The Canadian Right Needs to Reclaim its Roots and Stop Looking Southward for Inspiration

Over the past couple of weeks I have observed much online discussion among my countrymen over the recent drama in Davos over matters such as Krasnov the Orange’s threat to seize Greenland from Denmark by military force, Prime Minister Blofeld’s Churchillian oratory, and other related incidents that were I to list them all, the list would probably be as long as I intend this essay to be.  What follows is for the most part an expansion of a post on a social media platform that I had started to write until I realized that I didn’t wish to commit the time that would be necessary to following through if I got involved in the debate in that venue.  The particular debate was between Krasnov’s zombie cheerleaders purporting to be Canadian “conservatives” and Liberal Party supporters who think maintaining their party in government perpetually is necessary to protect Canadian sovereignty against American encroachments upon the same.

 

Before proceeding, a few observations are in order.  The first is that there will be some overlap between this essay and the previous two.  The second is that the most vocal among Krasnov’s “Canadian” zombie cheerleaders seem to be the Alberta separatists.  All that I have to say about this group in particular is that while they claim to speak for all of their province, I have too high a regard for the province named after Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter than to believe it to be entirely populated by inbred, knuckle-dragging, troglodytic, ass-tards as would have to be the case for these to be their legitimate spokesmen.

 

Now, let us turn to the subject of this essay which is that both groups, Krasnov’s zombie cheerleaders and Liberals who think their party to be the great defender of Canada and her ways, are wrong.  I have addressed the title to the Canadian right because, as unlikely as they are to listen to a word I have to say, I would consider trying to persuade such a lost cause as the Grits a violation of Christ’s command to not cast our pearls before swine.

 

First of all the Liberal Party has been the party of Americanization throughout all of Canadian history.  Confederation united the provinces of British North America into a single Dominion – a word chosen by the Fathers of Confederation from the Bible and given a meaning that is essentially the same as “Commonwealth Realm” today – and the Fathers of Confederation, led by the old Conservatives, recognized the biggest threat to the Confederation Project to be the United States and her dream of “Manifest Destiny.”  The Liberal Party, organized out of the pre-Confederation Reform movement which had considerable ideological overlap with the classical liberalism that the United States had been founded on, opposed the efforts of Macdonald’s Conservatives in the Dominion’s first quarter century to build a national economy strong enough to resist the economic pull of the United States, which Macdonald correctly saw as a stepping stone to the cultural and eventually political subjugation of Canada to the United States, and promoted free trade with the United States.  In 1891, when Sir Wilfred Laurier openly campaigned on a free trade – it was called reciprocity at the time – platform, an intellectual associated with his party, Goldwyn Smith published a book arguing that Confederation was a bad idea and that Canada should join the United States.  Freer trade with and closer ties to the United States were the consistent policies of William Lyon Mackenzie-King, Liberal party leader and Canada’s longest serving prime minister.

 

Second, the Liberals, although they underwent a significant change in policy under the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, never abandoned their essential nature as the party of Americanization.  Under Pearson and especially Trudeau, the Grits moved much further to the left than they had been, something that occurred again when the second Trudeau led the party, but they remained the party of Americanization even when they were mouthing left-wing slogans that in popular culture are often associated with an anti-American outlook.  The simple fact of the matter is that the leftism of the Liberal Party has always had a “Made in the USA” stamp on it.

 

Allow me to prove that point.

 

Americans, especially the Republicans, frequently accuse Canada (and Europe) of being “socialist.”  While there are other factors, such as, in the case of Canada, the supply management system (which is susceptible to criticism, but would more accurately be called a form of cartelism than socialism), the primary basis of this is the extensive network of social security programs often called “the welfare state”.  In the Great Depression, while it was the Conservatives who introduced relief measures towards the end of the Bennett premiership, the Mackenzie-King Liberals upon their return to government in 1935, after negotiating a trade agreement with the United States, began to implement measures based on the “New Deal” programs that FDR had introduced in the United States in the early 1930s.  Later, LBJ would expand the American welfare state as he introduced policies aimed at redressing social ills that went far beyond the poverty and unemployment targeted by FDR’s “New Deal.”  LBJ’s policies were dubbed the “Great Society” from speeches he made including this phrase as his goal and when Pierre Trudeau succeeded Lester Pearson as Liberal leader and prime minister a few months before LBJ’s presidency came to an end, he began introducing a similar welfare state expansion.  In seeking the Liberal leadership, he used the expression “Just Society” to describe what he sought to achieve.

 

In 1977, Trudeau introduced the Canadian Human Rights Act, a poorly titled bill because it had nothing to do with limiting government power and protecting people against the abuse of the same, which is what is usually suggested by the expression “human rights.”  This piece of legislation did quite the opposite of that.  It empowered government agencies created by the act, to investigate (Human Rights Commission) and adjudicate (Human Rights Tribunal) complaints about discrimination in personal transactions in everyday life.  Since it was classified as civil rather than criminal law, charges under this act do not have to meet the high standard of proof in criminal law (guilty beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt) although the act allows for penalties that far exceed what is normally allowed in cases of civil mitigation.  Although written as if any discrimination on a forbidden basis (race, sex, etc.) was prohibited, i.e., both white against black and black against white, the unwritten understanding by which the system actually operates is that it is entirely one way.  The worst clause in the bill, Section 13 which defined language communicated, originally over the phone, later extended to include all electronic communication, that was “likely to” expose someone protected against discrimination to “hatred or contempt”, as itself an act of discrimination, was repealed in 2013 and the Liberals have been trying to reinstate it ever since.  The CHRA, and its counterpart in the UK which Keith Starmer has been so egregiously abusing as of late, were both inspired by an American bill.  Specifically, the bill was the US Civil Rights Act of 1964.

 

Allow me a side note in this paragraph. This US Civil Rights Act was the chief accomplishment of the man the United States celebrated last Monday in a holiday signed into law by Ronald Reagan despite the fact that the FBI records on the man are so damning that they were long ago placed under a seal that doesn’t expire until next year.  Of course, what is known about him without access to those tapes is bad enough.  He was a total fraud in every possible way.  “Dr.” – he obtained his degrees through plagiarism – “Martin Luther” - his birth name was Michael - King Jr., was a Baptist minister who denied all the articles of the Christian Creed and who surrounded himself with Communist agents like Jack O’Dell and Stanley Levinson and called himself a Marxist.  The standard answer on the part of his cult of fawning adorers, which is much larger than that of Krasnov because it includes the whole of the left as well as the type of supposed “conservative” that rallied to Krasnov’s support when he abandoned everything that made him a fairly decent president in his first term and took to pissing all over every other country in the world except Israel in his second, whenever these things, and the failings in his, that is King’s, personal life which are likely what most of the FBI recordings pertain to, come up is that these cannot detract from the man’s accomplishments.  Those, however, like his degrees and his name, are fake.  His entire reputation is built on his career as an activist opposing segregation.  Segregation, however, was dealt a legal death blow in 1954 when the American Supreme Court ruled in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.  King’s career as a civil rights activist, at least as far as his being in the public spotlight goes, began with the Montgomery Bus Boycott the following year.  Segregation, in other words, was a dead foe already at the time King’s public crusade against it began.  His chief accomplishment, the aforementioned Civil Rights Act, did not end segregation.  It did exactly what its imitations in Canada and the UK and elsewhere in the Western world did, sans the speech clauses.  It was a terrible law, not a good one.

 

Canada, like the United States, and indeed all of Western Civilization experienced a shift towards social liberalism after World War II.  A number of factors contributed to this.  This was the period that saw the explosion of new communications technology that altered how popular culture was created and transmitted.  Prior to the development of what Richard Weaver called “the Great Stereopticon”, popular culture was fundamentally conservative due to tradition being its primary instrument of transmission.  Afterwards, however, as popular culture was replaced with “pop culture", a commodity produced for mass consumption in the factories of Los Angeles, California it became the instrument for the rapid dissemination of liberal attitudes on culture, religion, sex (both the thing and the act), and the like.  Demonstrating the truth of Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “the medium is the message”, even television shows as far back as the Andy Griffith Show, which would be almost universally regarded as conservative by today’s standards, were used to preach messages that subtly subverted traditional ways in a way that was a step towards the “woke” liberalism of the present day.  Watch the show, starting at the beginning.  You will not need to go beyond the tenth episode of the first season before my point will have been made. 

 

The spread of Hollywood “pop culture” and its liberalizing message throughout Western Civilization was, of course, facilitated by the United States’ having assumed the position of first power in the West as a result of the two World Wars and the necessities of the Cold War which commenced almost immediately upon the end of World War II.  It should be observed here, although this pertains more to Europe than to Canada, that American assistance in rebuilding after World War II was tied to the acceptance of Americanizing propaganda.  While obviously this was more the case in militarily occupied former Axis countries where the Americanization was introduced under the guise of denazification, it was also part of the package of assistance to war-devastated Allied countries.  Remember that in the muddled thinking of the American government of the 1930s and 1940s, Nazism and European traditionalism, although they had little to nothing in common except an opposition to Communism, were frequently confused, although the American government of those days did have a considerably clearer understanding of the relationship between the founding American ideology and Communism than American governments of subsequent decades.

 

This was a huge factor in the European shift to the left after the war.  While American neoconservatives like Leo Strauss (What is Political Philosophy?) and Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind) attributed the shift to the left in American culture to the influence of ideas from European philosophy, a thesis of which American paleoconservatives like William Lind (Marxifying America) and Pat Buchanan (The Death of the West) offered a rather more accurate version (hence its being dubbed a “conspiracy theory” by the ADL, $PLC, and other members of what Murray Rothbard called the Smearbund) in which the European neo-Marxists who fled to America during the ‘30s and ‘40s influenced the left-ward movement of post-war American academia, that the influence moving in the opposite direction has contributed more to the kind of leftism prevalent in the last part of the twentieth century moving into the twenty-first has been persuasively argued by American paleoconservative Paul Gottfried in Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy (this book especially, but see also the entire trilogy of which it is the middle volume).

 

If you consider the different movements that made up this shift to the left throughout Western Civilization it is evident that they spread out from an epicentre in the United States.  The second wave of feminism, the wave which introduced the demand for the legalization of abortion, for government provided day care (the idea behind which was that it is better for strangers to look after young children than for mothers to stay at home rather than rejoin the workforce as soon as possible after birth), and the like began in the United States with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and the founding of NOW a few years later.  True, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was published in 1949, but this was hardly a movement starter since, unlike Friedan’s mass-marketed for popular consumption, best-seller, the half-crazed existentialist musings of Sartre’s long-suffering love-slave was written for an academic audience.  Let us also not overlook the strong likelihood of American government involvement here.  When Ms. was founded in 1971 one of its many co-founding editors and the one with which the publication was most associated in the popular mind was Gloria Steinem.  I call her “the Spook Bunny” in allusion to her previous positions as a cocktail waitress in Hef’s New York club (as research for an article, she was already a journalist) and, more relevantly to the point at hand, a CIA operative. 

 

However, the real clincher of the overall argument is that by far the most effective instrument of accomplishing the ends of second-wave feminism was not the activist movement itself, whether in the less radical version organized by Friedan, more radical version represented by Steinem’s journalist, or totally nutbar version found in the women’s studies departments of universities, but in an ally that successfully marketed feminism’s ideals and values by not presenting them as angry demands even if it was not always recognized as an ally by feminism.  The year before Friedan’s book was published, Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl became a best-seller and in 1965 she became editor-in-chief of Hearst media’s Cosmopolitan.  She gave it a total makeover into the magazine it has been ever since.  What is not always recognized is that Cosmo as Brown remade it became essentially the women’s counterpart to the magazine Hugh Hefner had founded in 1953.  The reason this is not always recognized is because Hefner illustrated his magazine with erotic nude photographs placing it, correctly enough, in the category of pornography in a public mind that has always been reluctant to admit that almost 100% of literature mass-marketed to adult females is pornographic, albeit verbal more than visual.  If you look at the message preached in the two publications – and, as I have said before the message of Hefner’s magazine has always been the most dangerous part, so that ironically, somebody who actually does “read it for the articles” is more likely to have his mind polluted than somebody who just looks at the pictures – Brown’s message to women is the exact complement of the “Playboy philosophy.”  Friedan, who did recognize this, failed to see that Brown, preaching to women “you can have it all” (career, sexual freedom, etc.), was accomplishing her, that is Friedan’s, ends far more effectively than Friedan ever could, by her more attractive packaging and larger platform. 

 

Note that whether marketed to males or females, the Playboy/Cosmo philosophy was a fundamentally American message.  It was not thought up by agents of international Communist disloyal to the United States (Friedan, as Daniel Horowitz later revealed, hid her Marxist past when presenting herself as a typical American middle-class housewife, but no such claims have ever been made to the best of my knowledge against either Helen Gurley Brown or Hugh Hefner, nor would they have been remotely credible if they had been) but by individuals who embodied capitalism and the American dream and who had no qualms about tying their message of sexual liberation to both of these things. 

 

Americanism – or at least Yankeeism, the culture of the American northeast that crushed the rival culture of the American south to become the ruling culture of the entire United States in the 1860s, more about which will be said later – began life its life as a secularized Puritanism, and while Puritanism’s reputation is that of a strict, Pharisaical, killjoy moralism with the world’s largest pole stuck up its rear end, which it was, it was also a revolt against the traditions and order of Christendom which were usually firmly grounded, both on the Bible and the Church’s interpretation of such on the one hand and human nature and common sense on the other.  Before it was secularized, Puritanism was the rejection of anything in Church tradition that could not be shown to be explicitly spelled out in the Bible as an offense against Christian liberty which rejection the Puritans translated, without noticing the irony, into harsh rules against these traditions, which, like the celebration of Christmas, were usually joyous ones.  As it transitioned into its secular form, Puritanism rejected traditional Christian rules limiting the pursuit of wealth so as to constrain the vice of avarice, most conspicuously the rules against usury, and so paved the way for capitalism.  The sexual revolution was merely the next logical step in the path of secularized Puritanism, the rejection of traditional rules limiting the pursuit of sexual desires.  It is all wrapped up in that phrase “the pursuit of happiness” that Thomas Jefferson substituted for “property” in the three basic rights recognized both by the Lockean liberalism Jefferson obtained the concept from and by Tory jurist Sir William Blackstone. All that was needed for it to enter this phase was the pseudo-scientific justification provided by American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead’s research in the South Pacific (later debunked by New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman) and the attempts by notorious American quack sexologist Alfred Kinsey, to pass off the findings of research done primarily with prostitutes and prisoners as representative of the larger population.

 

If, as I have just shown, second-wave feminism and the sexual revolution of which second-wave feminism could be regarded as a manifestation, began in the United States and spread throughout the rest of Western Civilization, this basically establishes this to be the case with the post-World War II shift towards social liberalism in general for, with the exception of the American Civil Rights movement, all the other movements within this shift took their cues from either the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, or the American Civil Rights movement.  The gay rights movement, for example, which took its cues from all three, began with the demonstrations and riots at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in Manhattan in 1969.  I give this example, both because many, probably most, of the other movements in the general shift to the left are either variations of it or closely enough related to be included in the constantly expanding alphabet soup umbrella designation and because American conservatives often portray this as being particularly and distinctly un-American.  I don’t know who they think they are trying to kid.  Although I have refused to watch it since it started cheering on Krasnov’s threats against my country, before that it seemed like every second guest on Fox News was gay.  San Francisco, the last time I checked, was in the American state that was governed by Reagan at the time the city first gained its reputation as the world capital of this sort of thing.  Fran Lebowitz, whose witticisms I have always appreciated even if her political and religious views couldn’t possibly be further removed from my own, basically summed up the matter when she said “if you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture you would pretty much be left with Let’s Make a Deal.”

 

One of the primary instruments for the spread of social liberalism in both the United States and Canada has been judicial activism.   In some cases, traditional laws were liberalized by legislation.  This is how the liberalization of divorce law was accomplished.  Here in Canada, this started in 1968, the transition year between the Pearson and Trudeau premierships, when the Liberals passed the Divorce Act.  This made divorce more easily accessible after a marriage had effectively already broken down as evidenced by three years separation.  The following year, the Family Law Act introducing no-fault divorce (the most liberal kind) was signed into law in California by, interestingly enough, Ronald Reagan. Other states followed suit over the course of the following decade.  Also interestingly, New York was the last state to go fully liberal on this.  In Canada, the 1968 Act was amended to allow no-fault divorce by the Mulroney Conservatives in 1986.  The difference seen here between what jurisdiction divorce law falls under in the two countries, the federal Dominion in Canada versus the individual states in the United States, partially explains why liberalism has historically preferred the courts to make this sort of change in the United States. 

 

This aspect of the matter is further illustrated by the difference in how liberalism accomplished the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples in both countries.  In this case, it was accomplished by legislation at the Dominion level in Canada but by the Supreme Court in the United States.  Liberals in both countries first attempted to achieve this goal piecemeal, state by state in the USA, province by province here, but in the end relied on federal legislation here and on the Supreme Court in the United States. 

 

This was one of the very few instances where Canada anticipated the United States in a move to the left (in terms of changes to the law, that is, see the Lebowitz quote above and the paragraph in when it is found).  More often than not, the social liberal changes were made in the United States long before they were made in Canada.  Prayer and the Bible were banned from public schools in the United States, for example, in Supreme Court rulings in 1962 and 1963, in which years my parents were 12 and 13.  The Upper Canadian Court of Appeal did not rule against mandatory prayer in school until I was 12 in 1988 and while this became the precedent that gradually spread through the provinces the 1988 ruling affected only the one province at the time.  When I was in high school in rural Manitoba in the early 1990s the Lord’s Prayer was still recited – those who objected to participation, were allowed to leave the classroom – and it was not until two years after I graduated that the practice was discontinued throughout the Dominion. 

 

This is not merely one big post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The reason this happened so much later in Canada than in the United States is the same reason why the Canadian Supreme Court ruling of Morganthaler v. The Queen happened in 1988, over a decade later than its American equivalent Roe v. Wade.  The reason is that prior to 1982 the courts simply were not available to Canadian liberals as a weapon in the same way they were available to American liberals.  1982 was the year that Pierre Trudeau repatriated the British North America Act of 1867 – renaming it the Constitution Act of 1867 – and added to it the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  This entire incident is glorified in the Liberal Theory of Canadian History, that Canadian version of the Whig Interpretation of History that Donald Creighton derided as “the Authorized Version”, which, contrary to Canada’s true history, depicts Canada’s story as virtually identical to America’s story – an emerging nation, breaking from the mother country and forging a new identity for herself on the basis of a rejection of the past – but accomplished diplomatically rather than by violence.  By contrast, Canada’ true story is that of a country built on the opposite foundation to that of the United States, by retaining ties to the mother country and accepting and incorporating the past.  I mention this because it is relevant to the overall point.  In the immediate context the point is that the Charter empowered the Canadian Supreme Court to act in the same way as the American Supreme Court.  The US Supreme Court had already been given the power to strike down laws older than itself by the American Constitution in the eighteenth century, although it was the amendments to the American Bill of Rights that the Republican Party forced through in the Reconstruction period that provided the court with the tools it used for this purpose in the second half of the twentieth century, especially after Earl Warren was named chief justice by Dwight Eisenhower (about whom, see my previous essay “Is Orange the new Red?”).

 

To summarize, the Liberal Party of Canada when during the Pearson-Trudeau premierships it pushed Canada in the direction of the new social liberalism that was spreading throughout Western Civilization in the post-World War II era primarily through the medium of American pop culture manufactured for mass consumption in Hollywood, it did so with legislation inspired by American precedents, the Canadian Human Rights Act, an imitation of the US Civil Rights Act, and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, an imitation of the American Bill of Rights designed to give the Supreme Court of Canada the same powers to undermine tradition that the American Supreme Court had been exercising long before 1982.

The Liberal Party, therefore, when it took a massive leap to the left in the 1960s and 1970s and pushed Canada in the same direction, remained the party of Americanization that had been from Laurier to Mackenzie-King.  It remained the party of Americanization during the premiership of the second Trudeau, Captain Airhead.  Captain Airhead often seemed like he spent more time in the United States than in Canada, was a strong believer in free trade, and being incapable of original thought, was basically an imitator of the forty-fourth president of the United States, in whose second term in office, Captain Airhead became leader of the Liberal Party and then prime minister.  He heavily subsidized the far-left Canadian Anti-Hate Network, which was founded during his premiership on the model of the American Southern Poverty Law Center (sic), which provided the start-up funds.  CAHN specializes in the same kind of smear tactics its American parent and counterpart engages in.  It claimed that concern about the erosion of personal rights and freedoms and their constitutional protections during the Bat Flu scare was an extremist position and branded the Canadian Red Ensign, which was baptized our flag in the blood of the Canadian soldiers who died fighting for God, King, and Country against Hitler, a hate symbol.  That is the sort of idiocy one can only expect from an organization whose founding chairman was Bernie Farber. 

 

The only reasonable conclusion from all of this is that the Liberal Party does not deserve the trust of Canadians, especially when it comes to dealing with the threat of an American takeover.

 

Let us turn now to the Conservatives. 

 

Canada’s original Conservatives fought against the forces that sought to pull Canada closer to the United States and Americanize her.  Confederation took place in the years immediately following what is conventionally called the US Civil War, although it was not a war between two factions for control of the same country, as is usually what the expression “civil war” denotes, but rather a second war of independence on the part of eleven states who declared their secession from the United States after the election of the first Republican president.  In this second war of independence, those fighting for their secession lost as the Republican government in Washington waged total war against those who by their way of thinking were still their own countrymen to prevent them from leaving.  It is most unfortunate that in the last couple of decades, there has been a push to suppress all discussion of this conflict other than the naïve narrative that reads it entirely through the lens of the toxic American racial politics that was a very predictable by-product – or perhaps, primary product – of the mass media manufactured Civil Rights Movement, led by the phony discussed in the side note several paragraphs back.  At any rate, the war ended with the triumph of the Republican north and when the first Republican president was assassinated and replaced by his vice president, a weaker man than himself, he was dominated by the far more radical Republicans who controlled Congress.  In British North America, the triumph of the Union represented a threat, a threat that the same Republicans who had just so mercilessly consolidated their own power by subjugating their own countrymen would turn their sights northward and once again try to take Canada by force of invasion as the United States had attempted in the War of 1812.  One of the purposes of Confederation, which was led by Sir John A. Macdonald’s Conservatives was to protect against this threat.  As Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald implemented the National Policy, a policy of protecting new industries and investing in infrastructure, of which the most obvious example was the construction of the Canada Pacific Railroad, so as to build a strong national economy on east-west internal trade that would make for greater national unity and resist the economic pull of the United States.  Resisting Americanization and being in general very wary of the United States, remained official Conservative policy from Sir John A. Macdonald through to John G. Diefenbaker.

 

Unfortunately, in the 1980s the Conservatives abandoned their essential nature as the party of resistance to Americanization and standing for Canada’s own traditions when, under the leadership of Brian Mulroney, they negotiated the Free Trade Agreement with the United States.  By doing this, they betrayed the historical essence of their party in a way that the Liberals, the party of Americanization, never had.  The result was that they became a second Liberal Party, a Liberal Party lite, and hence a redundancy.  The Reform Party which was organized in the late 1980s as a Western protest party criticized the Mulroney Conservatives for being just this.  Unfortunately, although this criticism was correct, they did not understand their own criticism.

The Reform Party, which merged with much of the old Conservatives to form the Canadian Alliance in the late 1990s, failed to see that it was by signing the Free Trade Agreement that that the Conservatives betrayed their essential nature and became a second, redundant, Liberal Party.  The Reform Party, which took the name of the movement that gave birth to the Liberal Party of Canada, was in favour of free trade with the United States and wanted more Americanization not less.  Consider their position on Senate Reform.  All that would be needed to make the Senate function much better and as intended by the Fathers of Confederation, would be for the nomination of whom the Crown appoints to the Senate to be taken away from the prime minister, the rest of the Cabinet, and anyone who sits in the Lower House and given to a nomination committee to which the provincial governments appoint the members.  This would fix the main problem with the Senate as it currently stands while preserving it as the same body established in 1867.  The Reform Party, however, demanded that the Senate be remade on the Triple E model, which would essentially remake it into the image of the American Senate.

 

The Reform Party was a populist party that considered itself to be small-c conservative and to be exerting a right-ward pull to counter the left-ward pull of the Trudeau era Liberals in a way the old Conservatives had failed to do.  The problem with that is that they took their entire idea of what it means to be “conservative” or on the “right” from a country that was consciously built on the ideological foundation of liberalism and which never had a “right” in the truest, political, sense of the term.  The United States was founded in a left-wing revolution.  There is no other kind of revolution, the right’s response to revolution is found in the words of Joseph de Maistre, “What is needed is not a revolution in the opposite direction, but the opposite of a revolution.”  The quotation comes from Maistre’s Considerations on France, written, like Burke’s Reflections, in response to the French Revolution, which was born out of the same ideas and in some cases with the support of the same individuals – Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette are the obvious, but not the only examples – as the American Revolution.  The term “left” first took on its political sense in the French Revolution when it was used of supporters of the revolution based upon where they were standing in the French Chamber of Deputies.  Similarly, “right” first took on its political meaning, basically the continental equivalent of what had been called Toryism in England for over a century at this point in time, in the French Revolution based upon where the opponents stood.  The “right” in North America at the time of the American Revolution, were the Tories, the Loyalists who, persecuted by the triumphant revolutionaries, fled the new republic and became the first English Canadians who a century later, along with the French Canadians who had been spared going through the French Revolution by having been ceded to the British Crown at the end of the Seven Years’ War and were at the time more to the right than the English Canadians, founded the Dominion of Canada on a foundation of preserving and adapting the old order.

 

When something that called itself a “right” emerged in the United States in the period between the two World Wars, it did not stand for the things the right had historically stood for in Europe, which can basically be summarized as the political and religious heritage of pre-Modern Christendom, but was basically eighteenth century liberalism protesting against how twentieth century liberalism was moving away from its roots and converging with Communism, or at least socialism.  This first American right, similar if not entirely identical to what is called libertarianism today, was correct to be alarmed at the direction in which liberalism was moving, although the new liberals had a better perception of the related nature of liberalism and Communism, both of which grew out of Modern man’s turning away from the older order of Christendom and embracing abstract ideals which, while not all necessarily bad in themselves – “freedom” and “equality” were the main two such ideals, and while “equality” is a perversion of the good that is “justice”, “freedom” is itself a good (Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn has shown how, contrary to Modern assumptions, the two are contrary to each other and cannot be maximized at the same time) – in the hands of both liberals and Communists, became what Edmund Burke called “armed doctrines”, destructive weapons to be used by ignorant revolutionaries against the old order.  FDR, therefore, was correct to see America’s founding liberalism and Communism as being on the same side of history, although his opponents in the first American right were correct to see that what that side was moving towards was the opposite of the Golden Age of Utopia of which FDR dreamed.  In 1948, ideas from the more authentic European right entered the American right when, in response to the development and employment of the atomic bomb – something that the American right of the 1940s unanimously condemned as atrocious – Richard Weaver, wrote Ideas Have Consequences, tracing the moral, intellectual, and civilizational decay that could lead to such a monstrous occurrence, back through the centuries to Occam’s nominalism in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  Except that his title, chosen by his editor rather than himself, stuck around as a slogan, Weaver’s influence on the American right was short-lived.  Today, his most obvious intellectual heir in the United States is Wendell Berry, the poet, novelist, and organic farmer from Kentucky, who defies categorization as “left” or “right” in either the American or the proper sense of these terms.  Meanwhile, the American right has abandoned his abhorrence of the atomic bomb and of America’s wartime use of it, an abhorrence shared by Russell Kirk (“we are the barbarians within our own empire”), Colonel Robert McCormick, Henry Regnery, and basically by everyone on the American right prior to William F. Buckley Jr., for the lunatic position that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “saved lives” (the reasoning used to arrive at that absurd conclusion is easily rebutted by the testimony of General Douglas MacArthur if anybody wishes to look into it).

 

In other words, although the American “right” from its beginnings in the first half of the last century has never been a true right but rather a form of liberalism, the original American right-liberalism prior to William F. Buckley Jr. was preferable either to the mainstream of American liberalism which was moving left-ward or to the mainstream American right after Buckley became is self-appointed gate-keeper.  It is not, however, to the original American right that the Reform/Alliance looked for its definition of “conservatism” but to the Buckley brand, and especially to the later editions of that brand which incorporates every sort of vile argument for the United States going around the world, shaking it member in the face of every other country, and whacking them over the head with a stick, to prove how big and powerful it is. These arguments are fundamentally at odds with orthodox Christianity.  They include the view of good and evil of the Manichean heresy (formed in the early centuries of the Church by reading Christianity through the lens of Eastern dualism), as reflected in Hollywood movies and comic books.  They also include “might makes right”, an ancient notion revived by Nietzsche in the nineteenth century, the refutation of which notion as expressed by Thrasymachus by Socrates in Plato’s Politeia (misleadingly translated “The Republic”) was a basic foundation stone of civilization, ancient and Christian.

 

Even, however, if those who saw the Conservative Party moving towards liberalism under Mulroney had looked to Robert Taft, John T. Flynn, William Henry Chamberlin, and Albert Jay Nock rather than William F. Buckley (at best) and Rush Limbaugh for their ideas of what conservatism is it would have been a mistake on their part.  True Canadian conservatism, as expressed in such neglected volumes as John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown, John G. Diefenbaker’s Those Things We Treasure, the essays of Stephen Leacock, the histories and essays written by Donald Creighton and W. L. Morton, the philosophical treatises of George Grant, and in the family saga of novels about the royalist, Anglican, Whiteoak family of Jalna written by Mazo de la Roche the most read Canadian novelist of the 1930s, whose books remained extremely popular well past her death in the early 1960s, is more authentic, being a Canadianized form of British Toryism, itself an early form of the European right, which stood for the order and heritage of Christian civilization, for kings and the Christian religion and the Church against Modern rationalistic and liberalizing tendencies.  This is the well of inspiration from which a movement that wished to exert a pull to the right in Canada to counter the leftward pull exerted by the Americanizing Liberal Party and the liberal drift in the Conservative Party, should have drawn.   You cannot counter a “Made in the USA” left-liberalism, with a “Made in the USA” right-liberalism, that has no roots deeper than the origins of liberalism in the early Modern era, and it is foolish to try to do so when you have available a domestic Toryism, which had absorbed some of classical liberalism but still had roots that extended back to pre-Modern Christendom, to utilize instead.  Attempts to counter the “Made in the USA” leftward pull of the Liberal Party, with a “Made in the USA” “conservatism” will only further the leftward drift of the country.

 

God Save the King!

Taking Offence and Denying Defence

The late Sir Roger Scruton had much to say about the difference between “giving offence” and “taking offence.”  In an interview with Douglas Murray for The Spectator about a half a year before his death, for example, he said:

 

Remember though, that there’s this great distinction between giving offence and taking offence and we’re living in a culture where people become experts in taking offence even when it hasn’t been given.  And that’s what is taught in gender studies. It teaches young women to take offence at every remark a man might make or even his being there, you know. It’s a wonderful theatrical thing to take offence but it doesn’t lead to any lasting relationships. (1)

 

The importance of this distinction has to do with more than just gender.  Every form of “identity politics” majors in taking offence.  Identity politics is informed and underlain by the contemporary “morality” that has supplanted traditional moralities, including both the older traditional morality informed by classical ethics and Christian moral theology and the more recent morality of classical liberalism, in the civilization formerly known as Christendom in the post-World War II era.  This is one of the key distinguishing feature between the contemporary “morality” and traditional moralities.  Traditional morality taught you to moderate your speech and behaviour so as to avoid giving offence.  Contemporary morality teaches you to take offence and to moderate your speech and behaviour so as to minimize the likelihood of others taking offence.

 

The distinction is quite simple.  Allow me to illustrate.  If I were to go up to you and say something to the effect of “You dirty rotten so-and-so, you are ugly and stupid, a bum and a loser, and the biggest jerk who ever lived.  Now listen to me you miserable punk, you dress like a clown and smell like a skunk, your mother is a whore and your father is a drunk” then I would be giving offence.  If, on the other hand, I were to say to you “I listened to your lecture on this-or-that historical event and I don’t like your take on what happened because I think it portrays such-and-such a group in a poor light, bolstering unfair stereotypes, and although I am not a member of that group per se, I am deeply offended by your micro-aggression and think you need to be cancelled” or some such blithering nonsense, I would be taking offence.

 

Ordinarily, when someone gives offence the offence is intentional, he is deliberately trying to hurt the feelings of the person to whom he is speaking.  To the person who takes offence, however, the intentions of the person from whom he takes offence are irrelevant. 

 

With regards to the importance of intent it is worth observing that the cultural shift from the traditional morality of avoiding giving offence to the contemporary morality of taking offence, occurred simultaneously with the rise of technocratic managers in both government and private business. (2) Traditionally, in the Westminster system, the laws by which we are governed are subject to King-in-Parliament acting through legislation.  While the form remains in Canada, in the post-World War II era, the Prime Minister and Cabinet have increasingly by-passed the constraints the traditional system placed on their ability to impose new rules on Canadians, by relying more-and-more on civil service agencies acting through regulation instead.  The counterpart to this in the private sector is the increased control of middle level managers operating through Human Resource departments.

 

The reason this is worth pointing out here is because the traditional Westminster system of legislating by King-in-Parliament was closely allied with the Common Law tradition which includes the principle with regards to criminal culpability that actus reus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea (a guilty act does not make guilty unless the mind is guilty), that is to say, there needs to be criminal intent for there to be criminal culpability.  HR departments, by contrast, seldom if ever regard intent as an essential component of any of the myriad of made-up offences in the rule books through which they micromanage their employees.  While the parallel is not perfect it is notable.

 

The other factor that distinguishes giving offence from taking offence is objectivity.  If you give offence to someone by, for example, calling him a horse’s patoot, the offence is objective because it is reasonable to assume that anyone called this would be offended by it.  When someone takes offence that has not been given, however, the offence is largely if not entirely, subjective.  In Biblical hermeneutics, we distinguish between exegesis and eisegesis.  In both of these words the basic verb means to guide or to lead.  Exegesis adds the prefix for “out” and means to bring out of the text the meaning that is already there in it.  This, of course, is the approved hermeneutical method.  The other one, eisegesis, substitutes the prefix for “in” and means to read into the text the meaning you wish to find there.   Taking offence that has not been given is similar to eisegesis in this regards.

 

In this, as in so many other areas, contemporary morality is a poor substitute for traditional morality.  Morality informs law and when an inferior morality replaces a superior morality the result will be the introduction and multiplication of bad laws. 

 

The news media recently learned that the Liberal government led by Prime Minister Blofeld has come to an agreement with the Lower Canadian separatists. (3)   The separatists agreed to support the Liberal Bill C-9, a proposed series of amendments to the section of the Criminal Code pertaining to “hate.”  Over the past couple of years, Canadians have become increasingly disturbed and disgusted at a particular type of “protest” that has been popping up all over our country and the wider civilization.  Ostensibly about the Israel-Palestine conflict in the Middle East, these protests openly embrace not merely the cause of the Palestinians but the organization Hamas, glorify its worst actions, and are filled with violent, revolutionary, rhetoric directed not only against Israel but against our country and Western Civilization as a whole.  Bill C-9 is the Liberals’ proposed “solution” to this problem.  It is typical of the “solutions” put forward by politicians, especially Liberals, to problems that are largely of their own creation, in that it creates new statutory offences and laws where the already existing laws are more than sufficient to handle the situation if they would only be followed and enforced.  Bill C-9 would make preventing access to a place of worship or community centre by means of intimidation – which already violates more than one law – into a distinct “hate” offence.  It would also criminalize the public display of certain symbols.  To gain the support of the separatists, the Liberals agreed to include a further amendment in the bill that would remove the existing provision in Section 319 of the Criminal Code that exempts speech that expresses what the speaker holds in “good faith” based on “a belief in a religious text” from criminal culpability.

 

To do this would be to make a bad law worse.  What I said about bill C-9’s making of new statutory offences in the previous paragraph applies to all laws about “hate speech.”  Anything prohibited by “hate speech” laws that warrants being prohibited by law was already prohibited by law before there were any “hate” laws.  The most defensible limitation on speech in “hate speech” legislation is the prohibition of incitement.  Incitement is the urging or encouraging of others to commit a criminal act.  If the other person(s) actually commit the criminal act, the person who did the inciting shares in their responsibility and therefore criminal culpability for the act.  It is reasonable, therefore, that criminal incitement be prohibited by law, at least if the incitement is acted on.  Criminal incitement, however, was already against the law before “hate speech” laws were thought up. All “hate speech” laws did was single out a specific type of incitement, as if telling people to commit a crime against person X was much worse than telling people to commit the same crime against person Y, if when telling them to commit the crime against person X, you give the person’s race, sex, religion, whatever, as part of the reason. 

 

Worse, they expanded the prohibited speech beyond actual incitement.  Actual incitement is explicit.  It involves someone saying, in so many words, that such-and-such a criminal act should be committed.  The concept of “hate speech”, however, treats as the equivalent of actual incitement, speech that portrays groups that supporters of “hate speech” laws think should be protected in such a negative light that someone might be inspired to act criminally against that group.   It is interesting, isn’t it, how the progressive supporters of these kind of laws think that in the case of groups to which they think the law should extend special protection, negative portrayals will inspire people to commit crimes who were not already inclined to do so, whereas in the case of groups they do not think should be specially protected by the law – Christians, rather than Jews or Muslims, whites rather than any other race, men rather than women, heterosexuals rather than homosexuals, actual men and women rather than transsexuals – the non-stop stream of negative rhetoric on the part of progressives themselves, usually far more full of expressions of hate in the literal sense of the word than that which they seek to ban, will have no such effect.  Basically, “hate speech” laws in effect protect groups that progressives feel are entitled to special protection from having their feelings hurt.  Here, the thinking of the contemporary morality with regards to taking offence finds its legal manifestation.

 

The old laws against actual incitement were justifiable limitations on freedom of speech because they were not there to prevent the circulation of ideas but rather to prevent the encouraging of criminal acts.  “Hate speech” laws are not similarly justifiable.  Narrowing the range of ideas that can be circulated is precisely what those who introduce such legislation have in mind.  Moreover, good laws are few in number, clear and easy to understand, protect people and their property from objective, quantifiable, harm and not from subjective hurt feelings and extend this protection to everyone in the realm and not just to certain groups that progressive political parties think need special protection.  “Hate speech” laws do not meet any of those qualifications but are rather the opposite.  They are the textbook example of bad laws.

 

After the news was leaked about the deal between the Grits and the Bloc, the apologists for removing the exemption came crawling out of the woodworks.  Unsurprisingly, foremost among them was Marc Miller, (4) whom Blofeld just named Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, replacing Steven Guilbeault who resigned from Cabinet last weekend over Blofeld’s pipeline deal with Alberta.  It was difficult, prior to last weekend, to imagine that replacing eco-extremist Guilbeault could be anything but an improvement, but lo and behold, Blofeld managed the unthinkable.  Miller, a childhood friend of Captain Airhead, belongs to the former prime minister’s innermost circle.  If Blofeld really wants to move his party and the government he leads away from the blighted legacy of his predecessor, replacing one Trudeau-insider with another is not the way to go about it.  To the point at hand, however, Miller has been shooting his mouth off for months about how he considers certain Biblical texts “hateful” and wants to see the religious text exemption for “hate speech” eliminated. (5) 

 

In a meeting of the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, of which he was at the time the chair, just prior to All Hallows, Miller said “In Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Romans — there’s other passages — there’s clear hatred towards, for example, homosexuals.”  This is a nonsensical statement.  The Bible identifies many different acts as sins.  This is not ordinarily interpreted as “hatred”, clear or otherwise, towards those who commit such acts, the late Fred Phelps notwithstanding.  When the Ten Commandments say “thou shalt not commit adultery”, which act carried the penalty of death under the Mosaic Law, do we understand this to be hatred against adulterers? When the Ten Commandments say “thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour”, do we interpret this to be hatred against perjurers?    If identifying someone’s behaviour as sinful is expressing “hatred” against that person, then the Bible could be interpreted as expressing hatred against all mankind when it says “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”  That it would be absurd to interpret it this way, however, is generally understood because the text, St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, goes immediately on to say “Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”  Far from an expression of hatred towards those who sin, the Scriptures are a message of God’s redeeming love to sinners.  The thought contained in the verse from St. Paul just quoted is also expressed in what is undoubtedly the best-known verse in the Bible “For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.’

 

When his words were immediately understood by several commentators, members of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, and provincial ministers as calling for these Scriptural texts, their being read as Scripture lessons in church, and preached on from the pulpit, to be criminalized, Mr. Miller took offence.  All he intended, he maintained, was to say that these texts should not be allowed as defences, in cases of public incitement.  This is how he is now defending the proposed removal of the religious exemption from Section 319.  Note, however, the sleight-of-hand that is at play.  He hopes that those whose suspicions he wishes to allay will understand the public incitement, to which he says sincere belief in these Scriptural texts should not be a defence, to mean someone telling other people that they should commit some kind of violent crime.  If, however, interpreting these Scriptural texts in accordance with traditional Christian orthodoxy as identifying same-sex sexual activity as sinful is itself regarded as an expression of hate, then removing the religious exemption from Section 319 would have precisely the effect that Miller’s opponents say it would have, of opening the door for criminal prosecutions of Christian ministers who faithfully preach on these portions of Scripture.

 

All one has to do is look at the track record of the Liberal Party since Miller’s lifelong intimate friend Captain Airhead took over as leader in 2013 to realize that Miller should not be trusted to mean merely that the religious defence should be removed from cases of actual, explicit, incitement to violent crime.  One of the first things that Captain Airhead did upon becoming Liberal leader was to ban anyone who held the orthodox Christian view of abortion from running for a seat in the House as a member of the Liberal party.  During Captain Airhead’s premiership, the Liberal government made a lot of noise about combatting Islamophobia and anti-Semitism at the same time that a wave of arson and other vandalism directed against Christian churches was underway.  Arguably, the Liberal government itself had a hand in inciting that wave.   One of Miller’s Liberal colleagues, John-Paul Danko described the factual reporting of the over 120 churches so attacked as a “conspiracy theory.”  Repeatedly, over the course of the Airhead premiership, the Liberal government promoted as “Canadian values” ideas that were contrary to orthodox Christian moral theology – and, as they discovered to their discomfort, contrary to the traditional morality of other religions as well – and sought through various measures to coerce Christian churches into changing their moral theology to align with progressive values.

 

So no, we should not believe Mr. Miller that the removal of the religious defence will not lead to a wave of litigation and even criminal charges against churches unwilling to change their orthodox moral theology or to muzzle themselves.

 

Instead of doing what the Liberals and the Bloc are planning on doing, I propose that the government do the right thing instead.  It should strike Section 319 from the Criminal Code in its entirety and abandon its plans on reintroducing legislation similar to the notorious Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, the bill repealing which had gone into effect the year after it received royal assent and the year before the Liberals resumed government.  It is the right thing to do because “hate speech” legislation is by its very nature, fundamentally bad law.  (6) 

 

Since morality informs law, we will also need to repeal the contemporary new morality that encourages people to take offence over every perceived slight to their identity, real or self-chosen, and reinstate the traditional morality that merely encourages people not to give offence.  This will be more difficult to do because it cannot be accomplished simply by passing or repealing a bill, but it is here at the cultural level rather than at the political and legislative, that the real battle must be waged.

 

 

 (1)   https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ full-transcript-douglas-murray-in-conversation-with-roger-scruton/

(2)   Today, due to decades of speculative fiction and the current state of AI development, “technocratic”, probably suggests to most people the idea of machines taking over.  That is not how I am using it here.  I am referring to the fact that the professional managers – government bureaucrats and HR types in the corporate world – considered as a class, are distinguished by the use of language that is “technical” in the sense employed by Michael Oakeshott in the title essay of his Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962) in which he distinguishes “technical” from “traditional” knowledge.

(3)   https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/liberals-bloc-hate-speech-laws-religious-exemptions

(4)   https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/religion-is-no-excuse-for-hate-carneys-newest-minister-says-of-proposed-removal-of-hate-speech-defence

(5)   https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/canadian-mp-reciting-hateful-bible-verses-about-homosexuality-in-public-should-be-illegal/

(6)    Earlier this week, paleo-libertarian editor Lew Rockwell published an article entitled “Why Banning Hate Speech is Evil.” I agree with the premise entirely although I would employ a different line of reasoning to argue for it.  Bans on “hate speech” are attempts to legislate what is in the human heart.  The civil government that attempts to do this, however, exceeds its own jurisdiction and intrudes into that which belongs to God alone.  This is the root of the evil the ancients called tyranny and that is often called totalitarianism in our own day. https://www.lewrockwell.com/ 2025/12/lew-rockwell/why-banning-hate-speech-is-evil/ 

 

State of the Dominion – 2025

Seven years ago I entitled my annual essay for our country’s birthday “State of the Dominion – 2018.”  This was during the premiership of Captain Airhead, towards the end of his first term, and I noted that we were in the midst of a third “revolution within the form.”  The first had taken place in the early twentieth century in the premiership of William Lyon Mackenzie King and the second from the mid-1960s to 1982 in the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau.  Captain Airhead is finally out of office, although the Liberal Party – the party that each of these men had led – remains in power, under the new leadership of Blofeld.  So it is time to revisit the matter of the state of the Dominion.

 

The first thing to be observed is that as we emerge from the Airhead premiership Canada is in a far less worse condition than we could have anticipated going into that premiership after the 2015 Dominion Election.  This does not mean that we are emerging unscathed, far from it. 

 

On the social/moral front alone, the progressive agenda has been horribly advanced.  In 2023 a bill banning “conversion therapy” passed Parliament with unanimous support.  While the expression “conversion therapy” tends to conjure up the image of something similar to the Ludovico Technique from A Clockwork Orange, the bill banning it was worded so broadly that it essentially forbids the offering of counseling to anyone seeking help in conforming their “sexual orientation” and/or “gender identity” to the reality of their biological sex.  Meanwhile, the progressive forces that demanded this ban have insisted that the opposite sort of conversion therapy be provided at the taxpayers’ expense to minors without their parents’ consent.  The opposite sort of conversion therapy is hormone therapy and surgery intended to conform biological sex, at least in appearance, to “gender identity.”

 

Nor is this the worst example of the advancement of the progressive social/moral agenda in the Airhead years.  That dishonour goes to the aggressive promotion of the culture of death by Captain Airhead.  There was little he could do in the way of making abortion more available in Canada since the status quo going into his premiership was the absence of any legal restrictions due to the failure of Parliament to pass any after the Morgentaler ruling in 1988 struck down the previous laws on the matter.  He could and did waste tax dollars on promoting abortion outside of Canada.  It was the euthanasia side of the culture of death, however, that will be remembered as the darkest part of his legacy.  Captain Airhead became prime minister later in the year that the Supreme Court struck down the Criminal Code’s prohibition against euthanasia and in the first year of his premiership a bill that outright legalized it passed Parliament.  In the near-decade since, further legislation, policy decisions and court rulings have expanded the assisted suicide program dubbed MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) and like abortion, marketed by those in favour of it as a “health care” choice, extending it far beyond the terminally ill.  In 2021 they got Parliament to pass a bill making it much easier to obtain approval for MAID and extending it to those whom sane people would say are most in need of being protected from it, that is, the mentally ill, although this provision was delayed from coming into effect until the year after next.  In the meantime government agencies that process requests for financial aid from, most notably, military veterans, have recommended MAID as an alternative.

 

So no, Canada did not emerge from the Airhead era unscathed, and wounds on other fronts than the social/moral could be provided to further illustrate this.  My point, however, is that Captain Airhead did not do all the damage it looked like he was about to do at the beginning of his premiership.  This was not for lack of intent or trying on his part.  It is partly due to the fact that he and his entire circle of associates were grossly incompetent, an affliction not shared by previous revolutionaries such as his own father or William Lyon Mackenzie King.  It is partly due to the fact that the Canada which the Fathers of Confederation bequeathed to us with her ancient Imperial/Commonwealth heritage of parliamentary monarchy and Common Law rights and freedoms, while weakened by these Liberal “revolutions within the form” was still resilient enough to prevent Captain Airhead from doing his worst.  It is partly due to the fact that most Canadians have simply not succumbed to the brain rot that in its most recent form has been dubbed “wokeness” to the extent that Captain Airhead and the progressive commentariat all assumed they had.

 

The first of these three factors needs nothing in the way of further commentary.   

 

The second factor may be disputed by neoconservatives (people who call themselves conservatives even though they wish to replace our constitution, traditions, and heritage with those of the United States or something more closely resembling them) who over the last several years have chosen to express their frustration with the Airhead Liberals by taking it out on the country with the claim that “Canada is broken” but these are wrong.  The Fathers of Confederation built a far more resilient country than could be ultimately broken by the likes of Captain Airhead.  I attribute the neoconservative error in about equal parts to their misguided preference for the American system and to the sort of infantile thinking that sees every court ruling, election, or other such public occurrence that does not go one’s way as showing the entire system to be damaged beyond repair, which sort of thinking is by no means limited to neoconservatives.

 

Of all Captain Airhead’s bad acts, the worst was when he invoked the Emergencies Act in 2022 to crush the Freedom Convoy Protest.  Unlike the types of protests he routinely supported, the Freedom Convey did not involve the destruction or defacement of property, public or private, violence, or riotous behaviour in general but was a true peaceful demonstration.  The trucker-protestors converged on Ottawa, parked in the neighbourhood around the government buildings, and basically threw a long, loud, party in the streets.  The protest was entirely justified.  It was in response to the Liberal government’s having introduced new restrictions by removing the exemption to vaccine mandates for cross-border truckers at the time when restrictions were generally being rolled back, showing the government’s determination to milk the absurd bat flu paranoia for as long as they could at the expense of the rights, freedoms, and livelihoods of Canadians.  There was no call for bringing out the biggest weapon the government had at its disposal against the protestors, the brutality with which the government broke up the protest was the sort of thing one would expect from the Chinese or North Korean regimes, and the ongoing legal persecution of the protest organizers is disgusting, to say the least.  Nevertheless, it could have been a lot worse, and all the evidence indicates that Airhead and his cronies intended to go much further.  They were forced to rescind the Emergencies Act, however, because the Senate was about to vote against confirming their having invoked it, which would have made their position much more difficult going into the mandatory inquiry that followed.  As for the inquiry itself, while Justice Rouleau’s finding that the government had met the threshold required for invoking the Act was absurd, Captain Airhead failed in his efforts to turn the inquiry into a trial of the protesters’ actions rather than his own, and when the Federal Court ruled on the same question a year later, they found against the government.

 

That is what the system working looks like.  It could have and should have worked better.  Ultimately, however, it worked.

 

That Canadians do not share Captain Airhead’s “woke” views to the extent he always assumed is a large part of the reason why he is no longer prime minister and why the Liberal Party under Blofeld has taken several steps back from aggressive promotion of the “woke” agenda..  Whether this will be permanent or is only temporary while the forces of progressive insanity regroup remains to be seen, but for now at least, the Liberal government is focusing on matters that appeal to a wider base among Canadians than the far left fringe.  That something like this would happen sooner or later was inevitable because an ideological agenda based on maximizing every type of diversity except diversity of thought is unsustainable.  Towards the end of the Airhead premiership, the left’s efforts to maximize diversity in the realm of sex and gender were undermined by its simultaneous efforts to maximize diversity in the realm of culture and race.  That this would happen was entirely predictable because the only way to maximize diversity of culture and race in a Western society is by increasing the number of people whose culture has not been so transformed by Modern liberalism as to make it supportive of maximizing sex/gender diversity.  Eventually the foreseeable clash occurred and a sizeable portion of Canadians realized that Captain Airhead was pushing diversity too far in both of these areas.

 

For the immediately foreseeable future, it is likely that immigration levels will remain higher than they ought to be but will cease to resemble overt efforts to make Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints into a reality.  Promotion of the alphabet soup agenda will probably continue but it will be much lower key than under Captain Airhead.  That this is the case is evident in the fact that the abuse of the sign of God’s covenant with Noah was a lot less conspicuous last month than in the “month formerly known as June” in previous years.  The same will be more or less true in other areas where Captain Airhead pushed his agenda far beyond what the general public was willing to support him in.

 

In conclusion, while Canada should be in a much better condition than she actually is, she is far better off after a decade of Captain Airhead than could possibly have been anticipated. 

 

Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the King!

A Surprisingly Good Start

Since last month’s Dominion election, Blofeld, who has succeeded Captain Airhead as both leader of the Liberal Party and prime minister of Canada, has made it very difficult for me to maintain my intense dislike of him.  Difficult, but not impossible.  He is, after all, the worst kind of banker, someone with a track record of supporting the same sort of goofy environmental and social causes as his predecessor, and worst of all, a Grit.  However, his reversal of the Liberal Party’s previous practice of urinating all over Canada’s Loyalist roots and heritage is much to be appreciated.  The decision to arrange for His Majesty, King Charles III to deliver the throne speech opening the forty-fifth Parliament in person was a wonderful move which I wholeheartedly applaud.

 

Of course I am not holding my breath in anticipation of Blofeld’s re-criminalizing or even placing restrictions on abortion, abolishing MAID, re-orienting government policy towards a firm defense of parental rights against deranged educators who think their calling is to teach children to be ashamed of Canada and her history, hate white people, and choose their own gender or a firm defense of law-abiding Canadians and their property against violent criminals, abandoning the failed harms reduction approach to drug abuse in favour of a sane prevention based approach, jettisoning the vile government policy that has been in place under both Liberal and Conservative governments since the first Trudeau premiership of tolerating or at time encouraging hatred towards specific groups – males, heterosexuals, people who identify as their actual sex, whites, Christians, and above all the combination of these – while protecting other groups – basically everyone else - from even having their feelings hurt by words they find offensive, or anything else of this sort.   

 

To be fair, had the Conservatives won, I would not have expected them to do many of these things either.  Evelyn Waugh said once that he was giving up voting because he had been voting Conservative for years and they failed to turn the clock back even a second.  The Canadian version of the party has not been any different, at least in my lifetime.  They have long ago forgotten what they are supposed to be for.  Earlier this week, when former leader Andrew Scheer was named interim leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition until the party’s actual leader can return to the House via by-election, he said “The Conservative Party is the party of free trade.”  That would have come as news to Sir John A. Macdonald, the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker, and basically every Conservative prime minister prior to Brian Mulroney.

 

This Tuesday Blofeld met with Krasnov the Orange, who after fulfilling the prophecy of the wounded head of the beast last year became president of the United States for the second time.  Krasnov is the second Communist agent to have infiltrated the White House by means of the Republican party.  The first was Dwight Eisenhower, who in World War II sabotaged the Western forces so that Stalin’s could reach Berlin first, forcibly repatriated thousands of people who had fled Soviet tyranny and, most likely, had George Patton murdered to prevent exposure of his crimes.  Krasnov defended his obvious calls to make Canada the fifty-first state by talking about how it looked to him as a real estate developer which, of course, was what he was doing back before he became a television star.  Blofeld’s response, pointing out that “there are some places that are never for sale” and that Canada “is not for sale.  It won’t be for sale ever” was most appropriate.  Krasnov told him “never say never” and he replied that Canadians would not be changing their minds.

 

Was Krasnov’s “never say never” remark a James Bond reference?  It is one word short of the title of the 1983 Irvin Kershner directed remake of Thunderball. The Blofeld our new prime minister resembles, however, is Christoph Waltz who portrayed the character in Spectre (2015) and No Time To Die (2021), the only actor to portray him twice.  The Blofeld in Never Say Never Again was Max von Syndow, the Swedish actor who crossed over to the American film industry after making a name for himself in the films of Ingmar Bergman, by portraying our Lord in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) in which two other then-future Blofelds appear - Donald Pleasence from You Only Live Twice (1967) portraying the devil and Telly Savalas from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) portraying Pontius Pilate.  Apparently Krasnov can’t keep his Blofelds straight.

 

Is Krasnov’s latest proposal, a 100% tariff on non-American films, a by-product of his ignorance of the basics of James Bond filmography?  That would make as much sense as his stated reasons for any of the other things he has done since regaining the White House.  In this case, I welcome his proposal.  If he goes through with it, other countries will be prompted to respond with retaliatory tariffs on American-made films.  Limiting the influence of Hollywood can only be a good thing.

 

Back to Blofeld, so far he has been doing much better as prime minister than I expected, although with as low expectations as I had that isn’t saying much.  Still, with His Majesty coming, for the first time in ages I am looking forward to an opening rather than a dissolution of Parliament.

God Save the King!