Religion and Politics

 Worship on Earth as it is Where?

 

The Church is the society of faith that Jesus Christ founded through His Apostles on the first Whitsunday (the Christian Pentecost, the successor to Succoth the Jewish Pentecost) when in accordance with His promise given on the eve of the events through which He established the New Covenant that would become the basis of that society, the Father sent down the Holy Ghost upon His disciples, uniting them into one body, with Christ as the head.    Into this one organic body, was joined the Old Testament Church, the Congregation of the Lord within national Israel, whose faith looked forward to the coming of Jesus Christ and who were taken by Him, from Hades, the Kingdom of Death, in His Triumphant descent there after His Crucifixion, and brought by Him into Heaven when He ascended back there after His Resurrection.   The Church does many things when she meets as a community but first and foremost among them she worships her God.   In this, the Church on earth, or the Church Militant as she is called, unites with the Church in Heaven, also known as the Church Triumphant. 

Throughout her history those who have led, organized, and structured her corporate worship have been guided by the principle that our worship on Earth should resemble than in Heaven.   It is a Scriptural principle.   The Book of Hebrews discusses at length how the elaborate religious system given to national Israel in the Mosaic Covenant was patterned on Heavenly worship, the Earthly Tabernacle (the tent that was the antecedent of the Temple in the days when Israel was wandering in the wilderness before entering the Promised Land), for example, was patterned on the Heavenly Tabernacle.   Indeed, Hebrews uses language strongly suggestive of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to describe the relationship between the Earthly Tabernacle and the Heavenly Tabernacle.   Since Hebrews also uses this kind of language to describe the relationship between the Old Covenant and the New the only reasonable conclusion is that if the worship of the Old Testament Church was to be patterned after worship in Heaven, how much more ought the worship of the New Testament Church to be patterned after the same.   Now the Bible gives us a few glimpses of worship in Heaven.   These are generally found in visions in the prophetic and apocalyptic literature.   The sixth chapter of Isaiah is the classic Old Testament example.   The vision of St. John in the fourth and fifth chapters of Revelation is the classic New Testament example.   In these chapters we find a lot of praying, a lot of singing, a lot of incense, an altar and a lot of kneeling.   The Scriptural depiction of worship, in other words, is quite “High Church”.   Indeed, since the book of Hebrews tells us that Jesus, in His role of High Priest, entered the Heavenly Holy of Holies with His blood, which unlike that of the Old Testament bulls and goats effectively purges of sin and the New Testament elsewhere tells us that Jesus on the eve of His Crucifixion commissioned the Lord’s Supper to be celebrated in His Church until His Second Coming, which was practiced daily in the first Church in Jerusalem and which is Sacramentally united with Jesus’ offering of Himself, the way the pre-Reformation Churches – not just the Roman, but the Greek, Coptic, Armenian, Assyrian and other ancient Churches as well – made this the central focus of their corporate worship is also very Scriptural.   

In the Reformation, Rome’s abuses with regards to the Sacrament and her neglect of the preaching ministry, led many of the Reformers to de-emphasize the Sacrament and make the sermon the central focus of their corporate worship.   The more extreme wing of the Reformation confused the New Testament ideas of a preaching ministry in the Church, which is a didactic ministry, teaching the faithful, with that of evangelistic preaching, which is the Church’s external ministry of proclaiming the Gospel to the world, and worse, developed unhealthy ideas about the preaching ministry, such as that the Word is inert and lifeless unless it is explained in a sermon, which are susceptible to the same charges of idolatry that the Reformers themselves made against Rome’s late Medieval views of the Sacrament.   More to my point, however, the glimpses the Scriptures provide us of worship in Heaven do not mention a Heavenly pulpit, and, indeed, the closest thing to a sermon in Heaven I can think of in the Bible, is the reference to the everlasting Gospel in Revelation 14:6.  The same verse, however, specifies that while the angel carrying it is flying in the midst of Heaven, it is to be preached “unto them that dwell on the earth”.   Curiously, the Bible does make mention of a sermon that was preached to an otherworldly congregation.   St. Peter, in the nineteenth verse of the third chapter of his first Catholic Epistle, talks about how Jesus “went and preached unto the spirits in prison”.   There is, of course, a lot of debate about what St. Peter meant by this.   Did he mean that Jesus preached the liberty He had just purchased them to the Old Testament saints when He descended into Hades?   Or that He preached to those who would be left in the Kingdom of Death when He took His saints with Him to Heaven?   If the latter, as the verses following might suggest, to what end?   We cannot answer these questions dogmatically, interesting though the long-standing discussion of them be.   My point, with regards to sermon-centric worship, is best expressed in another question.   Whoever thought that worship on Earth as it is in Hell was a good idea?

 

The State?

 

I prefer the term Tory to the term conservative as a description of my political views, even if that always requires an explanation that I do not mean “big-C party Conservative” by the term, but Tory as Dr. Johnson defined it in his Dictionary, a pre-Burke conservative if you will.   Today, the word conservative in its small-c sense, is mostly understood in its American sense, which is basically the older, nineteenth-century kind of liberal.   I don’t disassociate myself from this out of a preference for the newer, twentieth and twenty-first century types of liberalism over the older.   Quite the contrary, the older type of liberalism is far to be preferred over the newer.   I disassociate myself from it because the older type of conservatism, the British Toryism in which Canada’s original conservatism has its roots, is to be preferred over either type of liberalism.   

Some explain the difference between a Tory and an American type conservative by saying that the Tory has a high view of the state, the American conservative a low view of the state.   While this is not entirely wrong – Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary mentioned earlier defines a Tory as “One who adheres to the antient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the Church of England, opposed to a whig” – it can be very misleading, because “the state” has several different connotations.   

The basic error of liberalism – classical liberalism – pertains to human freedom.   Classical liberalism was the theory that man’s natural condition is to be an individual, autonomous with no social connections to others, that this natural condition is what it means to be free, that society and the state were organized by individuals on a voluntary contractual basis in order to mutually protect their individual freedom, and that when society and the state fail to do this individuals have the right and responsibility to replace them with ones that do.   Liberalism was wrong about each and every one of these points, failing to see that man’s natural is social not individual – an individual outside of society is not a human being in his natural condition – that society and the state are extensions of the family, the basic natural social unit, rather than extensions of the marketplace based on the model of a commercial enterprise, and that attempts to replace old states and societies with new ones, almost always result in tyranny rather than greater freedom.   

Nor did the liberals understand how their view of things depersonalizes people.   “The individual” is not Bob or Joe or Mary or Sam or Sally or Anne or Herschel or Marcus or George or Bill or Leroy or Susie, each a person on his own earthly pilgrimage, distinct but not disconnected from others, but a faceless, nameless, carbon copy of everyone else, identifiable only by the rights and freedoms that he shares equally with each other individual, in other words, a number.   When our primary term for speaking about government is the abstract notion of “the state” this tends to depersonalize government in the same way liberal autonomous individualism depersonalizes people.   In twentieth century liberalism, which envisioned a larger role for government than the earlier classical liberalism, and in that offshoot of liberalism that has gone by the name “the Left” or “progressivism”, “the state” is very impersonal, a faceless bureaucracy which views those it governs as numbers rather than people, a collective but a collective of autonomous individuals rather than an organic society/community.   I would say that the traditional Tory view of “the state” in this sense of the word is even lower than that of an American style, classical liberal, neoconservative.   

What the Tory does have a high view of is government in the sense of traditional, time-proven, concrete governing institutions, particularly the monarchy and Parliament.   Note that Dr. Johnson spoke not of “One who adheres to the state” but “One who adheres to the antient constitution of the state”.   What monarchy and Parliament, which complement each other, have in common, is that they are both very personal ways of thinking about government.   The king reigns as father/patriarch over his kingdom(s), an extension of his family, as his governing office is an extension of the family as the model of society and state.   Parliament is the where the representatives of the governed meet to have their say in the laws under which they live and how their taxes are spent.   The conversation between these two personal governing institutions has contributed greatly to the most worthy accomplishments of our civilization, and both have long proven their worth, so it is of these that I prefer to say that I as a Tory have a high view, rather than the impersonal state.   I have a higher view of the monarchy than of Parliament, and not merely because those who currently occupy the seats of Parliament leave much to be desired, but for the very Tory reason that if the Church should be worshipping on Earth as in Heaven, government ought to be modelled after the Heavenly pattern as well.   God is the King of Kings, and governs the universe without the aid of elected representatives.    Monarchy is the essential form of government.   Parliament accommodates the model to our human condition.    

 

Capitalism or Socialism?

 

There is a popular notion that unless one has no opinion on economics at all one must be either a capitalist or a socialist.   Those who have studied economic theory will point out that that this is a little like the dilemma posed in the question “Did you walk to work or take a bagged lunch?” – a capitalist, in the terms of economic theory, is someone who owns and lives off of capital, whereas a socialist is someone who believes in the idea of socialism.   Since, however, for most people, the term capitalist now means “someone who believes in capitalism” we will move on.   A more nuanced version of the popular nation postulates a spectrum with capitalism, in the sense of pure laissez-faire with no government involvement in the market whatsoever as the right pole, and pure socialism, where the government not only controls but owns everything, as the left pole, with most people falling somewhere between and being identified as capitalists or socialists depending upon the pole to which they are the closest.   The terms “left” and “right” in popular North American usage have been strongly shaped by this concept even though their original usage in Europe was quite different – the “left” were the supporters of the French Revolution, which, although it was the template of all subsequent Communist revolutions, was not a socialist undertaking per se, and the “right” were the Roman Catholic royalists, the continental equivalent of the English Tories.   To complicate matters there is the expression “far right” which is usually used to suggest the idea of Nazism, which makes no sense with either the old continental European or the new North American usage, although the less commonly used “far left” for Communists makes sense with both.   

The conservatives who think civilization began with the dawn of Modern liberalism and have little interest in conserving anything other than classical liberalism tend to accept this idea of a socialist-capitalist, left-right, economic spectrum and to identify as capitalists.   This makes sense because it is liberalism they are trying to conserve and the Adam Smith-David Ricardo-Frédéric Bastiat theory of laissez-faire that we commonly identify as capitalism is more properly called economic liberalism.   

With us Tories it is a bit more complicated and this has led, in my country, the Dominion of Canada, to the idea held by some that classical conservatives or Tories, unlike American neoconservatives, are closer to socialism than to capitalism.     To come to this conclusion, however, one must accept the American notion of a socialist-capitalist economic spectrum and the idea contained within it that any move away from laissez-faire is a move in the direction of socialism.   That idea is nonsense and does tremendous violence to the historical meaning of the word socialism.   Historically, several different socialist movements, popped up at about the same time.   What they all had in common was a) the idea that the private ownership of property, meaning capital, any form of wealth that generates an income for its owner by producing something that can be sold in the market is the source of all social evils because it divides society into classes, some of which own property, others of which must sell their labour to the propertied classes in order to make a living, and b) the idea that the remedy is some sort of collective ownership of property.   In the Marxist version of socialism, this collective ownership was conceived of as by the state, after it had been seized in violent revolution by the proletariat (factory workers).   In other versions of socialism, such as that of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the state was viewed as unnecessary – Proudhon, as well as being a socialist, was the first anarchist - and collective ownership was conceived of more in terms of workers’ co-operatives.  Socialism, in both its diagnosis of the cause of social ills and in its proposed remedy, is fundamentally at odds with orthodox Christianity, which tells us that sin, the condition of the human heart as the result of the Fall of Man is the cause of social ills, and that the only remedy for sin is the grace of God, obtained for mankind by Jesus Christ through His Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection, and brought to mankind by His Church in its two-fold Gospel Ministry of Word and Sacrament.   From the perspective of orthodox Christianity, socialism, therefore, is an attempt to bypass the Cross and to regain Paradise through human political and social endeavours.   Even worse than that it is Envy, the second worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, made to wear the mask of Charity, the highest of the Theological Virtues, and institutionalized.   It is therefore utterly condemned by orthodox Christianity and Toryism, the political expression of orthodox Christianity, in its rejection of laissez-faire liberalism does not step in the direction of socialism.  Even when Toryism supports state social programs for the relief of poverty, unemployment, and the like, as it did under Disraeli in the United Kingdom in the Victorian era and as it historically did in Canada, it was not for socialist reasons, not because it believed that inequality was the cause of all social ills and wealth redistribution society’s panacea, but for counter-socialism reasons, because it did not want poverty, unemployment, etc. to because the opportunity for recruitment to the cause of socialism which it correctly saw as a destructive force that unchained leads to greater misery, especially for those whom it claims to want to help.   

The main way in which Toryism has historically envisioned a larger economic role for government than laissez-faire liberalism has been that the Tory recognizes the genuine economic interests of the entire realm, such as the need for domestic production of essential goods so as to not be dependent upon external supplies that may be cut off in an emergency, along with the economic interests of local communities, families, and individuals.   Adam Smith argued that individuals are the most competent people to look out for their own economic interests rather than governments, especially distant ones, and Toryism doesn’t dispute this as a general principle – obviously there are exceptions.   Rather it agrees with this principle and adds that families are the most competent at looking out for their interests as families, and communities for their interests at communities – this is what the idea of subsidiarity, rooted in Christian social theory, is all about.   Toryism doesn’t accept Smith’s claim that individuals looking out for their own interests will automatically result in these other interests taking care of themselves, much less those of the entire realm.   The government, although incompetent at making economic decisions for individuals qua individuals, or families qua families, communities qua communities, for that matter,  is generally as an institution, the best suited for making economic decisions for the realm.   

This is compromised, of course, if the person selected to lead His Majesty’s government as Prime Minister is an incompetent dolt, imbecile, and moron.    The government of Sir John A. Macdonald, protecting fledgling Canadian industries with tariffs while investing heavily in the production of the railroad that would facilitate east-west commerce, uniting Canada and preventing her from being swallowed up piecemeal by her neighbor to the south is an example of government making the best sort of economic decisions for the realm.   Unfortunately, His Majesty’s government is currently led by the classic example of the other kind of Prime Minister.

 

Which Branch of the Modern Tree?

 

Not so long ago, when the fashionable, progressive, forward-thinking, and up-to-date began to tell us that boys or men who thought they were girls or women and girls or women who thought they were boys or men should be treated as if they were what they thought and said they were instead of what they actually were in reality, rather than indulge this nonsense we ought instead to have treated those making this absurd suggestion the way we had hitherto treated those who thought they were something other than what they were, that is to say, called those fellows in the white uniforms with the butterfly nets to come and take them away that they might have a nice long rest in a place where they would be no harm to themselves or others.   Instead we left them among the general populace where they proceeded to wreak maximum harm.   

It had seemed, at one time, that this madness had peaked when people started introducing themselves by their “preferred pronouns” rather than their names but, as is usual when one makes the mistake of thinking things can’t get any worse, they did.    The past few years have seen a major backlash finally starting to take shape against the aggressive promotion of this gender craziness in the schools, and no, I don’t mean the post-secondary institutions that have long been home to every wacky fad under the sun, I am talking about elementary schools.   It seems that teachers, with the backing of school board administrators, have taken to treating every instance in which a boy says that he is a girl, or a girl says that she is a boy, as a serious case of gender dysphoria rather than the passing phase it would otherwise be in most cases and responded with “gender affirmation” which is a euphemism for indulging and encouraging gender confusion – and forcing everyone else in the classroom to go along with it.   To top it off, they have been keeping all of this secret from the parents.    

The state of California in the United States has just taken this to the next level, as a bill has passed in its legislative assembly that would essentially make “gender affirmation” a requirement for parents to retain custody of their children.    It is worth bringing up at this point that there is a very similar and closely related euphemism to “gender affirmation” and that is “gender affirming care”, which refers to using hormones and surgery to make someone who thinks they are of the other sex physically resemble that sex.   The same lunatics that I have been talking about, think it appropriate to offer this “care” to prepubescent children.   In every single instance where this is done – every single instance – it is a case of child abuse.  Period!   

It is this aggressive war on the sexual innocence of childhood and the rights and authority of parents that has sparked the backlash on the part of parents who have had enough and are fighting back.   Some jurisdictions, like the state of Florida in the United States, and the provinces of New Brunswick and Saskatchewan here in Canada, have responded by requiring schools to notify parents when this sort of thing is going on.  The government in my own province of Manitoba has promised to do this if they are re-elected next month.    That, I would say, is the very least they ought to do.   I think that teachers that twist the minds of young kids in this way ought to be severely punished – a case can be made for bringing back the stocks and/or public flogging to do this.   

The progressives, including both Captain Airhead, Prime Minister of Canada, and J. Brandon Magoo, President of the United States, have denounced the policy of informing parents as if it were placing kids in mortal danger.   Progressive spin-doctors have even coined a new expression “forced outing” with which to vilify the sensible idea that teachers should not be allowed to continue to get away with this ultra-creepy business of sexualizing little kids and encouraging them to keep it a secret from their parents.   

Those whose conservatism seeks primarily or solely to conserve the older stage of the Modern liberal tradition tend to view this sort of progressive cultural extremism as a form of Marxism or Communism.   There is truth in this perspective in that sort of thinking among progressives in academe that leads them to embrace such nonsense can be traced back to academic Marxism’s post-World War I reinvention of itself along cultural rather than economic lines, albeit through the detour of a few prominent post-World War II thinkers who were heirs of Marx only in the sense of following in his footsteps as intellectual revolutionaries rather than that of having derived their ideas from his in any substantial way.   The phenomenon itself – the idea that one has the right to self-identify as a “gender” other than one’s biological sex, to expect or even demand that others acknowledge this self-identification and affirm it to be true, and even to force reality itself in the form of one’s biological sex to bend to this self-identification – does not come from Marx, and those countries that had the misfortune of having been taken over by regimes dedicated to his evil ideas seem to have been partly compensated for this by being inoculated against this sort of thing.   This is the autonomous individual of Locke, Mill, and the other classical liberals taken to the nth degree and it is the countries where liberalism has had the most influence that have proven the most vulnerable to this gender insanity.

The Convoy and Captain Airhead

 

For those in the Dominion of Canada who still actually believe, as opposed to paying mere empty lip service to the idea, that freedom is a basic human good the legal protections of which must not be jettisoned in a state of emergency, the events of the preceding week have been most encouraging.   Indeed, as can be seen in the Monday column “We Are All Canadian Truckers Now”, by Dr. Ron Paul, the long-time Congressman from Texas who throughout my life time so far has been by far the most consistent advocate of personal freedom against the encroachments of government to have served as an elected representative in the federal government of our southern neighbour, they have inspired freedom lovers outside of our borders as well as within.

 

As you are undoubtedly aware, for the past two years most governments around the world have been trampling all over the basic freedoms of the people they govern.   The justification offered for all of this was the pandemic declared by the World Health Organization in March of 2020.     A new flu-like virus, related to the SARS virus of twenty years earlier, had passed from bats to humans, either through a wet market or experimentation in a laboratory, and had caused an epidemic in Wuhan in China late in 2019.   Early in 2020 it had begun rapidly spreading throughout the rest of the world.   Even then, the information necessary to respond rationally without panicking was available.  We knew that the people most at risk were the same people who are most at risk from any circulating disease – the really old and the really sick, although the danger to them was a bit more severe with this one.   We knew that while it could produce an intensively painful form of pneumonia, most people who contracted the virus would survive it, with many experiencing only mild symptoms or no symptoms at all.   Our governments, however, told us that because the virus was spreading so rapidly, our hospitals, emergency rooms, and intensive care units were in danger of been swamped, and so they were going to order us all to stay home for two weeks, to go out only for “essential” purposes like buying groceries or medicine, to close our businesses if they were not “essential” as the governments defined “essential”, and to worship and carry out all social interaction online.   We were told that we would need to do all of this to slow the spread of the disease – to “flatten the curve” – in order to prevent the swamping of the health care system.   Very few seemed to notice the obvious problem with this – that if the health care system were swamped it would recover, that if hospitals, emergency rooms, and ICUs were burdened beyond their capacity this would not mean their ultimate irrecoverable failure and destruction, and that it made absolutely no sense whatsoever to treat everything else as expendable and sacrifice it all to prevent a temporary flooding of the health care system.

 

Since our governments were allowed to get away with this unprecedented and tyrannical experiment at containing a respiratory disease – previous generations of mankind knew better than to arrogantly think they could do any such thing – they kept on doing it for the last two years, imposing restrictions and lockdowns every time there was a spike in the number of people testing positive for the virus.   When vaccines were invented for the bat flu virus in less than a year and given emergency authorization for use things got worse rather than better.   Our governments had been telling us that the strategy of restrictions and lockdowns would need to continue until vaccines were available.   Since the lockdown strategy was itself new and experimental, and was clearly causing more harm than the virus itself – as even our public health officers would admit in moments when they were relaxing restrictions rather than tightening them – and no one had been able to develop a vaccine for this kind of virus in the past this was highly dubious, to say the least.    When the vaccines were available, instead of saying “you should all return to your lives now, because we have vaccines to protect you from the virus if you want them” our governments began taking measures to coerce into being vaccinated those whom they could not persuade to be vaccinated voluntarily.

 

This took the tyranny to a whole new level.   While their telling us we could only “worship” online, could only meet with members of our own household, etc. made mockeries out of our freedoms of religion, assembly, and association, these attempts to coerce us rather than convince us to accept an inoculation, were an outright assault on our basic right to the security of our persons.   Our governments do not want to pass laws telling women they cannot have abortions on the grounds that such laws would violate a woman’s right to bodily autonomy even though abortion involves the deliberate taking of the life of another human being.   Euphemistically, those who support this status quo refer to this supposed right to have an abortion as a woman’s “reproductive rights” or her “right to make choices about her own reproductive health”.   Yet these same people seem to have no problem with telling everybody - men, women, whatever - that he must have a newly invented substance that has not yet completed its clinical trials injected into his body.   They claim to respect that whether a person does so or not is his choice.   Then they turn around and tell him that if he does not choose the way they want him to choose they will take away his right to participate in society until he makes what they say is the “right” choice.    This mobster-like bullying, of course, is itself a reason why refusing these demands is the morally right decision and complying with them is the morally wrong decision.

 

While we have not experienced this tyranny in its worst possible form here in the Dominion of Canada – our sister Commonwealth Realms of Australia and New Zealand have had it much worse – we have had to take it in combination with the insufferable arrogance of our Prime Minister, Captain Airhead.     This is rather the opposite of Mary Poppins’ old line about how “a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.”   Captain Airhead has outdone himself in the realm of arrogance – a truly spectacular feat – when it comes to the vaccine coercion, for he has turned it into a form of scapegoating that makes it look like he was sitting around reading Mein Kampf and thinking something to the effect of “hey, you know, this guy gained tremendous public support by talking this way about the Jews, a disliked minority, maybe I should try the same with the unvaccinated.”   Except that the thought as it formed in his own mind would have been much less coherent.  Captain Airhead does not have the capacity for extended rational thought even of such a perverse type.   Captain Airhead began telling Canadians in the last couple of waves of the bat flu that these waves are all the fault of the unvaccinated.   Since the vast majority of Canadians were vaccinated – the vaccination campaign had been a record-breaking success - he was in effect telling Canadians “your vaccines won’t work unless everyone is vaccinated.”   Rather than admit that his pandemic and vaccination policies had been a failure from beginning to end, he opted to taking an utterly stupid position in order to blame his failure on people he thought he could get away with abusing, in the hopes of turning the hostility of Canadians fed up with all this pandemic nonsense onto them.    For weeks, he and his sycophants in the media, have been telling us that Canadians are increasingly frustrated with the unvaccinated, and trotting out polls ostensibly saying that most Canadians would support even more draconian measures being taken against the unvaccinated.

 

While behaving in the aforementioned disgusting manner, this increasingly petty tyrant turned on the very people he had held up to us as heroes – to the extent he was capable of holding anyone other than himself up as a hero – at the beginning of the pandemic.  On top of vaccine passports – those vile “show me your papers”, Mark of the Beast-style cards/QR codes that limited access to pretty much everything except grocery stores and pharmacies to the vaccinated – he began adding vaccine mandates where he could, and pressuring the provinces to add them where he had no jurisdiction.   One of the very first vaccine mandates to be widely brought in across Canada restricted work in the field of health care to the fully vaccinated.   Thus, those “front-line” nurses and other health-care providers, lauded as heroes two years ago, were told that unless they took a shot that they were not persuaded was in their own best interests to take, they would be out of work.   When many opted to lose their jobs rather than submit to this bullying and tyranny, the effect of the vaccine mandate was obviously to increase the pressure on the health care system rather than decrease it.    Now Captain Airhead has imposed a vaccine mandate on long-haul truckers crossing the border with the United States, either in collusion with the Biden administration or prompting the latter to do the same in retaliation.   His government has also dropped hints that it is looking at a similar mandate for inter-provincial transportation.      Two years ago Captain Airhead was telling Canadians to thank truckers who did not have the option of staying at home and were “working day and night to make sure our shelves are stocked”.   Now he was telling them their services were not wanted unless they allowed him to dictate their medical choices.  This is what has prompted the long-overdue backlash we have been seeing over the last week.

 

Early last week, or the last day of the week prior to last if you wish to be precise, convoys of trucks set out from British Columbia heading towards Ottawa.   By the end of the week, similar convoys from every province of the Dominion were joining them.   As this armada of trucks descended upon the capital, everywhere they went supporters turned out in droves to cheer them on.   It was dubbed the “Freedom Convoy” and its purpose was quite straightforward.   It was a protest demanding the repeal, first, of the cross-border vaccine mandate for long haul truckers specifically, second, of vaccine mandates in general.   Many of the truckers, like all salt-of-the-earth type decent Canadians, also want Captain Airhead to step down.

 

About the middle of the week Captain Airhead dismissed the convoy with the sort of language we have come to expect from him.   He said “The small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa are holding unacceptable views that they’re expressing, do not represent the views of Canadians who have been there for each other who know that following the science and stepping up to protect each other is the best way to continue to ensure our freedoms, rights, and values as a country”.    The best way to answer that is to quote Luke Skywalker from the movie The Last Jedi (2017) as saying “Amazing.  Every word you just said was wrong.”    To briefly parse the latter part of Captain Airhead’s remarks, obeying government orders to stay apart for two years is the opposite of being there for each other, there is no such thing as “the science”, science, sans definite article, is a tool to be used and not a leader to be followed which real scientists would be the first to tell you, and agreeing to government measures that limit to the point of eliminating your and your neighbour’s freedoms of assembly, association, and religion and bodily autonomy helps destroy rather than ensure our rights, freedoms, and values.   It is the first part of the remarks, however, that are of most interest to us here.   It was apparent already on Wednesday when Captain Airhead said this and is unavoidable now that the convoy of truckers is a sizeable representation of a much larger segment of society and anything but “small” and “fringe”.   As for their “unacceptable views”, the only views that the truckers espouse as a group are that it is wrong and unacceptable for the government to be telling people they need to take a foreign substance into their bloodstream and punishing them if they don’t do it.    Prior to the pandemic, this was the consensus viewpoint in the free world.   As recently as last year Captain Airhead espoused those same views himself.   He opposed vaccine passports and mandates into the spring of 2021 calling them “divisive” and saying that this is not how we do things in Canada.   His complete flip-flop on the matter occurred at the time that Canada was emerging from the particularly harsh lockdown of winter-spring 2021, provinces were introducing vaccine passports, and they were polling well as they seemed to offer, to the vaccinated at least, a return to something resembling the normal.   It was around this time that Captain Airhead, faced with a Parliamentary order to hand over un-redacted documents regarding the dismissal of a couple of scientists from the virology lab in Winnipeg, documents he was so desperate to keep out of the hands of Parliament that he sued the Speaker showing his total contempt for Parliament and unfitness to serve as Prime Minister, was contemplating asking for a dissolution of Parliament and a new election.   When he ultimately went the latter route, arrogantly thinking he would be handed a majority government – the election, which nobody else but him wanted, restored the status quo ante – he tied his future political prospects to mandatory vaccination.    What arrogance, what hubris, what chutzpah to declare that his having abandoned his opposition to mandatory vaccination less than a year previously made that opposition into “unacceptable views”!

 

The Freedom Convoy arrived in Ottawa on Friday and Captain Airhead fled the city saying that he had come into contact with the bat flu and needed to self-isolate.   Then on Monday, after a weekend in which the truckers and their supporters had expressed their opposition to the vaccine mandates and other tyrannical pandemic measures without burning buildings down, looting stores, toppling monuments, or otherwise behaving like the kind of protestors Captain Airhead embraces and supports, Captain Airhead announced that he – triple vaccinated as of earlier that month – had tested positive for the bat flu, and that he would be speaking to the nation about the trucker protest.   When he gave his address, did he say “boy, I was wrong, I got all my shots and I still came down with the virus, maybe I should humble myself and talk to these truckers, who represent a lot more Canadians than I thought”?  

 

Hardly.   He doubled down on his insults, his arrogance, and his claims, obviously debunked by the fact that the most recent wave of the bat flu driven by a variant that infected more people in just over a month than previous variants had in a year producing a situation where, by contrast with previous variants, almost everyone has either had the bat flu or knows someone who had it, came after a record-breaking supermajority of the populace had been fully vaccinated, that vaccination is our only way out of the pandemic.   He said that “Canadians at home” were “watching in disgust and disbelief at this behaviour, wondering how this could have happened in our nation’s capital after everything we’ve been through together”.   He said this even as the results of the Angus Reid poll conducted over the weekend, results that showed that majority opinion in Canada had switched away from support for his policies to wanting all Covid restrictions lifted – the position of the truckers – were being released.  He spoke of those who “hurl insults and abuse at small business workers and steal food from the homeless”.  This was hardly typical of the behaviour of the demonstrators – were it otherwise the evidence would be all over the media – and is mighty rich coming from someone whose policies have ruined small businesses across the country while benefiting large multinationals, driven people into homelessness and destitution, and made life exponentially harder for the homeless (strict capacity limitations on homeless shelters and the closing of public spaces have, throughout the pandemic, corresponded with the winter months).   Wearing his “Mr. Tough Guy” mask, he declared that “we” – he should have used the singular, as that is what he meant, but he is not smart enough to recognize that holding the office of Her Majesty’s Prime Minister does not give him the right to use the royal “we” and that having lost his majority government in 2019, failing both then and in 2021 to win even a plurality in the popular vote, and now having lost majority support for his policies he should not presume to speak for Canadians in general – “would not be intimidated”.   His conveniently timed need to self-isolate in a non-disclosed secure location speaks rather loudly to the contrary.  “We won’t cave to those who engage in vandalism or dishonour the memory of our veterans” he said.   Whereas protestors whose causes he has embraced over the past couple of years have toppled and beheaded statues, burned down churches, and committed real acts of vandalism, what he refers to here is the placing of a removable sign on the Terry Fox memorial.   As for the dishonouring of the memory of our veterans, I would say that the last two years of him trampling all over the freedoms those veterans fought for is far more dishonouring to their memory than a few protestors dancing on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

 

His focus, however, was on smearing the protestors with accusations of racism.  A few weeks ago, a clip of him giving an interview prior to last year’s Dominion election re-surfaced, in which he accused the unvaccinated of being “racists” and “misogynists” and asked whether Canadians should “tolerate these people”.   This dehumanizing language brought upon him vehement condemnation, at home and abroad, nor did the hypocrisy of the person of whom photographic – and video – evidence of his having worn blackface – and on one occasion full body brown skin makeup – on at least three separate occasions surfaced in the 2019 Dominion election calling other people “racists” go without notice.   Whereas accusing opponents of “racism” and “sexism” is a standard progressive tactic in Captain Airhead’s case there appears to be a personal element to it.   Knowing that he is guilty of not living up to his own progressive ideals – and, indeed, falling short of them in ways that are truly spectacular, as you can see by asking yourself how many people you know who have worn blackface even once – he projects his guilt onto others, in this case onto the unvaccinated he was trying to scapegoat and otherize in a manner reminiscent of Hitler, more often onto the country of Canada prior to his “enlightened” premiership.  

 

In his speech, he concentrated on such things as the single person at the rally carrying a flag bearing the symbol that his own father reportedly wore on his jacket while dodging the draft to fight in the war against the regime whose emblem that symbol was.   Since nobody has been able as of yet to locate the person who brought this flag to the protest nobody knows whether he did so as an expression of agreement with the ideology the flag represents or, perhaps more likely, to make the statement that the Prime Minister’s actions resemble those of the regime that flew that flag.   Either way, it is obvious to everyone – and I suspect this includes Captain Airhead and his sycophants, as much as they claim otherwise – that the person with this flag represented nobody at the rally but himself.   Another person at the rally carried the flag of the states that attempted to secede from the United States seven years before Confederation.   Progressives maintain that this flag is as objectionable as the first mentioned through a tortured reductionism that reduces all the differences that had been driving the two regions of the United States apart for a century prior to that to a single racially sensitive issue.   Within living memory – indeed, quite recent living memory - that flag was a universal symbol, not of racism, but of rebellion, employed as such even in countries with no discernable connection to the history, culture, and issues pertaining to the conflict that produced it.   This notwithstanding, the fact that the other protestors were filmed objecting to its presence clearly demonstrates that this person too, whatever his intent, did not speak for anyone but himself.  

 

What many people may not realize is that in any large size protest against progressive policies there will always be one or two people with symbols of this type.   Progressives themselves make sure of this.   While in some cases it is a matter of outright infiltration – a progressive activist, or a government agent provocateur will join the protest and do or say something to bring opprobrium upon the protest as a whole - it also has to do with the way progressives a) introduce policies that are unjust to certain whites – working class whites, middle class whites, prairie farmers and other rural whites – but not to others such as journalists, academics, and technocrats where their own white supporters can be found, b) proclaim any backlash against such injustice to be “racist”, “white supremacist”, “white nationalist” etc., in the hopes of radicalizing the backlash so that c) they can point to the symbols of such radicalism, when they inevitably appear in larger protests against progressive policies that have nothing to do with racial issues whatsoever as a means of smearing the entire protest.

 

In this case, Captain Airhead’s efforts and those of his controlled media have failed on a truly grand scale.   The protest was too large and too obviously racially and ethnically diverse – predictably so, considering that what the media dubbed “vaccine hesitancy” is more prevalent among racial and ethnic minority groups – for Airhead’s remarks to be taken seriously by anyone with an iota of intelligence.

 

Captain Airhead, his fellow progressives, and their media spokesmen have spoken of the trucker protest as a threat to Canadian democracy.   Many supporters of the convoy have said, by contrast, that it is democracy in action.   In a way both are right and both are wrong.   What we have actually been seeing is two different understandings of democracy come to a clash.   There are many different ways of understanding democracy.   In ancient Athens, the birthplace of democracy, there was a form of direct democracy, in which the democratic assembly, consisting of all corporate members – citizens - of the city, voted on every public matter.   In most societies with a form of democracy – and all complex societies with a form of democracy – that democracy has been representative democracy, where the citizens vote for representatives, who then form the government.   Republican governments such as that of our neighbour to the south are a representative form of democracy.   The House of Commons in our parliamentary form of democracy is also a representative form.   Populism, in which a grass-roots movement forms – often behind a charismatic leader – to make demands of the government is another form of democracy.

 

Captain Airhead’s understanding of democracy is an extremely corrupt perversion of representative democracy.   It is basically that every few years there is an election and whoever wins the election, at least if it is a Liberal, can then do whatever he wants until the next election, constitutional limits on his powers be hanged, because he is the choice and voice of the people. The truckers protest is populism in its best possible form.   The popular movement is not demanding that anything be taken away from anybody else, merely that what was stolen from them – and from every Canadian – their basic freedoms of peaceful assembly, association, and religion and above all their right to reject with impunity the demand that they take a foreign substance into their body – be returned immediately.

 

Note the perspective of this writer.   I am not positively inclined towards democracy as an ideal.   I love and support my country’s traditional governing institutions, including our reigning monarchy and our democratic parliament, but with parliament I insist upon this distinction – I love and support it because it is a traditional governing institution and thus one that has proven itself over the ages and not because it is democratic.   Indeed, I belong to that “small fringe minority” of people with “unacceptable views” who agree with the consensus of the pre-modern tradition, classical and Christian, that democracy is the worst of all forms of government not the best, reject completely the modern liberal idea that legitimate government authority is that which is given to the government by the people (John Locke’s attempt to argue this against Sir Robert Filmer in his Two Treatises failed – even his fellow utilitarian liberal Jeremy Bentham could see that Filmer had the better of the arguments - and was thoroughly rebutted by the Rev. Charles Leslie, who demonstrated in his The Rehearsal that the legitimate authority of Parliament came through the Magna Carta from royal charter, not popular consent) along with the liberal idea that the individual person’s basic rights of life, liberty, and property come with the individual person into society from a pre-social state of nature (because there is no such thing as pre-social state of nature – society is part of man’s created nature – the rights of life, liberty, and property are real and bestowed by God, not the deistic God of Locke, but the True and Living God of Christianity), and hold in utter derision and scorn the modern equation of democracy with freedom (except when democracy is defined as self-government, and explained not in terms of the constitution of the state but the concept of subsidiarity – that the every decision should be left to those most locally competent to handle it rather than centralized in the state) because history clearly demonstrates that the size and intrusiveness of government grew exponentially after the modern heresy of popular sovereignty caught on and that governments that see themselves as the “voice of the people” have far less respect for those people’s basic rights of life, liberty, and property than kings who hold their authority by hereditary right and sacred oath.   (1) Recognizing these neglected truths does not incline one to much sympathy with populism.

 

These are exceptional times however.   Modern liberalism, in rejecting the ancient consensus that democracy was the mother of tyranny, believed that legal and constitutional recognition and protection of the rights of minorities was sufficient to guard against the problems the ancients had seen in democracy, which Alexis de Tocqueville summed up in his concept of the “tyranny of the majority”.   They failed to foresee the day when a professed liberal – the leader of the Liberal Party, as a matter of fact – would loudly espouse the rights and protections of “minorities”, but understand by that term “people of certain skin colours”, “women” (over 50% of the population), “people of certain ethnic and national backgrounds”, “people of certain religions”, “people of certain sexual orientations” and “people of certain gender identities”, while despising completely minorities in the sense the original liberals intended, the dictionary sense, of numeric minorities.   For all of his empty talk about protecting “vulnerable minorities”, Captain Airhead has felt completely free to dehumanize, otherize, scapegoat, and stir up hatred against those whom he has been unable to convince to voluntarily take a bat flu vaccine, because they are a numerically tiny fragment of the population.   The “unvaccinated” are the true “vulnerable minority”.   Mercifully, what we are seeing in this populist truckers protest, is not the kind of demagogue-driven mob action that has been the historical norm for populism, but Canadians, vaccinated and unvaccinated, coming together to send Captain Airhead the message, loud and clear, that he does not speak for them, and to demand that government start respecting the basic freedoms of all Canadians once again.   This is a cause most worthy of our support.

 

God save the Queen!

God bless the truckers!

 

(1)   This week began with Royal Martyr Day, the anniversary of the death of a godly king who was murdered by religious fanatics who, having gained control of Parliament, believed that they had the right to do whatever they want.   King Charles warned that those who in their fanatical belief that they were the voice of a popular sovereignty went to war against his rights as sovereign king, would not hesitate to trample over the rights of anyone else.  Those who deposed him proved him right on this during the mercifully short-lived Cromwellian Interregnum, as did those who followed their example – the Jacobins in France in the 1790s, and the Communists, beginning with Russia in 1917 and spreading from there to about a third of the world in the last century before their collapse.

The Left Abandons Liberalism

A criticism that I have frequently made of mainstream conservatives is that they no longer stand for anything with which Modern liberals would not wholeheartedly agree and which in many if not most cases was originally a liberal idea.   I most recently made this criticism in my annual essay for New Year’s Day explaining my own views, which I prefer to call Tory, because they stress affirmation of institutions such as royal monarchy and the Church as well as beliefs such as the orthodox Christianity of the Apostles’ Creed and ideas which go back to ancient times and predate Modern liberalism.   I have never meant by this criticism that the things for which conservatives still stand are bad in themselves, merely that there are other, older things, which are more important and ought to be recognized as such by those who wish to distinguish themselves from liberals.     This distinction is a very important one because without it, criticism of contemporary conservatism for making its focus primarily or entirely the defence of ideas that have their origins in liberalism could be construed as suggesting that every idea that liberals have ever had is wrong or bad.   Liberalism, I would say, has been wrong a lot more often than it has been willing to admit, has been very wrong in generally regarding itself as immune to the sort of analytic criticism it levels against its rivals, and most wrong in its assumption that there was little to no worth in anything that was around prior to itself.   To say that it was always wrong about everything, however, is to commit the equal and opposite error to that greatest of liberalism’s errors, and the events that have unfolded south of the border since Epiphany illustrate just how erroneous it is.   That which is called “the Left” sprang historically from the same sources as liberalism – the Puritan revolt against the orthodox Church of England and the Stuart monarchy, Modern philosophical rationalism, Kantianism, to name but three – and through much of their history the Left and liberalism have walked similar paths, so much so that in many periods, including that of my youth, their names have been used interchangeably as if they were completely identical.   Last week, however, the Left revealed just how much it has parted ways from historical liberalism.   It would appear that there is now not the slightest vestige of liberalism lingering within it, merely the totalitarianism that had previously reared its head in the Cromwellian Protectorate, the French Reign of Terror, and in every state unfortunate enough to be taken over by the Bolsheviks.   Utterly illiberal, it tolerates no divergence from its thought and mercilessly persecutes all who dissent.

 

The word liberal is derived from the Latin adjective liberalis.   My pocket Collins  Latin Dictionary defines this word as meaning “of freedom, of free citizens, gentlemanly, honourable, generous, liberal; handsome”.   Turning to Charlton Lewis and Charles Short for a more extensive definition I find that they begin by relating the word to the shorter root adjective liber (long i, with a short i it becomes the noun meaning book) and thus gives as its first meaning “of or belonging to freedom, relating to the freeborn condition of a man”.  The second definition is “befitting a freeman, gentlemanly, noble, noble-minded, honourable, ingenuous, gracious, kind.”   I will not cite all the sub definitions given for the second, just B. 1., which is “Bountiful, generous, munificent, liberal”.

 

The short version of all of that is that for the ancient Romans, the adjective liberalis first designated the condition of being free rather than a slave, and in its secondary connotations denoted the kind of character and behaviour that the Romans saw as being appropriate to someone with free status, e.g., graciousness, kindness and generosity.   Before it came to be used as a political label the English word liberal was pretty much an approximation of its Latin ancestor.   This gives us something of an idea of what those who originally applied this term to themselves as a political designation must have thought of themselves.    Frankly, I am of the opinion that they thought far too highly of themselves and this term is singularly inappropriate for the heirs of the religious fanatics who murdered King Charles I, outlawed Christmas, stripped the Churches of artwork and music, shut down the theatres, and imposed Sabbatarian restrictions so severe that they would have made the Pharisees of old blush and of the Manchester plutocrats who enclosed the commons, legalized usury, and drove the peasants from the countryside into the cities to subsist on servile labour in ugly, smelly, factories.   To be fair, a similar analysis of the Latin root of conservative would suggest that in its political usage it refers to everything those so designated have failed to accomplish.

 

That having been said, there is much to appreciate in the ideas put forward in the book which more-or-less defined liberalism when it was at its best in the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries.   No, I am not referring to John Locke’s Two Treatises, which in its response to Sir Robert Filmer provides us with what is perhaps the earliest example of mere contradiction being taken for refutation or debunking, the phenomenon that has become the working principle of news and social media “fact checkers”.   Locke’s book contains only one worthy idea and no, it is not his bastardization of Thomas Hobbes’ concepts of the “state of nature” and “social contract” but his idea of the basic rights of life, liberty, and property.  This, however, as Sir William Blackstone later demonstrated, was present in Common Law long before Locke.   The book that I am talking about is John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859).   It is an argument for the need for restrictions and limitations on government to protect the freedom of the governed.   While it contains much historical nonsense and Mill makes the repugnant false ethic of utilitarianism the entire foundation of his argument, a great deal of what he says about freedom and limited government has merit.   Freedom of thought or opinion, Mill argued, was the most fundamental freedom of all, and attempts to suppress opinions, even ones that are entirely false, by limiting freedom of speech, are always bad.

 

Clearly, the present day Left is light years removed from Mill on this matter.

 

That this is the case has been evident for quite some time.   For decades the Left has favoured legislation prohibiting what it calls “hate speech”.   “Hate speech”, as the Left uses it, has never meant speech that actually expresses hatred, such as, most obviously, “I hate you”.   Indeed, there has never been a “hate speech” law passed to the best of my knowledge under which someone could be charged for saying “I hate you”.   What the Left means by “hate speech” is speech that they consider to be “racist” or “anti-Semitic” or “anti-immigrant” or “xenophobic” or “sexist” or “homophobic” or “transphobic” or characterized by any other such weaponized word that they have coined to refer to ideas and opinions with which they disagree.   The Left considers “hate speech” to be a form of violence and supports this contention by comparing it to incitement.   There is no substance to this argument, however, because “hate speech” laws do not merely commit the redundancy of prohibiting people from explicitly suggesting, encouraging, or calling for violent action towards the groups they wish to protect which sort of thing was already covered by existing incitement laws that were are far superior to “hate speech” laws because they protect everybody and not just select groups.   Rather, they prohibit the communication of information and opinions, whether true or false, that reflect negatively on protected groups in a way that might, possibly, inspire someone to commit a criminal act against them.   For all their denials – “hate speech is not free speech” – their support for this kind of legislation is clearly a rejection of Mill’s case against the suppression of thought and opinion and an embrace of a form of thought control, one which has only gotten more totalitarianism since the Left first proposed it.

 

Although this is directly related to another way in which the Left has left liberalism behind, that is, in its abandonment of the arguments against racism, especially of the de jure discrimination type, which became prevalent about sixty years ago and which were grounded in liberalism in favour of an aggressive “anti-racism” that is actually itself racism against white people, I wish to devote an entire essay to this point and shall defer further discussion of it until that time.  What I would like to point out now is how the Left has expanded the flawed reasoning by which it equates speech it considers to be “racist”, “sexist”, etc. with violence into all-purpose argument for suppressing any information and opinions which contradict its own narratives.

 

In the aftermath of what transpired in Washington DC on Epiphany, the Democrat-dominated House of Representatives in the United States has for a second time voted for Articles of Impeachment against the current president of the American republic, a man whom the Left hates like it has hated no other political leader before him.    Last time, they accused him of colluding with the Russians to steal the 2016 election.   This time, they are accusing him of inciting an insurrection by claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him.    Tempting as it is to focus on the glaring hypocrisy, especially since insurrection more accurately describes the BLM riots that the Democrats and the Left in general have turned a blind eye to or endorsed out of their refusal to accept Trump’s election of four years prior, the point is to be found in the fact that in nothing Donald the Orange said, either on social media or in the address he gave to the throngs who showed up to the massive rally before the Washington Monument to show their support, was there anything that could legitimately be considered incitement.   Not when incitement is understood, as it traditionally has been, to take the form of “I want you to do X” with X being some form of violent or criminal behaviour.   The Left here is applying the same kind of bad reasoning that underlies its support for prohibiting “hate speech” – “saying Y about Z could make someone angry against Z and if someone is angry against Z he might turn violent against Z, therefore saying Y about Z should be considered the equivalent of indictment and banned” to justify suppression of a completely different kind of opinion.  

 

The Big Tech companies that control the largest social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, marching in step with the Democrats – or rather it was more like the other way around – threw the President of the United States of America off their platforms, using the same faulty justification, and then proceeded to purge their platforms of thousands of his supporters as well.   Then, having basically told thousands of people “if you don’t like our rules, go to our competitors”, they immediately proceeded to attempt to drive those competitors, such as Twitter competitor Parler, out of business.  When the internet first went online, many had seen it as a way of escaping the near monopoly on the sharing of information that the Left, which already dominated the major news and entertainment media corporations, possessed.   Now, however, with Big Tech controlling most of the platforms that people have come to regard as a kind of public forum, aligning itself with the Left, purging its platforms of those who dissent from the Left and ruthlessly eliminating competitors that allow for more freedom of thought, the Left is seeking to make its control on the sharing of information and opinion absolute and total.

 

Clearly, the Left has completely abandoned the liberalism of men like J. S. Mill in substance and spirit, and if it continues to maintain any sort of outward pretense of liberalism, it will be out of either sheer hypocrisy or an utter lack of self-awareness.

 

As many problems as there are with a conservatism that offers nothing but (classical) liberalism, it is to be preferred a billion times over a Left in which nothing of liberalism, neither its freedom nor the generosity and munificence to which it seems to have aspired in naming itself liberal, remains.

Canadians’ Common Law Right to Bear Arms

The Liberal Party, its supporters, and other progressives, leftists and kooks who support making Canada's already more than sufficient gun laws stricter, are quick to accuse those of us who disagree with them of wanting to bring American gun culture into Canada. This is rather rich, at least on the part of the Liberals, who historically have been the party of Americanization. As is so often the case with the Grits, they are relying upon the widespread ignorance that they themselves have done so much to promote among Canadians of our history, traditions, and the basic principles of our laws and governing institutions to help them sell their arguments. They are also relying upon assumptions about the American system that many Canadians hold but which are less than accurate. (1)


The Canadian and American paths diverged in the eighteenth century. In 1776 the Thirteen Colonies declared their independence from the British Empire. The French-speaking, Roman Catholic colony of Canada, which had been ceded to the British Crown by France at the end of the Seven Years War, remained loyal to the Crown that had guaranteed its language and religion, as did the colonies that became the Maritime Provinces. After the Americans won their secession in war, the members of their colonies who had remained loyal to the Crown fled persecution from the triumphant Yankees and came north to the Maritimes and this colony that bore the name Canada prior to its being applied to the Dominion formed from the Confederation of British North America in 1867. In their Declaration of Independence, the rebelling Yanks maintained that the government in London had violated their rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" and in subsequent war-time propaganda, they attacked the institution of the monarchy as being the source of their grievances. This was all pure propaganda. The policies they objected to in London had their origins in the elected House of Commons and hardly added up to an assault on the basic rights of the Americans.


I do not bring this up, however, to belabour the case against Revolution-era American propaganda but to make the point that the Canadian and American paths diverged by the Americans consciously choosing to break from the larger political society to which they had previously belonged, while those who would become the Canadians, equally consciously, chose to remain. The American tradition, as it developed from this point forward, diverged further from the British tradition, whereas the Canadian tradition remained close to that tradition and developed in conjunction with it. This is most evident in the governing institutions of both federations. The Americans, whose developing national self-image fused the Puritan concept of "city on a shining hill" with that of a "new Rome", built for themselves a federal republic. We, whose growing national self-image was rooted in the Loyalist heritage of honour and continuity, established a parliamentary monarchy patterned closely after the Westminster model with the same royal Head of State.


It logically follows from the above that if something in the American tradition as it developed away from the British tradition can trace its source to the British tradition then it was part of the latter tradition prior to the break and is therefore part of the Canadian heritage as well. This happens to be the case with the idea of a right to bear arms.


It has been widely thought that when Thomas Jefferson included the phrase "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" in the American Declaration of Independence he was borrowing, or, rather, adapting a concept from John Locke. Locke, who writings providing secular arguments for the positions of the Puritan-founded Whig Party, largely created the philosophical framework of classical liberalism, wrote of the triad of basic rights as life, liberty and property. Much closer to the time of the American Revolution, the same triad of basic rights featured into the famous four volume Commentary on the Laws of England by Sir William Blackstone. Blackstone was the first to hold the position of Professor of Common Law at Oxford University established in the late 1750s by an endowment in the will of the jurist Charles Viner. His Commentary was published from 1765 to 1770, the last volume appearing six years prior to the American Revolution. Unlike Locke, Blackstone was a Tory, and this demonstrates that the idea of the basic rights of life, liberty, and property was firmly established in the British Common Law tradition and treated as such by both parties.


Blackstone in his Commentary further identified five auxiliary rights as being necessary in order to protect the basic three. Of the final of these auxiliary rights he says:


The fifth and last auxiliary right of the subject, that I shall at present mention, is that of having arms for their defence, suitable to their condition and degree, and such as are allowed by law. (this and the following quotation are from Volume I of the Commentary on the Laws of England)


While the language is not the absolute language of the American Second Amendment since it includes qualifications and allows for legal limitations, having arms for defence is clearly identified as an essential right of the subjects of the Crown. Here is how he described all the auxiliary rights taken together:


But in vain would these rights [the basic and absolute rights of life, liberty, and property] be declared, ascertained, and protected by the dead letter of the laws, if the constitution had provided no other method to secure their actual enjoyment. It has therefore established certain other auxiliary subordinate rights of the subject, which serve principally as outworks or barriers to protect and maintain inviolate the three great and primary rights, of personal security, personal liberty, and private property.


Blackstone was speaking about the basic and auxiliary rights of subjects of the Crown. If these were the rights of the subjects of the Crown, prior to the American rebellion, they still belonged to those who remained loyal subjects of the Crown after the Americans had broken away.


Blackstone did not just pull these rights out of thin air. In the case of the right to bear arms in their own defence this was spelled out in statute in the Bill of Rights that the Whig-dominated Parliament had passed in 1689 when it changed the reigning dynasty to ensure a Protestant succession. The wording is virtually identical to Blackstone's except that the Bill limits the right to Protestants. Here is the wording:


That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.


This was not a right that was newly minted in 1689. If anything, it was a softening of the way in which this had been viewed in previous centuries, id est, that having arms for defence was an obligation of the Crown’s subjects and not merely a right. At this point in British history a permanent force of professional soldiers was a relatively novel concept. In most previous centuries, when wars arose all able-bodied males were expected to do their duty, take up their arms, and fight for their king and country. Such a duty required that they have arms to take up. This is the militia model of national defence. It was quite common in feudal monarchies, has been used for centuries by the federal republic of the Swiss Confederation, was envisioned by the Founding Fathers of the United States for their own federal republic where it was supplanted by the permanent army model, and played a very important role in the history of our own country and the development of our own national identity of tradition.


In Canada, the militia model and permanent army models, were not historically regarded in the adversarial terms of either/or but rather the complementary terms of both/and. The reasons for this are rooted in our history. By the time the Americans broke away from the British Empire while those who became the Canadians remained loyal, the British Empire had a standing army. Since we were on this side of the Atlantic, however, sharing a continent with the newly formed breakaway republic, the militia model of defence was necessary to supplement the Imperial Army in securing us against threats from the United States, whether in the form of terrorist raids by the Fenian Brotherhood or an official invasion.


Although threats of invasion emanated from Washington DC quite frequently as the Americans unfolded their doctrine of Manifest Destiny in the decades leading up to Confederation there was only one occasion in which this invasion actually materialized and this event was perhaps the single most important event in shaping our national identity that occurred in pre-Confederation Canada. That was the war that was fought between the British Empire and the United States of America from 1812 to 1815 and is generally called after the year in which it started. At the time this war broke out, the British Empire had already been at war with Napoleonic France for nine years. The actions on the part of the British navy to which the Americans objected and made their casus belli for war in 1812 had been undertaken as part of the war effort against Napoleon and the fact that the Imperial fleet and army were occupied with fighting the Little Corporal elsewhere in the world led the Americans to believe that British North America would be an easy conquest for them. They, of course, justified their invasion to themselves as being one of “liberation.”


They learned the hard way that they were wrong on both counts. British North America was not an easy conquest, and their invasion was not welcomed as an act of “liberation.” The British government had had the foresight at the start of the Napoleonic Wars to begin enlisting Canadians into the army and organizing them into units for the purpose of the protection of British North America. As W. L. Morton put it:


The six British battalions in the country would supply the discipline. To these were added the Canadian regulars, of whom the Glengarry Light Infantry, a militia battalion of veteran Highlanders and the Voltigeurs of Lower Canada under a Canadian officer of the British Army, Colonel Charles de Salaberry, were the chief in 1812. (The Kingdom of Canada, 2nd ed., p. 204)


In addition to these, however, Major-General Isaac Brock was able to call upon the armed populace of both Upper and Lower Canada to fight as militia alongside the regular army. Some of the militia groups would be disbanded after the war, others would be incorporated into the regular armed forces. Whether as part of the regular army or the militias, English and French speaking Canadians fought alongside the British Imperial army and allied Indian tribes, and repelled the American invaders in a series of notable battles beginning with Queenston Heights in 1812, where Major-General Brock was killed, and culminating with Lundy’s Lane in Niagara Falls in 1814.


These deeds, celebrated in the second stanza of Alexander Muir’s “The Maple Leaf Forever”, written in the year of Confederation and which served as an unofficial national anthem back in the period when our national self-image was still healthy, were, until very recently, in the minds of most Canadians awarded an honour that was equal, if not greater, to that given to the brave acts of our soldiers who fought in the two World Wars. In the minds of many Canadians they are still awarded that honour. These events left an impression on the Canadian psyche that even the Liberal Party, try though it may, has heretofore been unable to erase.


Liberals and other progressives hate this history, because it reveals that the true, historical Canada is very different from the much more recent image that they have sought to impose on our country. The Loyalists of pre-Confederation British North America, the Fathers of Confederation, and the leadership of our country up to and including both World Wars, held a notion of our civic duty that was virtually the opposite of that which the Liberals prescribe to us today. The idea that it is the duty of all of Her Majesty’s loyal subjects, to participate in the defence of our community and nation, whether against crimes directed against our persons, families, and property or foreign invasion like we kind we helped repel from 1812 to 1814, is abhorrent to them. Their idea of civic duty is to passively allow ourselves to be victimized, and leave defence up to the “professionals.” Indeed, today they seem completely incapable of distinguishing between vigilantism, which is the unlawful dispensing of personal “justice”, and civic duty. Think back two and a half months to when Peter MacKay, one of the candidates in the Conservative Party’s now-suspended leadership race, was denounced by mindless, left-wing, nincompoops for a tweet that they said “promoted vigilantism.” The supposed “vigilantism’ consisted of removing the garbage that people who were likely paid by American billionaires to be eco-protestors pretending to speak for an Indian tribe in British Columbia, had placed upon a railroad in Alberta.


Our right to bear arms as Canadians is nowhere mentioned in the Charter of 1982, but is part of our Common Law heritage. For almost forty years the Liberal Party has tried to make us forget that the Common Law and not the Charter is the source of our rights and freedoms, just as they want us to forget our entire Loyalist history, tradition, and heritage, the older sense of civic duty evidenced by the actions of the Canadian militia in the War of 1812, and that Queen-in-Parliament is the sovereign authority in our country and not Prime Minister-in-Cabinet. Our Common Law right to bear arms has never been an absolute right, although until well into the twentieth century, both here and in the United Kingdom, guns were as easily obtainable as anywhere in the United States. The Liberals’ greatest fear is that we will remember all of these things.


That our government and that of the United Kingdom seem to have forgotten the right to bear arms except for the “such as are allowed by law” part is most regrettable. Gun legislation that is responsible and reasonable, such as that which requires that those purchasing guns show that they have been trained in the responsible use of firearms, is one thing. The kind of gun control the Liberal Party has been pushing on us since the Chretien years, in which gun related atrocities in big cities are used as an excuse for cracking down on law-abiding, mostly rural, gun owners is another thing altogether. The former is compatible with the right contained in the Common Law, spelled out in the Bill of Rights of 1689, and elaborated upon by Blackwell. The latter is not.


(1) The assumption that the Second Amendment of the American Constitution makes gun rights absolute in the United States is what I have in mind here. Canadians, whether they think it a good or a bad thing, tend to borrow this assumption from Americans who interpret their Second Amendment this way. While telling the Americans what to think about the interpretation of their own Constitution is hardly any business of mine, I will make the following observation. The Amendment is worded in absolute language “the right…shall not be infringed” but is part of a Bill of Rights that was the Jeffersonian or Anti-federalist contribution to the American Constitution. That Bill, from the First to the Tenth Amendment, is as much about keeping the government of the federal republic that was established in 1789 from interfering in the affairs of its member states, as it is about protecting individual rights, perhaps even more so. In other words, as its framers understood it, it prohibited only the American federal government from making laws that infringe upon gun ownership, not the state governments. Of course, all of the intentions of those who drafted the Bill of Rights were thwarted by the triumphant side in the American internecine war of 1861-1865.


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