The Ordinary and the Extraordinary

The distinction between the “ordinary” and the “extraordinary” is a recurring one in theology.   In moral theology this distinction is essential to the discussion of certain ethical dilemmas.   How far are we obligated to go in preserving the lives of those who are suffering and dying?  The orthodox answer is that we are obligated to make use of every ordinary means of preserving their lives available but are not under such an obligation when it comes to extraordinary means, such as those made available by modern medical technology.   Since giving people food and water is an ordinary means of preserving their lives, the practice of starving or dehydrating someone for the purpose of ending his suffering – and life – quicker is forbidden, but we are under no obligation to prolong his life and suffering, and possibly make the suffering worse, with questionable modern drugs, for the latter are extraordinary means.

 

Another example of this distinction, one that requires little in the way of explanation, is the distinction between God’s ordinary and extraordinary operations in the natural world.   The former are the processes that God put in place in the world when He created it and which, observed and put into formulaic statement by men, are what we know as the laws of science.   The latter are miracles.

 

It is also common for us to speak of the “ordinary means of grace”.   This expression contains the implied assumption that there are also “extraordinary means of grace” although these are rarely talked about.   A definition and a couple of other distinctions are necessary to understand this one.   Grace is God’s favour, freely bestowed by God as Sovereign Lord upon His creatures.   We distinguish between common grace and saving grace.   Common grace is God’s favour as freely bestowed upon all of His creatures alike.   It is what Jesus spoke of when He said that His Father sends the rain on the just and unjust alike (Matt. 5:45).   Saving grace is both a) the favour God showed to rebellious, sinful, human creatures by giving us His Son to be our Saviour and b) the favour to which sinners are restored by our Saviour, Jesus Christ, Who purchased that favour for us by His Suffering and Death on the Cross, in which favour our sins are taken away and forgiven, God credits us with righteousness, we are reconciled to God, adopted as His children, and rescued from the state of spiritual death and given everlasting life.    While we could speak of “means of grace” with regards to common grace as well as saving grace, we generally do not do so because every good gift from God in this life would qualify as such and so it is too broad of a concept to say much that is meaningful about it.   The means of grace, therefore, are the means of saving rather than common grace.    A second distinction needs to be made.   When we speak of the “means of grace” we can be referring either to a) the means by which we each receive the freely given grace of God, that is the means by which we each appropriate it to ourselves, or b) the means through which God works to bring His freely given saving favour, obtained for us by Christ, to us that we may so appropriate it.     The latter and not the former are what we refer to as the “ordinary means of grace”.   With regards to the former, the means by which we each appropriate the saving grace of God to ourselves, there is only one such means, and that is faith in Jesus Christ, believing the Gospel about Jesus, trusting Jesus as the Saviour proclaimed in the Gospel.  (1)  There is no distinction between ordinary and extraordinary means with regards to this because it is the only such means. (2)    The “ordinary means of grace”, therefore are the second kind of means of saving grace, the means whereby God brings His saving grace to us that we may appropriate it to ourselves by faith.   The Church, the spiritual covenant society established by Jesus Christ through His Apostles, should be identified as the first such means.   God did not establish Christianity as a solitary way of life to be lived out by individuals on their own but as a communal way of life to be lived out in the community of faith He provided for that purpose.   Therefore, He created the Church and tasked it with the job of bringing His saving grace to everyone in the world.   The Church’s performance of this task is called “preaching the Gospel”, although proclaiming might be a better word than “preaching” because “preaching” now has the connotation of “giving a sermon” and the concept of “preaching the Gospel” is not limited to that.   Indeed, every Ministry of the Church, through which the grace of God is brought to us is a form of “preaching the Gospel”.   This includes the Ministry of the Word – this includes both preaching in the colloquial sense of the term and teaching – and the Ministry of Sacrament – the administration of baptism, the ritual cleansing through which one becomes a member of the Church, and the Eucharist, the ceremonial representation of the death of Jesus Christ through which the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, as broken and shed on the Cross, become the spiritual food that regularly sustains the life of the faithful.   All of these, and the Church’s ministry of formally proclaiming God’s forgiveness upon confession of sin, are the forms of preaching the Gospel that are called the “ordinary means of grace”.   They are called this to indicate that the ordinary way that God has appointed for people to receive His saving grace through faith and to be sustained in that faith and grace is through His Church and her Ministries.   The “extraordinary means of grace” would include any means God uses outside of these channels to bring people to faith in His grace through Jesus Christ.   For obvious reasons they cannot be enumerated in the same way as the ordinary means.   The distinction is very important, however, because it is essential for understanding how the “necessity” of the Church and her Ministries does not conflict with the New Testament emphasis on saving grace being freely given and received by faith.   The “necessity” is the general necessity attached to God’s appointed normal way of doing things, not the absolute necessity that would turn baptism, Communion, Church attendance, etc. into so many marks to be checked off rather than avenues of divine blessing and render the grace of God far less gracious and free.

 

The final example of the “ordinary” v “extraordinary” distinction that we shall look it pertains to the authority and power given by Jesus Christ to His Apostles.   This authority and power was of both types.    The ordinary authority and power that Jesus Christ bestowed upon His Apostles was the authority and power necessary for them to carry out their evangelistic commission from Him and to govern the Church, the spiritual society that He founded to be His Body and Spouse and the manifestation of His Kingdom in this world and over which He placed the Apostles as governors.   This ordinary authority and power, the Apostles passed on to the others whom they admitted to their College of Ecclesiastical Governors and remains with these, who have been called by the title bishop (overseer) since the first century, in the Church to this day.   The extraordinary authority and power that Jesus Christ bestowed upon His Apostles was a) the power to preach the Gospel by divine inspiration so that the message proclaimed and heard was the very Word of God (the sermons recorded in the Acts of the Apostles), b) in the case of select Apostles – from the original Twelve SS Matthew, Mark, John, Peter, Jude and James, if James the Just, Brother of the Lord was the same person as James the Lesser, directly commissioned by Christ to evangelize the Gentiles in the book of Acts in the case of St. Paul, or brought into the Apostolic ministry by the Twelve and St. Paul in cases of SS Mark, Luke, and James the Just if he was not the same person as James the Lesser – to write the very Word of God (the canon of the New Testament), and c) to perform the kind of miracles that served as proof that the Gospel they preached and the New Testament writings were the infallible Word of God.   This authority and power was not passed on to their successors.     It is vital to recognize this distinction.   The ordinary authority and power bestowed upon the Apostles was the authority and power inseparably attached to their office and commission, and therefore passed on along to others with that office and commission.   Extraordinary authority and power of the type described is never passed on from one person or another, but is directly given from God to individuals and while God can bestow extraordinary power and authority upon individuals of His Sovereign choosing any time He wishes, the purpose for which this specific extraordinary power and authority was bestowed was fulfilled with the completion of the New Testament canon and so will not be bestowed again.  

 

The failure to grasp this is the source of all sorts of confusion with regards to the nature of the authority vested in the Church and that vested in the Scriptures as the written Word of God.     For example, there is the confusion of those who claim that the authority of the Scriptures is derived from the authority given to the Church, by which they inevitably mean their particular Church, although it would not be true even if the Church meant were the actual Catholic Church, that is to say, every Church everywhere in organic continuity with the original Church in Jerusalem, under the governance of those in Apostolic succession, and confessing the ancient Creeds.   Some of these have even gone so far as to claim that their Church has the power to turn books that are not inherently inspired by God into authoritative Scripture. (3)   Obviously, however, the Scriptures being what the Church has always claimed them to be, that is the inspired (4) written Word of God - and the Church says that this is what they are because this is what they are, not the other way around - their infallible authority is derived from this fact and not from the authority of the Church.

 

The extraordinary authority and power given to the Apostles, therefore, can be seen in the end for which it was the means – the giving to the Church, an infallible Rule of Faith for the Gospel Covenant, in the New Testament Scriptures.      In these same infallible New Testament Scriptures we find the record of Jesus Christ’s commissioning His Apostles, placing them in authority over the Church, and bestowing upon them the ordinary authority and power they would pass on to those who would join them and follow them in the government of the Church.

 

Jesus Christ’s original commissioning of His Twelve Apostles is recorded by St. Matthew in the tenth chapter of his Gospel, by St. Mark in the fourth chapter of his Gospel, and St. Luke in the sixth chapter of his Gospel.   These were already Jesus’ disciples – St. John records how SS Peter, Andrew, Philip and Nathaniel had first come to know Jesus and become His private disciples shortly after His baptism, the other Evangelists record the more public calling of SS Peter, Andrew, John, James the Greater, and Matthew to follow Jesus after His public preaching ministry began with the arrest of John the Baptist.   By the time of the commission, the twelve were all among a much larger body of His disciples from which they were selected.  (5)  St. Luke records that He set them apart from His other disciples and gave them the title Apostle (6:13), SS Matthew and Mark record that He sent them throughout the Holy Land preaching the Gospel to the Israelites and that He gave them power to cast out demons and heal sicknesses.   The commission to preach was obviously an appointment that came with ordinary authority.   It is less obvious whether the power to cast out demons and heal sicknesses was ordinary or extraordinary.      The Gospel of Mark records that they healed the sick by anointing them with oil (Mk. 6:13).   The anointing of the sick is part of the ministry that the Apostles passed on to their successors and also to the order of presbyters that they established under their government in the Church (James 5:14).   Exorcism is also a ministry that has been passed down to subsequent bishops and the presbyters under them.   Therefore, it would appear that this initial power given with the first Apostolic commission, miraculous though it was, was also a case of ordinary power.   However, just as the commission would be greatly expanded before Jesus ascended back to heaven, so the Apostles’ power to cast out devils and heal would be expanded at Pentecost to the point where the Apostles, like their Master, even raised the dead (Acts 9, 20).

 

The expansion of the Apostles’ commission, after the Resurrection and before the Ascension, is recorded in the Synoptic Gospels and the book of Acts.   The original commission was limited to the Israelites - “Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not.  But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 10:5-6).   The expanded Commission – traditionally called the Great Commission – included the entire world – “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.  Amen.” (Matt. 28:19-20 – see also Mark 16:15 and Acts 1:8).   The commission could not be expanded any further than that, of course.  

 

In between the original commissioning of the Apostles and the final Great Commission, Christ had given them other powers and authority.   After St. Peter’s confession of faith that He, Jesus, was “the Christ, the Son of the living God”, Jesus announced that He would build His Church “and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” and told St. Peter that He would give him (“unto thee” – singular) the “keys of the kingdom of heaven”.  He later told the other Apostles that they would have this same power (18:18) and following the Resurrection He breathed on them, saying to them “Receive ye the Holy Ghost” and bestowed upon them (“ye” – plural) the power of the keys (Jn. 20:22-23).   This might seem like extraordinary power, especially if it is read in the extremely hyper-literal – and wrong - way of involving the arbitrary power to save and to damn others, but it is actually the ordinary authority to admit into the fellowship of the Church, exclude from such fellowship, and re-admit those formerly excluded, the authority essential to the governing of a society such as the Church.   As such, it has always been understood to have been passed on to those who were later admitted into the governance of the Church with the original Apostles – to all of them, not just the successor of St. Peter in one of the Churches he had presided over. (6)

 

On the evening of His betrayal, while keeping the Passover Seder with His Apostles, the Lord Jesus instituted the Sacrament of the Eucharist.   Each of the Synoptic Gospels records the event – St. John, who does not, provides an earlier extended discourse from Jesus in which its significance is explained at length.   He took the bread – the unleavened bread or matzot which was, of course, the only kind permitted at the “feast of unleavened bread” – and “gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.”  (Lk. 22:19)   After the supper, He took the cup and did the same saying “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.” (Lk. 22:20).   By doing this, Jesus established His Apostles as a new order of priests over His Church.   This does not conflict with the universal priesthood of all believers (1 Peter 2:4-5) any more than the establishment of the Levitical priesthood under the Aaronic high priesthood conflicted with Israel’s being a nation of priests (Ex. 19:6).   That this is clearly to be understood from the account of the institution of the Eucharist is evident from the nature of the Sacrament.   It takes bread and wine, the two kinds of sacrificial offerings from the Old Covenant that did not involve death and blood, and makes them the representatives of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, Whose death on the Cross was the final bloody Sacrifice, to which all the others had pointed, and the Only One which could effectively take sins away and propitiate the justice of God, and therefore the means whereby this Sacrifice could become a meal feeding the faithful of the New Covenant.   This takes the place under the New Covenant of the entire sacrificial system of the Old Covenant.   For this reason it is something that must be performed by someone with a priestly office and commission, as only such could offer sacrifices, and therefore the institution of the Eucharist is the bestowing of just such an office and commission on the Apostles.     Note that the New Testament, does not use the word ῐ̔ερεύς to describe the ministers of the Church, although, as just explained, it clearly tells of Christ bestowing such an office upon these ministers.   The Greek word that was used in the New Testament, however, as the title of the second order of ministry in the Church under the Apostles - πρεσβύτερος (presbyter – literally “elder”) would became the basis for the words, such as the English “priest”, that render the meaning of ῐ̔ερεύς in many languages, even when it is a priesthood other than the Christian that is being discussed.   The explanation for both of these things is probably that the New Testament was, with the exception of the Johannine writings, written while the Temple in Jerusalem was still standing and the Levitical priesthood was still performing their duties under the Old Testament.   The New Testament writers likely wished to avoid the potential confusion of referring to the two ministries with the same word.   At any rate, since St. Paul says that the Eucharist is to be celebrated until the Second Coming – “For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come” (1 Cor. 11:26) – the priestly office and the authority attached to it, was the ordinary type that the Apostles passed down to their successors – and, in this case, as is evident from what was observed above about the etymology of priest, to the second order of ministry, the presbyters, that served under them.

 

The exact time at which the extraordinary powers, as opposed to the ordinary powers, were bestowed upon the Apostles is not explicitly spelled out in the New Testament, although it can be reasonably concluded that this occurred on the first Whitsunday (Christian Pentecost) when the Holy Ghost descended upon them in the upper room, they preached the Gospel to the assembled multitude and each heard in his own tongue, and St. Peter preached the sermon recorded in Acts 2 that brought about the conversion and baptism of about three thousand.   In the book of Acts, we find the Apostles exercising their ordinary authority of government to establish the two orders of ministry beneath their own.  The reasons for the establishing of the order of deacons are spelled out in detail in the sixth chapter of Acts, leading to the account of the first Christian martyrdom, that of one of the deacons St. Stephen.   The reasons for the establishment of the order of presbyters are not similarly spelled out, but SS Paul and Barnabas are described as ordaining them in the Churches they planted in the fourteenth chapter of Acts, and they are described as being part of the Jerusalem Council along with the Apostles in the fifteenth chapter.  By this point in time the Apostles had already begun expanding their own College.   Apart from St. Matthias’ having been chosen to take Judas Iscariot’s place, and St. Paul’s dramatic conversion and calling following the martyrdom of St. Stephen, St. Barnabas had been made an Apostle by the fourteenth chapter, probably around the time he was sent by the Church of Jerusalem to Antioch in the eleventh chapter.    In the Pastoral Epistles we find St. Paul’s instructions to Timothy and Titus, who had been admitted to the College (as evident from their having the power of ordination) and set over the Churches of Ephesus and Crete respectively.   This appears to have been during a time of terminological tradition.   SS Timothy and Titus are not described by the term Apostle as St. Barnabas had been in Acts, but the term bishop has not yet been appropriated for the members of the College and is still used interchangeably with presbyters for the lower order.   Their having specific jurisdiction over Ephesus and Crete is further evidence that the assigning of episcopal oversight to specific Churches was not something introduced after the era of the Apostles – earlier evidence, for this, of course, can be seen in the fact that St. James the Just had been made bishop of Jerusalem – as the position would later be called – before the Jerusalem Council, over which he presided as bishop of the Church hosting the Council.

 

Thus we see, how the ordinary authority and power which Jesus gave to His Apostles when setting them in government over His Church, survives in the Episcopal College to this day, whereas the extraordinary authority and power bestowed upon them at Pentecost, having served its purpose was not passed on, except in the form of the infallible Rule of Faith, the New Testament Scriptures, that it was given to produce.

 (1)   Often the New Testament links repentance to faith/believing in identifying the response the Gospel calls for, but the role of repentance in that response is different from the role of faith.   It is not repentance’s role to appropriate the grace of God, or to assist faith in so appropriating it, but to bring the sinner into the condition, one of brokenness and humility, in which the Holy Spirit, working through the Gospel, forms faith in the sinner’s heart.

(2)    Works of righteousness, justice and mercy play no role in appropriating the grace of God or in preparing the sinner’s heart to receive the grace of God by faith – and the mistake of thinking that they do is spiritually deadly because if someone thinks his own works play a role in obtaining God’s favour this will prevent him from placing his faith in Jesus Christ and His works rather than in his own.    The New Testament, especially the Pauline and Johannine writings, is quite clear on this.   Works are not the basis of grace, nor the means of receiving it, but are the fruit of grace in the Christian life.   Without intending to discount entirely the insights of E. P. Sanders, N. T. Wright, and the other “New Perspective on Paul” scholars, the works contrasted with faith in St. Paul’s writings cannot be merely the external, ceremonial, aspects of the Law that established Israel’s national distinctiveness from the Gentiles.   Certainly this is emphasized in some of St. Paul’s epistles – Ephesians, especially – but it would make absolute nonsense out of Romans 4:4-5 and Titus 3:5 to read the “works” and “works of righteousness” in them as ceremonial works.   Nor does it make sense to explain away the Pauline doctrine by saying that he was talking about “works of the law” not “works of love” as the entire difference between the two is eliminated if the latter are said to be conditions of salvation.   The difference is that “works of the law” are done in order to obtain God’s favour, whereas “works of love” are done out of the love for God that can only arise in a heart that has received God’s favour, purchased for him by Christ, freely through faith, in response to God’s own love (1 John 4:19, cf. verse 10).   The very concept of “works of love” or “faith working by love” is eliminated if “works of love” are made into conditions whereby we obtain God’s favour or remain in God’s favour.   The old debate about whether sola fide is a heresy or “the article upon which the Church stands or falls” can be truthfully answered either way depending upon the question to which it is offered as the answer.   If the question is something along the lines of “what does the Christian life consist of?” or “what duties and obligations are placed upon God’s people under the New Covenant”, then to answer with “faith alone” would indeed be rank heresy.   If the question is “how may I receive the saving grace of God which Jesus Christ has purchased for me on the Cross” then “faith alone” is the right answer and indeed the very fundamental article that the famous paraphrase of Dr. Luther makes it out to be.   Note there is no conflict between Jacobean and Pauline doctrine on this.   While many of the same terms – “justification”, “faith”, “works” – and illustrations – Abraham – can be found in Romans 4 and James 2, with two seemingly opposite conclusions, a word that is prominent in Romans 4 and therefore noticeable by its absence in James 2, is “grace”.   The justification that St. James the Just was talking about is not justification in the sight of God by His grace.   St. Paul, who wrote after St. James, and is therefore St. James’ interpreter rather than the other way around, explains this in the second verse of his fourth chapter.

(3)  Albert Pighius, in his Hierarchiae Ecclesiasticae Assertio (1545), Book III, chapter 3, made this absurd claim, for example.

(4)   Inspiration with regards to the Scriptures does not mean the same thing as inspiration with regards to great works of art, music, and literature.   When people speak of the latter as being inspired, they are – often unconsciously – evoking the concept of the Muses from Greco-Roman mythology.   Inspiration in this sense, never meant that Homer’s Iliad, for example, was the “word of Calliope”.   Inspiration with regards to the Holy Bible, is what St. Paul asserts in II Timothy 3:16 with the words πᾶσα γραφὴ θεόπνευστος (“all scripture is given by inspiration of God”).   The word θεόπνευστος means “breathed out by God”.  Oddly, it is translated by a word that if broken down by the meaning of its component parts would be in a way the opposite of this – “breathed in” as opposed to “breathed out”.   The more exact equivalent exspired, however, is not in common usage and would, due to its being a homophone of expired, be more problematic than inspired.   The point to be grasped is that inspiration with regards to the Scripture, means more than just the bringing out of the inner talent of the writer, it means that the words written are the words of God and not just of the human writer.

(5)  St. Luke in the tenth chapter of his Gospel also records Christ’s appointing seventy other disciples whom He sent out in pairs with a similar commission at a later date – there is no record of their commission and powers ever being expanded.   If the list of them attributed to St. Hippolytus of Rome is at all accurate then other figures who feature prominently alongside the Twelve in the Acts were among them.  St. Matthias, whom the Eleven chose by lot to take the place of Judas Iscariot, and the other candidate in the lot toss St. Joseph Barsabas (Justus), have always been considered to have been among the Seventy, a reasonable conclusion from Acts 1:21-23. The Eastern Church counts all of the Seventy as Apostles, others have suggested that they were the prophets referred to by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 12:28 (“God hath set some in the church, first apostles, secondarily prophets…”)

(6)   Before going to Rome and leading the Church there, St. Peter had been the first bishop of the Church of Antioch.   If the keys were unique to St. Peter there is no logical reason why his successor at Antioch would not have as much claim to them – if not a better claim, seeing as St. Peter was at Antioch first – than his successor at Rome.   Note that the bishop of Antioch like the bishop of Rome was one of the three bishops (the other was the bishop of Alexandria) that the Council of Nicaea recognized in its sixth canon as having broad jurisdiction (larger than that of a metropolitan bishop), and one of the five (the three plus the bishop of Jerusalem and the bishop of Constantinople) who were the Patriarchs of the Pentarchy.   For most of the first millennium, to the extent that the Patriarch of Rome was regarded as having a place of priority over these others, it was a case of primum inter pares, the primacy arising out of Rome’s political status as the Imperial Capital, not out of the bishop’s status as the (second of two) successors of St. Peter.   On top of all of this, it is quite obvious that the Mother Church of all true Churches was not the Church of Rome, but the Church of Jerusalem whose first bishop was St. James the Just.   The exaggerated claims of the papacy are historical bunk, and it is quite clear from Matthew 18 and John 20, that the keys were given to all the Apostles, not just St. Peter, and thus are held collectively by all true bishops of all true Churches today.

From Bad to Worse

 

It is less than two months since I posted an essay entitled “Death and Doctors” that discussed how in the depravity of modern progressive liberalism those who are supposed to have dedicated their lives to healing disease and injury, alleviating pain and suffering, and saving lives are now expected to take the lives of the vulnerable at either end of the lifecycle through abortion or physician assisted suicide.   As I pointed out in that essay, both of these practices were against the law throughout most of Canadian history and the latter practice was only legalized quite recently.   It was in 2014 that Lower Canada – Quebec to those who are vulgarly up-to-date – became the first province to legalize physician assisted suicide and in February of 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada once again flexed the shiny new muscle that Pierre Trudeau had given them in 1982 by striking down the law against physician assisted suicide in its Carter ruling.   The Court placed a one year delay on this ruling coming into effect in order to give Parliament time to fix the issues with the law which the Court considered to be constitutionally problematic.   The Liberals, however, won a majority government in the Dominion election that year and so passed Bill C-14 instead, which completely legalized the practice and, indeed, allowed for physicians under certain circumstances, to go beyond assisting in suicide and actively terminate the lives themselves.   Note that while I would like to think that had Harper’s Conservatives remained in power the outcome would have been different, I am not so naïve as to be certain of that.   Indeed, the week after the Carter ruling, I had discussed how the Conservatives appeared to be preparing to capitulate on this issue in “Stephen Fletcher, the Byfields, and the Failure of Canada’s New Right”.

 

Now, one might be tempted to think that with regards to the issue of physician assisted suicide there is not much further in the wrong direction that our government could have gone than Bill C-14.   One would be very wrong in thinking so, however, as the government has just demonstrated.  

 

On February 24^th of last year, a few weeks before the World Health Organization hit the panic button because a new virus that is significantly dangerous only to the very sorts of people most likely to be on the receiving end of euthanasia had escaped from China and was making the rounds of the world, Captain Airhead’s Liberals introduced Bill C-7 in the House of Commons.  David Lametti, who became Justice Minister and Attorney General after Jody Wilson-Raybould was removed from this position for refusing to go along with the Prime Minister’s corruption, was the sponsor.    The aim of the bill was to make it easier for those who wanted what they are now calling “Medical Assistance In Dying” or MAID – in my opinion the acronym produced by the old convention of leaving out words of three letters or less would be more apt - but were not already on death’s door to obtain it.   

 

As bad as the original draft of Bill C-7 was, it has undergone revisions over the course of the year since its first reading that make it much worse.   The most controversial revision is the one that includes a provision that is set to come into effect two years after the bill passes into law and which would allow access to the procedure to those who are neither at death’s door nor experiencing extreme physical pain and suffering but only have severe mental or psychological conditions.    Since it could be easily argued that wanting to terminate one’s own life constitutes such a condition – I suspect the vast majority of people would see it as such – the revised version of Bill C-7 looks suspiciously like it is saying that eventually everyone who wants a physician’s assistance in committing suicide for whatever reason will be entitled to that assistance.

 

Last week the revised bill passed the House of Commons after the Grits, with the support of the Bloc Quebecois, invoked closure on the debate and forced a vote.    Since the bill will eventually make euthanasia available to those with merely psychological problems, why exactly the Bloc would support a bill with the potential to drastically reduce the numbers of their voters remains a mystery.    Jimmy Dhaliwal, or rather Jagmeet Singh to call him by his post-transition name as we would hate to mis-whatever anyone, announced that the NDP would not support the bill.   This should not be mistaken for an example of principled opposition to physician assisted suicide for the mentally ill, it was rather an example of voting the right way for the wrong reason – Singh’s rabid hatred of Canada’s traditional constitution.    In my last essay I pointed out how he, in marked contrast with the more popular and sane man who led his party ten years ago, has taken aim against the office of Her Majesty the Queen and wishes to turn the country into some sort of lousy people’s republic.   Here it is his problem with the Upper Chamber of Parliament that is relevant.   He did not like that some of the revisions were introduced in the Senate rather than the House of Commons.    As for that august body, the Senate passed the bill yesterday, by a vote of 60-25 with five abstentions.   This is easily enough explained.    Yesterday was St. Patrick’s Day, and even though the Senate is the chamber of sober second thought, its members were probably drunk.   The only mystery here is, with apologies to the Irish Rovers, whether it was the whiskey, the gin, or the three-or-four six packs.

 

A little under a year before Bill C-7 was introduced, it was announced in the federal budget that that the Dominion government would be spending $25 million dollars over a five year period to develop a nation-wide suicide prevention service.   In the fall of last year, after the information began to come out about just how badly the insane and unsuccessful experiment in locking down society to prevent the spread of a virus had affected the mental health of Canadians driving suicide rates through the roof, the government announced that it would be investing $11.5 million towards suicide prevention for “marginalized communities” that had been disproportionately affected by this mental health crisis, which they, of course, blamed on the virus rather than on their own tyrannical suspension of everyone’s basic rights, freedoms, and social lives.   Apparently the government cannot see any contradiction between prioritizing suicide prevention and providing easily available assistance in taking one’s own life.

 

By funding suicide prevention programs the government would seem to be taking the side in the ancient ethical debate that says that suicide is a bad thing and that it is wrong to take your own life.   The strongest version of this ethical position has traditionally been that of Christian moral theology.   Suicide, in Christian ethics, is not merely a violation of the Sixth Commandment, as the Commandments are numbered by the Jews, the Eastern Orthodox, and most Protestants, but a particularly bad violation of this Commandment because it leaves no room for earthly repentance and is an expression of despair, the abandonment of faith and hope in God.   In other traditions, suicide is generally frowned upon but in a less absolute way.   In some traditions suicide brings shame upon the memory and family of the person who commits it except under a specific set of circumstances in which case it accomplishes the opposite of this by erasing shame that the individual had already brought upon himself and his family through his disgraceful actions, shame which could only be expunged in this manner.   It is easier to reconcile these traditions with each other – preserving one’s family honour is a very different motivation from despair – than it is to reconcile either with physician assisted suicide.    Physician assisted suicide in no way resembles what would have been considered an honourable suicide in any pagan tradition.  In Christian ethics, since taking your own life is so bad, getting someone else to help you do it or do it for you is downright diabolical.  

 

Perhaps the very worst thing about Bill C-7 is that gives even more power to the medical profession.   The liberalization of the Criminal Code in 1969 and the Morgentaler decision from the Supreme Court of Canada in 1988 gave doctors the power of life and death over the unborn.    This was already too much power, but the Supreme Court’s ruling in Carter in 2015 and the passing of Bill C-14 the following year gave them similar power over the elderly and infirm.   Last year, the Dominion government and every provincial government gave their top doctors dictatorial power over all Canadians, allowing them to suspend all of the basic Common Law rights and freedoms that are the traditional property of all of Her Majesty’s subjects regardless of Charter protections, power which they proceeded to disgracefully abuse as they gleefully and sadistically traded the serpentine staff of Asclepius for the Orwellian symbol of a boot stamping on a human face forever.   Now, Bill C-7 is extending their power of life and death even further in a most irresponsible way.   Physician assisted suicide is the foot in the door for outright euthanasia or “mercy killing”, extending the availability of the former to people who are not already dying will lead inevitably to doctors being allowed to perform the latter on those who are not already dying, and since it is doctors who get to say what is and what is not illness, mental or otherwise, the ultimate effect of this bill is to give the medical profession total and unlimited power of life and death over every Canadian.    Nobody should be trusted with that kind of power, least of all the medical profession as their behaviour over the last twelve months demonstrates.  Indeed, the disgrace they have brought upon their profession by their tyranny and their callous disregard for the social, psychological, spiritual and economic harm they have done with their universal quarantines, mask mandates and social distancing is such, that even seppuku on the part of all non-dissenting physicians may prove insufficient to restore their professional honour.

Death and Doctors

Human fertilization occurs when the two human gametes, the sperm provided by the male and the egg provided by the female, combine to form a zygote.   The gametes, formed by the process known as meiosis, are haploid, which means that they each possess half of a full set of human chromosomes.   The zygote is diploid, which means that it possesses a full set of human chromosomes, half from the sperm, half from the egg.   With the formation of the zygote, the process whereby it grows through the ordinary cell replication known as mitosis into a multi-celled embryo and then a foetus, begins.    What this demonstrates is that a) the zygote is alive and b) it is human, therefore c) it is already a human life.    The ethical implication of this is that the deliberate termination of a pregnancy, unless it can be shown to fall into any of the recognized categories of justifiable homicide, such as self-defence against criminal assault or in execution of the sentence of a court of law after a conviction, following due process, for a capital crime, is an unjustifiable homicide, or, to use the plain English word for this, a murder.

This fact was recognized by Canadian law until relatively recently.   It was Pierre Trudeau, who after contributing to the overthrow of the traditional Roman Catholic cultural establishment of his home province in his career as a Communist propagandist in the 1950s was brought into the Liberal Party at the Dominion level by Lester Pearson in the 1960s and groomed to be Pearson’s successor as leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister which he became in 1968, who changed this.    In 1969, Trudeau altered the Criminal Code to allow for abortions in cases where three physicians would attest that the pregnancy was endangering the life of the mother.    This, however, was small potatoes, compared to the effect of his addition of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to the constitution in 1982.   This gave the Supreme Court of Canada powers similar to those of the American Supreme Court.   The consequence was that in 1988, the Supreme Court struck all remaining laws against abortion from the books, telling Parliament that it would have to pass new legislation restricting abortion that would conform to the Court’s interpretation of the Charter, which Parliament has failed to do to this day. 

Now, as bad as Pierre Trudeau’s role in creating this unprincipled exception whereby the protection of the rule of law against murder is withheld from the most vulnerable undoubtedly was, it was not exactly out of character for him either in his role of Communist radical or his role of sleazy, dirtbag, politician.   The same cannot be said for those who have the task of doing the dirty work of abortion – the physicians.   The first principle of the ethics that supposedly binds the medical profession is primum non nocere – first do no harm.    The deliberate termination of life is a fairly obvious and extreme violation of that principle. (1)   Yet abortion is not the only procedure in Canada today in which those who have sworn the oath attributed to Hippocrates of Kos intentionally put an end to human lives.

 

Physician-assisted suicide was against the law in Canada until very recently.    In was only in 2014 that the province of Lower Canada became the first to pass “right-to-die” legislation.   In February of the following year the Supreme Court gave its Carter ruling on the constitutionality of the law against physician-assisted suicide.   In the Morgentaler decision in 1988 in which the abortion laws were struck down, the Court had invited Parliament to pass new legislation that would restrict abortion without violating the Charter, which they never did.   In the Carter decision in 2015, the Court gave Parliament one year in which to fix the existing law before it was struck down absolutely.   Not only did Parliament fail to do this, but in passing Bill C-14 the following year, it legalized the procedure and, under certain circumstances, allowed for physicians to go even further than what the word “assisted” implies.  

 

The old expression for this sort of thing, where a physician kills or helps to commit suicide, a patient who is suffering from an incurable condition that causes excruciating pain, was "mercy killing".   This has long gone out of style, since its supporters are squeamish about acknowledging the reality that it involves "killing".   It was replaced years ago with the neologism euthanasia, formed from the Greek words for “good” and “death.”  Euthanasia is an example of a euphemism, a word with which it shares a component part.   Euphemism combines the word for "good" with the word for "talk" or "speech" and refers to inoffensive or at least less offensive words used as substitutes for more offensive ones.    George and Sheila Grant wrote an excellent essay about the euphemistic language of euthanasia - not just the term itself but the accompanying rhetoric such as "death with dignity" and "quality of life" - that first appeared in Care for the Dying and Bereaved, edited by Ian Gentles and published by the Anglican Book Centre in 1976, and which was subsequently republished as the second last chapter of Grant's Technology and Justice published by Anansi in 1986.   The Grants focused on the language surrounding the practice because they believed, rightly, that confusion with regards to terminology was creating confusion in the public debate about the issue.   They made this important distinction:

 

It must be forcefully stressed that the proper refusal to prolong inevitable death is quite different from deliberately causing the death of someone who is not already dying.  Only the latter is euthanasia.

 

Confusion over this point, they maintained, was what was generating sympathy for the practice:

 

If the public rightly disapproves of the abuse of technology on the dying, yet wrongly identifies euthanasia with letting the dying die, then our attitude to euthanasia inevitably becomes more positive.

 

Imagine what they would have said could they have seen ahead to 2020 in which physician-assisted suicide was embraced while letting the dying die was condemned to the point that it was deemed necessary to take away everybody's most basic rights and freedoms in order to prevent the latter from happening.   Actually, maybe we don't need to imagine.   Here is the concluding paragraph of their essay:

 

The three ideas which have been discussed - "death with dignity" and human autonomy, the distinction between "persons" and "non-persons", and "quality of life" judgements - all have something in common.   They are all used dogmatically, leading to great confidence in our right to control human life.  These are areas where the great religious tradition at its best has been restrained by agnosticism and a sense of the transcendent mystery.  Some believers have tried to combine these two views of life in a crudely simplistic manner.  They have identified the freedoms technology gives us with the freedom given by truth.  The result in the public world, if policy flowed from this identification, would be the destruction of cherished political freedoms.

 

Although decades have passed since the Grants warned us about where the paths of abortion and euthanasia were leading us, decades in which we, ignoring those warnings, proceeded down those paths at an accelerating pace, never have their words been more timely.

 

Today, the battle, for many of the sane remnant who think that an MD should not be regarded as the real life equivalent of a Double-O designation with a licence to kill in one of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, has shifted from protecting human lives from the threats of abortion and euthanasia, to protecting the rights of physicians to refrain from performing or taking part in these gruesome slaughters against their consciences.    This is unfortunate, because it sends the message of a retreat from, if not a concession to, the advancing foe, but it cannot, perhaps, be helped due to the many indications we have seen over the last decade or so that toleration of dissent to abortion and euthanasia within the medical profession is shrinking and short-lived.    In Upper Canada, for example, there is a requirement that physicians who do not want to take part in an assisted-suicide provide an “effective referral”.   If you don’t know what that means, think of the episode of the Simpsons where Homer comes up with a scheme to gain a whole lot of extra weight to qualify as clinically obese so he can work from home.   When Lisa tells him that “any doctor” would tell him that obesity is unhealthy, he says “well, we’ll just see about that little miss smart guy” and goes to see his family physician Dr. Hibbert.   Dr. Hibbert says “My God, that’s monstrous!  I’ve never heard of anything so negligent.  I’ll have no part of it”.   Homer, unperturbed, asks “Can you recommend a doctor who will?”  Dr. Hibbert replies “yes” and the next thing you know Homer is seeing Dr. Nick, who after his usual greeting of “Hi everybody”  tells Homer “Now there are many options available for dangerously underweight individuals like yourself.   I recommend a slow, steady, gorging process combined with assal horizontology…You’ll want to focus on the neglected food groups, such as the whipped group, the congealed group and the chocotastic.”   The point, before I end up quoting the entire episode, is that Dr. Hibbert performed an “effective referral”.  

 

Last November, the National Post’s Barbara Kay, writing for The Post Millennial, informed us about the case of Rafael Zaki, a young man who had been a student at the College of Medicine at the University of Manitoba here in Winnipeg.   He had written an essay against abortion for his Sunday School - he is a devout Christian of the ancient Coptic communion whose parents came to Canada fleeing religious persecution.   He posted the essay to Facebook, which prompted a number of anonymous complaints to the school.   The school investigated and, in Kay's words, this "led directly to a remediation process, during which Zaki was summoned to seven meetings with Dr. Ira Ripstein, the Max Rady College of Medicine associate dean for undergraduate medical education".   Kay's description of this "remediation process"  confirms what I assumed upon reading that expression - that it was euphemistic for the kind of nasty Communist official intimidation and reeducation process that hides behind the smiley-face of fake, outer "niceness" that evokes the image of Dolores Umbridge, the authoritarian bureaucratic educator from the Harry Potter books and which is ubiquitous on campuses all across Canada.   Kay drew the parallel with what had happened to Lindsey Sheppard at Wilfred Laurier University four years ago.   Although Zaki wrote letters of apology for giving offence - he should have refused to do so and read what the late Sir Roger Scruton had to say about the difference between giving and taking offence - this was not good enough for Ripstein because he, that is Zaki, did not recant of his views.   He was expelled from the College, appealed, and, despite any number of policy violations, procedural irregularities, and such, on the part of the school on top of the blatant injustice of it all, his appeal was turned down.   He has filed an application to have a real court, the Manitoba Court of Queen's Bench, conduct a judicial review, although he was denied an injunction staying the expulsion until the outcome could be determined.   Kay's focus in her commentary on this entire episode is on the growth of a totalitarian climate on the campuses of academe, suppressing freedom of thought in what until recently was considered to be its bastion.   The story, which does indeed, illustrate this well, also tells us that in at least one College of Medicine, the next step in the corruption of the medical profession has begun, the weeding out of dissenters to abortion and euthanasia before they can be licensed, so as to eventually produce a profession monolithic in its support of this blatant repudiation of basic medical ethics.  

 

The high esteem in which the medical profession is held has long brought to its members temporal rewards both social, in the form of respectability, and pecuniary in the form of very comfortable salaries.   Society has bestowed this esteem upon this profession based upon its image of learning put to the service of mankind in the alleviation of suffering, promotion of good health, and sustaining of life through the treatment of injury and disease.   That the putting to death of the vulnerable at both ends of life, the unborn in the womb on the one hand and the aged and the infirm on the other, is now also a part of this profession clashes with this image.   That the majority of the profession see no fundamental contradiction here is good cause for us to stop blindly trusting these overpaid rectal orifices, when they tell us that we must sacrifice our rights, freedoms, social lives, communities, jobs, and businesses in order to “save lives.”

 

(1)   This is obvious in any language, but interestingly to say “first do not kill” in Latin you would say primum non necare.   The second conjugation nocere – to injure, harm – and the first conjugation necare – to kill are both derived from a common root, believed to be the word for death in Proto Indo European, also the source of the cognate words nasyati, which means “perish” in Sanskrit and nekros which means “corpse” in Greek.

Life and Choice

Not that long ago - indeed, it is a matter of mere months - there was a consensus at all levels of Canadian government, Dominion and provincial, regardless of which party actually held the reins of power, that choice was more important than life. Today, it is the consensus of all levels of the Canadian government that life is more important than choice.

In neither case was the consensus one that was arrived at legitimately through informed and open discussion. In both cases this writer did not merely dissent from the consensus but condemned it as being monstrous and evil.

So what is going on here? Has some diabolical mad scientist from an extra-terrestrial world targeted our planet with a mind reversal beam powered by interstellar radiation?

Not exactly.

What is meant by “life” and by “choice” in the one consensus was radically different from what is meant by these terms in the other. In the first consensus, the choices that were valued over life were very specific choices. The choice of an expecting mother to terminate her pregnancy and kill her unborn child was one such choice. The choice of somebody – usually a person with an irreversible condition that causes intense pain and suffering – to end his own life with medical assistance was the other. In short, the choices were abortion and euthanasia. The lives that were considered less important than these choices in the previous consensus were specific lives – the lives of the unborn children of the women who chose abortion and the lives of those who chose euthanasia. That the termination of these lives would ensue as the outcome of these choices was certain. Furthermore, these deaths were the deliberate and intentional end of these choices for which reason these choices cannot be made without incurring moral culpability.

The reverse of all of this is true about the “life” and “choice” of the second consensus. Although certain demographics are more susceptible than others to die from the severe pneumonia that the Wuhan Flu aka COVID-19 produces in a minority of those who contract it, the disease does not target specific individuals, nor is death certain in any particular case. With the exception of acts like coughing and spitting in someone’s face, which were already considered to be unacceptable behaviour long before the pandemic, the choices that have been curtailed by our fascist public health officials do not deliberately, intentionally, and willfully spread the virus, much less cause the deaths of the small fraction of those who eventually die from it. Barring the discovery of any hard evidence for the conspiracy theories that claim this virus was created in a laboratory there is no moral culpability here.

At the end of February, only a couple of weeks before the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals tabled a bill in the Dominion Parliament – Bill C-7 – which, if passed, would remove most remaining legal roadblocks to euthanasia. It would also take a huge leap down that slippery slope from physician-assisted-suicide to physician-with-power-of-life-and-death that opponents of euthanasia such as this writer have been warning about all along. It allows for the euthanizing of those who have lost their ability to consent to the procedure provided that they have indicated their willingness at some point in the past.

The segment of the population that is likely to be euthanized overlaps to a very large extent the demographic that is most susceptible to die from pneumonia from the coronavirus. What kind of warped logic reasons that we must indefinitely cancel the most basic freedoms of everyone in society in order to protect people from dying from the Wuhan Flu in order that their physician might terminate their life deliberately, with or without their consent?

Note also that while each province in the Dominion has ordered its hospitals to cancel or post-pone most surgeries and procedures that do not involve saving lives, abortions remain accessible during the lockdown.

Now consider the kind of choices that the public health bureaucrats have taken away from us. The choice to go for a walk or jog in the park. The choice to get together with friends and family to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, weddings and the like. The choice to meet up with somebody for coffee. The choice to shake somebody’s hand, clap him on the back in congratulations, or cheer him up with a hug. The choice to pay our respects and mourn together for loved ones we have lost. The choice to assemble together with others of our faith and worship our God as He commands us. The choice to go outside and get some fresh air. The choice to go to the library and take out a few books. The choice to go to a gym and get some needed exercise. Unlike abortion, these and the thousand other similar choices that are now forbidden us, do no intentional harm to anybody.

It is choices like these that make up what we, until quite recently, used to call “living our lives.”

What is the point of protecting our lives if we are not allowed to live them?
The kind of choices that the Trudeau Liberals – and all the so-called “conservatives” in the provincial governments – believe should be protected at the expense of human life, do not deserve the protection of law. The kind of choices that our health authorities, Dominion and provincial, have taken away from us in order to protect our lives from the Wuhan Flu, are the choices that make up everyday life and which constitute our basic freedoms. Health authorities should not be able, under any circumstances, much less a media-hyped, flu-type virus, with a fancy name, to take these freedoms and choices away from us. Only Communists, Nazis, and others of that general type would ever wish to do so.

George Grant in an essay entitled “The Triumph of the Will” written in response to the decision by the Supreme Court of Canada, with the new powers given it by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to strike down our laws against abortion in R v Morgentaler, quoted Huey Long’s famous remark about how when fascism comes to America it will be in the name of democracy. Our Supreme Court, like that of the Americans in Roe v Wade the previous decade, Grant said “used the language of North American liberalism to say yes to the very core of fascist thought - the triumph of the will.”

I wonder what Grant would have had to say could he have seen the way in which the same people who show a disregard for human life in the name of choice, when that choice is abortion, have turned around and criminalized the most everyday of human choices in the name of life. Since it is happening all over the world, and Grant liked to remind us of the ancients’ warning a universal, homogeneous, state would be one of tyranny, I doubt that it would surprise him much.

Steven Fletcher, the Byfields, and the Failure of Canada's New Right

A little over twenty years ago, Dr. Samuel T. Francis, the American paleoconservative columnist who departed from this world far too soon ten years ago this month, saw a collection of several of his best essays and articles published by the University of Missouri Press under a title borrowed from Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers. The subtitle of the book was “Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism.” This was an interesting choice that raised many an eyebrow considering that the book saw print in the early 1990s, immediately after the period that mainstream American conservatism regarded as its moment of triumph, the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Dr. Francis looked beyond the superficiality of American conservatism’s seeming triumph and made the uncomfortable observation that the movement had failed to achieve a single one of its objectives – the restoration of their old republic, the rollback of the welfare state that was eroding America’s middle class, or victory in the war against the ongoing social, moral, and cultural revolution.

A recent conflux of occurrences could not help but bring to my mind certain parallels between this and the present state of Canadian conservatism. The February edition of the curiously titled monthly evangelical publication Christian Week features a cover story by Craig Macartney about a bill that had gone before the Senate for debate that would legalize assisted suicide. The focus of the article is upon how legalization has been gathering support among Christians. Steven Fletcher, the Winnipeg MP who authored the bill, is interviewed and pretty much the first thing he is cited as saying is that polls indicate “strong support for assisted suicide, even among professed Christians”. Perhaps Mr. Fletcher thinks that questions of what is true and right are matters to be settled by opinion polls.

Later in the article Fletcher comes off somewhat better as he predicts last Friday’s decision by the dotty old dolts, dingbats, and dipsticks on the Supreme Court to strike the laws against assisted suicide from the Criminal Code and indicates that it was in partial anticipation of this decision that he had authored the bill so that the question would not become a “free-for-all, with no restrictions”. Perhaps that is the best we can expect in this day and age in which case Mr. Fletcher doesn’t really deserve to be made the butt of a joke, inspired by the quadriplegic politician’s sharing a last name with the character played by Dame Angela Lansbury in her most celebrated role, and to have his bill dubbed “Murder He Wrote”. Whether Fletcher’s motives are noble or base, however, is not really the question or the point here. He is a member, not only of Parliament, but of the present Conservative Party which currently forms the majority government in Parliament, and a professing Christian to boot. That he would initiate a bill for the legalization of assisted suicide shows just how far that party has come from its roots.

The present Conservative Party claims two sets of roots for itself – those of the old Conservative Party, which had been around since before Confederation having been formed in Canada as a local version of the same party in Britain, and those of the Reform Party of Canada. In the late 1990s the “Unite the Right” movement led most of the old Conservative Party to join the Reform Party in what then became the Canadian Alliance. The full merger between the two parties into the present party was completed in the fall of 2003.

This merger has been alternately interpreted as both the triumph and the defeat of the Reform Party, the movement that gave birth to it, and the principles of that movement which we shall call the Canadian “New Right” for reasons that we will look at momentarily. These interpretations would seem to be mutually exclusive and the polar opposite of each other yet, paradoxically, they are both true. If success for a political movement is understood strictly in terms of the attainment of power then the New Right has succeeded, for the party it founded managed, first of all, to take over the old Conservative Party’s place as the main alternative to the Liberals, then to absorb that party into itself and take over its name, next to form a minority government in Parliament, and finally to win a majority in a federal election.

Yet, if we consider what the principles and objectives of the New Right movement actually were, the merger that led to the present government of Stephen Harper can hardly be viewed as a smashing success.

I have called this movement the Canadian “New Right” for two reasons. The first is its contrast with the Old Right. The Canadian Old Right, of which the original Conservative Party was the organized political expression, was a Canadian adaptation of British classical conservatism or Toryism. The essence of Canadian Toryism was loyalty to and defence of the traditions, and political, social, and cultural institutions, of Canada, especially her British heritage. It was fundamentally patriotic. The New Right, by contrast, had taken up the cause of Western regional dissatisfaction with Ottawa which it frequently expressed in anti-patriotic and anti-Canadian tones, with some of its leaders openly expressing or at least doing little to conceal their preference for American history, heritage, tradition and institutions over that of Canada. This antipatriotism was the ugliest aspect of the New Right and it was this that initially hindered the New Right from gaining strength outside of the West and becoming a national movement. Unfortunately, as we shall see, the leaders of the party the movement produced, chose to listen to their liberal and progressive critics who told them that it was the movement’s positions on social, moral, and cultural issues that was holding it back.

The second reason for calling the movement the Canadian New Right is the fact that it arose at the same time and in response to similar phenomena as parallel movements in the United States and Europe which were also known as the “New Right”.

The New Right, in Canada as in the United States and Europe, was born in the 1970s in response to the tidal wave of changes that had swept Western Civilization since the end of the Second World War. These included social and moral changes as Christian countries became more secular, Christianity, the Bible, and prayer were driven from public schools, as was much discipline due to new-fangled psychological and educational theories, the development of effective contraceptive technology led to the relaxing of both legal and cultural restraints on sexual behaviour, divorce became easily obtainable, abortion was legalized, a revolution against distinct roles for the sexes took place, and in which a kind of Western self-loathing took over the hearts and minds of the youth and their teachers in institutions of higher learning who came to see everything Western and Christian as oppressive and to venerate everything that was neither Western nor Christian. The Canadian New Right, just like the American New Right and the European New Right, was born out of righteous anger at this wave of changes and the desire to regain what had been swept away by it.

In Canada, the New Right grew and gained its greatest strength in the Western provinces. It was in the West that the remarkable periodical that became the movement’s primary organ was published for thirty years. It started out as the St. John’s Edmonton Report in 1973 when it was founded by Ted Byfield, a seasoned journalist turned Christian educator, but by the end of the decade had become the Alberta Report, the title under which it is still remembered today, despite undergoing a couple more name changes before ceasing publication in 2003, a few months before the merger that produced the present Conservative Party. For the largest part of its three decades of publication, its editor-publisher was Ted Byfield’s son Link who was also a Sun Media columnist, the founder of foundation/lobby the Citizens Centre for Freedom and Democracy (1) as well as the co-founder of and a candidate for Alberta’s Wildrose Party. Link Byfield’s untimely death from cancer last month is the other in the conflux of occurrences that has brought about this reflection on the success and failure of the New Right which he and his father did so much to shape and form.

The Byfields were devout Christians. When my maternal grandmother introduced me to their magazine in the early 1990s she told me it was published by a family of “Christian fundamentalists”. More precisely, they were a family of conservative Anglicans who, having gotten fed up with liberal domination of the Anglican Church of Canada, had joined the Eastern Orthodox Church in the case of the father and the Roman Catholic Church in the case of the son. To each issue of their magazine, the elder Byfield contributed, in addition to his last page editorial, a column called “Orthodoxy” which he co-wrote with his wife Virginia, devoted to religious issues. In 2001 the magazine ran advertisements a two-week tour of Israel and Greece, “Where Christian civilization was born”, that was to be hosted by Link Byfield and his wife Joanne. After the Report, Ted Byfield’s next project was a multi-volume history of Christianity from the days of Christ to the present. Opposition, rooted in Christianity, to the rapid social, moral, and cultural decay that has been rotting Canada and the rest of the civilization that used to be Christendom, was the basis of their editorial perspective and since their magazine paved the way for the creation of the Reform Party of Canada in 1988, this social conservatism was clearly the foundation of the New Right movement.

This is why the present Conservative government is more truthfully to be regarded as the failure of the New Right rather than its success. As the Reform Party grew from a Western regional party to a party that could potentially form the government in Ottawa it was constantly being told that its social conservatism was the baggage holding it back, preventing it from gaining the support it would need to oust the Liberals from government. As leader of the united Conservative party, Stephen Harper has refused to re-open the debates on abortion and same-sex marriage, even after that vapid twit Justin Trudeau and that creep Thomas Mulcair provided him with the perfect window of opportunity to do so last year, by declaring that anyone who did not toe the progressive party line on these issues was no longer welcome in their parties. Now, one of his own members has initiated a bill that would open the door to euthanasia in this country.

The idea that its social conservatism would have perpetually kept the New Right localized in the West as a regional protest movement is nonsense. Are the majority of Canadians outside the Western provinces – or at least in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec – really happy with unlimited abortion-on-demand, the ensuing low birth and fertility rates, dependence upon large scale immigration with no effort to assimilate the newcomers to keep up the population, high rates of illegitimacy among those children who are born, high divorce rates, and all the other rot that social conservatism objected to? That seems extremely difficult to believe. Even if that turns out to be the case, the leaders of what used to be the New Right and the Reform Party need to ask themselves whether attaining a majority government in Ottawa was worth the price of sacrificing all of the goals they hoped to accomplish in order to do so. Which is another way of asking what Jesus Christ asked two thousand years ago:

What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

(1) The Byfields transferred ownership of the magazine from their United Western Communications company to this organization for the last few months of its run. Unfortunately, when they did so they changed the name of the magazine to Citizens Centre Report, by far the least attractive sounding of the many variations on “Report” under which it had been published.