Thoughts on the 2025 Dominion Election

The 28 April, 2025 Dominion election has come and gone in Canada and we have elected our forty-fifth Parliament.  This is what a Dominion election is about.  We go to the polls to choose who will represent our local constituency in the House of Commons, the lower house which along with the Senate, comprises Parliament, the traditional institution in which by ancient prescription the legislative powers of the Crown are exercised.  This is good and as it should be. 

 

The members of Parliament are divided into factions which we call parties.  An unfortunate side effect of a Dominion election is that one of these parties wins a larger number of seats than the others.  If that party wins 172 seats, they have an outright majority of the seats in the House.  If they win less than 172 but more than any other party they have a plurality of the seats.  In either case, this party is said to have “won” the election and is customarily invited by the King or, more commonly, his vice-regal representative the Governor General, to form the next government.   The King, Parliament, civil service, and courts are all “the government,” of course, but in a narrower sense of the term the government consists of the ministers who make the day to day decisions of the King’s Privy Council, the institution in which the executive powers of the Crown are vested.  The leader of the winning party becomes the first minister of His Majesty’s government, the prime minister who chooses a cabinet of other executive ministers to head such ministries as finance, transportation, and dog-walking.

 

In this election, the Liberal Party won a plurality that came just short of a majority.  Initially this was reported as 169 seats but a recount in Lower Canada has since reduced it to 168.  I found this outcome disgusting and appalling.  The Grits have been in power for the last ten years during which period they have: 1) sabotaged the country’s economy, 2) waged war on the memory of her founders and historical leaders, 3) showed alarming disregard for their accountability to Parliament, 4) trod roughshod on the basic rights and freedoms of all Canadians supposedly protected by the Charter they are always patting themselves on the back for introducing in 1982, 5) shoved the insane cultural revolutionary ideas regarding sex, gender, race, and the like that are currently called “woke” down everyone’s throats, 6) reignited the national unity crisis that had finally died down after the first Trudeau premiership, 7) brought in an inexcusable number of new immigrants exacerbating the housing and affordability crises they the Liberals had created, 8) adapted and encouraged provincial governments to adapt policies that enable and encourage rather than hinder and discourage a lifestyle of drug abuse, 9) repeatedly attempted to take control over what Canadians say or think on the internet in the name of fighting “hate” while presiding over and tacitly encouraging a huge wave of hate crimes directed against Christian churches, and 10) took what Pope John Paul II had dubbed the “culture of death” to the nth degree as over the course of their decade in power euthanasia was first legalized for those already dying, then expanded to include virtually everyone else, and actively promoted to such an extreme that even the United Nations condemned it.  I could say more, but I’ll limit the list to one each for each of the years they have been in power.  The point is they did not deserve another term in office, much less an increase in their seat count.

 

Four months ago, when Captain Airhead, having made himself the most loathed prime minister in the history of Canada – if not the entire Commonwealth – finally got the hint and resigned, we were more sick and tired of the Liberals than we had ever been.  Their comeback cannot be attributed to the qualities of the man who replaced Captain Airhead.  An economist by education, Mark Carney spent most of his career in banking, investment and central.  He was an advisor to his predecessor and so could not credibly claim to be a clean break from him, especially when it was obvious that he was Captain Airhead’s hand-picked choice as successor.  He completely lacks his predecessor’s charisma and bears an uncanny resemblance to James Bond’s archnemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld as portrayed by Christoph Waltz in the Daniel Craig films.  These aren’t the makings of someone capable of breathing new life into the corpse of a political party.

 

That the Liberals won another term and even increased their seats to four short of a majority is all the more astonishing in that the Conservatives also gained seats.  In fact, the Conservative seat total went up by twenty four since the previous Dominion election.  The Liberals only gained sixteen seats.  The collapse of the New Democratic Party is what made this possible.  The NDP went from twenty-four seats to seven, losing seventeen seats and their official party status.  That the NDP was reduced to single digit seats and that Jimmy Dhaliwal lost his own seat and stepped down as leader of that awful party I would count among the positive outcomes of the election with one caveat, that they are part of a larger shift that is not positive.  The Lower Canadian separatists also lost ten seats and the Green Party lost one bringing its seat count down to one, that of its former leader Elizabeth May.  That the Liberals and Conservatives both saw large seat increases, while the smaller parties saw devastating losses, is indicative of a shift on the part of the electorate to thinking in terms of a two-party rivalry.  That is the way the American system operates.  It is not how ours is supposed to operate.

 

That brings us to the reason for the Liberal comeback.  It is almost entirely due to foreign interference in the election.  No, not interference by Red China, of the type the Liberals have been trying to cover up for years.  Interference by the leader of Canada’s oldest frenemy.  I hate to use this pop culture portmanteau but no other word adequately describes the relationship between the United States and Canada.  Canada and the United States were founded on opposite principles and ideals.  The United States was founded on the idea of cutting ties to the Christian civilization of Great Britain and Europe and establishing from scratch a new secular country based on ideals derived from abstract reason.  In other words she was founded on liberalism.  In defiance of this concept, Canada was founded on loyalty, on retaining ties to British and European Christendom, and adapting the institutions of the old country to the circumstances of the new.  In other words, she was founded on conservatism.  This would make the two countries natural enemies.  Nevertheless, for most of our history we have enjoyed the world’s longest undefended border, have been each other’s largest trade partner, and fought on the same side in two World Wars and several other global conflicts.   This is how friends behave.  So, frenemies. 

 

The current president of the United States is a man allegedly recruited by the KGB in 1987.  If true, his seeming attempts to engineer the collapse of international trade and history’s biggest stock market crash since his re-election last year become explicable as the actions of the ultimate Communist sleeper agent seeking to destroy capitalism from within.  It would not be the first time a Communist was elected president of the United States running on the Republican ticket. Whatever the truth of that may be, about the same time he started dropping tariffs the way his predecessors dropped bombs, Krasnov the Orange began saying that our country should become his country’s fifty-first state.  Initially this seemed like a joke at the expense of Captain Airhead, but he has kept it up ever since, including a particularly loathsome social media post addressed to the Canadian electorate on the day of the election. 

 

That Carney’s Liberals were able to translate Krasnov’s threats into enough votes for themselves to come back from political death is clearly the explanation of their victory but the explanation itself needs an explanation.  After all, the idea of Canada becoming an American state is abhorrent and loathsome to almost all Canadians including those, like myself, who find the thought of voting Liberal just as repugnant.  The idea that the Liberals are the best choice for dealing with Krasnov’s Anschluss threats makes no sense.  The Liberals have a new leader with no political experience, their own policies are largely to blame for the economic weakness that Krasnov is exploiting, and, most importantly, the Liberals have always, since the nineteenth century, sought to more closely integrate Canada with the United States.

 

While it was Brian Mulroney who signed the US-Canada Free Trade Agreement with Ronald Reagan in 1988, this was in betrayal of his own party’s traditional position.  Free trade with the United States was always the position of the Liberals.  Sir Wilfred Laurier ran on a platform of free trade – he called it “reciprocity” – with the United States in 1891.  The same year, Goldwin Smith, a Liberal intellectual, published a book Canada and the Canadian Question in which he maintained that Confederation was a mistake and that Canada should seek to join the United States.  John Wesley Dafoe, who for the first half of the twentieth century edited the Winnipeg Free Press, which then as now was a Liberal – big and little l – newspaper, and was Sir Wilfred Laurier’s biographer, entitled his history of our country Canada: An American Nation (1935). The absence of “North” was deliberate.  Dafoe saw Canada as the same kind of country as the United States, a country built on the foundation of liberalism by breaking ties with Old World Christian civilization, albeit by means other than a war of independence.  This interpretation of Canadian history is the Liberal interpretation, what Donald Creighton, who like myself vehemently disagreed with it, called the “Authorized Version.”  Even in the 1960s, when the Liberal Party leadership fell into the hands of Communists, it remained the party of Americanization.  Lester Pearson, who had been an informant of Elizabeth Bentley’s Soviet spy ring in the 1940s and who betrayed Canada’s traditional loyalties in his actions in the Suez Canal Crisis to serve the interests of both the United States and the Soviet Union, acted on behalf of JFK when he ousted Diefenbaker in 1963.  His successor, Pierre Trudeau, who had visited the Soviet Union towards the end of Stalin’s regime as a delegate to a Communist conference and as a far left journalist helped engineer the “Quiet Revolution” against established Roman Catholicism in Lower Canada in the 1950s, who admired Mao and basically never met a Communist he didn’t like, as prime minister in the 1970s and 1980s, got all his inspiration for his “communist” innovations from American models – LBJ’s “Great Society”,  the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the American Bill of Rights.  More recently, Captain Airhead was a disgustingly obsequious “Amen Charlie” to the American president, at least when Obama and J. Brandon Magoo held the office.

 

To summarize, the Liberal Party’s track record is such that they are the last party in Canada that ought to be trusted with handling a threat of being swallowed up by the United States. 

 

It turns out that they did not need a reliable track record in standing up to the United States on behalf of Canada to be elected.  All they needed was to make standing up to the United States and more specifically Krasnov the central issue of their campaign.  By doing so, they aligned themselves with the thinking of most Canadians that an existential threat to our country must be treated more seriously than any other matter.  And yes, despite the efforts of some who ought to know better to pretend otherwise, Krasnov’s rhetoric does indeed constitute an existential threat.  Lying through his teeth about his country subsidizing ours to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars[1], Krasnov keeps claiming that the only alternative is for us to become an American state.  If we became an American state, our country would cease to exist, therefore this rhetoric, however much worded politely in a Corleoneish “I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse”[2] manner, constitutes an existential threat.

 

By treating Krasnov’s threats to Canada as the central issue they were the Liberals were able to win an election they did not deserve to win.  For the Liberals to win, the Conservatives had to “lose”, that is, if increasing your seat total by twenty-four deserves to be called “losing.”  The Conservatives did not win the plurality or the majority that they had seemed on track for winning until Krasnov opened his big mouth, but a Dominion election is not the same sort of zero-sum, winner-take-all affair as an American presidential election.  That is not how the Westminster parliamentary system works.  The Conservatives as the second largest party remain His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and in a much stronger position than before apart from the fact that their leader lost his own seat.

 

No, that is not my trying to put a positive gloss on a disappointing outcome.  If there is one thing Canadians need it is a better understanding of and appreciation for our constitution.[3]  As for disappointment, my disappointment in the composition of the forty-fifth Parliament lies in the fact that the Liberals won and not that the Conservatives lost.  Maxime Bernier has been saying, ever since he lost the race for the Conservative leadership to Andrew Scheer and formed the People’s Party of Canada that the Conservative Party is now conservative in name only.  He seemed to devote most of his energies during this campaign to telling this to audiences of American television stations which may explain why the People’s Party’s portion of the vote dropped to below 1%.  As it so happens, I agree with his assessment of the Conservative Party although I reject Bernier’s measuring stick for determining conservatism.  Bernier’s standard of conservatism is what has been called conservatism in the United States since World War II which is a form of what everyone, everywhere else in the world, calls liberalism.  It is a better form of liberalism – lower taxes, freer markets, a lighter state, basically everything ancient Israel asked of Rehoboam after the death of Solomon – than what currently goes by the name liberalism in North America – basically, what Rehoboam, following the bad advice of the young and ignoring that of the elders who had advised his father, gave them - but it is still properly called liberalism rather than conservatism.  If the Conservative Party were actually conservative in other than name it would have won this election hands down because there would not have been the slightest doubt that it was the best choice to stand up to Krasnov’s bullying.  Real conservatism is about protecting the good things that have been handed down to us and passing them down to those who will come after us, about adapting traditional institutions rather than inventing new ones from scratch, about respecting the sacred and refusing to subordinate all of life to the values of the marketplace.  A Conservative party that was actually conservative – or better yet actually Tory[4] – would have seen Krasnov’s suggestion that Canada join the United States as an offense against everything for which it stands.

 

Having said that, I think that actions that cost the Conservative Party the votes they would have needed to win were mostly those of others than the party leader and those actually running in the election.  The Alberta premier’s warning that the country would face a national unity crisis if the Liberals won the election most likely had the opposite effect of what was intended.  In my youth, Lower Canada would frequently use the threat of leaving and breaking up Confederation to obtain what it wanted from the Dominion government.  This was not well received out here in the prairies and I very much doubt the similar rhetoric from Alberta took well outside that province.  Danielle Smith in this case should probably be viewed as the messenger rather than the one making the threat.  On election night, as the results from Atlantic Canada started to come in and the Liberals took an early lead but well before the outcome of the election could be reasonably called, I observed Albertan hotheads commenting in online threads about how they were done with Canada, were going to leave and take their province with them, and basically carry on like crybaby Hollywood liberals do every time they lose an election. [5]  It was rather satisfying, amidst the disappointment of the Liberal victory, to see these types lose.

 

Then there was the commentary from the Conservative Party’s supporters in the media.  Yes, these are vastly outnumbered by Liberal Party supporters in the media, but they do exist.  Their approach to Krasnov and his threats did not do the Conservative Party any favours.  Initially, when the threat was only of tariffs they justified Krasnov by saying that his demands were not unreasonable and were that we do things we should be doing for our own sakes, like crack down on fentanyl.   They were not entirely wrong, except in that Krasnov seemed to be demanding that we prevent people from leaving our country the way Communist countries used to (further evidence that he is KGB?)  Unfortunately, this persisted long after Krasnov’s threats had gone from tariffs to Anschluss.  

 

Worse, these commentators often came across as mocking and ridiculing Canadians for being angry at Krasnov’s attacks and for standing up for our country.   The more responsible Conservative commentators, like Brian Lilley, were careful to direct such criticism only towards the Liberals and NDP and not for expressing Canadian patriotism in itself but for their hypocrisy in having spent the last ten years bashing the country, her history, and her heroes.  Less careful commentators, however, often came across as suggesting that the only ones expressing Canadian patriotism were the Liberals and the Left in general or even as mocking Canadian patriotism in itself. I recall one commentator describing the booing at the American national anthem at sporting events as “jingoism at its worst.”  Seriously?  The president of the neighbour country says that our country shouldn’t exist and should be swallowed up by his and booing his country’s national anthem in response is a worse form of jingoism?  As with the “I’m going to take my province and leave” types, there is satisfaction in seeing the sort of person with so little judgement or taste as to express such nonsense lose.

 

Unfortunately the price of such satisfaction is having to put up with the premiership of Blofeld, whom Krasnov seems to adore.

 

God Save the King!

 

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[1] Krasnov was referring to the United States’ trade deficit with our country and to our insufficient spending on defense.  Even if the trade deficit was as large as that, and it is not, it is much smaller and disappears when energy exports are taken out of consideration, it would not amount to a subsidy, because a trade deficit is not a subsidy.  A subsidy flows in one-direction, from subsidizer to subsidized.  A trade deficit is what happens when two parties are exchanging cash for other goods in both direction, and party A buys more of party B’s goods for cash than party B buys of party A’s goods.  Party A is not subsidizing party B, because party A is getting party B’s goods in return for his cash.  In the case of Canadian and American trade the only thing that resembles a subsidy is the fact that the United States buys energy resources from us at well below the market value.  That is us subsidizing the United States, not the other way around.  As for our insufficient spending on defense, while I find this objectionable it does not amount to the United States subsidizing us and is in fact our business and not Krasnov’s.  There is only one country that has ever tried to conquer Canada, and that was the United States in the pre-Confederation period of the nineteenth century.  Krasnov’s claim that the United States has been “protecting” us is identical to when a different kind of “Don” sends his thugs to a shop owner to collect a payout with threats to the effect of “This is a pretty nice place you got here.  Would be a pity if something were to happen to it.”

[2] Okay, maybe the “Don” in the previous note is not such a different kind from Krasnov after all.

[3] Among the things they need a better understanding of is the fact that a constitution is a set of governing institutions, the system by which they operate, and the traditions that inform and shape them and not a piece of paper that magically prevents the government from abusing its powers.  If Canadians understood this better, they would not commit such errors as to think that Canada had no constitution prior to 1982, that the Liberals gave us our constitution in 1982, or that the Charter is our constitution (it is part of our constitutional law, but not the whole of our constitutional law, much less the constitution itself) and would be more enraged at the offences the Liberals keep committing against our constitution.

[4] A Tory is a specific kind of conservative by the meaning of the word I have provided in the text of this essay.  Conservatives tend to prefer monarchy, Tories are monarchists and royalists, respect for the sacred is part of conservatism, orthodox Churchmanship of Toryism.

[5] Many Albertans and neoconservatives elsewhere in Canada see Alberta as the most conservative province in Canada.  This, however, is based on making American “conservatism”, i.e., the older form of liberalism, the standard of conservatism.  By the standard of actual conservatism, Alberta is arguably the least conservative province in Canada.  It has been, at least since the oil boom, the province of the young and the rootless, by which I mean that a large part of its population are people who moved there from elsewhere in Canada, from the United States, and from further abroad in their youth in the hopes of becoming rich. 

One Small Step Towards Restoring Sanity

 

We are almost a quarter of a century into the third millennium Anno Domini.  In that period the alphabet soup – LGBTTQAEIOUandsometimesY - gang has grown accustomed to getting whatever it demands, no matter how ludicrous, absurd, or even downright insane, the demand happens to be.   This is true in general across the civilization formerly known as Christendom but nowhere more so than here in the Dominion of Canada.   It has been especially true here for the last nine years since Captain Airhead became the creepiest little low-life sleazebag ever to disgrace the office of the first minister of His Majesty’s government in Ottawa.   Captain Airhead has aggressively promoted the craziest, most fringe, and least defensible elements of the alphabet soup agenda as if they were commonsensical, had the weight of universally recognized moral truth behind them, and could be opposed only by knuckle-dragging moral reprobates.  If knuckle-dragging moral reprobation is what is required to oppose such things then Captain Airhead ought to be leading the opposition.   He was never able to add two and two together and come up with four, however.   Just look at his budgets.  

 

One consequence of Captain Airhead’s alphabet soup policies has been a sharp decline in average intelligence in the country.   We might call this the Trudeau Effect.   It is the opposite of the Flynn Effect, the psychometric phenomenon named after James Flynn by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in The Bell Curve (1994) that was the reason standardized IQ tests needed to be revised, updated, and recalibrated periodically to prevent the average from running significantly over 100.   The Trudeau Effect is when, due to constant government-backed gas-lighting and bullying, intelligence so declines that people no longer understand the difference between what is true in reality and what someone mistakenly thinks or imagines to be true.   Before Captain Airhead we could say in response to those pushing the trans part of the alphabet soup agenda that we don’t accept that the person who thinks he is a chicken actually is a chicken, we don’t accept that the person who thinks he is Napoleon Bonaparte actually is who he thinks he is, and neither should we accept that the boy who thinks he is a girl is a girl or that the girl who thinks she is a boy is a boy.   Today, not only do fewer and fewer people understand this, the aggressive promotion of the trans agenda has brought us to the point where there is now a demand that we regard people who think they are something other than people as being what they think or say they are.

 

This is why it has been rather encouraging over the last year or so to see a growing push back against this insanity.    Most recently, Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta, announced a new set of policies and upcoming legislation for her province that would restrict the genital and breast mutilation sickeningly called by such deranged euphemisms as gender-reassignment surgery or gender-affirming care to those who have reached the age of majority, ban puberty-blockers for those under the age of 16, require that parents be notified and give their consent when pervert teachers try to brainwash their kids into thinking they are the opposite sex/gender, require parental consent for sex education and that all sex ed curricula be approved by the minister of education, and prevent the sort of situation that Ray Stevens has hilariously lampooned in his new song “Since Bubba Changed His Name to Charlene”.   In other words, policies and legislation that anyone who isn’t a total idiot, insane, under the influence of an evil spirit or a substance that turns one’s mind to goo or both, evil on a megalomaniacal scale, or some combination of these, could and would support.   Needless to say, both Captain Airhead and Jimmy Dhaliwal, the supervillain who somehow broke out of the cartoon universe and into our own and having been denied entry to India due to his connections to the extremists who want to break that country up opted to become the leader of the socialist party here, have been having conniptions over this.

 

Most news media commentators have joined the whacko politicians like Airhead and Dhaliwal in howling in outrage over what could be best described as the very, bare bones, minimum of a sensible provincial policy towards alphabet soup gender politics.   This will not come as a shock to many, I suspect.    Canadian newspapers have acted as if their role was to propagate the ideas of and bolster support for the Liberal Party since at least the time when John Wesley Defoe edited the Winnipeg Free Press.   Arguably it goes back even further to when George Brown edited the Toronto Globe, the predecessor of today’s Globe and Mail.   That the new technological means of mass communication seemed designed to project a distorted view of reality that served the interests of some ideological vision of progress rather than of truth was a critique made by such varied observers as the American Richard M. Weaver, the French Jacques Ellul, and the Canadian Marshall McLuhan.  It was radio, television, and the motion picture industry that these men had in mind.   The second revolution in mass communications technology that gave us the internet, smartphones, social media, and streaming services has since eclipsed the first.    It has not rectified the problem those astute social critics and technosceptics saw in the earlier mass communications media any more than Captain Airhead’s bailout of the struggling Canadian newspapers solved the problem of their heavy bias towards the Liberal Party but rather, in both instances, the problem was exponentially magnified.

 

John Ibbitson wrote a piece that argued that Smith’s policies were endangering all teenagers in Alberta.   Naturally, the Globe and Mail had the poor taste to publish it.   The obvious reality is that no teenagers – or anybody else for that matter – are endangered by Smith’s policies.    Max Fawcett, the lead columnist for Canada’s National Observer, attempted to argue that Smith, who has long been identified with the libertarian wing of Canadian conservatism, has betrayed her ideology.   As Pierre Poilievre, the current leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, the Conservative Party, pointed out, however, when he – finally – took a stand in favour what Smith was doing, prohibiting people from making irreversible, life-altering, decisions while they are children means protecting their right to make adult choices as adults.  That is hardly something that could be described as irreconcilably out of sync with libertarian ideals  As an indicator of just how cuckoo most of the media reporting on this has been, Ibbitson’s and Fawcett’s are among the saner of the anti-Smith pieces that have appeared.

 

Poilievre also predicted that Captain Airhead will eventually have to back down on this issue.   I certainly hope that he is right about that and that soon we will have the pleasure of watching Captain Airhead eat his own words.   In the meantime, it is good to see that a rational, sane, pushback against the alphabet soup madness has finally begun.   Let us hope and pray that it continues and spreads.

New Day? No Thanks, I’ll Take the Old(er)!

 

Over the past couple of weeks there has been a great deal of talk here in Winnipeg about the announcement that today’s big party at the Forks would be called “New Day” instead of “Canada Day”, would be a whole bunch of pissing and moaning about wrongs real and imagined inflicted upon the Indians instead of a celebration of our country, and would not include the usual fireworks celebration.   Interestingly, Sunday evening, while enjoying a coffee at Tim Horton’s and trying to read a chapter out of the book of Isaiah, I overheard snatches of conversation from a couple at a nearby table with regards to all of this.  The man was boisterously objecting to all of these changes, especially the cancelling of the fireworks.   The woman was defending the changes, toeing the progressive party line on the subject.  For what it’s worth, the man was an Indian and the woman was lily white.

 

Among the more prominent of the local critics of these changes – I add the modifier “local” because it has attracted commentary from across the Dominion, including Toronto’s Anthony Furey and Edmonton’s Lorne Gunter – are Lloyd Axworthy and Jenny Motkaluk.    The former, who from 1979 to 2000 was the MP for Winnipeg - Fort Garry then Winnipeg South Centre when the former was dissolved and the latter reconstituted in 1988, during which time he served as Minister for various portfolios in Liberal governments under Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien, and later became president of the University of Winnipeg, the furthest to the left of the city’s academic institutions, expressed his criticism in the pages of the Winnipeg Free Press, a Liberal party propaganda rag that likes to think of itself as a newspaper.   The latter is one of the candidates for the office about to be vacated by Mayor Duckie whom she had previously but sadly unsuccessfully attempted to unseat in the 2018 mayoral election.   Ryan Stelter responded to Motkaluk with a column that appeared in the Winnipeg Sun – the local neoconservative tabloid – in which he defended the decision by the powers that be at the Forks, their reasons for the change, and basically argued that while the biggest party in the city has been re-named and re-imagined this does not prevent anyone else from celebrating the holiday as they like.

 

While I suspect Stelter of disingenuity – his argument is technically correct but does not address the real problems with the thinking behind the changes likely because he doesn’t want to be seen as dissenting from that thinking - I shall, nevertheless, be doing as he suggests and celebrating the holiday the way I like.     This means that like the crowd at the Forks, I will not be celebrating “Canada Day”.   Unlike the crowd at the Forks, however, I shall not be celebrating the atrociously progressive “New Day” either – perhaps they should have called it “New DIE” from the appropriate acronym for Diversity, Inclusivity, Equity – but shall be celebrating, as I do every first of July, Dominion Day.  This is Canada’s true national holiday and the first of July bore this name until the Liberals changed it in 1982.   Since the Liberals did not do so honestly and constitutionally – only thirteen members, less than a quorum, were sitting at the time that the private member’s bill changing the name was rushed through all the readings without debate in less than five minutes, hence the Honourable Eugene Forsey’s description of this as “something very close to sneak-thievery” – I think that continuing to celebrate Dominion Day rather than Canada Day is appropriate.   I am in good company in this.  The great Canadian man of letters Robertson Davies called Dominion Day “splendid” and Canada Day “wet” in reference to its being “only one letter removed from the name of a soft drink”.  

 

I will say this about Canada Day, however.   Like Dominion Day it is a celebration of our country as a whole.  Indeed, Dominion Day and Canada Day, are two different celebrations of Canada based on two different visions of what ought to celebrated about the country.   I will elaborate on that momentarily.   First I will point out the contrast.   Attempts at a post-Canada Day holiday, as this New Day would appear to be, seem to be attempts at having a celebration on the country’s anniversary without celebrating the country at all but rather celebrating progressive ideals and the group identities of groups within Canada who are favoured by the left while allotting shame and dishonour to the country (and to groups within it who are not favoured by the left).   Ironically, considering that the sort of people who think up this sort of thing are always going on about “inclusivity”, this is incredibly divisive.   It is also insane.

 

Canada Day is a celebration of the Canada of the Liberal vision.   That Canada is best described by the title of a 1935 history by John Wesley Dafoe, the Liberal Party promoter who edited the Winnipeg Free Press for the first half of the twentieth century, Canada: An American Nation.   By deliberately omitting the word “North” Dafoe expressed his idea that Canada is essentially American – possessing the same culture and values as the United States, and on the same political trajectory historically, away from the British Empire and towards democratic republican nationalism, albeit pursuing that path through means other than war.   Those who share this vision of Canada have historically regarded the Liberal Party as the guardians of Canada’s journey down this path or, as it has often been stated, “the natural ruling party of Canada”.    This is what the great Canadian historian Donald Creighton derisively called the “Authorized Version”, the Liberal Interpretation of Canadian History that was, before the Cultural Marxist version in which the history of Canada, the United, States, and Western Civilization is treated as nothing but racism, sexism, and other such isms, permeated academe, authoritatively taught in Liberal-leaning history classrooms, which were most of them.   What critics of the left-wing of the Liberal Party – the branch of the party most associated with the two Trudeaus and Jean Chretien – and particularly the neoconservatives who look for inspiration and ideas primarily if not solely to the American “conservative” movement, often fail to grasp is that this is the Liberal vision of Canada even when the party’s left-wing, which spouts the same sort of anti-American rhetoric as the American Cold War era New Left, is controlling the party, and perhaps especially so.   The symbols associated with Canada Day, such as the flag introduced by Lester Pearson in 1965, like the name of the holiday itself, are symbols that point to Canada while saying nothing about her history and traditions, symbols that were introduced by Liberals to replace older ones that also pointed to Canada but did speak about her history and traditions.   The historical events highlighted in this vision of Canada are events in which the Liberal Party led the country.   In recent decades the main one of these was the repatriation of the British North America Act of 1867 in 1982 and the addition to it of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.   In repatriating the British North America Act, it was renamed the Constitution Act, 1867.   Everything asserted a few sentences earlier about the symbols associated with Canada Day is true of this change as well and the new name reflects the American understanding of the word “constitution”, i.e., a piece of paper telling the government what to do, rather than the traditional British-Canadian understanding of the word as meaning the institutions of the state as they actually exist and operate in a living tradition that is largely unwritten.   Similarly, it was the American Bill of Rights that the authors of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms had in mind when they added this to the repatriated BNA, although, many of us have been warning for years and as is painfully obvious after the medical tyranny of the last two and a half years, and especially the harsh fascist crackdown on those peacefully protesting against this tyranny in Ottawa earlier this year, the Charter simply does not provide the same level of protection as the American Bill.     The Charter did not provide us with anything worth having that we did not already have by right of the Common Law and the long tradition of protected rights and freedoms associated with it including such highlights as the Magna Carta.    Furthermore, it weakened the most important rights and freedoms mentioned in it – the fundamental freedoms of Section 2 and the legal rights of Sections 7 to 14, institutionalized the injustice of reverse de jure discrimination – Section 15 b), and provided no protection whatsoever to property rights which in the older tradition which both we and the Americans inherited occupy the spot where the Americans put “the pursuit of happiness” in one of the founding documents of their tradition as it branched off from the older.  Perhaps the most significant single effect of the Charter was to transform our Supreme Court into an American-style activist Court which it had not been up unto that point.   The American Supreme Court has been activist so long that now, when it has finally reversed one of its most notorious activist rulings – Roe  v Wade – and returned the right to legislate protection for the lives of the unborn to the lawmaking assemblies from which it stole it in 1973, the American progressives whose causes have benefited from the vast majority of judicial activism have seen this as illegitimate judicial activism and have been behaving like extremely spoiled children who have finally received long-overdue discipline.   The point, however, is that these changes, arguably the most Americanizing of any the Liberal Party has ever made, were introduced by a Liberal government when the party was controlled by its left-wing, despite that left-wing’s Communist-sympathizing anti-American rhetoric.

 

Dominion Day is a celebration of the Canada that was formally established as a country when the British North America Act came into effect on 1 July, 1867.    The country was given the name Canada, which name, originally the Iroquois word for “village”, was mistaken by Jacques Cartier for the St. Lawrence region, then applied to the society of French settlers established there, then, after this French society and its territory were ceded to the British Crown by the French Crown after the Seven Years War, and the Americans seceded from the British Crown to establish their Modern, liberal, republic, became the name of two provinces of the British Empire, one French Catholic and the other English Protestant, located in this territory, the latter populated by the Loyalists who had fled persecution in the American republic.   These provinces were united into one in 1841, which proved almost immediately to be a mistake, and the search for a solution to the problems this fusion generated was one of the main reasons for Confederation in which the two provinces were separated once again, but made part of a larger federation of British North American provinces that was given the name common to both.   Dominion was the title the Fathers of Confederation gave the country that would bear the name country.   The title of a country, as distinct from its name, is supposed to tell you what kind of a country it is, that is to say, the nature of the constitution of the state.   If a country has “People’s Republic” as its title, for example, that tells us that it is a Communist, totalitarian, hellhole.   The “Dominion” in Canada’s title tells us that she is a parliamentary monarchy, a kingdom or realm under the reign of the monarch we share with the United Kingdom, governed by her own Parliament.   When the Liberals were waging war against the title “Dominion” from the 1960s to the 1980s, they maintained that it was a synonym for “colony” and was imposed upon Canada from London in the nineteenth century, but none of that was true.  The most charitable interpretation of the Liberals making these claims is that they were ignorant of history, an interpretation that would seem to be supported by the Honourable Eugene Forsey’s account, in his memoirs, of his attempts to educate his Liberal colleagues in the Senate about these things during this period, although a less charitable interpretation might be more appropriate for the top leaders of the party.   The reality is that the Fathers of Confederation had “Kingdom of Canada” as their first choice, were advised by London to pick something less provocative to our neighbours to the South, and chose “Dominion” as a synonym for “Kingdom” from Psalm 72:8.

 

Dominion Day, as a celebration of this Canada, is a celebration of a vision of Canada that is pretty much the opposite of the Liberal vision of Canada, and an interpretation of her history that is the opposite of the “Authorized Version”.   To call it the Conservative vision and interpretation of Canada would be very misleading, I am afraid, because, those who currently use the moniker Conservative are generally light years removed from Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir George-Étienne Cartier   Whatever you want to call it, however, it is the truer vision and interpretation of Canada.    The Confederation Project was not an attempt to do what the Americans had done in 1776 albeit without bloodshed.   It was an attempt to do the opposite of what the Americans had done – to take the provinces of the British Empire in North America, and build out of them a new country without severing ties with the United Kingdom and the Empire, using the Westminster Parliament as its model rather than devising a new constitution from scratch.   For the Fathers of Confederation in 1864 to 1867, as with the English and French Canadians who fought alongside the British Imperial army and its Indian allies from 1812 to 1815, and the ancestors of the same during the American Revolution four decades earlier, the threat to their freedom came from the American Republic, with its “Manifest Destiny”, cloaking its dreams of conquest in the rhetoric of “liberation”.   The British Crown and Empire were not tyrannical forces from which the Canadians needed to be “liberated” (1) but the guardian forces that protected Canadian freedom from American conquest.    The threat of American conquest did not just magically go away on 1 July, 1867.  The efforts of Sir John’s government in the decades that followed, to bring the rest of British North America into Confederation, to settle the prairies, and to build the transcontinental railroad that would unite the country economically, were all carried out with the threat of a United States hoping and wishing for him to fail so that they might swoop in and gobble up Canada looming over head.   Aiding and abetting the would-be American conquerors were their fifth column in Canada, the Liberals.   In Sir John’s last Dominion election, held in March 1891 only a couple of months prior to the stroke that incapacitated him shortly before his death, he faced a Liberal opponent, Sir Wilfred Laurier, who campaigned on a platform of “unrestricted reciprocity”, which is more commonly called “free trade”, with the United States.   Sir John called this treason, pointing out that free trade would create an economic union that would be the wedge in the door for cultural and political union with the United Sates.   That very year Liberal intellectual Goldwin Smith published a book, Canada and the Canada Question, that argued that Confederation was a mistake, that economics is everything, that trade in North America is naturally north-south rather than east-west – this was effectively rebutted by Harold Innis in The Fur Trade in Canada (1930) and Donald Creighton in The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence (1937) – and that union with the United States was both desirable and inevitable.   Sir John won another majority government in his last Dominion election by vigorously opposing all of this.

 

Sir John’s victory over Laurier in 1891 demonstrated that his vision of Canada, rather than the Liberal vision, was shared not just by the other Fathers of Confederation but by most Canadians.  That this remained true well into the Twentieth Century was evident in how the Liberals were the most likely to lose elections in which they most stressed the free trade plank of their platform and in the Loyalist spirit demonstrated by the Canadians who rallied to the call of King, Country, and Empire in two World Wars.   Even the Grit Prime Minister during the Second World War, who had mocked the Imperial war effort during the First World War, who was the very embodiment of the Liberal continentalist free trader, and who was actually an admirer of the dictator who led the other side – following his brief interview with Hitler in 1937, Mackenzie King wrote a gushing entry about him in his diary, in which he described the German tyrant in almost Messianic terms, comparing him to Joan of Arc, and employing language that would have sounded just as creepy had Hitler turned out to be the man of peace he thought him to be – had enough of that spirit to do his duty and lead Canada into the war alongside Britain and the rest of the Commonwealth.   Unfortunately, one of the consequences of that conflict was that the United States became the leading power in Western Civilization and immediately began to reshape the West into its own image.   To make matters worse around this same time mass communications technology, especially the television, became ubiquitous both a) facilitating the permeation of English Canadian culture with the mass pop culture produced in the culture factories of Los Angeles, and b) greatly increasing the influence of the newsmedia, which had been heavily slanted towards the Liberals since even before Confederation when George Brown edited the Globe, which evolved into today’s Globe and Mail.   These are among the foremost of the factors which produced the shift in popular thinking away from the truer, founding, vision of Canada celebrated in Dominion Day to the Liberal vision celebrated in Canada Day.   They are also among the factors that led George Grant, Canada’s greatest philosopher, traditionalist, and critic of technology, to pen his jeremiad for our country, Lament for a Nation, in 1965.

 

If the exponential growth in media power due to the development of mass communications technology and the post-World War II Americanization of Western Civilization as a whole are responsible for the shift in popular thought to the Liberal vision, how then do we explain this subsequent shift to the new, “woke” Left view, in which Canada, and everything that traditional Canadians celebrated about her in Dominion Day and Liberals in Canada Day, are regarded as cause for weeping and gnashing of teeth rather than celebration?

 

While the media certainly had a role in this as well – they were the ones, last year, remember, who, when various Indian bands began announcing that they had found ground disturbances – and this is all that they have found, to this date – on the grounds of former residential schools or in unmarked sections of cemeteries, irresponsibly reported this as “proof” of a conspiracy theory about the residential schools having been death camps where priests murdered kids by the thousands – it is our educational system that must bear the blame for the fact that so many people were stupid and ignorant enough to believe this stercus tauri.  It has been sixty-nine years since Hilda Neatby wrote and published So Little for the Mind: An Indictment of Canadian Education in which she lambasted the education bureaucrats who in most if not all Canadian provinces had decided in the decade or so prior to her writing to impose the educational “reforms” proposed by wacko, environmentalist (in the sense of taking the nurture side in the nature/nurture debate rather than the sense of being a tree-hugging, save-the-planet, do-gooder, although he may have been that too), atheist, secular humanist, Yankee philosopher John Dewey upon Canadian public schools.    This meant out with a curriculum focused on giving children facts to learn, expecting them to learn them, and acquainting them with the literary canon of the Great Conversation so that by exposing them to the Swiftian “sweetness and light” of Matthew Arnold’s “best which has been thought and said” they might be inspired to rise above their natural barbarism or philistinism and learn to think and ask questions and strive for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.  It meant in with a curriculum that was “child-centred”, which in practice meant dumbed down so as to minimize or eliminate content of which the child cannot immediately recognize its pragmatic utility to himself, although Dewey and his followers, who were decades ahead of everyone else in terms of solipsistic, narcissistic, psycho-babble, dressed it up in terms of helping the child maximize his potential.   Those sympathetic to the methods of Dewey et al. thought of these reforms as a positive shift from a passive education in which the teacher gives the student the content to be learned and the student receives it to an active education in which the student is trained to learn by self-discovery.   Neatby recognized these methods for what they really were – the means of transforming schools from institutions that provide their students with the intellectual tools necessary to live in control of their own lives as free people into institutions that train people to be docile, unquestioning, members of a more planned, more controlled, and more collectivist sort of society.   Her warnings largely went ignored, although she was commemorated with a stamp twenty-two years ago.   Even though the environmentalist presuppositions underlying Dewey’s system have been thoroughly debunked in the intervening decades, his theories survive as the dominant educational philosophy, albeit having been periodically translated into the latest forms of newspeak.      Meanwhile university level academics have mostly stopped criticizing the way the schools under the new system are failing to prepare students for a university education, but have instead accommodated the universities to the situation by transforming them into indoctrination centres in which their unquestioning and docile but also navel-gazingly narcissistic “student” bodies have their heads stuffed with every conceivable form of left-wing group identity politics – there are entire divisions of universities now dedicated to specific forms of this – and the deranged post-Marxist crackpot left-wing theories – intersectionality, Critical Theory (Race and otherwise), etc. – that support them.   The subversion and perversion of our educational system just described is the reason so many were quick to unthinkingly and unquestioningly accept the media’s irresponsible claims that the discovery of soil disturbances by ground-penetrating radar constitutes proof of the conspiracy theory that government-funded, church-operated, schools were murdering their students in some giant plot involving the highest officials of church, state, and a host of other institutions, that a defrocked United Church minister (2) pulled out of his rear end decades ago.    It is the reason so many were willing to commit the chronological snobbery of judging ex post facto our country’s past leaders by the left-wing standards of today’s progressives, the injustice of accepting a condemnation of our country in which only the accuser has been allowed to be heard and the defence has been denied the right of cross-examination and of making a defence by the mob shouting “disrespect” and “denial” every time anyone raised a question or pointed out contra-narrative facts, and the impiety of thinking the worst of the generations that went before us.   Note how the words “colonialism” and “imperialism” are constantly on the lips of such people, being used negatively in precisely the manner described by Robert Conquest in Reflections on a Ravaged Century in which he concluded that this usage, so different from how these terms are used by real historians, has reduced these words to “mind-blockers and thought-extinguishers”.   This bespeaks the failure of the educational system.

 

So no, I will not be participating in any “New Day” that is the product of what passes for thinking in the minds of those whose acceptance of the left-wing narrative that our country is something to be mourned rather than celebrated testifies to the ruin of our educational system.    Nor, as an unreconstructed old Tory, will I be celebrating the Liberal vision for our country on “Canada Day”.   I shall once again raise my glass – or rather cup of coffee – to Sir John A. Macdonald and celebrate Canada’s true holiday, Dominion Day.

 

Happy Dominion Day!

 

God Save the Queen!

 

(1)     For all of Jefferson’s Lockean rhetoric about natural law, unalienable rights, and the consent of the governed his 1776 accusations of “absolute tyranny” against George III and Parliament were nonsensical propaganda of the most risible sort, considering that the British government was one of the least intrusive governments in the world both at that time and in all of history up to that point.   

(2)     This is actually, in a twisted way, rather impressive.   It is far easier to be ordained in the United Church of Canada than to be defrocked.  

The Canadian Left Apes the Americans Yet Again

 

On Monday, the twenty-first of February, even though the border blockades had been removed – they were in the process of being removed at the very moment the Emergency Measures Acts was invoked the week prior – and the Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa had been dispersed over the weekend through an ugly display of police state brutality that is utterly out of place in a Commonwealth Realm and has tarnished Canada’s reputation, Captain Airhead nevertheless managed to get enough votes in the House of Commons to confirm his use of the EMA.   Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, the Conservatives, voted against the confirmation, as did the Lower Canadian separatists, but the Liberals all voted for it as did Jimmy Dhaliwal’s socialists.  The latter compromised the historical principles of their party to do so.  In 1970 they had been the only party in Parliament to take a principled stand against the War Measures Act when Captain Airhead’s father had invoked it in an actual emergency (bombs, kidnapping, murder, that sort of thing).   In 2022 they propped up the government in using the Emergency Measures Act against a peaceful, working-class, protest, despite warnings from retired members of the NDP old guard, like Svend Robinson, that they were throwing their legacy away in doing so.   

 

 

In the debate leading up to the vote, Captain Airhead and the other ministers of the government were repeatedly asked why they were still taking this to a vote even though the protest was over.   No convincing answer was provided.  The House was told that there was still an emergency, that they would just have to trust the government, and that how they voted would reflect whether they did so trust the government or not.   This was how the Prime Minister and Mr. Dhaliwal cracked the whip on their caucuses to prevent members from breaking ranks.   The implication was that it was a confidence vote, which if the government lost would dissolve Parliament, leading to an immediate new Dominion election – less than half a year after the last one – in which the leaders could punish dissenters by not signing their candidacy papers.

 

 

Two days after having thus given us his rendition of the role of Supreme Chancellor Palpatine from Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, the Prime Minister revoked the Emergency Measures Act.    There was, of course, no more of an emergency on Monday than there was on Wednesday, nor had there ever been an emergency of the type that would justify the invoking of the Emergency Measures Act.    While we cannot know for certain what was going on in the empty space between Captain Airhead’s ears, we can be sure that it was not a sudden epiphany about the importance of respecting constitutional limits on government powers – he would have resigned immediately had that been the case – and that three factors likely had a significant role to play in his turnaround.   One of these is that he had taken a severe beating in the international press.   The second is that the Big Five – Canada’s largest banks – would have explained to the government how that forcing financial institutions to act as the government’s thought police undermines those institutions’ credibility, both domestic and international, and threatens the entire financial superstructure of the country, already weakened by years of reckless government financial policy.   The last, but not least, factor was that the government was losing the debate in the Chamber of Sober Second Thought.   This is not like a bill of legislation which gets sent back to the House if the Senate does not approve.   A vote against confirming the use of the Emergency Measures Act in the Senate, and the indicators all suggested that the Senate would vote against confirmation, would immediately revoke the Act.   Which would make things far more difficult for the Prime Minister in the official inquiry into his actions that must necessarily follow the use of the EMA than a voluntary withdrawal of the power.

 

 

There is a lot that could be said about how this episode provides further demonstration of many of the truths that I have written about over the years.   It demonstrates that democracy is not the same thing as either constitutionally limited government or personal freedom.   The Prime Minister asked the elected House of Commons to approve his inappropriate use of an Act giving him sweeping powers to trample over our freedoms in order to crush a peaceful protest and they did so.   It demonstrates that the Westminster System of Parliament is much more than a democracy.  It is an institution that has proven itself over time to be effective at protecting personal freedom and checking the excesses of government, even democratic government, and its unelected components have as much to do with making it work as the elected House.   It demonstrates that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is absolutely useless as a safeguard of personal rights and freedoms.   The Grit government insisted that its actions under the EMA would be consistent with the Charter.   If allowing the government to freeze bank accounts, a) without a court order and b) without liability or any civil recourse for those whose accounts are so frozen is consistent with the Charter, then the Charter is empty and meaningless.   A government that can do that is a government that recognizes no constitutional limitations. It demonstrates that Liberal Prime Ministers, especially those with the last name Trudeau, see democracy in terms of elected dictatorship.  

 

 

It also demonstrates that the Canadian Left is incapable of independent thought and borrows all of its bad ideas from the United States.

 

 

This has always been the case.   The Liberal Party, which began as the centre-left party that developed out of the pre-Confederation Reform movement, was, before being captured by the harder New Left in the 1960s, the party that envisioned Canada’s destiny in American terms.   It was the party that advocated for North American free trade for a century before the Conservatives under Brian Mulroney sold out their own legacy and signed the US-Canada Free Trade Deal.   It was the party that wanted greater economic, cultural, and political alignment between Canada and the United States.   Liberal theorists such as Goldwin Smith were arguing for formal union between the two countries as early as the 1890s.   The Liberal interpretation of Canadian history retold it as if it were simply a re-run of American history with the same goals accomplished by compromise and negotiation rather than war and bloodshed.   John Wesley Dafoe, a prominent exponent of this interpretation as well as the Liberal propagandist who edited the Winnipeg Free Press for the first half of the twentieth century, entitled his fanciful view of our history Canada: An American Nation.

 

 

This looking to the United States for inspiration did not die out after the Liberal Party swung to the hard left.  When Pierre Trudeau became Prime Minister of Canada in the late 1960s he exponentially expanded the welfare state.   His inspiration for this was Lyndon Johnson’s similar expansion of social programs in the United States.   LBJ had his “Great Society”, PET had his “Just Society”.   The Canadian social security net that  he so expanded had been similarly introduced in the late 1930s based on the model of FDR’s New Deal in the United States and given the same name.     In 1977, the Trudeau Liberals talked Parliament into passing the Canadian Human Rights Act.   This Act had nothing to do with human rights in the ordinary sense of basic rights belonging to all people that need protection against the power of the state.   It gave the state more power -power that government ought never to have - power to police the thoughts and motives of individual Canadians in their personal and business interactions with one another.   It declared "discrimination" to be against the law - not discrimination by the government but by private Canadians - made it a civilly liable offence with criminally punitive consequences, established an investigative body, the Canadian Human Rights Commission to investigate complaints at the public expense and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal to hear such complaints.   It was a system stacked against the accused, in complete contradiction of the principles the Canadian system of law and justice are based upon, and it became the means whereby the oppressive atmosphere of restricting thought and censoring speech known as political correctness escaped the confines of left-liberal academe where it had developed into the general culture which in turn allowed political correctness in academe to evolve into the more warped version of itself that exists today, wokeness, characterized not so much by self-censorship of thought and speech but by the silencing and destruction of others.   Pierre Trudeau modelled the Canadian Human Rights Act on an American law passed thirteen years earlier - the US Civil Rights Act.  Canada’s constitution is a mixture of the written and unwritten.   In 1982, Pierre Trudeau oversaw the patriation of the principle document of the written part so as to make it amendable by the Canadian Parliament and in the process prefixed to it the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.   The Charter, over the course of the last two years has been shown to be useless as a protection of Canadians' basic rights and freedoms from governments, Dominion and provincial, determined not to let those rights and freedoms stand in the way of sweeping public health measures.   Over the past forty years, however, it has proven remarkably effecting at Americanizing our Supreme Court in the sense of empowering it to overturn local laws, customs, and traditions older than Confederation and to secularize public schools (In the last decade or so left-liberal commentators have taken to speaking without irony of Canada's tradition of "separation of church and state" when we have no such tradition, separation of the two being a distinguishing trait of the American tradition).    The Charter, in other words, has all of the negatives and few if any of the positives, of the document Pierre Trudeau looked to for inspiration - the American Bill of Rights.

  

Now consider the response of the Canadian Left - the Prime Minister and the Liberal Party, Jimmy Dhaliwal and the socialist party, the legacy media public and private - to the Freedom Convoy.    From their initial response as the trucks were heading towards Ottawa, through their commentary on the weeks long demonstrations, and their claims as the Emergency Measures Act was invoked and an ugly, militarized, police force were sent in to trample elderly women with horses, arrest protestors at gun point, beat people with batons and otherwise behave like the lowlife criminal thugs from whose ranks modern police are sadly often recruited, they have regurgitated every bit of the craziness that began afflicting the American Left in the United States' 2016 presidential election. 

In 2016, Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton stuck her foot in her mouth and lost the election by accusing the populist, Middle American, supporters of her opponent, Republican candidate Donald the Orange of being a "basket of deplorables" and threw every imaginable pejorative “ist” and “phobe” at them.    You can hear the echo of that in Captain Airhead's now infamous remarks about the "small fringe minority" with "unacceptable views",    When Clinton lost the election she then blamed her loss on Russian interference.

 

 

This is parenthetical but timely given the international events that have drawn everyone's attention away from Captain Airhead's vile actions, but notice how the same people who back in the Cold War used to accuse anyone who suggested that the Communist regime in the Soviet Union could not be trusted, was working to undermine constitutional government and freedom so as to enslave the world, and had spies everywhere of being paranoid "McCarthyites" started talking the exact same way themselves when the USSR was gone and Russia was Russia again.    Whatever one might think of Vladimir Putin, the present crisis is the result of a little over two decades worth of incredibly bad American policy towards post-Soviet Russia.    Their giving their support to every group wishing to secede from post-Soviet Russia and extending NATO membership to these countries in a period when NATO should have been contracting after the collapse of the Soviet regime and in a way that brought NATO ever closer to Russia’s doorstep – the expansion of NATO’s involvement in Ukraine and vice-versa is the immediate issue - was needlessly insulting and provocative to post-Soviet Russia. Nor was support for the coup about eight years ago in which a Russia-friendly elected Ukrainian government was overthrown in an armed coup that replaced it with a US-NATO puppet government in Kiev and placed de facto control of much of the country in the hands of Banderites (1) exactly helpful.   By doing these things, American governments, usually those led by left-liberal Democrats like Clinton, Obama and Biden, created the conditions that produced the present conflict.  

 

 

Just as Hillary Clinton blamed her loss on the Russians in 2016 - her claims have been long since thoroughly debunked - so a CBC commentator claimed with a straight face that the Russians were behind the Freedom Convoy.    The government in justifying its crackdown on the protesters maintained that the Freedom Convoy was backed by foreign funds, the implication being that a foreign government or some foreign organization hostile to the Canadian government was dumping huge amounts of money into it.   The further implication was that the money was coming from either Russia, some extremist group in the United States, or both.   FINTRAC has since demonstrated these claims to be nonsense.   The money supporting the protest came from good faith donors in Canada and abroad who supported the Convoy’s cause – the end of the public health restrictions and mandates that have severely curtailed basic personal rights and freedoms for the last two years.

 

The remainder of the insane and unsubstantiated allegations hurled against the truckers by the Liberal government, Jimmy Dhaliwal’s socialists, and the legacy media have been completely plagiarized from the American loony Left’s response to the incident that took place in Washington DC on the Feast of Epiphany last year.   As you might recall, that was the date on which Congress was scheduled to confirm the results of the previous year’s presidential election.   That morning, the incumbent president Donald the Orange, who was challenging the results, held a rally of his supporters.   A fraction of his supporters entered the Capitol building and it was treated as if it was an insurrection, an attempt to violently overthrow the American government and overturn the results of the election.   This was an extremely hyperbolic interpretation of what had actually happened – most of the participants, who rather atypical of insurrectionists were generally unarmed, seemed to be there to take selfies as if they were American versions of Captain Airhead.    It arose out of the paranoia about a supposed “far right” threat to American democracy which had been observably growing on the American left ever since the Charlottesville rally of three and a half years prior had drawn their attention to the fact that their ongoing campaign to tear down monuments, vilify admired historical figures, re-write the past in accordance with their present narrow obsessions about race, sex, and gender, and silence anyone who complains about all of this through the thuggish behaviour of Antifa thought enforcers was meeting with resistance and pushback.   As over-the-top as the American Left’s interpretation of the actual events of the sixth of January was, the Canadian Left’s attempt to impose this same interpretation on the Freedom Convoy is that much more removed from reality.   The Freedom Convoy protestors did not enter the Parliament buildings – they parked on the street in front and threw a block party – and clearly stated their intentions, which did not involve overthrowing the government, and they stuck to their single issue of personal, constitutionally protected, freedom.   Captain Airhead and the Canadian Left had far less on which to hang their accusations of insurrection, occupation, ideology-based extremism, and other such drivel against the truckers than Forgettable Joe Whatshisname and the American Left had for their identical charges against the Capitol Hill selfie-takers last year but they still tried to hammer that square peg into the round hole it so obviously did not fit.

 

There are many things that can be attributed to the Canadian Left.   Originality is not one of those things.   They should lay off imitating the Americans.   It never turns out well. 

 

(1)   Banderites take their name from Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian nationalist leader who collaborated with the Third Reich in the Second World War.   In other words, they are in actuality the sort of people Captain Airhead and his followers have been falsely accusing the truckers of being.  The Azov Regiment, a unit of the Ukrainian National Guard formed in the 2014 coup, proudly displays its National Socialist ideology in its emblem which prominently features imagery borrowed from the Third Reich.   It is part of the regime that Barack Obama installed in the Ukraine and which is supported today by the same Captain Airhead who thinks that the presence of a single Nazi flag, one almost certainly being used ironically – i.e., to attribute that which the flag symbolizes to Captain Airhead – in a protest is sufficient to condemn the entire protest of thousands as being somehow Nazi and justify his use of excessive government power to crush it.   Captain Airhead’s deputy prime minister, a woman with the ability to appear both vacuous and Machiavellian at the same time, the granddaughter of the editor-in-chief of the Krakivs'ki Visti, a Ukrainian language Nazi propaganda tabloid that ran from 1940 to 1945, and the same woman who about a week ago was giggling to herself in glee at a press conference when asked about the plight of the Canadian families whose bank accounts she had frozen because they supported the truckers protesting for freedom posted to social media the other day, a picture of herself holding a scarf with the colours of the Banderite movement at a demonstration in support of Ukraine.