The Canadian Left Apes the Americans Yet Again

 

On Monday, the twenty-first of February, even though the border blockades had been removed – they were in the process of being removed at the very moment the Emergency Measures Acts was invoked the week prior – and the Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa had been dispersed over the weekend through an ugly display of police state brutality that is utterly out of place in a Commonwealth Realm and has tarnished Canada’s reputation, Captain Airhead nevertheless managed to get enough votes in the House of Commons to confirm his use of the EMA.   Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, the Conservatives, voted against the confirmation, as did the Lower Canadian separatists, but the Liberals all voted for it as did Jimmy Dhaliwal’s socialists.  The latter compromised the historical principles of their party to do so.  In 1970 they had been the only party in Parliament to take a principled stand against the War Measures Act when Captain Airhead’s father had invoked it in an actual emergency (bombs, kidnapping, murder, that sort of thing).   In 2022 they propped up the government in using the Emergency Measures Act against a peaceful, working-class, protest, despite warnings from retired members of the NDP old guard, like Svend Robinson, that they were throwing their legacy away in doing so.   

 

 

In the debate leading up to the vote, Captain Airhead and the other ministers of the government were repeatedly asked why they were still taking this to a vote even though the protest was over.   No convincing answer was provided.  The House was told that there was still an emergency, that they would just have to trust the government, and that how they voted would reflect whether they did so trust the government or not.   This was how the Prime Minister and Mr. Dhaliwal cracked the whip on their caucuses to prevent members from breaking ranks.   The implication was that it was a confidence vote, which if the government lost would dissolve Parliament, leading to an immediate new Dominion election – less than half a year after the last one – in which the leaders could punish dissenters by not signing their candidacy papers.

 

 

Two days after having thus given us his rendition of the role of Supreme Chancellor Palpatine from Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, the Prime Minister revoked the Emergency Measures Act.    There was, of course, no more of an emergency on Monday than there was on Wednesday, nor had there ever been an emergency of the type that would justify the invoking of the Emergency Measures Act.    While we cannot know for certain what was going on in the empty space between Captain Airhead’s ears, we can be sure that it was not a sudden epiphany about the importance of respecting constitutional limits on government powers – he would have resigned immediately had that been the case – and that three factors likely had a significant role to play in his turnaround.   One of these is that he had taken a severe beating in the international press.   The second is that the Big Five – Canada’s largest banks – would have explained to the government how that forcing financial institutions to act as the government’s thought police undermines those institutions’ credibility, both domestic and international, and threatens the entire financial superstructure of the country, already weakened by years of reckless government financial policy.   The last, but not least, factor was that the government was losing the debate in the Chamber of Sober Second Thought.   This is not like a bill of legislation which gets sent back to the House if the Senate does not approve.   A vote against confirming the use of the Emergency Measures Act in the Senate, and the indicators all suggested that the Senate would vote against confirmation, would immediately revoke the Act.   Which would make things far more difficult for the Prime Minister in the official inquiry into his actions that must necessarily follow the use of the EMA than a voluntary withdrawal of the power.

 

 

There is a lot that could be said about how this episode provides further demonstration of many of the truths that I have written about over the years.   It demonstrates that democracy is not the same thing as either constitutionally limited government or personal freedom.   The Prime Minister asked the elected House of Commons to approve his inappropriate use of an Act giving him sweeping powers to trample over our freedoms in order to crush a peaceful protest and they did so.   It demonstrates that the Westminster System of Parliament is much more than a democracy.  It is an institution that has proven itself over time to be effective at protecting personal freedom and checking the excesses of government, even democratic government, and its unelected components have as much to do with making it work as the elected House.   It demonstrates that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is absolutely useless as a safeguard of personal rights and freedoms.   The Grit government insisted that its actions under the EMA would be consistent with the Charter.   If allowing the government to freeze bank accounts, a) without a court order and b) without liability or any civil recourse for those whose accounts are so frozen is consistent with the Charter, then the Charter is empty and meaningless.   A government that can do that is a government that recognizes no constitutional limitations. It demonstrates that Liberal Prime Ministers, especially those with the last name Trudeau, see democracy in terms of elected dictatorship.  

 

 

It also demonstrates that the Canadian Left is incapable of independent thought and borrows all of its bad ideas from the United States.

 

 

This has always been the case.   The Liberal Party, which began as the centre-left party that developed out of the pre-Confederation Reform movement, was, before being captured by the harder New Left in the 1960s, the party that envisioned Canada’s destiny in American terms.   It was the party that advocated for North American free trade for a century before the Conservatives under Brian Mulroney sold out their own legacy and signed the US-Canada Free Trade Deal.   It was the party that wanted greater economic, cultural, and political alignment between Canada and the United States.   Liberal theorists such as Goldwin Smith were arguing for formal union between the two countries as early as the 1890s.   The Liberal interpretation of Canadian history retold it as if it were simply a re-run of American history with the same goals accomplished by compromise and negotiation rather than war and bloodshed.   John Wesley Dafoe, a prominent exponent of this interpretation as well as the Liberal propagandist who edited the Winnipeg Free Press for the first half of the twentieth century, entitled his fanciful view of our history Canada: An American Nation.

 

 

This looking to the United States for inspiration did not die out after the Liberal Party swung to the hard left.  When Pierre Trudeau became Prime Minister of Canada in the late 1960s he exponentially expanded the welfare state.   His inspiration for this was Lyndon Johnson’s similar expansion of social programs in the United States.   LBJ had his “Great Society”, PET had his “Just Society”.   The Canadian social security net that  he so expanded had been similarly introduced in the late 1930s based on the model of FDR’s New Deal in the United States and given the same name.     In 1977, the Trudeau Liberals talked Parliament into passing the Canadian Human Rights Act.   This Act had nothing to do with human rights in the ordinary sense of basic rights belonging to all people that need protection against the power of the state.   It gave the state more power -power that government ought never to have - power to police the thoughts and motives of individual Canadians in their personal and business interactions with one another.   It declared "discrimination" to be against the law - not discrimination by the government but by private Canadians - made it a civilly liable offence with criminally punitive consequences, established an investigative body, the Canadian Human Rights Commission to investigate complaints at the public expense and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal to hear such complaints.   It was a system stacked against the accused, in complete contradiction of the principles the Canadian system of law and justice are based upon, and it became the means whereby the oppressive atmosphere of restricting thought and censoring speech known as political correctness escaped the confines of left-liberal academe where it had developed into the general culture which in turn allowed political correctness in academe to evolve into the more warped version of itself that exists today, wokeness, characterized not so much by self-censorship of thought and speech but by the silencing and destruction of others.   Pierre Trudeau modelled the Canadian Human Rights Act on an American law passed thirteen years earlier - the US Civil Rights Act.  Canada’s constitution is a mixture of the written and unwritten.   In 1982, Pierre Trudeau oversaw the patriation of the principle document of the written part so as to make it amendable by the Canadian Parliament and in the process prefixed to it the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.   The Charter, over the course of the last two years has been shown to be useless as a protection of Canadians' basic rights and freedoms from governments, Dominion and provincial, determined not to let those rights and freedoms stand in the way of sweeping public health measures.   Over the past forty years, however, it has proven remarkably effecting at Americanizing our Supreme Court in the sense of empowering it to overturn local laws, customs, and traditions older than Confederation and to secularize public schools (In the last decade or so left-liberal commentators have taken to speaking without irony of Canada's tradition of "separation of church and state" when we have no such tradition, separation of the two being a distinguishing trait of the American tradition).    The Charter, in other words, has all of the negatives and few if any of the positives, of the document Pierre Trudeau looked to for inspiration - the American Bill of Rights.

  

Now consider the response of the Canadian Left - the Prime Minister and the Liberal Party, Jimmy Dhaliwal and the socialist party, the legacy media public and private - to the Freedom Convoy.    From their initial response as the trucks were heading towards Ottawa, through their commentary on the weeks long demonstrations, and their claims as the Emergency Measures Act was invoked and an ugly, militarized, police force were sent in to trample elderly women with horses, arrest protestors at gun point, beat people with batons and otherwise behave like the lowlife criminal thugs from whose ranks modern police are sadly often recruited, they have regurgitated every bit of the craziness that began afflicting the American Left in the United States' 2016 presidential election. 

In 2016, Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton stuck her foot in her mouth and lost the election by accusing the populist, Middle American, supporters of her opponent, Republican candidate Donald the Orange of being a "basket of deplorables" and threw every imaginable pejorative “ist” and “phobe” at them.    You can hear the echo of that in Captain Airhead's now infamous remarks about the "small fringe minority" with "unacceptable views",    When Clinton lost the election she then blamed her loss on Russian interference.

 

 

This is parenthetical but timely given the international events that have drawn everyone's attention away from Captain Airhead's vile actions, but notice how the same people who back in the Cold War used to accuse anyone who suggested that the Communist regime in the Soviet Union could not be trusted, was working to undermine constitutional government and freedom so as to enslave the world, and had spies everywhere of being paranoid "McCarthyites" started talking the exact same way themselves when the USSR was gone and Russia was Russia again.    Whatever one might think of Vladimir Putin, the present crisis is the result of a little over two decades worth of incredibly bad American policy towards post-Soviet Russia.    Their giving their support to every group wishing to secede from post-Soviet Russia and extending NATO membership to these countries in a period when NATO should have been contracting after the collapse of the Soviet regime and in a way that brought NATO ever closer to Russia’s doorstep – the expansion of NATO’s involvement in Ukraine and vice-versa is the immediate issue - was needlessly insulting and provocative to post-Soviet Russia. Nor was support for the coup about eight years ago in which a Russia-friendly elected Ukrainian government was overthrown in an armed coup that replaced it with a US-NATO puppet government in Kiev and placed de facto control of much of the country in the hands of Banderites (1) exactly helpful.   By doing these things, American governments, usually those led by left-liberal Democrats like Clinton, Obama and Biden, created the conditions that produced the present conflict.  

 

 

Just as Hillary Clinton blamed her loss on the Russians in 2016 - her claims have been long since thoroughly debunked - so a CBC commentator claimed with a straight face that the Russians were behind the Freedom Convoy.    The government in justifying its crackdown on the protesters maintained that the Freedom Convoy was backed by foreign funds, the implication being that a foreign government or some foreign organization hostile to the Canadian government was dumping huge amounts of money into it.   The further implication was that the money was coming from either Russia, some extremist group in the United States, or both.   FINTRAC has since demonstrated these claims to be nonsense.   The money supporting the protest came from good faith donors in Canada and abroad who supported the Convoy’s cause – the end of the public health restrictions and mandates that have severely curtailed basic personal rights and freedoms for the last two years.

 

The remainder of the insane and unsubstantiated allegations hurled against the truckers by the Liberal government, Jimmy Dhaliwal’s socialists, and the legacy media have been completely plagiarized from the American loony Left’s response to the incident that took place in Washington DC on the Feast of Epiphany last year.   As you might recall, that was the date on which Congress was scheduled to confirm the results of the previous year’s presidential election.   That morning, the incumbent president Donald the Orange, who was challenging the results, held a rally of his supporters.   A fraction of his supporters entered the Capitol building and it was treated as if it was an insurrection, an attempt to violently overthrow the American government and overturn the results of the election.   This was an extremely hyperbolic interpretation of what had actually happened – most of the participants, who rather atypical of insurrectionists were generally unarmed, seemed to be there to take selfies as if they were American versions of Captain Airhead.    It arose out of the paranoia about a supposed “far right” threat to American democracy which had been observably growing on the American left ever since the Charlottesville rally of three and a half years prior had drawn their attention to the fact that their ongoing campaign to tear down monuments, vilify admired historical figures, re-write the past in accordance with their present narrow obsessions about race, sex, and gender, and silence anyone who complains about all of this through the thuggish behaviour of Antifa thought enforcers was meeting with resistance and pushback.   As over-the-top as the American Left’s interpretation of the actual events of the sixth of January was, the Canadian Left’s attempt to impose this same interpretation on the Freedom Convoy is that much more removed from reality.   The Freedom Convoy protestors did not enter the Parliament buildings – they parked on the street in front and threw a block party – and clearly stated their intentions, which did not involve overthrowing the government, and they stuck to their single issue of personal, constitutionally protected, freedom.   Captain Airhead and the Canadian Left had far less on which to hang their accusations of insurrection, occupation, ideology-based extremism, and other such drivel against the truckers than Forgettable Joe Whatshisname and the American Left had for their identical charges against the Capitol Hill selfie-takers last year but they still tried to hammer that square peg into the round hole it so obviously did not fit.

 

There are many things that can be attributed to the Canadian Left.   Originality is not one of those things.   They should lay off imitating the Americans.   It never turns out well. 

 

(1)   Banderites take their name from Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian nationalist leader who collaborated with the Third Reich in the Second World War.   In other words, they are in actuality the sort of people Captain Airhead and his followers have been falsely accusing the truckers of being.  The Azov Regiment, a unit of the Ukrainian National Guard formed in the 2014 coup, proudly displays its National Socialist ideology in its emblem which prominently features imagery borrowed from the Third Reich.   It is part of the regime that Barack Obama installed in the Ukraine and which is supported today by the same Captain Airhead who thinks that the presence of a single Nazi flag, one almost certainly being used ironically – i.e., to attribute that which the flag symbolizes to Captain Airhead – in a protest is sufficient to condemn the entire protest of thousands as being somehow Nazi and justify his use of excessive government power to crush it.   Captain Airhead’s deputy prime minister, a woman with the ability to appear both vacuous and Machiavellian at the same time, the granddaughter of the editor-in-chief of the Krakivs'ki Visti, a Ukrainian language Nazi propaganda tabloid that ran from 1940 to 1945, and the same woman who about a week ago was giggling to herself in glee at a press conference when asked about the plight of the Canadian families whose bank accounts she had frozen because they supported the truckers protesting for freedom posted to social media the other day, a picture of herself holding a scarf with the colours of the Banderite movement at a demonstration in support of Ukraine.   

Disagreeing with Dalton about Discrimination

Dalton Camp was a descendant of United Empire Loyalists and the son of a preacher. He was born in New Brunswick but spent most of his formative years in the United States, returning to Canada for summer vacations. He ran a successful advertising agency but is most remembered for his roles in Canadian politics, both as a strategist and unsuccessful candidate for the old Conservative Party and as a commentator in the media. Despite his association with the Conservative Party, more often than not his views were ones with which I vehemently disagreed. There were exceptions, of course. He was a supporter of the monarchy and a Canadian nationalist, who opposed free trade, continentalism and globalism. In these areas I agreed with him and occasionally he would take a stand I could applaud. When Prime Minister Chretien went to China in 1994, for example, to negotiate a trade deal, he wrote an excellent column ridiculing the Prime Minister weak stand against the Communist power’s abuse of its own citizens. Most of the time however, I found his views to be wrongheaded, arrogant, and repugnant. The first part of Whose Country Is This Anyway?, a collection of his columns that was published as a book in 1995 (1), is devoted to advancing the idea that running a large national deficit isn’t really a big deal after all but if you don’t like it you should happily agree to pay more taxes for if you prefer the other option, of cutting spending, that means that you are heartless and selfish. Camp called himself a Red Tory, but he was so in the worst possible meaning of the term, i.e., someone who promoted the ideas of the American progressive left from within the Canadian Conservative Party by pretending that these ideas were what made Canada historically distinct from the United States. The best possible meaning of the term Red Tory is the original meaning, i.e., someone like George Grant. The contrast between Grant and Camp could hardly be greater. Grant is most widely remembered for a jeremiad he penned in 1965, lamenting the downfall of the Diefenbaker government which he saw as the end of the Canadian national project. A couple of years later, Camp was responsible for ousting Diefenbaker from the leadership of the Conservative Party. Grant was a socially conservative pro-life activist, who opposed abortion-on-demand and euthanasia. Camp, despite his paternal heritage, ridiculed opposition to abortion as being American and far right, and displayed the kind of intellectual contempt for “fundamentalists” that Grant expressed indignation at in his final collection of essays, Technology and Justice. (2)

Perhaps you are wondering why, twelve years after his death, I am now wasting so many words on a man who is now mostly forgotten. It is because, while recently perusing the columns in his aforementioned book, I was struck by the way in which recent events have demonstrated just how out to lunch one of those columns was. Over the past several months, American states such as Kansas and Arizona, have introduced legislation for the protection of religious liberty. This legislation is designed to protect business owners from discrimination lawsuits brought by same-sex couples. The perceived need for such protection is due to the increasing number of American states that have enacted same-sex “marriage” legislation and the American Supreme Court’s decision last summer to strike down the provision in the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act prohibiting such “marriages” from being recognized at the federal level. It appears inevitable that same-sex “marriage” will become universally available in the United States and the freedom of religion laws introduced in Kansas and Arizona were drafted with an eye to a future in which a same-sex couple asks a Christian photographer, baker, caterer, or florist to participate in a gay wedding and then sues if that Christian refuses to do something against the historical and traditional teachings of his faith. The response of the progressive left, to this attempt to protect those who dissent from the ideology of the new Revolution, was to trot out the corpse of their Civil Rights era foe “Jim Crow” and take shots at him.

That the day would come, when American states felt it necessary to pass laws protecting Christians from being forced to participate in events that go against the ancient teachings of their faith and these laws would be condemned as violating somebody else’s “rights” would have been virtually unthinkable twenty years ago. At the time, our Parliament here in Canada was considering a bill, one of several introduced by Svend Robinson, NDP representative of Burnaby, British Columbia, over the years, that would add sexual orientation to the list of prohibited bases for discrimination, in the Canadian Human Rights Act. This time around the bill had a lot of support in the Liberal government of Jean Chretien, who assured everybody that if enacted, such a bill would not threaten the freedom of religious Canadians because such was already protected by the law. By the end of the ‘90s, it would be apparent to those who were paying attention, just how empty this promise of Chretien’s was. In 1996, Scott Brockie, a Christian who owned a printshop in Ontario, was charged with discrimination before the provincial Human Rights Commission for refusing to print stationary for the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. The Charter protection of freedom of religion failed to protect Brockie whom the courts consistently ruled against. Cases of this nature were springing up all over Canada during the ‘90s, even before sexual orientation was added to the Canadian Human Rights Act and before the Liberal government enacted same-sex “marriage” legislation early in the new millennium.

Twenty years ago, not everyone in the Liberal Party supported the ideology of the Revolution. Roseanne Skoke, who had been elected to represent the riding of Central Nova in Nova Scotia in 1993, declared her opposition to adding sexual orientation to the Canadian Human Rights Act. In a column, presumably originally published in the ultra-left wing Toronto Star on September 30, 1994, (3) Dalton Camp, the Canadian left’s favourite “conservative”, rebuked this member of the left-leaning centrist party, for being too right-wing.

Camp noted that Skoke’s view is “contrary to the legislative intentions of the Liberal government” and that therefore Chretien, asked to comment, took the position that in a free country, Skoke had the right to express her own opinion, an unusually liberal opinion from the leader of Canada’s Liberal Party who had served in the Liberal government which introduced all sorts of restrictions on freedom of speech back in the 1970s. He also remarked that it was “reassuring” that Chretien’s “endorsement of free speech” contained the implicit possibility that “he may have disagreed with Skoke’s opinion”. Then he encapsulated his objection to Skoke’s position by writing:

Skoke’s premise is that homosexuals are demanding “special rights” in seeking protection against discrimination in the human rights act. She is wrong and apparently wilfully so.

Actually, it is Camp who was wrong. Allow me to explain how.

There are rights which all Canadians possess. All Canadians, for example, have the right to be represented by a lawyer when charged with a criminal offense. Suppose that were not the case. Suppose, homosexuals were routinely denied access to counsel when charged with crimes, then a bill that changed that, that extended the right to counsel to homosexuals, would not be granting homosexuals “special rights” and homosexuals would not be demanding “special rights” in lobbying for such a bill but just the same rights that everyone else in the country has. There would, of course, be nothing wrong with such a demand.

The right to protection against discrimination is not such a right. The Canadian Human Rights Act prohibits discrimination under certain circumstances and based upon certain grounds. The grounds are defined in Section 3 (1) of the Act which currently reads as follows:

For all purposes of this Act, the prohibited grounds of discrimination are race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability and conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted or in respect of which a record suspension has been ordered.

This means that the Act protects you from discrimination if you are discriminated against on the basis of your skin colour but that it does not protect you from discrimination if you are discriminated against on the basis that you smell funny. Furthermore, while the Act is written in such a way that it sounds like it protects you against racial discrimination regardless of what your race actually is, that is not how the Act actually works. The way this law actually works, you are protected against discrimination on the basis of race, if you are any race but Caucasian, you are protected against discrimination on the grounds of colour if you are any colour but white, you are protected against discrimination on the grounds of sex if you are a woman, etc. This is not spelled out in the Act itself – although it is in Section 15 (2) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms – but it is obvious in how the Human Rights Commissions and the courts interpret the Act. While progressives may deny that this legislation grants special protection to some rather than protection to all, they affirm it in the justifications they offer for this kind of legislation. “It is needed to protect vulnerable minorities” is the refrain we usually hear from progressives when the need for this kind of legislation is questioned.

It is one thing to say that citizens of a country have the right to protection against discrimination on the part of their government in the administration of law and justice. This would simply be another way of asserting the concept that has been present in the Great Tradition since ancient times in the depiction of justice as wearing a blindfold. This kind of protection is not provided by anti-discrimination laws, like the Canadian Human Rights Act, which forbid private citizens from discriminating in their everyday affairs and business but by non-discriminatory policy on the part of the government. Anti-discrimination laws, like the American Civil Rights Act of 1964 which is the template for all anti-discrimination law elsewhere, and the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977, actually work against the ideal that government should be fair and non-discriminatory in the administration of law and justice to all of its citizens. Everywhere these laws have been passed they have been used by non-whites against whites, by non-Christians against Christians, by women against men, and now by homosexuals against those who hold to traditional faiths that from ancient times have affirmed that man is made for woman, and woman for man. These laws by their very nature work against the good of the whole of society, by turning class against class, race against race, sex against sex, they work against harmony, unity, and the good.

The idea that the passing of this kind of anti-discriminatory legislation in the late twentieth century represents a major leap towards moral enlightenment on the part of Western mankind is an idea that has led to a major decay in our ability to conduct moral reasoning. Many people now think of discrimination in simplistic terms – it is always bad. To discriminate, however, means to treat people differently on the basis of a distinction made. It could mean, to refuse to employ a man because he is black. It could also mean to award higher marks to a student who gets more answers correct on a test than to one who gets more answers wrong. We might qualify the idea that discrimination is always bad by saying that discrimination on the basis of race is always bad. This is more correct than the original idea but even it is too simplistic. Racial discrimination might mean the actual mistreatment of people on the basis of their race. It might also refer, however, to the way a shopkeeper in a bad neighborhood, where people from one race commit the vast majority of the crimes, stays extra alert and keeps his finger near the alarm when a youth who belongs to that race enters his shop after dark. Unfair as this may be to the youth if he is a law-abiding young man of good character, it would be unjust to condemn the shopkeeper for allowing the realities of the neighborhood in which he lives to influence his prudence and caution.

“The issue”, Dalton Camp wrote, “is whether to make it unlawful to discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation”. Let us also consider the question of whether it is moral or immoral to discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation.

Are we talking about the factory owner who refuses to hire a man to sweep his floor because he is gay? Or are we talking about the Christian baker who refuses to bake a cake for the celebration of a “wedding” between two women? Or are we talking about the young man who chooses to date a young woman instead of a young man?

If we were merely talking about the first example, I would still oppose legislation that makes this kind of discrimination unlawful, although I would also say that the discrimination in this case is the least morally justifiable of these examples. If we include the second example, however, that of the Christian baker, we are dealing with something that is completely different. For the Christian baker to bake a cake celebrating a Sapphic wedding would require the baker to participate in an event that violates the teachings of his faith. It would be immoral of him to do so. Any law that required him to do so would be immoral. Yet a law that makes it unlawful to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation would do precisely that.

As for the third example, perhaps you do not think it belongs with the other two but I disagree. As the late Lawrence Auster pointed out a couple of years ago, the logic of the movement to prohibit discrimination against gays and lesbians leads inevitably to the requirement that people agree to date members of their own sex. If you do not think it will ever go that far, look at how far we have gone already. Dalton Camp, when he penned his arrogant dismissal of Roseanne Skoke’s opposition to the inclusion of sexual orientation in the Canadian Human Rights Act, probably had no idea that twenty years later American states would be contemplating legislation to protect the religious freedom of Christians who would otherwise face discrimination lawsuits for refusing to violate their faith.

Unfortunately, such legislation, even if it passed, and was not struck down by some arrogant court, would just be a Band-Aid solution. Anti-discrimination law is, for the reasons I have explained above, bad law, and it is always better to get rid of bad laws than to keep piling up more laws on top of them, to make up for the damage they have done. Anti-discrimination legislation needs to go. That means, for us here in Canada, that the Canadian Human Rights Act in its entirety must be revoked. The sooner it goes, the better, I say.


(1) Dalton Camp, Whose Country Is This Anyway? (Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1995)

(2) “There are loyal Christians (called by their critics ‘fundamentalists’) who generally say that ‘technology’ is not a paradigm of knowledge but a set of instruments – inventions which come from scientific discoveries. As a whole, they do not much reflect on the ontological implications of the modern paradigm. They therefore live with certainty in the modern. Such people often make crude mistakes in theory; but who does not? Nothing fills me with greater aesthetic annoyance than the scorn which has been heaped on such people by clever journalists and ‘intellectuals’ (whatever that word may mean).” - George Grant, “Faith and the Multiversity”, in Technology and Justice (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1986).

(3) The column is found on pages 193-195 of Whose Country Is This Anyway? where it appears under the title “Is It Okay for Skokes?” The book dates the column to September 30, 1994. Most of the material in this book comes from Camp’s Toronto Star column. A search of the internet for this column brings up several references to it, mostly in comments on Kate McMillan’s “Small Dead Animals” blog, under the title “Skoke-ing the Fires of Anti-Gay Sentiment.” These indicate the Star as the place of origin, with the date of October 2, 1994.