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.

From Dubya to Dhaliwal

 I am a Tory rather than a true libertarian.   Actual libertarians would say that government is either a necessary evil or an unnecessary one, depending upon whether the libertarian is one who believes in the “nightwatchman state” model or one who believes that the state is a criminal plot against the rights of the individual.   I hold to the classical view that laws are necessary and that government is a good thing in the sense that it is an institution that was established and exists to serve the good of the public.   The degree to which any specific government in any specific time and place can be said to be either good or bad depends upon the degree to which it actually accomplishes this purpose.   Having said all of that, I am the kind of Tory who, like the novelist Evelyn Waugh and his son Auberon, has a great deal of sympathy for the minimal government type of libertarian.   As the elder Waugh once put it “I believe in government; That men cannot live together without rules but that they should be kept at the bare minimum of safety.”     It is from this perspective that I make the following observations. 

 

Whenever government declares “war” against something other than another country, whether it be drugs, crime, poverty, whatever, it is for the purpose of expanding its own powers.    This expansion of government is never necessary and it always involves the diminishing of the civil rights and freedoms of the governed.   It is very difficult to contract the powers of government after they have been expanded and to restore rights and freedoms after they have been diminished.   Any time, therefore, that the government starts talking about wars against abstract enemies we should take this as an alarm bell telling us to stand up for our rights and liberties before we lose them.

 

You are perhaps thinking at this point that I am about to apply this to the militaristic language our governments have been using while announcing totalitarian restrictions as their response to the spread of the bat flu.   While that is certainly a valid application, I will let you make it for yourselves.   Instead, I wish to consider another example from twenty years ago, the ramifications of which are now becoming most evident.

 

On September 11, 2001, al-Qaida, an Islamic terrorist organization that had evolved out of the CIA-trained mujahideen that the United States had employed against the Soviet Union following the latter’s invasion of Afghanistan decades earlier, attacked its former sponsor by hijacking planes and flying them into the towers that symbolized American and international commerce in Lower Manhattan.   The American President at the time, George W. Bush, shortly thereafter declared a “Global War on Terror” and gave the rest of the world an ultimatum to either stand with the United States in this battle or be counted on the side of the enemy.

 

By declaring war on the abstraction of terrorism in general rather than merely the specific, concrete, terrorist organization al-Qaida that had attacked America, Bush signaled that he had a far more ambitious project than merely settling the score and punishing the perpetrators of 9/11.   While terrorism is notoriously difficult to define due to a lack of consensus with regards to certain of the particulars there is a general understanding that it occupies the space where the kind of violence that law enforcement deals with and the kind that requires a military response overlap each other.   This makes it a particularly bad choice for an enemy in an abstract war.   In addition to the problem common to all wars against abstract enemies, that they can never be won and brought to a decisive end because abstract enemies cannot surrender or be toppled or killed, a war against terrorism is an invitation to merge the law enforcement and military functions of government in a way that threatens the privacy, rights, and freedoms of the governed.

 

This is precisely what happened with the Bush administration’s War on Terror.    In the first month of the War on Terror the Office of Homeland Security was established which about a year later would be expanded into the Department of Homeland Security, a creepy body, like something out of a totalitarian dystopia, in which the line between law enforcement and the military is all but eliminated.   In less than two months after 9/11 the Bush administration had drafted and pushed through Congress the draconian Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act, which stripped Americans of anything but nominal constitutional protection of their privacy rights and turned the American republic into an Orwellian surveillance state. 

 

I knew full well at the time that this was a power grab aimed at expanding the powers of the American government at the expense of the privacy, rights and freedoms of ordinary Americans.   I knew this because this is precisely what the men who were rushing to do this in September of 2001 had been saying about similar efforts on the part of the Clinton administration in the 1990s.

 

In the spring of 1995 I was finishing my freshman year as a theology student.   At the very end of the semester a terrorist attack in the United States was all over the news.   A truck loaded with a homemade bomb had been detonated outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.   Bill Clinton immediately began pointing to this event as demonstrating the need for the Omnibus Counterterrorism Bill that his Attorney General Janet Reno's Department had drafted and that had been introduced in the US Senate a couple of months earlier by none other than the present occupant of the White House who at the time was Senator for Delaware (Chuck Schumer was the sponsor of the Bill in the House of Representatives).   The bill met with strenuous opposition from civil libertarians of the left and right and consequently it was only a very emaciated version that was signed into law by Bill Clinton on Hitler's birthday the following year.  When, barely a week after 9/11, Bush's Attorney General John Ashcroft had the draft of the PATRIOT Act available - a bill so long that few who voted on it had been able to read the entire thing - this was because he had basically recycled Clinton's Omnibus Counterterrorism Bill, adding a few bells and whistles here and there.   Ashcroft is said to have called up Joe Biden to tell him that it was essentially the same bill that he, that is Biden, had introduced seven years earlier.   Now, although Clinton had failed to get the surveillance state he sought in 1995-1996, he did not let up in his efforts to enhance government powers in the name of fighting terrorism.   Indeed, he brought the matter up with increasing frequency as his many indiscretions began to surface and his administration became enmired in scandal.     Around 1997, for example, he wanted the FBI to be given the power to intercept and read all internet communications.   An excellent article was penned in opposition to this by the said John Ashcroft, who at the time was Senator for Missouri.   The article was entitled "Keep Big Brother's Hands Off the Internet" and included such wise observations as the following:

 

"The Clinton administration would like the Federal government to have the capability to read any international or domestic computer communications...The proposed policy raises obvious concerns about Americans' privacy...There is a concern that the internet could be used to commit crimes and that advanced encryption could disguise such activity.  However, we do not provide the government with phone jacks outside our homes for unlimited wiretaps.   Why then, should we grant government the Orwellian capacity to listen at will and in real time to our communications across the Web?...The administrations interest in all e-mail is a wholly unhealthy precedent, especially given this administration's track record on FBI files and IRS snooping.   Every medium by which people communicate can be subject to exploitation by those with illegal intentions.   Nevertheless, this is no reason to hand Big Brother the keys to unlock our e-mail diaries, open our ATM records, read our medical records, or translate our international communications".

 

Indeed.   It appears that some time between 1997 and 2001 one of the pod people from Don Siegel's 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers had replaced Ashcroft with a look alike who instead of the above sound reasoning espoused rhetoric about how those raising concerns about the PATRIOT Act's impact on civil liberties were aiding and abetting the terrorists.   He was hardly the only one.  The same could be said of a great many of the most prominent figures in American conservatism who had talked like Ashcroft about the Clinton administration's threat to American liberties in the 1990s, only to turn around and support the PATRIOT Act in 2001.   It was at this point that I lost all respect for American conservatives - other than those like Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, and Charley Reese who were manifestly the same people, espousing the same principles, regardless of whether a Clinton or a Bush was in power.

 

 

It was a couple of years later, when Bush and Ashcroft were again talking about expanding their powers to fight terrorism – they had drafted the Domestic Security Enhancement Act, nicknamed “PATRIOT II”, but it was never presented to Congress – that the late Sam Francis wrote an article explaining the case against all legislation of the type, in what was the single best response to the annoying “it’s okay when our side does it" attitude among the Bush “conservatives” that I ever read.   He wrote:

 

But the larger point is not what this administration does or doesn't do with the new powers.

The point is that the powers are far larger than the government of any free people should have and that whatever powers this administration doesn't use could still be used by future ones.

 

That, of course, is how free peoples typically lose their freedom—not by a dictator like Saddam Hussein suddenly grabbing power in the night and seizing all the library records but by the slow erosion of the habits and mentality that enables freedom to exist at all.

 

Instilling in citizens the notion that the power to seize library records is something the state needs is an excellent way to assist that erosion.

 

Most libertarians, of the left or the right, will tell you how we have been eroding those habits and that mentality for several decades now.  – Samuel Francis, “Bush Writing Last Chapters in Story of American Liberty”, September 25, 2003, Creators Syndicate.

 

The truth of Sam Francis' words is now glaringly obvious.   

 

The White House is now occupied by the decrepit swamp troll who had introduced the first draft of what would eventually become the PATRIOT Act back in 1995 and he is calling for even more anti-terrorism legislation.   He has also openly turned the War on Terror against those whom the Clinton administration had in mind when they attempted, unsuccessfully, to launch their own War on Terror that year - American citizens who stand up for their rights and freedoms, especially Christians who are serious about their faith, white people who object to being vilified for the colour of their skin and turned into scapegoats, and gun owners.   

 

The Department of Homeland Security has issued a bulletin that implies that those who are unsatisfied that the outcome of last year's election was legitimate, are opposed to the lockdown measures that trample all over their rights and freedoms ("frustrated with the exercise of government authority" is how the memo words this), or both, are potential violent threats to the United States.    A government that regards around half of the people it governs as threats is no longer a constitutional government that respects limits on its own power for the protection of its citizens and their rights and freedoms.  It is more like a government that fears and has declared war on its own people.   The progressive media that during the last administration defended its monolithically hyper-adversarial stance with slogans like "democracy dies in darkness" has been calling for Republican senators such as Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and in some cases the entire Republican Party to be designated "domestic terrorists".  The United States is a two-party country.   If you criminalize one of the two parties you are left, of course, with a one-party state.   Otherwise known as a totalitarian dictatorship.   The kind of state that the United States, the capital city of which is now under military occupation by its own army, is giving every impression of becoming.

 

From up north in the Dominion of Canada it is appalling to watch our southern neighbour turn itself into the world's largest banana republic, both because of what it means for our American friends and because bad ideas and trends down there have a nasty habit of migrating up here.

 

Think back to 2001 once again.   Our Prime Minister at the time was Jean Chretien, who was in my opinion a creepy, sleazy, low-life scumbag, to list only his better qualities. While Bush, Ashcroft, et al, were making a big noise about the PATRIOT Act and all the other things they were going to do in fighting their War on Terror, Chretien, relatively quietly had Anne McLellan introduce Bill C-36, an anti-terrorism bill of his own into Parliament.  It quickly passed the House and Senate and received Royal Assent in December of that year.   It consisted of amendments to several different pieces of existing legislation, such as the Criminal Code and the Official Secrets Act.   Some of its provisions, at the suggestion of Bill Blaikie who at the time was the Member representing Winnipeg-Transcona in the House of Commons, were given sunset clauses which caused them to automatically expire in five years. Other provisions remain to this day.      

 

I will provide an illustration of how this led to the shameful abuse of government power twenty years ago before returning to the present.

 

One the pieces of legislation amended was the Canadian Security Intelligence Services Act, which created CSIS in 1984.   The amendment replaced "threats to the security of Canada" with the much broader wording "activities within or related to Canada directed toward or in support of the threat or use of acts of serious violence against persons or property for the purpose of achieving a political, religious or ideological objective within Canada or a foreign state".   CSIS, when it took over the RCMP's intelligence functions, also took over the issuing of security certificates, a provision of the 1978 Immigration Act which allowed for those who were not Canadian citizens to be declared a threat to national security and deported in a streamlined manner.

 

In December of 2001, just as Bill C-36 was going into effect, American immigration officials arrested Ernst Zündel, who had left Canada in 2000 vowing never to return, rather understandably as he had on three separate occasions been persecuted by our government for his unpopular political-historical views.  He had married an American citizen, the Russian-German Mennonite novelist Ingrid Rimland and, had he been anybody else, would have been on track for American citizenship himself.    Interestingly enough, in February of that year the men’s magazine Esquire had published an essay by journalist and war correspondent John Sack in which Zündel featured   The essay was entitled “Inside the Bunker” and recounted the writer’s experiences at the previous year’s conference of the Institute for Historical Review where he met holocaust revisionists such as Zündel.   The essay, which was later selected for inclusion in the anthology, The Best American Essays 2002, edited by Stephen Jay Gould, was more-or-less the opposite of every other article which had ever appeared about holocaust revisionists in the mainstream press.  Sack treated them respectfully, pointed out a few places where they were demonstrably right, and gave reasons for rejecting their conclusions that were based on evidence rather than abuse, for he presented them all in general, and Zündel in particular, in a sympathetic light as basically ordinary people, who were more hated than guilty of hatred and whose views arose defensively, in response to post-World War II German bashing, rather than out of anti-Semitic bigotry.  Evidently, the essay had no impact on the American and Canadian authorities.   The Americans charged him with overstaying his visa and sent him back to us.   CSIS issued a security certificate against Zündel, which it would not have been able to do prior to Chretien’s anti-terrorism bill becoming law because he was by no means a threat to the security of Canada having been a peaceful and non-violent man for all of the decades he had lived here.   Under the Anti-terrorism Act, however, they were able to stretch the very flexible new wording of their mandate to include him on the basis of people he had associated with.

 

He was detained and held in solitary confinement in a tiny cell for over a year while he was tried in his absence before a prejudiced judge on the grounds of evidence to which neither he nor his lawyer, Doug Christie, were given full access, and ultimately was deported to Germany where he was arrested over things he said or written in North America, charged, and sentenced to five years in prison.

 

To summarize, the greater flexibility that had been given to our “intelligence” agency on the grounds that it was needed to protect our country from the threat of terrorist violence was used pretty much immediately after it had passed into law, to once again persecute a man whom our government had been persecuting for his political-historical opinions since 1984, this time denying him the protection of due process that had been available to him previously and which had ultimately prevailed in those cases when the Supreme Court struck the laws under which he had been convicted down.

 

This was a most disgraceful episode and one that clearly demonstrates that governments that seek to expand their own powers and flexibility in order to combat foes like “terrorism” cannot be trusted to confine the use of those powers to that purpose.

 

Parliament did take greater precautions than the US Congress in passing the Anti-terrorism Act.   I have already mentioned that certain provisions came with sunset clauses that would cause them to expire in five years unless the House and the Senate agreed to an extension.   The Act also required that the House and Senate appoint committees to conduct a comprehensive review of the Act within its first three years, which would be a necessary preliminary step towards any extension.   While a short extension was agreed upon after the first review, ultimately these provisions were allowed to expire in 2007.   By this time Stephen Harper had become Prime Minister, but the expiration of the provisions should not be attributed to any great concern for the privacy, rights, freedoms, and due process of Canadians on his part.   In his final year as Prime Minister he introduced a new Anti-terrorism Act, Bill C-51, which was more like the USA PATRIOT Act than Chretien’s Anti-terrorism Act had been, and which greatly expanded the powers and mandate of CSIS.   Readers might recall that this loathsome piece of legislation was the reason I vowed never to vote for the Conservatives again as long as Stephen Harper led the party.   The Conservatives were defeated in the election that fall, which I would like to think was in retaliation to Bill C-51, except that they were replaced in government by the only party in Parliament that had supported them in passing it.

 

Now let us return to the present.   One of the provisions of Chretien’s Anti-terrorism Act that remains in effect was the creation of a list of groups officially designated as terrorists.   It is odd, actually, that this was allowed to stand, because it is one of the worst provisions in the Act.   It essentially functions like a decree of outlaw, depersoning everyone in the groups placed on the list, stripping them of all constitutional protections.

 

One might think that the New Democrat Party, Canada’s officially socialist party (as opposed to all the unofficial ones), with its long history of human rights rhetoric, would have a problem with this.   Back in 2015, when they were led by Thomas Mulcair, they were on the right side, the opposing side, of the Bill C-51 debate.   In 2021, however, they are led by Jagmeet Singh.   One might think that Singh, considering his open support for the cause of separating Punjab from India and Pakistan and turning it into the Sikh state of Khalistan, a cause that has frequently been supported by acts of terrorism, including one of the most notorious – if not the most notorious – to take place on, well, not on Canadian soil, but in Canadian airspace, the bombing of Air India Flight 182 in 1985, would have even more cause than other NDPers to oppose the official terror list.   At the very least one would expect him not to be throwing stones from within this particular glass house.   One would be very, very, wrong in all of this.

 

Not long after a number of unarmed and oddly dressed supporters of Donald the Orange temporarily delayed the Congressional certification of the Electoral College vote by entering the Capitol in Washington DC causing everyone to break out into histrionics screaming “coup” “insurgency” and the like, Singh tweeted that the event was an “act of domestic terrorism” and stated that “the Proud Boys helped execute it”, “Their founder is Canadian”, “They operate in Canada, right now” and that he was “calling for them to be designated as a terrorist organization, immediately”.

 

What is this “Proud Boys” that Singh thinks deserve the terrorist designation more than the mass murderers of Hindus?

 

It is not, as its title would seem to suggest, an organization devoted to advancing the alphabet soup cause.   It is a group that has attained notoriety over the last five years mostly for its confrontations and clashes with antifa.   Antifa are those groups of masked thugs that go to events organized by right-of-centre groups and lectures featuring speakers with views that leftists believe ought not to be heard and try to disrupt and shut down these events and lectures through intimidation and bullying.  I don’t know if this was the original intent when the Proud Boys was founded but it quickly gained a reputation as a group that was eager and willing to fight back.

 

The media, which has tacitly and sometimes explicitly, supported antifa for years, has attached all sorts of labels to the Proud Boys that seem to completely disregard the group’s account of itself.   It is frequently called “white nationalist”, for example, despite the fact that it has always been multiracial, that its founder, the Canadian born “godfather of hipsterdom” and co-founder of Vice magazine, Gavin McInnes, is a civil nationalist who explicitly rejected racial nationalism, and its current leader, the one who has been charged with regards to the incident on Capitol Hill, is an Afro-Cuban.   McInnes described the group as “Western Chauvinist” but he explained this quite clearly in terms of the values of Western Civilization, which anyone from any race can adhere to and which, in an irony totally lost on his progressive critics, are entirely liberal – in the sense of classical liberal – values.  

 

Since the facts obviously conflict with the claim that the Proud Boys are white nationalists, why do the media and the self-appointed anti-hate watchdog groups continue to so designate them?

 

Obviously it is because they are not using the term to convey any meaningful information about who and what the group is but as a weapon to demonize, discredit, and destroy it.

 

The exact same thing can be said about Jagmeet Singh Dhaliwal’s call to designate the group a “terrorist organization”.   There is little if anything in the facts that would support this designation in any meaning-conveying sense.   The violence perpetrated by antifa which exists solely for the purpose of using violence or the threat of violence to suppress opinions with which the left disagrees and silence those who hold such opinions far more closely fits the meaning of the word terrorism than pushing or punching back against said violence, whatever else one might think about this sort of responding in kind.   The designation is not intended to be meaningful, it is intended to destroy a group that Singh opposes for political reasons.

 

This is a terrible misuse of a law that seems like it was written to be terribly misused.

 

Singh followed up on his tweet by raising the matter in Parliament and bringing it to a vote.   The House unanimously voted for a motion recommending that the government add the Proud Boys to the terrorist list.   There was not a single dissenting vote.   Anybody in the Conservative Party who might have thought that antifa and BLM deserved to be on that list much more than the Proud Boys kept that thought to himself.   Anybody in the NDP or Green parties who might have objected to the terrorist list even existing on the grounds that it is a threat to human rights, kept that thought to himself.   This unanimous vote to declare the group a terrorist organization for entirely political reasons, depersoning its members and stripping them of their constitutional protections, speaks extremely poorly about the politicians we have sent to Parliament, and bodes very ill for our country’s future.

 

The motion in Parliament had no binding force on the government.   Bill Blair, the ex-cop who is Public Safety Minister – a title from the French Reign of Terror which ought not to exist in a free Commonwealth realm, back to Solicitor General, please – told the CBC that the decision would be based on “intelligence and evidence collected by our national security agencies” and that “Terrorist designations are not political exercises”.     On February 3^rd he declared that the Proud Boys, along with a bunch of obscure groups that few have ever heard of before, had been added to the list.    

 

Jagmeet Singh was elated, although it was reiterated on the occasion that his motion was not a motivating factor in the decision (yeah right), and he called upon the government to go even further in eliminating groups that disagree with him.  He was quoted by the CBC as saying:

 

We need to build a country where everyone feels like they belong. Those hateful groups have no place in our country.

 

Clearly all anti-terrorism legislation needs to be repealed immediately.   Anything that gives such a man, who is so completely stupid that he cannot see the glaring contradiction between these two sentences, this kind of power to destroy those he doesn’t like is a far greater threat to our country than terrorism itself.

Khadr and Zündel Revisited

I have argued that since the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is part of Canada's constitution, and Canadian laws, constitutional or otherwise, are only in effect within the Dominion of Canada, the Charter rights of Omar Khadr could not have been violated in either Afghanistan, where he was captured by the Americans, or the detention centre at the American naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, because neither of these places is within Canadian territory and subject to Canadian law. It has been objected, against that argument, that because Canadian officials were involved in the interrogation of Khadr at Gitmo, his rights were therefore violated because Canadian officials are still bound to act within the limits of the Canadian constitution outside Canadian territory.

Let us grant the validity of the premise. It is, after all, a valid one. If Canadian officials were not bound by the constitution outside of Canada then Canadian citizens upon whom the sitting government looks with displeasure could conceivably be in danger from agents of that government every time they set foot outside of the country. That having been said, the conclusion does not follow from the premise.

The reason for that is simple: if Canadian officials are bound to act within the limits of Canadian constitutional law outside Canadian territory then that is true of the constitution in its entirety, including Section 33 of the Charter. Section 33 authorises both Parliament and each provincial legislature to pass legislation that violates the fundamental freedoms listed in section 2 of the Charter and the basic legal rights enumerated in sections 7 through 14, provided that legislation is set to expire within five years of the date it comes into effect (section 15 can also be overridden by the terms of Section 33 but it contains neither fundamental freedoms nor basic rights). As it so happens, at the time that agents of CSIS and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were participating in the interrogation of Khadr at Gitmo, just such a bill was in effect, the same antiterrorism/national security bill that was used to justify the detention of Ernst Zündel in a tiny isolation cell on Canadian soil for two years without charge or trial and his deportation to a country where he stood to serve prison time for controversial opinions expressed outside of that country's territory. If the law that allowed our government to do this to Zündel in Canada was constitutional by the terms of Section 33 then, quod erat demonstrandum, it also renders the involvement of CSIS and the Foreign Ministry in the Khadr interrogation, constitutional and legal.

As it happens, while I am satisfied with the conclusion of that reasoning, that the way our agents treated Khadr was constitutional and legal, I am not particularly thrilled with the part of the Charter that renders it valid. I reiterate my longstanding objection to Section 33 of the Charter. This clause is the reason that Brian Mulroney said that the Charter was not worth the paper it was printed on. Former Senator Eugene Forsey, who was one of our leading constitutional experts - his booklet explaining our form of government is still published by the government - was quoted by Charles Taylor as having called this clause "ghastly" and having said "if you are going to have a charter of rights - on balance I'm for it, but not without reservations - it had better be entrenched." (1) I have long maintained that Canadians were freer and their basic legal protections and rights were more secure prior to 1982 than after.

I am also not a fan of legislation passed in the wake of terrorist attacks that enhances government powers at the expense of civil liberties and legal rights. I can see the need for governments to detain and interrogate suspects quickly in the midst of an actual crisis situation but the kind of legislation the American government tried to pass in 1995, did actually pass in 2001, and which our government passed in 2001, all struck me as opportunistic power grabs. My long time readers will recall that prior to the last Dominion election I cited Bill C-51 as the reason why I could never vote Conservative again as long as Stephen Harper led the party.

All of that having been said, I stand by my judgement that it is the Zündel case and not the Khadr case that demonstrates the problem with both this kind of national security legislation and the constitutional loophole that allows for it. My critics may object that in so judging I show greater concern for a non-citizen (Zündel was only a landed immigrant) than a Canadian but in doing so they have elevated a technical distinction that happens to be irrelevant over the real differences between the two cases.

To preserve the corporate integrity of a state and the value of citizenship itself, legal citizenship must contain privileges not fully extended to non-citizens. Basic rights and freedoms, however, belong not to the category of the privileges of citizenship but rather that of the protections extended by the law of the land to all who fall under its jurisdiction, i.e., everyone who happens to be in the country at the time whether citizen nor not. Section 33 of the Charter certainly makes no distinction between citizen and non-citizen when it allows these rights and freedoms to be overridden.

The distinction between citizen and non-citizen is therefore irrelevant to the comparison being made. (2) The only thing further that needs to be said about it is that it ought to be of far greater importance to us that the laws of our country are justly enforced and their protections fully secured to everyone who falls under the jurisdiction of those laws than that privileges of our citizenship are respected abroad. It boggles the mind that anyone could find that ranking of priorities to be controversial.

As to the real differences between the Khadr and Zündel cases, note that the legislation that allowed the Chretien government to override basic rights and freedoms for the sake of national security was passed in order to combat the threat of terrorism of the type the United States had experienced in September of 2001. Omar Khadr actually was such a terrorist. He was fighting for al-Qaida, the same terrorist group to whom the 9/11 attack was attributed. He was at war with an American-led coalition in Afghanistan to which our government under Jean Chretien had committed Canadian troops and hence at war with our country but not as any sort of legitimate soldier for he fought out of uniform. He is exactly the sort of enemy Parliament had in mind when it passed Chretien's antiterrorism bill.

Zündel, on the other hand, was a political prisoner. He was not a terrorist and has never been a violent man. Indeed, when he was living in Canada he was himself the victim of terrorism - a bomb attack on his Toronto home incited by left-wing antiracists during his highly publicised trials. He posed no realistic threat to Canada's national security and the only motivation for the treatment he received was the desire to punish him for saying unpopular and controversial things and to silence him.

Zündel's case, therefore, was clearly an abuse of the legislation that gave the government the temporary power to override our basic rights and freedoms to combat terrorism whereas Khadr's case is an example of the real threat that inspired the legislation to begin with. It is Zündel, not Khadr, to whom we must point to demonstrate what is wrong with that kind of legislation and the section of the Charter that allows for it.

The basic rights and freedoms of Canadians as subjects of the Crown were protected by Common Law, grounded in centuries of prescription, long before Pierre Trudeau passed the Charter, Section 33 of which, rendered them less protected and secure than before. National security legislation, while understandable in a crisis, creates too much potential for abuse, as demonstrated by the Zündel case. The best way to combat terrorism, therefore, is not to fight wars abroad while undermining our own rights and freedoms to create a surveillance state at home. Rather, it is to leave other people alone in their own countries, and tighten up our immigration policies and citizenship laws so that terrorists from other countries like the Khadr family cannot get in, much less have anchor babies here who they then raise elsewhere to be enemies of our country and of Western Civilization of which we are part.

(1) Charles Taylor, Radical Tories: The Conservative Tradition In Canada, (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1982), p. 122)

(2) To the objection that citizenship v. non-citizenship matters when it comes to the question of deportation and denial of entrance, I answer that this is true but still irrelevant to the present comparison for the following reasons: a) While it is true that a citizen cannot be deported but a non-citizen can it is against Canadian policy to deport people to countries where they will become political prisoners, as was the case with Zündel's deportation to Germany; b) While it is true that Canadian citizens cannot be denied entry to the country except under extraordinary circumstances this does not mean that the government is in violation of a Canadian's rights whenever it places an obstacle in the way of his return - otherwise, the taxpayers would be liable every time a customs officer keeps a citizen waiting for hours while he does a thorough investigation - and at any rate, Khadr's having been convicted of murder, terrorism, and war crimes constitutes the extraordinary circumstances that justify the government's not wanting to take him back; c) Chretien's anti-terrorism bill may have expired by the time the government tried to block his repatriation but, since it was still in effect during the time in which our agents participated in his interrogation, their actions were therefore legal and constitutional under Section 33 of the Charter and the role the interrogation played in securing the conviction referred to in the previous point cannot invalidate the government's raising that conviction as an objection to his repatriation.

Stupidity and Arrogance

It is fitting, perhaps, that when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke out in defence of his decision to hand over ten and a half million tax dollars to the terrorist Omar Khadr, it was from Hamburg, Germany, where he is attending a G20 summit. It is fitting because his argument displays a particular combination of stupidity and arrogance for which the German government is also notorious. I refer to the stupidity and arrogance of thinking that a country’s laws apply outside the boundaries of its own territory. Sadly, Justin Trudeau is not the only one in Canada who shares this combination of stupidity and arrogance. His apologists, toadies, sycophants, and butt-kissers, who are the pathetic and contemptible excuse for journalists in our country, have been sanctimoniously shoving out drivel about how Khadr’s “Charter rights” were violated and how he “deserves” this compensation all week ever since the news about the payoff was leaked. That the less-than-Solomonic solons who sit on our Supreme Court are also infected with this brain rot is evidenced by their ruling in 2010 that Khadr’s rights had been violated.

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms has been part of Canada’s constitution since 1982. Note my wording carefully – part of Canada’s constitution. Far too many people in this country have gotten into the habit of equating the Charter with our constitution. It is not uncommon, for example, to hear people praise the father of the present Prime Minister for “giving us our constitution”. He did nothing of the sort and this kind of talk demonstrates incredibly sloppy thinking. Canada’s greatest constitutional expert, Eugene Forsey, used to complain about how people talked about our having gotten a “new constitution” in 1982 when the repatriated constitution was, in fact “the old constitution with knobs on.” The Charter is one of those knobs and it is not one that I am particularly fond of because, contrary to what the Prime Minister said in his defence, it does not protect all Canadians “even when it makes us uncomfortable.”

The Charter, for example, did not protect Ernst Zündel from the abominable treatment he received at the hands of our government during the premiership of Jean Chretien. Zündel, you might recall, was the German-born graphic artist and publisher who was charged and prosecuted, a little over thirty years ago, with spreading “false news.” The “false news” in question was the contents of a number of pamphlets he had published that presented a rather less-than-conventional account of the number of victims of the Holocaust and the intentions of the Third Reich during that whole nasty business. The pamphlets, dismissed by most people as kooky nonsense, did absolutely no harm except to the feelings of the oversensitive. Those who still revered the British tradition of liberty and justice upon which our country was built, easily recognized that if Canada was under the threat of a revived Hitlerism it came not from Zündel and his publications but from the attitude and actions of our government in putting a man on trial over the ideas he had published. The Supreme Court at the time agreed and stuck down the law under which Zündel had been charged as violating the Charter.

In 2003, however, Zündel, who had been living with his American wife in the United States for a couple of years, was deported here by the Yanks who claimed – probably falsely – that he had violated the terms of his visa. Our government then stuck him in a tiny isolation cell – 6 by 8 feet – and kept him in this hole, where bright lights were kept on around the clock, for two years. He was neither charged nor tried with any crime during this time – a judge heard evidence, that neither Zündel nor his attorney were given access to – that he posed a security threat, and he was deported to Germany.

We will get to what happened once he arrived in Germany in a moment. First, let us address the rather glaring problem of why this treatment of Zündel – far worse than what Khadr received and on Canadian soil to boot – did not violate the Charter.

Zündel received this treatment under a national security bill that Jean Chretien had rammed through Parliament in the fall of 2001 after the terrorist attack on the United States. The bill authorized the government to dish out this sort of treatment to anyone who was deemed to be a threat to national security. How could the Liberals, the party of the Charter, get away with passing a bill which so obviously tramples over basic Charter rights? It was easy. They set the bill to sunset in five years. Section 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms gives parliament and every provincial legislature the right to pass laws that violate the fundamental freedoms and legal rights enumerated in the Charter provided that those laws expire in five years. This would not have happened prior to 1982. The Charter made the rights and freedoms of Canadians less secure not more. As former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney once remarked it is not worth the paper it is printed on.

And yes, Zündel, although he only held landed immigrant status, having been turned down for citizenship repeatedly, was far more truly a Canadian than Omar Khadr. Khadr might have been born here, but he was never integrated into our society but was raised elsewhere to be an enemy of the civilization of which we are part. Zündel, on the other hand, regardless of whatever zany ideas he might have held, had moved here as a teenager, lived here for decades, and fully contributed to and participated in our society.

What was that you were saying the other week Justin about how you are “jealous” of “people who got to make the deliberate choice” and how “being able to choose it, rather than being Canadian by default, is an amazing statement of attachment to Canada” and “This is your country more than it is for others because we take it for granted”? Oh, I see, that only applies if the immigrants are brown-skinned and the Canadians who are born here are white-skinned, not the other way around.

At any rate, the Charter, whether it secures our rights as the Grits claim, or makes them less secure as is the case in reality, is part of Canada’s constitution. That makes it law in the Dominion of Canada but it does not govern elsewhere in the world. It was in Afghanistan that Omar Khadr, acting as a terrorist not a legitimate combatant, killed an American medic with a grenade just before being captured by the Americans. Afghanistan is not now and never has been in the past a part of the Dominion of Canada. After he was captured, he was taken to the American detention centre at their naval base in Guantanamo Bay. The Americans govern this base, which is located in Cuba, under a century old Lease Agreement. Neither Gitmo, the United States of America, nor Cuba is part of the Dominion of Canada. Neither Afghanistan nor Gitmo, therefore, is under Canadian law, constitutional or otherwise. It is absurd, therefore, to claim that anyone, Canadian citizen or otherwise, is protected by Canadian constitutional law – which is all that the Charter is – in either of these places. It is not only absurd but arrogant – the arrogance of asserting that our laws apply universally.

Twenty-three years ago, when an American teenager, Michael Fay, was sentenced to jail time, a fine, and a caning for vandalizing cars with graffiti and stealing road signs, the American government asked Singapore to be lenient on their delinquent citizen, because of his age, but at no point made the arrogant assertion that Singapore was violating Fay’s rights under the US Constitution. The Yanks, despite their talk about being the “first universal nation” and their world-wide reputation for arrogance, understood that their constitution only protects their citizens on their own soil.

Justin Trudeau, in claiming Charter protection for Khadr outside of Canada, has exceeded the legendary arrogance of the Yanks and approached that of the bloody Krauts. Germany promptly arrested Zündel, when he stepped down out of the plane after having been deported from Canada, charged him under their laws against Holocaust denial for material that had been posted on his website, and sentenced him to five years in prison. That his website was operated out of North America where he had been living did not faze them. The German government took the position that it has the right with its thought control laws to dictate to anyone living anywhere in the world what he may or may not put up on the internet. It has recently reiterated this position by threatening to fine social media outlets if they do not remove material that violates their idiotic and draconian laws.

It is arrogant enough to claim that your country’s laws protect its citizens everywhere in the world. It is far worse to claim the right to punish people for word and deeds that took place outside the borders of your country. Let us hope that Justin Trudeau hasn’t picked up any more of this German arrogance at the G20 summit. He has enough of his own as it is.

Hillary: An Historic Campaign?

As a Canadian High Tory I do not approve of republics and presidents, much preferring our own parliamentary monarchy system in which the head of state, the representative of the country as a whole including past and future generations not merely those who cast votes in the present, is above the political process, having come to her position through a constitutional, hereditary, line of succession through which the sovereignty she possesses, exercised, for better or for worse, in her name by the elected government, is hers by prescriptive and divine right.

That having been said, this year’s Presidential election in the republic to our south is certainly an interesting and entertaining one, far more so than any other than I can remember in my life time. The primary season is now over, and the candidates for the Republican and Democratic parties have been chosen. I have written about the Republican candidate, Donald Trump previously, and will likely do so again in the future. Today I would like to talk about the Democratic candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The news media has declared Clinton’s campaign to be an historic one, because she is the first woman to be the nominee of a major political party. The Hillary-sympathetic media will be attempting to get as much mileage out of this fact as they can, just as they got as much mileage as they could out of Barack Obama’s being the first black President, and if Americans fall for this trick twice it will demonstrate just how debased, degraded, and inane their system has become.

There are other better reasons for describing Hillary Clinton’s campaign as historic than her sex. There is, for example, the fact that she sought the nomination of her party while under investigation by the FBI for misdoings while Secretary of State. Has that ever happened before?

Actually, perhaps even this is not particularly history making. You might recall the word “Whitewater” being tossed around quite a bit when Clinton’s husband, Bill, was seeking the Democratic nomination in 1992. Whitewater was the name of a real-estate development company founded by Bill and Hillary Clinton and their friends Jim and Susan McDougal in the late 1970s. The purpose of the company was to buy up land to develop into vacation estates – which it sold, repossessed, and resold, fleecing people out of their money in an underhanded, but apparently legal, manner. The scheme eventually failed, and McDougal, who had been trying to keep it afloat with funds misappropriated from a bank he managed called Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, came under investigation just before the bank collapsed in the big S & L crisis. Bill Clinton was accused of using his influence as Governor of Arkansas to benefit Madison Guaranty. Hillary Clinton, as an attorney with the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas, represented Madison Guaranty for much of this time. During the federal investigation of this scandal early in Bill Clinton’s presidency, many of the relevant legal documents mysteriously disappeared, eventually being discovered in the White House with the fingerprints of Hillary Clinton and Vincent Foster Jr. all over them.

You remember Vince Foster don’t you? The colleague of Hillary’s from Rose Law, rumoured to have been her lover, who became Deputy White House Counsel only to turn up dead in Fort Macy Park six months into Bill Clinton’s presidency. After the body was discovered, and before the office was sealed, Hillary’s staff removed several boxes of documents. The death was ruled a suicide, but there is a reason that the term “Arkancide” was coined to describe a murder disguised as a suicide.

Whatever really happened to Vince Foster there is much blood on Hillary’s hands. In March of 1999, Hillary called up her husband from Africa and urged him to bomb Serbia. Bill did so – without the approval of the American Congress but with the support of other NATO leaders such as the UK’s Tony Blair and our own creepy Prime Minister at the time, Jean Chretien. “They need some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get”, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright declared. Albright was appointed, like so many other members of Bill Clinton’s cabinet, at Hillary’s choice. The excuse for the bombing was the accusation – later proven to be false – that the Serbian government was ethnically cleansing the Albanians in Kosovo. The bombing benefited the Albanian Islamic terrorist organization the KLA at the expense of Orthodox Serbia, which saw its infrastructure devastated and thousands of its civilians murdered by NATO bombs.

Speaking of American military interventions that should never have taken place and which had disastrous consequences, Hillary Clinton, as Senator for New York State, voted in favour of the Iraq War in 2002.

Then along came 2011. Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State in the administration of Barack Obama, urged a “humanitarian intervention” in Libya. She got her way, an Obama led NATO bombed Libya, and Colonel Qaddafi was ousted and killed, and jihadists gained control of Libya. The following year those jihadists attacked the American embassy in Benghazi, killing the American ambassador J. Christopher Stephens and ten others. The consulate had requested that their security be beefed up, but the request had been denied by the State Department headed by You Know Who.

“Do we want his finger anywhere near the button?” Hillary Clinton asked in the speech she gave to the Democratic National Convention, accepting the party’s nomination, but it is a question that might properly be asked of her, considering her track record as First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State and the bellicose language she uses when speaking of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In the same speech, Hillary Clinton called the foreign policy ideas of her opponent “dangerously incoherent”, but her own could be described as “dangerously coherent.” They are the same failed ideas that have guided American foreign policy since the Presidency of George H. W. Bush. In the last two and a half decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the forces of Islamic jihad have emerged as the biggest external threat to Western civilization. During that time, each American administration has thought that the appropriate way to handle this threat was to introduce more democracy into the countries that produce and support jihadists – unless their governments regularly do business with the administration and its friends – and to bomb the hell out of these countries. At the same time they have encouraged large scale immigration from all over the world, including Islamic countries. This policy would continue under a President Hillary Clinton. It is a policy that might serve the interests of the new, internationalist, globalist order, that every President since the first Bush has believed in, but from the perspective of anyone concerned about the safety and security of the United States, or the larger Western world for that matter, it is clearly a recipe for disaster, for converting an external threat into a much more dangerous internal one.

This, ultimately, is what this year’s election will be all about. If Americans want more of the same – more bombing countries overseas and more potential jihadists being allowed in – then they have Hillary Clinton to choose. If they want the opposite of this, then they had better consider voting for her opponent, for he is the first candidate of a major party in decades to offer anything different. That is the true historic first in this election.