Free Unrestricted Speech is the Servant of Truth

 

Pelagius was a Celtic monk who lived in the late fourth and early fifth centuries.   Although he was born somewhere in the British Isles, he lived most of his life in Rome until the city was sacked by the Visigoths.  Following the Fall of Rome he fled to Carthage and spent the remainder of his life in the region of North Africa and Palestine.  This was hardly a quiet retirement for it was in this period that the preaching of his disciple Caelestius brought him increasingly under the scrutiny of St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Jerome and led to his teachings being condemned by multiple regional synods, his excommunication by Innocent I of Rome in 417 AD, and finally, the following year which was the year of his death, the most sweeping condemnation of his teachings as heresy at the Council of Carthage, the rulings of which would later be ratified by the third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus in 431 AD making the condemnation of Pelagius and Pelagianism the verdict of the whole Church in the days before her ancient fellowship was broken.

 

What did Pelagius teach that was so vehemently rejected by the early, undivided, Church?

 

Pelagianism was the idea that after the Fall man retained the ability to please God and attain salvation through his own efforts and by his own choices unassisted by the Grace of God.   Expressed as a negation of Christian truth it was a denial of Original Sin and of the absolute necessity of God’s Grace.

 

Over a millennium later the Protestant Reformers, strongly influenced by the teachings of St. Augustine, would read their own conflict with the Patriarch of Rome through the lens of the earlier Pelagian controversy although the Pelagian controversy had to do with the absolute necessity of God’s Grace whereas the controversy in the Reformation had to do with the sufficiency of God’s Grace.   This led to further distortions of historical understanding of the earlier controversy so that in certain theological circles, particularly those who identify so strongly as Calvinists that in their hierarchy of doctrine they place the canons of the Synod of Dort in the top tier, make those matters on which all the Reformers agreed – the supreme authority of Scripture and the sufficiency of the freely given Grace of God in Christ for salvation – secondary, and assign the truths of the ancient Creeds to a tertiary position, any positive statements concerning Free Will are looked upon as either Pelagian or a step down the slippery slope to Pelagianism.

 

Free Will, however, is not some aberration invented by Pelagius, but a truth held by all the ancient orthodox Churches alongside Original Sin.   Neither is confessed in the Creed, because neither is Creed appropriate, but both are part of the body of the supplementary truths that help us to understand Gospel truth, the truth confessed in the Creed.   Free Will and Original Sin are complementary truths.   Apart from Free Will, the only explanation for Adam’s having committed the sin that brought sin and death upon his descendants, is some version of supralapsarianism, the repugnant and blasphemous hyper-Calvinist doctrine of Theodore Beza that teaches that God decreed the Fall of Man to occur in order that He might have grounds to punish people He had already decided to damn.

 

Why did God give man Free Will if He knew man would abuse it and fall into sin?

 

If God had not given man Free Will, man would not be a moral creature made in God’s own image, but would rather be like a rock or a tree.  Man without Free Will would have the same capacity for Good that a rock and a tree have.   Rocks and trees perform their Good – the reason for which they exist – not because they choose to do so, but because they have no choice.   This is a lower order of Good than the Good which moral beings do because they choose to do it.   God created man as a higher being with a higher order of Good and so He gave man Free Will because man could not fulfil this higher Good without Free Will.   Without the possibility of sin, there was no possibility of man fulfilling the Good for which he was created.

 

Original Sin impaired man’s Free Will and in doing so placed a major roadblock in the way of man’s fulfilment of the Good for which he was created.   When Adam sinned he bound himself and all his posterity in slavery to sin.   The ancient sages, such as Plato, urged man to employ his will in subjecting his passions to the rule of his reason or intellect.   They understood that the worst slavery a man could endure is not that which is imposed from the outside by laws, customs, or traditions but that which is imposed from the inside when a man is ruled by his passions. This is the closest than man could come to understanding his plight without special revelation.   When Western man in the post-World War II era turned his back on Christian truth he abandoned even this insight and began embracing the idea taught by Sigmund Freud et al. that liberating the passions rather than ruling them was the path to human happiness.   Although the evidence of experience has long since demonstrated this to be folly Western man continues down this path to misery.   The salvation that God has given to man in Jesus Christ frees us from this bondage to the sin principle, which rules us through what Plato called our passions and St. Paul called our flesh.   This is why the work of Jesus Christ accomplishing our salvation is spoken of as redemption, the act of purchasing a slave’s freedom from bondage.

 

God created man in a state of Innocence which is an immature form of Goodness.   Man in his Innocence possessed Free Will and was sinless but lacked knowledge and maturity.   He was not intended to remain in this state but to grow into Perfection, Goodness in its mature form.   The Fall into Original Sin interrupted the process of maturation and would have been ultimately fatal to it were it not for the Grace of God and the salvation given to man in Jesus Christ, our Redeemer, which Grace of salvation frees us from the bondage to sin into which we fell that we might finally grow in Christ into Perfection, the maturity of freedom with knowledge, in which we voluntarily choose the Good.    If we could somehow remove man’s ability to choose evil this would in no way assist man in his journey, by God’s Grace, to Perfection.   This is the Christian truth illustrated by Anthony Burgess in his novel A Clockwork Orange (1962)    The experimental technique to which the narrator submitted in order to obtain a reduced sentence, succeeded in removing his ability to commit violent crime, but failed to turn him into a good person.  In the novel, Alex does eventually become a better person but not as a result of the Ludovico Technique.  (1)

 

I recently remarked that the orthodox arguments for the necessity of Free Will for man to choose the Good can also be applied to Truth to make a more compelling case for free speech than the one rooted in classical liberalism that is usually so employed.   I wish to expand upon that idea here.   Think again of Burgess’s novel.   The Ludovico Technique rendered Alex incapable of committing violent crime – or even of acting in legitimate self defence – by causing him to experience nauseating sickness and pain at even the thought of doing the things that had landed him in prison, but it did not change his inner nature, it merely prevented him from acting on it.  Now imagine a story in which a similar form of extreme aversion therapy to the Ludovico Technique is developed, not for a violent, rapist, thug but for a compulsive liar, (2) which similarly prevents him from speaking what he knows not to be true.   This would not remove his internal compulsion to lie and make him naturally truthful, it would merely prevent him from acting on the compulsion.

 

If it is important, both to us as individuals and to the larger society to which we belong, that we develop good character by cultivating good habits, then it is important that we cultivate the habit of speaking the Truth to the best of our understanding.   By adapting the lesson of Burgess’ novel as we did in the last paragraph, we saw that artificially removing the ability to do other than speak what we understand to be the Truth is not the way to achieve the cultivation of this habit.   In the actual contemporary society in which we live, we are increasingly having to contend with constraints on our freedom of speech, not through experimental aversion therapy, but through laws and regulations telling us what we can and cannot say.  

 

These come in two forms.   The first and most basic are rules prohibiting speech – “you can’t say that”.   The second are rules compelling speech – “you have to say this”.   This distinction has in recent years been emphasized by Dr. Jordan Peterson after he ran afoul of a particularly egregious but sadly now almost ubiquitous example of compelled speech – the requirement to use a person’s expressed preference in pronouns rather those that align with the person’s biological sex.   Here, the speech that is compelled is speech that falls far short of Truth.   Indeed, the people who want this sort of compelled speech are generally the same people who speak of Truth with possessive pronouns as if each of us had his own Truth which is different from the Truth of others.

 

The rules that prohibit certain types of speech are no more respectful towards Truth.   Here in the Dominion of Canada, the rules of this type that have plagued us the most in my lifetime are speech prohibitions enacted in the name of fighting “hate”.   The very first in a long list of sins against Truth committed by those seeking to eradicate “hate speech” is their categorizing the speech they seek to outlaw as hateful.   Hate refers to an intense emotional dislike that manifests itself in the desire to utterly destroy the object of hatred.   This is a more appropriate description of the attitude of the people who call for, enact, and support “hate speech” laws towards their victims more than it does the attitude of said victims towards those they supposedly hate.   The first calls for laws of this nature came from representatives of an ethnic group that has faced severe persecution many times throughout history and which, wishing to nip any future such persecution in the bud, asked for legislation prohibiting what they saw as the first step in the development of persecution, people depicting them very negatively in word and print.   The government capitulated to this demand twice, first by adding such a prohibition to the Criminal Code, second by including a provision in the Canadian Human Rights Act that made the spread of information “likely to” expose someone to “hatred or contempt” into grounds for an anti-discrimination lawsuit.   The CHRA provision was eventually removed from law by Act of Parliament but the present government is seeking to bring it back in a worse form, one that would allow for legal action to be taken against people based on the suspicion that they will say something “hateful” in the future rather than their having already said some such thing.   The campaign against “hate speech” has from the very beginning resembled the actions taken against “precrime” in Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report (1956) in that both are attempts to stop something from happening before it happens, but the new proposed legislation would take the resemblance to the nth degree.   Early in the history of the enforcement of these types of laws the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the lack of a truth exception did not render the limitations they imposed on freedom of speech unconstitutional in Canada (Human Rights Commission) v. Taylor (1990).   More recently this notion of truth not being a defense was reiterated by Devyn Cousineau of the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal in a discrimination case against Christian evangelist and activist Bill Whatcott.   Whatcott had been charged with discrimination for distributing a flyer challenging a politician who had been born a biological male but who claims to be female.   Cousineau made the statement in ruling against the relevance of evidence the defense intended to present as to the complainant's biological maleness.   Clearly, if the upholding of laws restricting freedom of speech on the grounds of “hate” require rulings to the effect that truth is no defense, then these laws are no servants of Truth.

 

That, as we have just seen, those seeking to restrict speech are serving something other than Truth, something they are willing to sacrifice Truth for, is a good indicator that it is free speech that is the servant of Truth.   Further analysis confirms this.  If speech is restricted by prohibitions – “you can’t say that” – then unless those who make the prohibitions are both incorruptible and infallible, it is likely that much that is prohibited will be Truth.   If speech is compelled – “you must say this” – then again, unless those compelling us to speak are both incorruptible and infallible, it is likely that what we will be compelled to say will not be the Truth.   The good habit of truth-telling, which we ought to seek to cultivate in ourselves, in which cultivation the laws and institutions of society ought to support us, is a habit of caring about the Truth, searching for the Truth, and speaking the Truth.   Restrictions on speech, rather than helping us cultivate this habit, teach us to take the alternate, lazier, route of letting other people rather than the Truth determine what we must and must not say. 

 

Even restrictions on speech aimed at preventing the spread of untruths ultimately work against the speaking of Truth.   As long as there are such restrictions, especially if the penalties for breaking them are severe, there will be something other than Truth to which people will look to determine whether or not they should say something, and the result will be that less Truth will be spoken out of fear of running afoul of the restrictions.

 

The classic liberal case for free speech was made by utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill in his On Liberty (1856).   It is the topic of his second chapter “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion” which begins by arguing that this freedom is necessary not only when governments are tyrannical and corrupt, but under the best of governments as well, even or especially, when governments have public opinion behind them.  “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion”, Mill wrote “and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”   In support of the position taken in these justifiably famous words,  Mill’s first argument was that mankind is better off for having all opinions, false or true, expressed, because the expression of the false, makes the true stand out the more.   He wrote:

 

the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

 

In what he stated here, Mill was quite right.   Unfortunately, what he meant by truth, small t, is not the same thing as Truth, big T.   Mill wrote and thought within what might be called an anti-tradition that started within Western thought almost a millennium ago with nominalism and which has produced a downward spiral of decay within Western thought.   Mill came at a late stage in this anti-tradition, although not so far down the spiral as to think that truth is entirely subjective and different for each person as so many do today.    It had been set in that direction, however, by nominalism’s rejection of universals, whether conceived of as Plato’s otherworldly Forms existing in themselves or Aristotle’s embodied Ideas existing in their corresponding particulars, except as human constructions that we impose on reality by our words so as to facilitate in the organization of our thoughts.  By so departing from the foundation of the tradition of Western thought, nominalism introduced an anti-tradition that over time came more and more to resemble an embrace of Protagoras of Abdera’s maxim “man is the measure of all things”.   In the wisdom of the ancient sages, Truth, like Beauty and Goodness, were the supreme universals.   Philosophically, they were the Transcendentals, the properties of Being or existence.   In Christian theology, they existed in God Himself not as attributes or properties, but as His fundamental nature.   Human happiness, however the philosophical and theological answers to the question of how it is attained differed (the Grace of God is the theological answer), consisted in life ordered in accordance with Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.     Mill’s small t truth is worlds removed from this and this weakens what is otherwise a good argument against restrictions on the free expression of thought.   If truth is not Truth, an absolute ultimate value in itself which we must seek and submit to upon peril of loss of happiness, but something which may or may not be available to us because we can never be certain that that what we think is truth is actually truth, then it is a far less compelling argument for allowing all thought to be freely expressed in words that it serves truth better than restrictions would.    It opens the door to the idea that there is something that might be more important to us than truth, for which truth and the freedom that serves it might be sacrificed.    Indeed, Mill provided the enemies of Truth and freedom with that very something else, earlier in the first, introductory, chapter of his book in which he articulated his famous “harm principle”.   He wrote:   

 

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

 

On the surface, this seems like a principle that could do nothing but safeguard people against the abuse of government power.    In our day, however, we can see how it is actually a loophole allowing the government to justify any and all abuse of power.   Our government, for example, is currently using it to justify its bid to bring the flow of information entirely under its own control.   The Liberal Party of Canada, which is the party currently in office, has made combatting what it calls “Online Harms” part of its official platform.   The Liberals’ not-so-thinly-veiled intention is enacting this goal is to bring in sweeping internet regulation that will give them total control over what Canadians can say or write or see or hear on the internet.   Neither freedom nor Truth is a high priority for the Liberals, nor have they been for a long time, if they ever were.   The late Sir Peregrine Worsthorne years ago wrote that by defeating its old foes, and turning its attention to declaring war “on human, and even eventually animal, pain and suffering” and thus introducing the necessity for vast expansion of government power, liberalism “from being a doctrine designed to take government off the backs of the people” had rapidly become “a doctrine designed to put it back again”, and, he might have added,  in a more burdensome manner than ever before.

 

Mill was right that truth is better served by allowing all thoughts to be freely expressed, even false ones.   Apart from the acknowledgement of Truth as Truth, the absolute unchanging universal value, however, the argument is weak.  Within the context of liberalism, it is doomed to give way to that ideology’s insatiable lust to control everyone and everything, in the insane belief that it is protecting us from ourselves, and re-making the world better than God originally made it.   When we acknowledge Truth as Truth, we recognize that it is what it is and that it is unchangeable and so no lie can harm it.   Lies harm us, not the Truth, by getting in our way in our pursuit of Truth, but attempts to restrict and regulate the free verbal expression of thought, even when done in the name of combatting falsehoods, do far more harm of this type than lies themselves could ever do.   Just as men need free will to choose the Good, we need the freedom to speak our thoughts, right or wrong, in order to pursue and find and speak the Truth.

 

 (1)   The chapter containing this ending was omitted from the American edition of the novel and from Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation based on the American edition.

(2)   The idea of preventing a liar from lying has been explored in fiction.    The science fiction device of truth serum is one common way of doing this.  Note that the real life interrogative drugs upon which this device is based, such as scopolamine and sodium thiopental, don’t actually compel someone to tell the truth, they just make him more likely to answer questions put to him.  In Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) the title puppet, a compulsive liar, is not prevented from lying, but prevented from getting away with it, by the device of his nose growing whenever he tells a lie.  Closer is the 1997 film Liar, Liar, starring Jim Carrey as a lawyer whose son is magically granted his birthday wish that his father be unable to tell a lie for 24 hours.   William Moulton Marston, the inventor of the polygraph or lie detector, under the penname of Charles Marston created the comic book superheroine Wonder Woman and gave the character a magic lasso that compelled anyone trapped in it to speak the truth.    None of these stories was written with the idea of the necessity of freedom of speech for genuine truth telling in mind.

Captain Airhead’s Astounding Arrogance

 

On Sunday the fifteenth of August, it had not yet been a month since Mary Simon had been sworn into the office of Governor General of Canada, when a pestilential nuisance showed up on her doorstep at Rideau Hall to make a request.   One of the more tiresome duties of Her Majesty’s vice-regal representative is that of playing host to visits from the Prime Minister.   This duty must truly become an irksome burden when the Prime Minister is someone as odious as the current one, Captain Airhead.   Of course, since Captain Airhead is the worst excuse for a human being by far to serve as Prime Minister in the history of Canada, only Simon and her immediate predecessors have had to bear this burden.

 

What her Prime Ministerial supplicant asked for, and obtained, was a dissolution of the Parliament formed in the 2019 Dominion election.   Which means that on the twentieth of September, the next Dominion election will be held.   It is an election that nobody but Captain Airhead himself wants.   All of the other parties have opposed the move.   Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives who were Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in the last Parliament and, as the only other party to have ever formed a government or with much of a chance of forming one if the Grits are defeated this time around, would logically be the ones to want an election have condemned the move as an irresponsible, egotistical, waste of money, which it is.  Jimmy Dhaliwal’s socialists and the Lower Canadian separatists who have been taking turns propping up the Grit minority government against the Conservative Opposition have no desire to see their hold on the balance of power potentially eviscerated.   As for the Greens, they are too busy imploding as a party due to self-destructive infighting to want to run a campaign right now.   The Canadian public, polled on the subject, has indicated strong opposition to an election being held at this time.

 

That the public would not want an election right now is hardly surprising.   Canadians have historically not been pleased with early elections that follow too closely after the previous one, and since, whatever you and I might think about the bat flu pandemic having been blown out of proportion by the fear pornographers in the mainstream media, the majority of our countrymen seem to take this stercus tauri at face value, and thus would be even less likely to want a very early election this year than on previous occasions.    This makes Captain Airhead’s move a bit of a puzzler.   Ordinarily, Prime Ministers in his position, that is to say, leading a minority government with only a plurality of seats in the House of Commons, try not to risk being punished by an angry electorate by requesting a new election themselves.   Instead, they try to provoke the other parties into voting them down in a no-confidence vote, so that the party that asks for the vote is blamed and punished by the electorate for the dissolution of the previous Parliament.   Captain Airhead clearly thinks that he can take responsibility for the dissolution upon himself and still be awarded a majority by a public that obviously does not want an election.

 

Perhaps Captain Airhead, or Justin Trudeau as some occasionally call him, thinks that he can count on the sycophantic behaviour of the news media which he has enjoyed to an extent that exceeds that of any previous Prime Minister, including his own father at the height of Trudeaumania, to render him exempt from the normal rules.    It is, nevertheless, an extremely hubristic attitude on his part, especially when we consider all the other assumptions implicit within it.

 

In the Dominion election of 2015 the Grits won a solid majority.     This was due to a combination of people being tired with the previous government and the media’s love affair with the Liberal leader whose surface qualities, hiding a total lack of substance, they found appealing.    When a new government receives a majority in its first election, of course, this is not a reward that is has earned and it is expected to earn it after the fact.   When that government is reduced to a plurality in its next election, as Captain Airhead’s Grits were in 2019, this is the judgement of the public that they have failed to subsequently earn their majority.   In this particular example, it was also a rebuke of the Prime Minister’s scandalous behaviour.

 

Towards the end of Captain Airhead’s first term his government’s popularity tanked due to the SNC-Lavalin Affair, a scandal that concerned inappropriate pressure having been placed on the Justice Minister to interfere in the ongoing prosecution of a major corporate backer of the Liberal Party for political reasons.    This was a corruption scandal that pertained to the government’s behaviour in office.   Then, in the actual election campaign, Captain Airhead was hit with a personal scandal as a couple of photographs and a video surfaced, all showing him in blackface.   This is the sort of scandal that would have ended the career of pretty much any other politician in this day and age.   While personally, I think that those who consider skin colour-altering makeup to be inherently “racist” are twits and dingbats who ought to be ignored by sensible people rather than given the influence to police the thoughts and actions of others, Captain Airhead has, since the beginning of his political career, marketed himself as “woke”, that is to say, the sort of numbskull who takes every dictate from the far left’s self-appointed guardians of public mental hygiene vis-à-vis racism very seriously indeed and caters to their every irrational whim.   In other words, exactly the sort of person who ought not to be caught dead in blackface and whose career ought to be especially vulnerable to this sort of scandal.   He had spent an inordinate amount of time in his first term lecturing other Canadians about how we all need to be more “enlightened” and less “racist” like the image he was trying to present of himself.

 

Having survived these scandals has Captain Airhead learned from them and altered his behaviour according?

The evidence would suggest that he has not.

 

Less than a year into his second term, in the early months of the bat flu pandemic, Captain Airhead announced the formation of the Canadian Student Service Grant program that would give students $1000 for every 100 hours of volunteer work they did that summer up to a $5000 maximum.   The WE Charity was picked to administer this program.   This immediately erupted into a corruption scandal that rivalled SNC-Lavalin for the biggest of Captain Airhead’s career.   The WE Charity had been selected without giving other charities the opportunity to bid on the contract.  This charity had a long association with Captain Airhead’s family – his wife had volunteered for the organization which had paid for her travel and other expenses and his mother and brother had both been paid large sums to speak at its events.   Similarly, his then-Finance Minister Bill Morneau had one daughter who worked for the charity, another who spoke at their events, and had himself allowed the charity to pay $41 000 worth of travel expenses for him and his family.   The scandal led to Morneau’s resignation both as Finance Minister and from his seat in the House of Commons.      Captain Airhead, however, remained in office, taking advantage of every opportunity the pandemic afforded him to thwart a proper investigation by Parliament.   A few months ago, the Ethics Commissioner that he had himself had appointed, declared that “Although the connection between Mr. Trudeau’s relatives and WE created the appearance of a conflict of interest, the appearance of conflict is insufficient to cause a contravention to the Act’s substantive views” and pinned all the blame on Morneau.

 

It would seem that the only lesson Captain Airhead took away from the SNC-Lavalin experience is to avoid being held accountable by Parliament.

 

As for the blackface scandal, the very least we have the right to expect from someone who had gone through this sort of humiliation without, astonishingly, it killing his political career would be that he would give lecturing the rest of us about racism a rest.    Anyone foolish enough to actually expect this of Captain Airhead, however, would be very disappointed.   If anything, he has actually gotten much worse in this regards.    Just before the Parliament that has just been dissolved recessed for the summer his Justice Minister introduced Bill C-36, which would amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code so that left-wing control freaks would no longer have to meet the criminal justice system’s standard of evidence in order to file complaints against people for posting things they, that is the leftists, consider to be racist on the internet and obtain rulings silencing these people and/or imposing crippling fines upon them.   Indeed, unlike the defunct Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act which his father had introduced in 1977 and which was bad enough, Bill C-36, like something out of Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report”, would allow these leftist censors to peremptorily punish people with peace bonds that effectively strip them of all human dignity for the racist things the leftists are afraid these people might say in the future.     This takes his anti-racist lecturing to the nth degree.   It follows immediately after two summers straight in which far left radical movements that attempt to conceal their true agenda of hatred of the institutions, laws, traditions, and way of life of Western Civilization and racial hatred of people of European descent and light skin colour beneath the innocuous if banal truisms by which they call their movements have made use of deceptively selective media reporting  to stir up race riots and Year Zero Cultural Maoist assaults on historical figures, all of which Captain Airhead has capitalized on by jumping aboard the bandwagon and maximizing his anti-racist posturing.  

 

This is rather much to take coming from the man featured in the blackface scandal of 2019.   It is enough to induce vomiting in even the strongest stomached of sane people, although the same can be said about virtually everything about Captain Airhead from the beginning of his political career. 

 

Captain Airhead apparently thinks that after two years of demonstrating with his behaviour that he has learned absolutely nothing from the scandals that reduced his first majority government to a minority, that he can request an early election and win another majority.   The arrogance of this is truly astounding.

 

It is possible that he thinks that his pandemic record will accomplish his victory.   If so, this merely makes his hubris all the greater.   His handling of the bat flu has been nothing short of abominable.    

 

In the early months of 2020, before the World Health Organization officially declared a pandemic and while there was still a possibility, however slight, of keeping the bat flu virus contained in Wuhan, Captain Airhead and his subordinates branded anybody who suggested that it might be prudent to impose a temporary ban on travel to and from Red China as a racist.   Then in March, the moment the pandemic had been declared he switched gears and began encouraging the provincial governments to impose harsh lockdowns on Canadians based upon the experimental model that Communist China had been using to contain the virus.

 

From the perspective of political strategy there was an almost admirable ingenuity in this.   He could have evoked the Emergencies Act to impose a Dominion-wide lockdown himself.   Instead, he let the provincial governments, mostly led by those whose politics is purportedly the opposite of his, impose the lockdowns and thus incur the resentment of those whose lives were made a living hell by these restrictions which far exceeded anything any free country had ever known before, even in times of war.   Oh, he had a lot of say in it.   The provincial premiers basically gave their provincial chief public health officers free rein, and these in turn acted upon information provided from the Dominion chief public health officer who was appointed to the position by Captain Airhead who threatened to withhold support from the provinces if they veered too much from the lockdown program.   However, apart from the amusing incident when he attempted to play “Mr. Tough Guy” to all the young people who were still having parties and other large social gatherings but merely came across as doing a bad impression of Barbra Streisand and Donna Summer, he allowed the premiers to play the bully – our premier in Manitoba, Brian Pallister excelled in this  - while he put on his Santa Claus suit and started handing out goodies, essentially bribing people to follow the public health orders and stay home.    If he thinks that by doing so he has bought his way back to a majority government then he is assuming that Canadians are too stupid to realize the connection between his spending all of this money at a time when the production of goods and services has been severely limited and the recent spike in the price of food in the grocery stores.  (1)  Sadly, he might be right about that, although there is no reason to believe that he understands the connection himself.

 

At the very beginning of the first lockdown of the pandemic he asked for Parliament to vote him the power to tax and spend without limits or Parliamentary oversight for two years.   Mercifully, this was met with strong opposition from the Conservatives then led by Andrew Scheer and he was denied getting all that he had asked for, although he has since behaved as if he had been given it all.    This request was an outrageous assault on Parliament and the very principles that have been foundational to that venerable institution since the Magna Carta.   There is an interesting if ominous symbolism in the way he introduced the bill within days of the anniversary of the Enabling Act that had been passed by the Reichstag, the legislative assembly of Weimar Germany, which gave emergency powers to the new German chancellor and his cabinet in 1933 and brought about the most hated tyrannical dictatorship in history.

 

This was not the first time nor would it be the last when Captain Airhead demonstrated his utter contempt for Parliament.   Indeed, his entire second term as Prime Minister could be described as one big digitus impudicus in the face of Parliament.   Throughout the pandemic he treated his doorstep with the television cameras on it as if it rather than Parliament were the seat of government in Canada.   He has treated Parliament as if it had no right or authority to hold him and his cabinet accountable.    When the far left radicals began their assault on Canada and her history he made a point of sympathizing with them and reminding them of the colonial origins of Parliament as if to say that government would be so much better if he could just do whatever he wanted without having to answer to that “colonial” institution of Parliament.   When he got frustrated earlier this year with Erin O’Toole for the latter’s doing his job as Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and preventing the House from just rubber-stamping his bills as he would have preferred he threw a tantrum, complained of “obstructionism and toxicity” and called Parliament “dysfunctional”.    If there was any dysfunction in Parliament it was due to his own efforts to prevent that body from giving proper deliberation to his legislation proposals and to ram the latter through and not the Opposition’s doing its job.   Around the same time, when the House of Commons ordered the government and the Public Health Agency of Canada to hand over all documents pertaining to the dismissal of two scientists from the high security microbiology lab here in Winnipeg a couple of years previously, he had the amazing gall to launch a Federal Court case against House Speaker Anthony Rota.   On Tuesday of this week the government dropped this lawsuit, but this was because the dissolution of Parliament nullified the order with regards to the documents, and not because the Prime Minister has discovered a newfound respect for Parliament and its rights.

 

In this disrespect for Parliament Captain Airhead demonstrates yet another kind of arrogance, one which has been common to Liberal leaders since at least William Lyon Mackenzie King, but which he has elevated to a whole new level.   In Canada our system of government is that of Queen-in-Parliament.    In this system, which has been tried and proven over long eons of time, political sovereignty is vested in the office of the reigning monarch.    This office is filled, not by popular election nor by appointment by the rich and powerful, but by hereditary succession.   Therefore, since the monarch owes her office neither to a political faction nor to special interest groups, she can reign as a non-political figure in the way no elected head of state ever could.   The powers of government, principally those to legislate, tax, and spend, are exercised in the name of the Queen and those who exercise them are accountable to the representatives elected by the people who pay the taxes and are expected to obey the laws, which representatives meet in the lower House of Parliament.   Therefore in this system, when it is functioning properly, the Prime Minister and Cabinet are dually accountable both to the reigning monarch above, and to Parliament below.    The world has never known a better system of government than this one when it is allowed to function without subversion.   Liberal leaders from Mackenzie King down and especially Captain Airhead have shown a decided preference for subverting this system.   They seldom object to retaining its outward form, unlike the idiot who currently leads the socialist party, but they do not want to govern under its restraints and so seek to subvert them whenever they can.   Their preference is that in practice the Prime Minister and Cabinet rule through the bureaucracy that they control and are only ever held accountable at election time, at least when their party is in government.

 

If most Canadians had a proper appreciation for our traditional system of government most of the Liberal Prime Ministers of the last hundred years would have been unelectable.   This would be all the more true of Captain Airhead, who exceeds all of the rest of them combined in his autocratic arrogance, making even his own father look humble in comparison.

 

(1)   Wealth is generated by people producing goods and services that they and others want and consists of those goods and services.  Money is the medium that allows these goods and services to be exchanged more conveniently than by direct barter and which allows accumulated wealth to be stored for later use.   The value of money goes up when the amount of money remains the same but the production of goods and services increases, and goes down when more money is put into circulation while the production of goods and services remains the same.    When the amount of money increases relative to that of goods and services this is called inflation which is most noticeable when it manifests itself in the rise of the price of consumer goods.   Whenever the government starts handing out large amounts of money, whether it just runs more currency off on the printing press or borrows from some financial institution – in the age of electronic currency the distinction between these ways of doing it has been blurred to the point where it may no longer be meaningful – the amount of money relative to goods and services increases.   When, at the same time, the government puts a stop to the production of “non-essential” goods and services, that is to say, the goods and services that in terms of real wealth actually pay for the production of “essential” goods and services, this is a recipe for massive and devastating inflation.