State of the Dominion – 2025

Seven years ago I entitled my annual essay for our country’s birthday “State of the Dominion – 2018.”  This was during the premiership of Captain Airhead, towards the end of his first term, and I noted that we were in the midst of a third “revolution within the form.”  The first had taken place in the early twentieth century in the premiership of William Lyon Mackenzie King and the second from the mid-1960s to 1982 in the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau.  Captain Airhead is finally out of office, although the Liberal Party – the party that each of these men had led – remains in power, under the new leadership of Blofeld.  So it is time to revisit the matter of the state of the Dominion.

 

The first thing to be observed is that as we emerge from the Airhead premiership Canada is in a far less worse condition than we could have anticipated going into that premiership after the 2015 Dominion Election.  This does not mean that we are emerging unscathed, far from it. 

 

On the social/moral front alone, the progressive agenda has been horribly advanced.  In 2023 a bill banning “conversion therapy” passed Parliament with unanimous support.  While the expression “conversion therapy” tends to conjure up the image of something similar to the Ludovico Technique from A Clockwork Orange, the bill banning it was worded so broadly that it essentially forbids the offering of counseling to anyone seeking help in conforming their “sexual orientation” and/or “gender identity” to the reality of their biological sex.  Meanwhile, the progressive forces that demanded this ban have insisted that the opposite sort of conversion therapy be provided at the taxpayers’ expense to minors without their parents’ consent.  The opposite sort of conversion therapy is hormone therapy and surgery intended to conform biological sex, at least in appearance, to “gender identity.”

 

Nor is this the worst example of the advancement of the progressive social/moral agenda in the Airhead years.  That dishonour goes to the aggressive promotion of the culture of death by Captain Airhead.  There was little he could do in the way of making abortion more available in Canada since the status quo going into his premiership was the absence of any legal restrictions due to the failure of Parliament to pass any after the Morgentaler ruling in 1988 struck down the previous laws on the matter.  He could and did waste tax dollars on promoting abortion outside of Canada.  It was the euthanasia side of the culture of death, however, that will be remembered as the darkest part of his legacy.  Captain Airhead became prime minister later in the year that the Supreme Court struck down the Criminal Code’s prohibition against euthanasia and in the first year of his premiership a bill that outright legalized it passed Parliament.  In the near-decade since, further legislation, policy decisions and court rulings have expanded the assisted suicide program dubbed MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) and like abortion, marketed by those in favour of it as a “health care” choice, extending it far beyond the terminally ill.  In 2021 they got Parliament to pass a bill making it much easier to obtain approval for MAID and extending it to those whom sane people would say are most in need of being protected from it, that is, the mentally ill, although this provision was delayed from coming into effect until the year after next.  In the meantime government agencies that process requests for financial aid from, most notably, military veterans, have recommended MAID as an alternative.

 

So no, Canada did not emerge from the Airhead era unscathed, and wounds on other fronts than the social/moral could be provided to further illustrate this.  My point, however, is that Captain Airhead did not do all the damage it looked like he was about to do at the beginning of his premiership.  This was not for lack of intent or trying on his part.  It is partly due to the fact that he and his entire circle of associates were grossly incompetent, an affliction not shared by previous revolutionaries such as his own father or William Lyon Mackenzie King.  It is partly due to the fact that the Canada which the Fathers of Confederation bequeathed to us with her ancient Imperial/Commonwealth heritage of parliamentary monarchy and Common Law rights and freedoms, while weakened by these Liberal “revolutions within the form” was still resilient enough to prevent Captain Airhead from doing his worst.  It is partly due to the fact that most Canadians have simply not succumbed to the brain rot that in its most recent form has been dubbed “wokeness” to the extent that Captain Airhead and the progressive commentariat all assumed they had.

 

The first of these three factors needs nothing in the way of further commentary.   

 

The second factor may be disputed by neoconservatives (people who call themselves conservatives even though they wish to replace our constitution, traditions, and heritage with those of the United States or something more closely resembling them) who over the last several years have chosen to express their frustration with the Airhead Liberals by taking it out on the country with the claim that “Canada is broken” but these are wrong.  The Fathers of Confederation built a far more resilient country than could be ultimately broken by the likes of Captain Airhead.  I attribute the neoconservative error in about equal parts to their misguided preference for the American system and to the sort of infantile thinking that sees every court ruling, election, or other such public occurrence that does not go one’s way as showing the entire system to be damaged beyond repair, which sort of thinking is by no means limited to neoconservatives.

 

Of all Captain Airhead’s bad acts, the worst was when he invoked the Emergencies Act in 2022 to crush the Freedom Convoy Protest.  Unlike the types of protests he routinely supported, the Freedom Convey did not involve the destruction or defacement of property, public or private, violence, or riotous behaviour in general but was a true peaceful demonstration.  The trucker-protestors converged on Ottawa, parked in the neighbourhood around the government buildings, and basically threw a long, loud, party in the streets.  The protest was entirely justified.  It was in response to the Liberal government’s having introduced new restrictions by removing the exemption to vaccine mandates for cross-border truckers at the time when restrictions were generally being rolled back, showing the government’s determination to milk the absurd bat flu paranoia for as long as they could at the expense of the rights, freedoms, and livelihoods of Canadians.  There was no call for bringing out the biggest weapon the government had at its disposal against the protestors, the brutality with which the government broke up the protest was the sort of thing one would expect from the Chinese or North Korean regimes, and the ongoing legal persecution of the protest organizers is disgusting, to say the least.  Nevertheless, it could have been a lot worse, and all the evidence indicates that Airhead and his cronies intended to go much further.  They were forced to rescind the Emergencies Act, however, because the Senate was about to vote against confirming their having invoked it, which would have made their position much more difficult going into the mandatory inquiry that followed.  As for the inquiry itself, while Justice Rouleau’s finding that the government had met the threshold required for invoking the Act was absurd, Captain Airhead failed in his efforts to turn the inquiry into a trial of the protesters’ actions rather than his own, and when the Federal Court ruled on the same question a year later, they found against the government.

 

That is what the system working looks like.  It could have and should have worked better.  Ultimately, however, it worked.

 

That Canadians do not share Captain Airhead’s “woke” views to the extent he always assumed is a large part of the reason why he is no longer prime minister and why the Liberal Party under Blofeld has taken several steps back from aggressive promotion of the “woke” agenda..  Whether this will be permanent or is only temporary while the forces of progressive insanity regroup remains to be seen, but for now at least, the Liberal government is focusing on matters that appeal to a wider base among Canadians than the far left fringe.  That something like this would happen sooner or later was inevitable because an ideological agenda based on maximizing every type of diversity except diversity of thought is unsustainable.  Towards the end of the Airhead premiership, the left’s efforts to maximize diversity in the realm of sex and gender were undermined by its simultaneous efforts to maximize diversity in the realm of culture and race.  That this would happen was entirely predictable because the only way to maximize diversity of culture and race in a Western society is by increasing the number of people whose culture has not been so transformed by Modern liberalism as to make it supportive of maximizing sex/gender diversity.  Eventually the foreseeable clash occurred and a sizeable portion of Canadians realized that Captain Airhead was pushing diversity too far in both of these areas.

 

For the immediately foreseeable future, it is likely that immigration levels will remain higher than they ought to be but will cease to resemble overt efforts to make Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints into a reality.  Promotion of the alphabet soup agenda will probably continue but it will be much lower key than under Captain Airhead.  That this is the case is evident in the fact that the abuse of the sign of God’s covenant with Noah was a lot less conspicuous last month than in the “month formerly known as June” in previous years.  The same will be more or less true in other areas where Captain Airhead pushed his agenda far beyond what the general public was willing to support him in.

 

In conclusion, while Canada should be in a much better condition than she actually is, she is far better off after a decade of Captain Airhead than could possibly have been anticipated. 

 

Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the King!

Captain Airhead Throws Off His Mask and Stomps it Into the Ground

 Before he became Prime Minister, Captain Airhead was asked about what government he admired the most.   His answer was to praise the "basic dictatorship" of Red China.

This past week he has demonstrated, yet again, that this was not just him saying something stupid off the cuff.   It is how he actually thinks.    It is not like we had no warning.

The week prior to that, Matt Taibbi had said that this was his Ceaușescu moment.    This was in reference to the final days of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu who, as the Iron Curtain was crumbling, Communism was in retreat, and his populace were uniting against him, clung to the delusion that he was secure in power and could do whatever he wanted.   It would appear that Captain Airhead has decided to make this his Tiananmen Square moment instead.   It is astonishing that someone as focused on his image as Captain Airhead - his image is all that there is to him, he has no substance whatsoever - would think this a good move.

In a bid to upgrade himself from Captain Airhead to Generalissimo Airhead, he began the week on St. Valentine's Day by announcing that he was invoking the Emergency Measures Act to crush a peaceful protest.   The Freedom Convoy protest was initiated by long-haul truckers a few weeks ago when, as governments around the world began easing bat flu restrictions, and provincial governments began to talk of doing the same, Captain Airhead decided to do the opposite.   His Health Minister announced that he would be talking with provincial governments about imposing universal vaccine mandates.   The government of Lower Canada then took the step of announcing that it would introduce a significant tax on the unvaccinated.   Even as this was going on, the Omicron variant was disproving the government's claims that vaccines are the only way out of the pandemic and that the unvaccinated are to blame for how long it has gone on.   Meanwhile Captain Airhead removed, not a restriction, but an exemption to a restriction - the exemption for long-haul truck drivers to the vaccine mandate for crossing the border with the USA.   There was no reasonable justification for this.   It was just Captain Airhead, like the current occupant of the White House who did the same, being a dick.   The next thing you know, truckers descended on Ottawa in the largest convoy in history, parked their trucks along Wellington Street where Parliament is located, and announced their intention to not leave until all the basic Charter rights and freedoms that had been curtailed during the pandemic had been restored.

Remember that.   The Freedom Convoy was a single issue protest.    That issue is freedom which is not, as the idiots at the CBC tried to claim, a codeword for something nefarious, racist, and extremist.   Freedom is itself a basic right, and specific freedoms are identified as "fundamental" in the second section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.   Each of these has been severely curtailed by public health order over the last two years.   Vaccine mandates - telling people that they have to agree to have a foreign substance injected into their veins or lose their jobs, livelihoods, and everything if they don't - are the biggest affront to freedom we have seen in the name of public health yet.    The freedoms the Freedom Convoy wants restored, not just for themselves but for all Canadians, are these freedoms, freedoms supposedly guaranteed by our constitution, spelled out in the Charter the adding of which to our constitution, Captain Airhead's father oversaw.    Captain Airhead thinks very little of freedom.   Just before the Freedom Convoy started a video of an interview he had given a Lower Canadian television station last September before the last Dominion election resurfaced.   In it he hurled all sorts of abuse at people who believe that they should be free to decide for themselves what they put in their bodies and actually suggested that we should be asking whether we should tolerate such people as a society.   

The Freedom Convoy has been, despite Captain Airhead's claim to the contrary, a peaceful protest.   The truckers and the massive number of other Canadians who turned up to support them did not engage in the sort of violent and destructive behaviour that is typical of the kind of protests Captain Airhead endorses, like anti-pipeline environmentalist protests, Black Lives Matters riots, or the Cultural Maoist Year Zero assault on Canadian history that took place last summer.   The most violent incident until this week was when, during a related protest in Winnipeg, somebody drove his vehicle into the crowd.    This person was an Antifa thug, attacking the protestors, not the protestors assaulting anybody else.

Note that I said "until this week".   There has been more violence this week, but once again it was violence perpetrated against the protestors rather than by them.    This time it was violence by the state.     On Friday, as Captain Airhead suspended the Parliamentary debate on his illegal power grab - and it is illegal, because even if he manages to get enough votes in Parliament to confirm it the situation does not meet the requirements of the Emergency Measures Act itself for its own invocation - he sent his stormtroopers in to crush those protesters who were speaking out for all Canadians who still believe that their freedom belongs to them and is not the Prime Minister's to give and take away at will.    Ottawa police, armed with riot gear, descended upon the protestors on horseback, trampling and beating them.    Journalists like Andrew Lawton who were there reporting on this violent crackdown on  peaceful protestors were also attacked with pepper spray by the police.   Indeed, the next morning a journalist, Alexa Lavoie was clubbed by the police and shot in the leg with a gun loaded with tear gas.   No, contrary to what the Ottawa police and legacy media are saying, the police are not acting in self defence.

The weekend prior, GiveSendGo, the crowdfunding platform that the Freedom Convoy had turned to after GoFundMe, at the behest of Captain Airhead, had cancelled their fundraiser and announced that they would be giving the money to other causes instead (backing down on this and refunding the donors only when threatened with fraud investigations by American authorities) had been hacked,   The hacked information on the donors was then published, in some cases on social media by people like Captain Airhead's disgraced former adviser Butts, in others by media organizations sympathetic to Captain Airhead, including the Ottawa Citizen, the Washington Post, and even the Crown broadcaster the CBC.   Predictably this led to donors being harassed and threatened by woke goons and in some cases fired and forced to close their businesses.    The hacking and releasing of hacked information is illegal in itself, of course, and in this case it is also a huge act of violence - incitement - against the protestors - and their supporters - which can be laid at Captain Airhead's feet.    It failed to accomplish what was presumably Captain Airhead's intention - bolstering his claim that the protest is an insurrection on the part of Nazis funded by foreign organizations and governments.   The hacked data instead revealed that while there were more American donors, most of the money had come from Canadians, most of the donations were small, and the larger donations were from people who cannot be credibly accused of being the sort of people Captain Airhead claims were funding the Convoy.

His other attempt at backing up his false claims against the protestors by trying to tie them to a cache of arms captured near Coutts failed as well.   The people with the weapons were not part of the main body of the Coutts border blockade, which was peacefully resolved without the use of Captain Airhead's extra powers, and when Captain Airhead's new Public Safety Minister attempted to make the connection between the armed group and the Freedom Convoy organizers he was unable to do so convincingly when faced with tough questions from the media.     

Meanwhile in Parliament this week, Captain Airhead and the ministers under him dodged questions about the justification for their actions by giving non-answers, telling outright lies, attacking the members of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition collectively and individually, or simply walking out of the House.   

None of this behaviour on his part should surprise anyone.   Even if his remarks about China's "basic dictatorship" were taken as a poor joke the fact that the man is a control freak, who thinks he can do whatever he wants, who has no shame whatsoever, who will shed false tears about the misdeeds, supposed and actual, of past Canadian leaders, but who never gives a real apology for anything he has done wrong himself has been evident throughout his premiership.   Whenever he praises our "democracy" by "democracy" he means "elected dictatorship".   Several years ago he bailed out the Crown broadcaster, the CBC, and the larger privately-owned legacy media companies, to the tune of billions of dollars.    When he did so he cited the importance of a free media in a democracy.   He did so with a straight face.   The effect of his bailout, of course, was that the media in Canada became anything but free.  The legacy media, Crown and private, had long had a Liberal bias, but now they began to resemble the sycophantic press of North Korea.   A free media is important to a functioning democracy because it keeps tabs on the government, reports their misdoings, and calls them out.   Captain Airhead has taken a most adversarial attitude towards the few  private media companies who continue to do this.   He has several times banned them from election debates - the courts had to overrule him.   Clearly what Captain Airhead means by a  free media is a media controlled by him and free of dissent from his views.   Such a media is indeed important to "democracy" in his sense of "elected dictatorship".   

When Canada was founded, the Fathers of Confederation made sure to bestow upon us the best form of government the world has ever known, the parliamentary monarchy system, under which personal freedom has historically flourished like under none other.   It has been almost a century since the first attempt by a Liberal Prime Minister - William Lyon Mackenzie King - to subvert the sovereignty of Crown-in-Parliament and turn the Prime Minister's Office into a de facto elected dictatorship.   This was a serious assault on our constitution which has had lasting damage, but Mackenzie King's dictatorial instincts were mild in comparison to those of the first Prime Minister Trudeau, who never met a Communist dictator he didn't like.    Captain Airhead, however, makes his father look like a humble man with an abhorrence of the abuse of government power by comparison.

By suspending Parliamentary debate on the day he ordered a violent crackdown on a peaceful protest he has made it impossible to conceal his true nature any longer, not that it was particularly well concealed before.    Those who cannot see him for what he is now, never will.    Indeed, those who cannot see him for what he is now, cannot see anything at all.

The Year of Platinum Jubilee

 

The Lord’s Day this week, the last Sunday in Epiphanytide by the old Kalendar, was the sixth of February in the civil calendar, and the seventieth anniversary of the death of King George VI and the accession of his daughter Queen Elizabeth II to the throne.  She had already surpassed Queen Victoria to become the longest reigning monarch in the entire history of the British Crown, its English and Scottish predecessors, and thus it goes without saying in the history of the Canadian Crown and the Crowns of the other Commonwealth Realms.   This marks yet another milestone as she has become the first monarch to attain a Platinum Jubilee.     Congratulations to Her Majesty!   Long may her reign over us continue to last!

 

As might be expected, the best remarks on the occasion from one of Her Majesty’s Canadian subjects were those of David Warren, the former Ottawa Citizen columnist and former editor of The Idler, who was years ago driven out of polite journalism after its complete and total takeover by the forces of what is now called “wokeness”.   He wrote:

 

Her subjects are blessed, and have for so long been blessed, with a fine and adequate ruler. She has seen them through an incomparable ring of years and changes.

 

Not every nation of the British heritage deserves such a monarch, and indeed many have broken the royal connexion in displays of tawdry narcissism. Members of her own family have also failed her, and the governments over which she has presided have been a constant source of embarrassment. Yet Her Majesty, and the late beloved Prince Philip, have borne all these modern indignities with grace and extraordinary patience.

 

Amen!   As there is little if anything that could be said to add to such remarks I shall move on to address a question that has risen in connection with the occasion.   There has been some discussion about how to mark and celebrate the anniversary   Stephen K. Roney addressed this early last month:

 

And what has Canada planned to mark this epochal event? Apparently, an ice sculpture on Sparks Street Mall for Ottawa’s Winterlude. 

 

That almost sounds like an insult. As though her reign was written on water.

 

We can do better. Moreover, if the spring and summer of 2022 marks the end of a dread pandemic, we could all use a big party.

 

The federal government may have no time for the Queen, but it she is popular in much of Canada―in large part because the monarchy is the one thing that, historically, distinguishes us from the USA.

 

Although this was not my reason for quoting Roney, the last line deserves emphasis.   The monarchy is what has historically distinguished Canada from the USA.  Lefties in recent years would have us believe that it is our welfare state and especially our “single payer” health care system.   The former, however, was established in imitation of American innovations (in the late 1930s the Canadian government brought in a social security net in imitation of FDR’s “New Deal” in the USA, in the l960’s and 1970s, they expanded it in imitation of LBJ’s “Great Society”).   The latter, a system inferior to both the pre-Obamacare American system and the public system with free private competition of the UK and the Scandinavian countries, ought to be our national embarrassment, is too recent to historically distinguish us from the USA, and could eventually be adopted by the USA.    The monarchy is also what has historically united Canadians.   It is the single element of the Canadian heritage that unites the three traditional and historical Canadas.   English Canada was born out of the United Empire Loyalists.   French Canada remained loyal because the Crown had guaranteed its language, religion, and culture on the eve of the American Revolution.   The Crown is the other signatory in each of the Indian treaties.    It is very appropriate, therefore, that new Canadians have to swear an oath of loyalty to the Queen and her heirs to become Canadian citizens.  By doing so, they are joined to the historical, traditional, Canada by her one unifying factor, a factor the place of which cannot be taken by anything else.

Mr. Roney is right that an ice sculpture is an insufficient tribute.

 

My own humble suggestion is that Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee be celebrated with a new edition of a book that was first published early in her reign and which has been out of print for years.   The book I refer to is Freedom Wears a Crown.   Its author was John C. Farthing, the son of the Right Rev. John Cragg Farthing who served as the Anglican Bishop of Montreal from 1909 to 1939 (this is not a case of senior and junior – the son’s middle initial stood for Colborne).   Farthing was an academic man, who studied first at McGill – interrupting his studies there to fight in the First World War - then at New College, Oxford, before returning to McGill as faculty to lecture in the Political Science and Economics department chaired by Stephen Leacock.    Later, after a ten-year hiatus from academe spent in philosophical reflection, he would teach younger scholars at the Bishop’s College prep school in Quebec.  

 

Farthing began writing the work for which he would be remembered at a time when the world had been radically shaken up by the two World Wars and had realigned itself into two camps of nations – the one led by the United States of America, the other by the Soviet Union – which were engaged in what James Burnham called a “Struggle for the World”.   This conflict is known as the Cold War because the nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers – a legacy of the Second World War – made a direct “hot war” between them an unthinkable option.   This was the world situation when the young Elizabeth acceded the throne, and the situation to which Farthing spoke.   The two sides of the conflict represented rival political and economic ideals.   The United States represented capitalist republicanism, the Soviet Union represented socialist totalitarian democracy.   Farthing in his book reminded Canada – and the other realms of the British family of nations – that her and their heritage was an alternative to these.   It was also, he argued, a superior alternative to these, because it was not drawn up on paper by some armchair philosopher or political scientist, but had emerged naturally and organically, from the thousands of years of human experience and wisdom that had forged and tested it.    This heritage was that of the Westminster System of Sovereign Crown-in-Parliament.

 

Farthing did more than just argue that the Westminster System was better at guaranteeing personal freedom – he distinguished between this and “individual liberty” - than American capitalist republicanism and better at securing the common good than the Soviet system.   He also discussed in detail how this heritage had been threatened in the famous constitutional crisis known as the King-Byng Affair of almost a century ago.   It was not, however, as students who are taught what Donald Creighton dubbed the “Authorized Version” – the Liberal theory of Canadian history – learn, the Governor General, Lord Byng whose actions posed the threat, but those of Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King.   King had asked the Governor General to dissolve Parliament at a time when it had taken a recess before voting on whether to censure his less than a year old government because of a corruption scandal.    By refusing, the Governor General exercised in his vice-regal capacity the reserve powers of the Crown to prevent the Prime Minister from evading his accountability to Parliament.    The Governor General reminded King that he had remained in office after the last Dominion election under unusual circumstances – he had not won the plurality of seats, that had gone to Arthur Meighan’s Conservatives, but with the additional support of the Progressives, had been allowed to continue in government on the stipulation that Parliament would not be dissolved until after Meighan had been given a chance to form an alternative government.   King resigned, Meighan was given the chance, his government was immediately brought down in a confidence vote, automatically dissolving Parliament, and in the ensuing Dominion election King lied to the Canadian public, presenting himself as the champion of Canadian sovereignty over her domestic affairs, and the Governor General as having acted inappropriately and at the behest of the Imperial government in London.   In fact, as King’s letter of resignation to Byng demonstrates, King had asked Byng to consult with London before making his decision and had been told that there was no need because his constitutional duty was clear – a Prime Minister was not to be granted a dissolution under such circumstances.   The Canadian public accepted King’s story, however, and returned him a majority government.   By his success in deceiving the public, Farthing argued, King and his Liberals had undermined in practice the Crown’s reserve powers, and in doing so had undermined the accountability of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet to both Crown and Parliament, a dangerous step towards the subversion of the Westminster System and the turning of Prime Minister in Cabinet into a form of elected dictatorship.   Farthing’s understanding of this historical event – that Lord Byng was in the right and Mackenzie King in the wrong - is clearly borne out against the “Authorized Version” by the historical paperwork, as noted above.   It had previously been championed by Eugene Forsey, who had studied at McGill with Farthing under Leacock, and joined the latter’s department as faculty the year that Farthing departed, in his doctoral dissertation which was published in 1943 under the title The Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament in the British Commonwealth, another book that might be considered for re-issue in honour of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.   Farthing’s interpretation of the larger significance over the event has been borne out by subsequent history in which Prime Ministers – especially Liberal Prime Ministers, and especially Liberal Prime Ministers from the far left of the Liberal Party, whether it be the Marxist far left of the ‘60s and ‘70s, or the “woke” far left of today – have tended to treat their office as that of an elected dictator. 

 

When Farthing died in 1954, two years into the reign of Her Majesty, his manuscript required editing.   His friend Judith Robinson, a well-known Toronto investigative journalist and author during the middle decades of the Twentieth Century, polished off the manuscript which was published in 1957 by Toronto’s Kingswood House.

 

Farthing’s book has been out of print for quite some time and younger generations of Canadians are largely unfamiliar with the case for why the institution of monarchy is the most important symbol of our freedom.   Freedom stands and falls with traditional institutions, especially monarchy.   The freest countries in history, with one or two exceptions, have been monarchies.   Totalitarian police states have been republics.   Farthing’s book was a great contribution to the explanation of why this is the case. What better time to bring out a new edition of his book than now, when we are celebrating a record-setting milestone in Her Majesty’s reign at the end of two years of suffering under a particularly arrogant elected dictatorship of the type he warned us about, one that has treated our constitutionally protected freedoms as if they were the Prime Minister’s to take away from us as he sees fit?   Had our elected leaders – Prime Minister and provincial premiers – and their health officers, followed the example of Her Majesty in her address to the Commonwealth of almost two years ago and adopted the tone she set – one of encouragement, endurance, and sympathy – instead of the tone of scolding, nagging, bossing, bullying, condescending and scapegoating they have employed for the last two years – they would not be facing the protest demonstrations from fed-up truckers and other Canadians all across the Dominion that we have been seeing for the past two weeks.  

 

Happy anniversary Your Majesty!

God Save the Queen!

Reflections on a Waste of Time

Dominion Election 2021 has come and gone with the result being the restoration of the status quo ante.   This proves that the Conservatives, Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition in both the previous and the new Parliament, were absolutely correct in saying that this election was a colossal waste of time and money and an unpardonable one at that, having been called so soon after the last one and at a time when the public is still in the grip of an irrational paranoid panic because of a public health scare, going on two year's old, stirred up by the fear pornographers of the mass media noise machine, aided and abetted by the politicians and public health mandarins.   Note that in the place of that last part - everything from "grip" on - the Conservatives would have just said pandemic.   My wording is a more accurate description.

Since this means that  the incumbent Prime Minister, Captain Airhead, who occasionally uses the alias Justin Trudeau, gets to keep the job unless the Liberal Party decides to punish him for risking everything in a foolish and failed, egotistical bid for a majority, it is also evidence of the gross stupidity of a large part of the Canadian electorate.   This demonstrates further a point that I have made many times in the past - the universal franchise ideal of classical liberalism just does not live up to its hype and there is much that can be said on behalf of the pre-liberal wisdom that votes should be weighed and not just counted.

Or rather, to soften the judgement of the previous paragraph somewhat, this is what the results of this election would be saying if the election actually had been what almost everyone - the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, the idiotic clown who leads the socialist party, the media commentariat of all political stripes, and most of the public - thought of it as being, that is to say, the election of the next Prime Minister.   That so many Canadians think of our Dominion elections primarily in terms of who the next Prime Minister will be is one of the many unfortunate consequences of the permeation of our culture with imported American Hollywood pop culture.   Every four years Americans vote on who their next President will be.   In our Dominion elections we do not vote for who the next Prime Minister will be.   We vote for who will represent our local constituency in the lower House of the next Parliament.    A Dominion election is the election of the next Parliament, not the next Prime Minister,   The person invited by the Crown to fill the office of Prime Minister - the person who leads the Cabinet of Ministers who carry out the day-to-day executive administration of the government - is the person who commands the most support in the House.   This is either the leader of a party that has won a majority of seats in the House or, in the absence of a majority, the party leader who can convince one or more parties other than his own to back him, usually, but not necessarily, the leader of the party which won the plurality.

I have from time to time heard some people gripe about this and suggest that we should have a separate ballot in which we vote directly for the Prime Minister.   I very much beg to differ with such people.   This would be objectionable, in my opinion, not just because it would make our system more like that of the United States, although that is good grounds in itself for opposing the proposal.   It would also be a step further towards undermining the way our constitutional system is designed to de-emphasize the office and role of Prime Minister.    The Canadians of the present day are sorely in need of a true appreciation of this aspect of our constitution and a better understanding of how a great many of our country's problems stem from a century's worth of effort on the part of the Liberal Party under leaders from William Lyon Mackenzie King to Captain Airhead to subvert our constitution in this very aspect and turn our country into an elected Prime Ministerial dictatorship.

Before proceeding further with that thought, allow me to address those who might object to my characterization of this as a Liberal project by pointing out that the last Conservative Prime Minister also treated the office in this way.   Stephen Harper grew up a Liberal.   He left that party in his twenty's but never really became a traditional Canadian Tory. He was first elected to Parliament as a member of the Western protest party, the Reform Party of Canada.   The Reform Party, of which this writer was also a member in the 1990s, was first and foremost a populist party.  While it affected a small-c conservatism, support for Canada's historical traditions and constitution was never a large part of what it understood by this word, which is a significant part of the reason this writer walked away from it shortly before the completion of the second stage of its merger with the Progressive Conservatives.   Indeed, what it thought of as conservatism was largely indistinguishable from the original platform and policies of the Liberal Party, and, demonstrating, perhaps, its indifference to Canadian history and tradition, it gave itself the name by which the Liberal Party had gone prior to Confederation.   Harper, who was chosen as leader after the completion of the merger, always seemed to be more of a Mackenzie King Liberal than a Macdonald-Meighen-Diefenbaker Conservative.

Our constitution is sometimes called the Westminster Parliamentary system after the Mother Parliament in the United Kingdom from which we inherited the system and on which ours is modelled.   The centuries of history, the most memorable highlight of which was the Magna Carta, by which the constitution of Alfred the Great, which the Norman kings swore to uphold following William's Conquest, evolved into the original Westminster Parliament in a form we would recognize today, produced a concrete actualization of what the ancient Greeks thought of as the ideal constitution.   The mixed constitution, about which Aristotle and Polybius wrote, the former telling how it had been a much discussed ideal even before his day, was regarded by the ancients as the most stable and just constitution.   The three basic constitution-types - the rule of the one, the few, and the many - each had their strengths and weaknesses, and tended to follow a cyclical pattern in which the best form of each would be corrupted over time into its worst form - aristocracy would be corrupted into oligarchy, for example, to use the terms applied to the good and bad forms of the rule of the few - prompting its replacement, usually through violent and destructive means, with one of the other types.   A mixed constitution, the ancients reasoned, in which each of these simple constitutions was incorporated as an element, would balance the weaknesses of each element with the strengths of the others and so be a more stable and less corruptible whole.    

Our constitution is also sometimes called Crown-in-Parliament or King/Queen-in-Parliament depending upon the sex of the reigning monarch.   This expression can be used for our constitution as a whole, although it is more strictly the term for the legislative branch of government.  In our constitution the powers are both united and separated, the union or fusion being ,appropriately, in the institution of the Crown as this is the institution that embodies the ancient "rule of one".   The monarch, the office in which Sovereignty is vested, is the representative of the unified whole, both of the state and the country, and, accordingly, the office is filled by hereditary succession rather than by partisan politics so the officeholder can be above the inherently divisive latter.   The House of Commons is the element that embodies the ancient rule of the many in our constitution.   It is the Lower House of Parliament but, especially in discussions of this nature, is often called by the name of the whole, just as the union of that whole with the Crown in Crown-in-Parliament can mean either the legislative branch of our constitution, as opposed to the executive Crown-in-Counsel and the Judicial Crown-on-the-Bench, or the entire Westminster constitution.   By calling the whole by this name, the emphasis is placed on the two ancient and time-proven institutions, the monarchy and Parliament.

Placing the emphasis on these institutions means that it is not placed on the office of Prime Minister.   This is important because the office of Prime Minister, at the head of the Cabinet of executive Ministers, is one of great power.   The power attached to the office creates the necessity that the officeholder be held accountable for his exercise of that power and that the role of the office be one of humility.    To meet the first need, the Prime Minister is supposed to be strictly accountable to Parliament.   This is why there is an official role for the largest non-governing party as Opposition.   The Opposition's job is to question and challenge the Prime Minister, to hold his feet to the fire and make him give account to the House of Commons for his actions.   One of the roles of the other House of Parliament, the Senate, which is the element corresponding to the ancient rule of the few in our constitution, is to hold the Prime Minister accountable in a different manner, by deliberating on the legislation that passes the House, giving it "sober, second thought", and sending it back to the House if problems are found with it.    If the Prime Minister's relationship with Parliament is supposed to keep him accountable, his relationship with the Crown is supposed to keep him humble.    It is the Queen who as hereditary monarch, above factional politics, represents Canada as a unified whole, and the Governor General who represents the Queen.   While the Prime Minister exercises the executive powers of government, he does so in the name of the Sovereign, and he is supposed to do so in an attitude of humility as the "first servant" suggested by his official title.   This role calls for a kind of modesty that is conspicuously lacking in the present holder of this office, who more than any of his predecessors has rejected the accountability and humility of his office.   A short time before the last Parliament was dissolved he actually took the Speaker of the House to court to challenge a House ruling that he would have to provide Parliament with un-redacted documents about the firing of two researchers from the virology lab in Winnipeg.   This blatant repudiation of full accountability to Parliament ought to have disqualified him and his party from even running in the election.   As for humility, he has treated his office as one of  such shameless self-aggrandizement and self-promotion as to make the Kims of North Korea seem meek and unassuming by comparison.    Upon winning a second minority government, after arrogantly assuming that he would be handed a majority, he claimed absurdly that the electorate had given him a "clear mandate" which utter nonsense indicates that he has become victim to the delusions of his own propaganda.

He would never have been able to get away with any of this if Canadians had a true appreciation for our constitution and its principles.    Making the office of Prime Minister one that is directly elected, and our elections, therefore, even more like American presidential elections, would only make this worse.

There is another change to our system that has been proposed, indeed, far more often than the one discussed above.    Many would like to see us abandon what is absurdly called first-past-the-post for proportional representation as the means of filling the House with elected Members.   This is a change that the current Prime Minister had promised to make when he was first elected with a majority government in 2015.   He did not do so.   Had he done so, he would not be Prime Minister today, because the Conservatives won the popular vote this year as well as in 2019.   Proportional representation would have meant a Conservative government as the result of both elections.    Another difference that proportional representation would have brought about is that Maxime Bernier's populist-libertarian-nationalist party, the People's Party of Canada would have had members elected, at least in this Dominion election.   They received over five percent of the popular vote, double that of the self-destructing Greens who were able to elect two Members, including their leader emeritus although not their new leader.   This sounds like I am making an argument for proportional representation.   A Conservative government, led by Andrew Scheer in 2019, or even by Erin O'Toole this year, despite the latter's gross sell-out to the left, would have been preferable to the Trudeau Liberals.   The presence of the People's Party is desperately needed in Parliament where all currently sitting parties are skewed to the far left and to the idea that every problem requires government action as a solution.   Having said that, while the outcome of proportional representation would have been better in these regards in 2019 and again in 2021, the present system is still the better one.   The current system is based on the idea that the people of a local constituency, being a community or group of communities with particular interests, vote for the person who will represent that constituency in Parliament.   The person elected as Member is supposed to be responsible primarily to the constituency, and to speak on their behalf including all those who voted against him as well as those who voted for him..   In other words, the individual Member is supposed to act towards his constituents in the opposite way to how Liberal governments have acted towards rural areas and especially the prairie provinces, since at least the first Trudeau premiership, that is to say, in a manner that looks a lot like punishing them for voting against their party.   This is a good ideal and standard to guide elected Members.   By contrast, proportional representation would give us a House filled by people who represent only their party, its ideology, and the percentage of the electorate who voted for them.   That is hardly a desirable improvement.   The so-called first-past-the-post is by far the saner and more civilized way of doing things, even if it gives us results that for other reasons we would not prefer.

As stated in the previous paragraph, the ideas of Bernier's People's Party, ludicrously called "far right" by the CBC and its echo chambers in the private media, are desperately needed in Parliament right now.   In his column just before the election, Ken Waddell, who publishes my hometown newspaper the Rivers Banner as well as his own hometown newspaper the Neepawa Banner, and who was at one time considered for the leadership of our provincial Progressive Conservatives, said the following in this regards:

I have often encouraged people in the NDP or Green party to get involved with the Liberals or the Conservatives and bring their ideas forward. The Greens and NDP are not likely ever going to form government. Even less so will the Maverick Party, the Peoples’ Party of Canada or the Christian Heritage Party. They have a narrow list of policies. It would be better if they got involved, truly involved, with one of the two main parties and worked to bring their ideas to the forefront. A lot of good talent in the splinter parties is wasted on tilting at windmills instead of actually bringing about good policies. It’s too bad, really, as there are some good people and good ideas outside of the Liberal and Conservative parties, but the ideas will never see the light of day hidden in the splinter groups. God bless those who toil for the smaller parties, but I think their time and talents are being wasted.

I remember when Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel used to make this argument about third parties other than the Republicans and Democrats in the United States.   The argument was much stronger in that context because the American system is designed to be a two-party system, stacked against anyone other than the Republicans or Democrats..   Our system is not designed that way as seen in the number of times there have been minority governments that can only govern when propped up by one or more parties other than either itself or its main rival which is in Opposition.    There is, however, another problem with Mr. Waddell's suggestion here.   While the Greens and NDP might be able to get away with putting their ideas forward  as Liberals since the latter have largely incorporated the agendas of the former, nobody would be able to do as he suggests with the ideas of the Maverick, People's, or Christian Heritage Parties in either the Liberals or the Conservatives.    Both of these parties strictly police their members to keep just these very ideas out.   The Conservative Party, under the present leadership, is in some ways worse than the Liberals in this regards.   Whether we are talking about social conservatism of  the type associated with the Christian Heritage Party or libertarian opposition to public health tyranny such as the People's Party has been promoting, Erin O'Toole has expelled Members over these ideas and severely whipped those allowed to remain in caucus so as to make them afraid to speak their minds.  The present Liberal and Conservative leaders both govern their own parties the way the Liberals have for a century now wanted the country run, as an elected dictatorship.    For this reason, the option proposed by Mr. Waddell is simply not available.

Captain Airhead’s Astounding Arrogance

 

On Sunday the fifteenth of August, it had not yet been a month since Mary Simon had been sworn into the office of Governor General of Canada, when a pestilential nuisance showed up on her doorstep at Rideau Hall to make a request.   One of the more tiresome duties of Her Majesty’s vice-regal representative is that of playing host to visits from the Prime Minister.   This duty must truly become an irksome burden when the Prime Minister is someone as odious as the current one, Captain Airhead.   Of course, since Captain Airhead is the worst excuse for a human being by far to serve as Prime Minister in the history of Canada, only Simon and her immediate predecessors have had to bear this burden.

 

What her Prime Ministerial supplicant asked for, and obtained, was a dissolution of the Parliament formed in the 2019 Dominion election.   Which means that on the twentieth of September, the next Dominion election will be held.   It is an election that nobody but Captain Airhead himself wants.   All of the other parties have opposed the move.   Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives who were Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in the last Parliament and, as the only other party to have ever formed a government or with much of a chance of forming one if the Grits are defeated this time around, would logically be the ones to want an election have condemned the move as an irresponsible, egotistical, waste of money, which it is.  Jimmy Dhaliwal’s socialists and the Lower Canadian separatists who have been taking turns propping up the Grit minority government against the Conservative Opposition have no desire to see their hold on the balance of power potentially eviscerated.   As for the Greens, they are too busy imploding as a party due to self-destructive infighting to want to run a campaign right now.   The Canadian public, polled on the subject, has indicated strong opposition to an election being held at this time.

 

That the public would not want an election right now is hardly surprising.   Canadians have historically not been pleased with early elections that follow too closely after the previous one, and since, whatever you and I might think about the bat flu pandemic having been blown out of proportion by the fear pornographers in the mainstream media, the majority of our countrymen seem to take this stercus tauri at face value, and thus would be even less likely to want a very early election this year than on previous occasions.    This makes Captain Airhead’s move a bit of a puzzler.   Ordinarily, Prime Ministers in his position, that is to say, leading a minority government with only a plurality of seats in the House of Commons, try not to risk being punished by an angry electorate by requesting a new election themselves.   Instead, they try to provoke the other parties into voting them down in a no-confidence vote, so that the party that asks for the vote is blamed and punished by the electorate for the dissolution of the previous Parliament.   Captain Airhead clearly thinks that he can take responsibility for the dissolution upon himself and still be awarded a majority by a public that obviously does not want an election.

 

Perhaps Captain Airhead, or Justin Trudeau as some occasionally call him, thinks that he can count on the sycophantic behaviour of the news media which he has enjoyed to an extent that exceeds that of any previous Prime Minister, including his own father at the height of Trudeaumania, to render him exempt from the normal rules.    It is, nevertheless, an extremely hubristic attitude on his part, especially when we consider all the other assumptions implicit within it.

 

In the Dominion election of 2015 the Grits won a solid majority.     This was due to a combination of people being tired with the previous government and the media’s love affair with the Liberal leader whose surface qualities, hiding a total lack of substance, they found appealing.    When a new government receives a majority in its first election, of course, this is not a reward that is has earned and it is expected to earn it after the fact.   When that government is reduced to a plurality in its next election, as Captain Airhead’s Grits were in 2019, this is the judgement of the public that they have failed to subsequently earn their majority.   In this particular example, it was also a rebuke of the Prime Minister’s scandalous behaviour.

 

Towards the end of Captain Airhead’s first term his government’s popularity tanked due to the SNC-Lavalin Affair, a scandal that concerned inappropriate pressure having been placed on the Justice Minister to interfere in the ongoing prosecution of a major corporate backer of the Liberal Party for political reasons.    This was a corruption scandal that pertained to the government’s behaviour in office.   Then, in the actual election campaign, Captain Airhead was hit with a personal scandal as a couple of photographs and a video surfaced, all showing him in blackface.   This is the sort of scandal that would have ended the career of pretty much any other politician in this day and age.   While personally, I think that those who consider skin colour-altering makeup to be inherently “racist” are twits and dingbats who ought to be ignored by sensible people rather than given the influence to police the thoughts and actions of others, Captain Airhead has, since the beginning of his political career, marketed himself as “woke”, that is to say, the sort of numbskull who takes every dictate from the far left’s self-appointed guardians of public mental hygiene vis-à-vis racism very seriously indeed and caters to their every irrational whim.   In other words, exactly the sort of person who ought not to be caught dead in blackface and whose career ought to be especially vulnerable to this sort of scandal.   He had spent an inordinate amount of time in his first term lecturing other Canadians about how we all need to be more “enlightened” and less “racist” like the image he was trying to present of himself.

 

Having survived these scandals has Captain Airhead learned from them and altered his behaviour according?

The evidence would suggest that he has not.

 

Less than a year into his second term, in the early months of the bat flu pandemic, Captain Airhead announced the formation of the Canadian Student Service Grant program that would give students $1000 for every 100 hours of volunteer work they did that summer up to a $5000 maximum.   The WE Charity was picked to administer this program.   This immediately erupted into a corruption scandal that rivalled SNC-Lavalin for the biggest of Captain Airhead’s career.   The WE Charity had been selected without giving other charities the opportunity to bid on the contract.  This charity had a long association with Captain Airhead’s family – his wife had volunteered for the organization which had paid for her travel and other expenses and his mother and brother had both been paid large sums to speak at its events.   Similarly, his then-Finance Minister Bill Morneau had one daughter who worked for the charity, another who spoke at their events, and had himself allowed the charity to pay $41 000 worth of travel expenses for him and his family.   The scandal led to Morneau’s resignation both as Finance Minister and from his seat in the House of Commons.      Captain Airhead, however, remained in office, taking advantage of every opportunity the pandemic afforded him to thwart a proper investigation by Parliament.   A few months ago, the Ethics Commissioner that he had himself had appointed, declared that “Although the connection between Mr. Trudeau’s relatives and WE created the appearance of a conflict of interest, the appearance of conflict is insufficient to cause a contravention to the Act’s substantive views” and pinned all the blame on Morneau.

 

It would seem that the only lesson Captain Airhead took away from the SNC-Lavalin experience is to avoid being held accountable by Parliament.

 

As for the blackface scandal, the very least we have the right to expect from someone who had gone through this sort of humiliation without, astonishingly, it killing his political career would be that he would give lecturing the rest of us about racism a rest.    Anyone foolish enough to actually expect this of Captain Airhead, however, would be very disappointed.   If anything, he has actually gotten much worse in this regards.    Just before the Parliament that has just been dissolved recessed for the summer his Justice Minister introduced Bill C-36, which would amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code so that left-wing control freaks would no longer have to meet the criminal justice system’s standard of evidence in order to file complaints against people for posting things they, that is the leftists, consider to be racist on the internet and obtain rulings silencing these people and/or imposing crippling fines upon them.   Indeed, unlike the defunct Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act which his father had introduced in 1977 and which was bad enough, Bill C-36, like something out of Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report”, would allow these leftist censors to peremptorily punish people with peace bonds that effectively strip them of all human dignity for the racist things the leftists are afraid these people might say in the future.     This takes his anti-racist lecturing to the nth degree.   It follows immediately after two summers straight in which far left radical movements that attempt to conceal their true agenda of hatred of the institutions, laws, traditions, and way of life of Western Civilization and racial hatred of people of European descent and light skin colour beneath the innocuous if banal truisms by which they call their movements have made use of deceptively selective media reporting  to stir up race riots and Year Zero Cultural Maoist assaults on historical figures, all of which Captain Airhead has capitalized on by jumping aboard the bandwagon and maximizing his anti-racist posturing.  

 

This is rather much to take coming from the man featured in the blackface scandal of 2019.   It is enough to induce vomiting in even the strongest stomached of sane people, although the same can be said about virtually everything about Captain Airhead from the beginning of his political career. 

 

Captain Airhead apparently thinks that after two years of demonstrating with his behaviour that he has learned absolutely nothing from the scandals that reduced his first majority government to a minority, that he can request an early election and win another majority.   The arrogance of this is truly astounding.

 

It is possible that he thinks that his pandemic record will accomplish his victory.   If so, this merely makes his hubris all the greater.   His handling of the bat flu has been nothing short of abominable.    

 

In the early months of 2020, before the World Health Organization officially declared a pandemic and while there was still a possibility, however slight, of keeping the bat flu virus contained in Wuhan, Captain Airhead and his subordinates branded anybody who suggested that it might be prudent to impose a temporary ban on travel to and from Red China as a racist.   Then in March, the moment the pandemic had been declared he switched gears and began encouraging the provincial governments to impose harsh lockdowns on Canadians based upon the experimental model that Communist China had been using to contain the virus.

 

From the perspective of political strategy there was an almost admirable ingenuity in this.   He could have evoked the Emergencies Act to impose a Dominion-wide lockdown himself.   Instead, he let the provincial governments, mostly led by those whose politics is purportedly the opposite of his, impose the lockdowns and thus incur the resentment of those whose lives were made a living hell by these restrictions which far exceeded anything any free country had ever known before, even in times of war.   Oh, he had a lot of say in it.   The provincial premiers basically gave their provincial chief public health officers free rein, and these in turn acted upon information provided from the Dominion chief public health officer who was appointed to the position by Captain Airhead who threatened to withhold support from the provinces if they veered too much from the lockdown program.   However, apart from the amusing incident when he attempted to play “Mr. Tough Guy” to all the young people who were still having parties and other large social gatherings but merely came across as doing a bad impression of Barbra Streisand and Donna Summer, he allowed the premiers to play the bully – our premier in Manitoba, Brian Pallister excelled in this  - while he put on his Santa Claus suit and started handing out goodies, essentially bribing people to follow the public health orders and stay home.    If he thinks that by doing so he has bought his way back to a majority government then he is assuming that Canadians are too stupid to realize the connection between his spending all of this money at a time when the production of goods and services has been severely limited and the recent spike in the price of food in the grocery stores.  (1)  Sadly, he might be right about that, although there is no reason to believe that he understands the connection himself.

 

At the very beginning of the first lockdown of the pandemic he asked for Parliament to vote him the power to tax and spend without limits or Parliamentary oversight for two years.   Mercifully, this was met with strong opposition from the Conservatives then led by Andrew Scheer and he was denied getting all that he had asked for, although he has since behaved as if he had been given it all.    This request was an outrageous assault on Parliament and the very principles that have been foundational to that venerable institution since the Magna Carta.   There is an interesting if ominous symbolism in the way he introduced the bill within days of the anniversary of the Enabling Act that had been passed by the Reichstag, the legislative assembly of Weimar Germany, which gave emergency powers to the new German chancellor and his cabinet in 1933 and brought about the most hated tyrannical dictatorship in history.

 

This was not the first time nor would it be the last when Captain Airhead demonstrated his utter contempt for Parliament.   Indeed, his entire second term as Prime Minister could be described as one big digitus impudicus in the face of Parliament.   Throughout the pandemic he treated his doorstep with the television cameras on it as if it rather than Parliament were the seat of government in Canada.   He has treated Parliament as if it had no right or authority to hold him and his cabinet accountable.    When the far left radicals began their assault on Canada and her history he made a point of sympathizing with them and reminding them of the colonial origins of Parliament as if to say that government would be so much better if he could just do whatever he wanted without having to answer to that “colonial” institution of Parliament.   When he got frustrated earlier this year with Erin O’Toole for the latter’s doing his job as Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and preventing the House from just rubber-stamping his bills as he would have preferred he threw a tantrum, complained of “obstructionism and toxicity” and called Parliament “dysfunctional”.    If there was any dysfunction in Parliament it was due to his own efforts to prevent that body from giving proper deliberation to his legislation proposals and to ram the latter through and not the Opposition’s doing its job.   Around the same time, when the House of Commons ordered the government and the Public Health Agency of Canada to hand over all documents pertaining to the dismissal of two scientists from the high security microbiology lab here in Winnipeg a couple of years previously, he had the amazing gall to launch a Federal Court case against House Speaker Anthony Rota.   On Tuesday of this week the government dropped this lawsuit, but this was because the dissolution of Parliament nullified the order with regards to the documents, and not because the Prime Minister has discovered a newfound respect for Parliament and its rights.

 

In this disrespect for Parliament Captain Airhead demonstrates yet another kind of arrogance, one which has been common to Liberal leaders since at least William Lyon Mackenzie King, but which he has elevated to a whole new level.   In Canada our system of government is that of Queen-in-Parliament.    In this system, which has been tried and proven over long eons of time, political sovereignty is vested in the office of the reigning monarch.    This office is filled, not by popular election nor by appointment by the rich and powerful, but by hereditary succession.   Therefore, since the monarch owes her office neither to a political faction nor to special interest groups, she can reign as a non-political figure in the way no elected head of state ever could.   The powers of government, principally those to legislate, tax, and spend, are exercised in the name of the Queen and those who exercise them are accountable to the representatives elected by the people who pay the taxes and are expected to obey the laws, which representatives meet in the lower House of Parliament.   Therefore in this system, when it is functioning properly, the Prime Minister and Cabinet are dually accountable both to the reigning monarch above, and to Parliament below.    The world has never known a better system of government than this one when it is allowed to function without subversion.   Liberal leaders from Mackenzie King down and especially Captain Airhead have shown a decided preference for subverting this system.   They seldom object to retaining its outward form, unlike the idiot who currently leads the socialist party, but they do not want to govern under its restraints and so seek to subvert them whenever they can.   Their preference is that in practice the Prime Minister and Cabinet rule through the bureaucracy that they control and are only ever held accountable at election time, at least when their party is in government.

 

If most Canadians had a proper appreciation for our traditional system of government most of the Liberal Prime Ministers of the last hundred years would have been unelectable.   This would be all the more true of Captain Airhead, who exceeds all of the rest of them combined in his autocratic arrogance, making even his own father look humble in comparison.

 

(1)   Wealth is generated by people producing goods and services that they and others want and consists of those goods and services.  Money is the medium that allows these goods and services to be exchanged more conveniently than by direct barter and which allows accumulated wealth to be stored for later use.   The value of money goes up when the amount of money remains the same but the production of goods and services increases, and goes down when more money is put into circulation while the production of goods and services remains the same.    When the amount of money increases relative to that of goods and services this is called inflation which is most noticeable when it manifests itself in the rise of the price of consumer goods.   Whenever the government starts handing out large amounts of money, whether it just runs more currency off on the printing press or borrows from some financial institution – in the age of electronic currency the distinction between these ways of doing it has been blurred to the point where it may no longer be meaningful – the amount of money relative to goods and services increases.   When, at the same time, the government puts a stop to the production of “non-essential” goods and services, that is to say, the goods and services that in terms of real wealth actually pay for the production of “essential” goods and services, this is a recipe for massive and devastating inflation.

 

Captain Airhead's Scandalous Spending

Captain Airhead, who is often called by the less flattering epithet Justin Trudeau, has got himself into yet another ethics scandal. Over the past few years the Dominion government had offered grants to companies employing student workers. Captain Airhead had come under much justified criticism for requiring that these employers sign an affirmation of commitment to the latest revised edition of the values of the Liberal Party of Canada, which values are, of course, nothing but progressive and left-wing codswallop and drivel. This year, because of the Chinese bat flu, the government decided to do something extra. Back in April, on his daily morning cartoon show, Captain Airhead announced the creation of a Canada Student Service Grant which would provide students who were spending the summer volunteering for pandemic relief programs with financial assistance. Towards the end of June it was announced that the government was contracting the administration of this grant out to the WE Charity. This is where the scandal comes in. Captain Airhead’s mother and brother have been paid quite handsomely for speaking at this charity’s events in the past. It later came out that there were also connections between the organization and the daughters of Bill Morneau, the Minister of Finance. Neither Captain Airhead nor Morneau had bothered to recuse themselves from the Cabinet when the decision to award the contract to WE was made.

My thought, upon watching this scandal unfold last week, was that the timing could not possibly have been more fortunate – for the Prime Minister. The scandal itself revealed nothing about his character, or lack thereof, that we did not already know and possess evidence in spades. It is extremely unlikely that it will finally end his political career. If the SNC-Lavalin affair and the blackface scandal could not do so last year, the chances of this one doing so are slim to nil. Those who hope otherwise are presumably thinking of this being the “straw that broke the camel’s back” but politicians with a Teflon coating have often proven to be exceptions to that proverb.

The scandal, while unlikely to do much lasting harm to Captain Airhead, broke at just the right time to be a major distraction from the government’s revelation, last week, of just how large a deficit they have racked up since March in the name of protecting Canadians from the fiscal and economic consequences of the ill-advised universal quarantine imposed to combat the coronavirus. This deficit exceeds $343 billion, almost $100 billion more than what was estimated by the Parliamentary Budget Officer in April, on the basis of which it was predicted then that we would see the largest deficit on record. It tips our national debt – the total owed by the Dominion government alone, not including the provincial and municipal debts – over the trillion dollar mark.

Last Wednesday morning, on the day on which Morneau was scheduled to give this fiscal update or “snapshot” as he called it to Parliament, Captain Airhead patted himself and the government on the back over this by saying “We took on debt so Canadians wouldn’t have to.” There are really only two ways in which this remark can be understood. It is possible that Captain Airhead is himself too stupid to realize that the Canadian government cannot prevent Canadians from going into debt by taking on debt itself because all debt owed by the Canadian government must ultimately be paid by the Canadians who pay for that government with their taxes. Given that this is the man who infamously said that “the budget will balance itself” this is very much a possibility. The other option is that he thinks Canadians are so stupid that we won’t realize this and will adore and applaud him for “saving” us from all this debt.

The point is so obvious that even the Communist Party of Canada proved capable of grasping it and deviated from their long-standing record of being wrong about everything all of the time. In the Marxist-Leninist Weekly for July 11th, they said the following:

Clearly the Prime Minister thinks Canadians have no intelligence; that they cannot see through his unfortunate obsession with the word "we."

The debt the government "we" has taken on is to the richest and most powerful institutions within the U.S.-led imperialist system of states. The people "we" will owe this money to private moneylenders and be forced to pay it back with interest. The interest rate the people "we" will be paying is also going up as one of the three major U.S. credit rating agencies, Fitch, recently downgraded Canada's credit rating from AAA to AA+, making borrowing more expensive.

The "we" who will be responsible for this new debt of $343.2 billion, driving the federal debt from $765 billion to $1.2 trillion in one year, is essentially Canadian working people.

Despite being framed in the obnoxious and long ago debunked Marxist paradigm of “class warfare” with all the accompanying rhetoric, the above quotation summarizes the situation quite accurately. That Fitch’s downgrading of Canada’s credit rating, based largely on the fact that the total national debt – again, for the federal government alone – now exceeds the annual Gross Domestic Product by about fifteen percent, which is larger than the percentage by which it was lower than the GDP even last year, will make the cost of this debt even greater is a point worth reiterating. The government has, so far, been brushing off this credit downgrade, even though it is the first such downgrade our country has received in decades and is also the first that a G7 country has received due to pandemic spending. If Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s follow Fitch, as many are predicting will happen, it will be much harder for the Liberals to dismiss.

The Grits maintain, of course, that all of this spending was necessary and in one sense they are right. It was the government – the provincial governments acting upon recommendations coming from the Dominion government – which put all those people out of work and closed all those businesses, bringing them to the verge of insolvency. It was the government that caused all that economic damage, not the pandemic. If the government is going to prevent people from operating their businesses and going to their jobs then it must undertake to support them, but this is entirely for the same reason that someone who throw a baseball through a shop window is required to compensate the store owner for the glass. The government would prefer it if we thought of the coronavirus as the villain that caused the economic damage and themselves as the heroes who came to our rescue but that is not the right way of looking at it at all. There was absolutely no need for a universal quarantine. This is true, not only because the virus produces only mild to no symptoms for the vast majority of people who contract it, and the complicating factors which place people at a higher risk have been known since the beginning of the pandemic making a strategy of specially protecting people with those factors – which was not done – the most rational course, and because inexpensive treatment that when applied early enough greatly reduces the threat of the virus has been available all along and, despite a mass media campaign against it for entirely political reasons, been clinically demonstrated to be effective, but also because this experiment in quarantining all of the healthy along with the sick expanded government powers and eliminated civil rights and liberties in ways that entered into Big Brother territory and created the moral requirement that the state pay for all the people it put out of work and the businesses it shut down at a time when this could only be done through massive deficit placing a huge debt burden on future generations.

While this has been a problem with governments around the globe in this period, due to the origin of the lockdown recommendations in the World Health Organization, a body dominated by the totalitarian state of Red China, in Canada, the Liberal Party, which has been engaged in an ongoing assault upon the institutions and traditions which secure the rights and freedoms of Canadians since at least the days of Mackenzie King, jumped on the pandemic as an opportunity to rid itself of Parliamentary accountability. Parliament was sent into a recess from which it never fully returned, and the Liberal government asked for the passing of an Emergency Measures Bill that would give them the powers to spend and tax at their own discretion for two years. Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, mercifully was on the ball and prevented this. The government did, however, obtain spending powers up until the fall. They have used those powers, to saddle us with a debt so large that we will be paying over $12 billion in interest alone on it per year for the foreseeable future, in order to buy back the popularity they had obviously lost when they were reduced to a minority status in last year’s Dominion election, by bribing Canadians with their own, not-yet-earned, money. This clearly demonstrates that the Opposition was right to prevent them from getting two years’ worth of these powers, that they should have fought harder to prevent them from even getting them for the spring and summer, and the desperate need for Parliament to resume in full session to keep this government in check.