The Year of Platinum Jubilee

 

The Lord’s Day this week, the last Sunday in Epiphanytide by the old Kalendar, was the sixth of February in the civil calendar, and the seventieth anniversary of the death of King George VI and the accession of his daughter Queen Elizabeth II to the throne.  She had already surpassed Queen Victoria to become the longest reigning monarch in the entire history of the British Crown, its English and Scottish predecessors, and thus it goes without saying in the history of the Canadian Crown and the Crowns of the other Commonwealth Realms.   This marks yet another milestone as she has become the first monarch to attain a Platinum Jubilee.     Congratulations to Her Majesty!   Long may her reign over us continue to last!

 

As might be expected, the best remarks on the occasion from one of Her Majesty’s Canadian subjects were those of David Warren, the former Ottawa Citizen columnist and former editor of The Idler, who was years ago driven out of polite journalism after its complete and total takeover by the forces of what is now called “wokeness”.   He wrote:

 

Her subjects are blessed, and have for so long been blessed, with a fine and adequate ruler. She has seen them through an incomparable ring of years and changes.

 

Not every nation of the British heritage deserves such a monarch, and indeed many have broken the royal connexion in displays of tawdry narcissism. Members of her own family have also failed her, and the governments over which she has presided have been a constant source of embarrassment. Yet Her Majesty, and the late beloved Prince Philip, have borne all these modern indignities with grace and extraordinary patience.

 

Amen!   As there is little if anything that could be said to add to such remarks I shall move on to address a question that has risen in connection with the occasion.   There has been some discussion about how to mark and celebrate the anniversary   Stephen K. Roney addressed this early last month:

 

And what has Canada planned to mark this epochal event? Apparently, an ice sculpture on Sparks Street Mall for Ottawa’s Winterlude. 

 

That almost sounds like an insult. As though her reign was written on water.

 

We can do better. Moreover, if the spring and summer of 2022 marks the end of a dread pandemic, we could all use a big party.

 

The federal government may have no time for the Queen, but it she is popular in much of Canada―in large part because the monarchy is the one thing that, historically, distinguishes us from the USA.

 

Although this was not my reason for quoting Roney, the last line deserves emphasis.   The monarchy is what has historically distinguished Canada from the USA.  Lefties in recent years would have us believe that it is our welfare state and especially our “single payer” health care system.   The former, however, was established in imitation of American innovations (in the late 1930s the Canadian government brought in a social security net in imitation of FDR’s “New Deal” in the USA, in the l960’s and 1970s, they expanded it in imitation of LBJ’s “Great Society”).   The latter, a system inferior to both the pre-Obamacare American system and the public system with free private competition of the UK and the Scandinavian countries, ought to be our national embarrassment, is too recent to historically distinguish us from the USA, and could eventually be adopted by the USA.    The monarchy is also what has historically united Canadians.   It is the single element of the Canadian heritage that unites the three traditional and historical Canadas.   English Canada was born out of the United Empire Loyalists.   French Canada remained loyal because the Crown had guaranteed its language, religion, and culture on the eve of the American Revolution.   The Crown is the other signatory in each of the Indian treaties.    It is very appropriate, therefore, that new Canadians have to swear an oath of loyalty to the Queen and her heirs to become Canadian citizens.  By doing so, they are joined to the historical, traditional, Canada by her one unifying factor, a factor the place of which cannot be taken by anything else.

Mr. Roney is right that an ice sculpture is an insufficient tribute.

 

My own humble suggestion is that Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee be celebrated with a new edition of a book that was first published early in her reign and which has been out of print for years.   The book I refer to is Freedom Wears a Crown.   Its author was John C. Farthing, the son of the Right Rev. John Cragg Farthing who served as the Anglican Bishop of Montreal from 1909 to 1939 (this is not a case of senior and junior – the son’s middle initial stood for Colborne).   Farthing was an academic man, who studied first at McGill – interrupting his studies there to fight in the First World War - then at New College, Oxford, before returning to McGill as faculty to lecture in the Political Science and Economics department chaired by Stephen Leacock.    Later, after a ten-year hiatus from academe spent in philosophical reflection, he would teach younger scholars at the Bishop’s College prep school in Quebec.  

 

Farthing began writing the work for which he would be remembered at a time when the world had been radically shaken up by the two World Wars and had realigned itself into two camps of nations – the one led by the United States of America, the other by the Soviet Union – which were engaged in what James Burnham called a “Struggle for the World”.   This conflict is known as the Cold War because the nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers – a legacy of the Second World War – made a direct “hot war” between them an unthinkable option.   This was the world situation when the young Elizabeth acceded the throne, and the situation to which Farthing spoke.   The two sides of the conflict represented rival political and economic ideals.   The United States represented capitalist republicanism, the Soviet Union represented socialist totalitarian democracy.   Farthing in his book reminded Canada – and the other realms of the British family of nations – that her and their heritage was an alternative to these.   It was also, he argued, a superior alternative to these, because it was not drawn up on paper by some armchair philosopher or political scientist, but had emerged naturally and organically, from the thousands of years of human experience and wisdom that had forged and tested it.    This heritage was that of the Westminster System of Sovereign Crown-in-Parliament.

 

Farthing did more than just argue that the Westminster System was better at guaranteeing personal freedom – he distinguished between this and “individual liberty” - than American capitalist republicanism and better at securing the common good than the Soviet system.   He also discussed in detail how this heritage had been threatened in the famous constitutional crisis known as the King-Byng Affair of almost a century ago.   It was not, however, as students who are taught what Donald Creighton dubbed the “Authorized Version” – the Liberal theory of Canadian history – learn, the Governor General, Lord Byng whose actions posed the threat, but those of Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King.   King had asked the Governor General to dissolve Parliament at a time when it had taken a recess before voting on whether to censure his less than a year old government because of a corruption scandal.    By refusing, the Governor General exercised in his vice-regal capacity the reserve powers of the Crown to prevent the Prime Minister from evading his accountability to Parliament.    The Governor General reminded King that he had remained in office after the last Dominion election under unusual circumstances – he had not won the plurality of seats, that had gone to Arthur Meighan’s Conservatives, but with the additional support of the Progressives, had been allowed to continue in government on the stipulation that Parliament would not be dissolved until after Meighan had been given a chance to form an alternative government.   King resigned, Meighan was given the chance, his government was immediately brought down in a confidence vote, automatically dissolving Parliament, and in the ensuing Dominion election King lied to the Canadian public, presenting himself as the champion of Canadian sovereignty over her domestic affairs, and the Governor General as having acted inappropriately and at the behest of the Imperial government in London.   In fact, as King’s letter of resignation to Byng demonstrates, King had asked Byng to consult with London before making his decision and had been told that there was no need because his constitutional duty was clear – a Prime Minister was not to be granted a dissolution under such circumstances.   The Canadian public accepted King’s story, however, and returned him a majority government.   By his success in deceiving the public, Farthing argued, King and his Liberals had undermined in practice the Crown’s reserve powers, and in doing so had undermined the accountability of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet to both Crown and Parliament, a dangerous step towards the subversion of the Westminster System and the turning of Prime Minister in Cabinet into a form of elected dictatorship.   Farthing’s understanding of this historical event – that Lord Byng was in the right and Mackenzie King in the wrong - is clearly borne out against the “Authorized Version” by the historical paperwork, as noted above.   It had previously been championed by Eugene Forsey, who had studied at McGill with Farthing under Leacock, and joined the latter’s department as faculty the year that Farthing departed, in his doctoral dissertation which was published in 1943 under the title The Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament in the British Commonwealth, another book that might be considered for re-issue in honour of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.   Farthing’s interpretation of the larger significance over the event has been borne out by subsequent history in which Prime Ministers – especially Liberal Prime Ministers, and especially Liberal Prime Ministers from the far left of the Liberal Party, whether it be the Marxist far left of the ‘60s and ‘70s, or the “woke” far left of today – have tended to treat their office as that of an elected dictator. 

 

When Farthing died in 1954, two years into the reign of Her Majesty, his manuscript required editing.   His friend Judith Robinson, a well-known Toronto investigative journalist and author during the middle decades of the Twentieth Century, polished off the manuscript which was published in 1957 by Toronto’s Kingswood House.

 

Farthing’s book has been out of print for quite some time and younger generations of Canadians are largely unfamiliar with the case for why the institution of monarchy is the most important symbol of our freedom.   Freedom stands and falls with traditional institutions, especially monarchy.   The freest countries in history, with one or two exceptions, have been monarchies.   Totalitarian police states have been republics.   Farthing’s book was a great contribution to the explanation of why this is the case. What better time to bring out a new edition of his book than now, when we are celebrating a record-setting milestone in Her Majesty’s reign at the end of two years of suffering under a particularly arrogant elected dictatorship of the type he warned us about, one that has treated our constitutionally protected freedoms as if they were the Prime Minister’s to take away from us as he sees fit?   Had our elected leaders – Prime Minister and provincial premiers – and their health officers, followed the example of Her Majesty in her address to the Commonwealth of almost two years ago and adopted the tone she set – one of encouragement, endurance, and sympathy – instead of the tone of scolding, nagging, bossing, bullying, condescending and scapegoating they have employed for the last two years – they would not be facing the protest demonstrations from fed-up truckers and other Canadians all across the Dominion that we have been seeing for the past two weeks.  

 

Happy anniversary Your Majesty!

God Save the Queen!

One Victory Against the Encroaching Totalitarianism

If anyone was under the impression that my harsh, negative, assessment of our civil leadership’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic in my last essay was overblown, they need only look at the dirty trick the Liberals tried to pull this week. Parliament, which adjourned on March 13th until Hitler’s birthday - draw your own conclusions, was temporarily called back on Tuesday to vote on an emergency spending bill. The problem was not the $82 billion that the government was seeking permission to spend. The problem was that the bill, as originally drafted, included several provisions that would give them the power to increase spending and taxation without submitting the increases to Parliament for a vote.

Perhaps they thought that the panic that the media – which in Canada is almost monolithically the mouthpiece of the Liberal Party – has generated would be sufficient for them to get away with this. Or possibly they thought that all of their efforts over decades to get Canadians to devalue the traditions and institutions we inherited from Britain and to forget the history and significance of those traditions and institutions had finally paid off, and that we would be willing to let them overturn the Magna Carta and the very foundation of Parliamentary government and our Common Law liberties.

Mercifully, it appears they were wrong. Tuesday morning it was reported that Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition were doing their job and firmly standing up for our traditional, constitutional, limits on government powers and that in the face of this staunch defence, the Liberals had backed down from their proposed power grab. Which is grounds for hope in these troubling times. The spirit of liberty has not yet been entirely crushed within us.

Later in the day, it was clarified that the tax powers were all that the Liberals had removed from the bill and that they were still pushing for the spending and borrowing powers. The Tories dug in in their opposition to these as well. The parties entered into negotiations but the day ended without the House being called upon to vote. This Wednesday morning - the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary - it was announced that the Liberals had dropped all the provisions for extended powers from the bill, which as an emergency spending bill has just passed the House, and will undoubtedly clear the Senate and receive Royal assent within a day or two.

I have been very critical of Andrew Scheer’s past performance as Opposition Leader and his bumbling in the last election but now, when it counts the most, it looks like he has come through for Canadians. Andrew Cohen, writing for the Ottawa Citizen, has praised the Prime Minister’s performance in this crisis saying “This has been his finest hour.” I beg to disagree. This – not the Kokanee Grope, not the costume party in India, not the Blackface/Brownface Scandal, not the SNC Lavalin Affair – has been Justin Trudeau, revealed at his worst – an opportunistic, tyrant, who has tried to take advantage of a global health crisis to attack the foundations of our constitution and expand his own powers. This is Andrew Scheer’s finest hour, not Justin Trudeau’s.

I am under no illusions that the majority of my countrymen see it my way rather than Cohen’s. Canadians have been far too apathetic for far too long towards the riches of our inheritance in the Common Law and the Westminster System of Parliament. It is almost one hundred years since the famous incident when Lord Byng, Governor General of Canada, exercised the reserve powers of the Crown and refused Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s request for a dissolution of Parliament. King, who had been allowed to form a government despite not having won the plurality in the House, wanted the dissolution to save his own bacon because he faced an imminent censure in Parliament over a corruption scandal. Lord Byng’s refusal was an entirely appropriate use of the Crown’s powers to protect Parliament’s right to hold the government accountable, as such champions of our constitution as John Farthing and Eugene Forsey demonstrated in their books on the subject. In the next Dominion election, however, the Canadian electorate bought King’s execrable lies about the matter hook, line, and sinker and awarded him a majority government.

That the government’s first thoughts with regards to dealing with this crisis were that they need to expand their powers beyond what the constitution allows them is itself sufficient evidence that they do not deserve to be trusted with such powers.

The approach they have been taking to the COVID-19 pandemic is further grounds not to trust them. Remember that this is a virus which in over eighty percent of the cases we know about has produced no symptoms to moderate symptoms. The actual percentage of those who have contracted the virus of whom this is true is probably closer to 99.99%. Most people who are asymptomatic would not have been tested unless they were in a situation where they were known to have been exposed to the virus. Thus, an approach to containing the disease which focuses on protecting those most vulnerable to experience it at its worst rather than protecting us all by shutting everything down and forcing us all into isolation makes the most sense. Countries that have aggressively pursued such an approach have succeeded in containing the spread of the disease without going into extreme shut down mode. Ironically, the countries which Mr. Cohen lists in the second paragraph of his column have all followed this approach, unlike Italy and the United States whose mishandling of the crisis he decries, despite the fact that they are following the same kind of approach, albeit with varying degrees of severity, as our own government.

The model which Mr. Trudeau is following is that of advising – and probably eventually compelling – all Canadians to stay at home, away from the threat of contagion, and also from the sun and fresh air which are man’s most important natural allies in the fight against disease. This involves shutting down all “non-essential” businesses and promising that the government will take care of the huge segment of the workforce which now finds itself unemployed. Since government is not a wealth generating institution – despite sometimes having delusions to the contrary – this means that the burden it is taking upon itself must fall upon the only part of the private economy that remains open – the “essential” businesses that provide food and other necessities, putting a strain on these which will, if this lasts for any lengthy period of time, cause them to fail. This would result in far more deaths than the collapse of the medical system that Mr. Trudeau is trying to avoid by the long-term strategy of slowing the spread of the virus and pushing its peak into the future ever would. The modern economy is the way in which we have avoided the Malthusian consequences of our population size. Anybody who is not an idiot knows this. “Lives are more important than the economy” is a lie concealed behind a moral truism. Destroy the economy, and you destroy the lives that it sustains. The Holodomor of almost ninety years ago is an historical example of how a regime used that principle to destroy lives deliberately with malice aforethought. If the Trudeau Liberals accomplish the same it will be primarily through stupidity.

Nor is shrinking the economy to the point where it cannot possibly feed our population and so causing the deaths of masses by starvation the only way in which the model the Trudeau government is pursuing could produce disastrous results. As unemployment skyrockets, suicide rates are likely to rise as well. Furthermore, if “extreme social distancing” is kept in place for as long as the Liberals are saying is necessary – months rather than weeks – there will be a general breakdown in psychological and emotional health. Human beings are social creatures. They are not meant to live apart from each other. Force them to live contrary to their nature for a lengthy period of time and they will start to go bonkers. This too would contribute to a rise in suicide rates as well as other dangerous and destructive behaviour.

Furthermore, just as an extended shut down will rapidly burn up accumulated material capital, so an extensive period of “extreme social distancing” will burn up social capital – the trust between members of a community and society that enables them to function in a civilized way and cooperate for their own common good. The only kind of government that would want to destroy that is a totalitarian government that hates and persecutes all social interaction that is not under its direct planning and control, which demands the total undivided allegiance of its citizens, and which fears any and all rivals for its peoples’ loyalty, trust, and affection.

Those who would rather not live under that kind of a government, who still value our constitution in which Queen-in-Parliament and not Prime Minister-in-Cabinet is sovereign, and our Common Law rights and freedoms won a victory today. Let us practice eternal vigilance and pray that it is not short-lived.