The King has Arrived

His Majesty, King Charles III accompanied by Queen Camilla has arrived here in the Dominion of Canada, where he will be giving the throne speech opening the new Parliament in person.  While it is not often in recent years that something happens in my country of which I approve, this is very much to my liking.

 

I have been both a royalist and a monarchist all my life.  I put the word royalist first because monarchism requires royalism for clarity.  Monarchy is the ancient constitutional principle of the rule of one – or better, the leadership of the one, for the suffix –arche indicates the idea of headship, source, leadership more than “rule” which is what the suffix –cracy suggests. The ancients recognized three basic constitutional principles, the one, the few, and the many, but also that there were good and bad forms of each.  The good form of the principle of the one is kingship, the bad form is tyranny.  Royalism is about kings and queens, not tyrants.   Kingship is an office that possesses authority by ancient prescription.  A tyrant never has authority, only power, which he generally obtains by gathering a mob of followers to support him.  Tyranny is closely intertwined with democracy and populism and always has been.

 

While my royalism and monarchism was initially instinctual and related to my general conservative and reactionary instinct, that is, an inclination for what is ancient, time-tested, proven, and traditional rather than what is faddish, popular, and theoretical, one of the many ways in which the office of kingship is superior to any sort of elected head of state is that it is not a political office in the sense of partisan politics. 

 

My great-aunt Hazel passed away this January.  Thirteen years ago in “Testimony of a Tory” I made reference to a conversation that she and I had over Christmas the previous year in which she wholeheartedly agreed with me when I said that I wanted Canada to remain a monarchy and never become a republic.  She regularly voted NDP and while that party’s most recent leader, Jimmy Dhaliwal, was a republican, its most popular leader in the last twenty years, the late Jack Layton, was a royalist. 

 

One of the most enthusiastic supporters of Canada’s monarchy in the last century and probably the most noted expert on our constitution that our country has ever had, Eugene Forsey, was literally all over the map politically, as far as party alignment goes.  Raised a Conservative, he was one of the founders of the CCF membership in which he abandoned at the time of the merger that formed the NDP, then sat in the Senate as a Liberal appointed on the recommendation of Pierre Trudeau, while all the time calling himself a “John A. Macdonald Conservative”. 

 

The Green Party’s former leader Elizabeth May, currently the only elected Member from that party, is a strong royalist.  

 

You don’t have to be a conservative to be a royalist, although, and I say this as a rebuke of those Canadians who call themselves “conservative” but think that American republicanism is the standard of conservatism, you do have to be a royalist to be a conservative in the truest sense of the word.  

 

Some have criticized kingship for all the pomp that surrounds it but this criticism is misguided.  The pomp of kingship is attached to the office and not to the man who holds it.  Furthermore, the pomp of kingship is a dignified pomp, which extends to other institutions associated with kingship, especially Parliament.  That there is as much dignified pomp in our House of Commons as there is we can attribute entirely to its association with kingship through the Westminster parliamentary system.  Democracy removed from such a setting is a petty, ugly thing, and it becomes much more petty and ugly when someone skilled at expressing the grievances of large numbers of people, regardless of whether these grievances are legitimate or not, uses that skill to rise to power.  The cult of personality that can form around such a person is attached entirely to the man and not his office and is dangerous as well as ugly.  We have seen this happen twice in the United States in recent decades.  The cult of personality surrounding the current American president is one example.  That which surrounded Barack Obama is the other.

 

In one of Alexandre Dumas père’s D’Artagnan romances, the character of Athos defends the office of kingship, saying something to the effect that if it should happen to be occupied by an unworthy occupant, honour and duty require that the office be respected, if not the man.  In the case of our current Sovereign I have to say that the man won an awful lot of respect from me when at the beginning of his coronation, in words he himself had added to the service, he replied to the welcome in the name of the King of Kings by saying “in His name, and after His example, I come not to be served but to serve.”  That is so much better than the overweening peacocking and hubris coming from the elected head of state south of the border.

 

So, a warm welcome to His Majesty.

God Save the King!

Captain Airhead and Jimmy Dhaliwal Get Hitched

Just in time for the beginning of spring, Jimmy Dhaliwal, the clown in charge of Canada’s official socialist party – the others are the unofficial socialist parties – who looks and, more importantly, acts like he is playing the role of evil Grand Vizier in a cheap, third-rate melodrama adapted from one of Scheherazade’s tales, came out from his hole, looked around, saw his shadow and gave us a truly terrifying forecast – three more years of Captain Airhead.    He had agreed to prop up the Liberal minority government until the next Dominion election in return for….what exactly?   It is rather difficult to conceive of any concession the Grits could have made to him considering they have been stealing his clothes and his platform since pretty much the moment Captain Airhead became Prime Minister.   Perhaps all that is really going on is an attempt to remain relevant after having been rendered redundant.   Perhaps I threw that option out merely to see how many words beginning with re- I could fit in a single sentence.   Whatever the case may be, he then proceeded to pat himself on the back and compare himself to Tommy Douglas and Jack Layton.

 

In considering what this unholy marriage means for the country it would be helpful first to review how each of the partners currently stands in Parliament.

 

In the last Dominion election which took place last fall, Captain Airhead’s Grits increased their seats in the House of Commons by three from the previous Dominion election in 2019.   In that latter election they had been reduced from the majority government they had won in 2015 to a small minority government.   In both elections they won the plurality of seats while losing the plurality in the popular vote which was won by the Conservatives who have been Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition since 2015.   Indeed, despite their gain of three seats, their percentage of the popular vote dropped to the lowest a party that went on to form government has ever received.   Captain Airhead has, nevertheless, governed since 2019 as if he commanded a solid majority in the House.   Moreover, after last year’s election he claimed that he had received a clear mandate from the Canadian public.   This is a nonsensical claim for anybody in a minority government, let alone a minority government that won only a plurality of seats not a plurality of the popular vote to make, but he repeated it again when grilled by Opposition leader Candice Bergen in the House after the coalition was announced.

 

As for Jimmy Dhaliwal’s party, they did terrible in both elections as well.   In 2019, the first election in which Dhaliwal led the NDP, they dropped from the thirty-nine seats they had previously held to twenty-four.   Their percentage of the popular vote dropped by almost four percent.   They improved only slightly on this last year, gaining one seat.   To put a bit of context to this, remember that this was only eight years after the late Honourable Jack Layton had led the socialists into the 2011 Dominion election increasing their seats from thirty-six to one-hundred and three and increasing their percentage of the popular vote by twelve and a half percent.   Stephen Harper’s Conservatives won a majority government in that election and the NDP became Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition at the Dominion level for the first and only time in Canadian history.    This was called the “Orange Wave” at the time.   It is not merely in contrast to Layton’s popularity of eight years previously that Dhaliwal’s dismal performance needs to be understood.  2019 was the year that Captain Airhead was reduced from a majority to a small minority.   The government had been shaken by the SNC-Lavalin scandal earlier in the year before the election was called then, during the election campaign, all those chickens from Captain Airhead’s past as a blackface performer came home to roost in a personal scandal.   Ordinarily, when a Liberal leader loses voters and seats en masse in a disgrace like this, one expects the NDP to gain.   Those voters all jumped to the Lower Canadian separatists instead and the socialists lost ground too.

 

My point in going into all of this is that neither the Liberals nor the NDP under either party’s current leadership is very appealing to Canadians.   Far more Canadians voted against the Liberals than voted for them in the last two Dominion elections and that is true of the socialists as well.   Nor can you just add those who voted Liberal to those who voted NDP to get the popular support for the “clear mandate” now claimed by this unholy coalition.   No Canadians voted for a Liberal-NDP or NDP-Liberal coalition government.   Some, understandably including many of the Conservatives, would maintain that this in itself is the problem with what has just been done.   I disagree because this merely offends against the ideal of democracy of which idol my opinion is far closer to the ancients’ disdain and contempt than the Moderns’ infatuation.   It is technically permitted by the rules of that time-tested and honoured governing institution of Parliament although it seems fairly obvious that both leaders are acting by the letter of what is permitted rather than the spirit.    Promising to prop up a minority government in this way circumvents Parliament’s power to hold the government accountable.    What I wish to stress here is the reason why both of these parties have lost so much of their appeal under their present leaders.

 

While personal defects on the part of the leaders undoubtedly played a part in this, especially with regards to Captain Airhead who combines a staggering level of brazen hypocrisy with enough hubris to have brought Nemesis down on the heads of the entire pantheon of Greek heroes, both parties have under their current leaders adopted the same narrow, extremist, and utterly insane ideology.   Most people would probably describe this ideological shift as a move to the far left but this does not really do justice to what has happened.    Indeed, it is potentially misleading because “far left” is usually understood to mean “Communist” and what we are talking about is an ideology that would have been considered way out in the left field of Cloud Cuckoo Land by the old Marxist-Leninist Commies of the Cold War era.   Imagine what V. I. Lenin or Joseph Stalin would have done to someone who suggested to them that the Bolshevik regime should make it a priority to stomp out all usage of masculine pronouns for men who consider themselves to be women or of feminine pronouns for women who consider themselves to be men.  

 

An illustration of how thinking of the new Grit-NDP ideology simply as something further to the left can be misleading is provided by the Conservative response to the announced alliance.   It has been good insofar as it goes but it has gone no further than the economy.   Candice Bergen et al. are certainly right to say that this deal between the Grits and the socialists means that life will become even less affordable for ordinary Canadians as taxes are raised, grocery prices rise even higher due to the inflationary effect of all the “free” goodies everyone will be bribed with, while the energy sector, so important to a part of the country that not-coincidentally tends not to support either the Grits or the socialists, comes further under attack and efforts to develop other natural resources are hindered and thwarted.   As bad as all this is, it is only a small part of the woe that these deranged ideologues wish to unleash upon Canada.

 

I use the term ideology, by the way, for the sort of thinking that the Grits and the socialists share today even though that thinking does not come close to being as systematic and coherent as the word ideology usually implies because it is as rigid and dogmatic as any ideology and no better word suggests itself.

 

This ideology is based upon dividing Canadians according to race, religion, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc. – the list of categories is ever expanding – then assigning “victim” and “villain” status to the groups formed by these divisions.   Whites, for example, are the designated villain for the race category, and all others are the designated victims.   These statuses can be combined to create “supervictim” and “supervillain” statuses.   A woman, for example, of a race other than white who belongs to a non-Christian religion, is a member of three different victim groups and in accordance with the crackpot dogma of intersectionality that is the rationale behind all of this these victim statuses are multiplied rather than merely added to each other.   At the same time someone who is a white, Christian, male is that much more of a villain than the person who is only one of these things.   The ultimate bad guy in this warped worldview, however, is not merely the person who belongs to all of the villain groups.   Indeed, someone can belong to each and every one of them and still be regarded as one of the “good guys” by the woke provided that he is willing to make groveling apologies to each of the designated victim groups for each of the villain groups to which he belongs.   Captain Airhead himself is the obvious example of this.   He is white, male, and nominally at least cisgender, heterosexual and Roman Catholic, but is constantly weeping crocodile tears over all of this.   The ultimate bad guy for the new, woke, Canadian left is Canada herself, or at least a Canada that would still be recognizable as such to pre-1963 Canadians, and the larger Christian/Western civilization of which she is a part.   Each of the designated victim groups are encouraged by the woke left to air their grievances, not just against their corresponding villain group, but also and primarily against the historical Canada.   The woke left then pleads guilty on behalf of Canada regardless of whether the grievances are legitimate and have any substance to them or not.    Just as woke feminism insists that a woman must always be believed when she accuses a man of some sort of sexual crime so woke leftism in general insists that all accusations against the country made by designated victim groups be believed.   That this is the opposite of the old notion of innocent until proven guilty does not faze the woke left.   That notion came to us from the patriarchal, white supremacist, heteronormative, Christian past and so they consider it to be tainted.   The goal of all of this is power – gaining power by bringing all of these different identity groups, even if their interests are mutually exclusive, behind the woke left – then using that power to stomp out everything in the country that they don’t like and justifying this by associating it with all the “isms” and “phobias” of the past.  

 

Unfortunately, many Canadians tend to think of the woke ideology that has captured both the Liberal Party and the NDP in terms of meaningless apologies and other empty, symbolic gestures.   The problem is a lot more serious than this however.   For most of Canadian history, Conservatives, Liberals, and socialists believed that Canadians, regardless of race, sex, etc., each possessed as their property as subjects of the Crown, certain rights and freedoms that protected them from the abuse of government power.   The only rights that the woke Liberals and NDP seem to recognize as actually binding the hands of government, however, are newer “rights” that belong not to each Canadian but to members of designed victim groups protecting them against “isms” and “phobias” on the part of designated villain groups.   As for all those older rights and freedoms that we traditionally regarded as the property of all Canadians under Common Law, including the freedoms identified as “fundamental” in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, these the woke Liberals and NDP see as privileges, that is, things that we get to enjoy if the government decides to permit it.   As has increasingly become apparent the woke Liberals and NDP want that permission to be granted or denied on the basis of a social credit system.   That is social credit in the Chinese Communist sense of the term – the government keeps tabs on everything you say and do and awards you more or less freedom based upon whether it approves of what you have been saying and doing – rather than in the sense of the economic and monetary theories of Major C. H. Douglas from which all the now defunct Social Credit parties in Canada were named.

 

We don’t have to look far for an illustration of this.   Take the right to peacefully assemble to express disagreement with and make demands of the government.   This right has never included the right to commit acts of violence against others, to damage or destroy public or private property, or to commit actual sedition or insurrection.   It has, however, traditionally been regarded as belonging to all Canadian subjects of the Crown.   Captain Airhead’s Liberals, however, with the support of Jimmy Dhaliwal’s NDP even before the formal announcement of their nuptials, have treated this as a right that belongs only to those Canadians with whose causes they agree.   If there is a demonstration or protest with whose woke cause they agree, such as the environmentalist protests against Canada’s energy sector and especially the pipelines, the BLM demonstrations of the summer of 2020, or the residential school protests of last summer, the Liberals and NDP do not seem to care if the protests are paid for by foreign interests and the protestors commit acts of violence and destruction.   When, however, a group of working class Canadians objected to government rules and restrictions that were adversely affecting them just last month, even though this group committed no such acts of violence and destruction, nor, despite leftist claims to the contrary, were they funded by foreigners, the NDP-backed Liberals went all ballistic on them, evoked the Emergency Measures Act for the first time in Canadian history, froze their bank accounts, arrested their leaders, and sent the police in to brutalize them.   The summer before, the residential school protestors hijacked Canada’s anniversary holiday and, here in Winnipeg, toppled the statues on the grounds of the provincial legislature of Queen Victoria, who presided over Confederation, and Queen Elizabeth II our reigning Sovereign.  That is what sedition and insurrection look like.   By contrast, the truckers’ demonstration earlier this year was a display of patriotic love – Canada’s largest ever block party, with people cheering and greeting each other, enjoying food and games and hot tubs, and waving Canadian flags.   This is what Captain Airhead and Jimmy Dhaliwal decided needed to be crushed with the maximum force available to the government.   As this was going on the perpetrators of last year’s assault on Canada’ history and institutions were allowed to walk without penalty.

 

Never before in Canadian history has there been a Prime Minister less willing to tolerate those who disagree with him than Captain Airhead.   Since last summer he has spoken several times of those who wish to make their own choices about whether to have man-made foreign substances injected into their bodies rather than have such decisions dictated by government in the most dehumanizing of terms.   He has declared the views of those who disagree with him “unacceptable”.   He has said that we as Canadians need to ask ourselves whether we are willing to tolerate having those who disagree with him about this in our midst.   In the actions described in the previous paragraph he proved himself willing to act on this kind of language.   Even though he is brazenly hypocritical enough to lecture other countries about the need to listen to those with whom they disagree at home he practices the exact opposite of this.   It is like he took William F. Buckley’s famous line about how liberals loudly proclaim their willingness to listen to other ideas but are then shocked and offended to discover that there are any as a “how to” statement.   Having Jimmy Dhaliwal as a partner will only make this problem worse. 

 

In 1970 Parliament, dominated by a Liberal party led by Captain Airhead’s father, passed a bill amending the Criminal Code to include three sections against “hate propaganda”.   Since to qualify as “hate propaganda” by the terms of these sections incitement to violence, which was already against the law, had to be included, this was redundant and unnecessary and did nothing but start the process of conditioning Canadians to accept the government telling them what they can and cannot think and say.   Seven years later, Parliament, still led by the Liberals under Pierre Trudeau, passed the Canadian Human Rights Act, which took government policing of Canadians’ thoughts to a whole new level.   The entire Act was bad but the worst part of it was Section 13 which forbade the telephonic communication of material “likely to” expose designated victim groups to “hatred or contempt” as an act of discrimination.   In 2001 Jean Chretien’s Liberals amended this provision to cover the internet as well.   In 2014 these efforts to bring Canadians’ thoughts and words under government control met a setback when Section 13 was removed from the CHRA, one year after a private member’s bill revoking it had passed Parliament and received royal assent.   This bill had only passed through the cooperation of Conservative and dissenting Liberal members.   The current leader of the Liberals tolerates far less dissent among his caucus than was the case in 2013 and the Liberals have just reintroduced a bill that they had first introduced before the last Parliament was dissolved last year.   This bill would re-introduce something similar to Section 13 but far worse in that it would allow for peace bonds to be issued against people on the grounds of what it is feared they might say rather than something they have already said.   With Jimmy Dhaliwal’s pledge to Captain Airhead, this bill is now sure to pass the House, unless both caucuses are somehow able to muster up enough dissenting voices with the integrity to break with their leaders on this.

 

Not only have Captain Airhead’s woke Liberals and Jimmy Dhaliwal’s woke NDP expanded what they wish to see prohibited as “hate speech” to include much that was not covered by previous “hate speech” laws, even words not yet spoken, they have also clearly expressed their wish to suppress dissent in all sorts of other areas as well.   This is why they are always talking about “misinformation” and “disinformation”.   On matters as various as climate change, the bat flu, abortion, the last American election and the Russia-Ukraine conflict they claim that “misinformation” and “disinformation” are endangering the public good and so the government needs to step in to control these.   Of course, “misinformation” and “disinformation” do not mean to them what these words mean to normal people.   To you, I, the average Joe on the street, his brother Bob, and basically anyone with an ounce of horse sense, “misinformation” and “disinformation” are identified as such by being false.   They are held up to the yard stick of Truth and found to fall short.   To Captain Airhead and Jimmy Dhaliwal, however, neither of whom care a lick about Goodness or Beauty, much less Truth, “misinformation” and “disinformation” are anything that disagrees with what they say.   This is why it was so chilling to see that smug, soulless, smile come into Captain Airhead’s eyes the other day in Question Period when he responded to something Candice Bergen said about his new partnership with Dhaliwal with a remark about “misinformation” and “disinformation”.

 

Captain Airhead and Jimmy Dhaliwal have gotten hitched in a manner of speaking.   Now they are about to drag the entire country with them to their honeymoon in hell.

Jagmeet Doesn’t Know Jack!

In the 2011 Dominion election, under the leadership of Jack Layton, the New Democratic Party which is the officially socialist party, as opposed to the unofficial socialist parties such as the Liberals and the Conservatives, won the highest percentage of the popular vote and the most number of seats it has ever received.   While the Conservatives, led by Stephen Harper, won the election and formed a majority government, Layton’s NDP won enough seats to become Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, a role which, during Conservative governments, had always before been held by the Liberals.     While the unpopularity of Grit leader Michael Ignatieff undoubtedly contributed to this, it was clearly a credit to the charismatic leadership of Layton himself.   Sadly, he was not able to perform the role of Official Opposition Leader for long.   Cancer forced him to step down from his duties and in August of that year took his life.

 

In the 2019 Dominion election, by contrast, the NDP’s percentage of the popular vote fell drastically, and it moved from third party to fourth party status as it lost twenty seats from the forty-four it had won four years previous.   What is very interesting about this is that this was the same election in which the Liberal government dropped from majority to minority government status.   The Liberal drop was not difficult to explain – the year had begun with the government rocked by the SNC-Lavalin scandal and during the election campaign itself another scandal, which would have utterly destroyed anyone else, broke, as multiple photographs and even a video of the Prime Minister, who had marketed himself as the “woke” Prime Minister, in blackface surfaced.   What was surprising was not that the Liberals dropped in the popular vote and lost seats, but that they managed to squeak out a plurality and cling to power.   This makes it all the more damning that the New Democrats, ordinarily the second choice for progressive Liberal voters, did so poorly in this election.

 

Just as most of the credit for the NDP’s success in 2011 belonged to its late leader Jack Layton, so most of the blame for its failure in 2019 belongs to its current leader, Jagmeet Singh.   Despite the efforts of the CBC and its echo chambers in the “private” media to promote his brand, Singh, was clearly unpalatable to the Canadian public.   Whereas a competent politician who finds himself unpopular with the electorate would ask what it is about himself that is turning off the voters and try to change it, Singh is the type who declares that the problem is with the electorate, that they are too prejudiced, and demands that they change.   That this attitude, indicative of the kind of far Left politics Singh embraces – he is the furthest to the Left any mainstream party leader has ever been in Canadian politics – is itself a large part of what turns the voters off, is a fact that eluded him, continues to elude him, and will probably elude him forever.

 

That the contrast could hardly be greater between the late Jack Layton and Jagmeet Singh received another illustration this week.

 

On Sunday, a much hyped interview between Oprah Winfrey and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex was televised.   I did not watch the interview, as I make it a point of avoiding Oprah who, in my opinion, has done more than anybody else to turn people’s minds to mush, despite having a book club named after her.  The Sussexes consist of Meghan Markle, an ambitious American actress, and her husband, the younger son of the Prince of Wales.   Last year, you might recall, this couple was all over the news before they got pre-empted by the bat flu, because Markle, who obviously is the one wearing the pants between the two of them, having learned that unlike the Hollywood celebrity to which she had aspired, royalty comes with public duties as well as privilege, duties which do not include, and indeed conflict with, the favourite Hollywood celebrity pastime of shooting one’s mouth off, no matter how ill-informed one is, about every trendy, woke, cause, wanted to keep the royal privileges while giving up the royal duties, and was told, quite rightly, by the Queen, that this was not the way things were done.   The couple left the UK in a huff, stopping temporarily in Canada before they eventually relocated to the United States.    As I said, I did not watch the interview, but have caught enough of the highlights of it and the post-interview commentary to know that it was basically Markle throwing herself a “me party” and hurling mud at her inlaws and the ancient institution they represent, for not making everything all about her.  

 

Sane, rational, people surely realize that interviews of this sort speak far more about the spoiled, egotistical, narcissism of the individuals who give such interviews than they do about the people and institutions criticized in such interviews.   People like Jagmeet Singh, however, regard them as opportunities to promote their own agendas.

 

Singh, actually succeeded in making the current Prime Minister look classy by comparison, something which is exceedingly difficult to do.   The only comment the Prime Minister made following the interview was to say “I wish all members of the Royal Family the very best”.   Singh, however, ranted about how he doesn’t “see the benefit of the monarchy in Canadians’ lives”.   As with Markle’s interview this comment says far more about the person who made it than the institution he seeks to denigrate.

 

To fail to see the benefit of the monarchy in Canadians’ lives is to fail to see any benefit to Canadians in a) having their country remain true to her founding principles, b) having a non-political head of state, or c) having an institutional connection to the United Kingdom, Australia, and the other Commonwealth Realms that in no way impedes our country’s sovereignty over her own domestic affairs and international relationships.   To fail to see any benefit in any of this is to display one’s own blindness.

That Canada’s founding principles require her to retain the monarchy is an understatement.   Loyalty to the monarchy is the founding principle of Canada, at least if by Canada we mean the country that was founded in 1867.   Quebec nationalists like to point out that Canada was first used for the French society founded along the St. Lawrence long before Confederation, which is true enough, but the conclusions they draw from this are contradictory non-sequiturs.   At any rate, the original French Canada was, most certainly, a society under a monarch, the monarchy of France, and, contrary to the delusions of the Quebec nationalists who are products of the “Quiet Revolution” (against traditional, Roman Catholic, Quebecois society and culture), it was not moving in the direction of the French Revolution when the French king ceded Canada to the British king after the Seven Years War, a fact that is evinced by Quebec’s remaining ultramontane in its Catholicism and seigneurial in its society long after the Jacobins had done their worst in France.   Before Confederation began the process of uniting  all of British North America into the Dominion of Canada in 1867 – the Canada we speak of as Canada today – an English Canada, in addition to a French Canada, had come into existence, and this English Canada grew out of the United Empire Loyalists, that is to say, those among the Thirteen Colonies which revolted against Britain and become the United States who remained loyal to the Crown, and fled to Canada to escape persecution in the new republic.    They were able to flee to Canada because French Canada, although the ink was barely dry on the treaty transferring Canada from the French king to the British, did not join in the American Revolution against the Crown which had, to the upset of the American colonists, guaranteed its protection of their culture, language and religion.  During Confederation, the Fathers of Confederation, English and French, unanimously chose to retain a connection to the larger British Empire and to make the Westminster system of parliamentary monarchy our own (it was Canada’s own Fathers of Confederation, not the Imperial government in London, who brought all of this into the Confederation talks, and, indeed, when the Fathers of Confederation wished to call the country “The Kingdom of Canada”, London’s input was to suggest an alternative title, leading to the choice of “The Dominion of Canada’).    It is the Crown that is the other party to all of the treaties with the native tribes, who generally, and for good cause, respect the monarchy a lot more than they do the politicians in Parliament.   At several points in Canadian history, both on the road to Confederation, such as in the War of 1812, and after Confederation, such as in both World Wars, English Canadians, French Canadians, and native Canadians fought together for “king and country”.   The monarchy has been the uniting principle in Canada throughout our history.  To reject the monarchy is to reject Canada.

 

That anybody in March of 2021 could fail to see the benefit of having a non-political head of state demonstrates the extent to which ideology can blind a person.   Four years ago, the American republic had an extremely divisive presidential election after which the side that lost refused to acknowledge the outcome, spent much of four years accusing the winner of colluding with a foreign power – Russia – to steal the election, and giving its tacit and in some cases explicit approval to violent groups that were going around beating people up, using intimidation to shut down events, and rioting, because they considered the new American president to be a fascist.   Last year, they held another presidential election which was even more divisive, with a very high percentage of Americans believing the election was stolen through fraud, with the consequence that Congress had to order a military occupation of their own capital city in order to protect the inauguration of the new president against their own citizens.   This is precisely the sort of thing that naturally ensues from filling the office of head of state through popular election, politicizing an office that is supposed to be unifying and representative of an entire country.   This is not the first time in American history that this has happened.   Less than a century after the establishment of the American republic, the election of the first president from the new Republican Party led to all of the states south of the Mason-Dixon line seceding from the American union and forming their own federation, which the United States then invaded and razed to the ground in the bloodiest war in all of American history.   Generally, when a country replaces its hereditary monarchy it initially gets something monstrously tyrannical which may eventually evolve into something more stable and tolerable.   When the British monarchy was temporarily abolished after the English Civil War and the murder of Charles I, the tyranny of Cromwell was the result, which was fortunately followed by the Restoration of the monarchy.   In France, forcing the Bourbons off the throne resulted in the Jacobin Reign of Terror.   The forced abdication of the Hapsburg and Hohenzollern dynasties after World War I led directly to the rise of Adolf Hitler, whereas the fall of the Romanovs in Russia brought about the enslavement of that country to Bolshevism.   To wish to get rid of the hereditary monarchy in Canada is to fail to learn anything at all from history.

 

I won’t elaborate too much on the third point.   Either you see an advantage in the Commonwealth arrangement in which the Realms share a non-political, hereditary monarchy, but each Realm’s Parliament has complete control of its own affairs, or you do not.   Jagmeet Singh does not appear to care much for Canada’s relationship with other Commonwealth countries.   Take India for example.   The relationship is a bit different because India is a republic within the Commonwealth rather than a Commonwealth Realm, but it still illustrates the point.   As embarrassing as the present Prime Minister’s behaviour on his trip to India a few years ago was, the relationship between the two countries would be much worse in the unlikely event Jagmeet Singh were to become Prime Minister.   He would probably not even be allowed into India.  Eight years ago he was denied an entry visa – the first elected member of a Western legislature to be so denied – because of his connection with the movement that wishes to separate the Punjab from India and turn it into a Sikh state called Khalistan, a movement that is naturally frowned upon in India where it has been responsible for countless acts of terrorism (it has committed such acts in Canada too).   Asked about it at the time, Singh placed all the blame for any harm done to the two countries relationship on India.

 

Which leads me back to where this essay started.   Just as Singh could not see that his support for the movement that produced the bombing of Air India Flight 182 in 1985 may possibly be a legitimate reason for India to ban him from their country and blamed any deterioration in the relationship between the two countries on India, so he cannot see that anything he has said or done could possibly be a reason why his party did so poorly in the last Dominion election and places the blame on the prejudices of Canadians.

 

If by some miracle he were to come a self-awaking and realize that instead of demanding that Canadians change in order to accommodate him that there might be something objectionable about him that he ought to be trying to fix, a logical step for him to take would be to try and emulate the last leader in his own party who truly had popular appeal.   If he were to do so, he would learn that that leader had a radically different attitude toward our country’s founding principles and fundamental institutions than his own.

 

The Honourable Jack Layton, the son of former Progressive Conservative MP Robert Layton, had this to say:

 

Some people think the NDP may want to get rid of the monarchy but I assure you that’s absolutely not the case.   My dad was a big time monarchist and so am I.

 

Jagmeet should try to be more like Jack.  He would be less of an ass if he did.

God Save the Queen

Over the course of several months last year, the media manufactured a scandal with regards to the Duke of York’s reluctance to drop his friendship with a notorious financier after the latter’s less respectable, depending upon how you view the world of finance, side-business as a pimp was exposed and he went to prison where he died in an apparent case of Arkancide. Between this and the media spotlight on all the doings and difficulties of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex culminating in what has been amusingly dubbed “Megxit” it is not surprising that the republicans have come crawling out of the woodworks like the creepy little beady-eyed, pointy-eared, worm-tailed, buck-toothed, vermin that they are. Could there be anything lower or sleazier, more base, more despicable, or more vile, rotten and cheap than to make use of her relatives to attack Her Majesty and the sacred, time-honoured, office she holds after a lifetime of faithful, dutiful, public service?

It is more surprising to see men of sound principles like Peter Hitchens say things like “I do not much like the British royal family”, which is the sentence with which he opened a recent e-article for First Things in which he gave an excellent and admirable defense of the institution of the monarchy but expressed his doubt that anyone of generations younger than that of the current occupant of the throne has had the upbringing necessary to bear the responsibilities of the office. Mr. Hitchens posed this to his readers as a personal conundrum – how could he reconcile his monarchism with his lack of enthusiasm for the next generations of the reigning House?

Mr. Hitchens’ dilemma reminds me in some ways of the attitude of the Right Honourable Alan Clark, who served as Conservative MP for Plymouth Sutton and later for Kensington and Chelsea and held the office of Junior Minister in three different Ministries under Margaret Thatcher. Clark, a British nationalist, believed in all of his country’s old institutions, including the monarchy, but spoke rather disdainfully of most living members of the Royal Family. He respected the Queen, more so her mother – who was still living in his day - and adored Princess Diana but that was about it. Clark, however, never gave any indication of any sort of internal struggle over the matter and, indeed, was similarly rude in the way he spoke of virtually everyone else, his own family included.

I don’t have this problem myself. I am both a monarchist and a royalist in the sense of believing in the institution of the monarchy and the principle of hereditary reign, but I also very much admire and respect Elizabeth II as a person and do, for the most part, like the royal family. The members of the family that I would, perhaps, like less than the others, are not in the immediate line of succession. I may disagree with His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales on the subject of climate change but that hardly constitutes grounds for disliking him and I happen to think that he will make an excellent king. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge also impress me as a couple that will do an admirable job of reigning when their time comes. With regards to the latter couple Mr. Charles Coulombe, an American Monarchist – yes, there are Americans of sane and sound principles out there – said the following in his recent article about “Megxit” for the Roman Catholic magazine Crisis:

Princess Grace threw herself into the greatest role of her career. Devoting herself entirely to her new country and to her husband’s work, she became the symbol of Monaco’s new image, for all that her children from time to time seemed to be trying to revert to dynastic type.

So, too, has Prince William’s consort and future queen done, despite her middle-class background.

Since I like and respect the present occupant of the throne, the heir apparent and the next in the line of succession I don’t foresee myself having to face the kind of internal struggle Peter Hitchens is dealing with. I did, however, read a passage a couple of decades ago that struck me as providing the answer for anyone of sound principles struggling with this sort of dilemma. It is found in Twenty Years After, the second of the three (1) novels written by Alexandre Dumas père which are loosely based on a previous novel that itself is loosely based on the life of Charles D’Artagnan, Captain of Louis XIV’s Musketeers. In the passage, the Count de la Fère – better known to fans of the series as Athos - visits the grave of Louis XIII where he gives the following advice to his son Raoul, the Viscount of Bragellone:

This is the sepulcher… of a man who was weak and without grandeur, but whose reign was, notwithstanding, full of important events. Above this king watches another man's spirit, as this lamp watches over this tomb, and lights it up. The latter was a real king, Raoul; the other only a phantom into which he put a soul. And yet so powerful is the monarchy among us, that he has not even the honor of a tomb at the feet of him for the glory of whom he wore out his life, — for that man, if he made this king an insignificant one, has made the kingdom great. And there are two things enclosed in the Louvre Palace, — the king who dies, and the royalty which does not. That reign has ended, Raoul; that minister so renowned, feared and hated by his master, has gone to the tomb, drawing after him the king whom he did not wish to leave alone for fear he should destroy his work, — for a king only builds up when he has God, or the spirit of God, near him. Yet then every one thought the cardinal's death a deliverance, and I, blind like my contemporaries, sometimes opposed the designs of the great man who held France's destiny in his hands, (2) and who, just as he opened or closed them, held her in check or gave her the impress of his choice. If he did not crush me and my friends in his terrible anger, it was without doubt that I should be able to say to you to-day: Raoul, learn ever to separate the king and the principle of royalty. The king is but man; royalty is the spirit of God. When you are in doubt as to which you should serve, forsake the material appearance for the invisible principle, for this is everything. Only God has wished to render this principle palpable by incarnating it in a man. Raoul, it seems to me that I see your future as through a cloud. It will be better than ours. We have had a minister without a king; you, on the contrary, will have a king without a minister. You will be able then to serve, love, and honor the king. If he prove a tyrant, — for power in its giddiness often becomes tyranny, (3) — serve, love, and honor the royalty; that is the infallible principle. That is to say, the spirit of God on the earth ; that is, that celestial spark which makes this dust so great and so holy that we, gentlemen of high condition indeed, are as unimportant before this body extended on the last step of this staircase as this body itself is before the throne of the Supreme Being. (I have added the bold for emphasis on the most relevant sentences)

Now back to the republicans.

I don’t know which group of republicans in Canada disgusts me the most.

There are the neo-Marxist professors who fill the heads of impressionable youth with nonsense about how “imperialism” and “colonialism” were the equivalent of fascism and Nazism. Our young people have become particularly vulnerable to this inane tripe since they have not been taught history properly. Otherwise they would know that it was precisely because Canada was member of the Imperial Commonwealth that we went to war with fascism and Nazism in 1939. It had absolutely nothing to do with some Americanized crusade for “democracy.” Young Canadians of that generation gladly signed up to go overseas because they felt it was their duty to their God, their King, and their country.

On a somewhat related note allow me to interject here a comment on the following remark from Mr. Hitchens’ First Things article:

The monarch, stripped of all ancient direct power, is now remarkably like the king on a chessboard—almost incapable of offensive action, but preventing others from occupying a crucial square and those around it.

My comment is simply this – that it is less than a century since we were given all the evidence we need of just how important this role actually is. It was because they had retained their king that the Italians were able to remove Mussolini from power, although they proved themselves to be extreme ingrates when they voted for a republic the year after the war ended. In Germany, where Hitler had taken advantage of the vacancy created by the empty thrones of the Hapsburg and Hohenzollern families to seize absolute power, those who sought to depose him had no such advantage. Thus, Claus von Stauffenberg and his associates – mostly Roman Catholic aristocrats with royalist and monarchical leanings – had to resort to an assassination plan which famously failed.

Then there are the “Canadian nationalists” who think that we should have a domestic head of state rather than a “foreign monarch.” These twits can’t seem to grasp the fact that it is a total contradiction in terms to profess a “nationalism” or a “patriotism” towards a country while denying its historical and traditional essence. Again, part of the problem is a lack of knowledge of history. If only the late, great, Donald Creighton were still around to enlighten them – although his legacy lives on in his books – The Road to Confederation, The Dominion of the North, Sir John A. Macdonald Volumes I and II, etc. if they could only be bothered to read them. Perhaps it is too much to expect people these days to be capable of reading anything longer than a poorly spelled text message. Contrary to the Liberal “Authorized Version” of Canadian History – our domestic equivalent of the Butterfield-rebutted nineteenth century Whig Interpretation – Canada’s is not the history of a country that followed the same path as the United States, only through the route of negotiation rather than revolution. Canada’s is the history of a country that defined itself as following a path from which the Americans diverged two and a half centuries ago - Loyalist instead of Revolutionary, royalist instead of republican. To deny this is to deny the historical and traditional essence of Canada, to deny the very country of which these people profess to be “patriots” and “nationalists.”

Somewhere between these two groups are the divisive agitators. By this, I mean those who attack the monarchy on the grounds that it is “offensive” to some group or another – originally French Canadians, more recently native aboriginals and immigrants. Again the lack of any sort of logical reasoning is apparent.

Whatever French Canadians might have historically thought of the defeat of General Montcalm at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham (1759) in the Seven Years’ War the fact of the matter is that when the Thirteen Colonies rebelled against the Crown in 1776 the French Canadians chose to side with the British and the Loyalists because they knew that they stood a much better chance of preserving their language, religion, and culture under the Crown that had guaranteed these things two years earlier than by siding with those whose rebellion had been in part an angry response to that very guarantee.

Something similar can be said with regards to the native aboriginals. When the time came to choose sides between the Crown and the Americans, first in the American Revolution then again in the War of 1812, the tribes overwhelmingly, although not unanimously, chose the side of the Crown. Indeed, many of them can be counted among the Loyalists who fled to Canada after the American Revolution. The first Anglican Church in Upper Canada, or Ontario as it is called in the vulgar tongue, was founded for Mohawk Indians who had fled to Canada as Loyalists. It is called Her Majesty’s Royal Chapel of the Mohawks and still stands in Brantford, Ontario.

As for more recent immigrants the reasoning of the divisive agitators assumes them to be either incredibly stupid – moving to a country with a constitution and sovereign monarch they disapprove of without having inquired into these basic facts about her – or subversives who have moved here to overthrow said constitution and sovereign. If either of these things were true this would be a case for a much stricter immigration policy and not a case against the monarchy.

W. L. Morton provided the answer to all of this sort of illogic in his The Canadian Identity:

[T]he moral core of Canadian nationhood is found in the fact that Canada is a monarchy and in the nature of monarchial allegiance. As America is united at bottom by the covenant, Canada is united at the top by allegiance. Because Canada is a nation founded on allegiance and not on compact, there is no pressure for uniformity, there is no Canadian way of life. Any one, French, Irish, Ukrainian or Eskimo, can be a subject of the Queen and a citizen of Canada without in any way changing or ceasing to be himself. (4)

Probably the republicans who annoy and disgust me the most are those who are also libertarians, social conservatives, people who have enough courage to be open opponents of the overt anti-white bigotry and racism that hides beneath the guise of the cult of diversity, pluralism, and multiculturalism, and/or Western regional populists who feel the prairie provinces have been treated very poorly by the government in Ottawa. They do not annoy and disgust me because they hold these other views. Quite the contrary, as I agree with each of these groups far more often than I do those who espouse the opposite of these views. While these groups don’t always agree between themselves – the first two hold views that are usually considered to be difficult to reconcile with each other – in Canada, they all have a common enemy in the Liberal Party.

It is the Liberals, more than any other party, that have expanded the size of government and created the present-day cultural climate that is hostile to freedom of association, thought, and expression. It is the Liberals who have done the most to promote abortion, easy divorce, and the various causes associated with the alphabet soup gang in Parliament and it is the Charter they introduced into the constitution in 1982 that turned the Supreme Court of Canada into an American-style body of social liberal activists. The Grits are also the most obvious enemies of the other two groups. While the Liberal Party has never been officially republican, republicanism has walked hand in hand with it throughout its history. It has had all of two ideas throughout the duration of that history. The first, which dominated the party until 1963, was “let us make Canada more like the United States”, and the second, which dominated the party from 1963 to 1984 was “let us make Canada more like the Soviet Union”, after which the party has survived by not thinking at all. Both of these ideas naturally incline towards republicanism since the United States and Soviet Unions were both republics. It was in the second period that the Liberal Party did everything it could to earn the undying enmity of the libertarians, social conservatives, et al. The Americans, after all, only seceded from the reign of their king, the Bolsheviks murdered theirs. It was in this same period that the Liberal Party’s inclinations towards republicanism became most pronounced and obvious as they removed the designation “Royal” from several government branches and downplayed the country’s title “Dominion”, chosen by Canada’s own Fathers of Confederation to denote our being a kingdom without being as likely to provoke an invasion from the republic to our south. Ironically, any libertarian, social conservative, white rights defender or Western populist who advocates republicanism is in a sense promoting the completion of what Pierre Trudeau started. I regard all such as traitors to their own principles.

The previous paragraph should not be construed as saying that the monarchy is or ought to be a partisan issue, but merely that the groups mentioned are untrue to their own principles if they support republicanism. While the most outspoken advocates of republicanism in Canadian history have come from within the socialist movement the same movement has also been represented by some of the finest supporters of the monarchy – constitutional expert Eugene Forsey, Tommy Douglas, and even the much more recent Jack Layton come to mind. The monarchy ought to have the support of all parties because it provides us with a head of state – the person whose office involves the duty of representing the country as a unified whole – who is above the process of partisan politics. How anyone could possibly fail to see this as a huge benefit considering what is happening below the 49th parallel at this very moment is beyond me.

Think about it for a moment: The partisans of one party control the House of Representatives, the partisans of the other party control the Senate. The elected head of state belongs to party that controls the Senate. The party that controls the House has voted to impeach the President. The real grounds behind their doing so, not the thin veil of spurious rationale offered to the House, is because they cannot stand the man and his party. The Senate, which must conduct the trial before the impeachment is final, is most likely to rule in the President’s favour, not because the charges against him are the farce that they are but because he is of their party.

Why would anyone want to imitate the constitutional arrangement that allows for this scenario?

So let the republicans crawl back into the sewers they came from, I say.

God Save the Queen!


(1) The Son of Porthos was written by Paul Mahalin, although it was published under the name of Dumas père and Louise de la Vallière and The Man in the Iron Mask were originally published as part of The Viscount of Bragellone.
(2) This is a reference to the plot of the first novel in the series, The Three Musketeers.
(3) This foreshadows the plot of The Viscount of Bragellone, in which Athos, who had failed to save Charles I of Britain in Twenty Years After assists, with D’Artagnan’s help, in the restoration of Charles II, serving the principle of royalty even though he has a falling out with his own king, Louis XIV, over the latter’s tyrannical acts.
(4) W. L. Morton, The Canadian Identity, Toronto, The University of Toronto Press, 1961, 1972, p. 95.

My Druthers

While I am, for the most part, opposed to the vulgar, Americanization, of the English language, the phrase I have chosen for the title of this essay, a late nineteenth century drawled American contraction of the words “would rather”, expresses the subject of this essay perfectly.

In the unlikely event that I have my druthers and the upcoming Dominion election turns out exactly the way I want it to the following is what will happen on October 21st.

First, Captain Airhead will be turfed out on his rear end in the most decisive negative vote in the history of Canada. I am talking zero seats being given to the Grits in the next Parliament.

Second, the New Democrats will also be reduced to non-party status and be finished once and for all.

Third, the Greens will form Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and will from here on out take the place on the left made vacant by the decimation of the Liberals and NDP.

Fourth, the Conservatives will receive a minority government. Nota bene, I said minority, not majority. The Conservatives wasted the last majority government they received under Stephen Harper and I have not the least doubt that they would do the same under Andrew Scheer.

Fifthly, holding the balance of power and propping up the minority Conservative government, will be Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada. My reasons for wanting this to happen rather than for Bernier to form the next government are twofold. First, I suspect that he and his party would drift left-ward if they actually formed the government. This would inevitably be the case if they received a minority government – any other party, including the Conservatives, holding the balance of power would exert a left-ward pull. Second, I think that by exerting the leverage they would hold in this position they could accomplish more of the excellent goals in their party platform than if they formed the government.

Remember, all of this is what I would like to see happen, not what I am predicting will happen. I doubt that anyone will be able to accurately forecast the outcome of this election and I think the likelihood of it turning out exactly the way I want is extremely slim. It would require, for one thing, that the Canadian right develop overnight a capacity for strategic voting that it has given no previous indication of possessing, unlike the Canadian left which used that very method to straddle us with Captain Airhead in the last Dominion election.

It provides me with no small amount of amusement that so many of those who would share the first and second of the above set of druthers get so irate at the suggestion that anything less than an outright majority government by the Conservatives – or People’s Party depending upon which sort of partisan they happen to be – would be acceptable, much less desirable. Obviously the leaders, candidates, and campaign teams of the parties cannot make anything less than a majority government their goal, but there is no good reason why right-of-centre thinkers outside of the aforementioned groups should not prefer a different outcome. It is the job of right-wing politicians to win elections by selling a right-wing platform to the electorate. It is not the job of the right-wing portion of the electorate to put those politicians into office in an unthinking manner, without asking hard questions and making hard demands of them. The attitude that the electorate owes them their votes has always been one of the most obnoxious aspects of smug, Grit, arrogance. It ought not to be imitated on the right. It is the duty of right-wing commentators of the fourth and, like this writer, fifth estates, to constantly remind right-wing politicians of right-wing principles and hold them accountable. It irritates me that those who think otherwise regard any criticism of the leaders of their preferred parties as being akin to campaigning for the left. I have even seen such nincompoops describe Ezra Levant, the same Ezra Levant whom the mainstream media equally absurdly labels a “right-wing extremist”, as a Liberal agent because of his criticism of Scheer. These fools think of elections in terms of salvation and cannot bear to hear anything negative about their would-be Messiahs. This is the way progressives view politics and there ought to be no room for it on the right.

Of course the sort of people I have been talking about are “conservatives” of a highly Americanized type. Over the last two to three decades I have watched them jettison virtually every principle that has historically and traditionally been considered right-wing to the point that only capitalism seems to be indispensable to them. Which is ironic because capitalism is not right-wing. The true right is anti-socialist not capitalist. It is anti-socialist because it is hierarchical and socialism is egalitarian and it is anti-socialist because it is strongly pro-property – even more so than classical liberalism – and being anti-property is the very essence of socialism. The true right, while anti-socialist, has always been willing to condemn the vulgarity and Philistinism of capitalism and its erosion of social and cultural mores.

The same people, I would point out, are often the ones who insist that if the Liberals win again the Western provinces, or at least Alberta, ought to separate from Canada. While they are right to believe that Ottawa has treated the Western provinces unjustly, especially whenever the Liberals headed by a Trudeau have been in government, I have no sympathy with this kind of separatism whatsoever. The separatists all talk about forming a republic, proving themselves to be liberals. Alan Clark, the military historian turned Tory statesman, best remembered for his Diaries, who served as a junior minister in the ministries of Trade and Defence under Margaret Thatcher, was a Powellite and Eurosceptic who after the vote on the Common Market told the Labour MP Dennis Skinner “I'd rather live in a socialist Britain than one ruled by a lot of f***ing foreigners.” To paraphrase the sentiment, and apply it to the matter at hand, I’d rather live in a socialist Canada with her traditional constitution than in any sort of ******* republic. (1)

This, by the way, is why I would like to see the Greens replace both the NDP and the Grits on the other side of Canada’s political spectrum. Elizabeth May, however crazy I think her climate-change alarmism is, and however annoying I find her other progressive twaddle like that nonsense about “white privilege” she was spouting at Monday’s debate, is sound on the constitution. (2) Jagmeet Singh, like most NDPers, (3) is not.

Allow me to conclude by returning to the subject of my druthers and pursuing it a bit further than the outcome of the imminent election.

First, Canada would undergo a major revival of sound Christian religion.

Second, to summarize paragraphs nine through twelve above, the Canadian right would abandon American neo-conservatism and return to genuine British/Canadian Toryism. This would mean that both the preservation of our constitution – the preservation of our constitution, mind you, and not the adoption of one more like that of the Americans - and opposition to moral, social, and cultural decay would take precedence over any economic and fiscal concerns.

Third, the Canadian right would make it a top priority to break the control of the progressive cartel over the majority of the fourth estate.

Fourth, they would make it another top priority to repeal the Canadian Human Rights Act and abolish the Canadian Human Rights Commission/Tribunals. Despite the name of the Act/Commission/Tribunal these do nothing to protect people from the arbitrary abuse of government power but rather enable that abuse by allowing the state to police the thoughts, intentions, and motives of Canadians. To demonstrate this to the public, all that needs to be done is to encourage them to actually read the Act. Then explain the difference between a non-discrimination policy – Her Majesty’s government will administer the law and justice fairly and justly without discriminating on the basis of X, Y, Z – and an anti-discrimination law in which the government unnecessarily interjects itself into private transactions and tells us that we cannot have certain thoughts or allow them to influence us in our interactions with others.

Fifth, they would work through the provincial legislatures – which have jurisdiction over the matter – to ensure that a Canadian civics in which our constitution, history, and heritage are respected becomes part of our educational system so much so that parties that want to destroy our constitution, turn the country into a republic, or break up Confederation, become completely unelectable.

Sixth, they will put Sir John A. Macdonald back on our money where he belongs, and restore any other monument to the leading Father of Confederation that has been removed for politically correct purposes.

I could probably add others but that is enough wishful thinking for now.

(1) In response to a recent post by Will S. at his Patriactionary blog about how the West should have recognized the Republic of China (Taiwan) as legitimate rather than the People’s Republic of China (Red China) I said: “Neither Republic is legitimate, as no republic is a legitimate form of government (I would allow for the possibility of two exceptions to this in all of human history – Switzerland and the defunct Confederate States of America). The West should have told all of China that until they restored the Quin dynasty and put the rightful heir of the House of Aisin Gioro back on the throne we would not recognize any Chinese government as being legitimate, with the People’s Republic being even less legitimate than the other one. Sadly, the West let the bloody Yanks do all the talking for the rest of us.”

(2) http://maplemonarchists.weebly.com/blog/monarchist-profile-elizabeth-may

(3) Tommy Douglas and Jack Layton, both deceased, are the only exceptions that really come to mind off the top of my head. Eugene Forsey, who in his heart was really a Conservative all his life regardless of which party he was nominally associated with at the time was a strong constitutionalist but he was never an NDPer. He left the CCF when it became the NDP.

Why We Need the Monarchy

With His Excellency, the Right Honourable David Johnston’s term as Governor General of Canada coming to an end a new vice-regal representative has been chosen. Her name is Julie Payette, she hails from Montreal, Quebec, and has an impressive resume albeit one that is rather unusual for the position for which she has been selected. At first a computer engineer, she underwent training as an astronaut in the 1990s and served in this capacity for most of the first decade of this century. Her experience as an astronaut included flights into space aboard both the Discovery and the Endeavour shuttles. The National Post quoted Robert Finch, the Dominion Chairman of the Monarchist League of Canada, as saying that this breaking of new ground in appointing someone whose experience is outside the political provides “a good opportunity for her to elevate that office right across the country.” Juxtaposed with Finch’s comments was one by Philippe Lagasse of Carleton University who is quoted as saying:

The reaction might be, well, look, why do we need Royals when we can have such stellar people as our head of state, as opposed to our head of state’s representative? It calls into question, I would say, the necessity of having the monarchy.

Thanks to decades of failure on the part of our educational system to teach our history and civics with the respect they deserve there are many, sadly, who would like to complete the Liberal Party’s agenda of Americanizing our country by turning it into a republic. While this sentiment is most often found on the left, there are, sadly, a number of prominent neoconservatives – or perhaps pseudoconservatives would be the more appropriate term – such as Anthony Furey, Lorne Gunter, and J. J. McCullough who have also indicated their support for republicanism. Conversely, of course, there are a handful of individuals on the left who as staunch monarchists are better conservatives than the aforementioned. Green Party leader Elizabeth May is one, the late leader of the NDP, Jack Layton, was another. The following is my answer to republicans, whether of the left or the phony right, who raise this question.

First, the false Canadian nationalism that says that we should become a republic and have someone who was born and who lives here as our head of state, goes against the very idea of Canada.

150 years ago the Fathers of Confederation had a certain idea in mind when they founded our country. The building blocks out of which they fashioned the Dominion of Canada were the provinces of the British Empire that had remained loyal when the Thirteen Colonies rebelled and which had fought alongside the British army in repelling the American invaders in the War of 1812. The idea the Fathers of Confederation had, was to join these provinces into a federation that would be large enough and strong enough to resist being pulled into the orbit of the United States whose institutions would not be drawn up from scratch based on the abstract ideals of Enlightenment philosophy, like those of the United States, but would be borrowed with some appropriate adaptation from those of the United Kingdom with which we would deliberately maintain our connection. The monarchy that America’s Fathers rejected, the Fathers of Confederation embraced and to say that Canada ought to replace the monarch with some other kind of head of state is like saying that the United States ought to abandon “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for “death, slavery, and the pursuit of misery.”

Second, a hereditary, royal, monarch is the best possible head of state. Although this is considered heresy in our democratic modern age it is nevertheless easily demonstrated to be true. A legislative assembly consists of elected representatives. Except for city-states small enough to include all of their citizens in the assembly this will inevitably the case. Our legislative assembly, the House of Commons, is formed by members elected as the representatives of constituencies. This, by the way, is the best way to elect an assembly. The alternatives, such as proportional representation, that are much touted by progressives today, would have the effect of producing a more partisan, ideological, assembly in which the representatives, even more than is already the case, would be accountable only to their party and its party line. This would in no way be an improvement. The members are ideological and partisan enough as it is, but it is the role of each to represent and speak for the interests of the constituency which elected him. None of them represents the country as a whole, nor do the parties to which they belong. Even the Prime Minister, who heads the party that commands at most a majority, often merely a plurality, of the elected members, does not represent the country as a whole. This most important of roles falls to the head of state. For the head of state to perform this role properly she must be above partisan politics. This cannot be the case if the office is filled by popular election. Consider last year’s presidential election in our southern neighbour, the hostility and division it generated and how the United States remains bitterly divided still.

There is another dimension to the way in which a royal monarch can represent the whole of a country in its unity better than any president. A royal monarch inherits the throne from those who reigned over the country in past generations and passes the throne on to those who will reign over future generations. A monarchy, therefore, embodies and represents the organic unity of a country over time. This is sorely needed in our day and age as a counter to the temptation to forget the past and ignore the future in pursuit of our interests in the present.

Those who point to the unpopularity of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales in comparison with his mother as an argument for breaking with the monarchy at the next secession fail completely to grasp these points. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are very popular indeed but the republicans see the relative unpopularity of the Prince of Wales in the present as an excuse for robbing future generations of a more popular king and queen. Furthermore, it is precisely the fact that the monarchy does not derive its legitimacy from the fickle whims of a present day electorate but from tradition, that the monarch can transcend partisan politics to represent the country as a whole. Those who make an idol out of democracy would do well to pay heed to G. K. Chesterton’s wise words about how “tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.”

It is a fiction of liberal and American thought that equates hereditary monarchy with tyranny. Plato and Aristotle knew better and warned that democracy was the seed from which tyranny springs. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is called both “the father of modern democracy” and “the father of totalitarianism” for a reason. The government should be the voice of the “general will” of the people, he maintained – democracy – and those who dissent from the general will must be “forced to be free” and if he resists exiled or put to death – totalitarianism. Those most susceptible to being corrupted by power are those who desire it for themselves and to be elected to office, a person must first run, thereby indicating his desire for power. Tyrants, typically, begin as demagogues who rally the masses behind them and history’s most notorious despots are those who saw themselves as belonging to and speaking for the common folk, as the first among equals or, in Orwell’s phrase “Big Brother.”

The monarch who, by contrast, stands in loco parentis to the nation is a safeguard against tyranny. Sir Winston Churchill famously observed that had we not at the insistence of the Americans forced the monarchs of Austria and Germany off their thrones at the end of the First World War, Adolf Hitler would never have risen to power. In our own country freedom, as John Farthing and Eugene Forsey pointed out, “wears a crown” and the Liberal Party started us down the path to Prime Ministerial dictatorship eighty-nine years ago by challenging the royal prerogative to refuse a requested dissolution of Parliament and so hold the Prime Minister accountable to the assembly.

Our monarchy is, as the Fathers of Confederation intended, the source of internal unity in our country. The first English Canadians were the Loyalists who refused to join in the Thirteen Colonies’ rebellion against the Crown, were consequently persecuted by the American republicans, and fled up here. It was also the Crown which offered protection to the language, religion, and culture of the French Canadians against Puritan bigotry and with whom the native tribes entered into treaties. Immigrants who wish to become citizens have been required to pledge their allegiance to the monarchy thus joining them into our national unity. The monarchy is also, however, and this is my final point, our connection with something beyond our own borders, something larger than our own country.

It is as Queen of Canada that Elizabeth II reigns over us. It is as the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland that she reigns over Great Britain. The distinction between the two crowns is an important one because the one country is not subservient to the other. That the same person wears both crowns is also important because it joins the two countries with each other – and with Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Grenada, Jamaica, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu over each of which Elizabeth II reigns as Queen. The crowns are distinct, none of these countries is subservient to any of the others, and each parliament passes laws for its own country and not for the others. Yet through the Queen who reigns over all of us we are connected.

A connection with other nations of this sort that in no way infringes upon our own right to pass our own laws and determine our own policies is a rare and precious heritage. The kind of “nationalism” that would throw this away is introspective and short-sighted and completely out of sync with the spirit of the Fathers of Confederation. Let us, as true Canadian patriots, ever be on our guard against this kind of thinking.

Congratulations to Julie Payette on her appointment. May she remember what Liberal nominees have been prone to forget in recent decades, that the job of the Governor General is to represent the Queen in Canada and not to represent Canada to the world.

God save the Queen!

Justin Trudeau Expands His Vocabulary

So it turns out the t word is part of Justin Trudeau’s vocabulary after all.

You would never have known it from his verbal responses to the countless acts of jihad that have been waged against Western countries since that ill-fated day when he became the Prime Minister of our country. We have heard him condemn the violence of these acts and use such banal adjectives as “senseless” to describe it, but we were stuck listening to the crickets chirp and counting the tumbleweeds rolling by as we sat around waiting for him to use the obvious word – “terrorism.” That he seemed to be allergic to this term was something that had been observed and commented on even before he won the right to lead Her Majesty’s Canadian government by winning the 2015 general election. In the fall of the year prior, two young Canadians who had become alienated from their own country, traditions and people and converted to Islam and pledged their loyalty to the Islamic State, launched their own personal jihads in our Dominion’s capital of Ottawa and in the Quebec city of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu. Trudeau eventually conceded that these were acts of terrorism when they were labelled as such by the RCMP investigators but why was a statement of what was obvious treated as a concession?

Well that certainly changed this weekend when someone shot up a mosque in Quebec City. As the Prime Minister’s butt-kissing sycophants and toadies in the press set about scrubbing the early reports of the incident to eliminate details out of sync with the official narrative that somebody has obviously ordered them to push, Trudeau set a record in the speed with which he denounced the shooting as an act of terrorism, almost as if he had a speech prepared and ready for the occasion.

What is objectionable in this is not that the Prime Minister was quick to denounce the mosque shooting as an act of terrorism. Shooting up a place of worship and murdering the worshippers obviously falls into this category. The problem is all those other occasions when he dithered and dawdled and danced around the obvious. Trudeau was quick to call a spade a spade where terrorism is concerned when Muslims were the victims, but avoided doing so like the plague when Muslims were the perpetrators. Is the one kind of terrorism worse than the other in Trudeau’s eyes?

The official narrative being pushed by the propaganda arm of the Liberal Party, aka the Canadian media is that the shooting was the work of a lone gunman, a French Canadian named Alexandre Bissonnette. Details that came out in the first reports while the story was fresh but which do not support the official narrative have been either scrubbed or, when this was not possible, reinterpreted. Initially, eye-witnesses within the mosque testified to multiple shooters who shouted “Allahu Akbar.” This detail, which contradicts the Prime Minister’s narrative, was quickly scrubbed. That a second suspect, a Moroccan Muslim named Mohamed Belkhadir had been taken into custody by the police, was reinterpreted to fit the narrative. He is now identified as a “witness”, despite having been identified as a “suspect” in the initial police press conference. In the absence of any official confession or statement of motive on the part of Bissonnette the media has been cherry picking details from his Facebook page to support its narrative of his being motivated by what they call “far right”, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, nativism. Their evidence for this is that he “liked” Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen on Facebook. He also “liked” Jack Layton and the NDP. It would no doubt come as a great surprise to the late Jack Layton to learn that he and the socialist party he led have undergone a dramatic shift to the far right of the political spectrum six years after his death.

I suspect it will be decades, if ever, before we learn the full truth of what happened that night. The Prime Minister’s office has been leaning heavily on the media, Canadian and otherwise, to make sure that only their approved version of the incident gets reported. You can be sure that when the PMO gets this involved in the reporting of a news story it is not to ensure that the truth comes out. Trudeau is determined to exploit the deaths of these Quebec Muslims for the gratification of his own ego and the furtherance of his personal political agenda. If that strikes you as being a little harsh then you are clearly unfamiliar with the ice-cold, calculating, love and worship of power in the dead, soulless, vacuum that lies behind the pretty boy exterior of Justin Trudeau and the grating, superficial, personality that he seemingly plagiarized from Barney the purple dinosaur. Indeed, the incident could hardly have served his purposes better if he had planned and arranged it himself.

It came after several weeks of humiliation for the federal premier in which he toured Canada in a failed attempt to restore the lustre of his image after it had taken several devastating hits over his Clintonesque cash-for-access behaviour such as the scandal over the family vacation he had accepted on an island owned by the Aga Khan. In city after city, in townhall style meetings, he was subjected to difficult questions about matters such as why he was trying to make things even harder for people already struggling to make ends meet by jacking up the cost of living with a carbon tax. It did not help that he was caught speaking out of both sides of his mouth on the question of the oil sands. To an audience in Peterborough, Ontario, presumably one sympathetic to such tree hugging drivel, he said that the oil sands needed to be phased out. This left him trying to explain to an audience in Calgary that he did not really mean to drive even more Albertans out of work and inflict further damage on their province’s already struggling economy. He was in need of a sleight-of-hand to distract the public from their growing awareness of just how pathetic a disgrace to the office of Her Majesty’s first minister he is.

This shooting incident not only provided him with that distraction it came at just the appropriate time to allow him to grandstand and show off his supposed moral superiority over American President Donald Trump. Two days before the shooting Trump had enraged liberals around the world by daring to put the security and wellbeing of his country ahead of political correctness by issuing a four month halt to the admission of refugees and a three month temporary ban on entrance to the United States from seven countries that are significant sources of jihadi terrorism. The day after this and the day before the shooting Trudeau sent out a tweet that, while worded as a statement of non-discriminatory policy in the admission of refugees, was clearly intended to mean that those who were excluded from the United States by the Trump ban would be welcome in Canada. To deliberately throw out the welcome mat to those excluded from another country on the basis of the high level of security risk they present is to say that you place diversity, tolerance, and non-discrimination ahead of the security and wellbeing of your country and its citizens. To Trudeau and his international admirers this may be an indication of virtue but to any sensible person it is an indication of gross stupidity and utter villainy.

Then along comes the shooting, and an airbrushed media narrative which seems to be designed to justify forcing ordinary Canadians yet again to pay the price for Trudeau’s peacocking his “tolerance”, “understanding” and “compassion” to his global audience. The Liberal Party has a history of infringing upon the traditional rights of Canadians to think and speak freely, whenever they want to shove acceptance of their values down our throats and to chastise Canadians for this-or-that thought crime. The father of the present Prime Minister was notoriously bad for this and a Liberal MP has already placed a bill that would condemn Islamophobia before the House. The bill was introduced long before the shooting. You would almost think they knew in advance it was coming.