Danielle Smith Spoke the Truth

When Danielle Smith was chosen by the United Conservative Party of Alberta to replace Jason Kenney as their leader early last month and consequentially became that province’s premier she started off her premiership with a bang by giving an exceptionally great speech.    Even if we had not heard a word of it we would know it to be very good from the outrage it provoked on the part of Alberta’s socialists and the clowns in the legacy media, that is to say, the print and broadcast news outlets that predate cable news, talk radio, and the internet, which in Canada are all hopelessly corrupt having been bought off years ago by the dimwitted creep and lout who currently occupies the Prime Minister’s Office.    The best response to the legacy media, other than to cut oneself off from it altogether, is to look at what they are promoting and root for the opposite and to look at what they are saying and believe the opposite.   So when they began to howl and rage and storm and demand that Smith apologize for saying that the unvaccinated had experienced the most discrimination of any group in her lifetime, their reaction in itself was a powerful indicator of the truth of Smith’s words. 

 

It has now been a few generations since the old liberalism succeeded in generating a near-universal consensus of public opinion, at least within Western Civilization, against discrimination.   At the time the discrimination the liberals were concerned with was of the de jure type – laws and government policies which singled out specific groups and imposed hardships and disadvantages of various types upon them.    It was not that difficult, therefore, for liberalism to create widespread public opinion against it.   Since ancient times it has been understood that government or the state exists to serve the end of justice.   In Modern times justice has come to be depicted in art as wearing a blindfold.   This imagery is somewhat problematic – blindness to the facts of the case to be ruled on is not an attribute of justice but of its opposite – but is generally accepted as depicting true justice’s blindness to factors which should have no weight in ruling on a dispute between two parties or on the evidence in a case involving criminal charges against someone, factors such as wealth or social status.   If this latter is indeed a quality of justice then for the state to discriminate against people on the basis of such factors is for it to pervert its own end and to commit injustice.    This is what made the old liberalism’s campaign against discrimination so effective.  What they were decrying was already perceivably unjust by existing and long-established standards.

 

Liberalism, however, was not content with winning over the public into supporting their opposition to laws and government policies that discriminated on such grounds as race and sex.   Liberalism had set equality, which is something quite different from justice as that term was classically and traditionally understood, as its end and ideal and consequently with regards to discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, etc., they adopted a much more ambitious goal than just the elimination of existing unjust laws and policies, but rather set their sights on the elimination of discrimination based on such factors from all social interaction and economic transaction and as much as possible from private thought and speech.   Indeed it was this goal rather than ending de jure discrimination that was clearly the objective of such legislation as the US Civil Rights Act (1964), the UK Race Relations Acts of 1965, 1968 and 1976 and the Canadian Human Rights Act (1977).   Ironically, having so expanded their anti-discrimination project to target private thoughts and actions the liberals had to move away from their initial opposition to the injustice of state discrimination.   The project of achieving equality by eliminating private discrimination required the cooperation of the state and laws and measures enacted by the state in pursuit of the ends of this project were themselves discriminatory albeit in a different way from the discriminatory laws to which the liberals had originally objected.

 

Today, decades later, the anti-discrimination project has become even further removed from the opposition to unjust laws that had won it broad public support.   “Discrimination” has ceased to be defined by specific actions or even general attitudes that underlie actions and has become entirely subjective.   Such-and-such groups are the officially designated victims of discrimination, and such-and-such groups are the officially designated perpetrators of discrimination, and discrimination is whatever the members of the former say they have experienced as discrimination.   Loud and noisy theatrical displays of outrage cover up the fact that a moral campaign against “discrimination” of this sort lacks any solid foundation in ethics, logic, or even basic common sense.

 

Liberalism, or progressivism as it is now usually called having given up most if not all of what had led to its being dubbed liberalism in the first place and adopted a stringent illiberalism towards those who disagree with it, has clearly gone off the rails with regards to discrimination.  If any discrimination deserves the sort of moral outrage that progressivism bestows upon what it calls discrimination today it is the sort of discrimination that the old liberalism opposed sixty to seventy years ago, discrimination on the part of the state.   If we limit the word discrimination to this sense then Danielle Smith was quite right in saying that the unvaccinated have been the most discriminated against group in her lifetime.  

 

In early 2020, you will recall, the World Health Organization sparked off a world-wide panic by declaring a pandemic.   A coronavirus that had long afflicted the chiropteran population was now circulating among human beings and spreading rapidly.   Although the bat flu resembled the sort of respiratory illnesses that we have put up with every winter from time immemorial in that most of the infected experienced mild symptoms, most of those who did experience the severe pneumonia it could produce recovered, and it posed a serious threat mostly to those who were very old and already very sick with other complicating conditions, our governments, media, and medical “experts” began talking like we were living out Stephen King’s The Stand.   Our governments enacted draconian measures aimed at preventing the spread of the virus that were more unprecedented – and harmful – than the disease itself.   They behaved as if they had no constitutional limits on their powers and we had no constitutionally protected basic rights and freedoms that they were forbidden to impinge upon no matter how good their intentions might be.   They imposed a hellish social isolation upon everybody as they ordered us to stay home and to stay away from other people if we did have to venture out (to buy groceries, for example), ordered most businesses and all social institutions to close, denied us our freedom to worship God in our churches, synagogues, etc., demanded that we wear ugly diapers on our faces as a symbol of submission to Satan, and with a few intermissions here and there, kept this vile totalitarian tyranny up for almost two years.    All of this accomplished tremendous harm rather than good. Towards the end of this period they shifted gears and decided to create a scapegoat upon which to shift the blame for the ongoing misery.   It was not that their contemptible, misguided, and foolish policies were complete and utter failures, they maintained, it was all the fault of the people who objected to their basic rights and freedoms being trampled over.   They were the problem.   By not cooperating they prevented the government measures from working.   Those who for one or another of a myriad of reasons did not want to be injected with an experimental drug that had been rushed to market in under a year, the manufacturers of which had been indemnified against liability for any injuries it might cause, the safety of which had been proclaimed by government fiat backed by efforts to suppress any conflicting information, or who did not want to be injected with a second or third dose after a previous bad experience, were made the chief scapegoats.   These were demonized by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in terms and tone that call to mind those employed by Stalin against the kulaks and Hitler against the Jews.   A system was developed, seemingly by people who regard the beast in the thirteenth chapter of the Apocalypse as an example and role model to be emulated, whereby society was re-opened to everyone else, but the unvaccinated were kept under the same brutal and oppressive restrictions as earlier in this epidemic of ultra-paranoid hypochondria.   Indeed, some jurisdictions imposed new, harsher, restrictions on them.  

 

So yes, Danielle Smith spoke the truth.   Our governments’ attempt to shut the unvaccinated out of society as it re-opened from a forced closure that should never have occurred in the first place was indeed the worst case of discrimination by government to have occurred in Canada or the Western world for that matter in her lifetime.   Her critics in the legacy media know this full well of course.    Since they hate and are allergic to the truth, which they never report when a lie, a half-truth, a distortion, or some other form of mendacity will suffice, this is why they howled with rage and fury when Smith spoke it.   Hopefully, she will give them plenty more to howl at.  

Discrimination and Justice

Imagine the following scenario. You are at a bar or a nightclub and someone comes up to you, expressing romantic interest, and asks you for your name and contact information. This person is of the same sex as you and you, not being into that, politely explain this and turn this person down. The next day, you are notified that you have been charged with discrimination on the grounds of sex and sexual orientation. You think the charge is absurd but find yourself dragged into a long, expensive, legal battle, at the end of which, a judgement is made against you, and you are slapped with a fine that exceeds your annual gross income and which you cannot possibly pay.

“Preposterous,” you say. “That could never happen!”

Why not?

“It is not discrimination for a heterosexual to turn down an advance from someone of the same sex.”

Actually, yes it is. To discriminate is to observe a difference or make a distinction and to act as if that difference or distinction mattered. A man, who turns down a sexual advance from another man, because he himself is heterosexual, is discriminating against potential sexual partners on the grounds of both their sex and their sexual orientation.

“That cannot be right. There is nothing wrong with a person rejecting an advance from someone he is not attracted to.”

That is my point precisely. There is nothing wrong with it. Furthermore, since there is nothing wrong with it, there is nothing wrong with discrimination qua discrimination.

It is a matter of basic logic folks. A heterosexual man, being attracted only to women, will turn down advances from other men. In doing so, he is making and acting upon a distinction between men and women, and therefore discriminating. If discrimination is wrong in and of itself, then it is wrong for him to do so. Since, however, everyone who is not crazy knows that there is nothing wrong with a man who is attracted only to women turning down another man, it must therefore follow that discrimination in itself is not wrong.

As impeccable as this logic is, the conclusion will still be resisted by those who, lacking all capacity for thinking outside of the “discrimination is wrong” box, will sputter in helpless rage at this demonstration of how everything that they have been brainwashed into thinking by the news media, popular entertainment and the Stalinist indoctrination camps that are our public educational system all their lives is wrong. To pour salt on their wounds, I will point out that logic brings us to the same conclusion if the scenario is altered so that it is a lesbian rather than a heterosexual man rejecting the advances of a male suitor.

“Not so fast”, someone might object, “to arrive at the conclusion that discrimination is not intrinsically wrong from that starting point would requires that the lesbian be right or at least not wrong in rejecting her male suitor, and does not traditional Christian morality teach that lesbianism is wrong?”

Traditional Christian morality does indeed teach that lesbianism is wrong but not in a way that would affect the outcome of our argument. It is not the lesbian’s rejection of men that traditional Christian morality condemns as sinful but her having sexual relations with other women. It is modern liberalism that runs into a problem here, because liberal ethics seeks to simultaneously affirm the goodness of homosexuality and the injustice of discrimination. The lesbian’s choice of sexual partners, however, is no less discriminatory based on sex than that of the heterosexual male – or for that matter those of the homosexual male and the heterosexual woman.

It is not wrong to discriminate. That does not mean that it is always right to discriminate, of course, but it does mean that the rightness or wrongness of an act of discrimination lies elsewhere than in the mere fact of its being discriminatory. This is one of the reasons why laws against discrimination are themselves unjust.

It is a little over fifty year since the first anti-discrimination bill, the US Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. The United Kingdom followed suit with the Race Relations Act of 1965 and Canada with the Canadian Human Rights Act in 1977. Other Western countries brought in similar legislation and the US, UK and Canada have all subsequently amended and expanded their initial anti-discriminatory bills.

Advocates of this sort of law point to injustices of the era in order to justify the introduction of these laws but the interesting thing to note about that is that the injustices in question consisted of laws and government policies whereas the anti-discrimination bills forbade private acts of discrimination. Segregation in the southern United States, for example, the justification given for the US Civil Rights Act, was the separation of the races by laws enacted by the state governments in the late 1800s, laws which were struck down by the American Supreme Court ten years before the US Civil Rights Act, which forbade discrimination on the part of businesses, employers, and those looking to sell or rent a house, was passed.

It is one thing to tell a magistrate, responsible for hearing and settling disputes between two parties, that he is required to base his ruling on the facts of the case and not on the wealth and social status of the parties in question. This has been recognized as a basic principle of justice from time immemorial and the violation of it is the classic example of a kind of discrimination that is also an injustice.

It is a different matter altogether to tell an employer that he cannot discriminate in his hiring practices. Imagine if the government were to pass a law that says to employers “if a member of group X comes to you looking for a job, you are required to hire him, and you must never fire him.” That such a law would be a grotesque injustice to employers is easily recognizable by all sane people but laws which forbid discrimination on the part of employers inevitably translate into such laws in practice. If the law says you are not allowed as an employer to discriminate against members of group X, and a member of group X applies to be hired and is turned down, he can then charge you with discrimination and you will be faced with the burden of proving that your decision was not based on discrimination. That is not something that can be proven to a human judge, however, because discrimination takes place in the heart and mind which the judge cannot see for himself and can hardly be required to take your word for it. Therefore, the only way to protect yourself as an employer from a false charge under a law that says “you cannot discriminate against members of group X” is to treat the law as if it said “you are required to hire members of group X.”

Laws that forbid discrimination by placing the onus of proof upon the accused rather than the accuser and by presuming to dictate what we can and cannot think or feel in our thoughts and hearts violate our civilization’s traditional principles of justice and are experiments in totalitarian thought control that would be right at home in kind of Communist hellhole that Stalin and Mao ran and George Orwell satirized. Which is why, unless these laws are revoked, we can expect that someday in the not so distant future we will see the absurd hypothetical scenario with which I began this essay, become an absurd reality. It is the fundamental nature of these laws to produce such an outcome.

Disagreeing with Dalton about Discrimination

Dalton Camp was a descendant of United Empire Loyalists and the son of a preacher. He was born in New Brunswick but spent most of his formative years in the United States, returning to Canada for summer vacations. He ran a successful advertising agency but is most remembered for his roles in Canadian politics, both as a strategist and unsuccessful candidate for the old Conservative Party and as a commentator in the media. Despite his association with the Conservative Party, more often than not his views were ones with which I vehemently disagreed. There were exceptions, of course. He was a supporter of the monarchy and a Canadian nationalist, who opposed free trade, continentalism and globalism. In these areas I agreed with him and occasionally he would take a stand I could applaud. When Prime Minister Chretien went to China in 1994, for example, to negotiate a trade deal, he wrote an excellent column ridiculing the Prime Minister weak stand against the Communist power’s abuse of its own citizens. Most of the time however, I found his views to be wrongheaded, arrogant, and repugnant. The first part of Whose Country Is This Anyway?, a collection of his columns that was published as a book in 1995 (1), is devoted to advancing the idea that running a large national deficit isn’t really a big deal after all but if you don’t like it you should happily agree to pay more taxes for if you prefer the other option, of cutting spending, that means that you are heartless and selfish. Camp called himself a Red Tory, but he was so in the worst possible meaning of the term, i.e., someone who promoted the ideas of the American progressive left from within the Canadian Conservative Party by pretending that these ideas were what made Canada historically distinct from the United States. The best possible meaning of the term Red Tory is the original meaning, i.e., someone like George Grant. The contrast between Grant and Camp could hardly be greater. Grant is most widely remembered for a jeremiad he penned in 1965, lamenting the downfall of the Diefenbaker government which he saw as the end of the Canadian national project. A couple of years later, Camp was responsible for ousting Diefenbaker from the leadership of the Conservative Party. Grant was a socially conservative pro-life activist, who opposed abortion-on-demand and euthanasia. Camp, despite his paternal heritage, ridiculed opposition to abortion as being American and far right, and displayed the kind of intellectual contempt for “fundamentalists” that Grant expressed indignation at in his final collection of essays, Technology and Justice. (2)

Perhaps you are wondering why, twelve years after his death, I am now wasting so many words on a man who is now mostly forgotten. It is because, while recently perusing the columns in his aforementioned book, I was struck by the way in which recent events have demonstrated just how out to lunch one of those columns was. Over the past several months, American states such as Kansas and Arizona, have introduced legislation for the protection of religious liberty. This legislation is designed to protect business owners from discrimination lawsuits brought by same-sex couples. The perceived need for such protection is due to the increasing number of American states that have enacted same-sex “marriage” legislation and the American Supreme Court’s decision last summer to strike down the provision in the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act prohibiting such “marriages” from being recognized at the federal level. It appears inevitable that same-sex “marriage” will become universally available in the United States and the freedom of religion laws introduced in Kansas and Arizona were drafted with an eye to a future in which a same-sex couple asks a Christian photographer, baker, caterer, or florist to participate in a gay wedding and then sues if that Christian refuses to do something against the historical and traditional teachings of his faith. The response of the progressive left, to this attempt to protect those who dissent from the ideology of the new Revolution, was to trot out the corpse of their Civil Rights era foe “Jim Crow” and take shots at him.

That the day would come, when American states felt it necessary to pass laws protecting Christians from being forced to participate in events that go against the ancient teachings of their faith and these laws would be condemned as violating somebody else’s “rights” would have been virtually unthinkable twenty years ago. At the time, our Parliament here in Canada was considering a bill, one of several introduced by Svend Robinson, NDP representative of Burnaby, British Columbia, over the years, that would add sexual orientation to the list of prohibited bases for discrimination, in the Canadian Human Rights Act. This time around the bill had a lot of support in the Liberal government of Jean Chretien, who assured everybody that if enacted, such a bill would not threaten the freedom of religious Canadians because such was already protected by the law. By the end of the ‘90s, it would be apparent to those who were paying attention, just how empty this promise of Chretien’s was. In 1996, Scott Brockie, a Christian who owned a printshop in Ontario, was charged with discrimination before the provincial Human Rights Commission for refusing to print stationary for the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. The Charter protection of freedom of religion failed to protect Brockie whom the courts consistently ruled against. Cases of this nature were springing up all over Canada during the ‘90s, even before sexual orientation was added to the Canadian Human Rights Act and before the Liberal government enacted same-sex “marriage” legislation early in the new millennium.

Twenty years ago, not everyone in the Liberal Party supported the ideology of the Revolution. Roseanne Skoke, who had been elected to represent the riding of Central Nova in Nova Scotia in 1993, declared her opposition to adding sexual orientation to the Canadian Human Rights Act. In a column, presumably originally published in the ultra-left wing Toronto Star on September 30, 1994, (3) Dalton Camp, the Canadian left’s favourite “conservative”, rebuked this member of the left-leaning centrist party, for being too right-wing.

Camp noted that Skoke’s view is “contrary to the legislative intentions of the Liberal government” and that therefore Chretien, asked to comment, took the position that in a free country, Skoke had the right to express her own opinion, an unusually liberal opinion from the leader of Canada’s Liberal Party who had served in the Liberal government which introduced all sorts of restrictions on freedom of speech back in the 1970s. He also remarked that it was “reassuring” that Chretien’s “endorsement of free speech” contained the implicit possibility that “he may have disagreed with Skoke’s opinion”. Then he encapsulated his objection to Skoke’s position by writing:

Skoke’s premise is that homosexuals are demanding “special rights” in seeking protection against discrimination in the human rights act. She is wrong and apparently wilfully so.

Actually, it is Camp who was wrong. Allow me to explain how.

There are rights which all Canadians possess. All Canadians, for example, have the right to be represented by a lawyer when charged with a criminal offense. Suppose that were not the case. Suppose, homosexuals were routinely denied access to counsel when charged with crimes, then a bill that changed that, that extended the right to counsel to homosexuals, would not be granting homosexuals “special rights” and homosexuals would not be demanding “special rights” in lobbying for such a bill but just the same rights that everyone else in the country has. There would, of course, be nothing wrong with such a demand.

The right to protection against discrimination is not such a right. The Canadian Human Rights Act prohibits discrimination under certain circumstances and based upon certain grounds. The grounds are defined in Section 3 (1) of the Act which currently reads as follows:

For all purposes of this Act, the prohibited grounds of discrimination are race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability and conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted or in respect of which a record suspension has been ordered.

This means that the Act protects you from discrimination if you are discriminated against on the basis of your skin colour but that it does not protect you from discrimination if you are discriminated against on the basis that you smell funny. Furthermore, while the Act is written in such a way that it sounds like it protects you against racial discrimination regardless of what your race actually is, that is not how the Act actually works. The way this law actually works, you are protected against discrimination on the basis of race, if you are any race but Caucasian, you are protected against discrimination on the grounds of colour if you are any colour but white, you are protected against discrimination on the grounds of sex if you are a woman, etc. This is not spelled out in the Act itself – although it is in Section 15 (2) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms – but it is obvious in how the Human Rights Commissions and the courts interpret the Act. While progressives may deny that this legislation grants special protection to some rather than protection to all, they affirm it in the justifications they offer for this kind of legislation. “It is needed to protect vulnerable minorities” is the refrain we usually hear from progressives when the need for this kind of legislation is questioned.

It is one thing to say that citizens of a country have the right to protection against discrimination on the part of their government in the administration of law and justice. This would simply be another way of asserting the concept that has been present in the Great Tradition since ancient times in the depiction of justice as wearing a blindfold. This kind of protection is not provided by anti-discrimination laws, like the Canadian Human Rights Act, which forbid private citizens from discriminating in their everyday affairs and business but by non-discriminatory policy on the part of the government. Anti-discrimination laws, like the American Civil Rights Act of 1964 which is the template for all anti-discrimination law elsewhere, and the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977, actually work against the ideal that government should be fair and non-discriminatory in the administration of law and justice to all of its citizens. Everywhere these laws have been passed they have been used by non-whites against whites, by non-Christians against Christians, by women against men, and now by homosexuals against those who hold to traditional faiths that from ancient times have affirmed that man is made for woman, and woman for man. These laws by their very nature work against the good of the whole of society, by turning class against class, race against race, sex against sex, they work against harmony, unity, and the good.

The idea that the passing of this kind of anti-discriminatory legislation in the late twentieth century represents a major leap towards moral enlightenment on the part of Western mankind is an idea that has led to a major decay in our ability to conduct moral reasoning. Many people now think of discrimination in simplistic terms – it is always bad. To discriminate, however, means to treat people differently on the basis of a distinction made. It could mean, to refuse to employ a man because he is black. It could also mean to award higher marks to a student who gets more answers correct on a test than to one who gets more answers wrong. We might qualify the idea that discrimination is always bad by saying that discrimination on the basis of race is always bad. This is more correct than the original idea but even it is too simplistic. Racial discrimination might mean the actual mistreatment of people on the basis of their race. It might also refer, however, to the way a shopkeeper in a bad neighborhood, where people from one race commit the vast majority of the crimes, stays extra alert and keeps his finger near the alarm when a youth who belongs to that race enters his shop after dark. Unfair as this may be to the youth if he is a law-abiding young man of good character, it would be unjust to condemn the shopkeeper for allowing the realities of the neighborhood in which he lives to influence his prudence and caution.

“The issue”, Dalton Camp wrote, “is whether to make it unlawful to discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation”. Let us also consider the question of whether it is moral or immoral to discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation.

Are we talking about the factory owner who refuses to hire a man to sweep his floor because he is gay? Or are we talking about the Christian baker who refuses to bake a cake for the celebration of a “wedding” between two women? Or are we talking about the young man who chooses to date a young woman instead of a young man?

If we were merely talking about the first example, I would still oppose legislation that makes this kind of discrimination unlawful, although I would also say that the discrimination in this case is the least morally justifiable of these examples. If we include the second example, however, that of the Christian baker, we are dealing with something that is completely different. For the Christian baker to bake a cake celebrating a Sapphic wedding would require the baker to participate in an event that violates the teachings of his faith. It would be immoral of him to do so. Any law that required him to do so would be immoral. Yet a law that makes it unlawful to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation would do precisely that.

As for the third example, perhaps you do not think it belongs with the other two but I disagree. As the late Lawrence Auster pointed out a couple of years ago, the logic of the movement to prohibit discrimination against gays and lesbians leads inevitably to the requirement that people agree to date members of their own sex. If you do not think it will ever go that far, look at how far we have gone already. Dalton Camp, when he penned his arrogant dismissal of Roseanne Skoke’s opposition to the inclusion of sexual orientation in the Canadian Human Rights Act, probably had no idea that twenty years later American states would be contemplating legislation to protect the religious freedom of Christians who would otherwise face discrimination lawsuits for refusing to violate their faith.

Unfortunately, such legislation, even if it passed, and was not struck down by some arrogant court, would just be a Band-Aid solution. Anti-discrimination law is, for the reasons I have explained above, bad law, and it is always better to get rid of bad laws than to keep piling up more laws on top of them, to make up for the damage they have done. Anti-discrimination legislation needs to go. That means, for us here in Canada, that the Canadian Human Rights Act in its entirety must be revoked. The sooner it goes, the better, I say.


(1) Dalton Camp, Whose Country Is This Anyway? (Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1995)

(2) “There are loyal Christians (called by their critics ‘fundamentalists’) who generally say that ‘technology’ is not a paradigm of knowledge but a set of instruments – inventions which come from scientific discoveries. As a whole, they do not much reflect on the ontological implications of the modern paradigm. They therefore live with certainty in the modern. Such people often make crude mistakes in theory; but who does not? Nothing fills me with greater aesthetic annoyance than the scorn which has been heaped on such people by clever journalists and ‘intellectuals’ (whatever that word may mean).” - George Grant, “Faith and the Multiversity”, in Technology and Justice (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1986).

(3) The column is found on pages 193-195 of Whose Country Is This Anyway? where it appears under the title “Is It Okay for Skokes?” The book dates the column to September 30, 1994. Most of the material in this book comes from Camp’s Toronto Star column. A search of the internet for this column brings up several references to it, mostly in comments on Kate McMillan’s “Small Dead Animals” blog, under the title “Skoke-ing the Fires of Anti-Gay Sentiment.” These indicate the Star as the place of origin, with the date of October 2, 1994.

Why Do We Put Up With It?

Here’s an idea. Why don’t we move to Japan, loudly announce our unwillingness to live by Japan’s rules, show utter disrespect for the Tenno, and file a lawsuit against the Japanese government demanding that Japan change its ways to accommodate us. How far do you think we would be able to get with that?

The answer is that we would not get very far at all because Japan has a far more sensible attitude towards this sort of thing than we do and would simply not put up with it. We could learn a lesson or two from the Land of the Rising Sun.

Recently the Canadian news media treated us to a story of how certain immigrants who had become permanent residents in Ontario had launched a legal challenge against our country over the requirements we impose on those who have moved here and desire and seek citizenship. It is the Oath of Citizenship that they take umbrage with and specifically the part of the Oath where the new citizen is required to swear allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II and her heirs and successors. These would-be new Canadians maintain that this is a violation of their rights and that they should be allowed to pledge their loyalty to the country without swearing fealty to its Sovereign.

It apparently did not occur to them that an oath of allegiance to the Queen would be implicit within a pledge of loyalty to the country of Canada. For Elizabeth II is Queen of Canada, Sovereign over our country through her Parliament in Ottawa. Our elected governors are her ministers, who are chosen by the people to govern in her name. That is the nature of our country and a pledge of allegiance to the Queen is therefore implicit in a pledge of loyalty to Canada. An oath of allegiance to Canada that did not imply allegiance to the Queen would be a worthless oath. The Canada that the person who swore such an oath would be pledging allegiance to, would not be the real Canada, the Canada that actually exists, but some fictional construction. What we are looking for in new Canadians, the reason we have an Oath of citizenship at all, is not loyalty to “my idea of Canada” or some such nebulous and self-referential concept but to the actual country.

Therefore, if these litigious would-be Canadians were to be allowed to swear loyalty to Canada without the explicit oath of allegiance to Her Majesty, either, a) they would not be swearing loyalty to the Queen in doing so and the oath would be worthless to us because it would not be a pledge of loyalty to the real Canada or b) they would be implicitly swearing loyalty to the Queen in swearing loyalty to Canada and would have gained nothing because the same objections they make to the explicit oath of loyalty to the Queen would apply as well to the implicit oath of loyalty to the Queen contained in the oath of loyalty to Canada.

That an oath of loyalty to the country would implicitly contain an oath of loyalty to the Queen is in a sense, even truer of Canada, than it is of the United Kingdom. The country of Canada is built upon the choice of the Loyalists to remain loyal subjects rather than join in the republican rebellion. That is our country’s history, roots, and tradition and it is a fundamental part of our collective identity. Our loyalty to the monarchy has played a significant part in the proudest moments of our country’s history, such as when the British army and the Canadians successfully fought off the American invasion together in the early 19th Century, and when Canada declared war on Nazi Germany to fight side by side with Great Britain, in the name of our common king, in the greatest armed conflict of the 20th Century.

Those who wish to eliminate the monarchy from our national identity create a vacuum which they must inevitably fill with the silliest of things. I have actually heard people say that it is our socialized health care that makes us who we are as Canadians and distinguishes us from the Americans. What a vapid and moronic thing to say! The Tommy Douglas health care system referred to, whatever else, good or bad, one might say about it, is less than one hundred years old, dating back to the 1960s. Our country was brought together in Confederation a century prior to that. One wonders what those people who think Canada’s identity is based on socialist health care are saying now that the United States has Obamacare.

But I digress. An argument one sometimes hears from those misguided souls who wish to downplay the monarchy and other institutions and symbols we have inherited from Britain is the claim that they are only of significance to Canadians descended from people from the British Isles and are therefore an insult to those whose ancestors came from other parts of the world. This argument is a non-sequitur – even if it were true, that the monarchy is only of significance to Canadians of British descent, it would not follow from this that the institution would be an insult to others. In fact, the real insult to Canadians of non-British stock is the suggestion that the monarchy should be downplayed so as not to offend them. This suggestion implies that they or their ancestors put no thought into what they were doing when they moved to Canada and came to the country in ignorance of the fact that it was a Commonwealth country, built on a history of Loyalism, with a parliamentary monarchy as its constitution. For if they or their ancestors were aware of these things about Canada when they chose to come here, then, in the act of coming here they chose to become a part of all of that and to accept the institutions of Canada, including her monarchy, as their own.

There is an important difference between traditional Canadian pluralism and the contemporary left-wing multiculturalism that is afflicting our country today. The former was all about integrating people of different backgrounds into Canada in such a way that without having to give up everything they brought with them from their ancestral lands, the British traditions of Canada, from the monarchy to the Rights of Englishmen, became their own. The latter was all about stripping Canada of as much of its British traditions as possible and downplaying the rest while encouraging newcomers not to give up anything and to keep everything they brought from their ancestral lands.

The great Canadian historian W. L. Morton, at one time head of the department of history at the University of Manitoba, and author of my favourite one-volume history of Canada, The Kingdom of Canada, explained the essential role of the monarchy in traditional Canadian pluralism:

[T]he moral core of Canadian nationhood is found in the fact that Canada is a monarchy and in the nature of monarchial allegiance. As America is united at bottom by the covenant, Canada is united at the top by allegiance. Because Canada is a nation founded on allegiance and not on compact, there is no pressure for uniformity, there is no Canadian way of life. Any one, French, Irish, Ukrainian or Eskimo, can be a subject of the Queen and a citizen of Canada without in any way changing or ceasing to be himself. (1)

When he said “there is no Canadian way of life” by “Canadian way of life” he meant a universal, cultural, homogeneity throughout the entire country. That has never existed in Canada at that level. At Confederation there were three major people groups with their own cultures and way of life – English Canadians who spoke English and were mostly Protestant, French Canadians who spoke French and were mostly Roman Catholic, and North American Indians. (2) There were varying degrees of homogeneity among these different groups, with the most homogeneity among the French Canadians who were united in religion as well as language and the most diversity among the Indians whose languages and religion varied according to their tribe, the degree to which they had adopted either the English or the French culture, and, of course, which one they had adopted. English Canadians fell in the middle. They were unified in language, but while they were mostly Protestant in religion, that included English Anglicans, Scottish Presbyterians, and any number of non-conformists sects. Allegiance to the Crown was the principle around which these vastly different groups were able to come together to build a country.

Allegiance to the monarchy meant something different to each of these groups. The people who became the English Canadians had originally been Loyalists, i.e., people who remained loyal to the British Crown when the Thirteen Colonies revolted, and fled to Canada to escape persecution for their stance, after the American Revolution. Allegiance to the monarchy defined who they were.

To the French Canadians, their decision to remain loyal to the king under whose sovereignty they had only recently come rather than to join the American revolution, had secured for them their language, religion, and culture. The American leaders had wanted to make Canada entirely English speaking and Protestant but the British government had promised the French government that French Canadians would be able to keep their language, religion, and culture when the French king ceded the sovereignty of Canada to King George III in the Treaty of Paris. This was one of the things the British government and the American leaders quarrelled over. On the eve of the American Revolution, the British Parliament passed and the king signed into law, the Quebec Act, making those same guarantees directly to the French Canadian people. Had Canada joined the American revolutionaries, or had Canada been ceded to the United States at the end of the American Revolution, the French Canadians would not have been able to retain their religion, language, and culture.

For the Indians, the Crown was and is the party with whom their tribes are in a treaty relationship. (3) This continues to be important to them to this day, a fact of which we were recently reminded. (4)

While each group had its own reasons for allegiance to the Crown, that were very different from the reasons of the other two, these reasons added up to a common allegiance as the basis upon which the three groups could come together to form a country. Loyalty to the Crown is absolutely fundamental to Canadian identity. It is entirely appropriate, therefore, that our country insist that those who wish to be integrated into Canada as citizens make a pledge of the allegiance that is the basis of Canadian unity.

In fact, most immigrants applying for citizenship have no objection to this requirement. The legal challenge to the oath requirement, which has been so widely reported, is not coming from some broadly supported movement but from three individual immigrants.

Why do these three object to swearing the oath?

One is a man of Irish origins whose father died in the republican cause and who therefore believes that it is a violation of his rights to be made to swear an oath to the Queen. Another is a woman who objects to the oath on the grounds of her Afrocentric Rastafari ideology and because of Britain’s historical involvement in the slave trade. The third is an Israeli of strong anti-monarchical, republican, sentiment.

Whether or not these are good and valid reasons for these three individuals to personally refuse to swear allegiance to the Queen, they are not, separately or collectively, valid reasons for Canada to set the oath aside as a requirement. The two men came here from countries that are republics with no crowned monarch. If republicanism is so important to them, they are welcome to return to Ireland and Israel or to move to the United States if that would suit them better.

One of the reasons they are giving for their demand that the oath to the Queen be removed is that it is “discriminatory”. They claim that it is discriminatory because it discriminates in favour of those who have no problem swearing loyalty to the Queen against those who do. They claim that it is discriminatory because only immigrants applying for citizenship are required to swear the oath, not those who are born here or are born to Canadian citizens abroad.

Since progressives, over the last sixty years or so, have successfully conditioned most of us to shut our brains down, curl up into the fetal position, and cry uncle at the sound of the word “discrimination”, some explanation will be required of what should be common sense and obvious to anybody.

In the most basic sense of the word to discriminate simply means to distinguish, to make or to observe a distinction or a difference. If you can tell the difference between apples and oranges you are, in so doing, discriminating. There is nothing wrong with discrimination in this sense of the word.

Discrimination is also used in a narrower sense to refer to the act of making a distinction which is to the advantage of one or some against others. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this kind of discrimination either. All laws are by nature discriminatory in this sense. The law that says that is a criminal act to kill your neighbour, discriminates in favour of the non-murderer against the murderer. The law that forbids theft discriminates in favour of people who don’t steal against those who do. Even scientific laws are discriminatory. The law of gravity discriminates against those who jump off a cliff and in favour of those who don’t.

When is discrimination wrong?

Discrimination is wrong when it is unjust and discrimination is only unjust when those who have a legitimate right to be regarded as and treated the same are instead regarded as and treated differently. If the law forbids littering, and prescribes a certain penalty for littering, then you, your neighbour Bob, and everybody else who lives under the authority of the law, have a legitimate right to be treated the same under that law. If you and Bob are both guilty of littering and are both caught and arrested you have the legitimate right to except that you will receive the same sentence as Bob. If, the judge slaps you with the full penalty but lets Bob off because Bob is a member of all the same clubs the judge belongs to, this is a case of unjust discrimination.

Those who do not wish to swear the oath to the queen, and who claim it is discriminatory that they be required to do so, would like us to believe that it is this last kind of discrimination. People who are born into Canadian citizenship are entitled to all the benefits of Canadian citizenship without having to swear an oath to the Queen whereas those who have moved here from elsewhere have to swear the oath to obtain the benefits. If, however, this constitutes unjust discrimination, then so would the requirement that immigrants swear an oath to Canada before becoming citizens. In fact, placing any requirement of any sort on those who apply for citizenship that is not also placed on those born into citizenship would qualify as unjust discrimination if the requirement that they swear an oath to the Queen is unjust discrimination.

If a requirement placed on those applying for citizenship in a country is unjust discrimination because it is not also placed upon those born into citizenship that means that a country has no right to place requirements on people before they become citizens, that a society has no right to set rules as to how someone coming into the society from the outside can become a full member of the society.

Clearly that cannot be the case. If a society has no right to set rules as to how someone can join it from the outside then it is not a society. A society has every right to distinguish between those who are born into it and those who enter it from the outside at least up until the point where they are granted full citizenship. Unfortunately, liberalism, which teaches that a society is an artificial construction that exists for the sole purpose of serving the personal interests of generic individuals, has clouded the minds of many in this day and age as to the true nature of a society. A society is much more than this. It is a living organism, in which its individual members are joined into an organic whole like the cells in a body, in which generation succeeds generation the way new cells replace old, dying cells. As the body produces the new cells it needs to replace its old ones from its own genetic template, so the present generation of society gives birth to the next generation and raises it to take its place in the organic whole of the society. People can join the society from the outside, just as a branch can be grafted onto a tree or an organ can be transplanted from one body into another, but the tree can also reject the graft and the body can reject the organ. The more compatible the grafted branch or transplanted organ are with the hosts into which they are placed the more likely they are to be accepted. That is the nature of things.

In this case we have an organic society which began by the grafting of three different branches – the tree metaphor works better here as the body metaphor, thanks to Mary Shelley, would produce some unfortunate associations – onto a common trunk, the trunk of the monarchy, the parliamentary system in which the monarchy is incorporated, and the Common Law and rights attached to the monarchy, and of which the monarchy is a symbol. Now we have three wild branches, asking to be grafted into the tree, but in such a way that they are connected to the other branches, but not the trunk. That does not sound like the makings of a successful graft.

The real problem here, however, is not the handful of immigrants who have demanded we change our citizenship requirements to suit them. While the current three are not the first immigrants to contest the oath requirement – they are continuing a challenge first launched by an immigrant from Trinidad who died last year and who started several such challenges beginning in the 1990s - the total number who have contested the oath is negligible. Most people have the sense to realize that if they wish to move to and become part of a society they will have to adjust to the ways, traditions, institutions and rules of that society rather than expecting it to change to accommodate them. Most people have the decency to understand that accusing the institution around which a country has been built of being a symbol of racism, tyranny, and injustice is inconsistent with a desire to become a part of that country.

No, the problem is not these immigrants themselves. The problem is with us. We are the ones who put up with this nonsense. We are the ones who are allowing a handful of malcontents to waste our courts’ time with these frivolous lawsuits. We are the ones who allow people to come here, insult the institution at the heart of our constitution, and demand that we change our country to suit them, rather than telling them that if they don’t like our country’s constitution, institutions, and rules then they didn’t have to move here, are free to go elsewhere, and are no longer wanted or welcome here.

Progressive thought is the root of the problem. A progressive or forward looking person is someone who thinks that to arrive at future happiness we must leave the road cleared, paved, and marked by the landmarks of the past and skip merrily blindfolded along down the road of social, cultural, political and technological innovation. The attitude towards the monarchy, which progressivism tends to produce in Canada, is at best one of ambivalence and indifference and at worst of outright hostility. The progressive emphasizes the democratic aspect of our constitution and tends to regard the monarchy as out-dated or irrelevant.

Ironically, in taking this position, progressives show their own thought to be outdated. An institution like the monarchy is classy, and therefore timeless, and can never be outdated. It is the championing of democracy against monarchy that is outdated. As the great Canadian humourist and political scientist Stephen Leacock put it:

Look back a little in the ages to where ragged Democracy howls around the throne of defiant Kingship. This is a problem that we have solved, joining the dignity of Kingship with the power of Democracy; (5)

The progressive view of immigration is also a problem. Progressives, whether of the liberal or the socialist variety, tend to be believers in the nonsensical and contradictory concept of universal nationalism – that their country is a “universal nation”, membership in which everyone in the world is entitled to. Whereas ordinary patriotic people regard their country and its institutions in high esteem, and except people moving into their country and joining their society to adjust to the society, progressives hold their country and its traditions in low esteem, and see large scale immigration as a means of changing their country and getting rid of its institutions and traditions. Ordinary patriotic people consider it a privilege and honour to live in their country and be a member of their society, and expect newcomers to take that same attitude. Progressives, on the other hand, think it is the highest privilege and honour for a country that even a single immigrant would deign to come to their country, and that the country should show its gratitude by bending over backwards to make whatever alterations are necessary to accommodate the immigrant. Progressives seem to believe that any disagreement with them on this matter can only come out of irrational prejudice towards and hatred of other people and do not hesitate to accuse anyone who expresses disagreement with them of the bigotry and racism. Meanwhile, they take great offence when their patriotism is called into question over their not-so-subtle contempt for their own country, its people, and its traditions.

There is a great deal of short-sightedness in the progressive position. Those who refuse to look deeply into the past will never be able to see far into the future and are oblivious to what is before them in the present. By dismissing our country’s history as our “colonial past” and our traditional institutions as “outdated relics” progressives blind themselves to both the continuing and contemporary importance and relevance of the monarchy and to the harm their approach to immigration has done, is doing, and will do to our country in the future.

The way to deal with the handful of immigrants who want us to change our citizenship laws is simple. It is to tell them that if they are not interested in joining our society on our terms, then they are no longer welcome to join our society on any terms, and we are no longer interested in having them as citizens.

Dealing with the progressive thought that has pervaded our country and which hinders us from giving the appropriate response to these immigrants will be more difficult.

(1) W. L. Morton, The Canadian Identity, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961, 1972) p. 85

(2) It is no longer fashionable to call this group of people “Indians” and many people consider the continued use of the term to be an insult to the people so termed. All other terms, especially the one currently in vogue “First Nations”, are to varying degrees politically correct. My intentional use of the term “Indians” is not based upon a desire to insult these people but rather a refusal to submit to the tyranny of political correctness.

(3) http://www.canadiancrown.com/first-nations-treaties-with-the-crown.html


(4) http://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/op-ed/comment-harper-must-respect-tradition-time-and-place-1.48342


(5) Stephen Leacock, “Greater Canada: an appeal”, in Alan Bowker, ed., The Social Criticism of Stephen Leacock (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1973), p. 9. The article first appeared in 1907 in University Magazine and was given as an address to the Empire Club of Canada in March of that year.

Human Rights Fraud

What does the phrase “human rights abuse” suggest to you?

If you are like most people, when you hear about “human rights abuses”, you probably think about forced labor or extermination camps, about military dictators summarily executing their critics, about torture and ethnic cleansing, and other things similar to these.

What do all of these have in common?

First, they are all activities of governments rather than by ordinary people.

Secondly, they all involve actual physical suffering of some sort imposed on a large scale.

Finally, they have nothing to do with the laws and institutions established by progressives in Western countries like Canada, ostensibly to protect “human rights”.

Take the Canadian Human Rights Act, for example, which Parliament voted into law in 1977. This piece of legislation was clearly written, not to protect people from government abuses like ones mentioned above, to authorize government intrusion into the every day interactions of ordinary people.

In fact, this is blatantly stated at the very beginning of the CHRA itself. The “Purpose of Act” (Section 2) states:

The purpose of this Act is to extend the laws in Canada to give effect, within the purview of matters coming within the legislative authority of Parliament, to the principle that all individuals should have an opportunity equal with other individuals to make for themselves the lives that they are able and wish to have and to have their needs accommodated, consistent with their duties and obligations as members of society, without being hindered in or prevented from doing so by discriminatory practices based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability or conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted.

Observe the following:

First, while governments are the perpetrators of the abuses we most commonly associate with “human rights” in ordinary conversation, the Canadian Human Rights Act’s declared purpose is “to extend the laws in Canada”, not to limit the power, scale, and scope of government.

Second, while we ordinarily think of “human rights abuses” in terms of extreme physical suffering, death, and unjust confinement, the CHRA is about economics.

Third, the CHRA points to an underlying principle as its justification. Upon closer examination that “principle” is just a standard progressive/leftist ideal. A principle, remember, is something you learn over time, at home growing up, in church, and from the folklore, traditions, and customs that represent the accumulated wisdom of your society, which forms your character, and guides you in your everyday decisions. An ideal is something that you dream up in your youth, as an abstract exercise in imagining a perfect world, and seek to impose on others.

“Equal opportunity” is an ideal not a principle. In its best form it is a negative ideal, declaring that individuals should rise and fall on their own merits or lack thereof, and that the government should not do anything, one way or another, to give any particular person an advantage over others. In its worst form it calls upon the government to create “equal opportunity”.

One person has an advantage over another because his father is a doctor and can afford to send him to the best schools whereas the second person’s father is the janitor’s assistant at the local grocery store and cannot afford the same privileges to his son. This is intolerably “unfair” to progressives and leftists who declare that the government needs to get involved and tax the doctor to pay for the education of the janitor’s assistant’s son so that they both have “equal opportunity”.

The “equal opportunity” of the Canadian Human Rights Act is also a form of the kind of “equal opportunity” that calls upon the government to take action rather than simply asking it to mind its own business. In this case, the CHRA authorizes the government to take action to protect “individuals” from “discriminatory practices based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability or conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted.”

What are these discriminatory practices? Do they involve torturing, confining, or killing people because of their race, their national or ethnic origin, colour, religion or any of the other criteria listed?

No. Acts of that nature were already illegal in Canada prior to the passing of the CHRA. Well, at least they were until the Chretien government followed the American government’s bad example in voting itself the right to do these things to anyone suspected of “terrorism” after 9/11. That is a topic for another time however.

The acts which are considered “discriminatory practices” by the CHRA include the denial of “access to, any such good, service, facility or accommodation” which is “customarily available to the general public” (Section 5) or the denial of occupancy of “commercial premises or residential accommodation” (Secion 6), and the refusal of employment or termination of employment (Section 7) to anyone based on the prohibited grounds.

At first glance these rules might make sense to some. Consider, however, the implications. If you own a business or an apartment block and depend upon that for your and your family’s livelihood, these rules say that you do not have the final decision in who you do business with, who you hire to work for you, or who you rent your apartments too.

Lets say you own a restaurant. The services it provides are “customarily available to the general public” and so fall under Section 5. Someone comes into your restaurant who is drunk and abusive and starts harassing other customers. That person is of another ethnicity to yourself. What do you do?

The right thing to do, of course, is to boot the guy out on his arse. Your family depends on you to support them, the restaurant is your livelihood, and you cannot afford to give the impression to potential regular customers that they will be harassed if they come to your establishment and that you will do nothing about it.

However, because of his ethnicity, Section 5 of the Canadian Human Rights Act forces you to reconsider. If you kick this man out it will not be because of his ethnicity but because he is a drunken, boorish, lout. You know that but that is not what matters. What matters is that the law says you cannot deny services to this man because of his ethnicity, and if he complains to the Human Rights Commission that you kicked him out of your restaurant because you were prejudiced against him, it is his word against your word.

Who will the adjudicators of the CHRA be most likely to believe, him or you?

It would be nice to say that the traditional, prescriptive, English right to the presumption of innocence applies here, but in fact it doesn’t. The CHRA, like all forms of anti-discrimination legislation, is stacked against the defendant. It will cost the man nothing to file a complaint against you – you will have to hire a lawyer to advise you of your rights and defend you. And the adjudicators of laws like this operate on a presumption of guilt – to doubt the word of a “victim” of “discrimination” is to victimize him again in the thinking of progressives.

Laws of this nature are not necessary. Civilization survived for millennia without them. Moreover, as we have just demonstrated, these laws can be a positive evil. Lord Falkland once declared “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change”, to which excellent conservative axiom I would add the corollary “When it is not necessary for there to be a law, it is necessary for there not to be a law”.

It is the government’s job to provide us with the protection of the rule of law against murder, theft, assault, rape, and other criminal activities in which someone causes real physical harm to our persons or property. It is not the government’s place to interject itself into our everyday interactions with others and decide who has been treating who unfairly, and when it attempts to do so it makes things worse because it is not competent to do so.

What the Trudeau government and the progressive Left have done with the Canadian Human Rights Act is a form of sleight-of-hand. It was the Left that introduced the concept of “human rights” into our political discussion, selling the concept as a protection against the worst abuses of government. As a result we have come to associate the opposite of “human rights” with the horrors of tyranny.

Then it introduced legislation in the name of “human rights” that does nothing to protect people from such tyranny, but rather empowers the government to intrude into their everyday lives, and boss them around about who they do business with, who they rent their property to, and who they hire, fire, and promote in their businesses.

If it were done on a stage for our entertainment it would be trick worthy of standing ovation.

Since it was done with the laws of our land and affects our everyday lives, it is instead a fraud worthy of nothing but condemnation.