State of the Dominion – 2025

Seven years ago I entitled my annual essay for our country’s birthday “State of the Dominion – 2018.”  This was during the premiership of Captain Airhead, towards the end of his first term, and I noted that we were in the midst of a third “revolution within the form.”  The first had taken place in the early twentieth century in the premiership of William Lyon Mackenzie King and the second from the mid-1960s to 1982 in the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau.  Captain Airhead is finally out of office, although the Liberal Party – the party that each of these men had led – remains in power, under the new leadership of Blofeld.  So it is time to revisit the matter of the state of the Dominion.

 

The first thing to be observed is that as we emerge from the Airhead premiership Canada is in a far less worse condition than we could have anticipated going into that premiership after the 2015 Dominion Election.  This does not mean that we are emerging unscathed, far from it. 

 

On the social/moral front alone, the progressive agenda has been horribly advanced.  In 2023 a bill banning “conversion therapy” passed Parliament with unanimous support.  While the expression “conversion therapy” tends to conjure up the image of something similar to the Ludovico Technique from A Clockwork Orange, the bill banning it was worded so broadly that it essentially forbids the offering of counseling to anyone seeking help in conforming their “sexual orientation” and/or “gender identity” to the reality of their biological sex.  Meanwhile, the progressive forces that demanded this ban have insisted that the opposite sort of conversion therapy be provided at the taxpayers’ expense to minors without their parents’ consent.  The opposite sort of conversion therapy is hormone therapy and surgery intended to conform biological sex, at least in appearance, to “gender identity.”

 

Nor is this the worst example of the advancement of the progressive social/moral agenda in the Airhead years.  That dishonour goes to the aggressive promotion of the culture of death by Captain Airhead.  There was little he could do in the way of making abortion more available in Canada since the status quo going into his premiership was the absence of any legal restrictions due to the failure of Parliament to pass any after the Morgentaler ruling in 1988 struck down the previous laws on the matter.  He could and did waste tax dollars on promoting abortion outside of Canada.  It was the euthanasia side of the culture of death, however, that will be remembered as the darkest part of his legacy.  Captain Airhead became prime minister later in the year that the Supreme Court struck down the Criminal Code’s prohibition against euthanasia and in the first year of his premiership a bill that outright legalized it passed Parliament.  In the near-decade since, further legislation, policy decisions and court rulings have expanded the assisted suicide program dubbed MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) and like abortion, marketed by those in favour of it as a “health care” choice, extending it far beyond the terminally ill.  In 2021 they got Parliament to pass a bill making it much easier to obtain approval for MAID and extending it to those whom sane people would say are most in need of being protected from it, that is, the mentally ill, although this provision was delayed from coming into effect until the year after next.  In the meantime government agencies that process requests for financial aid from, most notably, military veterans, have recommended MAID as an alternative.

 

So no, Canada did not emerge from the Airhead era unscathed, and wounds on other fronts than the social/moral could be provided to further illustrate this.  My point, however, is that Captain Airhead did not do all the damage it looked like he was about to do at the beginning of his premiership.  This was not for lack of intent or trying on his part.  It is partly due to the fact that he and his entire circle of associates were grossly incompetent, an affliction not shared by previous revolutionaries such as his own father or William Lyon Mackenzie King.  It is partly due to the fact that the Canada which the Fathers of Confederation bequeathed to us with her ancient Imperial/Commonwealth heritage of parliamentary monarchy and Common Law rights and freedoms, while weakened by these Liberal “revolutions within the form” was still resilient enough to prevent Captain Airhead from doing his worst.  It is partly due to the fact that most Canadians have simply not succumbed to the brain rot that in its most recent form has been dubbed “wokeness” to the extent that Captain Airhead and the progressive commentariat all assumed they had.

 

The first of these three factors needs nothing in the way of further commentary.   

 

The second factor may be disputed by neoconservatives (people who call themselves conservatives even though they wish to replace our constitution, traditions, and heritage with those of the United States or something more closely resembling them) who over the last several years have chosen to express their frustration with the Airhead Liberals by taking it out on the country with the claim that “Canada is broken” but these are wrong.  The Fathers of Confederation built a far more resilient country than could be ultimately broken by the likes of Captain Airhead.  I attribute the neoconservative error in about equal parts to their misguided preference for the American system and to the sort of infantile thinking that sees every court ruling, election, or other such public occurrence that does not go one’s way as showing the entire system to be damaged beyond repair, which sort of thinking is by no means limited to neoconservatives.

 

Of all Captain Airhead’s bad acts, the worst was when he invoked the Emergencies Act in 2022 to crush the Freedom Convoy Protest.  Unlike the types of protests he routinely supported, the Freedom Convey did not involve the destruction or defacement of property, public or private, violence, or riotous behaviour in general but was a true peaceful demonstration.  The trucker-protestors converged on Ottawa, parked in the neighbourhood around the government buildings, and basically threw a long, loud, party in the streets.  The protest was entirely justified.  It was in response to the Liberal government’s having introduced new restrictions by removing the exemption to vaccine mandates for cross-border truckers at the time when restrictions were generally being rolled back, showing the government’s determination to milk the absurd bat flu paranoia for as long as they could at the expense of the rights, freedoms, and livelihoods of Canadians.  There was no call for bringing out the biggest weapon the government had at its disposal against the protestors, the brutality with which the government broke up the protest was the sort of thing one would expect from the Chinese or North Korean regimes, and the ongoing legal persecution of the protest organizers is disgusting, to say the least.  Nevertheless, it could have been a lot worse, and all the evidence indicates that Airhead and his cronies intended to go much further.  They were forced to rescind the Emergencies Act, however, because the Senate was about to vote against confirming their having invoked it, which would have made their position much more difficult going into the mandatory inquiry that followed.  As for the inquiry itself, while Justice Rouleau’s finding that the government had met the threshold required for invoking the Act was absurd, Captain Airhead failed in his efforts to turn the inquiry into a trial of the protesters’ actions rather than his own, and when the Federal Court ruled on the same question a year later, they found against the government.

 

That is what the system working looks like.  It could have and should have worked better.  Ultimately, however, it worked.

 

That Canadians do not share Captain Airhead’s “woke” views to the extent he always assumed is a large part of the reason why he is no longer prime minister and why the Liberal Party under Blofeld has taken several steps back from aggressive promotion of the “woke” agenda..  Whether this will be permanent or is only temporary while the forces of progressive insanity regroup remains to be seen, but for now at least, the Liberal government is focusing on matters that appeal to a wider base among Canadians than the far left fringe.  That something like this would happen sooner or later was inevitable because an ideological agenda based on maximizing every type of diversity except diversity of thought is unsustainable.  Towards the end of the Airhead premiership, the left’s efforts to maximize diversity in the realm of sex and gender were undermined by its simultaneous efforts to maximize diversity in the realm of culture and race.  That this would happen was entirely predictable because the only way to maximize diversity of culture and race in a Western society is by increasing the number of people whose culture has not been so transformed by Modern liberalism as to make it supportive of maximizing sex/gender diversity.  Eventually the foreseeable clash occurred and a sizeable portion of Canadians realized that Captain Airhead was pushing diversity too far in both of these areas.

 

For the immediately foreseeable future, it is likely that immigration levels will remain higher than they ought to be but will cease to resemble overt efforts to make Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints into a reality.  Promotion of the alphabet soup agenda will probably continue but it will be much lower key than under Captain Airhead.  That this is the case is evident in the fact that the abuse of the sign of God’s covenant with Noah was a lot less conspicuous last month than in the “month formerly known as June” in previous years.  The same will be more or less true in other areas where Captain Airhead pushed his agenda far beyond what the general public was willing to support him in.

 

In conclusion, while Canada should be in a much better condition than she actually is, she is far better off after a decade of Captain Airhead than could possibly have been anticipated. 

 

Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the King!

The Courts

This week we in the Dominion of Canada received some good news from the Federal Court.   It came about a week after we received bad news from the Court of Appeal in Upper Canada.   The good news consisted of a ruling.   The bad news, by contrast, was a refusal to rule, or even to hear a case.   I take this as further support for my long-established opinion that the courts of Upper Canada are the most corrupt in the Dominion.   Except maybe the courts of British Columbia.

 

The bad news was that the Upper Canada – for those who insist upon being slaves to the present day, the contemporary and the up-to-date, this is what you would call Ontario – Court of Appeal had refused to hear the appeal of Jordan Peterson, the well-known psychologist, educator, author and philosopher, in his case against the province’s College of Psychologists, the body that issues his professional license.   The College had ordered him into sensitivity training because they didn’t like something he said on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.   The remark had nothing to do with his professional practice and was entirely political – he said something uncomplimentary about Captain Airhead.   That no professional licensing board ought to be able to discipline one of its members for expressing these sort of opinions in this way is a no-brainer.   Although Peterson could have just told the College to take a hike – he has not used his professional license in years and is not dependent upon it financially – he opted to take them to court and fight for the principle at stake.   Anybody whose job or career requires a professional license and who does not want the licensing board to be allowed to act as a proxy censor for his political or ideological opponents by blackmailing him into changing his opinions or keeping silent about them by holding a gun to his license should be grateful that someone was willing to do this.  

 

It should have been an easy win for Peterson.   The College of Psychologists was 100% in the wrong and should have been slapped down hard by the courts.   Instead the Divisional Court ruled in their favour.   By refusing to hear Peterson’s appeal, the Court of Appeal has closed the door to taking the case to a higher court.   You can only appeal rulings, not refusals to consider.   The right of a court to refuse to hear a case is for the purpose of preventing the judicial system from being swamped by trivial and nonsensical nuisance suits.   Like the man who dreams that his neighbour’s dog has torn up his flower bed and then repeatedly tries to sue his neighbour for damages.   This case is nothing like that.   The principle at stake - that professional licensing boards must not be allowed to serve as proxy censors for those who wish to “cancel” someone for his opinions – is vital and fundamental.   The Upper Canadian Court of Appeal, by abusing its right of refusal in this way, has demonstrated that it is no longer worthy of possessing that right.

 

The good news was that the Federal Court has ruled that Captain Airhead acted unreasonably in invoking the Emergencies Act on Valentine’s Day in 2022.   Captain Airhead, in case you are unfamiliar with him, is the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.   He has occupied the office of Prime Minister in His Majesty’s government in Ottawa since 2015.   He resembles nothing so much as the result of an experiment at producing a golem using bovine excrement rather than mud and the word  שֶׁקֶר (sheker, “lies”) rather than אֱמֶת (emet, “truth”).   The official story, however, is that he is the son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.  However he got here, we are in the ninth year of his misgovernment and everybody is pretty much sick of him.  

 

In 2022, we were going into the third year of the world-wide panic over a novel respiratory virus that proved to be more of a nasty strain of the flu than that apocalyptic, super-plague ala Stephen King’s The Stand that politicians, journalists, and the legal dope-peddlers that long ago supplanted the legitimate medical profession, claimed it to be.   By January 2022 the world was re-opening but Captain Airhead, who in the last Dominion election had flip-flopped and come down hard in favour of requiring people to take the experimental and inadequately tested new vaccines that had been rushed to production, hurling the most abusive terms in the liberal dictionary against anyone who thought correctly that the choice to be injected with such a substance must be strictly voluntary, doubled down and imposed new vaccine mandates as they were being lifted in other jurisdictions.   One such new mandate was on long-distance truck drivers who haul freight across the border with the United States.   In response, these truck drivers organized the biggest protest against heavy-handed, draconian, health protocols that Canada had yet seen.   Trucks from all over Canada formed the Freedom Convoy that descended upon Ottawa and encamped in the streets outside of Parliament.   It was an entirely peaceful protest that posed no threat to Canada’s national security.    The protesters basically threw a long, extended, block party in which they patriotically celebrated Canada and her traditional basic freedoms and exercised those freedoms in ways like associating with each other in large numbers, in person and close up that before 2020 we all took to be our basic Common Law right but which the politicians and health bureaucrats had been treating as crimes against humanity for two and a half years.   Their demands were quite reasonable – that the government abide by the constitutional limits on its powers, respect our fundamental freedoms, and stop committing the actual crime against humanity of forcing people, by denying them access to employment and society unless they comply, to agree to be injected with a foreign substance the safety of which they were not fully persuaded.  

 

Captain Airhead and his cronies refused to meet with the protesters to discuss their grievances, called them all sorts of bad names and accused them of all sorts of other political agendas that had nothing to do with the single-issue cause that brought them to Ottawa.   Then, on 14 February, Captain Airhead announced that he was invoking the Emergencies Act.  The Emergencies Act is a piece of legislation that was passed during the premiership of Brian Mulroney in 1988.  It replaced the War Measures Act that Captain Airhead’s father had invoked to crush the FLQ in the October Crisis of 1970.   In both cases this was major overkill.   The Emergencies Act like the War Measures Act gives the government extraordinary powers of detention by putting the governed under what is essentially martial law.   It came into effect immediately upon being invoked, although both Houses were required to confirm it.   When it became apparent the Senate was not likely to do so, Captain Airhead withdrew the invocation, but by this time the damage had been done.   The thuggish Ottawa police, led by one Steve Bell whose actions were so disgraceful that in my opinion the Canadian contemporary Christian artist of the same name might want to consider changing his, with the free rein given them had charged into the throng of protesters on horseback, trampling on some, beating others with batons, spraying many with pepper spray and tear gas, and otherwise brutalizing people who merely wanted the basic freedoms supposedly guaranteed to them by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms restored.   They were arrested in droves, their vehicles were vandalized and confiscated, and across the country the bank accounts of people who had donated to the protest were frozen.

 

In accordance with the requirements of the Emergencies Act an inquiry was called and while Captain Airhead attempted to frame the inquiry so that the light of its scrutiny fell upon the protesters rather than the government he led, he did not succeed in this.   During the proceedings, in which Captain Airhead and his ministers testified, the government claimed that it had received expert legal advice that the Emergencies Act was necessary and that the conditions for invoking it had been met but when asked to share that advice hid behind the privilege of counsel.   Despite their not being forthcoming with the supposed grounds of their thinking the use of the Emergencies Act was justified, in February of 2023 Justice Paul Rouleau who headed the inquiry declared that the findings of his commission were that the “very high threshold” for invoking the Emergencies Act had been met.   That this was not the case was obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together.   Rouleau’s ruling was widely dismissed as yet more Liberal Party cronyism.   Perhaps there is another explanation, but in any case, even had it ruled otherwise, the Public Order Emergency Commission was a toothless body that only had powers to investigate and give an opinion, not to make its findings binding in any way.

 

The Federal Court, by contrast, is a real court.   Its decisions are binding in law and affect future rulings.   When, therefore, its Justice Richard Mosley ruled that the government’s invocation of the Emergency Act “does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness – justification, transparency and intelligibility – and was not justified” this ruling has much more weight and potential consequences than had it come from Rouleau’s Public Order Emergency Commission.   It amounts, for example, to a ruling that Captain Airhead and his Cabinet broke the law.   Not just in the sense of a misdemeanour or even a regular felony.  They broke the law in what is arguably the worst possible way in which politicians can break the law.   Without meeting the requirements of the safeguards placed in the Emergencies Act to prevent this very situation, they invoked the Act in order to make use of the extraordinary powers it grants government in situations of real emergency and did so in order to essentially declare war on Canadians who posed no threat to national security and who were merely, peacefully if noisily, demanding that government abide by the constitutional limits on its powers.   We all knew at the time that this is what they were doing, this is what the testimony before the Public Order Emergency Commission indicates even if that body ruled otherwise, and now the Federal Court has affirmed it.

The only honourable thing left for Captain Airhead now – and for Chrystia Freeland and anyone else involved in that debacle – is to resign, and not just resign but follow the lead of David Lametti, who had been Minister of Justice and Attorney General at the time, and get out of politics altogether.   Unfortunately, people like Captain Airhead and Chrystia Freeland have no honour, and if they ever heard the word would probably have a conversation that would go like this:

 

Chrystia Freeland: “Duh, what’s honour?”

Captain Airhead: “Duh, I don’t know, a dress?”

Chrystia Freeland: “Duh, that’s sexist!”

 

My apologies for making Captain Airhead and Chrystia Freeland seem more intelligent in the above than they actually are.   It is difficult to invent dialogue that reaches their level of imbecility.

 

So they are likely going to cling to power to the bitter end.   Fortunately, coming so soon after a year in which what was left of their popularity rapidly swirled down the drain and was gone, this is probably going to hasten that end.

 

The Federal Court ruling could not have come at a better time.   Tucker Carlson, formerly of FOX News, now with the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, came up to Alberta this week to speak in Calgary and Edmonton.  He took our government to task for its promotion of Christophobic hate, for its promotion of social and cultural capital eroding mass immigration, for its insane MAID (medical assistance in dying) program and its equally insane drug policy (harm reduction through safe supply).   Needless to say, I have no objections to what Carlson said on these matters and probably agree with 98% of it if not higher.   It very much amused me to see Captain Airhead’s remaining flunkies, such as Steven Guilbeault whose past as an eco-nut ought to have disqualified him from his current position of Minister of Environment, have kittens over his speeches.   It is almost as comical as the mainstream media’s attempts to portray Carlson as a promoter of “white supremacy”.   One can only hope they continue to lay it on thick, because the more they do so, the less meaning that expression will have, and the sooner the day will come when liberals will no longer be able to use it as a stick to beat and frighten people with.    Most amusing of all, however, was how Carlson packaged his appearance by saying that he was coming to “liberate Canada” from Captain Airhead.  

 

This is funny on two levels.  There is the level intended by Carlson, which was basically the verbal equivalent of poking Captain Airhead in the eyes or pulling some other similar gag from the Three Stooges.   Then there is the level unintended by Carlson – the hilarity in the very idea of an American “liberating” Canada or anywhere else for that matter.   Americans believe their country to be uniquely built on liberty, and in a way that is true, but the American concept of liberty is basically what you get when you take the ancient heresy of Pelagianism and the Puritan version of Calvinism and produce a Hegelian synthesis from these antitheses. This is a pale substitute for freedom as conceived by pre-Modern orthodox Christianity, which flourishes best under the reign of a king, like our own King Charles III.    “Freedom” as John Farthing put it “wears a crown”.   The United States was founded in revolt against the order of Christendom, as modified in the English Reformation, and as Loyalist Canada inherited it.   As far from our roots as we have come, I note, that eventually, our Federal Court, ruled against the legality and constitutionality of Captain Airhead’s most egregious overstep over the powers of his office.   In Carlson’s own country, four years ago, Donald the Orange, winning a larger number of votes than when he was first elected president, somehow lost the election to J. Brandon Magoo, who was unpopular even among Democrat voters - how he got the nomination is something of a mystery, and who didn’t campaign.   Magoo, who obviously belongs in a rest home somewhere, is equally obviously the puppet of somebody else who is actually governing the United States in line with the globalist-internationalist-high immigration-free trade-invade-the-world-invite-the-world consensus that prevailed during the Bush I-Clinton-Bush II-Obama administrations and against which Donald the Orange had successfully campaigned.   For four years Americans have been kept from having any kind of serious national discussion about the shenanigans that clearly must have taken place for Magoo to have won that election, by the fear of reprisals from the regime.   This fear was instilled by the Magoo regime’s successful efforts to portray the events that transpired on Capitol Hill, Epiphany 2021 as an “insurrection” against the American order supported by the past president.   Before being ousted from FOX, Carlson broadcast film footage that cast serious doubt upon that narrative of which there had already been plenty of good reasons to be suspicious.   Captain Airhead in the narrative he tried to spin about the Freedom Convoy in invoking the Emergencies Act was clearly trying to import into Canada the narrative that has worked so well to prop up the Magoo regime in the United States.   He failed, however, to make the inquiry into the Emergencies Act a witch hunt for his political enemies, the way the Democrats have made the inquiries into the Capitol Hill incident a witch hunt against Donald the Orange and his supporters.   The inquiry was into his actions, not those of the Freedom Convoy.  When the Commission ruled in his favour, an actual Court finally ruled his actions to be illegal. Let us pray, for Tucker Carlson’s sake and for the sake of his country that the lies propping up the Magoo regime will meet with a similar fate.

God Save the King!

What Word Would You Use?

What word would you use to describe a government that loudly proclaims its belief in and commitment to “democracy” but governs with contempt for the institution of Parliament and the idea that it, that is the government in the sense of the Cabinet of executive ministers, is accountable to Parliament for all of its actions and displays this same contempt regardless of whether it commands a majority or a small plurality in the House of Commons?   

 

What if that same government, while constantly evoking the “common good” when demanding total submission and obedience to every rule, regulation, and restriction it imposes even if these blatantly violate, and not in any way that could objectively be called reasonable or minimal, the most basic of the rights and freedoms that are supposed to be protected by constitutional law, conspicuously governs in a way that rewards those who tend to vote for it and punishes those who tend to vote against it?  

 

Let us say, for example, that a Liberal government on the one hand got itself embroiled in a huge corruption scandal for putting pressure on its Justice Minister to interfere in an ongoing prosecution on behalf of a large corporate donor to the Liberal Party located in the home province of the Prime Minister, and on the other hand did everything in its power to sabotage the energy industry of the province(s) least likely to elect Liberals to Parliament.      Let us add that this same Liberal government in the name of combatting the gun violence that is primarily a problem in urban areas that vote Liberal or NDP, introduced a new gun ban that was completely useless for that purpose in that urban gun violence is almost entirely committed with already illegal handguns, but, like most previous Liberal gun legislation, primarily affected rural gun owners who tend not to vote Liberal or NDP.    Let us also add that this Liberal government keeps targeting parts of the population – like pickup truck owners and prairie grain farmers – who traditionally vote against the Liberals with its tax policies.

 

In other words it displays utter disregard for that grand traditional principle of Parliament that it is the duty of those who hold executive office in government to serve all Canadians – this is what the common good is supposed to mean and what it was traditionally understood to mean – rather than favouring their own supporters, and especially not punishing those who voted against them.   Note that hindering the government from giving in to the temptation to do the latter is a major part of the role of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and of the reason why Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition is an official standing in Parliament and not just a label for the runner-up in the last Dominion election.

 

Suppose that the same government was led by a Prime Minister who refuses to take action when protests conducted in the name of causes that he and his followers support such as the various causes associated with the Green movement or those of the so-called anti-racist – in reality anti-white would be a more accurate description – movement disrupt commerce, movement, and the everyday lives of numerous Canadians or even break out into violence and other destructive criminal behaviour.    Suppose that this same Prime Minister likes to lecture the governments of other countries on the need to allow peaceful protest and to listen to people who disagree with them.   Then suppose that this same Prime Minister, when faced with a protest against his government’s policies and actions and how they have infringed upon Canadians’ basic rights and freedoms and adversely affected the lives and livelihoods of the protesters and countless others, even though the protest is far more deserving of the adjective “peaceful” than any of those that the Prime Minister supports, instead of listening to them hides himself away and like a tantrum-throwing three year old hurls every nasty name he can think of against them, before bringing out the biggest tool available to the government, one designed for use against terrorism and never before used in its current form, essentially putting the country under martial law, in order to crack down hard on the protesters.    While all of this is still expanding upon our initial and primary question it is worth adding a second question here of whether, when this Prime Minister sets up an inquiry into his own just mentioned actions, we can expect this to be impartial and its results credible.

 

Now suppose that immediately after the events described in the previous paragraph the same Prime Minister goes on a foreign tour in which he lectures other leaders about the dangers of a rise in “authoritarianism”.   In his usage, “authoritarian” appears to describe leaders and movements he doesn’t like, whereas “democratic” appears to mean little more than leaders and movements he does like, and the purpose of the lectures would seem to be to encourage the governments of the world to join him in an attempt to recklessly escalate a volatile situation in a volatile part of the world that the Americans had foolishly been fomenting for years into something much worse.   Meanwhile, while condemning “authoritarianism” – again, meaning little more than those whose politics he disagrees with – his own governance displays many of the characteristics of totalitarianism.

 

The distinction between “authoritarianism” and “totalitarianism” was made by Jeane Kirkpatrick, who would soon thereafter serve as American ambassador to the UN during the Reagan administration, in an article entitled “Dictatorships and Double Standards” that appeared in the flagship journal of American neo-conservatism, Commentary, in November of 1979 and was later expanded into a book that came out in 1982.   While the Kirkpatrick Doctrine is vulnerable to many of the same objections that could be made against American neo-conservatism in general, the distinction is not without merit.    The basic distinction is that an “authoritarian” government claims a monopoly on political power in the country it governs, but a “totalitarian” government claims a monopoly on every aspect of the country – political, economic, social, cultural – and the lives of those it governs.    Consequently, an authoritarian government, while bossier and far less tolerant of dissent than Western liberal democracies are – or like to think they are at any rate – does not attempt to dictate the every thought of those they govern, like a totalitarian regime.   People living under an authoritarian government were thought to be far less free than people living in a liberal democracy but far more free than people living in a totalitarian police state.   Programming the public to think a certain way about everything, spying on everyone’s every move, basically everything out of George Orwell’s 1984, these are the hallmarks of totalitarianism.   The term first caught on as a convenient way of describing the characteristics shared by both the Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union and the Fascist and National Socialist regimes in Italy and Germany.

 

Totalitarian governments like to rely upon fear to keep their populations under control.   Related to this, one of their favourite tactics to use against dissenters is scapegoating.   Scapegoating is when they point to an identifiable group of dissenters – it works best if the group is small and unpopular – and blames this group for whatever ills are afflicting the population, with these ills often being in reality the fault of the government, and tell the public that “they” are to blame, that these “spoilers” are the reason the regime’s grand and glorious programs aren’t working out as planned.   By doing this the totalitarian regime is able to identify its own enemies in the public mind as “enemies of the people” and turn the public’s fear against them.

 

Let us now return to the Liberal Prime Minister we had been discussing.   Let us imagine that this individual won the first term of his premiership in a Dominion election in which he accused his Conservative predecessor of employing the “politics of fear and division”.  The implication was that it was fear of ethnic and racial diversity and immigration that he was accusing the previous government of in which case the accusation was entirely groundless as that government was similar to his own on such matters.  The public did have good reason to think of the previous Conservative Prime Minister as engaging in the politics of fear in that he had exploited the fear of terrorism to pass a bill making it easier for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to spy on Canadians.   The Liberal leader, however, had been the only other party leader in Parliament to support this bill.   Perhaps his talk about the “politics of fear and division” was just an empty smokescreen.  

 

When it came to his own premiership, however, “the politics of fear and division” could be said to be its feature characteristic.   As one of the new “woke” breed of progressives, he has stoked the fear of such things as racism – racism on the part of whites, he doesn’t care about explicit and even violent racial hatred directed against whites by other people – sexism, homophobia, and more recently transphobia – in order to turn Canadians who have the “correct” opinions on such matters, i.e., those approved by the media and academic left, against Canadians who do not.   When the media generated an unnecessary panic over the spread of a new coronavirus he exploited the situation to get out from under the constraints of Parliamentary accountability which ordinarily would be enhanced by his having been reduced to minority status in the last Dominion election only a few months prior.   He made use of this new situation to spend like a drunken sailor, paying Canadians to stay home for months, so the provincial governments and their public health officers could follow the advice of the Dominion public health officer, which was to implement the experimental procedure of trying to control the spread of the virus by keeping everybody apart.   When this didn’t work, he scapegoated those who objected to the unprecedented curtailing of all our basic rights and freedoms.    Then, when the new mRNA injections were available, he, flip-flopping completely on his original stated position that they would be available to those who wanted them but nobody would be compelled to take them, jumped on board the idea of returning to most Canadians most of their rights and freedoms, converted by the whole process into permissions and privileges, while locking those who had refused the injection – or the required number of injections – out of the new re-opened society in a way that resembles nothing so much as the whole “show me your papers” trope from depictions of Cold War era totalitarian regimes.   His scapegoating of those who refused the injection – those, remember, who are distinguished from other Canadians only by the fact that they were not willing to give the government their unthinking, blind, trust and allow themselves to be injected with a never-before-used-on-humans substance that had not completed its clinical trials merely because the government said it was safe and was heavily pressuring them into taking it – was in language that we would normally associate with how the Bolsheviks talked about the kulaks, or the Nazis about the Jews.   Accusing them of all sorts of “isms” that had nothing to do with the issue, he suggested that we should be asking ourselves as a society whether we should be tolerating them in our midst.   Bizarre as may be to compare something said about the ultra-individualist Ayn Rand to this collectivist creep, his comment nevertheless brings to mind something Whittaker Chambers said in his famous review of Atlas Shrugged in the December, 1957 issue of National Review: “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber-go!’”

 

Now suppose this Prime Minister also conspicuously displays another totalitarian characteristic – the urge to control what everyone else thinks.   Indeed, let us further stipulate that this trait was evident in his leadership of his own party before he even became Prime Minister.    Declaring by fiat that the debate about abortion was settled and over – a rather strange way of describing a status quo that exists merely because Parliament narrowly failed in the Mulroney premiership to follow the Supreme Court’s recommendation that it pass new abortion laws to replace those it was striking down and no subsequent government has had the gumption to do anything about despite the fact that there is overwhelming public support for neither the status quo nor the status quo ante – he forbade pro-life members of his own party from voting their conscience on the issue, and refused to sign the nomination papers of any future candidates that did not agree with him on the matter.   It is less surprising, therefore, that a leader who places strict limits on what members of his own party are allowed to think on a controversial issue like this, as Prime Minister would treat the country in the same way.

 

When it comes to Canadians, this not-so-hypothetical Prime Minister is single-mindedly obsessed with controlling both the information that they are allowed to access and the ideas they are allowed to share with others.    When his then-Finance Minister, who shortly thereafter would be forced to resign in disgrace to save the Prime Minister’s skin in a scandal in which both of their families were involved, announced a government bailout of privately owned newspapers, television stations, and other pre-internet media of communication, he declared that this was “to protect the vital role that independent news media play in our democracy and in our communities”.   Predictably, however, it had almost the opposite effect of this.   The newspapers, television stations, etc. that took this money – the vast majority of them – began echoing the same point of view expressed on the CBC overnight and thus could hardly be said to be “independent news media” at all anymore.   The Crown broadcaster itself, which had long been shamefully slanted towards the progressive left and the Liberal party, abandoned even the pretense of the impartiality that Canadians ought to be able to expect from a public, tax-funded, news company and began presenting a narrower range of perspectives on a broader number of issues, one that was coterminous with the spectrum of views the Prime Minister considered “acceptable”.    Yes, this Prime Minister has actually distinguished certain Canadians from others on the grounds that their views were “unacceptable”.    Unsatisfied, however, with over 90% of the Canadian media, public and nominally private, echoing his own point of view, the Prime Minister has taken a hostile, combative attitude towards the few media outlets that present an alternative perspective, thus displaying his true attitude towards “independent news media”.

 

The independent news media that resist conforming to the Prime Minister’s party line are primarily those that operate on the internet.    Before the last Parliament was dissolved the government had introduced a bill that would give the CRTC the same kind of regulatory control over the internet that it already has over radio and television.   Although they pitched this as a means of making streaming services and social media abide by the same Canadian content rules as traditional broadcasting media, it was clearly worded in such a way as to give the CRTC the power to censor online opinions which the government has deemed to be “unacceptable”.   The main target of this, and the government’s more overt attempts at licensing independent media, seems obviously to be the handful of online news companies that have a perspective independent of and often hostile to the Prime Minister’s own.   The government also failed to assuage the concerns of those who feared that the government was trying to tell individual Canadians what they could and could not say when using social media.   Although they insisted that they were not trying to regulate user generated content, they kept removing safeguards against this very thing.   They had also tabled a bill that would re-introduce something similar to Section 13.   Section 13 was the provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act that allowed those who belonged to groups protected against discrimination – although the Act is worded in such a way as to suggest that it protects everybody against discrimination on the basis of their race, sex, etc., it has been generally interpreted by the courts as protecting certain groups that are “vulnerable” rather than others, i.e., blacks but not whites, women but not men, etc. – to charge others with discrimination on the basis of words they had communicated over the telephone or over the internet.   It was so loosely worded that virtually anything negative said about someone from a protected group would fall under the umbrella and so a conviction was pretty much guaranteed.   Parliament repealed it after the public became aware of how bad it was.   The proposed replacement would be even worse in that it would allow for a court order to be taken out against someone before he had even said anything.    Both of these bills were re-introduced after the government won re-election.   The new versions are worse than the ones that failed to become law in the last session of Parliament.

 

As if all that were not thought control enough, among many other non-budget related items included in this year’s federal budget – the turning of budget bills into omnibus bills ought to have been banned decades ago, it is far too easy a way for government to smuggle things into law that would not withstand Parliamentary scrutiny and debate if introduced separately on their own merits – was a provision that would criminalize publicly expressing an opinion that disagrees with that of the Prime Minister about historical events of eighty years ago.   To be more precise it will criminalize the denial, condoning, and diminishing of the Holocaust.  Germany, France, and a number of other European countries had introduced similar laws decades ago but this was a very bad example to follow.  (1)  It is not government’s place to tell people what they can and cannot think or say about historical events.   When they attempt to do so they merely set up their understanding and interpretation of the historical event as a dogma in a new state religion.   The very expression “Holocaust denial” illustrates the point.  (2)  When someone denies that a historical event took place this may, depending upon the evidence for the event, call into question his intelligence, but “Charge of the Light Brigade Denial” is an expression that would not carry the moral undertones that “Holocaust denial” does.   This tells us that to those who are obsessed with condemning the latter it involves the denial of an essential tenet of faith.     Yet it is an essential tenet of neither any orthodox form of Christianity nor Islam.   Nor is it an essential tenet of Judaism in any traditional understanding of that religion.   This was a point that the late academic rabbi Dr. Jacob Neusner frequently made when bemoaning the fact that for many American Jews remembering the Holocaust had replaced remembering Moses, the Exodus and the Sinaitic Covenant at the core of their identity.  (3)  If it is not an essential tenet of any of these religions, it is not an essential tenet of any traditional religion.    Surely members of all traditional religions, the tenets of faith of none of which are similarly protected against denial by law, ought to object to such protection being extended to a new state faith and by the party, none the less, which in Canada has been most historically identified with the American doctrine of “separation of church and state”.   (4) I hope that you note the irony – those who think that the appropriate way of responding to “Holocaust denial” is to pass laws of this sort which essentially boils down to telling people with a view they find loathsome “shut up, shut up, or I’ll make you shut up” by doing so make themselves far more closely resemble the Nazi dictator, at least as he is depicted in Hollywood films, than do those they are attempting to silence. (5)

 

This Prime Minister has a habit of condemning opinions that differ from his as “denial”, thus making his own opinion out to be an essential tenet of faith.   With regards to both the climate and the pandemic, for example, he speaks of those he disagrees with as “science deniers”.   Ironically, of course, since it is the very nature of science not to speak dogmatically – to be scientific at all, a theory must be open to being questioned and tested – “science denier” is an epithet that is only meaningful as it rebounds upon the one who uses it.   More to the point, however, when the same Prime Minister justifies his attempts to squash the few remaining independent Canadian media sources that do not dance to his tune and bring the online platforms where Canadians express their thoughts and speak their minds under government regulatory control on the grounds that the spread of “misinformation” and “disinformation” – information, that is, with which he disagrees and of which he disapproves – online causes “harm”, can there be any doubt that having outright banned one form of “denial”, he is moving in the direction of similarly suppressing all of these “denials” he hates.   He does all of this in the name of liberal democracy, although it looks more and more like totalitarianism every day.

 

As an old-fashioned Tory, of course, who believes in time-proven institutions like the monarchy and Parliament and distrusts abstract ideals like liberalism and democracy, this does not seem as contradictory to me as it would to a neo-conservative, since I see the seeds of totalitarianism in both liberalism and democracy.    In the Prime Minister in question and his sycophantic Cabinet these seeds are rapidly coming to a full bloom.

 

So again, I ask, what word best describes such a Prime Minister and such a Cabinet in which such an appalling combination of self-righteousness, arrogance, hypocrisy, disrespect for the constraints of Parliamentary tradition and constitutional law, and totalitarian impulse can be found?

 

A new one might be needed to really do the matter justice.

 

(1)   It might surprise some to learn that such a law was not already on the books in Canada.   The trials of Ernst Zündel and James Keegstra in the 1980s are among the most famous legal cases involving “Holocaust denial” in history and both took place here in Canada.   In both cases, however, the complaints were based on laws that did not speak about “Holocaust denial” specifically.   In Zündel’s case, for example, the law was Section 181 of the Criminal Code which prohibited the deliberate spread of false news.   He was charged twice under this law, and convicted twice.   The first conviction was thrown out on a technicality, but after the second conviction the Supreme Court struck the law down on appeal as a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  

(2)   Both words in the expression contribute to this.   Holocaust is ultimately derived from ὁλόκαυστος, the Greek word for “burnt offering”.

(3)   Dr. Neusner argued that the Holocaust was filling a vacuum created by the abandonment of Jewish traditions, beliefs, and practices on the part of many American Jews.    Indeed, he was talking about this decades before the fact became obvious in polls like the 2013 Pew Research Poll in which “remembering the Holocaust” was identified as the main essential to being Jewish by most of the Jewish American respondents.   He spoke of the theology developing around the historical event as the “Holocaust myth”, which, had he not passed away six years ago, could have rendered him susceptible to prosecution as a Holocaust denier on visits to Canada under the proposed law, although he was using “myth” in an academic sense that has nothing to do with the truth or falseness of the story in question.

(4)   I do not believe in the doctrine of “separation of church and state” in either its Anabaptist or its American form.   On one of the last occasions I spoke with my late friend the Reverend Canon Kenneth Gunn-Walberg, he spoke critically of “conservative” support for “religious liberty”, noting that support for clerical reserves for the orthodox, established, Church was the more authentic Tory position.   I agreed, of course, although I might have pointed out that one of the earliest tracts advocating broad religious liberty, not in the form of Church-State separation but that of tolerance of a wide spectrum of opinion (within the limits of the Apostles’ Creed) within the Church and peaceful co-existence with heterodox sects, was penned by none other than the great Carolinian Divine, the Right Reverend Dr. Jeremy Taylor, who based his arguments upon the demands of the highest of the Christian theological virtues.   That having been said, the American doctrine that has historically been associated mostly with the Liberal Party in Canada (the NDP’s predecessor was a “Social Gospel” party, founded and led by a former Methodist minister J. S. Woodsworth, and while the NDP has moved about as far away from Christianity as possible, its first and most famous leader was a Baptist minister, Tommy Douglas, with other prominent NDP MPs including United Church ministers such as Stanley Knowles and Bill Blaikie), which Liberals in the past have frequently mistaken as part of Canada’s tradition, while theoretically unsound, is much to be preferred to the establishment of left-wing dogma as a new state creed to which no public dissent is tolerated.    This is but one of several examples of older liberal – classical liberal – ideas which, while objectionable from the standpoint of a sounder perspective, are nevertheless preferable to what the newer kind of “liberal” is offering.

(5)  The government is pointing to claims that anti-Semitism is on the rise as its justification for doing this.    Almost 70 Christian church buildings were burned or otherwise vandalized last summer, but I see no action being taken to curb the Christophobia behind this largest single spree of hate crimes in Canada’s history, nor would I expect it from a government that seemed to be doing everything it could to throw fuel on the fire of that hatred.   Nevertheless, suppose we cede for the sake of argument the claim that anti-Semitism is the largest growing hate problem in Canada. Even if we also ceded that outlawing the expression of opinions was capable of justification, a concession I am by no means willing to make, this would be an extremely poor justification for this kind of law.  Similar laws have not prevented a resurgence of anti-Semitism in the European countries that passed them.   I suspect that you will find that the countries which passed such absurd laws are also the countries which have experienced the largest growth in anti-Semitism in the years since the laws were passed.   This is because the sort of progressive mindset that thinks banning “Holocaust denial” is a good thing to do rather than an insane, draconian, attack on freedom of speech that involves persecuting a tiny minority for holding an unpopular opinion, is also the same mindset that thinks bringing in immigrants from all over the world without any sort of screening for cultural compatibility – that would be “racist” to these dolts – is sound policy, and consequently, with floods of immigrants coming in from countries with either a deep-seated cultural animus against the Jews or perhaps just a more recent animosity based upon Middle Eastern conflicts of recent decades, finds its cases of anti-Semitic incidents exploding.   Rather than placing the blame squarely where it belongs, on the latter idiotic policy, they pass the former draconian law in order to scapegoat a tiny minority for the consequences of their own stupidity.    The government expects to get away with this because most people will think something to the effect of “This law will only affect neo-Nazis and who cares, they have it coming.”    That is stupidity at its worst.   Laws that the public accepts on the grounds that they only affect such-and-such a despised group never end up only affecting the group in question.   In this instance, I have already demonstrated (vide supra, footnote 3) how the most respected academic rabbi of the Twentieth Century could have run afoul of this law.   He was hardly a neo-Nazi.   Nor is Dr. Norman Finkelstein, the American academic and pro-Palestinian activist who has been accused of “Holocaust denial” although his book The Holocaust Industry makes no revisionist claims about the historical event but rather talks about people whom he sees as exploiting the event (both of his parents had been interred in the Nazi camps, incidentally, his mother in Majdanek, his father in Auschwitz).   It is unlikely that Noam Chomsky’s famous protégé would be prosecuted under the new law should he visit Canada but not out of the realm of possibility.    Almost a decade ago, at a Canadian conservative blog I witnessed a well-known progressive activist and blogger pedantically lecture the others present on the difference between “concentration camps” and “death camps” and how the latter were only on Polish soil.   That is a distinction that is made in every serious and mainstream history class and textbook that deals with the subject but he was accused of “Holocaust denial” for this.   The people making the accusation were not generally ill-informed people and perhaps made the accusation tongue-in-cheek because this man was a noted supporter of banning “hate speech”, but the point is that if something that is part of the mainstream narrative can be confused with “Holocaust denial”, a law against the latter, even if were justifiable to make such a law against those it is intended to be used against which it is not,  makes possible the prosecution of a lot of people who have not committed “Holocaust denial” in the conventional meaning of the phrase.   Ironically, had the United States passed such a law in the 1950s or even 1960s, and had it not been struck down immediately for violating their First Amendment, even if only actual “Holocaust deniers” in the conventional sense of the word were rounded up, if all of them were arrested there would have been more Jews than white supremacists arrested.   At that time, “Holocaust denial”, and World War II revisionism in general of which it is a subset, was most widespread among libertarians for the simple reason that these arch anti-statists recognized that the military expansion the United States underwent in World War II, and which continued after the war because of the Cold War, was a massive expansion of the American central state and therefore a threat to the liberty of American citizens.   Therefore the claims of the American government during that conflict were suspect to them.   There were far more libertarians than Nazi sympathizers, then as now, and a large percentage of libertarians were and are Jewish. 

Captain Airhead Throws Off His Mask and Stomps it Into the Ground

 Before he became Prime Minister, Captain Airhead was asked about what government he admired the most.   His answer was to praise the "basic dictatorship" of Red China.

This past week he has demonstrated, yet again, that this was not just him saying something stupid off the cuff.   It is how he actually thinks.    It is not like we had no warning.

The week prior to that, Matt Taibbi had said that this was his Ceaușescu moment.    This was in reference to the final days of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu who, as the Iron Curtain was crumbling, Communism was in retreat, and his populace were uniting against him, clung to the delusion that he was secure in power and could do whatever he wanted.   It would appear that Captain Airhead has decided to make this his Tiananmen Square moment instead.   It is astonishing that someone as focused on his image as Captain Airhead - his image is all that there is to him, he has no substance whatsoever - would think this a good move.

In a bid to upgrade himself from Captain Airhead to Generalissimo Airhead, he began the week on St. Valentine's Day by announcing that he was invoking the Emergency Measures Act to crush a peaceful protest.   The Freedom Convoy protest was initiated by long-haul truckers a few weeks ago when, as governments around the world began easing bat flu restrictions, and provincial governments began to talk of doing the same, Captain Airhead decided to do the opposite.   His Health Minister announced that he would be talking with provincial governments about imposing universal vaccine mandates.   The government of Lower Canada then took the step of announcing that it would introduce a significant tax on the unvaccinated.   Even as this was going on, the Omicron variant was disproving the government's claims that vaccines are the only way out of the pandemic and that the unvaccinated are to blame for how long it has gone on.   Meanwhile Captain Airhead removed, not a restriction, but an exemption to a restriction - the exemption for long-haul truck drivers to the vaccine mandate for crossing the border with the USA.   There was no reasonable justification for this.   It was just Captain Airhead, like the current occupant of the White House who did the same, being a dick.   The next thing you know, truckers descended on Ottawa in the largest convoy in history, parked their trucks along Wellington Street where Parliament is located, and announced their intention to not leave until all the basic Charter rights and freedoms that had been curtailed during the pandemic had been restored.

Remember that.   The Freedom Convoy was a single issue protest.    That issue is freedom which is not, as the idiots at the CBC tried to claim, a codeword for something nefarious, racist, and extremist.   Freedom is itself a basic right, and specific freedoms are identified as "fundamental" in the second section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.   Each of these has been severely curtailed by public health order over the last two years.   Vaccine mandates - telling people that they have to agree to have a foreign substance injected into their veins or lose their jobs, livelihoods, and everything if they don't - are the biggest affront to freedom we have seen in the name of public health yet.    The freedoms the Freedom Convoy wants restored, not just for themselves but for all Canadians, are these freedoms, freedoms supposedly guaranteed by our constitution, spelled out in the Charter the adding of which to our constitution, Captain Airhead's father oversaw.    Captain Airhead thinks very little of freedom.   Just before the Freedom Convoy started a video of an interview he had given a Lower Canadian television station last September before the last Dominion election resurfaced.   In it he hurled all sorts of abuse at people who believe that they should be free to decide for themselves what they put in their bodies and actually suggested that we should be asking whether we should tolerate such people as a society.   

The Freedom Convoy has been, despite Captain Airhead's claim to the contrary, a peaceful protest.   The truckers and the massive number of other Canadians who turned up to support them did not engage in the sort of violent and destructive behaviour that is typical of the kind of protests Captain Airhead endorses, like anti-pipeline environmentalist protests, Black Lives Matters riots, or the Cultural Maoist Year Zero assault on Canadian history that took place last summer.   The most violent incident until this week was when, during a related protest in Winnipeg, somebody drove his vehicle into the crowd.    This person was an Antifa thug, attacking the protestors, not the protestors assaulting anybody else.

Note that I said "until this week".   There has been more violence this week, but once again it was violence perpetrated against the protestors rather than by them.    This time it was violence by the state.     On Friday, as Captain Airhead suspended the Parliamentary debate on his illegal power grab - and it is illegal, because even if he manages to get enough votes in Parliament to confirm it the situation does not meet the requirements of the Emergency Measures Act itself for its own invocation - he sent his stormtroopers in to crush those protesters who were speaking out for all Canadians who still believe that their freedom belongs to them and is not the Prime Minister's to give and take away at will.    Ottawa police, armed with riot gear, descended upon the protestors on horseback, trampling and beating them.    Journalists like Andrew Lawton who were there reporting on this violent crackdown on  peaceful protestors were also attacked with pepper spray by the police.   Indeed, the next morning a journalist, Alexa Lavoie was clubbed by the police and shot in the leg with a gun loaded with tear gas.   No, contrary to what the Ottawa police and legacy media are saying, the police are not acting in self defence.

The weekend prior, GiveSendGo, the crowdfunding platform that the Freedom Convoy had turned to after GoFundMe, at the behest of Captain Airhead, had cancelled their fundraiser and announced that they would be giving the money to other causes instead (backing down on this and refunding the donors only when threatened with fraud investigations by American authorities) had been hacked,   The hacked information on the donors was then published, in some cases on social media by people like Captain Airhead's disgraced former adviser Butts, in others by media organizations sympathetic to Captain Airhead, including the Ottawa Citizen, the Washington Post, and even the Crown broadcaster the CBC.   Predictably this led to donors being harassed and threatened by woke goons and in some cases fired and forced to close their businesses.    The hacking and releasing of hacked information is illegal in itself, of course, and in this case it is also a huge act of violence - incitement - against the protestors - and their supporters - which can be laid at Captain Airhead's feet.    It failed to accomplish what was presumably Captain Airhead's intention - bolstering his claim that the protest is an insurrection on the part of Nazis funded by foreign organizations and governments.   The hacked data instead revealed that while there were more American donors, most of the money had come from Canadians, most of the donations were small, and the larger donations were from people who cannot be credibly accused of being the sort of people Captain Airhead claims were funding the Convoy.

His other attempt at backing up his false claims against the protestors by trying to tie them to a cache of arms captured near Coutts failed as well.   The people with the weapons were not part of the main body of the Coutts border blockade, which was peacefully resolved without the use of Captain Airhead's extra powers, and when Captain Airhead's new Public Safety Minister attempted to make the connection between the armed group and the Freedom Convoy organizers he was unable to do so convincingly when faced with tough questions from the media.     

Meanwhile in Parliament this week, Captain Airhead and the ministers under him dodged questions about the justification for their actions by giving non-answers, telling outright lies, attacking the members of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition collectively and individually, or simply walking out of the House.   

None of this behaviour on his part should surprise anyone.   Even if his remarks about China's "basic dictatorship" were taken as a poor joke the fact that the man is a control freak, who thinks he can do whatever he wants, who has no shame whatsoever, who will shed false tears about the misdeeds, supposed and actual, of past Canadian leaders, but who never gives a real apology for anything he has done wrong himself has been evident throughout his premiership.   Whenever he praises our "democracy" by "democracy" he means "elected dictatorship".   Several years ago he bailed out the Crown broadcaster, the CBC, and the larger privately-owned legacy media companies, to the tune of billions of dollars.    When he did so he cited the importance of a free media in a democracy.   He did so with a straight face.   The effect of his bailout, of course, was that the media in Canada became anything but free.  The legacy media, Crown and private, had long had a Liberal bias, but now they began to resemble the sycophantic press of North Korea.   A free media is important to a functioning democracy because it keeps tabs on the government, reports their misdoings, and calls them out.   Captain Airhead has taken a most adversarial attitude towards the few  private media companies who continue to do this.   He has several times banned them from election debates - the courts had to overrule him.   Clearly what Captain Airhead means by a  free media is a media controlled by him and free of dissent from his views.   Such a media is indeed important to "democracy" in his sense of "elected dictatorship".   

When Canada was founded, the Fathers of Confederation made sure to bestow upon us the best form of government the world has ever known, the parliamentary monarchy system, under which personal freedom has historically flourished like under none other.   It has been almost a century since the first attempt by a Liberal Prime Minister - William Lyon Mackenzie King - to subvert the sovereignty of Crown-in-Parliament and turn the Prime Minister's Office into a de facto elected dictatorship.   This was a serious assault on our constitution which has had lasting damage, but Mackenzie King's dictatorial instincts were mild in comparison to those of the first Prime Minister Trudeau, who never met a Communist dictator he didn't like.    Captain Airhead, however, makes his father look like a humble man with an abhorrence of the abuse of government power by comparison.

By suspending Parliamentary debate on the day he ordered a violent crackdown on a peaceful protest he has made it impossible to conceal his true nature any longer, not that it was particularly well concealed before.    Those who cannot see him for what he is now, never will.    Indeed, those who cannot see him for what he is now, cannot see anything at all.