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!

 

---

[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. 

Canada and Confederation are Worthy of Celebration

 

July 1^st is the anniversary of the day Canada became a country in 1867.   When I was born the annual commemoration of this event was still called Dominion Day.    This name, steeped in Canada’s history, was much better than “Canada Day” to which it was changed in 1982, prompting Robertson Davies to write to the Globe and Mail expressing his righteous indignation at the “folly” of the “handful of parliamentarians” who so trashed the “splendid title” of Dominion Day “in favour of the wet ‘Canada Day’ – only one letter removed from the name of a soft drink” which folly he described as “one of the inexplicable lunacies of a democratic system temporarily running to seed”.   The old name incorporated the title that the Fathers of Confederation had chosen themselves to designate the federation that was to be formed out of the provinces of Canada (formerly Upper and Lower Canada, which were separated again into Ontario and Quebec when the Dominion war formed), New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, to which five other provinces would soon after be added (1), and governed by its own Parliament modelled after the Mother Parliament of Westminster, under the reign of our shared monarch.    The new name simply adds “day” to the name of the country.    This would be like the Americans renaming “Independence Day” as “United States Day” – although, admittedly, it seems to be far more often simply referred to as the Fourth of July than by its official designation – or any other country renaming its main national celebration “Italy Day”, “France Day” or the like.   For this reason, and because the change was not accomplished constitutionally – the private member’s bill making the change passed all three readings on a single day in July when there were only thirteen members of the House of Commons, present, not near enough to constitute a quorum – I continue to use the older and better name.

 

This year, a movement to “cancel Canada Day” has arisen which has nothing to do with preference for the older name for the anniversary.    It is part of the “cancel culture” phenomenon associated with the radical, cultural Maoist, Left, and it is Canada herself, the country and her institutions that these crazies are really seeking to “cancel”.   It is a loony fringe movement that is opposed by the vast majority of Canadians.   It nevertheless has a powerful ally in the mainstream Canadian media, including, disgustingly, the Crown broadcaster, the CBC.   The media has provided its support to these radicals, by dishonestly spinning the discovery of the locations of unmarked cemeteries on the grounds of Indian Residential Schools in British Columbia and Saskatchewan as revealing something new about these schools (that they were there to be found has been known all along) and worse than what had been alleged against them in the past (that the bodies are of mass murder victims is extremely implausible).

 

Mercifully, there have been plenty of voices speaking out on behalf of Canada and why she should still be celebrated.   Lord Black gave us the sound advice to “Celebrate Canada, but not its political leaders or its propensity for self-flagellation”, meaning by “its political leaders” the current ones.   Even Erin O’Toole, the leader of the Conservative Party and of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, who in neither role has done much previously to inspire respect and confidence rather than disgust, was almost impressive when he correctly pointed out to his caucus last Wednesday that these wacko activists were attacking “the very idea of Canada itself” and observed that “there is not a place on the planet whose history can stand such close scrutiny” but that “there is a difference between acknowledging where we have fallen short, a difference between legitimate criticism and tearing down the country; always being on the side of those who run Canada down, always seeing the bad and never the good” and that “it’s time to build Canada up, not tear it down”.    Maxime Bernier of the People’s Party said it better when he tweeted “Every society in the world has injustices in its past and present.  The strategy of the far left is to exaggerate them so as to cancel our history, destroy our identity, and weaken our institutions.   They will then build their Marxist utopia on the smoking ruins.”  

 

Sadly, among Canada’s most prominent vocal defenders, those willing to say that the Emperor has no clothes with regards to the narrative being spun against her have been much fewer in number.   This would involve pointing out the difference between newly located graves and newly discovered deaths and saying that one of the great things about Canada is that traditionally we do not allow a man to be condemned after listening only to his accusers and telling his defenders to shut up, and that we are therefore no longer going to allow this to be done to the Churches, our historical figures, and the country as a whole, as has been done up until now with the Residential School narrative.

 

A common theme among those who have spoken and written in Canada’s defence is to praise her diversity.     They are obviously seeking to counter the charges of “racism” made by her accusers who are generally people who profess a very high regard for diversity, other than diversity of thought.    This is not the approach that I would take.   There are a few reasons for this, among them being that while I think diversity of the type mentioned has its advantages, I recognize its disadvantages too, and do not think that it should be turned into the object of cultish veneration the way it has.  The one most relevant in this context, however, is that the high degree of this type of diversity that exists in Canada today is the product of immigration policies introduced by the Liberals in the 1960s, primarily for the purpose of effecting a demographic change in the electorate that would, in their view, make it more likely to keep their party in government in perpetuity.   Since the main targets of those wishing to “cancel” Canada have been the Fathers of Confederation and the men who led the country prior to this period, this is not a particularly good counter to their accusations.   A better means would be to challenge the very idea that anything less than a full embrace of the widest diversity possible constitutes “racism”.

 

 

That having been said, there is an element of this appeal to diversity that can be salvaged and incorporated into a sounder defense of Canada.   As already observed the high degree of diversity that can be found in Canada today has been produced by the immigration policies of the last fifty years or so.    Immigration policy by itself cannot attract immigrants, however.   Imagine that the most repressive Communist regime on earth also had the most open, welcoming, immigration policy.   Not many people would want to take advantage of the latter.   Repressive regimes of this type typically have problems with too much emigration rather than too much immigration.   The Berlin Wall was there to keep East Germans in, not to keep other people out.

 

Therefore, the diversity that progressives have turned into a cult and which is the first thing to which most of Canada’s defenders turn, testifies to how Canada herself was attractive and appealing to a wide swathe of different people.   Now the basis of this attraction was not the opening, welcoming, immigration policy, since as seen in the previous paragraph this is insufficient in itself to constitute such an attraction.   Nor could it have been the diversity that is so much talked about today since this came later as a result of this immigration.     What appealed to and attracted so many different people, from so many different places, was Canada herself and, since the open immigration policy was one of the earliest changes introduced in the radically transformative – mostly not for the better – two decades of Liberal misrule under Pearson and Trudeau the Elder from the mid ‘60’s to the early ‘80’s, this means that it was Canada as she was prior to all the Liberal changes that was this appealing and attractive.

 

Could it be that what made Canada so attractive was the high degree of individual freedom that she, like other Western and especially English-speaking countries possessed, the protection of law that is largely absent from the autocracies and kleptocracies of the world, the parliamentary government built upon the Westminster model that has proven itself time and again to be vastly superior to all the strong-man dictatorships, military juntas, and peoples’ republics of the world, all the rights and freedoms protected by prescription, tradition, and constitution long before the Liberals added the Charter such as the right alluded to above not to be condemned on the basis of non-cross-examined accusations without a fair defense, and all the opportunities to make a decent life for yourself and your family afforded by all of the above?

 

That question, of course, was rhetorical, of the sort where the answer is yes.    It used to be that one did not have to point such things out.

 

Before proceeding, I must say that while all of these things are indeed what made Canada an attractive immigration destination for so many different people of so many different kinds from so many different places it is not the fact that these things were so attractive to so many that makes these things laudable.   They would be worth celebrating even if the only people to ever appreciate them had been the Canadians of the Dominion’s first century.   This is because these things are in themselves a blessing to the country fortunate enough to have them.

 

This cannot be emphasized enough, first, because all of those things were true of the Dominion of Canada from July 1^st, 1867 onward and we therefore owe a huge debt of gratitude to the Fathers of Confederation for establishing the country in such a way that all of these things, mostly inherited from the older British tradition, were true of Canada, and secondly, because those who are attacking the old Canada as being “racist” today rely heavily upon rhetoric borrowed from an ideology which thinks all of those things, or any others thought of as having been normative of white, European, Christian, Western Civilization, down to and including the notion that 2+2=4,  are themselves intrinsically “racist”.    Anytime you hear the expression “systemic racism”, (2) or “settler” used disparagingly, or some form of “colonize” used with people rather than a place as its object, you are hearing examples of the rhetoric of this insane ideology.   Perhaps the Canadian leaders of 1867 were not as “enlightened” on racial and cultural matters as today’s pampered and solipsistic generation like to think of themselves as being, but at least they were not so foolish that they could be taken in by such a vile ideological outlook, the product of decades of academic decline during which left-wing radicals took over most of our institutions of higher education and transformed them from traditional places of study and learning into mockeries of the same which more closely resemble Communist indoctrination camps.

 

I had intended to devote my Dominion Day essay for this year to Donald Creighton, who was, in my opinion, the greatest of Canadian historians, followed closely by W. L. Morton.    Current events have pre-empted this topic yet again.   I will say this about Creighton here, however, that throughout his career as a historian, he fiercely opposed what he mocked as “the Authorized Version”, that is to say, the interpretation of Canadian history associated with the Liberal Party that read Canada’s story as a version of the American story – a struggle to attain nationhood by achieving independence from the British Empire – by the boring means of diplomacy rather than the exciting means of war.    The Liberal version was, of course, the opposite of the reality of the Canadian story – the choice to grow up into nationhood within the British Empire as it evolved into the Commonwealth, by rejecting the American path and choosing the old loyalties and connections as a protection against encroaching Americanism.  We can only imagine what Creighton, who died in 1979, would have said could he have looked into the future and seen the day when much of the mainstream media would lend its support to a neo-Marxist re-interpretation of Canadian history which radical activists are using to trash the country and demand her “cancellation”.     We can be sure that he would not see it as leading us in any direction we would like to go.   His frequent warning that those who forget their past have no future applies all the more so to those who declare war on their past.

 

Let us not let the small minority of crazy radicals who want to cancel our country and her history win.  

 

Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the Queen!

 

 (1)   Newfoundland, which joined Confederation as the tenth province, did so much later in 1949.

(2)   “Systemic racism”, when used by neo-Marxists, especially of the Critical Race Theory type, does not mean, as many or perhaps most others think, either ideas and practices in Western institutions or attitudes on the part of those who administer them, that are to some degree or another “racist” in the meaning of the word that was conventional fifty years ago, but rather the entire Western way of doing everything conceived of as being irredeemably and wholesale “racist”.

Real Journalism?

 

Let us imagine that at some point in his youth Bartley Kives received a visit from the News Fairy who told him that someday, if he was very, very good, she would grant his wish and he would become a real journalist.   Kives, however, after high school went on to receive a degree in sociology from the University of Winnipeg.   It is very difficult to take a degree in sociology from anywhere without squashing your conscience like a chirping little annoying bug.   When the school is the University of Winnipeg it is virtually impossible.    While signing away your soul in a blood contract with Mephistopheles and Karl Marx may not actually be a formal requirement for the degree, it would seem to be de rigueur. 

 

For almost two decades Kives reported and wrote for the Winnipeg Free Press, covering pretty much everything from music to city politics to restaurants.   While occasionally the Winnipeg Free Press has employed a real journalist – Ted Byfield, believe it or not, worked for the paper back in the fifties and, of course, the late, great Tom Oleson graced its pages until shortly before his death almost ten years ago – for the most part Manitoba’s “paper of repute” has preferred hack writers that mindlessly toe its party line.    On issues that pertain to the Dominion of Canada as a whole, that party line is and always has been, Liberal, both big and small l.   In John Wesley Dafoe’s day the paper existed to promote the Grits’ agenda of Americanizing Canada and turning her into a vassal satellite of the United States.   When the federal Liberal Party was taken over by Communist operatives in the 1960s – Lester Pearson, who had been a Cambridge Five style Soviet spy when attached to our embassy in Washington D. C. in World War II, and Pierre Trudeau who had led the Canadian delegation to a Communist economic conference in Moscow in 1952 and who never met a Community tyrant he didn’t love and adore and fawn over – the paper dutifully followed its party into the fever swamps of the far left.   Radically opposite as those two positions seem, they were united in their contempt for the traditional constitution of Canada and for the Common Law freedoms of Canadians.  John Farthing showed in Freedom Wears a Crown, (1956) how the policies of the earlier, Mackenzie King Liberals, had undermined freedom and paved the way for Prime Ministerial dictatorship.   A decade earlier Eugene Forsey, after his doctoral dissertation was published, had debated the very same issues with Dafoe, making mincemeat out of the partisan publisher. On the provincial level, where the Grits have been mostly a non-entity for the larger part of a century, the paper has tended to support the NDP. 

 

In more recent years Kives has been reporting locally for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.   Abandoning the overt and heavy progressive bias of the Winnipeg Free Press is hardly a requirement for employment at the CBC.    Although the publicly funded Crown broadcaster is supposed to fairly represent the views of all Canadians it has long behaved like “anybody but the Conservatives” was its official policy, regardless of who happens to be in power at the moment in either Parliament or any of the provincial legislatures. 

 

The Progressive Conservatives have been in government in Manitoba since 2016 and the CBC, like the Winnipeg Free Press, has been striving to unseat them ever since.    Coincidentally or not 2016 was also the year that Kives was brought onboard CBC Manitoba.   In 2019, the efforts of the media failed and the Conservatives, led by Brian Pallister, were returned to power in an early provincial election.   The following year the bat flu pandemic struck, and the media in general, and Kives in particular found in it a stick with which to bludgeon the provincial government.

 

Now if, as has been thought to be case for centuries, it is the role and duty of the fourth estate to hold government accountable, to ask it the tough questions, to shine a light in every dark corner of the halls of authority, to expose all the secrets, to speak truth to power, does this not mean that the News Fairy has returned at long last and turned Kives into a real journalist after all?

 

Alas the answer is no.

 

It would be one thing if he really were asking Pallister and his chief health mandarin Brent Roussin the hard questions.   Questions like:

 

Do you recognize any constitutional limits to your powers that remain in effect even in an emergency?

 

In your opinion are the fundamental rights and freedoms of Manitobans their own property or something that is permitted to them by your government as you see fit?

 

How much mental, social, and economic damage would the lockdowns have to do before the cost of the lockdowns exceeds the cost of doing nothing at all?

 

How far would government restrictions have to go before you would admit they have gone too far and crossed a line that should never be crossed?

 

Kives does not seem to be interested in the answers to questions like these however.   He does not even seem to be interested in questions like those that Pallister groupie, Josh Aldrich of the Winnipeg Sun, is occasionally willing to interrupt his sycophantic boot-licking to ask about why the government has been consistently picking on small businesses and restaurants, which are not significant sources of transmission, with its public health orders.

 

No, the only questions Kives seems to be interested in are “why didn’t you lock us down again faster?” and “why didn’t you lock us down again harder?”

 

The theory that Kives appears to be operating on, based upon much of his recent commentary but especially “Lockdown 3, the one everyone could foresee” from the 8^th of May, and last Sunday’s “In Manitoba’s darkest days, the premier casts shade”, is that the province’s slapping down a hard lockdown as fast as possible last spring was a success, that their gradually increasing the restrictions in stages in the fall as the case numbers rose only to see them continue to rise was a failure, and that therefore they should have locked down the entire province hard as soon as they saw case numbers start to rise again this spring.  

 

One problem with this theory is that while Manitoba’s initial hard lockdown did indeed, seem to work, last spring, other provinces and other jurisdictions in other countries that tried the same thing at the same time, met with failure instead, and had the sort of results that we saw in the fall.   What is the explanation for this difference?

 

The most obvious explanation is that the virus had only just arrived in the province and had been caught before it had begun to spread in the brief period in which it was capable of being contained in this manner.      If this is indeed the true explanation, then last spring’s success would not have been duplicable in the fall.   All an earlier and harder lockdown would have accomplished would have been to make the lockdown that much worse in its harmful and destructive effects.  

 

Anybody familiar with the history of infectious disease and the way quarantines work should be able to grasp this.   Quarantines control the spread of infectious disease by either a) keeping it out in the first place or b) containing it so that it doesn’t spread.    The former is what the traditional method of placing ships and their passengers and cargo under quarantine before letting them into a country was designed to accomplish.   The latter is what the kind of quarantine where a doctor locked you into your house for a couple of weeks and had your neighbours drop food off on your doorstep when you had the smallpox or measles or some such thing was designed to accomplish.    The strongest quarantine of the latter type was the kind the French called the cordon sanitaire, where an entire city or region was sealed off, in the hopes of preventing the disease from spreading outside the area.   This practice was depicted in a fictional example by Albert Camus in The Plague (1947).   In more recent real life it was used in several places to contain the original SARS virus and Ebola.   What governments around the world have attempted to do with the lockdown model since last spring is something radically different from these traditional quarantine methods.   Indeed, it could be called the inversion of a quarantine.    It is not designed to keep a disease out of a country or contain it locally because it is imposed on societies where the disease is already present and spreading.   It is not imposed merely upon the sick and those known to have been in contact with the sick while contagious but upon all healthy members of a society, thus causing a ton of collateral damage.   It is not remotely as effective as traditional quarantines – last year’s experiment demonstrated that countries and regions that rejected the lockdown model did not end up being the countries and regions most devastated by the disease or even being significantly worse off than countries and regions that locked down.  In some cases they fared slightly better with regards to the disease itself and in all cases avoided the tremendous harmful effects of the lockdown.

 

Kives’ commentary is padded with tear-jerking rhetoric about the “deaths of hundreds of grandfathers and grandmothers”.   How many of those grandfathers and grandmothers died, not because of the disease this overhyped virus causes, but because of the extreme loneliness and despair created by being forced into social isolation in the name of saving their lives?   This is the sort of question a real journalist would be asking.   A real journalist would also be interested in all the sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters lost to opioid and other narcotic overdoses and suicides brought about by social isolation and/or the loss of the business in which all of their life’s work and savings had been invested caused by lockdown experiment.   Anyone interested in such people would not be so quick to shoot his mouth off about how the government has not been doing enough by not locking down fast enough and hard enough.

 

Where Kives does get it right is in raising questions about Brian Pallister’s stock excuse for how bad the province has done in the fall and again this spring.   In his remarks on Sunday, for example, Kives said:

 

The premier and public health officials routinely state that Manitobans are simply not following the rules at a time when community spread makes it difficult for people to avoid the virus in the workplace and elsewhere.

 

He then quoted an ICU physician from Winnipeg to the effect that most of her patients had been trying to follow the rules.

 

It is, of course, disgusting for Pallister, Roussin, and their underlings to continuously scapegoat ordinary Manitobans in this way.     To scapegoat is to blame someone else for your own failure.   The provincial government has failed Manitobans and not the other way around.   The government’s failure, however, is not a matter of them not suspending our constitutional rights and freedoms severely and quickly enough.   It is rather their refusal or inability to consider the myriad of options other than preventing us from socializing with one another until everyone is vaccinated.   

 

On Tuesday, the 25^th of May, a number of Manitoban physicians held a press conference in which they talked about “tens of thousands” of Manitobans who are suffering and dying, waiting for surgeries and cancer tests, because the hospitals are too busy dealing with bat flu patients.   They begged the province to issue a stay-at-home order and to order all “non-essential” businesses to shut down.   Sure enough, come the evening news, there is Bartley Kives on CBC, gushing all over these doctors and uncritically sympathizing with their plea, even though he was supposed to be reporting rather than editorializing.

 

“For nearly two months”, Kives said, “doctors have been pleading with the province to enact tougher restrictions to prevent the crush of COVID patients from getting out of hand.   Those pleas largely went unanswered.”

 

Who is he trying to kid?   For the nearly two months in question, I have watched as what little of Manitobans’ constitutional rights and freedoms as were left to us after the previous six months of Code Red have been whittled away as the government has given in to demand after demand from these doctors who are largely sheltered from the harmful effects of the fascism for which they are asking.

 

Doctors, as a rule, live in houses rather than apartments or single-rooms, and so, a stay-at-home order, restricting them to their homes outside of work hours and grocery shopping, would simply not be as confining to them as it would to the thousands of other Manitobans far more adversely affected by such an order.   Doctors are pretty much the hottest commodity in the marriage market and so, even though their notoriously insufferable egos keep the divorce rate high, a stay-at-home order would simply not leave them as completely isolated from human social contact as it would the thousands of people in the province who live alone.    Lockdowns do not threaten the livelihoods and savings of doctors – they will continue to rake in their highly overinflated salaries for the duration, with all the overtime they could dream of to boot.

 

Perhaps if a law were enacted requiring any doctor, journalist, or politician that calls for a lockdown to experience that lockdown in its harshest rather than its mildest form – confine them to a single room, not just their home in general, deny them contact with their immediate family, strip them of their salaries, for the duration of the orders they request – they would think twice before asking the government to place burdens on their neighbours that they are not willing to lift themselves.

 

Earlier, in his 8^th of May commentary, Kives had quoted Brent Roussin as saying, when he announced the third lockdown:

 

“We need to have these restrictions be the least restrictive that we need for that time.”

 

The necessity to which Roussin was likely alluding is that created by the requirements of our constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court of Canada in the 1986 Oakes ruling.   It is indeed, required, the Supreme Court ruled, that when the government has a legitimate reason for limiting our basic rights and freedoms, that the limits it so imposes be as few as possible.   A real journalist who believed it to be the fourth estate’s duty to stand up for the rights and freedoms of the people by sounding the alarm and calling the government out whenever it overstepped the constitutional boundaries on its powers, would have grilled Roussin on his claim that the restrictions he has imposed have indeed been minimal.

 

Kives, however, took the opposite approach of insisting that the government could have and should have done more.

 

Is it just me or did I see his nose grow a little in his last news segment?

 

He’s got a long way to go, I am afraid, before the News Fairy makes him a real journalist.  

Dominion Day Dolour

It has been my custom for Dominion Day over the last few years, to write either sketches about specific individuals who exemplified the Canada of Confederation and her traditions or jeremiads lamenting the present state of the Dominion. I had not realized, until I checked the last six years, that this has followed an alternating pattern, in which this would be a year for a jeremiad. This suits me as the next individual I had on deck for a sketch was the great Canadian historian Donald Creighton, and while I read Donald Wright’s biography of him as recently as last year – I much prefer the chapter on him in Charles Taylor’s Radical Tories, since Wright’s political correctness infuriates me as much as it would have his subject – I would need more time than I had available to re-read Creighton’s own books in order to do him justice. So a jeremiad it is.

There is plenty for someone from my point of view to lament. There have been two traditions of thought that have borne the rather inaccurate label “conservative” in Canada. There is the old Tory tradition of Loyalism and royalism, which is monarchist rather than republican, holds the Westminster system of Parliament to be the best form of government ever to evolve on the face of the earth, dissents from the narrative of the rebellion of 1776 and is suspicious of the United States, utterly rejects socialism without fully embracing capitalism, and is socially, morally, and culturally traditionalist. Then there is neo-conservatism, which is very pro-American, holds to the basic political and economic views of nineteenth century liberalism, and regards anything from outside eighteenth to nineteenth century liberalism which has been traditionally associated with conservatism as dispensable. While the extent to which the official Conservative Party has ever really stood for either of these traditions is questionable, it was associated with the first until 1967 and the latter from about 1983 on, especially after the merger with what began as the Reform Party. I have belonged to the first tradition from the moment political thoughts first formed in my head, and am very much a representative of its right wing. Most other surviving members – David Warren is a very notable exception –speak for its left wing. In other words, I speak for a point of view, which the Liberal Party, egged on by the further left parties, and aided and abetted by the Conservatives, has striven to make as unwelcome as possible in Canada.

Earlier this year, our provincial governments, with the full backing and support of Ottawa, essentially eliminated what was left of our most basic freedoms. These freedoms are part of the Common Law tradition which we inherited when we became the Dominion of Canada on this date in 1867. They are not something which Pierre Trudeau gave us in 1982, despite the fact that our lying schoolteachers and our lying newsmedia commentators, most of whom sold their souls to the Liberal Party and its true leader in hell at the beginning of their careers, have been instilling that impression among the younger generations ever since that year. Although the Charter did not give us those freedoms, it does name four of them in its second section. The freedom of conscience and religion is the first named. The third and fourth named are freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association. There is no freedom of conscience and religion when the provincial government forbids us from going to Church for four months. There is no freedom of peaceful assembly when the same government tells us we cannot gather in groups larger than five or ten or whatever number. There is no freedom of association if the government tells us we must be six feet apart from each other in public at all times. The provincial governments got away with this totalitarian power grab with the help of a media-generated panic over the spread of a virus with a low fatality rate that produces mild to no symptoms in the vast majority of those who contract it, information which has been available all along to anybody willing to check out the facts.

In the meantime, the Liberal Party which was reduced to a minority government in last year’s Dominion election, took full advantage of this situation to seek, in an underhanded attack on the Magna Carta and the foundational principles of Parliament, unlimited tax and spend powers, and to prevent Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition from doing their job of holding the government accountable in Parliament.

Then, about a month ago, when Marxist organizations in the United States found a pretext for launching a race war against white people, the Prime Minister, despite his own hands being far from clean when it comes to matters concerning race as we discovered in the election campaign last year, jumped on board the bandwagon. Even though the public health restrictions at whatever stage of easing they were at from province to province remained in effect for everybody else, they were lifted completely for the anti-white hate rallies that were organized in Canada’s major cities. The Prime Minister, who has never given the slightest indication of sincere contrition over his many personal failings, but who is always ready to give an apology on behalf of the entire country to whatever designated victim group happens to feel the most offended at any given moment, showed up for a photo op of himself “taking the knee” in a gesture of false humility at the rally in Ottawa. A few days later on his syndicated morning television show he berated our country over its supposed “systemic racism.” This was the cue for everyone else to ritually acknowledge this systemic racism, whether they understood the concept or, more likely, did not, and for the “woke” to start “cancelling” anybody who failed to participate in this now mandatory ritual.

This requirement that everybody accept this ridiculous narrative, taken from the neo-Marxist Critical Theory, is, of course, an assault on yet another of our basic freedoms. As with the others, this too is a freedom from the Common Law tradition which is named in the second section of the Charter, where it is called the “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication.” If all Canadians are now required to confess the neo-Marxist narrative that our country is systemically racist, upon threat of being cancelled if we dissent, then it is a joke to say that we have freedom of thought, belief, opinion or expression. If the Crown broadcaster and all of the other news stations and newspapers that have been subsidized by this government are pushing this same narrative, while the government has been applying pressure to big tech social media companies to censor dissent, then there is no “freedom of the press and other media of communication.” The assault on this basic freedom has been going on since the premiership of the first Trudeau. It has been carried out in the name of combatting prejudice and promoting diversity, even though the most essential kind of diversity for a free country is the diversity of thought that is under attack.

All of Western Civilization is now threatened by these neo-Maoists who wish to raze history to the ground and bring us to Year Zero. They have the support of most of the mainstream media, the corporate world, academia, celebrities and a wide assortment of elected officials, civil servants and even the police forces they wish to see “defunded”. In Canada, they have demanded that the prestigious McGill University disown its founder and namesake. Worse, they are demanding that our country disavow the leading Father of Confederation and our first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald. Hilariously, they managed to get a newspaper or two to put trigger-warning labels on the flag. The reason this is so funny is because the flag in question is not the traditional, historical, flag of Canada, the Red Ensign, but rather the bland Maple Leaf which the Communist traitor, Lester Pearson chose to replace it with in 1965 precisely because it said nothing about Canada’s history, heritage, and legacy. Indeed, the Liberal Party’s assault on the traditional symbols of the Canada of Confederation during the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, starting with the old flag and ending with Dominion Day, could pretty much be said to have been the first wave to which the present wave of neo-Maoist, Year Zeroism is the second.

The Liberal Party rejected our country’s traditional symbols and was determined to replace them with ones bearing its own stamp. Today’s neo-Maoists demand a wholesale repudiation of our country’s founding and history. Symbols and history are important. Almost a century ago, the Mackenzie King Liberals attacked the Crown’s legitimate and necessary right to refuse an improper dissolution request (see Eugene Forsey, The Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament, 1943). This undermined Parliament’s right to hold the Prime Minister accountable and set the stage for Prime Ministerial dictatorship (see John Farthing, Freedom Wears a Crown, 1957). This year, we have seen the largest assault on Parliamentary prerogative since then, and on the part of a minority Liberal government to boot, while all the provincial governments ran roughshod over our most basic Common Law rights and freedoms. If we had valued our traditional symbols and our history more, we would not have so willingly acquiesced in this.

While I weep for my country, I wish you all a Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the Queen!

Race Riots: One More American Import We Don’t Need

I have, for as long as I can remember, been an opponent of the Americanization of Canada. This will probably not come as a surprise to long-time readers, although it might shock those who think of the Canadian way as being progressive, liberal, and left-wing and the American way as being reactionary, conservative and right-wing. When one takes the historical point of view, however, and remembers that all three of the latter set of terms originally referred to people who supported the institution of royal monarchy and the establishment of a Church governed by bishops in direct succession from the Apostles, it is quite apparent that they are misapplied in reference to the secular, republic of the United States of America. It is less difficult to argue against the claim that the Canada of the present day is progressive, liberal, and left-wing, but to the extent that this is true, it is true because of the Americanization of Canada. The Liberal Party was historically the party of Americanization. This was most obvious in 1891, 1911, and throughout the entire period when William Lyon Mackenzie King was Prime Minister. (1)


I oppose the Americanization of Canada politically, on the grounds that the Westminster System of parliamentary monarchy is superior to any form of republicanism and that innovations introduced from the American republican system have never improved things here but only made them worse. I oppose the Americanization of Canada religiously - while I would prefer that the mainstream Christian Churches in Canada were far more orthodox and far less liberal than they are, I do not think the solution is more of the mixture of Puritanism, direct-personal-revelation-from-God-through-experience enthusiasm (2), and fanatical Millennialism that tends to characterize American folk Christianity. We have quite enough of our own domestic version of that sort of thing. I oppose the Americanization of Canada culturally. Probably nothing originating below the 49th Parallel has been more erosive and corrosive of Canada's traditions, institutions, culture, morality, and religion than what has been imported from the motion picture studios of Hollywood, California, and the recording studios of greater Los Angeles. To be fair, this is also what has been eroding and corroding the United States' own traditions, institutions, etc.



It is greatly to my disgust, therefore, to see signs that the American custom of the race riot is starting to move northward. We have enough trouble with our own, closest domestic equivalent, to worry about. Periodically Indians illegally blockade roads and railroads until the cowardly and craven politicians in Ottawa throw enough of the taxpayers' money at them and make enough absurd and meaningless gestures in response to whatever demands, reasonable or unreasonable, they are making. Nowadays, as the railroad blockade earlier this year demonstrates, professional agitators on the payroll of American petroleum interests can get away with this by claiming to be Indians, even if this claim has about the same level of validity as Elizabeth Warren's. We certainly do not need what is going on south of the border happening up here.


Once again the inner-cities of major American metropoles are burning. The race riot is an American tradition that is usually traced back to the Harlem riot of 1935. I am going to pass over this and the Harlem riot of 1943 due to their being isolated incidents, however celebrated, and date the tradition to the Harlem riot of 1964, since it was demonstrably the first in a chain. The riot, which started in response to a police officer’s having shot down a black teenager named James Powell, ran for almost a week. It began on July 16th. This was two weeks to the day after the Civil Rights Act came into effect.


The significance of that timing cannot be stressed enough. Ten years previously, the United States Supreme Court had ruled that de jure segregation was unconstitutional in its decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The American President at the time, liberal Republican Dwight Eisenhower, declared that this decision would be backed up by force if necessary and three years later, when he sent the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas he demonstrated that he meant it. Progressive liberals, to distract public attention from the fact that the institutional white racism, which even then they were blaming for all the evils of the world, had been dealt a death blow in a top down move by an all-white Supreme Court (3) backed by a white President, had the new mass media of communications technology shine its spotlight on a bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama led by a local Baptist minister about a year and a half after Brown v. Board, to create the illusion of a grass-roots, protest movement, headed by a saintly preacher of non-violent resistance, that would slay the dragon of segregation. In reality the movement was fighting a mortally wounded segregation in its death throes. Its crowning achievement was the aforementioned Civil Rights Act which laid the foundation for the crazy busing schemes of de jure integration, Affirmative Action and its quotas, anti-discrimination litigation and the shakedown industry in general. Two weeks after it had come into effect, the first race riot began. Let that forever shut the mouths of those who try to justify riots of this sort on the grounds that “it’s the only way they can make themselves heard.” That is and always has been utter tripe.


Ten days after the Harlem riot broke out in July of 1964, another one started in Rochester in the same state. Then in August race riots broke out in Illinois and Pennsylvania. These were relatively small scale compared to the one that broke out in the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles the following summer, after a black man was pulled over by a highway cop for reckless driving and found to be drunk as a skunk. Like the Harlem riot this one lasted almost a week. It saw 34 deaths, over a thousand injured, and some $40 million worth of property damage as almost a thousand businesses and government buildings were looted and burned. In July of 1966 there were race riots in the West Side of Chicago and the Hough section of Cleveland. The year after that saw the infamous “long, hot summer” in which over 150 race riots broke out between the months of June and August all over the United States, the worst of which was the one in Detroit, Michigan. Finally, in 1968, another string of riots broke out in Washington D.C., Chicago, Baltimore and over thirty other cities, upon the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.


These marked the end of the first wave of the race riots. There would be others periodically in the next two decades but it would not be until 1992 that anything comparable to those of the sixties took place. The previous year, Rodney King, who had been driving drunk in violation of his parole for robbery, sought to elude arrest. The result was a high speed chase which ended badly for him. A video of his capture which showed the police beating him was released – although the longer, unedited version paints rather a different picture of the events than the small clip that was repeatedly played on the media. When the police who arrested him and were charged with excessive force were acquitted in early 1992, race riots again erupted in Los Angeles. The deaths and injuries were about double those of Watts in 1966, and the property damage was at least twenty-five times greater.


What has grown into the current wave of race riots began almost a decade ago when the Black Lives Matter movement sprung up in response to the shooting of Trayvon Martin, an incident which the media had grotesquely misrepresented in a deliberate and successful effort to stir up strife. Called activists by their sympathizers and terrorists by their detractors, Black Lives Matter appears to subscribe to a belief system in which all police brutality is directed towards blacks and black men are more likely to die at the hands of the police than in any other way, are always unarmed, never resist arrest, and are always salt of the earth pillars of their community. This belief system forms the interpretive lens through which they view any incident involving the police and a black man.


When you look at the actual data available on the subject you discover that pretty much everything progressive liberals, Hollywood celebrities, the news media, etc. take as given when it comes to race and the police in the United States is the opposite of the truth. Blacks are not killed by policemen in numbers disproportionate to their own involvement in violent crime unless by disproportionate we mean lower than we would expect, more whites are killed by American police each year than blacks and Hispanics, cops are more likely to be killed by black criminals than unarmed blacks are likely to be killed by police, white cops are far more likely to kill other whites than they are to kill blacks, it is black cops who are the most likely to kill other blacks, and black people in general are far more likely to be killed by black criminals than by either whites or police of any colour and ethnicity. That these facts sound so strange to so many people is entirely due to the duplicity of the media. The newspapers and television news highlight cases of white cops killing black suspects, editorializing on them for weeks on end, while under-reporting cases that don’t fit the pattern.


It is that same media that refers to every Black Lives Matter event as a “protest” regardless of how violent it gets, similar to how the illegal blockade of the railroads earlier this year was called a “protest” even though it manifestly went beyond a peaceful demonstration.


Early last week, a black man named George Floyd was arrested for passing a counterfeit bill in Minneapolis. A video that someone took from their phone showed him on the ground by a police car, with an officer named Derek Chauvin keeping him in this position by pressing his knee on the man’s neck for almost ten minutes. Floyd could be heard saying that he could not breathe and within an hour was dead. It is difficult to imagine any evidence coming to light that would show this not to be an excessive use of force and Chauvin has been charged with third degree murder. Yet, despite the fact that the officer responsible was quickly charged, a protest that was held in Minneapolis the day after Floyd was killed quickly degenerated into a riot, and riots rapidly spread to other cities of the United States. The number of cities where these riots have occurred or are occurring already exceeds that of the “long, hot, summer” of 1967. While David Warren is quite right when he says “there is no such thing as a spontaneous riot” these show evidence of a much higher level of organization than previous riots of the type. It is quite obvious who is doing the organizing. Despite the looting, arson, and other lawlessness typical of these sort of riots, many in the media persist in calling them “protests.”


How all of this will end is difficult to say at this point. The police are hardly in a strong position to contain these riots and the use of military force to keep the peace is being decried by the same sort of “human rights” watchdog groups who had no problem whatsoever with governments placing their entire populations under house arrest for two and a half months to stop the spread of bat flu.


There are those in this country who hold the opposite sentiments to those expressed in the first two paragraphs of this essay. There are those who think we need a “Canadianized” version of everything that happens south of the border, seemingly putting no thought into the question of whether it is good or bad in itself. There are others who would like to see Canada swallowed up by the United States entirely. One would like to think that nobody would be so foolish as to want the civilization-threatening violence south of the border to come up here, but apparently one would be mistaken in so thinking.


I was rather less than impressed, Saturday, to watch a televised report of a protest in Toronto. The protest pertained to the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet last Wednesday. Korchinski-Paquet was a 29 year old black woman, whose mother had called the police late in the afternoon. Some sort of conflict was going on and her mother asked the police to take Korchinski-Paquet to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. She was subject to epileptic seizures and apparently had other mental health problems as well. She ended up falling to her death from the balcony of their apartment on the twenty-fourth floor. Her mother, in an interview that evening, accused the police of pushing her daughter off the balcony.


This was, I think, the least credible accusation of murder that I have ever heard levelled against the police. It is one thing to accuse a policeman of using too much force and beating someone to death or of being too quick to pull the trigger. These things, regrettably, happen. It is far less believable that they would push a mentally ill person they are trying to help off of a balcony.


Unfortunately, this incident took place two days after the death of George Floyd, just as the riots were heating up south of the border. Which brings us back to the protest in Toronto on Saturday, with approximately 4000 in attendance. Some wore coronavirus masks, others wore Antifa masks. There were signs demanding “justice for Regis”, signs that made reference to George Floyd, and signs with all sorts of left-wing slogans of varying degrees of inanity. There were plenty of Marxist flags and anarchist and revolutionary chants. It was just the sort of thing that could easily and quickly have degenerated into the sort of thing happening south of the border.


The next day that was exactly what did happen in Montreal. What began as a demonstration outside of police headquarters late in the afternoon turned into a violent riot in which windows were broken, shops were looted, and a barricade was set on fire.


This is precisely the sort of import from American culture that we would be better off without.


(1) The point could be argued that in the period when the Liberal Party veered to the hard left - the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau - it abandoned its platform of Americanization for one of anti-Americanism. It could be counter-argued however, that this was merely a matter of appearance. At the time the United States was engaged in the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the two superpowers seemed to be each the polar opposite of the other. This was not how things looked in the period from 1933 to 1945 in which the American president was the biggest cheerleader of the Soviet Union and the latter was ruled by the most brutal despot of its entire history. It was in this period that Lester Pearson betrayed his king and country, and became a spy for the Soviet Union through the network headed and later exposed by Elizabeth Bentley. Pearson would later win a Nobel Prize for supporting the Soviet and American interest - once again united - against the French, Israeli, and, most important, British in the Suez Canal Crisis, betraying Canada's tradition of Commonwealth Loyalty and costing the government in which he was minister the next election. When he became Prime Minister himself in 1963, it was by bringing down the Diefenbaker government in a conflict over whether Washington DC should be allowed to dictate policy to Canada. Diefenbaker took the con position, Pearson the pro - see George Grant’s Lament for a Nation (1965). In Trudeau père's premiership, his most Communistic innovations were all brought in by following American precedent. His "just society" expansion of the welfare-nanny state followed the example of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society", and his Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977, establishing the Canadian equivalent of Soviet thought police and tribunals, was modeled on the United States' Civil Rights Act of 1964.

(2) I am using this term in its technical theological meaning, not its colloquial use.

(3) Thurgood Marshall Jr. was not appointed to the American Supreme Court until 1967, a good thirteen years later.