Canada is a
Commonwealth Realm, a country within the British Commonwealth of Nations which
governs herself through her own Parliament but which shares a reigning monarch
with the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth Realms. Progressives, especially of the woke,
“anti-colonial”, “anti-imperial” type, don’t like this and periodically call
for us to “severe our ties to the monarchy." This expression demonstrates just how little
they understand our country. We don’t
have “ties” to the monarchy as if it were something external that can be lopped
off. It is integral to our constitution
and for that matter to our history.
When our
current king was crowned in Westminster Abbey on 6 May, 2023 he was greeted by
a young lad of His Majesty’s Chapel Royal who welcomed him “in the name of the
King of kings.” To this, His Majesty
replied "In His name and after His example I come not to be served
but to serve." This was an addition
to the coronation service requested by His Majesty himself although it
expresses the attitude of humility appropriate to the tradition of the king
coming to Church to be crowned by priestly representatives of the King of
kings.
What a contrast between this attitude of humility on the
part of the man and appropriate to the office he fills with the insufferable
arrogance that has been characteristic of his Canadian prime minister for the
last decade. Thankfully, that prime
minister will soon be history. On
Epiphany he announced his upcoming resignation, to take effect after the
Liberal Party has chosen its new leader which is set to take place on 9
March. Unfortunately, the joy of hearing
that he is finally stepping down, nine years after he should have resigned, has
been dampened by the noise coming from south of the border. For as big as the contrast between His
Majesty’s appropriate Christian humility and the vainglory of his rotten
Canadian prime minister may be there is an even bigger contrast between that
humility and the hubris of the festering anal sore who is set to be sworn in
again as American president on 20 January.
Yes, that last sentence expresses a rather different
character evaluation of Donald the Orange than the one I have been expressing
for the last eight years. As recently as
last 5 of November, Guy Fawkes Day and the day of the American presidential
election, after declining to endorse either candidate on the grounds that it
was an election in another country and for an office, president of a republic,
of which I don’t approve, I
did say that “If someone were to ask me which of the two candidates I like
better as an individual person and which of the two has, in my opinion, the
better ideas and policies, my answer to both questions would be Donald the
Orange.” I can no longer say this,
although my opinion of Kamala Harris has in no way improved. One’s insight into another person’s character
gets a lot clearer when he is holding a gun to one’s country’s head and
screaming “Anschluss!” Whether he is
joking or serious, literal or non-literal, is entirely immaterial. Since he is
holding a gun to another country’s head and screaming “Lebensraum” and
demanding from yet a third the return of his “Danzig Corridor” he has clearly
gone stark raving mad.
Enough, however, about the wounded head, now healed of the
revived Roman Empire to our south who has been given a “mouth speaking great
things and blasphemies” whose followers all wear a sign of allegiance on their
foreheads. I do not wish to write an essay all about him because he thinks
everything everywhere should always be about him and I have no desire to
indulge him on that. Rather this essay
is about Canada’s small-c conservatives and how the behaviour of some of them
over the past week has made me abundantly glad that in my 1
January essay this year I distinguished my own Toryism, not only from big-C
Conservative partisanship but from small-c conservatism as well.
John Casey, writing in the 17 March, 2007 issue of The Spectator, in an article entitled “The
Revival of Tory Philosophy” recounted a conversation that had taken
place between Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher in the Conservative Philosophy
Group, which Hugh Fraser, Casey, the late Sir Roger Scruton and others had
founded back in the 1970s. The meeting
was just before the Falklands War and in it Edward Norman had given a
presentation on the “Christian argument for nuclear weapons.” In the discussion that followed according to
Casey “Mrs. Thatcher said (in effect) that
Norman had shown that the Bomb was necessary for the defence of our values.” Then this exchange took place:
Powell: ‘No, we do not fight for values. I would fight
for this country even if it had a communist government.’ Thatcher (it was just
before the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands): ‘Nonsense, Enoch. If I send
British troops abroad, it will be to defend our values.’ ‘No, Prime minister, values exist in a transcendental
realm, beyond space and time. They can neither be fought for, nor destroyed.’
Mrs Thatcher looked utterly baffled. She had just been presented with the
difference between Toryism and American Republicanism.
I very much doubt that many
of the small-c conservatives in Canada today would have understood Enoch
Powell’s point any more than Margaret Thatcher did although Toryism is the
traditional Right of Canada as well as the UK.
One’s country is a concrete good for which a patriot fights regardless
of what he may think of the people in government at the moment and what their
ideology may happen to be. Of course
many, probably most, on the Right today, would call themselves nationalists
rather than patriots and would probably not understand this difference
either. Here it is as explained by
American paleoconservative/paleolibertarian Joe Sobran in a column from 16
October, 2001:
This is a
season of patriotism, but also of something that is easily mistaken for
patriotism; namely, nationalism. The difference is vital.
G.K. Chesterton once observed that Rudyard Kipling, the great poet of British
imperialism, suffered from a “lack of patriotism.” He explained: “He admires
England, but he does not love her; for we admire things with reasons, but love
them without reasons. He admires England because she is strong, not because she
is English.”
In the same way, many Americans admire America for being strong, not for being
American. For them America has to be “the greatest country on earth” in order
to be worthy of their devotion. If it were only the 2nd-greatest, or the
19th-greatest, or, heaven forbid, “a 3rd-rate power,” it would be virtually
worthless.
This is nationalism, not patriotism. Patriotism is like family love. You love
your family just for being your family, not for being “the greatest family on
earth” (whatever that might mean) or for being “better” than other families.
You don’t feel threatened when other people love their families the same way.
On the contrary, you respect their love, and you take comfort in knowing they
respect yours. You don’t feel your family is enhanced by feuding with other
families.
While patriotism is a form of affection, nationalism, it has often been said,
is grounded in resentment and rivalry; it’s often defined by its enemies and
traitors, real or supposed. It is militant by nature, and its typical style is
belligerent. Patriotism, by contrast, is peaceful until forced to fight.
Joe Sobran, sadly, passed
away far too early in 2010 and so did not live to see the “Make America
Great Again” movement. The paragraphs
quoted above, however, are a good indication of what he would have thought of
it, especially in its current revised version.
In 2016, the movement used nationalist rhetoric but when it spoke of
putting “America First” it sounded like it was echoing what those words meant
to Sobran’s friends, Sam Francis and Pat Buchanan. Neither man took it to mean that the United
States should be telling the rest of the world “we’re the best, we’re the strongest,
so all the rest of you have to do what we say,” quite the contrary. Buchanan campaigned for American president three
times on a platform of doing the opposite of that. In 1999 he published a book entitled A Republic not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s
Destiny. In 2016, American
neoconservatives, the most vehement supporters of American imperialism, shunned
the MAGA movement because it sounded to them like Buchananism. It was thought by many that MAGA had taken
its playbook from Sam Francis, who
predeceased Sobran in 2005 and his “Middle American Radicals” strategy. The MAGA of 2024-5, however, is clearly the
nationalism Sobran wrote against, taken to the nth degree, in both rhetoric and
reality. Note that the neoconservatives
who shunned it in 2016 are flocking to it today. Compare the Ben Shapiro of 2016 to the Ben
Shapiro of today, for example.
John Lukacs, the Hungarian born historian who fled the Nazi
and then Communist occupations of his home country and immigrated to the United
States was another who understood the difference between nationalism and
patriotism. He was a man of the Right,
but was very skeptical about the American conservative movement which popped up
after World War II in a country that had always considered itself to be founded
on liberalism. Lukacs, like his friend
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, another refugee from Europe whom he succeeded as
history professor at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia when
Kuehnelt-Leddihn returned to Austria after the war, he was a Roman Catholic royalist,
the continental equivalent of a Tory, and always referred to himself as a
reactionary. I learned to self-apply
this favourite epithet of the Left from his example. In his Democracy
& Populism: Fear and Hatred (2005) which I reviewed here,
he predicted that a new type of Right was on the ascendency, but warned that it
might be an unpalatable sort of Right that blended populism, the demagogic
exploitation of dissatisfaction with elites with nationalism rather than
traditionalism with patriotism.
The MAGA movement in the United States is, of course, a
blend of populism and nationalism. It is
at its best when playing the role of the “agin man”, that is, someone
identified by what he is “agin” (against).
It opposes globalism, uncontrolled and illegal immigration, the
soft-on-crime policies that are wreaking havoc in places like New York and
California, and to the whole combination of racial, sexual, gender and other
identity politics that is woke ideology.
MAGA did not invent the opposition to these things, however, and one
does not have to be either a populist or a nationalist to oppose them. The term “woke” in its political sense had
not yet become a household word when Joe Sobran died, but he opposed everything
the term denotes and we have already seen his opinion of nationalism. John Lukacs’s mini-book “Immigration and
Migration: A Historical Perspective” which can be read in .pdf on the American
Immigration Control Foundation’s website here
was originally published in 1986, decades before MAGA, the embodiment of the
populist nationalism or nationalist populism he foresaw in 2005 and saw unappealing,
arrived on the scene.
All of these things that MAGA opposes, the Liberal Party
under its present leadership has embraced, taken to their most absurd extremes,
and made into its own platform. This was
not in response to MAGA, since Captain Airhead was promoting these things from
the moment he became Grit leader, which was a couple of years before he became prime
minister the year before that in which Donald the Orange defeated Hilary
Clinton. He did, however, take his cues
from the man who was president of the United States at the time, Barack Obama. Liberal prime ministers in Canada have always
taken their cues from the United States.
The Liberal Party has always been the party of Americanization.
In 1891, when Sir John A. Macdonald won his last Dominion
election, he was campaigning against Sir Wilfred Laurier’s Liberals who were
running on a platform of “unrestricted reciprocity” or what today would be
called “free trade” with the United States.
Macdonald has overseen the construction of the railroad in his
premiership both to promote trade within Canada, uniting our economy, and to
resist pressure to become dependent on trade with the United States, because he
correctly foresaw trade dependence on the United States as a step towards
falling into the cultural and political gravitational pull of the American
republic and so undermining the Confederation Project. Macdonald won his last majority government in
that election, shortly before he passed away, by campaigning against any such
outcome. His campaign posters bore the
slogan “The Old Flag, the Old Policy, the Old Leader.” William Lyon Mackenzie King, who led the
Liberal Party for much of the early twentieth century was even more of a free
trader and Americanizer than Laurier.
Now someone might point out that Mackenzie King represented
a different wing of the Liberal Party big tent than that which today is
identified with the Trudeau family. That
is true but it is also true that the Trudeau Liberals as much as the Mackenzie
King Liberals took their cues from the United States. Indeed, the very celebrity of the Trudeau
family in Canada is an imitation of that of the Kennedy family in the United
States. Americans should be grateful that
they have not had a second Kennedy presidency.
When Pierre Eliot Trudeau became prime minister he began to
expand federal social programs in an unveiled imitation of Lyndon Johnson’s
similar expansion in the United States.
More importantly, in 1977 Pierre Trudeau introduced the Canadian Human
Rights Act and in 1982, he introduced the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in
imitation of the US Bill of Rights. The
Charter gave the Canadian Supreme Court the type of powers the American Supreme
Court has and after 1982 Canada began for the first time to experience the kind
of cultural revolution through liberal judicial activism that had plagued the
United States for decades prior. The
American Supreme Court, for example, threw the Bible and prayer out of American
public schools two decades before Pierre Trudeau introduced the Canadian
Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They
were still in Canadian public schools when I attended and I would have been in
Grade 1 when the Charter passed. The Morgentaler ruling of the Canadian
Supreme Court came in 1988, 15 years after Roe
v. Wade in the United States. Such a ruling would not have been possible
prior to 1982.
As for the Canadian Human Rights Act, this was an imitation
of the United States’ unnecessary 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibiting private
discrimination that capped Martin Luther King Jr. phoney career as a civil
rights crusader which started a year after segregation had been ruled
unconstitutional by the American Supreme Court and was hence already legally
dead. Most of the free speech battles in
Canada during my lifetime have been because of problems that go back to this
Act. Those who maintain that we would not
have had these problems if we had the American First Amendment are grossly mistaken. From 1949 to 1987 the American communications
regulator the FCC had a policy called the Fairness Doctrine that amounted to
what Jordan Peterson calls “compelled speech”, which transgresses freedom of
speech worse than “prohibited speech.”
The Fairness Doctrine required broadcasters, if they expressed editorial
opinions, to give equal time to the opposite view, thus forcing them to
subsidize views they disagreed with. It
was not evenly enforced but was enforced against right-wing broadcasters while
left-wing broadcasters were generally left alone. The Rev. Carl McIntire ran afoul of it, for example,
on a number of occasions. It was not
struck down by the US Supreme Court on the grounds of the First Amendment,
although challenges on that basis were made.
After pressure from Congress and the Reagan administration, the FCC
repealed it itself in 1987. So no, the
American First Amendment is not the sacred guarantee of freedom of speech that
some think it to be. Furthermore, and
this is actually the main point, the enforced racial, sexual, and gender
identity politics of today’s wokeness, at least insofar as it touches on public
policy, in Canada can be traced directly to Pierre Trudeau’s introduction of an
Act in 1977 based on an American Act of 1964.
This, coupled with the fact that the biggest agent for promoting
wokeness in popular culture, not only in North America but throughout the
civilization formerly known as Christendom, has been the mass culture
production industry centred in Los Angeles, California demonstrates that
wokeness comes stamped with “Made in the USA.”
In 1980 at the beginning of the Reagan administration in the
United States and a year into Margaret Thatcher’s premiership in the United
Kingdom, Sir Roger Scruton wrote The
Meaning of Conservatism to demonstrate that while Reagan and Thatcher had
their good points, conservatism was not what they thought it was, free market
ideology, but rather the instinct to preserve and pass on the good things that
others have built before you because these things are much easier to destroy
than to build. Towards the end of the 1980s,
a movement arose in Canada that completely ignored Scruton’s message. It called itself small-c conservative to
distinguish itself from the party, and it took the position that
Reaganism/Thatcherism is the standard to which conservatism should hold
itself. While the movement loathed the
Liberal Party, its foundational misconception meant that it would never be more
than an imitation of the centre-right wing of the Liberal Party. When it founded an alternative party to the
old Conservatives, it gave it the name that the movement which became the
Liberal Party had gone under in the years leading up to Confederation, the
Reform Party. It promoted more economic
integration between Canada and the United States, the Liberal Party’s position,
rather than the economic nationalism traditional to both Canadian Toryism and
American Republicanism. Lacking
historical depth and a proper understanding of Confederation it wanted to make
Canadian provinces more like American states and the Canadian Senate more like
the American Senate. The social and
cultural conservatism of the movement and the Reform Party initially attracted
me to them until I realized that these were entirely expendable to the movement
and that it would always put business interests ahead of traditions,
institutions, and basically all those good things Scruton said that a
conservative instinctually defends.
It is understandable, perhaps, that small-c conservatives,
after almost a decade of misrule by the Liberal Party at its worst as far as
extreme Leftism goes, would look to the success of the MAGA movement in the United
States, but it is a huge mistake to follow the example of the Liberal Party in
taking cues from the United States.
Since Epiphany, small-c conservatives have demanded that the prorogation
of Parliament end and that we go into the next Dominion Election right
away. I, as well, would like to see that
happen. Challenging the prorogation in
court is not the way to go about it.
Should the challenge go through this would weaken the Crown’s reserve
powers and that outcome would be worse for us than having to wait until March
for the no confidence vote that will inevitably bring down the Liberals. We should be strengthening, not weakening,
the Crown, so as to check any future prime minister from becoming as autocratic
as the current one. What this means is
that the role of recommending whom the King appoints as Governor General must
go to someone other than the prime minister.
The Governor General should have refused to prorogue Parliament to give
the Liberal Party time to choose a new leader, just as Lord Byng refused to
dissolve it to save Mackenzie King’s skin 99 years ago. The solution is not to have the use of the
Crown’s powers subjected to judicial review but to take control over the
appointment of the Governor General away from the prime minister. Lord Byng was not appointed at the prime
minister’s recommendation.
Furthermore, it is one thing to accuse the prime minister of
abusing the process and putting party ahead of country by asking for Parliament
to be prorogued until the eve of Lady Day to give the Liberals enough time to
choose a new leader. It is quite another
to complain that the Liberal Party choosing a new leader before the dissolution
of Parliament that will lead to the Dominion election in which the Liberals are
defeated is letting Party insiders choose the next prime minister rather than the people. Small-c conservatives, like Ezra Levant and
Candace Malcolm, have perhaps not thought through the implications of this talk. There will be another Dominion Election by
October. There will be one a lot sooner
than that, because whoever the Liberals put in as their next leader will be
brought down almost immediately when the House sits again. The next Liberal leader may technically be
the next prime minister but it will be a very, very, short premiership. What Levant, Malcolm, et al., are demonstrating,
however, is a lack of understanding of the Westminster Parliamentary model,
which allows for the premiership to change hands between elections. In Dominion elections, we do not vote for the
prime minister in the same way Americans vote for their president. We vote individually for the representative
of our constituency, and collectively for a Parliament. The results determine who will be the next Prime
minister – the person who has the confidence of the House – but not
directly. It has been a huge mistake
over the last thirty years or so to increasingly treat each Dominion election
as if it were a direct vote for the prime minister. The last thing we need in this country is to import
more of the American cult of the leader.
Green Party leader Elizabeth May showed more understanding of our Parliamentary
system and more basic constitutional conservatism than anyone at True North or
Rebel when she schooled the American president-elect on why Wayne Gretsky can’t
run directly for prime minister.
Then there are those who think Kevin O’Leary’s proposal of
an EU style, common market, common currency has merit. This appears to include Brian Lilley. Has it perhaps eluded their notice that the
result of this experiment in Europe was that each country involved began to
face a migration crisis and related problems similar but on a larger scale to
those that conservatives in Canada and the United States say they want to solve
rather than exacerbate?
The small-c conservatives who have annoyed me the most have
been those who have suggested one anti-patriotic response to Trump’s obnoxious
behaviour or another. Laughing alongside
Trump as if his “51st state” remarks were jokes only at Trudeau’s
expense rather than that of the country as a whole is one example, excusing his
remarks on the grounds that this is how he does business, “it’s all in the Art of the Deal” is another. If that is how he does business that
compounds the charge against him it does not excuse it. Going around saying “I’m bigger than you and
stronger then you therefore you have to do as I say or I’m going to take your
toys” is bad behaviour in the schoolyard and it is no more acceptable anywhere
else. It is just as reprehensible in
business as it is in geopolitics. Then
there is the response of emphasizing what good friends Canada and the United
States have been. That is not the way to
talk at this time. As Joe
Warmington in the Toronto Sun put it
“Trump can no longer claim to be a friend to Canada. No friend talks like this.” The problem with these anti-patriotic
small-c “conservatives” is that while they lack true patriotism, that love of
Canada like unto their love for their own immediately family, they do have a
Nietzschean worship of power and strength which they direct towards the United
States that in certain respects resembles what Joe Sobran called nationalism
except that it is worse because it is focused on a country other than their own. Mercifully, these types are, I think, a
small, if loud, minority.
The prize for the most reprehensible attitude goes to
Stephen K. Roney who has been positively salivating at the idea of becoming the
51st state. He seems to be
under the impression that those of us who love our country bear the burden of
justifying her continuing independence of the United States. My answer to him is that if he wants to be an
American so badly he is free to move there if the Americans will let him. I wouldn’t let him if I were the
Americans. Someone who has that kind of
attitude towards his own country cannot be trusted to be loyal to any other.
Yes, if these types are what it means to be “conservative”
today, I am glad that I am a Tory rather than a conservative, just as I am very
glad to be a Canadian, a citizen of a Commonwealth Realm and the subject of a king
who went to his coronation to follow the example of the King of kings, not to
be served but to serve, rather than the citizen of an imperial republic, whose
incoming president is so full of himself, that I half expect him to raise a
statue of himself in the National Cathedral in Washington DC and demand that not
just Americans but everyone in the world worship before it.
God Save the King.
