The Courts

This week we in the Dominion of Canada received some good news from the Federal Court.   It came about a week after we received bad news from the Court of Appeal in Upper Canada.   The good news consisted of a ruling.   The bad news, by contrast, was a refusal to rule, or even to hear a case.   I take this as further support for my long-established opinion that the courts of Upper Canada are the most corrupt in the Dominion.   Except maybe the courts of British Columbia.

 

The bad news was that the Upper Canada – for those who insist upon being slaves to the present day, the contemporary and the up-to-date, this is what you would call Ontario – Court of Appeal had refused to hear the appeal of Jordan Peterson, the well-known psychologist, educator, author and philosopher, in his case against the province’s College of Psychologists, the body that issues his professional license.   The College had ordered him into sensitivity training because they didn’t like something he said on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.   The remark had nothing to do with his professional practice and was entirely political – he said something uncomplimentary about Captain Airhead.   That no professional licensing board ought to be able to discipline one of its members for expressing these sort of opinions in this way is a no-brainer.   Although Peterson could have just told the College to take a hike – he has not used his professional license in years and is not dependent upon it financially – he opted to take them to court and fight for the principle at stake.   Anybody whose job or career requires a professional license and who does not want the licensing board to be allowed to act as a proxy censor for his political or ideological opponents by blackmailing him into changing his opinions or keeping silent about them by holding a gun to his license should be grateful that someone was willing to do this.  

 

It should have been an easy win for Peterson.   The College of Psychologists was 100% in the wrong and should have been slapped down hard by the courts.   Instead the Divisional Court ruled in their favour.   By refusing to hear Peterson’s appeal, the Court of Appeal has closed the door to taking the case to a higher court.   You can only appeal rulings, not refusals to consider.   The right of a court to refuse to hear a case is for the purpose of preventing the judicial system from being swamped by trivial and nonsensical nuisance suits.   Like the man who dreams that his neighbour’s dog has torn up his flower bed and then repeatedly tries to sue his neighbour for damages.   This case is nothing like that.   The principle at stake - that professional licensing boards must not be allowed to serve as proxy censors for those who wish to “cancel” someone for his opinions – is vital and fundamental.   The Upper Canadian Court of Appeal, by abusing its right of refusal in this way, has demonstrated that it is no longer worthy of possessing that right.

 

The good news was that the Federal Court has ruled that Captain Airhead acted unreasonably in invoking the Emergencies Act on Valentine’s Day in 2022.   Captain Airhead, in case you are unfamiliar with him, is the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.   He has occupied the office of Prime Minister in His Majesty’s government in Ottawa since 2015.   He resembles nothing so much as the result of an experiment at producing a golem using bovine excrement rather than mud and the word  שֶׁקֶר (sheker, “lies”) rather than אֱמֶת (emet, “truth”).   The official story, however, is that he is the son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.  However he got here, we are in the ninth year of his misgovernment and everybody is pretty much sick of him.  

 

In 2022, we were going into the third year of the world-wide panic over a novel respiratory virus that proved to be more of a nasty strain of the flu than that apocalyptic, super-plague ala Stephen King’s The Stand that politicians, journalists, and the legal dope-peddlers that long ago supplanted the legitimate medical profession, claimed it to be.   By January 2022 the world was re-opening but Captain Airhead, who in the last Dominion election had flip-flopped and come down hard in favour of requiring people to take the experimental and inadequately tested new vaccines that had been rushed to production, hurling the most abusive terms in the liberal dictionary against anyone who thought correctly that the choice to be injected with such a substance must be strictly voluntary, doubled down and imposed new vaccine mandates as they were being lifted in other jurisdictions.   One such new mandate was on long-distance truck drivers who haul freight across the border with the United States.   In response, these truck drivers organized the biggest protest against heavy-handed, draconian, health protocols that Canada had yet seen.   Trucks from all over Canada formed the Freedom Convoy that descended upon Ottawa and encamped in the streets outside of Parliament.   It was an entirely peaceful protest that posed no threat to Canada’s national security.    The protesters basically threw a long, extended, block party in which they patriotically celebrated Canada and her traditional basic freedoms and exercised those freedoms in ways like associating with each other in large numbers, in person and close up that before 2020 we all took to be our basic Common Law right but which the politicians and health bureaucrats had been treating as crimes against humanity for two and a half years.   Their demands were quite reasonable – that the government abide by the constitutional limits on its powers, respect our fundamental freedoms, and stop committing the actual crime against humanity of forcing people, by denying them access to employment and society unless they comply, to agree to be injected with a foreign substance the safety of which they were not fully persuaded.  

 

Captain Airhead and his cronies refused to meet with the protesters to discuss their grievances, called them all sorts of bad names and accused them of all sorts of other political agendas that had nothing to do with the single-issue cause that brought them to Ottawa.   Then, on 14 February, Captain Airhead announced that he was invoking the Emergencies Act.  The Emergencies Act is a piece of legislation that was passed during the premiership of Brian Mulroney in 1988.  It replaced the War Measures Act that Captain Airhead’s father had invoked to crush the FLQ in the October Crisis of 1970.   In both cases this was major overkill.   The Emergencies Act like the War Measures Act gives the government extraordinary powers of detention by putting the governed under what is essentially martial law.   It came into effect immediately upon being invoked, although both Houses were required to confirm it.   When it became apparent the Senate was not likely to do so, Captain Airhead withdrew the invocation, but by this time the damage had been done.   The thuggish Ottawa police, led by one Steve Bell whose actions were so disgraceful that in my opinion the Canadian contemporary Christian artist of the same name might want to consider changing his, with the free rein given them had charged into the throng of protesters on horseback, trampling on some, beating others with batons, spraying many with pepper spray and tear gas, and otherwise brutalizing people who merely wanted the basic freedoms supposedly guaranteed to them by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms restored.   They were arrested in droves, their vehicles were vandalized and confiscated, and across the country the bank accounts of people who had donated to the protest were frozen.

 

In accordance with the requirements of the Emergencies Act an inquiry was called and while Captain Airhead attempted to frame the inquiry so that the light of its scrutiny fell upon the protesters rather than the government he led, he did not succeed in this.   During the proceedings, in which Captain Airhead and his ministers testified, the government claimed that it had received expert legal advice that the Emergencies Act was necessary and that the conditions for invoking it had been met but when asked to share that advice hid behind the privilege of counsel.   Despite their not being forthcoming with the supposed grounds of their thinking the use of the Emergencies Act was justified, in February of 2023 Justice Paul Rouleau who headed the inquiry declared that the findings of his commission were that the “very high threshold” for invoking the Emergencies Act had been met.   That this was not the case was obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together.   Rouleau’s ruling was widely dismissed as yet more Liberal Party cronyism.   Perhaps there is another explanation, but in any case, even had it ruled otherwise, the Public Order Emergency Commission was a toothless body that only had powers to investigate and give an opinion, not to make its findings binding in any way.

 

The Federal Court, by contrast, is a real court.   Its decisions are binding in law and affect future rulings.   When, therefore, its Justice Richard Mosley ruled that the government’s invocation of the Emergency Act “does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness – justification, transparency and intelligibility – and was not justified” this ruling has much more weight and potential consequences than had it come from Rouleau’s Public Order Emergency Commission.   It amounts, for example, to a ruling that Captain Airhead and his Cabinet broke the law.   Not just in the sense of a misdemeanour or even a regular felony.  They broke the law in what is arguably the worst possible way in which politicians can break the law.   Without meeting the requirements of the safeguards placed in the Emergencies Act to prevent this very situation, they invoked the Act in order to make use of the extraordinary powers it grants government in situations of real emergency and did so in order to essentially declare war on Canadians who posed no threat to national security and who were merely, peacefully if noisily, demanding that government abide by the constitutional limits on its powers.   We all knew at the time that this is what they were doing, this is what the testimony before the Public Order Emergency Commission indicates even if that body ruled otherwise, and now the Federal Court has affirmed it.

The only honourable thing left for Captain Airhead now – and for Chrystia Freeland and anyone else involved in that debacle – is to resign, and not just resign but follow the lead of David Lametti, who had been Minister of Justice and Attorney General at the time, and get out of politics altogether.   Unfortunately, people like Captain Airhead and Chrystia Freeland have no honour, and if they ever heard the word would probably have a conversation that would go like this:

 

Chrystia Freeland: “Duh, what’s honour?”

Captain Airhead: “Duh, I don’t know, a dress?”

Chrystia Freeland: “Duh, that’s sexist!”

 

My apologies for making Captain Airhead and Chrystia Freeland seem more intelligent in the above than they actually are.   It is difficult to invent dialogue that reaches their level of imbecility.

 

So they are likely going to cling to power to the bitter end.   Fortunately, coming so soon after a year in which what was left of their popularity rapidly swirled down the drain and was gone, this is probably going to hasten that end.

 

The Federal Court ruling could not have come at a better time.   Tucker Carlson, formerly of FOX News, now with the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, came up to Alberta this week to speak in Calgary and Edmonton.  He took our government to task for its promotion of Christophobic hate, for its promotion of social and cultural capital eroding mass immigration, for its insane MAID (medical assistance in dying) program and its equally insane drug policy (harm reduction through safe supply).   Needless to say, I have no objections to what Carlson said on these matters and probably agree with 98% of it if not higher.   It very much amused me to see Captain Airhead’s remaining flunkies, such as Steven Guilbeault whose past as an eco-nut ought to have disqualified him from his current position of Minister of Environment, have kittens over his speeches.   It is almost as comical as the mainstream media’s attempts to portray Carlson as a promoter of “white supremacy”.   One can only hope they continue to lay it on thick, because the more they do so, the less meaning that expression will have, and the sooner the day will come when liberals will no longer be able to use it as a stick to beat and frighten people with.    Most amusing of all, however, was how Carlson packaged his appearance by saying that he was coming to “liberate Canada” from Captain Airhead.  

 

This is funny on two levels.  There is the level intended by Carlson, which was basically the verbal equivalent of poking Captain Airhead in the eyes or pulling some other similar gag from the Three Stooges.   Then there is the level unintended by Carlson – the hilarity in the very idea of an American “liberating” Canada or anywhere else for that matter.   Americans believe their country to be uniquely built on liberty, and in a way that is true, but the American concept of liberty is basically what you get when you take the ancient heresy of Pelagianism and the Puritan version of Calvinism and produce a Hegelian synthesis from these antitheses. This is a pale substitute for freedom as conceived by pre-Modern orthodox Christianity, which flourishes best under the reign of a king, like our own King Charles III.    “Freedom” as John Farthing put it “wears a crown”.   The United States was founded in revolt against the order of Christendom, as modified in the English Reformation, and as Loyalist Canada inherited it.   As far from our roots as we have come, I note, that eventually, our Federal Court, ruled against the legality and constitutionality of Captain Airhead’s most egregious overstep over the powers of his office.   In Carlson’s own country, four years ago, Donald the Orange, winning a larger number of votes than when he was first elected president, somehow lost the election to J. Brandon Magoo, who was unpopular even among Democrat voters - how he got the nomination is something of a mystery, and who didn’t campaign.   Magoo, who obviously belongs in a rest home somewhere, is equally obviously the puppet of somebody else who is actually governing the United States in line with the globalist-internationalist-high immigration-free trade-invade-the-world-invite-the-world consensus that prevailed during the Bush I-Clinton-Bush II-Obama administrations and against which Donald the Orange had successfully campaigned.   For four years Americans have been kept from having any kind of serious national discussion about the shenanigans that clearly must have taken place for Magoo to have won that election, by the fear of reprisals from the regime.   This fear was instilled by the Magoo regime’s successful efforts to portray the events that transpired on Capitol Hill, Epiphany 2021 as an “insurrection” against the American order supported by the past president.   Before being ousted from FOX, Carlson broadcast film footage that cast serious doubt upon that narrative of which there had already been plenty of good reasons to be suspicious.   Captain Airhead in the narrative he tried to spin about the Freedom Convoy in invoking the Emergencies Act was clearly trying to import into Canada the narrative that has worked so well to prop up the Magoo regime in the United States.   He failed, however, to make the inquiry into the Emergencies Act a witch hunt for his political enemies, the way the Democrats have made the inquiries into the Capitol Hill incident a witch hunt against Donald the Orange and his supporters.   The inquiry was into his actions, not those of the Freedom Convoy.  When the Commission ruled in his favour, an actual Court finally ruled his actions to be illegal. Let us pray, for Tucker Carlson’s sake and for the sake of his country that the lies propping up the Magoo regime will meet with a similar fate.

God Save the King!

Freedom Under Siege

I have never thought very highly of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms which was added to our constitution in 1982.   Note the wording there.   The Charter is not itself our constitution but merely a part of it and a late addition at that.   Those who make the mistake of calling the Charter itself our constitution have bought in to the American superstition that a constitution is a piece of paper that keeps a government from going bad through its magical powers.    A constitution is a country’s system of law and government, the institutions that comprise it, and the traditions that inform their motions.   The largest part of it is unwritten and this is true even in the American republic.  Documents like our Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the one the Americans call their Constitution are merely parts of the Canadian and American constitutions respectively.   They are the laws that define and set limits to the power of government institutions.   They have no power to keep government within those limits apart from the loyalty of those who hold public office in obeying them, the willingness of the courts to uphold them, and the faithful vigilance of the public.

 

My low estimation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is not because I don’t like the rights and freedoms that are listed in that document.   With a few exceptions, such as the “equality rights” written in Animal Farm style doublespeak in Section 15, these are rights and freedoms that I consider to be among the most valuable elements of our Common Law tradition.   It is rather because the Charter has made these rights and freedoms less secure rather than more.   In part this is due to flaws in the Charter itself such as the “notwithstanding clause” in Section 33 and the broad loophole in Section 1 which effectually nullify the Charter as far as the whole point of constitutionally protected rights and freedoms, that is to say that they are supposed to limit what the government can do so as to protect us from the abusive exercise of its powers, goes.   The Charter’s loopholes and exceptions protect the government instead of us and for this reason former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was right to say that it is not worth the paper it is written on.   It is also, however, because the Charter has encouraged a way of thinking about our rights and freedoms in a way that is the fundamental opposite of that which has historically belonged to our Common Law and traditional institutions of constitutional monarchy and parliament.   It encourages us to think of our rights and freedoms as privileges bestowed upon us by government to be limited or taken away by government freely as it sees fit, rather than our own property.

 

The consequences of this way of thinking having become pervasive have been most evident over the course of the last year.   Section 2 of the Charter identifies four freedoms as being fundamental.   The first of these is freedom of conscience and religion.   The third is the freedom of peaceful assembly.  The fourth is the freedom of association.    The whole point, remember, of having the Charter designate these freedoms as essential is to place limits on government power, to tell the government that it must keep its hands off of these things.   Yet ever since the World Health Organization declared the spread of the Wuhan bat flu to be a pandemic last March, our provincial governments have treated these freedoms as if they were completely non-existent, much less fundamental and protected by constitutional law and the Dominion government has constantly been urging the provincial governments to clamp down on us in violation of these freedoms in even more severe ways.

 

In 1986 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in the case of R v Oakes.  David Oakes had been arrested with drugs in his possession and under what was then Section 8 of the Narcotics Control Act was presumed to be guilty of trafficking.   He challenged the constitutionality of Section 8 on the grounds that it violated the presumption of innocence, a civil right spelled out in Section 11 (d) of the Charter and which had been long established as part of the Common Law tradition.     That the provision of the NCA being challenged did indeed violate the civil right in question was easily demonstrated, but the Court then had to decide whether the violation was justifiable under the “reasonable limits” loophole in Section 1 of the Charter.   The Court’s ruling established what has ever since been the litmus test for this question.    The Court ruled that for a law which violates a Charter right or freedom to be justifiable under the “reasonable limits” clause, it first had to have a “pressing and substantial” goal.   Second, it had to meet the three qualifications of a) being “rationally connected” to the goal of the law, b) only impairing the rights and freedoms in question minimally, and c) not overwhelming the benefit hoped to be achieved with its negative effects.

 

It is quite obvious that the public health measures fail to meet the second of the three qualifications of the second part of the Supreme Court’s Oakes’ test.   When the public health officer tells you that you cannot have any visitors to your home, even if you meet outside, as is currently the case in Manitoba, he is clearly not trying to only “minimally impair” your freedom of association.   What he is doing is disregarding freedom of association entirely.   The provincial legislature is not allowed to do this constitutionally, nor can it delegate to the public health officer the authority to do so.   The legislature cannot delegate what it does not legitimately possess itself.   When the public health officer orders churches, synagogues, and mosques not to meet for the largest part of a year, cancels the most important festivals of these religions, and only permits re-opening at a severely reduced capacity that requires churches to betray the tenets of their own faith and turn worshippers away, he is similarly disregarding freedom of conscience and religion rather than making sure that his orders only “minimally impair” this freedom.    There is also plenty of evidence that the public health orders fail to meet the third qualification of the Oakes’ test as well.   The costs of lockdowns, measured in the destruction of lives due to the breakdown of mental health and the rise in substance abuse and suicides, the erosion of community and social capital, and the devastation of businesses and livelihoods, has been tremendous and far exceeds any questionable benefits of these insane, unjust, evil and oppressive restrictions.   Indeed, I believe the case could be made that the public health measures fail every single element of the Oakes’ test.

 

The provincial governments have gotten away with all this stercus tauri because they have until fairly recently met with only minimal resistance on the part of the Canadian public.   This can be attributed to a number of causes.   One of these, of course, is the hysterical and irrational fear generated by the mainstream corporate media that have been deceitfully and despicably portraying a virus that produces no to mild symptoms in most people who contract it, from which the vast majority of people who actually do get sick recover, and which in many if not most jurisdictions has an average age of fatality that is higher than the average expected lifespan of the general public, as if it were the second coming of the bubonic plague.   Another cause is the new attitude which has been encouraged among Canadians, especially by the Liberals, since 1982, of regarding our rights and freedoms as privileges bestowed upon us by the government in the Charter rather than what they are, our lawful property as free subjects of the Crown which it is the government’s duty to respect.  

 

The assault on our freedoms of religion, peaceful assembly, and association have come from the provincial governments.    At the same time the second of the four freedoms designated as fundamental in the Charter has come under attack from the Liberals who are in power in the Dominion government.    This is the freedom of “thought, belief, opinion and expression”.   Whereas our freedoms of religion, peaceful assembly, and association have never been this besieged before in Canadian history, our freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression has taken hits every time the Liberal Party led by a Trudeau has come to power in Ottawa.   It has been less than ten years since we finally got rid of one of the vilest elements of Pierre Trudeau’s legacy, the notorious Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.   While the entire Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977 is, in fact, an affront to freedom of thought because, despite its title, it has nothing to do with protecting our rights either as Canadians or human beings from government abuses, but is instead all about prohibiting the crimethink of discrimination on the part of individual Canadians, Section 13 was the Act’s worst provision by far.   By defining any electronic communication of information “likely to” expose someone protected against discrimination “to hatred or contempt” as an act of discrimination it in effect forbade all negative criticism of groups protected against discrimination or individuals belonging to such groups, regardless of the truthfulness or justice of the criticism in question.  

 

Section 13 was finally abolished during the premiership of Stephen Harper thanks to a private member’s bill repealing the foul section that received enough support from Conservative MPs and Liberal MPs of the pre-Trudeau variety – these had not yet been purged from the party – to pass Parliament.    Neither Stephen Harper nor his Minister of Multiculturalism, Jason Kenney, who is currently overseeing the throwing of pastors in gaol and the barricading of churches in Alberta, had much to do with this for although they had spoken out against Human Rights Tribunals and their unjust infringement upon freedom of thought and speech on their road to power, in office they betrayed most of what they had once stood for, apparently having sold their souls to get there.  The demise of Section 13 has long been lamented by Pierre Trudeau’s son, Captain Airhead, and when he became Prime Minister in 2015 he dropped a number of hints that he would be seeking to revive it.   The appeal of Section 13 to Captain Airhead was based on more than just the fact that it had been originally introduced when his father was in power.   More than any previous Liberal leader, Captain Airhead has been of the mindset that once a progressive goal has been attained, all debate about it ought to cease.   This was evident even before he became Prime Minister when he purged the party of its pro-life members.   More than any previous Liberal leader, he has enthusiastically endorsed fringe progressive causes that could not possibly achieve widespread popular support on their own merits without measures that intimidate and suppress dissenters.   More than any previous Liberal leader he has been prone to tell Canadians who disagree with him that they are not welcome in their own country.   He has used the expression “there is no place for X in Canada” far more liberally than any previous leader and with a much wider range of Xs. (1)   In all of this he has demonstrated the sort of sick, censorious, mindset to which something like Section 13 appeals.    In December of 2019, after he won re-election in the sense that he managed to squeak out a plurality despite falling majorly in the polls from where he had been four years previously, he instructed his Cabinet that fighting online “hate speech” would be one of their priorities in the new session of Parliament.   Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault was specifically charged with finding a way to force social media platforms to remove what the Liberals consider to be “hate speech” within twenty-four hours of being told by the government to do so.   This would be Section 13 magnified to the nth degree.

 

In response to this directive, Guilbeault came up with a bill that pursued the same goal as Section 13 through a different avenue.   Last November he introduced Bill C-10, or “An Act to Amend the Broadcasting Act” into Parliament.   This bill if passed would place internet media under the same regulatory authority of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) as older electronic media such as radio and television broadcasters.   By going this route, Guilbeault could maintain that his goal was not to censor what individual Canadians post on the internet, but to ensure that the companies that make shows and movies available through online streaming follow the same Canadian content guidelines as other broadcasters, a goal consistent with his portfolio as Heritage Minister.   That having been said, the Bill as originally drafted would have given the CRTC regulatory authority over individual Canadians’ user-generated content on social media.   When objections to this were raised the Bill was amended to include an exception for individual user-generated content, but this exception was removed in committee late last month around the same time that the government moved to shut down debate on a motion that the Conservatives had introduced calling for a review of whether or not the bill violated the Charter.   None of this inspires much confidence in the Heritage Minister’s claim that the aim of this bill is cultural protectionism and not censorship of thought.   On Monday, faced with backlash over all of this, Guilbeault promised that they would make it “crystal clear” that the user-generated content will not be subjected to the same sort of regulatory control as television programming.   Needless to say, he ought not to be taken at his word on this.    Indeed, Michael Geist, the law professor at the University of Ottawa who has been one of the foremost critics of Bill C-10, has already said that the amendment the Heritage Committee proposed on Thursday evening fails to follow through on Guilbeault’s promises.

 

It is worth observing here that with Bill C-10, Captain Airhead and Steven Guilbeault have returned to the very first thing the original Trudeau Liberals did to control the minds of Canadians and limit their freedom of thought.   At the very beginning of the first Trudeau premiership the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker pointed out how the Liberals were threatening freedom of thought through the powers of the CRTC.   In a speech entitled “The Twilight of Liberty”, the second included in the collection Those Things We Treasure (Macmillan, 1972), Diefenbaker said:

 

The Trudeau Government seems to be dedicated to controlling the thinking of Canadians.   Through the power being exerted by Pierre Juneau, as Chairman of the Canadian Radio and Television Commission, (2) private radio and T.V. station proprietors in Canada are frightened to speak, fearful of being subject to the cancellation of their licences.   One such station was CKPM in Ottawa, which dared to have an open line program critical of the Government.  Pierre Juneau did come before a Committee of the House and he uttered lachrymose words in reply to the criticism leveled at him that he wishes to determine what Canadians shall hear, and to deny them the right to listen to what they will.   His attitude was different when he spoke to the Association of Private Broadcasting Companies and in effect stated: “When I ope my lips, let no dog bark.” Under him the broadcasting network owned by the people of Canada is allowed to broadcast what he permits.

 

Diefenbaker’s warning of decades ago has gone largely unheeded, perhaps because the CRTC’s official raison d’être  is cultural protectionism which appeals to a much broader range of Canadians than its more covert purpose of limiting freedom of thought.   Certainly right-of-centre Canadians of the more traditional variety, such as Diefenbaker himself or this writer, would have no objections to the idea that Canadian culture ought to remain Canadian.   It needs to be pointed out, however, that the CRTC has been a total failure in this regards.    Fifty-three years later, the Canada of 2021 is far more Americanized culturally than the Canada of 1968 was.   Indeed, much of what Canadians regard as distinctly “Canadian” culture today, is merely Hollywood culture with a maple leaf stamped on it.   Read the novels of Mazo de la Roche and Robertson Davies if you want a taste of the more authentic pre-CRTC Canadian culture.    Since the CRTC failed in its official appointed task, probably because its real purpose was thought control all along, there is hardly grounds here for extending its reach over the new online media.    Indeed, the scarcely disguised agenda of censorship and thought control behind the move to so extend its reach, is sufficient reason why this bill, amended or otherwise, must never be allowed to pass.  It is also more than sufficient reason for voting the Trudeau Liberals who dreamed it up in the first place out of Parliament and never allowing them to resume power again.   For as Rex Murphy pointed out earlier this week, “What is more galling and more threatening that the bill itself, however, is the set of mind behind it”, and that won’t go away even if the bill itself does.

 

(1)       Disturbingly, the leaders of the other parties – including the present leader of the Conservatives – have taken to aping his example in this.

(2)       The full name of this agency was changed into the awkward and absurd redundancy that it is now in 1976, but the acronym remains the same.