Canada's "Conservatives", Put Your Sabres Away and Give Your Heads a Shake

When Erin O’Toole was ousted as leader of the Conservative Party of Canada and Candice Bergen – not the Murphy Brown actress, the Member of Parliament for Portage-Lisgar – was made interim leader, it began to look, much to my surprise, like there might be some hope for the party after all.   While the Freedom Convoy protest was underway in Ottawa, the Conservatives led by Bergen actually did their job as Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition for the first time since Captain Airhead became Prime Minister.   They dug in and stood on principle, calling him, the Prime Mister that is, to account for his inflammatory and entirely inappropriate response to the protest, and for his dangerous and illegal invoking of the Emergency Measures Act to crush the protest.   Then, as Captain Airhead’s tyrannical power grab was eclipsed by a crisis on the international stage, they did something so stupid that it completely erased the credit they had earned over the previous weeks.    They supported the government in its move to hinder Canadians from accessing information about the crisis other than that spun from an anti-Russia perspective and urged the government to expel the Russian ambassador.   By doing the former, they adopted the same condescending attitude towards Canadians that we have come to expect from Captain Airhead’s Grits and Jimmy Dhaliwal’s anti-working class socialists, i.e., the attitude of “you cannot be trusted to examine all the information available and come to an intelligent decision for yourselves so we will control what you can see and hear and tell you what to think”.   By doing the latter, they were essentially asking the Prime Minister to declare war on Russia.

 

Captain Airhead does not need this sort of crazy advice from Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.   He gets enough of it from his deputy prime minister.   The only reason, other than the Lord’s command to “love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” for not wanting the ground to immediately open up underneath Captain Airhead and drop him screaming into the abyss, is the very practical reason that should that occur Chrystia Freeland would take his place.   Of all the ministers of the Cabinet, yes, including Captain Airhead himself, she is by far the worst.     Since that Cabinet includes such creeps as Bill Blair, Jean-Yves Duclos, Steven Guilbeault, Patty Hajdu, David Lametti and Marco Mendicino that is saying a lot. Moreover she is herself at her absolute worst when it comes to anything having to do with Russia, Ukraine and geopolitics in general., although she is almost as abysmal with regards to her actual current portfolio which is finance.

 

By offering the Prime Minister this advice and taking the stance they are taking the Conservatives are acting as if Stephen Harper were still their leader.   Presumably, they would not object to this characterization and regard it as a compliment.   It is not intended as such.   Stephen Harper was the best Prime Minister the Dominion has had since 1963 but this is not saying much.   The entire lot of post-Diefenbaker Prime Ministers have been terrible.   Harper was merely the least vile of them.  Even so he was bad enough that this writer vowed never to vote Conservative again as long as he led the party, intending, since the other options at the time were much worse, to follow the advice of the late, great, P. J. O’Rourke, i.e., “don’t vote, it only encourages the bastards”.    Harper had his good qualities, and his bad qualities.   What can be seen of Harper on display in the present hawkish attitude of the Conservatives towards Russia is one of his worst traits.

 

Harper liked to boss other countries around and self-righteously lecture them about their internal affairs and their relationships with their neighbours.   This is a trait he shared with Captain Airhead.   Granted, there are a couple of big differences in the manner in which they did this.   Harper, for the most part, only lectured other countries on serious matters.   Captain Airhead lectures other governments for not being “woke” enough, that is to say, not conforming with the latest ridiculous and self-righteous form of identity politics promoted by the Cultural Maoists who dominate academe and the media, both news and entertainment.   Harper’s style was also radically different from Captain Airhead’s.   Harper came across as someone who was trying to follow Teddy Roosevelt’s advice “talk softly and carry a big stick” but miscalculating the softness of his tone while hoping that nobody would notice that he didn't have the big stick.   Captain Airhead’s style is much more clownish than this.   It summons up the image of a scrappy little chihuahua running up to a much bigger dog that could easily bite his head off and obnoxiously yipping in its face before running to hide behind a big bruiser of a bulldog, with the bulldog representing either the “international community” acting in concert, or the United States.   It is not a good image for a leader of our country.

 

If even a tenth of what we have been fed by the newsmedia about the Russian invasion of Ukraine is reliable – and that is a big if, because while all lies must contain some truth in order to be believable, a tenth is a much larger percentage than what we can usually expect from the media and that percentage goes down the more univocal the media is in its take on any given event – the Ukrainians are, of course, much to be pitied.   Having sympathy, however, for people who are suffering under an invasion and all its attendant woes, is not the same thing as having the ability to do anything about it.   Pretending that they are the same is both dangerous and stupid.   Especially in this situation.

 

Even the United States would be insane to go to war with Russia over Ukraine.    While my reason for saying this rests upon different factors that I will briefly explain later, let me add that the invasion of Ukraine could have been avoided entirely had the United States behaved differently and better over the last few decades.   Although  Russia's president Vladimir Putin is clearly guilty of invading another country, the explanation for his actions is not, as most politicians and media, both liberal and conservative, are claiming, his own imperialist ambition.   It is the response of the leader of a country that has been backed into a corner by American-NATO expansionism.  It is the response of a bear that has been poked one too many times.     

 

In a pact with the devil made in order to defeat the Third Reich, the Western Allies agreed to hand Eastern Europe over to the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War.   Almost immediately after this the Cold War began.   This conflict between the American and Soviet superpowers was necessarily “cold” because the nuclear arms possessed by both made a “hot” war unthinkable.   In the Cold War nuclear arms race, each side tried to get the better of the other by obtaining a first strike advantage – the ability to obliterate the other side's capacity to retaliate.   Both sides had to settle, however, for the deterrent that was appropriately named MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction.   The Cold War only came to an end when both sides, having entered into negotiations under American President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev, agreed to step back from the arms race.     

 

Before the Communist regime in Russia fell, the Soviet Union dissolved, and Ukraine became independent of Russia, Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush and the other leaders of NATO – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, formed in the Cold War to protect Western Europe against Soviet invasion – promised Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would not seek to expand its membership further than the re-unified Germany.   Whether Bush was sincere in this promise or not is debatable.   The following year, the year in which the dissolution of the Soviet Union took place, saw Operation Desert Storm, in which an American-led coalition went to war with Iraq in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.  In connection with this action Bush declared his vision for a “new world order” in which a coalition of free, democratic, countries, led by the United States, would be the world’s police, acting against countries that aggressed against their neighbours in the way Iraq had.   As the implications of this unfolded in the two terms each of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, NATO was transformed from the defensive alliance it had been in the Cold War into the muscle enforcing America’s new, liberal international, world order.   In the process of accomplishing this the United States replaced both the anti-Communism of the Cold War era which opposed a totalitarian ideology and system rather than a nation and the diplomacy backed by strength of the Reagan-Bush era, with an arrogant and foolish anti-Russian attitude.   This manifested itself early in Clinton’s presidency when he decided to meddle in the conflicts in the Balkans that were tearing apart what from the First World War to the end of the Cold War had been Yugoslavia.   Ethnic hostility fueled these conflicts and invariably Clinton sided with Muslim groups, like those in Bosnia, Albania, and Kosovo against Christian groups, especially the Eastern Orthodox Serbs, the group with the closest and deepest ties to Russia.   At the end of his presidency Clinton committed the war crime of ordering NATO to conduct an indiscriminate bombing campaign against Serbia.   At the same time he brought Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO in violation both of the letter as well as the spirit of American and NATO assurances to Russia.

 

After Bill Clinton finished serving out his wife’s two terms as president – contrary to all of the rot one hears blaming the horrors of war on masculinity and patriarchy the military misbehavior of the Clinton administration, whose Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once asked Colin Powell “what’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it”, like that of the Obama administration, the current American administration, and even Captain Airhead’s Cabinet which can do nothing but posture, are all the clear consequence of estrogen poisoning and toxic femininity – he was followed by George H. W. Bush’s morally retarded son, who began his presidency by giving the digitis impudicus to Russia in the form of  withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and placing missiles in Poland.   He brought seven countries that had either been Soviet republics or Warsaw Pact members into NATO and in the last year of  his presidency declared Ukraine and Georgia eligible for NATO membership.  Russia could hardly have failed to notice that his and Clinton's actions were moving America's military reach closer and closer to their own borders.

 

The Obama administration with Hillary Clinton as its Secretary of State was even worse.   In 2014 they sponsored the second of two colour revolutions against Russia-sympathetic, elected Ukrainian governments – George W. Bush had sponsored the first.   In what was absurdly called the Revolution of Dignity that grew out of the Euromaiden protests, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was driven from office in a coup carried out by groups like Svoboda, the party re-organized from the Social-National Party (yes, it was exactly what that sounds like) and the various groups of the so-called Right Sector coalition (the Banderite group Trident, the Ukrainian National Assembly-Ukrainian National Self-Defense, Social-National Assembly, Patriot of Ukraine, and a few others, all of which were self-identified Nazi groups) with the backing and support of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.   While it would be going too far to say that the coup established a Nazi-style Reich regime in Ukraine – the new government was more of a US-NATO puppet regime - later in that year the Azov Regiment, which wears its neo-Nazism on its sleeve, quite literally, (1) was organized and incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard.   The Ukrainian government has employed this unit in its harassment of the ethnic Russian population of the Donbass region of south-eastern Ukraine.   The Russian separatists in Donbass sought to join the Russian Federation in 2015 and were turned down by Putin.   After eight years of harassment by the Ukrainian government and its Nazi army their independence was recognized by Putin just before Russia launched her  invasion of Ukraine.   This came a matter of months after the present American administration renewed its efforts to bring |Ukraine into NATO with the clear intention of arming its border with Russia.

 

Had the United States not behaved in this way, had she not replaced her justified opposition to the evil ideology of Communism with an ugly, stupid and bigoted Russophobia and done everything in her power to drive the Russian bear into a corner and start poking at it with Ukraine being her most recent proxy, the present conflict between Russia and Ukraine could have easily been avoided entirely.

While this does not necessarily mean that Putin's actions are justified, nor does it make the sufferings of the Ukrainians any less horrible, it does mean that neither the United States nor her allies have any moral ground to stand upon in condemning these actions.

In 2001, the United States and a coalition of her allies, including Canada, invaded Afghanistan with the intention of toppling the Taliban government there.   In 2003, the United States and a smaller coalition, invaded Iraq for the purposes of regime change.    Were these actions justified?

While this writer would answer no, at least with regards to the second war, most of those who saw both of these invasions as justified are among the loudest condemning Putin today.    The burden therefore is upon them to explain why the United States is allowed to invade countries and topple governments it doesn't like while Russia is not allowed to invade a country that had belonged to her until 1991 to prevent the Americans from turning it into a military base with which to threaten her on her very doorstep.    One could take the ethical position that it is always wrong for one country to invade another, a position that is  commendable for its internal consistency, even though this writer does not believe it to be correct.   This position is not available to those who regard the invasions of Afghanistan and/or Iraq as justified.    Some might argue that it is wrong for one country to invade another, but it is alright for coalitions of countries under the supervision of some international agency to do so.   This would presumably be close to the answer that liberal Democrats in the United States and Liberals here in Canada would give.   Internationalists are prone to this sort of thinking.   It is obviously wrong, however.   If it is wrong for one country to do something, it does not become right when two or more agree to do it.   Indeed, it is arguably much worse.   It compounds the wrongness of each country invading on its own by involving the others and ganging up on the victim.   Others would try to argue to the effect that it is okay for "good guy" countries to invade "bad guy" countries but that it is not okay for "bad guy" countries to invade "good guy" countries.   This sort of thinking is puerile, a Modern version of the heresy of Mani, the result of reading too many superhero comic books and watching too many Hollywood action movies.   Sadly, it is all too ubiquitous among the post-Cold War generation of neoconservatives who unfortunately have been the most influential group when it comes to geopolitics in both the American Republican Party and the Canadian Conservative Party for the last thirty years. (2)

The ethical side of this conflict is not remotely as easily resolved as all of those jumping on the anti-Russia bandwagon - some going to absurd lengths, such as suggesting a ban on the works of Dostoevsky - think, although Edward Feser had made a strong case that neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor a military response from the United States and allies can be justified by the terms of Just War.    Ultimately, however, it is the pragmatic side of the matter that dictates that the sort of response that many are calling for is utterly insane.

Even before the United States developed the first nuclear weapons and became the first and to this date only country to use them it was generally agreed that about the stupidest military move anyone could make was to attack Russia.   Two notorious conquerors, Napoleon Bonaparte in the nineteenth century and Adolf Hitler in the twentieth, successfully overran Europe before going to their doom by making precisely this mistake.   The advent of nuclear weapons, of which the Russians have their own formidable stockpile has not made attacking Russia any less of a suicidal thing to do. 

Unless the United States and other Western countries are willing to risk escalating the conflict into nuclear Armageddon there is not much they can do to back up their angry rhetoric against Russia which makes that rhetoric only so much empty posturing.

Such posturing is bad enough coming from the United States, a nuclear superpower.      It is simply clownish for Canadian politicians to engage in this kind of sabre rattling.    While clownish behaviour is about all we can expect from Captain Airhead and his horrid deputy,  we ought to be able to expect Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition to, well, oppose the government when it is doing something this stupid instead of egging it on to take it to the next, far worse, level.

(1) Contrary to the lies of professional anti-hate "experts", individuals and groups still crazy enough to align themselves with National Socialism today do so proudly and advertise the fact.   Most of the Ukrainian groups mentioned, including the Azov Regiment, for example, use or have used, the Wolfsangel and the swastika as symbols.   The Ukrainian groups are the real deal.   Groups like this in Canada and the United States are smaller, powerless, and generally, much like the World Council of Anarchists in G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, consist almost entirely of government agents.   The two most publicized such groups in relatively recent Canadian history, for example, the Canadian Nazi Party of the 1960s and 1970s and the Heritage Front of the 1990s, were creations of the Canadian government, in the case of the former the Liberal government working in conjunction with the Canadian Jewish Congress, in the latter case CSIS acting on the orders of Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservative government.   The intent in both cases was to generate a Nazi-scare among the public.   In the earlier instance this was to gain public support for government measures taken ostensibly to suppress such groups but in reality to expand government surveillance and curtail certain civil liberties  and basic freedoms.   In the latter instance it would seem the motive was to discredit the right-of-centre Canadians primarily from the West who were exiting the Progressive Conservatives in dissatisfaction to form an alternative prairie populist party by smearing them through guilt-by-association with the Heritage Front which popped up right around the same time.  Professional anti-hate "experts" demonstrate the fraudulent nature of their profession in the way they do not focus their attention on real, self-identified, neo-Nazi groups like those in Ukraine but instead try to smear Christian fundamentalists, libertarians, populists, immigration reformers and basically anyone who disagrees with the left-liberal agenda as being closet neo-Nazis.    The same anti-hate "experts" who spent decades trying to get elderly Ukrainian Canadians stripped of their citizenship and kicked out of the country because they served the SS, usually as translators, often under duress, in the Second World War, despite no evidence that these men were guilty of war crimes, seem to have less of a problem with the present Liberal government's providing funds and training for the Azov Regiment.   They provided the media with a condemnatory statement but did not pursue the matter with the vehemence with which they have persecuted the elderly Ukrainian fathers, grandfathers, and great grandfathers of Canadians.   Nor have they shown much interest in the Azov Regiment's biggest cheerleader in Canada, the deputy prime minister, who has twice been denied entry to Russia or the Soviet Union as it was the first time this happened over her involvement with the Euromaiden seditionists and their predecessors.   It is true that accusing ethnic Ukrainians living in the West of Nazism is a KGB disinformation tactic going back to the Cold War - John Demjanjuk , the American equivalent of the elderly Ukrainian Canadians mentioned above, was a famous victim of just such a disinformation campaign, but in the case of the deputy prime minister, who cries disinformation every time her unsavoury connections in Ukraine are brought up the boy crying Wolfsangel happens to be right and her cries of disinformation have long ago been debunked by every researcher willing to dig into the matter.   Note that the anti-hate "experts" alluded to are heavily funded by the  Canadian Liberal government.

(2) I am using "neoconservative" in its American rather than Canadian sense here.   From the perspective of those, such as this writer,  who hold to traditional British-Canadian Toryism, all of American conservatism is neoconservative, being a form of liberal republicanism.  In the  context of American conservatism, neo-conservatives were originally Cold War liberals who moved to the right in the last decades of the Cold War when the New Left was in  its ascendancy in American left-liberalism.   While these were notably hawkish in comparison with some other elements of the American right, such as the libertarians, their hawkishness was nothing in comparison with the next generation of American neoconservatives who emerged in the post-Cold War era preaching American unipolarity, a vision that resembled George H. W. Bush's new, liberal internationalist, world order, except that in it the United States is even more prominently at the top of the order, the sole global hegemon.     This is the sort of thinking that has been too influential in the American Republican Party and Canadian Conservative Party in recent decades.   George Grant warned that the world was heading towards just such an unipolar American hegemony in his Lament for a Nation (1965), reminding us that in the wisdom of the ancients a "universal and homogenous state" would be the ultimate tyranny.

Bad Politicians Pass a Bad Bill

As anyone who has followed my writings for any significant length of time will know when I identify my politics and general philosophy as Tory this is not in reference to the Conservative Party.   This is something that I wish to emphasize in light of the disgraceful behaviour of that party in the last couple of weeks.   To me, being a Tory means being loyal to and supporting traditional institutions that have proven themselves over long ages of time.   In the political sense the primary such traditional institution is hereditary royal monarchy.   The second such institution is parliament.   True Toryism means placing these institutions ahead of abstract ideals like democracy, equality, and even freedom although freedom is not just an abstract ideal but also a basic human good, a good which over the long run is better protected by traditional institutions than by political crusades launched in its name as an abstract ideal.   It also means suspicion and skepticism towards the utopian schemes of those who think that either such ideals or what they consider to be "science" should be the basis of a new, re-ordered, engineered society.    It is a confidence in traditional institutions over the long term, rather than the people who make them up in the short term.   This needs to be stressed especially in regards to parliament.   Earthly human institutions, even traditional ones, are not infallible.  They are of necessity made up of people, and therefore fallible due to the flaws in fallen human nature.   Parliaments are made up of politicians, who have more than their fair share of those flaws.

 

The recent actions of our Canadian Parliament alluded to above in reference to the disgraceful behaviour of the Conservative Party illustrate the point.   In passing Bill C-4, a bill which is objectively not only evil but insane, Parliament failed big time.   This was not because of some flaw in the Westminster System as it evolved over time that can be fixed by social and political engineers.   The problem is entirely in the character of the human beings who make up both the House and the Senate.  

 

Bill C-4 is a new version of a bill the Liberals introduced in the last Parliament which failed to pass the Senate in time to become law, itself a re-worked version of an earlier bill that had expired when Parliament was prorogued last summer.   It was introduced on the twenty-ninth of November, passed the House of Commons on the first of December when all parties extradited it, and passed the Senate on the seventh of December.    The bill that had been introduced in the last Parliament had been quite controversial and this new version, rather than remove the objectionable elements, made them worse.   Therefore, for the Conservatives led by Erin O'Toole to help the Grits pass this bill unanimously was for them to abdicate their duties in the role of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition.   For the Senate to pass the bill so quickly was for them to abdicate their duty as the chamber of "sober second thought".  The Liberals, in this Parliament as in the last, are a minority government.   Even if they were a majority, they ought not to be able to fast-track controversial legislation like this.    Something is very, very, wrong here.

 

Bill C-4 amends the Criminal Code to forbid “causing another person to undergo conversion therapy”, “doing anything for the purpose of removing a child from Canada with the intention that the child undergo conversion therapy outside Canada”, “promoting or advertising conversion therapy” and “receiving a financial or other material benefit from the provision of conversion therapy”.   Now, some explanation may be required here.

 

There are people who, like almost everyone else, were born either biologically male or biologically female but who, unlike most other people, either a) think that they are of the other sex than what their body would indicate, b) think that they are some option other than male or female, c) identify as their biological sex but are sexually attracted to members of their own sex either instead of or in addition to members of the opposite sex, or d) are some combination or minute variation of the above.   Those among these who have politicized their gender/sexual identities – or allowed ideologues of the cultural revolutionary far-left to politicize these for them - and who collectively refer to themselves by an ever-increasing stretch of letters standing for the various labels they identify themselves with and which currently goes something like LGBTTQAEIOUandsometimesY, have demanded that “conversion therapy” be banned. 

 

Now, among those in the aforementioned group who believe their true “gender” to be different from the biological sex they were born with, some seek out reconstructive surgery that would make their bodies, at least in outward appearance, conform to the gender with which they identify.    This is not what is meant by “conversion therapy” and those who have been pushing for the ban on “conversion therapy” would be appalled at the thought of banning this sort of thing.   Indeed, many of them wish to see it available to young children with or without parental approval or consent.

 

No, “conversion therapy” could be said to be the opposite of the above mentioned procedure.   Whereas gender reassignment surgery is cosmetic surgery that makes the appearance of the body conform to the self-image, that makes the physical conform to the psychological, on the assumption that the physical is “wrong” and the psychological “right”, “conversion therapy” is psychological treatment aimed at correcting the psychological so that it conforms to the physical, on the opposite assumption, the assumption that the physical is right and the psychological wrong.

 

Now, among those who support legislation like Bill C-4 that bans “conversion therapy”, there seem to be many who base their support on the assumption that “conversion therapy” entails something like the Ludovico technique that features into Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange and the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film of the same title featuring Malcolm McDowell.   In that story, you might recall, Alex – the character portrayed by McDowell in the film – is the leader of a gang of “ultraviolent” youth that he calls his “droogs”, who, after robbing and beating an eccentric elderly woman, the last in a string of such thuggish acts, is abandoned by his friends, arrested, and charged for the murder of the woman who dies from her wounds.   In prison, he is offered the chance to get out early if he will undergo the experimental Ludovico technique that would make him incapable of reoffending.   The jumps at the opportunity.   The technique involves strapping him in a chair, with his eyes propped open, and forcing him to watch hours of extremely violent film footage, while he is injected with drugs that cause pain and nausea.    He is thereby so conditioned to experience pain and illness at the slightest thought of violence that he cannot even defend himself.   Proponents of Bill C-4 have certainly encouraged people to assume that this is how “conversion therapy” works.   The legislation itself, however, is worded in such a way as to cover a lot more than just this sort of thing.

 

The bill introduces into law a definition of “conversion therapy” as meaning:

 

a practice, treatment, or service that is designed to

(a)    change a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexual;

(b)   change a person’s gender identity to cisgender;

(c)   change a person’s gender expression so that it conforms to the sex assigned to the person at birth;

(d)   repress or reduce non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behaviour;

(e)   repress a person’s non-cisgender gender identity; or

(f)    repress or reduce a person’s gender expression that does not conform to the sex assigned to the person at birth.

 

Notice the following about this definition:

 

First, if someone were to create something like the Ludovico technique designed to turn a heterosexual person into a homosexual person, or a cisgender person into a transgender person, it would not meet the definition of “conversion therapy’ introduced in the bill.   Thus, although this sort of legislation has been sold to the public as a ban of a harmful technique akin to brainwashing it is no such thing.   No technique that has been used in “conversion therapy” in the past is banned by this legislation and remains legal under it provided the conversion is in the opposite direction of what the bill forbids.

 

Second, the definition is broad enough to take in any sort of counselling or advice that encourages people to recognize, acknowledge and identify as their birth sex and to live within the limits of traditional sexual ethics.   Indeed, (d) could be interpreted as banning the teaching of traditional sexual ethics altogether.   It would not surprise me if the clowns that now occupy Her Majesty’s bench in most jurisdictions in the Dominion were to interpret it in just this manner.

 

So what we have here is a definition that errs by being too broad and too narrow at the same time.   It is too broad in that it takes in things that government has no business legislating against – traditional sexual ethics and counselling based on the same.  It is too narrow in that it does not ban what the public has been told it bans – coercive and abusive techniques qua coercive and abusive techniques.

 

In its previous incarnations as Bill C-8 (first attempt) and C-6 (second attempt), this legislation met with opposition on precisely the grounds that the definition of “conversion therapy” was too broad and could take in professional and pastoral counselling, pulpit teaching and preaching, and even ordinary conversation in which traditional views of sexual identity and ethics are expressed.   The present bill has done nothing to assuage such concerns and, indeed, is worse than its predecessors in that whereas the earlier bills were attempts to ban “conversion therapy” for children the bill which actually passed Parliament also bans “conversion therapy” for adults.   The earlier versions were bad enough in that given the broad definition of “conversion therapy” they would have made criminals out of parents who seek out help for their children in accordance with their own consciences and beliefs rather than those of the left-wing ideologues in the Liberal Party of Canada.   With the passing of this bill, however, when it comes into effect the state of the law will be such that those who identify their gender as something other than the biological sex with which they were born will have no problem obtaining the kind of “conversion therapy” that consists of physical surgery to make the body conform in appearance to “gender identity”, and should someone for some reason or another want professional help in converting from heterosexuality to homosexuality or from cisgender identity to transgender identity  (1) the law would not prohibit some quack from providing this service even if it involves dangerous, pain-inducing, methods, but those who want help in accepting their biological sex or controlling same-sex desires that they believe it is wrong to act upon will be prevented from finding such help and anyone offering such help, even in the form of conversational counselling, will face criminal punishment for doing so.

 

A bill of this sort is fundamentally and thoroughly rotten legislation that is clearly aimed at imposing “woke” ideology as it pertains to sex and gender on Canadians at the expense of traditional religious and moral beliefs as well as personal freedom of choice.   It ought never to have passed Parliament at all, much less without debate and with unanimous support in both chambers, and with Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and the Upper Chamber of “sober second thought” both patting themselves on the back for refusing to do their jobs.    Parliament is an institution that has stood the test of time and proven itself over and over again, but if we keep sending to it the sort of people who currently fill its seats – and I include those on the Opposition bench as well as those in government in this – then cruddy legislation like this will keep making it into law.

 

(1)     A case can be made that what goes under the name “education” today in most schools (other than private and parochial ones) and universities amounts to little more than just this sort of “reverse conversion therapy” inflicted upon unsuspecting youth.

Reflections on a Waste of Time

Dominion Election 2021 has come and gone with the result being the restoration of the status quo ante.   This proves that the Conservatives, Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition in both the previous and the new Parliament, were absolutely correct in saying that this election was a colossal waste of time and money and an unpardonable one at that, having been called so soon after the last one and at a time when the public is still in the grip of an irrational paranoid panic because of a public health scare, going on two year's old, stirred up by the fear pornographers of the mass media noise machine, aided and abetted by the politicians and public health mandarins.   Note that in the place of that last part - everything from "grip" on - the Conservatives would have just said pandemic.   My wording is a more accurate description.

Since this means that  the incumbent Prime Minister, Captain Airhead, who occasionally uses the alias Justin Trudeau, gets to keep the job unless the Liberal Party decides to punish him for risking everything in a foolish and failed, egotistical bid for a majority, it is also evidence of the gross stupidity of a large part of the Canadian electorate.   This demonstrates further a point that I have made many times in the past - the universal franchise ideal of classical liberalism just does not live up to its hype and there is much that can be said on behalf of the pre-liberal wisdom that votes should be weighed and not just counted.

Or rather, to soften the judgement of the previous paragraph somewhat, this is what the results of this election would be saying if the election actually had been what almost everyone - the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, the idiotic clown who leads the socialist party, the media commentariat of all political stripes, and most of the public - thought of it as being, that is to say, the election of the next Prime Minister.   That so many Canadians think of our Dominion elections primarily in terms of who the next Prime Minister will be is one of the many unfortunate consequences of the permeation of our culture with imported American Hollywood pop culture.   Every four years Americans vote on who their next President will be.   In our Dominion elections we do not vote for who the next Prime Minister will be.   We vote for who will represent our local constituency in the lower House of the next Parliament.    A Dominion election is the election of the next Parliament, not the next Prime Minister,   The person invited by the Crown to fill the office of Prime Minister - the person who leads the Cabinet of Ministers who carry out the day-to-day executive administration of the government - is the person who commands the most support in the House.   This is either the leader of a party that has won a majority of seats in the House or, in the absence of a majority, the party leader who can convince one or more parties other than his own to back him, usually, but not necessarily, the leader of the party which won the plurality.

I have from time to time heard some people gripe about this and suggest that we should have a separate ballot in which we vote directly for the Prime Minister.   I very much beg to differ with such people.   This would be objectionable, in my opinion, not just because it would make our system more like that of the United States, although that is good grounds in itself for opposing the proposal.   It would also be a step further towards undermining the way our constitutional system is designed to de-emphasize the office and role of Prime Minister.    The Canadians of the present day are sorely in need of a true appreciation of this aspect of our constitution and a better understanding of how a great many of our country's problems stem from a century's worth of effort on the part of the Liberal Party under leaders from William Lyon Mackenzie King to Captain Airhead to subvert our constitution in this very aspect and turn our country into an elected Prime Ministerial dictatorship.

Before proceeding further with that thought, allow me to address those who might object to my characterization of this as a Liberal project by pointing out that the last Conservative Prime Minister also treated the office in this way.   Stephen Harper grew up a Liberal.   He left that party in his twenty's but never really became a traditional Canadian Tory. He was first elected to Parliament as a member of the Western protest party, the Reform Party of Canada.   The Reform Party, of which this writer was also a member in the 1990s, was first and foremost a populist party.  While it affected a small-c conservatism, support for Canada's historical traditions and constitution was never a large part of what it understood by this word, which is a significant part of the reason this writer walked away from it shortly before the completion of the second stage of its merger with the Progressive Conservatives.   Indeed, what it thought of as conservatism was largely indistinguishable from the original platform and policies of the Liberal Party, and, demonstrating, perhaps, its indifference to Canadian history and tradition, it gave itself the name by which the Liberal Party had gone prior to Confederation.   Harper, who was chosen as leader after the completion of the merger, always seemed to be more of a Mackenzie King Liberal than a Macdonald-Meighen-Diefenbaker Conservative.

Our constitution is sometimes called the Westminster Parliamentary system after the Mother Parliament in the United Kingdom from which we inherited the system and on which ours is modelled.   The centuries of history, the most memorable highlight of which was the Magna Carta, by which the constitution of Alfred the Great, which the Norman kings swore to uphold following William's Conquest, evolved into the original Westminster Parliament in a form we would recognize today, produced a concrete actualization of what the ancient Greeks thought of as the ideal constitution.   The mixed constitution, about which Aristotle and Polybius wrote, the former telling how it had been a much discussed ideal even before his day, was regarded by the ancients as the most stable and just constitution.   The three basic constitution-types - the rule of the one, the few, and the many - each had their strengths and weaknesses, and tended to follow a cyclical pattern in which the best form of each would be corrupted over time into its worst form - aristocracy would be corrupted into oligarchy, for example, to use the terms applied to the good and bad forms of the rule of the few - prompting its replacement, usually through violent and destructive means, with one of the other types.   A mixed constitution, the ancients reasoned, in which each of these simple constitutions was incorporated as an element, would balance the weaknesses of each element with the strengths of the others and so be a more stable and less corruptible whole.    

Our constitution is also sometimes called Crown-in-Parliament or King/Queen-in-Parliament depending upon the sex of the reigning monarch.   This expression can be used for our constitution as a whole, although it is more strictly the term for the legislative branch of government.  In our constitution the powers are both united and separated, the union or fusion being ,appropriately, in the institution of the Crown as this is the institution that embodies the ancient "rule of one".   The monarch, the office in which Sovereignty is vested, is the representative of the unified whole, both of the state and the country, and, accordingly, the office is filled by hereditary succession rather than by partisan politics so the officeholder can be above the inherently divisive latter.   The House of Commons is the element that embodies the ancient rule of the many in our constitution.   It is the Lower House of Parliament but, especially in discussions of this nature, is often called by the name of the whole, just as the union of that whole with the Crown in Crown-in-Parliament can mean either the legislative branch of our constitution, as opposed to the executive Crown-in-Counsel and the Judicial Crown-on-the-Bench, or the entire Westminster constitution.   By calling the whole by this name, the emphasis is placed on the two ancient and time-proven institutions, the monarchy and Parliament.

Placing the emphasis on these institutions means that it is not placed on the office of Prime Minister.   This is important because the office of Prime Minister, at the head of the Cabinet of executive Ministers, is one of great power.   The power attached to the office creates the necessity that the officeholder be held accountable for his exercise of that power and that the role of the office be one of humility.    To meet the first need, the Prime Minister is supposed to be strictly accountable to Parliament.   This is why there is an official role for the largest non-governing party as Opposition.   The Opposition's job is to question and challenge the Prime Minister, to hold his feet to the fire and make him give account to the House of Commons for his actions.   One of the roles of the other House of Parliament, the Senate, which is the element corresponding to the ancient rule of the few in our constitution, is to hold the Prime Minister accountable in a different manner, by deliberating on the legislation that passes the House, giving it "sober, second thought", and sending it back to the House if problems are found with it.    If the Prime Minister's relationship with Parliament is supposed to keep him accountable, his relationship with the Crown is supposed to keep him humble.    It is the Queen who as hereditary monarch, above factional politics, represents Canada as a unified whole, and the Governor General who represents the Queen.   While the Prime Minister exercises the executive powers of government, he does so in the name of the Sovereign, and he is supposed to do so in an attitude of humility as the "first servant" suggested by his official title.   This role calls for a kind of modesty that is conspicuously lacking in the present holder of this office, who more than any of his predecessors has rejected the accountability and humility of his office.   A short time before the last Parliament was dissolved he actually took the Speaker of the House to court to challenge a House ruling that he would have to provide Parliament with un-redacted documents about the firing of two researchers from the virology lab in Winnipeg.   This blatant repudiation of full accountability to Parliament ought to have disqualified him and his party from even running in the election.   As for humility, he has treated his office as one of  such shameless self-aggrandizement and self-promotion as to make the Kims of North Korea seem meek and unassuming by comparison.    Upon winning a second minority government, after arrogantly assuming that he would be handed a majority, he claimed absurdly that the electorate had given him a "clear mandate" which utter nonsense indicates that he has become victim to the delusions of his own propaganda.

He would never have been able to get away with any of this if Canadians had a true appreciation for our constitution and its principles.    Making the office of Prime Minister one that is directly elected, and our elections, therefore, even more like American presidential elections, would only make this worse.

There is another change to our system that has been proposed, indeed, far more often than the one discussed above.    Many would like to see us abandon what is absurdly called first-past-the-post for proportional representation as the means of filling the House with elected Members.   This is a change that the current Prime Minister had promised to make when he was first elected with a majority government in 2015.   He did not do so.   Had he done so, he would not be Prime Minister today, because the Conservatives won the popular vote this year as well as in 2019.   Proportional representation would have meant a Conservative government as the result of both elections.    Another difference that proportional representation would have brought about is that Maxime Bernier's populist-libertarian-nationalist party, the People's Party of Canada would have had members elected, at least in this Dominion election.   They received over five percent of the popular vote, double that of the self-destructing Greens who were able to elect two Members, including their leader emeritus although not their new leader.   This sounds like I am making an argument for proportional representation.   A Conservative government, led by Andrew Scheer in 2019, or even by Erin O'Toole this year, despite the latter's gross sell-out to the left, would have been preferable to the Trudeau Liberals.   The presence of the People's Party is desperately needed in Parliament where all currently sitting parties are skewed to the far left and to the idea that every problem requires government action as a solution.   Having said that, while the outcome of proportional representation would have been better in these regards in 2019 and again in 2021, the present system is still the better one.   The current system is based on the idea that the people of a local constituency, being a community or group of communities with particular interests, vote for the person who will represent that constituency in Parliament.   The person elected as Member is supposed to be responsible primarily to the constituency, and to speak on their behalf including all those who voted against him as well as those who voted for him..   In other words, the individual Member is supposed to act towards his constituents in the opposite way to how Liberal governments have acted towards rural areas and especially the prairie provinces, since at least the first Trudeau premiership, that is to say, in a manner that looks a lot like punishing them for voting against their party.   This is a good ideal and standard to guide elected Members.   By contrast, proportional representation would give us a House filled by people who represent only their party, its ideology, and the percentage of the electorate who voted for them.   That is hardly a desirable improvement.   The so-called first-past-the-post is by far the saner and more civilized way of doing things, even if it gives us results that for other reasons we would not prefer.

As stated in the previous paragraph, the ideas of Bernier's People's Party, ludicrously called "far right" by the CBC and its echo chambers in the private media, are desperately needed in Parliament right now.   In his column just before the election, Ken Waddell, who publishes my hometown newspaper the Rivers Banner as well as his own hometown newspaper the Neepawa Banner, and who was at one time considered for the leadership of our provincial Progressive Conservatives, said the following in this regards:

I have often encouraged people in the NDP or Green party to get involved with the Liberals or the Conservatives and bring their ideas forward. The Greens and NDP are not likely ever going to form government. Even less so will the Maverick Party, the Peoples’ Party of Canada or the Christian Heritage Party. They have a narrow list of policies. It would be better if they got involved, truly involved, with one of the two main parties and worked to bring their ideas to the forefront. A lot of good talent in the splinter parties is wasted on tilting at windmills instead of actually bringing about good policies. It’s too bad, really, as there are some good people and good ideas outside of the Liberal and Conservative parties, but the ideas will never see the light of day hidden in the splinter groups. God bless those who toil for the smaller parties, but I think their time and talents are being wasted.

I remember when Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel used to make this argument about third parties other than the Republicans and Democrats in the United States.   The argument was much stronger in that context because the American system is designed to be a two-party system, stacked against anyone other than the Republicans or Democrats..   Our system is not designed that way as seen in the number of times there have been minority governments that can only govern when propped up by one or more parties other than either itself or its main rival which is in Opposition.    There is, however, another problem with Mr. Waddell's suggestion here.   While the Greens and NDP might be able to get away with putting their ideas forward  as Liberals since the latter have largely incorporated the agendas of the former, nobody would be able to do as he suggests with the ideas of the Maverick, People's, or Christian Heritage Parties in either the Liberals or the Conservatives.    Both of these parties strictly police their members to keep just these very ideas out.   The Conservative Party, under the present leadership, is in some ways worse than the Liberals in this regards.   Whether we are talking about social conservatism of  the type associated with the Christian Heritage Party or libertarian opposition to public health tyranny such as the People's Party has been promoting, Erin O'Toole has expelled Members over these ideas and severely whipped those allowed to remain in caucus so as to make them afraid to speak their minds.  The present Liberal and Conservative leaders both govern their own parties the way the Liberals have for a century now wanted the country run, as an elected dictatorship.    For this reason, the option proposed by Mr. Waddell is simply not available.

Captain Airhead’s Astounding Arrogance

 

On Sunday the fifteenth of August, it had not yet been a month since Mary Simon had been sworn into the office of Governor General of Canada, when a pestilential nuisance showed up on her doorstep at Rideau Hall to make a request.   One of the more tiresome duties of Her Majesty’s vice-regal representative is that of playing host to visits from the Prime Minister.   This duty must truly become an irksome burden when the Prime Minister is someone as odious as the current one, Captain Airhead.   Of course, since Captain Airhead is the worst excuse for a human being by far to serve as Prime Minister in the history of Canada, only Simon and her immediate predecessors have had to bear this burden.

 

What her Prime Ministerial supplicant asked for, and obtained, was a dissolution of the Parliament formed in the 2019 Dominion election.   Which means that on the twentieth of September, the next Dominion election will be held.   It is an election that nobody but Captain Airhead himself wants.   All of the other parties have opposed the move.   Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives who were Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in the last Parliament and, as the only other party to have ever formed a government or with much of a chance of forming one if the Grits are defeated this time around, would logically be the ones to want an election have condemned the move as an irresponsible, egotistical, waste of money, which it is.  Jimmy Dhaliwal’s socialists and the Lower Canadian separatists who have been taking turns propping up the Grit minority government against the Conservative Opposition have no desire to see their hold on the balance of power potentially eviscerated.   As for the Greens, they are too busy imploding as a party due to self-destructive infighting to want to run a campaign right now.   The Canadian public, polled on the subject, has indicated strong opposition to an election being held at this time.

 

That the public would not want an election right now is hardly surprising.   Canadians have historically not been pleased with early elections that follow too closely after the previous one, and since, whatever you and I might think about the bat flu pandemic having been blown out of proportion by the fear pornographers in the mainstream media, the majority of our countrymen seem to take this stercus tauri at face value, and thus would be even less likely to want a very early election this year than on previous occasions.    This makes Captain Airhead’s move a bit of a puzzler.   Ordinarily, Prime Ministers in his position, that is to say, leading a minority government with only a plurality of seats in the House of Commons, try not to risk being punished by an angry electorate by requesting a new election themselves.   Instead, they try to provoke the other parties into voting them down in a no-confidence vote, so that the party that asks for the vote is blamed and punished by the electorate for the dissolution of the previous Parliament.   Captain Airhead clearly thinks that he can take responsibility for the dissolution upon himself and still be awarded a majority by a public that obviously does not want an election.

 

Perhaps Captain Airhead, or Justin Trudeau as some occasionally call him, thinks that he can count on the sycophantic behaviour of the news media which he has enjoyed to an extent that exceeds that of any previous Prime Minister, including his own father at the height of Trudeaumania, to render him exempt from the normal rules.    It is, nevertheless, an extremely hubristic attitude on his part, especially when we consider all the other assumptions implicit within it.

 

In the Dominion election of 2015 the Grits won a solid majority.     This was due to a combination of people being tired with the previous government and the media’s love affair with the Liberal leader whose surface qualities, hiding a total lack of substance, they found appealing.    When a new government receives a majority in its first election, of course, this is not a reward that is has earned and it is expected to earn it after the fact.   When that government is reduced to a plurality in its next election, as Captain Airhead’s Grits were in 2019, this is the judgement of the public that they have failed to subsequently earn their majority.   In this particular example, it was also a rebuke of the Prime Minister’s scandalous behaviour.

 

Towards the end of Captain Airhead’s first term his government’s popularity tanked due to the SNC-Lavalin Affair, a scandal that concerned inappropriate pressure having been placed on the Justice Minister to interfere in the ongoing prosecution of a major corporate backer of the Liberal Party for political reasons.    This was a corruption scandal that pertained to the government’s behaviour in office.   Then, in the actual election campaign, Captain Airhead was hit with a personal scandal as a couple of photographs and a video surfaced, all showing him in blackface.   This is the sort of scandal that would have ended the career of pretty much any other politician in this day and age.   While personally, I think that those who consider skin colour-altering makeup to be inherently “racist” are twits and dingbats who ought to be ignored by sensible people rather than given the influence to police the thoughts and actions of others, Captain Airhead has, since the beginning of his political career, marketed himself as “woke”, that is to say, the sort of numbskull who takes every dictate from the far left’s self-appointed guardians of public mental hygiene vis-à-vis racism very seriously indeed and caters to their every irrational whim.   In other words, exactly the sort of person who ought not to be caught dead in blackface and whose career ought to be especially vulnerable to this sort of scandal.   He had spent an inordinate amount of time in his first term lecturing other Canadians about how we all need to be more “enlightened” and less “racist” like the image he was trying to present of himself.

 

Having survived these scandals has Captain Airhead learned from them and altered his behaviour according?

The evidence would suggest that he has not.

 

Less than a year into his second term, in the early months of the bat flu pandemic, Captain Airhead announced the formation of the Canadian Student Service Grant program that would give students $1000 for every 100 hours of volunteer work they did that summer up to a $5000 maximum.   The WE Charity was picked to administer this program.   This immediately erupted into a corruption scandal that rivalled SNC-Lavalin for the biggest of Captain Airhead’s career.   The WE Charity had been selected without giving other charities the opportunity to bid on the contract.  This charity had a long association with Captain Airhead’s family – his wife had volunteered for the organization which had paid for her travel and other expenses and his mother and brother had both been paid large sums to speak at its events.   Similarly, his then-Finance Minister Bill Morneau had one daughter who worked for the charity, another who spoke at their events, and had himself allowed the charity to pay $41 000 worth of travel expenses for him and his family.   The scandal led to Morneau’s resignation both as Finance Minister and from his seat in the House of Commons.      Captain Airhead, however, remained in office, taking advantage of every opportunity the pandemic afforded him to thwart a proper investigation by Parliament.   A few months ago, the Ethics Commissioner that he had himself had appointed, declared that “Although the connection between Mr. Trudeau’s relatives and WE created the appearance of a conflict of interest, the appearance of conflict is insufficient to cause a contravention to the Act’s substantive views” and pinned all the blame on Morneau.

 

It would seem that the only lesson Captain Airhead took away from the SNC-Lavalin experience is to avoid being held accountable by Parliament.

 

As for the blackface scandal, the very least we have the right to expect from someone who had gone through this sort of humiliation without, astonishingly, it killing his political career would be that he would give lecturing the rest of us about racism a rest.    Anyone foolish enough to actually expect this of Captain Airhead, however, would be very disappointed.   If anything, he has actually gotten much worse in this regards.    Just before the Parliament that has just been dissolved recessed for the summer his Justice Minister introduced Bill C-36, which would amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code so that left-wing control freaks would no longer have to meet the criminal justice system’s standard of evidence in order to file complaints against people for posting things they, that is the leftists, consider to be racist on the internet and obtain rulings silencing these people and/or imposing crippling fines upon them.   Indeed, unlike the defunct Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act which his father had introduced in 1977 and which was bad enough, Bill C-36, like something out of Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report”, would allow these leftist censors to peremptorily punish people with peace bonds that effectively strip them of all human dignity for the racist things the leftists are afraid these people might say in the future.     This takes his anti-racist lecturing to the nth degree.   It follows immediately after two summers straight in which far left radical movements that attempt to conceal their true agenda of hatred of the institutions, laws, traditions, and way of life of Western Civilization and racial hatred of people of European descent and light skin colour beneath the innocuous if banal truisms by which they call their movements have made use of deceptively selective media reporting  to stir up race riots and Year Zero Cultural Maoist assaults on historical figures, all of which Captain Airhead has capitalized on by jumping aboard the bandwagon and maximizing his anti-racist posturing.  

 

This is rather much to take coming from the man featured in the blackface scandal of 2019.   It is enough to induce vomiting in even the strongest stomached of sane people, although the same can be said about virtually everything about Captain Airhead from the beginning of his political career. 

 

Captain Airhead apparently thinks that after two years of demonstrating with his behaviour that he has learned absolutely nothing from the scandals that reduced his first majority government to a minority, that he can request an early election and win another majority.   The arrogance of this is truly astounding.

 

It is possible that he thinks that his pandemic record will accomplish his victory.   If so, this merely makes his hubris all the greater.   His handling of the bat flu has been nothing short of abominable.    

 

In the early months of 2020, before the World Health Organization officially declared a pandemic and while there was still a possibility, however slight, of keeping the bat flu virus contained in Wuhan, Captain Airhead and his subordinates branded anybody who suggested that it might be prudent to impose a temporary ban on travel to and from Red China as a racist.   Then in March, the moment the pandemic had been declared he switched gears and began encouraging the provincial governments to impose harsh lockdowns on Canadians based upon the experimental model that Communist China had been using to contain the virus.

 

From the perspective of political strategy there was an almost admirable ingenuity in this.   He could have evoked the Emergencies Act to impose a Dominion-wide lockdown himself.   Instead, he let the provincial governments, mostly led by those whose politics is purportedly the opposite of his, impose the lockdowns and thus incur the resentment of those whose lives were made a living hell by these restrictions which far exceeded anything any free country had ever known before, even in times of war.   Oh, he had a lot of say in it.   The provincial premiers basically gave their provincial chief public health officers free rein, and these in turn acted upon information provided from the Dominion chief public health officer who was appointed to the position by Captain Airhead who threatened to withhold support from the provinces if they veered too much from the lockdown program.   However, apart from the amusing incident when he attempted to play “Mr. Tough Guy” to all the young people who were still having parties and other large social gatherings but merely came across as doing a bad impression of Barbra Streisand and Donna Summer, he allowed the premiers to play the bully – our premier in Manitoba, Brian Pallister excelled in this  - while he put on his Santa Claus suit and started handing out goodies, essentially bribing people to follow the public health orders and stay home.    If he thinks that by doing so he has bought his way back to a majority government then he is assuming that Canadians are too stupid to realize the connection between his spending all of this money at a time when the production of goods and services has been severely limited and the recent spike in the price of food in the grocery stores.  (1)  Sadly, he might be right about that, although there is no reason to believe that he understands the connection himself.

 

At the very beginning of the first lockdown of the pandemic he asked for Parliament to vote him the power to tax and spend without limits or Parliamentary oversight for two years.   Mercifully, this was met with strong opposition from the Conservatives then led by Andrew Scheer and he was denied getting all that he had asked for, although he has since behaved as if he had been given it all.    This request was an outrageous assault on Parliament and the very principles that have been foundational to that venerable institution since the Magna Carta.   There is an interesting if ominous symbolism in the way he introduced the bill within days of the anniversary of the Enabling Act that had been passed by the Reichstag, the legislative assembly of Weimar Germany, which gave emergency powers to the new German chancellor and his cabinet in 1933 and brought about the most hated tyrannical dictatorship in history.

 

This was not the first time nor would it be the last when Captain Airhead demonstrated his utter contempt for Parliament.   Indeed, his entire second term as Prime Minister could be described as one big digitus impudicus in the face of Parliament.   Throughout the pandemic he treated his doorstep with the television cameras on it as if it rather than Parliament were the seat of government in Canada.   He has treated Parliament as if it had no right or authority to hold him and his cabinet accountable.    When the far left radicals began their assault on Canada and her history he made a point of sympathizing with them and reminding them of the colonial origins of Parliament as if to say that government would be so much better if he could just do whatever he wanted without having to answer to that “colonial” institution of Parliament.   When he got frustrated earlier this year with Erin O’Toole for the latter’s doing his job as Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and preventing the House from just rubber-stamping his bills as he would have preferred he threw a tantrum, complained of “obstructionism and toxicity” and called Parliament “dysfunctional”.    If there was any dysfunction in Parliament it was due to his own efforts to prevent that body from giving proper deliberation to his legislation proposals and to ram the latter through and not the Opposition’s doing its job.   Around the same time, when the House of Commons ordered the government and the Public Health Agency of Canada to hand over all documents pertaining to the dismissal of two scientists from the high security microbiology lab here in Winnipeg a couple of years previously, he had the amazing gall to launch a Federal Court case against House Speaker Anthony Rota.   On Tuesday of this week the government dropped this lawsuit, but this was because the dissolution of Parliament nullified the order with regards to the documents, and not because the Prime Minister has discovered a newfound respect for Parliament and its rights.

 

In this disrespect for Parliament Captain Airhead demonstrates yet another kind of arrogance, one which has been common to Liberal leaders since at least William Lyon Mackenzie King, but which he has elevated to a whole new level.   In Canada our system of government is that of Queen-in-Parliament.    In this system, which has been tried and proven over long eons of time, political sovereignty is vested in the office of the reigning monarch.    This office is filled, not by popular election nor by appointment by the rich and powerful, but by hereditary succession.   Therefore, since the monarch owes her office neither to a political faction nor to special interest groups, she can reign as a non-political figure in the way no elected head of state ever could.   The powers of government, principally those to legislate, tax, and spend, are exercised in the name of the Queen and those who exercise them are accountable to the representatives elected by the people who pay the taxes and are expected to obey the laws, which representatives meet in the lower House of Parliament.   Therefore in this system, when it is functioning properly, the Prime Minister and Cabinet are dually accountable both to the reigning monarch above, and to Parliament below.    The world has never known a better system of government than this one when it is allowed to function without subversion.   Liberal leaders from Mackenzie King down and especially Captain Airhead have shown a decided preference for subverting this system.   They seldom object to retaining its outward form, unlike the idiot who currently leads the socialist party, but they do not want to govern under its restraints and so seek to subvert them whenever they can.   Their preference is that in practice the Prime Minister and Cabinet rule through the bureaucracy that they control and are only ever held accountable at election time, at least when their party is in government.

 

If most Canadians had a proper appreciation for our traditional system of government most of the Liberal Prime Ministers of the last hundred years would have been unelectable.   This would be all the more true of Captain Airhead, who exceeds all of the rest of them combined in his autocratic arrogance, making even his own father look humble in comparison.

 

(1)   Wealth is generated by people producing goods and services that they and others want and consists of those goods and services.  Money is the medium that allows these goods and services to be exchanged more conveniently than by direct barter and which allows accumulated wealth to be stored for later use.   The value of money goes up when the amount of money remains the same but the production of goods and services increases, and goes down when more money is put into circulation while the production of goods and services remains the same.    When the amount of money increases relative to that of goods and services this is called inflation which is most noticeable when it manifests itself in the rise of the price of consumer goods.   Whenever the government starts handing out large amounts of money, whether it just runs more currency off on the printing press or borrows from some financial institution – in the age of electronic currency the distinction between these ways of doing it has been blurred to the point where it may no longer be meaningful – the amount of money relative to goods and services increases.   When, at the same time, the government puts a stop to the production of “non-essential” goods and services, that is to say, the goods and services that in terms of real wealth actually pay for the production of “essential” goods and services, this is a recipe for massive and devastating inflation.

 

Canada and Confederation are Worthy of Celebration

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the Queen!

 

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

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