Captain Airhead Fesses Up, But Only Partially

Last week Captain Airhead made an interesting admission.   He was in Halifax announcing that the government was committing $6, 000, 000, 000 to a new housing and infrastructure development fund.   He was asked if the government would also be scaling back the immigration that has been making housing so unaffordable for Canadians.   In his answer he acknowledged that “over the past few years we’ve seen a massive spike in temporary immigration, whether it’s temporary foreign workers or whether it’s international students in particular that have grown at a rate far beyond what Canada has been able to absorb.”

 

Was this admission immediately followed by an apology to all the Canadians he has accused of racism for pointing out that immigration was too high before he was willing to admit it himself?

 

Yeah right.  In Captain Airhead’s dictionary racist is a word that always applies to his opponents even if they are at odds over something that has nothing to do with race, such as when he accused people who opposed mandatory vaccination of racism, and never applies to him even when he does something that he would regard as racist, perhaps extremely so, in anyone else, such as all those times he was photographed or caught on video in blackface.   Words that are used in this way are absolutely meaningless and it is imperative that all the rest of us recognize this and ignore these words entirely so as to rob scumbags like Captain Airhead of the ability to use them as weapons.

 

What Captain Airhead admitted to was, of course, only a part of a larger truth the rest of which he continues to deny.  Just before the admission he said the following: “It’s really important to understand the context around immigration. Every year we bring in about 450,000, now close to 500,000, permanent residents a year, and that is part of the necessary growth of Canada. It benefits our citizens, our communities, it benefits our economy.”

 

Captain Airhead, in other words, was trying to divide permanent from temporary immigration and to say that it is only temporary immigration has gotten out of control and is being conducted on an unsustainable scale.   This, however, is nonsense.

 

If we eliminate the distinction between permanent and temporary then the rest of what he said about immigration being necessary and benefiting our citizens, communities, and economy would have been true had he been talking about Canada in the first few decades after Confederation when the country was basically being built.   Immigration is, indeed, necessary to a country in the building phase in which the struggles to build a new country serve to sift out the temporary from the permanent immigrants. The immigrants who come to participate in the building of the country either succeed in making a life for themselves in the new country and so become permanent or they do not and go back from whence they came in which case they are only temporary.  

 

Canada is long past this building phase.   One of the most basic problems with the Liberal Party of Canada is that it has never been able to accept this.   The Liberal Party cannot claim credit for Confederation or for building the country in those early decades when there was a very real danger that Confederation would fail and the country in whole or in part would be swallowed up by the American republic if we did not get our basic national economic and transportation infrastructure built and communities established from sea to sea, thus requiring large scale immigration.   The Liberal Party has ever since been trying to re-create the country in its own image, which has always been derived from either the United States or some Communist hell hole depending upon whether it is someone like Mackenzie King or someone like the Trudeaus who is leading the Grits at the time.   This is one reason why the Liberal Party tends to think building phase immigration should be a permanent feature of the country.   For them Canada is always in the building phase because they are constantly reinventing it.  Lest it be thought that I am attributing this problem solely to the Grits allow me to point out that one of the biggest failures of the Conservatives in the two periods in which they governed at the Dominion level since American neoconservatism replaced traditional Toryism as the party’s basic philosophy – the period in which the late Brian Mulroney was Prime Minister and the period in which Stephen Harper was Prime Minister – they went out of their way to not provide a sensible alternative to the Liberal Party’s approach to immigration and arguably made the problem worse.   Nor are they particularly strong on this point today.   While I cannot support him because of his neoconservative republicanism I give Maxime Bernier of the People’s Party credit for being the only federal politician willing to talk sanely and sensibly about immigration today.

 

Am I saying that a country should shut down immigration altogether after the building phase?

 

No, that would be an extreme almost as silly and absurd as the one represented by the current status quo.

 

A country like Canada that is already built and established needs to determine its immigration level on a year to year basis, based upon the needs and circumstances of the country in the year in question.  The sort of arguments based on economic necessity that might have been valid in the building phase should not be retained to argue for a permanent immigration target and especially not for a target that is set at a record high.   However many immigrants a built country may need in a particular year, it will under any but the most extraordinary of circumstances be far less than what she needed per year in the building phase.   Such circumstances as economic recession, high unemployment, and a shortage of affordable housing call for a radical reduction in immigration – all types, permanent and temporary.  

 

If the government is claiming that taking in half a million permanent immigrants per year is necessary despite circumstances that clearly call for its reduction then either a) the government is lying,  b) the necessity is an artificial one created by other types of government mismanagement, or c) all of the above.   With regards to what those other types of government mismanagement might look like, suppose that the necessity lies in the size of the tax-paying population.   If high immigration targets are needed to have enough tax payers to keep the government solvent then a) massive deficit spending on a yearly basis, b) an anti-natal program consisting of legal abortion that is easily accessible up to the very end of the pregnancy, heavy promotion of alternatives to heterosexuality, and the like and c) trying to keep health-care costs down by offering euthanasia as the answer to every sort of ill, are among the types of government mismanagement that would artificially produce this necessity.  These are all policies of the present Liberal government that Captain Airhead has gone out of his way to mark as belonging to his particular brand.

 

What is needed is not a scapegoating of temporary immigrants for the problems created by bad government immigration policy but a radical reduction of immigration of all types.   At a more fundamental level there needs to be a questioning of the ideas that almost everyone in leadership in the state, church, academy and fourth estate have held or at least given lip service to for several decades causing them to stifle and squash all deviation and dissent from the liberal “the more the merrier” approach to immigration.   For example, one of those ideas appears to be that since diversity is a strength therefore more diversity makes us stronger and maximum diversity would make us the strongest we can possibly be.  The comparative and superlative in this line of reasoning may follow from the initial premise although the principle that things that are good in themselves may cease to be good when taken to excess would argue against this being necessarily so.  Moreover, the initial premise is far from being infallibly established.  “Diversity can be a strength” is a far more rationally defensible statement than “diversity is a strength.”

The Most Important Section in the Charter

As I have said many times in the past, I am not an admirer of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This is not because I disagree with the “fundamental freedoms” listed in Section 2 or the basic legal and civil rights listed in Sections 7 to 13. All of these rights and freedoms, which are by far the most important rights and freedoms in the entire document, Canadians already possessed as subjects of Her Majesty under Common Law before 1982. The reason I dislike the Charter is because the Charter, rather than making these rights and freedoms more secure, as the Liberals who drafted it want you to believe, made them less secure. It includes two extremely broad loopholes.

The clause “subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society” found in Section 1 is the first of these. Who says what limits are “reasonable” and who decides whether they are “demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society?” The government that seeks to place limits on these rights and freedoms cannot be trusted to make this decision itself.

The second loophole is Section 33, the Exception Section with its notorious “notwithstanding clause”. This section allows the Dominion and provincial governments to pass Acts which will operate “notwithstanding a provision included in section 2 or sections 7 to 15 of this Charter”, i.e., the sections about our fundamental freedoms and basic legal rights. Although such Acts are required to sunset in five years (subsection 3) they can be renewed (subsection 4). This second loophole is the reason former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said, and he was right to say it, that the “Charter is not worth the paper it’s written on.”

This is not the only problem with the Charter.

Section 7 reads “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice”, substituting “security of the person” for “property” which is the third of the basic rights under Common Law, in which the security of person and property is the concise way of stating all three basic rights. Property is nowhere mentioned in the Charter. This has long been criticized as one of the chief failings of this document and has been thought to reflect the Marxist inclinations of those who have led the Liberal Party, arguably since Lester Pearson became leader in 1958, but especially since Pierre Trudeau took over in 1968.

Subsection 2 of Section 4 allows a Dominion or provincial government with a large enough backing in the House of Commons or the provincial legislature – a supermajority of two-thirds – to suspend elections indefinitely in a time of “real or apprehended, war, invasion or insurrection.” Note the words “or apprehended.” The threat of war, invasion or insurrection does not have to be real. Pray that neither the Liberals nor any other party, ever obtain enough seats in Parliament to put this subsection into effect.

Subsection 2 of Section 15 nullifies what subsection 1 says about how every individual is “equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.”

I am not particularly keen on the wording of subsection 1 either. Saying that everyone has a right to “equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination” can be interpreted in two ways. It can be interpreted as binding the State, preventing it from practicing said discrimination in its administration of the law and justice. I would not have a problem with that interpretation. It can also be interpreted as empowering the State to interfere in our everyday interactions to make sure we aren’t discriminating against each other. I have a huge problem with that – it is a form of totalitarian thought control.

Consider the Canadian Human Rights Act which was passed five years prior to the Charter. Although the expression “human rights” is thought by most people to mean rights which all human beings possess by virtue of their humanity and which only bad governments violate, and the phrase “human rights violation” is ordinarily understood to refer to governments incarcerating people for indefinite periods without a trial, torturing them, murdering them, and the like, this Act places limits on individuals not the State, which it empowers to police the thoughts and motivations of Canadians in their private interactions with each other.

The second subsection of Section 15 states that the first subsection “does not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.” In other words, the State is allowed to practice discrimination on the basis of race, rational or ethnic origin, colour, religion, etc., if that discrimination is the type sometimes called reverse discrimination, that is to say, discrimination against white people, especially those of British and French stock, Christians, males, etc.

Section 15 as a whole, then, appears to authorize the State to interfere in our private affairs to prevent us from discriminating against each other, while allowing the State to practice a form of discrimination itself.

Other flaws in the Charter itself could be pointed out but those that I have mentioned here are by far the worst. Worse, in my view, than any actual flaw in the Charter, however, is the attitude towards the Charter and the set of false notions about it that the Liberal Party has encouraged us to hold ever since 1982. There are many, for example, who refer to the Charter as if it were our constitution and claim that Pierre Trudeau gave us our constitution. This is not a claim the Charter makes for itself and it is no such thing. The Charter has been a part of our constitution since 1982, but it is not the constitution itself. Indeed, even the British North America Act of 1867, which was renamed the Constitution Act, 1867 during the repatriation process which gave us the Charter but remains in effect, is not the whole of our constitution. Most of our constitution is in fact, unwritten, or, to put it another way, written in prescription and tradition rather than paper and ink. As our greatest constitution expert, the late Eugene Forsey used to say to those who made the absurd claim that Pierre Trudeau had given us our constitution, we still have the constitution we had in 1867, albeit with a new name, and bells and whistles added.

Even more common is the strange notion that the Charter itself gave us our rights and freedoms. Admirers of the Charter tend to view it this way. Some critics, such as William Gairdner (The Trouble With Canada, 1990) and Kenneth McDonald (The Monstrous Trick, 1998, Alexis in Charterland, 2004) have argued that the Charter is an example of continental-style charter law, like the Napoleonic Code, intended to replace our Common Law system of rights and freedoms. The reality is more nuanced than that. Before explaining the nuance and what really happened, we need to understand the difference between the two systems and why this would indeed be a “monstrous trick” if it were in fact true.

Under continental-style charter law, everything is imposed from the top down, from the law itself, to the rights and freedoms that exist under it. Therefore, under this kind of law, you only have the specific rights and freedoms that are spelled out on paper in black and white. The question, under this system of law, is whether or not I have permission to do something.

Under Common Law, the law is not imposed from the top down, except in the sense of the underlying natural law being laid down by God, and even then this raises the much-debated theological question of whether God’s law and justice are expressions of His character or of His will. Don’t worry. I will not attempt to answer that question here as it is quite extraneous to this discussion. The Common Law is not imposed by the State. Although the Sovereign authority, the Queen-in-Parliament, has the power to add to, subtract from, and otherwise alter the Law, the Law is not the creation of the Sovereign authority. The law arises out of natural law and justice, through a process of discovery in the courts, where disputes are brought to be arbitrated on the basis of fairly hearing all the evidence on both sides. Rights and freedoms, under Common Law, are not limited to those that are spelled out in black and white. The question, under this system of law, is whether or not I am prohibited to do something. If not, I am free to do it.

The Charter of Freedoms does not actually replace Common Law with continental-style charter law. It merely creates the impression of having done so. The Charter does not identify itself as the source of our rights and freedoms, nor does it say that we have only those rights and freedoms it spells out. Indeed, it states the very opposite of this. Remember that the addition of the Charter was part of a constitutional repatriation process that required adopting an amendment formula and which required the participation of the provincial governments. Nine out of ten of the provinces are fully Common Law, and it is the exception, which under the provisions of the Quebec Act of 1774 has a hybrid of Common Law criminal law and French civil law, which dissented from the final product. The Liberals would never have been able to get away with substituting continental law for Common Law in this context in 1982. They, quite in keeping with their modus operandi of never telling the truth when a lie will suffice, settled for creating the impression that they had done so. Their totalitarian ends would be met, as long as Canadians started to think in terms of “am I permitted” rather than “is it prohibited.”

This is why the most important section in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is Section 26. Here it is in full:

The guarantee in this Charter of certain rights and freedoms shall not be construed as denying the existence of any other rights or freedoms that exist in Canada.

This is the Charter’s acknowledgement, tucked away in the miscellaneous category towards the end rather than being placed in the very first section as it ought to have been, that the Charter did not take us out from under Common Law and cause all of our Common Law rights and freedoms to disappear.

To illustrate what this means in application to a current hot topic, the Supreme Court of Canada was entirely in the wrong when it said as part of its ruling in R v Hasselwander in 1993, that Canadians have no constitutional right to own guns. The passing of the Charter, by its own admission in Section 26, did not cancel our right, as subjects of Her Majesty, to have arms for our defence, such as are allowed by law. This is a Common Law right, the fifth right that Sir William Blackstone in the first volume of his Commentary on the Laws of England (1765) identified as a necessary auxiliary to the basic and absolute rights of life, liberty, and property, and which had been put into statute in the Bill of Rights of 1689. This does not mean that the Supreme Court of Canada was necessarily wrong in its ruling on this case which involved the confiscation of a Mini-Uzi sub-machine gun. It does mean, however, that it erred in saying that Canadians had no constitutional gun rights. This was in response to the defence’s own mistake of trying to argue based upon American law, but what they should have said was that Canadians’ Common Law right to own guns is not absolute, but is subject to the qualification “as are allowed by law.”

The significance of Section Twenty-Six is much larger than this however. It means that we should stop listening to all the lies of the Liberals and their supporters in the schools and media, and insist upon all of our traditional rights and freedoms as Her Majesty’s free subjects.

True Allegiance and The Liberal Party’s Politics of Fear

The Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker, the last true Conservative and the last patriot of the true Canada, to serve as Her Majesty’s First Minister in this Dominion, in a speech given early in the premiership of the first Trudeau, remarked how he could remember a time when one could disagree with the Prime Minister without being considered a bigot. The implication, of course, was that this was no longer the case. The speech is included in the collection published by Macmillan of Canada in 1972 under the title Those Things We Treasure. This book, along with John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown, should be required reading for every Canadian. The latter is a philosophical defence of the Westminster system of parliamentary monarchy against the rival republicanisms of the United States and the Soviet Union, and a warning to Canadians about how our system had been compromised and undermined in the Mackenzie King years. Diefenbaker’s book was a timely protest against how the actions of Pierre Trudeau were further undermining that system as well and also the traditional freedoms of Canadians and the culture of political civility associated with it.

At the time the Chief made the remark alluded to above the progressive tactic of smearing opponents on the right with the label “racist” was fairly new. It would soon become the standard progressive response to any criticism from the right and has been so beaten to death over the decades that in the last few years, progressives, finding that people have become desensitized to the word “racist”, have been turning to stronger terms like “white supremacist.” Milo Yiannopoulos in a recent interview with David Horowitz remarked:


When somebody calls you a racist, this is far worse than somebody who casually drops the N word, cause when you call somebody that name, the only person who looks bad is you. Whereas, when you call somebody a racist, you are creating a set of obligations for them to defend themselves, which will, whatever they do, indelibly associate their name with that crime. Way worse.


This is very true and it is worse yet to call somebody a “white supremacist” for this expression suggests an organized, ideological, form of racism and not merely prejudiced thoughts and attitudes.

Unsurprisingly, the Liberal Party of Canada and its leader, swamped by the mire of the SNC-Lavalin Scandal and sinking in the polls with the next Dominion election only months away, has fallen back in desperation on this updated version of their old tactics. They have been issuing demands that Andrew Scheer denounce “white supremacy” and “white nationalism.” They have continued to make these demands even after Scheer had complied with them. Scheer, in my opinion, ought not to have complied. The implication of such demands is that Scheer is under a presumption of guilt of sympathizing or collaborating with neo-Nazism until he proves otherwise by making a sufficient denunciation, and that those who make these demands have the right to decide when the denunciation is sufficient. Arrogant, bullying, demands of this sort ought neither to be acknowledged nor complied with. Especially when coming from someone against whom charges of ties to extremists of a different sort, Sikh separatists, are far more sustainable, having generated an international incident two years ago and just now resurfaced with the Liberal government’s redaction of last year’s terrorism report.

The other implication of these demands is that white supremacism is a significant problem in Canada and a realistic threat to our civilization. This is total bunk, a fact which nobody knows better than the Liberals themselves. It was a Liberal government in 1977, the government led by the father of the present Prime Minister, that passed the Canadian Human Rights Act after selling the Act to the public, with the assistance of the media, by generating a fear that Nazism was on the verge of being reborn here on Canadian soil. This had been facilitated by the formation of the Canadian Nazi Party which contained, maybe, one actual disciple of Adolf Hitler. It otherwise consisted of agents provocateurs supplied by the government and by private activist organizations that had an interest in seeing this legislation passed. There was not the slightest possibility of this group, or any white supremacist group, establishing a Fourth Reich in Canada but the manufactured, bogus, threat of such was used by the Liberals and their allies, to pass a bill which, despite its title, did nothing to protect the lives, property, and freedoms of people under the jurisdiction of Canadian law from the threat of abusive state power, but instead authorized state meddling in all sorts of private interactions and imported, from the Soviet system, thought police and tribunals which, since the media, except for a brief time about a decade ago when it felt its own liberty threatened, has largely refrained from criticizing or even reporting their doings, have been effectually allowed to function as secret police and tribunals. It was this system set up by the Canadian Human Rights Act, and not the phony “Nazi menace” invented to dupe the public into supporting it, which was and is the real threat to our freedom and order, civilization and way of life.

The Liberals also know as well as anyone else that the Conservative Party is not a front for white supremacists and that Andrew Scheer is not a crypto-neo-Nazi. If anything they are pathetically progressive and liberal on all issues pertaining to race and ethnicity, not only when compared to the Conservatives of a century ago, but to the Liberals and socialists of that era as well. The noise to the contrary, that the Grits are currently generating, is, of course, intended as a distraction from the scandal that has been engulfing them, but it is also an example of the very “politics of fear and division” which they accused the previous Conservative government of in the last Dominion election.

Let me speak now for a moment to anyone who might sincerely believe that we have a serious problem with white supremacism in this country. I have two things that I would say to such a person.

First, if ideological racism and racial nationalism are serious problems in the world today, then it is all ideological racism and all racial nationalisms which are the problems and not just white supremacism. As Stephen Roney recently put it:

To denounce “white supremacy” as a stand-alone item is to imply that other forms of racial supremacy are fine: black supremacy, Asian supremacy, Muslim supremacy, aboriginal supremacy. The problem is not with supremacy, then; it is with whites. That is extreme racism. And should be called out as such.


Indeed, and to further demonstrate the point that this paranoid obsession with one particular form of racial supremacy amounts to extreme racism in itself, I will draw your attention to the hysteria that was generated on campuses across North America late last year, including the campus of the University of Manitoba here in Winnipeg, by the appearance of posters containing one simple phrase “It’s OK to be white.” The posters were widely condemned as conveying a “white supremacist” message, but if this slogan is “white supremacist”, then to not be a “white supremacist” one must hold that “It’s NOT OK to be white.” Taking that position amounts to racial hatred against white people.

Since the first Trudeau premiership the Liberal Party has conducted an aggressive campaign to drum racism out of Canada, a campaign that has been enthusiastically supported by the media, the academic establishment, the other progressive parties, and yes, even the Conservative Party in both its old and new incarnations, but this campaign, which has only ever seriously targeted white racism has in reality promoted anti-white racism. They have managed to get away with this for so long because anyone who has dared to point it out and speak out against it has been smeared with a lot of nasty labels, such as “white supremacist.” This is the very essence of the “politics of fear and division”, Liberal Party style, and it is about time that Canadians stop giving in to these bullying tactics and send the Grits and other progressives the clear message, that as long as they insist on a non-tolerance policy towards racial prejudice on the part of whites their own promotion of anti-white bigotry will receive the exact same treatment. Or, alternately, we could follow David Warren’s more amusing suggestion:


We need a National Bigotry Day, in which for twenty-four hours we can all find relief from the Political Correctors. And laugh at each other, scoff taunt and mock, because (have you noticed?) all of us deserve it.


The second thing I would say is that if ideological racism and racial nationalism are serious problems in the world today, then the solutions, if there are any, are not be sought in modern and progressive thought. Nationalism – all nationalism, not merely the racial kind – and ideological racism are themselves the products of the Modern Age’s departure from royal monarchism in the political sphere and from orthodox, catholic, Christianity in the spiritual and religious sphere. When in the twentieth century progressives came to reject these offspring of the Modern Age, racism and nationalism, at least for white, Western people, and to regard them as problems, the solution they devised was one-world, globalism, the ideal of a world without borders, in which capitalism and socialism converge, and the flow of goods and people is completely unimpeded. This “solution” proved to be worse than the problem, and in rejection of it populist, nationalist, movements have been springing up all across the Western world to defy the globalist consensus between mainstream liberal and conservative parties. These, it must be added, are no more solutions to the problem of globalism, than globalism was a solution to the problems of racism and nationalism. Neither is the solution to the other because the real problem is the modern thinking that lies beneath both and to address this problem we need truly reactionary thinking that looks back to the older tradition, to royal monarchy and orthodox Christianity.

In a royal monarchy, sovereign authority is vested in a person, and is hereditary, passed down from ancestors to descendants. This is the very embodiment of the accumulated wisdom of the ancients that men in modern times have foolishly thrown away. Whereas Lockean liberalism declared voluntary individual contract to be the basis of society, the ancients knew that families were the building blocks of communities and societies, and that the sovereign authority in a state could not rest upon a contractual foundation, but was an extension of the natural authority of father and mother in the home, through the patriarchs and matriarchs of the extended kin group, to the kings and queens of the realm. The reigning monarch, by holding the sovereign authority in trust, is a symbol of stability and continuity, which are essential to order, which in turn is essential to true freedom, and is an example to the generation living in the present day, of the debt owed to generations past, to conserve what they have left, for generations yet to come. The hereditary nature of the office, derided as archaic and unfair by its democratic and republican foes, is what allows the monarch to be a unifying symbol in a way no elected politician ever could. Furthermore, the monarch as that symbol of unity, gives government a personal face. These last two aspects of the office make it the essential and necessary counter to two of the most obnoxious characteristics of the modern state, the endless factionalism promoted both by government by elected assembly and by meritocratic individualism, and the faceless inhumanity of bureaucracy.

As the symbol of unity and the personal face of the state, the royal monarch is the object of the natural allegiance of her subjects and the sworn allegiance of state ministers and immigrants. When a country is united by its loyal allegiance to the person of the royal monarch, that place as the object of loyalty, cannot be filled by abstract ideas. Filling that place with abstract ideas, is precisely what the liberals of the Modern Age, in rebellion against their kings, set out to do. The most popular such idea was that of “the people.” The liberals had either rejected or forgotten the wisdom of Plato and Aristotle, who taught that democracy was the parent of tyranny which was the opposite of true kingship, and the doctrine of “popular sovereignty” begat tyranny on a scale the world had never before seen in the England of the Cromwellian Protectorate, the France of the Reign of Terror, and the Soviet Union and all subsequent People’s Republics. Nationalism, which began in the eighteenth century and spread throughout the Western world in the nineteenth, was originally a form of this left-wing, rebellion against royal monarchy which defined “the people” for whom the revolutionaries claimed to speak as “the nation”, i.e., a people united by blood, language, history, and culture. (1) The Third Reich, which would never have had the opportunity to rise had the Hohenzollern and Hapsburg thrones not been emptied, defined “the people” in more explicitly racial terms, but otherwise was not significantly different from these other regimes. It would make far more sense to look to what these regimes had in common as an explanation of their common industrial scale brutality than to single out what set the Third Reich apart as the sole reason for its specific atrocities.

Before the Modern Age, what we now call Western Civilization was called Christendom, and in Christian civilization it was acknowledged that there is an allegiance which men owe that is higher even than that which they owe to their king or queen, and that is the allegiance owed to God, the Creator and Sovereign Ruler of all that is. Orthodox Christianity has called itself “catholic” since the earliest centuries. The ancient baptismal Creed confesses faith in “the holy catholic church” and the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed in “one holy, catholic, and Apostolic church.” The third of the three ancient Creeds begins by saying “Whosoever would be saved needeth before all things to hold fast the catholic faith.” The word “catholic” means “universal”, making it both ironic and inappropriate, that it is used today as a denominational label, but that is the subject matter for another essay. The early church chose this word to designate both itself and its faith both because it was an appropriate designation for the entire church worldwide as distinguished from the church in a particular location and because of the universal nature of the church and her mission.

Jesus, before His Ascension, commissioned His Apostles with the words “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matthew 28: ), and “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15), and told them that “But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.” (Acts 1:8). When the promise of the coming of the Holy Ghost was fulfilled, as recorded by St. Luke in the next chapter of Acts, the Apostles preached the Gospel to the multitude of Jews who had come from all over the known world to celebrate the Feast of Pentecost – the Old Covenant Feast commemorating the giving of the Law not the Christian Feast of the same name commemorating the coming of the Holy Ghost – and each heard in his own tongue. (2) Eight chapters later, St. Peter was sent to proclaim the Gospel to the first Gentile convert, Cornelius and five chapters after that there were so many Gentile converts that the Apostolic Council met in Jerusalem to address the question of whether they would be required to be circumcised and to follow the diet and rituals of the Mosaic Law. It was ruled that these, which had been given in the Old Covenant to keep national Israel distinct and separate from her idolatrous neighbours, were not to hinder the unity of the new transnational spiritual commonwealth that was the church under the New Covenant. This was a point that St. Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, would emphasize throughout his epistles. St. John, in his apocalyptic vision, heard the twenty-four elders, representing the church in heaven, singing the new song “Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation; And hast made us unto our God kings and priests: and we shall reign on the earth.” (Rev. 5:9-10) All people, orthodox Christianity teaches, are brothers because of our common descent from Adam, and out of this natural brotherhood, which since the Fall has carried the curse of Original Sin, all people are called by the Gospel, to believe and be baptized into the new spiritual brotherhood established by the Second Adam, Christ.

In royal monarchy, our sovereign is the personal object of our civil allegiance. In orthodox Christianity, Christ as the head of the “one, holy, catholic, and Apostolic church” which transcends all boundaries of tribe, race, and nation, is the personal object of our spiritual allegiance. When our civil and spiritual allegiance both belong to the right personal object, they cannot be claimed by the false substitute of the Modern Age, the people, in any of its various guises – race, nation, working class, the whole of humanity, etc. Only thus can we avoid the pitfalls of nationalism and racism, without falling into the opposite pits of one-world, globalism and the virulent anti-white racism that wears the mask of anti-racism.

Canada, although a century younger than the United States and thus founded well in to the Modern Age, because she was built upon the foundation of Loyalism rather than nationalism, was established as a parliamentary monarchy and as an explicitly Christian rather than a secular country. We retain our royal monarchy and our Christianity to this day, if only in the most outward, nominal, and ceremonial ways, despite the Liberal Party’s having done their worst to eliminate these things, and these outward trappings of Christian civilization are the signposts pointing the way back to our true civil and spiritual allegiance, should we ever find the courage and the character to take it.

(1) The American and French Revolutions were arguably the first nationalist movements. The word “nationalism” only goes back to the nineteenth century, but the phenomenon it designates goes back to the previous century. The American Revolutionaries called themselves “patriots,” using “patriotism” with all the connotations of nationalism, but patriotism is a much older concept which simply means “love of country.” Dr. Johnson argued, in both The Patriot (1774) and in conversation recorded by Boswell, that the patriotism espoused by the American rebels was false and hypocritical. Had the word been around to be used at the time he might have said that it was nationalism rather than patriotism.

(2) It has been observed that the miracle of the first Whitsunday was a reversal of the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel, the event through which God divided the human race into different tribes and nations. This does not make the agenda of one-world, borderless, globalism somehow “Christian.” Christ told Pilate that His kingdom was “not of this world”, meaning, not that it was located on Mars or some other planet, but that it was an eternal and spiritual rather than a temporal and civil commonwealth and that is not in political competition with any of the latter. It is only in that spiritual kingdom, the Church, that the effect of Babel is reversed. Progressive, one-world, borderless, globalism is a manifestation of the same human arrogance that brought about the divine judgement at Babel in the first place.

Justin Trudeau Needs to Go

We Canadians are paying a heavy toll for having voted the Liberal Party into power so many times over the course of the last century. The Liberal Party has, from its inception, been the party of opposition to the Confederation project that established our country, the Dominion of Canada, in 1867. It has neither confidence in nor respect for the constitutional, political, legal and judicial traditions and institutions that, adapted by the Fathers of Confederation for our own country, we inherited from Great Britain. It has encouraged and fostered the widespread ignorance of and apathy towards those traditions and institutions that is so appalling in Canada today.

A consequence, sadly, of that apathy is that books like Eugene Forsey’s The Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament in the British Commonwealth (1) and John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown (2)have been out of print for many years. Forsey’s abridged doctoral dissertation and Farthing’s posthumously edited masterpiece are both brilliant defences of our constitution of parliamentary monarchy which spell out the continuing importance of the reserve powers of the Crown for maintaining our traditional rights and freedoms and protecting us from the tyranny of the governing party and Prime Minister. These truths are needed today like never before.

In their arguments for the reserve powers of the Crown it was the right to refuse a recommendation for the dissolution of Parliament that Forsey and Farthing focused upon. The reason for this was historical. In 1926, William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Liberal Prime Minister who had clung to power after the last Dominion election despite having failed to win even a plurality through the support of a third party, was facing a vote of censure in Parliament over his government’s involvement in a customs scandal, asked for a dissolution. The Governor General, Lord Byng, quite properly turned him down. In the next election, Mackenzie King deceived the electorate with his entirely false claim that Byng had acted inappropriately, that his refusal amounted to imperial interference in Canadian domestic politics, and that he, Mackenzie King, was championing Canada’s sovereignty over its own domestic affairs. All of this was hogwash, and the real issue was that if the Prime Minister can obtain a dissolution just by asking in order to avoid the just censure of Parliament then he is no longer responsible to that Parliament or to anybody else. The Liberal interpretation of these events, Forsey and Farthing rightly argued, laid the foundation for autocratic Prime Ministerial tyranny.

The Crown also has the right, in extraordinary circumstances in which the sitting government has become an active threat to the rights and freedoms of Canadians and the laws protecting them, to demand the resignation of the Prime Minister. Over the course of this past week, the Prime Minister and several of his Cabinet, including his Justice Minister, have behaved in such a way as to make the exercise of this Crown power appropriate.

I am referring to their response to the acquittal of Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley who had been charged with second-degree murder over the death of Colten Boushie. Justin Trudeau and Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould both responded to the acquittal by extending their sympathy to Boushie’s family and treating the verdict as an act of racial injustice – Boushie was an aboriginal youth. “We have to do better” they both said. Jane Philpott, Minister of Indigenous Affairs tweeted that her thoughts and prayers were with the Boushie family and that “we all have more to do to improve justice & fairness for Indigenous Canadians.”

If the Prime Minister or any other Cabinet Minister sincerely wished to offer their condolences to the grieving Boushie family the time and occasion to do so would have been a year and a half ago after the shooting. To extend sympathy at this time, however, not over the death of a family member but over a jury verdict of not-guilty, is out-of-line. To do so is to disagree with the verdict and to say that the jury either made a mistake or made a bad decision out of malice. We are all free to disagree with jury verdicts but to do so publicly in this way is not the place of a government Minister.

Even worse was the government’s announcement later in the week that it was going to act on the ill-chosen words of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet. Let us go over this again. A man was put on trial for murder and acquitted by a jury of his peers. The government says that it does not like the verdict. The government says that it is going to overhaul the legal system to correct what it does not like. There is no way that Trudeau and his Ministers can act on this that will not trample over some basic Canadian legal rights and undermine some of the most basic principles of our legal system.

One of those principles is that the burden of proof in a criminal case always rests upon the Crown prosecutor. This principle rests upon the foundation of the even more basic principle that it is better that many guilty people go unpunished than that a single innocent person be made to suffer unjustly. (3) Translated into the language of legal rights, this becomes the right of someone accused of a crime to be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. Included within this are the rights to confront his accuser face to face, to cross-examine and discredit his accuser, and to have the case decided, not by politically motivated government ministers, but by a jury of his peers. That is to say, a jury of the defendant’s peers, not the peers of his alleged victim. If a member of race A is accused of murdering a member of race B, this ought not to ensure that race B is represented on the jury but may indeed, be grounds for excluding them because of the likelihood of prejudice against the defendant.

All of this is potentially endangered by the Trudeau government’s shameless exploitation of this case. It was not that long ago that the progressive left was accusing the neoconservative Stephen Harper of “fascism” because he wished to limit a judge’s ability to hand down slap-on-the-wrist sentences for serious crimes. Note, however, and note well, that sentencing by a judge only takes place after a guilty verdict has been reached. It is the Trudeau Liberals, not the Harper Conservatives, who want to interfere in the verdict-reaching process so as to get the verdicts they desire. This is where true fascism lies.

Through his complete disrespect for the principles of our justice system and his willingness to discard them in order to virtue signal to his mindless, politically correct, base of Generation Snowflake social justice warriors, Justin Trudeau has forfeited his right to lead Her Majesty’s government in Ottawa. It is time for him to go.

(1) Eugene A. Forsey, The Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament in the British Commonwealth, (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1943)
(2) John Farthing, Judith Robinson ed., Freedom Wears a Crown, (Toronto: Kingswood House, 1957)
(3) This is an ancient principle, drawing upon both Scriptural (Abraham negotiating the fate of Sodom in the book of Genesis) and classical authority (Socrates, at least as represented by Plato in the Gorgias, said “it is better to suffer an injustice than to commit one”). Of course the same Liberals who have encouraged apathy and ignorance of our country's political and legal traditions have encouraged the same towards Scriptural and classical learning. If more people were familiar with Aeschylus’s Oresteia they would appreciate better that trial by jury was designed to liberate man from the tribal vengeance mode of “justice” that those upset over the Stanley verdict are calling for. For an excellent critique of how Canada’s educational system has gone to pot through progressive liberalism, written just as the rot was first setting in, see Hilda Neatby’s So Little For the Mind: An Indictment of Canadian Education, (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin and Company Ltd, 1953)

Thoughts on the Times

Smoking Stupidity

The solons who govern the city of Winnipeg in which I reside have, in their inscrutable wisdom, ruled, that as of April 1st, no one is to be allowed to smoke in outdoor patios where food and beverages are served. Although set to come into effect on April Fool’s Day, sadly, this fascist bylaw, is no joke. This latest and most absurd assault, in the neopuritan war on tobacco, is, like previous ones, based on the myth of harmful and deadly second-hand smoke. Undoubtedly, many if not most of the dingbats championing this ban are the same people applauding the federal Liberals’ decision, also coming into effect this year, to legalize the recreational smoking of the flowers and leaves of non-industrial hemp. Tobacco smoking can over time be damaging to the health of the body. The risk is much higher for cigarette smokers than for those who smoke tobacco the way God intended it in pipes and cigars, although this distinction and difference means nothing to the Mrs. Grundys of the Winnipeg City Council. Cannabis smoking damages the health of the mind. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

Heed my advice if you wish to stay sane;
If you smoke, smoke Old Toby and not Mary Jane.

Remember S. Charles, King and Martyr

Yesterday was the Feast of King Charles the Martyr, murdered by the regicidal and heretical, Puritan sect 369 years ago. The December 2017 edition of the American Region Edition of SKCM News, the Magazine of the Society of King Charles the Martyr, contains this item:

BBC History magazine has published a seventeenth-century recipe for drinking chocolate. Charles I enjoyed the beverage, but Oliver Cromwell banned it, deeming it sinful. (p. 3)

Yet further evidence, as if more were needed, that Puritanism is evil. In addition to being Pharisees, the Puritans were also Philistines and in the Interregnum, they broke up King Charles’ impressive collection of art and sold most of it off. The Telegraph reports that with the help of the Royal Martyr’s namesake, the present Prince of Wales, the Royal Academy of Arts has reassembled the collection for the first time in almost four centuries, for a special show commemorating the Academy’s 250th anniversary.

Some Quotes from a Church Father

St. Irenaeus was a second century Church Father. He was born and raised in Smyrna, in what is now Turkey, when St. Polycarp, who had been the disciple of St. John the Apostle, was bishop there. Later he served, first as presbyter (priest) then as bishop, in what is now Lyon in France. He is most remembered as a defender of Apostolic orthodoxy against the various Gnostic sects that taught that the God of the Old Testament Who created the heavens and the earth was an inferior deity, the Demiurge, and not the Father of the New Testament. Eric Voegelin argued, in The New Science of Politics, that in Calvinist Puritanism, Gnosticism had been revived and had evolved into the spirit of the Modern Age.

St. Irenaeus wrote a five-book treatise against the Gnostics which in Latin is titled Adversus Haereses. The first book outlines the teachings of several varieties of Gnosticism, focusing primarily on the Valentinian sect. In the second paragraph of the twenty-fourth chapter of this book can be found this remark about a different Gnostic sect, the followers of Saturninus:

Many of those, too, who belong to his school, abstain from animal food, and draw away multitudes by a feigned temperance of this kind.

Later, of yet another Gnostic sect, the Encratites, he writes:

Some of those reckoned among them have also introduced abstinence from animal food, thus proving themselves ungrateful to God, who formed all things. (I.28.1)

Sadly, there has been a great deal of ignorance of and indifference to the Patristic writings among Western Protestants for the last century or so which perhaps explains the revival and popularity of the Gnostic heresy of vegan vegetarianism in our day and age.

A Quote From Our Friends Down Under

The Australian traditionalist and reactionary group Sydney Trads, in its “The Year in Review: 2017, Year of the Hate Hoax, the Heckler’s Veto and the Persecuted ‘Oppressor’”, included the following:

2017 was the year of Schrodinger’s ethnicity: Whites apparently exist as an identifiable category if they are being attacked, mocked, ridiculed or blamed for something, but also do not exist as a legitimate category of self-identification when a representative defends their interests as a group.

That is liberalism’s essential self-contradiction on race all summed up in a nutshell. Nicely done.

Justin Trudeau’s Nightmare

In the 1860s, the Fathers of Confederation formed a new country out of the provinces of British North America, giving it the title of Dominion and the name of Canada. The new country was to be a federation of provinces, with a parliamentary government modeled after the Westminster parliament, under the monarchy shared with Great Britain and the rest of the British Empire. The Fathers of Confederation looked to the federal system to overcome the difficulties of British Protestants and French Catholics living together in one country and to the monarchy as the source of continuity and unity, envisioned the evolution of the British Empire itself into a federation in which Canada would play a senior role, and tried to protect their country from the gravitational pull of the republic to their south with a national economic program of protective tariffs and internal trade facilitated by the construction of a transcontinental railroad. From that time to today, the Liberal Party of Canada has been the anti-Confederation party, the party that has sought to belittle the accomplishments of the Fathers of Confederation and Canada’s Loyalist heritage, to line the pockets of its financial backers through increased trade with the United States up to the point of continental economic integration, to weaken our parliamentary constitution and give autocratic power to the Prime Minister and Cabinet, to replace our traditional national symbols with ones of their own manufacture and to seriously undermine our traditional Common Law rights and freedoms. The Liberal Party found out in 1891 and again in 1911 that presenting their naked agenda to Canadians at election time was a losing strategy and evolved the strategy of pandering and grievance mongering that worked much better for them in the twentieth century. The strategy consists of telling identifiable groups that the Old Canada of Confederation had treated them unfairly but that if they would give their support to the Liberals, the Liberals would fix the situation and give them a bag of taxpayer-supplied goodies.

At first it was French Canadians that Liberals focused on, telling them that all the Britishness of the Canada of a Confederation was an unfair reminder of their defeat at the Plains of Abraham. This was nonsense – French Canadians knew full well that the protection of the British Crown had secured their language, religion, and culture for them when the Puritan Americans had wanted to take them away from them and their leaders were fully involved in the Confederation talks, helping shape the Dominion. The Liberal strategy had an unintended consequence – the emergence of the Quebec nationalist separatism that threatened to divide the country.

When this happened the Liberals adjusted their strategy. They now told a broad, “rainbow coalition” of different races, religions, and ethnic groups that they had been unfairly “excluded” from the Old Canada of Confederation, but would receive redress in the New Canada of the Liberal Party. To ensure that the coalition was as large as possible they revamped the immigration system, bringing in the race-neutral points system of 1965 as our “official” immigration policy, but this was merely a cover for their true policy of exploiting the loopholes to the points system (the largest of these being “family reunification”) to make Canada as ethnically diverse as possible as quickly as possible. They, of course, silenced anybody who pointed out the obvious drawbacks to this by calling him a “racist.”

This was done largely during the premiership of Pierre Trudeau. Now, in the premiership of Justin Trudeau, the Liberal coalition has been expanded to include minority sexual orientations and gender identities as well.

This strategy has always been a divisive one, first pitting French Canadians against English Canadians, then pitting a coalition of racial, religious, and ethnic minorities against European Christian Canadians, and maximizing diversity in total disregard to the fact that this is the way to generate ethnic and racial strife and conflict rather than harmony. It has been quite clear for some time now that the Liberal coalition cannot hold together for long. Earlier in the premiership of the second Trudeau it seemed likely that the breaking point would be between Muslims and the alphabet soupers, both of whose causes the Prime Minister was loudly, vehemently, and recklessly championing despite the obvious contradiction between the two. Now, however, a different fracture has become evident.

Earlier this month, the Prime Minister shamelessly turned the occasion of a young Muslim girl in Toronto, Khawlah Noman’s, claim that she had been attacked by a man who cut her hijab with scissors, into an opportunity to grandstand, get his name and picture in the press yet again, and lecture Canadians about how horribly “Islamophobic” we all are. It later turned out that, like the vast majority of highly publicized “hate crimes”, the incident was a hoax and had not occurred after all. Those who have been waiting for Trudeau to return to his taxpayer-funded soap box and eat crow have been listening to crickets chirp and watching the tumbleweeds drift by ever since.

This weekend, however, protests were held all across Canada by the Asian communities of cities such as Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, and Regina. It turns out that it was an Asian man whom the girl had falsely accused – a detail that was not widely reported by the press as it conflicts with their narrative in which bigotry and bigotry-inspired-violence are the exclusive domain of white, heterosexual, Christian males. The protests were aimed at Trudeau, insisting that the hoax, and his gullible swallowing it without waiting for a full investigation, constituted a “hate crime” against them. While I have little sympathy for the protestors, as their claim that they were being scapegoated and discriminated against is ludicrous seeing that the school division, the federal and provincial governments, the leaders of the opposition, and the news media all went out of their way to avoid drawing attention to the fact that the girl had accused one of their ethnicity, there is something deeply satisfying in seeing Trudeau’s coalition fall apart, and its members turn on him.

De Me Ipso

It is the Feast Day of the Circumcision of Christ otherwise known as New Year's Day. The year that begins today is the 2018th Anno Domini and never have I been happier at being completely out of sync with the times. This is, of course, the opposite attitude of that of the ignorant, mindless, nincompoop of a pretty boy who deceived my country into putting him into the office of Her Majesty's First Minister a little over two years ago and who has been using the calendar year as an excuse to justify his misdeeds ever since. To have little in common with that obnoxious twerp pleases me as well.

It is my custom, one picked up from the late Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel, to begin each year with a full disclosure essay, letting my readers know exactly where I stand. I am a patriot of the Dominion of Canada, which celebrated her 150th anniversary last year, loyal to the Old Canada, to the vision of Sir John A. MacDonald and the other Fathers of Confederation and to the heritage of the United Empire Loyalists who fled north after the rebellion of 1776 to build a country on the foundation of honour and loyalty rather than progress and commercialism. If little traces of this Canada remain in the Canada of 2018 it is because of the treachery, deception, and betrayal of the vile Liberal Party, of which I am a sworn, lifelong, foe.

I am a Christian. I had a United Church upbringing, "accepted Jesus Christ as my Saviour," in evangelical lingo, when I was fifteen, was baptized by immersion in a Baptist church when I was in high school, studied theology for five years at Providence Bible College and Theological Seminary (now Providence University College) in Otterburne, Manitoba and was confirmed in the Anglican Church of Canada as an adult. I hold to the orthodox theology of the Apostles', Nicene-Constantinopolitan and Athanasian Creeds, and to the final authority and infallibility of the Holy Scriptures of which, like any fundamentalist, I prefer the Authorized translation of 1611 but, unlike fundamentalists, regard as incomplete without the portions of the Greek Old Testament that had been read as Scripture by the Christian Church since the first century but assigned deuterocanonical status due to their absence from the Hebrew Old Testament. I reject the so-called "higher critical" interpretations of the Scriptures as codified unbelief masquerading as scholarship, but neither do I accept that proper interpretation can be found through simplistic, formulaic rules such as those of literalism or by private believers guided only by inner illumination that they associate, rightly or wrongly, with the Holy Spirit. The Scriptures were given to the church as an organic community of faith and it is to that body, collectively indwelt by the Holy Spirit, that the enlightening ministry of the Spirit is promised, and individual believers must pay heed to how previous generations of believers from the Church Fathers on, understood the Scriptures, if they are to hear "what the Spirit saith unto the churches."

Politically, I am a Tory. That is a statement of political conviction rather than partisan allegiance. As much as I dislike the Liberal Party, and despise everything that the parties to the left of the Grits stand for, I have little use for politicians of any brand, including those of the Conservative Party. As a Tory I am first and foremost a royalist and a monarchist, who believes in our parliamentary form of government if not in the politicians who make up its composition or the bureaucrats who carry out its daily business, and who looks upon his country as an organic whole, in which past and future generations are united with those living in the present who have a duty, as trustees acting on behalf of previous and future generations, to preserve and pass on our constitution and institutions intact. I am neither a Red Tory nor a neoconservative. Red Tories try to associate Toryism with socialism, pacifism, feminism, and all sorts of other left-wing causes I despise. Neoconservatives want to further Americanize our country making them no different from the Liberals who did so much damage in previous generations.

I am right-wing in the original and true meaning of the term - an opponent of the vision, values, and ideals of the French Revolution of 1789 rather than a supporter of those of the German Revolution of 1933.

I am a social, moral, and cultural reactionary. By this I do not mean a Puritan who wants the state to dictate everyone's personal choices and control their private lives and who condemns art, theatre and the music on the basis of non-aesthetic judgements. The Puritans were the first liberals, progressives, and leftists. What I mean is this: societies are made up of communities, which in turn are made up of families, and it is families, supported by churches, schools, and the larger community, that are responsible for passing on the customs, ways, and manners that make up culture and the basic rules of right and wrong to the next generation and for trying to instil in them the habit of choosing the right over the wrong. If families, and the institutions that make up their social support network fail in this task, the state cannot step in and do it for them, although it may have to clean up the mess that ensues. When I say I am a reactionary I mean that I firmly believe that our social organization, our idea of what constitutes right and wrong, our manners, customs, and habits, and our aesthetic sense of the beautiful, which is the good of that highest of cultural expressions we call art, have all undergone severe decay and degradation since the beginning of the Modern Age and that this process has been accelerating in the last sixty years or so.

I agree with most of the basic components of capitalism such as the private ownership of property and the general superiority of market freedom over central economic planning but I am less than enthusiastic about the whole which they comprise. If I am a capitalist, in the sense of a believer in capitalism, then, like Sir Roger Scruton, I am a "reluctant capitalist." While I think that most if not all of the accusations socialists make against capitalism are silly, stupid and easily debunked nonsense, I would say that it is quite vulnerable to the charge that it is the engine of progress, a bulldozer which uproots communities, breaks down traditions, and otherwise destroys everything the worth of which cannot be measured in dollars and cents if it stands in the way of economic growth. I do not believe international free trade to be the path to global prosperity and universal peace that liberals have been touting it as for centuries and believe that it is important for countries to maintain strong borders and that often a country's national interests might require it to protect its domestic producers even if it is more economical to import on the cheap.

I am opposed to the Third World invasion of all Western countries, aided and abetted by treasonous politicians, bureaucrats, and cultural and academic elites, which amounts to a reverse colonialism and which if allowed to continue much longer will culminate in the genocide of all Western peoples, culturally, if not in the literal, physical sense of the term that the whites of Rhodesia and the Boers of South Africa have faced since the Communist takeovers brought about by the cowardice and treachery of Western governments determined to sacrifice these countries on the altar of anti-racism. I realize that it is extremely unpopular to express such sentiments but, to anyone who takes offence at this I refuse to apologize and say bluntly, that if you have a problem with what I have said, then it is you, not I, that has a problem, and I am not sorry in the least. Furthermore I scoff at the idea that there is anything at all "racist" in these sentiments. The word "racist" is a weapon rather than a unit of communication, it is designed to inspire anger, hatred and rage towards those against whom it is hurled, by imputing to them the motivation of an irrational desire to oppress and harm others because of their ethnic origin and/or skin colour. In reality, however, those who hold to the views expressed in this paragraph generally do so because we do not wish to see our countries torn apart by violent racial strife, and it is those who throw accusations of racism around liberally who wish to stir up ill will towards others. They are bullies and tyrants, who hide behind masks of "tolerance" and "compassion" and who deserve to be stripped of their guise of virtue and exposed for the thugs they really are.

My resolution for 2018, apart from seeing the publication of my finally completed book The High Tory: Essays On Classical Conservatism By a Patriotic Canadian, is the same as my resolution every other year, which is to grow even more out of sync with our increasingly corrupt times!

Happy New Year,
God Save the Queen!

Justin's Virtue-Signalling is Actually Vice-Signalling

So it appears there are things happening in the world other than Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un calling each other names and threatening to blow each other up. The American news has been dominated this week by a bizarre religious controversy that is dividing their country over whether it is ritually correct for people to kneel or stand while their national anthem is sung during a sacred Yankee ceremony that is called a "football game." Meanwhile, here in Canada, Justin Trudeau has been trying to divert our attention away from his vile speech to the United Nations last week expressing his hatred of the country whose government he leads and his scheme to bleed small business owners dry, by preening and grandstanding and virtue-signalling his supposed moral superiority to his political and ideological opponents on the matter of "women's rights."

There is a standing committee in the House of Commons that addresses the "Status of Women." This should not be confused with the Cabinet Ministry or the National Action Committee (a private lobby/activist group, albeit one that once was heavily funded by the government) of the same name although historically these all have their beginnings in the Pearson/Trudeau Liberal cultural revolution of the '60's and '70s and have been ideologically in sync with each other. The House committee is one whose chair, by established custom, is selected not by the governing party, but by Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, which at this time happens to be the Conservative Party of Canada. Accordingly, the new Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer nominated Rachael Harder, the MP representing Lethbridge to chair the committee. When this was announced on Tuesday, all the Liberal MPs on the committee walked out, along with the New Democrat members, and Trudeau immediately called a press conference in which he declared his support of those who walked out.

What was the reason for the walk out? Does Harder support the importing into Canada of cultures in which the genitals of young females are ritually mutilated or in which male relatives are encouraged to kill daughters and sisters that in their opinion have brought dishonour upon their family through promiscuity or dress that they see as being too provocative? No, it is the Liberals and NDP themselves who do that, who want to criminalize all criticism of such cultures, and who accuse anyone who disagrees with them of racism, xenophobia, and bigotry (and probably anti-Semitism and homophobia as well since in left-liberal usage these kind of words have a purely expletive function that has little to do with their literal meaning). The reason the progressives are having conniptions over Harder is because she is pro-life. She does not believe that women should have the right to murder their unborn babies.

The neoconservative press has subjected the MPs who walked out and the Prime Minister who supported them to much deserved criticism and ridicule. The Sun newspaper chain, for example, published an editorial entitled “Liberals Fail to Embrace Diversity of Opinion” which pointed out the hypocrisy of the Liberals who loudly proclaim their devotion and dedication to “diversity” but seem to have little regard for diversity of viewpoint in that they are notoriously intolerant of anyone who disagrees with them. The Grits deserve every word of this criticism which brings to mind the old quip of William F. Buckley Jr. about how liberals “claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” On this particular issue you might recall that a year and a half before the 2015 Dominion election Trudeau had announced that new candidates seeking the nomination of the Liberal Party would be required to give their full support to women’s “right” to murder their unborn babies. Not to be outdone in his support for the right of baby murder, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair declared that all NDP candidates, new and old, were required to vote the party line on this issue.

Yes, the Grits and their socialist doppelgangers, with their idolatrous cult of diversity on the one hand and their neo-Stalinist, ideological, party line on the other, are every bit the hypocrites the Sun editorial makes them out to be. There is other, far more important, criticism that deserves to be heard, but which sadly, you will never read in the pages of a mainstream Canadian publication. Neoconservatives, which is to say people who call themselves conservative but by this term mean “American classical liberal”, such as those who set the editorial policy for the Sun chain, are the only dissenters from the left-liberal ideological monolith that are tolerated in the mainstream Canadian media.

What really needs to be said is that the pro-life position is the only sane position and that anyone who believes that women have some sort of natural right to terminate their pregnancies that ought to be protected as a legal right is bat-shit crazy and ought not to be allowed into any position of authority, power, and influence or entrusted with any responsibility higher than that of sweeping the floors in an institution in which they are humanely kept for their own safety and that of society. No, in case you are wondering, my saying this does not make me guilty of the mirror image of the hypocrisy displayed by the Liberals and NDP. I don’t worship at the altar of diversity.

When a human sperm fertilizes a human egg a zygote is formed that is a) living and b) human, ergo, a human life. To deliberately take a human life is murder except in the following circumstances: when you are acting out of necessity in self-defence, when you are the state official entrusted with executing a sentence of death determined by a lawfully constituted court on someone found guilty of a capital crime, or when you are a soldier fighting for your country. None of these exceptions can possibly apply here and so the termination of the life of the unborn is murder. It should not be thought of as a medical procedure since it is in complete violation of everything the medical practice has traditionally stood for. It is a particularly odious form of murder in that it is done at the request of those who have a particular responsibility to love and cherish that life.

Those who defend it, rely entirely upon spurious, easily-refutable, arguments such as the hard cases argument about pregnancies that ensue from rape or incest, or those which endanger the life of the mother. Even if it were not the case – and it is – that such cases represent only a tiny percentage of the total number of terminated pregnancies each year, it is a well-established legal maxim that hard cases make bad law.

Even the real motivation behind the demand for legal abortion is ultimately a lie. Giving one sex the unilateral power of life and death over the next generation does not create “sexual equality.” Feminists accuse the traditional, patriarchal, family, of dehumanizing women but if anything does that it is this insane insistence on their supposed right to murder their children.

There is one other thing that really needs to be said about all of this and that is that a standing House committee – or a Ministry for that matter – devoted to the “Status of Women” sounds like something out of George Orwell’s 1984. The status of women – and of men for that matter – in any society, arises out of the way the sexes interact and relate to each other, primarily within the family, and it is best to allow it to evolve within the living tradition of a culture rather than to try and artificially engineer it. If you reflect for a moment on the slogan of the 1960s revival of feminism, “the personal is the political”, you will see that this is a recipe for totalitarianism. Which is why this is the sort of thing that belongs in a regime like the former Soviet Union, Red China, or North Korea and not in a free, parliamentary country of the British Commonwealth that is heir to the Common Law under the Crown.

The Senate Should Not Be Condemned For Doing Its Job Right

A couple of weeks ago Jim Warren, a Liberal strategist who worked for Dalton McGuinty in Ontario and who writes a weekly column for the neoconservative Sun newspaper chain explained why he has become a convert to Senate abolitionism. The Grits, over the last century, have been guilty of a great many crimes against the constitution that the Fathers of Confederation drew up for us in the Charlottetown, Quebec, and London Conferences, but unicameralism was not typically one of them. They left that to the socialists in the NDP. The neoconservatives in the Reform Party had advocated reforming the upper chamber to make it more like the American Senate – democratically elected, with each province being equally represented. The sin of the Grits, however, who have held power in the House of Commons more often than any other party, has ordinarily been to treat the seats in the Red Chamber as rewards for Liberal partisanship.

The Conservatives, who are the only other party to have ever formed a federal government, have succumbed to the same temptation when in office and five years ago the media decided to shine its spotlight on the dubious travel and expense claims made by a handful of Senators most of whom had been Conservative appointees. Far more heat than light was generated in the scandal that erupted and rather than just going after individual Senators for abusing their appointment and treating their seat as a means of personal enrichment instead of an office of public service, the media attacked the Conservative government that had appointed the Senators as if the Liberal Party, to which most members of the Canadian media are loyal sycophants, had a squeaky clean record of appointing only upright, honourable, disinterested, and dutiful individuals. Stephen Harper’s method of dealing with the scandal only added fuel to the flames. At any rate, in addition to the Conservative government, the media also made a target out of the Senate as an institution, mostly on the grounds of its being unelected, and there were loud calls for it to be done away with. Here again the media was being disingenuously selective in the facts it reported. Elected members of the House of Commons are no strangers to the temptation to abuse their expense accounts and enrich themselves at the expense of the public treasury. Indeed, I dare say the problem is much worse in the House than in the Senate.

Was it this scandal that drove Mr. Warren into his newfound belief in unicameralism?

No, he wrote that after that “I was prepared to give the Senate one last chance.”

What has happened since then to make him change his mind?

After a brief mention of the ongoing Senate inquiry into the harassment claims against former Senator Don Meredith he devoted several paragraphs to complaining about how the Senate had delayed the passing of Justin Trudeau’s budget bill. Then he wrote the following:

“Perhaps the straw that broke the camel’s back for me is the Senate delaying passage of Bill C-210. This is the private member’s bill of the late Mauril Belanger that changes the lyrics of O Canada to make them gender neutral.”

Now let us think about that for just a moment. Mr. Warren was “prepared to give the Senate one last chance” after the scandal in which Senators were accused of dishonestly claiming inflated housing and travel expenses against the taxpayer-funded public treasury but their delaying passage of a bill is the “straw that broke the camel’s back.” What that translates into is “I am willing to overlook it when you do your job badly, but I refuse to forgive you for doing your job right.”

If Bill C-210 were a bill authorizing the government to take some initiative that needed to happen immediately in order to save thousands of lives then this level of anger over its delay might be understandable. The bill is nothing of the sort. Ironically, Mr. Warren blames the delay of the bill on “pathetic partisan politics” in the Senate when the bill itself is nothing more than an example of playing games with a national symbol in a lame attempt to virtue signal to feminists, one of the interest groups in the Liberal Party’s support base. Think of all the other issues there are out there for Parliament to meddle with. There are probably at least a trillion more important than this one.

As for Justin Trudeau’s budget bill, we are talking about an omnibus bill of the sort that the Liberals complained about during the Harper years and claimed that they would do away with, containing a budget with a deficit close to $30 billion. This is not exactly the kind of legislation that deserves to be fast-tracked through Parliament.

Even if these bills were better and more important than they actually are, however, the Senate, in taking its time passing them, would merely be doing its job. Sir John A. MacDonald, a Father of Confederation and the first Prime Minister of Canada, said, when they were putting the constitution together, that the role of the Senate would be to provide a “sober second thought” to the decisions passed in the House. In other words its job would be to do precisely that which Mr. Warren is complaining about – slow down the passing of bills, by taking the time to think critically about them.

The Fathers of Confederation, in adapting the Westminster model of Parliament to the use of the new country they were building, knew and respected its history and traditions, and understood that the role of criticizing, objecting to, and slowing down legislation was just as important – indeed, more important – than the role of writing and passing legislation. Legislation that is quickly written and hastily passed is likely to be bad legislation. Furthermore, it is not good for the Prime Minister to get his way whenever he wants just because he commands a majority in the House.

This is why there are several hurdles that a government bill must pass before it can become law. It is not enough that it be written by a government that commands a majority in the elected House. It must be heard, and Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, traditionally the second largest party in the House, must be given the opportunity to scrutinize it, criticize it, raise objections to it, and basically hold the government accountable to the House and the people they were elected to represent. Having cleared that hurdle, it must then be heard by the Senate, who review it, and if necessary, recommend alterations or delay its passing. Anyone who thinks that this stage of review is unnecessary, needs to read the chapter of Eugene Forsey’s memoirs, A Life on the Fringe, in which he describes his years in the Senate, and all the poorly-written bad laws they had to deal with.

Mr. Warren appears to think that the Official Opposition is sufficient to hold the government accountable, but the Fathers of Confederation thought otherwise. Mr. Warren objects to an “unelected group of people” holding up government bills but, here too, his thought is miles removed from that of the Fathers of Confederation who deliberately built our country as a parliamentary monarchy. He does, however, reveal himself to be, with apologies to John Wayne, a “true Grit”, for the Liberal Party has never liked the roadblocks our parliamentary system places upon the Prime Minister, who as as head of the elected government is seen the voice of the will of the people, getting his way, and have sought to eliminate these obstacles wherever possible and to reduce the Crown, the Senate, and the elected House as a whole, to mere rubber stamps of the Prime Minister’s will.

Where Mr. Warren feels the Senate deserves condemnation, I insist that it deserves praise, and would suggest that if anything, the powers of the Senate to hold up the Prime Minister’s bills ought to be increased. The only thing that really, desperately, needs to be fixed with our Senate is that the Prime Minister controls the appointment process. For the Senate to truly provide the “sober second thought” that Sir John A. MacDonald envisioned, it needs to be independent of the Prime Minister who ought to surrender his right to advise the Crown on the appointment of Senators to some other group that is in no way beholden to the office of the Prime Minister – perhaps the provincial legislatures.

Captain Airhead Strikes Again!

It has been almost two years since a gullible Canadian electorate was duped into giving the Liberal Party a majority government in the last Dominion election. This means that that government, headed by Captain Airhead, is approaching the half-way point in its four year mandate. It has recently been reported that the Grits have passed less than half the legislation in that time than the previous Conservative government had. This is not surprising. The Prime Minister has been far too busy flying around the world, handing out money, and looking for photo-ops, all at the taxpayers’ expense, to actually do the job of governing the country. John Ibbitson, writing in the Globe and Mail, made the observation that “the amount of legislation a Parliament creates matters less than the quality of that legislation.” As true as that is, the quality of the bills the Trudeau Grits have passed is enough to make one wish that they had, the moment they were sworn in, called a term-length recess of Parliament and sent every member on a four-year paid Caribbean vacation.

One example of this is Bill C-16, which passed its third-reading in the Senate on Thursday, June 15th and which was signed into law by the Governor-General on Monday, June 19th. Bill C-16 is a bill which amends both the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code. To the former it adds “gender identity or expression” to the list of grounds of discrimination prohibited by the Act. To the latter it adds the same to Section 318, the “hate propaganda” clause of the Code. The Canadian Human Rights Act and Section 318 of the Criminal Code were both inflicted upon us by the present premier’s father in his long reign of terror and it would have been better had the present Parliament passed legislation striking both out of existence rather than amending them to increase the number of ways in which they can be used to persecute Canadians. When, a century and a half ago, the Fathers of Confederation put together the British North America Act which, coming into effect on July 1, 1867, established the Dominion of Canada as a new nation within what would soon develop into the British Commonwealth of Nations, their intention was to create a free country, whose citizens, English and French, as subjects of the Crown, would possess all the freedoms and the protection of all the rights that had accumulated to such in over a thousand years of legal evolution. The CHRA and Section 318 do not belong in such a country – they are more appropriate to totalitarian regimes like the former Soviet Union, Maoist China, and the Third Reich.

The CHRA, which Parliament passed in 1977 during the premiership of Pierre Trudeau, prohibits discrimination on a variety of grounds including race, religion, sex, and country of origin. It applies in a number of different areas with the provision of goods and services, facilities and accommodations, and employment being chief among them. Those charged with enforcing this legislation have generally operated according to an unwritten rule that it is only discrimination when whites, Christians, and males are the perpetrators rather than the victims, but even if that were not the case, the very idea of a law of this sort runs contrary to the basic principles of our traditional freedoms and system of justice. It dictates to employers, landlords, and several other people, what they can and cannot be thinking when conducting the everyday affairs of their business. It establishes a special police force and court – the Canadian Human Rights Commission and Tribunal respectively – to investigate and sit in judgement upon those private thoughts and prejudices. Those charged do not have the protection of the presumption of innocence because the CHRA is classified as civil rather than criminal law.

There are more protections for defendants under Section 318 because it is part of the Criminal Code but it is still a bad law. Incitement of criminal violence was already against the law long before Section 318 was added. It is not, therefore, the incitement of criminal violence per se that Section 318 was introduced to combat, for the existing laws were sufficient, but the thinking and verbal expression of thoughts that the Liberal Party has decided Canadians ought not to think and speak.

Bill C-16 takes these bad laws and makes them even worse. By adding “gender identity and expression” to the prohibited grounds of discrimination the Liberals are adding people who think and say that they belong to a gender that does not match up with their biological birth sex to the groups protected from discrimination. Now, ordinarily when people think they are something they are not, like, for example, the man who thinks he is Julius Caesar, we, if we are decent people, would say that this is grounds for pity and compassion, but we would not think of compelling others to go along with the delusion. Imagine a law that says that we have to regard a man who thinks he is Julius Caesar as actually being the Roman general! Such a law would be crazier than the man himself!

Bill C-16 is exactly that kind of law. Don’t be fooled by those who claim otherwise. The discrimination that trans activists, the Trudeau Liberals and their noise machine, i.e., the Canadian media, and everyone else who supports this bill, all want to see banned, is not just the refusing of jobs or apartments to transgender people but the refusal to accept as real a “gender identity” that does not match up with biological sex. Dr. Jordan Peterson, a professor at the University of Toronto who has been fighting this sort of nonsense at the provincial level for years, and who testified against the Bill before the Senate committee that reviewed it, has warned that it could lead to someone being charged with a “hate crime” for using the pronoun – “he” or “she” – that lines up with a person's birth sex, rather than some alternative pronoun made-up to designate that person’s “gender identity.” Supporters of the bill have mocked this assertion but we have seen this sort of thing before – progressives propose some sort of measure, someone points out that the measure will have this or that negative consequence, the progressives ridicule that person, and then, when the measure is passed and has precisely the negative consequences predicted, say that those negatively affected deserved it in the first place.

Indeed, progressive assurances that Peterson’s fears are unwarranted ring incredibly hollow when we consider that the Ontario Human Rights Commission has said that “refusing to refer to a trans person by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity” would be considered discrimination under a similar clause in Ontario’s provincial Human Rights Code, if it were to take place in a context where discrimination in general is prohibited, such as the workplace. Bruce Pardy, Professor of Law at Queen’s University, writing in the National Post, explains that this new expansion of human rights legislation goes way beyond previous “hate speech” laws in its infringement upon freedom of speech. “When speech is merely restricted, you can at least keep your thoughts to yourself,” Pardy writes, but “Compelled speech makes people say things with which they disagree.”

It is too much, perhaps, to expect Captain Airhead to understand or care about this. Like his father before him – and indeed, every Liberal Prime Minister going back to and including Mackenzie King – he has little to no appreciation of either the traditional freedoms that are part of Canada’s British heritage or the safeguards of those freedoms bequeathed us by the Fathers of Confederation in our parliamentary government under the Crown. For a century, Liberal governments have whittled away at every parliamentary obstacle to the absolute power of a Prime Minister backed by a House majority. The powers of the Crown, Senate, and the Opposition in the House to hold the Prime Minister and his Cabinet accountable have all been dangerously eroded in this manner. Last year the present government attempted to strip Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition of what few means it has left of delaying government legislation. The motion in question was withdrawn after the Prime Minister came under strong criticism for behaving like a spoiled, bullying, petty thug in the House but it revealed his character. These Opposition powers are a necessary safeguard against Prime Ministerial dictatorship but Captain Airhead, the son of an admirer of Stalin and Mao, regards them, like the freedoms they protect, as an unacceptable hindrance to his getting his way as fast as he possibly can. Years ago, George Grant wrote that the justices of the American Supreme Court in Roe v Wade had “used the language of North American liberalism to say yes to the very core of fascist thought - the triumph of the will.” This is also the modus operandi of Captain Airhead and the Liberal Party of Canada.