Monarchy and the Transcendence of Politics

 

His Majesty King Charles III acceded to the throne of the United Kingdom and his other Commonwealth Realms including the Dominion of Canada the moment his mother, our late Queen Elizabeth II, passed from this life on Thursday, 8 September.   The formal proclamations of the accession began to take place on Saturday, 10 September.   Although there were also proclamations in Wales, Scotland, and North Ireland the formal proclamation on behalf of the entire United Kingdom took place at St. James’ Palace in London.   Similarly, while there were provincial proclamations as well, the formal proclamation on behalf of the Dominion of Canada took place at Rideau Hall in Ottawa on Saturday, 10 September.  

 

Although these proclamations were, of course, ceremonies of state, they were not political in the common sense of the word.   While the term “politics” is derived from the Greek word for city and state and thus can mean something along the lines of “statecraft” in everyday English we employ it in reference to the process of competing for the power of elected office by flattering the electorate, making empty promises and vain boasts, defaming your competitor(s) and demonizing factions other than your own.   Mercifully, the institution of the monarchy is not political in this sense.   The office of Sovereign is filled by hereditary right and the moment the previous Sovereign dies the next heir in the line of succession accedes to the throne.   Thus the king or queen can be a symbol of unity in a way that no elected head of state could ever be.   It is very appropriate, therefore, that on this occasion, while office-holding politicians were present and had to sign the proclamations, it was generally non-political figures, usually historians or similar such scholars associated with the realm’s college of arms, who had the duty of reading out the proclamation.   In the United Kingdom this was the Garter Principle King of Arms, David White.   In the Dominion of Canada it was the Chief Herald of Canada, Samy Khalid.

 

It so happens that on the day of the proclamation another event took place in the Dominion of Canada which by contrast was very political indeed.   This was the convention in which the Conservative Party of Canada chose their new leader.     Father Raymond J. De Souza, in a column for the National Post a couple of weeks ago criticized both the Conservatives for not post-postponing the convention or at the very least announcing the result “without fanfare” and the Prime Minister for the partisan rant he gave the following Monday in the guise of congratulating the new leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.   I wholeheartedly agreed with Father De Souza that partisan politics of this sort ought to have been put on hold until at least after the interment of Her Late Majesty and in that spirit have refrained from commenting on the new Conservative leadership until now.

 

In our constitution, the principal body of government under the reigning Sovereign is Parliament, a bicameral legislature, the lower chamber of which, the House of Commons, is filled with Members chosen to represent local constituencies by popular election.   By custom, the person with the largest amount of support in the House of Commons is invited to become His Majesty’s Prime Minister and to select from his associates those who with him will join His Majesty’s Privy Council as the Cabinet, the committee within the Privy Council charged with the day-to-day administrative work of government and thus conventionally referred to as “the government”.  If you are going to have this kind of government, then you have to accept alongside it the necessary evil of politics in the sense described a few paragraphs ago and the inevitable companion of this kind of politics which is partisanship, the division of the legislative assembly and the electorate it represents into competing factions.    While politics and partisanship are undoubtedly evils, they are far lesser evils than that which occurs when a single faction eliminates its competitors and establishes a one-party, totalitarian, state.   This was a major lesson of the first half of the last century.   Therefore we put up with the nonsense that is this kind of partisan politics and thank God that in the time-tested ancient institution that is our traditional hereditary monarchy we have a symbol of order, unity, and continuity that transcends the political.   Only a complete dolt, a total doofus,  a hopeless sniveling moron would wish that it were otherwise.

 

While political parties claim to disagree about all sorts of different ideas and issues, on one matter they are all remarkably alike in their thinking.   Each believes that the country would be better off if they, the party in question, were the ones governing it.  This is what each party is ultimately trying to convince the Canadian electorate to agree with them about in every Dominion election.    Ultimately, for each political party, their ideas, positions, and policies with regards to specific issues are subservient to the idea that they ought to be the ones in power.   This is the reason why parties often jettison ideas and positions that they once treated as sacred principles.   They, that is the parties, feel that they, that is the ideas and positions, have become a hindrance to their attaining the power they covet.   Since the willingness to sacrifice principle for ambition is ordinarily regarded as being an indicator of bad character rather than good character this can be viewed from one angle as speaking very poorly about the corrupting effect partisan politics has on its participants.   The other angle that needs to be considered, however, is that if this were not the case, and every party was made up of inflexible ideologues rather than pragmatic compromisers, this would hardly be preferable to things as they currently stand.   It would make things more interesting, certainly, but in a way that is much worse rather than much better.

 

The new leader of the Conservative Party, which is currently His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, the party with the second most seats in the House of Commons on which the task of holding the governing party accountable to Parliament chiefly falls, was chosen by the membership of the party at the aforementioned, ought-to-have-been-postponed, convention.   In passing, let me say that I very much dislike this method of party’s selling memberships to people who then choose the party leader in convention.   The older method, in which the leader was chosen by the party caucus, that is to say, the Members of Parliament who belong to the party, was much better.  The party leader’s veto over local riding associations as to who runs as the party’s candidate in the constituency, an innovation introduced by Pierre Trudeau in the 1970s, ought also to be scrapped.  Returning the final say in candidacy to the local riding associations, and the final say in leadership to the caucus, would have the effect of making the leaders accountable to the parties they lead rather than near-dictators within their parties.   Allowing the party leader to act like a dictator within his own party makes him all the more likely to act like a dictator to the whole country should he become Prime Minister.   These reforms, both of which involve returning to an older, better, way of doing things, are the electoral reforms needed, not proportional representation, which would be the way to attain the undesirable goal of a Parliament filled with parties of inflexible ideologues discussed at the end of the previous paragraph, nor lowering the voting age, which if anything ought to be raised.   All that having been said, it was by membership convention that the new Conservative leader was chosen.

 

Pierre Poilievre, the Member of Parliament for Carleton, had been ahead throughout the leadership race, and so it came as little surprise that he won.   He owes his victory to two broad waves of opinion.  One of these is within the members and supporters of the Conservative Party and is the opinion that the party’s leadership in recent years – basically since they left office in 2015 – has shown far too much of that tendency discussed a couple of paragraphs ago, to sacrifice principle for ambition, and without achieving the intended end as they lost two consecutive Dominion elections that ought, by all rights, to have been easy wins.   The other wave is not confined to Conservative supporters but is the growing sentiment among Canadians that the present Prime Minister has been in office far too long, is haughty and arrogant and completely out of touch with the country he governs, has made life unaffordable and miserable for a large segment of the Canadian population and is continuing to do so and by all indications will keep on doing so in the future, has divided Canadians and turned them against each other,  has been hopelessly corrupt and abusive of government power and that he needs to go, preferably yesterday.   Poilievre’s performance as a critic of the government in the Shadow Cabinet for the last seven years, which was better than that of most of his colleagues and any other of the candidates for leader, combined with these waves of thought to make him the natural choice for the next Conservative leader.

 

The qualities of Poilievre that brought him enough support to win the Conservative leadership on the first ballot are such that it is fairly safe to say that he will do an excellent job in his current role of leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.   The question that only time will answer is whether these same qualities will translate into the ability to lead his party to victory in the next Dominion election and the ability to govern the country well as Prime Minister should he do so.  

 

I hope that the answer to both parts of that question proves to be yes.   It is not so much that I am anxious to see the Conservative Party in government again.   It is rather than I very much share the sentiment expressed in a recently trending hashtag that the present Prime Minister needs to go.     The last time that the Conservatives were in government they angered me so much by passing a bill giving government agencies enhanced powers to spy on Canadians, a bill which had no support in Parliament outside the Conservatives except from the current governing party, that I vowed never to vote for them again unless they majorly adjusted their attitude and leadership.    While I call myself a Tory I do not use the word in the obvious partisan sense of the present day, or even in the sense of what is usually meant by “small c conservative”, i.e., someone holding views on political, fiscal, economic, social, cultural, moral and religious matters that correspond to those that are ordinarily thought of as right-of-centre although I happen to be that as well, but rather to mean someone who believes in and supports the institutions, spiritual and temporal, that survive as our living connection to the Christian civilization that preceded the Modern and liberal and through that civilization to the ancient world, which meaning accords well with the definition famously provided by Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary.   I would recognize a churchman and monarchist whose views on government spending, taxation, economics, etc. are mostly if not all diametrically opposed to my own – F. D. Maurice, the Anglican priest who was one of the founders of the Christian Socialist movement in the Victorian era is an example that comes to mind – as a fellow Tory, far sooner than I would a republican like Lorne Gunter whose views on such matters are much closer to my own.   

 

With that thought we return full circle to where we started this essay and I shall close by reiterating the point that we are blessed to have in our traditional monarchy an institution at the head of our state that transcends the chaos of the perpetual struggle for power that is partisan politics and represents stability, continuity, and order.  

 

God save the King!

Pallister is Under Attack for All the Wrong Reasons

I don’t like Brian Pallister who is the premier of my province, Manitoba, very much.   Oh, I was very glad to see him replace Greg Selinger in that office, voted for the Progressive Conservative party which he leads in the last two provincial elections, and even congratulated him in person on his re-election, but I was never particularly enthusiastic about his leadership qualities.    In March of last year, I lost most of my respect for the man when he locked down the province harder than almost anywhere else in Canada before the bat flu had even really arrived here and did so by holding a press conference in which he arrogantly rubbed the heavy-handedness of his approach in all of our faces.  In the year and a half since then, he has whittled away at what little of that respect remained by such behaviour as scapegoating ordinary Manitobans for the failure of the dictatorial public health orders of his power-mad public health mandarin Brent Roussin, setting up a snitch line and encouraging Manitobans to spy on their friends, family, and neighbours and rat them out for violations of these petty public health orders, showing complete and utter disregard for constitutional protections of Manitobans’ basic freedoms and rights, blasphemously raising himself to the level of God by adding an eleventh commandment to the Decalogue, and, most recently, using the means of bribery and blackmail to coerce Manitobans to give up their right to not be medicated against their freely given, informed, consent.

 

I have expressed my present attitude towards the premier in the following lines of verse:

 

Brian Pallister is an ignorant fool!

He’s a stupid, ugly, loser and he smells bad too!

His one and only virtue,

I hate to say it but it’s true,

His one and only virtue is –

He’s not Wab Kinew!

 

That having been said, Pallister has come under heavy attack this month for reasons that have nothing to do with the draconian way in which ran roughshod over all our rights and freedoms in order to swat the bat flu bug.   On Dominion Day an angry, lawless, mob descended upon the grounds of the provincial legislature here in Winnipeg.   The mob was not angrily demanding the restoration of our rights and freedoms and small businesses and social lives.   They were mad, in both senses of the word, because for the month previous far left activists masquerading as journalists, that is to say, most of the mainstream media in Canada, had been using the discovery of graves that are currently without markers near former Indian Residential Schools to defame Canada, her founders and historical leaders, the Christian religion and especially the Roman Catholic Church, and white people in general, in a most vile and disgusting manner.    The mob vandalized and tore down the large statue of Queen Victoria that had stood in front of the legislature as well as a smaller statue of Queen Elizabeth II that had stood near the Lieutenant Governor’s residence.   Since Queen Victoria was the queen who signed the bill that established Canada as a country, Queen Elizabeth II is the present reigning monarch and this was done on the country’s anniversary this was an obvious assault on the very idea of Canada herself.

 

Pallister, quite rightly, expressed his “disgust and disappointment” at these actions, condemning them both at the time and in a press conference the following Wednesday.   At the latter he said that the statues would be restored.   He also said, with regards to the early settlers of Canada “the people came here to this country, before it was a country and since, didn’t come here to destroy anything, they came here to build, they came to build better and build they did.   They built farms and they built businesses, they built communities and churches too.   They built these things for themselves and one another and they built them with dedication and with pride and so we must dedicate ourselves to building yet again”.  This is what his enemies wish to crucify him for saying.  Much to his credit, he has so far stood by his remarks.

 

In these comments Pallister depicted those who settled here and built what became the country Canada as having been human beings rather than devils.   This is what the far left finds so unforgiveable.  The fundamental essence of the political left, its sine qua non, is the envious hatred of those who build, especially those who have built in the past those things we enjoy and benefit from as a legacy in the present, which envious hatred manifests itself as efforts to tear down and destroy.    They have to think of the builders of the past as devils in order to avoid the suspicion that they themselves are such.

 

The media, which everywhere but perhaps especially in Canada is largely synonymous with the political left, has framed the controversy which it has itself generated over Pallister’s remarks in racial and ethnic terms.   What is implied, or in some cases practically stated outright, in all the criticism and condemnation of Pallister’s words, is that speaking positively of the European, Christian, settlers who came to what is now Canada over the last four to five centuries and of their accomplishments rather than demonizing them is insensitive and offensive to Native Indian Canadians.   We are essentially being told that our country, her history, and her founders and historical figures from the early settlers through the Fathers of Confederation to the present day, must only be spoken of in terms of shame, that everything we have historically celebrated about our country must be forgotten, and that we must instead forever be beating ourselves up over the Indian Residential Schools.   Should there be anyone left in Canada still capable of thinking at the level of an adult, such a person must surely recognize that it is this attitude on the part of the progressive media rather than Pallister’s speech that is truly demeaning to the Natives as it treats them as thin-skinned bigots who cannot hear anyone other than themselves spoken of positively without taking it as an insult to themselves.   It also suggests that they are incapable of telling when the left is cynically exploiting their suffering for its own interests.  The attack on the symbols of the monarchy serves the cause of the left since republicanism, whatever J. J. McCullough, Anthony Furey, Spencer Fernando, Lorne Gunter, and the average American “conservative” may think to the contrary, is essentially left-wing, but it is difficult to see how an attack on the only Canadian symbol that unites all Canadians – aboriginal, English, French, and newer immigrants – could genuinely serve the interests of Native people. (1)

 

I will note here, for whatever it is worth, that on the day of Pallister’s press conference, the first attack on his words that I came across was on the local CBC.    The segment, which was formatted as a news report although it was in reality an editorial, was by a well-known local reporter and featured as an “expert” a man on the faculty of the University of Manitoba who was described, amusingly in my opinion, as a historian.   Both men are notorious for their left wing views, both are lily white, and both have British-Scandanavian family names.   The following day both the Association of Manitoba Chiefs and the Southern Chiefs Organization issued press releases condemning Pallister and his remarks which it would probably have been fairer to these organizations to not have mentioned as the bigoted and ill-informed terms in which they are written do them no credit whatsoever, but white leftists appear to have been the ones that got the ball rolling on this anti-Pallister campaign.

 

That ball has been picking up speed ever since.   Helping it along have been a number of defections from Pallister’s Cabinet and staff, starting with the resignation of Eileen Clarke who had been Minister of Indigenous and Municipal Relations.   The portfolio was then given to Alan Lagimodiere, the Member of the Legislative Assembly for Selkirk.  Although Lagimodiere is Metis, his appointment has not exactly improved the situation for Pallister as he began his opening speech in this office by saying that those who established the Residential Schools “thought they were doing the right thing”.   This is, as Colby Cosh has pointed out, “a flat factual truth”.   Obviously, a great many Canadians today are of the opinion that they were not doing the right thing.   Ordinarily, when people in one era do something that they think is right and people of a later era, with the benefit of hindsight, conclude that what was done was actually wrong, the latter do not refuse to credit the former for the sincerity of their intentions.   In this case, however, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has so poisoned the well of discussion with its interpretation of the schools as a “cultural genocide”, a vile expression which is a dishonest, morally outrageous, Marxist trick by which cultural assimilation, whatever one might think about it, is treated as if it were the equivalent of mass murder, which it is not, that it is impossible to speak the truth Lagimodiere spoke without provoking an irrational, emotion-driven, backlash.     Needless to say, matters have not been helped by the mainstream media’s having, in what constitutes criminal incitement that has spawned a massive wave of hate crimes, spun the discovery of graves lacking markers near the former Indian Residential Schools into a malicious blood libel against our country and her churches.   Lagimodiere was quickly interrupted by Wab Kinew, the present leader of the provincial socialists who ever since taking over that role from Selinger has been making his predecessor look better by comparison, a rather difficult undertaking indeed.     My personal opinion of Kinew you can probably deduce from the verse about Pallister above.  Kinew, applying the current left wing dogma that nothing positive must ever be said about the Residential Schools and those who established and ran them, a dogma which if applied retroactively would condemn even Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner Murray Sinclair, told Lagimodiere that he could not do the job to which he had appointed while thinking the way he does.

 

Since then, there have been more resignations, more condemnations and ultimatums from the chiefs, and more calls from the progressive media for Pallister to step down.

 

If only all of this were in response to what he has done wrong – suspending our constitutional rights and freedoms, treating in-person social interaction which is both bonum in se and absolutely essential to our wellbeing as if it were a crime, destroying small local businesses, declaring religion and worship to be non-essential but places that peddle mind-destroying , highly addictive, substances to be essential, basically turning the province into a police state for a year and a half, and holding normal life ransom in order to bully us all into accepting a medical treatment whether we have made informed decisions as to whether the benefits sufficiently outweigh the risks or not – rather than to what he has done right – refusing to go along with the wholesale demonization of Canada, her European Christian settlers, and her historical founders and leaders, by the left which can only ever tear down and never build up, the media that is so totally in its thrall, and those Native leaders who have shortsightedly joined forces with the left.

 

(1)   English Canada grew out of the United Empire Loyalists who parted ways with the Americans by declaring their loyalty to the monarchy when the Americans rebelled and became republicans.  It was the Crown’s guarantee of protection of French culture, civil law, language and the Roman Catholic religion in Quebec following the Seven Year’s War that preserved French Canadian identity and kept French Canada loyal during the American revolution and down through Confederation in which all the French Canadian Fathers joined the English Fathers in unanimous support for making the new country a parliamentary monarchy rather than a republic.  The Crown is the other signatory to the Indian treaties – Queen Victoria, whose statue was so insultingly treated by the left wing mob, was the reigning monarch when most of these treaties were made.   All new comers to Canada from whatever other country and background have sworn loyalty to the monarch and her heirs to become citizens.  Therefore the monarchy is the one and only national symbol that belongs to all Canadians, albeit in different ways, and thus unites them.    To attack this symbol as a symbol of “imperialism” and “colonialism” in the derogatory sense which Marxists attach to these words is to insult all Canadians of all races, religions, and languages.

Lorne Gunter and the Pod People

I think that perhaps one of the pod people from Don Siegel’s 1956 The Invasion of the Body Snatchers has replaced Sun Media’s Lorne Gunter. That is the only way I can make sense out of his November 12th column, arguing that Sportsnet was right to fire Don Cherry.

“As much as it pains me to say”, Gunter wrote, “I think Sportsnet was right to dump the long-time namesake of Coach’s Corner on Hockey Night in Canada.” Nota bene, Gunter did not say “had the right to” but “was right to.” Gunter is not merely defending Sportsnet’s right as an employer to terminate their contract with Cherry but their actual decision to do so.

This is the opposite of my own position, articulated here, and therefore obviously misguided, dunderheaded and just plain wrong.

How does Gunter or his pod person doppelganger justify this expression of mental flatulence?

By saying that this time Cherry “went too far.”

How did he do that?

By excoriating “’you people’ – meaning immigrants – for not wearing poppies to honour Canada’s veterans on Remembrance Day.”

Gunter went on to talk at length about the distinction between what Cherry said to Joe Warmington in his post-firing interview on Monday, i.e., that everyone in Canada should wear a poppy and what he said on Saturday night. Yes, the two statements are very different, and yes, saying that everyone should wear a poppy would have been a lot less controversial than singling out immigrants for criticism. Just because the latter is more controversial, however, does not necessarily make it wrong, much less an offense worthy of losing one’s position.

Gunter maintains that by identifying the group he was talking about as immigrants Cherry was “criticizing them for their national origin.” This is palpable nonsense. Cherry may have been criticizing immigrants, but he was not criticizing immigrants qua immigrants, id est, for being immigrants. He was criticizing them for not wearing poppies. This negates what Gunter then had to say about the words “you people.”

Gunter wrote:

But “you people” is a lumping term. It lumps together all people with a specific characteristic and blames them equally, whether or not as individuals they deserve a particular accusation.

That is pure drivel. In hermeneutics – the discipline of Scriptural interpretation – class, we were taught to distinguish between exegesis and eisegesis. Exegesis is when you take your interpretation from out of the text of Scripture itself. Eisegesis is when you read your interpretation into a text. That is exactly what Gunter is doing here. “You people” in the context of Cherry’s Saturday night harangue, clearly does not mean “all immigrants” but only the ones who don’t wear poppies.

In my last remarks on this matter I made reference to the 2000 comedy by the Farrelly Brothers, Me, Myself and Irene. In the introductory scenes to that movie, Jim Carrey’s character, Rhode Island state trooper Charley Baileygates has just married his first wife and brought her home. As he prepares to tip the limousine driver, portrayed by Tony Cox, he asks if “you people” take cheques. By “you people” he obviously means the limo company, but Cox’s character takes it to mean “black people” and gets combative. Baileygates’ wife intervenes – on behalf of the limo driver – and excoriates her new husband for his racist talk, and when he denies having said anything racist, the driver switches gears and re-interprets “you people” as a reference to his diminutive stature.

What Peter and Bobby Farrelly saw as a hilarious joke nineteen years ago, has become the sad, sober reality of the present day.

Having disposed of the ridiculous assertion that the words “you people” turned Cherry’s remarks into a swipe at all immigrants regardless of their personal behaviour, the question becomes one of whether or not it was justifiable to specify them as a group in addressing the problem of neglect of poppies on Remembrance Day. Gunter’s colleague Tarek Fatah, who similarly reads volumes into Cherry’s words, but disagreed with Gunter’s conclusion that the firing was justified, answered this question in his column.

If there was any doubt about Cherry’s assertion, it was removed the next evening by Mississauga-based-Pakistani-Canadian broadcaster Tahir Gora. He tweeted: “I attended 2 events Nov 10th evening organized by two diaspora groups in which I couldn’t find a single person wearing poppy – I can’t name those diaspora groups otherwise I would be called a ‘racist’ by politically correct media and politicians. But Don Cherry makes a point.

Fatah then went on to describe his own observations on Monday, in downtown Toronto, of how few people were wearing poppies.

Cherry did not say that immigrants were the only ones not wearing poppies nor did he say that all immigrants were not wearing poppies. It would seem, however, that neglect of the poppy is a problem in certain immigrant communities, and this more than justifies Grapes’ mention of them in his commentary.

Unless, of course, we believe that immigrants are a sacred class, above criticism and reproach. This appears to be Justin Trudeau’s belief, but I never took Lorne Gunter to be in Captain Airhead’s camp before.

While I have disagreed with things that Gunter has written several times in the past, those disagreements were all of the type that naturally occur between an old-fashioned Tory and a neo-conservative. He is a republican, I am a royalist and a monarchist. He thinks of the heritage of Western civilization in the modern terms of classical liberalism, whereas I would emphasize more our heritage from classical antiquity and Christendom. He is an enthusiastic supporter of capitalism and the free market, I merely dislike these things less than I loathe socialism. It is very rare, however, that I have disagreed with him on matters pertaining to the politically correct suppression of words and ideas that offend and the crusade of the woke to destroy the lives and careers of all who disagree with him. Indeed, this is the first such instance of which I can think.

Which is why I am leaning towards the hypothesis that he has been replaced by a space alien look alike. What other theory could possibly explain his having become someone who thinks like a woke social justice warrior overnight?

Why We Need the Monarchy

With His Excellency, the Right Honourable David Johnston’s term as Governor General of Canada coming to an end a new vice-regal representative has been chosen. Her name is Julie Payette, she hails from Montreal, Quebec, and has an impressive resume albeit one that is rather unusual for the position for which she has been selected. At first a computer engineer, she underwent training as an astronaut in the 1990s and served in this capacity for most of the first decade of this century. Her experience as an astronaut included flights into space aboard both the Discovery and the Endeavour shuttles. The National Post quoted Robert Finch, the Dominion Chairman of the Monarchist League of Canada, as saying that this breaking of new ground in appointing someone whose experience is outside the political provides “a good opportunity for her to elevate that office right across the country.” Juxtaposed with Finch’s comments was one by Philippe Lagasse of Carleton University who is quoted as saying:

The reaction might be, well, look, why do we need Royals when we can have such stellar people as our head of state, as opposed to our head of state’s representative? It calls into question, I would say, the necessity of having the monarchy.

Thanks to decades of failure on the part of our educational system to teach our history and civics with the respect they deserve there are many, sadly, who would like to complete the Liberal Party’s agenda of Americanizing our country by turning it into a republic. While this sentiment is most often found on the left, there are, sadly, a number of prominent neoconservatives – or perhaps pseudoconservatives would be the more appropriate term – such as Anthony Furey, Lorne Gunter, and J. J. McCullough who have also indicated their support for republicanism. Conversely, of course, there are a handful of individuals on the left who as staunch monarchists are better conservatives than the aforementioned. Green Party leader Elizabeth May is one, the late leader of the NDP, Jack Layton, was another. The following is my answer to republicans, whether of the left or the phony right, who raise this question.

First, the false Canadian nationalism that says that we should become a republic and have someone who was born and who lives here as our head of state, goes against the very idea of Canada.

150 years ago the Fathers of Confederation had a certain idea in mind when they founded our country. The building blocks out of which they fashioned the Dominion of Canada were the provinces of the British Empire that had remained loyal when the Thirteen Colonies rebelled and which had fought alongside the British army in repelling the American invaders in the War of 1812. The idea the Fathers of Confederation had, was to join these provinces into a federation that would be large enough and strong enough to resist being pulled into the orbit of the United States whose institutions would not be drawn up from scratch based on the abstract ideals of Enlightenment philosophy, like those of the United States, but would be borrowed with some appropriate adaptation from those of the United Kingdom with which we would deliberately maintain our connection. The monarchy that America’s Fathers rejected, the Fathers of Confederation embraced and to say that Canada ought to replace the monarch with some other kind of head of state is like saying that the United States ought to abandon “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for “death, slavery, and the pursuit of misery.”

Second, a hereditary, royal, monarch is the best possible head of state. Although this is considered heresy in our democratic modern age it is nevertheless easily demonstrated to be true. A legislative assembly consists of elected representatives. Except for city-states small enough to include all of their citizens in the assembly this will inevitably the case. Our legislative assembly, the House of Commons, is formed by members elected as the representatives of constituencies. This, by the way, is the best way to elect an assembly. The alternatives, such as proportional representation, that are much touted by progressives today, would have the effect of producing a more partisan, ideological, assembly in which the representatives, even more than is already the case, would be accountable only to their party and its party line. This would in no way be an improvement. The members are ideological and partisan enough as it is, but it is the role of each to represent and speak for the interests of the constituency which elected him. None of them represents the country as a whole, nor do the parties to which they belong. Even the Prime Minister, who heads the party that commands at most a majority, often merely a plurality, of the elected members, does not represent the country as a whole. This most important of roles falls to the head of state. For the head of state to perform this role properly she must be above partisan politics. This cannot be the case if the office is filled by popular election. Consider last year’s presidential election in our southern neighbour, the hostility and division it generated and how the United States remains bitterly divided still.

There is another dimension to the way in which a royal monarch can represent the whole of a country in its unity better than any president. A royal monarch inherits the throne from those who reigned over the country in past generations and passes the throne on to those who will reign over future generations. A monarchy, therefore, embodies and represents the organic unity of a country over time. This is sorely needed in our day and age as a counter to the temptation to forget the past and ignore the future in pursuit of our interests in the present.

Those who point to the unpopularity of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales in comparison with his mother as an argument for breaking with the monarchy at the next secession fail completely to grasp these points. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are very popular indeed but the republicans see the relative unpopularity of the Prince of Wales in the present as an excuse for robbing future generations of a more popular king and queen. Furthermore, it is precisely the fact that the monarchy does not derive its legitimacy from the fickle whims of a present day electorate but from tradition, that the monarch can transcend partisan politics to represent the country as a whole. Those who make an idol out of democracy would do well to pay heed to G. K. Chesterton’s wise words about how “tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.”

It is a fiction of liberal and American thought that equates hereditary monarchy with tyranny. Plato and Aristotle knew better and warned that democracy was the seed from which tyranny springs. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is called both “the father of modern democracy” and “the father of totalitarianism” for a reason. The government should be the voice of the “general will” of the people, he maintained – democracy – and those who dissent from the general will must be “forced to be free” and if he resists exiled or put to death – totalitarianism. Those most susceptible to being corrupted by power are those who desire it for themselves and to be elected to office, a person must first run, thereby indicating his desire for power. Tyrants, typically, begin as demagogues who rally the masses behind them and history’s most notorious despots are those who saw themselves as belonging to and speaking for the common folk, as the first among equals or, in Orwell’s phrase “Big Brother.”

The monarch who, by contrast, stands in loco parentis to the nation is a safeguard against tyranny. Sir Winston Churchill famously observed that had we not at the insistence of the Americans forced the monarchs of Austria and Germany off their thrones at the end of the First World War, Adolf Hitler would never have risen to power. In our own country freedom, as John Farthing and Eugene Forsey pointed out, “wears a crown” and the Liberal Party started us down the path to Prime Ministerial dictatorship eighty-nine years ago by challenging the royal prerogative to refuse a requested dissolution of Parliament and so hold the Prime Minister accountable to the assembly.

Our monarchy is, as the Fathers of Confederation intended, the source of internal unity in our country. The first English Canadians were the Loyalists who refused to join in the Thirteen Colonies’ rebellion against the Crown, were consequently persecuted by the American republicans, and fled up here. It was also the Crown which offered protection to the language, religion, and culture of the French Canadians against Puritan bigotry and with whom the native tribes entered into treaties. Immigrants who wish to become citizens have been required to pledge their allegiance to the monarchy thus joining them into our national unity. The monarchy is also, however, and this is my final point, our connection with something beyond our own borders, something larger than our own country.

It is as Queen of Canada that Elizabeth II reigns over us. It is as the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland that she reigns over Great Britain. The distinction between the two crowns is an important one because the one country is not subservient to the other. That the same person wears both crowns is also important because it joins the two countries with each other – and with Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Grenada, Jamaica, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu over each of which Elizabeth II reigns as Queen. The crowns are distinct, none of these countries is subservient to any of the others, and each parliament passes laws for its own country and not for the others. Yet through the Queen who reigns over all of us we are connected.

A connection with other nations of this sort that in no way infringes upon our own right to pass our own laws and determine our own policies is a rare and precious heritage. The kind of “nationalism” that would throw this away is introspective and short-sighted and completely out of sync with the spirit of the Fathers of Confederation. Let us, as true Canadian patriots, ever be on our guard against this kind of thinking.

Congratulations to Julie Payette on her appointment. May she remember what Liberal nominees have been prone to forget in recent decades, that the job of the Governor General is to represent the Queen in Canada and not to represent Canada to the world.

God save the Queen!

Hic et Ille, II

My Last Two Essays in a Nutshell

The ancients maintained that governments exist to establish and protect the common good of the political communities they govern. Liberals maintain that governments exist to safeguard the freedom of individuals. This is a self-defeating goal. The more governments seek to safeguard individual liberty by adding to the evergrowing list of "rights" that are formally recognized and officially protected, the more areas of our everyday lives they regulate until their cramping presence is felt everywhere. The ancients, as classical Tories recognize, had it right. The common good of the entire country is the end for which government exists, and when governments seek that end, with past and future generations in mind not just those living in the present, freedom, which is a big part of the good but not the whole, is better secured, than when it is actively and aggressively pursued in the liberal fashion.

A Leader Who Does Not Give a Fig For the Good of His Country

Earlier this month Canada received offers of assistance from Russia, the United States, Mexico, Australia, Israel, Taiwan and even the Palestinian Authority to assist in fighting the wildfire that was devastating northern Alberta. Justin Trudeau, in his typical snotty and haughty manner, told them that no help was needed, on the same day that he announced that he would be pouring $785 million in foreign relief to Africa over the next three years. One wonders if Trudeau, who six years ago told an interviewer on a Quebec station that "Canada isn't doing well right now because it's Albertans who control our community and socio-democratic agenda. It doesn't work", would have been singing a different tune if the fire had been elsewhere than Alberta, say in Quebec.

This Tuesday the Trudeau Liberals introduced Bill C-16 which, if passed, will make it illegal to discriminate against men who think they are women, women who think they are men, or men and women who think they are some other gender altogether. The "discrimination" that Trudeau wants to forbid includes "hate speech", which means that if you are a sane person, who thinks that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, your freedom to speak your opinion, is about to be curtailed severely.

The same Justin Trudeau who wants to make it illegal for you or I to say that a man who thinks that he is a woman is still a man is the Justin Trudeau who has been bringing refugees into the country by the thousands, and who wants to bring thousands more in, most of whom are Muslims. I wonder if they will be expected to obey the new transgender rights bill as well? I wonder if the Liberals really do not see the conflict between these two policies seemingly so dear to them?

Whatever the case, Justin Trudeau clearly does not give a fig for the good of this country.

Mrs. Trudeau In the News

Justin Trudeau's wife, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau has been in the news almost as much as her husband this month with the controversy she sparked when she requested a larger staff to assist her. Canada is not the United States. The Prime Minister's spouse does not have an official title and role the way the spouse of the American President does. There is a very good reason for that. The Americans, in electing the head of their republic, choose the person who will be both head of state and head of government. In Canada, as in all the parliamentary monarchies of the Commonwealth, the Queen is the head of state, and the Prime Minister is merely the head of the government, a fact of which the Trudeaus need to be reminded. The Queen, currently a Queen regnant, during the reign of a king, a Queen consort, is the First Lady of Canada. The Queen's representative in Canada is the Governor-General and his wife has the title "Her Excellency" as befits a vice-regal spouse.

I was amused to read Lorne Gunter's comments on this matter in his Sun media column this weekend. Mr. Gunter, who was the managing editor of the defunct Alberta Report, and who writes regularly for the National Post and the Sun chain of newspapers, is the kind of commentator from whose columns I generally walk away saying that I more or less agree on the issue at hand, but have either deep reservations or at times am outright opposed, to the underlying ideals and principles brought to bear on the issue. Mr. Gunter is one of those individuals, of whom Alberta has plenty, who thinks he is a conservative but is not. He is actually, a pro-American, classical liberal, republican which is something quite different. To be a conservative in Canada you have to be a monarchist.

Mr. Gunter, writing from his American-style populist democratic worldview, ridicules Mrs. Trudeau's desire for a larger role and staff, writing that:

The point is Canada doesn’t need a First Lady or a queen consort or even a prime minister’s wife with a lot of pretentions.

Gregoire Trudeau hasn’t been elected by Canadians to any official position. She needs to remember that.

No Mr. Gunter. The reason Mrs. Trudeau needs to be humbled is not because Canadians have not elected her to anything. We elected her husband, and look at how well that turned out! She needs to be reminded that Canada is a Commonwealth country, that we have a Queen Regnant, and that her husband merely leads Her Majesty's government in the currently elected Parliament.