Erin is a Tool: The Conservative Party's Latest Quisling Leader

The last time the old Conservative Party was led by someone whose political philosophy I would feel comfortable acknowledging as my own was almost a decade before my birth.  The Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker, who became leader of the Progressive Conservative Party when it was in Opposition in 1956, led it to victory (a minority government) in the 1957 Dominion election, shortly before winning the party’s largest majority in percentage of seats ever the following year.   Reduced to a minority government again in 1962, Diefenbaker’s government fell in 1963 when Tommy Douglas’ socialists and the right-wing Social Credit Party both supported Liberal leader Lester Pearson when he called for a vote of no confidence because of Diefenbaker’s refusal to allow Washington D. C. to dictate policy in Ottawa on the matter of the nuclear arming of the Bomarc missiles.   Pearson, who had betrayed his country to the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union when he was attached to our Washington embassy in World War II (see the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley before the American House of Un-American Activities Committee), and betrayed the entire Commonwealth to both the Soviets and the Americans when he sided with these powers against the alliance of Britain, France, and Israel in 1957 as a Minister in the government of Louis St. Laurent, was here acting on behalf of John F. Kennedy’s government in the United States.   Diefenbaker continued to lead the party in Opposition for the next four years, which saw the shining moment of his entire career, when he led the Conservatives in fierce opposition to the new flag of 1965, the first major step taken by the Liberals during the long period in which they were led by Lester Pearson and his successor Pierre Trudeau to radically re-invent the country, and strip it of the most visible symbols of its Loyalist heritage and identity.   In 1967, Diefenbaker was replaced by Robert Stanfield as party leader in a leadership convention that was the culmination of two years’ worth of effort on the part of Dalton Camp, then the party president (which is not the same thing as party leader) to oust him.

 

While I admit that Diefenbaker’s performance in the office of Prime Minister was far less stellar than his performance in the office of Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, his political philosophy was what I admire most about him.  He was a fierce defender of Canada’s Loyalist history and heritage, the traditional institutions derived from these such as the monarchy, Parliament, and the Common Law, and the symbols of all of these, such as the old flag.   While most if not all of his successors have paid lip service to much of this, it has never been with his passion.  He opposed all threats to Canadian freedom, whether it was the external threat posed by increasing American cultural and economic influence – or, as in the case of the Bomarc missiles incident, political influence – or the internal threat posed by the subversion of Parliamentary tradition, the exponential growth of the civil service, and the alarming way in which the government was increasingly treating the latter as a means of bypassing the former to govern by bureaucratic regulation rather than Parliamentary legislation.   His views are best stated in his own words in the speeches collected in his Those Things We Treasure (1972).   This book and John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown (1956 – posthumously edited by Judith Robinson) are the two classic texts of the political philosophy associated with the old Conservative Party from Sir John A. MacDonald to John G. Diefenbaker, a Canadian version of classical British Toryism.  Sadly both books have been out-of-print for years, although Diefenbaker’s has been fairly easily and inexpensively obtainable through used-book stores.   (I first obtained a copy from Black’s Vintage Books in Winnipeg, sadly no longer around, when I was still a theology student in college.   I had to send away for Farthing’s book when my attention was drawn to it by Ron Dart several years later.)   The classic text of the religious philosophy underlying this political philosophy, expressed as a jeremiad over the latter’s failure, was George Grant’s Lament for a Nation (1965), which remains in print.

 

After Diefenbaker was ousted, the leadership of the Progressive Conservatives fell alternately to people who were more-or-less socialists in Conservative garb, like Stanfield, and had little-to-no problem with increasing bureaucratization and its threat to Canadian freedom, or to people who were basically big business liberals in Conservative garb, like Brian Mulroney, who promoted free trade with the United States, which throughout Canadian history had been a Liberal Party policy, and who had little-to-no problem with increasing American economic and cultural influence over Canada.     It was while Stanfield led the party that a "conservative movement" outside of the party began to form to oppose what Pierre Trudeau's Liberals were doing and lobby for conservative causes, obviously because it was felt that the Party was failing to do this.    While the organizations and publications that made up this movement fought for good things for the most part - to give one example, Colin Brown founded the National Citizens Coalition in 1975 to fight for government fiscal accountability against Trudeau's huge deficits - it lamentably tended to ignore the classical texts of Canadian Toryism mentioned in the previous paragraph and look for inspiration to the American conservative movement.   This led to a blindness in the Mulroney years.   They could perceive that Mulroney had little interest in combatting the sweeping social, moral, and cultural changes that were quickly being introduced as a result of Pierre Trudeau's having given the Supreme Court powers similar to its American counterpart by adding the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to the constitution (although to give credit where credit is due Mulroney was the last Conservative leader to attempt to pass legislation restricting abortion after the newly empowered Court struck the existing laws down in 1988) and thus in that sense was way too far to the Left like Stanfield,  but failed to recognize that the problem stemmed from unnaturally grafting an element of the American republican system onto our system of Crown-in-Parliament where it neither belongs nor fits (a mistake Tony Blair would later make in the United Kingdom) and to see Mulroney's reversal of traditional Conservative opposition to free trade with the United States for the betrayal it was.   It was during the Mulroney years that the conservative movement allied itself with a populism that had been growing in the Western prairie provinces in response to the exceedingly arrogant way in which they had been treated by Ottawa under Trudeau and how Mulroney had offered little in the way of redress.   Together they formed a new party, the Reform Party of Canada.

 

This was not the first time conservatism and populism had been united in Canadian history.    John G. Diefenbaker, as explained above, was the last Conservative leader to fully represent in a way that did more than lip service, authentic traditional Canadian Toryism, but he was also a prairie populist reformer, a role that arose naturally out of his early career as a defence lawyer in Saskatchewan.   W. L. Morton, who was head of the history department at the University of Manitoba and the author of the Kingdom of Canada and a Canadian historian second only to Donald Creighton was, like Creighton, a traditional Tory, and, unlike Creighton, a strong advocate for fairer representation of the West in the Dominion government.   Diefenbaker and Morton, however, combined traditional Toryism with Western populism.   The Reform Party combined a neoconservatism that looked for inspiration to the United States with Western populism and this was not a good mix.   Ironically, they gave their party what had originally been the Confederation era name of their despised foe, the Liberals.   Also ironic, but in a less amusing way, their dividing the right-of-centre vote with the Progressive Conservatives kept the Liberals in government from 1993 to 2005.

 

Realizing that their division would only keep the Liberals in perpetual power, the Progressive Conservatives and the Reform Party began "Unite the Right" discussions in the late 1990, partially merging into the Canadian Alliance in 2000 and then fully uniting into the present Conservative Party of Canada in 2003.  They have had four leaders since then.   The first of these was Stephen Harper, who became Prime Minister with a minority government in 2006, won a majority government in 2011, and served as Prime Minister until 2015.   When Captain Airhead led the Liberals back into government in the Dominion election of that year, Harper stepped down, was briefly replaced by Rona Ambrose as an interim leader, before Andrew Scheer was chosen as the next leader.   Scheer performed incredibly poorly in that role, being initially too cautious as Opposition Leader, then essentially throwing away an election that was practically being handed to him by Captain Airhead with his self-destructive heaping of scandals upon scandals, with his, that is Scheer’s, one shining moment coming in March of last year, when he resolutely opposed the Liberals’ attempt to use the pandemic to escape Parliamentary oversight for two years.   At this point, however, it was too late to salvage Scheer’s leadership, and Erin O’Toole was chosen as the next leader.

 

Erin O’Toole has now set the record for the shortest time it has ever taken for a Conservative leader to so disgust me that I vowed never to vote for anyone in the party as long as he led it.   It took Stephen Harper until the last year of his premiership, when he introduced legislation to enhance the powers of government to invade the privacy of Canadians and spy on them, to do that.   Erin O’Toole has not even been leader for a full five months yet and he has already managed to do so.

 

On Monday O’Toole announced that he would be seeking to kick Derek Sloan out of the party caucus.   Sloan is the Member who represents the Upper Canada riding of Hastings-Lennox and Addington in the House of Commons.   Although he is a quite young MP – he is in his mid-thirties and was elected for the first time in the Dominion election of two years ago – he was one of O’Toole’s rivals in the leadership race last year.   He had become a target of the Left earlier that year when he asked the question of whether Theresa Tam, the federal chief medical mandarin, was working for Canada or China.  The Left assumed this to be a racist question based upon Tam’s ethnicity, although the question naturally arises out of the possible conflict of interests between her position in Canada and her role in the World Health Organization over which Red China has held an inordinate amount of influence, especially under its current director.   Sloan, a Seventh Day Adventist, is also a strong social conservative who opposes abortion, gender-identity discrimination legislation, and the Liberal government’s current attempts to ban conversion therapy.   O’Toole’s announcement was based upon the revelation that Sloan had received a donation from Paul Fromm.   On Wednesday the party voted to expel Sloan from the caucus.

 

Sloan’s response to this, appropriately, was to call out O’Toole for his blatant unfairness and hypocrisy.   Sloan could not have been reasonably expected to have known that the donation came from Paul Fromm since he had used his first name, Frederick, in making it, nor, would I add, is it reasonable in a free country to expect people who receive donations to vet their donors to make sure they are not guilty of some sort of crimethink.   That is the unfairness – the hypocrisy is in the fact that the party took a cut from the same donation and had sold a membership to the donor. 

 

This incident illustrates the biggest problem I have with the post-Diefenbaker leadership of the Conservative Party whether of the Left-leaning Stanfield variety or the American neo-liberal Mulroney variety.   They have all been terrified of being labelled “Far Right” and since they have allowed the Liberals and the socialists to define the “Far Right” and attach this label to whomever they wish without serious challenge, this has meant that they have allowed the Liberals and the socialists to dictate the acceptable parameters of thought within their own party.   Back in the period alluded to earlier, when discontent with the performance of the Progressive Conservatives had led to the creation of first a conservative movement and then the Reform Party of Canada, Dalton Camp, the party official who had orchestrated the backstabbing of Diefenbaker, was a regular commentator on the CBC.   He was frequently part of a panel with Erik Kierens of the Liberals and Stephen Lewis of the NDP as the Conservative representative to create the false impression of balanced commentary (like Kierens he very much represented the Left wing of his own party).   Camp shared with his Liberal and NDP colleagues an abhorrence of social conservatism or “the Religious Right” as he called it, and regarded the phenomenon as both an import from the United States and the next thing to fascism.   This was utter nonsense, of course – most of the things that the Religious Right railed against – abortion on demand, the relaxing of laws and liberalization of attitudes towards sexual morality, the driving of the Bible and Lord’s Prayer out of schools – came to Canada much later than they did to the United States and consequently what social conservatives wish to return to had remained the status quo here much longer and had been the status quo much more recently(1).    Indeed, the first issue in the Culture War between the Left and the Religious Right in which the Left's triumph in Canada preceded its victory in the United States was same-sex marriage, and Camp could hardly have claimed the Religious Right's stance on this issue as an American import because he died of complications from a stroke the year prior to the first court-ordered alteration to the status quo of 1 man + 1 woman = marriage and three years before the Liberals introduced the bill in Parliament that generalized the change.    The leadership of the Conservative Party, however, was terrified of the accusations coming from the Liberals, the NDP, the Left-dominated mainstream media, and their own Dalton Camp, that the social conservative ideas of  the conservative movement and the new Reform Party were dangerously" Far Right".

 

That by taking this stance they were helping to move the centre of the Canadian mainstream dangerously close to the "Far Left" never seemed to occur to them.

 

Everything I have just said with regards to the social, moral, and religious issues of the Culture War also applies to the issues pertaining to immigration, nationality, and race except that with these issues, the Progressive Conservative Party leadership was even quicker to concede to the Liberals and to the Left the right to define a consensus and the acceptable parameters containing that consensus from which all dissent would be excluded. The capitulation was more complete.   Furthermore, the leadership  of the Reform Party joined in this concession with regards to these issues.

 

 

What is the consensus that the Liberals and their further-to-the-Left allies, given this free reign, imposed upon Canada?

 

It amounts to this: if you are white, discriminating against someone who is not is about the worst thing you could do, and the law must protect others against your discrimination by giving the government the power to punish you with complete and total economic and social destruction, but you yourself must have no protection under law against discrimination, because you, being white, are incapable of being discriminated against, and if you complain about or even notice the unfairness of this then you are an evil, prejudiced bigot, a racist, a Nazi, who must either be re-programmed or completely excluded from society.

 

The Liberal Party worked hard at establishing this double standard which is utterly repugnant morally and completely indefensible intellectually as consensus, or rather state-imposed dogma,  during the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau.   In 1970 Parliament passed a bill introduced while Pearson was Prime Minister that added sections 318-320 to the Criminal Code which created several new offences each having to do in some way with "hate propaganda".   This was entirely unnecessary because anything criminalized by these sections that really ought to be against the law was already against the existing laws against inciting crime and violence.   The existing laws were superior in every way because they protected all Canadians alike.   In 1977, Trudeau's Liberals rammed the Canadian Human Rights Act through Parliament.   Despite the title, this bill had nothing to do with ensuring that such basic rights as life, liberty, and property were guaranteed to all people in Canada or in protecting anybody in Canada from the abuse by the state that is the first thing that pops into most people's minds upon hearing "human rights violations".   The Act was entirely about dictating to Canadians that they could not discriminate against each other on the grounds of race, sex, etc. in their private lives.   It established an investigatory body to look into accusations of discrimination, and a tribunal to hear the charges.   Since it is considered "civil law", the accused are denied the rights they would have as defendants under criminal law.   The reality, however, is that it punishes the "crime" of wrongthink.   Although the law is written in such a way as to make the offence reside in the act of discriminating rather than the race/sex/whatever of the complainant and the accused so that in theory, the white person turned down from a job by an employer who only hires people from his own Asian or African nationality ought to have just as strong a case as someone in the reverse situation, that is not how it works in practice.   The Commission that investigates and the Tribunal that hears these cases operate on an Animal Farm, "some animals are more equal than others" basis, which is, of course, how the Trudeau Liberals instructed them to operate from the beginning.   In the few instances when anybody has ever bothered to question the uneven way in which this law is administered, the answer has always been to point back to the intent behind the law, to protect "vulnerable minorities".    It is, of course, incredibly bad practice to allow the intent behind a law that is worded in such a way as to suggest that it protects everybody from racial discrimination to overrule the wording and turn it into a law that protects people from some races and not others, but then, the law itself is bad because it unnecessarily extends government control into the private lives of Canadians to the point of telling them what they can and cannot be thinking when interacting with others when all that was really called for was for the government to lead by example in not practicing colour discrimination itself.   That, however, would have required going back to the policies of John G. Diefenbaker, the Conservative Prime Minister who  militantly opposed racism and whose vision for the Dominion of Canada was one of national unity, which he believed in so strongly that he made it the title of his three volume memoir One Canada, instead of following the bad example of the Americans, who at least had the sense to call their earlier and equivalent law a "Civil Rights Act". 

 

The protecting "vulnerable minorities" justification for all this bad legislation and practice has grown in its rhetorical force from then until now and Pierre Trudeau's foul offspring has just trotted it out again in support of his upcoming efforts to seize even more control over what Canadians are allowed to think and communicate to each other.   Its rhetorical force should have shrunk.   At the time it was first evoked, 96% of Canadians were white.   This is no longer the case today, indeed, we are at the point where whites becoming a minority is on the near horizon, but the voices from the Left telling us that everybody else belongs to a "vulnerable" or "disadvantaged" minority that needs increased government protection against whites are becoming louder, more stringent and more hysterical by the day.   Don't expect  those same voices to come to the defence of whites when they become a minority and one far more vulnerable than any other in Canada has ever been due to decades of this anti-white propaganda.   The demographic transformation just alluded to is the direct result of immigration changes introduced by Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau.   I don't mean the points system introduced by Order-in-Council in 1967.   It is itself an admirable and fair way of processing applications based upon individual merit, although the Pearson Liberals do not deserve the credit for eliminating racial discrimination from immigration policy that the Liberal Interpretation of Canadian History - what Donald Creighton dubbed "the Authorized Version" - assigns them because Diefenbaker had already done that in 1962.   I refer rather to a number of changes introduced quietly, unannounced, and with no fanfare, whereby the civil servants charged with processing applications were told to give priority to applications from non-traditional source countries over those from traditional source countries with the result that "traditional Euro-British sources of immigration were effectively shut off in favour of migrants and their extended families from the Third World" (Kenneth McDonald, A Wind in the Heath: A Memoir, Epic Press, 2003).  

 

Instead of opposing all of this, as they ought to have done, the Progressive Conservatives whether the socialist Stanfield types, the moderate Joe Clark types, or the neo-liberal Brian Mulroney types embraced it.   Indeed, when Brian Mulroney took over the leadership of the party he basically sent out the message that opposition to the Trudeau agenda on these issues would not be tolerated and that discrimination against whites would be continued.   As Prime Minister, in fact, he set out to out-Trudeau Trudeau himself with regards to immigration.   Perhaps some of the Conservative leader were dense enough to think that Pearson and Trudeau had been continuing Diefenbaker's "One Canada" vision rather than subverting and inverting it.   For the most part, however, they were terrified of being labelled "Far Right" by the Liberals and the press.   The Liberals, in the Pearson-Trudeau period had attempted the frighten the public into accepting their measures as necessary to fight a non-existent "Far Right" threat, by creating a fake "Canadian Nazi Party", which their media allies then splashed all over the headlines and the television news.   The Mulroney Conservatives, having received the message, proceeded to pass it on when they gained competition for the right-of-centre vote in the Reform Party.   They ordered CSIS, the spy agency created in the last month of the Trudeau premiership, to create another fake neo-Nazi group, the Heritage Front, which the media again went wild over.   This was in 1989, two years after the Reform Party was formed.   The purpose seems to have been to smear the Reform Party by association, a goal towards which they received assistance from lawyer, activist and Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella in his 1997 book Web of Deceit, which, in my opinion ought to be categorized as fiction, under which genre it might actually deserve an award for its creative plot about the imminent threat of  a neo-Nazism working through the  conservative movement  and  the Reform Party to take over Canada.   Note this is the same Warren Kinsella, who should not be confused with the late novelist W. P. Kinsella (W. P. stood for William Patrick, Warren is, I think, a middle name), but who was, according to a Globe and Mail article conveniently timed to come out just before the last Dominion election, hired by Andrew Scheer's Conservatives to sling mud of a similar nature against Maxime Bernier, Scheer's chief rival in the previous Conservative Party leadership race, and his new People's Party of Canada.

 

Erin O'Toole has now followed the shameful examples of Mulroney and Scheer.   His motive is obvious enough - only a few weeks ago he was jumped on by Captain Airhead, for giving an interview to Ezra Levant's Rebel Media.   Captain Airhead, who thinks that only media that he subsidizes and which express views of which he approves, should be allowed to exist, condemned the Rebel as being "Far Right".   If he had Ludwig von Mises concept of "Left" and "Right" as a spectrum moving from total government control on the Left to an absence of government on the Right, he might have had a point, as The Rebel is quite libertarian, but I very much doubt he has read Mises or that he possesses the capacity to do so.   The interview, however, came shortly before the incident on Epiphany when, as Donald the Orange was addressing half a million of his supporters before the Washington Monument, a smaller group entered the Congress building on Capitol Hill, took selfies and, unfortunately in a handful of cases, got into violent skirmishes with the Capitol Hill Police, all of which was blown up by the same media that supported the BLM and Antifa anti-white hate riots that produced far more destruction, violence, and death all across America, into the ludicrous lie of "Trump incites insurrection".   O'Toole, pissing himself, immediately proceeded to proclaim how much he and the party he leads are against "white supremacists", by which the media seems to mean anyone who opposes anti-white racism and certainly everyone - all 75 million American voters of them - who supported Trump.   He also took the opportunity to throw his own rival from last year's leadership race under the bus and out of the party.

 

Well, perhaps he can instruct his party to stop soliciting me for funds.   I have not received a campaign contribution from Paul Fromm, as I have never stooped so low as to run for office, but I have donated to the Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform, the Canadian Association for Free Expression, and the Canada First Immigration Reform Committee, all of which were founded or co-founded by said Paul Fromm, whom I have known for years.  The first mentioned, which is also, I believe, the oldest is "a group of aid reformers who eschew guilt and believe that population control and free enterprise are the key to development".   I took that definition from the Glossary in my personally inscribed copy of Down the Drain? A Critical Re-examination of Canadian Foreign Aid written by Paul Fromm and James P. Hull and published by Griffin House, Toronto in 1981.  Fromm and Hull's approach to foreign aid has always made more sense to me than the Liberal policy of taxing poor people in rich countries to subsidize rich people in poor countries, never more evident than under the current Prime Minister.   The Canadian Association for Free Expression was founded shortly prior to when Brian Mulroney became Prime Minister which was also around the time that Canada's two most publicized trials for crimethink began, those of Ernst Zuendel, the German born graphic artist and publisher who resided in Toronto and James Keegstra, the school teacher and mayor from Eckville , Alberta.   CAFE is committed to the classical liberal view of John Stuart Mill that speech, whether right, wrong, or somewhere in between, ought never to be suppressed.   While there are many who would think that the cases of Zuendel, whose publications included The Hitler We Loved and Did Six Million Really Die?, and Keegstra, who taught his students that the Jews were behind a conspiracy to dominate the world, stretch that principle past its breaking point, these are, in my opinion, wrong.   Cases like this are not the breaking point of freedom of speech, they are its test.   Only those willing to stand up for freedom of speech, when it is opinions that the vast majority find loathsome that the government is trying to suppress, can truly be said to have passed that test - men like Paul Fromm and the late Doug Christie, who was the lawyer in both of these cases.   If the state is allowed to get away with suppressing extremely unpopular opinions, it will move on to suppressing less unpopular opinions.    In Canada we have moved from the government persecuting a man for saying that Hitler's victims were significantly less than six-million in number all the way to where the government is trying to tell us that we cannot say that someone born with a penis and testicles and who has XY chromosomes is a man if he self-identifies as a woman.   Give the state censors an inch and they will take a mile.   Pastor Martin Niemöller said "First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out-Because I was not a socialist.  Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out-Because I was not a trade unionist.  Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out-Because I was not a Jew.  Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me".  It astonishes me that there are those familiar with this poem and the story behind it who miss the point completely and will get offended at the application I am about to make.  In 1984 - a rather significant date don't you think - they came for Ernst Zuendel and James Keegstra, and Doug Christie and Paul Fromm spoke out!   Everyone who values the freedom our country was built upon - Richard Cartwright famously expressed the spirit of Confederation by saying that he preferred British freedom over American equality - and for which we have always been told our country went to war against Hitler, would do well to look to that example.

 

The progressive media, of course, in their lust to help O'Toole crucify Sloan, has been calling Paul Fromm such names as "white supremacist" and "neo-nazi", as have those members of the neo-conservative press who have defended Sloan on the same grounds on which he defended himself.   Mr. Fromm has never applied such terms to himself, which the media have thrown against him for decades, but has always eschewed and disavowed them (I once witnessed him do so to someone who actually was a self-proclaimed National Socialist).   He has referred to himself as a "white nationalist" but I remember that when he started doing this the term had not developed the connotations it now has and simply meant something along the lines of an advocate for the rights of white people, similar to what groups like the NAACP are for black people in the United States, and I have never gotten the impression that he meant it in any other way.   He should, perhaps, have foreseen the way the term would evolve.   I never liked the term, although I believe that now more than ever, open advocates for the rights and liberties of white people, who are demonized by racist hate groups such as BLM and Antifa with the full support of the media and the politicians and who are officially discriminated against, are needed.   It confuses "race" with "nation" for one thing.   For another, nationalisms of any sort tend to conflict with my Tory political philosophy.   One's monarch is the proper object of political allegiance, not a people, race, or nation, and in association with one's monarch, one's country, which is a place, one's home writ large, although not merely in the sense of a location on a map, but a place vested with tradition and history, expressed in its institutions, and including, of course, those who live there.   This is what the old patriotic cry "for King and country" meant.

 

This brings me back to Diefenbaker.   

 

Diefenbaker, because he was the last Conservative leader - and the last Canadian Prime Minister - to really embrace "King and country" or "Queen and country" Toryism in a wholehearted way, was the last Conservative leader and Prime Minister capable of taking the strong stand against racism that he did, without replacing it with racism of another sort, as the Liberals who governed after him did.   This is precisely because "Queen and country" is the only object of allegiance which can truly provide civil unity and harmony.   As W. L. Morton put it "Any one, French, Irish, Ukrainian or Eskimo, can be a subject of the Queen and a citizen of Canada without in any way changing or ceasing to be himself." (The Canadian Identity, University of Toronto Press, 1961, 1972)   If that sounds like Pierre Trudeau's "mosaic" vision of "multiculturalism", understand that Trudeau's doctrine is actually a mockery of this.  Instead of uniting diverse people in loyalty to their Royal Sovereign so that they can all participate in the country over which she reigns in a way that makes the history, traditions, and legacy of freedom of that country their own, Trudeau's doctrine turned diversity itself into an object of cult worship that keeps them divided so that bureaucrats can increasingly manage their lives and rob them of the freedom that is the property by right of all Her Majesty's subjects.   If Erin O'Toole really believes that "racism is a disease of the soul" then he would do better to lead his party back to what it was when Diefenbaker led it rather than to win Captain Airhead's approval by repeating his totalitarian rhetoric about "It has no place in our country" and opportunistically ejecting a rival from the party's caucus, over his unknowingly having received a donation from the man who has for decades been the most courageous opponent of the only racism that is truly a problem in Canada today, the racism that has been enshrined in law since 1977, anti-white racism.

 

 

 

(1)   This also shows how utterly absurd the expression “Red Tory” is.   Originally, Gad Horowitz coined the term to refer to traditional Tories like George Grant who had some positive views of socialism.   Grant, a strong social conservative who warned that in the legalization of abortion the essence of fascism was coming to North American under the guise of liberalism, did not like having this label applied to him.   Dalton Camp, who was a Mulroney Conservative until Mulroney became a free trader – it is to Camp’s credit that he abandoned the Mulroney camp over this – embraced the label.   Grant wrote his Lament over the fall of the Diefenbaker government, Camp was responsible for ousting Diefenbaker from the party leadership.  Any term coined to refer to the one and appropriated by the other cannot possibly express anything meaningful.   

O Tempora, O Mores!

In this, which will be my last posting for 2017, I would like to begin on a positive note by announcing the publication of The Other North America: Traditions and Identities. Edited by D. H. Graham, and published by the American Anglican Press, this book is an anthology of essays by North American writers, some of the past, others of the present, but who are all Anglican Christians who dissent in their political thinking from the vision of the revolutionaries of 1776 and who draw upon traditions older than the liberalism that inspired that revolution. Some of these, such as Michael Cushman and V. Francis Knight, speak for the cultural tradition of the antebellum South, which the Yankees went to war to extirpate in 1861. Others, such as Professor Ron Dart, the Rev. Canon Kenneth W. Gunn-Walberg, and myself, speak for the monarchist, Tory tradition of Loyalist Canada. I am very grateful to Mr. Graham for the honour of being included in such distinguished company in this book.

Jerusalem

Imagine if Germany were to declare that it was offensive to her that France considers Paris to be her capital city and tried to blackmail the rest of the world into moving their embassies in France to Marseilles with threats that they would otherwise renew the armed hostilities of almost a century ago. Would any government anywhere in the world regard this demand as anything other than hubris taken to a degree that is both absurd and insane? Of course not. At the risk therefore, of sounding Zionist, might I suggest that everybody can their faux outrage over US President Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States would be recognizing Israel’s choice of its own capital and moving their embassy there from Tel Aviv. Spare me the nonsense about this derailing the peace process. There is no process that will ever lead to a lasting peace in this region unless someone finally persuades all of the Arab and Muslim countries to recognize Israel’s existence as an established fact which, they do not have to like, but which they are bloody well going to have to put up with and live with.

Hollywood


When l’affaire Weinstein broke a couple of months ago, I was initially skeptical. My skepticism was due to a case of mistaken identity. Having heard the name Harvey Weinstein, my mind for some reason processed it as Harvey Fierstein, and since the latter’s erotic proclivities are well-known to be directed elsewhere than towards the ladies, multiple charges of sexual harassment against him by the fairer sex seemed rather implausible. When I realized my mistake, and who the actual subject of the accusations was, my skepticism evaporated – at least, until the accusations were elevated from offering stardom in exchange for sex and generally being a sleazebag to include rape.

Rape, as the term was defined prior to 1975 (the year that saw the publication of Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Wills), is, of course, a heinous crime, worthy of castration, or perhaps even capital punishment. It is precisely because of the heinous nature of the crime, and the severity of the punishment it deserves, that all accusations of such must be regarded with a healthy skepticism until such time as their truth is established by overwhelming evidence. This attitude is one upon which the “Me Too” crowd looks aghast and indeed, regards as worse than the crime itself. Their position is that victims of rape or sexual assault have a “right” to be both heard and believed and that to doubt or question their accounts is to “victimize” them a second time. They rationalize their position with the argument that victims of rape and sexual assault are reluctant to speak out and that those who question and doubt their testimony by so doing add to this reluctance.

This argument is a rationalization rather than sound reasoning. It ignores the distinction between a victim – someone against whom a crime has actually been perpetrated – and an accuser – someone who says that a crime has been perpetrated against her. An accuser is only a victim if her claim is true – if it is not, then she is not a victim but a victimizer. There is no way to give victims a right to be believed without giving this same right to all accusers, both the true and the false. To give accusers the right to be believed, is to throw away the long-established rights of the accused to a fair trial, to confront and cross-examine their accusers, and to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Those who claim a “right” to be believed for rape accusers are well aware of this for they do not make their arguments in bona fide. What the so-called “right to be believed” is really all about is giving one sex a weapon – the career-reputation-and-life-destroying false accusation – to use against the other, at the expense of sacrificing an ancient right that protects both sexes.

None of this is written in defence of Weinstein who, whether or not he is guilty of crimes like rape and sexual assault, certainly seems to be a major sleazebag. This goes with the territory, him being a major Hollywood producer at all. Hollywood has been full of enough sleaze to make Las Vegas look like the most virtuous city in North America by comparison since the day its first movie studio opened. Indeed, show business was a notoriously sleazy business long before the motion picture was invented. At the risk of further outraging those who would find my comments in the last two paragraphs offensive, might I follow Ilana Mercer in making the suggestion that blame for the resemblance between the inner workings of show business and that of a bordello, does not rest upon the shoulders of lecherous managers, agents, and producers alone, but has as much to do with the ambitious young actresses and divas who are more than willing to sleep their way to fame and fortune?

Hypocrisy Anyone?

It appears that for all those left-liberals, determined to crucify Weinstein and other big name Hollywood types – who are generally all long-time supporters of progressive causes, including feminism, the Democrat Party, and Hillary Clinton – there is an exception to a woman’s right to refuse. The other week the news broke that a young actress – to use the term extremely loosely – who went by the stage name of August Ames, had been driven to commit suicide, not by the extreme emptiness that accompanies the kind of ephemeral stardom achieved through allowing oneself to be filmed in the most private of acts for mass voyeuristic consumption, but because those exemplary models of letting other people be, the LGBTTQ et alia ad infinitum gang, launched a social media blitzkrieg against her after she withdrew from a shoot in which she was cast opposite a co-star who has primarily appeared in films of a same-sex nature. Apart from illustrating the well-known fact that it is those who talk the most about tolerance and letting others be who are the least likely to practice these things, this demonstrates the truth of a remark I made last summer about how “We are fast approaching the time where social and legal pressure to conform to the new culture of “tolerance” will be the instruments of a raptum omnium ab omnibus.”

Robert Charles Sproul, Requiescat in Pace

One of the first books of serious theology – or what passes for serious theology in contemporary evangelicalism - that I ever read was R. C. Sproul’s The Holiness of God, which my pastor lent me when I was still in high school. While I have not read all of the approximately 100 books that Sproul wrote during his ministry, of the several that I have read, I still consider this to be the best. I have not always agreed with everything he wrote – and indeed, have charged him with serious heresy – but, as Dame Joan Collins’ Alexis Carrington Colby had a habit of saying in Aaron Spelling’s Dynasty to those whom she had previously stabbed in the back, but wished to use in the present, “that’s all in the past” and the sacred and ancient principle of de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est is now in play, as Dr. Sproul, who had suffered from chronic pulmonary obstructive disease for several years, passed away this week from respiratory complications brought on by the flu. I offer my condolences to his loved ones. May he rest in peace.

The Stalinism that is Strangling the Dominion of Canada to Death

On Friday December 8th, Mary Wagner was dragged out of something that euphemistically refers to itself as the “Women’s Care Clinic” in downtown Toronto and tossed in the clink. Her crime? Passing out red roses, to which models of unborn babies, and cards with contact information for the Sisters of Life and the message “You can choose life for your baby. Love will find a way” in an effort to dissuade young women from having their babies murdered. It used to be illegal, in the Dominion of Canada, for women to murder their babies. Trudeau pere changed that, by legalizing abortion in certain circumstances in 1969, and by corrupting our constitution with the addition of the diabolical Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, which the Supreme Court of Canada then used as the basis for striking down all our remaining laws against abortion in 1988. Now, under Trudeau fils, it is attempting to prevent abortion, by gentle persuasion, that is treated as a crime.

Last month, at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, 22 year old teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd was censured by the University administration. Her offence? In a class entitled “Canadian Communication in Context”, she showed a brief clip of a televised debate between University of Toronto Professors Jordan Peterson and Nicholas Matte on the subject of gender-neutral pronouns, in which the former took the con side and the latter the pro. To those who censured her, the acknowledgement of the existence of any other than the pro side on this issue, constituted a hate crime, a promotion of “transphobia.” Shepherd had the foresight to record the interview in which she was censured in abusive terms by a professor who absurdly compared Peterson to Hitler. The university, faced with a backlash of negative public opinion after the recording was released, backed down and apologized to the TA. One wonders how many students, teacher’s assistants, and staff and faculty members, in universities across the Dominion – or across North America for that matter as universities in the United States are no better – have faced similar censure, from administrations that tolerate no dissent from the increasingly radical, Marxist agenda on cultural and social issues, that they have been ramming down everyone’s throats?

Around the same time that the Lindsay Shepherd story was breaking there was an incident here in Winnipeg that further demonstrates the chilling atmosphere of Stalinism that has fallen upon our Dominion now that a Trudeau is once again the Prime Minister’s Office. Paul Fromm, Director of the Canadian Association for Free Expression, had scheduled a talk in his hotel room at the Hilton Suites for November 15th, on the subject of “Charlottesville Changes Everything.” The day before the scheduled talk, the left-liberal Winnipeg Free Press ran a front-page editorial, about how a “white nationalist” had planned an “event” in Winnipeg. The mendacity of this wording cannot be understated. The word “event” was intended to obscure the nature of what was planned by implying that it might be a public rally or demonstration rather than a closed door meeting, in which Mr. Fromm in suit-and-tie, would give a non-incendiary, informative talk, to those interested in hearing him. The words “white nationalist”, to the writers and readership of the Winnipeg Free Press, have only one connotation, and that is neo-Nazi, which, to anyone who actually knows Paul Fromm, is an absurd description of a man who has been fighting against the kind of soft-totalitarian thought control that the Grits introduced to our country during the first Trudeau premiership for almost as long as I have been alive. To left-liberals, who applaud and lionize every other sort of racial and ethnic identity group, anyone who tries to speak for white people and their rights and interests is the equivalent of Hitler. By this ridiculously pathetic excuse for reasoning Sir Winston Churchill, portrayed by Gary Oldham in the upcoming war drama Darkest Hour, was the equivalent of the tyrant he defeated in war in 1945, because ten years later he tried, unsuccessfully, to introduce immigration restrictions, suggesting to his Cabinet that they adopt the slogan “Keep England White.”

The Winnipeg Free Press’s activism-disguised-as-journalism had its intended effect. The Hilton Suites cancelled Mr. Fromm’s reservation. When he relocated to the Main Stay Suites, black clad, masked “antifa”, whom the sympathetic media call “protestors” but in my opinion would be better described as “terrorists” descended upon the premises. Again Mr. Fromm’s reservation was cancelled and he soon discovered that he had been blacklisted – “whitelisted?” – by every hotel in town.

Now, if you have the courage and honesty to do so, think about this story and ask yourself who bears the closest resemblance to Adolf Hitler – Paul Fromm or those who went to such great lengths to prevent him from giving a talk to those who wanted to hear him?

The Trudeau Liberals have made known to MPs what they will publically announce next week – that to receive grant money from the government for summer jobs for students, employers will need attest that:

both the job and the organization’s core mandate respect individual human rights in Canada, including the values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as other rights. These include reproductive rights and the right to be free from discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, race, national or ethnic origin, colour, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression.

In other words, anyone who disagrees with Trudeau’s Marxist agenda, need not apply.

One Last Thing

If there is anybody that I have not offended, with any of my preceding remarks, allow me to make up for this oversight by wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

A Grave Injustice

We are fallen beings, living in a fallen world. Created with free will in the image of God, we were given the choice of obedience and everlasting life on the one hand and sin and death on the other. We chose sin and death – and were exiled from Paradise. God, in His mercy and grace, promised to send a Redeemer Who would lift the curse of sin and death and restore us to Paradise. He gave us that Redeemer in Jesus Christ and one day, through Christ’s redemptive work, we will be restored to Paradise in the New Heaven and New Earth. Before that happens, men will be called upon to give account at the Final Judgement before the throne of God. There, they will find perfect, uncorrupted, justice, tempered, we hope and pray, by mercy and grace.

Until that day, men look for justice upon earth. Such justice as they find will be impure - mixed with injustice and corruption. Often what they will find cannot be counted as justice at all.

We have just received a most unfortunate reminder of this fact. After several years of legal battles, the defamation lawsuit Richard Warman launched against Mark and Connie Fournier of Free Dominion and several members of the conservative message board identified as “John Does” because they posted under online screen names, came to trial a couple of weeks ago. After several days of deliberation, the jury found in favour of Warman, who was awarded $42, 000 in damages plus costs. He is also seeking an injunction from the judge against Free Dominion, which would mean instant jail time for the Fourniers if anything negative were ever posted about him there again.

This decision is a travesty of justice.

The complainant in this case, Richard Warman, is a serial complainant. He launched several complaints under Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Section 13 was the portion of the CHRA that declared it an act of discrimination to communicate electronically any words that are “likely to” expose a member of a group protected against discrimination by the CHRA to “hatred or contempt.” Section 13 was itself bad law. All laws against acts of private discrimination are bad laws for that matter, but Section 13 was particularly bad both because it forbade words and thoughts, and because it did so in such a way that virtually anything negative or critical of a protected group or its members might be considered to be grounds for a complaint. Warman is not himself, as far as I can tell, a member of any of the protected groups. Nevertheless, he launched the majority of the Section 13 complaints filed in the last ten to fifteen years before it was repealed.

He has also launched multiple defamation lawsuits. He sued British, New Age, conspiracy theorist David Icke for defamation over remarks the author made about him in his book Children of the Matrix. He sued Paul Fromm, director of the Canadian Association for Free Expression for libel, for remarks he had made about Warman on the internet. He was awarded $30,000 in damages, a ruling that was upheld in every appeal, with the Supreme Court refusing to even hear the case. When the National Post's Jonathan Kay reported on Warman v. Lemire, the last Section 13 case ever heard, Warman sued the newspaper and columnist for defamation. Named as co-defendents were conservative bloggers Kathy Shaidle, Kate McMillan and Ezra Levant, as well as the Fourniers and Free Dominion, all because they had reposted the assertion made in the original article about Warman, that he claimed was defamatory.

When the same person launches so many lawsuits against so many people surely it is appropriate to question whether or not he is acting in good faith. Indeed, to this writer and many others it seems obvious that he is not acting in good faith, that these are vexatious lawsuits initiated for the purpose of harassment and that they should have been tossed out of court ages ago.

Consider the merits of these suits. In his suit against the National Post and assorted co-defendants, the basis of the complaint was that the column in question had reported a claim, made by Bernard Klatt, an expert for the defence in Warman v. Lemire, that Richard Warman was himself the author of a post on Marc Lemire’s Freedomsite (not to be confused with the Fourniers’ FreeDominion) that referred to Senator Anne Cools using extremely derogatory, racist, and misogynistic language. This post – removed by Lemire from the site before anyone else ever saw it – was part of the complaint Warman filed against Lemire.

Warman denies being the author of this post. Whether he was or was not I do not profess to know. The allegation was originally made by an expert witness in a courtroom. Mr. Klatt offered reasons for why he thought the post had originated with Warman. Surely a better method for protecting his reputation, if that is truly Warman’s concern, would be to rebut Mr. Klatt’s reasoning rather than to sue everyone in sight who repeats the allegation.

Let us assume that Warman is telling the truth when he says that he is not the author of the post in question. For words to be defamatory they must have the effect of lowering a person’s reputation or esteem in the eyes of others. Would repeating the allegation that Warman is the author of the Cools post have that effect?

To answer that, let me put another question to you. If you had robbed the Bank of Montreal, Scotia Bank, and the Royal Bank of Canada, would a false accusation that you had also robbed Toronto Dominion lower your esteem in the eyes of others?

Warman has admitted to posing as a racist online under various assumed names. He posted under “axetogrind” at Vanguard News Network and under “Pogue Mahone” at Stormfront, for example. In an affidavit, quoted by Joseph Brean of the National Post, he wrote the following:

I signed up and posted to the neo-Nazi website forums vnnforum.com and stormfront.org as another means of collecting intelligence about the neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements and information about the identities of individuals in Canada that it was my intention to file federal human rights complaints against. (1)

If he has admitted to posing as a racist at Vanguard and Stormfront, how can the allegation that he did the same thing at Freedomsite possibly damage his reputation?

Then there was his defamation suit against Paul Fromm. Here is how the decision in the case summarizes Warman’s complaint:

Mr. Warman pleads that the defendants are responsible for libelling him in nine posting on various Internet websites. These postings characterize him as, among other things, an enemy of free speech, a member of the thought police, a high priest of censorship, and an employee who abused his position at the CHRC in order to limit freedom of expression and pursue his own ideological agenda. (2)

So Warman’s complaint basically was that Mr. Fromm accused him of trying to censor or limit other people’s verbal expressions of their thoughts. His response to this accusation was to ask a court to force Mr. Fromm to retract this accusation and apologize for it (and pay a ridiculously large amount in “damages”)?

Do you see the absurdity in that?

Even if you don’t see the defamation suit as being itself a form of censorship or limitation of freedom of speech, think of the kind of behaviour that Mr. Fromm was commenting on. Warman had filed numerous complaints against people over remarks they made on the internet. How can describing that kind of behaviour as censorship possibly be defamatory?
Warman’s progressive defenders seem to reason that because Warman was acting in accordance with the law at the time, his actions should be above reproach, and criticism, condemnation, or ridicule of those actions should be considered defamation.

So in one defamation suit against multiple defendants, Warman complained that he was falsely accused of making a racist post on Freedomsite when he had acknowledged having posed as a neo-nazi on Vanguard News Network and Stormfront, and in another defamation suit he complained that he was accused of censorship for filing Section 13 complaints against people. These seem to be frivolous grounds for defamation suits. Yet Warman, a public figure who should surely be held to a higher standard of proof than an ordinary person in making defamation complaints, won his case against Mr. Fromm, and the National Post settled out of court. In the latter case, Warman obtained the legal copyright to the article he had complained about, and then filed a copyright infringement suit against the Fourniers! How can anyone in their right mind think that this is being done in good faith?

If the ruling against the Fourniers had been made by a judge it could be blamed on the abysmally low quality of the magistrates currently sitting on Canadian benches. It was a jury that rendered this verdict however. That speaks of an even greater problem.

The problem is that Warman is an anti-racist crusader and for decades now Canadians have been bombarded by left-wing anti-racist propaganda in the schools, from the pulpit, and in the new electronic media, both “news” and “entertainment”. In the classroom, year after year children have video footage of the Nazi concentration camps shoved down their throats. If an equivalent amount of time were spent teaching them about the GULAG and the horrors of officially egalitarian communism, perhaps a valuable lesson could be taught about how when man bows the knee to the idol of technology, he becomes like a machine himself, (3) and treats people accordingly. This is the appropriate lesson to be gleaned from the history of Twentieth Century totalitarianism in all its varieties. Instead the message attached to the Holocaust footage is “this is where racism leads to” – a message that obliterates the difference between the racial views of Sir Winston Churchill and those of Adolf Hitler and which makes the virtue of pietas – at least when practiced by white people – into a cardinal sin.

Mark and Connie Fournier are not racists. In their stand against Section 13, however, they took the position that racists should have freedom of speech like anyone else, and that a law that allows people to be sued and silenced merely because their words were deemed to be racist is a bad law. This conflicts with the antiracist programming, in which racism is the greatest of all evils, and everything done to stop racism is good. When confronted with evidence that injustice was being done in the name of fighting racism, and that those who stood up for the freedom of speech even of racists were being unfairly persecuted, some people appear to be simply unable to cope with this conflict between reality and what they have been programmed to think.

Only thus can the idiotic jury decision in this case be explained.

Mark and Connie, my prayers are with you.

(1) http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/12/12/undercover-work-debated-in-hate-hearing/


(2) http://www.nelligan.ca/e/PDF/Warman_Court_Decision.pdf


(3) Psalm 135:18

A Long Awaited Day Has Come At Last!

The day many of us have been awaiting for a long time has finally arrived. On Wednesday, June 26th, Bill C-304 passed its third reading in the Canadian Senate. Having cleared the Senate, all the bill needed to become the law of the land was Royal Assent, which it received later that evening, when it was signed by Governor General David Johnston, the representative of Her Majesty Elizabeth II, Queen of Canada.

Bill C-304 is a private members bill introduced into Parliament in September of 2011 by Brian Storseth, Conservative MP for Westlock-St. Paul, Alberta. The bill’s actual title is “An Act to Amend the Canadian Human Rights Act (Protecting Freedom).”

It contains six provisions. The key provision is the second which states “Section 13 of the Act is repealed”. The first, third, fourth, and fifth provisions of the bill amend other parts of the CHRA to remove all references to Section 13. The sixth provision states that the provisions of the bill will come into effect one year after it receives Royal Assent.

Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act is the notorious and infamous “hate speech” law. When Parliament first passed the Canadian Human Rights Act in 1977 it read:

It is a discriminatory practice for a person or a group of persons acting in concert to communicate telephonically or to cause to be so communicated, repeatedly, in whole or in part by means of the facilities of a telecommunication undertaking within the legislative authority of Parliament, any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of the fact that that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.

This later became subsection 1, when Section 13 was amended in 2001 to include subsection 2, which reads:

For greater certainty, subsection (1) applies in respect of a matter that is communicated by means of a computer or a group of interconnected or related computers, including the Internet, or any similar means of communication, but does not apply in respect of a matter that is communicated in whole or in part by means of the facilities of a broadcasting undertaking.

Bill C-304 passed its third reading in the House of Commons early last June.It had its first reading in the Senate on June 7^th of last year and there it sat for over a year until it had its second reading on June 20^th of this year. After the second reading the Senate referred the bill to a Committee which presented its findings shortly before the Senate heard the bill for the third time and passed it.

This is great news for Canada. It means that as of June 26th, 2014, Section 13 will no longer be part of the Canadian Human Rights Act. I am not sure exactly why it was thought necessary to include a one year delay in the bill taking effect. It hardly seems logical that a bill designed to abolish an unnecessary law that has been exceedingly abused would extend to the agency guilty of that abuse an opportunity for one last kick at the cat. Government, however, is seldom logical and we have reason to rejoice that, despite the temporary delay, the final death of Section 13 is assured. This Dominion Day we can sing with extra gusto the final word in the verse of our national anthem that describes our country as “the True North strong and free”.

For many in our great Dominion, the reality of the extent to which our traditional freedoms had gradually been eroded over the last four decades did not become clear until 2006 when Ezra Levant, publisher of the Western Standard, re-published the Mohammed cartoons that had stirred up so much controversy overseas when they were first published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. A couple of organizations, the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada and the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities, filed a complaint against Levant and his magazine before the Alberta Human Rights Commission.The complaint was made, not under Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, but under Alberta’s provincial equivalent.

That, by the way, is a reminder to us that the work of turning back the clock on progressive thought control is not completed with the abolition of Section 13. Each province has its own provincial equivalent and freedom will not be fully restored to our Dominion until each of these are struck down as well.

About the same time that the complaint was made against Levant, the Canadian Islamic Congress filed complaints with the Ontario, BC, and Canadian Human Rights Commissions against MacLean’s magazine and author Mark Steyn. The complaint regarded an excerpt from Steyn’s book America Alone that had been reprinted in MacLean’s under the title “The Future Belongs to Islam”. The complaint was that the article was hate speech that discriminated against Muslims as a group.

These were high profile cases that involved two widely read magazines. This brought greater exposure to the precarious state into which freedom of speech had fallen in our country. As they defended themselves in their own human rights/freedom of speech cases, Levant and Steyn brought another case to the public’s attention, one which otherwise might have attracted very little attention, the case of Warman v. Lemire.

Marc Lemire was the webmaster of Freedom-Site and a complaint had been made against him, under Section 13, by Richard Warman, the lawyer formerly employed by the Canadian Human Rights Commission, who has filed the bulk of the Section 13 complaints over the last decade. The complaint pertained to posts that had been made – by others – on the Freedom-Site’s internet bulletin board. Lemire, in addition to defending himself and his site against this complaint, filed a constitutional challenge against Sections 13 and 54 of the Canadian Human Rights Act (Section 54 is also amended by Bill C-304 to remove the elements which were problematic).

Over the course of Warman v. Lemire much material was revealed about the way in which Section 13 cases were started, investigated, and handled that cast the Canadian Human Rights Commission in a rather unflattering light. In 2009, Athanasios Hadjis, a member of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, dismissed most of the charges against Lemire and refused to pass sentence on the remaining charge, ruling that Section 13 was unconstitutional. This subsequently went into appeal and Lemire’s constitutional challenge was put on hold pending Parliament’s decision on Bill C-304 – which has now rendered the challenge moot.

These cases received wider discussion in the media than previous hate/free speech cases, due to the involvement of high profile figures like Levant and Steyn. They also received wider exposure because the development of the internet and of political blogging had created a way for people to get around self-imposed mainstream media blackouts. It also added a new dimension to the legal battle over freedom of speech.

As previously mentioned, in Warman v. Lemire much material had come to light that was unflattering to the Canadian Human Rights Commission. That same material was also unflattering to the plaintiff, himself. In early 2008, he launched a defamation suit against the National Post over an article that made reference to testimony from Warman v. Lemire that suggested that Warman himself was the author of one of the contested posts on Freedom-Site, one that contained some rather rude remarks about a female Canadian Senator. Warman also named as co-defendants the author of the article, Jonathan Kay, bloggers who had made reference to the article such as Kathy Shaidle (Five Feet of Fury) and Kate McMillan (Small Dead Animals), and Mark and Connie Fournier, the founders and administrators of the small-c conservative message board Free Dominion.

This was not the first time Warman had launched a defamation suit against his opponents. He had sued British author David Icke in the early 2000’s over remarks Icke had made about him in one of his books. Icke is a New Age, environmentalist, type who specializes in conspiracy theories about reptillian shape-shifters from outer space. Nevertheless he was justifiably unimpressed when he was accused of anti-semitism in the late 1990s, which accusations became part of the basis for a campaign to have his speaking tour of Canada cancelled and his books removed from Canadian bookstores and libraries. Warman’s involvement in that campaign was the reason for the remarks which were the basis of the lawsuit. In 2007, Warman sued Paul Fromm, director of the Canadian Association for Free Expression for libel over remarks he had made about Warman on the internet.

Warman launched multiple lawsuits against Mark and Connie Fournier of Free Dominion.In addition to the National Post lawsuit previously mentioned, he also filed another defamation suit against the Fourniers and eight members of Free Dominion over remarks they had made about him. Since the eight members posted under internet pseudonyms, they were named as “John Does” in the suit. The lawsuit therefore centred around the issue of the right to anonymity on the internet. After the National Post and Jonathan Kay settled with Warman, he became the owner of the article in question, and then sued the Fourniers over copyright infraction for reposting the article on their site!

I have encountered people who appear to believe that this is a legitimate use of the court system. I do not. In my opinion it is a shameful abuse of the legal process and it is a disgrace that the courts allow this to go on. Now that Section 13 has been taken care of, badly needed reform of Canada’s defamation laws would be an excellent next step to consider in securing and protecting the rights of Canadians to freely express their thoughts and opinions.

The passing of Bill C-304 is a significant victory for those who have been fighting to restore freedom of speech to the Dominion of Canada. The events referred to above only cover the last few years of what has been a very long battle. The Canadian Human Rights Act with its Section 13 was signed into law in 1977. I was one year old at the time. In the 1980s, when I was growing up, freedom of speech and what, if any, legitimate limitations on it ought to exist, was a matter of public discussion.

The discussion centered around two high profile cases, neither of which, interestingly, was a Section 13 case. Ernst Zundel, a Toronto graphic artist who also published pamphlets that argued that only thousands rather than six million Jews died in World War II and that the deaths were not part of an orchestrated plot of genocide on the part of the Third Reich but a consequence of the realities of war, was charged with “spreading false news” twice under a law that was eventually struck down by the Supreme Court of Canada. James Keegstra, a high school teacher and at the time mayor of Eckville, Alberta was charged with spreading hate for teaching his history class that the Jews were behind a global conspiracy against Christianity. The law he was charged under was the hate speech provision which had been added to the Criminal Code by the Trudeau government a few years prior to the Canadian Human Rights Act. In fact, Section 13 had been added to the Canadian Human Rights Act because it was considered too difficult to obtain a conviction under the Criminal Code where the prosecutor was required to meet the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The Crown managed to do so in the Keegstra case.

These two cases were widely discussed in the news and in the classroom.After that the mainstream media went curiously silent on the subject of freedom of speech until the Levant and Steyn cases. There were a few exceptions. One or two writers in the Sun newspaper chain occasionally discussed a freedom of speech case. Doug Collins of the North Shore News reported on the decay of freedom of speech, and was eventually himself brought before the BC Human Rights Commission on charges of “hate speech” by Harry Abrams of the Binai B’rith. The Report newsmagazines (Alberta, Western, BC) of the Byfield family had a number of writers and editors, such as Kevin Michael Grace, who faithfully reported on these matters. Very few others would do so.

There was a reason for this. Collins, Grace, the Byfields, and virtually everyone else who defended freedom of speech against “hate speech” laws, including the late Doug Christie, the founder of the Canadian Free Speech League and the lawyer for both Zundel and Keegstra, were accused of being racists.

Former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, in a speech given early in the Trudeau premiership, later published in the book Those Things We Treasure, recalled an earlier time of more civil discussion when one could disagree with the Prime Minister without being accused of prejudice. By the time Peter Brimelow wrote his book about American immigration, Alien Nation, in the mid 1990s, he could accurately say that the new definition of a racist was “someone who was winning an argument with a liberal”. Liberals, capitalizing on the disgust generated by the revelation of the horrors of WWII, had turned “racist” into a powerful weapon, an epithet that could ruin a person’s reputation, career, and life. It was a weapon they did not hesitate to use against their enemies.

Ironically, the pet projects with liberals used that weapon to protect, were themselves racist projects. This was not immediately recognizable because the targets of the racist projects were white people.

Think about it. If you were to say that your community or your country is “too black” or “too Asian” or “too fill-in-the-blank-with-any-race-but-white” you would be immediately denounced as a racist. The denunciation would be even more immediate and severe if you proposed doing something about it. The same, however, is not true of people who say that their community or country is “too white”. Indeed, such people are lauded for saying this sort of thing. This makes no sense from an ethical perspective. If racism is wrong, and racism is prejudice against people because of their race, then it is as wrong when it is directed against white people as when it is directed against any other group of people. If thinking that a community is “too black” is racist, then thinking that it is “too white” is also racist.

Yet the idea that our country is “too white” is recognizably the idea behind the liberal policies pertaining to race, culture, and immigration that have been enacted since the 1960s. When liberals talk about promoting diversity they never mean making black communities less black, or aboriginal communities less aboriginal, and they certainly never mean making any kind of non-white community more white. “Diversity” is clearly a euphemism for “less white”.

An objection might be raised to this reasoning in that most liberals are themselves white. All that proves, however, is the truth of Robert Frost’s observation that a liberal is someone “who is too polite to take his own side in a quarrel”.

Liberalism’s accusations of racism against those who dissent from its policies of self-hatred – or those who recognize and dare to point out that its policies are racist against white people – is a self-defense mechanism that has proven remarkably effective. It by itself has protected against criticism many policies that would not be able to withstand scrutiny. For the longest time our insane policy concerning “hate speech” was one of those policies.

“Hate speech” as defined by laws like Section 13 is not necessarily speech that expresses actual hatred. Statements like “I hate you”, “I despise you”, “I utterly detest and loathe you” and “I curse the day you were born” simply do not fall under the category of “hate speech”. Yet expressing the view that significantly less than six million Jews died in the Nazi concentration camps in World War II, which is an opinion about historical facts, albeit an unusual and perhaps nutty one, apparently does.

Clearly “hate speech” laws are not about hatred in any literal sense of the world. “Hate speech” laws, like all anti-discrimination laws, are based upon anti-white racism. When anti-discrimination laws were first introduced there was growing opposition to laws that were themselves discriminatory. The basis of this opposition was the idea that the law should be the same for all citizens, a modern version of the ancient concept represented by justice wearing a blindfold. It is one thing, however, for government to strike down laws that favour one group of citizens over another, and declare that it will administer the law justly. It is another thing altogether, for government to pass a law prohibiting its citizens from discriminating against each other. Not only are such laws unduly intrusive into the personal thoughts and feelings of citizens, history has demonstrated that such laws cannot themselves be administered justly. Laws which prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, for example, are enforced against white people who are accused of discriminating against other kinds of people. They are seldom, if ever, enforced against people who discriminate against white people.

This is glaringly obvious in the case of “hate speech” laws. Countless examples could be given of speech, directed against white people, which is actually hateful and even violent, which has never caused those uttering it to be charged with “hate speech”. The defendants are almost always white, the only time anyone else is charged is when his “hate speech” is directed against a group that enjoys a greater degree of protection than his own. The justification given for this unjust administration of the law is that the law exists to “protect vulnerable minorities”. This, however, is merely a euphemism for “the law applies to one group differently than it applies to another”.

Thankfully, the government has finally done the right thing and abolished the abhorrent Section 13. Let us pray that the rest of the racist, anti-white, liberal house of cards, will come crashing down after it.

The Long War Against Free Speech in Canada

Five years ago, the Conservative Party of Canada was elected to a minority government and its leader Stephen Harper became the twenty-second Prime Minister of Canada. Many conservative Canadians, including this writer, hoped that a Conservative government might do something to reverse the loss of free speech that has taken place in our country over the last few decades beginning with the Liberal premiership of Pierre Eliot Trudeau. Such hopes were quickly dashed to pieces. In Harper’s years as Prime Minister with a minority government he made no attempt to curb the threat to our freedom of thought and speech posed by the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Instead, as we will see, he made the problem worse.

Some Canadian conservatives, loyal to Harper, believed that this was only because of his minority position. If he ever achieved a majority government, they argued, he would govern according to conservative principles and the threat of the Canadian Human Rights Commission would be ended once and for all. On May 2, 2011, Stephen Harper achieved his majority government. In his campaign, he promised that within 100 days of his election, he would see passed an Omnibus Crime Bill. This Bill contains legislation aimed at eliminating “house arrest” as a soft-option penalty for serious crimes, establishing stricter sentences including mandatory jail time for certain offences, and basically making it easier for the police to do their jobs. Hidden within this Bill, however, are laws which pose a serious threat to whatever remaining freedom of thought and speech, Canadians have left.

One of those laws, for example, if passed will make everybody who posts a link on the internet responsible for the content of the site to which they have linked. If the site contains an article that is deemed to be “hate speech” by the absurd and draconian laws against “hate” that the Liberal Party saddled us with, then you will be guilty of a hate crime for linking to the site, even if you linked to a different article.

We will shortly take a look at how Canada arrived at this place. First, however, we need to be clear on what free speech is and why it is important.

WHAT IS FREE SPEECH?

Some people seem to think that free speech means “the right to say anything you want, anywhere you want, at any time you want, under any possible circumstances”. They then point out that there are laws limiting such a right which nobody ever objects to, such as laws against yelling “Fire” in a crowded theatre. They reason, therefore, that if we do not object to laws of that nature, we should have no objection to laws limiting free speech in another way, by for example outlawing the distribution of “hate speech” on the internet.

Other people seem to think that free speech means “the right to disrupt other people’s lives”. Suppose for example, that a psychologist who has written a controversial paper about how the influence of the hereditary g’ factor on the gap between racial averages on IQ test scores is invited to lecture at a university. A left-wing professor who opposes the lecture talks to the leader of an organization of student radicals and they decide to stage a protest. They protest in such a way that many people, including the speaker himself, are prevented from entering the auditorium. Many progressives would refer to the thuggish actions of the protestors as “an expression of their freedom of speech”, even though they have prevented a speaker from giving a lecture he was invited to give to people who wanted to hear what he had to say.

Both of these concepts of “free speech” are erroneous. Free speech, is a person’s legal right to verbally express his thoughts to those without being penalized by the law for the content of those thoughts. It is a legal protection of an even more basic freedom – the freedom of thought. Freedom of thought is your freedom to think your own thoughts, form your own opinions, and to hear the opinions of others and form your own judgment as to who is right and who is wrong.

Freedom of speech/thought does not mean that one person’s ideas are just as good and just as authoritative as any other person’s. The views of a man who is an expert in physics, for example, are more authoritative when he is speaking in his field of expertise than the views of a man who has never studied physics but is an expert landscape painter. An intelligent audience, seeking to be informed about physics, would consider the lecture of the physics expert as having more weight than the lecture of the landscape painter, even prior to hearing both lectures.

It does mean that if the landscape painter has formulated a theory about physics he should be allowed to present it to anyone willing to listen – and they are also free to laugh him to scorn and listen to the physicist instead.

Laws against yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre are not limitations on freedom of speech as I have defined it. Such laws do not penalize anyone for holding or expressing a particular point of view. Instead they penalize an act of mischief. The act of yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre is likely to start a panic, in which a mob in a hurry to leave the room through its tiny exists, may hurt or even kill somebody.

At this point, the supporter of laws against “hate speech” might jump in and say “That is what hate speech laws do. They penalize people for spreading propaganda which can result in members of vulnerable groups in our society being harmed or killed”.

This, however, is a load of codswallop.

Laws against “hate speech” are never limited to threats of violence, calls to violence, or other such incendiary talk. Section 13.1 of the Canadian Human Rights Act reads:

It is a discriminatory practice for a person or a group of persons acting in concert to communicate telephonically or to cause to be so communicated, repeatedly, in whole or in part by means of the facilities of a telecommunication undertaking within the legislative authority of Parliament, any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of the fact that that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.

Note especially the highlighted portion of the text. The “matter” communicated does not have to include the advocacy of criminal violence. Nor does it have to actually expose a single person to criminal violence in order to be proscribed by this law. It does not even have to actually expose a single person to the stated “hatred or contempt”. It only has to be “like to” to do so. The question of what constitutes being “likely to” is left up to the adjudicating body.

The matter in question does not even have to be demonstrably false to qualify as “hate speech” under Section 13.1. This is what the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in Canadian Human Rights Commission v. John Ross Taylor in 1990. The law only addressed adversity, therefore truth is no defence.

Laws of this nature are not used to prevent criminal violence to “vulnerable” minorities. They are used to establish a secular orthodoxy of official egalitarianism about race, sex, religion, language, ethnicity, and sexual orientation and to suppress viewpoints which conflict with that orthodoxy.

“Hate Speech” and Free Speech in post 9/11 Canada

Section 13.1 is currently in a state of legal limbo, although other “hate speech” laws across the country, including the provisions added by the Trudeau government to the Criminal Code remain in effect. To understand how this came about we need to look back over the developments of the last ten years.

The September 11, 2001 attack by Al Qaeda upon the United States of America affected the countries of North America and the world in general in many ways. As the American and Canadian governments passed new anti-terrorism legislation the tension between the need for effective national security against terrorist attacks and the rights, liberties, and privacy of law-abiding citizens came into focus and became a matter of debate. Back in 1992 the late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington had identified the “clash of the civilizations” as the source of regional and global conflict following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the arms race and the Cold War. 9/11 and the military response on the part of the United States and its coalition of allies made this “clash of the civilizations” real to people in way it had not previously been.

In this context, it was inevitable that discussion would arise about Islam, how it differs from Christianity and Judaism, and how Islamic culture differs from Western culture, and what the historic relationship has been between the Islamic world and the Western world. (1) The wisdom of the reigning liberal orthodoxy on immigration and multiculturalism was seriously called into question and the fundamental contradiction inherent in the progressive view of multicultural tolerance became apparent to many.

In a controversy that began in September of 2005 this contradiction was made manifest when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a number of editorial cartoons which featured the founder of Islam, Mohammed in a less-than-positive light. Needless to say the joke was not appreciated by Muslims and many protests and riots broke out as a result. All of a sudden the contradiction within progressivism was laid bare. Progressives had been actively encouraging large-scale immigration to Western countries in the hopes of creating secular, pluralistic, multicultural societies in the naïve dream that such societies would be harmonious and peaceful. Then they discovered that their secular, pluralistic, tolerant values were not shared by many of the immigrants whose importation they had been cheerleading.

The Jyllands-Posten cartoons were republished in several newspapers and magazines throughout the Western world as a statement of commitment to freedom of speech in defiance of Islamic attempts at intimidation. One such publisher was Canada’s Ezra Levant (2).

Ezra Levant, a lawyer from Alberta, had founded a magazine called the Western Standard in 2004, to fill the gap that had been created by the folding of the conservative Report Newsmagazine (the last incarnation of the publication better known as the Alberta Report or Western Report). In his February 27, 2006 issue Levant reprinted the Jyllands-Posten cartoons on pages 15-16 along with an article by Kevin Steel that criticized the North American media for having capitulated on freedom of the press with regards to these cartoons in marked contrast to their defense of the freedom of expression of everyone who mocks Western beliefs and culture.

A complaint was launched against Levant and the Western Standard before the Alberta Human Rights Commission, the Alberta provincial equivalent of the CHRC, by a number of Muslim organizations. Levant vigorously fought back, even going so far as to record his interview with the Human Rights investigator and post it to YouTube.

Meanwhile, the same year that Ezra Levant republished those cartoons the book America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It was published by Regnery Publishing in the United States. The author of this book was Mark Steyn, a well-known Canadian-born conservative writer who has been widely published in periodicals in Canada, the UK, and the United States. The book quickly became a best-seller.

In October of 2006, Maclean’s magazine ran an article entitled “The future belongs to Islam” which was an excerpt from Steyn’s book. The article was about the implications of the demographics of the Muslim world for the West. The Canadian Islamic Congress filed a complaint against Maclean’s with the Ontario Human Rights Commission the following year, as well as with the federal and the BC Human Rights Commissions. Several other pieces by Steyn were also brought up in the complaint.

These cases generated a lot of bad publicity for the Human Rights Commissions because they brought to public attention the state to which free speech had fallen in Canada. The problem, as we will see, goes back to the 70’s but the Canadian media had largely refused to discuss it following the 80’s (the various versions of the Alberta Report being virtually the only exception). In this case, because the victims of the Human Rights Commissions were major publishers and writers, the media woke up and took notice. Eventually these complaints were withdrawn, dropped, or dismissed.

In the process of the reporting on these cases attention was brought to another case, that of Marc Lemire. Lemire was, among other things, the webmaster of the Freedom Site, a website he had started back in the 90’s. Lemire’s site was highly critical of multiculturalism and liberal immigration from what could be described as a “white nationalist” (3) perspective. His site was bulletin board style website to which people could post messages. Richard Warman filed a complaint against him with the Canadian Human Rights Commission under section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal began to hear the case roughly around the same time that the Levant and Maclean’s cases were making news. Lemire, who like Levant and Maclean’s was not the kind of person to take this sort of thing quietly, had filed a challenge to the very constitutionality of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, long before his own case was finally heard.

In the course of the Lemire hearings, all sorts of scandalous things about the way in which the Canadian Human Rights Commission operated were brought to light, which Levant, Steyn and a number of courageous conservative bloggers did their best to make known to the Canadian public.

Ultimately, the case against Lemire was dismissed. The decision was made on September 2, 2009 by Athanasios Hadjis, chairman of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, who dismissed all of the charges against Lemire but one, and on that one ruled that a violation of Section 13 had taken place, but that in his opinion Section 13 was unconstitutional. Hadjis does not have the judicial standing to actually strike something out of law, and the CHRC filed an appeal against this decision. This has left Section 13 in limbo.

Libel Law and Freedom of Speech

Section 13 was not, unfortunately, the only tool available for those who wish to punish other people for the words that they say. Our libel laws have also been available for that purpose.

The term libel refers to defamation that is written (as opposed to slander which is defamation that is communicated orally). Defamation is when you communicate something about someone else with the intent of harming their reputation so as to lower their social status and/or destroy their business or career. Canada’s defamation laws are sorely in need of revision.

First, the definition of defamation needs to be revised so that it only applies to demonstrably false statements where it can also be shown that the person making the statement knew the statement to be false at the time. As our defamation laws currently stand a person can be punished for telling the truth if the truth happens to reflect negatively on someone else. That is a situation that should be unacceptable in a country that values personal liberty. In criminal law, the English-speaking world has long had a concept of justice in it is considered to be far worse to use the law to do a positive injustice to a defendant than to fail to give justice to a complainant by freeing a guilty defendant. There is absolutely no reason why this should not hold true for defamation as well.

As mentioned above, when the Human Rights complaints against Levant and Steyn were in the news, these writers and many conservative bloggers reported on proceedings of the Warman v. Lemire case. Much of this cast the CHRC, and the complainant, a lawyer and political activist who was at one time an employee of the CHRC and had subsequently become the principal section 13 complainant, in a particularly bad light.

In addition to filing section 13 complaints, Warman has over the years filed a number of libel suits against his critics. The defendants of these suits have included David Icke, the British author and New Age conspiracy theorist and Paul Fromm the director of the Canadian Association for Free Expression. He launched a libel suit against Jonathan Kay and the National Post over one allegation that the newspaper reported out of the Warman V. Lemire case and against several bloggers who also reported on the story, including Ezra Levant. Mark and Connie Fournier, the founders of Free Dominion, a small-c conservative message board are also among the defendants in that case. They are also being sued by Warman in a libel case that features eight “John Does”, i.e., people who post under a pseudonym at FreeDominion. Warman has demanded that the Fourniers turn over the identities of the “John Does” to him. These cases are still in the courts and the Fourniers are bravely standing their ground.

One hopes that Levant, the Fourniers, and the other bloggers who are being sued will win their cases. The process of defending themselves against, however, is incredibly expensive. It is itself, as others have pointed out, a punishment.

What is desperately needed is an overhaul of Canadian libel law that prevents abuses such as this from taking place.

Instead, Stephen Harper is smuggling in a piece of legislation that will make them easier.

How Did We Get Here?

The Right Honorable John G. Diefenbaker, the last Canadian Prime Minister who was a decent human being and not either a crook or a traitor to the traditions upon which Canada was built, in a lecture delivered to the Empire Club of Toronto, on March 9, 1972 said:

Thirty-two years ago I came into the House of Commons, and even though we were in the darkest days of war Members by their speeches brought about change. No one was then a “bigot” because he disagreed with the Government. (4)

That changed considerably in the premiership of the two Prime Ministers that followed Diefenbaker. The Prime Minister in power at the time he gave that speech, Pierre Trudeau, would become famous for accusing his critics, especially in Western Canada, of being bigots. The establishment media would quickly come to follow his example.

When Diefenbaker spoke those words, the first steps in the erosion of freedom of speech in Canada had already been taken. The Liberal Party’s new media-backed strategy of accusing their opponents of racism was only a miniscule part of it. The first legislation, making it illegal to communicate “hate propaganda” had already been passed.

The legislation in question was not Section 13, the problems with the wording of which we have already looked at. Section 13 was only a few short years away, but the first “hate speech” provisions were what are now Sections 318-320 of the Criminal Code of Canada. The first of these makes it a criminal offense to advocate genocide. The second of these prohibits the public communication of statements that incite hatred in a place where it is likely to result in a breach of the peace and the communication of statements other than in private conversation which “wilfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group”. Section 320 prohibits the written equivalent of what is verbally prohibited in the previous two sections and allows for such material to be seized.

Although these sections are more responsibly worded than Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act - truth is clearly stated as a defense in Section 319, for example – there was no compelling need for these provisions to be added to the law. Laws against inciting violence and other criminal behavior were already in place and anything that is covered in Sections 318-320 that should be illegal was already covered under such provisions. “Hate speech” laws are seldom passed in order to address a real problem. They are passed in order to limit public discussion of certain topics and to thereby enforce a civil orthodoxy with regards to those topics.

Auberon Waugh, writing with regards to the British equivalent of such laws, explained their stupidity many years ago:

Long before the passing of the Race Relations Act there were perfectly adequate laws against public conduct or language likely to cause a breach of the peace. They [The National Front] may well be a nasty, boring and humourless collection of fanatics, but I have never seen that there was anything more wicked about race hatred than there is about class hatred or religious hatred or the peculiarly intense and inexplicable hatred which my dear wife feels for Jimmy Connors, the tennis player. They are all part of the rich panorama of life. If I forbade my wife to express her true feelings for Jimmy Connors, I have no doubt they would fester inside her, creating little black eddies of resentment and paranoia which would eventually burst out in some hideous drama on the Centre Court at Wimbledon when Connors would expire, coughing blood, in front of the television cameras, with a lady’s parasol sticking between his ribs; public subscriptions would create a Jimmy Connors Memorial Trust and we would be stuck with a hideous modern stature of the young man somewhere on those green and pleasant lawns. So, wisely, I let her have her say. (5)

The government had been under pressure from various organizations to pass hate speech laws for quite some time. In the 1960’s, Lester Pearson had instructed Justice Minister Guy Favreau to appoint a Special Committee on Hate Propaganda. Maxwell Cohen, the Dean of the Faculty of Law in McGill University, was appointed to chair the committee and Pierre Trudeau, the future Prime Minister sat on the committee which gave its report in 1966. It was on the basis of the recommendations of that report that these provisions against the advocacy of genocide and the communication of hatred were added to the Criminal Code in 1970.

The relatively responsible way in which these laws were written made it less easy to abuse them. They therefore failed to satisfy the sort of people who wanted such laws passed in the first place. This is what created the pressure for what would become Section 13.

In 1977, the Trudeau government passed the Canadian Human Rights Act. The Canadian Human Rights Act is considered to be part of civil law rather than criminal law in Canada. Therefore, a complainant need only meet the standard of proof in civil court which is considerably less than the “beyond reasonable doubt” standard of criminal law. A defendant is not guaranteed counsel and there is no process for recovering expenses even if he wins. The system is stacked against him and the government has added unreasonably high penalties for CHRA offenses.

Section 13 was brought in to the CHRA, largely through the efforts of one man, F.W. Callaghan, who had been the deputy attorney general in Ontario, and would later become Chief Justice of the Ontario Court. F. W. Callaghan wished to prosecute John Ross Taylor, an old man who had supported the fascists and Nazis in the 20’s and 30’s and had not seen fit to change his views when those parties were defeated and discredited in World War II. At the time he was using a telephone answering machine to communicate his ideas on various topics to the public. Callaghan found it unacceptable that he should be allowed to leave messages on his answering machine for the 5 or 6 people in Canada who actually bothered to call his number (most, if not all, of whom would have been government agents) and found the limitations of the existing laws so frustrating that he wrote to the federal government and asked them to bring in a civil law statute against “hate speech” that would be easier to use to shut Taylor up with than the existing criminal code provisions.

Taylor was charged under Section 13 and it was in the Supreme Court’s final decision of his case in 1990 that truth was ruled not to be a defence. Subsequently, additions would be added to Section 13 that allowed it to be applied to the internet.

Before the Supreme Court passed its decision in the Taylor case, however, two other free speech cases made nation-wide headlines. These were the cases of James Keegstra and Ernst Zündel. The former was a high school teacher and the mayor of Eckville, Alberta. He was charged under the Criminal Code provisions against hate propaganda. Zündel had been born in Germany around the start of WWII and moved to Canada in the late 50’s where he became a graphic artist and printer by profession. He was charged under an old law against “spreading false news”.

What brought upon these charges? Both men promoted, Keegstra in his classroom, and Zündel in pamphlets produced by his Samisdat Publishers, the holocaust revisionist theory of WWII.

What is that?

Called “holocaust denial” by its opponents, it is the view that contrary to standard history texts, Nazi Germany had no systematic plans to exterminate the Jewish people, that the Jews who died in the Nazi camps in WWII numbered in the hundreds of thousands rather than millions, that they died primarily from typhus and other diseases brought about by concentration camp victims, and that the gas chambers found in Auschwitz and the other camps were used to delouse clothing rather than to kill people. (6)

While we can perhaps see why someone might be offended by these views it is not at all clear why they should be criminalized. They are a take, albeit perhaps a crazy one, on what happened in the past. There is nothing within those views that demands violence against any person or group.

Someone at this point might interject and say “If these laws are only being used against unrepentant Nazis like Taylor and guys who promote crazy theories like Keegstra and Zündel, who cares?”

The answer is: we all should.

Pastor Martin Niemöller, imprisoned by the Nazis in 1937, in a famous poem said:

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

A similar poem could be written about Canada, but it would have to begin

First they came for the nazis,
And I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a nazi.

This sort of thing began with John Ross Taylor. It did not end with him. By the end of first decade of the 21st century, even Maclean’s, a long-standing Canadian institution, a mainstream weekly publication, was regarded as a fair target for these insane laws. There is a direct line of precedent leading from the Taylor case to the Maclean’s case.

Why should we punish and seek to destroy personally men who hold strange beliefs about history? We don’t do this with people who question the official version of the JFK assassination. We don’t do this with people who question the official version of 9/11. We don’t do this with people who attribute every war of the last century to causes other than the officially stated ones. We don’t do this with people who think the moon landing was faked. Perhaps there are some people think we should, but we should not be listening to those people.

Neither should we be punishing people for calling the standard history of the holocaust into question.

James Keesgtra was found guilty and fined $5000. Upon appeal, his conviction was upheld, but the sentence was reduced.

Ernst Zündel was also convicted in 1985, had his conviction overturned, and was then charged and convicted again. The Supreme Court upon appeal, struck down the law under which he had been convicted. In the late 90’s he was charged again, over the content of his website. He ended up leaving Canada for the United States where his wife was a citizen. American immigration officials arrested him in 2003 and sent him back here where he was held in custody and absurdly charged with being a threat to the state. We deported him to Germany in 2005, at which point he was arrested by the Germans, charged with a hate crime there (for his words over here) and given a five year prison sentence.

We ought to be thoroughly ashamed of ourselves for all of this. Whatever his views are Zündel committed no violent acts against other people while he was in our country and was subjected a number of times to violence from progressive, anti-racist, terrorists who even went so far as to bomb his house.

After the 1980’s, the Canadian media stopped doing serious reporting on cases like this. The men who had fought against the oppression of “hate speech” laws from the very beginning, men like Doug Collins who was a columnist for the North Shore News in BC (7), Doug Christie who was the lawyer for Keegstra and Zündel and a number of other people who fell victim to these kind of laws (8), and Paul Fromm the founder and director of the Canadian Association for Free Expression (9), were villainized by the mainstream press and would have to pay a tremendous cost for standing up for those whom nobody else would stand up for.

Why is Harper Adding to the Problem?

The reason why the Pearson/Trudeau Liberals brought in these laws is fairly simple. Apart from demands from certain organizations that wanted hate propaganda laws for their own interests, and demands from prosecutors like Callaghan, Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau had a vision for Canada. They wanted to get rid of traditional English Canada, with its British loyalties, symbols, and royalism. They also didn’t think much of traditional French Canada with its ultra-conservative Roman Catholicism. They wished to replace both with a new Canada that would exist in a new, closer relationship with the United States of America. They wanted to create a new Canadian identity that would be able to survive in this new alignment. They believed that identity would have to transcend traditional English and French Canada. They wanted a unified Canada, that was not divided into English and French, but was both English and French at the same time.

They had a unique opportunity in that WWII had brought about the collapse of British power and the rise of American power, which weakened traditional English Canada considerably. Quebec was entering the “Quiet Revolution” that would weaken the hold of Catholicism on the province. Hence they stripped Canada of as many of its traditional symbols as possible replacing them with new ones, falsifying the history of the country in the process, and brought in new official doctrines of “bilingualism” and “multiculturalism”. They also started bringing in immigrants from non-traditional source countries by the thousands in order to break up the established communities and cultures of English and French Canada.

Now, most people in English and French Canada did not want this. They opposed the mass immigration. They did not want to give up their traditional identities. By accusing their critics of racism, and then passing laws which made racism potentially subject to severe punishment, the Liberals were able to intimidate many of their critics.

So why is Stephen Harper going along with it? Why is he seeking to pass legislation which will punish you, not just for what you say, but for what other people say as well?

I don’t have an answer to that question although I certainly wish I did. I do know that Harper and his Immigration Minister Jason Kenney have shown little interest in free speech over the years.

A couple of years ago they banned UK Labour Minister George Galloway from entering the country. The reason they gave was that he was supposedly connected to terrorists. That reason was absurd however. They based it upon a humanitarian trip he had made to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip. It is an insult to Canadians intelligence to try and tell us that a man is a threat to national security because he delivered medical supplies to suffering people in a region governed by Hamas.

Then earlier this year Kenney’s ministry barred Dr. Srdja Trifkovic from Canada when he had been invited to speak in BC. A Bosnian Muslim organization had complained, and again Kenney came up with an absurd-on-the-face trumped up excuse for banning him from the country.

Neither speaker posed a threat to the security of Canada. Both had people here who wanted to hear them speak. They were controversial speakers, however, albeit from opposite sides of the political spectrum. Both had groups that wished to prevent them from speaking and Harper and Kenney have shown themselves to be all too willing to accommodate such groups.

Now that Harper has a majority government will any of his MPs finally stand up and confront him on this, and demand that the government restore freedom of speech in Canada, rather than doing more to take it away?

Let us hope and pray that they will.

(1) It would sidetrack this essay too much to fully discuss these subjects here. I refer you to Dr. Srdja Trifkovic’s The Sword of the Prophet: Islam - History, Theology, Impact on the World (Regina Orthodox Press: Boston, MA, 2002) for an excellent discussion of these matters.

(2) Much important information about the behavior of the human rights tribunals in Canada is to be found in Ezra Levant’s Shakedown: How Our Government Is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights (McClelland & Stewart: Toronto, 2009). I don’t care much for the subtitle – it is “liberty” not “democracy” we should be worried about – but the book itself is vitally important.

(3) This expression means different things to different people. Some people use it to describe themselves. Others use it as a derogatory term for people they don’t like. Those who use it in the latter sense generally use it as a synonym for “neo-nazi”. Those who describe themselves by the label would probably be comfortable with a definition that goes something like this: “someone who takes a stand for the identity and interests of white people”. Within the category of self-described “white nationalists” there are those whose views could be crudely be summarized as “Hitler was right”. Such people see racial conflict and violence as a basic reality of life that should be embraced, with the intention of seeing one’s own race win, and would regard Jews the way Hitler regarded them, as a racial enemy within the ranks of one’s own race. Other self-described “white nationalists” do not hold to such views.

(4) The speech quoted is entitled “Towards a False Republic” and is chapter 4 of John G. Diefenbaker, Those Things We Treasure, (MacMillan of Canada; Toronto, 1972). The quotation can be found on page 55.

(5) Auberon Waugh, “Che Guevara in the West Midlands”, originally published in July 7, 1976 issue of The Spectator, reprinted in Brideshead Benighted (Little, Brown and Company: Boston and Toronto, 1986) pp. 153-156. The quote can be found on page 154.

(6) These are the main claims made by the holocaust revisionists. It would take up too much space to give the reasons they present for believing these things or the reasons why most historians reject their claims. A person should not have to agree with these people in order to defend their right to hold and express their views without harassment from others. Nor should a person be required to denounce and demonize these people before he can speak out against their persecution. There is sometimes a big difference, however, between what “should be” and what “is”. People who support the persecution of holocaust revisionists maintain that revisionist views can only ever arise out of anti-Semitism and sympathy for the Third Reich. This is demonstrably not the case. The first known holocaust revisionist was Paul Rassinier. He was a French Communist who was part of the anti-Nazi resistance, who was captured by the Nazis and sent to Buchenwald himself. It hardly makes sense to attribute his post-war writings to sympathy with the regime he resisted and which persecuted him. The man who translated his writings into English and arranged for their publication in North America was Harry Elmer Barnes, a historian who taught at Columbia University. Dr. Barnes was a Germanophile but he was hardly sympathetic to the views of Hitler and his party. One journalist, the late John Sack, himself a Jewish liberal, who attended a holocaust revisionist convention eleven years ago and wrote an essay about it for the February 2001 issue of Esquire, said that among the people he met there, including Zündel, he could not detect any anti-Semitism. The common factor that appears to draw people to holocaust revisionist views is not anti-Semitism but German ethnicity and/or Germanophilia. Common sense alone should tell people that attempts to minimize the crimes Hitler committed in the name of Germany in WWII are far more likely to arise out of love for and sympathy with the German people than out of hatred for the Jews. Persecuting the holocaust revisionists, however, is the way to go about it if for some perverse reason you want to generate anti-Semitism.

(7) Collins was born in England. He fought for the British in WWII, and was captured by the Nazis a number of times. He moved to Canada after the war and became a journalist. He held conservative political views and took much delight in poking fun at the left-wing secular orthodoxy often called “political correctness” that politicians, teachers, media commentators and many clergy sought, far too often with success, to impose upon Canadians after WWII. His favorite targets included liberal immigration (about which he wrote a book), official bilingualism and multiculturalism, the self-righteous international crusade against South Africa and Rhodesia, and hate speech laws. He himself fell victim to the latter when a complaint was filed against him and his employer the North Shore News with the BC Human Rights Commission.

(8) Doug Christie, who lives in British Columbia, is noted for two things. His leadership in the Western separatist movement and his championing, as a lawyer, freedom of thought and freedom of speech against “hate speech” laws. Nobody would ever accuse a defence attorney specializing in murder cases of harboring a sympathy for homicide. Christie, however, has been routinely abused by the Canadian media for his defence of Keegstra, Zündel, etc.

(9) Paul Fromm, who lives in Ontario, was a school teacher by profession. He has also been a conservative political activist for decades, beginning in his student days in the University of Toronto. He is the founder and director of a number of small-c conservative, single issue organizations, including C-FAR (Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform), the Canada First Immigration Reform Committee, and CAFÉ (Canadian Association for Free Expression). He is an outspoken advocate for the interests of white people as well as an outspoken believer in personal liberty and freedom of thought. He was fired from his job as an English teacher because of his political associations and political views expressed on his own time, off of campus. Eventually, he was stripped of his teacher’s certificate as well.