The Year of Platinum Jubilee

 

The Lord’s Day this week, the last Sunday in Epiphanytide by the old Kalendar, was the sixth of February in the civil calendar, and the seventieth anniversary of the death of King George VI and the accession of his daughter Queen Elizabeth II to the throne.  She had already surpassed Queen Victoria to become the longest reigning monarch in the entire history of the British Crown, its English and Scottish predecessors, and thus it goes without saying in the history of the Canadian Crown and the Crowns of the other Commonwealth Realms.   This marks yet another milestone as she has become the first monarch to attain a Platinum Jubilee.     Congratulations to Her Majesty!   Long may her reign over us continue to last!

 

As might be expected, the best remarks on the occasion from one of Her Majesty’s Canadian subjects were those of David Warren, the former Ottawa Citizen columnist and former editor of The Idler, who was years ago driven out of polite journalism after its complete and total takeover by the forces of what is now called “wokeness”.   He wrote:

 

Her subjects are blessed, and have for so long been blessed, with a fine and adequate ruler. She has seen them through an incomparable ring of years and changes.

 

Not every nation of the British heritage deserves such a monarch, and indeed many have broken the royal connexion in displays of tawdry narcissism. Members of her own family have also failed her, and the governments over which she has presided have been a constant source of embarrassment. Yet Her Majesty, and the late beloved Prince Philip, have borne all these modern indignities with grace and extraordinary patience.

 

Amen!   As there is little if anything that could be said to add to such remarks I shall move on to address a question that has risen in connection with the occasion.   There has been some discussion about how to mark and celebrate the anniversary   Stephen K. Roney addressed this early last month:

 

And what has Canada planned to mark this epochal event? Apparently, an ice sculpture on Sparks Street Mall for Ottawa’s Winterlude. 

 

That almost sounds like an insult. As though her reign was written on water.

 

We can do better. Moreover, if the spring and summer of 2022 marks the end of a dread pandemic, we could all use a big party.

 

The federal government may have no time for the Queen, but it she is popular in much of Canada―in large part because the monarchy is the one thing that, historically, distinguishes us from the USA.

 

Although this was not my reason for quoting Roney, the last line deserves emphasis.   The monarchy is what has historically distinguished Canada from the USA.  Lefties in recent years would have us believe that it is our welfare state and especially our “single payer” health care system.   The former, however, was established in imitation of American innovations (in the late 1930s the Canadian government brought in a social security net in imitation of FDR’s “New Deal” in the USA, in the l960’s and 1970s, they expanded it in imitation of LBJ’s “Great Society”).   The latter, a system inferior to both the pre-Obamacare American system and the public system with free private competition of the UK and the Scandinavian countries, ought to be our national embarrassment, is too recent to historically distinguish us from the USA, and could eventually be adopted by the USA.    The monarchy is also what has historically united Canadians.   It is the single element of the Canadian heritage that unites the three traditional and historical Canadas.   English Canada was born out of the United Empire Loyalists.   French Canada remained loyal because the Crown had guaranteed its language, religion, and culture on the eve of the American Revolution.   The Crown is the other signatory in each of the Indian treaties.    It is very appropriate, therefore, that new Canadians have to swear an oath of loyalty to the Queen and her heirs to become Canadian citizens.  By doing so, they are joined to the historical, traditional, Canada by her one unifying factor, a factor the place of which cannot be taken by anything else.

Mr. Roney is right that an ice sculpture is an insufficient tribute.

 

My own humble suggestion is that Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee be celebrated with a new edition of a book that was first published early in her reign and which has been out of print for years.   The book I refer to is Freedom Wears a Crown.   Its author was John C. Farthing, the son of the Right Rev. John Cragg Farthing who served as the Anglican Bishop of Montreal from 1909 to 1939 (this is not a case of senior and junior – the son’s middle initial stood for Colborne).   Farthing was an academic man, who studied first at McGill – interrupting his studies there to fight in the First World War - then at New College, Oxford, before returning to McGill as faculty to lecture in the Political Science and Economics department chaired by Stephen Leacock.    Later, after a ten-year hiatus from academe spent in philosophical reflection, he would teach younger scholars at the Bishop’s College prep school in Quebec.  

 

Farthing began writing the work for which he would be remembered at a time when the world had been radically shaken up by the two World Wars and had realigned itself into two camps of nations – the one led by the United States of America, the other by the Soviet Union – which were engaged in what James Burnham called a “Struggle for the World”.   This conflict is known as the Cold War because the nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers – a legacy of the Second World War – made a direct “hot war” between them an unthinkable option.   This was the world situation when the young Elizabeth acceded the throne, and the situation to which Farthing spoke.   The two sides of the conflict represented rival political and economic ideals.   The United States represented capitalist republicanism, the Soviet Union represented socialist totalitarian democracy.   Farthing in his book reminded Canada – and the other realms of the British family of nations – that her and their heritage was an alternative to these.   It was also, he argued, a superior alternative to these, because it was not drawn up on paper by some armchair philosopher or political scientist, but had emerged naturally and organically, from the thousands of years of human experience and wisdom that had forged and tested it.    This heritage was that of the Westminster System of Sovereign Crown-in-Parliament.

 

Farthing did more than just argue that the Westminster System was better at guaranteeing personal freedom – he distinguished between this and “individual liberty” - than American capitalist republicanism and better at securing the common good than the Soviet system.   He also discussed in detail how this heritage had been threatened in the famous constitutional crisis known as the King-Byng Affair of almost a century ago.   It was not, however, as students who are taught what Donald Creighton dubbed the “Authorized Version” – the Liberal theory of Canadian history – learn, the Governor General, Lord Byng whose actions posed the threat, but those of Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King.   King had asked the Governor General to dissolve Parliament at a time when it had taken a recess before voting on whether to censure his less than a year old government because of a corruption scandal.    By refusing, the Governor General exercised in his vice-regal capacity the reserve powers of the Crown to prevent the Prime Minister from evading his accountability to Parliament.    The Governor General reminded King that he had remained in office after the last Dominion election under unusual circumstances – he had not won the plurality of seats, that had gone to Arthur Meighan’s Conservatives, but with the additional support of the Progressives, had been allowed to continue in government on the stipulation that Parliament would not be dissolved until after Meighan had been given a chance to form an alternative government.   King resigned, Meighan was given the chance, his government was immediately brought down in a confidence vote, automatically dissolving Parliament, and in the ensuing Dominion election King lied to the Canadian public, presenting himself as the champion of Canadian sovereignty over her domestic affairs, and the Governor General as having acted inappropriately and at the behest of the Imperial government in London.   In fact, as King’s letter of resignation to Byng demonstrates, King had asked Byng to consult with London before making his decision and had been told that there was no need because his constitutional duty was clear – a Prime Minister was not to be granted a dissolution under such circumstances.   The Canadian public accepted King’s story, however, and returned him a majority government.   By his success in deceiving the public, Farthing argued, King and his Liberals had undermined in practice the Crown’s reserve powers, and in doing so had undermined the accountability of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet to both Crown and Parliament, a dangerous step towards the subversion of the Westminster System and the turning of Prime Minister in Cabinet into a form of elected dictatorship.   Farthing’s understanding of this historical event – that Lord Byng was in the right and Mackenzie King in the wrong - is clearly borne out against the “Authorized Version” by the historical paperwork, as noted above.   It had previously been championed by Eugene Forsey, who had studied at McGill with Farthing under Leacock, and joined the latter’s department as faculty the year that Farthing departed, in his doctoral dissertation which was published in 1943 under the title The Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament in the British Commonwealth, another book that might be considered for re-issue in honour of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.   Farthing’s interpretation of the larger significance over the event has been borne out by subsequent history in which Prime Ministers – especially Liberal Prime Ministers, and especially Liberal Prime Ministers from the far left of the Liberal Party, whether it be the Marxist far left of the ‘60s and ‘70s, or the “woke” far left of today – have tended to treat their office as that of an elected dictator. 

 

When Farthing died in 1954, two years into the reign of Her Majesty, his manuscript required editing.   His friend Judith Robinson, a well-known Toronto investigative journalist and author during the middle decades of the Twentieth Century, polished off the manuscript which was published in 1957 by Toronto’s Kingswood House.

 

Farthing’s book has been out of print for quite some time and younger generations of Canadians are largely unfamiliar with the case for why the institution of monarchy is the most important symbol of our freedom.   Freedom stands and falls with traditional institutions, especially monarchy.   The freest countries in history, with one or two exceptions, have been monarchies.   Totalitarian police states have been republics.   Farthing’s book was a great contribution to the explanation of why this is the case. What better time to bring out a new edition of his book than now, when we are celebrating a record-setting milestone in Her Majesty’s reign at the end of two years of suffering under a particularly arrogant elected dictatorship of the type he warned us about, one that has treated our constitutionally protected freedoms as if they were the Prime Minister’s to take away from us as he sees fit?   Had our elected leaders – Prime Minister and provincial premiers – and their health officers, followed the example of Her Majesty in her address to the Commonwealth of almost two years ago and adopted the tone she set – one of encouragement, endurance, and sympathy – instead of the tone of scolding, nagging, bossing, bullying, condescending and scapegoating they have employed for the last two years – they would not be facing the protest demonstrations from fed-up truckers and other Canadians all across the Dominion that we have been seeing for the past two weeks.  

 

Happy anniversary Your Majesty!

God Save the Queen!

Stand Up to the Mob!

 

When a mob vandalizes or tears down statues that have been in place for generations of nation-builders, whether statesmen like Sir John A. Macdonald, Father of Confederation and first Prime Minister of the Dominion of Canada, or educators like Egerton Ryerson, one of the chief architects of the Upper Canadian – Ontarian for the hopelessly up-to-date – public school system, back the in days when schools were a credit to their builders rather than a disgrace, this tells us much more about the mob than about the historical figures whose memory they are attacking.   It is far easier to tear something down than it is to build something, especially something of lasting benefit.   It is also much quicker.   What these acts tell us is that the members of these mobs, whether taken individually or collectively, who are howling for the “cancelling” of the memories of men like Macdonald and Ryerson, do not have it in them to achieve a thousandth of what such men accomplished.  Driving them down this quick and easy, but ultimately treacherous and deadly, path of desecration and destruction, is the spirit of Envy, which is not mere jealousy, the wish to have what others have, but the hatred of others for being, having, or doing what you do not and cannot be, have, or do yourself.   It was traditionally considered among the very worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, second only to Pride.    This makes it almost fitting, in a perverse sort of way, that last weekend’s mob assault on the statue of Ryerson at the University that bears his name, took place at the beginning of the month which, to please the alphabet soup people of all the colours of the rainbow, now bears the name of that Sin in addition to the Roman name for the queen of Olympus.

 

The toppling of the Ryerson statue came at the end of a week in which the Canadian media, evidently tired of the bat flu after a year and a half, found a new dead horse to flog.   Late in May, a couple of days after the anniversary of the incident which, after it was distorted and blown out of proportion by the media, sparked last year’s wave of race riots and “Year Zero” Cultural Maoism, and just in time to launch Indigenous History Month, yet another new handle for the month formerly known as June, the Kamloops Indian Band made an announcement.   They had hired someone to use some fancy newfangled sonar gizmo to search the grounds of the old Indian Residential School at Kamloops and, lo and behold, they had discovered 215 unmarked graves.  

 

The Canadian mainstream media was quick to label this discovery “shocking”.   This speaks extremely poorly about the present state of journalistic integrity in this country.   When used as an adjective, the word shocking expresses a negative judgement about that which is so described but it also generally conveys a sense of surprise on the part of the person doing the judging.   There was nothing in the Kamloops announcement, however, that ought to have been surprising.   It revealed nothing new about the Indian Residential Schools.   That there are unmarked graves on the grounds of these schools has been known all along. The fourth volume of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report is entitled Missing Children and Unmarked Burials.  It is 273 pages long and was published in December of 2015.    According to this volume the death rate due to such factors as disease – tuberculosis was the big one – and suicide was much higher among aboriginal children at the Residential Schools than among school children in the general population.   The TRC attributed this to the inadequacy of government standards and regulations for these schools which fell under the jurisdiction of the federal government rather than the provincial education ministries like other schools, as well as inadequate enforcement of such standards and regulations, and inadequate funding.   Had the TRC been the impartial body of inquiry it made itself out to be it would also have compared the death rate among Residential School children to that among aboriginal children who remained at home on the reserves.     At any rate, according to the TRC Report, unless the families lived nearby or could afford to have the bodies sent to them, they were generally buried in cemeteries at the schools which were abandoned and fell into disuse and decay after the schools were closed.    All that this “new discovery” has added to what is already contained in that volume is the location of 215 of these graves.   One could be forgiven for thinking that all the progressives in the mainstream Canadian media who have been spinning the Residential School narrative into a wrecking ball to use against Canada and the men who built her are not actually that familiar with the contents of the TRC Report.

 

The Canada-bashing progressives have been reading all sorts of ridiculous conclusions into the discovery of these graves that the actual evidence in no way bears out.   The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was hardly an impartial and unbiased body of inquiry.   Its end did not seem to be the first noun in its title so much as painting as unflattering a portrait of the Indian Residential Schools, the Canadian churches, and the Canadian government as was possible.  Even still, it did not go so far as to accuse the schools of the mass murder of children.   The most brazen of the progressive commentators have now been pointing to the discovery of the graves and making that accusation, and their slightly less brazen colleagues have been reporting the story in such a way as to lead their audiences to that conclusion without their outright saying it.   This is irresponsible gutter journalism at its worst.   The Kamloops band and its sonar technicians have not discovered anything that the TRC Report had not already told us was there, and bodies have not been exhumed, let alone examined for cause of death.   Indeed, they did not even discover a “mass grave” as innumerable media commentators have falsely stated, with some continuing to falsely say this despite the band chief having issued an update in which she explicitly stated “This is not a mass grave”.   The significance of this is that it shows that the media has been painting the picture of a far more calloused disposal of bodies than the evidence supports or the band claims.

 

The media, of course, are not acting in bona fide.  This time last year, they were using the death of George Floyd to promote a movement that was inciting race riots all across the United States and even throughout the larger Western world.   Coinciding with this was a wave of mob attacks on the monuments of a wide assortment of Western nation-builders, institutional founders, statesmen, and other honoured historical figures.   The New York Times, the American trash rag of record,  had been laying the foundation for this for months by running Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project, a revisionist distortion of American history that interprets everything by viewing it through the lens of slavery, in its Sunday Magazine supplement.    What we are seeing up here this year is simply the Canadian left-wing gutter press trying to reproduce its American cousin’s success of last year.

 

Those who use their influence to support statue-toppling mobs have no business commenting on history whatsoever.   By their very actions they demonstrate that they have not learned a fairly basic historical lesson.   Movements that seek to tear down a country’s history – her past cannot be torn down, but her history, her “remembered past” to use John Lukacs’ definition, can - never end well but rather in disaster, destruction, and misery for all.   The Jacobins attempted this in France in the 1790s when they started history over with their Republic at “Year One”, and endued up with the Reign of Terror.   It has been a pretty standard feature of all Communist revolutions since.    Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, when they took over Cambodia in 1975, declared it to be “Year Zero”.   Watch the film “The Killing Fields” or read my friend Reaksa Himm’s memoir The Tears of My Soul to find out what that was like.  Anybody who fails to grasp the simple historical fact that these are terrible examples and not ones to be emulated has no business passing judgement on the errors of the historical figures who built countries and institutions, led them through difficult periods, and otherwise did the long and difficult work of construction, enriching future generations, rather than the short and easy work of destruction that can only impoverish them.

 

There are undoubtedly those who would feel that this comparison of today’s statue-topplers who are now likening our country’s founders to Hitler with the Jacobins, Maoists, Pol Pot and other statue-toppling, country-and-civilization destroyers of the past is unfair.    It is entirely appropriate, however.   It is one thing to acknowledge that bad things took place at the Indian Residential Schools and to give those who suffered those things a platform and the opportunity to share their story.   It is another thing altogether to use those bad things to paint a cartoonish caricature so as to condemn the schools, the churches that administered them, and the country herself, wholesale, and to silence those whose testimony as to their experiences runs contrary to this one-sided, un-nuanced, narrative.   It is one thing to acknowledge that admired leaders of the past were human beings and thus full of flaws, or even to point out examples of how they fell short of the standards of their own day or of timeless standards.   It is something quite different to use their flaws to discredit and dismiss their tremendous accomplishments and, even worse, to condemn them for failing to hold attitudes that are now all but ubiquitous but which nobody anywhere in the world held until the present generation.  

 

When the so-called Truth and Reconciliation process began – I don’t mean the appointment of the Commission but the proceedings that led to the Indian Residential Schools Settlement which brought about the creation of the Commission, so we are talking about two and a half decades ago – the discussion was primarily about physical and sexual abuse that some of the alumni of the schools had suffered there, over which they had initiated the lawsuits that led to the Settlement.   With the creation of the TRC, however, the discussion came to be dominated by people with another very different agenda.   Their agenda was to condemn the entire Residential Schools system as a project of “cultural genocide”.

 

The concept of “cultural genocide” is nonsensical.   Genocide, a term coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, means the murder of a “people”, in the sense of a group with a common ancestry and identity.  The Holocaust of World War II is the best known example. The mass murder of Tutsis in Rwanda towards the end of that country’s civil war in 1994 is a more recent example.   The concept of “cultural genocide” was thought up by the same man who coined the term.   It refers to efforts to destroy a people’s cultural identity without killing the actual people.   Since the equation of something that does not involve killing actual people with mass murder ought to be morally repugnant to any thinking person, the concept should have been condemned and rejected from the moment Lemkin first conceived it.    Soon after it was conceived, however, the leaders of certain Jewish groups began using it as a club against Christianity.   Christianity teaches that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, the Messiah, the Redeemer prophesied in the Old Testament Who established the promised New Covenant through His death and Resurrection and Who is the only way to God for Jews and Gentiles alike.   Christianity’s primary mission from Jesus Christ is evangelism – telling the world the Gospel, the Good News about Who Jesus is and what He has done.   While not everybody believes the Gospel when they hear it and it is not our mission to compel anybody to believe, obviously the desired end of evangelism is for everybody to believe.   Since rabbinic Judaism has long taught that a Jew who converts to Christianity ceases to be a Jew, the Jewish leaders in question argued that evangelism amounts to cultural genocide – if all the Jews believed the Gospel, there would be no Jews any more.   On the basis of this kind of reasoning they began pressuring Christian Churches to change their doctrines and liturgical practices as they pertain to the evangelism of Jews.  Sadly, far too many Church leaders proved to be weak in the face of this kind of pressure.

 

Canada’s Laurentian political class showed a similar lack of backbone when it came to defending our country against the smear that the Residential Schools were designed to wipe out Native Indian cultural identities.   Indeed, their attitude throughout the entire “Truth and Reconciliation” process was to accept the blame for whatever accusations were thrown against Canada and to refuse to hold the accusers accountable to even the most basic standards of courtroom justice.   Imagine a trial where the judge allows only the prosecutor to call witnesses, denies the defense the right to cross examine, and refuses to allow the defense to make a case.   That will give you a picture of what the trial of Canada by the TRC over the Residential Schools was like.

 

The reality is that had Canada wanted to erase Native Indian cultural identity she would have abolished the reserves, torn up the treaties and declared the Indians to be ordinary citizens like everyone else, insisted that they all live among other Canadians, and that their children go to the same public schools as everybody else.   In other words, she would have done the exact opposite of what she actually did.   The Canadian government’s policy was clearly to preserve Indian cultural identity, not to eradicate it.   Had they wanted to do the latter, residential schools would have been particularly ill-suited to the task.   The TRC maintains that the idea was to break Indian cultural identity by taking children away from the cultural influence of their parents. If this was the case one would think the government would have had all Indian children sent to these schools.  In actuality, however, in the approximately a century and a half that these schools operated, only a minority of Indian children were sent there.   This was a very small minority in the early days of the Dominion when Sir John A. Macdonald, whom the TRC et al seem more interested in vilifying than anyone else, was Prime Minister.   The government also ran day schools on the reserves and in those days the government only forced children to go to the residential schools when their parents persistently neglected to send them to the day schools.    The Dominion had made it mandatory for all Indian children within a certain age range to attend school – just as the provinces had made it mandatory for all other children within the same age range to attend school.  It was much later in Canadian history, after the government decided to make the schools serve the second function of being foster group homes for children removed from unsafe homes by social workers that a majority of Indian children were sent to the residential schools.     Even then, the eradication of Indian cultural identity is hardly a reasonable interpretation of the government’s intent.

 

The TRC, in the absence of serious challenge from either Canada’s political class or the fourth estate, created a narrative indicting our country and its founders for “cultural genocide”, featuring a one-sided caricature of the Indian Residential Schools.   Now, after a discovery that adds nothing that was not already contained in the TRC Report, left-wing radicals egged on by the mendacious and meretricious media, have gone far beyond the TRC in their defamatory accusations of murder against the schools and their Pol Potish demands that we “cancel” our country, her history, and her historical figures.   It is about time that we stood up to these thugs who in their envy and hatred of those who did what they themselves could never do by building our country wish to tear it all down.   It is slightly encouraging that the Conservatives were able to stop the motion by Jimmy Dhaliwal’s Canada-hating socialist party to have Parliament declare the Residential Schools to have been a genocide.   I didn’t think they had the kives – the Finnish word for “stones” the bearing of which as a last name by a local reporter brings to mind how the biggest man in Robin Hood’s band of Merry Men was called “Little John” – to do so.

 

For anyone looking for more information about the side of the Indian Residential Schools story that the Left wants suppressed I recommend Stephen K. Roney’s Playing The Indian Card: Everything You Know About Canada’s “First Nations” is WRONG!, Bonsecours Editions, 2018 and From Truth Comes Reconciliation: An Assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, edited by Rodney A. Clifton and Mark DeWolf and just published by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy here in Winnipeg earlier this year.

 

Since the progressive wackos are calling for Canada Day to be cancelled, I encourage you this July 1^st to fly the old Red Ensign, sing “God Save the Queen” and “The Maple Leaf Forever”, raise your glass to Sir John and celebrate Dominion Day with gusto.   The only thing we need to be ashamed of in Canada is the way we have let these ninnies who are constantly apologizing for everything Canada has been and done in the past walk all over us.   While I seldom recommend emulating Americans in this case I say that it is time we forget about our customary politeness and take up the attitude of old Merle, who sang “When they’re runnin’ down my country, man, They’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me”.

The Stopped Clock

The proverbial stopped clock is right twice a day. I am using the expression metaphorically to refer to the person who through the ignorance which decades of academic decline and progressive media brainwashing have induced in our electorate now occupies the office of Prime Minister of Her Majesty’s government in the Dominion of Canada. I don’t think his actual track record is quite as good as a stopped clock. Indeed, twice a year might be pushing the boundaries of what is credible. Nevertheless, he was right on Monday. Or as close to being right as I have seen from him in a long time. 

He was in Montreal for some purpose or another related to the bat flu and the upcoming rape – thank you Dr. Paul Craig Roberts for pointing out the analogy – of the populace with injections of some noxious and satanic witch’s brew, when somebody asked him about the violent, Canada-hating, thuggish mob that tore down the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald on Saturday. His response was to say:

Those kind of acts of vandalism are not advancing the path towards greater justice and equality in this country. 

Now, this was a poor way of saying “it was wrong.” Justice and equality should never be linked because equality is often the exact opposite of justice. Justice is doing right by everybody. Equality is treating everybody the same. The image of equality is that of treating a stranger as well as you would treat your own brother. This is how it sells itself. The reality of equality, however, is that of treating your own brother as if he were a stranger. This is the opposite of justice, which demands not that we treat everybody as if they were the same, but that we treat everybody right, which is much more difficult. Equality is the easy, lazy, substitute for justice.

Furthermore, even if he had not added equality to justice in this way and had simply said “greater justice”, this wording suggests that the vandals were striving towards a worthy and admirable cause, they just went about it the wrong way. In reality, however, those who tore down Sir John’s statue were, like past zealots who have sought to erase history – and for those who think otherwise, while the past cannot be erased, it is entirely possible to erase history, for history is not just the past but, in the words of John Lukacs, “the remembered past” – are not admirable but misguided seekers after justice. They are the mob, the easily enflamed masses, stirred up by those who have incited hatred against our country, its history, its institutions, and its traditions.

I will return to that momentarily. Allow me to first conclude my reflection upon the Prime Minister’s words by saying that while it was a poor way of saying that the vandals were wrong, it was indeed a way of saying it, a condemnation of their actions. Erin O’Toole the new Conservative leader, Maxime Bernier the leader of the People’s Party of Canada, François Legault the Premier of Quebec, and Jason Kenney the Premier of Alberta each and all said it much better, but he did say it. It is right to give credit where credit is due, even if I am thinking of Sawyer Brown’s linking that proverb with thanking “the devil for the trouble that I get into” as I write this, and so kudos to the Captain, Canada’s stopped clock, for finally getting something right, in a way. 

Now, having gotten that out of the way, let us turn our attention back to the mob and the diabolical minds that have stirred up their passions and misdirected their energy. 

There are those who have tried to justify the actions of the mob by slinging mud at our first Prime Minister. Rather than re-invent the wheel, for those seeking answers to such people I refer you to Stephen K. Roney’s rebuttal of Bruce Katz, which can hardly be improved upon. To those looking for a fuller defence of Sir John I refer to my essay from two years ago entitled “Speaking Out For Old Tomorrow.” For those wanting a comprehensive rebuttal of the anti-Canada, Critical Race Theory, narrative as found in the Truth and Reconciliation Committee Report and the more recent report of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Committee, I refer you to the aforementioned Stephen Roney’s excellent book Playing the Indian Card: Everything You Know About Canada’s “First Nations” is Wrong.

The toppling of the statue, however, was an act of violence, directed not against Sir John A. Macdonald as an individual, but the country of which he is a symbol. Sir John A. Macdonald was the leading figure in Confederation, the discussion in which the provinces of British North America agreed to join into a federal union with our own Parliament under the Crown. He was the first Prime Minister of the Dominion of Canada and the man who saw her through the period in which she was most vulnerable to the various powerful commercial and political interests from the republic south of the border who wished the Confederation Project to fail that they might swallow up the pieces. He was the one who spearheaded the construction of the railroad which effectively thwarted the designs of Manifest Destiny and saw it through to its completion. It is no coincidence, that the Critical Race Theorists’ attempts to blacken his reputation take the form of a spurious and anachronistic deliberate misreading of everything he did in order to meet the obligations of the Dominion government under the treaties signed with the Indian tribes, and that those treaties just happened to have been negotiated as part of the process of building the railroad, settling the prairies and uniting the east with the west. The Critical Race Theorists know what they are doing and it is the Dominion of Canada the country, not Sir John A. Macdonald the man that is really under attack here. 

On a larger scale, of course, the attacks of this nature that we have seen occurring across Western Civilization are attacks upon that very civilization as well as the countries within it.

Neither the Dominion of Canada nor Western Civilization is beyond scrutiny and criticism, of course. Both are made up of fallible and deeply flawed human beings since other than the Son of God these are the only kind that can be found on this earth this side of Eden and prior to the Second Coming. The universal failings of human nature are a perpetual and unanswerable argument against those who would point to the inevitable shortcomings of human leaders, institutions, countries, and civilizations as grounds for razing them to the ground. Revolutionaries, no matter how lofty the ideals they preach, are fundamentally incapable of replacing an old order with a perfect and pristine new one, for they cannot escape participating in the same flawed nature as those who built the old one. In the end, all that revolutionaries can ever accomplish is to destroy all those things which meliorate the human condition and allow for the possibility of a good life for fallen human beings. We ought never to forget the words of the late Sir Roger Scruton that “good things are more easily destroyed than created.” 

The Dominion of Canada, established on a foundation of loyalty, honour, and continuity, has been blessed with an abundance of those good things. To list our constitution of parliamentary monarchy, and the civil rights, prescriptive liberties and judicial principles of the Common Law tradition, is to speak only of the most obvious civil or political examples of these. The way our political leaders and mass media commentators, from all sides of the political spectrum, feel constantly compelled to reduce all of these to “our democracy” has trivialized them, but that is a topic for another time. It is these good things that are under attack, when mobs stirred up by demon-inspired Critical Theory intellectuals, wage war on our country and civilization, by attacking its symbols and historic figures. 

If only the Prime Minister had included all of that in his answer.