Jagmeet Doesn’t Know Jack!

In the 2011 Dominion election, under the leadership of Jack Layton, the New Democratic Party which is the officially socialist party, as opposed to the unofficial socialist parties such as the Liberals and the Conservatives, won the highest percentage of the popular vote and the most number of seats it has ever received.   While the Conservatives, led by Stephen Harper, won the election and formed a majority government, Layton’s NDP won enough seats to become Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, a role which, during Conservative governments, had always before been held by the Liberals.     While the unpopularity of Grit leader Michael Ignatieff undoubtedly contributed to this, it was clearly a credit to the charismatic leadership of Layton himself.   Sadly, he was not able to perform the role of Official Opposition Leader for long.   Cancer forced him to step down from his duties and in August of that year took his life.

 

In the 2019 Dominion election, by contrast, the NDP’s percentage of the popular vote fell drastically, and it moved from third party to fourth party status as it lost twenty seats from the forty-four it had won four years previous.   What is very interesting about this is that this was the same election in which the Liberal government dropped from majority to minority government status.   The Liberal drop was not difficult to explain – the year had begun with the government rocked by the SNC-Lavalin scandal and during the election campaign itself another scandal, which would have utterly destroyed anyone else, broke, as multiple photographs and even a video of the Prime Minister, who had marketed himself as the “woke” Prime Minister, in blackface surfaced.   What was surprising was not that the Liberals dropped in the popular vote and lost seats, but that they managed to squeak out a plurality and cling to power.   This makes it all the more damning that the New Democrats, ordinarily the second choice for progressive Liberal voters, did so poorly in this election.

 

Just as most of the credit for the NDP’s success in 2011 belonged to its late leader Jack Layton, so most of the blame for its failure in 2019 belongs to its current leader, Jagmeet Singh.   Despite the efforts of the CBC and its echo chambers in the “private” media to promote his brand, Singh, was clearly unpalatable to the Canadian public.   Whereas a competent politician who finds himself unpopular with the electorate would ask what it is about himself that is turning off the voters and try to change it, Singh is the type who declares that the problem is with the electorate, that they are too prejudiced, and demands that they change.   That this attitude, indicative of the kind of far Left politics Singh embraces – he is the furthest to the Left any mainstream party leader has ever been in Canadian politics – is itself a large part of what turns the voters off, is a fact that eluded him, continues to elude him, and will probably elude him forever.

 

That the contrast could hardly be greater between the late Jack Layton and Jagmeet Singh received another illustration this week.

 

On Sunday, a much hyped interview between Oprah Winfrey and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex was televised.   I did not watch the interview, as I make it a point of avoiding Oprah who, in my opinion, has done more than anybody else to turn people’s minds to mush, despite having a book club named after her.  The Sussexes consist of Meghan Markle, an ambitious American actress, and her husband, the younger son of the Prince of Wales.   Last year, you might recall, this couple was all over the news before they got pre-empted by the bat flu, because Markle, who obviously is the one wearing the pants between the two of them, having learned that unlike the Hollywood celebrity to which she had aspired, royalty comes with public duties as well as privilege, duties which do not include, and indeed conflict with, the favourite Hollywood celebrity pastime of shooting one’s mouth off, no matter how ill-informed one is, about every trendy, woke, cause, wanted to keep the royal privileges while giving up the royal duties, and was told, quite rightly, by the Queen, that this was not the way things were done.   The couple left the UK in a huff, stopping temporarily in Canada before they eventually relocated to the United States.    As I said, I did not watch the interview, but have caught enough of the highlights of it and the post-interview commentary to know that it was basically Markle throwing herself a “me party” and hurling mud at her inlaws and the ancient institution they represent, for not making everything all about her.  

 

Sane, rational, people surely realize that interviews of this sort speak far more about the spoiled, egotistical, narcissism of the individuals who give such interviews than they do about the people and institutions criticized in such interviews.   People like Jagmeet Singh, however, regard them as opportunities to promote their own agendas.

 

Singh, actually succeeded in making the current Prime Minister look classy by comparison, something which is exceedingly difficult to do.   The only comment the Prime Minister made following the interview was to say “I wish all members of the Royal Family the very best”.   Singh, however, ranted about how he doesn’t “see the benefit of the monarchy in Canadians’ lives”.   As with Markle’s interview this comment says far more about the person who made it than the institution he seeks to denigrate.

 

To fail to see the benefit of the monarchy in Canadians’ lives is to fail to see any benefit to Canadians in a) having their country remain true to her founding principles, b) having a non-political head of state, or c) having an institutional connection to the United Kingdom, Australia, and the other Commonwealth Realms that in no way impedes our country’s sovereignty over her own domestic affairs and international relationships.   To fail to see any benefit in any of this is to display one’s own blindness.

That Canada’s founding principles require her to retain the monarchy is an understatement.   Loyalty to the monarchy is the founding principle of Canada, at least if by Canada we mean the country that was founded in 1867.   Quebec nationalists like to point out that Canada was first used for the French society founded along the St. Lawrence long before Confederation, which is true enough, but the conclusions they draw from this are contradictory non-sequiturs.   At any rate, the original French Canada was, most certainly, a society under a monarch, the monarchy of France, and, contrary to the delusions of the Quebec nationalists who are products of the “Quiet Revolution” (against traditional, Roman Catholic, Quebecois society and culture), it was not moving in the direction of the French Revolution when the French king ceded Canada to the British king after the Seven Years War, a fact that is evinced by Quebec’s remaining ultramontane in its Catholicism and seigneurial in its society long after the Jacobins had done their worst in France.   Before Confederation began the process of uniting  all of British North America into the Dominion of Canada in 1867 – the Canada we speak of as Canada today – an English Canada, in addition to a French Canada, had come into existence, and this English Canada grew out of the United Empire Loyalists, that is to say, those among the Thirteen Colonies which revolted against Britain and become the United States who remained loyal to the Crown, and fled to Canada to escape persecution in the new republic.    They were able to flee to Canada because French Canada, although the ink was barely dry on the treaty transferring Canada from the French king to the British, did not join in the American Revolution against the Crown which had, to the upset of the American colonists, guaranteed its protection of their culture, language and religion.  During Confederation, the Fathers of Confederation, English and French, unanimously chose to retain a connection to the larger British Empire and to make the Westminster system of parliamentary monarchy our own (it was Canada’s own Fathers of Confederation, not the Imperial government in London, who brought all of this into the Confederation talks, and, indeed, when the Fathers of Confederation wished to call the country “The Kingdom of Canada”, London’s input was to suggest an alternative title, leading to the choice of “The Dominion of Canada’).    It is the Crown that is the other party to all of the treaties with the native tribes, who generally, and for good cause, respect the monarchy a lot more than they do the politicians in Parliament.   At several points in Canadian history, both on the road to Confederation, such as in the War of 1812, and after Confederation, such as in both World Wars, English Canadians, French Canadians, and native Canadians fought together for “king and country”.   The monarchy has been the uniting principle in Canada throughout our history.  To reject the monarchy is to reject Canada.

 

That anybody in March of 2021 could fail to see the benefit of having a non-political head of state demonstrates the extent to which ideology can blind a person.   Four years ago, the American republic had an extremely divisive presidential election after which the side that lost refused to acknowledge the outcome, spent much of four years accusing the winner of colluding with a foreign power – Russia – to steal the election, and giving its tacit and in some cases explicit approval to violent groups that were going around beating people up, using intimidation to shut down events, and rioting, because they considered the new American president to be a fascist.   Last year, they held another presidential election which was even more divisive, with a very high percentage of Americans believing the election was stolen through fraud, with the consequence that Congress had to order a military occupation of their own capital city in order to protect the inauguration of the new president against their own citizens.   This is precisely the sort of thing that naturally ensues from filling the office of head of state through popular election, politicizing an office that is supposed to be unifying and representative of an entire country.   This is not the first time in American history that this has happened.   Less than a century after the establishment of the American republic, the election of the first president from the new Republican Party led to all of the states south of the Mason-Dixon line seceding from the American union and forming their own federation, which the United States then invaded and razed to the ground in the bloodiest war in all of American history.   Generally, when a country replaces its hereditary monarchy it initially gets something monstrously tyrannical which may eventually evolve into something more stable and tolerable.   When the British monarchy was temporarily abolished after the English Civil War and the murder of Charles I, the tyranny of Cromwell was the result, which was fortunately followed by the Restoration of the monarchy.   In France, forcing the Bourbons off the throne resulted in the Jacobin Reign of Terror.   The forced abdication of the Hapsburg and Hohenzollern dynasties after World War I led directly to the rise of Adolf Hitler, whereas the fall of the Romanovs in Russia brought about the enslavement of that country to Bolshevism.   To wish to get rid of the hereditary monarchy in Canada is to fail to learn anything at all from history.

 

I won’t elaborate too much on the third point.   Either you see an advantage in the Commonwealth arrangement in which the Realms share a non-political, hereditary monarchy, but each Realm’s Parliament has complete control of its own affairs, or you do not.   Jagmeet Singh does not appear to care much for Canada’s relationship with other Commonwealth countries.   Take India for example.   The relationship is a bit different because India is a republic within the Commonwealth rather than a Commonwealth Realm, but it still illustrates the point.   As embarrassing as the present Prime Minister’s behaviour on his trip to India a few years ago was, the relationship between the two countries would be much worse in the unlikely event Jagmeet Singh were to become Prime Minister.   He would probably not even be allowed into India.  Eight years ago he was denied an entry visa – the first elected member of a Western legislature to be so denied – because of his connection with the movement that wishes to separate the Punjab from India and turn it into a Sikh state called Khalistan, a movement that is naturally frowned upon in India where it has been responsible for countless acts of terrorism (it has committed such acts in Canada too).   Asked about it at the time, Singh placed all the blame for any harm done to the two countries relationship on India.

 

Which leads me back to where this essay started.   Just as Singh could not see that his support for the movement that produced the bombing of Air India Flight 182 in 1985 may possibly be a legitimate reason for India to ban him from their country and blamed any deterioration in the relationship between the two countries on India, so he cannot see that anything he has said or done could possibly be a reason why his party did so poorly in the last Dominion election and places the blame on the prejudices of Canadians.

 

If by some miracle he were to come a self-awaking and realize that instead of demanding that Canadians change in order to accommodate him that there might be something objectionable about him that he ought to be trying to fix, a logical step for him to take would be to try and emulate the last leader in his own party who truly had popular appeal.   If he were to do so, he would learn that that leader had a radically different attitude toward our country’s founding principles and fundamental institutions than his own.

 

The Honourable Jack Layton, the son of former Progressive Conservative MP Robert Layton, had this to say:

 

Some people think the NDP may want to get rid of the monarchy but I assure you that’s absolutely not the case.   My dad was a big time monarchist and so am I.

 

Jagmeet should try to be more like Jack.  He would be less of an ass if he did.

Barbaric Cultural Practices

Earlier this year, and especially during the long federal election campaign, the Liberal and New Democrat parties, the liberal media, progressive bloggers, and other assorted lefties, were able to get a lot of mileage out of the phrase “barbaric cultural practices”. The previous government, led by Stephen Harper, had banned the wearing of the niqab during citizenship oath ceremonies in 2011, a ban which was struck down by a Federal Court.* Harper’s government vowed to take the matter to the Supreme Court and then, in the last month of the election campaign, promised to establish an RCMP tipline for reporting cases of “barbaric cultural practices”.

The progressives condemned this as racist and xenophobic. Harper, they maintained, was appealing to fear, negativity, and hatred, and this was “unCanadian” because Canada is the land of tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism. Actually, Canada was nothing of the sort prior to the premiership of Trudeau the Elder, which began in 1968. It was the Trudeau Liberals who created the new Canada of tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism – that is to say tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism that were imposed on the country from the top down, administered by arrogant bureaucrats, and protected by the suppression of dissent. The older, traditional, British Canada was a much superior country.

The merits of the older British Canada, and the rather odious nature of the kind of “tolerance” and “diversity” introduced by the Trudeau Liberals which make a mockery of the ordinary meaning of these terms are, of course, beyond the understanding of today’s progressives. Nor do they seem to be capable of grasping that it is one of their own chief ideals that Stephen Harper was fighting for in his campaign against “barbaric cultural practices”.

This is not intended to be laudatory of Stephen Harper. The ideal in question is that of the equality of the sexes, or, as the progressives now insist upon mislabelling it, “gender equality”, an ideal I do not share with Harper or the progressives and, indeed, regard as worthy only of ridicule. Auberon Waugh put it best, I think, years ago when he wrote:

I have never understood how equality can be said to apply, except in the most superficial sense. to any human relationship. By this I do not mean that we are all graded in some divinely-imposed pecking order, but that our essential differences make talk of equality meaningless. Study of the sexes is bound to identify the differing characteristics of each, and I cannot see how anything useful is achieved by asserting that chalk is equal to cheese, or should be equal to cheese and must be made equal.

I don’t believe in “gender equality” but the progressives all seem to believe in it and none of them more so than that vapid young twit who is our new Prime Minister and who has made a grand gesture of support for this ideal in the way he chose the Ministers for his new Cabinet.

These same progressives accused Stephen Harper of waging a “war on women”. Which, however, actually accomplishes more for the fairer sex – choosing your Cabinet Ministers on the basis of their sex so you can have an equal number of men and of women, or actively trying to keep such practices as honour killings and female circumcision from becoming prevalent in Canada? It is practices like these, which target the female sex, that the Harper government condemned as barbaric.

In 2011, the year the Harper Conservatives won a majority government, the federal government updated the “Discover Canada” brochure that is given to those who wish to immigrate to and become citizens of Canada. Among the changes was the addition of forced marriage to the following list: “Canada’s openness and generosity do not extend to barbaric cultural practices that tolerate spousal abuse, “honour killings,” female genital mutilation, forced marriage or other gender-based violence” and goes on to say that those who commit these things will all be severely punished under our criminal law. Now that last part may have been more a statement of wishful thinking than an accurate description of how our criminal justice system actually functions but that is beside the point. “Spousal abuse”, runs both ways, and in fact there is recent evidence that women are more likely to be abusive in relationships than men, which, of course, would have come as no surprise to Rudyard Kipling, but this too is beside the point as the government clearly had male-on-female abuse in mind when it put that into the pamphlet. For that is what all of these “barbaric cultural practices” have in common, they all target females. The title of the subsection of the brochure that this is found in, by the way, is “The Equality of Women and Men”.

At the time, Justin Trudeau, then Michael Ignatieff’s Liberal Shadow Minister for Immigration condemned the Harper government for the use of the word “barbaric”, even though it was not itself a new addition to the publication. He received so much negative feedback over this he was forced to make a retraction the next day.

Every time the Harper government spoke of “barbaric cultural practices” it was with regards to practices in which women are treated cruelly or unfairly. The niqab controversy was no exception to this although the face veil is obviously not on the same scale as murdering one’s daughter or sister because she shamed the family by having a boyfriend, dressing inappropriately, or being raped, or removing a young girl’s clitoris to prevent her from growing up to become promiscuous. While I may not think much of the “gender equality” Mr. Harper and Mr. Trudeau both believe in, unlike Mr. Trudeau four years ago, I have no problem agreeing that these practices are utterly barbaric. Indeed, one of the things most objectionable about the false ideal of equality, is that those who believe in it tend to make a big deal out of peccadilloes while letting major injustices like these slide.

Consider the example of feminism. “The women’s movement” is a modern phenomenon, whose raison d'être is to promote the rights of women. Yet it has never concentrated its efforts on fighting honour killings or cliterodectomy or anything of the like. Instead, it has focused on such things as the “glass ceiling” and the “77 cents on the dollar” and to combat these largely imaginary bogeys, has created a barbaric cultural practice of its own, i.e., abortion on demand. It could be argued that this is because feminism is a movement which began in, grew up in, and still mostly belongs to, the Western world where the former practices were mostly unknown until quite recently. That is the whole point, however. That a revolutionary movement seeking radical societal transformation in the name of women developed in the West, where it really only became a force after women had been given the vote and barriers to their education, owning property, and having professional careers had for the most part disappeared, and not in parts of the world where girls have their genitals mutilated and may be murdered by their relatives if they “shame” their family is because the modern Western mind has been thoroughly permeated and polluted by the false ideal of equality.

Ironically, feminism is part of the larger progressivism which is itself responsible for practices like female genital mutilation and honour killings, once unknown in countries like Canada, becoming more and more common in large Western cities. For progressivism is not just about the equality of the sexes, it is about the equality of races and cultures as well and for decades now, what this has meant, is that it has insisted that all cultures ought to be equally welcome in Canada and other Western countries. This is what the first Prime Minister Trudeau’s policy of “official multiculturalism” was all about and it is clearly the reason that the younger Trudeau, heir to this dogma in which he was undoubtedly indoctrinated from an early age, initially took a foolish offence to the description of forced marriages, female genital mutilation, and honour killings as barbaric a few years ago. To call these things barbaric is to say that all cultures are not equal after all, which, of course, they are not.

Trudeau and other progressives are no more capable of admitting this than they are of admitting that there is a fundamental contradiction in their ideology – that equality of the sexes and equality of cultures are mutually incompatible ideals. They can be rejected together with consistency – which is my own position – but they cannot be consistently affirmed together. Stephen Harper got this partially right, the Trudeaus have always gotten it completely wrong, and Canada has paid a heavy price for their error.

*It has been drawn to my attention that I was mistaken in thinking that the ruling by the Federal Court of Appeal was based on the Charter. The ban, which was an instruction from the Ministry to the judges administering the citizenship oath rather than a law, was overturned because it conflicted with an older rule that requires such judges to give maximum religious freedom in the swearing-in ceremony. Thank you to the person who noticed and notified me of this factual error.

Canada, Past, Present, Future

I sometimes say that I am a patriot of the Canada my father grew up in. This is, of course, a way of expressing disapproval of many significant changes that occurred in Canada in the 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s, some before I was born, others in my early childhood. It should not be taken as suggesting that the only Canada I have ever loved is one that never saw for myself, one that passed away before I was born. I grew up on a farm in rural Manitoba. Time moves slower in the country than in the city, and the rural Canada I grew up in was still in many ways recognizable as the Canada that existed before Pierre Trudeau started messing around with it.

“Protestant, small town, British, virtuous”. Those are the words Michael Ignatieff, leader of the Liberal Party of Canada uses in True Patriot Love, the history of his mother’s family, to describe the Canada his uncle George Parkin Grant loved, and famously lamented over.

Grant, who was born into a family of illustrious Canadian educators and intellectuals, was a professor of philosophy at Dalhousie University and later professor of religion at McMaster. In 1965, two years after the opposition brought down the Diefenbaker administration over his refusal to allow American nuclear arms on Canadian soil, Grant wrote Lament For A Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. Grant believed that the collapse of the Diefenbaker administration spelled the end of Canadian sovereignty and that we would be swallowed up in the continental and world empire of the United States of America.

The booklet, Lament for a Nation earned George Grant, a Christian conservative, a place alongside Oswald Spengler, Evelyn Waugh, and James Burnham, as a twentieth century conservative prophet of doom. Ignatieff, who believes his uncle was wrong, says that his uncle “gave up on his country at exactly the moment when it roused itself to action”. As evidence he goes on to list the very changes I referred to in the first paragraph of this essay.

Ignatieff writes that “the modern Canadian welfare state – medicare and the Canada Pension Plan – was created, distinguishing us ever more sharply from the United States”, a curious assessment on the part of a historian. Surely Ignatieff must realize that the modern welfare state is an American construction? Canada, like many European countries, has gone further down the road of welfare statism than the United States went under Roosevelt in the 30’s, or under LBJ in the ‘60’s, but for all that the welfare-states origins lie clearly within the United States of America.

Ignatieff goes on to list such things as “the repatriation of the Canadian constitution, the next-to-last symbol of our dependency on the British, and the creation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, incarnating a distinctive national rights culture; and we gave ourselves a national anthem and a flag.”

We already had a flag actually, the Canadian Red Ensign, and there was nothing wrong with it. In Lament For A Nation, which was published the year the current flag was adopted, George Grant pointed to Diefenbaker’s stand for the Red Ensign, as leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, as evidence that Diefenbaker’s “basic principles were far removed from any petty sense of self-importance”. The Red Ensign, versions of which remain as the provincial flags of Ontario and Manitoba, speaks of our roots and identity as a country that is at the same time British and North American.

It was, of course, because the Red Ensign identified Canada as being British, that it had to go, even though the Ensign, which includes the fleur-de-lis of Quebec in the shield of arms, also speaks of our country’s French heritage, while the current flag speaks of neither. The Liberal Party elites who insisted upon all of these changes are often thought of as being extremely anti-American and in a certain sense, the worst possible sense, that is correct. Yet, in their attitude towards Canada’s British roots, heritage, and identity they showed themselves to be the most American of all Canadians. They spoke condescending of all the things they were getting rid of – the Red Ensign, “Royal” in the title of several government services, and the name of the country “The Dominion of Canada” as our “colonial trappings”.

What utter nonsense. The Red Ensign, far from being a colonial flag, was the flag our soldiers fought under in World War II, a war which we entered upon our own Declaration of War. The Liberal elites, ignorant of Canada’s history, considered “Dominion” to be a synonym for “colony”.

Sir. John A. MacDonald and the Fathers of Confederation wished to name our country “The Kingdom of Canada” and proposed such as the name in the early drafts of the British North America Act. This met with opposition in London based on the fear that such a title would prove provocative to the United States. The term “Dominion”, taken from the 8th verse of the 72nd Psalm was adopted as a substitute for “Kingdom”, being intended to convey the exact same meaning.

John G. Diefenbaker, in an address given to the Empire Club of Toronto on March 9, 1972 and later printed as the 4th chapter “Towards a False Republic” in his book Those Things We Treasure, describes some of the underhanded tactics the Liberal Party elites were using to strip Canada of her royal heritage:

An “Information Canada” booklet entitled How Canadians Govern Themselves states on page 3 that “…we are no longer a Dominion.” This statement is a direct contradiction of the British North America Act which gave the name “Dominion of Canada” to our country, and that was the name included in the Treaty of Versailles, the operative Statute of Westminster and the Canadian declaration of war in 1939.

The repatriation of the British North America Act, which made Canada’s constitution amendable by our own Parliament, was probably a good thing. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms was not. Despite the lofty title of this document, the basic right of property is omitted altogether, whereas all of the other most basic freedoms and rights of a civilized, free society, previously protected by ancient prescription under Common Law, find themselves spelled out in sections 2, and 7 through 13, where they are compromised by the weasel clause in section 1, and the notwithstanding clause in section 33. Do we really want the government to pass a law giving itself the power to arrest some and hold them indefinitely without trial despite the rights listed in section 11 of the Charter, which all Canadians had before the Charter was passed? That is exactly what the Charter allows the government to do.

In all of these changes Michael Ignatieff sees the Liberal Party leading Canada into shaping its own identity and future as a country. They look more like acts of sabotage to me.

I hope that George Grant was as wrong about Canada being doomed to become a colony of the United States as he was wrong about socialism being “an essentially conservative force”. In chapter 5 of Lament For a Nation, Grant argues that American corporate capitalism (which he distinguishes from “early capitalism” which was “full of moral restraints”) is a powerful force for progress in the world. Grant was hostile to and suspicious of progress, which he regarded as social upheaval and change which threatened the tranquility of everyday life, rather than as societal improvement. With this attitude I am in full sympathy. I do not however, accept Grant’s conclusion that socialism must therefore be conservative. Grant wrote:

Yet what is socialism, if it is not the use of the government to restrain greed in the name of social good? In actual practice, socialism has always had to advocate inhibition in this respect. In doing so, was it not appealing to the conservative idea of social order against the liberal idea of freedom?

Socialism, far from restraining greed, encourages it. Socialism encourages among the lower classes the greed which it condemns in the upper classes. As the former in any society will outnumber the latter by far, socialism results in a net increase in greed in society. Socialism cannot appeal to the conservative idea of social order because it has historically been defined as opposition to the institution of private property, an institution as foundational to conservative order as it is to the freedom of the classical liberal.

Grant was correct in seeing corporate capitalism as a progressive force and in seeing progress as being a bad rather than a good thing. Instead of pursuing the silly argument that socialism, the economic doctrine beloved of revolutionaries around the world, was somehow “conservative” he should have pursued his thought on “early capitalism”, inhibited by Protestant morality, beyond the two or three lines he devoted to it as it was a thought far worthier of such a great Christian thinker. He could, for example, have considered the arguments of Wilhelm Röpke, the German economist who combined the Austrian school’s arguments for the free market, with arguments that such a market could only function within the framework and on the foundation of Christian moral and social order.

Grant’s views on socialism led to his being dubbed a “Red Tory”. I however, would associate that term with someone like Dalton Camp, a politician who hid his revolutionary socialist agenda behind a conservative mask. Grant, in contrast, was an actual conservative, a defender of the ways and mores of everyday life in traditional, Christian, small town, Canada, against the forces seeking to overwhelm and swamp that life.

Despite the revolutionary agenda of the Liberal Party in the ‘60’s and 70’s, I believe that the Canada George Grant loved, the Canada I love, is still out there, in the small towns, churches, and homes of rural Canada, and perhaps, hidden deeply, in parts of urban Canada as well. Canada became a country under the reign of Queen Victoria. Historian W. L. Morton, in his history The Kingdom of Canada, described the moment when Queen Elizabeth II opened Parliament in person in 1957, the first Canadian monarch to do so, as the moment Canada truly became the “Kingdom of Canada” Sir. John A. MacDonald had envisioned.(1) On this, the 143rd anniversary of the enactment of the British North America Act and the birth of Canada as a sovereign country, Queen Elizabeth is visiting her North American kingdom once more. May that inspire hope that the traditions of our country may yet be preserved in recognizable form for generations to come.

Happy Dominion Day
God save the Queen

(1) As an interesting aside, the first viceroy Queen Elizabeth II appointed upon ascending to the throne, and the first ever Canadian born Governor General, Vincent Massey, was uncle-by-marriage to George P Grant.