Yet Another Big Leap Downwards

The Whiteoak Brothers is, in order of publication, the thirteenth in Mazo de la Roche’s series of novels chronicling the lives of the Whiteoak family of Jalna manor in rural Ontario. Set in the year 1923 it is the sixth in the series by order of internal chronology. In the sixteenth chapter of the novel, Wakefield Whiteoak, the youngest of the family’s third generation, is placed under the tutorage of the Reverend Mr. Fennell, the rector of the Anglican parish church that had been built by his grandfather Captain Whiteoak. He was unable to attend regular classes due to a diagnosis of a weak heart and had previously been taught by his older sister Meg, who now found him too much of a handful. In their first session with the vicar they discuss Wakefield’s grandmother, who is approaching her centennial, causing the rector to speculate:

“If you live to her age, I wonder what sort of world this will be. The year 2013—hm.”

We, of course, do not need to engage in such speculation as we are now living in the second year beyond the annum specified. I suspect that if a vision of the present day had been given to a clergyman ninety years ago he would have been horrified at what he saw. A great many changes have occurred since 1923 and, indeed, since 1953, the year the words quoted above saw print for the first time. They have almost all been for the worse, but that goes without saying as the vast majority of all change – a good 99.99% at least – is always for the worse.

Some of these changes have been specific to Canada, rendering our country virtually unrecognizable as the same Dominion in which the Jalna saga is set, and in which de la Roche, who died in 1961, lived all her life. We are coming up close, for example, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Pearson Liberals’ changing of our national flag from the Canadian Red Ensign to the Maple Leaf, which, despite Allan Levine’s recent remarks to the contrary in the opinion pages of the Winnipeg Free Press, was an attack on our country’s British heritage, and a slap in the face of all the Canadian veterans who fought under the Red Ensign in our country’s finest moment when we stood with Britain against the Axis powers from the beginning of the Second World War.

Other changes, however, have been part of a wave of change that has swept Western civilization as a whole. There are many factors that contributed to bringing about this wave of change. One of these was the drawing to an end of the Modern Age, itself brought about by the triumph of liberalism, the moving and energizing spirit of the Modern Age, which had more or less completed all of its original goals by the middle of the twentieth century (and had also seen its claims to be able to provide a better and brighter future for man aptly refuted and debunked by the two World Wars, the rise of a whole new scale of tyranny made possible by modernity in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and the invention of the atomic bomb). Another factor was cultural Marxism, i.e., the infiltration and takeover of the political, social, academic, cultural, and other institutions of Western civilization by those who were intent upon redirecting these institutions towards the subversion of the civilization and ordered societies they comprise.

This wave of change has not yet ebbed out or shown any indication that it will do so within the foreseeable future. Instead, it has swept away yet another remnant of what used to be our civilization, as the Supreme Court of Canada, yesterday, in a unanimous decision, struck down the law against assisted suicide. Their ruling, in a case brought before them by the BC Civil Liberties Association, was that the law violated the worthless appendage to our constitution that Pierre Trudeau tacked on when he had it repatriated in 1982. Last year, Steven Fletcher, the MP for Charleswood-St. James-Assiniboia here in Winnipeg had introduced bills that would have legalized assisted suicide in certain circumstances. It is expected that Parliament will pass new laws to replace the ones struck down. If the present government’s track record is anything to go by I would not anticipate any improvement. In December of 2013 the Supreme Court struck down our laws against prostitution and the present government replaced them with a horrible new unjust law based on a bill passed by the rabidly egalitarian, socialist, and feminist government of Sweden in 1999.

There is a great deal of muddled thinking about assisted suicide today. Suicide means the deliberate taking of positive action towards ending one’s life. The person who knowingly ingests cyanide is committing suicide, the person who refuses treatment that will prolong his life, is not. It needs to be clear that to prohibit assisted suicide does not mean that people should be forced to go on life support, to take chemotherapy, or undergo any other potentially life-extending treatment. The question of assisted suicide is not even a question of whether a person has the right to take his own life or not, although the assertion that he does ought be challenged because it is itself a manifestation of an idea that is far too uncritically accepted today, namely the autonomy of the individual and his absolute right to do whatever he wills provided that others are not adversely affected It is a question of whether he has the right to involve other people in the deliberate termination of his life. This is a question to which the answer ought to be a resounding no. Of course nobody should have the right to place the burden of terminating his life on another person’s shoulders.

Allowing assisted suicide is the first step down a slippery slope. The next step is allowing doctors to decide to terminate the lives of people who cannot make the decision to terminate their lives for themselves. Make no mistake – this next step will follow the first one. For decades now, the kind of people who have been making radical changes have been pooh-poohing everyone who has warned about a slippery slope, and each time we ended up sliding down that slope. The justices of the Supreme Court of Canada must be frothing-at-the-mouth mad to think it wise or right to start the ball rolling on giving physicians, a notoriously arrogant class of people who have great difficulty with differentiating or distinguishing between themselves and God, the power of life and death. Apart from the matter of their inflated egos, physicians are required to swear a solemn oath that includes a pledge to do no harm. Terminating someone’s life is the ultimate in harmdoing. The physician willing to assist in suicide, therefore, is an oathbreaker, and hence somebody who should not be trusted, and certainly not trusted with power over whether people live or die.

Years ago, the television cartoon The Simpsons ran an episode in which Homer Simpson was put in a coma by an exploding beer can in an April Fool’s joke gone wrong. Mr. Burns, complaining of the hospital bills his company’s insurance was having to cover, brought in Dr. Nick Riviera who looked at Homer and concluded “Oh dear, I can find no signs of life. Just to be safe, we’d better pull the plug”. At the time this was brilliant satire. Now, thanks to our satire-killing Supreme Court, it seems more like a dark foreshadowing of things to come.

It would be nice to think that those who we send to Parliament to write Her Majesty’s laws for us will find away of rescuing us from the goofy decision by the clowns on the bench to allow the medical profession to decide whether we live or die. I wouldn’t wager a plugged nickel on that happening, though. I’m afraid things are only going to progress from here in the more honest meaning of the word progress, i.e., get worse.

Three Cheers For the Supreme Court

Those who sit as judges in Her Majesty’s courts perform a role that calls not only for an extensive knowledge of the law but for the virtues of justice and prudence and above all else for wisdom. The higher the court and the more final its decision the more vital it is that that its member judges possess these qualities. It is of the utmost importance, therefore, that the Chief Justice of Canada and the eight Puisne Judges who with the Chief Justice make up the highest court in the land, be models of Solomonic wisdom.

I have not always been impressed by the decisions that our courts have issued. Indeed, decision after decision to give the perpetrators of serious crimes a slap on the wrist while allowing frivolous and expensive lawsuits by people whose feelings have been hurt or, even worse, who wish to use the courts to harass their ideological opponents, have often left the impression that the path to appointment to the bench starts in the monkey cage at the zoo.

This was not the case with the ruling the Supreme Court handed the Prime Minister’s Office last Friday. Asked to review the constitutionality of Prime Minister Harper’s proposals for reforming the Senate, the Supreme Court told him that any such reforms would require the consent of the provinces. To make major reforms he would need the consent of a majority of the promises, to abolish it outright would require unanimous consent.

In issuing this ruling, the Supreme Court did its job and did it superbly. It did not create new law by fiat, but reminded the Prime Minister – and the Opposition Leader who has been beating drums for Senate abolition – of what they should have already known, namely, that Canada has a constitution, with a formula for amendment, and that there are no shortcuts to amendment because changing the constitution is a far more serious process than changing the law and is not something to be done on the quick. This is something that Stephen Harper, of all people, should have known because he is leader of the Conservative Party, and respect for the constitution and an unwillingness to allow it to be changed at a whim is a fundamental Tory principle.

It is not a question of whether Senate reform is in itself desirable or whether or not the specific reforms proposed by Prime Minister Harper are good or bad. That the Senate is in need of serious reform has been obvious for decades. The need is there but it is not urgent, despite the recent media hype over how certain Senators have abused their expense accounts. The Prime Minister’s proposals were for Senators to be elected to office and for term limits to be set for them. While I can understand why he thinks these are good ideas they are not the kind of reforms I would like to see. I think that the Senate should remain an appointed body but that control over who the Governor General appoints should be removed from the Prime Minister’s Office and put in the hands of an appointment committee composed of representatives of the provincial governments. I would like to see the property ownership requirements for Senators be updated to reflect the inflation that has taken place since 1867 and their salaries either eliminated or reduced to an honorarium. Rather than impose a term limit on Senators, I would prefer to see the minimum age for Senate appointment raised to about fifty. I think these reforms are more appropriate for Canada than the Triple-E model that the Reform Party favoured but I would not want to see them brought in without provincial consent either. The constitutional amendment formula must be respected because to fail to respect that process is to fail to respect the constitution itself.

The proposals for Senate reform that I just suggested differ from the Triple-E model that the Reform Party advocated and which is the basis of Prime Minister Harper’s proposals in that they are not based upon the assumption that making the Senate better means making it more democratic. The equation of good government with democracy is a very modern and very erroneous idea which lies beneath both the desire for an elected Senate on the part of the supposedly right-wing support base of the old Reform Party and the desire to abolish the Senate on the part of the left-wing NDP. The reforms that I would prefer to see are based upon respect for Canada’s parliamentary monarchy form of government and the tradition from which we obtained that form of government. They take into consideration both the current problems with the Senate, the role the Senate was intended by the Fathers of Confederation to play in government, and offer suggestions as to how to get fix as much as is possible the former and help the Senate to perform the latter that are consistent with the history and tradition of our constitution.

The problem with the Senate is that it is used by whichever party happens to be in power in the lower House as a means of rewarding people who have served the party by providing them with a cushy position that comes with a large salary and fat expense account and a minimal amount of responsibility. When Canada’s Fathers established the Senate, modifying the House of Lords in the British parliamentary model to fit the Canadian situation, they intended for it to serve as a sort of brake on those in power in the lower House. The Senate would review the legislation they passed and provide a “sober second thought” so that the party which commanded a majority in the lower House could not simply rush through legislation that might ultimately be to the detriment of the country. Needless to say, the Senate cannot very well perform this function if it is constantly being stacked by the government to which it is supposed to act as a brake.

Removing control of appointments to the Senate from the Prime Minister’s Office would prevent the Prime Minister from being able to stack the Senate and use it as a rubber stamp on whatever he wants thus enabling it to serve its original function better. Updating the property requirements for Senators and removing the perks of the position would help insure that Senate seats are filled by public minded and spirited people rather than those hoping to grow fat off the public purse. Raising the minimum age for Senators would help make sure that the Senate does provide the needed “sober second thought” because wisdom, contrary to the folly of the youth-worshipping zeitgeist, comes with age.

All of these reforms would be superior to just making the Senate more democratic. The ancients recognized that just as there are good kings and bad kings, and an elite may be either a wise and public spirited aristocracy or an arrogant and selfish oligarchy, so democracy can be both good and bad as well. Therefore, they reasoned, the best constitutional arrangement would include a king, an aristocracy, and a form of democracy so that each of these elements of government would check the tendency towards the bad in the others and bring out the tendency towards the good. This is, of course, what we have in the parliamentary monarchy system that we inherited and adapted from Britain. The desire to democratize the non-democratic elements misses the point altogether and replaces the wisdom of the ancients with the folly of the modern.

Reforms that respect the constitution and the tradition on which it is based are democratic in another sense of the word, the best sense of the word, that of which G. K. Chesterton wrote when he said that he wanted a democracy that does not exclude members of a society from the franchise on the grounds that they are no longer among the living. It is tradition to which he was referring, the only kind of democracy that can give a vote to all members of a society, the dead and the unborn as well as the living. In this sense of the word democracy, the will of the people is not to be equated with whatever the majority of the populace can be persuaded to say they want at any given moment. This concept of democracy suits our constitution well for in it, the task of representing the people as an organic whole, including past and future generations as well as the present, is assigned to an office that is above elections and the political process, the office of the Queen.

The Supreme Court, by insisting that any government wishing to make significant changes to the structure of the Senate must follow the amendment procedure in the constitution, has declared that the government must respect the constitution and the tradition upon which it is built. Critics of their decision may complain that the Court is standing in the way of the will of the people and of democratic reform, but it is in keeping with the Chestertonian “democracy of the dead” which is the best form of democracy and perhaps the only one truly worthy of honour.

So three cheers and kudos to the Supreme Court. This time, at least, they did their job well.

Just Say No to the Nordic Model

In 1988, when the Supreme Court of Canada handed down its ruling in R. v. Morgentaler, our laws against abortion were already quite light, having been liberalized by Pierre Elliot Trudeau, our worst Prime Minister ever and the father of the dingbat who is currently leader of the Liberal Party, within months of his taking over the reins of power from Lester Pearson. This did not prevent the Supreme Court from ruling against Her Majesty the Queen and in favour of a Polish born quack who had survived the Holocaust of Dachau to pursue a career of killing the unborn here in Canada. All existing laws against abortion were struck down and no government since has succeeded in introducing new ones. Nor has any government since Mulroney’s seriously tried. As a result, there continue to be no legal restrictions on the clinical killing of foeti prior to and up until the moment of birth and, thanks to Tommy Douglas’ single-payer health system, every Canadian with enough moral sanity to recognize that abortion is murder, has to contribute to it through his taxes.

Last December, the Supreme Court had another such Solomonic moment. Just before Christmas they decided to hand out tricks as well as treats and made it their ruling in Canada v. Bedford that the laws against running brothels, soliciting on the streets, and living off of prostitution were unconstitutional. Parliament was given one year to come up with better laws in the duration of which the old ones will remain in effect. If Parliament fails to do so, as of December there will be no legal restrictions on prostitution in Canada.

While the ruling in Morgentaler was stupid, unconscionable, and downright evil, the ruling in Bedford does make a certain amount of sense. Prostitution itself was not illegal in Canada. Therefore, all that these laws that were ruled unconstitutional actually did was to harass people engaged in what is technically a legal trade. This is hardly right and fair and those who fought for the elimination of such laws had a point when they argued that this kind of legislation made the trade more dangerous for those involved.

Why not make prostitution itself illegal then?

Well, the problem with that solution is that prostitution is just the sale of sexual intercourse. Like most Western countries, Canada has liberalized its laws so that sexual immorality itself, fornication, adultery, etc. is neither prohibited nor punished by law. There are good arguments that can be made for and against this liberalization. The case against it is that it weakens marriage, the family, and the social order in general. The case in favour of it is that to be enforceable, laws against sexual immorality would require that we empower the police to spy on people in the privacy of the bedroom. These arguments are both quite strong, indeed, they are ironclad. Whichever argument you or I might think to be the best, the political reality is that the only change we are likely to see any time in the near future is in the direction of further liberalization. This is my point – in the absence of laws against sexual immorality, laws prohibiting prostitution do not make sense. Such laws would in effect be saying to people “screw around all you want, just don’t let any money change hands while you are doing it.” Surely the stupidity in that is plain to be seen.

Given my druthers, I would have the government take the opportunity the Supreme Court has handed it, to decentralize and localize legislation restricting prostitution. Of all conceivable laws restricting the sale of sex, the kind that seem the most sensible and necessary to me are those that are passed locally, are locally enforced and which are designed to keep it out of residential neighborhoods and away from schools and playgrounds. Have Parliament hand over the regulating and restricting of prostitution entirely to city, town, and municipal governments that make laws only for themselves and the neighborhoods they live in. Nothing further is necessary.

Now, not everybody would agree with this, naturally, and it would be a dull world if that were not the case. There are those who think of prostitution in the same way that the neo-Puritans of the early twentieth century viewed the consumption of alcohol and the neo-Puritans of the late twentieth century regarded the use of narcotics – as a great and terrible evil towards the stomping out of which all the powers of government must be marshalled. We all know how well Prohibition and the War on Drugs turned out, after all.

One person who prefers the neo-Puritan, prohibitionist approach to prostitution is Joy Smith, the Conservative Member of Parliament for the constituency of Kildonan-St. Paul here in Winnipeg. Smith is a moral crusader, noted for her efforts against human trafficking. This is to her credit, of course, as no sane person could find anything defensible in human trafficking. Her response to the Supreme Court’s ruling that our prostitution laws need to be rewritten has been to campaign for what is called the “Nordic model”, i.e., the kind of laws that are in place in Sweden.

A red flag should have popped up immediately at the mention of Sweden. Sweden is a country that has much to admire including her constitutional monarchy and her national, albeit now disestablished, church that combines a Lutheran confession with the historical episcopacy. These are all centuries old, however. While Sweden may still be impressive in terms of her unusually high quality pop groups, her beautiful women and her Muppet chefs, her statesmanship has long left something to be desired. Her abandonment of her long-established traditional cultural identity for multiculturalism, extreme political correctness, and bizarre obsession with turning sex into something one chooses rather than something one is born with, all lead one to the inevitable conclusion that, not to put too fine a point on it, the members of her polite class have all gone børking mad. She is the last country whose recent political innovations we ought to consider imitating.

What the Nordic model entails is simply this – laws that target the customer rather than the provider, the john rather than the prostitute. While this approach makes a certain amount of sense from an economic point of view – cut off the demand and there will be no incentive for there to be a supply – it is highly dubious from the ethical point of view. Think of what the equivalent strategy in combatting the drug trade would look like. It would mean having law enforcement focus on arresting users for drug possession rather than going after dealers, supplies, and smugglers. Indeed, the police have often come under criticism for doing just that.

Someone might object to that comparison by saying that in drug trafficking the supplier is the victimizer, taking advantage of his client’s addiction to make a profit out of selling him the meanas of his own destruction whereas in prostitution it is the supplier, the hooker, who is the victim. The problem with that reasoning is that if prostitutes are victims as a class, their victimizers are not the people Joy Smith and company wish to punish. Individually, prostitutes may frequently suffer violence at the hands of individual clients. As a class, they can only rightly be regarded as the victims of the men who through various means force them into prostitution, i.e., their pimps. We could pass laws targeting the kind of men who kidnap girls, addict them to drugs, and force them to sell their bodies. Those laws would for the most part look identical to the laws the Supreme Court struck down.

The fact of the matter is that the clients of prostitution are a class of victims too, the victims of feminism. The true purpose of feminism, the so-called ”women’s movement”, was never to benefit women so much as to break the one woman for one man pattern of traditional, monagamous, marriage so that alpha males could horde women. It is from the deprived and desperate numbers of the beta-or-lower males that the client base for prostitution is derived. There is more than a hint of feminism in the movement to rewrite the prostitution laws to punish the clients rather than the prostitutes. This means that if the laws are changed in this way, feminism will have succeeded in victimizing this class twice over.

Rather than jump on this bandwagon of injustice, it would be far better to either return to the status quo ante, go for complete liberalization, or follow my earlier suggestion of decentralized, local regulations and restrictions.

Finally, if an attempt to starve off prostitution by cutting off the demand is still seen as desirable, then the best way to do so is not to introduce laws targetting the clients, but by cleaning up the sex-saturated culture and passing laws that strengthen rather than weaken the traditional family and marriage. Just as the trade in destructive narcotics will not go away as long as pharmacetical companies continue to promote their products as the instant cure to all your pain in their advertisements, so the demand for prostitution will not lessen as long as television, movies, magazines and books continue to preach the message "just do it" and to use sex to sell their products.