The Canadian Left Apes the Americans Yet Again

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

  

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

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Canada and Canadians

The Pirates of Penzance was the fifth comic opera to come out of the collaboration of librettist Sir W. S. Gilbert and composer Sir Arthur Sullivan.   It premiered in New York City – the only one of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas to open first in the United States rather than London – on New Year’s Eve in 1879, a year and a half after their fourth work, the H.M.S. Pinafore, had become a huge hit, both in London and internationally.

 

The hero of The Pirates of Penzance is the character Frederic, a role performed by a tenor.   The opera begins with his having completed his twenty-first year – not his twenty-second birthday, for he was born on February 29^th, a distinction, or rather, a “paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox”, that becomes essential to the plot in an amusingly absurd way – and the titular pirates throwing him a party.   He has, up to this point, served as their apprentice due to a mistake that his nurse, Ruth, made, when he was a boy (she had heard the word “pilot” as “pirate” in his father’s instructions regarding his apprenticeship).  The bass-baritone Pirate King (“it is, it is, a glorious thing to be a pirate king”), congratulates him and tells him that he now ranks as a “full blown member of our band”, producing a cheer from the crew, who are then told “My friends, I thank you all from my heart for your kindly wishes.   Would that I can repay them as they deserve.”   Asked what he means by that, Frederic explains “Today I am out of my indentures, and today I leave you forever.”   Astonished, since Frederic is the best man he has, the Pirate King asks for an explanation.   Frederic, with Ruth’s help – for she had also joined the pirate crew – explains about the error, and that while as long as the terms of his indentures lasted it was his duty to serve as part of the pirate crew, once they were over “I shall feel myself bound to devote myself heart and soul to your extermination!”

 

In the course of explaining all of this, Frederic expresses his opinion of his pirate colleagues in these words “Individually, I love you all with affection unspeakable, but, collectively, I look upon you with a disgust that amounts to absolute detestation!”

 

As tempting as it is to continue this summary until we get to the “doctor of divinity who resides in this vicinity” and Major-General Stanley who, as he likes to introduce himself, is the “very model of a modern Major-General”, I have already arrived at the lines that are the entire point of my having brought all of this up.

 

I have stated many times in the past that I prefer to call myself a Canadian patriot rather than a Canadian nationalist.  There are two ways in which patriotism and nationalism are usually distinguished.  The first is a distinction of kind.   Patriotism is an affection that people come by naturally as they extend the sentiment that under ordinary circumstances they acquire for the home and neighbourhood they grew up in to include their entire country.   Nationalism is an ideology which people obtain through indoctrination.   The second is a distinction of object.   The object of nationalism is a people, the object of patriotism is a country.   I have talked about the first distinction in the past, it is the second which is relevant in this essay.   I love my country, the Dominion of Canada, and its history, institutions and traditions.   When it comes to my countrymen, however, Canadians, and to be clear, I mean only those who are living at the present moment and not past generations, I often find myself sharing Frederic’s sentiments which were again:

 

Individually, I love you all with affection unspeakable, but, collectively, I look upon you with a disgust that amounts to absolute detestation!

 

The more my fellow Canadians show a lack of appreciation for and indifference towards Canada’s traditions and institutions the more inclined I am to think of them, taken collectively, in such uncharitable terms.   If opinion polls are any real indication – and to be fair, I do not think that protasis to be certain, far from it - this lack of appreciation and indifference has been very much on the rise among Canadians as of late.  

 

Take personal freedom or liberty, for example.   This is a vital Canadian tradition.   It goes back, not just the founding of the country in Confederation in 1867, but much further for the Fathers of Confederation, English and French, in adopting the Westminster constitution for our own deliberately chose to retain continuity with a tradition that safeguarded liberty.   Sir John A. Macdonald, addressing the legislature of the United Province of Canada in 1865 said:

 

We will enjoy here that which is the great test of constitutional freedom – we will have the rights of the minority respected. In all countries the rights of the majority take care of themselves, but it is only in countries like England, enjoying constitutional liberty, and safe from the tyranny of a single despot, or of an unbridled democracy, that the rights of minorities are regarded.

 

Sir Richard Cartwright made similar remarks and said “For myself, sir, I own frankly I prefer British liberty to American equality”.   This sentence encapsulated the thinking of the Fathers of Confederation – Canada was to be a British country with British freedom rather than an American country with American equality.   In the century and a half (with change) since then, this has been reversed in the thinking of a great many Canadians.  In the minds of these Canadians “equality” has become a Canadian value, although not the equality that Sir Richard Cartwright identified with the United States but a much uglier doctrine with the same name, and freedom has become an “American” value.   The Liberal Party and their allies in the media and academe are largely if not entirely to blame for this.   Indeed, this way of thinking was evident among bureaucrats and other career government officials who tend to be Liberal Party apparatchiks regardless of which party is in government long before it became evident among the general public.  

 

About fourteen years ago, in the Warman v. Lemire case before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, Dean Steacy, an investigator with the Canadian Human Rights Commission, was asked “What value do you give freedom of speech when you investigate?”   His response was to say “Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don’t give it any value.”   This despite the fact that in the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which people like this usually although contrafactually regard as the source of constitutionally protected rights and freedoms in Canada, “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication” is the second of the “fundamental freedoms” enumerated in Section 2.   Perhaps Steacy did not think “speech” to be included in “expression”.

 

When Steacy’s foolish remark was publicized it did not win him much popularity among Canadians.   Quite the contrary, it strengthened the grassroots movement that was demanding the repeal of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, a movement that was ultimately successful during the premiership of Stephen Harper by means of a private member’s bill despite it lacking the support of the Prime Minister and even, as many of us thought at the time, with his tacit disapproval.   This demonstrates that as recently as a decade and a half ago, Dean Steacy’s knee-jerk rejection of Canada’s traditional British liberty as “American” did not resonate with Canadians.   Can the same be said today?

 

The last year has provided us with many reasons to doubt this.   In March of 2020, after the media irresponsibly induced a panic over the spread of the Wuhan bat flu, most provincial governments, strongly encouraged to do so by the Dominion government, followed the example of governments around the world and imposed an unprecedented universal quarantine, at the time recommended by the World Health Organization, as an experiment in slowing the spread of the virus.  This involved a radical and severe curtailing of our basic rights and freedoms.   Indeed, the freedoms described as “fundamental” in the second section of the Charter – these include, in addition to the one quoted two paragraphs ago, the freedoms of “conscience and religion”, “peaceful assembly” and “association” – were essentially suspended in their entirety as our governments forbade all in-person social interaction.   Initially, as our governments handed over dictatorial powers to the public health officers we were told that this was a short-term measure to “flatten the curve”, to prevent the hospitals from being swamped while we learned more about this new virus and prepared for it.  As several of us predicted at the time would happen, “mission creep” quickly set in and the newly empowered health officials became determined to keep these excessive rules and restrictions in place until some increasingly distant goal – the development of a vaccine, the vaccination of the population, the elimination of the virus – was achieved.   Apart from a partial relaxation of the rules over the summer months, the lockdown experiment has remained in place to this day, and indeed, when full lockdown measures were re-imposed in the fall, they were even more severe than they had been last March and April.   This despite the fact that the evidence is clearly against the lockdown experiment – the virus is less dangerous than was originally thought (and even last March we knew that it posed a serious threat mostly to those who were very old and already had other health complications), its spread rises and falls seasonally similar to the cold and flu, lockdowns and masks have minimal-to-zero effect on this because it has happened more-or-less the same in all jurisdictions regardless of whether they locked down or not or the severity of the lockdown, while lockdowns themselves inflict severe mental, physical, social, cultural and economic damage upon societies.

 

Polls last year regularly showed a majority – often a large majority – of Canadians in favour of these restrictions and lockdowns, or even wishing for them to be more severe than they actually were.   If these polls were at all accurate – again, this is a big if – then this means far fewer Canadians today respect and value their traditional freedoms than has ever been the case in the past, even as recently as a decade ago.   It means that far too many Canadians have bought the lie of the public health officers, politicians, and media commentators that valuing freedom is “selfish”, when, in reality, supporting restrictions, masks, and lockdowns means preferring that the government take away the rights and freedoms of all your neighbours over you taking responsibility for your own safety and those of your loved ones and exercising reasonable precautions.   It means that far too many Canadians now value “safety” – which from the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution to this day has ever been the excuse totalitarians of every stripe, Nazi, Communist, woke, whatever, have used to tyrannize people and take away their freedoms – over freedom.

 

Over the past week or so, the mainstream media have been reporting opinion poll results that seem to indicate that a similar lack of appreciation for an essential Canadian institution is growing.   According to the media the poll shows that support for replacing our hereditary royal monarch with an elected head of state is higher than it has ever been before, although it is not near as high as the lockdown support discussed above and is still below having majority support.   There is good reason to doubt the accuracy of such poll results in that they indicate growing support for a change the media itself seems to be trying to promote given the way it has used the scandal surrounding the recent vice-regal resignation to attack the office of the Queen’s representative, the Governor General, when the problem is obviously with the person who filled the office, and the way in which she was chosen, i.e., hand-picked by Captain Airhead in total disregard of the qualities the office calls for, selection procedures that worked well in the past such as with Payette’s immediate predecessor, or even the most basic vetting.    There is also, of course, a question over whether these poll results indicate an actual growth in small-r republican preferences or merely disapproval of the next in line of succession, His Royal Highness Prince Charles.

 

To the extent that this poll is accurate, however, it indicates that many Canadians have traded the Canadian way of thinking for the American way of thinking.   Americans think of the Westminster system as being inferior to their own republican constitution because they consider it to be less than democratic with a hereditary monarch as the head of state.   The historic and traditional Canadian perspective is that the Westminster system is superior to a republican constitution because it is more than democratic, incorporating the monarchical principle along with the democratic.   To trade the Canadian for the American perspective on this is to impoverish our thinking.   That a constitution is better for including more than just democracy is a viewpoint with an ancient pedigree that can be traced back to ancient Greece.   That democracy is the highest principle of government and that a constitution is therefore weaker for having a non-elected head of state is an entirely Modern perspective.   It cannot even be traced back to ancient Rome, for while the Roman republic was like the American republic in being kingless, it was unlike the American republic in that it was openly and unabashedly aristocratic and made not the slightest pretense of being democratic.    Some might consider an entirely Modern perspective to be superior to one with an ancient pedigree, but such are ludicrously wrong.   Novelty is not a quality of truth – the truer an idea is, the more like it is that you will be able to find it throughout history, stretching back to the most ancient times, rather than merely in the present day.

 

Indeed, to think that an elected head of state is preferable to a hereditary monarch at this point in time, that is to say after the clownish mayhem of the fiascos that were the last two American presidential elections, is to embrace the Modern perspective at the worst possible moment, the moment in which it has been utterly discredited.    It is bad enough that Canadians have lately allowed the American presidential election style to influence the way we regard our parliamentary elections so as to make the question of which personality cult leader we want as Prime Minister into the primary or even sole factor to be considered in voting for whom we want for our local constituency representative.   We do not need to Americanize the office of head of state as well.

 

We are better off for having a hereditary royal monarch as our head of state and a constitution that is therefore more than, not less than, democratic.   Historically and traditionally, the institution of the monarchy has been the symbol and safeguard of our traditional rights and freedoms.   I have long said that in Canada the monarchy and freedom stand and fall together.   Therefore, if the polls are correct about waning Canadian support for both, this speaks very poorly about the present generation of Canadians.   Which is why if these trends continue,  Canadians who still love their country with its traditional monarchy and freedoms will be increasingly tempted to individually love their countrymen with affection unspeakable, but collectively look upon them with a disgust that amounts to absolute detestation.

One Victory Against the Encroaching Totalitarianism

If anyone was under the impression that my harsh, negative, assessment of our civil leadership’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic in my last essay was overblown, they need only look at the dirty trick the Liberals tried to pull this week. Parliament, which adjourned on March 13th until Hitler’s birthday - draw your own conclusions, was temporarily called back on Tuesday to vote on an emergency spending bill. The problem was not the $82 billion that the government was seeking permission to spend. The problem was that the bill, as originally drafted, included several provisions that would give them the power to increase spending and taxation without submitting the increases to Parliament for a vote.

Perhaps they thought that the panic that the media – which in Canada is almost monolithically the mouthpiece of the Liberal Party – has generated would be sufficient for them to get away with this. Or possibly they thought that all of their efforts over decades to get Canadians to devalue the traditions and institutions we inherited from Britain and to forget the history and significance of those traditions and institutions had finally paid off, and that we would be willing to let them overturn the Magna Carta and the very foundation of Parliamentary government and our Common Law liberties.

Mercifully, it appears they were wrong. Tuesday morning it was reported that Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition were doing their job and firmly standing up for our traditional, constitutional, limits on government powers and that in the face of this staunch defence, the Liberals had backed down from their proposed power grab. Which is grounds for hope in these troubling times. The spirit of liberty has not yet been entirely crushed within us.

Later in the day, it was clarified that the tax powers were all that the Liberals had removed from the bill and that they were still pushing for the spending and borrowing powers. The Tories dug in in their opposition to these as well. The parties entered into negotiations but the day ended without the House being called upon to vote. This Wednesday morning - the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary - it was announced that the Liberals had dropped all the provisions for extended powers from the bill, which as an emergency spending bill has just passed the House, and will undoubtedly clear the Senate and receive Royal assent within a day or two.

I have been very critical of Andrew Scheer’s past performance as Opposition Leader and his bumbling in the last election but now, when it counts the most, it looks like he has come through for Canadians. Andrew Cohen, writing for the Ottawa Citizen, has praised the Prime Minister’s performance in this crisis saying “This has been his finest hour.” I beg to disagree. This – not the Kokanee Grope, not the costume party in India, not the Blackface/Brownface Scandal, not the SNC Lavalin Affair – has been Justin Trudeau, revealed at his worst – an opportunistic, tyrant, who has tried to take advantage of a global health crisis to attack the foundations of our constitution and expand his own powers. This is Andrew Scheer’s finest hour, not Justin Trudeau’s.

I am under no illusions that the majority of my countrymen see it my way rather than Cohen’s. Canadians have been far too apathetic for far too long towards the riches of our inheritance in the Common Law and the Westminster System of Parliament. It is almost one hundred years since the famous incident when Lord Byng, Governor General of Canada, exercised the reserve powers of the Crown and refused Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s request for a dissolution of Parliament. King, who had been allowed to form a government despite not having won the plurality in the House, wanted the dissolution to save his own bacon because he faced an imminent censure in Parliament over a corruption scandal. Lord Byng’s refusal was an entirely appropriate use of the Crown’s powers to protect Parliament’s right to hold the government accountable, as such champions of our constitution as John Farthing and Eugene Forsey demonstrated in their books on the subject. In the next Dominion election, however, the Canadian electorate bought King’s execrable lies about the matter hook, line, and sinker and awarded him a majority government.

That the government’s first thoughts with regards to dealing with this crisis were that they need to expand their powers beyond what the constitution allows them is itself sufficient evidence that they do not deserve to be trusted with such powers.

The approach they have been taking to the COVID-19 pandemic is further grounds not to trust them. Remember that this is a virus which in over eighty percent of the cases we know about has produced no symptoms to moderate symptoms. The actual percentage of those who have contracted the virus of whom this is true is probably closer to 99.99%. Most people who are asymptomatic would not have been tested unless they were in a situation where they were known to have been exposed to the virus. Thus, an approach to containing the disease which focuses on protecting those most vulnerable to experience it at its worst rather than protecting us all by shutting everything down and forcing us all into isolation makes the most sense. Countries that have aggressively pursued such an approach have succeeded in containing the spread of the disease without going into extreme shut down mode. Ironically, the countries which Mr. Cohen lists in the second paragraph of his column have all followed this approach, unlike Italy and the United States whose mishandling of the crisis he decries, despite the fact that they are following the same kind of approach, albeit with varying degrees of severity, as our own government.

The model which Mr. Trudeau is following is that of advising – and probably eventually compelling – all Canadians to stay at home, away from the threat of contagion, and also from the sun and fresh air which are man’s most important natural allies in the fight against disease. This involves shutting down all “non-essential” businesses and promising that the government will take care of the huge segment of the workforce which now finds itself unemployed. Since government is not a wealth generating institution – despite sometimes having delusions to the contrary – this means that the burden it is taking upon itself must fall upon the only part of the private economy that remains open – the “essential” businesses that provide food and other necessities, putting a strain on these which will, if this lasts for any lengthy period of time, cause them to fail. This would result in far more deaths than the collapse of the medical system that Mr. Trudeau is trying to avoid by the long-term strategy of slowing the spread of the virus and pushing its peak into the future ever would. The modern economy is the way in which we have avoided the Malthusian consequences of our population size. Anybody who is not an idiot knows this. “Lives are more important than the economy” is a lie concealed behind a moral truism. Destroy the economy, and you destroy the lives that it sustains. The Holodomor of almost ninety years ago is an historical example of how a regime used that principle to destroy lives deliberately with malice aforethought. If the Trudeau Liberals accomplish the same it will be primarily through stupidity.

Nor is shrinking the economy to the point where it cannot possibly feed our population and so causing the deaths of masses by starvation the only way in which the model the Trudeau government is pursuing could produce disastrous results. As unemployment skyrockets, suicide rates are likely to rise as well. Furthermore, if “extreme social distancing” is kept in place for as long as the Liberals are saying is necessary – months rather than weeks – there will be a general breakdown in psychological and emotional health. Human beings are social creatures. They are not meant to live apart from each other. Force them to live contrary to their nature for a lengthy period of time and they will start to go bonkers. This too would contribute to a rise in suicide rates as well as other dangerous and destructive behaviour.

Furthermore, just as an extended shut down will rapidly burn up accumulated material capital, so an extensive period of “extreme social distancing” will burn up social capital – the trust between members of a community and society that enables them to function in a civilized way and cooperate for their own common good. The only kind of government that would want to destroy that is a totalitarian government that hates and persecutes all social interaction that is not under its direct planning and control, which demands the total undivided allegiance of its citizens, and which fears any and all rivals for its peoples’ loyalty, trust, and affection.

Those who would rather not live under that kind of a government, who still value our constitution in which Queen-in-Parliament and not Prime Minister-in-Cabinet is sovereign, and our Common Law rights and freedoms won a victory today. Let us practice eternal vigilance and pray that it is not short-lived.

The Westminster System is Better Than Republicanism

That the Westminster parliamentary system of government is a superior form of government to any republicanism has been a lifelong conviction of mine. This will come as a surprise to none of my long-time readers, I am sure.

There are many reasons for this conviction. On one level it is simple patriotism. True patriotism - as opposed to nationalism, which is the ideological devotion to an ideal vision of one's nation - is love, affection and loyalty for one's country because it is one's own. It is by nature the same thing as the love one ordinarily feels for one's family and home, just on a larger scale. The Westminster parliamentary system of government is the traditional form of government of my country, the Dominion of Canada, which inherited it from the United Kingdom where it originally developed. We share this form of government with the UK and several other countries in the British Commonwealth, or, as I often call it, the British family of nations.

There is a theoretical foundation for the conviction, however. Two and a half millennia ago, Plato, of whom A. N. Whitehead wrote that all of Western philosophy is just a series of footnotes, wrote his most important dialogue, the Politeia. The title is usually translated "The Republic" from the Latin De Republica, which means "about the affairs of the public" but this is misleading because of the connotations the word "republic" now has. In the dialogue, Plato has Socrates debate the nature of justice , first with Thrasymachus, who maintains that injustice is superior to justice, and then with Glaucon (Plato's brother) who asks, in response to Socrates' answer to Thrasymachus, why justice itself is to be preferred over the mere appearance of justice. Socrates proposes that they found a hypothetical city-state and look at justice as it would be in that state on the theory that by seeing it viewed on a large scale there, they would be better able to understand the nature of justice in the individual.

The hypothetical ideal city-state is ruled by kings who are also philosophers, men who through higher thought have been able to catch a glimpse of goodness, truth, and beauty as they are in themselves, and not merely their worldly imitations. The constitution of this city-state is dubbed royal/aristocratic by Plato through Socrates, and is contrasted with actual constitutions of which four are identified. States, according to Plato, have the tendency to shift from one of these to the next as extremes beget their opposites and so states go from timocracy - the closest to the ideal, the rule of honour-seeking aristocrats, identified with the government of Sparta at the time, to oligarchy, the rule of the wealthy few, to democracy, which ultimately begets tyranny. This is a progression, in Plato's view, from best to worst.

Aristotle, Plato's student, modified his teacher's political theories by proposing that there were three simple constitutions - the rule of the one, the few, and the many which have good and bad forms depending upon whether the one, the few, or the many govern for themselves at the expense of the common good or for the sake of the common good. Like Plato, Aristotle saw states as going through these constitutions in cyclical fashion, but theorized that the cycle could be broken and a lasting, stable, constitution produced, by mixing monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, checking the worst tendencies of each and bringing out the best of all.

The Westminster parliamentary system is the living embodiment of this mixed constitution. The Americans also had Aristotle's ideal in mind when they drew up their republican constitution, but the Westminster system, forged over centuries of history, has the greater weight of prescriptive tradition behind it.

The Founding Fathers of the United States, in devising their republic, saw the importance of separating the executive, legislative, and judicial powers of government. They were heavily influenced by the theories of Montesquieu who in turn looked to the Westminster system as the already-existing model of this separation. In the Westminster system these powers are both united and separated at the same time, with no contradiction, because the uniting factor is the Sovereign Crown. In Canada we speak of the distinction between "the Queen-in-council" (the executive branch, consisting of the Queen, usually represented by the Governor General, and privy council, the day-to-day business of which is carried out by the Prime Minister and Cabinet), "the Queen-in-Parliament" (the legislative branch, consisting of the House of Commons, Senate and again the Queen, usually through vice regal representation), and "the Queen-on-the-bench"(the judicial branch, the courts). The Westminster system makes this harmonious separation-in-unity of the powers possible, by distinguishing between the ownership of the powers of government, which belongs in each case to the Monarch, and the exercise of the powers which are carried out in her name by different groups of people. There is a slight overlap, in that the Prime Minister and Cabinet ministers are also members of Parliament, but this is supposed to make the Cabinet, responsible for the everyday decisions of the executive branch of government, dually accountable, both to the Sovereign above in whose name they act and to the Parliament below.

There are many reasons for preferring this to the republican system. As I have discussed in many previous essays, history shows us that when government is thought of as the property of "the people" and leaders see themselves as the champions of "the people", traditional limitations on the use of government power break down. A government that acts in the name of the people can justify whatever it does to the people. Hitler saw himself as one of the common people, the first among equal brothers, empowered to act as the voice of the people in carrying out his tyrannical murderous evil deeds. The same was true of Stalin and every other totalitarian despot. By contrast, when the ownership of government power belongs to a Royal Sovereign, who stands in a paternal or maternal relationship to the people, the people who exercise the powers of government are in the position of being servants - which is what the word minister means - to their Royal master. This is a humbling position, and if the exercise of government power is to be carried out by politicians - people who by definition are power-seekers and therefore the most likely to be corrupted by actual power - it is all the more important that they be placed in a position of humility rather than one that promotes arrogance.

When a king or queen reigns over your country it adds a touch of class that is simply not present in a republic.

The events that we have seen in the republic south of our border this week testify to another strength of our system. No, I am not referring to the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency, which event I welcome for reasons explained elsewhere, but rather to the response to it. Protests have broken out all over America, ranging from the juvenile but fairly innocuous antics of Stefani Germanotta outside the Trump Tower in New York to the violent riots such as have been taking place in Portland, Oregon. Unsurprisingly, many of the protests appear to have been organized by the George Soros funded MoveOn, but the sentiment shared by all, organized or spontaneous, peaceful or violent, is expressed in the words "not my president."

Had the election gone the other way, the same sentiment would have been expressed by the other side. Whether it would have gotten this violent or not is difficult to say. The liberal media certainly feared it would, but that means very little as their powers of prediction have not been particularly great as of late. There was certainly potential for a violent uprising, however. The men and women who turned out in droves to vote for Trump included many white, middle and working class Americans who have been scapegoated by the American political, cultural, economic, and academic establishment for decades, seeing their jobs being exported and their replacements imported and their objections to all of this answered with vile accusations of bigotry, prejudice, ignorance and hatred. To these, the forgotten Americans whom the president-elect vowed in his victory speech would never be forgotten again, and whom Hillary Clinton had dismissed as "a basketful of deplorables", Trump had offered a glimmer of hope for the first time in years and, as Pat Buchanan pointed out in September, this election was really their last chance.

This was the most polarizing election the American republic has seen since 1860. The election of Abraham Lincoln that year, incidentally, makes nonsense out of the claim that we heard from many pundits last month in feigned shock over Trump’s unwillingness to invite fraud by making a preliminary concession to Clinton, that the United States has experienced 227 years of uninterrupted peaceful transfer of power. That election split the country in two and brought about a four year internecine war that saw over 600, 000 casualties. Hardly what one could call a peaceful transition of power. At any rate, the election this year has revealed a division between Americans that rivals that of 1860 in its extent and intensity. It is a division that is unlikely to be healed any time soon, since the liberal left continues to reject the validity of the complaints of white, middle and working class Americans against their agenda and to accuse these Americans of being “hateful” and “bigoted” while scarcely bothering to conceal their own hatred of the same beneath the thin veneer of their positive-sounding but empty platitudes such as “love trumps hate.”

The weakness of the republican system revealed in all of this is that the president, who is head of state of the republic, is supposed to be the person who represents the country as a collective whole – as opposed to the members of the House of Representative, who represent their own districts, and the Senators who represent their own States. The president, however, is chosen by election, making it possible for those who voted against him to plausibly claim that he is “not my president.”

In the Westminster system, the head of state is the monarch, who is not elected. Since her position is hereditary, she is above the divisive and polarizing, political process, and is therefore a better symbol of the unity of the country than an elected president. Indeed, since she is the descendent of previous monarchs and ancestor of future monarchs, she is a symbol not just of the present unity of the country, but of the unity of the country across past, present, and future generations as well, and of our country's enduring link to other countries in the British family of nations. The party which wins a majority or a plurality in the House of Commons forms Her Majesty’s government and its leader becomes Prime Minister but the second largest party in the House has a role as well as Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. The Opposition’s role is to challenge the policies and practices of the government, to hold it accountable to Parliament, and to be the Parliamentary voice of those who did not win the last election. The unifying factor, to which government and Opposition alike are supposed to be loyal, is the Royal Sovereign. No matter which party wins the election, even if the Prime Minister is a mindless, smug, smarmy, contemptable, little waste of space who never sold his soul to the devil only because he never possessed one to sell in the first place, like the present Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, all Canadians can look to our head of state and say “God Save the Queen!”

That is something for which, in light of the riots and uproar our republican neighbours are experiencing, we can be truly thankful.

God Save the Queen!

Don't Pull Down the Post!

I never thought former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau was as smart as his journalist and academic groupies made him out to be. There is a huge difference between an intellectual and being intelligent and Trudeau was the former rather than the latter. Compared to his son, however, Trudeau the Elder was a genius, albeit an evil one.

Since taking over his father’s old role as leader of the Liberal Party Justin Trudeau has had a habit of sticking his foot in his mouth and otherwise talking and acting like a complete moron. This week, however, he outdid himself with his 32 point plan to “restore democracy” in Canada. While some of the points have merit, most, like the goal of greater gender parity are utter foolishness, and the one which we will be concentrating on here is absolute insanity.

Before turning to that point, however, it must be said that it is not democracy that needs to be restored in Canada so much as freedom. Democracy and freedom are not the same thing nor do they necessarily go together. The idea that democracy and freedom go together like a knife and fork is an idea that has strong roots in the American tradition but which Canadians have traditionally rejected since the days of the American Revolution when the Loyalists chose to remain loyal to the Crown rather than jump on the republican bandwagon. Alexis de Tocqueville warned our American friends, after his visit to the United States in the nineteenth century, that democracy can potentially be the basis of the greatest tyranny of all, the “tyranny of the majority” as the history of his own country’s democratic revolution, begun fifteen years after that of the Americans ended, so well illustrates. Far superior to the modern ideal of democracy, is the classical ideal of the mixed constitution, as explained by Aristotle and Polybius, in which the three basic simple forms of government – monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy – are combined and balanced. That, of course, is exactly what our traditional form of government, the Westminster system consisting of the monarchy, Senate, and elected House of Commons embodies, and it is this system that historically and traditionally went together with and safeguarded freedom and justice in Canada.

The point of Trudeau’s plan to “restore democracy” that has attracted the most attention is his announced intention to abolish “first past the post” by the next election. It is this point to which we will now turn to show that when Ezra Levant dubbed Justin Trudeau the “shiny pony” a few years ago, it was an unfair slur on ponies everywhere.

First past the post is an expression borrowed from horse racing for our traditional way of determining the outcome of elections. The House of Commons is made up of the representatives of constituencies or ridings. In each constituency when the general election is called – or if for some reason there is a by-election for that particular riding – many candidates are allowed to run against each other for the right to sit in the House as that area’s representative. They may run as representatives of a party or independents. Sometimes the outcome of the election is a majority in which one candidate receives over half of the votes. Other times the outcome of the election is a plurality in which the vote is so divided that no one candidate receives over half. In this case, the candidate who receives the highest number of votes, wins the election.

So what are the objections to this?

Well, one common objection is that by awarding the election to the person with the highest number of votes the system is going against the wishes of the majority of voters who voted for someone other than the winner. While this objection seems to have merit upon first hearing it, you must realize that in a plurality election this would be the case regardless of which of the candidates is determined to be the winner. Proposed alternatives, such as multiple round elections until a clear majority is achieved or ranking the candidates on the ballot in order of preference rather than picking one would have the effect of making elections more expensive, more complicated, and with more factors for the unscrupulous to manipulate, without really eliminating the objection seeing as the person who wins the final round will still be someone the majority voted against in the first round and a ranked preference ballot can still return a winner who did not receive a majority of first preference votes and who therefore is still technically someone the majority voted against, all in order to fix a system that isn’t really broke, on the grounds of an objection that ultimately reduces to the idea that an election should be determined by its negative outcome, the most votes against, rather than its positive outcome, the most votes for.

Another common objection is that under this system the percentage of seats awarded to a party in the House of Commons is not the same as the percentage of the popular vote that party received. The popular vote is the accumulated vote of all voters in all ridings across the country. A small party, with voters scattered across the country, may win one or no seats, while receiving a comparably larger percentage of the popular vote. The Green Party, for example, won only the seat of its leader Elizabeth May in the 2011 election, although it received just under four percent of the popular vote. In the previous election it won no seats although it received just under seven percent of the popular vote. Supporters of the Green Party and other fringe parties regard this as being unfair and call for a system of proportional representation, in which the makeup of the assembly by party percentage is representative of the popular vote. That proportional representation would have the obvious effect of making the House of Commons even more ideological and partisan than it already is, and that this would not be a good thing, never seems to occur to such people.

What all of this shows is that while we are hardly in need of having the democratic element of our government fixed by a man who like his father is an admirer of Chinese Communist dictatorship, we are in urgent need of having our educational system, especially when it comes to the teaching of civics, repaired. The popular vote is a meaningless abstraction. When an election is called, it is not the ideological or partisan make up of the House of Commons for which people are supposed to be voting. They are supposed to be voting for the representative of their constituency. Thus, it makes no sense for a person to say “I’m not represented in Parliament because my party didn’t win a seat”. You are represented in the House of Commons as someone living in a constituency and not as a supporter of a party or a subscriber to an ideology – and this is a good thing. Your representative is the Member for your riding, whether you voted for him or not. Even though I can’t stand the jackass and his bloody socialist party, I know full well that Pat Martin is my representative in the House of Commons, because he is the Member for the constituency in which I live, as much as I find that fact intolerable.

Our Members of Parliament need this basic civics lesson as well. When a party puts forward a candidate in an election, he is running for the right to represent his constituency in Parliament on behalf of his party. This means that he is supposed to represent his party to his constituency in the election, but his constituency in the House if he wins. In other words, when campaigning for the votes of a riding, he is supposed to explain that he belongs to such and such a party which stands for such and such a platform. When sitting in the House as a Member, he is supposed to speak on behalf of the people who live in his constituency, including those who did not vote for him, work on their behalf, and protect their interests.

Of course the way the system works in practice does not always or perhaps even often resemble the way it is supposed to work but it would be no improvement to remove the reminder, once every so many years, that our politicians are supposed to be working on behalf of their constituency and tell them that they will now be sitting in Parliament only as representatives of their party and ideology. It is sheer madness to think otherwise.

Justin Trudeau, you can stick that in your joint and smoke it.