Free Unrestricted Speech is the Servant of Truth

 

Pelagius was a Celtic monk who lived in the late fourth and early fifth centuries.   Although he was born somewhere in the British Isles, he lived most of his life in Rome until the city was sacked by the Visigoths.  Following the Fall of Rome he fled to Carthage and spent the remainder of his life in the region of North Africa and Palestine.  This was hardly a quiet retirement for it was in this period that the preaching of his disciple Caelestius brought him increasingly under the scrutiny of St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Jerome and led to his teachings being condemned by multiple regional synods, his excommunication by Innocent I of Rome in 417 AD, and finally, the following year which was the year of his death, the most sweeping condemnation of his teachings as heresy at the Council of Carthage, the rulings of which would later be ratified by the third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus in 431 AD making the condemnation of Pelagius and Pelagianism the verdict of the whole Church in the days before her ancient fellowship was broken.

 

What did Pelagius teach that was so vehemently rejected by the early, undivided, Church?

 

Pelagianism was the idea that after the Fall man retained the ability to please God and attain salvation through his own efforts and by his own choices unassisted by the Grace of God.   Expressed as a negation of Christian truth it was a denial of Original Sin and of the absolute necessity of God’s Grace.

 

Over a millennium later the Protestant Reformers, strongly influenced by the teachings of St. Augustine, would read their own conflict with the Patriarch of Rome through the lens of the earlier Pelagian controversy although the Pelagian controversy had to do with the absolute necessity of God’s Grace whereas the controversy in the Reformation had to do with the sufficiency of God’s Grace.   This led to further distortions of historical understanding of the earlier controversy so that in certain theological circles, particularly those who identify so strongly as Calvinists that in their hierarchy of doctrine they place the canons of the Synod of Dort in the top tier, make those matters on which all the Reformers agreed – the supreme authority of Scripture and the sufficiency of the freely given Grace of God in Christ for salvation – secondary, and assign the truths of the ancient Creeds to a tertiary position, any positive statements concerning Free Will are looked upon as either Pelagian or a step down the slippery slope to Pelagianism.

 

Free Will, however, is not some aberration invented by Pelagius, but a truth held by all the ancient orthodox Churches alongside Original Sin.   Neither is confessed in the Creed, because neither is Creed appropriate, but both are part of the body of the supplementary truths that help us to understand Gospel truth, the truth confessed in the Creed.   Free Will and Original Sin are complementary truths.   Apart from Free Will, the only explanation for Adam’s having committed the sin that brought sin and death upon his descendants, is some version of supralapsarianism, the repugnant and blasphemous hyper-Calvinist doctrine of Theodore Beza that teaches that God decreed the Fall of Man to occur in order that He might have grounds to punish people He had already decided to damn.

 

Why did God give man Free Will if He knew man would abuse it and fall into sin?

 

If God had not given man Free Will, man would not be a moral creature made in God’s own image, but would rather be like a rock or a tree.  Man without Free Will would have the same capacity for Good that a rock and a tree have.   Rocks and trees perform their Good – the reason for which they exist – not because they choose to do so, but because they have no choice.   This is a lower order of Good than the Good which moral beings do because they choose to do it.   God created man as a higher being with a higher order of Good and so He gave man Free Will because man could not fulfil this higher Good without Free Will.   Without the possibility of sin, there was no possibility of man fulfilling the Good for which he was created.

 

Original Sin impaired man’s Free Will and in doing so placed a major roadblock in the way of man’s fulfilment of the Good for which he was created.   When Adam sinned he bound himself and all his posterity in slavery to sin.   The ancient sages, such as Plato, urged man to employ his will in subjecting his passions to the rule of his reason or intellect.   They understood that the worst slavery a man could endure is not that which is imposed from the outside by laws, customs, or traditions but that which is imposed from the inside when a man is ruled by his passions. This is the closest than man could come to understanding his plight without special revelation.   When Western man in the post-World War II era turned his back on Christian truth he abandoned even this insight and began embracing the idea taught by Sigmund Freud et al. that liberating the passions rather than ruling them was the path to human happiness.   Although the evidence of experience has long since demonstrated this to be folly Western man continues down this path to misery.   The salvation that God has given to man in Jesus Christ frees us from this bondage to the sin principle, which rules us through what Plato called our passions and St. Paul called our flesh.   This is why the work of Jesus Christ accomplishing our salvation is spoken of as redemption, the act of purchasing a slave’s freedom from bondage.

 

God created man in a state of Innocence which is an immature form of Goodness.   Man in his Innocence possessed Free Will and was sinless but lacked knowledge and maturity.   He was not intended to remain in this state but to grow into Perfection, Goodness in its mature form.   The Fall into Original Sin interrupted the process of maturation and would have been ultimately fatal to it were it not for the Grace of God and the salvation given to man in Jesus Christ, our Redeemer, which Grace of salvation frees us from the bondage to sin into which we fell that we might finally grow in Christ into Perfection, the maturity of freedom with knowledge, in which we voluntarily choose the Good.    If we could somehow remove man’s ability to choose evil this would in no way assist man in his journey, by God’s Grace, to Perfection.   This is the Christian truth illustrated by Anthony Burgess in his novel A Clockwork Orange (1962)    The experimental technique to which the narrator submitted in order to obtain a reduced sentence, succeeded in removing his ability to commit violent crime, but failed to turn him into a good person.  In the novel, Alex does eventually become a better person but not as a result of the Ludovico Technique.  (1)

 

I recently remarked that the orthodox arguments for the necessity of Free Will for man to choose the Good can also be applied to Truth to make a more compelling case for free speech than the one rooted in classical liberalism that is usually so employed.   I wish to expand upon that idea here.   Think again of Burgess’s novel.   The Ludovico Technique rendered Alex incapable of committing violent crime – or even of acting in legitimate self defence – by causing him to experience nauseating sickness and pain at even the thought of doing the things that had landed him in prison, but it did not change his inner nature, it merely prevented him from acting on it.  Now imagine a story in which a similar form of extreme aversion therapy to the Ludovico Technique is developed, not for a violent, rapist, thug but for a compulsive liar, (2) which similarly prevents him from speaking what he knows not to be true.   This would not remove his internal compulsion to lie and make him naturally truthful, it would merely prevent him from acting on the compulsion.

 

If it is important, both to us as individuals and to the larger society to which we belong, that we develop good character by cultivating good habits, then it is important that we cultivate the habit of speaking the Truth to the best of our understanding.   By adapting the lesson of Burgess’ novel as we did in the last paragraph, we saw that artificially removing the ability to do other than speak what we understand to be the Truth is not the way to achieve the cultivation of this habit.   In the actual contemporary society in which we live, we are increasingly having to contend with constraints on our freedom of speech, not through experimental aversion therapy, but through laws and regulations telling us what we can and cannot say.  

 

These come in two forms.   The first and most basic are rules prohibiting speech – “you can’t say that”.   The second are rules compelling speech – “you have to say this”.   This distinction has in recent years been emphasized by Dr. Jordan Peterson after he ran afoul of a particularly egregious but sadly now almost ubiquitous example of compelled speech – the requirement to use a person’s expressed preference in pronouns rather those that align with the person’s biological sex.   Here, the speech that is compelled is speech that falls far short of Truth.   Indeed, the people who want this sort of compelled speech are generally the same people who speak of Truth with possessive pronouns as if each of us had his own Truth which is different from the Truth of others.

 

The rules that prohibit certain types of speech are no more respectful towards Truth.   Here in the Dominion of Canada, the rules of this type that have plagued us the most in my lifetime are speech prohibitions enacted in the name of fighting “hate”.   The very first in a long list of sins against Truth committed by those seeking to eradicate “hate speech” is their categorizing the speech they seek to outlaw as hateful.   Hate refers to an intense emotional dislike that manifests itself in the desire to utterly destroy the object of hatred.   This is a more appropriate description of the attitude of the people who call for, enact, and support “hate speech” laws towards their victims more than it does the attitude of said victims towards those they supposedly hate.   The first calls for laws of this nature came from representatives of an ethnic group that has faced severe persecution many times throughout history and which, wishing to nip any future such persecution in the bud, asked for legislation prohibiting what they saw as the first step in the development of persecution, people depicting them very negatively in word and print.   The government capitulated to this demand twice, first by adding such a prohibition to the Criminal Code, second by including a provision in the Canadian Human Rights Act that made the spread of information “likely to” expose someone to “hatred or contempt” into grounds for an anti-discrimination lawsuit.   The CHRA provision was eventually removed from law by Act of Parliament but the present government is seeking to bring it back in a worse form, one that would allow for legal action to be taken against people based on the suspicion that they will say something “hateful” in the future rather than their having already said some such thing.   The campaign against “hate speech” has from the very beginning resembled the actions taken against “precrime” in Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report (1956) in that both are attempts to stop something from happening before it happens, but the new proposed legislation would take the resemblance to the nth degree.   Early in the history of the enforcement of these types of laws the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the lack of a truth exception did not render the limitations they imposed on freedom of speech unconstitutional in Canada (Human Rights Commission) v. Taylor (1990).   More recently this notion of truth not being a defense was reiterated by Devyn Cousineau of the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal in a discrimination case against Christian evangelist and activist Bill Whatcott.   Whatcott had been charged with discrimination for distributing a flyer challenging a politician who had been born a biological male but who claims to be female.   Cousineau made the statement in ruling against the relevance of evidence the defense intended to present as to the complainant's biological maleness.   Clearly, if the upholding of laws restricting freedom of speech on the grounds of “hate” require rulings to the effect that truth is no defense, then these laws are no servants of Truth.

 

That, as we have just seen, those seeking to restrict speech are serving something other than Truth, something they are willing to sacrifice Truth for, is a good indicator that it is free speech that is the servant of Truth.   Further analysis confirms this.  If speech is restricted by prohibitions – “you can’t say that” – then unless those who make the prohibitions are both incorruptible and infallible, it is likely that much that is prohibited will be Truth.   If speech is compelled – “you must say this” – then again, unless those compelling us to speak are both incorruptible and infallible, it is likely that what we will be compelled to say will not be the Truth.   The good habit of truth-telling, which we ought to seek to cultivate in ourselves, in which cultivation the laws and institutions of society ought to support us, is a habit of caring about the Truth, searching for the Truth, and speaking the Truth.   Restrictions on speech, rather than helping us cultivate this habit, teach us to take the alternate, lazier, route of letting other people rather than the Truth determine what we must and must not say. 

 

Even restrictions on speech aimed at preventing the spread of untruths ultimately work against the speaking of Truth.   As long as there are such restrictions, especially if the penalties for breaking them are severe, there will be something other than Truth to which people will look to determine whether or not they should say something, and the result will be that less Truth will be spoken out of fear of running afoul of the restrictions.

 

The classic liberal case for free speech was made by utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill in his On Liberty (1856).   It is the topic of his second chapter “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion” which begins by arguing that this freedom is necessary not only when governments are tyrannical and corrupt, but under the best of governments as well, even or especially, when governments have public opinion behind them.  “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion”, Mill wrote “and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”   In support of the position taken in these justifiably famous words,  Mill’s first argument was that mankind is better off for having all opinions, false or true, expressed, because the expression of the false, makes the true stand out the more.   He wrote:

 

the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

 

In what he stated here, Mill was quite right.   Unfortunately, what he meant by truth, small t, is not the same thing as Truth, big T.   Mill wrote and thought within what might be called an anti-tradition that started within Western thought almost a millennium ago with nominalism and which has produced a downward spiral of decay within Western thought.   Mill came at a late stage in this anti-tradition, although not so far down the spiral as to think that truth is entirely subjective and different for each person as so many do today.    It had been set in that direction, however, by nominalism’s rejection of universals, whether conceived of as Plato’s otherworldly Forms existing in themselves or Aristotle’s embodied Ideas existing in their corresponding particulars, except as human constructions that we impose on reality by our words so as to facilitate in the organization of our thoughts.  By so departing from the foundation of the tradition of Western thought, nominalism introduced an anti-tradition that over time came more and more to resemble an embrace of Protagoras of Abdera’s maxim “man is the measure of all things”.   In the wisdom of the ancient sages, Truth, like Beauty and Goodness, were the supreme universals.   Philosophically, they were the Transcendentals, the properties of Being or existence.   In Christian theology, they existed in God Himself not as attributes or properties, but as His fundamental nature.   Human happiness, however the philosophical and theological answers to the question of how it is attained differed (the Grace of God is the theological answer), consisted in life ordered in accordance with Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.     Mill’s small t truth is worlds removed from this and this weakens what is otherwise a good argument against restrictions on the free expression of thought.   If truth is not Truth, an absolute ultimate value in itself which we must seek and submit to upon peril of loss of happiness, but something which may or may not be available to us because we can never be certain that that what we think is truth is actually truth, then it is a far less compelling argument for allowing all thought to be freely expressed in words that it serves truth better than restrictions would.    It opens the door to the idea that there is something that might be more important to us than truth, for which truth and the freedom that serves it might be sacrificed.    Indeed, Mill provided the enemies of Truth and freedom with that very something else, earlier in the first, introductory, chapter of his book in which he articulated his famous “harm principle”.   He wrote:   

 

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

 

On the surface, this seems like a principle that could do nothing but safeguard people against the abuse of government power.    In our day, however, we can see how it is actually a loophole allowing the government to justify any and all abuse of power.   Our government, for example, is currently using it to justify its bid to bring the flow of information entirely under its own control.   The Liberal Party of Canada, which is the party currently in office, has made combatting what it calls “Online Harms” part of its official platform.   The Liberals’ not-so-thinly-veiled intention is enacting this goal is to bring in sweeping internet regulation that will give them total control over what Canadians can say or write or see or hear on the internet.   Neither freedom nor Truth is a high priority for the Liberals, nor have they been for a long time, if they ever were.   The late Sir Peregrine Worsthorne years ago wrote that by defeating its old foes, and turning its attention to declaring war “on human, and even eventually animal, pain and suffering” and thus introducing the necessity for vast expansion of government power, liberalism “from being a doctrine designed to take government off the backs of the people” had rapidly become “a doctrine designed to put it back again”, and, he might have added,  in a more burdensome manner than ever before.

 

Mill was right that truth is better served by allowing all thoughts to be freely expressed, even false ones.   Apart from the acknowledgement of Truth as Truth, the absolute unchanging universal value, however, the argument is weak.  Within the context of liberalism, it is doomed to give way to that ideology’s insatiable lust to control everyone and everything, in the insane belief that it is protecting us from ourselves, and re-making the world better than God originally made it.   When we acknowledge Truth as Truth, we recognize that it is what it is and that it is unchangeable and so no lie can harm it.   Lies harm us, not the Truth, by getting in our way in our pursuit of Truth, but attempts to restrict and regulate the free verbal expression of thought, even when done in the name of combatting falsehoods, do far more harm of this type than lies themselves could ever do.   Just as men need free will to choose the Good, we need the freedom to speak our thoughts, right or wrong, in order to pursue and find and speak the Truth.

 

 (1)   The chapter containing this ending was omitted from the American edition of the novel and from Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation based on the American edition.

(2)   The idea of preventing a liar from lying has been explored in fiction.    The science fiction device of truth serum is one common way of doing this.  Note that the real life interrogative drugs upon which this device is based, such as scopolamine and sodium thiopental, don’t actually compel someone to tell the truth, they just make him more likely to answer questions put to him.  In Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) the title puppet, a compulsive liar, is not prevented from lying, but prevented from getting away with it, by the device of his nose growing whenever he tells a lie.  Closer is the 1997 film Liar, Liar, starring Jim Carrey as a lawyer whose son is magically granted his birthday wish that his father be unable to tell a lie for 24 hours.   William Moulton Marston, the inventor of the polygraph or lie detector, under the penname of Charles Marston created the comic book superheroine Wonder Woman and gave the character a magic lasso that compelled anyone trapped in it to speak the truth.    None of these stories was written with the idea of the necessity of freedom of speech for genuine truth telling in mind.

The Left Abandons Liberalism

A criticism that I have frequently made of mainstream conservatives is that they no longer stand for anything with which Modern liberals would not wholeheartedly agree and which in many if not most cases was originally a liberal idea.   I most recently made this criticism in my annual essay for New Year’s Day explaining my own views, which I prefer to call Tory, because they stress affirmation of institutions such as royal monarchy and the Church as well as beliefs such as the orthodox Christianity of the Apostles’ Creed and ideas which go back to ancient times and predate Modern liberalism.   I have never meant by this criticism that the things for which conservatives still stand are bad in themselves, merely that there are other, older things, which are more important and ought to be recognized as such by those who wish to distinguish themselves from liberals.     This distinction is a very important one because without it, criticism of contemporary conservatism for making its focus primarily or entirely the defence of ideas that have their origins in liberalism could be construed as suggesting that every idea that liberals have ever had is wrong or bad.   Liberalism, I would say, has been wrong a lot more often than it has been willing to admit, has been very wrong in generally regarding itself as immune to the sort of analytic criticism it levels against its rivals, and most wrong in its assumption that there was little to no worth in anything that was around prior to itself.   To say that it was always wrong about everything, however, is to commit the equal and opposite error to that greatest of liberalism’s errors, and the events that have unfolded south of the border since Epiphany illustrate just how erroneous it is.   That which is called “the Left” sprang historically from the same sources as liberalism – the Puritan revolt against the orthodox Church of England and the Stuart monarchy, Modern philosophical rationalism, Kantianism, to name but three – and through much of their history the Left and liberalism have walked similar paths, so much so that in many periods, including that of my youth, their names have been used interchangeably as if they were completely identical.   Last week, however, the Left revealed just how much it has parted ways from historical liberalism.   It would appear that there is now not the slightest vestige of liberalism lingering within it, merely the totalitarianism that had previously reared its head in the Cromwellian Protectorate, the French Reign of Terror, and in every state unfortunate enough to be taken over by the Bolsheviks.   Utterly illiberal, it tolerates no divergence from its thought and mercilessly persecutes all who dissent.

 

The word liberal is derived from the Latin adjective liberalis.   My pocket Collins  Latin Dictionary defines this word as meaning “of freedom, of free citizens, gentlemanly, honourable, generous, liberal; handsome”.   Turning to Charlton Lewis and Charles Short for a more extensive definition I find that they begin by relating the word to the shorter root adjective liber (long i, with a short i it becomes the noun meaning book) and thus gives as its first meaning “of or belonging to freedom, relating to the freeborn condition of a man”.  The second definition is “befitting a freeman, gentlemanly, noble, noble-minded, honourable, ingenuous, gracious, kind.”   I will not cite all the sub definitions given for the second, just B. 1., which is “Bountiful, generous, munificent, liberal”.

 

The short version of all of that is that for the ancient Romans, the adjective liberalis first designated the condition of being free rather than a slave, and in its secondary connotations denoted the kind of character and behaviour that the Romans saw as being appropriate to someone with free status, e.g., graciousness, kindness and generosity.   Before it came to be used as a political label the English word liberal was pretty much an approximation of its Latin ancestor.   This gives us something of an idea of what those who originally applied this term to themselves as a political designation must have thought of themselves.    Frankly, I am of the opinion that they thought far too highly of themselves and this term is singularly inappropriate for the heirs of the religious fanatics who murdered King Charles I, outlawed Christmas, stripped the Churches of artwork and music, shut down the theatres, and imposed Sabbatarian restrictions so severe that they would have made the Pharisees of old blush and of the Manchester plutocrats who enclosed the commons, legalized usury, and drove the peasants from the countryside into the cities to subsist on servile labour in ugly, smelly, factories.   To be fair, a similar analysis of the Latin root of conservative would suggest that in its political usage it refers to everything those so designated have failed to accomplish.

 

That having been said, there is much to appreciate in the ideas put forward in the book which more-or-less defined liberalism when it was at its best in the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries.   No, I am not referring to John Locke’s Two Treatises, which in its response to Sir Robert Filmer provides us with what is perhaps the earliest example of mere contradiction being taken for refutation or debunking, the phenomenon that has become the working principle of news and social media “fact checkers”.   Locke’s book contains only one worthy idea and no, it is not his bastardization of Thomas Hobbes’ concepts of the “state of nature” and “social contract” but his idea of the basic rights of life, liberty, and property.  This, however, as Sir William Blackstone later demonstrated, was present in Common Law long before Locke.   The book that I am talking about is John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859).   It is an argument for the need for restrictions and limitations on government to protect the freedom of the governed.   While it contains much historical nonsense and Mill makes the repugnant false ethic of utilitarianism the entire foundation of his argument, a great deal of what he says about freedom and limited government has merit.   Freedom of thought or opinion, Mill argued, was the most fundamental freedom of all, and attempts to suppress opinions, even ones that are entirely false, by limiting freedom of speech, are always bad.

 

Clearly, the present day Left is light years removed from Mill on this matter.

 

That this is the case has been evident for quite some time.   For decades the Left has favoured legislation prohibiting what it calls “hate speech”.   “Hate speech”, as the Left uses it, has never meant speech that actually expresses hatred, such as, most obviously, “I hate you”.   Indeed, there has never been a “hate speech” law passed to the best of my knowledge under which someone could be charged for saying “I hate you”.   What the Left means by “hate speech” is speech that they consider to be “racist” or “anti-Semitic” or “anti-immigrant” or “xenophobic” or “sexist” or “homophobic” or “transphobic” or characterized by any other such weaponized word that they have coined to refer to ideas and opinions with which they disagree.   The Left considers “hate speech” to be a form of violence and supports this contention by comparing it to incitement.   There is no substance to this argument, however, because “hate speech” laws do not merely commit the redundancy of prohibiting people from explicitly suggesting, encouraging, or calling for violent action towards the groups they wish to protect which sort of thing was already covered by existing incitement laws that were are far superior to “hate speech” laws because they protect everybody and not just select groups.   Rather, they prohibit the communication of information and opinions, whether true or false, that reflect negatively on protected groups in a way that might, possibly, inspire someone to commit a criminal act against them.   For all their denials – “hate speech is not free speech” – their support for this kind of legislation is clearly a rejection of Mill’s case against the suppression of thought and opinion and an embrace of a form of thought control, one which has only gotten more totalitarianism since the Left first proposed it.

 

Although this is directly related to another way in which the Left has left liberalism behind, that is, in its abandonment of the arguments against racism, especially of the de jure discrimination type, which became prevalent about sixty years ago and which were grounded in liberalism in favour of an aggressive “anti-racism” that is actually itself racism against white people, I wish to devote an entire essay to this point and shall defer further discussion of it until that time.  What I would like to point out now is how the Left has expanded the flawed reasoning by which it equates speech it considers to be “racist”, “sexist”, etc. with violence into all-purpose argument for suppressing any information and opinions which contradict its own narratives.

 

In the aftermath of what transpired in Washington DC on Epiphany, the Democrat-dominated House of Representatives in the United States has for a second time voted for Articles of Impeachment against the current president of the American republic, a man whom the Left hates like it has hated no other political leader before him.    Last time, they accused him of colluding with the Russians to steal the 2016 election.   This time, they are accusing him of inciting an insurrection by claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him.    Tempting as it is to focus on the glaring hypocrisy, especially since insurrection more accurately describes the BLM riots that the Democrats and the Left in general have turned a blind eye to or endorsed out of their refusal to accept Trump’s election of four years prior, the point is to be found in the fact that in nothing Donald the Orange said, either on social media or in the address he gave to the throngs who showed up to the massive rally before the Washington Monument to show their support, was there anything that could legitimately be considered incitement.   Not when incitement is understood, as it traditionally has been, to take the form of “I want you to do X” with X being some form of violent or criminal behaviour.   The Left here is applying the same kind of bad reasoning that underlies its support for prohibiting “hate speech” – “saying Y about Z could make someone angry against Z and if someone is angry against Z he might turn violent against Z, therefore saying Y about Z should be considered the equivalent of indictment and banned” to justify suppression of a completely different kind of opinion.  

 

The Big Tech companies that control the largest social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, marching in step with the Democrats – or rather it was more like the other way around – threw the President of the United States of America off their platforms, using the same faulty justification, and then proceeded to purge their platforms of thousands of his supporters as well.   Then, having basically told thousands of people “if you don’t like our rules, go to our competitors”, they immediately proceeded to attempt to drive those competitors, such as Twitter competitor Parler, out of business.  When the internet first went online, many had seen it as a way of escaping the near monopoly on the sharing of information that the Left, which already dominated the major news and entertainment media corporations, possessed.   Now, however, with Big Tech controlling most of the platforms that people have come to regard as a kind of public forum, aligning itself with the Left, purging its platforms of those who dissent from the Left and ruthlessly eliminating competitors that allow for more freedom of thought, the Left is seeking to make its control on the sharing of information and opinion absolute and total.

 

Clearly, the Left has completely abandoned the liberalism of men like J. S. Mill in substance and spirit, and if it continues to maintain any sort of outward pretense of liberalism, it will be out of either sheer hypocrisy or an utter lack of self-awareness.

 

As many problems as there are with a conservatism that offers nothing but (classical) liberalism, it is to be preferred a billion times over a Left in which nothing of liberalism, neither its freedom nor the generosity and munificence to which it seems to have aspired in naming itself liberal, remains.

Last Freedom Standing

The second section of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms reads as follows:

Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
(a) freedom of conscience and religion;
(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
(c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
(d) freedom of association.

As I point out every time I mention the Charter, I am not an admirer of this document. My problem is not with the rights and freedoms spelled out in it. I don't like that, contrary to widespread but mistaken opinion, this document makes these rights and freedoms less secure than they were before by including two gigantic loopholes. I also have a huge problem with the revolting notion that this Charter is the source of our rights and freedoms, that we did not have them prior to 1982, and that we should all bow in idolatrous worship before a statue of Pierre Trudeau, thank him for giving us our rights and freedoms, and perpetually vote his party into government, All of the basic rights and freedoms in the Charter had belonged to Canadians, as free subjects of the Queen, as part of our Common Law heritage, long before Pierre Trudeau was making an ass of himself with his swastika helmet, goose-stepping, and Roman salute during World War II, and praising every Communist regime on the planet for the rest of his miserable life.

Having included that necessary disclaimer, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that during the COVID-19 panic our Dominion and provincial governments, on the advice of their public health officials, have taken freedoms a), c), and d) from us, and most Canadians have, pitifully and pathetically, willingly surrendered them. Up until now b) has not been touched. This in itself has been remarkable, as of all the four freedoms it is the one that the Liberal Party has undermined and attacked most often in the past, especially when the Party has been led by a Trudeau.

Consider the second part of b) "freedom of the press and other media of communication." Ever since Justin Trudeau first became Prime Minister he has sought government control over internet based "social media" which would certainly fall under "other media of communication." In his first term as Prime Minister he wasted millions of dollars taken from hard-working Canadian taxpayers to prop up failing media outlets. Needless to say, the small independent media companies that have subjected him and his Cabinet to the most intense scrutiny and criticism did not see a dime of this money. Worse, in the months leading up to last year's Dominion election, especially after the campaign was underway, he tried to exclude all but sympathetic reporters from his press conferences, even going so far as to have adversarial reporters arrested. These are not the actions of someone who respects "freedom of the press and other media of communication." They are quite in keeping with the precedent set by the current Prime Minister's father. Consider what the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker had to say about freedom of press under Trudeau pere in 1972:

The Trudeau Government seems to be dedicated to controlling the thinking of Canadians. Through the power being exerted by Pierre Juneau, as Chairman of the Canadian Radio and Television Commission, private radio and T. V. station proprietors in Canada are frightened to speak, fearful of being subject to the cancellation of their licences. One such station was CKPM in Ottawa, which dared to have an open line program critical of the Government. Pierre Juneau did come before a Committee of the House and he uttered lachrymose words in reply to the criticism levelled at him that he wishes to determine what Canadians shall hear, and to deny them the right to listen to what they will. His attitude was different when he spoke to the Association of Private Broadcasting Companies and in effect stated: “When I ope my lips, let no dog bark.” Under him the broadcasting network owned by the people of Canada is allowed to broadcast what he permits. (Those Things We Treasure, pp. 32-33).

Freedom of the press is a meaningless concept if it is limited only to the press that is sympathetic to the government and of which the government approves.

Similarly, "freedom of thought, belief, opinion, and expression" means nothing if it does not include the freedom to think thoughts the government disapproves of and to express those thoughts. Ever since Pierre Trudeau became leader of the Liberal Party, however, and it was already leaning in this direction under Lester Pearson's leadership, the Grits have maintained that freedom of thought and expression does not include the freedom to think and express thoughts which they disapprove of because they consider them to be "discriminatory." The entire Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977 - the entire Act, mind you, and not just the especially bad former Section 13 - includes no provisions that prevent the government from infringing upon people's basic rights and freedoms, as one might otherwise suppose based on its title, but consists entirely of definitions of acts of private individuals and companies as being "discrimination", that is to say, expressions of thoughts of which the Liberal Party does not approve. Since the CHRA does not fall under the umbrella of criminal law, despite including provisions for crippling, punitive, and vindictive penalties, the agency charged with investigating and charging people with violations of this act is not subject to most of the limitations of the regular police and Crown prosecutors. All of this is in complete violation of freedom of thought and expression, and belongs in some Communist regime, not in a free Commonwealth realm.

Our Dominion and provincial governments have already taken away our freedom of religion and conscience by closing the Churches, and our freedoms of peaceful assembly and association by telling us we cannot meet in public or private in groups of larger than ten, or in some jurisdictions even less. The Liberal government in Ottawa already tried to sneak a provision that would give it two years of unlimited, unaccountable, power to tax and spend into a COVID-19 Emergency Spending bill. Now, as the Dominion Parliament is scheduled to resume session on April 20th, this same Liberal government, a government that has talked seriously about using software on Canadians' cellphones and other electronic devices to track their movements, which has encouraged us to switch to cashless - and thus trackable - transactions, and otherwise behaved exactly like the kind of government described in any post-apocalyptic, totalitarian, dystopic novel of the last century or so, has dropped hints that it will be tabling legislation against the spread of "misinformation" regarding the pandemic. Such legislation, if enacted, would of course, mean, that the government that passed it, decides what constitutes "misinformation." Since it is constantly changing its own mind about what the facts are - masks don't help, masks do help being merely one example - this is not exactly reassuring. This kind of legislation would inevitably be used to silence critics of the government's approach to the pandemic. It would mean that it would be safe to agree with the government, but not safe to disagree, which would be yet another way in which COVID-19 measures have brought us closer to the kind of regime that existed in the Soviet Union - or the Reich of the man on whose birthday Parliament is set to re-open.

The Prime Minister has been trying to prevent Parliament from resuming in full session, proposing alternatives which would greatly decrease the ability of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition and the smaller parties to hold the government accountable. Parliament's power to hold the Prime Minister and Cabinet accountable is far more important than government ministers having the power to act quickly in a crisis. If the Prime Minister were to get his way on this, it would be much easier for him to push legislation like the proposed anti-"misinformation" bill through a reduced Parliament, Pray that Andrew Scheer keeps up his noble fight against these Liberal power grabs.

Here is a petition from the Alberta Institute against the government's planned assault on free speech: https://www.albertainstitute.ca/defend_free_speech

Sign it while you still can.
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Let Me Put it To You Plainly

Progressives and others on the “left” generally do not understand the difference between a legitimate and an illegitimate protest. On the one hand they think that somebody who hands out a tract about the evil of murdering the unborn to a woman headed to an abortion clinic or who stands on the sidewalk across from it holding a placard with a pro-life message is doing something horrible that should be against the law. On the other hand they think that when a gang of environmentalist activists who claim to speak for aboriginal people blockades a railroad, preventing it from conducting its daily business of shuttling people and transporting goods across the country, and costing Canadian businesses multiple millions of dollars a day, that they are within their rights and may even consider it a noble and laudable act.

Since lefties have such difficulties with grasping this simple concept, I will explain it to them plainly.

Let us imagine that you are mad about some public issue and want to make your opinion known. You make up a sign expressing your point of view, go to the people who you want to hear it, and march up and down on the sidewalk in front of their building holding the sign up for everyone to read. Or, if a sign just won’t cut it, you write a pamphlet, have several copies printed, and start handing them out.

Note what you have not done. You have not gotten in anyone’s way. You have not used force to prevent other people from going somewhere or doing something.

Your protest, therefore, is a legitimate one. It does not matter whether your opinion is one that the vast majority of people would heartily agree with or one that the vast majority of people would find repugnant. You have made your position known without forcibly interfering with other people’s rights to go about their daily business.

Suppose, however, that you were to take a different approach. Let us say, for example, that the local university is hosting a speaker whose political views you disagree with. When the university refuses to listen to your demands that the lecture be cancelled you form a posse of like-minded individuals and go to the auditorium where the event is scheduled to occur and block all the entrances preventing speaker and audience alike from getting in.

In this instance you have not just made your opinion known, but you have forcibly interfered with the freedom of others to share and hear views different from yours. Your protest, in this case, is not a legitimate one. This has nothing to do with the content of your views, or the matter of whether they are right or wrong. It is because you are interfering with the rights and freedoms of other people.

Having made the basic difference between a legitimate and an illegitimate protest clear, let us consider one more scenario.

In the previous example of an illegitimate protest, you had interfered with the rights and freedoms of others but at least those others were people holding to the views you were protesting against. Suppose that you were upset that Project X was taking place somewhere in the country and in order to protest this you went somewhere else and erected an illegal barricade that interfered with the movement and daily business of millions of people regardless of whether or not they had anything to do with Project X.

Is it not obvious that by doing so you have exited the sphere of mere illegitimate protest and entered that of unlawful aggression against the civil order itself?

The duty of Her Majesty’s government in such an instance is clear. Unfortunately, since the First Minister of that government is still Captain Airhead, the Canadian electorate having proven itself foolish enough last fall to give him a totally undeserved second term, we are not likely to see that duty done any time soon. As the events of this past week have demonstrated, even beneath his fancy new beard, Captain Airhead is still Captain Airhead.

Should, however, Captain Airhead experience a miraculous epiphany, enduing him with a newfound sense of obligation towards the constitution, laws, and common good of our country, here is what he would do.

He would call a press conference immediately. He would address the “protesters” who have blocked the railroad, informing them that their action is one of unlawful aggression against the Dominion of Canada, its constitution, government, laws, civil order in general, economy and people. He would give them twenty four hours to cease and desist this aggression, remove their blockades from the railroad, and to surrender themselves to the police. He would then inform them that the police have been instructed that immediately at the end of that twenty four hour grace period they are to move in and remove any remaining barrier from the railroad and that the Canadian Armed Forces have been put on notice and are standing by to back up the police using whatever force is necessary to accomplish this end.

Yeah, I’m not holding my breath waiting for that to happen either.

The above arguments are, as stated, independent of any question of whether or not the protesters are right or wrong. Nevertheless, it is a fairly obvious observation that the illegitimate forms of protest are more likely to prove tempting to those whose cause rests upon a weak foundation. In the case of those currently blocking the railroad, you have environmentalist activists opposed to the pipeline project in British Columbia. They purport to be speaking on behalf of the Wet’suwet’en aboriginal tribe, but that tribe’s leaders have, in fact, approved the pipeline project, as have the other tribes in the area in question. This tribe has both elected and hereditary chiefs and the protesters claim that the latter are the legitimate chiefs for whom they speak, but even then only a minority of the hereditary chiefs have opposed the pipeline and it would appear that some shenanigans went down with regards to the hereditary titles apart from which this minority would have been even smaller. At any rate, contrary to the impression one would get from the CBC, the protesters are not all aboriginals, many appear to be of white European descent, and some have only recently come to Canada. As is often the case with environmentalist “protest” movements that speak entirely in neo-Marxist jargon, it is likely that the only people these protesters truly speak for are the American petroleum companies who benefit from environmentalist protests against Canadian pipelines because these pipelines, if constructed, would allow our major oil-producing provinces, both landlocked, to access world markets and no longer be dependent upon the American market.

Even if none of that were case and this was a sincere protest movement, however, its actions are intolerable and the government’s duty remains clear. It is the duty of all lawfully constituted civil authority to use lawful force to combat those who use unlawful force to wage anarchical war against order and civilization. Again, the government’s duty is clear. If only the Prime Minister cared.

The Totalitarian Left Declares Total War on Opponents of Baby Murder

On the evening of Saturday, October 20th I attended a lecture at New Life Sanctuary Church here in Winnipeg. The lecture, given by the Church’s pastor, Christian apologist John Feakes, was on the subject of “Abortion: Is it a Woman’s Right.” Feakes, of course, took the position that it is not, a position with which I fully agree. What was somewhat unusual about the lecture was the number of private security guards present in the church. Evidently trouble was anticipated. Indeed, there was good cause for expecting troublemakers to show up. The lecture was not originally supposed to be a lecture but a debate, co-sponsored by Feakes’ church and by Life’s Vision Manitoba in which Mark Fenny would take the opposing position. It had been scheduled, at first, to take place at Jubilee Place on the campus of the Mennonite Brethren Collegiate Institute. MBCI, however, rescinded its agreement to allow the debate to take place on its site and, at the last minute, Fenny backed out. “Concerns regarding event security” were cited as the reason the event would not take place at the location or in the format originally advertised. Anyone familiar with the way in which antiracist groups (1) operate will immediately recognize one of their favourite tactics for shutting down an event they disapprove of - pressuring the venue hosting the event into withdrawing by raising security concerns.

Five days after the lecture, Jakob Sanderson, president of the University of Manitoba Students’ Union, tabled a motion for the Union to endorse a “woman’s right to freedom of reproductive choice; and a woman’s right to be free from coercion or attempted coercion with respect to making reproductive choices.” This motion passed on Monday, November 5th and effectively established a no-tolerance policy for any activity on the part of pro-life people that the leadership of the Student’ Union regarded as “coercive.” The targets of this motion were a pro-life students group, the University of Manitoba Students for a Culture of Life, and the Canadian Centre for Bio-ethical Reform, both of which had come under attack by the leadership of the Students’ Union in the weeks leading up to and culminating in this motion. The Students’ Union objected to the pro-life groups handing out post-cards containing images of aborted foetuses. Like the anti-racist groups that attempt to shut down any public talks about racial differences or the case against open immigration, the Students’ Union leaders denied that they were engaged in censorship and claimed that they objected, not to the pro-life groups’ beliefs, but to their actions which they said were “coercive” and “discriminatory.” They apparently do not understand the difference in meaning between “coercive” and “persuasive”, thus calling into question their qualifications to attend an institution of higher learning, let alone serve in a student leadership capacity.

It was only a couple of weeks after this that Nahanni Fontaine, who sits as the NDP Member of the Manitoba Legislative Assembly for St. Johns, introduced a private member’s bill that, if passed, would create buffer zones around abortion clinics within which pro-life protestors would not be able to come. Fontaine’s stated reasons for introducing this bill, entitled the “Safe Access to Abortion Act”, are similar to those of the UMSU. “Manitoba women have the right to access the essential reproductive health care they need safely and without harassment” she says, using “essential reproductive health care” as a euphemism for “the deliberate termination of unborn human life.” Do not be deceived by Fontaine’s rhetoric about protecting abortion doctors and their clients from threats, assaults and violence. The existing laws against assault and uttering threats are sufficient to do that. To see the true intent behind this bill all we need to do is look at how this kind of legislation is being used one province to our east.

On October 24th an eighty-three year old Roman Catholic priest, Fr. Tony Van Hee, was arrested in Ottawa for violating Kathleen Wynne’s “Safe Access to Abortion Act”. Not only is the name of this act identical to the one Fontaine has introduced here, it does the exact same thing and establishes a bubble zone around hospitals and abortion clinics within which negative views of abortion cannot be expressed. Apparently this is being interpreted as including negative views of the law itself. The “crime” for which Van Hee was arrested was merely sitting across the street from the Morgentaler clinic wearing a sandwich board which read “The Primacy of Free Speech: Cornerstone of Western Civilization” on the front and “Without Free Speech the State is a Corpse” on the back. A simple and effective defence, in this case, would have been to point out that the messages on these signs said nothing about abortion one way or the other. His lawyer, however, has gone the more difficult route of launching a constitutional challenge against this draconian law. Let us hope and pray that it succeeds.

It is evident from the above mentioned incidents that the pro-infanticide movement – away with this euphemism of “pro-choice” that is so utterly inappropriate for these tyrannical mind-control freaks - has adopted the arrogant attitude and aggressive methods of antiracist groups such as the antifa. Indeed, on the day of the lecture mentioned in the first paragraph the friend of mine who had invited me to the lecture, an aboriginal student at the University of Manitoba who had participated in the pro-life activism referred to in the second paragraph, told me that he had been accused of “white supremacism” for doing so by someone in student leadership a day or two previously.

This association between the pro-abortion and anti-racist causes is not entirely new. You might remember Anti-Racist Action, a street gang with Marxist and anarchist backing, similar to the skinheads but with the opposite agenda that was a precursor to what is now called antifa. Most active in the 1990s and early 2000s, it used threats, intimidation, and violence in its confrontations with neo-Nazi groups and conservative groups that it falsely accused of racism. Its manifesto, in addition to what one would expect to find there, also contained a declaration of its full support for abortion. The Anti-Defamation League, which was founded one hundred and five years ago, may be the oldest antiracist group in existence. It too has been very supportive of abortion. Eighteen years ago in Stenberg v. Carhart the US Supreme Court struck down Nebraska’s law against partial-birth abortion – the kind of abortion that has the least support. The ADL applauded the Court’s decision and indeed had intervened in the case on the side of the abortionists. Earlier, in 1998 it had labelled Human Life International an extremist group. Before that, when the HLI had scheduled a conference in Montreal in 1995, the vice-president of the Canadian branch of the ADL’s parent organization, the Binai B’rith, had accused HLI and its founder, Fr. Paul Marx, of “being infected with this virus of anti-Semitism.” The grounds for this spurious accusation were remarks Fr. Marx had made in articles he had written in 1977 and 1993, and in a chapter of his Confessions of a Pro-Life Missionary, about how odd it was that there is so much Jewish support for abortion. However, as Rabbi Daniel Lapin, a frequent speaker at HLI conferences, wrote in defence of Fr. Marx in his 1999 book, America’s Real War, “the prominence of Jews in the pro-abortion movement” is “a factually correct detail about the Jewish community” and not an invention of anti-Semites. Normal people understand the word “defamation” to refer to the deliberate spreading of falsehoods in order to injure someone’s reputation. Anti-racists like the ADL, however, believe that even the truth can be defamatory. This attitude towards truth they have in common with the pro-infanticide movement.

The standard response on the part of pro-lifers to this strange convergence of movements that seemingly have little to do with each other except that they mutually receive support from the liberal-left is to observe that a century ago the alliances were quite different and abortion was being promoted – along with birth control, sterilization and euthanasia – by the advocates of eugenics and racial genetic superiority. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood is the obvious, but hardly the only, example of this. Pro-life advocates might also point out that the number of abortions per 1000 women is considerably higher among racial and ethnic minority groups. In the United States, the highest rate of abortion is among black women and if abortion were counted, as it ought to be, as a cause of death by the organizations that keep track of such statistics, it would be listed as the leading cause of black deaths each year, being more than double that of heart disease which is usually listed as the official leading cause. Such arguments will never convince either pro-abortion people or anti-racists, however, seeing as both movements have thoroughly inoculated their members against such things as facts and reason.

In Canada the knowledge that they have the full support of the majority government in Parliament has undoubtedly contributed to the heightened arrogance being displayed by pro-abortion groups. Prior to the last Dominion election, Justin Trudeau let it be known that he would not approve as a Liberal candidate anyone who did not whole-heartedly support a woman’s “right” to have an abortion. Around this time last year he announced that this year, all employers applying for grants under the federal Student Jobs program would be required to attest to their commitment to a set of values that included the same so-called right. Trudeau can be accused of many things, but subtlety in making his wish that the pro-life movement would give up and disappear is not one of them. It does not help matters that the Conservatives, even when they had a majority government, were afraid to do anything about abortion and the other major party, the NDP, takes the position that the Liberals are too soft, wishy-washy, and compromising in their support for abortion.

The Liberals and NDP and their toadies in the media want us to believe, whether we agree with it or not, that a woman’s “right” to an abortion is a settled matter in Canada. This, however, is a gross distortion of reality that can only be arrived at by ignoring the history of how we arrived at the present status quo and why it has not changed in the last three decades Thirty years ago the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in R v Morgantaler that Section 251 of the Criminal Code was unconstitutional. The vote was five to two in favour of striking down the section, but it was not as simple as that. There were four separate opinions, three of which concluded via three separate lines of reasoning that the section was unconstitutional, one of which dissented. None of these opinions had more than two supporters. Such a ruling would not in ordinary circumstances be considered the last word on the subject, and where the justices did agree was in the fact that it ought not to be so in this case. They acknowledged precisely what the Liberals and NDP deny – that the state has a responsibility to protect the foetus. Each of the authors of the three opinions supporting the repeal of Section 251 – Chief Justice Brian Dickson, Justice Jean Beetz, and Justice Bertha Wilson, states that protection of the foetus is a valid objective of legislation (See R v Morgentaler, pp. 75, 112-113, 181, 185) None of the justices took the position of the Trudeau Liberals and New Democrats that a woman has an absolute right to an abortion with which the state has no right to interfere and that abortion ought to be freely and universally accessible and unregulated. They expected Parliament to pass new legislation and the fact that abortion has remained entirely unregulated since is due to Parliament's failure to follow through. This was not a matter of Parliament bending to the will of the public. In the immediate aftermath of Morgentaler, the Mulroney Conservatives tried to introduce new legislation which was narrowly defeated. They have not tried since and the post-Morgentaler status quo has never been put to a vote at election time. The Grits and Socialists have largely relied upon keeping the public uninformed to maintain this status quo. There may not be enough public demand to restore the pre-1969 status quo ante of all abortions being illegal, but there would certainly be more support for this than for the present status quo if were widely understood that for the last three decades abortions have been available, right up to the very moment of birth.

The necessity of widespread ignorance to maintain the progressive status quo goes a long way towards explaining why this has now become a free speech issue. The less the public knows about how small a percentage of abortions have anything to do with rape or life-threatening pregnancy complications, the less likely they are to demand new legislation on abortion. The modern day cult of Moloch does not want women to be confronted with the truth about abortion because it knows that far fewer of them would choose to undergo that procedure if they fully grasped that more is at stake than their own health and convenience. Hence their objection to graphic depictions of the aborted foetus. Thus their demand for bubble-zones around abortion clinics in which the truth cannot be legally spoken.

(1) Antiracist individuals and organizations have the self-proclaimed mission of combatting racial prejudice, hatred, and violence by keeping tabs on, informing the public about, and protesting the activities of individuals and groups that promote racialist ideologies such as national socialism. In reality, however, they for the most part ignore the activities of non-white racialist groups, no matter how violent, classify any pro-white group as extremist no matter how peaceful, and attack anyone who disagrees with whatever liberal orthodoxy happens to be at the present moment on matters concerning race and immigration. Their tactics include private espionage, lawfare, spreading disinformation, intimidation, and generating security concerns that they then exploit to shut down speeches and other events of which they disapprove.

Captain Airhead Strikes Again!

It has been almost two years since a gullible Canadian electorate was duped into giving the Liberal Party a majority government in the last Dominion election. This means that that government, headed by Captain Airhead, is approaching the half-way point in its four year mandate. It has recently been reported that the Grits have passed less than half the legislation in that time than the previous Conservative government had. This is not surprising. The Prime Minister has been far too busy flying around the world, handing out money, and looking for photo-ops, all at the taxpayers’ expense, to actually do the job of governing the country. John Ibbitson, writing in the Globe and Mail, made the observation that “the amount of legislation a Parliament creates matters less than the quality of that legislation.” As true as that is, the quality of the bills the Trudeau Grits have passed is enough to make one wish that they had, the moment they were sworn in, called a term-length recess of Parliament and sent every member on a four-year paid Caribbean vacation.

One example of this is Bill C-16, which passed its third-reading in the Senate on Thursday, June 15th and which was signed into law by the Governor-General on Monday, June 19th. Bill C-16 is a bill which amends both the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code. To the former it adds “gender identity or expression” to the list of grounds of discrimination prohibited by the Act. To the latter it adds the same to Section 318, the “hate propaganda” clause of the Code. The Canadian Human Rights Act and Section 318 of the Criminal Code were both inflicted upon us by the present premier’s father in his long reign of terror and it would have been better had the present Parliament passed legislation striking both out of existence rather than amending them to increase the number of ways in which they can be used to persecute Canadians. When, a century and a half ago, the Fathers of Confederation put together the British North America Act which, coming into effect on July 1, 1867, established the Dominion of Canada as a new nation within what would soon develop into the British Commonwealth of Nations, their intention was to create a free country, whose citizens, English and French, as subjects of the Crown, would possess all the freedoms and the protection of all the rights that had accumulated to such in over a thousand years of legal evolution. The CHRA and Section 318 do not belong in such a country – they are more appropriate to totalitarian regimes like the former Soviet Union, Maoist China, and the Third Reich.

The CHRA, which Parliament passed in 1977 during the premiership of Pierre Trudeau, prohibits discrimination on a variety of grounds including race, religion, sex, and country of origin. It applies in a number of different areas with the provision of goods and services, facilities and accommodations, and employment being chief among them. Those charged with enforcing this legislation have generally operated according to an unwritten rule that it is only discrimination when whites, Christians, and males are the perpetrators rather than the victims, but even if that were not the case, the very idea of a law of this sort runs contrary to the basic principles of our traditional freedoms and system of justice. It dictates to employers, landlords, and several other people, what they can and cannot be thinking when conducting the everyday affairs of their business. It establishes a special police force and court – the Canadian Human Rights Commission and Tribunal respectively – to investigate and sit in judgement upon those private thoughts and prejudices. Those charged do not have the protection of the presumption of innocence because the CHRA is classified as civil rather than criminal law.

There are more protections for defendants under Section 318 because it is part of the Criminal Code but it is still a bad law. Incitement of criminal violence was already against the law long before Section 318 was added. It is not, therefore, the incitement of criminal violence per se that Section 318 was introduced to combat, for the existing laws were sufficient, but the thinking and verbal expression of thoughts that the Liberal Party has decided Canadians ought not to think and speak.

Bill C-16 takes these bad laws and makes them even worse. By adding “gender identity and expression” to the prohibited grounds of discrimination the Liberals are adding people who think and say that they belong to a gender that does not match up with their biological birth sex to the groups protected from discrimination. Now, ordinarily when people think they are something they are not, like, for example, the man who thinks he is Julius Caesar, we, if we are decent people, would say that this is grounds for pity and compassion, but we would not think of compelling others to go along with the delusion. Imagine a law that says that we have to regard a man who thinks he is Julius Caesar as actually being the Roman general! Such a law would be crazier than the man himself!

Bill C-16 is exactly that kind of law. Don’t be fooled by those who claim otherwise. The discrimination that trans activists, the Trudeau Liberals and their noise machine, i.e., the Canadian media, and everyone else who supports this bill, all want to see banned, is not just the refusing of jobs or apartments to transgender people but the refusal to accept as real a “gender identity” that does not match up with biological sex. Dr. Jordan Peterson, a professor at the University of Toronto who has been fighting this sort of nonsense at the provincial level for years, and who testified against the Bill before the Senate committee that reviewed it, has warned that it could lead to someone being charged with a “hate crime” for using the pronoun – “he” or “she” – that lines up with a person's birth sex, rather than some alternative pronoun made-up to designate that person’s “gender identity.” Supporters of the bill have mocked this assertion but we have seen this sort of thing before – progressives propose some sort of measure, someone points out that the measure will have this or that negative consequence, the progressives ridicule that person, and then, when the measure is passed and has precisely the negative consequences predicted, say that those negatively affected deserved it in the first place.

Indeed, progressive assurances that Peterson’s fears are unwarranted ring incredibly hollow when we consider that the Ontario Human Rights Commission has said that “refusing to refer to a trans person by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity” would be considered discrimination under a similar clause in Ontario’s provincial Human Rights Code, if it were to take place in a context where discrimination in general is prohibited, such as the workplace. Bruce Pardy, Professor of Law at Queen’s University, writing in the National Post, explains that this new expansion of human rights legislation goes way beyond previous “hate speech” laws in its infringement upon freedom of speech. “When speech is merely restricted, you can at least keep your thoughts to yourself,” Pardy writes, but “Compelled speech makes people say things with which they disagree.”

It is too much, perhaps, to expect Captain Airhead to understand or care about this. Like his father before him – and indeed, every Liberal Prime Minister going back to and including Mackenzie King – he has little to no appreciation of either the traditional freedoms that are part of Canada’s British heritage or the safeguards of those freedoms bequeathed us by the Fathers of Confederation in our parliamentary government under the Crown. For a century, Liberal governments have whittled away at every parliamentary obstacle to the absolute power of a Prime Minister backed by a House majority. The powers of the Crown, Senate, and the Opposition in the House to hold the Prime Minister and his Cabinet accountable have all been dangerously eroded in this manner. Last year the present government attempted to strip Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition of what few means it has left of delaying government legislation. The motion in question was withdrawn after the Prime Minister came under strong criticism for behaving like a spoiled, bullying, petty thug in the House but it revealed his character. These Opposition powers are a necessary safeguard against Prime Ministerial dictatorship but Captain Airhead, the son of an admirer of Stalin and Mao, regards them, like the freedoms they protect, as an unacceptable hindrance to his getting his way as fast as he possibly can. Years ago, George Grant wrote that the justices of the American Supreme Court in Roe v Wade had “used the language of North American liberalism to say yes to the very core of fascist thought - the triumph of the will.” This is also the modus operandi of Captain Airhead and the Liberal Party of Canada.

Hic et Ille VII

An Apology to My Readers

My posting has been light all year and it has now been over a month since my last post. I apologize for this. It is due to my writing time being tied up with projects external to this blog. One of these is quite a large project and is still not finished so posting may continue to be light for a few months to come – perhaps the remainder of this year.

So We Have a New Conservative Leader

In the Conservative Party of Canada’s leadership convention last month, Maxime Bernier the most libertarian of the candidates was leading up until the thirteenth ballot, which gave the leadership to Andrew Scheer. This outcome has its positives and its negatives, as of course would have been the case with any of the alternatives as well. Among the positives, Scheer is a strong royalist – an absolute essential for a Tory leader – and has the reputation of being a social conservative if not as staunch a one as Brad Trost or Pierre Lemieux. Also impressive is Scheer’s promise that as Prime Minister he would withdraw federal funds from universities that allow Social Justice Warriors to get away with bullying, harassing, and silencing those who hold opinions contrary to theirs.

The down-side to Scheer is that he is very much a Stephen Harper man. Apart from the fact that this taints him by association with the man who made himself so unliked during his time as Prime Minister that the country was willing to hand the reins of power over to a shallow little empty-headed egomaniac, there is something in the Harper brand of neo-conservatism that puts a damper on the enthusiasm that would otherwise be inspired by each of the listed positive points.

Harper-style neo-conservatism blends elements from the traditions of both the old Conservative Party and the Reform Party/Canadian Alliance. The latter was a very pro-American tradition that believed in closer economic partnership with the United States – free trade, traditionally a plank of the Liberal Party platform – and in introducing democratic reforms to the upper house of Parliament to make it more like the American Senate. These aspects of the Reform tradition have survived into the neo-conservatism of the present Conservative Party even though they are the most difficult to harmonize with the elements, such as royalism, taken from the tradition of the old Conservative Party. Scheer himself is on the record as saying “I support an elected Senate with meaningful term limits.” Many royalists such as myself would say that to insist upon elections and term limits for the Senate weakens the foundation upon which you will need to stand in fighting for our hereditary monarchy should it come under republican attack. (1)

Neo-conservatives are convinced that fiscal conservatism wins elections but social conservatism loses elections. This is what the media, the academics, and the other parties tell them, but what it boils down to is the idea that people want balanced budgets, spending cuts, and tax breaks more than they want secure homes and communities, strong marriages and families, and a stable moral environment in which to raise their children. This is nonsense – but try convincing a neoconservative of that. This is why social conservatives know that while neo-conservatives will court their votes and tolerate them within the “big tent” – which is more than can be expected from the leadership of the other parties – they will do nothing to advance the causes dear to their hearts.

Finally, as welcome as are Scheer’s proposals for cutting off funds to schools that allow politically incorrect viewpoints to be silenced by the tyranny of well-organized cultural Marxist bullies, civil libertarians will remember that the Harper administration was no friend to freedom of speech. The private members bill that finally brought about the repeal of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act – the “hate speech” clause – during the Harper years had the support of the governing party, but not of the government itself. Worse, while it is the Trudeau wing of the Liberal Party that has demonstrated a propensity for passing absurd laws that punish people for saying things about women and racial, religious, and sexual minorities that egalitarians consider offensive, the Harper neo-conservatives have shown themselves to be fond of enhancing the government’s powers to monitor our private conversations in the name of national security. This is what Bill C-51, which made Harper so unpopular towards the end of his premiership, was all about. The response of both the American and Canadian versions of neo-conservatism to the increasing threat of Islamic terrorism has not been the sensible policy of keeping potential jihadists out of our countries while letting Muslims live in peace if they can in their own. Rather it is the exact opposite of this – allowing mass Islamic immigration into our countries while bombing the hell out of them in their own. When, as any thinking person could have predicted, this produces an increase in incidents of Islamic terrorism, they then introduce intrusive domestic surveillance and other police state measures to deal with it.

If there is an unmixed positive about Scheer, something that does not have a corresponding negative to diminish it, it is that he has said that he would scrap the carbon tax which, like so many other of the schemes of the Liberals/NDP/Greens is an evil wearing the mask of a good. The carbon tax raises the cost of living for all Canadians while reducing the funds they have available to meet their expenses, hurting the poor and the working class the most. The villains who have imposed it, however, like that soulless monster Justin Trudeau, go around bragging about how caring and compassionate they are, because they are doing something for the environment. In reality the environment is not helped in the least by this shameless money grab. Let us hope that if Scheer gets the opportunity to put this promise into practice that he will follow through.

Kudos to America’s Caesar

Liberals have, for decades, denied the obvious fact that the news media, in its editorializing and increasingly in its reporting, is heavily biased in their favour. How much longer, one wonders, can they maintain this façade? It is difficult to know which is more sickening – the way the Canadian media fawns over our grossly incompetent, arrogant, and idiotic Prime Minister or the way the American media pounces on the smallest flaws they can find in their President as grounds for terminating his term in office. “He starts on the wrong side of his mouth when brushing his teeth – impeach him!”

While there is much that President Trump deserves criticism for – among other things, the way he has moved away from the Buchananite rhetoric of his campaign towards a more typical neo-conservatism with regards to the Middle East – he deserves praise for the move for which the international media has sought to crucify him over the last two weeks. On June 1st he announced that he was withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement adopted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change a year and a half ago. This agreement was a fraud of the same type as the Trudeau Liberal carbon tax, just on a larger scale.

Let me explain it to you. The climate on this planet of ours has never been constant. It has been changing for as long as there has been an earth and will continue to change for as long as earth exists. The amount of that change which can be attributed to human activity, past, present, or future, is a fraction of a fraction of a percentage point. Even if the theory of anthropogenic climate change were true – and it is not – and the earth’s climate was changing in the way the theory says it is, for the reasons it says it is, and with the results the theory predicts, the actions that the governments of the world agreed to take in the Paris Accord would not have the slightest effect on it.

The Paris Accord is about one thing and one thing only - allowing the political leaders of the world to show off, pose as saviours of the world, and otherwise virtue signal for a scheme that does nothing – absolutely nothing – except take wealth from poor and middle class taxpayers in rich white countries and give it to wealthy kleptocrats in poor non-white countries.

Kudos to Donald Trump for pulling his country out of this farce.

Ontario To Rename Itself New Sodom?

If, unlike the residents of George Orwell’s Oceania that we are all starting to resemble, you can think back a couple of decades and remember the past as it actually happened, you will recall that at the time one of the hot issues on the agenda of what was then called the gay-rights movement was the question of whether same-sex couples should be allowed to adopt children or not. Those who supported the status quo, which prevented them from adopting, did so on the basis of a child’s need for both a father and a mother. That their reasoning was perfectly sound and legitimate did not prevent the other side from getting into a tizzy, shrieking hysterically and calling it bigotry and discrimination and all sorts of other nasty and unpleasant sounding things. That was basically all that their own argument amounted to and eventually some judge got so sick and tired of their whining that they won.

Now, in the current year, the Liberal government of the Province of Ontario, headed by a hatchet-faced lesbian with an axe to grind, has just passed a law, Bill 89, which allows – or, perhaps, requires – foster and adoption agencies to turn down couples who oppose the agenda of the alphabet soup gang. In practice, this means “Evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants, traditional Roman Catholics, and orthodox Christians in general, need not apply.” Worse, it gives Children’s Aid the right to take natural children away from such parents.

It is remarkable, is it not, how quickly those who start out by saying “we just want our rights” can move to taking away rights from other people once they attain power.

Christians, of course, are not the only ones who hold quaint, old-fashioned, antiquated ideas like that if you are born with a penis you are male, if you are born with a vagina you are female, that males should pair with females and vice-versa, and that male-female couples should raise their children together. All of these Muslims that Kathleen Wynne, like Justin Trudeau, is so enthusiastic about bringing into the country, think the same way. Do you think that now that under the provisions of Bill 89 the Children’s Aid of Ontario is going to start taking their children away?

Yeah right.

(1) For a Senate Reform proposal that addresses the problems with the Senate as it stands, while remaining true to the principles the Fathers of Confederation had in mind when they made the upper chamber of our Parliament an appointed Senate, see my essay "Senate Reform": http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2012/08/senate-reform.html