Aftermath Reflections

The Canadian Dominion Election of 2019 is now over. Since disappointment consists of hopeful expectations being shattered I suppose my response to the results is one of disgust rather than disappointment. As I said in My Druthers prior to the election I did not expect it would turn out in the way in which I wanted.

The Grits, led by Captain Airhead, survived the election. They no longer have an absolute majority. They won 157 seats in the House of Commons, which is twenty less than they had when the last Parliament was dissolved and twenty seven less than they received in the last Dominion election. Most of the mainstream media are hailing this as a victory for Airhead. Andrew Coyne of the National Post, who is often more perceptive than the average MSM commentator, has argued to the contrary, that the Liberals “didn’t win the 2019 federal election, they just lost less than the Conservatives.” This is an interesting perspective, but I doubt that Captain Airhead himself sees it that way. Others have said that this reduction from majority to minority status will be a humbling experience for the Prime Minister. I think it is safe to say that it will be nothing of the sort. Trudeau has never shown the slightest capacity for learning from his mistakes. Having won the most seats, even after the Kokanee Grope, SNC-Lavalin, and blackface scandals, among his other huge embarrassments, he will be more insufferably smug and cocky than ever, and will treat his minority mandate as a blank cheque to do whatever he wants.

The ancient Greeks had a word that describes Trudeau’s attitude perfectly - ὕβρις. Hubris was an intense, overweening, pride, in defiance of the limitations of divine law, especially, at least as Aristotle describes it, by humiliating those one sees as his inferiors for his own pleasure. In Greek thought, hubris inevitably led to the destruction of those who practiced it. Nemesis, the dread daughter of Nyx, goddess of the night, was the figure whom their mythology assigned the task of wreaking divine vengeance upon the proud and arrogant. This concept was not limited to the pagan Greeks. In the Book of Proverbs it says “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” and the falls of both Satan and man illustrate the point. It may not have come this election, but eventually Trudeau’s arrogance will be his own undoing.

Of the three major parties, the biggest loss in this election was that of the New Democrats. They won only 24 seats, fifteen less than they had at dissolution and twenty less than they received four years ago. This is despite the fact that around the time of the blackface scandal the progressive media dumped Trudeau and threw all their resources into promoting the NDP and their leader Jagmeet Singh. Indeed, they even tried to make the blackface scandal all about Singh, as if Captain Airhead somehow owed Singh a personal apology for his clownish antics. There was, of course, no demand that he apologize to those whom he truly owed an apology, id est, all those whom he has himself labelled “racist” for disagreeing with his hyper-progressive, “woke” agenda. From this point on it was almost impossible to turn to any of the major news networks on television and not find Singh either giving an interview or speaking at some rally. Polling companies began reporting that Singh’s popularity was on the rise, and even the neo-conservative press got in on the action regurgitating the progressive talking point about how “likeable” Singh was, which, frankly, I never understood as I find the man to be quite unbearable. Despite all of this, the NDP ended up going down almost four percentage points in the popular vote which translated into a significant seat loss for them. I am not sorry to see this happen, even though it contributes to the Grits winning the plurality. It shows that the progressive media cartel’s ability to mold Canadian public opinion is not as infallible as is often assumed. It is also nice to see a man who has displayed contempt for the constitutional monarchy of the country he wants to lead and contempt for the customs and protocols of its Parliament fall flat on his face.

I have mentioned that the NDP went down almost four percentage points in the popular vote. The Grits went down almost six and a half percentage points. The Conservatives went up by two and a half points and, in fact, came out of the election with the largest percentage of the popular vote. Had Captain Airhead kept his 2015 election promise and brought in proportional representation the Conservatives, rather than the Liberals, would have won the plurality. This notwithstanding, I still support the traditional first-past-the-post, for the reasons I have given in the past. The principle of having Members of Parliament represent the actual realities of particular locations (first-past-the-post) rather than the fictional construct of partisan percentages (proportional representation) outweighs, for me, my preferences with regards to the outcome of elections.

Andrew Scheer and the leadership of the Conservative Party are undoubtedly now asking themselves how they failed to defeat an incumbent Prime Minister who seemed to be hell-bent on self-destruction. They will be hearing an awful lot of misguided, foolish, and downright wrong answers to this question from the mainstream media. For what it may be worth, the following is my answer to the same question.

First, in this election the Conservatives relied far too much on the hope that other parties – the NDP, Greens, and the Bloc – would draw votes and seats away from the Liberals instead of focusing on presenting a superior alternative to the Liberals and thus increasing their own percentage of the vote. This is a bad strategy, and in the end the “orange wave” did not materialize, the Greens gained only one seat, and the revival of the Bloc was not large enough.

Second, the Conservatives attempted to sell their leader, Andrew Scheer, to the public as a fiscally responsible, average Canadian husband and father, who would be a more reliable alternative than the irresponsible, privileged and cosmopolitan Trudeau. Their efforts to do so were undermined because Scheer contradicted the image they were trying to present with his own evasiveness. Consider the way he answered questions about his views on abortion and same-sex marriage. I have seen several commentators suggest that Scheer’s answers hurt him because he failed to dispel the fears of those with liberal opinions on these subjects that he was secretly pining to turn Canada into the kind of theocratic caricature that can be found in the pages of a bad Margaret Atwood novel. This is nonsense. His answers hurt him, not because the electorate was afraid of someone whose opinions deviate from the politically correct party line of the Liberals but because they were evasive rather than straightforward. Evasiveness is not a quality that suggests trustworthiness but rather the opposite. This is why all of the scandals the progressive media raised over Scheer – his insurance broker career before politics, his dual citizenship, the bizarre last minute allegations that he hired Warren Kinsella to wage a smear campaign against Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party – hurt him more than the sexual harassment, corruption, and racism scandals hurt Trudeau. They struck at the very quality on which the Conservatives were trying to sell Scheer to the public. Worse, they did so in a way that turned the Canadian public’s conservative instincts, which the Conservatives needed in order to win, against Scheer. Trudeau may be the devil, but as the old adage and the Kylie Minogue song say “better the devil you know.” Scheer could not afford an image of anything less than 100% straightforward honesty.

Every time that the Conservative Party has lost an election in the past, it has been beset with counsellors offering the advice that their platform was too right-wing and that they needed to move to the centre. Their having listened to this bad advice so often in the past is one of the reasons that the centre has moved so far to the left. This time these advisors will be pointing to the People’s Party and saying “see, they ran on a platform considerably to the right, and failed to win a single seat, lost even the seat of their leader Maxime Bernier, and won a mere 1.6% of the popular vote.” The exact opposite of this is true. The Conservative Party cannot win elections by moving further to the centre and helping move the centre further to the left. The only message this sends is that the Conservatives have nothing to offer that is different from the Liberals and the other progressive parties. Canadians have no good reason to vote for a Conservative party that offers only centrist, progressive, liberal, and leftist policies. The fact that Maxime Bernier was unable to sell the public on a more right-of-centre set of policies does not mean that the Conservatives would similarly fail. They will never be able to sell right-of-centre policies to the Canadian public, however, if they do not try, and certainly not if they continue to undermine themselves by wasting their resources in the sponsorship of progressive, anti-racist, attacks on those further to the right.

One thing that the outcome of this election shows is the foolishness of the proposal that the CBC seemed to be seriously pondering last Friday, namely the lowering of the voting age to 16. What we ought to be considering is the opposite of this – raising the voting age. Wisdom is the most desirable quality in an electorate, enthusiasm and idealism are the least desirable qualities. As a general rule, the former increases with greater maturity while the latter decreases. This same point can also be demonstrated by noting the most obvious example of foreign interference in the election, the way the wealthy foreigners, probably mostly American, who wish to sabotage Western Canada’s energy industry, brought an ignorant teenage twit over from Sweden and sent her and her crowds of adulating youthful fans, even more clueless than her, on a celebrity tour that not-coincidentally coincided with the election.

Things are looking extremely grim for the Western energy industry now as Rex Murphy has superbly explained in his post-election remarks in the National Post. The talk of Alberta or even Western separatism – “Wexit” – began pretty much the moment the outcome was declared. This talk of separation disgusts me as much as the election results that provoked it and reminds me of nothing so much as the way Hollywood liberals respond every time the Democrats lose the White House. As much as I admired the late Doug Christie in his role as a crusader for freedom of thought and speech I never had any use for his Western Canada Concept and all of this talk of breaking up Confederation and forming a – ugh – republic, makes me want to puke. The blame for the revival of Western separatism, however, belongs entirely to that smug, arrogant, filius canis, who is willing to sacrifice the economy of an entire region of the Dominion in order to win the accolades of eco-socialists around the world.

God save the Queen – including from Her Prime Minister – and Heaven Bless the Maple Leaf forever!

History Repeating Itself

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” said the early twentieth century Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana. There is a popular aphorism that says “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” While the meaning of the high-brow remark is not exactly the same as that of the low-brow saying the two are complementary and both happen to apply to what I am about to discuss.

The Winnipeg Free Press, which some people still think is a real newspaper for some reason, made the same story its front page headline every day from Monday to Friday last week. While the story was presented under the guise of investigative journalism it seems to me that agitprop would be a better term for it. It is all about how a local member of the Canadian Armed Forces Reserves has been purportedly recruiting for some neo-Nazi organization called “the Base.” I won’t bore you with the details as I doubt whether a word of them ought to be believed by anyone who isn’t a gullible fool.

Why the extreme skepticism, you may ask?

Speaking for myself, the fact that it was the Winnipeg Free Press that was doing the “reporting” is more than sufficient grounds for skepticism. In my opinion that rag is little more than a Liberal Party disinformation sheet and has been ever since the days – 1901 to 1944 – when it was edited by John Wesley Dafoe. This particular story, however, would have been ringing alarm bells even if a newspaper with an as-of-yet unimpeached record for journalistic integrity could be found somewhere on the planet and had been the one to break the story. Allow me to explain why.

How many of you remember the Heritage Front?

I suspect that name will be familiar to most Canadians who were old enough and attentive enough to have been following the news in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There is a good chance they will also remember the organization’s front man, Wolfgang Droege, a man who was depicted as being pretty much the in-flesh personification of all the images and associations that the words “neo-Nazi” are intended to conjure up. Droege and the Heritage Front received an awful lot of airtime on the news, back then, because the media was trying to scare us into thinking that there was an imminent danger of a Fourth Reich being erected on Canadian soil.

How many of you who remember the Heritage Front also remember the name Grant Bristow?

Here I suspect the number will be far fewer, although he too was in the media spotlight for a brief period of time. Bristow was the man behind Droege – the co-founder, organizer, and security chief of the organization. He was also an undercover agent of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Services or CSIS which, ever since it took over the role from the RCMP in 1984, has aspired to perform for Her Majesty’s government in Ottawa the same services which both MI6 and MI5 perform for Her Majesty’s government in London. Bristow’s activities in the Heritage Front and his involvement with CSIS were both exposed by the Toronto Sun in 1994.

So why was a government spook one of the top officers of what was believed to be a neo-Nazi organization?

The facts can be interpreted one of two ways. The first explanation is that CSIS had infiltrated a burgeoning neo-Nazi movement in order to gather informative and/or neutralize any potential threat that it posed. The second explanation is that Bristow’s mission was to create a realistic looking neo-Nazi menace to frighten the public.

Before you discard the second explanation as a paranoid conspiracy theory, consider the previous neo-Nazi scare that had taken place in the 1960s.

In 1965 a man named John Beattie founded something called the Canadian Nazi Party, and the alarmist wing of the liberal media had a field day. For the next couple of years they kept the spotlight on this tiny group, reporting its every action, and blowing everything way out of proportion like a bunch of Chicken Littles trumpeting the imminent fall of the sky. The progressives demanded that the government step in and do something before this group, whose miniscule rallies they had magnified to the scale of those Hitler held at Nuremberg, took over Canada and imposed its agenda of racial purification on the country. This blitzkrieg of media disinformation culminated in the October 1966 issue of MacLean’s magazine. The cover story was an insider’s report on Beattie’s party by a man named John Garrity. The following is from his first paragraph:

I was more successful than I expected. I became a trusted officer of the party—its local Heinrich Himmler—though I've managed to avoid being linked with the nationwide publicity that has made the name of John Beattie, the unemployed clerk who is the party's leader, familiar to most Canadians.

Garrity’s story was eerily similar to Bristow’s. Each man befriended a would-be Führer, infiltrated his inner circle, and became the behind-the-scenes Himmler to his Hitler. In both cases the liberal media took a tiny molehill and blew it up into a huge mountain, but apart from the efforts of the moles, Garrity and Bristow, it is unlikely that there would have been even a molehill – just a couple of random, lone-wolf, racist fanatics.

There was one notable difference in the two cases. Whereas Bristow was working for the government, Garrity was employed by a private organization, the Canadian Jewish Congress. Not that there were not also government infiltrators. This was two decades before CSIS was formed but the RCMP, arguably a much more competent agency, was handling this sort of thing back then, and it is unthinkable that they would not have also had a mole or two. Given the infinitesimal size of the group, it seems to have resembled nothing so much as the World Council of Anarchists in The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton’s novel in which a Scotland Yard detective infiltrates the anarchist movement and is elected to said Council only to discover that every other member is also an undercover policeman.

At any rate, while the Canadian Jewish Congress was a private organization, it was working very closely with the Liberal Party, which was the governing party in the Dominion at the time, as, unfortunately, it is now. In the same year that Beattie founded the Canadian Nazi Party – indeed, the same month – Prime Minister Lester Pearson appointed a Special Committee to study “hate propaganda” and report back to the Minister of Justice with recommendations as to potential legislation. The Canadian Jewish Congress had been petitioning Parliament to pass such legislation for years prior to this. Maxwell Cohen of McGill University was named chairman and among its seven members were a vice-president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, the then executive editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, and a far left journalist and law professor from Quebec whom Pearson was about to bring onto the front stage of Canadian federal politics. This was not an objective committee that would look into the question of whether or not there should be legislation against hate propaganda, it was a very left-leaning committee that would start from the conclusion that there ought to be legislation against hate propaganda and devise reasonable sounding arguments that the Minister of Justice could use to sell the idea to Parliament.

Do I really need to point out how having an organization called the Canadian Nazi Party all over the news would facilitate that process?

The reasons why the Canadian Jewish Congress wanted hate speech laws passed don’t really need to be explained as they are fairly obvious. The reasons why the Liberal Party leadership was set on passing such laws do require an explanation. Freedom of thought and freedom of speech were, after all, supposed to be among the basic pillars of classical liberal political philosophy. Most people would probably acknowledge that there are reasonable limitations on even these basic freedoms but hate speech laws are not among them. Laws against the incitement of violence and other criminal behaviour were already on the books and were sufficient to cover the incitement of racially motivated violence and crime. Hate speech laws were not necessary, therefore, to deal with such incitement, and would only serve the purpose of suppressing the expressions of thoughts which certain people did not want expressed.

The Liberal Party, historically, was the party that wanted to move Canada away from her British roots and connections into a closer relationship with the United States – or, as the old Tories such as George Grant and Donald Creighton liked to put it, to sell us out to the Americans. This was bad enough, but at the time of which we are speaking, the leadership of the party had fallen into the hands of ideologues of the totalitarian far Left. Lester Pearson, according to the highly credible testimony that Elizabeth Bentley gave to the United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security in 1951, had been an aware and willing participant in the Soviet spy ring she operated while he served in the Canadian embassy in Washington D. C. during the war. If he kept his far left ties hidden, the so-called “three wise men” that he brought into the Liberal Party for the 1965 election, the aforementioned Pierre Trudeau, Gérard Pelletier and Jean Marchand wore theirs on their sleeves. Under Pearson’s patronage they rapidly rose in the ranks of the Liberal Party and Trudeau was, from his entrance into federal politics, groomed by Pearson to be his hand-picked successor as Party leader and Prime Minister.

The free expression of ideas, which had been so important to classical liberals like J. S. Mill, was of no value or consequence to this kind of leftist, except insomuch as it pertained to the expression of their own ideas. Communists, whenever and wherever they seized control of a state, used its power to brutally suppress all dissent to their new order. In the 1960s, the hard Left was itself undergoing an internal transformation as it shifted its focus from economic class to race, sex, etc. and so “hate speech” laws were particularly appealing to them. So was the idea of dangling a perpetual Nazi threat before the public. What better way to distract people from the perpetual menace of the many-headed hydra that had sprung from the seed planted by Cromwell’s Puritans, grown into Jacobinism, evolved into Bolshevism, and which was rapidly spreading throughout the globe, than by keeping them fixated on the threat of a rival totalitarianism which resembled Communism in almost every way, but which had died, at least insofar as being a real threat to civilization goes, with its Führer in 1945.

The same issue of MacLean’s that featured Garrity’s story also contained an article by Blair Fraser entitled “Hate”, which told about the Cohen Committee, its report which had been submitted to the Minister of Justice in November of 1965 and brought before Parliament early the following year, and Pearson’s promise at a press conference that hate speech legislation was on its way. The article was filled with specious arguments designed to allay the Canadian public’s fears that such legislation would be a threat to freedom of speech. Fraser was wrong in his prediction that such laws would be passed by the following year but he was only off by three years. Pierre Trudeau succeeded Lester Pearson as Liberal leader and Prime Minister in 1969 and the following year acted on his own recommendations as a member of the Cohen Committee and introduced the legislation that added Sections 318 to 320 to the Criminal Code.

Let us recap: the leadership of the Liberal Party was determined to pass “hate speech” laws, it appointed a Special Committee to come up with a report to persuade Parliament to approve such laws, while selling the Canadian public on these laws was left to the media, which for the most part serves as a propaganda arm of the Liberal Party. Conveniently, the jobs of both the Special Committee and the media were made easier by the appearance on the scene of the Canadian Nazi Party, whose leader was propped up behind the scenes by a private investigator working for the Canadian Jewish Congress, which had long wanted hate speech legislation and was working closely with the Liberal Party towards achieving that end. It is difficult, for anyone capable of adding two and two together and coming up with four, to avoid the conclusion that the Nazi scare of the 1960s was a fake scare, created to make hate propaganda legislation an easy sell.

The uncanny resemblance of Bristow’s story to Garrity’s strongly suggests that the second Nazi scare was a fake scare too. The motive is not as obvious as with the first scare but consider the following facts. During Pierre Trudeau’s long premiership, the Liberal Party had shifted government policy drastically to the left on immigration, abortion, homosexuality, preferential treatment for victims of “discrimination” in employment, and a myriad of other social, cultural, and moral issues. The Grits had never had to take these policies to the polls because the New Democrats were even further to the left and the Progressive Conservatives, under Robert Stanfield, Joe Clark, and Brian Mulroney were completely dominated by the wets and easily intimidated by accusations of racial, religious, sexual, and cultural bigotry. Then, in 1987, the protest movement that had been growing in the West in response to the Liberals’ heavy-handed imposition of their leftist agenda, the non-opposition to that agenda provided by the Progressive Conservatives, and Ottawa’s arrogance in general, formed the populist Reform Party of Canada. For a time, at least, the Reform Party was willing to take relatively right-of-centre positions on some of these issues, and that frightened both the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives. The Liberals were terrified of having to take their radical agenda to the polls and find out what Canadians actually thought of it. The Progressive Conservatives were – with good cause, as events proved – afraid that their voting base would defect to the Reform Party. (1) The Heritage Front was formed in 1989 and the liberal media immediately tried to tie it to the Reform Party. The plot of Liberal Party strategist and anti-racist activist Warren Kinsella’s 1997 Web of Hate: Inside Canada’s Far Right Network revolves around such supposed connections.

The question, then, of who exactly CSIS was serving, when its agent Grant Bristow helped found the Heritage Front, is rather moot. The Progressive Conservatives, who were in power in Parliament at the time, had a motive for creating a new fake Nazi threat. The Liberal Party which had created CSIS – the Act forming the new intelligence agency passed Parliament one week before Pierre Trudeau stepped down as Prime Minister – and to which civil servants have an obnoxious tendency to be loyal regardless of who the governing party in Parliament happens to be, also had a motive. Both parties had the same motive – to smear the right-populist Reform Party by association. If I had to bet on who was ultimately responsible, however, my money would be on the Liberals.

Under its present leadership the Liberal Party is the furthest to the left it has ever been. It is in power in Parliament at the moment, but the next Dominion election is in October and the wave of popularity that swept this government into office four years ago has been ebbing fast, due to its own overweening arrogance, gross incompetence, and a huge scandal in which it’s unethical and perhaps criminal behaviour has been exposed. It has resorted to accusing the leadership of the Conservative Party of links to “white supremacy” and “white nationalism.” It has also expressed its desire to bring back something similar to Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act which was repealed by Parliament six years ago. Section 13 defined it as an act of discrimination to communicate via telephone or internet anything “likely” to expose someone to “hatred or contempt” on the grounds of membership in a group protected against discrimination. Worded that broadly, it covered virtually any negative criticism of such groups, and unlike the hate speech provision of the Criminal Code, did not come with a presumption of innocence for the accused or the right to any sort of real defense. It was a terrible law, far more in keeping with the totalitarian mindset of actual National Socialism than with the principles of justice and freedom enshrined in our traditional Common Law. Earlier this year, the government instructed the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights to conduct a study of the dissemination of hate on the internet – in other words, to come up with arguments for bringing back Section 13, or even something worse, if that is conceivable.

Now, a newspaper that served the Liberal Party faithfully for over a century, just happens to have discovered a neo-Nazi organization that nobody has heard of before but which is supposed to have embedded itself in the Canadian Armed Forces. Yeah right. Sometime, probably years down the road, it will be revealed that this “Base” is as much a phony set-up as the Canadian Nazi Party and the Heritage Front were – mark my words.

If we fail to remember the past and allow ourselves to be fooled by this nonsense for yet a third time, then shame, shame, triple shame on us.

(1) I was one of the defectors. I eventually grew disgusted with the Reform Party and allowed my membership to lapse – on the verge of its final merger with what was left of the Progressive Conservative Party. This disgust had nothing to do with the Reform Party’s right-of-centre positions, real or imagined, which if anything I would have preferred more of, but with its hostility to our Loyalist heritage which it illogically blamed for the country’s slide into far-leftism, its indifference to the monarchy, and its barely concealed, anti-patriotic, preference for the constitution, institutions, and traditions of the United States over our own.

Obnoxious Self-Righteous Jerks versus Basic Human Decency

The late Fred Phelps was a man who earned for himself the reputation of being a jerk. Not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill, jerk, either, but a jerk on such a scale that the character which Denis Leary portrayed in the song “Asshole” from his 1993 album No Cure For Cancer had absolutely nothing on him. It is not just that the founder and “pastor” of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas disavowed the conventional Christian wisdom that God hates the sin but loves the sinner and that we ought to do the same in favour of an extreme five-point Calvinism that proclaimed God’s literal hatred for certain people. It is also, and perhaps most importantly, the way he choose to publicize his message. It requires an astonishing level of low-life creepiness to intrude upon the grief of people who are mourning the loss of a loved one by picketing a funeral. Indeed, perhaps the kindest thing that can be said in Mr. Phelp’s favour, is that he never – at least to the best of my knowledge – took it a step further and attempted to prevent the funerals he picketed from taking place.

As we shall see in a moment, that cannot be said of certain other people. First, however, let us consider just how contrary to the wisdom of the ages this sort of thing actually is.

Of the ancient Greek poets, none was more inspiring and influential than Homer, the epic poet of the eighth century BC. The most important of his works was the Iliad the story of which is set in the last year of the Trojan War. The many different conflicts and intrigues that take place among gods and men over the course of the poem’s twenty four books are tied together by the poem’s theme, identified in its very first line: μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος “Sing goddess, of the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus.” At the beginning of the poem, that wrath is directed against Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and the leader of the Greek forces. Achilles, in his anger withdraws his Myrmidons from the war. His mother Thetis secures from Zeus the promise that the tide of the war will go against the Greeks until Agamemnon gives Achilles the honour he deserves and he returns to the war. When the Trojans are on the verge of burning the Greek ships, Achilles’ closest friend Patroclus obtains his permission to lead the Myrmidon army back into the battle. Wearing Achilles’ own armour, Patroclus is mistaken for Achilles and, ignoring the latter’s instructions to fight only in defence of the ships, he drives the Trojans back to their city where he is killed by the crown prince of Troy, Hector. At this point Achilles’ wrath turns from Agamemnon to Hector, and he re-enters the war himself, lays waste to the Trojan forces, and eventually kills Hector. Then, however, Achilles takes his wrath too far. Rather than turn the body of Hector over to the Trojans for proper burial, he ties it to his chariot and drags it around the walls of Ilium. This is in violation of the laws of the gods but he continues to do this until his mother arrives from Olympus with a message from Zeus telling him in no uncertain terms to knock it off. So rebuked, Achilles turns the body over to Hector’s father, King Priam, when he, smuggled by Hermes into the Greek camp, pleads for it, and assures Priam that he will make the Greeks abide by an armistice that will allow Priam sufficient time to bury Hector with all the proper honours.

The idea that it is against divine law to refuse a proper burial even to an enemy recurs in the Antigone, one of three surviving tragedies by fifth century BC playwright Sophocles that deal with the curse that Oedipus brings upon himself and his city, Thebes, by unwittingly killing his father and marrying his mother. After Oedipus learned the truth, blinded himself, and went into exile one of his sons, Eteocles, drove the other, Polynices, into exile. The latter found refuge in Argos where he married the daughter of king Adrastus who then supported him in an expedition against Eteocles in Thebes. In the course of the battle, both brothers were killed. Creon, Oedipus’ uncle/brother-in-law was then made king of Thebes and he decreed that Eteocles was to be fully honoured, but Polynices was to be left to rot, imposing capital punishment upon anyone who defied this edict. This is where the Antigone begins for the title character, daughter of Oedipus, refuses to obey the edict and performs the burial rites for her brother. Although he is warned by the seer Tiresias, Creon persists in defying the law of the gods and orders Antigone to be buried alive. Divine judgement falls upon him in the loss of his own house, as his son Haemon who had been betrothed to Antigone kills himself in anger and grief, to be followed into suicide immediately thereafter by his mother Eurydice.

That one ought not to interfere with the proper burial even of those who were your enemies was evidently an idea that the Greeks felt rather strongly about. The Romans had a saying, de mortuus nil nisi bonum dicendum est – “about the dead, nothing except good, must be spoken” – which, while not entirely the same concept, nevertheless indicates a sort of consensus among the ancients, that the grievances we have against people in their lives ought to be buried with them in the grave and must not be allowed to interfere with the duty owed by the living to the dead.

There are some here in Canada today, I am sorry to say, who disagree with the wisdom of the ancients and have recently shown it in actions that make Fred Phelps look classy by comparison. It is not merely the ancient tradition dictating respect for the dead and mourning that they have disregarded, however, in their recent attempts to shut down a memorial service for an Ontario lawyer, but some of the most foundational principles of our system of justice. Their indecorous posthumous vendetta against this woman is based entirely upon who her clients were. One of the fundamental principles of our system of justice is that it is better for the guilty to escape punishment than for the innocent to be unjustly condemned. This too is a principle with ancient antecedents. Socrates argument against Polus in Plato’s Gorgias that it is better to suffer wrong than to commit it is one example, Abraham’s negotiations with God over the fate of the righteous in the condemned cities of Sodom and Gomorrah in the book of Genesis is another. Upon this foundation rest such other basic principles as the right of the accused to confront his accuser and to be considered innocent until proven guilty in a fair trial. Imagine what would happen to these principles if we were to allow the precedent to be established that defence advocates are to be treated as participants in the guilt of their clients.

If that were not bad enough in this case the lawyer’s clients were not people accused of crimes that are universally recognized as such – murder, robbery, rape and the like – but rather of thought crimes.

There is a backstory to all of this that goes back several decades. For a long time certain groups lobbied Parliament to have laws against “hate literature” passed. NB that hate literature does not mean literature that literally expresses hatred of the “I hate you, you lousy rotten sonuvabitch, I wish you were dead” type but rather literature that portrays racial and religious groups in a negative light. Unless, that is, the racial and religious groups are whites or Christians. In the 1960s, Lester Pearson appointed a committee to look into this and in 1971 Pierre Trudeau, who had been a member of that committee, added Section 318, the “hate propaganda” clause, to the Criminal Code. Those who wanted these laws were still unsatisfied, because those charged under this law were entitled to the full protection of the rights of a defendant and so Trudeau passed the Canadian Human Rights Act which prohibited discrimination in 1977 and this included Section 13 that defined the communication via telephone of anything “likely to” expose a member of a protected group to “hatred or contempt” as a discriminatory act. Later Jean Chretien would add Section 13 b) that extended this to all electronic communication to cover the internet as well. Since the Canadian Human Rights Act is considered civil rather than criminal law it was much easier to charge and convict people under this law than under Section 318.

For anyone acquainted with the history of the Soviet Union and other totalitarian regimes or with the body of literature by authors such as Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that shone a light on the nature of such regimes the outcome of these laws will be chillingly familiar. A list of prohibited books was drawn up which were seized at customs and removed from libraries, public and academic. About a decade after these laws were passed widely publicized show trials of a handful of individuals accused of this new form of crimethink were held. The press tried these individuals in the court of a public opinion which they manufactured by making these individuals the subjects of a two-minute hate but remained largely mute about the much larger number of people who were being dragged before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunals under Section 13.

That would change, of course, in the late 2000s when two magazines with national circulation were charged under the provincial equivalents of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Hoist with its own petard, the media which had stood by and said nothing while Section 13 was used to ruin the lives of Canadians for daring to express forbidden thoughts, but now aware of the threat to its own freedom, began to report on Warman v. Lemire, the last Section 13 case to be heard by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. The light this shed on Section 13 and the shady behaviour of the Canadian Human Rights Commission generated enough of a backlash that Conservative MP Brian Storseth was able to garner sufficient support in Parliament for a bill that brought about the repeal of Section 13. Nevertheless, there is much more work that needs to be done to completely rollback this Soviet-style thought control and recover the atmosphere of freedom that Canadians used to know and which our Common Law birthright as subjects of the Crown.

In this fight for traditional Canadian freedoms against this kind of soft totalitarianism those who deserve the most honour are those who stood up against it from the beginning. It is one thing to speak out when someone tries to censor MacLean’s magazine. The true test of commitment to freedom of conscience, thought, and speech is when you dare to speak out when they go after an Ernst Zündel, James Keegstra, or John Ross Taylor. This is a point that Pastor Martin Niemöller would certainly have understood. Foremost among those who demonstrated such commitment were BC lawyer Doug Christie and his long-time associate Barbara Kulaszka of the Law Society of Upper Canada. Although Christie, who passed away four years ago, was the better known of the two, Kulaszka had been a key figure in the fight for free speech from the beginning, when she worked alongside Christie in the Zündel case back in the 1980s. She passed away from cancer this year on the fifteenth of June.

The Canadian Association for Free Expression rented space in the Richview Public Library in Toronto for the purpose of holding a memorial service for Kulaszka last Wednesday. When word of this got out several individuals and organizations placed pressure on the Toronto Public Library system to cancel the event and a number of newspapers and other media outlets expressed manufactured outrage when the library, to its credit, refused to do this. Keep in mind that this was a memorial service – an occasion for those who had known Kulaszka, had worked with her, and whom she had defended in court, to remember her and pay her public tribute. It was not, despite the dishonest way in which it has been reported in many media sources, something akin to a Klan rally.

Overlooked and ignored by Kulaszka’s detractors is the fact that while many of her clients are said to have expressed admiration for Nazism and the Third Reich and questioned the accuracy of the crimes and atrocities attributed to it – I use the words “said to” because hate speech laws by their very nature are intended to prevent us from having access to what the thought criminal has actually said and to force us to rely upon the word of hate speech experts, themselves extremely hostile to the thought criminals, to tell us what they think and say - in fighting on their behalf against those who sought to penalize them for their ideas she was fighting, not for the ideology of National Socialism, but for the principles of freedom and justice that belong to the tradition of Great Britain and the Commonwealth – the countries that went to war to defeat Nazism. It is this desire to silence people with laws that penalize them for their thoughts and words that lies behind the hate laws that Kulaszka fought against which is akin to the spirit of the totalitarianism that was Nazism, not her brave and dedicated efforts to fight this tyranny.

So who are these people who are so utterly lacking in class as to begrudge Kulaszka her memorial?

Well, there are the politicians of course. John Tory, the present mayor of Hogtown, and Toronto City Councillors James Pasternak and John Campbell all gave quotes to the media expressing their dismay over the library’s decision to allow the memorial. Politicians being what they are it is reasonable to suspect that if the media had taken the opposite approach to the story they would have been quoted as supporting the library’s decision. So take their words for the nothing they are worth.

Then there are the usual suspects – the professional anti-bigots. Richard Warman, Bernie Farber, and Warren Kinsella were all on hand to vent their impotent rage at the library that actually dared to defy their edict as to who should or should not be allowed to rent public facilities for a memorial service. It is easy to see why these three are so upset. Warman, whom the media describe as a “human rights lawyer”, is a former investigator for the Canadian Human Rights Commission who went on to become the complainant in the vast majority of Section 13 cases. Farber was the CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress until it was swallowed up by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs about six years ago. The CJC was the chief organization that lobbied for hate literature laws before the Liberals acquiesced and while this was before Farber’s time as CEO he was himself an avid supporter of hate laws throughout his career. Kinsella, lawyer, Liberal Party strategist, and political commentator, has also been an outspoken advocate of hate laws over the years. It is people like this, who have devoted their lives to the cause of fighting views that they perceive to be bigotry, who, blinded by their zeal, seem incapable of distinguishing between lawyers and their clients or understanding that those who hold the views they object to do not thereby forfeit their rights.

Smug, soulless, and absolutely convinced of their own righteousness, they see no need for showing the basic human decency of allowing their opponents to mourn their dead in peace, and so they have been carrying on with the lack of class we have come to associate with Westboro Baptist Church. Is it that surprising, therefore, to learn that Fred Phelps in his first career, before starting Westboro Baptist Church, was a lawyer who specialized in racial discrimination cases?

Save The Senate!

As the ongoing trial of disgraced Senator Mike Duffy continues to loom large in the news the media has been treating Canadians to a daily diet of opinion columns and letters to the editor asking why we don’t just get rid of the Senate. For someone with a high regard for the intelligence of either the general populace, the letter writing segment of it, or the class of professional scribblers who earn their bread and butter by composing opinion columns, it must surely be disheartening and disillusioning to realize that so many of those they so admire have displayed, through asking this question, their acceptance of an easily refutable premise. As one who does not hold any of these groups in high regard I do not share this disillusionment – merely a sense of disgust.

Suppose someone were to come forward with evidence that high ranking police officers have been taking bribes, trafficking confiscated narcotics, and otherwise abusing the powers and privileges that come with being charged, in Her Majesty’s name, with the enforcement of the laws of the land? I imagine you are all shocked at the very suggestion of such an unheard of possibility. Once you revive from your faint, snap out of your catatonic state, or otherwise recover from the trauma that has just been inflicted upon your psyche ask yourself if, in the event, perish the thought, that such evidence were to be found, it would be reasonable to argue that because of such corruption, law enforcement agencies therefore ought to be abolished. Perhaps someone reading this who is an anarchist by way of political ideology would say that such an argument is reasonable but if he is a true anarchist he would say that all government agencies including the police are illegitimate regardless of whether we can point to specific examples of corruption or not. Otherwise, I expect, very few would conclude that the abolition of law enforcement is a reasonable response to police corruption.

That point that I wish to make is that you cannot deal with corruption and abuse of office by tearing down institutions and offices once such corruption and abuse is manifest within them. If we were to seriously attempt to do this then very soon we would have no institutions left but corruption would be as much present among us as ever it was before. This is because the source of corruption, as Christians and conservatives have always known although the fact continues to elude liberals, progressives, and socialists to this very day, is not institutions but the human heart. If you tear down an institution because you find corruption in it, you will also find corruption in whatever you erect to take its place because it too must contain the human element. Unless, of course, you are envisioning the replacement of man by machine ala James Cameron.

The Canadian Senate, let it be said, does not do a very good job of representing the principle it is supposed to embody and has not done so in a very long time. If the principle is a true one, however, and important to the balance of Parliament, then an imperfect and badly flawed representation is better than no representation at all. The House of Commons embodies the principle of representative democracy – that we, through the representatives we sent to Parliament, have a say in the laws we live under. The Crown embodies the principle of dignified, prescriptive authority that transcends popular politics. This is the more important of these two principles because governments can only derive power and not authority from winning elections – the power of numbers that comes from having a majority or at least a plurality behind you. A government that has power but not authority is a tyrannical government even if its power is democratic power. In our constitution, the government possesses authority as Ministers of the Crown in whose name they act and power as elected representatives of the people. What then does the Senate represent?

The Senate represents the principle that laws should not be enacted in haste, that reason should govern passion, and that legislation written by the representatives of the people should be reviewed by those representing experience, public spirit, and the wisdom that comes from age before it is allowed to become law. As I said, the Senate does not represent this principle well. Indeed, it would not be going too far to say that it does an abysmally poor job of representing the principle. Nevertheless, the principle is a sound one and it is better that it be represented poorly than that it not be represented at all. Note how the impulse to tear down the institution because of the corruption within it is the very opposite of the principle of not acting in haste and allowing reason to overrule passion. To give in to such an impulse would not bode well for our country.

If abolishing the Senate is a bad idea, and it is, the Upper Chamber is badly in need of reforms. I would suggest the following reforms as being particularly appropriate and necessary: 1) that the advisory role to the Crown on appointment to the Senate be taken from the Prime Minister’s Office and placed in the hands of a committee that itself is independent of the Prime Minister’s Office - perhaps consisting of representatives of the provinces, 2) that we increase the minimum age of Senators from thirty to perhaps forty-five or fifty, 3) that we either scrap salaries for Senators altogether or reduce them to something that is a mere honorarium while 4) updating the Constitutional property requirements for Senators to reflect a century and a half of inflation. (1)

These proposed reforms, which unlike the Triple-E alternative advocated by the old Reform Party, seek to be respectful and true to the tradition upon which our Parliament is founded, would go far towards ensuring that the Senate is filled by public spirited individuals with the wisdom of experience rather than cronies of the Prime Minister looking for a cushy position with a large salary and expense account. This would lessen greatly the biggest problem with the Senate as it currently stands while helping it to much better represent its principle in Parliament.

Of course, these proposals would be anathema to someone like Warren Kinsella who in his Toronto Sun column last weekend argued that the Senators were hastening the demise of the Senate by their own words and actions and gave as his chief example of this, Nancy Ruth’s remarks about the quality of airline food given in answer to the auditor general’s question about why she had charged a different breakfast to her expense account. Kinsella spoke of her “arrogance” and her “appalling condescension and contempt”, an interesting choice of pejoratives coming from someone who often tells Canadians what they think or feel as if those who thought or felt differently from him were not “Canadian”, examples of which can be found in the very same article. Kinsella led into this by providing details about the Senator’s background in the Jackman family, using her wealth against her to paint a portrait of patrician pride. Thus I infer that he would not approve of my proposal that only those of independent means be allowed to sit in the Senate.

Reading Warren Kinsella’s column solidified more than ever my conviction that the Senate must be retained and that the reforms which I have proposed would be for the best. After all, which is the more reasonable response to a rich Senator complaining about how airline breakfasts “are pretty awful”? To tell the Senator that she can pay for her breakfast out of her own independent means or to insist that the Upper House of Parliament be abolished altogether?

(1) For a more detailed exposition of these proposals see: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.ca/2012/08/senate-reform.html

Religious Need Not Apply?

Imagine that a national political figure made a controversial statement that was highly offensive to black people and the leader of a black organization was to publicly rebuke him for it. Suppose that you then opened your newspaper one morning, turned to the opinion page, and in a syndicated column were to read that although the politician had stuck his foot in his mouth he was now out of hot water because “Canadians don’t like black people involving themselves, at all, in politics.” Would you find this statement to be offensive? If so, what would you consider to be most offensive about it, that it expresses racist sentiments or that it presumptuously attributes those sentiments to you and your countrymen?

There are many substitutions you can make for the main variable in the above scenario. You could substitute any other racial group other than white Europeans for black people. Or you could substitute women or homosexuals. Run the scenario again with each of these substitutions and you will probably get the same results. Progressive, liberal, and forward thinking people would be appalled to read such remarks in their newspaper and would probably put pressure on the editor to stop running the column.

What if, however, we were to substitute “Christians” for “black people”? Or “religious people” used in such a way that many if not most people would automatically read it as meaning “Christians”.

This, it would appear, is somehow different because we were recently treated to just such a comment and by a progressive, liberal, forward thinking commentator, nonetheless.

The national political figure was Justin Trudeau who, a little over a year ago, was elected leader of the Liberal Party, presumably on the basis of his youth, good looks, and family name. He is the son of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the lawyer and far left editor, writer and activist from Quebec who entered federal politics in the 1960s as a member of the Liberal Party and succeeded Lester Pearson as leader of the Liberals and Prime Minister. Under his leadership the Liberal Party went from being the party of free trade and continentalism, founded with its lips firmly pressed against Uncle Sam’s rear end, to being the party of socialism, multiculturalism and post-modern moral relativism (in other words a huge redundancy as we already had the NDP for that). Take your pick as to which version of the Liberal Party was most repulsive – it is six of one, half a dozen of the other. In the decade and a half that Pierre Trudeau governed Canada as the head of the Liberal Party he did everything he could to undermine the political, cultural, and social traditions of both English and French Canada, while ruining the country’s economy, saddling us with an enormous debt, and creating a constitutional crisis that long threatened to tear the country apart. The reason I bring all this up is because Trudeau fils is doing an excellent job of making Trudeau père look good by comparison.

The controvers y the young Trudeau provoked a few weeks ago was over abortion. The day before the annual March for Life in Ottawa he announced that future Liberal candidates would be expected to vote the party line with regards to abortion and defined that party line as pro-choice – no legislative restriction on abortion. Needless to say, Trudeau’s stance did not impress the Roman Catholic Church, whose members have traditionally tended to vote Liberal in Canada. Trudeau himself is a member of the Roman Catholic Church and claims, despite his obvious disagreement with the Church on this key ethical issue, to be devout. Catholic leaders have condemned Trudeau’s stance and last week, in an interview with the CBC, the Catholic Bishop of Ottawa described Trudeau’s support for abortion as “scandalous”.

Enter Warren Kinsella. Warren Kinsella is, among other disagreeable things, a lawyer, a punk rocker, a former Liberal Party strategist, and a progressive, forward minded, liberal. He writes a column for the Toronto Sun which is carried by the other papers in the Sun chain, including the Winnipeg Sun. As these papers generally have a right-of-centre, neo-conservative slant, Kinsella’s left-of-centre column tends to stand out.

Last Friday an article by Kinsella entitled “Trudeau leaps blindly into abortion debate” appeared on page 9 of the Winnipeg Sun. In the first half of the column Kinsella praised as reasonable Trudeau’s earlier statement that the party’s position is “we do not reopen (the abortion) debate” but then pointed out that by declaring that future candidates would have to toe the party line Trudeau had done just that. He further observed that Trudeau has dug himself deeper into this hole with his confusing and contradictory attempts to salvage the situation.

Then, however, Kinsella went on to talk about and quote from the Catholic Bishop’s remarks, suggesting that by rebuking Trudeau, the bishop has provided him with a way out of the mess he has made. Here is the reasoning he used to arrive at this conclusion:

“As Stockwell Day learned the hard way, Canadians favour a wall between church and state. And they don’t like the religious involving themselves, at all, in politics.”

It is interesting the different ways in which different people remember certain events. When I think back to the federal election of 2000 in which Stockwell Day led the Canadian Alliance, I do not recall “Canadians” as a whole mocking or attacking Stockwell Day because of his Christian faith. I remember progressive and liberal media elites doing so, especially a certain Liberal Party strategist.

Tories, if and when they are ever true to their own principles, look to their country’s long-rooted traditions and institutions as the foundation of their policies. Progressives look instead to the “will of the people”. Since the people don’t actually have a collective will, unless you count that which is filtered through time and expressed as tradition and which is hence on the side of the Tory rather than the progressive, progressives have to supply the people with one, which inevitably is indistinguishable from the progressive’s own will. Which is why, in this country, one frequently finds progressive writers in an arrogant and condescending tone, telling Canadians what they think.

On almost any issue, Canadians have a wide diversity of ideas. There are those, like myself, who are Tories and support Canada’s traditions and institutions. Then there are those who for some reason or another – perhaps they had a nasty fall when they were children, perhaps they are lacking some important nutrient in their diet, perhaps they have been breathing in too many noxious fumes of one sort or another – are progressive and think more like Kinsella. Of course there are many other viewpoints out there as well. The closest thing to a general consensus among Canadians is that we are not Americans (referring to America in the sense of the country not the continents). Almost everyone agrees about this. Traditional Tories say that we are not Americans with a sense of patriotic pride in our country’s Loyalist heritage and traditions. Neoconservatives agree that we are not Americans but with a sense of regret that we were not part of what they consider to be the great experiment in freedom and democracy shaping the ultimate destiny of the world. Progressives like to say that we are not Americans in the context of telling us what we think, even if what they say we think has less to do with our own country’s traditions and institutions than it does with the United States.

This can be the source of great irony. Note that in the sentences quoted earlier in which the progressive Kinsella tells Canadians what they think, he attributes to them the American concept of a “wall between church and state”. The idea of a “wall between church and state” is not a Canadian idea, nor is it part of our political tradition or constitution. The expression comes from a letter that Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States wrote in 1802 to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut. Jefferson was explaining the significance of the First Amendment to the American Constitution. Furthermore, when Jefferson wrote about “the wall of separation between church and state” he was clearly expressing a liberal, democratic fear of the power of the state, not a progressive contempt for religion. This wall, as Jefferson saw it, was to keep Congress out of religion, not to keep religion from having any say in politics.

Kinsella therefore, has not only attributed to Canadians the belief in a political concept that is part of the American tradition rather than our own, he has also transformed that concept into its polar opposite, a fence to keep “the religious” out of politics rather than a defensive wall protecting religion from state intrusion.

We have not yet mined the irony in Kinsella’s remarks to its full depth. The author of The Web of Hate has built a reputation for himself, among his supporters as an expert on bigotry, among his detractors as a jerk who likes to bully his opponents on the right with accusations of bigotry. You can decide for yourself which version is more accurate, but note in doing so, the irony that this same self-appointed expert on bigotry and hatred, who in the federal election of fourteen years ago publicly ridiculed the leader of the Canadian Alliance for his evangelical Christian beliefs, wrote “the religious” rather than “religion”.

Then ask yourselves whether you, as Canadians, feel complimented or insulted at having this progressive sentiment attributed to yourselves.

The Reform Party, Then and Now

I was six months shy of being able to vote in the Canadian federal election of October 1993. Nevertheless, I followed the election closely having had an interest in politics for as long as I can remember. The results did not please me. The Liberal Party, for which I have never had anything but the deepest loathing received a large majority of 177 seats. The party that came in second and thus, ironically, became Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, was the Bloc Québécois, a separatist party. The socialist New Democrats were reduced to 9 seats but it was difficult to rejoice over this when the Conservatives had been reduced to 2 seats.

Although I was not old enough to vote for them I had always thought of the Conservatives as my party. Undoubtedly part of the reason for this was that my parents had supported them in 1984 and 1988. I had deeper reasons than this, however. The Conservatives were the party of Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. MacDonald and they were the party of John G. Diefenbaker. Then as now, I thought of Diefenbaker as the statesman who embodied all the political principles I believed in. He was a Canadian nationalist, who believed in a united Canada whose place was with the United States and the free world in the fight against Communism but not at the expense of her own identity and sovereignty, a Tory who supported our parliamentary tradition, our monarchy, and our ties to the rest of the British family of nations in the Commonwealth, and a Western, rural populist who hated the way the companies and politicians of the big Ontario and Quebec metropolises tended to think they could walk all over the other provinces and the rural communities of Canada.

Yet, despite my instinctual Toryism, when the next general election came in 1997, it was the Reform Party for which I voted and in which I had actually taken out a membership. The Reform Party had been the other big winner in 1993, after the Liberals and Bloc Québécois, having won 52 seats, just two short of tying with the Bloc. This was the part of the outcome of the 1993 election with which I was most satisfied. This was not an indication of a change in my political principles, although the title of the Reform Party would suggest a spirit of impatience for change that is the very antithesis of conservatism. It was due, rather, to the conviction that on a number of important issues the Conservative Party was no longer interested in standing for conservative principles and presenting Canadians with a real alternative to the positions of the Liberal and NDP parties. The Reform Party, on the other hand, seemed to be that alternative.

It had been founded in 1987 at a conference here in Winnipeg, but the movement that gave birth to it had been years in the making. The arrogance of the Trudeau Liberals towards Western Canada (not just to the Alberta oil industry) had generated a lot of resentment towards Ottawa in the West. The Mulroney Conservatives had not helped things when, in their efforts to solve the constitutional crisis that Trudeau had dumped in their laps, they gave every appearance of wishing to appease Quebec at the expense of the Western provinces. The Reform Party was founded as a vehicle to take to Ottawa the message that the West had had enough. This was a message that I firmly believed Ottawa needed to hear and was long overdue to receive.

What I did not realize at the time was that the grievances that had given birth to the movement that gave Western populism its own party had also transformed Western populism into something that was quite different from the Western populism I admired in Diefenbaker. In Diefenbaker, as you can read on almost every page of his three volume memoirs One Canada or his These Things We Treasure(the best short expression of traditional Canadian Toryism out there) his refusal to stand by and allow the urban elites of Ontario, Quebec, and Ottawa to trample over the rest of the country, especially the rural, West where he had grown up, was inseparably joined to a deep Tory love and reverence for the traditions and institutions of his country, Canada. In the Reform Party, however, Western populism was frequently wed to a thinly veiled, if veiled at all, contempt for Canada, her history, traditions, and institutions, and a desire to replace these with ones more resembling those of our republican neighbours to the south. Had I fully realized this twenty years ago, I would not have touched the Reform Party with a ten-foot pole.

I did not realize it at the time, however, and the Reform Party, under the leadership of Preston Manning, an evangelical Christian, was taking all sorts of stands that I agreed with. It was opposed to abortion, to easy divorce, to same-sex marriage (although this was barely on the radar twenty years ago) and to the basic replacement of what had been the social and moral norms throughout most of Canadian history with the values of Hollywood. It was opposed to the approach to criminal sentencing that elevates fairness to the perpetrator of a crime over justice to his victim. It opposed the long-gun registry which was an expensive and obnoxious way of appeasing feminists by harassing farmers. It rejected the absurd idea that robbing Peter to pay Paul through high taxes and ever-expanding social programs was a form of Christian charity, compassion and generosity rather than the bribing of people with their own money. It wanted lower taxes, more fiscal responsibility on the part of government, and a friendlier general atmosphere towards business and job creation.

This is what drew me to the Reform Party and I am still fundamentally in agreement with all of this today. Liberals, NDP socialists, and left-of-centre Conservatives, have all suggested that these ideas were products of the American Right, alien to traditional Canadian conservatism and imported by the Reform Party. Unfortunately, many within the Reform Party shared this idea and joined it with their obnoxious anti-Canadian, anti-patriotism. The idea is pure nonsense. There is a world of difference between the Disraelian social safety net traditionally supported by the Conservative Party in Canada and the bloated welfare state that is, ironically, itself largely an American import built up by the Canadian government following the lead of the American Democrats in the 1930s and 1960s. The idea that the Reform Party’s positions on abortion, divorce, homosexuality, and other social and moral issues were foreign to traditional Canadian conservatism is even more worthy of ridicule. Until very recently support for these positions could be found even in the centre (Liberal) and left (NDP) parties.

I let my membership in the Reform Party, or the Canadian Alliance as it had become, lapse in 2003 prior to the merger that created the current Conservative Party. The merger could have blended the best of both parties, such as the old Conservative Party’s nationalism and support for our traditions and institutions with the Reform Party’s right-wing economic and social views. I suspected it would be far more likely to blend the worst of both parties, i.e., the Conservative Party’s willingness to capitulate to the centre and the left on economic and social issues and the Reform Party’s disgusting anti-patriotism.

Perhaps that says more about my tendency towards cynicism than anything else but I find myself reflecting on all of this after reading Warren Kinsella’s column in yesterday’s Sun entitled “Reform fades into history”. (1) Kinsella’s argument was that today, twenty years after the Reform Party became a force to be reckoned with in Canadian national politics, it is Ottawa that has changed the Reformers and not the other way around. Kinsella pointed to several old Reform Party positions on which their heirs in the current Conservative Party appear to have flip-flopped. I will only comment on two of them.

The first thing Kinsella mentions is that the Reformers “arrived opposing gay rights” and today “are indifferent to, or supportive of, gay rights.” Kinsella’s choice of words does not quite do justice to the change he is referring to. The phrase “gay rights” could suggest the idea that homosexuals have the same legal protection of their lives and property and the same rights to legal counsel, a trial before a jury of their peers, etc. as heterosexuals. The Reform Party was never opposed to this, however. It could also mean something like the right to engage in consensual sexual intercourse with another adult member of one’s own sex in privacy behind closed doors. This too, doesn’t quite fit the discussion. Homosexuality had already been decriminalized by the time the Reform Party was founded and while one or two Reformers might have had the idea that it ought to be recriminalized this was never part of the party’s policy and platform. What the Reform Party did oppose, and presumably this is what Kinsella meant by “gay rights”, was the addition of “sexual orientation” to the prohibited bases of discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act and changing the legal definition of marriage so that a man could “marry” a man, and a woman could “marry” a woman.

Twenty years ago, when the governing Liberal Party declared its support for adding sexual orientation to the CHRA and redefining marriage it assured us that the rights of other Canadians, particularly religious Canadians, would not be adversely affected because these rights were already recognized in Canadian law. These assurances were pure boloney. The courts, both the kangaroo “human rights” tribunals and the real courts, have taken the position that to protect homosexuals against discrimination Christians must either do things that violate the ancient teachings of their religion or face heavy fines and/or the loss of their businesses and livelihood. The Reform Party saw this coming twenty years ago. The fact that their successors seem to have backed down on the matter is not to their credit.

A few paragraphs into his column, Kinsella referred to the “Blue Book”, i.e., the Reform Party’s official policy book, and says that it “declared the Reformers opposed anything that would ‘alter the ethnic makeup of Canada.’” This, Kinsella told us, means that they “wanted to keep Canada as white as possible. It was indisputably racist.”

Indisputably? Not exactly. What the Blue Book actually declared the Reform Party to be opposed to was “any immigration based on race or creed or designed to radically or suddenly alter the ethnic makeup of Canada”. One does not have to dislike people of other races or even just the people of any particular race to see that massive, large scale, and quick demographic change is seldom if ever good for a country. Furthermore, immigration policy that is purposefully designed to bring about such change is indicative of a government that holds its own people in utter contempt.

The Liberal Party brought in just such an immigration policy early in the premiership of Pierre Trudeau. No subsequent government has reversed that policy – Mulroney’s Conservatives, if anything, made it worse – in part because the Liberals accused anybody who opposed the policy of being a bigot. They particularly liked to accuse rural Canadians and Western Canadians of being ignorant, uneducated, racists which helped fan the flames of resentment in the West against the arrogance of the Liberal Party and their support base in Ontario and Quebec. This, as we have seen, led to the creation of the Reform Party and the Reformers were right to declare their opposition to a policy that treated Canadians with such disrespect.

Kinsella claimed that this policy attracted “Nazi” support to the Reform Party and then gave himself a big verbal pat on the back for the help he gave Tom Flanagan and Stephen Harper in purging the party of these. Whatever amount of truth there may be to this story, and, no matter how many books on the subject he may write, I am not inclined to put any stock in Warren Kinsella’s accusations that so-and-so is a Nazi, he is certainly right that the current Conservative Party of Stephen Harper has jettisoned the Reform Party’s original position on immigration and adopted one virtually indistinguishable from that of the Liberal Party and NDP.

Judge for yourself, but I think that Kinsella has pretty much proven my cynical assessment, ten years ago, of what the outcome of the merger would be, to be justified.

(1) http://www.torontosun.com/2014/04/21/reform-fades-into-history

This and That No. 12

WHAT NOT TO READ BEFORE GOING TO CHURCH

Before going to Holy Communion yesterday morning I decided to look over the Winnipeg Sun. In the op/ed pages there was a column by Warren Kinsella entitled “Doors barred to Israel hater, but Islamophobe ushered in”. Against my better judgment I decided to read it.

I say that it was against my better judgment because Warren Kinsella is not a man I like very much. I generally disagree with everything he has to say and the way he says it. Reading a Kinsella column can produce one of two negative emotions that should not be brought into Holy Communion. The first is anger, an emotion the Master expressly warned that we should not take to the altar with us. The second is pride. It is very easy to get a sense of personal superiority when one reads Kinsella’s column, and we are to take the Sacrament with a spirit of humility and repentance not a spirit of pride.

So against my better judgment I read Kinsella’s column. I was not surprised to find that he took pretty much the exact opposite position on everything I took in my last essay “The Long War Against Free Speech In Canada”. I would be horribly disgusted with myself if that were not the case.

In his column Kinsella accuses the Harper government of letting a “Muslim-hating white supremacist” into Canada. He is referring to Geert Wilders, Dutch politician, and leader of the Party for Freedom. He also calls him a “creep” and a “lunatic” but we need not concern ourselves with that. Being called names by Kinsella is a compliment and Mr. Wilders should consider it a badge of honour.

Calling someone a “white supremacist” is a bit different than calling someone a “creep” or a “lunatic”, however. The last two terms are just insults. Few people take them seriously. Calling someone a “white supremacist” can ruin that person’s reputation and/or his career, place him in danger of violence, and possibly even put him at risk of legal harassment.

Is Geert Wilders a white supremacist? No. He is a classical liberal who wants restrictions on immigration to the Netherlands, particularly Islamic immigration, not for racial reasons but for cultural reasons. He believes Islam to be incompatible with the liberal tradition of individualism and democratic institutions which he defends. Is he right or is he wrong? That is a matter of debate and Kinsella is, as he should be, free to disagree with Wilders.

To call him a “white supremacist”, however, is absurd and low, although not unexpected when one considers the source.

Kinsella goes on to contrast Mr. Wilders recent visit to Canada, with George Galloway’s having been barred from the country two years ago. Note that Kinsella supports the ban on Galloway:

When kooky anti-Israel British politician George Galloway wanted to visit Canada in 2009, the Conservatives (appropriately) denied him entry, citing his extremism as justification.

Why was the denial of entry to Galloway appropriate? His supposed “extremism” consisted of remarks critical of the government of Israel and a humanitarian mission to bring relief supplies to the Gaza Strip (which is governed by the terrorist organization Hamas thanks to the American government’s foolish insistence upon bringing democracy to these regions). How can anyone take seriously the Harper government’s absurd claim that he poses a security risk to Canada because of this?

George Galloway is a leftist ideologue. He is a lot closer to Kinsella’s political beliefs than he is to mine, yet I say he should have been allowed into Canada to speak, just as Mr. Wilders has been. Neither man is a threat to Canada, both have unique perspectives and people in Canada who wish to hear them speak. There is no good purpose that could be accomplished by banning either man.

That, of course, is the difference between my position and Kinsella’s. I support the freedom of speech even of people like Galloway whose views are diametrically opposed to my own.

Blast it all. There is pride sneaking in.

The next time I decide to glance at the Winnipeg Sun before going to the Eucharist I am going to have to avoid Kinsella’s column and flip directly to more wholesome material like the Sunshine Girl.

THE EXCEPTION

In my last essay “The Long War Against Free Speech in Canada” I described how Canada’s defamation laws are currently biased in favour of the complainant creating great potential for their abuse. Labels like “white supremacist”, “racist”, and “neo-nazi” are popularly associated with violence and racial oppression, can ruin a person’s social status and career, and can lead to that person being targeted for violence by anti-racist terrorist thugs.

One would think, that in a country where defamation laws are so strict, that people would be extra careful about how they use these harmful labels. On the contrary, however, these labels are carelessly thrown at anyone who disagrees with multiculturalism and liberal immigration by the media, liberal and leftist politicians, and progressive bloggers.

Why is this the case? Are the labels accurate?

No.

Take “neo-nazi” for example. The National Socialist party was a revolutionary party in Germany, with its own private army, known for its violence even before it was elected to office in 1933. Once in power it established a dictatorial police state, demanded absolute loyalty from its citizens which it encouraged to spy on one another, and frequently murdered people that it considered a threat to itself. In this, it was remarkably similar to the Communist Party. The Nazi party, however, was committed, not to an economic utopia, but to a Darwinist ideology in which life was regarded as a struggle for existence between rival races and a belief in the “Aryan” race’s destiny to come out on top of this struggle. The Nazi party considered the Jews to be the Aryans’ worst enemy, regarding them as a racial fifth column.

Needless to say Nazism and its ideology was and is repugnant. It is almost as repugnant as the ideology of progressive liberalism.

One would think that the term “neo-nazi” should be applied to similar people who hold to the same ideology today. It is not. All it takes to be labeled a “neo-nazi” by many progressives in Canada is for you to oppose multiculturalism, diversity, and liberal immigration and take the position that white people have a right to a collective identity and have legitimate interests of their own. The same people, can be non-violent, life-long defenders of free society and such fundamental freedoms as freedom of speech, and yet progressives feel free to call them “neo-nazis”, associating them in people’s minds with the violence and oppression of the Third Reich.

In many cases, the very progressives who are so loose with this life-destroying, defamatory label, are themselves the type to sue at the drop of a hat over the slightest exaggeration of their own views.

How is it possible that in a legal system which makes it far too easy for people to successfully sue others for defamation, the only exception is that of the most damaging defamation of all?

SPEAKING OF PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT NAZIS

Last Thursday, John Demjanjuk was convicted in a German court of being an accessory to the murder of almost 30, 000 Jews. Nobody testified to his having taken part in committing a single murder or other atrocity. He was convicted on the theory that his presence in Sorbibor as a guard during WWII establishes his guilt as a participant in the crimes that went on there.

Demjanjuk was not a Nazi. He was not even a German. He was a Ukranian, who was conscripted into the Soviet army during WWII, then captured and made a POW by the Germans. He was one of a number of POW’s trained to be guards in the Nazi camps. It is well known that the Nazis secured obedience from the POWs they made into guards by threats against them and their families. I often wonder what is wrong with people to make them think that it is appropriate for such men, who served the Nazis under duress, to be prosecuted.

Demjanjuk is the man who had been stripped of his American citizenship, extradited to Israel, and then charged with and convicted for the crimes of “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka. It was a case of mistaken identity, although Patrick J. Buchanan was virtually the only journalist who was willing to say so. Ultimately, Demjanjuk and Buchanan were vindicated, when the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the conviction and aquited Demjanjuk, upon hearing evidence that demonstrated that Demjanjuk could not possibly be Ivan the Terrible. Here are Pat Buchanan’s remarks upon the outcome of the trial in Germany: http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2011/05/13/the-persecution-of-john-demjanjuk/

There are a number of similar cases here in Canada, of Ukranian or Polish origins, captured by the Nazis in the war and conscripted into service as camp guards or translators, who emigrated to Canada after the war. Certain organizations have demanded that they be stripped of their citizenship and deported, accusing them of “war crimes”. See Kevin Michael Grace’s “Who needs evidence? The Odynsky case proves Canadian citizenship is a meaningless protection” from the July, 8, 2002 issue of Report Newsmagazine (pp. 26-27) for the story of one of these men. Peter Worthington, columnist for the Toronto Sun (of which he was founding editor) has reported on several of the other cases in his column over the years. Here is a fairly recent example: http://www.torontosun.com/news/columnists/peter_worthington/2009/12/08/12075761-sun.html

It has been a little over one year since I opened this blog. The essays that I have posted here are a continuation of a series that I started the year previous to opening “Throne, Altar, Liberty” and which I privately distributed to my friends via e-mail and Facebook. The earlier essays were written in more of a newspaper column format – shorter, commenting on current events. Some of these I have reposted here, others I have opted not to because they pertained to things which were no longer current in the news. The first of all of these essays, from March of 2009, was about the Demjanjuk case. Since that case has just concluded, making it timely again, I will complete this post by reproducing my first essay.

True Justice and the Strange Case of John Demjanjuk

By Gerry T. Neal
March 13, 2009

So they are after him again. 33 years ago, John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-born auto worker in Seven Hills, Ohio, was accused of being “Ivan the Terrible”, a brutal SS guard at Treblinka. The accusation led to his being stripped of his American citizenship, extradited to Israel, convicted and sentenced to death. He was later exonerated by the Israeli Supreme Court after that body heard evidence that Demjanjuk could not have been “Ivan the Terrible”. The overturn of his conviction did not result in an apology to Demjanjuk from the organizations that had pressured the US Justice Department into deporting him. Nor was there a word of apology to Pat Buchanan on the part of the self-righteous commentators, like Norman Podhoretz and the New York Times' Abraham Rosenthal, who had accused him of being an anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizer, because he had maintained all along, what the Israeli Supreme Court eventually decided – that it was a case of mistaken identity.

The people who wanted Demjanjuk deported and tried, you see, were the type who simply cannot admit they were wrong. They immediately fell back on the “well, maybe he wasn’t ‘Ivan the Terrible’ at Treblinka, grumble, grumble, but he was a guard at Sorbibor and he must have committed war crimes there” position. That kind of argument usually convinces no one other than the person making it, but in this case they have had no problem getting others to listen to them. Although his US citizenship had been restored, the US Justice Department, which had withheld evidence the first time around, went after him again, and again they managed to get his citizenship revoked. They obtained a ruling that he was to be deported to the Ukraine. Now the German government has charged him with 29 000 cases of accessory to murder and called for his extradition. He is almost 89 years old.

63 years ago, when the Nuremberg Trials concluded, Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, the leader of the conservative wing of the Republican Party, and the son of former US President William Howard Taft, condemned the trials as unjust. They were a kangaroo court, in Taft’s opinion, which violated the sacred principles of Anglo-Saxon justice, upon which the legal systems of countries such as Great Britain, Canada, and the United States were based. At Nuremberg, the victors in the war, were judge, jury, executioner, and prosecutor, all rolled up into one. The court did not exist at the time the crimes it was sentencing took place, and thus, had no legitimate authority to pass sentence. Neither victor’s justice, nor ex post facto justice, was true justice.

It was not a question of whether or not the Nazi leaders deserved punishment. Taft was simply pointing out that the courts doing the punishing had no legitimate right to do so and that they were setting a dangerous precedent. Many did not like to hear these uncomfortable truths. Senator, and future President, John F. Kennedy, although a detestable man in many ways, had the decency to laud Taft for his stand, in his 1956 Profiles in Courage.

In 1960, Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who had been in charge of transporting the Jews to the camps and who had escaped following the War and ended up in Argentina, was captured in Buenos Aires by the Mossad, and taken to Israel, where he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in 1961. He was executed the following year. As Taft had done 14 years earlier, the editors of the conservative journal National Review, among them William F. Buckley Jr. and James Burnham, took a principled stand against these proceedings. Again, it was not a matter of whether or not Eichmann deserved his fate. The state of Israel was non-existent at the time Eichmann committed his heinous acts. Nor, was the state of Israel the successor government, to the territory in which these acts took place. Eichmann was charged under statutes that did not exist in the 1940s. This was clearly a case of ex post facto justice. Israel had no legitimate authority to try this case, and had in fact acted illegally to capture Eichmann, which understandably led to a protest of their actions by the government of Argentina.

Taft in the 40’s, and Buckley, Burnham, et. al., in the 60’s, took their principled stands during periods when the people being tried and condemned were genuine villains, the high command of the tyrannical Third Reich. Today, 64 years after WWII ended, none of these are left. Yet the professional anti-Nazis are still going strong. Having long ago run out of real Nazis to hunt, they are now going after anyone they can find, who they can connect to the SS and its camps, regardless of how minor a role they may have played. Like most single-mindedly obsessed fanatics, these people care very little about the genuine facts.

Here in Canada, the Canadian Jewish Congress, Binai B’rith Canada, and the Canadian version of the Simon Wiesenthal Center have lobbied the Canadian government for quite some time, to deport several men the CJC calls “war criminals”. These men include Helmut Oberlander, Wasyl Odynsky, and a few others. Oberlander is a man of German ethnic background, born in the Ukraine. Odynsky is ethnically Ukrainian, born in what was then a part of Poland. Both were conscripted into the service of the SS when the German army captured their home towns. Oberlander served the SS as a translator. Odynsky served as a guard in the forced labor camps of Trawinki and Poniatowa. Both men served only under duress. In Odynsky’s case he was told that his family would be killed if he did not cooperate. In both cases Judge Andrew MacKay found that there was no evidence that either had participated in any war crimes. Nevertheless both men were order deported (the deportations have not taken place, thankfully) on the grounds that they lied on their application to come here. This was not proven, as the records no longer exist, but merely inferred in each case. Both cases make a mockery of every principle of justice in the long and proud English tradition in which our country stands.

I wonder if something similar is the case for Mr. Demjanjuk. He also was from the Ukraine. He had been conscripted into the Soviet army, and was captured by the Germans. Perhaps he too was forced to serve under duress. Even if he did voluntarily join up with the Germans, it would not have been unreasonable for him to regard the German army as liberators. Lets not forget that he was living in the Ukraine, at the height of Stalin’s regime. The Terror Famine had taken place only a decade earlier. Of course we can only speculate as to what happened in Mr. Demjanjuk’s case. But one thing is certain, the man is no Hitler, no Himmler, no Eichmann.

The parties calling for his deportation are not asking for justice. They are demanding a complete and total revolution in the Anglo-Saxon justice system, which over the course of centuries developed, to protect the rights of the innocent. It is in the interests of all of us, that they not be allowed to get their way.