Good Riddance

On Sunday, 9 March, the Liberal Party chose a new leader.  That Mark Carney will be His Majesty’s next Prime Minister in the Dominion of Canada is no cause for celebration because he is as bad, if not worse, than his predecessor.  Mercifully, his premiership should be very short.  There is a Dominion election coming up this year.  Despite the legacy media’s treatment of the Liberal leadership campaign as if it were a Dominion election it was not.  When the next session of Parliament begins on the eve of Lady Day, it will still be the forty-fourth Parliament that sits. 

 

While some polls have been indicating a resurgence of support for the Liberals after their previous leader drove it to an all-time low those in the legacy media who have been translating this into a prediction of a Liberal victory, even a majority government, come the actual election, are being a bit premature.  Carney is in the same situation that Kim Campbell was in in 1993 and John Turner in 1984. In both of these instances a prime minister resigned and turned the leadership of his party over to someone else who briefly became prime minister before the next Dominion election in which the party suffered a major defeat.  After the first Trudeau handed over the Liberal Party to Turner in 1984, Brian Mulroney led the Progressive Conservatives to a historical victory, winning 211 seats, the largest majority government in Canadian history by seat count.[1]  In 1993, Mulroney stepped down from the leadership of the Conservatives who were hemorrhaging support to the Western populist Reform Party, and Kim Campbell led the party to the humiliating defeat in which it was reduced to 2 seats, and John Chretien’s Liberals won a majority government.

 

Historical precedent, therefore, does not favour a Liberal victory in the upcoming Dominion election.  Nor does the fact that Carney lacks the charisma of his predecessor while sharing all of the points that eventually made him the most hated prime minister in the history of the Dominion.  Nevertheless, I am not going to imitate the legacy media in counting chickens before they are hatched.

 

The preceding is all by way of introduction to an essay which, as you have probably gathered from the title, is about the outgoing Liberal leader, Captain Airhead, or, as he is sometimes called, Justin Trudeau.  While I am not pleased to see Carney step into the Dominion premiership I am very happy to see Captain Airhead leave it.  He has been by far the worst prime minister in the history of Canada and probably of the entire British Commonwealth. 

 

Last week, in a farewell address, Captain Airhead said “On a personal level, I made sure that every single day in this office, I put Canadians first, and I have people’s backs, and that’s why I’m here to tell you all that we got you.”  He could not say this with a straight face, although laughter would have been more appropriate than the tears that broke his composure.  Perhaps he thought the qualifying phrase “on a personal level” made what is otherwise a bald-faced lie somehow true.  For in his public actions, he did the very opposite of put Canadians first.

 

To demonstrate this I am now going to switch to the second person and address Captain Airhead directly.

 

How exactly, Captain Airhead, were you putting Canadians first, when you raised foreign aid spending to approximately $7-8 billion annually?  Since the only money the Canadian government can spend is money that it has either a) obtained by taxing Canadians, b) borrowed and which will have to be paid back with interest by taxing Canadians in the future or c) printed, thus reducing the spending power of Canadian currency per unit and indirectly taxing Canadians now and in the future, you were taxing Canadians, either in the present or in the future, to spend in other countries.  That is not putting Canadians first.  Since you made a spectacle of tying foreign aid to spreading feminism and climate change alarmism around the world it looks more like you were putting your personal agenda first.

 

Related to the previous paragraph is the fact that in these years that you were so generous with the money of other Canadians, present and future, you never once came close to balancing a budget.  Granted, you gave us advance warning that you would be like that when you infamously said “the budget will balance itself.”  Each year you ran a deficit this added to the debt burden that Canadians will have to pay in the future.   How is that putting Canadians first?

 

Then there was your immigration policy.  Over the course of the last year you gradually admitted that immigration levels were too high.  In spring of last year you said that “Whether it’s temporary foreign workers or whether it’s international students in particular, that have grown at a rate far beyond what Canada has been able to absorb.”  Later in the fall, after your immigration minister, Marc Miller, announced that the number of permanent immigrants to be admitted this year would be reduced by about 20% while the number of temporary immigrants admitted would be almost halved, you admitted that permanent immigration levels were also a problem.  In your typical, “everybody else is to blame but me” fashion, you said “Increasingly bad actors like fake colleges and big chain corporations have been exploiting our immigration system for their own interests.”  This came after years of you dismissing those of us who pointed out that immigration was too high for the country to absorb as “racists”, an accusation you continued to shamelessly fling at others despite what the blackface scandal of 2019 revealed about yourself.  That you acknowledged this at all was only because everyone else in the country had long recognized that it is insane to be bringing in record numbers of immigrants at a time we are experiencing a major housing crisis.  Bringing in large numbers of newcomers when we are having trouble housing Canadians is not putting Canadians first. The problem is not “fake colleges” or “big chain corporations” exploiting what would otherwise be good policy.  Very early in your premiership you showed your contempt for Canadians when you said that you are “jealous” of new immigrants and addressing immigrants said “this is your country more than it is for others because we take it for granted, we default into this place.”

 

How was it putting Canadians first to constantly denigrate the founders and historical leaders of our country?  Over the last couple of months it has been heartwarming to see Canadians come forward to show their love of Canada in the face of insults and threats coming the megalomaniacal president of the United States.  That Canadian patriotism is alive today, however, is despite you, Captain Airhead, not because of you.  The way the memory of the foremost Father of Confederation, our first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald has been treated during your premiership has been a disgrace.  You have made countless apologies for the acts of previous Canadian governments, acts of which you show little to no historical comprehension.  Since you were not the one who committed the acts for which you were apologizing and for the most part those to whom you were apologizing were not the ones who were on the receiving end of those acts, these were absolutely devoid of worth as apologies and would be so even if the historical incidents were as shameful as you think they are which in most cases they were not.

 On 18 May, 2016, for example, a little over halfway into the first year of your premiership, you apologized in the House of Commons for the Komagata Maru incident.  The incident took place in 1914, before your father, let alone yourself, had even been born.  Nobody alive today or in 2016 had been on board the Japanese ship when it was turned away from Vancouver.  Furthermore, we were not in the wrong to turn them away.  The man who had chartered the cargo ship to carry 376 mostly-Sikh, Punjabis to Canada, Gundit Singh, was well aware that he was defying Canadian immigration rules.  He had bragged that he would successfully challenge the rules in court and that he would bring another 25 000 Punjabis over.  Singh was a supporter of the revolutionary nationalist Ghadarite movement as were many of those on board the Komagata Maru.  The violent actions of these during the incident more than justified the decision not to allow them to disembark.  If anyone is owed an apology in connection to this incident it Canadian Sikhs who owe Canada an apology for honouring as a martyr Mewa Singh, who in the aftermath of the incident murdered Canadian immigration inspector William C. Hopkinson and was justly executed for his capital crime.

 

Moreover you have actively embraced blood libel against Canada.  In 2021 when ground disturbances were discovered by sonar on the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, the media dishonestly distorted this into a claim that evidence of genocide having been committed in the Indian Residential Schools had been discovered.  This claim has since been thoroughly rebutted.  It was patently absurd even at the time. You, however, lowered the Canadian flag on Parliament Hill and kept the flag at half-mast for almost half a year.  By embracing this blood libel, you encouraged that summer’s wave of statue toppling and other “Year Zero” attacks on Canadian history.  You also encouraged the biggest wave of hate crimes Canada has ever seen as 112 church buildings were burned or otherwise vandalized.  As this was going on you held conferences about anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, about both of which you are known to wax eloquent in your indignant condemnation of these prejudices as un-Canadian, but were notably silent on the subject of the Christophobia that you helped stoke, directed against what is still the majority religion in Canada, until pressed to comment, at which point you gave a weak statement that the church burnings were “unacceptable and wrong” while adding that you thought the anger behind them was “fully understandable”, a qualification you have never used about bigotry against any other religion.  How exactly was this putting Canadians first?

 

Early in your premiership you cancelled the Northern Gateway pipeline and placed so many roadblocks in the way of the Energy East pipeline that the company that owned it, then called TransCanada, cancelled it themselves.  The Trans Mountain pipeline had been approved for an expansion project that would twin the pipeline but was facing protests from environmentalists and Indians, or at least from professional protesters claiming to be environmentalists and Indians.  This and the uncooperative behaviour of the BC provincial government at the time led the company that owned Trans Mountain to wash its hands of the project. You bought the pipeline from them for $4.5 billion and the TMX was finally completed last year.  Those other pipelines should have been built too.  Your Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, François-Philippe Champagne said in the light of the current trade war with the United States “That may mean you need pipelines that go west-east.”  In other words, precisely the pipelines you got in the way of being built.  It should not have taken threats and tariffs from an unhinged American president to realize that we need east-west pipelines.  If we had these we would not have to import oil from OPEC and would not have to sell most of our oil to the Americans at a rate far below the world market value.  If, instead of removing Sir John A. Macdonald from our currency and allowing his reputation to be besmirched you had paid attention to his example you would have realized this.  The most important infrastructure project of his premiership was the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway.  It was first conceived as part of Macdonald’s National Policy in 1873 and was completed in 1885.  The purpose of the project was to build national unity, political and economic, by facilitating east-west trade, and in pushing the project through to completion Macdonald had to successfully fight several attempts by American interests to defeat the purpose of the project by having the route changed so that east-west trade could be diverted in a southern direction.  The need for east-west pipelines is basically an application of the same principle.  You were hardly putting Canadians and our country first when you let your idiotic climate ideology get in the way of building such pipelines.

 

On a related note, neither were you putting Canadians or our country first, when you, again driven by your climate ideology, basically declared war on the petroleum industry.  Did you really think that when you shot your mouth off about how “We need to phase them [the oil sands] out” that this would not reignite the feelings of resentment and alienation in Alberta that your father lit with the National Energy Program in 1980?  With much more justification for these feelings, might I add, since your father’s NEP, hopelessly flawed as it was, was a form of economic nationalism aimed at limiting foreign ownership of the Canadian energy sector, expanding the energy industry, doing what I criticized you for not doing in the previous paragraph, and basically making sure the industry works for the national interest, whereas your remarks came across as a threat to eventually – the sentence preceding the one already quoted was “We can’t shut down the oil sands tomorrow.” – shut down the petroleum industry.  Since you surrounded yourself with anti-petroleum radicals like Gerald Butts and Stephen Guilbeault Alberta had every reason to feel threatened.  Bringing back the national unity crisis of the 1970s to mid-1990s was hardly acting in the interest of Canadians and our country.  Especially now that we are faced with threats of economic warfare and Anschluss from a power mad American president who is degenerating further into a deranged lunatic and despot every day.

 

Perhaps you think you were putting Canadians first, looking out for us, and having our backs, during the absurd paranoia from 2020 to 2022 over a new strain of respiratory disease that while having a slightly higher mortality rate than the seasonal flu was far more comparable to it than to MERS or even the original SARS to which it was related and basically posed a significant danger only to those to whom the seasonal flu also poses a significant danger.  If so, let me remind you of what actually happened.  You suspended all of the fundamental freedoms identified as such in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the addition of which to our constitutional law in 1982 when your father was prime minister is one of the few events of Canadian history of which you have spoken positively.  You arbitrarily declared some people’s jobs and businesses to be essential and others to be non-essential, shut down those unfortunate enough to be declared non-essential, and ordered everybody to stay home and paid them to do so.  You forced them to wear masks designed to prevent large particles from dropping into bodies opened up during surgery and entirely ineffective at preventing the transmission of respiratory disease when you did let them out.  Then you tried to require them in order to be readmitted to society to take injections of a type never before used on human beings involving the modification of mRNA (the messenger that brings your body the instructions from your genes) and which had been rushed to production with inadequate testing.  When you introduced new requirements of this nature at a time when every other country was removing restrictions, some Canadians said enough is enough, and supported a convey of long-distance truckers who drove to Ottawa and conducted a peaceful albeit noisy protest by basically holding a long block party celebrating Canada and freedom.  Your response was to unjustifiably invoke the Emergencies Act, a piece of legislation designed for use as a means of last resort in combatting terrorism, insurrection, and the like, to crush the protest.  Through this period of over two years, you refused to listen to anyone critical of what you were doing, accused those who stated the plain facts which contradicted what your Public Health Officer was saying of spreading “misinformation” and “disinformation”, said that those who disagreed with you held “unacceptable views” and bizarrely accused them all of being “racists” and “white supremacists.”  These are not the actions of someone who puts Canadians first and has our backs.  These are the actions of a narcissist who is in love with power.  You and the American president have a lot in common.

 

How is it putting Canadians first and having our backs to limit our access to information to sources of which you approve and restrict what we can say ourselves in public, both of which you have been obsessed with doing for the duration of your premiership?

 

How is it putting Canadians first to make medically assisted suicide widely available for pretty much any reason whatsoever and to encourage Canadians to choose it as an alternative to medical treatment, social assistance, or any other help that they actually need?

 

How is it putting Canadians first to condemn provincial governments that ban the prescription of puberty blockers and gender reassignment surgery to minors as if they were attacking the vulnerable rather than what they are obviously actually doing which is protecting them from making irreversible decisions that they are too young to make?  Or to accuse parents who object to their children being indoctrinated with radical gender identity politics and ideology in school of hatred and bigotry?  Is this not rather putting your own ridiculous ideological agenda first and Canadians last?  

 

I think I have sufficiently made my point.

 

While I do not look forward to the premiership of the man who will be replacing you as His Majesty’s prime minister, Captain Airhead, I hope that premiership will be very short.  In the meantime, I am very pleased to see you go.  It should have happened long before now.  You will not be missed.

 

 

 

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[1] John Diefenbaker’s 1958 victory of 208 seats is still the largest in terms of percentage of the House.  There were 265 total seats in 1958, 282 in 1984, and 338 today.

More Assorted Reflections

The first Assorted Reflections can be found here.

- Although Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans claimed to be fighting for the freedom of the people against “tyranny”, it was King Charles I who had the love and support of the common people. The Jacobins, likewise, declared themselves to be the champions of the poor of France, even though in the cahiers detailing their grievances the poor of France had not called for the overthrow of the monarchy, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were in fact more popular than the men who deposed them, the Revolution was instigated by a cousin of the king, and most of its leaders were upper class intellectuals. Marxism considered itself to be the voice of the proletariat (factory workers) despite the fact that its founders were a pseudo-philosopher (Marx) and a factory owner (Engels), it has always been led by intellectuals, and has never drawn significant support from the actual working classes, who generally suffered the most wherever it came to power. Similarly, the feminist movement appointed itself the voice of the female sex, although it has never spoken for family oriented women who make marriage and children their top priorities and is overtly hostile to Christian women who believe the Sixth Commandment applies to both sexes. The claims of black activist groups to speak for all blacks and of the Anti-Defamation League to speak for Jews are further examples of the same.

- From its beginning feminism has drawn inspiration from both liberalism (classical) and Marxism, with some feminists leaning more toward liberalism, others towards Marxism, but with a general alignment to the liberal-left. The liberal-left has always been inclined towards democratic and small-r republican institutions of government – an inclination which in no way conflicts with its inclination towards totalitarianism. Within such institutions, feminism had to fight for the right of women to vote and to hold elected office. Conversely, we on the conservative-right have traditionally been inclined towards the institution of hereditary, royal, monarchy. This institution has allowed for reigning and even ruling queens and empresses since the dawn of human history.

- Feminism has strange priorities. On New Year’s Eve, 2015, gangs of migrants harassed, assaulted, and in some cases raped large numbers of women in Cologne and other German cities. The feminist outcry over this was insignificant, almost non-existent in comparison to the loud noise they are currently making over Brett Kavanaugh, the charges against whom are unsubstantiated and suspiciously timed. Indeed, most feminists have jumped on the “migrants welcome” and anti-Islamophobia bandwagons, proving that while politics makes strange bedfellows, intersectionality makes the strangest bedfellows of all.


- While I do not take the position that women ought to be kept barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen, I do think a case can be made that this is what should be done to feminists. Especially the male feminists.


- It has been reported for a couple of weeks now that Her Excellency, Julie Payette, is less than happy with her position as Her Majesty's vice-regal representative in the Dominion government and that others are less than happy with her performance in that role. Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that she was chosen for the position by the Liberal Party. The Grits, and especially the Trudeau branch of the party, have long lacked both an understanding of and an appreciation for the office of the Governor General and the grand, traditional, institution of royal monarchy it represents. So, when it falls to them to choose the next Governor General, they don't look for the person best suited to represent the Queen in Canada - which is the actual, constitutional, purpose of the office - but for someone to be the face of Canada, as they envision it, which is constantly changing, to the world. There is a simple solution to the problem. I have long maintained that while the Canadian Senate is badly in need of reform, the reform it needs is reform that respects and is consistent with the constitution that the Fathers of Confederation bequeathed to us in 1867. The complete overhaul of the Americanized, Triple-E, model proposed by the old Reform Party is unacceptable. The most necessary reform could be accomplished simply by removing control over who is recommended to be appointed to the Senate from the Prime Minister's office. Having the provinces, rather than the federal government, recommend the appointees to the Senate seats allotted to them would be an obvious way of doing this. Similarly, it should not be the Prime Minister who advises the Queen as to who her representative should be. Indeed, unlike the Senate, in the case of the Governor General's office it was not established in Confederation that the Queen would appoint based on recommendation from the Prime Minister's office, but rather, until the Statute of Westminster the appointment was made on recommendation by the Imperial Privy Council. In the Liberal Version of Canadian history this is regarded as a step forward in the evolution of Canadian nationhood. This is because the Liberal Version falsely superimposes America's story - the story of former colonies forging a new national identity after severing the imperial connection - upon Canada. Canada's true story is the exact opposite of this - the story of Britain's loyal North American colonies, English-speaking Protestant and French-speaking Catholic, coming together to create a new nation that would deliberately retain the connection, that would in time become more familial than imperial. Since so many Canadians do not know our own story, transferring the right of recommendation from the Canadian PMO back to London would not sell in this day and age, but that is not the only option that suggests itself. The Queen's Canadian Privy Council, minus the current Prime Minister and Cabinet, is the appropriate body to make the recommendation.


- Mazo de la Roche, at one time Canada's most popular novelist (she also wrote plays, short stories, and a memoir), had very strong views as to who was qualified to be Governor General. According to her biographer Ronald Hambleton she believed the office should be restricted to the aristocracy and preferably a member of the royal family. De la Roche is buried very close to the grave of Stephen Leacock in the churchyard of St. George the Martyr at Sibbald Point in Sutton, Ontario. Both were traditional Canadian Tories - royalists, who believed in Canada and her British institutions and connection, and were suspicious of American liberal republicanism. With her reverence for nobility and the aristocratic ideal, so obviously on display in her Jalna books, de la Roche was more properly the High Tory. Apart from his royalism and his views of race and sex, Leacock's dissent from egalitarianism was in the direction of individualistic meritocracy. He was, perhaps, the quintessential Canadian Low Tory.


- Canada's British institutions and familial connection have historically been means to the end of preserving Canada's independence from the United States. The reverse is also true, that the cause of maintaining Canada's independence from the United States has been the means to the end of preserving her British institutions and familial connection, valued as goods in themselves. The main weakness of Canadian Toryism, apart from the fear of being seen as too right-wing by the electorate that has led to far too much left-ward drift over the years, is that while it always recognized the first point, it seldom fully grasped the second, which is the more important of the two. John Diefenbaker was an exception to this. John Farthing, whose Freedom Wears a Crown articulated and defended the point, was another. Neither man was properly appreciated by the Conservative Party.


- Conservatives of the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries looked back to the eighteenth century statesman Edmund Burke as their prophet. Ironically. Edmund Burke was a member of the Whig (liberal) Party. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this. The ideas that conservatives most respect in Burke are his defence of the British monarchy and established Church, his condemnation of "armed doctrines", his revision of social contract theory to make the "contract of each particular state" into a "clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society" that is a "partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born," and the local patriotism of his "little platoons," all of which come from his Reflections on the Revolution in France, written late in his career, and which better reflect Tory convictions than those of his own party. Indeed, this sharing of ideas has gone both ways. Thomas Hobbes, who introduced social contract theory to begin with, and David Hume, the noted eighteenth century skeptic, are both recognized as significant contributors to the development of the ideas of classical liberalism, but politically both were affiliated with the Royalists/Tories. In Hume's case this only really comes out in his History of England. At any rate, excellent as many of Burke's "neo-Tory" insights in the Reflections are, conservatives would do better to look to his friend the lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the oft-quoted Dr. Johnson, as their eighteenth century prophet. T. S. Eliot was one conservative who recognized this, and his famous statement "I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics" consciously echoes Dr. Johnson's definition of a Tory.


- Canadian conservatism began as an adaptation of British Toryism. It was royalist, but, due to the greater denominational differences that have been here since before Confederation (French Canadians were predominantly Roman Catholic, English Canadians were traditionally English Anglicans and Scottish Presbyterians, with a sizable number of English Methodists and Baptists and Irish Catholics, and smaller numbers from other denominations) it was less associated with church establishment than its British parent, although it was far from being secular, and Canada, contrary to the claims of certain ignorant Grits, has no tradition of separation of church and state. Since the 1950s, and the birth of the American conservative movement (as recently as 1950 Lionel Trilling could write "In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition"), Canadian conservatives have tended either to borrow ideas from American conservatives (Canadian neo-conservatives) or to emphasize the differences between Canadian Toryism and American conservatism and try to re-align the former with socialism, progressivism, and the left (Red Tories). Both tendencies are mistakes, in my opinion. Contrary to some clever arguments from the Reds and the examples of lovably eccentric individuals like George Grant and Eugene Forsey who were able to blend religious conservatism and the Tory love of Canadian institutions with otherwise left-wing views in their personal philosophies, there is no natural affinity between Toryism on the one hand and socialism, progressivism, and the left in general on the other. Canadian neoconservatives, however, have had the perverse tendency to pick out of the big tent of American conservatism, the ideas that are least compatible with our own Toryism and neglect those that are the most. That big tent originally consisted of classical liberals or libertarians (liberals in the nineteenth century meaning of the term), ex-Communist Cold Warriors, and traditionalists like Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and Robert Nisbet. The traditionalists borrowed from British classical conservatism as many ideas as they could compatibly incorporate into a liberal republic. Obviously, these are the American conservatives most compatible with our own Toryism. They are also the most neglected by Canadian neo-conservatives. This is perhaps not surprising when we consider how neglected they are in their own movement. Their role in the big tent was largely supplanted in the 1970s and 1980s by the New Right and (American) neo-conservatives. The New Right was an alliance between populist-nationalists and the Religious Right. There was some overlap in position between the older moral and social conservatism of the traditionalists which corresponded closely to that of British and Canadian Tories but the predominantly evangelical/fundamentalist Religious Right more often seemed to be a revival of Puritanism, the theocratic Calvinism that had been the first form of liberalism before it went secular, and the Tories' oldest enemy. The American neo-conservatives were New Deal, liberal, Democrats who defected from the left when the New Left became pro-Soviet and pro-Palestinian. These became the arch champions of American, neo-imperialistic, militarism. It is from the classical liberals and American neo-conservatives that Canadian neo-conservatives have borrowed the most. The Religious Right has had much less of an impact, perhaps because of the large influence of social justice theology on our evangelicals, although interestingly the socially and morally conservative George Grant, usually considered a Red Tory, was willing to look on the Religious Right as allies in the fight against abortion and euthanasia. With the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency, the populist-nationalists, with the backing of a sizable portion of the Religious Right, rose to ascendency in the big tent of American conservatism, much to the disgust of the Republican Party elite, an alliance of the neo-conservatives, classical liberals (except the Trump-supporting paleolibertarians), and a minority of the Religious Right. Already in Canada we see signs of this impacting us, with Doug Ford leading the Ontario Progressive Conservatives to victory on a populist-nationalist platform, and now Quebec having given a majority government to a party which, like Maxime Bernier's proposed new federal party, blends classical liberalism with populist-nationalism. What this entails for the future of Canada and Canadian conservatism remains to be seen. I will still be holding on to my classical, Canadian, Toryism with a willingness, as always, to entertain worthy ideas from any of these other varieties.

- The elements of genuine moral and social conservatism are the beliefs: a) in an unchanging and universal moral order or natural law with fixed standards of right and wrong (C. S. Lewis’ “Tao” from The Abolition of Man), b) that tradition, through which the accumulated wisdom of the past is passed down to us, is a more reliable guide to these standards than private, abstract, reasoning, c) that the cultivation and nature of right habits of behaviour (virtues) is more effective than the imposition of rules at producing right decision-making and that while the information transmitted in the process of cultivating such habits necessarily includes some rules, the bulk of it cannot be codified as rules and can only be learned from example, which is best accomplished in the home with the support of the teaching ministry of the church, and d) that the government’s role is the “ministry of the sword”, by which it makes and enforces the laws that uphold the peace, order, and justice that provide the civilized framework for all of the preceding points. The popular perception of moral and social conservatism, however, has largely been shaped by the New American Religious Right, the most immediate direct ancestor of which was the Prohibition movement which grew out of the Temperance Movement supported by evangelical and fundamentalist revivalists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is often forgotten today that Prohibition was considered to be a Progressive cause, both big and small p, at the time, and also had the support of the Social Gospel movement (theological liberalism) and first-wave feminism. Indeed, in Canada at least, the latter was largely responsible for Prohibition passing – the provinces generally voted Prohibition in immediately after feminism won the franchise for women in World War I and then voted it back out again once the men returned from overseas. While Prohibition did have its supporters among Conservatives, the most traditional Tories and the churches most associated with classical conservatism, the Anglican Church which at the time was still “The Tory Party at prayer” and the ultramontane Roman Catholic Church of pre-Quiet Revolution Quebec, opposed it. Stephen Leacock gave lectures against it pro bono public! There are significant differences, of course, between the Prohibition movement and the New Religious Right. The former sought to impose on society a new law, the complete abstinence from alcoholic beverages, which was not grounded in tradition, had not been part of mainstream Christian orthodox moral theology (it belongs rather to the Islamic tradition) and which, despite the best efforts of Rev. William Patton to prove otherwise, clearly contradicts the Scriptures. The latter was a response to a moral revolution that removed long-standing, traditional rules, which are supported by orthodox Christian moral theology. There is nothing in its opposition to abortion, euthanasia, and the ongoing sexual revolution with which genuine moral and social conservatism would disagree, but in its presentation it evokes the image of previous evangelical backed moral crusades, such as Prohibition and the seventeenth century Puritanism that would put a man in stocks for kissing his wife in public when he returned from a three year voyage on Sunday, an unattractive image to say the least.


- David Lane was a disturbed individual who rejected the Christian faith in which he was raised for a revived, Nordic, paganism and embraced a violent racialism and was eventually sent to prison for the crimes he committed as a member of the Order, a neo-Nazi terrorist group that supported its activities with funds obtained through armed robbery. Obviously a man who any sane person would consider to be utterly repugnant. What is interesting, however, is that if you take the "fourteen words" meme attributed to him, "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children", and substitute any other colour or racial identity for "our" and "white" you will end up with a statement that would be considered unobjectionable, non-offensive, acceptable, laudable, and even an essential goal of social policy by liberals, progressives, and other self-identified "enlightened" people. Make the substitution and you will see what I mean. This provides us with a challenge for the soi disant "enlightened." Either admit, that despite its unsavoury origins and associations, there is nothing objectionable in the content of the “fourteen words” meme or disavow all the other racial identity politics that you support.

- Another white nationalist meme is that of “white genocide.” It purports to explain the observable phenomenon that has sometimes been called “white death,” i.e., the vast shrinking, over the last century, of the Caucasian percentage both of the total world population and of the populations of historically white countries, that has accelerated after the post-World War II Baby Boom as white fertility has dropped and white populations have been aging without reproducing themselves, relying instead upon immigration to replace themselves. The explanation offered by the “white genocide” meme is that this is due to the plotting of some racial enemy. Although there certainly are leftists who express their hatred of white people in genocidal terms, an obvious example of which being Noel Ignatiev, and genocide would be an apt description of what is being done to the whites of Zimbabwe and South Africa, the phenomenon as a whole is probably better described as “white suicide.” The white nationalists are asking the wrong question. Instead of asking “who is doing this to us” they should be asking “why are we doing this to ourselves.” The answer is liberalism.

- Forty-five years ago, in the eerily prophetic novel, The Camp of the Saints, French author Jean Raspail warned of the coming death of Western civilization through an invasion of the masses of Third World poor aided and abetted by a suicidal white liberalism. The author was not a populist-ethno-nationalist, at least not primarily, but rather a traditional Roman Catholic and a legitimist royalist. Perhaps this explains his insightful prescience.


- Both the left and the right believe that ethnocentrism has both a healthy and a toxic form. Where they disagree is over what constitutes the difference between the healthy and toxic. The right would say that a healthy ethnocentrism is the kind of in-group loyalty that promotes and facilitates social cohesion, trust, and cooperation whereas toxic ethnocentrism is characterized by a paranoid distrust and violent hatred towards other groups. The left is more simplistic. For them it is a matter of skin colour. If you have the wrong skin colour, white, your ethnocentrism is toxic, no matter what form it takes, if you have the right skin colour, all others, it is healthy, even if it is expressed in paranoid and hateful terms.

- Today “enlightened” seems to mean “uncritically following the latest trends and fads in modern philosophy.” Come to think of it, that’s what it meant in the days of Diderot, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Kant and Rousseau, as well.


- Finding economic truth boils down to one question: who is the most competent to make the decision? If it is a decision that primarily affects the individual and his family, then the individual and family are under most circumstances the most competent to make the decision. There are obvious exceptions of people who lack the rational facility to make their own decisions, but for the most part this stands true. Conversely, if it is a decision that primarily affects the good of the country as a whole, the government is the most competent to make the decision. Again there are obvious exceptions, such as when the government consists of arrogant, egotists, obsessed with reading everything through the lens of the latest trend in progressive and politically correct ideology, but generally it is the case. The doctrine of laissez faire or economic liberalism is the error of thinking that the individual is competent to make all decisions (and that the common good of the whole country is thereby brought about through Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”). Socialism is the error of thinking that the government is competent to make all decisions, including those that individuals and families should be making for themselves. The latter is by far the worst error of the two, but they are both errors.


- When someone says "satire is dead" they generally mean that things so bizarre have been happening in reality that it would be pointless to parody them. Satire is dead, but for an entirely different reason - the widespread influence of liberal, progressive, and left-wing thinking. The left does not get satire, because the left is incapable of distinguishing between basic human imperfection and huge evils that demand immediate rectification. This is because they refuse to accept the basic Christian truth that human history, between the Fall and Second Coming, is the history of people with the fundamental flaw of Original Sin, and that perfection cannot be expected on this earth and in time. Therefore, their response to any perceived imperfection is "this is unacceptable, it must be smashed, crushed, destroyed, and replaced with perfection." The point of satire, however, is to help us live with our imperfections, by allowing us to laugh at them. The political, social, religious, and cultural institutions that make for the good and civilized life are not perfect, but they can never be perfect, so rather than smashing them, crushing them, and razing them to the ground, let us laugh at their imperfections, so that we can appreciate them, warts and all. This spirit is completely foreign to the progressive. This is also why the greatest satirists - Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Stephen Leacock, and Evelyn Waugh to give a few examples, have been Tories.

State of the Dominion – 2018

Today, on the 151st anniversary of the founding of the Dominion of Canada, let us take a look at the state of the Dominion. We will start on a positive note – contrary to what liberals would like us to believe Canada still is the Dominion of Canada. This is because the Fathers of Confederation gave our country the title of Dominion – as a substitute for their original choice of Kingdom – and the name Canada. This happened decades before the word Dominion became a more general description of self-governing bodies within the Empire as it evolved into the Commonwealth. When the Liberals repatriated the British North America Act in 1982 and renamed it the Constitution Act they did not excise the section and article that titles our country Dominion (II.1) and so we remain the Dominion of Canada. The late, great, Canadian constitutional expert, the Honourable Eugene A. Forsey, was fond of pointing this out as one of the inadvertently positive results of the repatriation process of which he was overall, and quite rightly, critical. Another observation of Forsey’s is worth mentioning at this point – that the BNAA, albeit under a new name and with some bells and whistles added –remains our constitution. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms is not itself our constitution but a set of amendments to it. The common liberal notion that Pierre Trudeau gave us a “new constitution” in 1982 is a myth. Last, but not least, among the positives, Queen Elizabeth II does indeed still reign over our country as Head of State. It speaks very poorly of the intelligence of Justin Trudeau’s supporters that one of them chose to deride me for saying this in a recent essay even though it is an easily demonstrated statement of fact. Perhaps this liberal does not understand the difference between “reign” and “rule.”

Now we must turn to the negative side of the leger. Sadly, there is much more to be found here than on the positive side. There has been a growing tendency among true Canadian conservatives, i.e., those who wish to conserve the legacy of Confederation and the Loyalist tradition behind it, since the end of the Second World War to focus on the negative. This tendency stands in marked contrast to the more optimistic tone in the writings of the leading such Canadian conservative man of letters from the era that ended with the War, economist, political scientist, and humourist, Stephen Leacock. This is because the post-War conservatives have had much that is negative to focus on due to the success of a series of “revolutions within the form” that have been perpetrated by the Liberal Party. The first such revolution took place in the 1920s during the premiership of William Lyon Mackenzie King. John Farthing, in his posthumously published (1957) Freedom Wears a Crown, noted how this revolution seriously undermined Parliament’s ability to hold the government accountable leaving the Prime Minister and Cabinet with the near-dictatorial powers with which they have plagued Canada ever since. The book for which George Grant will forever be remembered, his Lament for a Nation, was published in 1965, two-years in to the second “revolution within the form” (1) that took place during the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau. Lament was a jeremiad based upon the author’s conviction that the fall of the Diefenbaker premiership two years previously, due to its insistence on not allowing Canadian policy to be dictated by Washington D.C., spelled the failure of the Confederation Project of building a conservative country that could withstand the continental gravity pulling it towards the orbit of American liberalism. Diefenbaker himself sounded the alarm about the radical changes being introduced in the early years of the Pierre Trudeau premiership in his Those Things We Treasure: A Selection of Speeches on Freedom and Defence of Our Parliamentary Heritage published in 1972. The same year, historian Donald Creighton’s collection of essays – in many cases originally lectures – Towards the Discovery of Canada, was, if anything, more pessimistic in tone than Lament. Creighton, although the son of a Methodist minister, did not allow Christianity’s optimistic view of history as ultimately culminating in the Kingdom of God to moderate his nationalist pessimism in the way Grant did. Towards the end of the Trudeau premiership and the completion of the second revolution, Winnett Boyd, Kenneth McDonald, and Orville Gaines published a series of books under their BMG label demonstrating how Trudeau’s policies were further subverting Canada’s parliamentary form of government and Common Law rights and freedoms, moving us closer to Soviet Communism, and, in the final book in the series, Doug Collins’ Immigration: The Destruction of English Canada, deliberately engineering radical changes to the demographic makeup of English Canada and in the process unnecessarily importing racial strife that would make it impossible to maintain order without a more authoritarian, if not totalitarian, style of governing.

The fact that all of the above books, with the exception of Grant’s, have been allowed to go out of print and that the leadership of the present Conservative Party shows little to no interest in their contents is itself a good reason for negativity and pessimism among traditional Canadian conservatives.

Today, we are in the midst of the third “revolution within the form”, being carried out under the leadership of the son of the architect of the second, a man operating without the benefit of either brains or a brain trust, even as we continue to be hit with the repercussions of the second revolution. As an example of the latter, consider the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent ruling in the Trinity Western University case. Trinity Western University is a conservative, evangelical, Christian university in British Columbia. It requires, as schools of this nature generally do, that its students agree to a Christian lifestyle covenant for the duration of their study. For some time now TWU has been working towards establishing a law school. While the law societies of most provinces have agreed to accredit the school and admit its graduates to the bar, the law societies of Ontario and BC have refused to do so. They consider TWU’s covenant to be discriminatory towards the alphabet soup gang, apparently holding the position that members of that group are incapable, unlike heterosexual singles who are also required to practice chastity by the same covenant, of refraining from acting upon their desires for the number of years it takes to get a law degree. The law societies’ decision has nothing to do with the quality of the legal education that would be available at the proposed school. What the law societies are doing is, ironically, exactly what they are complaining that TWU is doing – making their religious ethical convictions, in this case “thou shalt not discriminate”, into a standard that excludes others from membership in their community. There is a huge difference, however, in that the law societies are not the same kind of organization as TWU. TWU is a self-confessed, faith-based institution and the right of such institutions to require their members to adhere to the standards of their faith is well-established and time-honoured. The law societies are not institutions of that kind and have no such well-established and time-honoured right. The Supreme Court ought to have ruled in favour of TWU and prior to 1982 would have done so. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, however, transformed the Court into an agent of moral, social, and cultural revolution, which agrees with the law societies' efforts to force TWU to abandon either its Christian principles or its efforts to establish a nationally-accredited law school, because it ultimately shares their Cultural Marxist agenda of replacing the Christian principles of the old Canada with the modern, secular, pluralistic ideals of the new.

To many liberals today it would come as news that Canada ever had Christian principles to begin with. Former Liberal Party strategist Warren Kinsella and Mike Harris – the journalist not the 22nd premier of Ontario – are among the liberals that I have seen claim that Canada is a secular country that believes in separation of church and state. This absurd claim confuses the Canadian political tradition with its American counterpart but Kinsella and Harris are hardly the first liberals to be so confused. The Liberal Interpretation of Canadian History – what Donald Creighton mockingly called “the Authorized Version” – has always been based upon the false notion that Canada’s story is a repeat of America’s story – a former colony struggling to gain independence from the British Empire – rather than the truth that the those who built our country deliberately chose not to go down that path but to build our country within the evolving Commonwealth on a foundation of loyalty and continuity. This truth does not sit well with liberals – but then no truth ever has.

It is not just the Supreme Court. Justin Trudeau, who duped the Canadian electorate into voting his party a majority government in 2015, has been another aggressive promoter of the Cultural Marxist agenda. Not that he possesses the intelligence to actually understand the theories of Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukács, Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault. Cultural Marxism seems to be instinctual with him. He has made it a policy, starting this year, that employers receiving grants to hire student workers under the government’s Summer Jobs program must attest to their agreement with Liberal Party ideals including his crackpot notion that women have a right to murder their unborn babies. In other words “orthodox Christians need not apply.” The best that can be said about this is that it is merely an attempt to use the taxpayers’ money to bribe the faithful into giving up their convictions rather than dragging them before Human Rights tribunals and fining them or forcing them to attend the re-education camps euphemistically known as “sensitivity training classes” if they refuse to do so. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that this means that Trudeau is less of a soft-totalitarian than his father. It just means that these other methods of cramming far-left views down Canadians throats are being reserved for new battles, like his war against “transphobia” and “Islamophobia”, rather than ones seen by the Liberals as having been won long ago.

It is, of course, only orthodox believers in the religion of the old Canada that the Liberals intend to press to give up their traditional beliefs. Neo-conservatives have recently called attention to the fact that the Islamic Humanitarian Service of Kitchener, Ontario, whose Sheikh Shafiq Huda was recorded calling for violent action against Israel at a recent al-Quds day march in Toronto, has been approved for a grant under the Summer Jobs program despite its leader’s conduct being as out of sync with the ideals employers are expected to sign on to as the pro-life views of Christians. When the neo-conservatives accuse the Liberal government of hypocrisy, however, they miss the point altogether. The Liberal Party’s Cultural Marxist agenda is one of replacing the old Canada with the new. Christianity, the faith of the old Canada, has to be forced to bow the knee to the idols of the new. Practitioners of other religions do not have to because they are part of the “diversity” that is one of the chief of those idols. In the 2015 election campaign, Trudeau campaigned against the previous neo-conservative government’s use of the expression “barbaric cultural practices.” The practices in question – forced marriages, female genital mutilation, and the like – are in fundamental conflict with the feminism that Trudeau espouses but to call anything that people from other cultures do “barbaric” is to sin against diversity. While Trudeau wastes millions of our tax-dollars on schemes for promoting “gender equality” around the world, at home the only throats he will shove it down are those of orthodox Protestants and Catholics and traditional English and French Canadians. The neo-conservatives, since they share most of the same ideals as the liberals – their objection to “barbaric cultural practices” was based upon the inconsistency of those practices with egalitarian liberalism – are reduced to pointing out the inconsistencies in Liberal practice, having no resources with which to resist and combat the Liberals’ increasingly radical left-wing agenda.

A large part of Canada’s trade has always been with the United States. For decades, however, the old Canada resisted the Liberal Party’s call for free trade with the United States. There were several reasons for that. Confederation took place only a few years after the Republican Party had come to power in the United States and put into place Alexander Hamilton’s “American system” of growing a strong manufacturing base through tariff protectionism and internal infrastructure improvements. Sir John A. MacDonald’s Conservatives knew better than to waste their time trying to negotiate reciprocity with a country that was not interested in it and furthermore recognized that due to the larger population and economy of the United States a free trade arrangement would lead to the subjugation of Canada – economically, culturally, and perhaps eventually politically. Goldwin Smith, the nineteenth century Manchester School free-trader and Liberal intellectual, made no effort to hide the fact that this was exactly what he desired for Canada in his Canada and the Canadian Question (1891). Confederation, Smith maintained, was a mistake - the formation of an unnatural country against the natural north-south trade flow of the continent, an argument which was amply refuted by Harold Innis in The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (1930) and Donald Creighton in The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence 1760-1850 (1937). Canada, Smith argued, should apply for entry into the United States. To allow this to happen would go against the very purpose of Confederation – uniting the provinces of British North America into a single country that could resist the expansionism of a United States that was preaching its “Manifest Destiny” to rule all of North America and which had threatened Canada with annexation more than once. The Tories introduced, therefore, their National Policy, which was a similar sort of protectionist nation-building to what the Republicans were engaged in south of the border at the time. In 1891 and again in 1911 Sir Wilfred Laurier sought election with promises of free trade – and both times he was soundly defeated. Sir John A. MacDonald, denouncing the "veiled treason" of reciprocity, defeated him in 1891 despite the collapse of his health that led to his death shortly after the election. In 1911 the poet Rudyard Kipling, in a front page editorial against reciprocity for the Montreal Daily Star that was reprinted across the Dominion wrote: "It is her own soul that Canada risks today. Once that soul is pawned for any consideration, Canada must inevitably conform to the commercial, legal, financial, social, and ethical standards which will be imposed on her by the sheer admitted weight of the United States" and the Canadian voting public evidently agreed. By 1988, however, Canada had already undergone the first two “revolutions within the form” and the objections to free trade were largely forgotten or regarded as having no abiding relevance in the late twentieth century. When the Free Trade Agreement was negotiated between Canada and the United States it was Brian Mulroney, the leader of what had been Sir John A. MacDonald’s party, that did the negotiating and signed the treaty into law. The Liberals were forced into temporarily disavowing their historic pro-free trade position in 1988, but they quickly resumed it when they returned to power led by Jean Chretien in time to oversee the evolution of the Free Trade Agreement into NAFTA. In the decades that followed, as free-trade opponents predicted, Canadian businesses were bought up by American ones and Canadians increasingly came to resemble Americans in the places they worked, shopped, and ate at. Many Canadians, however, seemed to think this was a small price to pay for cheap consumer goods and economic growth - a further indication of the Americanization of our culture feared by the Fathers of Confederation. Twenty-five years after the initial Free Trade Agreement, American-born Diane Francis of the Financial Post revived Goldwin Smith’s arguments with her Merger of the Century: Why Canada and America Should Become One Country, demonstrating that the kind of annexionist thinking that had led the old Canada to fear free trade was not quite dead after all. For the history of the resistance against just such an outcome see David Orchard, The Fight for Canada: Four Centuries of Resistance to American Expansionism. (1993, 1998)

We have just been reminded of another reason why free trade was considered unwise - that we would be that much worse off if free trade were entered into and then rescinded than if we never agreed to it and became dependent upon it to begin with. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States on a populist platform that included, among other things, a revival of the Republican Party’s old economic nationalism. Trump vowed to put the interests of his own country ahead of international and global concerns, promising that if he could not renegotiate NAFTA to his liking he would "scrap it." The attitude Trudeau and his Trade Minister took, in entering into the renegotiation talks, was clearly not that of leaders who cared a fig about the interests and well-being of their country. They insisted on bringing into the talks all sorts of trendy, left-wing, nonsense that had no relevance to trade whatsoever but appealed to Trudeau's international liberal fan base. Trump, evidently sick of having to put up with this, has begun slapping tariffs on Canada. Things were made much worse when, after the G7 Summit in which the leaders, including Trump, had agreed to a united communication, Trudeau seized the opportunity to gloat, provoking a barrage of insults from the American President and a hardening of his trade policies. In response, the Liberal government has declared that it will impose retaliatory tariffs against the United States, but this is not the same thing as protective tariffs incorporated into a larger National Policy as MacDonald had put in place. It amounts to a trade war being fought against a country with a much larger economy than ours by people who are fundamentally emotionally and intellectually incapable of placing what is best or even good for their own country ahead of their global, international, popularity. That is a recipe for disaster.

The Laurentian political class behind Trudeau has, behind its mask of indignation, been rejoicing over Trump's verbal assaults on Trudeau because they have been bolstering up his support which had been declining drastically due to his own incompetence and egotism. The greatest fear of said political class, however, is of a populist revolt similar to the one that put Trump in power. That such is possible in Canada was demonstrated at the provincial level in Ontario with the election of Doug Ford's Progressive Conservatives and the decimation of Wynne's Grits. The political class has every reason to fear because the arrogance and contempt they have displayed to ordinary Canadians has long exceeded even that with which Hillary Clinton dismissed ordinary Americans as a "basketful of deplorables." In Canada, as in the United States, the most important issue over which the political class and the average citizen are at odds is immigration. In the 1960s the political classes of every nation within Western civilization adopted liberal views of immigration - that border laws should be lightly enforced, if at all, that immigrants should be accepted in larger numbers than ever before, and that restrictions based on race, religion, and ethnicity were not acceptable. Dissent from these views was condescendingly taken as evidence of irrational racial and cultural prejudices that would have to be eliminated through education. In Canada, the Diefenbaker Conservatives had removed racial and cultural restrictions on admission in the early 1960s, but the Liberals in the late 1960s gave the immigration system a complete overhaul. They introduced the points system of evaluating individual immigrant applications, a fair and ethnically neutral system, that nevertheless contained a large backdoor in the "family reunification" policy that allowed them to operate an ethnically biased policy under the guise of an ethnically neutral one. This policy, which Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau seemed to believe to be the solution to the existing tension between English and French Canada, was to make the country as diverse as possible as fast as possible. This was never a popular policy, as polling has always shown, and they took a particularly heavy-handed approach to dealing with dissent. (2) Laws which severely limited what could be said publicly in criticism of this were added to both the Criminal Code and the Canadian Human Rights Act. Twice, to my knowledge, government agents actually helped found and lead neo-Nazi groups (the Canadian Nazi Party of the 1970s and the Heritage Front of the 1980s and 1990s) for the purpose of creating a public fear of resurgent Nazism that could be used to tar all criticism of unpopular liberal immigration with the Nazi brush. Under Brian Mulroney's leadership the Conservatives refused to criticize any of this and indeed embraced it all. The result was that by the end of the 1980s anyone who expressed the same restrictionist views of immigration that Conservative Stephen Leacock had expressed in his final book While There is Time (1945), that Liberal leader William Lyon McKenzie King, who led the Dominion in World War II, had held, and that the Rev. J. S. Woodsworth, first leader of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation had defended in the twenty-first and twenty-second chapters of his Strangers Within Our Gates (1909) was suspected of Hitlerist sympathies. Even Preston Manning's neo-conservative/right-populist Reform Party refused to challenge the Laurentian class's manufactured and imposed consensus.


Skip ahead to the present day. In the United States, Donald Trump, fighting against the political establishments of both American parties, has been trying to stop the flood of illegal immigrants into the United States across the Rio Grande. Justin Trudeau, however, last year tweeted an open invitation to all those rejected by the United States. Surely it does not require more than a modicum of intelligence to see that those rejected by another country are not the ideal pool from which to draw your own country's immigrants? That thought appears never to have crossed Trudeau's mind, however, obsessed as he is with his image as the "compassionate" anti-Trump. This is an image he has been cultivating since the election that brought him to power which happened to coincide with the year in which the plot of Jean Raspail's 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints came true and Europe was swamped with an invasion of those whose most effective weapon was Europe's own liberal humanitarianism. Trudeau promised to bring thousands of these over here, which he did upon winning the election, after which he had his picture taken with them, and then promptly forgot about them as they were now the problem of ordinary tax-paying Canadians. After Trudeau's ill-conceived open invitation tweet Canada suddenly found herself with her own brand new border crisis just like the American one. Trudeau and his Laurentian backers are deceiving themselves if they think the average Canadian is any more pleased with this than the average American.

Our political, academic, and media elite classes, fearing that they have built up a massive reservoir of resentment against their arrogantly imposed consensus which a populist reformer could easily tap into if he were willing to defy all their rules, have been going bananas with a Trump Derangement Syndrome that exceeds that of the American Left. Luckily for them no such reformer has yet appeared on the federal horizon. Unluckily for Canada, even if one were to appear, the best we could hope for would be that he would stop the third revolution dead in its tracks. What we really need is for the previous two revolutions to be rolled back and our country put back on the course set for it by the Fathers of Confederation.

Much as I would like it to, I am not going to be holding my breath waiting for that to happen. So, to avoid ending on a negative note, I will quote the thought with which George Grant ended his Lament fifty three years ago:

Beyond courage, it is also possible to live in the ancient faith, which asserts that changes in the world, even if they be recognized more as a loss than a gain, take place within an eternal order that is not affected by their taking place. Whatever the difficulty of philosophy, the religious man has been told that process is not all. “Tendabantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.” (3)

Happy Dominion Day,
God Save the Queen

(1) I have borrowed this expression from Garet Garrett’s essay “The Revolution Was.” Garrett used it to describe the American New Deal in the 1930s.

(2) Not coincidentally, the men who dreamed up this draconian scheme of silencing their opponents were admirers of the totalitarian police state of the Soviet Union. According to Elizabeth Bentley’s testimony to an American Congressional Subcommittee about the Soviet spy ring she had operated in the United States during the Second World War, Lester Pearson, who was attached to the Canadian embassy in Washington at the time, was one of her informers. This part of his ignoble career is often overlooked because of his toadyish attitude towards the Soviets’ rivals, the Americans, as when he engineered Diefenbaker’s downfall to please Kennedy, but when the man won his Nobel Peace Prize in the 1950s for selling out Britain, whose side Canada had traditionally always taken as a family matter, along with France and Israel, it was to both the United States and the Soviet Union that he had prostituted himself. Pierre Trudeau’s sympathies with Communism were well known. He led the Canadian delegation to a Communist conference in Moscow back during Stalin’s dictatorship, prior to his disastrous entry into Canadian federal politics as editor of the far left Cité Libre he engineered the Marxist revolt against the Roman Catholic Church in Quebec known as the Quiet Revolution for which, for some reason, he was never excommunicated, and while in power federally made no attempt to hide his admiration for Mao and Castro. Since Pearson and Trudeau’s leadership of the Liberal Party took place smack in the middle of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union both men were able to fend off criticism over all of this by writing off anti-Communism as a kind of “American paranoia” as if the old Canada had not been solidly anti-Bolshevik long before the Cold War, and indeed, before the period just prior to the Cold War, when the American President whose policies ensured that the Second World War would end with the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe, was kissing Stalin’s backside.

(3) The Latin quotation is from the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid. The English translation given by Grant in a footnote is “They were holding their arms outstretched in love toward the further shore.”

Truth Versus Canada’s National Media

This year on July 1st, the 150th anniversary of the British North America Act’s coming into effect and establishing the Dominion of Canada as a new country, a disgraceful event occurred. It is not, however, the event which the national media has been harping on.

Some idiots decided that an appropriate way to celebrate the sesquicentennial was to stage a protest at the statue of Edward Cornwallis in Halifax. Edward Cornwallis, a Lt. General in the British Army, had founded, back in 1749, the settlement that would develop into the provincial capital of Nova Scotia. The protestors, carrying an upside-down Canadian flag, defaced the statue with crude anti-Canadian slogans, and a woman who identifies herself as Chief Grizzly Mamma cut off her hair and put it on the statue accusing Cornwallis of genocide and saying “You took their scalps, you can have mine too.”

She was referring to the bounty that Cornwallis had placed on the scalps of Micmac Indians, (1) on October 2, 1749. Cornwallis had done so after the Micmacs had carried out the Raid on Dartmouth three days earlier in which they scalped and beheaded a number of the British settlers. Cornwallis’ proclamation was, therefore, both defensive and retaliatory, although it was not effective, even when the bounty was raised a couple of years later. Chief Grizzly Mamma and her co-protestors had cherry-picked Cornwallis’ proclamation out of its historical context in order to insult our country on its birthday.

This protest is the disgraceful event to which I refer. It is not, however, what the national media focused on. During the protest, five young men, carrying the Canadian Red Ensign, came up to observe the events. These men, who were members of the Canadian Armed Forces – four navy, one army - politely and respectfully expressed their disagreement with the way the protestors were distorting history and then peacefully left despite the protestors’ belligerent attempts to pick a fight. The national media has ganged up on these men and, if you will excuse the metaphor, called for their scalps. Sadly, the Chief of Defence Staff and the Defence Minister have been all-too-willing to comply with this demand.

In addition to being servicemen these men were also members of an organization called Proud Boys. This is an organization founded last year by Gavin McInnes, who decades ago as co-founder of Vice Magazine, earned himself the sobriquet “the godfather of hipsterdom”. In more recent years he has developed a reputation as a kind of right-wing libertarian “shock jock.” He writes a regular column for Taki Theodoracopulus’ eponymous paleolibertarian e-zine and is also a commentator on Ezra Levant’s Rebel Media, a sort of online samizdat that was established to fill the hole that had been left when the Sun News network shut down. The media have been portraying this organization he founded as some sort of Nazi-sympathetic white supremacist organization but anyone familiar with Canada’s national media will recognize this as their worn out, nasty trick, of smearing anyone who dissents from what the liberal-left decides we must all think about race and race-related issues as a Nazi. McInnes, who despises political correctness almost as much as I do, goes out of his way to say things that offend the oversensitive and provoke the politically correct thought police but nobody who listens to what he has to say with an honest heart and an open mind could make the mistake of thinking that he is a true believer in racism of the ideological sort or that he would found an organization committed to such.

Listening with a honest heart and an open mind excludes most members of Canada’s national media, I am afraid, and so it doesn’t surprise me that apart from Rebel Media, the only person I have seen with the balls to report honestly on this story was the National Post’s Christie Blatchford. Sadly, her colleagues at the National Post do not all share her journalistic integrity. This is where I find myself, much to my amusement, dragged into this story.

In honour of Canada’s 150th I wrote two essays this year. One of these, a tribute to the great patriot Eugene Forsey, was posted on my own site, Throne, Altar, Liberty, on July 1st. The other, an essay entitled “Canada: More Than Just a Land” I contributed to the 2017 symposium at Northern Dawn, a traditionalist/neo-reactionary website where, as it so happened, it was also posted on the holiday. The title of the essay alludes to the fact that the English lyrics of "O Canada", declared to be our official national anthem in 1980, speak of Canada only as a northern land, omitting any reference to its history, traditions, and institutions, unlike "The Maple Leaf Forever", which had served as an informal national anthem alongside "God Save the Queen" since Confederation. The essay is about how "O Canada", the anthem of choice of the Liberal Party, reflects what our country is in danger of being reduced to by the Liberal Party’s long-standing campaign against the original vision of the Fathers of Confederation. Whereas the Founding Fathers of the United States had built their republic on the foundation of rebellion against and separation from the British crown and empire, the Fathers of Confederation chose to build our country on the opposite foundation of loyalty, honour, and maintaining our ties to the British crown and the empire that would soon become the Commonwealth. The Liberal Party, ever since, has tried to re-write Canada’s story into another version of the American story and has sought to divest us of our British heritage, including our traditional symbols, and in the process has threatened and weakened our parliamentary form of government and the Common Law, and the rights and freedoms of which these are the source.

This essay was quoted, earlier this week, by Graeme Hamilton, the Quebec correspondent of the National Post. Under some circumstances this could be considered an honour but Mr. Hamilton’s article is entitled “Former Canadian flag, the Red Ensign, gets new, darker life as far-right symbol.” Now if “far-right” means further to the right than the neoconservatives, or better yet what “the right” originally meant in the eighteenth century – a supporter of royalty, the institution of monarchy, aristocracy, nobility, and the established church – then I have no problem with the term being applied to myself. When the media speak of the “far-right”, however, they ordinarily mean and intend their audience to understand them as meaning admirers and followers of Adolf Hitler. This is what Mr. Hamilton, who makes reference to both the Aryan Guard and John Beattie who founded the Canadian Nazi Party decades ago, has in mind. As I have said many times, I have nothing but contempt for Adolf Hitler, his tyrannical system of government, or the left-wing movement he headed – for National Socialism, like Communism, was a direct ideological descendent of the original eighteenth century left, i.e., the anti-king, anti-church, anti-aristocracy French Revolutionaries.

Mr. Hamilton begins his article by talking about the Red Ensign’s having been used by the Proud Boys in the incident in Halifax, and using this as a launching point for a discussion of the way in which the Red Ensign has been “adopted as Canada’s equivalent of the Confederate flag by some extremists.” In the context of this discussion he includes the following paragraph:

Northern Dawn, a Canadian alt-right website launched last year to defend Western heritage against “chaos,” has used the Red Ensign as its Facebook cover photo. In a July 1 essay on the site, Gerry Neal decried the 1965 replacement of the Red Ensign with the current flag as evidence of a Liberal revision of national symbolism “to eliminate reference to our British heritage.”

Now, taken by itself, this paragraph does not misrepresent what I had to say about the replacement of the Red Ensign, but placed within the context of Mr. Hamilton’s article as a whole, which at no point acknowledges, let alone discusses, any of the differences between the groups and individuals it describes as “far right”, it presents a rather distorted picture of my essay in which race is not even mentioned, let alone discussed.

There is much that I could have said about race in that essay had I not been writing within the confines of a word limit. I could, for example, have pointed out that the Liberal Party of Canada, under Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, reintroduced racial bias into our immigration policy after it had been removed by John Diefenbaker. It was John Diefenbaker, by the way, who led the opposition to the changing of the flag, who insisted that the Red Ensign rather than the current flag should drape his coffin at his state funeral. Diefenbaker was an outspoken champion of the Old Canada, our ongoing family connection to Britain and the rest of the Commonwealth, our constitutional monarchy, parliamentary government, and Common Law heritage as the basis of our traditional rights and freedoms – all the things I argued for in my essay. He was also the Prime Minister who at a meeting of the Commonwealth leaders stood up and insisted that the Commonwealth must be colour blind in its policies. Diefenbaker removed race as a selection criteria from our immigration laws in 1962. Pearson and Trudeau put it back in there and, furthermore, the racial bias they introduced, was worse than the racial bias Diefenbaker had removed.

Prior to 1962, by an all-party consensus, our government considered race in the selection of immigrants for the purpose of maintaining the ethnic status quo. This is condemned as racist by liberals today, but it can be defended on grounds that have nothing to do with racist ideology. Indeed, the desire not to import a lot of new racial conflicts into a country where the peaceful co-existence of English-speaking Protestants, French-speaking Roman Catholics, and the various aboriginal tribes was already filled with tension, is arguably the exact opposite of racism. The racial bias introduced by Pearson and Trudeau, however, was the opposite of the original racial bias – rather than seeking to preserve the ethnic status quo, they wished to smash it to pieces by making Canada as ethnically diverse as possible, as fast as they could, with utter disregard for any potential negative consequences such as the atomization of communities and the balkanization of the nation as a whole.

Moreover, whereas Canada’s original race-based immigration policy had been carried out openly and honestly, as had Diefenbaker’s introduction of racial neutrality, Pearson and Trudeau introduced their new, reverse racial bias, in the sneaky, underhanded, dishonest manner that is the Liberal Party’s modus operandi. Instead of putting it down on paper in a bill, debating it in Parliament, and seeking public approval at election time, they simply instructed our visa officers to give priority to applications from the Third World and snuck millions of people past the race-neutral points system through a loophole. Then, if anyone dared to notice what was happening, let alone say anything critical about it, they loudly and aggressively cried “racist.” Worse, to deal with the increase in racial tension and conflict that would be the inevitable result of their reverse-racist immigration policy, they, following a precedent set by the Americans in the 1960s, passed laws dictating what employers, landlords, and a host of other people can or cannot be thinking in conducting their everyday business in complete violation of our traditional freedoms of thought and association, and established what is essentially a “friendly Canadian” version of Soviet/Nazi style thought police to enforce these evil and unjust laws in a manner that itself displays racial bias of the reverse type.

There are two lessons that we can learn from this history, if we have ears to hear and eyes to see. The first is that race, like sex, is a fact of human existence that we cannot escape from, and no good can come from pretending that it is otherwise. The second, is that when men forget God, the idols they erect in His place will eventually devour them. The Germans in the early twentieth century made just such idols out of their race and the man who appointed himself to be the voice of that race. The post-World War II liberal West, understandably recoiling from the horrors perpetrated in the name of that idol, but unwilling to return to the true and living God, have embraced the idol of diversity. We will eventually learn the hard way that this idol is no less monstrous than the other one.


I very much question whether Mr. Hamilton possesses either the intelligence to understand the difference between what I have said in the last four paragraphs and a Nazi screed or the honesty and integrity to acknowledge that difference. It does not bother me, however, to be smeared by association with the likes of the Aryan Guard in his article, because I am in good company with the much-maligned servicemen – two of whom are Metis – who stood up against the defamation of our country on its birthday. If you too think that these men did the right, honourable, and patriotic thing in not standing by and letting our country be insulted on its anniversary, then please sign Gavin McInnes’ “Save the Five” petition which can be found here:

https://www.therebel.media/save-the-five



(1) My use of “Indian” and the traditional English spelling “Micmac” is not out of any disrespect for the people so designated but out of a refusal, under any circumstances, to obey the dictates of political correctness. Anyone who has read George Orwell’s 1984, will recognize in political correctness’ demands that we use this word instead of that, or this spelling instead of that, what Orwell called “Newspeak” in his novel.

Appendix: My Correspondence with Mr. Graeme Hamilton

Graeme Hamilton to Gerry T. Neal
Friday, July 7, 2017, 11:21 AM
Subject: National Post inquiry

Hello Mr. Neal
I’m a reporter for the National Post, based in Montreal. I came across your blog through a link on the Northern Dawn site. I’m working on a story about the adoption of the Red Ensign as a symbol by what some call the alt right. I’d be interested in your thoughts on the flag’s appeal and was wondering if you would have time to talk today.

Regards,

Graeme Hamilton
National Post Quebec correspondent

Gerry T. Neal to Graeme Hamilton
Saturday, July 8, 2017, 12:00 AM
Subject: Re: National Post inquiry

Dear Mr. Hamilton,

I have just now received your e-mail. It is after eleven in the evening in Manitoba, which means that it is after midnight in your time zone. I am assuming, therefore that it is too late to call.

With regards to the Red Ensign - the Canadian Red Ensign, that is, rather than the provincial flags of Ontario and Manitoba - there are various people who still prefer it to the flag adapted in 1965. For Canadian veterans of the Second World War, for example, it is the flag they fought under and that many of their comrades in arms died under. For others, the present flag is a symbol of the massive top-down changes the Liberal Party wrought in this country during the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau and they therefore embrace the Red Ensign as a symbol of their rejection of these changes.

I am far too young to have fought in the Second World War and so it is for the latter reason that I display the Red Ensign on my blog. For me it is not just a negative symbol, however, of rejecting the changes introduced by Pearson and Trudeau - although it is that - but also, and primarily, a positive symbol - representing the Canada that the Fathers of Confederation envisioned in 1867. Our constitutional monarchy, our Westminster-based parliamentary system of government, our Common Law heritage, and the Victorian era Christian worldview shared, with nuances of course, by English-speaking Protestants and French-speaking Catholics alike - these are the things that I, as a High Tory, argue for on my blog and which the Liberal Party, for over a century, has worked to undermine. The Liberal Party's "revolution within the form" was far more extensive than national symbolism, of course - they have systematically undermined the powers of the Crown, Senate, and Opposition to stand in the way of Prime Ministerial dictatorship in their efforts to turn Canada into a people's republic over which they will perpetually rule - but symbols are important, and in this essay, written for the fiftieth anniversary of the flag change, I explain the sinister significance of that change: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.ca/2015/02/day-of-infamy.html

That explains why I use the Red Ensign myself. I don't presume to speak for anyone else. "Alt-right" is short for "alternative right", and in the broadest sense that would apply to anyone on the right who does not conform to the neo-conservatism that has become the mainstream right in the last thirty-forty years or so. I doubt that anyone could accurately speak for such an array of vastly differing individuals and groups.

Best,
Gerry T. Neal