Hic et Ille VI

A Correction

In my essay of March 30th, on the race for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada I declared that anything less than wholehearted support for the institution of royal monarchy ought to disqualify anyone from running as a candidate for the Conservative Party, much less for the party’s leadership. On those grounds I said that Erin O’Toole ought to be ruled out. This was based upon a survey of the prospective Conservative leaders done by the blogger A Kisagari Colour of the blog Maple Monarchists who had reported, on March 3rd, that O’Toole “has refused to answer my question regarding the monarchy.” On the ninth of this month, Maple Monarchists posted a second entry on O’Toole. It turns out that he had been given several policy questions at once and that his collective response was one of “While I don't have these detailed policy positions right now, I am working on it... I intend to release my policy proposals in the near future.” Commenting on this, A Kisagari Colour says “in hindsight 'refusal' was too strong of a word to have used” and quotes a statement Mr. O’Toole has given to the Monarchist League of Canada, expressing his “steadfast support for the monarchy as a foundational element of our parliamentary democracy and a positive force in our society” and outlining his past track record of support for the institution. Welcome back to the race, Mr. O’Toole!


Common Sense from Kellie Leitch

Kellie Leitch, one of the other candidates for the Conservative leadership, sent out an e-mail on April 22nd with the subject line “a common sense approach to immigration” and the content of the message lives up to this. She talks about a visit she made to Emerson, the border town in my home province of Manitoba that has been deluged with illegal aliens crossing over from the United States since the Trump administration introduced its highly sensible immigration/refugee policies a couple of months ago. While the pinheaded dolt who to the great misfortune of our Dominion has been put in charge of Her Majesty’s government in Ottawa has refused to talk to the people of Emerson whose lives he is ruining with his bloody “compassion” and his damned obnoxious and obscene “welcoming” attitude towards anyone and everyone who self-identifies as an “asylum seeker”, Leitch did so talk to them and stated the following:

Throughout this campaign I have been clear:
• I will ensure that every immigrant, refugee, and visitor to Canada receives an interview with a trained immigration officer

• I will ensure they are screened for their agreement for Canadian values before they are admitted to the country

• I will ensure that illegal border crossers are detained, questioned, and returned to the United States

• I will ensure that any city that declares itself a sanctuary does not receive federal funding for transportation

While this still leaves much to be desired it is by far the most sensible position on these matters that a major Canadian political leader has taken in the last twenty years.

Common Sense From Andrew Scheer

Andrew Scheer, as noted in my essay on the Conservative leadership race, has taken a particularly strong stand for the monarchy for which he ought to be commended. Now, in his bid for the Conservative leadership, he has also proposed measures to combat the Social Justice Warriors who harass, bully, and intimidate officials on the campuses of our universities into cancelling events and banning speakers with whom they disagree. Pointing to incidents such as the harassment of the University of Toronto’s Professor Jordan Peterson and the cancelling of pro-life meetings at Wilfred Laurier, Scheer has called on the government to withhold federal funding from any university that gives in to this kind of bullying and refuses to protect freedom of speech. This proposal is long overdue and it is greatly to the credit of Scheer that he has put it forward, just as it is to his credit that he has fought for freedom of speech in Parliament against the draconian thought control bills of the present Liberal government.

If there are any who question why it is laudable in a prospective Conservative leader that he be a strong and consistent advocate of a liberal doctrine like freedom of speech the answer is that while classical liberals may have been the first to formulate the idea of free speech it is an idea to which all people who genuinely believe the creeds they profess can subscribe. The person who believes his creed is the person who believes it to be true and truth is what it is independently of whether a single soul believes it. While there is danger in error to the minds, hearts and souls of those it misleads error can pose no threat of harm to truth itself. Truth, therefore, rather than suppression, is the answer to error. Whether you are a Tory like myself, who believes in Christian orthodoxy, in time-tested ways, in ancient institutions like royal monarchy, and in his country or some left-wing radical who believes in socialism, feminism, egalitarianism, anthropogenic global warming and other such asinine drivel you testify best to your confidence in the truth of your creed by responding to those who disagree with you with persuasion rather than suppression. Those who seek to suppress views they do not like testify only to their own lack of faith in their supposed convictions.

Liberals may have been the first to formulate this idea, but today they are the ones who seek to abridge the freedom of speech of others. Eleven years ago Sir Peregrine Worsthorne memorably noted that “with remarkable rapidity, from a doctrine designed to take government off the backs of the people, liberalism has become a doctrine designed to put it back again.” Nowhere is this more evident that when it comes to freedom of speech and what this tells us is that liberalism is a creed that has run its course, which everybody is now required to pay lip service to, although no one really believes it anymore.

SJWs Lampooned by The Simpsons

In a recent episode of the long-running television cartoon The Simpsons the kind of campus bullies referred to in the previous segment were brilliantly and hilariously lampooned. At one time, successful satire required quite a bit of exaggeration. Those days are behind us now for there is very little exaggeration in this.

The Conservative Leadership Race

As one whose lifelong Toryism is a matter of principle and conviction rather than partisan allegiance the present contest for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada has been of only tertiary interest, if that, to me. The party has compromised, sold-out, and otherwise betrayed the principles and ideals to which its name alludes time and time again.

Unfortunately, while the Conservatives cannot be trusted to live up to their own principles you can always count on the Grits to live down to our worst expectations of them as they do everything in their power to impose the latest version of their ever-changing insane ideology upon our country while feathering their nests, enhancing their power, and displaying the utmost arrogance and contempt for ordinary Canadians. The Liberal Party of Canada began its sordid existence as the party advocating selling out the heritage of honour and loyalty upon which our country was built for filthy American lucre and has spent a century and a half trying to undo Confederation, strip us of our traditions and legacy, rob us of our rights and freedoms and turn Canada into a pathetic, third-world, police state that hides the sheer nastiness of its politically correct oppressiveness behind a thin outward veneer of toxic niceness. Now, under the leadership of an intolerably arrogant, empty-headed and black-hearted coxcomb, the Grits have placed an onerous debt burden upon the backs of future generations of Canadians for centuries to come with their present extravagance, taken a gigantic first step towards the subjection of Christians, Jews, and all other non-Muslim Canadians to dhimmitude by passing, against widespread objection, a motion condemning Islamophobia, while seeking to shove the most recent gender insanity down all of our throats and, in complete disregard for the safety, well-being, and wishes of Canadians, thrown out the welcome mat to all those who pose enough of a security risk to be rejected as immigrants and asylum-seekers by our southern neighbour.

Therefore, while it is too much to hope that the Conservatives, returned to power, would actually put Tory principles into practice in their governance, such a return is to be wished if for no other reason than to rid the country of the disastrous misrule of the vile and loathsome gang of miscreants presently holding office. For a number of reasons – several decades worth of neglect in the teaching of Canadian civics in our schools and our having been swamped by Yankee pop culture in the same period being the chief two – the Canadian electorate treats our general elections as if they were the equivalent of American presidential contests and votes according to who the party leader is. Who the leader is, therefore, matters and so this race demands our attention.

Sadly, the quantity of the candidates seeking the leadership is far more impressive than the quality. Indeed, it is much easier to decide which candidates ought not to be allowed anywhere near the leadership than to pick one who stands out as deserving to win. Foremost among these is Kevin O’Leary. The Dragon’s Den star has been compared to American President Donald Trump but the comparison is cosmetic and superficial and has nothing to do with policy matters. O’Leary is a free trader and an immigration enthusiast, as well as being the most socially liberal candidate to ever seek the Tory leadership. He is most like Donald Trump in his personality – in his policies he is much closer to Justin Trudeau. It is hard to imagine a worse combination in a prospective Conservative leader.

The other Irishman, Erin O’Toole is also disqualified in my books. A Kisaragi Colour, the founder of the blog The Maple Monarchists, has surveyed the leadership candidates on their views of Canada’s constitutional monarchy. All who replied, either personally or through their staff, indicated their support of the institution to some degree or another, except O’Toole and Lisa Raitt, both of whom declined to indicate their position. This is a disqualifier. Royalism is a sine qua non of Canadian conservatism and someone who refuses to commit publicly to support of the monarchy has no business even running as a Conservative candidate much less for the leadership.

If the leadership were to be decided on that sole issue alone, Andrew Scheer would clearly be the best candidate as he indicated the most enthusiastic support for the royal institution by far of all the candidates in his response.

There are other issues to be considered, however, and here things become complicated because different candidates stand out as being the strongest on different sets of issues.

Take “social conservatism” for example. This commonly denotes the sort of moral and social positions that evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants, traditionalist Catholic and Orthodox, and other religious conservatives would support. This would include being pro-life, i.e., opposed to abortion and euthanasia, a supporter of traditional one man/one woman marriage, and an opponent of the alphabet soup gang agenda, of feminism, and often of the legalization of recreational drugs such as marijuana. For a couple of decades the conventional wisdom has been that no party running on a socially conservative platform stood a chance of winning because Canadians are fiscally conservative but socially liberal. In fact the opposite is the case. Opposition to moral and social breakdown will always be more popular than tightening the purse strings and anybody with an ounce of sense knows that. The conventional wisdom exists to browbeat the major parties into not putting it to the test by running a socially conservative campaign. On social conservatism, the strongest of the candidates would be Brad Trost, MP for Saskatoon-University. Trost is an evangelical Christian, who has been outspoken on socially conservative issues throughout his political career, and who has opposed the shift towards social liberalism taken by the party under the interim leadership of Rona Ambrose.

On culture and immigration there is no good candidate. A good candidate would be one who takes the position that immigration, legal and illegal, should not be allowed to change the character of the country, that our government and not the immigrants themselves will select who is allowed in and that it will place the needs of our country first in doing so rather than those of the prospective immigrants, that we will not admit large numbers of either immigrants or refugees in periods of high unemployment and economic recession, that illegal immigration will not be tolerated and will result in the permanent disqualification of the queue-jumper for even legal immigration, and that our refugee admission policies need to be reformed to recognize the reality that the vast majority of asylum seekers are frauds. A good candidate would denounce the toxic cultural atmosphere of ethnomasochism and oikophobia that liberalism spent much of the last fifty years creating. No candidate dares to take this position, of course. The closest thing to it is Kellie Leitch, who is not close at all but who merely wants prospective immigrants to be screened for values that conflict with Canadian values, by which she means the values of the multicultural, feminist, progressive, liberal, left that has been denouncing her as a bigot for wanting newcomers to hold to their values. On this, as with social conservatism, a platform much further to the right that provided Canadians with a real alternative to liberalism for a change would garner much more support than the conventional wisdom would acknowledge.

On fiscal and economic policy if any of the candidates stands out it is probably Maxime Bernier.

Ideally, the next Conservative leader would be strong on all of these issues, but such a person does not appear to be present among the current candidates. Practically, the next leader will also have to be someone around whom the party can unite and who can generate enough popular support to oust the Liberals. Although this quality is harder to gauge, here too there is no name jumping off of the candidates list as the obvious choice.

Perhaps the best we can hope for is that whoever the Conservatives choose as their leader will win by default simply because everyone will finally be sick to death of Justin Trudeau.

Canada's Donald

Political correctness in America suffered a tremendous blow last Tuesday with the election of Donald Trump. Whether or not the blow was fatal, only time will tell, but it is not one from which political correctness will be recovering any time soon. There is great cause for rejoicing in its defeat.

Political correctness is the term we use for that obnoxious and toxic form of totalitarian group think that on the one hand tells us that we must never say anything derogatory about non-white racial groups, ethnic and religious minorities, women, those with various and sundry sorts of alternative sexual practices and gender identities and on the other hand encourages contempt for working and middle class whites, males, Christians, heterosexuals, and especially those who belong to all of these categories. To criticize the protected groups, no matter how legitimately, to speak truths, no matter how substantiated by evidence, that portrays them in a less than positive light, is considered forbidden derogatory speech. Yet scapegoating, pejorative nicknames, and even outright expressions of violent hostility towards the despised groups is winked at.

These ridiculous standards were imposed by those who wish to limit the public conversation by dictating what terminology is and is not acceptable. Defenders of political correctness maintain that this was done for the sake of the protection of people who were “marginalized”, “disenfranchised” and “vulnerable.” In reality, however, the political agenda it protects targets whites, seeking to reduce their numbers and replace them, targets Christians by trying to drive their faith out of an increasingly secular public sector, and targets men by treating any and all masculine behaviour women object to as a form of sexual assault, by giving women a right to be believed in whatever accusations they chose to make against men and by obscenely giving women the power of life and death over the next generation.

This entire crazy system was shaken to its foundations when Donald Trump, who brazenly defied all the rules of political correctness and openly courted the votes of the targets of political correctness by championing their causes, won the presidency of the United States.

Ordinarily, I would not recommend that my country follow the lead of the United States. Canada is in the mess she is in today largely because the Liberal governments led by Mackenzie King, Pearson, and the two Trudeaus sought to imitate the policies of FDR, JFK, LBJ and Barack Obama. Indeed, as I pointed out in my last essay, the divisiveness of this year’s presidential election points to one of the many advantages of our form of government, the older Westminster model of parliamentary monarchy, over the American republican system.

Our country, however, desperately needs to break the chains of political correctness. It is a problem that is relatively newer in Canada than it is in the United States but which has been taken much further. The Liberal Party, since the days of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, has sought to make itself the permanent government of Canada by contemptuously dissolving the old Canadian people and electing a new one through mass third world immigration. During the premiership of Pierre Trudeau CSIS created a fake Canadian Nazi movement in order to generate a public scare in response to which the Liberals passed draconian speech laws like Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Now, under Justin Trudeau, the Liberals are bringing in thousands of poorly vetted “refugees” from the Middle East and the motion the Liberal-dominated Parliament just passed to condemn “Islamophobia” is a thinly-veiled attempt to intimidate Canadians who express disagreement with this and who have legitimate concerns about the possible connections of some of the asylum-seekers to jihadist terror groups. The Liberals have also introduced Bill C-16 which would add “gender identity or expression” to the grounds of prohibited discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act and to the “hate propaganda” section of the Criminal Code. This could potentially make it illegal to say that someone with an XY set of chromosomes and who was born with a male body but who thinks and says he is a woman is actually a man with a delusion. Dr. Jordan Peterson, a Psychology Professor at the University of Toronto, recently posted a series of videos on Youtube demonstrating the slide towards totalitarianism that such laws represent and the response he has received from social justice warriors determined to shut him up indicates the direction we are headed unless this political correctness is stopped firm in its tracks.

Canada, therefore, needs someone to break the stranglehold of political correctness the way Donald Trump has done in the United States. It will have to be done in a different way. In Canada, we do not vote for either our head of state or our head of government in a winner-take-all plebiscite. Our head of state comes to her position by royal inheritance and we vote to elect the House of Commons. The head of Her Majesty’s government in Ottawa is the person who has the largest amount of support in the House of Commons. The person who breaks political correctness in Canada, therefore, will have be the leader of a party and not a lone-gunman. He will have to be like Trump in some ways, but different in others.

Dr. Kellie Leitch, who is seeking the leadership of the Conservative Party, is one person who appears to want to usher in a Canadian version of the Trumpening. After the American election she told her supporters that Trump’s victory was “an exciting message and one that we need delivered in Canada as well.” I agree, and if she is capable of accomplishing the task, she has my support. As I explained in a previous essay, it took just the right set of circumstances and qualifications to produce a Trump victory, however, and it is fair to say that the same would have to be true for a Conservative leader who finally deals the death blow to political correctness in Canada. Does Dr. Leitch have those qualifications? Perhaps. It remains to be seen.

What would I look for in a Conservative leader? The next Conservative leader must, at the very least, be a firm royalist and a patriotic Canadian. If we are looking to re-create the Trump effect, however, it would help if this person were also a celebrity, as Trump is, especially considering that he will be contending against Justin Trudeau. A reputation for making offensive, politically incorrect remarks, is also a must. You cannot defeat political correctness by being politically correct.

Do I have anyone in particular in mind?

As it so happens, I can think of one Canadian who meets all the criteria I would be looking for. He is a staunch monarchist, a Prayer Book Society Anglican, and is known for his patriotic love of our country. He is as right-of-centre as they come in Canada, an outspoken supporter of our military and police, and has a long record of speaking his mind and making controversial statements. He is also an extremely famous super-celebrity whose name is virtually synonymous with our national sport.

Why, he even shares the same first name as America’s new president-elect.

The pinkos, liberals, and the rest of the politically correct crowd have been howling for him to retire for years, but I think that at eighty-two years young, perhaps the time has come for Don Cherry to take the next step in his career, lead the Tory Party to victory over Justin Trudeau in the next election, end political correctness, make Canada great again, and build a wall to keep out all those Hollywood liberals who keep threatening to come here every time they lose an election down south.

He is the ideal choice. If someone like George Soros were to hire thugs to stir up fights in his rallies a hockey game would just break out.

Heck, if he doesn’t put in his bid for the leadership himself the party ought to draft him.

Grapes, your country needs you! Don’t let us down.

Hic et Ille V

The Prince and the Premier

As I have said in the past and will undoubtedly say again, contrary to the thinking of progressive republicans, royalty and all that it entails – kings and queens, princes and princesses, and the office of a reigning sovereign monarch - is more important and necessary now, in the age of democracy, than ever before. When the day to day running of the affairs of state is in the hands of officials who are chosen by popular election and are therefore, of necessity, politicians, people who by definition are more power-hungry, arrogant, and corruptible than anyone else, they must be humbled by being placed in the position of servants to the Crown. Treating them as servants of the people will not suffice. Every tyrant in the history of world has regarded himself as being the servant, friend, and spokesman of the people. Nothing is more gratifying to the ego of a politician, nothing feeds his deadly and dangerous hubris more, than the thought that he represents, speaks for and serves the people and that they love him for it. He must be forced to bend the knee to royalty for it is only this that keeps him in his proper place and checks the more unpalatable aspects of his nature.

We received an illustration of just this point last weekend. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge arrived in Canada with their children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte, on Saturday for a week-long tour of the west coast of the Dominion. When they debarked from their plane in Victoria they were greeted by Canadian officials including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Trudeau, that smarmy, slimy, embodiment of everything that is wrong with the present era, oozing the sickeningly superficial saccharine charm for which he is notorious, attempted to “high five” the young prince and was rebuffed. Prince George demonstrated his good taste and breeding by refusing to even shake the hand of the low-life who is an embarrassment to Canada and a disgrace to the office of Her Majesty’s first minister. Already at the age of three, the prince was able to put the haughtiest and most arrogant premier our country has ever known, in his place.

The Tycoon and the Witch

South of the border, due to the rebellious Whiggery of their forebears, our Yankee friends are not fortunate enough to have a royal Sovereign reigning over them and a royal family to keep their politicians in line. Consequently, they rely upon popular election to determine their head of state once every four years. This is one of those years and this Monday evening the first of the three debates between the Republican and the Democratic candidates for the office of President of the United States of America took place at Hofstra University in New York, moderated by NBC’s Lester Holt. The debate attracted more viewers than any other in the history of televised debates and will probably hold that record for quite some time having been something of a snoozer that is likely to discourage people from watching future debates.

In the period leading up to the debate, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton saw her eight point lead in the polls over Republican candidate Donald Trump shrink away to nothing. This was largely of her own making rather than to an improved performance on the part of Trump. As more and more damning information kept coming out about her compromising American national security by illegally using a private server for classified e-mails, how access to her while Secretary of State could be bought by large donations to the Clinton Foundation, and other such scandals, she did not help things by calling a sizable portion of the American public “irredeemable” and a “basket of deplorables” while speaking at a fund-raising banquet for the alphabet soup gang. Then, when she had to be taken away from the 9/11 memorial, the wall of media denial that there was anything to be concerned about in regards to her health collapsed. It turns out that all those midnight excursions on her broomstick to dance with the devil in mountaintop orgies had taken their toll, and she had come down with pneumonia.

The mainstream media, which is almost entirely on Clinton’s side, concluded after Monday night that she had managed to turn that around and to take back the momentum from Trump by defeating her opponent in debate. It is true that by the criteria ordinarily used to judge the outcome of a debate, Clinton did better than Trump. Trump did very well for the first portion of the debate in which he talked about trade and the disastrous consequences the trade deals of previous governments have had for American workers, but in the last two thirds of the debate wasted a lot of time defending himself on ridiculous rabbit trail matters like the Obama birth certificate and Rosie O’Donnell and missed a number of opportunities to go on the offensive against Clinton. Clinton definitely came across as the more skilled and expert debater which she, her team, and her echo chamber in the media all see as supporting the central argument in her campaign, namely that she has the experience and knowledge necessary for the position and her opponent does not. What they seem unable to see is that this also supports a key argument in Trump’s campaign – that she has been and is an entrenched part of the very establishment that has made all the bad decisions – free trade deals, lax border security, liberal immigration, the incompetent bumbling in the Middle East that has made ISIS into the threat it is today – that he has been railing against and that therefore, the experience upon which she bases her claim to being qualified to lead the country also disqualifies her. Trump made this very point Monday night when he said yeah she has all this experience but it is bad experience. This is a point which media liberals and other hard-core Clinton supporters will never understand but it is one that is likely to resonate with voters fed up with previous governments. It is their frustration that has been fueling the Trump train’s momentum which is why that momentum, to the consternation of the chattering classes, will probably continue to be built despite, or perhaps even because of, this debate.

The Attempted Lynching of Kellie Leitch

Dr. Kellie Leitch, who since 2011 has been the Conservative MP for the riding of Simcoe-Grey and who served as Minister of Labour and of the Status of Women in the last two years of the Harper premiership, has thrown her hat in the ring for the leadership of the Conservative Party. Whether or not she should get the leadership, I do not know. I do not know, for example, where she stands on the constitution. Nobody should lead the Conservative Party who is not a firm supporter of our traditional parliamentary constitution of House of Commons and Senate under the reigning monarch. I am not saying that she is not such, just that I have no information on where she stands on these things.

Whether or not she should get the position, the controversy that the liberal and progressive left have generated over her position on immigration is absolutely absurd. Indeed, it was not even a stated position or proposal that sparked the attacks on her, but merely a question put in a survey to her supporters. The question was "Should the Canadian government screen potential immigrants for anti-Canadian values as part of its normal screening for refugees and landed immigrants?"

The question is a reasonable one and quite mild. It did not even ask whether immigrants should be required to hold Canadian values, just whether they should be screened for anti-Canadian ones. The majority, not just of Leitch's supporters but of Canadians in general would answer "yes." Yet the liberal and progressive left - including leftists in the Conservative Party like Chad Rogers and her former colleague Jason Kenney - shrieked, and wailed, and wrung their hands in despair that such a horrible, mean-spirited, thought could ever have been expressed by someone seeking to lead a major Canadian party.

The irony is undoubtedly lost on these liberals that by screening "for anti-Canadian values" Leitch means screening for ideas that are contrary to their own, that is the liberals' own, dearly beloved values like equality of the sexes, tolerance, diversity, multiculturalism and all that other sappy nonsense. To acknowledge this would require that they acknowledge and address the fundamental contradictions in their own set of unrealistic beliefs. It is liberals who cherish "values", a term George Grant once pointed out had been taken from Nietzsche to refer to the constructions of our own wills that have taken the place of the eternal verities of goodness, truth, and beauty, and in Canada it has been liberals who have been telling us for decades what our "values" are. Conservatives cherish institutions, customs, traditions, and order over nebulous and malleable "values."

Imagine how the left would have howled had Leitch, instead of asking a survey question about screening for anti-Canadian values, instead outright proposed, as that great old Canadian political scientist, economist, social commentator and humourist Stephen Leacock once did that “we must see to it that our newcomers are British, or something so akin to it as to blend and fuse with the British Commonwealth as a natural part of it” (While There Is Time: The Case Against Social Catastrophe, McLelland & Stewart, 1945, p. 103). This was not a controversial proposal at the time and in fact reflected actual immigration policy, under both Conservative and Liberal governments, until the 1960s.

I would have no problem, were I running for Tory leader, with resurrecting Leacock's policy which, to anyone who treasures the rich heritage of English Common Law justice, ordered liberty and prescriptive rights, and parliamentary government all under and represented by the Sovereign Crown, it is a quite sensible safeguard against the erosion of these things. I will not be running for Tory leader, however, for to do so would require that I become a politician and I could never look myself in the mirror again if I were to do that.