Captain Airhead and Jimmy Dhaliwal Get Hitched

Just in time for the beginning of spring, Jimmy Dhaliwal, the clown in charge of Canada’s official socialist party – the others are the unofficial socialist parties – who looks and, more importantly, acts like he is playing the role of evil Grand Vizier in a cheap, third-rate melodrama adapted from one of Scheherazade’s tales, came out from his hole, looked around, saw his shadow and gave us a truly terrifying forecast – three more years of Captain Airhead.    He had agreed to prop up the Liberal minority government until the next Dominion election in return for….what exactly?   It is rather difficult to conceive of any concession the Grits could have made to him considering they have been stealing his clothes and his platform since pretty much the moment Captain Airhead became Prime Minister.   Perhaps all that is really going on is an attempt to remain relevant after having been rendered redundant.   Perhaps I threw that option out merely to see how many words beginning with re- I could fit in a single sentence.   Whatever the case may be, he then proceeded to pat himself on the back and compare himself to Tommy Douglas and Jack Layton.

 

In considering what this unholy marriage means for the country it would be helpful first to review how each of the partners currently stands in Parliament.

 

In the last Dominion election which took place last fall, Captain Airhead’s Grits increased their seats in the House of Commons by three from the previous Dominion election in 2019.   In that latter election they had been reduced from the majority government they had won in 2015 to a small minority government.   In both elections they won the plurality of seats while losing the plurality in the popular vote which was won by the Conservatives who have been Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition since 2015.   Indeed, despite their gain of three seats, their percentage of the popular vote dropped to the lowest a party that went on to form government has ever received.   Captain Airhead has, nevertheless, governed since 2019 as if he commanded a solid majority in the House.   Moreover, after last year’s election he claimed that he had received a clear mandate from the Canadian public.   This is a nonsensical claim for anybody in a minority government, let alone a minority government that won only a plurality of seats not a plurality of the popular vote to make, but he repeated it again when grilled by Opposition leader Candice Bergen in the House after the coalition was announced.

 

As for Jimmy Dhaliwal’s party, they did terrible in both elections as well.   In 2019, the first election in which Dhaliwal led the NDP, they dropped from the thirty-nine seats they had previously held to twenty-four.   Their percentage of the popular vote dropped by almost four percent.   They improved only slightly on this last year, gaining one seat.   To put a bit of context to this, remember that this was only eight years after the late Honourable Jack Layton had led the socialists into the 2011 Dominion election increasing their seats from thirty-six to one-hundred and three and increasing their percentage of the popular vote by twelve and a half percent.   Stephen Harper’s Conservatives won a majority government in that election and the NDP became Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition at the Dominion level for the first and only time in Canadian history.    This was called the “Orange Wave” at the time.   It is not merely in contrast to Layton’s popularity of eight years previously that Dhaliwal’s dismal performance needs to be understood.  2019 was the year that Captain Airhead was reduced from a majority to a small minority.   The government had been shaken by the SNC-Lavalin scandal earlier in the year before the election was called then, during the election campaign, all those chickens from Captain Airhead’s past as a blackface performer came home to roost in a personal scandal.   Ordinarily, when a Liberal leader loses voters and seats en masse in a disgrace like this, one expects the NDP to gain.   Those voters all jumped to the Lower Canadian separatists instead and the socialists lost ground too.

 

My point in going into all of this is that neither the Liberals nor the NDP under either party’s current leadership is very appealing to Canadians.   Far more Canadians voted against the Liberals than voted for them in the last two Dominion elections and that is true of the socialists as well.   Nor can you just add those who voted Liberal to those who voted NDP to get the popular support for the “clear mandate” now claimed by this unholy coalition.   No Canadians voted for a Liberal-NDP or NDP-Liberal coalition government.   Some, understandably including many of the Conservatives, would maintain that this in itself is the problem with what has just been done.   I disagree because this merely offends against the ideal of democracy of which idol my opinion is far closer to the ancients’ disdain and contempt than the Moderns’ infatuation.   It is technically permitted by the rules of that time-tested and honoured governing institution of Parliament although it seems fairly obvious that both leaders are acting by the letter of what is permitted rather than the spirit.    Promising to prop up a minority government in this way circumvents Parliament’s power to hold the government accountable.    What I wish to stress here is the reason why both of these parties have lost so much of their appeal under their present leaders.

 

While personal defects on the part of the leaders undoubtedly played a part in this, especially with regards to Captain Airhead who combines a staggering level of brazen hypocrisy with enough hubris to have brought Nemesis down on the heads of the entire pantheon of Greek heroes, both parties have under their current leaders adopted the same narrow, extremist, and utterly insane ideology.   Most people would probably describe this ideological shift as a move to the far left but this does not really do justice to what has happened.    Indeed, it is potentially misleading because “far left” is usually understood to mean “Communist” and what we are talking about is an ideology that would have been considered way out in the left field of Cloud Cuckoo Land by the old Marxist-Leninist Commies of the Cold War era.   Imagine what V. I. Lenin or Joseph Stalin would have done to someone who suggested to them that the Bolshevik regime should make it a priority to stomp out all usage of masculine pronouns for men who consider themselves to be women or of feminine pronouns for women who consider themselves to be men.  

 

An illustration of how thinking of the new Grit-NDP ideology simply as something further to the left can be misleading is provided by the Conservative response to the announced alliance.   It has been good insofar as it goes but it has gone no further than the economy.   Candice Bergen et al. are certainly right to say that this deal between the Grits and the socialists means that life will become even less affordable for ordinary Canadians as taxes are raised, grocery prices rise even higher due to the inflationary effect of all the “free” goodies everyone will be bribed with, while the energy sector, so important to a part of the country that not-coincidentally tends not to support either the Grits or the socialists, comes further under attack and efforts to develop other natural resources are hindered and thwarted.   As bad as all this is, it is only a small part of the woe that these deranged ideologues wish to unleash upon Canada.

 

I use the term ideology, by the way, for the sort of thinking that the Grits and the socialists share today even though that thinking does not come close to being as systematic and coherent as the word ideology usually implies because it is as rigid and dogmatic as any ideology and no better word suggests itself.

 

This ideology is based upon dividing Canadians according to race, religion, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc. – the list of categories is ever expanding – then assigning “victim” and “villain” status to the groups formed by these divisions.   Whites, for example, are the designated villain for the race category, and all others are the designated victims.   These statuses can be combined to create “supervictim” and “supervillain” statuses.   A woman, for example, of a race other than white who belongs to a non-Christian religion, is a member of three different victim groups and in accordance with the crackpot dogma of intersectionality that is the rationale behind all of this these victim statuses are multiplied rather than merely added to each other.   At the same time someone who is a white, Christian, male is that much more of a villain than the person who is only one of these things.   The ultimate bad guy in this warped worldview, however, is not merely the person who belongs to all of the villain groups.   Indeed, someone can belong to each and every one of them and still be regarded as one of the “good guys” by the woke provided that he is willing to make groveling apologies to each of the designated victim groups for each of the villain groups to which he belongs.   Captain Airhead himself is the obvious example of this.   He is white, male, and nominally at least cisgender, heterosexual and Roman Catholic, but is constantly weeping crocodile tears over all of this.   The ultimate bad guy for the new, woke, Canadian left is Canada herself, or at least a Canada that would still be recognizable as such to pre-1963 Canadians, and the larger Christian/Western civilization of which she is a part.   Each of the designated victim groups are encouraged by the woke left to air their grievances, not just against their corresponding villain group, but also and primarily against the historical Canada.   The woke left then pleads guilty on behalf of Canada regardless of whether the grievances are legitimate and have any substance to them or not.    Just as woke feminism insists that a woman must always be believed when she accuses a man of some sort of sexual crime so woke leftism in general insists that all accusations against the country made by designated victim groups be believed.   That this is the opposite of the old notion of innocent until proven guilty does not faze the woke left.   That notion came to us from the patriarchal, white supremacist, heteronormative, Christian past and so they consider it to be tainted.   The goal of all of this is power – gaining power by bringing all of these different identity groups, even if their interests are mutually exclusive, behind the woke left – then using that power to stomp out everything in the country that they don’t like and justifying this by associating it with all the “isms” and “phobias” of the past.  

 

Unfortunately, many Canadians tend to think of the woke ideology that has captured both the Liberal Party and the NDP in terms of meaningless apologies and other empty, symbolic gestures.   The problem is a lot more serious than this however.   For most of Canadian history, Conservatives, Liberals, and socialists believed that Canadians, regardless of race, sex, etc., each possessed as their property as subjects of the Crown, certain rights and freedoms that protected them from the abuse of government power.   The only rights that the woke Liberals and NDP seem to recognize as actually binding the hands of government, however, are newer “rights” that belong not to each Canadian but to members of designed victim groups protecting them against “isms” and “phobias” on the part of designated villain groups.   As for all those older rights and freedoms that we traditionally regarded as the property of all Canadians under Common Law, including the freedoms identified as “fundamental” in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, these the woke Liberals and NDP see as privileges, that is, things that we get to enjoy if the government decides to permit it.   As has increasingly become apparent the woke Liberals and NDP want that permission to be granted or denied on the basis of a social credit system.   That is social credit in the Chinese Communist sense of the term – the government keeps tabs on everything you say and do and awards you more or less freedom based upon whether it approves of what you have been saying and doing – rather than in the sense of the economic and monetary theories of Major C. H. Douglas from which all the now defunct Social Credit parties in Canada were named.

 

We don’t have to look far for an illustration of this.   Take the right to peacefully assemble to express disagreement with and make demands of the government.   This right has never included the right to commit acts of violence against others, to damage or destroy public or private property, or to commit actual sedition or insurrection.   It has, however, traditionally been regarded as belonging to all Canadian subjects of the Crown.   Captain Airhead’s Liberals, however, with the support of Jimmy Dhaliwal’s NDP even before the formal announcement of their nuptials, have treated this as a right that belongs only to those Canadians with whose causes they agree.   If there is a demonstration or protest with whose woke cause they agree, such as the environmentalist protests against Canada’s energy sector and especially the pipelines, the BLM demonstrations of the summer of 2020, or the residential school protests of last summer, the Liberals and NDP do not seem to care if the protests are paid for by foreign interests and the protestors commit acts of violence and destruction.   When, however, a group of working class Canadians objected to government rules and restrictions that were adversely affecting them just last month, even though this group committed no such acts of violence and destruction, nor, despite leftist claims to the contrary, were they funded by foreigners, the NDP-backed Liberals went all ballistic on them, evoked the Emergency Measures Act for the first time in Canadian history, froze their bank accounts, arrested their leaders, and sent the police in to brutalize them.   The summer before, the residential school protestors hijacked Canada’s anniversary holiday and, here in Winnipeg, toppled the statues on the grounds of the provincial legislature of Queen Victoria, who presided over Confederation, and Queen Elizabeth II our reigning Sovereign.  That is what sedition and insurrection look like.   By contrast, the truckers’ demonstration earlier this year was a display of patriotic love – Canada’s largest ever block party, with people cheering and greeting each other, enjoying food and games and hot tubs, and waving Canadian flags.   This is what Captain Airhead and Jimmy Dhaliwal decided needed to be crushed with the maximum force available to the government.   As this was going on the perpetrators of last year’s assault on Canada’ history and institutions were allowed to walk without penalty.

 

Never before in Canadian history has there been a Prime Minister less willing to tolerate those who disagree with him than Captain Airhead.   Since last summer he has spoken several times of those who wish to make their own choices about whether to have man-made foreign substances injected into their bodies rather than have such decisions dictated by government in the most dehumanizing of terms.   He has declared the views of those who disagree with him “unacceptable”.   He has said that we as Canadians need to ask ourselves whether we are willing to tolerate having those who disagree with him about this in our midst.   In the actions described in the previous paragraph he proved himself willing to act on this kind of language.   Even though he is brazenly hypocritical enough to lecture other countries about the need to listen to those with whom they disagree at home he practices the exact opposite of this.   It is like he took William F. Buckley’s famous line about how liberals loudly proclaim their willingness to listen to other ideas but are then shocked and offended to discover that there are any as a “how to” statement.   Having Jimmy Dhaliwal as a partner will only make this problem worse. 

 

In 1970 Parliament, dominated by a Liberal party led by Captain Airhead’s father, passed a bill amending the Criminal Code to include three sections against “hate propaganda”.   Since to qualify as “hate propaganda” by the terms of these sections incitement to violence, which was already against the law, had to be included, this was redundant and unnecessary and did nothing but start the process of conditioning Canadians to accept the government telling them what they can and cannot think and say.   Seven years later, Parliament, still led by the Liberals under Pierre Trudeau, passed the Canadian Human Rights Act, which took government policing of Canadians’ thoughts to a whole new level.   The entire Act was bad but the worst part of it was Section 13 which forbade the telephonic communication of material “likely to” expose designated victim groups to “hatred or contempt” as an act of discrimination.   In 2001 Jean Chretien’s Liberals amended this provision to cover the internet as well.   In 2014 these efforts to bring Canadians’ thoughts and words under government control met a setback when Section 13 was removed from the CHRA, one year after a private member’s bill revoking it had passed Parliament and received royal assent.   This bill had only passed through the cooperation of Conservative and dissenting Liberal members.   The current leader of the Liberals tolerates far less dissent among his caucus than was the case in 2013 and the Liberals have just reintroduced a bill that they had first introduced before the last Parliament was dissolved last year.   This bill would re-introduce something similar to Section 13 but far worse in that it would allow for peace bonds to be issued against people on the grounds of what it is feared they might say rather than something they have already said.   With Jimmy Dhaliwal’s pledge to Captain Airhead, this bill is now sure to pass the House, unless both caucuses are somehow able to muster up enough dissenting voices with the integrity to break with their leaders on this.

 

Not only have Captain Airhead’s woke Liberals and Jimmy Dhaliwal’s woke NDP expanded what they wish to see prohibited as “hate speech” to include much that was not covered by previous “hate speech” laws, even words not yet spoken, they have also clearly expressed their wish to suppress dissent in all sorts of other areas as well.   This is why they are always talking about “misinformation” and “disinformation”.   On matters as various as climate change, the bat flu, abortion, the last American election and the Russia-Ukraine conflict they claim that “misinformation” and “disinformation” are endangering the public good and so the government needs to step in to control these.   Of course, “misinformation” and “disinformation” do not mean to them what these words mean to normal people.   To you, I, the average Joe on the street, his brother Bob, and basically anyone with an ounce of horse sense, “misinformation” and “disinformation” are identified as such by being false.   They are held up to the yard stick of Truth and found to fall short.   To Captain Airhead and Jimmy Dhaliwal, however, neither of whom care a lick about Goodness or Beauty, much less Truth, “misinformation” and “disinformation” are anything that disagrees with what they say.   This is why it was so chilling to see that smug, soulless, smile come into Captain Airhead’s eyes the other day in Question Period when he responded to something Candice Bergen said about his new partnership with Dhaliwal with a remark about “misinformation” and “disinformation”.

 

Captain Airhead and Jimmy Dhaliwal have gotten hitched in a manner of speaking.   Now they are about to drag the entire country with them to their honeymoon in hell.

Whips and Scorpions - Captain Airhead’s St. Valentine’s Day Manic Meltdown

 

In the 2015 Dominion election Captain Airhead, the son of the man who up to that point had been the worst Prime Minister in the history of Canada, was swept into the Prime Minister’s office by a second wave of Trudeaumania, much worse than the first, and he has remained in that office ever since, despite scandal after scandal and a combination of gross incompetency with massive egotistical arrogance that resembles a dark, sinister, unfunny version of the kind we associate with characters portrayed by Peter Sellers in the movies..   He was whittled down to a plurality of seats in 2019, which he just managed to retain in 2021, but with help, sometimes from the socialists, sometimes from the separatists, he has managed to cling to office.   In his hubris, which puts even that of his father to shame, he has continued to govern as if he had the mandate of a majority government – even a supermajority – in the House behind him.

 

Captain Airhead has always seemed to be more concerned about the image he projects than anything else, including the good of the country whose government he leads.   The groups he has most often sought to impress have been the young and the woke – his domestic support base – and the “international community”.   His efforts have at times failed in ways that rendered him – and Canada – a laughing stock.   Earlier this year we were given yet another example of this.   When the rest of the world was finally coming around and deciding to treat the bat flu like the normal flu and lifting restrictions and mandates, he, who had been scapegoating the unvaccinated for all the country’s problems since last summer, decided to double down instead and removed the vaccine mandate exemption for long haul truck drivers crossing the border from the United States.    This led truckers, vaccinated and unvaccinated, from all across the Dominion to head towards Ottawa in one big protest convoy.   As they approached, he hurled insults at them and then, as they began to pour into the capital, he fled to an “undisclosed secure location”, citing a conveniently timed need to self-isolate due to exposure to the bat flu.    This earned him the scorn and derision of his opponents and allies, at home and abroad, alike.    The image he was clearly projecting for all to see was that of a sniveling coward.   

 

The trucker protest has been ongoing since, both in Ottawa and other major Canadian cities.   Captain Airhead, in an address to the nation from his hiding place on the Monday after the convoy arrived in Ottawa doubled down on his insulting language and his arrogant tone but despite his efforts and those of his sycophants in the media to portray the trucker protest as a small group of astroturfed racist ideologues it was apparent to everybody watching that unlike the protests he himself supports – anti-pipeline and anti-petroleum environmentalist protests, Black Lives Matter, etc., which typically consist of professional protesters funded by far left billionaires like George Soros – this was a genuine, grassroots, working and middle class protest.    

 

It differed from the kind of protest Captain Airhead admires in one other way.    Whereas Black Lives Matter rallies broke out into riots, vandalism and looting in major cities all across North America and last year’s demonstrations arising out of wild and irresponsible allegations against the former Indian Residential Schools led to the arson and other vandalism over well over fifty churches and the toppling and decapitation of statues, the truckers’ protest has been an actual peaceful protest rather than an anarchistic riot declared to be peaceful by media fiat.   While loud and noisy, it has not been violent and destructive and, indeed, would be best described as the world’s largest and longest block party.   Where some of the spin-off protests have arguably crossed the line from expressing their legitimate complaints about the infringement of their own rights and freedoms into interfering with those of others has been the impediment of traffic across the border with the US at important commercial crossings such as the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, Emerson here in Manitoba, and Coutts in Alberta.   Many have noted, however, and rightly so, that those condemning the freedom protestors on these grounds had no objection to the entire border being closed by the government to anything but supply-chain commercial transport for almost two years nor have they ever insisted that the government do anything when groups of Indians – in many cases paid environmentalist protestors claiming to be Indians would probably be more accurate - have blockaded commercial infrastructure such as highways or railroads to back up some demand or another of theirs.

 

Over the past couple of weeks most Canadians when asked, regardless of what they thought of pandemic measures or the truckers’ protest itself, agreed that Captain Airhead’s attitude and behaviour were only making things worse.   In the midst of calls from everyone except the most bootlicking of his supporters to deescalate the situation he seemed determined to do the exact opposite.

 

On Monday, the fourteenth of February, Captain Airhead decided to do just that and to send a Valentine to those questioning and challenging his heavy-handed pandemic policies in the form of the invocation of the Emergency Measures Act.   Technically this is the first time this act has been used, although it was introduced in the premiership of Brian Mulroney in 1988, not as a first-of-its-kind piece of legislation, but as an update and replacement for the War Measures Act.   Captain Airhead’s own father had been the last to invoke the War Measures Act – and the only Prime Minister to do so in peacetime.   Indeed, the thought that was almost certainly foremost in Captain Airhead’s mind as he decided to do this was that he could dispel the image of a coward he had crafted for himself by conjuring up that of his father’s handling of the October Crisis.

 

He has succeeded, however, only in presenting the image of a weak man trying to appear strong, of a little man – or potato, to borrow China’s favourite contemptuous epithet for him - trying to appear big.    The contrasts with his father are far greater than the similarities.

 

In 1970 Pierre Trudeau was dealing with a militant Quebec separatist organization that had been committing acts of terrorism against Canada since the early ‘60s.   These had been increasing in intensity.   The previous year they had bombed the Montreal Stock Exchange, injuring several people and causing a million dollars’ worth of damage.   In the crisis in which Trudeau acted the FLQ had kidnapped the British Trade Commissioner James Cross and then kidnapped and murdered the Labour Minister of Quebec – he was also deputy premier of the province – Pierre Laporte.   This was a situation that called for a display of government strength although Pierre Trudeau was criticized then and afterwards – justly in my opinion – for taking this to an unnecessary extreme.

 

By contrast, the people over whom Captain Airhead is throwing a tantrum have not blown anything up, kidnapped anyone, murdered anyone, or done anything remotely similar.    They have parked their trucks in the vicinity of Parliament – and several provincial legislatures – with the declared intention of not leaving until their demands are met.   Those demands, unlike the separatist demands of the FLQ, are entirely reasonable.   They are demanding that the government return to them – and to all Canadians – the basic freedoms that belong to them, that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is supposed to protect, but which the government has treated as if they were its own to give and take away as it sees fit for the duration of the bat flu pandemic of the last two years.    Since these reasonable demands translate into a reasonable objection to government overreach, piling more government overreach on top – indeed, the maximum overreach available to the government – after two weeks of doing nothing but insult the protestors, can only be seen as an irresponsible and incendiary response.

 

It is not his father, Captain Airhead has come across as resembling, so much as Rehoboam, the son and heir of King Solomon.   At his coronation at Shechem as recorded in the twelfth chapter of I Kings, Rehoboam received a delegation of Israelites headed by Jeroboam which asked him to lighten the yoke his father had laid upon them.   He asked them to come back in three days for an answer, then consulted with the wise elders of Israel, who advised him to grant the request.   Then he asked the advice of the hot-headed youth of his own generation.   They told him to make the yoke heavier instead of lighter.   Rehoboam discarded the advice of the wise elders, and heeded instead the reckless advice of the fools he had grown up with and told the delegation “My father made your yoke heavy, and I will add to your yoke: my father also chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.”    This went down as one of the most boneheaded moves in all the history of Old Testament Israel.   By behaving this way Rehoboam provoked all the tribes of Israel except his own tribe, Judah, and Benjamin into rebelling against the Davidic dynasty and split the formerly united kingdom of Israel into the Northern and Southern kingdoms.   Captain Airhead’s similar response to the freedom protestors is unlikely to be looked upon any more favourably than Rehoboam’s in generations yet to come.  

 

This situation in no way meets the stringent requirements written into the Emergency Measures Act for its invocation.   The protests do not “seriously endanger the lives, health or safety” of Canadians nor do they “exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it” as ought to evident from the facts that even as Captain Airhead was preparing to make his announcement the Ambassador Bridge and Coutts border blockages were being cleared by ordinary police action and the provincial premiers – with the exception of the dolt in charge of Upper Canada – were all telling him to take a chill pill, they could handle the situation, the EMA was neither necessary nor wanted.   Captain Airhead most likely believes that none of this matters, that with the support of Jimmy Dhaliwal’s New Democrats he will be able to ram approval of the EMA through the House of Commons and get the Senate to rubber stamp it while the courts, if they act at all to hold the government accountable rather than merely defer to the government, will act too late to stop him.

 

The speech in which Captain Airhead announced this step was his most brazen one to date.   How he managed to keep a straight face while saying that this was not something a Prime Minister should do lightly, that it is not the first step, nor the second step, but the last step that should be considered, is beyond me.    Perhaps he is a better actor than I had given him credit for.  Michelle Ferreri, the Conservative MP for Peterborough-Kawartha put the question to the government in Question Period on Tuesday of what other steps had been tried first.   The “answer” from Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair sidestepped the question.   Obviously, the government did not exhaust all other means available to it before taking this step.   It did not, for example, try talking to the protestors, hearing their complaints, and negotiating.    Indeed, the only other “step” it appears to have taken has been to hurl insults, lies, threats, condescension and other abuse at the protestors.    

 

It was also mighty rich of Captain Airhead to smugly and self-righteously pat himself on the back and justify this unjustifiable power grab by saying that the people of Ottawa deserve to have their lives back.    That all Canadians deserve to have their lives back is, of course, precisely the point of the truckers’ protest.   The truckers’ protest has been going for about a month.   To whatever extent it can be said to interfere with the daily lives of the people of Ottawa that interference is insignificant in comparison with how requiring businesses to operate at a fraction of their capacity, closing churches and other places of worship, telling people that they cannot have friends over or meet with people outside of their own household other than through the internet, ordering people to wear masks everywhere, and forcing them to take a foreign substance into their bodies against their will by taking everything away from them until they “consent” has affected the daily lives of all Canadians.

 

Since Captain Airhead, for all of his talk about providing local law enforcement with the “tools” necessary to end the protests, does not seem to be interested in sending the military in to support local law enforcement – credible reports, prior to the invoking of the Emergency Measures Act, indicated that he had already asked the military to intervene and had been told, essentially, to “truck off” – it is obvious that it is the extra financial powers spelled out by Chrystia Freeland after his announcement that he is after.    This should come as a surprise to nobody.   Even though Freeland, Captain Airhead’s deputy prime minister, has only been in the Ministry of Finance since Bill Morneau was forced to fall on the sword to save Captain Airhead in the WE Charity scandal of 2020, she and the Prime Minister have been seeking to take control over their finances out of Canadians’ hands since they came to power a little over six years ago.   As smug and arrogant as her boss, on Monday she announced that under the Emergency Act the Canadian government would be requiring crowdfunding platforms and their payment providers to register with FINTRAC and report large and “suspicious” transactions, somehow regulating cryptocurrency, telling banks and other financial institutions to review the transactions of their accountholders, giving those institutions the power to freeze the accounts of convoy supporters without a court order and protecting them against civil liability for doing so.   In other words, she and the Prime Minister gave themselves the power to utterly destroy dissenters by seizing their assets without due process and leaving them no legal recourse.   For the record, I, like all sane people, am opposed to government ever having this kind of power under any circumstances.   Not even in a real emergency – which this is not.   Not even to combat real terrorists rather than non-violent protestors.   A government that has this kind of power is not a government limited by constitution.   Nota bene, Freeland also said that the government would be introducing legislation aimed at making its new financial powers permanent.   This shows the utter hollowness of the government’s assurances that their actions under the EMA would be subject to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

 

On Wednesday, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, presented the House with the motion that would confirm the Emergency Measures Act.   Let us hope and pray that there are many Liberal MPs chafing to get out from under Captain Airhead’s whip.   Let us hope and pray that there are NDP members left who can recognize that it would be a betrayal of an important legacy of their party which in 1970, led by the legendary Tommy Douglas, had the distinction of being the only party in Parliament to take a just stand against Pierre Trudeau’s peacetime use of the War Measures Act against actual terrorists, to follow Jimmy Dhaliwal in using martial law to crush a protest by the working class their party once claimed to stand for.   Let us hope and pray that there are enough of both who will stand with the Conservatives and the Bloc in refusing to confirm the EMA so as to send the message to Captain Airhead and his goons that their assaults on constitutional government and personal freedom will be tolerated by Parliament no longer and that they can take their whips and scorpions and stick them where the sun don’t shine.

Only Morons Try to Flatten Curves

Straightenin' the curves
Flattenin' the hills
Some day the mountain might get 'em
but the law never will.

- Waylon Jennings as "The Balladeer" in the theme song to the Dukes of Hazzard. This quote has absolutely nothing to do with what I am discussing in this essay and is thrown in merely for my amusement.

In most – not all – countries, public health authorities have responded to the Wuhan Flu pandemic by issuing “shelter in place” or “stay at home” orders to the entire population, closing public facilities, shutting down all businesses and services that they declare to be “non-essential” and requiring that people stay at least six feet from each other when they must go out to buy groceries, get medical attention or the like. The end to which these are the means is expressed in that ubiquitous phrase, one of many that I wish never to hear again in my life after this pandemic is over, “flattening the curve.”

The curve that they are trying to flatten is that of the graph indicating the projected pattern of numbers of persons infected with COVID-19 from when the coronavirus first enters a population – or at least when it is first detected there – to when the pandemic peters out and ends. As is usual for an epidemic/pandemic the numbers infected are small at the beginning, then as it begins to spread faster they rise, at some point reaching a peak, before dropping back down again. Plotted on a graph, it forms the familiar bell shaped curve that statisticians use to represent a normal distribution in probability theory.

To “flatten the curve” means to alter the pattern by slowing down the spread of the virus so that the peak is much lower. This does not necessarily mean that the total number of people infected will be any less – just that the largest number of people who will be infected at the same time will be less. The point of doing this, is to prevent the medical system from being overburdened all at once and collapsing.

It should be observed that this strategy is designed to save the health care system rather than to save lives. It is important that we remember that, as much as our public health officials would prefer that we believe otherwise, these things are not synonymous. When it comes to saving lives, the big question with regards to flattening the curve is which is most likely to produce the most fatalities – a short-term, temporary, overload of the health care system during which treatment will not be available to everyone who requires it or an artificial extension of the duration of the pandemic and the lifespan of the virus giving it more opportunities to mutate and do more harm. To flatten the curve is to produce said artificial extension of the duration of the pandemic.

Our governments are being rather less than honest with us about the fact that the absurd time frames – up to two years - that we are seeing in their projection models are the result of the strategy of flattening the curve rather than the reason for it. The only way to push the peak of curve down is by slowing down the rate of infection and thus extending the duration of the pandemic long past the virus’ natural cycle. Even if doing this were to prove to be less fatal in terms of those who ultimately die from the virus it is an incredibly stupid and insane thing to do because it maximizes the myriad sorts of other damage that will be done by the shutdown.

Shocking as it will be for the many Canadians who worship at the altar of Tommy Douglas to hear this, the collapse of the health care system would not mean the end of the world. The hospitals would recover from such a collapse a lot quicker than the economy will recover from the shutdown, our social and communal lives will recover from our being brainwashed into fearing ordinary human contact, and our heritage of Common Law rights and freedoms will recover from our having willingly surrendered all of our most basic freedoms the moment some Hitler with a stethoscope told us to do so to avoid catching and spreading a bad bug.

The long-term negative consequences of the means being employed to flatten the curve of the coronavirus pandemic so outweigh the benefit of saving the health care system that those who for whatever reason have decided upon this strategy have been trying to sell it to the public by pretending that it is the only option for dealing with this pandemic that is available. Consider, for example, the way in which our Dominion and provincial governments have released over the past couple of weeks the projection models that they have been working with. In the press conferences where these models were released contrasts were drawn. On the one hand, we were given the numbers of those that these models predict will be infected with the virus and die under the measures currently being taken. On the other hand, we were given the numbers of those that according to the model would have been infected and died had we done nothing at all.

All of this is, of course, an obvious example of bifurcation, of the logical fallacy of the false dilemma. It is hardly the case that the only options available to us were to do what we are presently doing or to do nothing. A strategy of protecting the most vulnerable, while letting everybody else go about their daily lives, would reduce the number of deaths expected from the pandemic without the numerous ill effects of flattening the curve. The Kingdom of Sweden is following such a strategy and it appears to be working for them. It has not been often in the last century that Sweden has been a model of sound and sane public policy. It figures that after following their bad example on any number of other issues, usually having something or the other to do with gender politics and political correctness, that when they actually get something right we would ignore them.

Dissenting epidemiologist, Dr. Knut Wittkowski, who was the head of Rockefeller University’s Department of Biostatics, Epidemiology, and Research Design for twenty years, has argued that there is no good reason to extend the duration of a respiratory disease’s run through the population and that the present regime of extreme social distancing and shut down, far from being the best or only response to the pandemic, is the worst. He is far from being the only epidemiologist to think this way and to disagree with the strategy being pursued by most public health authorities. As is generally the case, when the mainstream media claims that a consensus of scientific experts is behind a policy which they and the government support, they are lying through their teeth.

That there is a great deal of uncertainty about this virus and pandemic is acknowledged by all. That the measures being taken to combat it will have devastating effects of their own, which will only get worse the longer they are kept in place, is a certainty. Yet the strategy which underlies these measures, requires that they be kept in place for a very long time. This is hardly grounds for the blind confidence in our public health authorities that they are demanding from us at this moment.

Indeed, they are starting to give the impression that we would have been better off seeking the advice of that alternative medicine practitioner whose answer to everything is “ooo eee ooo ah ah, ting tang, walla walla bing bang.”

God Save the Queen

Over the course of several months last year, the media manufactured a scandal with regards to the Duke of York’s reluctance to drop his friendship with a notorious financier after the latter’s less respectable, depending upon how you view the world of finance, side-business as a pimp was exposed and he went to prison where he died in an apparent case of Arkancide. Between this and the media spotlight on all the doings and difficulties of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex culminating in what has been amusingly dubbed “Megxit” it is not surprising that the republicans have come crawling out of the woodworks like the creepy little beady-eyed, pointy-eared, worm-tailed, buck-toothed, vermin that they are. Could there be anything lower or sleazier, more base, more despicable, or more vile, rotten and cheap than to make use of her relatives to attack Her Majesty and the sacred, time-honoured, office she holds after a lifetime of faithful, dutiful, public service?

It is more surprising to see men of sound principles like Peter Hitchens say things like “I do not much like the British royal family”, which is the sentence with which he opened a recent e-article for First Things in which he gave an excellent and admirable defense of the institution of the monarchy but expressed his doubt that anyone of generations younger than that of the current occupant of the throne has had the upbringing necessary to bear the responsibilities of the office. Mr. Hitchens posed this to his readers as a personal conundrum – how could he reconcile his monarchism with his lack of enthusiasm for the next generations of the reigning House?

Mr. Hitchens’ dilemma reminds me in some ways of the attitude of the Right Honourable Alan Clark, who served as Conservative MP for Plymouth Sutton and later for Kensington and Chelsea and held the office of Junior Minister in three different Ministries under Margaret Thatcher. Clark, a British nationalist, believed in all of his country’s old institutions, including the monarchy, but spoke rather disdainfully of most living members of the Royal Family. He respected the Queen, more so her mother – who was still living in his day - and adored Princess Diana but that was about it. Clark, however, never gave any indication of any sort of internal struggle over the matter and, indeed, was similarly rude in the way he spoke of virtually everyone else, his own family included.

I don’t have this problem myself. I am both a monarchist and a royalist in the sense of believing in the institution of the monarchy and the principle of hereditary reign, but I also very much admire and respect Elizabeth II as a person and do, for the most part, like the royal family. The members of the family that I would, perhaps, like less than the others, are not in the immediate line of succession. I may disagree with His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales on the subject of climate change but that hardly constitutes grounds for disliking him and I happen to think that he will make an excellent king. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge also impress me as a couple that will do an admirable job of reigning when their time comes. With regards to the latter couple Mr. Charles Coulombe, an American Monarchist – yes, there are Americans of sane and sound principles out there – said the following in his recent article about “Megxit” for the Roman Catholic magazine Crisis:

Princess Grace threw herself into the greatest role of her career. Devoting herself entirely to her new country and to her husband’s work, she became the symbol of Monaco’s new image, for all that her children from time to time seemed to be trying to revert to dynastic type.

So, too, has Prince William’s consort and future queen done, despite her middle-class background.

Since I like and respect the present occupant of the throne, the heir apparent and the next in the line of succession I don’t foresee myself having to face the kind of internal struggle Peter Hitchens is dealing with. I did, however, read a passage a couple of decades ago that struck me as providing the answer for anyone of sound principles struggling with this sort of dilemma. It is found in Twenty Years After, the second of the three (1) novels written by Alexandre Dumas père which are loosely based on a previous novel that itself is loosely based on the life of Charles D’Artagnan, Captain of Louis XIV’s Musketeers. In the passage, the Count de la Fère – better known to fans of the series as Athos - visits the grave of Louis XIII where he gives the following advice to his son Raoul, the Viscount of Bragellone:

This is the sepulcher… of a man who was weak and without grandeur, but whose reign was, notwithstanding, full of important events. Above this king watches another man's spirit, as this lamp watches over this tomb, and lights it up. The latter was a real king, Raoul; the other only a phantom into which he put a soul. And yet so powerful is the monarchy among us, that he has not even the honor of a tomb at the feet of him for the glory of whom he wore out his life, — for that man, if he made this king an insignificant one, has made the kingdom great. And there are two things enclosed in the Louvre Palace, — the king who dies, and the royalty which does not. That reign has ended, Raoul; that minister so renowned, feared and hated by his master, has gone to the tomb, drawing after him the king whom he did not wish to leave alone for fear he should destroy his work, — for a king only builds up when he has God, or the spirit of God, near him. Yet then every one thought the cardinal's death a deliverance, and I, blind like my contemporaries, sometimes opposed the designs of the great man who held France's destiny in his hands, (2) and who, just as he opened or closed them, held her in check or gave her the impress of his choice. If he did not crush me and my friends in his terrible anger, it was without doubt that I should be able to say to you to-day: Raoul, learn ever to separate the king and the principle of royalty. The king is but man; royalty is the spirit of God. When you are in doubt as to which you should serve, forsake the material appearance for the invisible principle, for this is everything. Only God has wished to render this principle palpable by incarnating it in a man. Raoul, it seems to me that I see your future as through a cloud. It will be better than ours. We have had a minister without a king; you, on the contrary, will have a king without a minister. You will be able then to serve, love, and honor the king. If he prove a tyrant, — for power in its giddiness often becomes tyranny, (3) — serve, love, and honor the royalty; that is the infallible principle. That is to say, the spirit of God on the earth ; that is, that celestial spark which makes this dust so great and so holy that we, gentlemen of high condition indeed, are as unimportant before this body extended on the last step of this staircase as this body itself is before the throne of the Supreme Being. (I have added the bold for emphasis on the most relevant sentences)

Now back to the republicans.

I don’t know which group of republicans in Canada disgusts me the most.

There are the neo-Marxist professors who fill the heads of impressionable youth with nonsense about how “imperialism” and “colonialism” were the equivalent of fascism and Nazism. Our young people have become particularly vulnerable to this inane tripe since they have not been taught history properly. Otherwise they would know that it was precisely because Canada was member of the Imperial Commonwealth that we went to war with fascism and Nazism in 1939. It had absolutely nothing to do with some Americanized crusade for “democracy.” Young Canadians of that generation gladly signed up to go overseas because they felt it was their duty to their God, their King, and their country.

On a somewhat related note allow me to interject here a comment on the following remark from Mr. Hitchens’ First Things article:

The monarch, stripped of all ancient direct power, is now remarkably like the king on a chessboard—almost incapable of offensive action, but preventing others from occupying a crucial square and those around it.

My comment is simply this – that it is less than a century since we were given all the evidence we need of just how important this role actually is. It was because they had retained their king that the Italians were able to remove Mussolini from power, although they proved themselves to be extreme ingrates when they voted for a republic the year after the war ended. In Germany, where Hitler had taken advantage of the vacancy created by the empty thrones of the Hapsburg and Hohenzollern families to seize absolute power, those who sought to depose him had no such advantage. Thus, Claus von Stauffenberg and his associates – mostly Roman Catholic aristocrats with royalist and monarchical leanings – had to resort to an assassination plan which famously failed.

Then there are the “Canadian nationalists” who think that we should have a domestic head of state rather than a “foreign monarch.” These twits can’t seem to grasp the fact that it is a total contradiction in terms to profess a “nationalism” or a “patriotism” towards a country while denying its historical and traditional essence. Again, part of the problem is a lack of knowledge of history. If only the late, great, Donald Creighton were still around to enlighten them – although his legacy lives on in his books – The Road to Confederation, The Dominion of the North, Sir John A. Macdonald Volumes I and II, etc. if they could only be bothered to read them. Perhaps it is too much to expect people these days to be capable of reading anything longer than a poorly spelled text message. Contrary to the Liberal “Authorized Version” of Canadian History – our domestic equivalent of the Butterfield-rebutted nineteenth century Whig Interpretation – Canada’s is not the history of a country that followed the same path as the United States, only through the route of negotiation rather than revolution. Canada’s is the history of a country that defined itself as following a path from which the Americans diverged two and a half centuries ago - Loyalist instead of Revolutionary, royalist instead of republican. To deny this is to deny the historical and traditional essence of Canada, to deny the very country of which these people profess to be “patriots” and “nationalists.”

Somewhere between these two groups are the divisive agitators. By this, I mean those who attack the monarchy on the grounds that it is “offensive” to some group or another – originally French Canadians, more recently native aboriginals and immigrants. Again the lack of any sort of logical reasoning is apparent.

Whatever French Canadians might have historically thought of the defeat of General Montcalm at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham (1759) in the Seven Years’ War the fact of the matter is that when the Thirteen Colonies rebelled against the Crown in 1776 the French Canadians chose to side with the British and the Loyalists because they knew that they stood a much better chance of preserving their language, religion, and culture under the Crown that had guaranteed these things two years earlier than by siding with those whose rebellion had been in part an angry response to that very guarantee.

Something similar can be said with regards to the native aboriginals. When the time came to choose sides between the Crown and the Americans, first in the American Revolution then again in the War of 1812, the tribes overwhelmingly, although not unanimously, chose the side of the Crown. Indeed, many of them can be counted among the Loyalists who fled to Canada after the American Revolution. The first Anglican Church in Upper Canada, or Ontario as it is called in the vulgar tongue, was founded for Mohawk Indians who had fled to Canada as Loyalists. It is called Her Majesty’s Royal Chapel of the Mohawks and still stands in Brantford, Ontario.

As for more recent immigrants the reasoning of the divisive agitators assumes them to be either incredibly stupid – moving to a country with a constitution and sovereign monarch they disapprove of without having inquired into these basic facts about her – or subversives who have moved here to overthrow said constitution and sovereign. If either of these things were true this would be a case for a much stricter immigration policy and not a case against the monarchy.

W. L. Morton provided the answer to all of this sort of illogic in his The Canadian Identity:

[T]he moral core of Canadian nationhood is found in the fact that Canada is a monarchy and in the nature of monarchial allegiance. As America is united at bottom by the covenant, Canada is united at the top by allegiance. Because Canada is a nation founded on allegiance and not on compact, there is no pressure for uniformity, there is no Canadian way of life. Any one, French, Irish, Ukrainian or Eskimo, can be a subject of the Queen and a citizen of Canada without in any way changing or ceasing to be himself. (4)

Probably the republicans who annoy and disgust me the most are those who are also libertarians, social conservatives, people who have enough courage to be open opponents of the overt anti-white bigotry and racism that hides beneath the guise of the cult of diversity, pluralism, and multiculturalism, and/or Western regional populists who feel the prairie provinces have been treated very poorly by the government in Ottawa. They do not annoy and disgust me because they hold these other views. Quite the contrary, as I agree with each of these groups far more often than I do those who espouse the opposite of these views. While these groups don’t always agree between themselves – the first two hold views that are usually considered to be difficult to reconcile with each other – in Canada, they all have a common enemy in the Liberal Party.

It is the Liberals, more than any other party, that have expanded the size of government and created the present-day cultural climate that is hostile to freedom of association, thought, and expression. It is the Liberals who have done the most to promote abortion, easy divorce, and the various causes associated with the alphabet soup gang in Parliament and it is the Charter they introduced into the constitution in 1982 that turned the Supreme Court of Canada into an American-style body of social liberal activists. The Grits are also the most obvious enemies of the other two groups. While the Liberal Party has never been officially republican, republicanism has walked hand in hand with it throughout its history. It has had all of two ideas throughout the duration of that history. The first, which dominated the party until 1963, was “let us make Canada more like the United States”, and the second, which dominated the party from 1963 to 1984 was “let us make Canada more like the Soviet Union”, after which the party has survived by not thinking at all. Both of these ideas naturally incline towards republicanism since the United States and Soviet Unions were both republics. It was in the second period that the Liberal Party did everything it could to earn the undying enmity of the libertarians, social conservatives, et al. The Americans, after all, only seceded from the reign of their king, the Bolsheviks murdered theirs. It was in this same period that the Liberal Party’s inclinations towards republicanism became most pronounced and obvious as they removed the designation “Royal” from several government branches and downplayed the country’s title “Dominion”, chosen by Canada’s own Fathers of Confederation to denote our being a kingdom without being as likely to provoke an invasion from the republic to our south. Ironically, any libertarian, social conservative, white rights defender or Western populist who advocates republicanism is in a sense promoting the completion of what Pierre Trudeau started. I regard all such as traitors to their own principles.

The previous paragraph should not be construed as saying that the monarchy is or ought to be a partisan issue, but merely that the groups mentioned are untrue to their own principles if they support republicanism. While the most outspoken advocates of republicanism in Canadian history have come from within the socialist movement the same movement has also been represented by some of the finest supporters of the monarchy – constitutional expert Eugene Forsey, Tommy Douglas, and even the much more recent Jack Layton come to mind. The monarchy ought to have the support of all parties because it provides us with a head of state – the person whose office involves the duty of representing the country as a unified whole – who is above the process of partisan politics. How anyone could possibly fail to see this as a huge benefit considering what is happening below the 49th parallel at this very moment is beyond me.

Think about it for a moment: The partisans of one party control the House of Representatives, the partisans of the other party control the Senate. The elected head of state belongs to party that controls the Senate. The party that controls the House has voted to impeach the President. The real grounds behind their doing so, not the thin veil of spurious rationale offered to the House, is because they cannot stand the man and his party. The Senate, which must conduct the trial before the impeachment is final, is most likely to rule in the President’s favour, not because the charges against him are the farce that they are but because he is of their party.

Why would anyone want to imitate the constitutional arrangement that allows for this scenario?

So let the republicans crawl back into the sewers they came from, I say.

God Save the Queen!


(1) The Son of Porthos was written by Paul Mahalin, although it was published under the name of Dumas père and Louise de la Vallière and The Man in the Iron Mask were originally published as part of The Viscount of Bragellone.
(2) This is a reference to the plot of the first novel in the series, The Three Musketeers.
(3) This foreshadows the plot of The Viscount of Bragellone, in which Athos, who had failed to save Charles I of Britain in Twenty Years After assists, with D’Artagnan’s help, in the restoration of Charles II, serving the principle of royalty even though he has a falling out with his own king, Louis XIV, over the latter’s tyrannical acts.
(4) W. L. Morton, The Canadian Identity, Toronto, The University of Toronto Press, 1961, 1972, p. 95.

My Druthers

While I am, for the most part, opposed to the vulgar, Americanization, of the English language, the phrase I have chosen for the title of this essay, a late nineteenth century drawled American contraction of the words “would rather”, expresses the subject of this essay perfectly.

In the unlikely event that I have my druthers and the upcoming Dominion election turns out exactly the way I want it to the following is what will happen on October 21st.

First, Captain Airhead will be turfed out on his rear end in the most decisive negative vote in the history of Canada. I am talking zero seats being given to the Grits in the next Parliament.

Second, the New Democrats will also be reduced to non-party status and be finished once and for all.

Third, the Greens will form Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and will from here on out take the place on the left made vacant by the decimation of the Liberals and NDP.

Fourth, the Conservatives will receive a minority government. Nota bene, I said minority, not majority. The Conservatives wasted the last majority government they received under Stephen Harper and I have not the least doubt that they would do the same under Andrew Scheer.

Fifthly, holding the balance of power and propping up the minority Conservative government, will be Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada. My reasons for wanting this to happen rather than for Bernier to form the next government are twofold. First, I suspect that he and his party would drift left-ward if they actually formed the government. This would inevitably be the case if they received a minority government – any other party, including the Conservatives, holding the balance of power would exert a left-ward pull. Second, I think that by exerting the leverage they would hold in this position they could accomplish more of the excellent goals in their party platform than if they formed the government.

Remember, all of this is what I would like to see happen, not what I am predicting will happen. I doubt that anyone will be able to accurately forecast the outcome of this election and I think the likelihood of it turning out exactly the way I want is extremely slim. It would require, for one thing, that the Canadian right develop overnight a capacity for strategic voting that it has given no previous indication of possessing, unlike the Canadian left which used that very method to straddle us with Captain Airhead in the last Dominion election.

It provides me with no small amount of amusement that so many of those who would share the first and second of the above set of druthers get so irate at the suggestion that anything less than an outright majority government by the Conservatives – or People’s Party depending upon which sort of partisan they happen to be – would be acceptable, much less desirable. Obviously the leaders, candidates, and campaign teams of the parties cannot make anything less than a majority government their goal, but there is no good reason why right-of-centre thinkers outside of the aforementioned groups should not prefer a different outcome. It is the job of right-wing politicians to win elections by selling a right-wing platform to the electorate. It is not the job of the right-wing portion of the electorate to put those politicians into office in an unthinking manner, without asking hard questions and making hard demands of them. The attitude that the electorate owes them their votes has always been one of the most obnoxious aspects of smug, Grit, arrogance. It ought not to be imitated on the right. It is the duty of right-wing commentators of the fourth and, like this writer, fifth estates, to constantly remind right-wing politicians of right-wing principles and hold them accountable. It irritates me that those who think otherwise regard any criticism of the leaders of their preferred parties as being akin to campaigning for the left. I have even seen such nincompoops describe Ezra Levant, the same Ezra Levant whom the mainstream media equally absurdly labels a “right-wing extremist”, as a Liberal agent because of his criticism of Scheer. These fools think of elections in terms of salvation and cannot bear to hear anything negative about their would-be Messiahs. This is the way progressives view politics and there ought to be no room for it on the right.

Of course the sort of people I have been talking about are “conservatives” of a highly Americanized type. Over the last two to three decades I have watched them jettison virtually every principle that has historically and traditionally been considered right-wing to the point that only capitalism seems to be indispensable to them. Which is ironic because capitalism is not right-wing. The true right is anti-socialist not capitalist. It is anti-socialist because it is hierarchical and socialism is egalitarian and it is anti-socialist because it is strongly pro-property – even more so than classical liberalism – and being anti-property is the very essence of socialism. The true right, while anti-socialist, has always been willing to condemn the vulgarity and Philistinism of capitalism and its erosion of social and cultural mores.

The same people, I would point out, are often the ones who insist that if the Liberals win again the Western provinces, or at least Alberta, ought to separate from Canada. While they are right to believe that Ottawa has treated the Western provinces unjustly, especially whenever the Liberals headed by a Trudeau have been in government, I have no sympathy with this kind of separatism whatsoever. The separatists all talk about forming a republic, proving themselves to be liberals. Alan Clark, the military historian turned Tory statesman, best remembered for his Diaries, who served as a junior minister in the ministries of Trade and Defence under Margaret Thatcher, was a Powellite and Eurosceptic who after the vote on the Common Market told the Labour MP Dennis Skinner “I'd rather live in a socialist Britain than one ruled by a lot of f***ing foreigners.” To paraphrase the sentiment, and apply it to the matter at hand, I’d rather live in a socialist Canada with her traditional constitution than in any sort of ******* republic. (1)

This, by the way, is why I would like to see the Greens replace both the NDP and the Grits on the other side of Canada’s political spectrum. Elizabeth May, however crazy I think her climate-change alarmism is, and however annoying I find her other progressive twaddle like that nonsense about “white privilege” she was spouting at Monday’s debate, is sound on the constitution. (2) Jagmeet Singh, like most NDPers, (3) is not.

Allow me to conclude by returning to the subject of my druthers and pursuing it a bit further than the outcome of the imminent election.

First, Canada would undergo a major revival of sound Christian religion.

Second, to summarize paragraphs nine through twelve above, the Canadian right would abandon American neo-conservatism and return to genuine British/Canadian Toryism. This would mean that both the preservation of our constitution – the preservation of our constitution, mind you, and not the adoption of one more like that of the Americans - and opposition to moral, social, and cultural decay would take precedence over any economic and fiscal concerns.

Third, the Canadian right would make it a top priority to break the control of the progressive cartel over the majority of the fourth estate.

Fourth, they would make it another top priority to repeal the Canadian Human Rights Act and abolish the Canadian Human Rights Commission/Tribunals. Despite the name of the Act/Commission/Tribunal these do nothing to protect people from the arbitrary abuse of government power but rather enable that abuse by allowing the state to police the thoughts, intentions, and motives of Canadians. To demonstrate this to the public, all that needs to be done is to encourage them to actually read the Act. Then explain the difference between a non-discrimination policy – Her Majesty’s government will administer the law and justice fairly and justly without discriminating on the basis of X, Y, Z – and an anti-discrimination law in which the government unnecessarily interjects itself into private transactions and tells us that we cannot have certain thoughts or allow them to influence us in our interactions with others.

Fifth, they would work through the provincial legislatures – which have jurisdiction over the matter – to ensure that a Canadian civics in which our constitution, history, and heritage are respected becomes part of our educational system so much so that parties that want to destroy our constitution, turn the country into a republic, or break up Confederation, become completely unelectable.

Sixth, they will put Sir John A. Macdonald back on our money where he belongs, and restore any other monument to the leading Father of Confederation that has been removed for politically correct purposes.

I could probably add others but that is enough wishful thinking for now.

(1) In response to a recent post by Will S. at his Patriactionary blog about how the West should have recognized the Republic of China (Taiwan) as legitimate rather than the People’s Republic of China (Red China) I said: “Neither Republic is legitimate, as no republic is a legitimate form of government (I would allow for the possibility of two exceptions to this in all of human history – Switzerland and the defunct Confederate States of America). The West should have told all of China that until they restored the Quin dynasty and put the rightful heir of the House of Aisin Gioro back on the throne we would not recognize any Chinese government as being legitimate, with the People’s Republic being even less legitimate than the other one. Sadly, the West let the bloody Yanks do all the talking for the rest of us.”

(2) http://maplemonarchists.weebly.com/blog/monarchist-profile-elizabeth-may

(3) Tommy Douglas and Jack Layton, both deceased, are the only exceptions that really come to mind off the top of my head. Eugene Forsey, who in his heart was really a Conservative all his life regardless of which party he was nominally associated with at the time was a strong constitutionalist but he was never an NDPer. He left the CCF when it became the NDP.

Thomas Mulcair, Quit Your Day Job! You Have a Promising Future in Comedy!

I had never thought of Thomas Mulcair, federal leader of the New Democratic Party, as a particularly humorous individual. He is a progressive, after all, and progressives are generally noted for their lack of a sense of humour. Mulcair, whose visage is as constantly plastered with a scowl as his predecessor’s was with a cheap grin, gives off a particularly strong vibe of being allergic to anything funny that would bring a smile to a normal man’s lips and fill his heart with cheer.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, to discover that the joke of the century had been uttered last Tuesday, in the unlikely setting of the Economic Club of Canada, by none other than the present Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, which title, as applied to the leader of a party that is full of outspoken, severe-our-ties-to-the-monarchy, republicans, is itself a pretty good joke.

Addressing his audience of businessmen, he said, apparently with a straight face, that “The federal department of finance’s own reports show that NDP governments are the best at balancing the books when in office”.

Upon first hearing of this, I thought that perhaps Mulcair was referring to the old etiquette class exercise of balancing books upon the top of one’s head to learn poise. Perhaps, in an effort to improve himself and obtain a little culture, he had been watching My Fair Lady, the musical film version of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, in which Audrey Hepburn’s Eliza Doolittle is made to do this by Rex Harrison’s Professor Henry Higgins. I hoped this was the case because the NDP could use some of the class and culture that their British counterparts, like the Fabian Mr. Shaw, far more frequently possess than socialists on this side of the Atlantic. Unfortunately, he was talking about the budget.

Now boasting is generally considered to be rather gauche but if you absolutely must play the braggart there are some basic guidelines as to how to do it without ending up looking like post-metamorphosis Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The most basic guideline is to actually have the qualities of which you crow. If that is not possible, the next guideline is that your boast should at least be believable. If Mr. Mulcair wanted to boast of his party’s strengths, perhaps he should have chosen something more credible than budget balancing. He could have said that NDP governments are the best at killing rural economies, shutting down rural hospital services, and forcing consolidation upon rural municipalities. Or he could have said that the NDP are the best at increasing people’s tax burdens, killing businesses, and transferring employment from the private to the public sector. All of that would have been believable. But balancing budgets?

To be fair, Mulcair did not just pull this astonishing boast out of thin air. He pointed to the examples of Tommy Douglas and Roy Romanow in Saskatchewan and Gary Doer here in Manitoba to back up his claim. With regards to the rather obvious counter-example of Bob Rae in Ontario, he said “There was one exception — but he turned out to be a Liberal.” Rae, as provincial NDP leader, was premier of Ontario from 1990 to 1995. Upon taking over from a Liberal government that had been running over their budget, he ran Ontario’s deficit from the millions into the billions. In his first budget, despite raising taxes he set a record breaking deficit of over nine billions dollars. No wonder Mulcair tried to explain away Rae by saying that he was really a Liberal, i.e., that when he re-entered politics at the federal level, he did so as a member of the party in which Mulcair had spent his years in Quebec provincial politics.

Mulcair is mistaken, however, in thinking of Rae as the exception. The exception is the provincial NDP in Saskatchewan. They have indeed, been exceptionally fiscally responsible, despite their other failings, and we will consider the significance of that shortly. Countrywide, the NDP’s budgeting record has far more often resembled that of Bob Rae than that of Roy Romanow.

Outside of Saskatchewan, the NDP has formed governments in BC, Manitoba, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and the Yukon Territory. It has never formed governments in Quebec, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, or Prince Edward Island and only formed a government in Alberta for the first time earlier this year, obviously too soon to be considered in any kind of comparison.

They seem to have been fairly fiscally responsible in the Yukon. Darrell Dexter’s NDP governed Nova Scotia for a single term from 2009 to 2013 in which their first and last budgets were balanced but the two inbetween had large deficits. In BC the NDP governed for three years in the 1970s, then again from 1991 to 2001. Dave Barrett inherited a surplus in 1972 and turned it into a deficit. In the ‘90s under Mike Harcourt and Glen Clark, the NDP produced Rae-style budgets with billion dollar deficits. It was only in their last year and a half in office, after scandal forced Clark to resign, that his successors managed to get their books into balance..

This brings us to my own province of Manitoba where the NDP has governed longer than anywhere excepct Saskatchewan. In the 1970s Ed Schreyer balanced most of his budgets going into deficit in his last year. His cousin-in-law, Howard Pawley, reversed that pattern in the 1980s, balancing the budget only at the end of a string of deficits. It is the more recent NDP governments that are particularly relevent, however, because Mulcair gave Gary Doer as an example of fiscal prudence in his speech and has repeatedly held Greg Selinger up as an example for other premiers, even going so far as to say that a federal NDP government would follow Selinger’s example.

The NDP have governed Manitoba since 1999, when Gary Doer inherited a balanced budget from the Progressive Conservative government of Gary Filmon which had passed legislation requiring the government to balance the budget every year and to call a referendum before any major tax increase. Doer declared that this legislation would stand, and accordingly his Finance Minister Greg Selinger announced every year that he had balanced the books. There are a few things peculiar about this seemingly laudable display of financial prudence, however.

Selinger took over the leadership of the NDP and the premiership of Manitoba in the fall of 2009. Since then, his government has run deficits of hundreds of millions of dollars, each year, despite raising the Provincial Sales Tax by a percentage point in 2013 without holding the referendum they were legally required to call. If Selinger’s handling of the budget as premier seems to be an rather drastic contrast with the way he handled it as Doer’s Finance Minister, realize that the provincial debt has more than doubled since the NDP took power in 1999. Even the large deficits of the last six years cannot acount for that debt, much of which had to have been acquired while Doer was premier. Selinger has gone through four Finance Ministers since becoming premier, whereas Doer had been able to make do with one. It looks like Selinger has been unable to find a Finance Minister as capable of making a deficit look like a surplus as he was.

So, no Mr. Mulcair, Bob Rae is not the exception. In Nova Scotia and BC, the NDP were more like Rae, as the NDP has been in Manitoba under Selinger and earlier was under Pawley. The NDP claimed to have balanced the budget under Doer but this claim is highly questionable in light of the way the debt has skyrocketed since 1999.

The real exception, therefore, is the Saskatchewan New Democratic Party. It was in Saskatchewan, that the NDP’s predecessor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, first formed a government under the leadership of Tommy Douglas in 1944. Douglas governed Saskatchewan for sixteen years, never running a deficit. After this, he moved into federal politics as first leader of the NDP, which was formed in 1961 when the CCF merged with the Canadian Labour Congress. Under the new name, the Saskatchewan NDP formed governments under Allan Blakeney from 1971 to 1982, then again under Roy Romanow and Lorne Calvert from 1991 to 2007. These leaders all followed Douglas’ example and the NDP almost never ran a deficit in Saskatchewan.

This is to the credit of the provincial NDP in Saskatchewan but is it to the credit of the party as a whole? Mulcair seems to think so, and in the 2011 Ontario provincial election Andrea Horwath made this “the NDP are the best at balancing books” part of her campaign. The problem is that this is asking people to believe that because the Saskatchewan NDP have been fiscally responsible, other NDP parties will be fiscally responsible elsewhere. This kind of claim cannot be based on just the percentage of years in which an NDP government has balanced the budget because the province in which the NDP has been extremely good at avoiding deficits is also the province in which they were in office far longer than anywhere else, and their record there is radically different from their record elsewhere.

Thomas Mulcair has said that he thinks Greg Selinger is doing a great job as Manitoba’s premier and that he would govern the same way federally. That tells us all we need to know about what kind of budget to expect from a federal NDP government and is what makes Mulcair’s claim that his party is fiscally responsible such an excellent joke. Unfortunately, judging from Mulcair’s rising popularity in the polls, the joke may end up being on us.



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The Unsolved Riddle of Affordable Health Care and the Medicare Mystique

Imagine that you are suffering from chronic pain due to a condition that can be alleviated by fairly simple surgery. You schedule the surgery but are told that it has recently been re-classified as elective or cosmetic surgery and so is no longer covered by your health insurance. If you want the surgery you must now fork over thousands of dollars.

Or imagine that you live in a rural community that is only a half hour drive away from the second largest city in your province. You have a condition that is fairly common but the city close to you does not have any of the specialists who treat that condition, despite having a decent sized general hospital and several smaller clinics, and so twice a year you must travel half way across the province to see a specialist in the capital city.

How about this scenario? Your spouse has an irreversible, progressively worsening, mentally debilitating condition that requires round-the-clock supervision and extremely expensive medication. As your savings disappear paying for the expensive and ineffective medication you find that you are now figuratively chained to your spouse because the health care system seems unable or unwilling to provide you with relief from the duty of watching over your spouse 24/7.

Suppose you are a young, expectant, mother on the verge of giving birth. You are staying with your family in a rural community that has its own, modest, health centre. When your water breaks you contact the local health centre and are told to go to the hospital in the nearest city which is approximately an hour’s drive away. So you hop in your pickup truck, the father of your child takes the wheel, and off you go but you do not have time to make it and give birth along the road.

Let’s say that an elderly loved one was discharged from the hospital in a particularly harsh winter, taken home by taxi, and later found dead on his porch. What would you think if the provincial health minister were to try and pin the blame for this entirely on the cab driver?

All of these scenarios are real. Two of them are taken from stories that made the news here in Manitoba during the last six months. One describes a situation within my own family. One describes something that friends of mine from church have had to deal with. One is a story that was relayed to me by these same friends.

What all of these scenarios have in common is that they point to the fact that our publically funded health care system is overburdened and unable to meet the demands upon it or the medical needs of Canadians.

That the publically funded health care system is overburdened is not exactly news. For years now Canadians have had to put up with waits to see their family doctor, followed by longer waits either to see a specialist, to have lab work done or both, followed by yet another wait until they actually receive treatment. These waits can be months or even years long, even if the condition is serious enough to require urgent treatment. It is openly acknowledged that there is a problem here and there is also a pre-packed, knee-jerk, pat answer to the question of what the solution is. That answer is to say that the government needs to devote more resources to health care, to put more money into it.

That is the wrong answer but to point that out in Canada is to be like the boy in Hans Christian Anderson’s story who observes that His Imperial Majesty is strutting around naked as a jaybird. This is because it is the only answer that is consistent with the prevalent Medicare mystique.

By Medicare mystique I refer to the ridiculous but popular idea that our single-payer health care system is not only superior to all other systems but a glorious national institution, Canada’s pride, joy, and crown jewel, and that its monopoly on the provision of health care services must be protected against competition at all costs, lest we become like the Americans. I have often heard this mystique put in these words “our health care system is what makes us different from the Americans”.

I wonder if those who put it this way realize how utterly stupid it makes them sound? On the national level, universal, single-payer, health care dates back to the Medical Care Act passed by Parliament in 1966. Not that the Pearson Liberals invented it from scratch. It developed over the course of a couple of decades as the provinces, starting with Saskatchewan under the socialist government of Tommy Douglas, developed provincial public health insurance programs, and the federal government, under both the Liberal and Conservative parties in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s, began to provide funding. Something that is less than fifty years old in its present form cannot be what defines us as a nation and makes us distinct and different from our nearest neighbour. Canada is a parliamentary monarchy and a federation of English and French provinces, formed out of colonies that had remained loyal to Britain when the Americans rebelled and by Loyalists that had fled persecution in the new republic, which developed as a country within the British family of nations rather than through revolt and rebellion. This, and not Medicare, is what distinguishes us from the Americans. I will not dwell on this point further, however, because I am writing about what is wrong with our health care system not what is wrong with our educational system.

The way the system works, each province operates its own public health insurance plan with a large part of the funding coming from the federal government. The province issues a card with a health number on it to each of its residents which they show to the hospital, clinic or doctor’s office. The provincial health plan is then billed for the services.

Public health insurance systems like Canada’s were created in response to the rapid and exponential rise in the cost of health care over the last century brought upon by such factors as the explosion in the development of new health technology. The rise in the cost of health care put it beyond the reach of many people and so public health insurance was developed with the goal of making sure that everybody who needed medical care had access to it and that families did not have to clean out their savings, take out a loan, or go into bankruptcy to pay for life-saving surgery.

This was and is a laudable goal but the problem with public health insurance is that it is an answer to the question how can we make somebody else pay for our health care rather than to the question how can we make health care more affordable overall. Indeed, if we think of the expense of health care as being the problem, public insurance adds to the problem rather than decreases it. Health care that is paid for by public insurance is not free because we pay for it with our taxes, but by separating the payment from the use, it creates the popular illusion that it is free. This in turn leads people to use the system more often than they would if they had to pay per use. When you increase the demand for any commodity you drive up its price and so public health insurance increases the total cost of health care even though you don’t pay for it at the moment of use.

If this sounds like an argument for private health insurance of the sort that we ordinarily associate with the United States, think again. Private health insurance also increases the overall cost of health care, albeit for different reasons. Look at how much the Americans spend on health care every year if you want evidence of this.

If both public and private health insurance drive up the cost of health care then it seems like we are trapped between a rock and a hard place. Paradoxically, however, countries that have both seem to have better overall health care than countries that have only one or the other.

Several decades ago, in an interview that was published in the Paris Review, British novelist Anthony Burgess remarked that despite his loathing of the State he conceded “that socialized medicine is a priority in any civilized country today”. To this, he added that “there’s no reason why a private practice shouldn’t coexist with a national health one”. This, he noted, was how it was set up in England, and then remarked on how the difference in treatment is indistinguishable, except that “the State materials (tooth fillings, spectacles, and so on) are inferior to what you buy as a private patient.”

What Burgess was describing is what exists not only in the United Kingdom but in every other first world country other than Canada and the United States. Canada and the United States do have a mix of public and private in the sense that the United States has had public health insurance for the elderly and low-income families since the 1960s and Canada allows private coverage for procedures not covered under the public plan. In the UK, Europe and Australia, however, a universal public health system exists alongside competing private systems and the health care is generally superior, both in quality and affordability, to that of the North American countries that have taken the more extreme routes of either relying mostly upon private companies for health coverage (the United States) or giving the universal public plan a monopoly (Canada).

Technically it is the provinces that give their public health plans a monopoly, although the Canada Health Act of 1984, one of the last bills passed by the Trudeau Liberals, provides strong incentive for them to do so. While this monopoly was successfully challenged before the Supreme Court in Chaoulli v. Quebec (2005) it has not yet been broken. The refusal to allow private insurance to compete with public insurance is downright stupid and is the single biggest reason why the public system is failing. It is also the sort of thing that outside Canada only exists in Communist dictatorships. Unsurprisingly, it is also the aspect of our health care system that is most protected by the Medicare mystique. You may recall that in the 2000 general election the other parties ganged up against Stockwell Day of the Canadian Alliance and accused him of wanting to Americanize the country by introducing “two-tier health care”. Day’s response was to hold up a sign in the leader’s debate that said “No 2-Tier Health Care”. There is irony in the fact that two-tier health care would have given us the British/European/Australian model and not the American model but this irony is lost on the type of people who, with the twisted reasoning of egalitarianism which in a wiser age was known as Envy, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, would rather have all Canadians waiting in long lines to receive more expensive, poorer quality, health care, than to allow Canadians who can afford it to opt out of the public system and pay for private care, thus relieving the burden on the public system and allowing it to operate better.

As long as this mystique prevails, the burden on our health care system, especially in provinces like Manitoba where the socialist NDP government is determined to cling to the public monopoly even as it finds itself closing rural emergency rooms and obstetric wards across the province, will continue to grow, and the riddle of affordable, quality health care, will go unsolved.