Thoughts on the 2025 Dominion Election

The 28 April, 2025 Dominion election has come and gone in Canada and we have elected our forty-fifth Parliament.  This is what a Dominion election is about.  We go to the polls to choose who will represent our local constituency in the House of Commons, the lower house which along with the Senate, comprises Parliament, the traditional institution in which by ancient prescription the legislative powers of the Crown are exercised.  This is good and as it should be. 

 

The members of Parliament are divided into factions which we call parties.  An unfortunate side effect of a Dominion election is that one of these parties wins a larger number of seats than the others.  If that party wins 172 seats, they have an outright majority of the seats in the House.  If they win less than 172 but more than any other party they have a plurality of the seats.  In either case, this party is said to have “won” the election and is customarily invited by the King or, more commonly, his vice-regal representative the Governor General, to form the next government.   The King, Parliament, civil service, and courts are all “the government,” of course, but in a narrower sense of the term the government consists of the ministers who make the day to day decisions of the King’s Privy Council, the institution in which the executive powers of the Crown are vested.  The leader of the winning party becomes the first minister of His Majesty’s government, the prime minister who chooses a cabinet of other executive ministers to head such ministries as finance, transportation, and dog-walking.

 

In this election, the Liberal Party won a plurality that came just short of a majority.  Initially this was reported as 169 seats but a recount in Lower Canada has since reduced it to 168.  I found this outcome disgusting and appalling.  The Grits have been in power for the last ten years during which period they have: 1) sabotaged the country’s economy, 2) waged war on the memory of her founders and historical leaders, 3) showed alarming disregard for their accountability to Parliament, 4) trod roughshod on the basic rights and freedoms of all Canadians supposedly protected by the Charter they are always patting themselves on the back for introducing in 1982, 5) shoved the insane cultural revolutionary ideas regarding sex, gender, race, and the like that are currently called “woke” down everyone’s throats, 6) reignited the national unity crisis that had finally died down after the first Trudeau premiership, 7) brought in an inexcusable number of new immigrants exacerbating the housing and affordability crises they the Liberals had created, 8) adapted and encouraged provincial governments to adapt policies that enable and encourage rather than hinder and discourage a lifestyle of drug abuse, 9) repeatedly attempted to take control over what Canadians say or think on the internet in the name of fighting “hate” while presiding over and tacitly encouraging a huge wave of hate crimes directed against Christian churches, and 10) took what Pope John Paul II had dubbed the “culture of death” to the nth degree as over the course of their decade in power euthanasia was first legalized for those already dying, then expanded to include virtually everyone else, and actively promoted to such an extreme that even the United Nations condemned it.  I could say more, but I’ll limit the list to one each for each of the years they have been in power.  The point is they did not deserve another term in office, much less an increase in their seat count.

 

Four months ago, when Captain Airhead, having made himself the most loathed prime minister in the history of Canada – if not the entire Commonwealth – finally got the hint and resigned, we were more sick and tired of the Liberals than we had ever been.  Their comeback cannot be attributed to the qualities of the man who replaced Captain Airhead.  An economist by education, Mark Carney spent most of his career in banking, investment and central.  He was an advisor to his predecessor and so could not credibly claim to be a clean break from him, especially when it was obvious that he was Captain Airhead’s hand-picked choice as successor.  He completely lacks his predecessor’s charisma and bears an uncanny resemblance to James Bond’s archnemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld as portrayed by Christoph Waltz in the Daniel Craig films.  These aren’t the makings of someone capable of breathing new life into the corpse of a political party.

 

That the Liberals won another term and even increased their seats to four short of a majority is all the more astonishing in that the Conservatives also gained seats.  In fact, the Conservative seat total went up by twenty four since the previous Dominion election.  The Liberals only gained sixteen seats.  The collapse of the New Democratic Party is what made this possible.  The NDP went from twenty-four seats to seven, losing seventeen seats and their official party status.  That the NDP was reduced to single digit seats and that Jimmy Dhaliwal lost his own seat and stepped down as leader of that awful party I would count among the positive outcomes of the election with one caveat, that they are part of a larger shift that is not positive.  The Lower Canadian separatists also lost ten seats and the Green Party lost one bringing its seat count down to one, that of its former leader Elizabeth May.  That the Liberals and Conservatives both saw large seat increases, while the smaller parties saw devastating losses, is indicative of a shift on the part of the electorate to thinking in terms of a two-party rivalry.  That is the way the American system operates.  It is not how ours is supposed to operate.

 

That brings us to the reason for the Liberal comeback.  It is almost entirely due to foreign interference in the election.  No, not interference by Red China, of the type the Liberals have been trying to cover up for years.  Interference by the leader of Canada’s oldest frenemy.  I hate to use this pop culture portmanteau but no other word adequately describes the relationship between the United States and Canada.  Canada and the United States were founded on opposite principles and ideals.  The United States was founded on the idea of cutting ties to the Christian civilization of Great Britain and Europe and establishing from scratch a new secular country based on ideals derived from abstract reason.  In other words she was founded on liberalism.  In defiance of this concept, Canada was founded on loyalty, on retaining ties to British and European Christendom, and adapting the institutions of the old country to the circumstances of the new.  In other words, she was founded on conservatism.  This would make the two countries natural enemies.  Nevertheless, for most of our history we have enjoyed the world’s longest undefended border, have been each other’s largest trade partner, and fought on the same side in two World Wars and several other global conflicts.   This is how friends behave.  So, frenemies. 

 

The current president of the United States is a man allegedly recruited by the KGB in 1987.  If true, his seeming attempts to engineer the collapse of international trade and history’s biggest stock market crash since his re-election last year become explicable as the actions of the ultimate Communist sleeper agent seeking to destroy capitalism from within.  It would not be the first time a Communist was elected president of the United States running on the Republican ticket. Whatever the truth of that may be, about the same time he started dropping tariffs the way his predecessors dropped bombs, Krasnov the Orange began saying that our country should become his country’s fifty-first state.  Initially this seemed like a joke at the expense of Captain Airhead, but he has kept it up ever since, including a particularly loathsome social media post addressed to the Canadian electorate on the day of the election. 

 

That Carney’s Liberals were able to translate Krasnov’s threats into enough votes for themselves to come back from political death is clearly the explanation of their victory but the explanation itself needs an explanation.  After all, the idea of Canada becoming an American state is abhorrent and loathsome to almost all Canadians including those, like myself, who find the thought of voting Liberal just as repugnant.  The idea that the Liberals are the best choice for dealing with Krasnov’s Anschluss threats makes no sense.  The Liberals have a new leader with no political experience, their own policies are largely to blame for the economic weakness that Krasnov is exploiting, and, most importantly, the Liberals have always, since the nineteenth century, sought to more closely integrate Canada with the United States.

 

While it was Brian Mulroney who signed the US-Canada Free Trade Agreement with Ronald Reagan in 1988, this was in betrayal of his own party’s traditional position.  Free trade with the United States was always the position of the Liberals.  Sir Wilfred Laurier ran on a platform of free trade – he called it “reciprocity” – with the United States in 1891.  The same year, Goldwin Smith, a Liberal intellectual, published a book Canada and the Canadian Question in which he maintained that Confederation was a mistake and that Canada should seek to join the United States.  John Wesley Dafoe, who for the first half of the twentieth century edited the Winnipeg Free Press, which then as now was a Liberal – big and little l – newspaper, and was Sir Wilfred Laurier’s biographer, entitled his history of our country Canada: An American Nation (1935). The absence of “North” was deliberate.  Dafoe saw Canada as the same kind of country as the United States, a country built on the foundation of liberalism by breaking ties with Old World Christian civilization, albeit by means other than a war of independence.  This interpretation of Canadian history is the Liberal interpretation, what Donald Creighton, who like myself vehemently disagreed with it, called the “Authorized Version.”  Even in the 1960s, when the Liberal Party leadership fell into the hands of Communists, it remained the party of Americanization.  Lester Pearson, who had been an informant of Elizabeth Bentley’s Soviet spy ring in the 1940s and who betrayed Canada’s traditional loyalties in his actions in the Suez Canal Crisis to serve the interests of both the United States and the Soviet Union, acted on behalf of JFK when he ousted Diefenbaker in 1963.  His successor, Pierre Trudeau, who had visited the Soviet Union towards the end of Stalin’s regime as a delegate to a Communist conference and as a far left journalist helped engineer the “Quiet Revolution” against established Roman Catholicism in Lower Canada in the 1950s, who admired Mao and basically never met a Communist he didn’t like, as prime minister in the 1970s and 1980s, got all his inspiration for his “communist” innovations from American models – LBJ’s “Great Society”,  the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the American Bill of Rights.  More recently, Captain Airhead was a disgustingly obsequious “Amen Charlie” to the American president, at least when Obama and J. Brandon Magoo held the office.

 

To summarize, the Liberal Party’s track record is such that they are the last party in Canada that ought to be trusted with handling a threat of being swallowed up by the United States. 

 

It turns out that they did not need a reliable track record in standing up to the United States on behalf of Canada to be elected.  All they needed was to make standing up to the United States and more specifically Krasnov the central issue of their campaign.  By doing so, they aligned themselves with the thinking of most Canadians that an existential threat to our country must be treated more seriously than any other matter.  And yes, despite the efforts of some who ought to know better to pretend otherwise, Krasnov’s rhetoric does indeed constitute an existential threat.  Lying through his teeth about his country subsidizing ours to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars[1], Krasnov keeps claiming that the only alternative is for us to become an American state.  If we became an American state, our country would cease to exist, therefore this rhetoric, however much worded politely in a Corleoneish “I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse”[2] manner, constitutes an existential threat.

 

By treating Krasnov’s threats to Canada as the central issue they were the Liberals were able to win an election they did not deserve to win.  For the Liberals to win, the Conservatives had to “lose”, that is, if increasing your seat total by twenty-four deserves to be called “losing.”  The Conservatives did not win the plurality or the majority that they had seemed on track for winning until Krasnov opened his big mouth, but a Dominion election is not the same sort of zero-sum, winner-take-all affair as an American presidential election.  That is not how the Westminster parliamentary system works.  The Conservatives as the second largest party remain His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and in a much stronger position than before apart from the fact that their leader lost his own seat.

 

No, that is not my trying to put a positive gloss on a disappointing outcome.  If there is one thing Canadians need it is a better understanding of and appreciation for our constitution.[3]  As for disappointment, my disappointment in the composition of the forty-fifth Parliament lies in the fact that the Liberals won and not that the Conservatives lost.  Maxime Bernier has been saying, ever since he lost the race for the Conservative leadership to Andrew Scheer and formed the People’s Party of Canada that the Conservative Party is now conservative in name only.  He seemed to devote most of his energies during this campaign to telling this to audiences of American television stations which may explain why the People’s Party’s portion of the vote dropped to below 1%.  As it so happens, I agree with his assessment of the Conservative Party although I reject Bernier’s measuring stick for determining conservatism.  Bernier’s standard of conservatism is what has been called conservatism in the United States since World War II which is a form of what everyone, everywhere else in the world, calls liberalism.  It is a better form of liberalism – lower taxes, freer markets, a lighter state, basically everything ancient Israel asked of Rehoboam after the death of Solomon – than what currently goes by the name liberalism in North America – basically, what Rehoboam, following the bad advice of the young and ignoring that of the elders who had advised his father, gave them - but it is still properly called liberalism rather than conservatism.  If the Conservative Party were actually conservative in other than name it would have won this election hands down because there would not have been the slightest doubt that it was the best choice to stand up to Krasnov’s bullying.  Real conservatism is about protecting the good things that have been handed down to us and passing them down to those who will come after us, about adapting traditional institutions rather than inventing new ones from scratch, about respecting the sacred and refusing to subordinate all of life to the values of the marketplace.  A Conservative party that was actually conservative – or better yet actually Tory[4] – would have seen Krasnov’s suggestion that Canada join the United States as an offense against everything for which it stands.

 

Having said that, I think that actions that cost the Conservative Party the votes they would have needed to win were mostly those of others than the party leader and those actually running in the election.  The Alberta premier’s warning that the country would face a national unity crisis if the Liberals won the election most likely had the opposite effect of what was intended.  In my youth, Lower Canada would frequently use the threat of leaving and breaking up Confederation to obtain what it wanted from the Dominion government.  This was not well received out here in the prairies and I very much doubt the similar rhetoric from Alberta took well outside that province.  Danielle Smith in this case should probably be viewed as the messenger rather than the one making the threat.  On election night, as the results from Atlantic Canada started to come in and the Liberals took an early lead but well before the outcome of the election could be reasonably called, I observed Albertan hotheads commenting in online threads about how they were done with Canada, were going to leave and take their province with them, and basically carry on like crybaby Hollywood liberals do every time they lose an election. [5]  It was rather satisfying, amidst the disappointment of the Liberal victory, to see these types lose.

 

Then there was the commentary from the Conservative Party’s supporters in the media.  Yes, these are vastly outnumbered by Liberal Party supporters in the media, but they do exist.  Their approach to Krasnov and his threats did not do the Conservative Party any favours.  Initially, when the threat was only of tariffs they justified Krasnov by saying that his demands were not unreasonable and were that we do things we should be doing for our own sakes, like crack down on fentanyl.   They were not entirely wrong, except in that Krasnov seemed to be demanding that we prevent people from leaving our country the way Communist countries used to (further evidence that he is KGB?)  Unfortunately, this persisted long after Krasnov’s threats had gone from tariffs to Anschluss.  

 

Worse, these commentators often came across as mocking and ridiculing Canadians for being angry at Krasnov’s attacks and for standing up for our country.   The more responsible Conservative commentators, like Brian Lilley, were careful to direct such criticism only towards the Liberals and NDP and not for expressing Canadian patriotism in itself but for their hypocrisy in having spent the last ten years bashing the country, her history, and her heroes.  Less careful commentators, however, often came across as suggesting that the only ones expressing Canadian patriotism were the Liberals and the Left in general or even as mocking Canadian patriotism in itself. I recall one commentator describing the booing at the American national anthem at sporting events as “jingoism at its worst.”  Seriously?  The president of the neighbour country says that our country shouldn’t exist and should be swallowed up by his and booing his country’s national anthem in response is a worse form of jingoism?  As with the “I’m going to take my province and leave” types, there is satisfaction in seeing the sort of person with so little judgement or taste as to express such nonsense lose.

 

Unfortunately the price of such satisfaction is having to put up with the premiership of Blofeld, whom Krasnov seems to adore.

 

God Save the King!

 

---

[1] Krasnov was referring to the United States’ trade deficit with our country and to our insufficient spending on defense.  Even if the trade deficit was as large as that, and it is not, it is much smaller and disappears when energy exports are taken out of consideration, it would not amount to a subsidy, because a trade deficit is not a subsidy.  A subsidy flows in one-direction, from subsidizer to subsidized.  A trade deficit is what happens when two parties are exchanging cash for other goods in both direction, and party A buys more of party B’s goods for cash than party B buys of party A’s goods.  Party A is not subsidizing party B, because party A is getting party B’s goods in return for his cash.  In the case of Canadian and American trade the only thing that resembles a subsidy is the fact that the United States buys energy resources from us at well below the market value.  That is us subsidizing the United States, not the other way around.  As for our insufficient spending on defense, while I find this objectionable it does not amount to the United States subsidizing us and is in fact our business and not Krasnov’s.  There is only one country that has ever tried to conquer Canada, and that was the United States in the pre-Confederation period of the nineteenth century.  Krasnov’s claim that the United States has been “protecting” us is identical to when a different kind of “Don” sends his thugs to a shop owner to collect a payout with threats to the effect of “This is a pretty nice place you got here.  Would be a pity if something were to happen to it.”

[2] Okay, maybe the “Don” in the previous note is not such a different kind from Krasnov after all.

[3] Among the things they need a better understanding of is the fact that a constitution is a set of governing institutions, the system by which they operate, and the traditions that inform and shape them and not a piece of paper that magically prevents the government from abusing its powers.  If Canadians understood this better, they would not commit such errors as to think that Canada had no constitution prior to 1982, that the Liberals gave us our constitution in 1982, or that the Charter is our constitution (it is part of our constitutional law, but not the whole of our constitutional law, much less the constitution itself) and would be more enraged at the offences the Liberals keep committing against our constitution.

[4] A Tory is a specific kind of conservative by the meaning of the word I have provided in the text of this essay.  Conservatives tend to prefer monarchy, Tories are monarchists and royalists, respect for the sacred is part of conservatism, orthodox Churchmanship of Toryism.

[5] Many Albertans and neoconservatives elsewhere in Canada see Alberta as the most conservative province in Canada.  This, however, is based on making American “conservatism”, i.e., the older form of liberalism, the standard of conservatism.  By the standard of actual conservatism, Alberta is arguably the least conservative province in Canada.  It has been, at least since the oil boom, the province of the young and the rootless, by which I mean that a large part of its population are people who moved there from elsewhere in Canada, from the United States, and from further abroad in their youth in the hopes of becoming rich. 

Captain Airhead Fesses Up, But Only Partially

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

The Monarchy and the Permanent Things

 The Coronation of His Majesty King Charles III is set for this Saturday, the sixth of May.   As this event, the peak of the ceremony surrounding the accession of our new Sovereign, has grown nearer, the woodworks have released a fairly predictable swarm of vermin intent on spoiling things as much as they can.   Liberal Party bureaucrats circumventing proper procedure to quietly commission changes to our royal symbols to make them less evocative of tradition.  Special interest groups trying to make what should be a solemn yet celebratory occasion embodying unity, stability, and continuity for each of His Majesty’s realms and for the whole Commonwealth, as was the Coronation of His Majesty’s late mother, all about them.   Left-wing journalists calling our institution of monarchy “outdated” and “archaic”, which it, being timeless, can never be, suggesting that we “severe our ties” to it as if it were something external and not integral to our constitution, and defaming both the monarchy and our country as a whole by insisting that our history be read through the distorting lens of BIPOC racial grievance politics.    Sadly, these latter have found a strange bedfellow in the person of Maxime Bernier, the leader of what they would absurdly describe as the “far right” People’s Party of Canada.   For me, this last means that come the next Dominion election I will have one less option to vote for.   While on most things, perhaps everything except this, where Bernier’s views differ from those of the present leadership of the Conservative Party I agree with Bernier, this is a deal breaker.   No small-r republican will ever have my support, no matter how right he is on other things.

 

Bernier has allowed his objections to Charles the person blind him with regards to monarchy the institution.   His objections to Charles have to do with the king’s views on certain controversial points.   Our prime minister, Justin Trudeau is far further removed from Bernier's views on these same points - and many others as well - than is our king.   Imagine if Bernier had tweeted that because of his objections to Trudeau we should replace parliament with something else.   This would be recognized instantly as a terrible suggestion.   Yet the same bad reasoning – get rid of the institution because of objections to the person – is worse in the case of what Bernier actually said.   The monarchy is a non-political – in the sense of party politics – office.   It is therefore much worse to attack the institution because of objections to the officeholder based on partisan political views in the case of the monarchy than in the case of parliament and the prime minister.   

 

It is because he approaches monarchy from the standpoint of Modern democratic assumptions – yes, populist nationalist assumptions, comically labelled right-wing by those seemingly unaware that the original right was anything but populist and nationalist, are Modern democratic assumptions, well within the boundaries of historical liberalism -  that Bernier makes the basic blunder of failing to recognize that it is because the monarchy is non-democratic that it is non-political and that it is because it is non-political that it can both stand above partisan politics as a beacon of unity and serve as an anchor of stability for parliamentary government in the turbulent sea of Modern democratic politics, an institution far more important and valuable even than its ancient democratic complement of parliament, which only the basest of fools would want to mess with..  This mistake can be categorized with others common to those who have so imbibed the basic assumptions of the Modern Age that they simply cannot think outside that box and find it painful to even try.   These mistakes all involve prioritizing that which, important as it may be to the moment, is fleeting and ephemeral, over that which is fixed, stable, permanent, and lasting.   This is the consequence of turning our backs on the consensus of the wisdom of all of human tradition until yesterday and deciding that the marketplace is a better model for the whole of society than the family.

 

When we speak of stability and permanence with regards to human institutions, of course, we are referring to these qualities to the extent that they can be possessed by anything in our earthly, mortal, existence.   Monarchy is the state institution that has demonstrated the largest capacity for such.  Family is the most permanent social institution.    While I am referring to family in the general sense of “the family”, the oldest and most universal social institution, specific families also have much longer lifespans than the individuals who belong to them in any generation.   We are born into families that have been around a lot longer than us and, until very recently at any rate, those families raised us to behave in ways that would ensure they would be around long after we are gone, i.e., grow up, get married, have kids, raise those kids to do the same.   Like living under the reign of a king whose Sovereignty has passed down to him from those who reigned over generations of our forebears this reminds us that we are not each our own individual selves the centre of the universe around which all else revolves and to whose wills reality must bend the knee.   This is a reminder we are in constant need of now more than ever since we are constantly surrounded by voices telling us otherwise.

 

The recognition that everything is not about us, that we are part of things bigger, more important, and longer lived than ourselves, is, paradoxically, absolutely essential to our growth as individuals, not physical growth of course, but our development into our best possible selves, the selves we are supposed to be, the kind of growth that perfection in the original root meaning of the word points to and which in the language of the ancient thinkers consists of finding and accomplishing to the best of our ability our good, that is to say, our end, our purpose, the reason we are here on this earth.    For we cannot find and serve our own small-g good, if we are solipsistic prisoners of our own selves.   Our individual small-g goods are not, pace Nietzsche, goods we make for ourselves out of our own wills, but are that within us which answers to big G Goodness.      We do not have to be able to conceive of Goodness in philosophical terms, but none of us will ever come near being the best version of ourselves possible without acknowledging Goodness as something that is what it is regardless of what we think, say, or do about it and something to which our will must bend rather than vice versa.

 

Goodness is often spoken of in connection with Beauty and Truth, both of which like Goodness are what they are regardless of us and to which our wills must bend.   These are stable and permanent in the absolute sense.   In philosophy and theology they are called the Transcendentals, which term means “the properties of being, i.e., that which is to existence itself what “red” is to “apple”, but as has already been stated, a philosophical understanding of these things is hardly necessary.   The important thing to understand is that we don’t have a say in what Goodness, Truth and Beauty are and that we are to conform ourselves to these rather than to try to force them to conform to our will.

 

We live in a time when we are suffering the consequences of having done the exact opposite on a massive scale.   Take Beauty for an example.   Our cities look as one would expect them to after a century or so of architects and city engineers designing buildings and streets with the idea that Beauty must take backseat to utility.    Our countrysides, while not affected as badly as our cities, show the scarring one would expect when those responsible for projects that affect the countryside share the same priorities as the aforementioned architects and city engineers.   Is it any wonder, with such disregard for Beauty being shown by the engineers responsible for city and country alike, that so many others add to the problem by strewing garbage all over both?   We have art and music that looks and sounds like what one would expect from a century or so of sculptors, painters, and composers who no longer saw the primary purpose of their vocation as being to create works of Beauty but to “express themselves” and “reach the people” even if that meant shocking them with ugliness.   Bernier’s objections to Charles the person are based on His Majesty’s life-long outspoken environmentalism which, in the minds of Bernier and many who think like him, make His Majesty into someone like Bill Gates or Al Gore.   Even if His Majesty was that type it would still be utter folly to wish to abolish the office of the monarchy because of such a quirk in the present officeholder, but it is also an ill-informed misjudgment of His Majesty.   His environmentalism began as countryside conservationism rooted in his love of the Beauty of the countryside.   His love for Beauty has manifested itself in a similar outspokenness with regards to the other things discussed in this paragraph.   It would be difficult to read his defense of older buildings and architectural styles and his biting criticism of modernism and functionalism as anything other than a deep traditionalism.  Similarly, if you consider everything he has said and done with regards to environmentalism instead of focusing in only on climate-related matters, it is quite evident that he is more of a Wendell Berry than a Bill Gates.  

 

Late last week a bill cleared parliament, the first of several planned by the current Liberal government, that will have the effect of severely limiting Canadians access to Truth by giving the government the same, or even stronger, control over alternative sources of information online that they already exercise over the traditional media.   This is not, of course, how the prime minister and his cult of followers talk about what they are doing.    They say that this first bill is intended to protect “Canadian content” on online streaming services.  They say with regards to their internet legislation as a whole that they are trying to protect Canadians from “online harms” such as “misinformation”, “disinformation”, and “hate”.   If one were to make the mistake of taking this language literally and seriously one could be fooled into thinking that it is the opposite of Truth that the government is trying to keep from Canadians for “misinformation” and “disinformation” as these words are properly used mean information that is false.   The Liberals, however, use these words to mean information that disagrees with whatever narrative they happen to be promoting at that moment and since that narrative is almost inevitably false it is Truth that ends up being censored as “misinformation” or “disinformation”.   A Ministry of Truth never promotes Truth, it only suppresses it.   It is always a bad idea, but especially so when coming from someone like our prime minister who never tells the Truth when a lie will suffice.   Only a few days before the Online Streaming Act passed he told an audience that he never forced anyone to get a vaccination.   This was a rather audacious lie considering there were not many world leaders worse than him when it came to imposing vaccines on millions by preventing anyone without one from having any sort of a normal existence.     Many opposed this bill and will continue to fight it, in the courts if need be, and to his credit Bernier is a leading example of these.   This was done, however, in the name of freedom of speech, and freedom of speech was championed, not because of its necessity to Truth (without freedom of speech, including the freedom to speak that which is false, we do not have the freedom to speak Truth, the parallel to the classical theological argument that without Free Will, including the ability to choose evil, we do not have the ability to choose the Good) but because it violated our individual rights.   I don’t deny that individual rights are important, but they are a liberal value, and like all liberal values their importance is greatly exaggerated in this age.  Truth is more important.   Sir Roger Scruton wrote “beauty is an ultimate value – something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given.  Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations”.  (Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, 2011)   Imagine how different the fight against the Liberal Party’s plans to seize control of what we can say or see online would be if those fighting fought first and foremost in the name of Truth, the permanent and lasting value, and framed their arguments accordingly.

 

My hope and prayer for Max Bernier is that his eyes will be opened and that he will come to see that as important as all the things he has been fighting for are, what T. S. Eliot called “the permanent things”, both the truly permanent ultimate values of Truth, Goodness and Beauty and the relatively permanent concrete human institutions such as the family and in the political sphere parliament and especially the monarchy which point us to those ultimate values, are more important and that he will repent of having allowed his minor objections to Charles the person to attack the monarchy and espouse small-r republicanism.   Until such time, he will have to do what he does without my support.

 

God save the King!

Reflections on a Waste of Time

Dominion Election 2021 has come and gone with the result being the restoration of the status quo ante.   This proves that the Conservatives, Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition in both the previous and the new Parliament, were absolutely correct in saying that this election was a colossal waste of time and money and an unpardonable one at that, having been called so soon after the last one and at a time when the public is still in the grip of an irrational paranoid panic because of a public health scare, going on two year's old, stirred up by the fear pornographers of the mass media noise machine, aided and abetted by the politicians and public health mandarins.   Note that in the place of that last part - everything from "grip" on - the Conservatives would have just said pandemic.   My wording is a more accurate description.

Since this means that  the incumbent Prime Minister, Captain Airhead, who occasionally uses the alias Justin Trudeau, gets to keep the job unless the Liberal Party decides to punish him for risking everything in a foolish and failed, egotistical bid for a majority, it is also evidence of the gross stupidity of a large part of the Canadian electorate.   This demonstrates further a point that I have made many times in the past - the universal franchise ideal of classical liberalism just does not live up to its hype and there is much that can be said on behalf of the pre-liberal wisdom that votes should be weighed and not just counted.

Or rather, to soften the judgement of the previous paragraph somewhat, this is what the results of this election would be saying if the election actually had been what almost everyone - the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, the idiotic clown who leads the socialist party, the media commentariat of all political stripes, and most of the public - thought of it as being, that is to say, the election of the next Prime Minister.   That so many Canadians think of our Dominion elections primarily in terms of who the next Prime Minister will be is one of the many unfortunate consequences of the permeation of our culture with imported American Hollywood pop culture.   Every four years Americans vote on who their next President will be.   In our Dominion elections we do not vote for who the next Prime Minister will be.   We vote for who will represent our local constituency in the lower House of the next Parliament.    A Dominion election is the election of the next Parliament, not the next Prime Minister,   The person invited by the Crown to fill the office of Prime Minister - the person who leads the Cabinet of Ministers who carry out the day-to-day executive administration of the government - is the person who commands the most support in the House.   This is either the leader of a party that has won a majority of seats in the House or, in the absence of a majority, the party leader who can convince one or more parties other than his own to back him, usually, but not necessarily, the leader of the party which won the plurality.

I have from time to time heard some people gripe about this and suggest that we should have a separate ballot in which we vote directly for the Prime Minister.   I very much beg to differ with such people.   This would be objectionable, in my opinion, not just because it would make our system more like that of the United States, although that is good grounds in itself for opposing the proposal.   It would also be a step further towards undermining the way our constitutional system is designed to de-emphasize the office and role of Prime Minister.    The Canadians of the present day are sorely in need of a true appreciation of this aspect of our constitution and a better understanding of how a great many of our country's problems stem from a century's worth of effort on the part of the Liberal Party under leaders from William Lyon Mackenzie King to Captain Airhead to subvert our constitution in this very aspect and turn our country into an elected Prime Ministerial dictatorship.

Before proceeding further with that thought, allow me to address those who might object to my characterization of this as a Liberal project by pointing out that the last Conservative Prime Minister also treated the office in this way.   Stephen Harper grew up a Liberal.   He left that party in his twenty's but never really became a traditional Canadian Tory. He was first elected to Parliament as a member of the Western protest party, the Reform Party of Canada.   The Reform Party, of which this writer was also a member in the 1990s, was first and foremost a populist party.  While it affected a small-c conservatism, support for Canada's historical traditions and constitution was never a large part of what it understood by this word, which is a significant part of the reason this writer walked away from it shortly before the completion of the second stage of its merger with the Progressive Conservatives.   Indeed, what it thought of as conservatism was largely indistinguishable from the original platform and policies of the Liberal Party, and, demonstrating, perhaps, its indifference to Canadian history and tradition, it gave itself the name by which the Liberal Party had gone prior to Confederation.   Harper, who was chosen as leader after the completion of the merger, always seemed to be more of a Mackenzie King Liberal than a Macdonald-Meighen-Diefenbaker Conservative.

Our constitution is sometimes called the Westminster Parliamentary system after the Mother Parliament in the United Kingdom from which we inherited the system and on which ours is modelled.   The centuries of history, the most memorable highlight of which was the Magna Carta, by which the constitution of Alfred the Great, which the Norman kings swore to uphold following William's Conquest, evolved into the original Westminster Parliament in a form we would recognize today, produced a concrete actualization of what the ancient Greeks thought of as the ideal constitution.   The mixed constitution, about which Aristotle and Polybius wrote, the former telling how it had been a much discussed ideal even before his day, was regarded by the ancients as the most stable and just constitution.   The three basic constitution-types - the rule of the one, the few, and the many - each had their strengths and weaknesses, and tended to follow a cyclical pattern in which the best form of each would be corrupted over time into its worst form - aristocracy would be corrupted into oligarchy, for example, to use the terms applied to the good and bad forms of the rule of the few - prompting its replacement, usually through violent and destructive means, with one of the other types.   A mixed constitution, the ancients reasoned, in which each of these simple constitutions was incorporated as an element, would balance the weaknesses of each element with the strengths of the others and so be a more stable and less corruptible whole.    

Our constitution is also sometimes called Crown-in-Parliament or King/Queen-in-Parliament depending upon the sex of the reigning monarch.   This expression can be used for our constitution as a whole, although it is more strictly the term for the legislative branch of government.  In our constitution the powers are both united and separated, the union or fusion being ,appropriately, in the institution of the Crown as this is the institution that embodies the ancient "rule of one".   The monarch, the office in which Sovereignty is vested, is the representative of the unified whole, both of the state and the country, and, accordingly, the office is filled by hereditary succession rather than by partisan politics so the officeholder can be above the inherently divisive latter.   The House of Commons is the element that embodies the ancient rule of the many in our constitution.   It is the Lower House of Parliament but, especially in discussions of this nature, is often called by the name of the whole, just as the union of that whole with the Crown in Crown-in-Parliament can mean either the legislative branch of our constitution, as opposed to the executive Crown-in-Counsel and the Judicial Crown-on-the-Bench, or the entire Westminster constitution.   By calling the whole by this name, the emphasis is placed on the two ancient and time-proven institutions, the monarchy and Parliament.

Placing the emphasis on these institutions means that it is not placed on the office of Prime Minister.   This is important because the office of Prime Minister, at the head of the Cabinet of executive Ministers, is one of great power.   The power attached to the office creates the necessity that the officeholder be held accountable for his exercise of that power and that the role of the office be one of humility.    To meet the first need, the Prime Minister is supposed to be strictly accountable to Parliament.   This is why there is an official role for the largest non-governing party as Opposition.   The Opposition's job is to question and challenge the Prime Minister, to hold his feet to the fire and make him give account to the House of Commons for his actions.   One of the roles of the other House of Parliament, the Senate, which is the element corresponding to the ancient rule of the few in our constitution, is to hold the Prime Minister accountable in a different manner, by deliberating on the legislation that passes the House, giving it "sober, second thought", and sending it back to the House if problems are found with it.    If the Prime Minister's relationship with Parliament is supposed to keep him accountable, his relationship with the Crown is supposed to keep him humble.    It is the Queen who as hereditary monarch, above factional politics, represents Canada as a unified whole, and the Governor General who represents the Queen.   While the Prime Minister exercises the executive powers of government, he does so in the name of the Sovereign, and he is supposed to do so in an attitude of humility as the "first servant" suggested by his official title.   This role calls for a kind of modesty that is conspicuously lacking in the present holder of this office, who more than any of his predecessors has rejected the accountability and humility of his office.   A short time before the last Parliament was dissolved he actually took the Speaker of the House to court to challenge a House ruling that he would have to provide Parliament with un-redacted documents about the firing of two researchers from the virology lab in Winnipeg.   This blatant repudiation of full accountability to Parliament ought to have disqualified him and his party from even running in the election.   As for humility, he has treated his office as one of  such shameless self-aggrandizement and self-promotion as to make the Kims of North Korea seem meek and unassuming by comparison.    Upon winning a second minority government, after arrogantly assuming that he would be handed a majority, he claimed absurdly that the electorate had given him a "clear mandate" which utter nonsense indicates that he has become victim to the delusions of his own propaganda.

He would never have been able to get away with any of this if Canadians had a true appreciation for our constitution and its principles.    Making the office of Prime Minister one that is directly elected, and our elections, therefore, even more like American presidential elections, would only make this worse.

There is another change to our system that has been proposed, indeed, far more often than the one discussed above.    Many would like to see us abandon what is absurdly called first-past-the-post for proportional representation as the means of filling the House with elected Members.   This is a change that the current Prime Minister had promised to make when he was first elected with a majority government in 2015.   He did not do so.   Had he done so, he would not be Prime Minister today, because the Conservatives won the popular vote this year as well as in 2019.   Proportional representation would have meant a Conservative government as the result of both elections.    Another difference that proportional representation would have brought about is that Maxime Bernier's populist-libertarian-nationalist party, the People's Party of Canada would have had members elected, at least in this Dominion election.   They received over five percent of the popular vote, double that of the self-destructing Greens who were able to elect two Members, including their leader emeritus although not their new leader.   This sounds like I am making an argument for proportional representation.   A Conservative government, led by Andrew Scheer in 2019, or even by Erin O'Toole this year, despite the latter's gross sell-out to the left, would have been preferable to the Trudeau Liberals.   The presence of the People's Party is desperately needed in Parliament where all currently sitting parties are skewed to the far left and to the idea that every problem requires government action as a solution.   Having said that, while the outcome of proportional representation would have been better in these regards in 2019 and again in 2021, the present system is still the better one.   The current system is based on the idea that the people of a local constituency, being a community or group of communities with particular interests, vote for the person who will represent that constituency in Parliament.   The person elected as Member is supposed to be responsible primarily to the constituency, and to speak on their behalf including all those who voted against him as well as those who voted for him..   In other words, the individual Member is supposed to act towards his constituents in the opposite way to how Liberal governments have acted towards rural areas and especially the prairie provinces, since at least the first Trudeau premiership, that is to say, in a manner that looks a lot like punishing them for voting against their party.   This is a good ideal and standard to guide elected Members.   By contrast, proportional representation would give us a House filled by people who represent only their party, its ideology, and the percentage of the electorate who voted for them.   That is hardly a desirable improvement.   The so-called first-past-the-post is by far the saner and more civilized way of doing things, even if it gives us results that for other reasons we would not prefer.

As stated in the previous paragraph, the ideas of Bernier's People's Party, ludicrously called "far right" by the CBC and its echo chambers in the private media, are desperately needed in Parliament right now.   In his column just before the election, Ken Waddell, who publishes my hometown newspaper the Rivers Banner as well as his own hometown newspaper the Neepawa Banner, and who was at one time considered for the leadership of our provincial Progressive Conservatives, said the following in this regards:

I have often encouraged people in the NDP or Green party to get involved with the Liberals or the Conservatives and bring their ideas forward. The Greens and NDP are not likely ever going to form government. Even less so will the Maverick Party, the Peoples’ Party of Canada or the Christian Heritage Party. They have a narrow list of policies. It would be better if they got involved, truly involved, with one of the two main parties and worked to bring their ideas to the forefront. A lot of good talent in the splinter parties is wasted on tilting at windmills instead of actually bringing about good policies. It’s too bad, really, as there are some good people and good ideas outside of the Liberal and Conservative parties, but the ideas will never see the light of day hidden in the splinter groups. God bless those who toil for the smaller parties, but I think their time and talents are being wasted.

I remember when Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel used to make this argument about third parties other than the Republicans and Democrats in the United States.   The argument was much stronger in that context because the American system is designed to be a two-party system, stacked against anyone other than the Republicans or Democrats..   Our system is not designed that way as seen in the number of times there have been minority governments that can only govern when propped up by one or more parties other than either itself or its main rival which is in Opposition.    There is, however, another problem with Mr. Waddell's suggestion here.   While the Greens and NDP might be able to get away with putting their ideas forward  as Liberals since the latter have largely incorporated the agendas of the former, nobody would be able to do as he suggests with the ideas of the Maverick, People's, or Christian Heritage Parties in either the Liberals or the Conservatives.    Both of these parties strictly police their members to keep just these very ideas out.   The Conservative Party, under the present leadership, is in some ways worse than the Liberals in this regards.   Whether we are talking about social conservatism of  the type associated with the Christian Heritage Party or libertarian opposition to public health tyranny such as the People's Party has been promoting, Erin O'Toole has expelled Members over these ideas and severely whipped those allowed to remain in caucus so as to make them afraid to speak their minds.  The present Liberal and Conservative leaders both govern their own parties the way the Liberals have for a century now wanted the country run, as an elected dictatorship.    For this reason, the option proposed by Mr. Waddell is simply not available.

Canada and Confederation are Worthy of Celebration

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the Queen!

 

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

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