Kenney Gets it Backwards Again

Jason Kenney, the former premier of Alberta who had been a Cabinet minister in the Dominion government during the premiership of Stephen Harper, has recently attracted attention again for his criticism of Candice Malcolm and her Juno News.  On Monday, 16 February, Malcolm hosted Daniel Tyrie, who at one time was the executive director of Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party and who is currently the chairman of the Dominion Society of Canada which he co-founded last year, on her podcast, the Candice Malcolm Show.  The topic of the interview was immigration and national identity, unsurprisingly as this is the focus of the Dominion Society, and in the course of the interview creative solutions to the problems created by the aggressive promotion of mass immigration in recent decades were discussed. 

 

That Kenney objected to this is also not surprising.  While the Liberal government under its previous leader Captain Airhead highly publicized its aggressive promotion of mass immigration the actual policy was virtually identical during the Harper premiership in which Kenney was the minister responsible for this sort of thing.  The most significant difference is that Harper and Kenney did not peacock what they were doing to the extent that Captain Airhead later did.

 

Kenney responded to the interview on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.  He opened by accusing Tyrie of being a racist, then included a self-righteous mini-rant about the immorality of racism, then asked what “remigration” meant as if the term wasn’t self-explanatory and suggested an interpretation that presented the concept in the worst possible light.

 

Malcolm, defending the interview from this and similar criticism from progressive sources, correctly argued that her job as an interviewer wasn’t to agree or disagree with her interviewee and that the topic was an important one worthy of discussion.  Later that week in another tweet – or whatever you are supposed to call that now – Kenney stated “they are getting more attention from ostensibly sane right wing media.  We have to maintain hygiene within the conservative movement by calling this stuff out.”  The spirit of Bill Buckley lives on!

 

In my right opinion, Kenney has got things backwards.  He thinks that Malcolm has tainted her platform by allowing Tyrie to appear on it.  On the contrary, I think that a better case can be made that it is Tyrie who risked tainting himself and his organization by appearing on the Candice Malcolm Show.   Over the course of the past year Juno News has promoted all sorts of odious things such as the Alberta separatist movement.  If Malcolm can be charged with giving a platform to someone who ought not to be given one it should be over her interview with Diane Francis last year, right at the time when the American president was shooting his mouth off daily about making our country “the 51^st state”, over Francis’s repugnant vision of a business-merger type joining of Canada with her country of birth.  Juno’s continuing admiration for Krasnov the Orange despite his degeneration into a petty tyrant who completely disregards the constitutional limitations of his office or the fact that it does not come with jurisdiction over the entire world and of the MAGA movement despite its having turned into a cult for whom its leader can accomplish anything but can do no wrong, is utterly disgusting.  This is a pity, because on many matters from  pretty much everything concerning the bat flu scare to the false narrative concerning the residential schools to the wave of arsons and other vandalism of church buildings, Malcolm and her organization have been far more reliable and trustworthy than the legacy or mainstream media. 

 

It was not entirely unexpected, however.  Malcolm and True North/Juno are neo-conservative which means that they consider the American conservative movement to be the measuring stick of conservatism.  The American conservative movement, however, unlike the classical Canadian Toryism expounded in John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown, the essays of Stephen Leacock, and the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker’s speeches collected and published as Those Things We Treasure, was never authentically conservative but was rather eighteenth to nineteenth century liberalism resisting liberalism’s twentieth century convergence with socialism.  Long before last year, neo-conservative organizations like Malcom’s displayed an extremely unpatriotic preference for the country built on liberalism, the United States of America, over our own country with her genuinely conservative, Loyalist, foundation. 

 

Lest you think I am being unfair to the neo-conservatives allow me to point out two ways in which this preference has long been evident.  The first is the way in which negative attitudes towards the United States are treated as compared to negative attitudes towards Canada.  On Malcom’s Juno News, as on its predecessor True North and their sister organization, Ezra Levant’s Rebel News, anti-American attitudes are treated as being something akin to mental disease. (1)   This is rather ironic when you consider that authentic conservatism, in Canada and elsewhere, historically has been highly suspicious of and skeptical towards the United States.  Diefenbaker, the last authentic Canadian conservative to hold office as prime minister, responded to criticism from the left that he was too negative in his views towards the United States by saying “I am not anti-American, I am very pro-Canadian.” The point, however, is that anti-Canadianism is not similarly treated as mental contagion by the neo-conservatives.  Some forms of it, like the attempts by progressives to “cancel” historical figures like Sir John A. Macdonald, they have rightly opposed, but other forms, such as that of the Alberta separatists get a free pass from them. 

 

The second way in which the neo-conservative anti-patriotism has long been evident is itself a form of anti-Canadianism.  Neo-conservatives have long seemed incapable of criticizing the Liberals when they, the Liberals, are in government, without framing it as an attack on Canada and her institutions.  During the previous premiership, instead of “the Grits are incompetent, Captain Airhead is an ass, and this party and its leader should not be entrusted to look after a broom closet let alone govern our country” what we kept getting from the neo-conservatives was “Canada is broken.” 

Ironically, of course, in their anti-patriotism, the neo-conservatives do not resemble the American conservatives they admire so much but rather the Hollywood liberals who keep threatening to leave their country whenever they lose an election.

 

Let Sir Walter Scott’s timeless judgement be the final word on those of this ilk:

 

If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.

 

This sort of aggressively pro-American anti-patriotism is something that Tyrie and his organization can ill-afford to be associated with.  While the Dominion Society was only founded last year and I cannot pretend to have followed everything it has said and done, I am familiar enough with it to be confident in saying that it is best described as an advocacy organization dedicated to a single issue, that issue being the preservation and restoration of historical Canada from the deleterious effects of mass immigration.  There are two reasons why activists for this cause cannot afford to be associated with neo-conservatism.  The first is what we have already discussed about the nature of neo-conservatism.  A movement that has long wanted Canada to be more like the United States can be no friend to the cause of preserving and restoring historical Canada.  If the Dominion Society and its founders don’t understand why this is the case they would do well to read the works of the dean of Canadian history, Donald Creighton and learn to distinguish Canada’s true story from the Liberal Version shared by the neo-conservatives.

 

The second reason is that the neo-conservatives continue to admire the current American president who has been poisoning the public mind against the correction of the excesses of mass immigration through association with himself.  I have come to suspect that this is deliberate on his part.  A little under twenty years ago a crack opened up in the wall that had kept criticism of mass immigration and the deliberate and rapid increase in diversity outside the Overton Window.  This was about the time that Harvard University professor and political scientists Robert Putnam made public the findings of a five-year research project that showed that, in the short term at least, increasing ethnic diversity within a community reduced its social capital so that people had less trust, not merely in the other but in members of their own group.  Putnam did not intend this as criticism of immigration or diversity and, indeed, delayed publishing his research because he did not want it used as such, but it opened a crack which grew wider and wider until it appeared that the wall would imminently collapse and sane and open discussion of this topic would enter the sphere of public and polite discussion from which it had been excluded for decades.  Then Krasnov the Orange, the real estate developer turned public entertainer, made another career change and entered politics.  Claiming to be a political outsider, he ran for president of the United States on the issue of immigration.  In actuality, his position on immigration was not significantly different from that of the mainstream Republicans.  He did not promise to undo fifty years of a failed experiment in social engineering by means of mass immigration.  He merely promised to enforce the United States’ immigration laws and keep people from entering illegally.  Nevertheless, his supporters and opponents alike mistook him to be taking a much stronger stand on immigration than he was, and in other Western countries experiencing the consequences of the aforementioned failed social experiment immigration reformers were emboldened and inspired by him.  Then came his second term in office.  Perhaps something snapped in his brain forming the thought “they keep calling me Hitler, I’ll give them Hitler.” (2)  Perhaps, and more likely in my opinion, it had been the intention of his controllers in the international Communist movement all along to use him to discredit the growing opposition to their mass immigration social experiment.  Either way, his actions upon his return to office have put any idea or cause associated with him in the public mind, no matter how good or necessary it may be on its own merits, in danger of being set back for decades to come.

 

No, Tyrie and his society would do well, if they wish to go anywhere with their cause, to avoid any association with either the anti-patriotic neo-conservatives in Canada or the American MAGA cult.

 

I would recommend that they look to Enoch Powell.  Powell was a British classical scholar turned World War II military intelligence officer turned Tory statesman.  Although in some ways, primarily monetarism and free market economics, he was a forerunner to Margaret Thatcher, his was a more authentic Toryism.  He did not admire the United States the way Thatcher did, but referred to her as “our terrible enemy” in a letter written during World War II and in his subsequent career always distrusted her and opposed her efforts to flex her muscle around the world.  In one well-known incident, he showed Thatcher what true Tory patriotism looks like when he told her “No, we do not fight for values. I would fight for this country even if it had a Communist government.”  

 

Powell is most remembered, however, perhaps unfortunately considering his long list of achievements, for a speech he gave in 1968 in which he condemned the way the Labour government of Harold Wilson was needlessly importing American-style racial strife into the United Kingdom by bringing in immigrants in numbers far in excess of what British communities could absorb without friction and by trying to force harmony on everyone with heavy-handed legislation in imitation of the US Civil Rights Act something which anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together would recognize as doomed to accomplish the opposite of what was intended.  Powell, like all sane men of his and all previous generations who grew up without being brainwashed into the cult of diversity, knew instinctually what it took Putnam five years of research to discover.  The speech instantly made Powell the most popular man in the UK, but it was immediately condemned as incitement of racial hatred by progressives in the media and the Labour Party and its orator was labelled by the same a “racialist.”  In reality, of course, it was Wilson’s policies which were generating racial strife and so by opposing them, Powell was doing the exact opposite of inciting racial hatred. 

 

Kenney’s accusations against Tyrie are the same as those that were made against Powell after his 1968 Birmingham speech.  They ought not to be taken seriously.  In the 1960s, all the countries in the civilization formerly known as Christendom embraced the insane and absurd idea that increasing ethnic diversity as much as possible and as fast as possible can have only beneficial and no deleterious results.  They did this because the United States had emerged from the two World Wars as the dominant power in that civilization and everyone else thought they had to imitate her even though she at the time was obviously in the midst of a pendulum swing from one form of toxic racial politics into an equally toxic opposite form.  This idea, which is the basis of the social experiment to which the former Christendom has been subjected ever since, is so obviously wrong that it could not withstand even the slightest of scrutiny and so it has been protected ever since by ad hominem attacks on anyone who dares express dissent, attacks designed to prevent people from considering what the dissident has to say by imputing to him irrational prejudice and hatred, subscription to some odious racial ideology or another, or both and while irrational prejudices and hatreds undoubtedly exist as do odious racial ideologies, rarely do these accusations have any basis in fact.  The interesting thing about the word “racist” which Kenney called Tyrie is that it seems to have actually been coined to be used in this way and so has never been a word that admits of good faith usage but could actually be called an anti-word because it exists, not as the means of conveying information and ideas, but as the means of stopping discussion and debate.  Kenney professes to be a Roman Catholic Christian.  Perhaps he ought to think long and hard about whether using this word is an automatic violation of the eighth commandment by his Church’s method of numbering. (3)

 

I very much doubt, however, that Kenney lies awake at night worrying about whether he is bearing false witness against his neighbour or not.  I have long observed that those who consider themselves to be on a moral crusade against racism think truth to be an acceptable sacrifice in the name of carrying out this endeavor and that the more committed they are to this crusade, or at least the more prominently it is featured in their own self-promotion, the less compunctions they have about telling falsehoods about those they consider to be racists.  Twice in Canadian history, people who wanted the government to aggressively clamp down on racism assisted some stooge in founding a neo-nazi organization that in reality resembled the World Council of Anarchists from G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (it consisted entirely of undercover policemen rather than actual anarchists) in order to generate public fear of a threat that was obviously non-existent if it required such measures in order to create the scare.

 

The ethical reasoning that seems to justify this sort of deception to those who perpetrate it, although it may not always be consciously formulated as such in their own minds, is something like this: a) the world is divided into good people and evil people, b) racists are evil people, therefore c) anything done in the name of fighting racists is justified.   While that conclusion would not follow even if both premises were completely true because that does not even come close to being a valid syllogism the thinking that underlies at least the first premise is not sound by the standards of orthodox Christian moral theology and, indeed, in it can be recognized a form of the dualism of the third century Persian false prophet Mani, against whose heresy St. Augustine wrote extensively having been drawn to it himself prior to his conversion. (4) 

 

Many, probably most, of those who joined Kenney in decrying Tyrie’s appearance on the Candice Malcolm Show relied upon a single authority for their idea of what the Dominion Society and its founders are all about.  That authority is the Canadian Anti-Hate Group.   With this group, as with all others of its kind, nothing they say should be believed unless they can prove it, down to the minutest detail, with evidence that would meet the standard of proof in a court of criminal law, that is, beyond the shadow of any reasonable doubt. This group, founded early in the premiership of Captain Airhead who heavily subsidized it, was based on the model of a similar organization in the United States that funded its founding.  The parent organization, once the go to when American media needed an “expert” to pontificate on racism, has been largely discredited in the last ten years as the organization lost a number of defamation suits, its founder was ousted after being accused of, among other things, racism, law enforcement agencies began to disassociate themselves from it, and the public came increasingly to see it as a racket that was more about using the fear of racial hatred to raise funds rather than raising funds to combat racial hatred.  I have seen no evidence that would suggest that CAHN is any better and everything that I have seen suggests the exact opposite of that.  Its founding chairman, in his previous role with the new defunct Canadian Jewish Congress (5), first came to my attention when he was lobbying the government to strip several Ukrainian and German refugees from Communism of their citizenship in their old age and have them deported to stand trial for war crimes.  The men in question, had been captured by the Nazis when they overran their countries (the Germans were ethnic Germans who lived in countries other than Germany) during World War II and forced to serve by means such as holding their families captive and threatening harm to them if they did not comply.  To sane people, like the late Peter Worthington of the Toronto Sun, these men were clearly victims of the Third Reich.  To Bernie Farber, however, the fact that they served under duress and the fact that they served mostly in roles such as translator, meant nothing, he considered them to be collaborators, culpable in the crimes of the regime that forced them to serve at gunpoint, literal and metaphorical. 

 

This blindness and/or indifference to the difference between the actual historical Nazis and people they forced to serve them is more than sufficient to justify dismissing claims to expertise on such matters from this source and completely disregarding what he and his ilk have to say about contemporary individuals and groups like Tyrie and the Dominion Society.

 

So no, Candice Malcom was not tainting her platform by allowing Tyrie to speak for the Dominion Society on it.  Challenging the idea behind the experiment in social engineering through mass immigration that has been ongoing from the ‘60’s to the present that the more you increase ethnic diversity and the faster the better, an idea that has far too long been protected from scrutiny, is more like a breath of fresh air than a contagion. (6)  If anything, the contagion went in the other direction, the contagion that is, of Americanist neo-conservatism.

 

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 (1)   Indeed, the only country negative attitudes towards which are more quickly condemned by the neo-conservatives than those towards the United States, is Israel, the tail that has wagged the American dog since the Lyndon Johnson administration.

(2)   When the left likens Krasnov to Hitler, as they have been doing since before his first term, it is because in their fevered brains his immigration policies resemble Hitler’s racial ideology.  The two are nothing alike.  In Hitler’s thinking, the races were involved in a Darwinian struggle against each other that was a winner-take all zero-sum game.  Krasnov’s is a civil, not a racial, nationalism.  This remains true in his second term.  Where he has begun to resemble Hitler is in the following areas: a) disregard for constitutional limits on the powers of his office, b) threatening other countries and making territorial demands, c) the optics of his crackdown on illegal immigration.  With regards to the last mentioned, illegal immigration has been a problem demanding a crackdown for decades, but the way it is being done seems to be deliberately evoking images of Nazi or Soviet secret police – faceless, unaccountable, demanding to see one’s papers.

(3)   My own Church, the Anglican, like the Jews, the Eastern Orthodox, and all other Protestants except the Lutherans, consider it as the ninth commandment.

(4)   Mani’s dualism erred by reifying evil which in orthodox Christian theology “exists” not as a thing but in the way the hole left in a wall after you accidentally drive your car through it might be said to “exist” in the wall.  God created everything good, evil is a defect in goodness not a created “thing”, it possesses neither form nor substance.  The idea of an eternal struggle between an equally or almost equally matched good and evil, light and darkness, while a popular theme in Hollywood, is false.  There is a conflict in the spiritual realm, but this conflict is not eternal, it had a beginning and it will end in the total defeat of the evil side, the two sides are nowhere near being evenly matched, and evil, even in the being that initiated the conflict by rebelling against God, is a self-imposed defect in the goodness with which he was created.  The idea that the world is divided into good and evil people is ultimately derived from Manichean dualism.  In orthodox Christian theology, such a division is the result of the Final Judgement at the end of time, not a description of the state of affairs in time.  Note that St. Augustine was not merely the great opponent of Manichaeism but of Pelagianism as well and in opposing Pelagianism he upheld the orthodox doctrine of Original Sin, that in Adam all fell so that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”, from which condition the Son of God entered human history in order to rescue and redeem us.  When the final division into the “righteous” and “wicked” takes place at the end of time, the latter will be those who rendered their sinful condition incurable by finally rejecting redeeming grace.  A system that divides people into good and evil in time and demands repentance from those it considers to be evil while offering them nothing in the way of redemption, forgiveness, and cleansing is fundamentally Manichean and must be recognized and condemned as such by all orthodox Christians. 

(5)   This organization features in the first of the Man Who Was Thursday incidents.  Farber was not involved, of course, since it took place in 1965, almost two decades before he started working for the CJC and while he was still a teenager. In this year a man named John Beattie started a “Canadian Nazi Party” which the CJC hired an ex-cop named John Garrity to infiltrate.  There was not much more to this group than the two of them.  When Ezra Levant wrote about the incident in his 2009 book Shakedown the CJC denied that their purpose had been to facilitate the passing of hate speech legislation.  They had long been lobbying for such legislation, however, and 1965 had begun with Lester Pearson appointing the Special Committee on Hate Propaganda in Canada to look into the matter.  This committee, called the “Cohen Committee” after its chairman Maxwell Cohen of McGill University included among its members Saul Hayes, then executive vice president of the CJC and Pierre Trudeau who would succeed Pearson and Liberal leader and prime minister and who early in his premiership would act upon the committee’s report and pass the first hate propaganda legislation.  Given this historical context, does the CJC’s denial decades later seem at all credible?

(6)   It should go without saying that the challenging ideas should not just be accepted uncritically either but should be weighed and allowed to stand or fall on their own merits.

Danielle Smith Spoke the Truth

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Fires and Fire Extinguishers

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

What would constitute a fire?

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

God Save the Queen!

 

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

Abstract Flags

 

One of the bad habits of the age in which we live is the habit of turning abstract terms into flags, running them up the pole, and demanding that everybody salute them or be denounced as a traitor. 

 

This habit can be found on both sides of the political spectrum.   This is, for example, what neoconservatives do with the term “liberty” and its synonym “freedom”.   Up until about a century ago it was self-identified liberals who did this these terms but that is the nature of neoconservatism.   Irving Kristol defined a neoconservative as a “liberal who has been mugged by reality”.  Neoconservatism is yesterday’s liberalism.   Think back two decades to the events of 9/11 and the “War on Terror” that ensued.   The American President at the time, George W. Bush, his Cabinet, and his supporters all maintained that 9/11 had been an attack on American “liberty” by people who hated Americans for their “freedom” and that their “War on Terror” would be fought on behalf of said freedom.   They ran freedom up the flagpole, demanded that everyone salute, and denounced everyone that was not 100% behind everything they were doing as a traitor to liberty.

 

By turning “freedom” and “liberty” into flags, and proclaiming their allegiance to them, however, they avoided accountability for how their actions were affecting the actual freedoms and liberties of American citizens.   In order to fight the “War on Terror” on behalf of the abstract flag of “freedom”, they permanently and exponentially expanded the powers of their government and created a national surveillance state.   It is a strange sort of “freedom” and one that does not much resemble the traditional understanding of the word that can be defended in this way.  

 

This, of course, is the problem with this habit of making flags out of abstract terms.   Allegiance to the term as a flag is required of people, but it is all that is required, not any sort of consistent, intelligent, understanding of the term.

 

Progressives are just as prone to this bad habit as conservatives.   Indeed, they are much worse.    In the previous example it was noted that the abstraction the neoconservatives were saluting as a flag had originally been run up the pole by liberals, who are progressives and this is true of most of the abstractions that today’s conservatives salute.   Progressives are the ones who make the abstract terms into flags, then, when they have decided that the flag they were saluting yesterday is no longer “modern” (1), they abandon it to the conservatives and make a new one.   “Democracy” is an abstract flag that progressives created and neoconservatives adopted even though the progressives have not abandoned it.   Both sides frequently accuse the other of betraying “democracy”.   This is one reason, among many, why I try to avoid saluting this particular flag, and insist that I believe in the concrete institution of parliament under the reign of a royal monarch, that has proven itself through the test of time, rather than abstract ideal of democracy.

 

At the present moment the primary abstract flag that progressives are saluting and demanding that the rest of us show our allegiance to is that of “diversity”.   This, of course, raises the question of what kind of diversity is in question.   The term is used in a myriad of diverse contexts, from speaking of someone whose outfits are radically different from day to day as having a diverse wardrobe to a farmer who plants diverse crops as opposed to only wheat or only barley to my own use of the word at the beginning of this sentence.   The diversity that progressives demand our allegiance to today is a very specific kind of diversity.   It means diversity of the population in terms of categories of group identity.   Race and cultural ethnicity are the most obvious such categories.   Sex ought to be the least controversial such category, in that no human population could last longer than a generation that is entirely of one sex, and all societies except for mythical ones like the Amazons, have been sexually diverse in the traditional sense.   Progressives have turned it into the most controversial category, however, by demanding that everyone show their allegiance to diversity of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity”.

 

In practice, the progressive insistence that we all salute the flag of diversity translates into a requirement that we accept the propositions a) that diversity of this kind is an unmixed blessing to a society and b) the more diversity of this kind a society has the better off it will be.   Here again, we find the habit of making flags out of abstract ideas shutting down intelligent thought concerning those ideas.   Both propositions are obviously false.   Consider the first proposition.  The much more nuanced statement that there are positives and negatives to both cultural and racial heterogeneity (diversity) and homogeneity, that each conveys distinct advantages and disadvantages upon a society, and that the advantages and disadvantages of each must be weighed against those of the other can be defended intelligently.   So can the assertion that after such weighing, the advantages of diversity outweigh its disadvantages and the advantages of homogeneity, although the opposite assertion can also be intelligently defended.    The proposition that diversity of this kind is an unmixed blessing cannot be intelligently defended.  Even if it could, however, and further, we were to concede it to be the case, the second proposition, that the more diversity the better, would by no means follow from the first.   Plenty of things that are good in themselves turn bad when taken to excess.   Indeed, in classical Aristotelean ethics, vices (bad habits) are formed by indulging natural appetites that are good in themselves to excess, and in classical Christian theology heresies (serious doctrinal errors concerning tenets of the Gospel kerygma as summarized in the ancient Creeds) are formed by taking one tenet of the faith, true in itself, to excess.

 

More important, for the purposes of this discussion, than what is included in the “diversity” to which progressives demand our allegiance, is what is excluded.   It is quite clear, from the way progressives respond to those who dare to raise points such as those raised in the previous paragraph, that diversity of thought or opinion is not included in the diversity they praise and value so highly.   Indeed, this entire bad habit of turning an abstract idea into a flag is very inconsistent with the idea of diversity of thought or opinion.   Yet, for anyone who values freedom in the political sense as it was traditionally understood, this is surely the most important kind of diversity of all.   For that matter, for parliamentary government or democracy, in any sense of the word that is consistent with a free society, to function, diversity of thought must be the most important kind of diversity.

 

While this does provide a further illustration of how progressives, in raising new abstract flags, abandon those they saluted in days gone by, it has long been observed that even when liberals, the progressives of yesterday, expressed a belief in diversity of thought, their practice often contradicted it.   Remember that famous line of William F. Buckley Jr.’s “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover there are other views”?  He made this statement, in one form or another, numerous times, and I don’t know when he first said it, but the oldest version of which I am aware comes from his Up From Liberalism, first published in 1959.   “Duke” Morrison, the legendary actor who under the stage name John Wayne starred in countless films from The Big Trail in 1930 until The Shootist in 1976, in an interview with Tony Macklin in 1975 said:

 

I have found a certain type calls himself a liberal.   Now I always thought I was a liberal.   I came up terribly surprised one time when I found out that I was a right-wing, conservative extremist, when I listened to everybody’s point of view that I ever met, and then decided how I should feel.  But this so-called new liberal group, Jesus, they never listen to your point of view and they make a decision as to what you think and they are articulate enough and in control of enough of the press to force that image out for the average person.

 

If this could be said of liberals back in 1959 and 1975 it is all the more true of today’s progressives.   

 

One way in which this is evident is in their exclusionary rhetoric.   Progressives, especially those who hold some sort of office of civic authority, have become increasingly prone to issuing proclamations about how such-and-such a thing they disapprove of has “no place” in our community and society.  It would be one thing if what they were so excluding were things like murder, robbery, and rape which would meet with broad disapproval in pretty much any society in any time and place.   In most cases, however, they are speaking of some “ism” or “phobia”, usually one that has been that has been newly coined.   What these neologisms have in common is that each of them is defined in a special way.   On the surface, these “isms” and “phobias” appear to refer to varieties of crude bigotry but they are applied by progressives in actual usage so as to include all forms of dissent from the sacred progressive dogma that identity-group diversity is always good and that more identity-group diversity is always better, no matter how respectfully and intelligently that dissent is worded.   A couple of months ago the Orthosphere blogger who writes under the nom de plume Bonald after the reactionary philosopher who wrote against the French Revolution and its aftermath provided us with some disturbing insights into the implications of the growth of this sort of rhetoric.

 

Another way in which the progressive Left’s increasing rejection of the most important form of diversity for those who want to live in a free society with a functioning parliamentary government is in its use of the terms “denial” and “denier” as derogatory epithets for those who disagree with its dogmas.

 

This has become fairly standard practice whenever progressives run into disagreement on a wide assortment of matters.   The implications of this use of these terms are that either a) what progressives are asserting is so self-evidently obvious that one would have to be stubbornly, stupidly and willfully ignorant to disagree, b) we are under a moral obligation to believe what the progressives say and therefore are committing a moral offense in disagreeing, or c) a combination of a) and b).    Since progressives are not the authorities of a religious communion to which we all belong and have no legitimate authority to set dogma, the second of these implications is absurd.  Since progressives use the “denial” and “denier” epithets to avoid answering well-reasoned and evidence backed arguments against their positions the first of these implications is also ridiculous.

 

This becomes quite comical when the progressive assertions pertain to matters that have a large scientific component.  For decades now, anyone who has questioned the progressive narrative that states that due mostly to the emissions of greenhouse gasses by livestock and human industry the average temperature of the earth has risen and cataclysmic climate change is impending unless the population of the world is radically reduced, we all become vegans, and we stop using fossil fuels for energy has been labelled a “denier”.   A rather convenient way of avoiding answering difficult questions such as “why should climate change be assumed to be for the worse rather than the better, especially since historically human beings have thrived better in warm periods than cold ones?” and “why, since the earth’s climate has hardly been constant throughout history to the point that advocates of your theory have stooped to doctoring graphs of the historical data to hide this fact, should we expect it to remain constant now and be alarmed about the observed rise of about a degree in the earth’s average temperature over a century?”   In the last year and a half we have seen progressives accuse anyone who questions whether it is either good or necessary to sabotage the economies of every country in the world, drive small businesses into bankruptcy while enriching the billionaires who control the big online businesses, cancel our constitutional rights and freedoms, brainwash everyone into looking upon other human beings primarily as sources of contagion, exponentially accelerate the problem of people substituting their smartphones and computers for real, in-person social contact, establish anarcho-tyrannical police states in which acts that are bona in se and absolutely essential to healthy social and communal life are turned into mala prohibita crimes and hunted down with greater severity than real crimes that are actually mala in se, and bribing and blackmailing people into accepting an experimental new gene therapy in violation of the Nuremberg Protocol, all in order to combat a pandemic involving a virus that has proven to be less lethal than the vast majority of previous pandemics for which no such extreme measures were ever considered, let alone taken, of being a “COVID denier”.    To be fair, plenty of “conservative” political leaders, including the premiers of my own province (Manitoba), Alberta, and Upper Canada have all done the same, but the progressives have been much more monolithic about it.   The reason this is so comical is because real “science”, as anybody who understands the word knows, does not make dogmatic statements and therefore admits of no “denial”.   The comedy is greatly enhanced when those denouncing “COVID deniers” or “climate change deniers” advise us to “follow the science” or “listen to the science” as if “science” made dogmatic proclamations, or when they say “the science is settled” when, by the prevalent litmus test of the philosophy underlying science, for a theory to be scientific, it must be falsifiable, and therefore, science can never be settled.   Less funny and more sad, is when someone like Anthony Fauci or Theresa Tam admits the real nature of science, that it is always evolving, but uses this to back up a claim to absolute obedience of the nature of “you should unquestioningly obey my orders at any given moment, even if it contradicts what I told you to do the moment before” as if he, or allegedly she in the case of Tam, were Petruchio and the rest of us were Katherina the shrew.

 

It is far less comical when progressives impose a narrative interpretation on their country’s history in order to undermine the legitimacy of their country and its institutions and attack its historical figures, and then accuse those who point out the holes in their narrative of “denial”.   In this case, the progressives are walking in the footsteps of the French Jacobins, the Chinese Maoists, and the Khmer Rouge all of whom wrought tremendous devastation, destruction, and disaster upon their countries by insisting that their history was irredeemably corrupt and needed to be razed to the ground, along with all of the countries’ institutions.   This is what the progressives that infest Canada’s university faculties and newsmedia, both print and electronic, have been attempting to do in Canada for a couple of decades with their interpretation of the Indian Residential Schools.   In the real past, the past as it actually happened, these were boarding schools, initially founded by Christian Churches as a missionary outreach to Native Indians to provide their children with the kind of education they would need if they were to thrive in the modern economy.   The Indian chiefs of the nineteenth century wanted just this kind of education for their children and so, at their insistence, the stipulation that it would be provided by the Dominion government was included in all of the treaties.   Accordingly, the government funded and expanded these schools, as well as making provisions for day schools on the reserves.   If Indian parents neglected to send their kids to the day schools, the government would make the kids go to the residential schools, but initially it was mostly the kids of the chiefs and the elders of the bands who were sent to the schools at their own parents’ insistence.   By a century later, however, the government was making these schools serve the double function of schools and foster group homes for Indian children whom child welfare social workers had removed from their homes to protect them from such things as physical abuse.   Through utterly contemptible methodology, including a “victim centred” approach to testimony that could just as easily have been used to produce an equally damning picture of the schools to which wealthy, elite, white kids were sent, or for that matter schools of any sort because for any school you can always find alumni for whom the experience was something horrible to be “survived”, and which is completely in violation of the standards by which truth and guilt are assessed in the courtroom and the historical process, progressives spun a cock and bull narrative in which all the bad experiences in the schools were made out to have been the intent of the schools’ founders, administrators, and the Canadian government, and the  purpose of the schools was interpreted as the elimination of Native Indian cultural identities.   The progressives then used this narrative interpretation to claim that all of this was the moral equivalent of what the Third Reich did in its prison camps in World War II or what was done to the Tutsis in the last days of the Rwandan Civil war, which would have been a reprehensible claim even if the facts admitted of no other interpretation than that of their narrative, which is not even close to being the case.   The progressives insist that everything else in the history of Canada, especially anything traditionally seen as a great and positive achievement of either English or French Canadians, must take a backset to their interpretation of the Indian Residential Schools and that Canadians of all ethnicities, but especially English and French Canadians, must perpetually live in shame and submit to having their country “cancelled”.   In the last month or so the progressives have kicked this up a notch by claiming falsely that the discovery of the location of abandoned cemeteries on the grounds of the Kamloops Residential School – and more recently the Marieval Residential School in Saskatchewan – was a “shocking” new discovery (that such cemeteries were to be found has been known all along – an entire volume of the TRC Final Report is dedicated to this) and, irresponsibly to the point of criminal defamation of past Canadian governments, the Churches and the school administrators, faculty, and staff, that the graves constitute evidence of mass murder, the least plausible explanation, by far, of the deaths of the children.

 

For several weeks now Chris Champion, author, historian, and editor of the history journal the Dorchester Review, one of the few publications in Canada still worth reading, has been attacked by progressives over tweets made on the journal’s Twitter account challenging this narrative.   Sean Carleton, who is associated with the Indigenous Studies program at the University of Manitoba, accused the Dorchester Review of being a “straight up garbage, genocide denialism, outfit” for agreeing with the Final Report of the TRC that “the cause of death was usually tuberculosis or some other disease”.   Janis Irwin, the Deputy Whip for Alberta’s NDP, also denounced Champion as “reprehensible and disgusting” for expressing this agreement with the TRC’s Final Report, and demanded that Jason Kenney scrap the K-9 social studies curriculum on the preparation of which, Champion had advised the Albertan government.   While this sort of thing is to be expected from those of Carleton’s and Irwin’s ilk, about a week ago the CBC, the Crown broadcaster paid for out of the taxes of all Canadians, ran a story by Janet French of CBC Edmonton,  full of quotes from people such as the Alberta NDP Education Critic, Sarah Hoffman, Nicole Sparrow who is press secretary to Kenney’s Education Minister, Kisha Supernant who is an archeology professor at the University of Manitoba, and Daniel Panneton of the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre in Toronto, all expressing how appalled they were at Champion’s disagreement with the progressive, Canada-bashing, narrative, this time in an article that appeared on Dorchester Review’s website under his byline on June 17^th and which pointed out just how inappropriate the comparisons the narrative makes between the residential schools and what happened in Europe in the 1940s are.    

 

In his article, which is well-worth reading in its entirety, Champion wrote:

 

It is ridiculous to compare organizations of poor Oblates to machine-gun-toting Einsatzgruppen and Soviet NKVD.   And it is equally false and unjust to act as if every single nun or priest or brother or Methodist minister and his wife was a child-abuser or sexual predator. 

 

All of this is absolutely true and, it is worth noting, the second sentence is quite consistent with the TRC Report in which the testimony of those who experienced sexual abuse is overwhelmingly of the type in which older students were the abusers, sadly the common experience of boarding school students of all types.  Which is why all of Champion’s detractors quoted in the CBC article do not answer his arguments but merely accuse him of bigoted attitudes and “denial”.   “One photo of smiling children does not negate thousands of survivors’ stories”, which Kisha Supernant is quoted as having said, is the closest thing to an attempt at an answer that appears, although anyone who reads Champion’s article from beginning to end – since the CBC article appeared the same day it is questionable as to whether those quoted had done so – will know that nothing in the article negates the testimony of those whose experience at the residential schools was bad, only the spin by placed on that testimony by the progressive narrative, a narrative, incidentally, which itself negates the testimony of no small number of alumni of these schools whose experience was positive.

 

The progressives who have been attacking Champion and the Dorchester Review talk as if they think that someone who tells a story of having suffered victimization, especially of the sort that can be attributed to some prohibited “ism” or “phobia”, has a right to have “their truth” in current progressive lingo accepted without question or cross-examination.  A certain type of feminist makes this claim explicitly with regards to females who claim to have been sexually harassed or assaulted.   This sort of thinking runs contrary to the principles of courtroom justices, such as the right of the accused to confront and cross-examine his accuser, and the right of the accused to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, principles which exist for very good reasons, to prevent courts of law from being used as instruments of abuse by false accusers.   This kind of talk, however, is a rhetorical device that dishonestly equates criticism of the progressives’ ideas, interpretations, and narratives with criticism of personal testimony incorporate into these narratives.  

 

In all of these examples of progressive dismissal of their critics as “deniers” we can see how progressives have moved increasingly further away from the diversity of thought and opinion that is the most important diversity as far as the freedom of society and the functioning of parliamentary government goes.    In the last example, the diversity of thought they condemn as “denial” is disagreement with their narrative interpretation of the history of the residential schools, a narrative interpretation that they are presently using to attack the foundations and institutions of Canada, an attack which if it succeeds and follows its historical precedents will not bode well for freedom and parliamentary government in this country.   This makes the way progressives have run “diversity” up the flagpole and are constantly demanding that we salute it into a kind of sick joke.

 

Perhaps it is time we all got over this bad habit of turning abstract ideas into flags.

 

 

 

 (1)   In Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief, (1932) Basil Seal, having fled England to avoid the duties his mother was insisting he take up, is invited to help modernize the country of Azania by its Emperor Seth, an old Oxford friend of his.   He tells Seth “we’ve got a much easier job than we should have had fifty years ago.  If we’d had to modernize a country then it would have meant constitutional monarchy, bi-cameral legislature, proportional representation, women’s suffrage, independent judicature, freedom of the Press, referendums…” to which the Emperor asks “what is all that” and is told “just a few ideas that have ceased to be modern”.