Justin Trudeau Expands His Vocabulary

So it turns out the t word is part of Justin Trudeau’s vocabulary after all.

You would never have known it from his verbal responses to the countless acts of jihad that have been waged against Western countries since that ill-fated day when he became the Prime Minister of our country. We have heard him condemn the violence of these acts and use such banal adjectives as “senseless” to describe it, but we were stuck listening to the crickets chirp and counting the tumbleweeds rolling by as we sat around waiting for him to use the obvious word – “terrorism.” That he seemed to be allergic to this term was something that had been observed and commented on even before he won the right to lead Her Majesty’s Canadian government by winning the 2015 general election. In the fall of the year prior, two young Canadians who had become alienated from their own country, traditions and people and converted to Islam and pledged their loyalty to the Islamic State, launched their own personal jihads in our Dominion’s capital of Ottawa and in the Quebec city of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu. Trudeau eventually conceded that these were acts of terrorism when they were labelled as such by the RCMP investigators but why was a statement of what was obvious treated as a concession?

Well that certainly changed this weekend when someone shot up a mosque in Quebec City. As the Prime Minister’s butt-kissing sycophants and toadies in the press set about scrubbing the early reports of the incident to eliminate details out of sync with the official narrative that somebody has obviously ordered them to push, Trudeau set a record in the speed with which he denounced the shooting as an act of terrorism, almost as if he had a speech prepared and ready for the occasion.

What is objectionable in this is not that the Prime Minister was quick to denounce the mosque shooting as an act of terrorism. Shooting up a place of worship and murdering the worshippers obviously falls into this category. The problem is all those other occasions when he dithered and dawdled and danced around the obvious. Trudeau was quick to call a spade a spade where terrorism is concerned when Muslims were the victims, but avoided doing so like the plague when Muslims were the perpetrators. Is the one kind of terrorism worse than the other in Trudeau’s eyes?

The official narrative being pushed by the propaganda arm of the Liberal Party, aka the Canadian media is that the shooting was the work of a lone gunman, a French Canadian named Alexandre Bissonnette. Details that came out in the first reports while the story was fresh but which do not support the official narrative have been either scrubbed or, when this was not possible, reinterpreted. Initially, eye-witnesses within the mosque testified to multiple shooters who shouted “Allahu Akbar.” This detail, which contradicts the Prime Minister’s narrative, was quickly scrubbed. That a second suspect, a Moroccan Muslim named Mohamed Belkhadir had been taken into custody by the police, was reinterpreted to fit the narrative. He is now identified as a “witness”, despite having been identified as a “suspect” in the initial police press conference. In the absence of any official confession or statement of motive on the part of Bissonnette the media has been cherry picking details from his Facebook page to support its narrative of his being motivated by what they call “far right”, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, nativism. Their evidence for this is that he “liked” Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen on Facebook. He also “liked” Jack Layton and the NDP. It would no doubt come as a great surprise to the late Jack Layton to learn that he and the socialist party he led have undergone a dramatic shift to the far right of the political spectrum six years after his death.

I suspect it will be decades, if ever, before we learn the full truth of what happened that night. The Prime Minister’s office has been leaning heavily on the media, Canadian and otherwise, to make sure that only their approved version of the incident gets reported. You can be sure that when the PMO gets this involved in the reporting of a news story it is not to ensure that the truth comes out. Trudeau is determined to exploit the deaths of these Quebec Muslims for the gratification of his own ego and the furtherance of his personal political agenda. If that strikes you as being a little harsh then you are clearly unfamiliar with the ice-cold, calculating, love and worship of power in the dead, soulless, vacuum that lies behind the pretty boy exterior of Justin Trudeau and the grating, superficial, personality that he seemingly plagiarized from Barney the purple dinosaur. Indeed, the incident could hardly have served his purposes better if he had planned and arranged it himself.

It came after several weeks of humiliation for the federal premier in which he toured Canada in a failed attempt to restore the lustre of his image after it had taken several devastating hits over his Clintonesque cash-for-access behaviour such as the scandal over the family vacation he had accepted on an island owned by the Aga Khan. In city after city, in townhall style meetings, he was subjected to difficult questions about matters such as why he was trying to make things even harder for people already struggling to make ends meet by jacking up the cost of living with a carbon tax. It did not help that he was caught speaking out of both sides of his mouth on the question of the oil sands. To an audience in Peterborough, Ontario, presumably one sympathetic to such tree hugging drivel, he said that the oil sands needed to be phased out. This left him trying to explain to an audience in Calgary that he did not really mean to drive even more Albertans out of work and inflict further damage on their province’s already struggling economy. He was in need of a sleight-of-hand to distract the public from their growing awareness of just how pathetic a disgrace to the office of Her Majesty’s first minister he is.

This shooting incident not only provided him with that distraction it came at just the appropriate time to allow him to grandstand and show off his supposed moral superiority over American President Donald Trump. Two days before the shooting Trump had enraged liberals around the world by daring to put the security and wellbeing of his country ahead of political correctness by issuing a four month halt to the admission of refugees and a three month temporary ban on entrance to the United States from seven countries that are significant sources of jihadi terrorism. The day after this and the day before the shooting Trudeau sent out a tweet that, while worded as a statement of non-discriminatory policy in the admission of refugees, was clearly intended to mean that those who were excluded from the United States by the Trump ban would be welcome in Canada. To deliberately throw out the welcome mat to those excluded from another country on the basis of the high level of security risk they present is to say that you place diversity, tolerance, and non-discrimination ahead of the security and wellbeing of your country and its citizens. To Trudeau and his international admirers this may be an indication of virtue but to any sensible person it is an indication of gross stupidity and utter villainy.

Then along comes the shooting, and an airbrushed media narrative which seems to be designed to justify forcing ordinary Canadians yet again to pay the price for Trudeau’s peacocking his “tolerance”, “understanding” and “compassion” to his global audience. The Liberal Party has a history of infringing upon the traditional rights of Canadians to think and speak freely, whenever they want to shove acceptance of their values down our throats and to chastise Canadians for this-or-that thought crime. The father of the present Prime Minister was notoriously bad for this and a Liberal MP has already placed a bill that would condemn Islamophobia before the House. The bill was introduced long before the shooting. You would almost think they knew in advance it was coming.

Independence Movements

On Thursday, September 18th, Scotland voted in a historical referendum on the question of whether or not they wanted independence from the United Kingdom. The devolution of power to the Scottish assembly under Labour governments in the last four decades and the growth of the Scottish independence movement under the leadership of a small but organized group of zealots had made the referendum inevitable. The referendum had a very high voter turnout – 84.59% and in the end the no side won with 55.3% of the votes.

This outcome is pleasing to those, such as myself, who did not wish to see the United Kingdom break up. It was also not particularly surprising. Here in Canada, the Quebec separatist movement failed twice to win their independence in referendums. Quebec is far more culturally distinct from English Canada than Scotland is from the rest of the United Kingdom. Quebec is a French speaking province – the rest of the country speaks English, Quebec is traditionally Roman Catholic, English Canada is traditionally Protestant, and so on. Yet despite this, the secession movement lost twice, albeit by a much narrower margin the second time around than the Scottish independence movement, and is now basically dead. When the Parti Quebecois made it an issue in the last provincial election earlier this year their overwhelming defeat by the Liberals sent the message loud and clear that no further such referendums were welcome.

The unity of England and Scotland goes back much further than that of English and French Canada. The English and the Scots have had the same sovereign since 1603, the year that the King James VI of Scotland inherited the English throne from the last English monarch, Queen Elizabeth I, becoming King James I of England. Note that the Scottish king inherited the English throne. This can by no means be construed as England conquering Scotland. In 1707, during the reign of Queen Anne, the parliaments of the two kingdoms that had shared a monarch for a century voted to unite and form a single country. England and Scotland were both better off for it and the union thus formed proved greater than the sum of its parts. The idea that after three centuries as a united whole one part of this whole should be able to unilaterally vote on whether to break or maintain the union is perverse.

There are some who might charge me with holding to double standard on the matter of secession. When the subject of the war the American states fought between themselves from 1861 to 1865 comes up I ordinarily put forward as my opinion that the South was in the right. In that conflict it was the Southern states that had seceded from the American union to form the Confederate States of America. Recently, when the anti-European Union nationalist parties scored major gains all across Europe in the European Parliamentary election, while progressives were wringing their hands and gnashing their teeth in frustration I was rejoicing.

My answer to the charge would be to say that it is unreasonable to insist that if someone supports one independence movement he must therefore support all independence movements or that if he opposes one he must therefore oppose all. “A foolish consistency”, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” To insist that secession must be either supported or opposed across the board is surely to insist upon a foolish consistency.

If independence movements arise in different countries their reasons for wanting to secede are unlikely to be identical and even less likely to be equally valid. Surely the question of whether we favour or oppose these movements should be more influenced by our evaluation of the reasoning behind these movements than some abstract ideal that supposedly settles the question of independence at a general level.

The leaders of the independence movement among the American colonies in the eighteenth century expressed their intention of seceding from the British Crown in terms of accusations of tyranny and oppression levelled against King George III and lofty sounding ideals about natural rights and democracy drawn from liberal philosophy. The accusations of tyranny were completely bogus and would have been so even if they had been levelled against the elected Parliament that had deliberated and decided upon all the acts to which the American colonists objected. The liberal philosophy behind the lofty ideals was unsound. At any rate, the accusations and ideals both concealed the real reasons for the drive for American independence, not least among which was the fact that the King’s guarantee of the French language and Roman Catholic religion in Canada interfered with their goal of creating a united, English speaking, Protestant, North America. My opinion, of the American independence movement of three centuries ago, is therefore rather low.

When the leaders of the Southern states declared their secession from the American republic a little less than a century later they justified their decision on the grounds of “states’ rights” a phrase which expressed both their objection to federal interference in what they regarded as the domestic affairs of the states and their theory of the American constitution, i.e., that it was a federal union of sovereign states which retained the right to secede at any time. This was one of two constitutional theories that had been competing with each other since the founding of the American republic. Ultimately, the argument was settled in favour of the other side by a bloody internecine war but a strong case can be made that by the terms of the American charter, the South was in fact in the right and that constitutionally, the members states of the federal republic of the United States had the right to secede. (1)

Of course, although the matter was decided by the war, at least from a historical perspective, the states did not divide and fight each other over a disagreement in constitutional theory. Nor did they divide and fight each other over slavery, despite what the politically approved history of the day will tell you, or over tariffs as pro-Confederate libertarians will tell you. Slavery and tariffs were both peripheral issues.

The antebellum Southern states comprised a society with an agrarian economy and an Old World culture with traditional codes of honour and chivalry, presided over by a landed patrician class. By contrast, the society of the north-eastern states was a dynamic society, with an economy that was rapidly being modernized and industrialized, a culture shaped by Puritanism, presided over by a class of wealthy merchants and factory owners. When the latter society succeeded in unilaterally electing a Republican president the leaders of the former society could see the handwriting on the wall – the forces of innovation, modernization, and industrializing now had complete control of the United States and their older style, more rooted, traditional society would be swept away. Secession was a last ditch effort to prevent this, albeit one that ultimately failed and resulted in their society being ravaged by the merciless war machine of the North.

The South, therefore, politically correct propaganda about race and slavery be damned, fought for their independence over what I would regard as a worthy cause – the preservation of a traditional, honourable, chivalrous, rural, society against “the Modern Age at arms” to borrow a phrase from Evelyn Waugh. By contrast, the separatist movement in Quebec arose precisely at the time when that province had thrown off most of its traditional elements and embraced modernity.

As for the Scottish independence movement, it sought to break up a kingdom that has been united for centuries, that was united peacefully by mutual acts of the English and Scottish parliaments a century after the Scottish king inherited the English throne, the union of which has stood the test of time. Let us hope that after this defeat at the polls it will soon be as dead as Quebec separatism.

(1) The case is based upon the ninth and especially the tenth amendment to the US Constitution.

Péladeau Saves Canada!

Someone check the almanac to see if that proverbially rare celestial occurrence, the blue moon, is scheduled to appear this month. For the first time in my recollection I find myself pleased that the Grits have scored an electoral victory. Don’t get me wrong, this pleasure does not arise out of a newfound sense of appreciation for the merits and virtues of the Liberal Party. It comes rather from relief over the fact that it means that the country will be spared, at least for the immediate future, another round of the Quebec separatism crisis.

This past Monday the province of Quebec held an early provincial election. A little over a year and a half ago, the Liberals had lost control of the province in the last election. The separatist Parti Québécois had won a minority government and the decision to take the province back to the polls early was a bid to convert that minority government into a majority after they failed to gain support for their budget from the opposition parties. In a sense, that is what happened except that the majority government was given to Philippe Couillard’s Liberals instead of to the PQ of Pauline Marois. The Grits won seventy seats in the Quebec assembly, seven more than is needed to form a majority, and well over double the thirty that were returned to the PQ, whose leader lost her own seat in the constituency of Charlevoix–Côte-de-Beaupré and stepped down as leader of her party even while conceding the election to Couillard. This is the lowest number of seats the separatist party has received since the 1980s.

What caused this drastic overturn of the fortunes of the Parti Québécois?

The answer is, in a single word, separatism.

Shortly after the election was called, media magnate Pierre Karl Péladeau announced that he would run as a candidate for the Parti Québécois. He further declared that it was the issue of separatism that was drawing him into the race and he wanted “to make Quebec a country”. This put party leader Marois, who presumably would have preferred to have continued to downplay her party’s contentious raison d’être, into something of a bind. Forced to run a campaign with the separatism issue front and centre, the PQ lost and lost big.

Péladeau’s true motivations are known only to himself and God. He does not have an established history as a separatist. Apart from this one issue his views are not notably in line with those of his party. He is said to have blamed his business troubles of a few years back on English Canada and particularly the Royal Bank which could explain a conversion to the sovereignist cause. Yet surely he could not have been unaware that if there is one thing that English and French Canadians, the people of Quebec and the rest of Canada, agree upon more than anything else is that we are all sick to death of politicians raising the issue of the separation of Quebec.

The spectre of Quebec separatism loomed large over the land when I was growing up. It was a movement that was born in the 1960s while Quebec was undergoing the sweeping changes that are often called the “Quiet Revolution.” The ancien régime, the old Catholic order that had been the support base of the Union Nationale government of Maurice Duplessis, largely disappeared and was replaced by a new order of moral permissiveness, secularism, and socialism. Out of the New Quebec that replaced the Old, arose both federalists and separatists. The federalists were conscripted by the national Liberal Party, which was looking to create a new, multicultural, Canada that rejected the traditions of both English and French Canada. The separatist movement divided into a militant and a moderate wing. The militant wing formed the terrorist organization the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) whereas the relatively moderate wing organized what eventually became the Parti Québécois.

It was the terrorist wing of the separatist movement that first attracted the attention of the nation. Throughout the 1960s, the FLQ waged a campaign of bombing, kidnapping and murder that culminated in the October 1970 kidnappings of British Trade Commissioner James Cross and Quebec Vice-Premier Pierre Laporte. The government that had to deal with this crisis was the Liberal government headed by Pierre Elliot Trudeau, the most prominent of the New Quebec federalists.

With the October crisis, the FLQ reached the zenith of their terrorist campaign and subsequently more or less disappeared. The Parti Quebecois, on the other hand, under the charismatic leadership of René Lévesque rose in popularity. In 1976 they won their first provincial election and in 1980 called the first referendum over separating from Canada. They lost the referendum by a fairly large margin. Forty percent voted in favour of separation, or rather in favour of giving the PQ a mandate to negotiate a new sovereignty association with the rest of Canada which is how the question was actually put to them, but sixty percent voted against it.

Shortly after the failure of the referendum, however, the separatists found a new way to threaten the unity of Confederation, with unintended help from their federalist enemy Pierre Trudeau. Trudeau wanted the British North America Act, by which Canada had been established as a country in 1867, to be patriated to Canada so that we could amend our own constitution. To do so required that the federal government and the provincial governments come to an agreement about the amendment process and so Trudeau entered into negotiations with the provincial governments about this. Ultimately, all provinces except one, Lévesque’s Quebec, ratified the Constitution Act when it passed both the British and Canadian Parliaments in 1982.

This created a constitutional crisis which was dumped on the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney that took power in 1984. With the Meech Lake Accord in 1987, and the Charlottetown Accord of 1992, Mulroney tried to convince Quebec to ratify the Constitution Act provincially, but each time failed to do so, despite the federalist Liberal Party of Robert Bourassa being in power during this period. In the fall of 1994, the Parti Quebecois, now lead by Jacques Parizeau, came to power. In 1995, they called a second referendum on Quebec sovereignty. Once again they did not get the results they desired, but the margin by which they lost was reduced to a fraction of what it had been in 1980.

Despite the fact that this would suggest an increase in popular support for separation it was at this point that the separatist movement began to lose steam. The two referendums had been very divisive within Quebec and had generated a great deal of ill-will between her and the rest of Canada while failing to gain enough support for separation to form a majority. Quebeckers, regardless of which way they voted in the referendum, indicated in the polls at the time that however it turned out, they did not want a third one. The polls continued to indicate this just before this election, and in handing the Parti Quebecois its biggest defeat in decades once the issue of separatism was raised, the people of Quebec could not have made the message any clearer.

Therefore Canadians owe M. Péladeau our gratitude. By raising the issue of sovereignty in this way, he has sank his own party in the polls, perhaps irrevocably, spared us another bitter round of the Quebec sovereignty debate, and shown English and French Canadians that in not wanting to go through this all over again we are more united than we thought.