Hic et Ille, II

My Last Two Essays in a Nutshell

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mrs. Trudeau In the News

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abounding Ironies

When the image of the drowned body of three year old Alan Kurdi was broadcast around the world to feed the eyes of voyeurs of compassion everywhere, Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau, who as leaders of the NDP and Liberals respectively were already competing against each other for the Canadian premiership in this fall’s federal election, immediately started up a second contest as to who could shed the most tears, point the most fingers of blame at the present Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Immigration Minister Christopher Alexander, and promise to bring in the largest number of people claiming to be refugees from the Syrian civil war.

As comforting as it is to know that the men who want to be trusted with the job of leading Her Majesty’s next government in Ottawa hold the lives of young children so close to their hearts and are so visibly upset at the untimely death of one of them, this must surely leave many of us with a sense of puzzlement. For while Kurdi’s death, an accident caused primarily by the actions of his own father, could in no way have been prevented by the Canadian government there are almost 100, 000 deaths of children even younger that take place in Canada each year which are both deliberate and preventable, yet which Mr. Mulcair and Mr. Trudeau have both insisted they will neither prevent nor allow anyone else to prevent.

In 2013, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, there were 82, 869 induced abortions in Canada. The year before that there had been 83, 708, and the number had been in the ninety thousands for the five preceding years. These statistics, while official, are acknowledged to be low, because some kinds of abortions are omitted. Canada has had no laws restricting abortion since the Supreme Court’s 1988 ruling in R v. Morgantaler to strike down all existing abortion laws.

This absence of laws prohibiting or even restricting a procedure that deliberately terminates the lives of the next generation before they are even born is an indefensible and, indeed, reprehensible, state of affairs and yet, Mr. Trudeau last spring declared that those who wish to run as candidates for the Liberal Party in future federal elections must agree with the party line on abortion. Pro-life Liberal MPs already seated, he added, would be grandfathered in and allowed to run again, provided they supported the party’s position when it came to voting. Even this was regarded as a horrible compromise by Thomas Mulcair, who declared in response that no NDP candidate now or in the future “will ever vote against a woman's right to choose.” Indeed, the staunchly anti-life Mulcair insisted that “No one will be allowed to run for the NDP if they don’t believe that it is a right in our society for women to make their own choices on their reproductive health. Period.”

So the accidental death of a three year half a world away that could not have been prevented by our government is cause to wring our hands, put on sackcloth, and heap ashes on our heads as we loudly lament our hardheartedness which had nothing to do with the boy’s death, and throw caution to the winds in opening our borders to tens of thousands of people claiming asylum, regardless of whether they are actual refugees or the jihadists who are turning their own countrymen into refugees in the first place, but the deliberate termination of the lives of our next generation is a woman’s “right” which must be treated as sacred and not interfered with? It is a sad symptom of the spiritual illness that is devastating our country that these two ding-a-lings are electable even as representatives of their own constituencies, let alone potential Prime Ministers.

Earlier this year, when it was reported that pro-life groups were distributing fliers that put Justin Trudeau’s face next to that of an aborted fetus, Liberal health critic Hedy Fry was quoted as saying:

These flyers are incredibly graphic in nature, and regardless of individual positions on abortion, many Canadians are understandably upset that this group has exposed their children to these disturbing images.

You know what other disturbing image is incredibly graphic in nature? The image of Alan Kurdi lying dead on a beach. I wonder if the Vancouver Centre representative who as Chretien’s Minister of Multiculturalism was forced to apologize fourteen years ago for having stuck her foot in her mouth with a ludicrously absurd remark about how in Prince George “crosses are being burned on lawns as we speak” would have the same objection to the much wider distribution of that image.

Both Trudeau and Mulcair express the indefensible position of their parties on abortion in terms of “women’s right to choose.” The matter of abortion, they have declared, should not be reopened. It is easy to see why they think so. If the issue were reopened they would have to explain why women should have the right to choose to pervert their natural, maternal instincts by having innocent human lives that are utterly dependent upon them terminated. A healthy society allows for the deliberate taking of human life only when it is done in self-defence, when it is imposed as a penalty by a lawfully constituted court for a capital offence, and when done to the enemies of queen and country, nation and homeland, in time of war. Otherwise it is murder. If a man were to come home, find his wife in bed with someone else, and kill the both of them in a fit of passionate rage, his act of murder would be more understandable and defensible than that of a mother, who against her natural instinct to love, protect, and nurture the life growing in her, decides in cold blood to terminate her pregnancy. We would, nevertheless, still arrest that man, convict him of murder, and lock him up in prison. If we do not, shame on us. An even greater shame on us if we do not put a stop to this holocaust in which our unborn future generations are being offered up as sacrifices to the Moloch of sex equality.

The thousands of abortions that take place in Canada every year, along with the effective new contraceptive technology that sparked the second wave of the sexual egalitarian movement about six decades ago, have contributed significantly to the extended period of low fertility that we have experienced in recent decades which our government has used to justify an equally extended period of high immigration. The government’s rationale is economic, based upon the need to keep the tax-paying population from shrinking too drastically, but from the point of view of the national good it is suicidal, for no country can survive that sacrifices its continuity of identity by replacing rather than reproducing its population. That it has been going on so long makes it all the more reckless to consider taking in this new wave of migrants by the tens of thousands.

The ultimate irony, in all of this, is that Mr. Mulcair and Mr. Trudeau, if they manage to flood the country with tens of thousands of migrants, may very well end up slaying the pagan goddess of sex equality or women’s rights for whom they have abandoned and betrayed the true and living God of their nominal Catholic faith. Or perhaps, since it was worship at her altar that brought about the low fertility that started the chain of events that has brought us to the place where we might be overwhelmed by these migrants, it might be more appropriate to adapt a line of Hamlet's and say she will be hoist with her own petard. For these migrants are mostly Muslims, and if we let them in in such numbers and so indiscriminately that we end up adapting to them rather than the other way around, her temple will soon fall.