider to be hateful and legislation that would make it possible for someone to receive life imprisonment for certain “hate crimes”, by rolling it up in a bill ostensibly about protecting children from online bullying and pornographic exploitation.  As is always the case when the Liberals introduce legislation that has something to do with combatting hate it reads like they interpreted George Orwell’s depiction of Big Brother in 1984 as a “how-to” manual.  

 

Nobody with an IQ that can be expressed with a positive number could possibly be stupid enough to think that this Prime Minister or any of his Cabinet cares about protecting children.   Consider their response to the actions taken over the last year or so by provincial premiers such as New Brunswick’s Blaine Higgs and Alberta’s Danielle Smith to do just that, protect children  from perverts in the educational system hell-bent on robbing children of their innocence and filling their heads with sex and smut from the earliest grades.   Captain Airhead and his corrupt cohorts denounced and demonized these premiers’ common-sense, long overdue, efforts, treating them not as the measures taken in defense of children and their parents and families that they were, but as an attack on the alphabet soup gang, one of the many groups that the Liberals and the NDP court in the hopes that these in satisfaction over having their special interests pandered to will overlook the progressive left’s contemptuous disregard for the common good of the whole country and for the interests of those who don’t belong to one or another of their special groups.  

 

Nor could any Canadian capable of putting two and two together and who is even marginally informed about what has been going on in this country in this decade take seriously the Prime Minister’s posturing about hate.    The leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, Pierre Poilievre, when asked about what stance the Conservatives would take towards this bill made the observation that Captain Airhead given his own past is the last person who should be dictating to other Canadians about hate.   Poilievre was referring to the blackface scandal that astonishingly failed to end Captain Airhead’s career in 2019.  It would have been more to the point to have referenced the church burnings of 2021.  In the summer of that year, as Captain Airhead hosted conferences on the subjects of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia that consisted of a whole lot of crying and hand-wringing and thinking out ways to get around basic rights and freedoms so as to be able to throw in gaol anyone who looks at a Jew or Muslim cross-eyed, Canada was in the midst of the biggest spree of hate crimes in her history.   Christian church buildings all across Canada were targeted for arson and/or other acts of vandalism.  Not only did Captain Airhead fail to treat this violent and criminal display of Christophobia as a serious problem in the same way he was treating these other types of hatred directed towards specific religions he played a significant role in inciting these attacks on Canada’s Christian churches by promoting a narrative in which all allegations against Canada’s churches and her past governors with regards to the Indian Residential Schools are accepted without question or requirement of proof. (1)

 

Clearly Captain Airhead does not give a rat’s rump about hate qua hate.   If hatred is directed towards people he doesn’t like, like Christians, he shrugs it off even when it is expressed through violent, destructive, crime.   If it is directed against people he likes, or, more accurately, against groups to which he panders, he treats it as if it were the most heinous of crimes even if it is expressed merely in words.   While I am on principle opposed to all laws against hate since they are fundamentally unjust and by nature tyrannical (2) they are especially bad when drawn up by someone of Captain Airhead’s ilk.

 

Captain Airhead’s supposed concern about “online harms” is also a joke.   Consider how he handles real world harms.   His approach to the escalating problem of substance abuse is one that seeks to minimize the harm drug abusers do to themselves by providing them with a “safe” supply of their poison paid for by the government.   This approach is called “harms reduction” even though when it comes to the harms that others suffer from drug abuse such as being violently attacked by someone one doesn’t know from Adam because in his drug-induced mania he thinks his victim is a zombie space alien seeking to eat his brain and lay an egg in the cavity, this approach should be called “harms facilitation and enablement.”   Mercifully, there is only so much Captain Airhead can do to promote this folly at the Dominion level and so it is only provinces with NDP governments, like the one my province was foolish enough to elect last year, that bear the full brunt of it.   Then there was his idea that the solution to the problem of overcrowded prisons and criminal recidivism was to release those detained for criminal offenses back into the general public as soon after their arrest as possible.   Does this sound like someone who can be trusted to pass legislation protecting people from “online harms”?

 

Captain Airhead inadvertently let slip, last week, the real reason behind this bill.   In an interview he pined for the days when Canadians were all on the same page, got all their information from CBC, CTV, and Global, before “conspiracy theorists” on the internet ruined everything.   He was lamenting the passing of something that never existed, of course.   People were already getting plenty of information through alternative sources on the internet long before his premiership and the mainstream legacy media became far more monolithic in the viewpoints it presented during and because of his premiership.   What he was pining for, therefore, was not really something that existed in the past, but what he has always hoped to establish in the future – a Canada where everyone is of one opinion, namely his.    This is, after all, the same homunculus who, back when a large segment of the country objected to him saying that they would be required to take a foreign substance that had been inadequately tested and whose manufacturers were protected against liability into their bodies if they ever wanted to be integrated back into ordinary society, called them every name in the book and questioned whether they should be tolerated in our midst.

 

Some have suggested that Bill C-63 is not that bad compared with what the Liberals had originally proposed three years ago.   It still, however, is a thinly-veiled attempt at thought control from a man who is at heart a narcissistic totalitarian and whose every act as Prime Minister, from trying to reduce the cost of health care and government benefits by offering people assistance in killing themselves (MAID) to denying people who having embraced one or more of the letters of the alphabet soup, had a bad trip, the help they are seeking in getting free, deserves to be classified with the peccata clamantia.   It took a lot of pain and effort for this country to finally rid herself of the evil Section 13 hate speech provision that Captain Airhead’s father had saddled us with in the Canadian Human Rights Act.   Captain Airhead must not be allowed to get away with reversing that.

 

It is about time that he took a walk in the snow.   Or got badly trounced in a Dominion election.   Or fell screaming into a portal to the netherworld that opened up beneath his feet.   Any of these ways works.  

 

The time is come.  The time is now.  Just go. Go. GO!   I don’t care how.  Captain Airhead, would you please go now?! (3)

 

(1)   Anyone who thinks the allegations were proven needs to learn the difference between evidence and proof.   Evidence is what is brought forward to back up a claim.   Proof is what establishes the truth of a claim.   That the evidence advanced for the allegations in question simply does not add up to proof and moreover was flimsy from the onset and has subsequently been largely debunked is an entirely valid viewpoint the expression of which is in danger of being outlawed by the bill under discussion.   In a court of criminal law the burden is upon the prosecutor to prove the charge(s) against the defendant.   Not merely to present evidence but to prove the accused to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.  The same standard must be applied to allegations made against historical figures and past generations.   They, after all, are not present to defend themselves against their accusers.   To fail to do so is to fail in our just duty towards those who have gone before us.   The ancients had a term for this failure.   It is the vice of impiety.

(2)   The folly of legislation against hate was best expressed by Auberon Waugh in an article entitled “Che Guevara in the West Midlands” that was first published in the 6 July, 1976 issue of The Spectator, and later included in the collection Brideshead Benighted (Toronto: Little, Brown & Company, 1986).    Michael Wharton, however, writing as “Peter Simple” was second to none, not even Waugh, in ridiculing this sort of thing.

(3)   Apologies to Dr. Seuss.

One Small Step Towards Restoring Sanity

 

We are almost a quarter of a century into the third millennium Anno Domini.  In that period the alphabet soup – LGBTTQAEIOUandsometimesY - gang has grown accustomed to getting whatever it demands, no matter how ludicrous, absurd, or even downright insane, the demand happens to be.   This is true in general across the civilization formerly known as Christendom but nowhere more so than here in the Dominion of Canada.   It has been especially true here for the last nine years since Captain Airhead became the creepiest little low-life sleazebag ever to disgrace the office of the first minister of His Majesty’s government in Ottawa.   Captain Airhead has aggressively promoted the craziest, most fringe, and least defensible elements of the alphabet soup agenda as if they were commonsensical, had the weight of universally recognized moral truth behind them, and could be opposed only by knuckle-dragging moral reprobates.  If knuckle-dragging moral reprobation is what is required to oppose such things then Captain Airhead ought to be leading the opposition.   He was never able to add two and two together and come up with four, however.   Just look at his budgets.  

 

One consequence of Captain Airhead’s alphabet soup policies has been a sharp decline in average intelligence in the country.   We might call this the Trudeau Effect.   It is the opposite of the Flynn Effect, the psychometric phenomenon named after James Flynn by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in The Bell Curve (1994) that was the reason standardized IQ tests needed to be revised, updated, and recalibrated periodically to prevent the average from running significantly over 100.   The Trudeau Effect is when, due to constant government-backed gas-lighting and bullying, intelligence so declines that people no longer understand the difference between what is true in reality and what someone mistakenly thinks or imagines to be true.   Before Captain Airhead we could say in response to those pushing the trans part of the alphabet soup agenda that we don’t accept that the person who thinks he is a chicken actually is a chicken, we don’t accept that the person who thinks he is Napoleon Bonaparte actually is who he thinks he is, and neither should we accept that the boy who thinks he is a girl is a girl or that the girl who thinks she is a boy is a boy.   Today, not only do fewer and fewer people understand this, the aggressive promotion of the trans agenda has brought us to the point where there is now a demand that we regard people who think they are something other than people as being what they think or say they are.

 

This is why it has been rather encouraging over the last year or so to see a growing push back against this insanity.    Most recently, Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta, announced a new set of policies and upcoming legislation for her province that would restrict the genital and breast mutilation sickeningly called by such deranged euphemisms as gender-reassignment surgery or gender-affirming care to those who have reached the age of majority, ban puberty-blockers for those under the age of 16, require that parents be notified and give their consent when pervert teachers try to brainwash their kids into thinking they are the opposite sex/gender, require parental consent for sex education and that all sex ed curricula be approved by the minister of education, and prevent the sort of situation that Ray Stevens has hilariously lampooned in his new song “Since Bubba Changed His Name to Charlene”.   In other words, policies and legislation that anyone who isn’t a total idiot, insane, under the influence of an evil spirit or a substance that turns one’s mind to goo or both, evil on a megalomaniacal scale, or some combination of these, could and would support.   Needless to say, both Captain Airhead and Jimmy Dhaliwal, the supervillain who somehow broke out of the cartoon universe and into our own and having been denied entry to India due to his connections to the extremists who want to break that country up opted to become the leader of the socialist party here, have been having conniptions over this.

 

Most news media commentators have joined the whacko politicians like Airhead and Dhaliwal in howling in outrage over what could be best described as the very, bare bones, minimum of a sensible provincial policy towards alphabet soup gender politics.   This will not come as a shock to many, I suspect.    Canadian newspapers have acted as if their role was to propagate the ideas of and bolster support for the Liberal Party since at least the time when John Wesley Defoe edited the Winnipeg Free Press.   Arguably it goes back even further to when George Brown edited the Toronto Globe, the predecessor of today’s Globe and Mail.   That the new technological means of mass communication seemed designed to project a distorted view of reality that served the interests of some ideological vision of progress rather than of truth was a critique made by such varied observers as the American Richard M. Weaver, the French Jacques Ellul, and the Canadian Marshall McLuhan.  It was radio, television, and the motion picture industry that these men had in mind.   The second revolution in mass communications technology that gave us the internet, smartphones, social media, and streaming services has since eclipsed the first.    It has not rectified the problem those astute social critics and technosceptics saw in the earlier mass communications media any more than Captain Airhead’s bailout of the struggling Canadian newspapers solved the problem of their heavy bias towards the Liberal Party but rather, in both instances, the problem was exponentially magnified.

 

John Ibbitson wrote a piece that argued that Smith’s policies were endangering all teenagers in Alberta.   Naturally, the Globe and Mail had the poor taste to publish it.   The obvious reality is that no teenagers – or anybody else for that matter – are endangered by Smith’s policies.    Max Fawcett, the lead columnist for Canada’s National Observer, attempted to argue that Smith, who has long been identified with the libertarian wing of Canadian conservatism, has betrayed her ideology.   As Pierre Poilievre, the current leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, the Conservative Party, pointed out, however, when he – finally – took a stand in favour what Smith was doing, prohibiting people from making irreversible, life-altering, decisions while they are children means protecting their right to make adult choices as adults.  That is hardly something that could be described as irreconcilably out of sync with libertarian ideals  As an indicator of just how cuckoo most of the media reporting on this has been, Ibbitson’s and Fawcett’s are among the saner of the anti-Smith pieces that have appeared.

 

Poilievre also predicted that Captain Airhead will eventually have to back down on this issue.   I certainly hope that he is right about that and that soon we will have the pleasure of watching Captain Airhead eat his own words.   In the meantime, it is good to see that a rational, sane, pushback against the alphabet soup madness has finally begun.   Let us hope and pray that it continues and spreads.

Danielle Smith Spoke the Truth

When Danielle Smith was chosen by the United Conservative Party of Alberta to replace Jason Kenney as their leader early last month and consequentially became that province’s premier she started off her premiership with a bang by giving an exceptionally great speech.    Even if we had not heard a word of it we would know it to be very good from the outrage it provoked on the part of Alberta’s socialists and the clowns in the legacy media, that is to say, the print and broadcast news outlets that predate cable news, talk radio, and the internet, which in Canada are all hopelessly corrupt having been bought off years ago by the dimwitted creep and lout who currently occupies the Prime Minister’s Office.    The best response to the legacy media, other than to cut oneself off from it altogether, is to look at what they are promoting and root for the opposite and to look at what they are saying and believe the opposite.   So when they began to howl and rage and storm and demand that Smith apologize for saying that the unvaccinated had experienced the most discrimination of any group in her lifetime, their reaction in itself was a powerful indicator of the truth of Smith’s words. 

 

It has now been a few generations since the old liberalism succeeded in generating a near-universal consensus of public opinion, at least within Western Civilization, against discrimination.   At the time the discrimination the liberals were concerned with was of the de jure type – laws and government policies which singled out specific groups and imposed hardships and disadvantages of various types upon them.    It was not that difficult, therefore, for liberalism to create widespread public opinion against it.   Since ancient times it has been understood that government or the state exists to serve the end of justice.   In Modern times justice has come to be depicted in art as wearing a blindfold.   This imagery is somewhat problematic – blindness to the facts of the case to be ruled on is not an attribute of justice but of its opposite – but is generally accepted as depicting true justice’s blindness to factors which should have no weight in ruling on a dispute between two parties or on the evidence in a case involving criminal charges against someone, factors such as wealth or social status.   If this latter is indeed a quality of justice then for the state to discriminate against people on the basis of such factors is for it to pervert its own end and to commit injustice.    This is what made the old liberalism’s campaign against discrimination so effective.  What they were decrying was already perceivably unjust by existing and long-established standards.

 

Liberalism, however, was not content with winning over the public into supporting their opposition to laws and government policies that discriminated on such grounds as race and sex.   Liberalism had set equality, which is something quite different from justice as that term was classically and traditionally understood, as its end and ideal and consequently with regards to discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, etc., they adopted a much more ambitious goal than just the elimination of existing unjust laws and policies, but rather set their sights on the elimination of discrimination based on such factors from all social interaction and economic transaction and as much as possible from private thought and speech.   Indeed it was this goal rather than ending de jure discrimination that was clearly the objective of such legislation as the US Civil Rights Act (1964), the UK Race Relations Acts of 1965, 1968 and 1976 and the Canadian Human Rights Act (1977).   Ironically, having so expanded their anti-discrimination project to target private thoughts and actions the liberals had to move away from their initial opposition to the injustice of state discrimination.   The project of achieving equality by eliminating private discrimination required the cooperation of the state and laws and measures enacted by the state in pursuit of the ends of this project were themselves discriminatory albeit in a different way from the discriminatory laws to which the liberals had originally objected.

 

Today, decades later, the anti-discrimination project has become even further removed from the opposition to unjust laws that had won it broad public support.   “Discrimination” has ceased to be defined by specific actions or even general attitudes that underlie actions and has become entirely subjective.   Such-and-such groups are the officially designated victims of discrimination, and such-and-such groups are the officially designated perpetrators of discrimination, and discrimination is whatever the members of the former say they have experienced as discrimination.   Loud and noisy theatrical displays of outrage cover up the fact that a moral campaign against “discrimination” of this sort lacks any solid foundation in ethics, logic, or even basic common sense.

 

Liberalism, or progressivism as it is now usually called having given up most if not all of what had led to its being dubbed liberalism in the first place and adopted a stringent illiberalism towards those who disagree with it, has clearly gone off the rails with regards to discrimination.  If any discrimination deserves the sort of moral outrage that progressivism bestows upon what it calls discrimination today it is the sort of discrimination that the old liberalism opposed sixty to seventy years ago, discrimination on the part of the state.   If we limit the word discrimination to this sense then Danielle Smith was quite right in saying that the unvaccinated have been the most discriminated against group in her lifetime.  

 

In early 2020, you will recall, the World Health Organization sparked off a world-wide panic by declaring a pandemic.   A coronavirus that had long afflicted the chiropteran population was now circulating among human beings and spreading rapidly.   Although the bat flu resembled the sort of respiratory illnesses that we have put up with every winter from time immemorial in that most of the infected experienced mild symptoms, most of those who did experience the severe pneumonia it could produce recovered, and it posed a serious threat mostly to those who were very old and already very sick with other complicating conditions, our governments, media, and medical “experts” began talking like we were living out Stephen King’s The Stand.   Our governments enacted draconian measures aimed at preventing the spread of the virus that were more unprecedented – and harmful – than the disease itself.   They behaved as if they had no constitutional limits on their powers and we had no constitutionally protected basic rights and freedoms that they were forbidden to impinge upon no matter how good their intentions might be.   They imposed a hellish social isolation upon everybody as they ordered us to stay home and to stay away from other people if we did have to venture out (to buy groceries, for example), ordered most businesses and all social institutions to close, denied us our freedom to worship God in our churches, synagogues, etc., demanded that we wear ugly diapers on our faces as a symbol of submission to Satan, and with a few intermissions here and there, kept this vile totalitarian tyranny up for almost two years.    All of this accomplished tremendous harm rather than good. Towards the end of this period they shifted gears and decided to create a scapegoat upon which to shift the blame for the ongoing misery.   It was not that their contemptible, misguided, and foolish policies were complete and utter failures, they maintained, it was all the fault of the people who objected to their basic rights and freedoms being trampled over.   They were the problem.   By not cooperating they prevented the government measures from working.   Those who for one or another of a myriad of reasons did not want to be injected with an experimental drug that had been rushed to market in under a year, the manufacturers of which had been indemnified against liability for any injuries it might cause, the safety of which had been proclaimed by government fiat backed by efforts to suppress any conflicting information, or who did not want to be injected with a second or third dose after a previous bad experience, were made the chief scapegoats.   These were demonized by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in terms and tone that call to mind those employed by Stalin against the kulaks and Hitler against the Jews.   A system was developed, seemingly by people who regard the beast in the thirteenth chapter of the Apocalypse as an example and role model to be emulated, whereby society was re-opened to everyone else, but the unvaccinated were kept under the same brutal and oppressive restrictions as earlier in this epidemic of ultra-paranoid hypochondria.   Indeed, some jurisdictions imposed new, harsher, restrictions on them.  

 

So yes, Danielle Smith spoke the truth.   Our governments’ attempt to shut the unvaccinated out of society as it re-opened from a forced closure that should never have occurred in the first place was indeed the worst case of discrimination by government to have occurred in Canada or the Western world for that matter in her lifetime.   Her critics in the legacy media know this full well of course.    Since they hate and are allergic to the truth, which they never report when a lie, a half-truth, a distortion, or some other form of mendacity will suffice, this is why they howled with rage and fury when Smith spoke it.   Hopefully, she will give them plenty more to howl at.  

Fires and Fire Extinguishers

 

The new Lieutenant (pronounced lef- tenant) Governor of Alberta has recently and needlessly provoked outrage among the “conservatives” in that province, that is to say, Albertans who are small-l liberals in the sense that term conveyed in Canada in the days when Sir Wilfred Laurier led the big-L Liberal Party.   When asked by a representative of the fourth estate, whether she would sign royal assent to Danielle Smith’s Alberta Sovereignty Act, she said that she would consult experts about the constitutionality of the bill before doing so.     Few of those who took immediate umbrage with this answer, seemed to notice how strange it was that the question was asked in the first place.   While the conclusions of inductive reasoning are not infallible, the fact that bills that pass the appropriate legislative body, provincial legislature or Parliament, have always, or the next thing to it, received royal assent in the past means that it is rather silly of a reporter to ask such a question unless there is reason to think that it might be different this time.   There was no such reason to think this until the Lieutenant Governor answered the way she did.

 

Before proceeding to look at some of the criticism this answer has received, let us back up a bit and provide some background information.   The Lieutenant Governor of a province, as you may have deduced if you did not already know, is the provincial representative of our Head of State, Queen Elizabeth II, corresponding provincially to the Governor General in the Dominion government.   Just as the Governor General, assuming the Queen is not present to do so herself, summons Parliament together and dissolves it, and appoints on the basis of who commands the support of Parliament, the executive ministers of Cabinet, so the Lieutenant Governor does with the provincial Legislative Assembly and the provincial Cabinet.  Just as all bills that pass Parliament – the House of Commons and Senate – become law when the Governor General acting on behalf of the Queen signs royal assent, so with the Lieutenant Governor and the bills that pass the provincial Legislative Assembly.

 

The Alberta Sovereignty Act is not a bill currently before the Alberta Legislative Assembly.   It is something that Danielle Smith has proposed as part of her campaign to become the next leader of Alberta’s United Conservative Party.   The UCP needs a new leader because of the abysmal job that their current leader Jason Kenney has done as party leader and provincial premiers, especially during the bat flu in which he attained the dubious distinction of being the premier who locked up the most Christian pastors for doing their duty and obeying God rather than man.   Danielle Smith, who is the frontrunner in the race to replace Kenney, was formerly the leader of the Wildrose Party of Alberta which merged with the provincial Progressive Conservatives to form the UCP in 2017.   The Alberta Sovereignty Act is the reason why she is frontrunner.   It is not, as some might mistakenly conclude from the title, a proposal of formal secession of Alberta from the Dominion of Canada.   It is rather a proposal that Alberta claim for herself the same position, vis-à-vis the Dominion government, that the province of Quebec already enjoys, that is, the right to ignore the Dominion government on matters that she thinks are her business, and not Canada’s.   Smith maintains that this would be done within the limits of the Canadian constitution, and, indeed, would be merely reclaiming what is allotted to the province in the constitution.   Since the Act has not even been drafted yet, it is rather premature to opine on whether it meets the lofty goals of this rhetoric or not.   

 

Those who objected to the way Alberta Lieutenant Governor Salma Lakhani answered the strange question, objected to both the content of what she said and to what we might call the context in which she said it.   Like the Lieutenant Governor herself, they were partially right and partially wrong. 

 

“We are a constitutional monarchy and this is where we keep checks and balances” she said.  “I’m what I would call a constitutional fire extinguisher. We don’t have to use it a lot, but sometimes we do.”   While many of the objectors, including some who really ought to know better like Rebel News founder Ezra Levant, took exception to these words, there is nothing in the way of content here that is not fundamentally correct.   There is a constitutional as well as a ceremonial importance to the office of the Queen and that of her vice-regal representatives.   Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria-Hungary famously told American President Teddy Roosevelt that his role as monarch was to protect his people from their governments.   The Fathers of Confederation saw the role of the monarchy in similar terms, as the final check on the danger of Prime Ministerial dictatorship.   The greatest constitutional expert our country has ever had, the Honourable Eugene Forsey, called this “an absolutely essential safeguard of democracy”.    The problem is not with the principle of what Lt. Governor Lakhani said, but with the application.    The most important power reserved to the Crown in our constitution, is the power to dissolve Parliament/Legislature, call an election, and if need be dismiss the Prime Minister/Premier.    Forsey’s dissertation on the subject, later published as a book, was entitled The Royal Power of Dissolution.    The fire extinguisher is indeed an apt metaphor for this, but it is only to be used when there is what would be the equivalent of a fire in this metaphor.   The Alberta Sovereignty Act as proposed by Smith is not such a fire.   It may be unconstitutional, it may not be - this can only be determined when the text is made available.   From the proposal, however, if it proves to be unconstitutional, it will not be in a way that corresponds with a fire, but in a manner in which the courts are the appropriate venue to deal with the unconstitutionality.

 

What would constitute a fire?

 

The closest thing to it that Canada has ever seen has been the behaviour of the current Prime Minister in Ottawa.  At the beginning of the bat flu, when fear was at its zenith and rational thinking at its nadir, he seized the opportunity to unburden himself of accountability to Parliament.   Having been reduced to minority status from a huge majority in a humiliating Dominion election the year previous, almost immediately after the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, he sent Parliament home, calling them back together temporarily to ask them to approve a measure that would in effect have suspended the Magna Carta for two years, giving him carte blanche to tax and spend as he saw fit without having to account to Parliament.   While he was only given part of what he wanted, he nevertheless proceeded to govern from in front of the television camera before the front door of his cottage, while Parliament remained in suspension.   A year into the bat flu, he called a snap vanity election, which merely returned the status quo ante, but in the course of campaigning decided to take the dangerous and provocative path of demonizing and scapegoating a portion of the Canadian public that turned out to be much larger than he thought.   When, after the first two years of the bat flu, he began imposing new restrictions while the rest of the world was abandoning them, he found himself faced with a massive but peaceful protest.   Indeed, the protest was far more peaceful than any other mass movement of the last two years, many of which have been called “peaceful” or “mostly peaceful” despite being essentially riots characterized by violent language, violent behaviour, property destruction, looting and vandalism, none of which could be found in the truckers’ protest.   When defaming the protestors didn’t work, he evoked the Emergency Measures Act, giving himself the kind of powers designed for use when the country is besieged in war, to crush the protest.   He has continued since, to use law enforcement, the revenue agency, and other such branches of government to inappropriately attack his personal and political enemies.   If there is anything lacking to qualify his premiership as the sort of “fire” for which the reserve constitutional powers of the Crown are the “fire extinguisher” it is only the refusal to relinquish power after losing an election.

 

When it comes to what I have dubbed the context of the Lt. Governor’s remarks, her critics are on firmer ground.   The Alberta Sovereignty Act, whatever its merits and demerits might be, is not the sort of thing for which the reserve powers of the Crown are intended, and, worse, is a multilevel political matter.  What I mean by that is that it is at the present time at the heart of one political contest, the race for the leadership of a political party, the UCP, but should the person proposing it win that race, it will then become a bill to be debated in the Alberta Legislature between the various parties represented there and potentially an issue in another political contest, the next Alberta provincial election.   There is yet another level on which it is political in that it is of such a nature as will almost certainly generate contention between Alberta and other provinces and between Alberta and the Dominion government.   A Lieutenant Governor should not be involving herself in such matters.

 

One of the foremost benefits to the institution of hereditary monarchy in the age in which we live, is that a hereditary monarch is above politics in the partisan sense of the word.   For an example of what can happen when the head of state is not above partisan politics but is elected to office by running as the representative of a faction, we need look no further than the republic to the south of the 49^th Parallel.   Last Thursday, the current occupant of the White House gave an intemperate rant at Independence Hall in Philadelphia about how the approximately half of his country that voted for his opponent in the last election were some sort of existential threat to the United States and democracy.   To make this speech, already creepy enough, even more threatening, he delivered it from behind a lectern stationed in front of blood red illumination, mingled with shadows, while flanked by US Marines, conjuring up the images of dictators in general, Nazi Germany in particular, and the devil in hell.   This is what you will eventually get, when you fill the office of the head of state, the person who represents the entire country, by partisan election. (1)   Parliamentary government under a hereditary monarch is much better.    Queen Elizabeth II herself, has always understood that since her office is above partisan politics, she has a duty to that office not to descend into partisan politics personally.   Those charged with representing her in a vice-regal capacity in Canada, whether at the Dominion or provincial level, have a responsibility to follow this example.   Here, the Lt. Governor of Alberta has clearly failed.   Perhaps this part of her duty was not made plain to her.

 

God Save the Queen!

 

(1)   Totalitarian countries have been, almost without exception, republics – the Cromwellian protectorate, the first French Republic i.e. the Reign of Terror, every Communist country (they generally call themselves People’s Republics), Nazi Germany.   The freest countries in the world, with only a few exceptions, have had parliamentary government under a hereditary monarch.   Dictators are fundamentally a democratic phenomenon.  The dictator claims absolute power over people, because he claims to speak for “the people”.   Whereas kings and queens are the fathers and mothers of their countries, dictators are always Big Brother.   Dictatorship like democracy, is all about power, the ability to compel obedience.   Monarchy is about authority – the respected and recognized right, derived from a number of sources including ancient prescription and constitutional succession, to lead.    This distinction is reflected even in the difference between the two Greek suffixes of the words themselves.   The ancients understood democracy to be the mother of tyranny.   Modern democracy has become more totalitarian over time.   The original problem with democracy, as Alexis de Tocqueville spelled it out in the nineteenth century in Democracy in America, was the “tyranny of the majority”, i.e., the majority trampling over the rights of the minority.   The original Modern solution to this problem was to temper democracy with liberalism, in the sense of acknowledged, protected, rights and freedoms of individuals and minorities with which governments, even with majority backing, are forbidden to interfere.   NB, minority here means “the numerically less”, and not, what more recent liberals and democrats seem to think it means, people of certain designated skin colours, ethnicities, national origins, religions, sexual orientations, etc.  More recently, replacing the majoritarian principle with the consensus principle, has been the preferred solution.   This, however, makes things worse.   Under the consensus principle, a democratic decision is not valid without universal participation and universal agreement.   Universal agreement, however, translates into “dissent will not be tolerated.”   This is why such present day liberal democrats as the current occupier of the White House and the current Prime Minister of Canada are so absolutely intolerant of all who disagree with them.