Manitoba is now up the Creek, Without a Paddle, in a Leaky Kinew

 I have said before that I think we Canadians owe our Sovereign, now His Majesty Charles III, although when I made the remark originally it was our late Sovereign Lady of blessed memory, Elizabeth II, an apology for the incompetent, utterly corrupt, and insanely evil clown who, through our abuse of our voting privilege, has been Prime Minister of this Commonwealth Realm for the last eight years.   Now I would add that the Canadians of my province, Manitoba, owe a double apology for putting the only politician in the Dominion worse than Captain Airhead himself into the premier’s office, with a majority in the Legislature behind him.

 

When the evil New Democratic Party led by the execrable Wab Kinew won the provincial election on 3 October, I was disgusted but not surprised.   When Lee Harding of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a local think-tank here in Winnipeg, published a piece on 29 September calling for the re-election of the Progressive Conservatives, I could not agree with his title as much as I desired that outcome.   The title was “Manitoba PCs Deserve Another Mandate”.   No, they did not.   The reason for voting PC this election was not that they deserved it but that the alternative was much, much, worse.

 

The Progressive Conservatives, led by Brian Pallister, won the provincial election of 2016 and governed well enough in their first term that Harding’s title would have been true had he written his article in 2019.   That year they won re-election and at the annual New Year’s Levée hosted by the Lieutenant Governor I shook Pallister’s hand and congratulated him on his victory.   Within a few months of this, however, Pallister’s governance went south badly and I came to loathe the man.   In July of 2021, a short time before he resigned as PC leader and premier, I expressed this in these words:

 

Brian Pallister is an ignorant fool!

He’s a stupid, ugly, loser and he smells bad too!

His one and only virtue,

I hate to say it but it’s true,

His one and only virtue is –

He’s not Wab Kinew!

 

 

It was Pallister’s handling of the bat flu scare that had so soured me on his governance.   He had imposed a particularly harsh lockdown, had done so earlier than many other provinces, and had done so in an arrogant, in-your-face, manner.   Wab Kinew and the NDP criticized Pallister’s handling of the pandemic, but their criticism went entirely in the wrong direction.   They criticized Pallister for not imposing lockdowns sooner, not making them harsher, lifting them too early and this sort of thing.   They should have been criticizing Pallister for trampling all over the most basic rights and freedoms of Manitobans, that is to say our ancient Common Law rights and freedoms not the useless and empty guarantees of Pierre Trudeau’s Charter, and acting like there are no constitutional limits to the power of government in an emergency.   Their mishandling of the bat flu panic under Pallister is the reason the PC’s don’t deserve another mandate.   Kinew’s criticism of the same, which amounted to a demand that Pallister do more of what he was doing wrong, is one reason why the NDP do not deserve to replace the PC’s as government and are a much worse alternative.

 

It was not the botched job he made of the bat flu that ultimately brought about Pallister’s resignation as PC leader and premier at the beginning of September 2021.   This was 2021, and the crazy progressive leftists who dominate so much of the Canadian mainstream media, envious as always of their counterparts in the United States, decided that Canada needed her version of the George Floyd controversy that had been manufactured by the BLM Movement – the movement for whom the lives of American blacks matter the least because their target is the American police who protect American blacks from the violent crime that costs so many blacks their lives each year – and so jumped on the discovery of ground disturbances – and that was all that were discovered – on the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, which the band interpreted as the discovery of unmarked graves – not “mass graves” as falsely reported – and began claiming that this “proved” the version of the Indian Residential Schools narrative that defrocked United Church minister and conspiracy theorist Kevin Annett has been spouting since the 1990s, i.e., that children were murdered by the thousands in the schools and buried in secret graves.   Imagine if the mainstream media in the UK were to start reporting David Icke’s theory that the world is controlled by reptilian shapeshifters from outer space and you will have an approximation of the degree of departure from journalistic standards and integrity that was involved here.   Their claim has since been thoroughly debunked, which is why leftist politicians now want to criminalize debunking it, but it had its intended effect.   That summer saw the biggest wave of hate crimes in Canadian history as Church buildings – whether the Churches had any connection to the residential schools or not – were burned or otherwise vandalized all across the country.   On Dominion Day, Year Zero, Cultural Maoist terrorists, toppled the statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II on the grounds of the Manitoba Legislature.   No society can afford to tolerate this sort of violent, seditious, assault on her history and civilization and Brian Pallister appropriately condemned these acts.   In doing so he made positive statements about the previous generations of Canadians who settled and built the country and who are now constantly being defamed by progressive academics and journalists, in violation of the fifth and ninth commandments.   The provincial Indian chiefs decided to take offense at this – take offense is the operative phrase, as none was given, Pallister had not said anything about them, negative or otherwise – and demanded that Pallister apologize.  Pallister should have told them to go suck an egg and stood his ground.   Instead, about a month later, he cravenly gave them the apology they didn’t deserve, and in the event didn’t accept, and shortly thereafter resigned.

 

Kelvin Goertzen took over as interim party leader and premier until the party held its leadership vote on 30 October.   Now, I am not a fan of this method of choosing a party leader.   I think that it is far more consistent with our parliamentary form of government for the party caucus – the party’s sitting members in the House of Commons or provincial legislative assembly – to choose their leader, and that selling paid memberships in the party with a vote for the leader attached smacks of the American republican system.   I also dislike the way our elections, Dominion and provincial, are now treated by almost everyone as if we were directly voting for the prime minister or premier, rather than voting for our local representatives in a larger parliamentary assembly, for the same reason.   This is a consequence of being inundated with too much American culture in the form of television and movies.   That having been said, if the party leader is to be chosen this way, it should at least be open and honest.   That is precisely what the vote that put Heather Stefanson in as leader of Manitoba’s Progressive Conservatives and premier of the province was not.   Stefanson was the candidate supported by the sitting members – had the party chosen its leader according to my preferred method she would have still become leader.   She was also, however, the candidate that the backroom bosses of the party wanted as leader, and when they ultimately got their way their new leader had a huge cloud of suspicion of shenanigans over her head.   Stefanson won the leadership vote by a narrow margin – 51.1% over the 48.9% received by Shelly Glover, which looks even narrower in total vote count – 8, 405 for Stefanson, 8, 042 for Glover.   Glover, who had formerly been a member of the House of Commons representing St. Boniface, based her campaign in part on dissatisfaction with how Pallister, with whose government Stefanson had been associated, had handled the bat flu.   The party’s former CFO, Ken Lee, had also sought the leadership, in his case making opposition the Pallister lockdowns his sole issue, but his candidacy was disqualified for reasons that never really were made clear.   This looked shady, as did the fact that over 1200 members had not received their ballots in time to vote, and when Glover lost by such a narrow margin - less than 400 votes - she contested the outcome, but her challenge was quickly dismissed.    This had all the appearances of a backroom fix.

 

When this happened I realized that it would take a miracle for the Progressive Conservatives to win the next election.   You cannot treat your voting base this way and expect them to turn up in sufficient numbers to support you come election time.

 

It was apparent during the short election campaign, and the longer pre-campaign leading up to it, that Stefanson’s PCs were not remotely as committed to their winning the election as their enemies were to their being defeated.   I say enemies rather than opponents because it is not just their rivals in the legislature that I am talking about.

 

The unions have been determined to take down the PCs since pretty much the moment Brian Pallister became premier and have really stepped up their game in the last couple of years.   They have spent a fortune on billboard ads all over Winnipeg attacking the PC government.   Then there are the yard signs that began popping up like mushrooms all over the place long before the party campaign signs came out.   These couldn’t explicitly endorse candidate or party, but everyone knew what they were getting at.  The most common such signs were from the Manitoba Nurses Union and the Manitoba Teachers Society.  

 

Allied with these unions in their quest to bring down the PCs and put Kinew’s NDP into government, was the media, especially the CBC, which as Crown broadcaster by rights ought to be neutral, and the Winnipeg Free Press.     

 

These media, along with the Manitoba Nurses Union and the NDP, have been using health care as a club to bash the Progressive Conservatives with ever since Pallister, early in his premiership, indicated his disagreement with them that health care spending needs to keep going in one direction only, up, converted the Emergency Rooms at Seven Oaks and Victoria Hospitals in Winnipeg into urgent care centres, and closed the Concordia Hospital ER refocusing the hospital to transitional care for the elderly and those undergoing physical rehabilitation.   The PCs dropped the ball on this one.   They should have hammered back, just as hard, pointing out that the consultant’s report on whose recommendations they did this had been commissioned by the previous, NDP, government, and that at the same time they expanded the capacity of the three remaining ERs – Health Sciences Centre, St. Boniface, and Grace.   They should also have emphasized that health care has usually fared much worse under NDP governments in rural ridings.   The ER in Vita, a rural community about an hour and a half south-east of Winnipeg, closed three years after Greg Selinger became premier.  Two years later it was still closed, with eighteen others along with it.    ERs in many other rural communities remained open, but on a basis somewhat like a multi-point parish, with the same doctor serving several ERs, being in the one the one day, another the next.   In the second last year of Gary Doer’s premiership, the ER in Virden, a rural community along the TransCanada Highway near the Saskatchewan border was temporarily closed, mercifully for only about half a year.   These examples are representative, not comprehensive, and while the rural doctor shortage is a chronic problem regardless of who is in government, rural areas always fare worse under the NDP.  Not coincidentally, these same areas rarely if at all vote NDP.   A rural ER closure, even a temporary one, is worse than an ER closure in Winnipeg, for while there are more people in Winnipeg, the transit time to the next ER, especially if the ER to close is one that serviced a very large area, like the one in Vita, is increased that much more in the country.

 

The media also found another club to bash the PC government with in the Indians’ demand that the Prairie Green Landfill be searched for the remains of two murdered women that the Winnipeg Police believe to have ended up there.   This demand was expressed in protests, blockades, and something that is probably best described as a riot, earlier this year.   Here again, Stefanson’s PCs shot themselves in the foot.   Not so much by refusing the demand – their grounds for doing so were sound, and certainly not the “racism” of which idiots accuse them – but by bringing the issue into the election campaign.   No matter how sound the case for not conducting this just under $200 million search of an area laced with toxins, there was no way Stefanson could argue her point without appearing heartless.  It would have been better to stay silent.

 

So, no, the Stefanson PC’s did not deserve another mandate.   The problem is that those who won deserved it even less.

 

Let me spell it out for you.   At the moment, people all across the Dominion of Canada are experiencing an affordability crisis.   The price of food has gone through the roof.   Many Canadians are skipping meals, many others are buying less healthy processed food than they otherwise would, because the prices at the grocery stores are too high.   At the same time rent is sky high and houses are selling at obscene prices.   Transportation is also that much more expensive.   Much of this is the direct consequence of bad action on the part of the Dominion government.   The price of gasoline has gone up considerably due to the carbon tax, which in turn increases the price of everything that needs to be transported using fuel.  The housing shortage is a direct consequence of Captain Airhead’s decision to use record immigration, with apologies to Bertolt Brecht, to elect a new people.   While Captain Airhead seems to think that food prices are high because of price fixing on the part of the big grocery chains, a notion he borrowed from the man propping his minority government up, federal NDP leader Jimmy Dhaliwal, the fact of the matter is that he has been spending like a drunken sailor since he got into office.   When governments spend more than they take in in revenue, this is not a contributing factor to inflation, it is inflation.   The extra they spend increases the supply of money, the means of exchange, which decreased the value of money per unit, and causes the price of everything else to rise relative to it.    When you spend the way Captain Airhead did over the last few years, paying people to stay home for long periods of time and not go to work – decreasing the production of goods and services and thus causing their cost in currency to go up – you increase inflation exponentially.   Manitoba just elected a premier who has the same sort of attitude towards spending as Captain Airhead.  

 

Last month, in the Million Person March, organized by Ottawa Muslim activist Kamel El-Cheik, but supported by many faith groups and people just concerned about the rights of parents, Canadians across the Dominion expressed what polls already had indicated to be the overwhelming majority opinion of Canadians – that schools should not be keeping parents out of the loop about what is going on in the classroom with their kids about gender identity and that sort of thing.   While leftists have tried to spin this as an alphabet soup issue, accusing those protesting of various sorts of hatred and bigotry, and spinning the reasonable insistence that teachers entrusted with the education of children report back to the parents who so entrusted them, as “forced outing”, they are being absurd.   There is a word for someone who tells kids to keep stuff having to do with sex a secret from their parents.   The policy that schools and school boards have been following in recent years seems tailor-made to accommodate such people.   Heather Stefanson had promised in her campaign to protect parental rights.   The promise would have been more credible had she introduced the legislation to do so earlier when the New Brunswick and Saskatchewan governments were doing so.   However, this much is clear, if someone wanted to protect perverts in the schools rather than the rights of parents, he would be cheering the outcome of this election.

The province already has a huge problem with drug abuse and related social evils.   The CBC reported in April that provincial Chief Medical Examiner had told them via e-mail that the number of drug-related deaths per year has "risen dramatically here in recent years" and that "the deaths are only the tip of the iceberg".   407 Manitobans died from overdoses in 2021, 372 the year previously, both record numbers.   It was at least 418 in 2022.    At least 228 involved fentanyl and/or related drugs.   The city of Winnipeg also saw the largest jump in crime severity of any Canadian city in the same period.   These two facts are not unrelated, nor is the size of the homelessness problem in Winnipeg.    The left, in recent years, has been obsessed with the "harms reduction" approach to this matter, an approach that tries to lower the number of deaths due to overdose and contamination by providing a "safe" supply of drugs and "safe" places to use them.   It is usually coupled with decriminalization or outright legalization of some or all narcotics.   This approach is concerned more with the effects of drugs on those who (ab)use them and less or not at all with the effects of drug abuse on the surrounding community.   It was tried by the NDP in Alberta in the premiership of Rachel Notley, and more dramatically in British Columbia, where the provincial NDP government introduced this approach on a provincial scale earlier at the beginning of this year, despite it having proven a failure when the city of Vancouver tried it, causing overdose deaths to rise.   The NDP are incapable of learning from their mistakes on matters such as these.   Expect Kinew to try and imitate BC's mistake, not avoid it and look elsewhere, like, for example, Singapore's "harm prevention" approach, for a successful model.    This problem is about to get much worse in Winnipeg and Manitoba.

 

It will not be long before we in Manitoba rue the outcome of this election.

 

Now we owe His Majesty a double apology, first for Captain Airhead in the Dominion Prime Minister’s Office, now for Captain Airhead’s doppleganger in the province of Manitoba.

Brian Pallister Removes All Doubt

There is an old saw that goes “it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt”.   It has been attributed to pretty much everyone with a reputation for folksy wisdom of this sort from the last millennium or so, and is sometimes ascribed to sources of ancient wisdom such as Confucius.   Indeed, it could be taken as a rough paraphrase of Proverbs 17:28.    Homer, when confronted with it in an early episode of The Simpsons, promptly set about illustrating it.  Internally, he asked himself “What does that mean?  Better say something or they’ll think you’re stupid”, and then blurted out “Takes one to know one”, after which his inner voice applauds this supposedly witty comeback.  Brian Pallister, premier of my province of Manitoba in the Dominion of Canada, is either unfamiliar with the adage or he has decided to follow in the footsteps of Homer Simpson.

 

On Tuesday, the day his public health mandarin Roussin informed us that he would finally be lifting the vile and absurd requirement that we gag and muzzle ourselves with face diapers in indoor public places which tyrannical order ought never to have been imposed on us in the first place, Pallister ensured that this news would be overshadowed by issuing a poorly worded apology for his remarks of the seventh of July. 

 

In those remarks for which he apologized, he had not said anything bad about anyone – except the Marxist terrorist mob that had vandalized the statues of Canada’s founding and reigning monarchs on Dominion Day and who deserved his rebuke.   Nor had he said anything that could be reasonably interpreted as justifying historical wrongs that had been done to anyone.   Note the adverb “reasonably”.   The interpretations of the nitwits and nincompoops whose thinking has been perverted and corrupted by being infected with the academic Marxist virus of Critical Race Theory, a pathogen far more deadly and dangerous than the bat flu, don’t count.   His comments were entirely positive and affirming, but because they were positive and affirming about the people who settled and built Canada, that is to say the very people whom the “Year Zero” Cultural Maoists wish to erase from history, they were met with outrage and outcry on the part of the same.

 

In other words he had said nothing for which he owed anyone an apology.   Indeed, he owed it to Canada and to all patriotic Canadians regardless of their racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, not to apologize for his remarks.   This is because to give in to the demand that he apologize for his remarks of the seventh of July is apologize for the very existence of Canada.    Canada owes nobody an apology for her existence.   Academic Marxists who think otherwise, and the far too many who speak for them in government and in the media, need to be slapped down hard, not coddled with apologies intended to appease.

 

Astonishingly, for someone who gives the impression of being a man who is quite proud of the fact that his only ethics are those acquired in the schoolyard, Pallister would appear to have forgotten one of the most basic lessons of the same – bullies cannot be appeased.   Bullies feed off of the weakness of their prey.  By appeasing them, people merely announce their own weakness and let the bullies know where their next meal can be found.  

 

Surely Pallister must realize that those who have been demanding that he grovel and eat his innocuous words spoken in defence of the people who built this country are bullies.   What other word could better describe those who make such irrational demands knowing that they can count on the Crown broadcaster, the “paper of record”, and most of the other public opinion-generating media to back them up, with nary a word of dissent?

 

Therefore, Pallister should have known that there was no apology that he could make that would have satisfied these wolves.   The fact that he has spent the last year and a half throwing his weight around, telling Manitobans they cannot meet with their friends in either public places or their own homes, blaming Manitobans for when his own draconian policies failed to produce the desired effect of a drop in bat flu cases, berating and insulting the few of us who dared stand up for our constitutional rights and freedoms, and trying to blackmail us all into agreeing to take a hastily prepared, experimental new medical treatment, might help explain why he failed to grasp this.   Having enjoyed playing the bully himself for so long he forgot what to do when on the receiving end of bullying.  

 

In this situation, offering an apology of any sort, was the worst thing Pallister could have done.     The people demanding that he apologize are not interested in receiving an apology from him, sincere or otherwise.   They want to remove him from office and replace him with the one man in Manitoba who would have handled the situation of the last year and a half worse than he.    Whereas the role of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition is supposed to be to hold the government accountable to the elected assembly for its actions and to speak out when the government abuses its power, Wab Kinew, the leader of the provincial socialists, has spent the pandemic, not calling Pallister out for how his actions have trampled the most basic constitutional rights and freedoms of Manitobans, destroyed businesses and livelihoods, and done tremendous harm to our mental, social, and overall wellbeing, but saying that he should have locked us down harder, faster, and kept us in lockdown longer.   When groups who have been speaking out about how our rights and especially our religious freedoms were endangered by the lockdown measures met with one of Pallister’s minister’s to express their concerns, Kinew condemned the government for agreeing to meet with them and hear their point of view.    Those who want this man to become our next premier, either can see nothing wrong with a government strategy of closing all businesses and paying people to stay home for the duration of a pandemic, or don’t care about his policies and want him in power for no reason other than his race, while accusing those of us who do very much see something wrong with his political philosophy and strategy of being racists for opposing him.

 

If we limit the options to those of which Pallister is capable, the best thing he could have done would have been to follow the advice of the old saying with which we opened this essay.   That was more or less what he had been doing for the previous few weeks and it had been working fairly well.   The media was running out of things to say about his remarks and would eventually have moved on to something new, whereas Manitobans were given a respite from having to see his face on the news every day.    It was a win for everybody!

 

If, however, we expand our options to include what Pallister might have done had he been a different person with a better character, the best thing he could have done would have been the following.   

 

He would have held another press conference in which he flat out refused to apologize for his comments.   He would have said that his words had been directed towards the mob of Maoist radicals who attacked Canada, her constitution and institutions, and her founders and history in their criminal and terrorist acts on her national holiday.   He would have then pointed out, correctly, that throughout history, any time a mob like this has been allowed to get its way it has turned out very, very, bad for everybody, and that therefore this sort of thing must not be tolerated but rather nipped in the bud.    He would then have reiterated his comments and insisted, quite rightly, that Canada owes nobody an apology for her founding, history, and very existence as a country.

 

He would then have directly addressed the media and the phoniness of their manufactured moral outrage.   He would have pointed out that they themselves carried the lion’s share of the blame for stirring up the Marxist mob whose actions he had rightly condemned.   They had completely abandoned even the pretense of journalistic ethics, integrity, and responsibility when they spun the discovery of graves on the sites of the Indian Residential Schools into a web of exaggerations and outright lies about murdered children (1) which has incited not only the aforementioned mob actions but the largest wave of hate crimes this country has ever seen.

 

Finally, he would have addressed the Indian chiefs who took offense at his remarks – note the distinction the late Sir Roger Scruton liked to make between “taking” and “giving” offense – and issued rude and arrogant demands for his resignation in which they insulted and demonized other Canadians in a most racist manner.   He would have told them that if they persist in their crummy attitude then they can take it and their “reconciliation” and stick these where the sun don’t shine, to which location he would be happy to provide directions.

 

Of course, the Brian Pallister who would have done this would have had to have been a very different and very better Brian Pallister than the one we actually have.   The same would have to be true of the Brian Pallister who would sincerely apologize to those whom he actually owes an apology – all Manitobans, of all races, cultures, and creeds – for the way he has bullied us all with his lockdowns, masks and other such draconian nonsense.

 

(1)   That thousands of graves could be found on these sites has never been a secret.   The Truth and Reconciliation Commission discussed these at length in the fourth volume of its final report.  They are not “mass graves” – the media falsely labelled them such and the bands that had announced the finding of the graves corrected them and while the media  eventually switched to talking about “unmarked graves” they issued no retractions.   “Unmarked” refers to their present condition, it does not mean they were always unmarked.   The TRC Report says that graves in the Residential School cemeteries were usually marked with wooden crosses.   Students were not the only ones buried in these cemeteries – school staff were buried there as well, and often the school shared the cemetery of the church to which it was related and the nearest community.   There is no reason to think that the graves contain murdered children.   No bodies have been exhumed, no autopsies conducted, and the TRC Report itself indicates that disease was the cause of most of the deaths of children buried in the school cemeteries, tuberculosis alone accounting for almost half.   The huge gulf between what the actual known facts are and the narrative imposed over the facts by the media, arises entirely out of the anti-Canada, anti-Christian, hatred and malice of the latter. 

Pallister is Under Attack for All the Wrong Reasons

I don’t like Brian Pallister who is the premier of my province, Manitoba, very much.   Oh, I was very glad to see him replace Greg Selinger in that office, voted for the Progressive Conservative party which he leads in the last two provincial elections, and even congratulated him in person on his re-election, but I was never particularly enthusiastic about his leadership qualities.    In March of last year, I lost most of my respect for the man when he locked down the province harder than almost anywhere else in Canada before the bat flu had even really arrived here and did so by holding a press conference in which he arrogantly rubbed the heavy-handedness of his approach in all of our faces.  In the year and a half since then, he has whittled away at what little of that respect remained by such behaviour as scapegoating ordinary Manitobans for the failure of the dictatorial public health orders of his power-mad public health mandarin Brent Roussin, setting up a snitch line and encouraging Manitobans to spy on their friends, family, and neighbours and rat them out for violations of these petty public health orders, showing complete and utter disregard for constitutional protections of Manitobans’ basic freedoms and rights, blasphemously raising himself to the level of God by adding an eleventh commandment to the Decalogue, and, most recently, using the means of bribery and blackmail to coerce Manitobans to give up their right to not be medicated against their freely given, informed, consent.

 

I have expressed my present attitude towards the premier in the following lines of verse:

 

Brian Pallister is an ignorant fool!

He’s a stupid, ugly, loser and he smells bad too!

His one and only virtue,

I hate to say it but it’s true,

His one and only virtue is –

He’s not Wab Kinew!

 

That having been said, Pallister has come under heavy attack this month for reasons that have nothing to do with the draconian way in which ran roughshod over all our rights and freedoms in order to swat the bat flu bug.   On Dominion Day an angry, lawless, mob descended upon the grounds of the provincial legislature here in Winnipeg.   The mob was not angrily demanding the restoration of our rights and freedoms and small businesses and social lives.   They were mad, in both senses of the word, because for the month previous far left activists masquerading as journalists, that is to say, most of the mainstream media in Canada, had been using the discovery of graves that are currently without markers near former Indian Residential Schools to defame Canada, her founders and historical leaders, the Christian religion and especially the Roman Catholic Church, and white people in general, in a most vile and disgusting manner.    The mob vandalized and tore down the large statue of Queen Victoria that had stood in front of the legislature as well as a smaller statue of Queen Elizabeth II that had stood near the Lieutenant Governor’s residence.   Since Queen Victoria was the queen who signed the bill that established Canada as a country, Queen Elizabeth II is the present reigning monarch and this was done on the country’s anniversary this was an obvious assault on the very idea of Canada herself.

 

Pallister, quite rightly, expressed his “disgust and disappointment” at these actions, condemning them both at the time and in a press conference the following Wednesday.   At the latter he said that the statues would be restored.   He also said, with regards to the early settlers of Canada “the people came here to this country, before it was a country and since, didn’t come here to destroy anything, they came here to build, they came to build better and build they did.   They built farms and they built businesses, they built communities and churches too.   They built these things for themselves and one another and they built them with dedication and with pride and so we must dedicate ourselves to building yet again”.  This is what his enemies wish to crucify him for saying.  Much to his credit, he has so far stood by his remarks.

 

In these comments Pallister depicted those who settled here and built what became the country Canada as having been human beings rather than devils.   This is what the far left finds so unforgiveable.  The fundamental essence of the political left, its sine qua non, is the envious hatred of those who build, especially those who have built in the past those things we enjoy and benefit from as a legacy in the present, which envious hatred manifests itself as efforts to tear down and destroy.    They have to think of the builders of the past as devils in order to avoid the suspicion that they themselves are such.

 

The media, which everywhere but perhaps especially in Canada is largely synonymous with the political left, has framed the controversy which it has itself generated over Pallister’s remarks in racial and ethnic terms.   What is implied, or in some cases practically stated outright, in all the criticism and condemnation of Pallister’s words, is that speaking positively of the European, Christian, settlers who came to what is now Canada over the last four to five centuries and of their accomplishments rather than demonizing them is insensitive and offensive to Native Indian Canadians.   We are essentially being told that our country, her history, and her founders and historical figures from the early settlers through the Fathers of Confederation to the present day, must only be spoken of in terms of shame, that everything we have historically celebrated about our country must be forgotten, and that we must instead forever be beating ourselves up over the Indian Residential Schools.   Should there be anyone left in Canada still capable of thinking at the level of an adult, such a person must surely recognize that it is this attitude on the part of the progressive media rather than Pallister’s speech that is truly demeaning to the Natives as it treats them as thin-skinned bigots who cannot hear anyone other than themselves spoken of positively without taking it as an insult to themselves.   It also suggests that they are incapable of telling when the left is cynically exploiting their suffering for its own interests.  The attack on the symbols of the monarchy serves the cause of the left since republicanism, whatever J. J. McCullough, Anthony Furey, Spencer Fernando, Lorne Gunter, and the average American “conservative” may think to the contrary, is essentially left-wing, but it is difficult to see how an attack on the only Canadian symbol that unites all Canadians – aboriginal, English, French, and newer immigrants – could genuinely serve the interests of Native people. (1)

 

I will note here, for whatever it is worth, that on the day of Pallister’s press conference, the first attack on his words that I came across was on the local CBC.    The segment, which was formatted as a news report although it was in reality an editorial, was by a well-known local reporter and featured as an “expert” a man on the faculty of the University of Manitoba who was described, amusingly in my opinion, as a historian.   Both men are notorious for their left wing views, both are lily white, and both have British-Scandanavian family names.   The following day both the Association of Manitoba Chiefs and the Southern Chiefs Organization issued press releases condemning Pallister and his remarks which it would probably have been fairer to these organizations to not have mentioned as the bigoted and ill-informed terms in which they are written do them no credit whatsoever, but white leftists appear to have been the ones that got the ball rolling on this anti-Pallister campaign.

 

That ball has been picking up speed ever since.   Helping it along have been a number of defections from Pallister’s Cabinet and staff, starting with the resignation of Eileen Clarke who had been Minister of Indigenous and Municipal Relations.   The portfolio was then given to Alan Lagimodiere, the Member of the Legislative Assembly for Selkirk.  Although Lagimodiere is Metis, his appointment has not exactly improved the situation for Pallister as he began his opening speech in this office by saying that those who established the Residential Schools “thought they were doing the right thing”.   This is, as Colby Cosh has pointed out, “a flat factual truth”.   Obviously, a great many Canadians today are of the opinion that they were not doing the right thing.   Ordinarily, when people in one era do something that they think is right and people of a later era, with the benefit of hindsight, conclude that what was done was actually wrong, the latter do not refuse to credit the former for the sincerity of their intentions.   In this case, however, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has so poisoned the well of discussion with its interpretation of the schools as a “cultural genocide”, a vile expression which is a dishonest, morally outrageous, Marxist trick by which cultural assimilation, whatever one might think about it, is treated as if it were the equivalent of mass murder, which it is not, that it is impossible to speak the truth Lagimodiere spoke without provoking an irrational, emotion-driven, backlash.     Needless to say, matters have not been helped by the mainstream media’s having, in what constitutes criminal incitement that has spawned a massive wave of hate crimes, spun the discovery of graves lacking markers near the former Indian Residential Schools into a malicious blood libel against our country and her churches.   Lagimodiere was quickly interrupted by Wab Kinew, the present leader of the provincial socialists who ever since taking over that role from Selinger has been making his predecessor look better by comparison, a rather difficult undertaking indeed.     My personal opinion of Kinew you can probably deduce from the verse about Pallister above.  Kinew, applying the current left wing dogma that nothing positive must ever be said about the Residential Schools and those who established and ran them, a dogma which if applied retroactively would condemn even Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner Murray Sinclair, told Lagimodiere that he could not do the job to which he had appointed while thinking the way he does.

 

Since then, there have been more resignations, more condemnations and ultimatums from the chiefs, and more calls from the progressive media for Pallister to step down.

 

If only all of this were in response to what he has done wrong – suspending our constitutional rights and freedoms, treating in-person social interaction which is both bonum in se and absolutely essential to our wellbeing as if it were a crime, destroying small local businesses, declaring religion and worship to be non-essential but places that peddle mind-destroying , highly addictive, substances to be essential, basically turning the province into a police state for a year and a half, and holding normal life ransom in order to bully us all into accepting a medical treatment whether we have made informed decisions as to whether the benefits sufficiently outweigh the risks or not – rather than to what he has done right – refusing to go along with the wholesale demonization of Canada, her European Christian settlers, and her historical founders and leaders, by the left which can only ever tear down and never build up, the media that is so totally in its thrall, and those Native leaders who have shortsightedly joined forces with the left.

 

(1)   English Canada grew out of the United Empire Loyalists who parted ways with the Americans by declaring their loyalty to the monarchy when the Americans rebelled and became republicans.  It was the Crown’s guarantee of protection of French culture, civil law, language and the Roman Catholic religion in Quebec following the Seven Year’s War that preserved French Canadian identity and kept French Canada loyal during the American revolution and down through Confederation in which all the French Canadian Fathers joined the English Fathers in unanimous support for making the new country a parliamentary monarchy rather than a republic.  The Crown is the other signatory to the Indian treaties – Queen Victoria, whose statue was so insultingly treated by the left wing mob, was the reigning monarch when most of these treaties were made.   All new comers to Canada from whatever other country and background have sworn loyalty to the monarch and her heirs to become citizens.  Therefore the monarchy is the one and only national symbol that belongs to all Canadians, albeit in different ways, and thus unites them.    To attack this symbol as a symbol of “imperialism” and “colonialism” in the derogatory sense which Marxists attach to these words is to insult all Canadians of all races, religions, and languages.

It is Way Too Late for That Brian

Brian Pallister should have been an actor.   Judging from his performance last Thursday he would have been much better in that career than in his chosen profession of politics.   Granted, prior to this year, he did a fairly decent job as premier of the province of Manitoba.   He was certainly a major improvement over his predecessor, Greg Selinger of the NDP, although that is setting the bar of comparison extremely low.   This year however, faced with the true test of leadership, a crisis manufactured by the irresponsible news media and the even more irresponsible medical profession, he failed that test big time.   His tear-jerking, emotional-laden, speech on Thursday may very well indicate that he has missed his true calling, the stage.   His timing, however, needs some work, for the performance would have been much more convincing had it come in March.   Adjustments would have had to be made, of course, as it would have made little sense to talk about stealing Christmas in the middle of Lent.   An emotional appeal to Manitobans to follow public health guidelines would have been much better received if he had led with that, however, instead of tacking it on after nine months of arrogant posturing, threats, and bullying.

 

Pallister’s speech came a couple of days after the release of an Angus Reid Institute survey that indicated that his approval rating had dropped to the lowest of all premiers in the Dominion.   Although he had been asked to comment about this on the day the poll results were released and gave a brief answer it is generally understood that his remarks on Thursday were his real response.  

 

He claimed that he understood why do not like him.  “I understand that, I totally do” he said.   Certainly, he seemed to be aware of the reasons:

 

I’m the guy who has told you that you cannot shop…I am the person who has told you you can’t go to work.  I am the premier who has said you can’t run your business because we have the toughest restrictions in Canada, and it affects people who put their lives into their businesses.  I am the person who has come before you and said you can’t go to church, you can’t see your friends, you can’t travel. I’m that guy.

 

While some dispute this explanation for his drop in approval – Wab Kinew, the current NDP leader, and his butt-kissers in the media think it is due to his having re-opened the economy, which, except for the fact that he shouldn't have closed it in the first place, was the one thing he did right this year – these all seem to be fairly good reasons for disliking him.  It would appear that being aware of the reasons does not actually translate into understanding them, however, because from this starting point, Pallister launched into a bunch of self-justifying hocus pocus about the difference between being liked and respected, illustrated by a story from his school days about being disciplined by the principal for being late and told by the headmaster “You don’t like me right now, son, and that’s okay.  I want you to respect me in ten years.”

 

Does he seriously think that lesson applies here?

 

A teacher who disciplines a child for being late does so to prevent the bad habit of tardiness from forming.   Tardiness is a habit which hurts people both professionally, because employers don’t like to either hire or advance people who are tardy, and socially, because, formal occasions where it is fashionable to be late aside, people do not like to be kept waiting by their friends, dates, etc., all the time.   Like all bad habits, it is easier to break when it is just forming than when it is fully developed.   The principal who yells at a student for being late is, indeed, doing him a favour, and so the line from Pallister’s anecdote does indeed apply in that situation.

 

What Pallister is doing is completely different.

 

To tell people that they cannot go to work or run their business is to do the very opposite of what the teacher who tries to discipline tardiness out of his student does.   Rather than correcting behaviour that is bad and harmful it forbids behaviour that is both good and necessary.   Rather than helping people it is hurting them.   There is nothing in what Pallister is doing that deserves respect, either now or years down the road.

 

He, of course, justifies what he is doing on the grounds that it is “saving lives”.   He said:

 

I will do what I believe is right, and right now I need to save lives.

 

We have been hearing this from him for quite some time.   It is, however, utter nonsense.  

 

It is only ethically permissible to hurt Person A to save Person B under certain very limited circumstances.   If Person A pulls a knife on Person B with the intent to kill then we are justified in harming Person A to prevent Person B from being killed.   In this scenario, however, the action of Person A which threatens Person B will definitely have the effect of the death of Person B if not prevented and is done with malicious intent.   Neither of these things is true with regards to the lockdown scenario.    If Person A opens his store there is no certainty that anyone will die from the Wuhan bat flu as a result.   Indeed, when we consider the survival rate of the disease, who the people most likely to die from it are, and the circumstances pertaining to their contracting it, it is, in fact, extremely unlikely that anyone will die as a direct result of Person A opening his store.   Furthermore, there is no malicious intent, no mens rea, in Person A’s opening his store.   His intent is quite good and honourable, to earn a living for himself and his family, by selling people goods that they want or need rather than to be a burden on the public purse.   There is nothing wrong with what he is doing, unless, of course, he is selling nuclear waste to children or some such thing.   Finally, that forbidding Person A from opening his store will harm him is certain, the only uncertainty being the extent of the harm, whether it completely destroys his business and drives him into bankruptcy or not.   The lockdown scenario simply does not meet the standards of when it is ethnically permissible to hurt Person A to save Person B.

 

Immediately after that self-justifying prattle about saving lives Pallister said the following:

 

If you don’t think that Covid is real, right now you’re an idiot. 

 

What an interesting remark from someone who claims that he is doing the right thing and hopes we will eventually respect him for it.    In the same sentence he completely misrepresents the views of those who oppose him and insults them.   To say that someone does not think that Covid real is to say that he questions the existence of either the SARS-CoV-2 virus or the sickness it can produce with symptoms ranging from shortness of breath, fever, and cough to a life-threatening, organ-damaging, severely painful, pneumonia.   I think very few of those who oppose the lockdown question the existence of either of these things.   Opposition to the lockdown is based upon the fact that lockdowns do a lot of very real harm - they devastate the economy, load future generations with piles of debt, damage the fabric of society, dissolve communities, and create mental health problems that themselves result in many fatalities that would not have occurred sans lockdown - and only a small amount at best, of questionable good.   The most informed opposition to the lockdown is also based on the fact that the government imposing what amounts to a total suspension of our constitutional and prescriptive basic freedoms for the supposed sake of keeping us safe from a disease with a survival rate higher than the seasonal flu for otherwise healthy people under the age of 65 and with which the average age of those who die is higher than the average lifespan of Canadians is a giant leap away from civil freedom and towards totalitarianism.

If Mr. Pallister really wants to do the right thing and be respected for it then he had better learn to himself respect the Common Law, the constitution, and the limits these place on his powers as First Minister of the Crown in this province, for until he respects these he is a disgrace to his office.

His speech culminated in an emotional appeal to Manitobans to stay apart at Christmas, full of self-pity about having to be the Grinch that steals Christmas from us this year to keep us safe, so that we will have plenty to celebrate next year.

Well, it was a good performance, but to return to the point made at the beginning, it would have been a lot more persuasive if it had not followed ten months of ordering us around, telling us to snitch on neighbours who don't do as their told, threatening us with punishment, calling us names, setting obscenely high fines for breaking very petty rules, and wasting a million dollars that would have been put to better use hiring extra hospital staff and opening extra beds on contracting a private security organization to help enforce his draconian rules.

Roussin’s Victims

 

The province of Manitoba in the Dominion of Canada, one of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s Commonwealth Realms, is my home.   We have seen two types of protests directed against the provincial government in recent months, both objecting to the province’s response to the spread of the Wuhan bat flu.   One type of protest, such as that which took place in Steinbach on the 14^th of November, expresses opposition to the public health orders as trampling all over our basic freedoms of association, assembly and religion and our prescriptive and constitutional civil rights.   The other type of protest expressed the views of the socialist opposition party, its leader Wab Kinew and his health critic, and their far left echo chamber in the media which features such automatons as the CBC’s Bartley Kives and the Winnipeg Free Press’s Dan Lett and Ryan Thorpe.   Those involved in this type of protest take the position that the government’s public health orders have been too few, too light, and too slowly enacted, and that the government by not imposing a harsh lockdown the moment the case numbers started to rise in the fall, is responsible for all the deaths we have seen since September.

 

 

My sympathies are entirely with the first group of protesters, as anyone who has read a word I have previously written on the subject already knows.   I should say that my sympathies are with the protesters' basic position.   I don’t much care for the rhetoric of civil disobedience, rebellion, and populism in which that position is often expressed at those protests.

 

 

While the second group of protesters are certainly entitled to their opinion and the free expression of the same, a freedom that I note many if not most of them would prefer to deny to me and others who take my side of the issue, their position is easily debunked from an ethical point of view.

 

 

When a virus is spreading, government is not required to do everything in its power to slow or stop the spread.   Indeed, it has a moral obligation NOT to do everything in its power to slow or stop the spread of the virus.   This is because the government has the power to do tremendous evil as well as good.

 

 

Let us agree that saving lives that are at risk from the virus is in itself a good and worthy goal.   Stopping and slowing the spread of the virus may be a means to that end, but whether it is a good means to a good end or a bad means to a good end is debatable.  Slowing the spread of the virus increases the total length of the pandemic, stretching out the time we have to deal with this plague over a much longer period than would otherwise be the case.   That can hardly be regarded as desirable in itself.   Quite the contrary in fact.   Whether this is an acceptable evil, worth tolerating in order to achieve the end of lives saved, depends upon a couple of considerations.

 

 

First it depends upon the effectiveness of the method of slowing the spread of the virus in saving lives.   If the method is not effective, then the evil of artificially lengthening the period of the pandemic is much less tolerable.

 

 

Second it depends upon the means whereby the stopping or slowing of the virus, considered as an end itself, is to be accomplished.   If those means are themselves bad, this compounds the evil of stretching out the pandemic.

 

 

Neither of these considerations provides much in the way of support for concluding that a longer pandemic is an evil made tolerable by a good end, such as saving lives.

 

 

With regards to the first consideration, it is by no means clear that any lives have been saved in this way at all.  Indeed, at the beginning of the first lockdown, back when everyone was repeating the phrase “flatten the curve” ad naseum, the experts advising this strategy told us that it would not decrease the total lives lost  but merely spread them out so that the hospitals would not be overwhelmed at once.   This, in my opinion at least, was not nearly as desirable an end as saving lives and not one sufficient to make the lockdown measures acceptable.

 

 

This brings us to our second criteria.   The means by which our government health officials have tried to slow or stop the spread of the virus are neither morally neutral nor positively good.   On the contrary, they are positively evil.  They inflict all sorts of unnecessary misery upon people.  Advocates of the lockdown method sometimes maintain that the damage inflicted is merely economic and therefore “worth it” to save lives.   This would be a dubious conclusion even if the premise were valid.   The premise is not valid, however, and it is highly unlikely that those who state it seriously believe what they are saying.  

 

 

Telling people to stay home and avoid all contact with other people does not just hurt people financially, although it certainly does that if their business is forced to close or their job is deemed by some bureaucrat to be “non-essential”.  It forces people to act against their nature as social beings, deprives them of social contact which is essential to their psychological and spiritual wellbeing, which are in turn essential to their physical wellbeing.   Mens sana in corpore sano.   The longer people are deprived of social contact, the more loneliness and a sense of isolation will erode away at their mental health.   Phone, e-mail, and even video chat, are not adequate substitutes for in-person social contact.

 

All of this was true of the first lockdown in the spring but it is that much more true with regards to the second lockdowns that are now being imposed.   The first lockdown was bad enough, but the second lockdown, imposed for at least a month, coming right before Christmas in the same year as the first, will be certain to pile a sense of hopelessness and despair on top of the inevitable loneliness and isolation.  The government has kept liquor stores and marijuana vendors open, even though the combination of alcohol and pot with hopelessness, loneliness, and despair is a recipe for self-destructive behaviour, while ordering all the churches, which offer, among other things, hope, to close.    This is evil of truly monstrous proportions.    It can only lead to death – whether by suicide, addictive self-destruction, or just plain heart brokenness.   

 

 

The protesters who accuse Brian Pallister and the government he leads of murder for having re-opened our economy from the first lockdown and not having imposed a second one right away when the cases began to rise are wrong-headed about the matter as they, generally being leftists, are wrong-headed about everything.   The government does not become morally culpable for deaths because it refrains from taking actions which are extremely morally wrong in themselves in order to achieve the goal of saving lives.   Not imposing a draconian lockdown does not translate into the murder of those for whom the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus becomes one health complication too many.

 

 

Where Pallister does bear moral culpability for deaths is with regards to all the people who will kill themselves, or perhaps snap and kill others, drink themselves to death or accomplish the same with drugs, or simply give up on life in hopeless gloom and despair because he has allowed Brent Roussin, once again, to impose these totalitarian public health orders.

 

 

Roussin has been going on television as of late, showing pictures of people who have died, and lecturing Manitobans on how these are not just numbers but people.   This is a kind of sleight-of-hand, by which he hopes to distract the public from all the harm he is actively causing, and he knows full well that lockdowns are themselves destructive and lethal for he admitted as much a couple of months ago thus compounding his guilt now, by manipulating their emotions.

 

 

Does Roussin realize that this street runs both ways?

 

 

What about the young man, Roussin, who would otherwise have had decades of life ahead of him, much more than those whose deaths you have been exploiting to justify your bad decisions, but who killed himself because you cancelled his job as "non-essential", took away  his social life, and left him with the prospect of long-term isolation?   Do you not realize that he is a person as well?

 

 

In the end, those who die from the lockdown may very well turn out to outnumber by far those who succumb to the bat flu.   In which case all that Roussin will have accomplished will have been to exchange a smaller number of deaths for which he would not have been morally responsible for a larger number of deaths that leave his hands permanently stained with blood.

 

The Approach of Winter

At midnight, as Remembrance Day ended and at least four weeks of Code Red lockdown on the province of Manitoba began, it was snowing in Winnipeg.   Within a couple of hours the ground was white and, as of noon on the twelfth, the snow was stilling coming down.    This is not unusual for Manitoba around this time of year.   This city is referred to as "Winterpeg" for a reason.    While the forecast is predicting a rise to low but above freezing temperatures on the weekend and again around Wednesday of next week, overall the highs predicted for the next two weeks are below the freezing point.   Weather forecasting is notoriously unreliable, but at this time of year unforeseen complications often include sudden and quick-moving low pressure systems sweeping the prairies and bringing a ton of wind, snow, and cold along with them.   As we get this taste of the long winter we know is inevitably coming, grocery stores and other businesses fortunate enough to be considered essential by the health bureaucrats and politicians who arrogantly think they have the right to designate other people's businesses and livelihoods as otherwise, have been reduced to twenty-five percent capacity.    This means long lineups, out in the cold, waiting to get into the store to buy what you need to keep you and your family from starving.

 

Let us think about that for a moment.

 

How many of you when you were growing up, heard your mothers say to you, too many times to count, something to the effect of “get inside, do you want to catch your death of pneumonia?”

 

I think it is a safe assumption to say that the vast majority of you would answer “yes.”    Unless you have suffered from a lifelong agoraphobia, in the conventional sense of a fear of the outdoors rather than the more technical clinical sense, chances are good that when you were a child you would play outdoors in cold and wet weather, with little thought to protecting yourself against the elements, prompting such an expression of maternal concern.

 

Now consider the irony.   Brent Roussin, our local public health mandarin, has issued orders that will require people to stand outside in cold and most likely wet weather for long periods of time.   The purpose of these orders is to prevent people from catching their death from the severe type of pneumonia that, in a small minority of cases, those who contract the bat flu virus experience.

 

Who do you trust more, Brent Roussin or your mother?

 

There are those who will answer by saying that this is an unfair question.   Roussin is an expert on these sort of things, after all, and our mothers, except, of course, for the ones who happened to also be physicians and epidemiologists, were not.   All of that, however, is another way of saying “shut up, don’t think for yourself, just listen to the experts and don’t ask questions.”

 

It is also advocating for stupidity.

 

It is obvious to anyone with any amount of life experience and common sense that Roussin’s orders are going to result in more people getting sick rather than less.     Not only are we entering a period of cold and wet weather, in which, thanks to the public health orders we are all going to have to stand outside in long lineups, this is a season in which people always get sick.  It is the period in which sunlight hours are the shortest, everyone has a Vitamin D deficiency and therefore a weakened immune system, and, consequently, the bugs that are always with us are able to do their worst.

 

This is a huge problem for us because, as I have discussed previously, Roussin and the premier’s attitude since the end of September has been one of piling restrictions upon restrictions upon restrictions when the previous restrictions failed to reduce the number of cases, blaming the failure on the disobedience of the public, and threatening and bullying people.  What are the chances that they are finally going to realize – or, rather, admit – that the problem is not with the public, but with this entire approach?   It doesn’t work and no amount of hiring more enforcers, raising the fines, berating and haranguing us, and taking away more of our rights and freedoms, is ever going to change that.    Unless Roussin and Pallister finally acknowledge this, they will just keep piling rule after useless rule upon us.   Since, unlike with the first lockdown, we are transitioning into the period of maximum sickness rather than out of it, that will be going on for a long time.

 

The person whose job it is to raise these kind of questions, challenge the government when its policies and actions are stupid and wrong, and fight the government when its actions infringe upon our traditional and constitutional rights and freedoms, is the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.   That may yet happen at the Dominion level, where the Prime Minister, Captain Airhead, has been urging the provincial governments to take drastic measures to stop the spread of the bat flu.   I have my doubts.   Erin O’Toole should have spoken out long before now.   The only leader of a Dominion level political party who has consistently spoken out for the traditional rights and freedoms of Canadians against these draconian lockdowns has been Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada, who has no sitting Members in Parliament.   At the provincial level here in Manitoba, Wab Kinew has been doing the opposite of his job.   He has been demanding more restrictions than those the government has been imposing, criticizing the Health Minister for meeting with and giving a hearing to people who expressed their opposition to such measures, and, most recently, condemning the government for relaxing one of the more odious elements of the recent public health orders, i.e., restricting social interaction to within the immediate household.   I wonder if it ever occurred to Mr. Kinew, who is married and has three sons, to think about what such an order would mean to the many people who live by themselves, far more today than in previous times?

 

Lockdowns do a lot of damage and, furthermore, they hurt a lot more people than the bat flu does.   While socialists like Kinew and his echo chamber in the local CBC and most of the “private” media, justify their support of lockdowns in spite of this fact on the grounds that the harm lockdowns do is merely economic whereas the virus kills, this reasoning is entirely spurious.    Enforcing extreme social isolation upon a society where loneliness was already a problem will increase the rates of suicide and addiction.   Note, with regards to the latter, that once again stores specializing in booze and the mind-destroying toxins that can be extracted from certain cultivars of hemp are deemed essential and allowed to operate at a time when all religious services have been ordered to close.   Lockdowns, not to put too fine a point on it, kill.

 

To attempt to stop the spread of the bat flu with a lockdown is a major violation of medical ethics.   It is also incredibly stupid.  That you cannot lock people away from a plague is not exactly a new insight.   It was the point made by Edgar Allan Poe in his The Masque of the Red Death, originally published in 1842.   Perhaps the egalitarian socialists who support lockdowns think they have avoided the hubris and nemesis of Poe’s Prince Prospero by locking away the common people as well as the wealthy, but the harm inflicted by lockdowns falls disproportionately on the poor.    We are, again, entering the winter season.   With the new health orders, homeless shelters are operating at reduced capacity, public places such as libraries are closed to them, as are restaurant dining rooms.   With all the businesses closed and jobs lost due to the earlier lockdown measures and these new ones, I very much doubt there are fewer homeless in this province than at this time last year.   All of these physicians who have been petitioning the government for stricter lockdown measures, as if crashing everything else in an attempt to prevent the hospitals from crashing made any sense, ought to stripped of their medical credentials and busted down to jobs that cannot be done by video teleconference from home.

 

As we enter into winter the demonic spirit behind the lockdowns becomes even more apparent.  With winter comes Christmas.    Indeed, the last Sunday of the current liturgical year, Christ the King, or, what used to be called “Stir-up Sunday” after the first words of the Book of Common Prayer’s Collect for that day, is the Sunday after the next, only a little over a week away.   The lockdown orders currently extend into at least the first two weeks of Advent.   The Jewish festival of lights, Hanukkah, is scheduled to begin this year right after the time the lockdown orders as they currently stand expire, but if the current four weeks of province-wide Code Red lockdown does not stop the spread of the bat flu, and it is hardly likely that it will, the next thing on deck will be for the same Grinches that stole Easter and Passover earlier this year, to steal Christmas and Hanukkah too.    Having robbed us of the joyous celebration of our Lord and Saviour’s Glorious Resurrection, they appear set to rob us of the joyous celebration of His Nativity and Incarnation as well. 

 

The ordinary thermometer cold of winter is not enough for these people.   They wish to drive the warmth of faith from our hearts as well.