Don't Pull Down the Post!

I never thought former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau was as smart as his journalist and academic groupies made him out to be. There is a huge difference between an intellectual and being intelligent and Trudeau was the former rather than the latter. Compared to his son, however, Trudeau the Elder was a genius, albeit an evil one.

Since taking over his father’s old role as leader of the Liberal Party Justin Trudeau has had a habit of sticking his foot in his mouth and otherwise talking and acting like a complete moron. This week, however, he outdid himself with his 32 point plan to “restore democracy” in Canada. While some of the points have merit, most, like the goal of greater gender parity are utter foolishness, and the one which we will be concentrating on here is absolute insanity.

Before turning to that point, however, it must be said that it is not democracy that needs to be restored in Canada so much as freedom. Democracy and freedom are not the same thing nor do they necessarily go together. The idea that democracy and freedom go together like a knife and fork is an idea that has strong roots in the American tradition but which Canadians have traditionally rejected since the days of the American Revolution when the Loyalists chose to remain loyal to the Crown rather than jump on the republican bandwagon. Alexis de Tocqueville warned our American friends, after his visit to the United States in the nineteenth century, that democracy can potentially be the basis of the greatest tyranny of all, the “tyranny of the majority” as the history of his own country’s democratic revolution, begun fifteen years after that of the Americans ended, so well illustrates. Far superior to the modern ideal of democracy, is the classical ideal of the mixed constitution, as explained by Aristotle and Polybius, in which the three basic simple forms of government – monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy – are combined and balanced. That, of course, is exactly what our traditional form of government, the Westminster system consisting of the monarchy, Senate, and elected House of Commons embodies, and it is this system that historically and traditionally went together with and safeguarded freedom and justice in Canada.

The point of Trudeau’s plan to “restore democracy” that has attracted the most attention is his announced intention to abolish “first past the post” by the next election. It is this point to which we will now turn to show that when Ezra Levant dubbed Justin Trudeau the “shiny pony” a few years ago, it was an unfair slur on ponies everywhere.

First past the post is an expression borrowed from horse racing for our traditional way of determining the outcome of elections. The House of Commons is made up of the representatives of constituencies or ridings. In each constituency when the general election is called – or if for some reason there is a by-election for that particular riding – many candidates are allowed to run against each other for the right to sit in the House as that area’s representative. They may run as representatives of a party or independents. Sometimes the outcome of the election is a majority in which one candidate receives over half of the votes. Other times the outcome of the election is a plurality in which the vote is so divided that no one candidate receives over half. In this case, the candidate who receives the highest number of votes, wins the election.

So what are the objections to this?

Well, one common objection is that by awarding the election to the person with the highest number of votes the system is going against the wishes of the majority of voters who voted for someone other than the winner. While this objection seems to have merit upon first hearing it, you must realize that in a plurality election this would be the case regardless of which of the candidates is determined to be the winner. Proposed alternatives, such as multiple round elections until a clear majority is achieved or ranking the candidates on the ballot in order of preference rather than picking one would have the effect of making elections more expensive, more complicated, and with more factors for the unscrupulous to manipulate, without really eliminating the objection seeing as the person who wins the final round will still be someone the majority voted against in the first round and a ranked preference ballot can still return a winner who did not receive a majority of first preference votes and who therefore is still technically someone the majority voted against, all in order to fix a system that isn’t really broke, on the grounds of an objection that ultimately reduces to the idea that an election should be determined by its negative outcome, the most votes against, rather than its positive outcome, the most votes for.

Another common objection is that under this system the percentage of seats awarded to a party in the House of Commons is not the same as the percentage of the popular vote that party received. The popular vote is the accumulated vote of all voters in all ridings across the country. A small party, with voters scattered across the country, may win one or no seats, while receiving a comparably larger percentage of the popular vote. The Green Party, for example, won only the seat of its leader Elizabeth May in the 2011 election, although it received just under four percent of the popular vote. In the previous election it won no seats although it received just under seven percent of the popular vote. Supporters of the Green Party and other fringe parties regard this as being unfair and call for a system of proportional representation, in which the makeup of the assembly by party percentage is representative of the popular vote. That proportional representation would have the obvious effect of making the House of Commons even more ideological and partisan than it already is, and that this would not be a good thing, never seems to occur to such people.

What all of this shows is that while we are hardly in need of having the democratic element of our government fixed by a man who like his father is an admirer of Chinese Communist dictatorship, we are in urgent need of having our educational system, especially when it comes to the teaching of civics, repaired. The popular vote is a meaningless abstraction. When an election is called, it is not the ideological or partisan make up of the House of Commons for which people are supposed to be voting. They are supposed to be voting for the representative of their constituency. Thus, it makes no sense for a person to say “I’m not represented in Parliament because my party didn’t win a seat”. You are represented in the House of Commons as someone living in a constituency and not as a supporter of a party or a subscriber to an ideology – and this is a good thing. Your representative is the Member for your riding, whether you voted for him or not. Even though I can’t stand the jackass and his bloody socialist party, I know full well that Pat Martin is my representative in the House of Commons, because he is the Member for the constituency in which I live, as much as I find that fact intolerable.

Our Members of Parliament need this basic civics lesson as well. When a party puts forward a candidate in an election, he is running for the right to represent his constituency in Parliament on behalf of his party. This means that he is supposed to represent his party to his constituency in the election, but his constituency in the House if he wins. In other words, when campaigning for the votes of a riding, he is supposed to explain that he belongs to such and such a party which stands for such and such a platform. When sitting in the House as a Member, he is supposed to speak on behalf of the people who live in his constituency, including those who did not vote for him, work on their behalf, and protect their interests.

Of course the way the system works in practice does not always or perhaps even often resemble the way it is supposed to work but it would be no improvement to remove the reminder, once every so many years, that our politicians are supposed to be working on behalf of their constituency and tell them that they will now be sitting in Parliament only as representatives of their party and ideology. It is sheer madness to think otherwise.

Justin Trudeau, you can stick that in your joint and smoke it.

2013 in Retrospect

In the decades after the Second World War, the governments of the West adopted a number of policies that were bad enough on their own but taken together were disastrous for their countries. One of those policies was the anti-natalist social engineering, such as the development of cheap artificial birth control, abortion on demand, and the reduction of marriage to a contract easily broken and without penalty, that has driven Western fertility rates down below population replacement level. Another was liberal immigration, in which immigrants from non-Western countries have been admitted at rates that are unprecedentedly high and at times when domestic unemployment rates have also been high, in order to replace the children Western people are not having due to the previous set of policies. A third policy is multiculturalism in which the government decides that the country will change to adapt to the new immigrants rather than requiring that they change to adapt to their new country. Finally, there is the policy of squelching opposition to these policies by means that range from the relatively mild means of name-calling, i.e. labeling opponents of the policies as “racists” to the more draconian measures of anti-discrimination, “hate propaganda” and other so-called “human rights” laws. (1)

Those brave souls who have dared to speak out against this insane abuse of Western peoples by their own liberal, democratic, governments, have often found themselves occupying the role of Cassandra, the Trojan princess who, having spurned the advances of Apollo after he gave her the gift of prophetic sight, was cursed to go unheeded and ignored by those who needed the truths she uttered, but thought her mad for uttering them.

This year saw the sapphire and ruby anniversaries of two such Cassandra moments. The twentieth of April was the forty-fifth anniversary of Enoch Powell’s famous Birmingham address warning about the consequences of immigration that is still remembered and talked about as his “Rivers of Blood” speech. (2) This year was also the fortieth anniversary of the original French publication of Jean Raspail’s prophetic, dystopic, novel, The Camp of the Saints, which depicts a Western world, weakened by liberalism, unable to summon up the conviction necessary to preserve its own existence when faced with an invasion by those armed only with their own poverty and need. (3)

Less impressively, this year was also the eleventh or steel anniversary of the publication of the book in which Diane Francis presented arguments against Canada’s liberal immigration policies, the incompetency with which they are administered, and the failure of a refugee system that has made us the laughing stock of the world. (4) Written in the aftermath of 9-11, in this book the National Post editor and columnist made valid arguments on the basis of economic and national security concerns, while doing her very best to ignore completely the heart of the problem with liberal immigration, as I described it in my first paragraph. I mention this only because this year Francis has provided us with a much stronger argument for limits and restrictions on immigration.

Harper Collins has just released her new book, Merger of the Century. (5) In this book she argues, on the basis of the perceived economic advantage to both countries, that Canada and the United States should become one country. By doing so, she has by her personal example, given us an excellent argument for being more careful about whom we let into the country. Diane Francis is American born. She immigrated to Canada in the 1960s, so that her British born husband could avoid being drafted to fight in the Vietnam War. Now, she has written a book length argument for a union that would in practice mean the swallowing up of her adopted country by her country of birth. The kind of immigrant that comes to Canada to advocate our take over by the United States is exactly the kind of immigrant we do not need. This is especially the case when they add insult to injury by making the proposal at a time when the United States is under the extreme mismanagement of a buffoon like Barack Obama.

This, incidentally, is an excellent reason for maintaining the law that requires newcomers to swear an oath of loyalty to our head of state, Queen Elizabeth II, and her heirs in order to obtain citizenship. Earlier this year, three malcontents sued the government in an attempt to get this requirement overturned, claiming that it was unconstitutional and violated their human rights. (6) Thankfully the judge that heard that case had the common sense, a commodity extremely rare these days, especially on the judicial bench, to rule against them. (7)

That common sense, unfortunately, is not shared by the man who, equally unfortunately, represents the constituency in which I dwell as our Member of Parliament. That man is Pat Martin for whom, I can thankfully say, I have never voted and, unless I am suddenly stricken by some form of insanity, never shall vote. Earlier this year, even before the court case referred to above had made the news, Martin had declared his desire for legislation that would remove the oath from our citizenship requirements. He was quoted as saying “It’s just so fundamentally wrong. These people are from all over the world — Paraguay and the Congo and the Philippines and Vietnam. Why are they swearing loyalty to some colonial vestigial appendage from the House of Windsor? It’s bizarre really.” (8) While this goes back to what I was saying earlier about the insanity of multiculturalism, in which a country decides to change its institutions and ways to accommodate new immigrants rather than require them to adapt to its institutions and ways, it apparently never occurred to Martin that these people from all over the world knew full well that in moving to Canada they were moving to a constitutional monarchy within the British Commonwealth and by so moving here indicated that this was not a problem to them and perhaps that it was part of what attracted them to the country in the first place. Martin, as the National Post article from which I took that quotation indicates, ultimately wants more than just to scrap the citizenship oath, he wants to sever Canada’s ties to the monarchy. This, and the utterly disrespectful language he used in speaking of that institution, is utterly inappropriate for a member of Her Majesty’s “Loyal” Opposition.

Of course, the monarchy is not the only Canadian institution that has come under attack from that supposedly loyal Opposition this year. Martin was expressing his own private views which are not officially endorsed by his party, the New Democrats. It is, however, the official policy of the New Democratic Party to support the abolition of the Senate, the upper house in the Canadian Parliament, and Opposition leader Thomas Mulcair made a major nuisance of himself this past fall by going across the country trying to win support for such abolition.

In doing so he was seeking to capitalize on the public exposure of the misdoings of now-suspended Conservative Senators Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin, both of whom seemed to be in the news more often this year over their alleged abuse of their Senate expense accounts than in their entire previous careers as broadcasters. Whatever the facts may be in the Duffy and Wallin cases, Mulcair, in using these cases to build support for the abolition of the Senate displayed the same astonishing lack of perspective and comparative judgement that he showed when he opposed allowing Canadian born, Canadian raised, Lord Conrad Black back into Canada because of his conviction in the United States for a financial crime while at the same time campaigning for the return to Canada of Omar Khadr, who, while born here, had been raised in Pakistan, and had been captured by the Americans in Afghanistan where he had taken up arms against Canada and her allies. Khadr’s claims upon Canada are far less substantial and more nominal than those of Lord Black, and his crimes far more serious, but such considerations appear to be of no consequence to Thomas Mulcair. Similarly, to make the financial misdoings of particular Senators a cause for abolishing the Senate itself, which as an institution is one of the three fundamental elements of our traditional parliamentary monarchy, is to grotesquely miscalculate the difference between the importance of maintaining our constitutional institutions and that of punishing the abuse of office. You do not throw out a time-honoured, traditional institution because one or two members of that institution have done wrong. Not if you have any sense of perspective.

If I know the NDP at all I suspect that Diane Francis’ new book is not likely to be well received among their membership. While this in and of itself speaks well for the socialist party, which is not something that can be said very often, it raises a curious question. Presumably, the objection which New Democrats would have to being absorbed by the United States is that Canada and everything that makes Canada Canadian would therein be lost, which is an excellent objection. How do the members of the NDP square their Canadian nationalism with their party’s hostility to Canada’s history, heritage, traditions, and most of its institutions?

An even bigger question is raised by those members of the Conservative Party who have indicated their support for the NDP’s call for Senate abolition. (9) The Conservative Party is supposed to be the party of continuity, tradition, and national institutions. Conservative thought is supposed to be rooted in classical political philosophy and medieval Christian political theology as mediated and interpreted in the traditions that have come down to us today. Classical political philosophy favoured a constitution in which the principles of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy were mixed and balanced, such as the parliamentary monarchy system that evolved in Great Britain and became part of our Canadian heritage. How can a conscientious Conservative support the abolition of an essential element of that constitution? (10)

Of course the Conservative Party of today is not the Conservative Party of yesterday. This year is the tenth anniversary of the merger which formed the present Conservative Party, uniting what was left of the Progressive Conservative Party (11) with the Canadian Alliance which had been formed out of a previous merger of most of the PC Party and the western populist Reform Party. When the merger took place, I, who had left the old Conservative Party to join the Reform Party in the 1990s out of disgust with the direction the old Party had gone under Brian Mulroney, declined to join the new party on the grounds that it was most likely going to combine the worst of both parties rather than the best of both parties. In other words it was likely to combine the anti-patriotism often present in the Reform Party and her frequent desire to abandon Canadian traditions and institutions for American ones with the Progressive Conservative Party’s refusal to take seriously the grievances of the western provinces against central Canada and her willingness to rubber stamp the intrusive progressive social engineering of the other parties. It should have combined the old Tory Party’s Canadian nationalism and respect for Canada’s traditions and institutions with the Reform Party’s support for pro-business policies and traditional social mores.

Ten years later, I think my prediction has largely been born out, although Harper’s Conservatives have on occasion surprised me. This summer, for example, they finally got their act together and passed the bill which will abolish Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act one year from the day it received royal assent. (12) Of course they should have abolished the entire Canadian Human Rights Act while they were at it. Passed into law by the Trudeau Liberals back in 1977, the only thing this vile piece of legislation does is allow Canadians who are members of groups deemed to be “vulnerable” and therefore needing protection, to accuse other Canadians of discriminating against them and sue them for it. It was and is a disgusting act of social engineering designed to program people so that they will think in ways that the progressive movement and the government approves and not to think in ways of which they disapprove. Thankfully, the death warrant for its worst clause has been signed. The Harper government continues, however, to support, on various pretexts, legislation for policing the internet that might, in the long run, prove even more dangerous in the hands of progressive social engineers than Section 13 was.

There is probably more that I will later wish that I included in this year’s recap but I am going to end it here on that admittedly less than positive note. This will be my last essay for this year, as I am going to be busy with Christmas celebrations in the next couple of weeks and wish to reserve the rest of my time for reading rather than writing. I wish you all a Merry Christmas and if the Lord tarries will resume posting early in the New Year.

(1) http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2011/02/suicide-cult.html

(2) http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2013/04/enoch-was-right.html

(3) http://archive.org/stream/CampOfTheSaints/Camp_of_the_Saints_djvu.txt

(4) Diane Francis, Immigration: The Economic Case, (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2002).

(5) Diane Francis, Merger of the Century: Why Canada and America Should Become One Country, (New York and Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 2013).

(6) http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2013/07/why-do-we-put-up-with-it.html

(7) http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/oath-to-queen-a-reasonable-form-of-compelled-speech-judge-rules/article14449686/

(8) http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/04/18/its-just-so-fundamentally-wrong-ndp-mp-pat-martin-wants-queen-dropped-from-citizenship-oath/

(9) http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/10/15/idea-of-senate-abolition-gaining-momentum-inside-conservative-caucus/

(10) There is a clear need for the institution to undergo some sort of reform. My proposals for a form of Senate reform that does not do violence to Canada’s traditions and constitution can be found here: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2012/08/senate-reform.html I also recommend two articles that a blogger who goes under the internet handle “Alberta Royalist” recently contributed as a guest blogger at the excellent MadMonarchist blog: “The Problem With the Canadian Senate”, http://madmonarchist.blogspot.ca/2013/12/guest-article-problem-with-canadian.html and “A Case For a Canadian House of Lords” http://madmonarchist.blogspot.ca/2013/12/guest-article-case-for-canadian-house.html.

(11) “Progressive Conservative” is a contradiction in terms, but this contradiction, unfortunately, is the title under which the party which formed Canada’s first national government was known before it merged into the current Conservative Party. At the provincial level it is still called by this contradictory title.

(12) http://www.thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2013/06/a-long-awaited-day-has-come-at-last.html